Taking a digital page from Brenda‘s notebook, a picture of what I’m reading next:
I’m not chasing any particular theme of thought, just changing pace from what the same-same memoirs of literal today that have such prevalence and sway. What was brought to my path by friends, family or random chance.
It’s tricky this admired trait of being contemporary, being in step with current. It’s like being present. I seem to need to be present and past back and forth I try not to drag too much of history with me at once.
I wonder about my relationship to history, literary or general. I look back at my growing up in the perennial urgent harvest or urgent to rest up and there was no past spoken of except by senility which wasn’t lucid and there was no future because it was either uppity to presume what god (or husband or random acts of neighbour dropping by) had in store. Plans were kind of taboo except in the broadest strokes and immovables, like wash day or grocery day for a given house. I’d guess that’s what drove me to history, anyone’s history. I was shut out of my own, so fine, anyone’s will do. I’ll glean something to make sense of now. Because now needs before to make any sense.
What is communication except an extension of trust or extension of mistrust? It plays in somehow.
I wonder why Candy Hemphill’s* song was so resonant. “You gotta trust somebody. You gotta let somebody in. You gotta trust somebody and call somebody friend. When you’re afraid and been betrayed, go to the Lord Almighty. He’ll show you with his tender care that you can trust somebody.”
A funny claim, that a god who doesn’t interact can prove trust. Funny that in the absence of reliable real people, trust is still needed and you can take an abstract concept and construct a “personal friend in Jesus” to fill the gap that needs filling.
[*She was born Carmel Hemphill but is now is Candy Christmas having married Rev. Christmas near Nashville. In her photo she is a middle aged woman but she was just a teen when I saw her sing, but then, I was a teen and I am middle-aged. Still somehow this all doesn’t add up right.]
We need the past and community to stabilize present and allow motion to grow to momentum in the future and are resilient and creative enough to find solutions wherever.
But the books and whatever I’m looking for for reinforcement or countering…
Top to bottom: Paul Mackan’s O My God of Apes and Apples (Publish America, 2011). My Father Who Art is one of my favorites in here.
“To be my father’s son, a tragedy/ inherited with a ‘by your leave’. / His bones speak for him now/ he’s hit me with them if he could /[…] He was liberal so I am,/He sang, I sing,/ he played piano, / I the organ — a bigger to-do”
I must admit I’ve a weak spot for poetry with music that is sacrilegious or struggling with. “Resurrection Day will rise without me.” It’s a pleasure to see some of these poem’s I’ve heard at open mic come to the page and to discover new ones I haven’t seen.
The current issue of unarmed.
Pieces from Buck Downs thinking on ex mas when “suitability killed the tree”, Sheila E Murphy’s “I have been practicing/for life/to be lived” and Elisabeth Guthrie. Who is this, then? Her full X Portraits, from Crater Press is already out of print. (Their pricing scheme baffles. You can buy by a ROW? ROW? And for some issues, there’s a note “paperknife required”. It seems an odd enticement? warning?)
No End in Strangeness by Bruce Taylor (Cormorant Books, 2011)
It’s a chatty sort of book. Everyday language, from a playful person, not trying to put on the mask of lower class marxist layman. He’s alert, as in Fortune’s Algorithm which starts
If only you could strip
off the falseness,
tear away its fabulous
headgear and expose
its good bald head
It’s not a lineated prose (not that I expect it from him, just seems to be a common trend). His line breaks chosen to hook, turn, please and play. Conceptually he plays with the idea of mask yet more than theatre half masks, the suggestion of it covering the whole head, like a gorilla mask. As if even the back of our heads and our ears are trained to portray the target social grace in fabulous faux culture. He doesn’t sound bite excerpt.
Rather like Barry Dempster’s poems, they evolve and turn on themselves so the reveal is if you’ve been there for the whole poem.
In Taylor’s case, he really reels it out. Little Animals is a 10-page long poem. More commonly they’re 2-3 pages. Different things can be said in more time when you don’t cut to the punch.
In Taylor‘s 1998 collection, Facts (Signal), the title poem, The Facts runs on for 7 pages. Under the school of thought that each poem should have one subject and one metaphor set, clearly explored, it veers around like a webcam on a hummingbird.
He starts it sitting in a back of a moving pickup with a stray dog. By p. 25 and 26
[…]hammered sheet metal to a school wall;
then I drove a blue van, and later I worked for the city
painting white lines on roads,
and in the course of that spring
I did every job for a day,
so now I can tell you I’ve been every person in that town
I’ve done every work that was offered
and lived every life. When I went
I saw myself coming, the trolleys filled up with me
coming and going, the newspaper kept me informed
about all that I did, I looked up
to th rainstreaked windows downtown and saw me
looking down over streets full of me.
A red bird flapped up to its nest, it was me,
she laid me in branches and twine, when I hatched
I asked to be fed, so she brought me
a frantic six-legger and in a snap of the beak
I was gone, mislaid somewhere in a forest of me,
my slim branches clicking and groaning.[…]
in a world that’s always been there,
[…] with the power to pulverize
theories beliefs and conjectures
under the flat rough stones of the facts.
Next book down? Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson, edited by Hugh Kenner (Reinhart Editions, 1964) p. 85, Lame pickup lines that probably didn’t work then either, such as Song to Celia, where the narrator sends flowers which she rejects but because she breathes on them, they’ll never wither only taken an upgrade and give off her scent instead of their own.
p. 205, George Herbert who calls for a little more plainness, less painterlyness. Down to earth in Jordan 1 he questions, “false hair/ becomes a verse? Is there in truth no beautie? […] is it no verse except in enchanted groves[…] while he that reades, divines/ catching the sense at two removes”.
The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press, 2008) won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Almost no capitalization, the sense of single poems with the title at the top, except each page has the same title, and the only punctuation is space on the page. It’s an intricate structure, a sort of a verbal dancing sodoku. Almost every line of the 64 long-lined pages ends with the word stop, please or advise. A dizzying sort of structure. The funny thing is, so far, the lines can be read skipping those words, or including them making multiple texts overlaid. It is right-justified, which I don’t think I can reproduce here. p. 5
my pleasures inventoried like cutlery stop
no histrionics just two brass lamps a stack of old newsprint from Paris tied in twine stop
the glamour in asking first Are you happy? stop
I’m elongating the upward curve of my handwritten “f” please
years of growth sanded away to make this beautifully varnished myth please
the stories so often describe the homecoming as some kind of relief stop
Letters on Birchbark by Uta Regoli, translated by Henry Beissel (Penumbra, 2000) I’ve owned for a long time but somehow slipped sideways without being read. p. 53, City in Winter, “In the city glass separates/ice from light” and p. 84, Winter Litany,
It was so cold that we needed two fires:
each one to keep the other warm.
The animals emigrated south
and took the trees along.
We were left behind […]
and talked to ice ferns”
What better time for gardening? Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte (Story, 1975, 1998) Wild carrot’s deep taproot indicates a soil worth improving for crops. p. 73
Stinging nettle […] strengthens growth of mint and tomatoes and gives greater aromatic quality to herbs such as valerian, angelica, marjoram, sage and peppermint.[…] Fruit packed in nettle hay ripens more quickly. Stinging nettle is helpful to stimulate fermentation in compost or manure piles.
Custom by Rae Armantrout (above/ground, 2012) got slipped back out of the shot but it’s fitting because in “At least” there’s a natural slip to it
“The train of thought
is not a train,
but a tendril,
blind”
In West Coast Line (24/Three, 1990) Ray Kiyooka has some memoir essays, including on the Sino-phobia that swept Canada, poems, and something on arts funding from 1979,
as well all know: visual thirst in the last quarter
of the 20th century was satisfied by a weekyl sitcom on television.
I’d say let’s pull the gold-plated plug out of the kultural-grain
dump a can of draino into it and let the wind pass thru.[…] a simple
proposition, viz: does the thing on he wall turn you on. it takes
love or a reasonable facsilimile thereof to make a painting and
be able to see if for what it’s worth, clearly.
Curiously Kevin Connolly is also in the issue using the same date and year at the bottom of the poem as Paul Mackan used. p. 94 Connolly has a poem “Junk Male”
I wonder if we’d calm down
a little if sex were a seasonal thing,
like fruit ripening. If all you
had to do was sit there in the wet dirt
and wait for the carrot to scream.
He goes on to play pool in stanza 4
“Research,” I call it. Bob call
it “Thursday,” and he’s right.
The issue is curiously full of familiar names: Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Maxine Gadd, Barry McKinnon, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Creeley, Stuart Ross, Lillian Necakov, Lisa Downe, Gary Barwin, Michael Redhill, Margaret Christakos. And 17 others that don’t ring a bell. Over 20 years, some poets could have written the same today, and others have shifted. Some value different scales of change differently, I speculate but don’t understand. And I wonder what did Janset Shami do next? Amazon lists only one title for her from and it from that year, and 5 years later she was making marionette shows, but then, women change their names and become untraceable.
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, edited by Susanne Woods (Oxford). Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to women patrons. I’m still in the introduction.
Maybe I should dig out The Cloud Corporation which I got at Dodge Poetry Fest…I started but didn’t finish it and it just won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.
I’ve also just discovered Asymptote, a literary journal of translation and reviews. I often feel hemmed in by the small circles of reference. This widens it out.
If, what I’m seeking, is surrogate stories of family or tribe, I may be taking a circuitous, scenic route in the wrong direction to that end. I should be heading towards bloodlines, except the rate of dying is high and there’s no reason to bring me into the fold of stories among those who remain.
If I’m seeking a more benevolent, more critically engaged narrative of how the world works, and more diversity than the implausible conformity that didn’t comfort, perhaps I’m going the right way.