Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

I Can’t/Can Believe

I can’t believe bpNichol published his first poem – “Translating Apollinaire” in bill bisset 's Blew Ointment – forty frickin' years ago, August 1964.

I can believe how fresh his work reads, glad his first book of concrete poems, Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, has been re-released by Coach House Press. Editor Nelson Ball zeroes in on the sources of this freshness in his introduction: “Nichol’s typewriter concrete, although not extensive in itself, is at the core of his development as a writer. Through it he discovered aspects of language frequently ignored by other writers. Concrete poetry at its best is a contemplative poetry, allowing the writer and the reader to consider visual, aural and literal meanings together.” [my emphasis]

I can’t believe our only choices in 2004 are Ralph Nader, John Kerry, George Bush, and …

I can believe I will vote though it almost always feels like spilled seed. Why isn’t Onan running?

I can’t believe how bloggers Geoff Huth and Ron Silliman and others find the time to write thought-deepening essays while most of us write logs – you know, floating things, the things that go bump on kevlar canoe-- when they’ve got children under their wings.

I can believe they are as good of fathers for their children as they are for their words, for their ideas. I can believe I am just as pleased to hear that bump in the current -- deep in its own way -- as to cruise the essays, to hear the laughs of all children.

I can’t believe the marigolds got fried again on the back deck. I can’t believe I typed the last two words of the previous sentence “back neck.” (I suppose there is a front neck and two side necks.)

I can believe I may have the best butternut squash harvest I’ve ever had (unless my children run through the garden again, snatching at everything they can, it seems, to supply their bottomless jars and cups of Harry Potter potions). I can believe that Snape is not as snape as he seems.

I can’t believe how beautiful Bob Grumman’s mathemaku are.

I can believe this beauty has not come easy. Bob has lived and worked his ass off as a poet. Contact Bob for copies of early mathemaku to see the growth in these poems.

I can’t believe I can believe.

I can believe I can’t believe.

I can’t believe in what many writers think is “new.” I can’t believe “new” is the primary criterion for many readers. I can't believe in the cult of the new.

I can believe that new is relative. I can believe that Emily Dickinson for many readers is as new as new gets. I can believe that for many of the readers I work with Richard Lopez will be delightfully new. I can believe, then, that “new” generates reading. I can believe in reading.

I can’t believe the American public believes anything our President says. I can’t believe he isn’t being impeached for war crimes.

I can believe that the American public believes excessively in the surface, the pedestrian service, of words. I can believe that poets do their best to counteract the foregoing belief.

I can’t believe the tip of my tongue.

I can only believe the tip of my tongue.

I can’t believe I haven’t had that experience of newness as a reader for over twenty years.

I can believe I’ve read some of the damnedest fine poetry I've read in my lifetime in the last twenty years, in the last twenty hours, in the last twenty minutes. I can believe, too, that I will experience newness as a person or I will be dead.

I can’t believe how tasty I found Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge. (I can’t believe that I just read that as Moose & Drudge. Hmm, moose and muse, here in Idaho, maybe those two words are interchangeable.) I can’t believe how much that work “interfered” with my reading, overwhelming, strangling, any other text I picked up. I can’t believe how the strong effects of Mullen's poems made it difficult to write unless I wrote spontaneous quatrains, riffs upon riffs upon irffs, word-jazzes.

I can't believe I put the can't first.

I can believe. I'll give that the final word.

Can.

Call for Work: Chain 12

Chain 12: FACTS

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. -Dick Cheney August 26, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.
-Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003

McKenzie: Mr Perkins, what took place there yesterday is a total/disgrace and/and Mr Perkins, there is no way you can pinpoint a soldier to say dat dis is de soldier dat did it because the soldiers doan carry numbers! The soldiers doan carry anyting dat you can i/dentify dem to say dat dis is de man oou/oou did it! M/M Mr Perkins, what I am saying to you is not fictitious, it is not done to score political points, it is someting dat took place, I am speaking about REALITY, someting dat took place yesterday.
-Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock

My problem presupposed that I couldn't judge because I didn't know what the facts were. All I had, or could have, was a series of different perspectives, and so nothing that would count as an authoritative source on
which moral judgments could be based. But, as I have just shown, I did judge, and that is because, as I now think, I did have some facts.
-Jane Tompkins, " 'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History"

If you are a reader of Chain, we would be pleased to read your work for Chain 12: FACTS.

We are interested in work that begins from fact. Numbers. Testimonies. Litanies of various gross domestic products. Scientific formulas. Art that addresses pesticide load in corporate farming. The poetry of charts and resource usage comparison. Maps of colonization. The prosody of statistics. We will welcome all genre and disciplinary considerations of hard data: visual art, writing, new media, non-fiction, essays, actions, debates. In this time of contradictory information, how do know facts, how do we circle around them, how do we act on them?

Please be aware that we can only print visual images in black and white.

Submissions will be read by Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr. We welcome cover letters or notes where you discuss how your work relates to the topic. If your work begins from a certain fact, perhaps explain this to us in your letter.

Send two copies of your submission and two copies of your cover letter to
CHAIN (c/o Jena Osman)
English Department
Temple University
Anderson Hall (022-29)
1114 W. Berks St.
Philadelphia, PA 19122-6090.

Deadline: December 1, 2004

If you have questions, send them to josman@temple.edu and spahr@hawaii.edu.
But please, NO email submissions (we tend to lose them).

Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you would like your work returned. Do not send us originals.

We read work in December and then reply in early February at the latest.

See also . . . http://www.temple.edu/chain

Cover Letter's Call for Visual Poetry

Deadline: September 1st, 2004

Cover Letter is an evening of performance (8 p.m. Sept. 10th, St. John's Church, Baltimore, MD), performance reading and visual texts wherein each participant is basing their work upon pre-existing texts--there is always room for play.

& indeed, we listen only for the pleasure of repeating, and yet we write under the illusion that we are not repeating what has already been--Raymond Federman

Criticism is prone to invent authors--JL Borges

Kevin Thurston will be curating a visual poetry clothesline spanning the pews (realize that the work will be suspended most likely by clothespins, or another equally low-tech method)! Please send submissions for the visual to:

kevin thurston
2647 n calvert st #1
baltimore, md (usa) 21218

***if you would like your work returned, please include a vessel with appropriate postage and address, if you don't want it returned, i'll find a wonderful home for them***
***if you would like to send 'a stack' of photocopied whatevers for the audience to take with them, please feel free--this can be independent of any other submissions***

Please send work in by September 1st, 2004 to make it easier to
produce a program.

George Bush's Missing Year

Records
now show
he was on

extended
tour of
Cuba's oldest industry

Indisputably Delightfully Received and Deeply Breathed E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d.:

I have been literally inhaling this beautiful chapbook, cover to cover, sucking in the cover, the poems in command of the full page (no shy little lyrics here). But while I'm huffing (me and brown bag squatting behind the 7-11), here's geof huth speaking of E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d.:

http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2004/07/interwritten-snow.html

Compass 24-34

Compass 24

Near reflection, far reflection, none – diffusion, magnets on the refrigerator. Two sandals in lock-step, one going in the opposite direction, its partner veering off to the left. The towel forms a snow-capped mountain over the chair back, a swimsuit flung atop the peak, another suit and a pair of underwear drying in the foothills. In the children’s garden, the sunflowers are now taller than the lupine going to seed.

Compass 25

Predominant colors edging the driveway are green, a half dozen variations of it, dull cement gray pushing them back. It makes more sense today than at any one time in the last year, floor swept. Mom’s bike rarely used, tires out of air; daughter’s bike, training wheels outgrown, scorned. No one to explain the garage window’s half-inch screen, evening sun rushing through.

Compass 26

His bike didn’t jump, jump rope entangled in the rear wheel. Bent screw, twisted plastic bag, a rubber band with its shape but not immediate purpose. The clock’s stopped: 3:10:46. If the step ladder’s upside down, what’s the orientation of the spider web?

Compass 27

Green shade, brick-red shade, no shade. The roof bends the shadow, scraping it against shingles. The conversation’s too far away to be overheard, but one man holds one point in hand over his head and another below his waist. She films her husband chasing their daughter, desperate to keep them within the frame.

Compass 28

Infield raked smooth, baselines chalked, the right field foul pole 276 feet away. He’s not alone, writing, and he’s not alone lying on his back, his companion an absolutely cloudless sky. The elm makes denser shade than the maple. Crows bickering over something in the outfield grass, picking at it, squawking.

Compass 29

Pines stop their march up the north slope here, but a few spot the south. Below the butte, winter wheat nudges toward brown. At the top of its aerial spiral, lofted by an updraft, the hawk aims then shoots toward the ground. Balsam root, flowers long since flown, dries out in the dust.

Compass 30

Ponderosa, lower limbs bare, broken off, hangs on to its thinning crown. He swings furiously, singing loudly, “He was born in a bin, he lost a quaffle in, that’s why Weasley’s our King.” Two ground squirrels, swelling with courage or hope or greed, skitter toward the bench. Following the hill’s contour, falling, folding, springing up, the wooden fence looks as if it grew there.

Compass 31

He doesn’t want to spin around, to take that direction. That way leads to a wooden wall, hard enough, if he hit it head on, to take his energy away. Single strand of spider web, one end unanchored, floats in a breeze. Sun falling, playing, throws long shadows across the deck.

Compass 32

Burning blue wall, in mid-July, shrivels dianthus, wilts daisies. Where the day begins, doubt ebbs or flows. Distance tints the spruce, more gray than green the farther away from the observer. Bell, birdseed, rain gutter, lilac, infinity.

Compass 33

“Angel quilt photo is here!!!” One second exposure stretches him as he strolls into “The Best Ice Cream” shop. Not going to catch many stars with the telescope inside, pointed down at the wall, but who can tell? Heron Blues, framed, street wet with rain, topless woman staring out a third story window.

Compass 34

He sees a forest where no forest grows. Turning the World Inside Out. His vision leans toward the cool, dimly-lit wall, away from the shelves of books. Where the white wall begins, cleansed, his universe begins.

John Perlman's Self Portrait

John Perlman's Self Portrait contains poems based on paintings by Cezanne, Dubuffet, Vermeer, Corot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Klee, Sloan, Eakins and other artists; Chinese scroll paintings; photographs by Lissella, Heyman, and Tice; artifacts/exhibits at The Natural History Museum; and other "objects" that deftly become subjects, one artform transformed into another. Perlman's writing is a good fit with painting, his spare, clear brushstrokes draw less attention to themselves than the composition as a whole. The poems, too, show a poet/painter's eye, focusing on the most telling detail, grading the background to point to the highlights. Here's one poem:

"The Beard of Computations"
Jean Dubuffet

it would be rock
a

weathered limestone, such
silts

the figure for survival,
or
not rock,

neither man.

the weights, say, of n
shells

signify a residue
of one sea's

deaths, a
sum --

two eyes, a
mouth,

if man, then,
the stone displaced

by soul

one thought
turned forward into terror

9/11 Leaders Urge Intelligence Overhaul

Start
by hauling
George out of

office
on Nov. 2
Dear Fellow Americans

remembering
intelligence starts
at the top

FrancieBobShawPlayingPerelmanBodies

Francie Shaw says of the paintings: “… each poses a question: is this play or struggle or both at once? What is the difference between terror and excitement, pleasure and pain? Who is carrying whom, who is in control?”

I say: Is this love-making or are these scenes of rape, foreplay or endgame, play or battle? Are these bodies separate, existing outside the other? In all of these paintings – and many of the poems – it’s impossible to tell. Ambiguity is androgynous.

Bob says of the paintings: “…the three figures [two bendable people and a dinosaur] are posed into an alphabet of primal postures. Spelling what? Eroticism pushing outward and intensifying or just little toy pictures? Subjectivity frames reason in these paintings. At the same time they stage flexible tragicomedies of the unnamable mixes of drive and reaction that course through our moments.”

Bob says of the words: “To try to meet this in words has been as exhilarating as those dreams where you can fly and as sobering as waking up.”

I say: FrancieBobShawPlayingPerelmanBodies, poems playing with the paintings while not being played by them. The paintings lead, the paintings travel passed the eye, away from the poems, connecting with other images, other amorphous dreams (fuss of amour), yet the poems can go places the paintings can’t, the naming wrapped around other namings:

48

I can have packed,
parked, gone through
inspection, flown and met
that day’s local infinity

I can have touched
those I love and spoken
phrases to those
I’ll never see again

Everyone knows how boring dreams are
And yes, the fulcrum only works when you’re awake
But the guy in the blue denim baseball cap
was he right when he said, “Killing me
is a war crime”?

Playing Bodies. Granary Books, 2004. www.granarybooks.com

Franz Kafka Wright

I found David Nemeth's July 15 entry, "Tough Guy Poets," including a stupid exchange between Franz Wright and William Logan, especially interesting.

My sweetheart/wife, Laurie Schneider, went to Oberlin a couple years behind Franz Wright. I've maintained an acquaintance with his work, then, for over twenty-five years, as I do for other poets associated with Oberlin and/or Field, e.g. David Young, David Walker, Bruce Beasley, and Charles Wright. His work has always been safe, a breeze to read -- transparent, personal lyricism -- the kind of poem that fits comfortably in the palm of the mind, poetry for Pleasantville. The kind of poetry as a high school teacher I will browse just in case Kym who hates poetry so much she sucks the air out of the room when the word is mentioned might find one of these poems worth reading twice. And then read another poem without stealing the air around her. I'd rather she read Fanny Howe's Gone or or or or... but I know readers of poetry have to start walking with one poem, any poem, before they start running with Coolidge or Mullen or Spahr or or or...

The last few weeks, I've spent a couple hours every afternoon at the university reading Vygotsky and/or Bakhtin (lit review for a doctorate I'm inching toward). For a break, I browse the literature stacks. Pleased by C. D. Wright's selected poems Steal Away (what the hell school is she lumped into? Certainly not that infamous school of quietude), I went looking for more. I stumbled upon Franz Wright's Walking to Martha's Vineyard, sandwiched between Charles and James.

Although it's undoubtedly debatable whether the book is worthy of the Pulitizer Prize or any prize for that matter, I would argue it's a hair-raising departure -- a swerve -- for him. These poems are ugly (read the insipid, misleading commentary by Random House linked above), grovelling in form and content, lines stuttering or swerving or stopping dead with no connection to the line above or below. (I'd give a sample but I return the book to the shelf each day. But, forgive me, when the book's out in paperback, I'll buy it.) This is the kind of style-shift that makes me want to watch his subsequent work. Unlike many of his peers, I sense he doesn't know where he's going, what's next. I find that compelling as hell.