this is just to say that Meritage Press, in the person (grandeur) of Eileen Tabios, is once again shuffling *** Royalties *** in my direction for Days Poem. royalties mean that there still remain those whose money resides where their mouth is. well, I here declare that I shall take my share of the green grab and add it to the national trickle down, possibly breakfast at Starbucks. it is the least I can do (only Congress can do less). Eileen takes the idea of poetry seriously enough as to treat the publication thereof as if it were something of value. this rare envisionment is in itself of value. I leave it to the Reader to figure out why.

two things in the recent mail:

1. A book:

   by Eileen Tabios, a wee little book. it is a Teeny Tiny chapbook, produced by Amanda Laughtland, whose other chaps can be seen here. this is an anti-brick, consisting of a single sheet of paper folded into 6 pages, plus covers. the story is a short poetic sortie, with holes open for the reader to fill. it is yet another adventure from the institution that is Eileen Tabios. or do I mean instigation. “Nearby, needless to say, breathed the 1950 Petrus.” I believe I have tasted the 70 vintage of Petrus, which is named for a famous disciple. fwiw.

2. A teaching certificate:

   I am now licensed to teach. while I seek employ, let me ruminate, perhaps even divagate, on education. just before I entered 2nd grade we moved across town, and I had a different school to attend. this school, for some reason, was experimental, unlike the other elementary schools in town. in the other ones, students stayed in the same classroom all day, whereas in mine we shifted to different classrooms for different classes. the school blended grades somewhat. I was among a handful of students who took French lessons in 3rd grade. the school secretary would round up those of us who took this class and brought us to the weirdo who taught it. weirdo, I came to discover, is synonymous with French teacher. I mean no disrespect, just observing. I learned to conjugate a few verbs in the 4 years of French that I took in elementary school, and I had to sing a lot of baffling French songs. a feature of my elementary school (Franklin School, named after a famous president of the US, or at least so I understood for perhaps too long) was a lot of singing. several teachers that I had could be expected to haul out their guitar, and we had many school wide conventions in the auditorium during which the teachers led a hootenanny. too real! the repertoire was folk music, the Pete Seeger canon, I would say, with a fair taste of international music. it amuses me to think of an auditorium of children singing about marching to Pretoria. come the revolution, brothers and sisters… three teachers from the school actually quit teaching to become folk singers. we gathered in front of the television once to watch them singing somewhere. honest!

   my senior year at high school I was offered the opportunity of an experimental program. I mean, the entire senior class was so offered. I took it mostly because my friend did, I think. the program was called Education Without Walls, shortened to, heaven help us, EWOW (ee-wow). the teachers were allowed to offer courses that really interested them, and students too could teach courses. I took my first creative writing course, and my stellar pass/fail evaluation is posted on this very blog, a few weeks back. it was a great experience for me.

   et puis--which means look, this proves that I learned something in French class--I went to Franconia College, which was along the lines of Black Mountain or Antioch, I imagine, tho no one ever said so. located in the woolly realm of north central New Hampshire, a federally recognized poverty zone, it was under-financed but had a good heart. I did a lot of writing there. my 1st semester, I was supposed to write 20 pages of material (poetry, in my case) for the semester. I wrote 40 pages before the class had convened the 1st time. this course was taught by a fiction writer who did not feel qualified to critique poetry, tho I found his advice useful and sound. during my 2nd semester a search went for a poetry professor. several candidates read at the school. Robert Grenier was the winner. he left Tufts (where my father went to school), and Kenneth Irby took his place there. Grenier, as I have said a-many times, has had great effect on my course and direction. I recall that all the candidates for the poetry position made much of Olson and Creeley. I think my education did a pretty decent job of not stifling my interest. I remember learning about Heinrich Schliemann in elementary school, and whaling, and dinosaurs, all very exciting. and I am still interested in French, and folk music. education is opportunity. I can legitimately say that I am a lifelong learner. I owe this to the fortuitous facts of my education.

ah, the Super Bowl®. I watched but had other things going so did not pay full attention. it was a good game. certes, that interception at the end of the half was one of those ecstatic, improbable moments that are so beguiling. I do not know why the Steelers were allowed to add 15 blockers on the run back of the interception, nor why the Cards thought waving at Hamilton would help, but so it goes. I write, tho, because of Bruce Springsteen. I have made several failed attempts to record my impressions of Springsteen’s ridiculous performance, but the results have been unsatisfying. why did his performance bother me so?

I am not a fan of Springsteen’s music, but I am not against it either. not to my taste, but I recognize its appeal. I fumed a little at work about what I experienced of his performance, and someone said that he liked hearing those old songs again. och, I do not mean this to be about my musical taste.

the ‘show’ began with Bruce and Clarence posed in profile together. then the lights came up and, inscrutably, Bruce tossed the guitar he was holding to someone. that was disturbing. it appears that the guitar was only a prop. tossing the guitar seemed like a ceremonial detachment. curious, with an unpleasant vibration. Bruce then takes a mike and announces that the greatest rock band in the world will now take over for the next 12 minutes. and suddenly it is Wayne Newton onstage exerting himself to get a rise out of the audience. he smirks, dashes about the stage, exhorts. is irony evident? it does not matter. whether the desperation is joking or serious, it still smells. I forget which song he does 1st, but he goes thru a gamut of shticks. he drops to his knees à la James Brown. he kneels, arching his back dramatically, I guess à la Bruce Springsteen. he runs over to Clarence to mug à la every 80s hair band. oh yeah, sliding across the stage towards the camera, ugh.

the 12 minute high that Bruce offered was full of his tiresome shouty vocals, fake sincerity, over production, and sad lack of promise. it was all a straightforward attempt to move units of his latest release. yes, the agents of dystopia in charge of the show established that Bruce pretend that the claque was the world. just like last year with Tom Petty, and years before, no doubt, the formatted audience waved lit cigarette lighters, just like in the real world. silly.

despite the fakery, Tom Petty’s performance last year came across as sincere. Bruce was awkwardly content to swim the bullshit. and at a time of jitters, one would think this person who has been willing to speak would have said something to the nervous world at large. an acknowledgement that times are tough now, a note of hope about the new administration, something/anything related to the country and world now<. no, it is about those units that need to be moved.

2 of the songs, and they are both legitimately familiar ones, are songs of the frozen past: “Glory Days” and “Born to Run”. so much of Bruce's energy just bubbled in this mire of weary documentation. the anachronism is obvious. his performance was canny bullshit. once again, poetry is dead.

here is a link to my graduate thesis "Personal Myth in Art", which I have been meaning to put online for some time. it can also be accessed by way of the Bramhall Writing Portfolio link to the right. some years ago, I had the opportunity to write the advertising newsletter for the store where I worked. this newsletter was a significant part of the store's image. it was meant to inform and entertain as well as to advert and entice. I was happy, thrilled really, by the challenge, but at the time, I almost no longer knew how to write appropriately for this venue. my poetry then was written without much punctuation except commas. in addition, the extensive journal writing I was doing then did not really obey sentences. instead, I used dashes rather than periods, and certainly nothing so complex as semi-colons, because I was pouring forth, not developing a structured piece. dashes could be full stops or they could lead on, which is what I wanted from the writing. to write declarative sentences meant that I had to relearn prose writing. I consciously studied good and bad writing, reread Strunk and White, as I do regularly, and paid a lot of attention. to write a college paper meant a similar study, tho less on sentence mechanics and more on developing ideas. one notes in my poetry (prose tho it may be) that I accept dissonance, disjunction, and other deformities of what we define as good English. poetry is, after all, an effort to break thru the received structures of our daily speak to a realm of verbal immediacy. anyway, I commend what I have written to your gentle eyes.

I read a piece that Gerald Burns presented to the Charles Olson Society (from the minutes thereof: 8/95), to wit: “Maximus Betrayed”. he pretty well excoriates George Butterick, for poor scholarship, poor proofreading, etc. Burns’ criticism unleashes some emotions for me. I went thru hero worship with Olson, whose example meant so much to me. and Butterick, who did so much to bring O to the public, earned 2ndary hero status. but I have grown out of slavish respect. I recognize that Olson had his weaknesses and errors.

O was goofy. he envisioned a community of scholars, best of the best, and tried to entice the historian Carl Sauer, among others, to join. Sauer was too practical for such visions and demurred. Olson was wack, and that is both precious and something to be wary of.

one should remember that Olson was a scholar, but his aims were poetic. those who followed him were of the same vision. presenting a definitive text cannot proceed by such impetus, however.

so O had his acolytes, and Butterick was one of them. Butterick’s dedication was admirable, but was he a rigourous scholar? Burns argues effectively that Butterick was not. Burns has a prickly surety not unlike Dahlberg’s, and I can see that his rigour is well-earned. Butterick, on the other hand, and not surprisingly, is an enthusiast.

the idea of a definitive text presents a set of accepted terms and procedures, like that the last change that a writer makes is the definitive one. we know that both Whitman and Wordsworth reworked their work as time went on, and perhaps not for the better. a public sense could be said to have intruded on their artistic decisions. those changes are definitive, but one might prefer the earlier expressions over the redactions. Butterick’s decisions were not always rigourous.

my emotion here rides on wanting to agree with Butterick, but I see Burns’ point. and please, do we need this singular ownership? Dickinson is sadly trapped by that walled garden in Cambridge, and you can think of myriad other artists monopolized by the whosis with the rights.

papers of mine are housed and available at Ohio State University. yes, that is a weird thing to consider, imagining the future and who might be interested.

when I worked on typewriter, I would retype successive drafts, often for the most minor of changes. I developed the habit of numbering and dating the drafts, but that rigour only put the lie to consistency. there was all that work that preceded the decision to date everything, and there were the times when I neglected to follow my rules.

the computer complicates the situation. every time I hit ctrl-s, a draft is created and another is annihilated. I could go to the trouble of saving each ‘finished’ draft but I don’t, for obvious reasons. those annihilated texts still exist, in some quantum way.

it is difficult to get my mind around definitive. when I make changes, even of sloppy typos, I have the feeling that I make a new poem not change the old one. there is this sense of fluidity in the process. I occasionally make odd errors, like writing which when I clearly meant with. I could and sometimes do stay with the oddity but usually make the correction as quickly as I repair hte.

I read of the debate concerning the last lines of Keats’ Grecian Urn. the wording is fine but exactly what the punctuation should be creates a significant change in meaning. as readers, we create meaning, as much thru our misapprehensions as our care. the possibilities that arise thru this muddle of punctuation resolves in the idea of a poem’s manyness. poetry is not statement.

a definitive text is an effort to agree. in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is credited with the unlikely chest measurement of 29”. a so called definitive edition of Ulysses came out in the 90s that was supposed to fix all the many errors that entered the text via confused compositor and such. according to Guy Davenport, as many errors as were corrected in that edition were added. we as human beings will err.

an ownership has taken place with Olson, as it has with others. this ownership becomes a slavish reliance. text disappears into mythos. Butterick was obviously energized by Olson. you can see it in his own odd and eccentric Collected Poems. I was so pleased to come upon Butterick’s collected, because it showed him defining space that was his own, not just working Olson’s farm. Butterick’s collected seems incomplete, and not just because he died young. one sees points of interest for him, but it feels as if he never developed the comprehensive vision of his own work that he had with Olson’s. that is, he gave more time to his work with Olson than he did with his own work.

when one looks at the works that Butterick edited one is aware of Butterick expressing himself. one sees an area being protected. I understand that urge, but readers must do their best to ignore such defenses.

the Authors are in eternity, fair enough. editors are still here on earth. I do not want to lionize anymore, not Olson, not Butterick. I just want to continue digging around in the rubble.

to the right the canny reader will see links to my Resume, my C.V., and my Writing Portfolio. the Portfolio, so far, features some user guides that I wrote, and some academic papers. I shall continue adding to these offerings.

Dr John M Bennett, curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State informs me that my archival papers are now catalogued. go to library.osu.edu/ and search "Allen Bramhall Collection" as title. you can click on full record and also click on the link to the finding aid. begin writing theses on my work now. seriously, this is something to twist my brain around. I have never done archival research but it fascinates me. I also learned today, via Dan Bouchard's local readings email list, that the Boston Athenaeum has acquired a goodly portion of John Wieners' published work... I'm looking at that now: does that mean they acquired his BOOKS??? well yes, it does, including mimeos and that sort of whatnot. cool.

Traffique de Thanksgiving

just back from another dimension (got a new hat!!!)

oh, okay, here is one of Robert Grenier’s comments on my class work. I know it is pretty unreadable but I think the gist is that I am awesome, you should buy my books, and generally you should bow to me. you can forgo the bowing if you would simply buy this book.

It Started Here…

 

The following is from the one creative writing class I took in high school, when I was 17. I began writing the year before. I am glad that Mrs H noted my predilection for rewriting. I am sure I did not do a lot of that rare thing, but any time a young writer makes such effort, it is worth noting. I also found one of the comments that Robert Grenier made for a poetry class I took at legendary Franconia College, a study of American poetry. I cannot put my hand on the one in which he notes that I spent my time either writing or playing ping pong. living in Franconia meant that Littleton, NH represented Big City Lights. click the image to read the report.

 

a few thoughts in an unfocused post:

1st) Anny Ballardini and Obododimma Oha (denizens of the Wryting-L list) have collected poetic responses to the recent election in USA at the site Anny oversees, Poet's Corner. the specific link is here, but check out all the work collected at the site, including a poem by Ezra Pound's daughter. I was invited to contribute to the project (Anny is one of the really supportive poetry folk out there--stay out of NYC, Anny!!!), but had nothing fitting, and I did not write to fit. work by Your Servant can be found on the site, however, including a couple of poems for the Autumn anthology

2nd) I know I should be more adept with my links. some are out of date, others could be added. Ron Silliman's excellent harvesting of links, which lose some usefulness with the less than evocative captions that he supplies, shows a terrific span of attention. in the same vein, but more so, of course, is Wood's Lot, which left my link list some while back because of my inability to do justice to (id est: read) it all just made me sad. a stunning range of material.

I have added links to more of my work (work I neglected to link to earlier), to the right there, yonder, which you might feel inspired to tap. you can even buy what excellent Carl Annarummo created of my wordage: Walden Book, a sort of preamble to Days Poem, which you already cherish as 1000 pages of awesome. Walden Book is the early buzz of the same obsessions, not to give any stories away. the internet, cor, it fills up with your work.

Important Advice

I was looking at a recent book by a butler, about manners and how to get along. Sensible advice but I quibble with his description of how to open a bottle of sparkling wine. He was doing fine until he ripped the cork free with a loud pop. Big Drama, but lives are at stake. For SAFETY'S SAKE, read on:

1. Remove the wire cage from the bottle, always keeping a finger or thumb on top of the cork. Corks can pop without your help, and with devastating force. Could be a bad thing.


2. Hold cork in one hand, bottle in the other. Keep the bottle horizontal. The reason? The pressure is upward from the surface of the wine. Holding the bottle vertically can inspire a rapid exodus of the contents of the bottle towards unprepared regions. You can wrap the bottle in towel or napkin, for a better grip and added safety, but you will look a bit poncy. Also, wear a Kevlar suit.


3. Twist the cork slowly. I have heard it advised that one should twist the bottle. In my experience, it is easier to twist the cork. Do whatever you think is right. Just because I have professional experience does not mean you should listen.


4. Ease the cork out. The trapped gas will help.


5. As the cork reaches the point of extrication, maintain a firm grip on the cork and let the gas slowly hiss out as you raise the bottle to a vertical and remove the cork entirely. Oh darn, did not spill a drop.


6. Pour wine into glasses, not the ones modeled after Marie Antoinette's breast--oh those French!--but tall flutes. Flutes are made with a rougher surface. Bubbles emanate from those rough points. Oo, the bubbles tickle your nose!


7. Hail the New Year, lads and lasses.

you ought to take time to read this blog, by the former Stephen Ellis now ycelpt Bob Button and likely to take on other aliases. page down a bit for a lovely Youtube performance by Leo Koetke (on the Tonight Show!!!), but do not ignore the words.

my informant sent this link to Charles Olson reading "The Librarian". additionally I am informed that today is Frank Moore's birthday, born 1923. yesterday was Olson's 99th annivérsaire. there are several other videos of Big Fire Source on Youtube. I realize that that sort of moniker is weighty and wearing but I am sure Duncan meant it straight up. I am now beyond slavishness towards my teachers but I am still much invigorated by Olson's work.

saw Batman the Dark Knight. it exceeded expectations. it is based more in a human reality than these comic book movies usually manage. Heath ledger was certainly riveting. of course, that is how it works, the crazy, intense one is the centre of attention. as has been noted, Satan is far more interesting in Paradise Lost than Adam or Eve. that given, Ledger still made every moment crackle. Cesar Romero played the role campy, pretty much as Bob Kane envisioned the character. Jack Nicholson was Jack, creepy yet fun. Ledger’s Joker was disturbing. late in the movie he deliver unto Batman an examination of Batman’s moral dilemma that was splendidly biting and well-aimed. Joker himself is hors de combat of that problem. he’s a terrorist without the moral clause. the sense of the city being terrorized, in the current political sense, was strong and compelling. Aaron Eckart as the white knight DA was good. he’s startlingly goodlooking in a brisk public servant way, and entered the role of Two-Face smoothly, I thought. no need to go entirely Willem DaFoe. Michael Caine as Alfred was good, cockney Alfred, and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, worked well as well. do not go cheap on the little roles in these things. Batman as Dark Knight is wearisome. he’s got issues just like the criminals, but is far less evolved. Christian Bale as Wayne has life to him, but no Batman has succeeded in being more than a costume. which is the point, I suppose, of the character. the movie was well-contained, did not allude outside itself to other entries in the franchise, and its themes held thru out. I haven’t seen the latest James Bond movies, but I think they tried to just start over, treat them more like separate movies. there was that obvious sense in Iron Man that this began the series. it worked nonetheless, but one fears the attenuation that likely will occur. one need only look at the Pirates flicks following Black Pearl, and the 2nd Matrix was so awful that I could not watch the 3rd, tho that is supposed to be better and resolve the 3.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, check. 1st one is still the best. this one has the same self-conscious manipulation as The Last Crusade, the urgency to touch all the franchise keynotes and let the plot take care of its own. the result is even more muddled than Last Crusade. I even found it visually cluttered. it looked remarkably cheesy, which is surprising given that as a film technician Spielberg aint no slouch. the movie starts with some malarkey about Russians invading Area 51 to steal, oh, you know, the Crystal Skull, or some hint to its whereabouts. the movie simply accepted that certain forces must push the plot, and dealt something to suffice. Indy is accompanied by a Brit who, it turns out, is a double agent. and a triple agent, except no one likely believed that reconciliation. but Indy gets away, and survives a nuclear bomb test by hiding in a refrigerator. I believe everything I see. there’s a brief 50s blackball theme, then Indy meets Shia LaBoeuf, who arrives looking like Brando in The Wild Ones. decent rapport exists between Ford and LaBoeuf, albeit a contrived tension, plotwise. on a vague hint, they fly to Peru, in search of that crystal skull. the Russians remain in the story, poor man’s Nazi. I did not mench Cate Blanchett being the nutsoid in charge of the Russians. she’s Stalin’s head of psychic research, or some such. which sounds more like a Hitler thing but anyway.she’s a dully campy dominatrix. is she a good actress??? her Galadriel was probably not her fault, the director forced her to look like such a bemused drag. I cannot remember what else I have seen of her. the plot was muddled beyond repair. the crystal skull attracted metal, but only when convenient to the plot. the action set pieces were lacklustre and did not seem to worry about plausibility. one accepts that Mythbusters might bust certain imaginative elements in a movie, but not that Jamie and Adam would not even bother to probe the possibilities. that is how it seemed with this movie. the movie was enjoyable enough, since I like Ford, and Spielberg’s failures are still largely competent. the crystal skull belongs, we learn, to ETs, so we end up with Richard Dreyfus’ friends with a somewhat more malign aspect. I do not know the budget of this flick but it looked cheapo. I wonder about Lucas, who has twiddled away his most interesting projects for the sake of merchandise and 2nd rate productions. I imagine that the plan was to slip River Phoenix into the Indy franchise, back in that day, and death kinda precluded that. LaBoeuf might be the next chance to move on, because Ford’s not good for many more punch outs. the movie ended smarmily, so maybe we should just tuck the baby in and say goodnight.

traffic to this space tripled because of searches on Emma Bee Bernstein, indicating the interest in her. Beth and I did our share, just wanting to know a little more. I did not intend to write a poem to her (see link below), but it was immediately identified as such by someone on the Wryting-L list. intent is a difficult thing in poetry. I (hope to) let feeling find the words, rather than, say, replicate the feeling in a structured response. if there is a School of Quietude, its sin is boosting emotional moments into crass simulacra. some things are too large in feeling, and too essential, death certainly, that we cannot play them like that. when Olson tells Blackburn that he did not know it was a subject, he lets boundaries find themselves. when I write ‘E’ in my poem, I really meant the letter, mostly. that was a safe distance, you might safe, tho I did invoke her name. i like the poem, because I see language passing thru me, mostly, rather than me at the steering wheel, sorry if metaphors are mixed.