tributary

Last weekend, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading in Buffalo, to read and celebrate their collaborative joint interview, a project of at least a year. According to one of their accounts, 11 people attended. Buffalo is too far off for this camper to shuffle off to, and the school year at Buffalo was over, but still, that 11 seems not enough. For any reading, that is, let alone for one that really promised a pay off. What's up with poetry?

Poetry is not some camp we go to, either as vacation or as a neglect of more serious stuff. Poetry is the language itself, yours, mine, and that of those people over there by the daylilies. It is the language of Margaret Fuller drowning and of Thoreau on the seashore looking for her remains. It is the language of that and more. You know this.

We as poets, writers of poems, need not be defensive about poetry. It has a function that we can describe and honour. WCW was right (once again) that you cannot get the news from a poem. Poetry is not for the survival of facts, but for the lifting of facts and concerns to places of importance. Poetry is language at the essence of communication. Granted, this communication is not at the simple delivery level of thing for thing. Heidegger (which see) grants us distinctions by going at the idea of thingness, which sounds at first (and at second, and at third) like a convolution until one relaxes into the ride of that query and realizes the barest minimum. Emerson notes that every word was, initially, a poem. Exaltation, exultation, excitation.

We need something to get thru the screening process, thru our lack of attention, thru our mundane distraction. Poetry is a capability that we discover and develop. As a writer, I came to poetry as an alternative to the bounded possibilities that I saw (novels, essays, whatever: they were (at least I thought they were) fully defined. Poetry, once freed in my mind from metre and rhyme, which overwhelmed any other aspect of poetry for me, looked likely to give me space. I was ignorant, no question, but I did not see myself writing like someone else.

As I have written before, my first palpable influence as a writer was probably Robert Benchley. I liked his humour, of course, but also, I liked the sense of his stance. I saw him as being able to writer 'like that' about anything. Sure, I mimicked him some, and others as well, out of envy as well as within a process of learning. I knew all along that I could not capture the thing of most interest, but learning that was a step in my own slow growth as a writer. Eventually, I allowed myself to teem with my own necessity, not that of the already integrated.

I and others have written of the reading that Tom Beckett gave in Cambridge in '07. It was wonderful to witness his nerves, his insistence, his involvement. Geof Huth was not on the docket that day but his presence was felt (the intimate dynamics of the reading space allowed audience involvement, and even just Geof's furious notetaking was a contribution). Later, at the pub, the conversation roiled, with Tom and Geof, fellow reader Charles Shively, Jack Kimball, and others. To which, alas, I was unable to enter by virtue of where I sat and that I had to leave early. The point of this remembrance is just to note the intensity of the combination: that Poetry. That some heavy shit, man.

I have always felt slightly icky about poetry and about calling myself a poet. Poetry is grand spaces, for sure, but its intensity is often read as merely rarification, only those born in high places with lungs that can breathe the thin air there. Partly, that is true, but only in the sense that you need strong lungs, just to stretch the metaphor awkwardly. Poetry is learned, not bequeathed. Really, the learning is the interesting part, once you get used to the effort. Like running, where you learn to resist the boundaries, go further, harder, until the occasional moment of ease that makes a lot of trudging worthwhile.

Poetry is so damn useful, because it directed me to learn words, and how words work together, and what words could mean in contexts that they, the words, did not expect. And so forth. I acknowledge the great debt I owe to Charles Olson, for the interesting paths he suggested to me. I will shoo idolatry aside (it has its uses for the youthful writer) and remain with the fact of the interesting venues I saw in Olson's attempts. Science and history and philology and politics and aesthetics. You might find the same elsewhere. Gather it up, it is Poetry.

It was an event in Buffalo, I have no doubt. It was an event when Jack Kimball, in his excitement over the evolving work, showed and read to Beth and me the ms for Post-Twyla. It will be an event when Jeff Harrison and I read either of our two endless collaborations in public (halfway between Arkansas and Massachusetts, I wot). Poetry is an event. It is language poised for any possibility. Your language, my language, the world's language. We do not need to be defensive about our interest in such a thing. It is worthy of the best spaces on our cave walls.

Antic View continues apace. Jeff Harrison is a thoughtful and idiosyncratic thinker, and I am usefully reactive. You know what? I prepared myself for writing. I put myself in front of the texts, tho I did not know what I was supposed to find (and yet I found 'it'). Jeff is a scholar, as evidenced by his command (see Antic View, intallments 1-141). Do I have to sell this? Welladay.

On a similar road, Tom Beckett and Geof Huth gave a reading of (a selection of) their own 1-year dual interview in a reading at Buffalo yestreen (sat nite live). Geof is a terrific critical thinker, Tom is a gentle provocateur, and both are exceptional poets. Look for the publication of this work. Read the generating incisions that Jeff and I bring. I think we are On To Something.

I was surprised to hear of Michael Jackson's death and, perhaps stupidly, surprised at the reaction to it. I know he has been popular, and his incipient comeback generated a lot of interest, but that did not add up to relevancy in my eyes. I thought it was all about the hype machine, but I guess that I was wrong.

Jackson was an original. I do not need to haul out WCW's still accurate description of America's pure products (which, of course, I have just deftly done), but Jackson was certainly troubled. His talent was enormous, as singer, as dancer, and as entertainer, but the curtain never seemed to be drawn across the stage of his life.

What gets me is that the 1st thing that occurs to me when thinking of Jackson is his weirdness. I am tolerant of difference, and do not excoriate him for his look, or his hobby horses. The cloud of pedophilia that hangs over him, however, is disturbing, and he never seemed intent on mitigating that.

As entertainer, he was not to my taste, but I could appreciate what he did. Some of his songs were downright silly. I mean "Billie Jean" is not convincing at all, nor "Beat It". He was more convincing in that song with Paul McCartney, the video of which shows him joining Linda and Paul as travelling scam artists. Jackson was still fresh-faced then. I think he could have gone in the way of McCartney, as an entertainer, I mean, but his weird relation to the world scotched that. He was more publicly weird than Elvis but it seems like they were similar in their urge to live in a make believe world or something. I do not know, nor do I really want to tramp these grounds.

It would seem that the rumours and accusaations of his pedophilia would be a deal breaker. Instead, they simply kept the people who would not have liked him anyway in a state of boil. His fans stayed with him. I do not ignore Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism, I live with it. My interest in his work cannot let me ignore that critical aspect of the man. And Pound paid for that anti-Semitism, if that is any consolation, which it is not.

MJ paid for his interest in children, in more than one way. It is dynamically creepy that parents allowed him to use their children as playmates. MJ was clearly out of touch concerning boundaries but how did the parents figure it? They were enablers.

RIP is especially appropriate with Jackson. His was an agitated soul, for which he seemingly found no relief. The pure products of America thing seems terribly apt. The weirder he was, the more interest he received from the world. The snowball just kept getting bigger.

Peter Ciccarriello proves to be my prime source for interesting links, via Twitter. Here is one he recently tweeted, a small publication by Richard Brautigan, brought to online life. Nice to be reminded of Brautigan.

I 1st read him in the earliest days of Rolling Stone. This was before that esteemed piece of crap became an esteemed piece of crap. Brautigan contributed tiny prose pieces as column filler. These pieces were quirky and under-inflected and fit oddly well with the distinctions of the burgeoning rag and the teeming new music scene being documented.

I am sure Brautigan's work inspired a slew of pointedly wishy washy dabblings, but his own work stood and stands with an innocent sort of genuineness. A quick, scholarly study of Wikipedia reveals that Brautigan suffered paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. I do not know what that assertion is worth (including the possibility of multiple jolts of electroconvulsive therapy), but it all rings as plausible, at least. But why go there? Okay, such intelligence does seem to help make sense of the man and his work.

Brautigan's work reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's except Vonnegut was much more canny, which I do not think Brautigan could ever be accused of. Vonnegut's flaky mythos in his earlier books beheld an honest sort of scope but I found later books (Breakfast of Champions comes to mind) tiresome in their effort to be underinflected.

Brautigan's work seems to hold no scope whatsoever. His work resides in a depressed yet lovely stasis. The pictures I've seen of him all show a classic (so to speak) California hippie type. I mean that phrase generously. Brautigan had long hair, full droopy mustache, brimmed hat, wholly iconic in my eye. According to the undaunted expertise at Wikipedia, Brautigan died by his own hand in 1984. I was thinking he died more recently. Sad and wistful story. His work seems an attempt to find a quiet place of chance, an opening into sunlight. The translation of the hard copy into an online experience is by Andrew Stafford. Isn't it a sweet, wispy pleasure?

Peter Ciccariello uses Twitter to send nifty url's (@ciccariello). The other day he posted er tweeted a link to a Youtube video (not that Youtube created the video) of Richard and Mimi Farina. I have not listened to them in years, alas, but please check out this and this. Folk Scene, 1966. "Pack Up Your Sorrows" is a classic sort of song, a lovely icon of the early 60s. "Joy Round My Brain" is that moment of wide-eyed hippie purity, palpably sincere. Mimi's utterly crystalline voice, like that of her sister Joan Baez, and Richard's straightforward genuineness create a wonderful experience. And didn't they look like J Crew models? Gee, Richard died on Mimi's 21st birthday. Selah, but the sweetness lasts. And take a few hats off to Pete Seeger. Okay, he did not take kindly to Dylan backed by the Paul Butterfield Band, but the guy made thunder with a stalwart political edge. Friends, please take this stuff all as resource.

The instigation of this ramble was my having watched that awful morning show on Fox, id est one host of reasonable obsequity and 2 certifiably stupid, as in stupid, co-hosts. The good Senator Grassle from somewhere Twittered about Obama, specifically that the president hadn't ought to be gallivaunting around Paris when the country needs leadership. It was a ridiculous criticism because clearly Obama has been busy in his first months in the White House, and are your hands so work-dirtied Senator Grassle? Not, let me say, a big story.

The real story was that the senator used Twitter to broadcast his exasperation. Because, you know, Oprah said Hey, Peeps! I'm on Twitter!!!!!!!!, and that effort at product placement made Twitter worth talking about on television, thus a substantial commodity. And that is Web 2.0, a new sense of online community.

I have not gotten into Twitter a whole lot. I follow a number of funny/interesting people, Jesse Thorn of the podcast Jordan Jesse Go!, the three members of You Look Nice Today (who met thru Twitter), Rob Corddry, and a few others I just sort of fell to. I do not contribute often, just do not have the handle on that. I am not ragging on Twitter, it could be quite useful. I think the communities built upon it could become quickly lapsed, but that is just a guess.

Peter Ciccariello is the only poet type that I follow who makes a vigourous usage of Twitter. He posts links to articles and works online, including his own fine visual work (@ciccariello). That is a community effort, and not simply performance of the public directive. I do not want to say that there is no interest for writers and poets, my study and usage of Twitter, as I have indicated, is limited. Presumably the potential is there for a poetic Twitter community...

Ten years ago, listservs were immeasurably useful to me, as a way to connect to other writers. Beth and I met thru a listserv, and the Poetics list, at that time, was a way to read some zesty (at times) thinking re contemporary poetry, also to connect via backchannel to writers from afar. Having fallen into isolation, I found this to be a great opportunity, truly invigourating.

Alas, the Poetics list got old and wary. Stephen Vincent for one admirably continues to press the idea of community, the connection we hold as writers and poets, as well as citizens of a wider consideration. I think the machine is broken, now. That is okay, the world changes and new tools arise.

Other community tools...

Blogs started to become common 5 years ago, which is when I began using them. Oddly, there arose the sense that blog writing was somehow different from other writing. Many people use blogs as journals, which is to say public performances of their world view. This happens currently with some Twitter users. The medium does not require this usage. Those who look askance at blogs are not recognizing the basic tool. Blogs are websites, simple to use. In the early days, they developed communities, in which like-minded bloggers would refer back and forth. That self-reference got rather boggy, frankly, in a way similar to how some Twitterers get. A public Twitter replying to another reads, to the outsider, as a mere puzzle, just as blogs did. Community does not hold up in that way, too restrictive.

I believe in the possibility of the Internet. I think, however, that the pressure on the various tools is over-emphasized. By my augury, we will see a decline in Facebook because it is so consuming. It is fascinating that ex-classmates or co-workers, or whoever, can find you after so many years, and that you can work the network into a wide intimacy. Some of this network development is just counting coup but still. I do not feel all that attached to the writers with whom I am connected, not in the sense of a Facebook community. I have not given the effort needed, I admit. The vastness and busyness of the interface is too distracting. The promotional interest of Facebook itself, and of some of the denizens of the surface, amount to clutter. Would that that clutter could be delivered elsewhere, so that one could receive just content qua content.

How, the question occurs, can these tools deliver more of their communal possibly?

Robin Blaser and David Bromige both died recently, as well as David Carradine. Bromige and Blaser are writers I should read more of, tho I have taken lessons from both. Carradine is something different to me, but his death is affecting.

My real intro to Blaser was his excellent essay on Spicer, "The Practice of Outside", included in Black Swallow's edition of Collected Books. It is a great introduction to Spicer, perceptive and comprehensive. His poetry, which I finally delved into by way of Holy Forest, conspires to open into an excitement of language, from the vantage of a quiet perspective. Duncan and Spicer were louder compadres, so to speak, but Blaser's more minimalist style had character and strength.

Bromige was an odd one, with a good sine qua non factor. I think I first met Bromige by way of This 3, in which I was published, and it is my memory that Bromige was as well. So, someone Grenier knew, so I looked further in Bromige's direction. Tom Beckett, of course, dedicated an issue of The Difficulties to Bromige, etc. Bromige's Englishy humour and sliding skew of language is tough yet involving. He, and Blaser too, should be regarded more highly by the experts out there. That is, the landscape is wickedly varied, and interest should not rest in the first call manifestations of poetic assertion. The Poetics list flunked out for me by how limited and lame the readership seemed to be. Too may writers deserve better than that crack.

Carradine, well. Perfectly brewed Hollywood oddball, for sure. His father, I estimate, appeared in every movie ever made. I saw some upliftingly screwy horror movie in which Carradine makes an appearance. The director played along, and inserted a picture of John Carradine into the film, so that even after his death he was appearing in movies. Without filling in blanks or assumptions, the idea of hanging oneself in Bangkok just sounds too sad and horrible. And so I have writ my piece on recent deaths...

Only in Whispers is the comic that I bought last Sunday at Anime Boston (Issue 1, 2007). It is a product of Free Lunch Comics, a small independent entity, I infer. Nothing wrong with independent. Matt Ryan, the person who I spoke with, is the president of this entity.

I did not dip deeply into the world of underground comix in the day but certainly liked them. R Crumb and his ferocious world view, S Clay Wilson and his odd fascination with bikers and pirates, the intensely psychedelic Rick Griffin, etc. I no longer have whatever collection I made of these things, alas. They were anodyne to the the weary paths much of Marvel and DC comix were on at the time. So now there is a more wide open market for comix, not underground but not Marvel either.

Only in Whispers reminds me of Charlton Comics. Charlton ran a distant um 5th or 6th behind DC, Marvel, Harvey, and whatever. Without consulting Wikipedia, I will say that Charlton dealt largely with horror stories, which is where the comparison with Whispers begins. The Charlton visual style was rough, if I remember rightly. Whispers boasts several different artists but I think the style would be considered manga-like: images expressively stretched across panels and pages.

The cover shows a desperate looking fellow in what appears to be a Grande Armee uniform, tho the hat (shako?) bears a skull emblem, with sword draw (well, the whole picture is drawn). At his feet is a horde of rats, presumably at his command. The background suggests a fiery, hellish scene. So, what is the takeaway?

It is an image of horror. This scene does not relate to anything inside the book. It is just a visceral, powerful image. That is the pull of the horror genre, the inexplicable and disturbing.

Think of Frankenstein's monster. By Shelley's presentation he is basically someone with an unfortunate upbringing who murders a few people. Karloff's monster exceeds those distinctions and presents an unexplainable phenomenon, to iconic levels of intensity. What I am doing here is relating the virtues of the horror genre.

The inside cover introduces a creepy fellow from whose library the ensuing stories come. The Crypt Keeper without the kitsch, and a way to tie the disparate stories together.

The first story is set in Coventry, MA, which gets me right away. I do not believe a Coventry exists in Massachusetts (one does in Rhode Island), but the localization makes me think of Lovecraft. One of Lovecraft's books was published in Athol, Massachusetts, in the mysterious realm beyond Worcester. In stopping there once, and knowing that one Lovecraft fact, I felt the impinging strangeness of HPL. I guess I am drifting in tangents here...

The plot of the story is simple and odd: a writer finds/steals a manuscript written in blood, the Devil's book. The woman from whom it was obtained, a witch, invokes revenge. The End. In the gap between the period and the capital T one sees the writer being caught by numerous spider webs, culminating in the final page spread of the writer grossly ensnared and covered with spiders. The artwork is manga-like and graphic, meaning that the panels stand well on their own.

Next is a short story by Steve Kanarus, who is publisher of Free Lunch Comics (Ryan is president). It is about a magic-involved couple. I think you could say that they teeter on the edge of black arts but finally choose a less nihilistic, more redemptive view. Horror stories are nothing if not moralistic, by which I mean there is always that sense of balance: good/evil, right/wrong.

The next story is familiar enough, a man makes what turns out to be a Faustian deal, and we witness the ensuing decline in his life. It seems to me the inking is too heavy, the lines too thick, for the more delicate style of the artist (Stephanie O'Donnell; story again by Kanarus). The style is more linear than what I call manga-like, and to me less interesting. To each his own, of course. The Faust theme is powerful, and always leaves you wanting to yell, Don't do it!.

"The Conscript" (Kanarus/Anthony Summey) features a black arts fellow in 18th Century Germany. He insinuates himself darkly into some lives there then is banished to America. The story features some very Lovecraftian rats, maybe the cover does relate to this story, and an implication that the story will continue. The idea of this bad influence coming to the New World is a powerful idea. I mean Keats' brother came to the States a little later to join a Utopian community (I think Coleridge almost joined the same one). The belief that America welcomes all receives an early challenge. I think the story should continue, as it does not wholly satisfy as it stands. It ends, I should say, with rats scritching in the walls of the home of the person who had the magician sent away.

The final story, by Andrew Pollock seulement, is "The Wailing". In smaller letters in the title square is the word WitchHound: is that part of the title or the name of a continuing character or series?. Je ne sais pas.

The plot concerns a curst family. Every generation, a male of the family hears the banshee's cry. then dies. A Mr. Delacroix is consulted. I am shakily guessing that he turns into this creature who confronts the banshee. A violent fight ensues, until the dread words to be continued appear.

Well, as I turn the page and look at the ad there, it is for WitchHound, the adventures of which/whom I can see unfold at Wickedsmash.com. Pictured on the page is Mr. Delacroix, the creature who fought the banshee, and another creature, a hulking fellow who is built like Thing of Fantastic Four. Anyway, Pollock's style is flattened expanses of white and black, at times suggestive of Beardsley, leastwise if Beardsley were rattled from his opiate bliss. Er, I do not know if Beardsley experienced opiate bliss, just my impression from his work.

I had fun reading this and would like to read more. Comix are pretty powerful in possibility. If you look at the old Donald Ducks from the 50s and 60s, they had some pretty savvy satire going. The early superhero stuff is rife with goodies to deconstruct, and later day superheroes effort towards serious themes dealt seriously, and now the further array of possibilities. I am not expert in the genre, tho I spent my time and money in the day on these creations, so I maybe I got it 'all wrong'. My own poetics says comix are worth inclusion, or more exactly that inclusion is within the nature of my poetics. For that reason, I hope you have read this far.

Note:According to several googled sources, including the book Opium by Martin Booth, Aubrey Beardsley is indeed believed to have partaken of opium. Good guess on my part.

Please forgive the dreadful gap problem that I have yet to solve. More posts are below.