Carl Annarummo published my recent chapbook, but beyond that evidence of percipience, he makes really nifty books. look at what he has produced. I recommend all of his work.
unrelated, but another wonder worker, Donna Kuhn and ferlies of visual and word.

taking a moment to feed my blog, on a springy, daylight saved day in southern New England... I downloaded a word processor called Jarte (and you can too). it is a simple word processor without a lot of extras. writers do not necessarily need all those extras as offered by Word and OpenOffice, both of which I regularly use. it occurred to me that I get the same jolt from getting a new word processor as I do a new pen or notebook. just as a new pen or notebook seems to open possibilities, likewise different word processors. just the difference of the interface, I guess. changing where I write has always seemed to come thru in the writing. watched portions of 3 movies yesterday, while doing other things.

1. that movie by the Farrelly Brothers about Siamese twins, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear. clearly a South Parkian willingness to risk bad taste. Damon and Kinnear are connected at the waist, they share a liver. while their condition is occasionally awkward it is never disabling. it helps that they can switch sides at times, which is not explained and is barely pointed to. it is a surprisingly goodhearted movie. playing somewhat against type, Kinnear is the confident one and Damon is tremulous.
2. that smoking industry movie starring Aaron Eckert. his character is a lot like his role in Dark Knight. his character is a crisply accomplished and efficient lawyer defending the tobacco industry. he is pretty charismatic.
3. Troy. seeing the trailer at the theatre had me, specifically the shot from above of the 1000 face-launched ships headed towards Troy. I have seen it several times and enjoy it, tho it has its weaknesses. the gods have been excluded from the story, which is okay. Zeus and the gang would distract from the human story. the movie opens with a nice evocation of a battlefield, with Agamemnon's army about to face that of Thessaly. it is hard to conceive of the hand to hand clash of such armies. the battle of Cannae, Hannibal's greatest victory over Rome, saw an army of at least 50,000 Romans destroyed. some of those were made slaves but most were slaughtered slaughtered slaughtered. having a visual rendering of something like that, I mean a representation of two large armies meeting, is fascinating to me. whoever played Agamemnon was perfect. he is beefy and blustering and pompous as I imagine Agamemnon to have been. Brad Pitt as Achilles is good despite an overarching Brad Pittiness. you cannot forget that it is Pitt there, the guy married to the goddess Angelina (and not to that pale hamadryad Jennifer). Pitt is convincing vis-à-vis the physical prowess. early on he goes up against a steroid giant, whom he efficiently dispatches with a Michael Jordan sort of leaping feint. when Achilles and the Myrmidons hit the Normandy shore, Achilles is blurry ferocity. this ferocity brings to mind John Cleese's Lancelot in Holy Grail. the movie presents a lot of great shots of Troy and the battleground, a lot of presence. Eric Bana as Hector is terrific. he clearly hath not th'advantages of Achilles but proceeds nobly natheless. Orlando Bloom, despite all the great swordplay in Pirates and Rings, is stuck being a washout as Paris. it is a thankless role. there are plenty of changes in what we know of the Troy story, some of which seem gratuitous. Patroclus is the nephew of Achilles, brash due to youth rather than hubris, and Achilles can focus his attention on Briseis. the movie fizzles out after Hector dies, mainly because that love story is tired.

Steve Tills comments on my reaction to Elizabeth Willis' intro to Lisa Robertson, below. I should say that when I make bold statements, I imply, and you should infer, a question mark. as in, in this instance, is Willis' intro as disturbing as I think it is? that would require you (Dear Reader) to go to iTunes and download the podcast. I have read Willis' poetry, and like it, but I wonder why poetry should be transmuted into an academic quandary of code. poetry itself is a code, but the key is, poetry's code is immediacy. words in poetry are leaping life. Emerson was right enough that every word was, initially, a poem, an exalted expression of the world's experience. trapping poetry in a dialectic of segregated meaning is distressing. I wish others would listen to Willis and tell me how far off the mark I may be. as I said earlier, what she says is not meaningless. her words just seemed to have a push away, as if poetry were an Arcanum. it may be. when pressed, I have told people that I wrote poetry, which often seems to amount to admitting that I do weird, if not quite criminal, things. that is a sad encroachment. Robert Grenier did not speak in an involved haze, in the classes I took with him, but in the realm of personal (his) experience. school should not change that. but maybe I am prickly on this point, and unfair to Elizabeth Willis. does poetry need to be an isolation? maybe so, that is largely my experience. I gravitated to writing poetry because the field was open. I did not know what poetry was, so I could make up the necessities. the necessities flowed in and out. writing is a directive, and impetus toward confirmation. sorry if I compelled sleepiness with that sentence. one writes as an act of discovery. that would imply a personal language. the stutter of writers like Olson or Creeley, or Dickinson--look at her work--is instructive, a revelation in speech. speech is active. poetry is an active moment in language. it will not be rightly described by stalled words. I acknowledge my ignorance and my resistance in these matters, because poetry is not, after all, not easy or easily quantifiable.

In Podcasting News...

1. listening to a podcast called Jordan Jesse Go, which is 2 guys talking, mostly. they are funny, often unexpectedly so. in the most recent episode they mention a teacher they had at UC Santa Clara, or whatever it is exactly called. said teacher was Kasey Mohammad, whom they describe as strange but interesting. hey, I almost know Kasey, beyond rep, from being on the Flarf list... in a similar vein, Stephen King mentions Creeley and Olson in his novels. the world of poetry is so small...


2. in another podcast, from iTunes U, actually, is a reading given by Lisa Robertson. I have not read much of her work so that is fine. thing is, Elizabeth Willis gave an atrocious intro. the atrocity of which I speak concerns the stodgy academic talkspeak she employus. it is not gibberish that she speaks, but a stultifying overlay. is poetry indeed such a code of segregation? the4 lecture by Harold Bloom that I have mentioned here was a pleasure to me because he revealed his pleasure in the works of poetry. Willis' intro had the makings of a bad lecture, a congestion of words around but somehow not in a subject. let's not do that sort of thing, k?

I herewith advert 2 pieces that I myself wrote:

1. Some Songs. I wrote this oh 8-9 years ago, a translation (if you do not notice) of the 1st 3 Duino Elegies. I took a Project Gutenberg translation of Rilke's work and just changed a lot of words. what I like here is how something of the original (twice translated) remains. I posted it some time ago on my crappy website, the one with all the pop ups, but here I clean it up a tad and you avoid the pop ups.
2. On Education. this is another college paper, written within that stricture. even so, I think it is fresh enough in looking at how my work evolved. a great impetus in a writer, in the arts, in many endeavours, is the urge to do it. added to that, tho, is the urge to understand how to do it, and why. we make much of our bi-cameral brains but it is all one brain after all. anyway, I hope this paper is not seen as mere indulgence. to me, it seems bright-eyed.

reading Nota Bene Eiswein, but I shan't review it at this time (might as well read it before review it, tho I do not wish to set unattainable goals). I am, however, inspired to write a few general words about Eileen Tabios' work. a byproduct of reading her work, for me anyway, is that I want to write. I always want to write but I mean try something different. Eileen's hallmark is adventure, in the sense of setting a challenge for herself, and enjoying the ride (mixed metaphors are the best metaphors). I think of Virginia Woolf, who, at least in the handful of her novels that I have read, seems to have given herself experiments to perform. the relentless wave action of The Waves, the focused quest of To the Lighthouse, the shifting POV of Mrs Dalloway. she sets herself challenges beyond the creation of a story, technical challenges. with Eileen, one sees different methodologies applied with each work. she attaches context to local effort, or the local context is understood as informative of the whole, the whole being Her Work. Nota Bene largely eschews the prose that she often writes in, instead she uses hay(na)ku and similar short lines forms. what she does not eschew with this book is notes and such, which she supplies with every book of hers that I have seen. I love notes and afterwords and all that stuff. Black Sparrow Books were always good for extra matter, which I enjoy. Eileen frequently uses other works of art, as well as historical or personal narratives, as seeds to riff from or with. in the case of NBE, there is an extensive use of the work of Christian Hawkey, whose work I am unfamiliar with. one thing that interests me with Charles Olson: his poetry, his prose, his lectures and interviews, all of it has the same voice. I mean the bold rush and stutter, assertions and questions. Eileen's work, including many blogs and even her place and placement in the Poetry Republic (as writer, editor, instigator), is an embrace of the many in one. all my life I heard one makes many. this is inspirational. it is simply fun to discover what is next with Eileen. when I say fun, I mean including books that embrace her father's death, or the painful nexus of her heritage, as well as the immersion into criticism of her work she allowed with The Blind Chatelaine's Keys (which see). these few words for now...

1. Nota Bene Eiswein by Eileen Tabios is in hand, product of Ahadada Books. I have not read it yet but it boasts cover art (collage) by Eileen Herself. the work is not in prose, unlike much of her work, but instead owes form to hay(na)ku and other means of counting, short lines. it is always worth reading the work of someone who pays me royalties (check is in hand).


2. Anny Ballardini sent a note to Wryting, and presumably elsewhere, adverting her new book, Ghost Dance in 33 Movements, available from Mark Young's excellent publishing adventure Otoliths. Anny's work receives of many tributaries, without formailized attachment. she also presents a wonderful generosity. her blog, par exemple, points to many works not her own. both Anny and Mark do good work. our challenge, should we accept it, is to support their support. this is part of what we can call community, if u willin.

for those who might be interested, I added numerous texts to my writing portfolio site, yclept Allen Bramhall Writing Portfolio. included in this array is the catalogue for the art show that I did 2 years ago, “Conversations and reactions”. the catalogue is part of my thesis project. I still need to scan in the images. that is a project, and beyond that, many of the pictures exceed, size-wise, the capabilities of my scanner. I wrote the catalogue descriptively, but it would be better with the images. selah, until such time as I can do better. I am hopeful that links, of which there are many, work, and apologize now for whatever glitch I have yet to fix. I will keep nurturing this thing. if you have any involvement with what I write, please let me know.

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.