This site is for posting poems, essays about poetry, and thoughts about the art. Francis Picabia: "What I like least about others is myself." W.G. Sebald: "The greater the distance, the clearer the view."
New American Writing 33 (2015) is at the printer. It contains work by David Mutschlecner, Martha Ronk, Elaine Equi, Carolyn Guinzio, Noelle Kocot, Linda Norton, Lance Phillips, Johannes Goransson, Joseph Lease, Joshua Corey, Alejandra Azuero, Richard Greenfield, Andrew Maxwell, rob mclennan, Caroline Knox, Catherine Wagner, HL Hazuka, Ed Smallfield, Valerie Coulton, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Kevin Phan, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Jennifer Givhan, Phillip Barron, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, John Sakkis, Gray Tolhurst, Steve Fujimura, Zoe Meints, Emilie Delcourt, George Life, Justin Robinson, and Alice Jones. Subscriptions available, three issues for $36, single issues for $15, from New American Writing, 369 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941. Distributed to bookstores and newsstands by Ingram Periodicals, also available from http://spdbooks.com.
I found this short poem of Celan in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy:
"I am the first"
I am the first to drink of the blue that still looks for its eye.
I drink from your footprint and see:
you roll through my fingers, pearl, and you grow!
You grow, as do all the forgotten.
You roll: the black hailstone of sadness
is caught by a kerchief turned white with waving goodbye.
Hurry Up Please It's Time, A new anthology of poetics, has just been published. Edited by Vanessa Place and Teresa Carmody, it contains Trenchart monographs by Les Figues Press authors:(www.lesfigues.com). In addition to my three-part essay, "Statement, Manifesto, Poetics," it contains pieces by Stephanie Taylor, Sissy Boyd, Lisa Darms, Vincent Dachy, Molly Corey, Julie Thi Underhill, Nuala Archer, Axel Thormahlen, Danielle Adair, Alta Ifland, Stan Apps, Kim Rosenfield, Susan Simpson, Allison Carter, Ken Ehrlich, Amina Cain, Sophie Robinson, Harold Abramowitz, the VD Collective, Lily Hoang, Matthew Timmons, Frances Richard, Doug Nufer, Myriam Moscona, Jen Hofer, Alex Forman, Michael du Plessis, Melissa Buzzeo, Mark Rutkowski, Klaus Killisch, Matias Viegener, Redell Olsen, Dodie Bellamy, Chris Tysh, Divya Victor, and Alice Koniitz. Today I read Stan Apps' "On Unimportant Art" and Matthew Timmons' "the old poetics."
A page of my essay is below, from the "Manifesto" section:
Sonnet 56 (2009) is featured in Annette Gilbert's study, Reprint, Appropriation (&) Literature (Berlin: LuxBooks, 2014) for its processing of Shakespeare's sonnets with the machinery of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. The book includes facing German and English text, as well as photos of facing pages of the book doing the pirating. Among many books discussed: Words nd Ends from Ez (Jackson Mac Low, 1989); My Sun Also Rises (Robert Fitterman, 2008); RADI OS (Ronald Johnson, 1977); Purloined. A Novel (Joseph Kosuth, 2000); A Humument. A Treated Victorian Novel (Tom Phillips, 1970); UN COUP DE DES JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD. IMAGE (Marcel Broodthaers, 1969); and Writing Through Finnegans Wake & Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake (John Cage, 1978).
News has come from Vietnam that the writer Nguyen Quang Lap, who blogs under the name Blogger Que Choa, has been arrested and imprisoned. A group of Vietnamese artists, intellectuals and scientists has forwarded the following petition.
REQUEST TO FREE NGUYEN QUANG LAP IMMEDIATELY
Please sign this petition by sending an email to bolap2014@gmail.com with your name, occupation, and address. The number of signers was 1,062 as of 12/19/2014.
To: H.E. Truong Tan Sang, President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
To: H.E. Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
To: Mr. Trai Dai Quang, Minister of Public Security of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
We, the undersigned, are colleagues and readers of writer Nguyen Quang Lap, also known as blogger Que Choa, who advocates for culture and the arts, who cares about freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and basic human rights as defined in the constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, as in he United Nations Universal Human Rights Declaration, of which Vietnam is a signatory.
We are deeply concerned that Nguyen Quang Lap was detained by the Security Police of Ho Chi Minh City on December 6, 2014, citing Article 258 of Vietnam's penal code: "Abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State, the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and/or citizens." Nguyen Quang Lap is a popular playwright and blogger who is well respected by the public of Vietnam and the international community.
The imprisonment of writer Nguyen Quang Lap has strongly moved the public, including intellectuals, writers, artists, colleagues, young people, and readers who love him.
The legitimacy of this imprisonment is in question because:
1. The content of the Que Chua blog provides only news from different sources, for the purpose of reaching the truth, as stated by Bo Lap. It peacefully questions the policy and actions of the Vietnamese government, in order to contribute to the reforms of the nation.
2. the Security Police entered a private home without warrant, then claimed to have caught the writer "red handed" while he was writing his novel on his own computer.
The imprisonment of Nguyen Quang Lap is inhumane since he has been in poor health. He suffers from hemiplegia due to traumatic brain injury. As a result, walking, sitting, and even care for his personal hygiene are difficult for him.
The imprisonment of Nguyen Quang Lap, therefore, is not convincing. It only creates negative reactions from the people of Vietnam and the international community. It also diminishes public trust in the justice system of Vietnam. It raises doubt that the Vietnamese government truly honors human rights and civil rights. More importantly, it impedes Vietnam's efforts to gain support from other democratic countries.
We therefore request:
1. That the government free writer Nguyen Quang Lap immediately.
2. That further investigation be legitimate and transparent and include the involvement of a lawyer selected by the writer.
3. That the government free Truong Duy Nhat, Nguyen Huu Vinh, Hong Le Tho, and other bloggers who were imprisoned because of similar illegal and false convictions.
4. Revision and repeal of articles 258.88 of the penal code, which are vague and thus easily abused in order to suppress freedom of speech and expression.
To lift our nation out of the current crisis, the government needs to listen to the voices of the Vietnamese people, as well as intellectuals and artists, instead of brutally oppressing them, a principle that the President and Prime Minister have previously affirmed many times.
Very respectfully yours,
Nguyen Ngoc, writer, and 34 Vietnamese writers, artists, and scientists
The following document should be of great interest to all of us committed to freedom of expression. It is an announcement of the intention of 60 leading Vietnamese writers to found a League of Independent Vietnamese Writers. Why is this of interest? Because decision-making in the publishing world of Vietnam is largely in the hands of the powerful Vietnamese Writers Association. Members of the association are limited in number, and each enjoys a powerful and well-paid patronage, including a car and driver. It is equivalent, I'm told, to the military positions of Major and General, depending on who you are and what seniority you have. One of the League's founders, Hoang Hung, whose work is included in Black Dog, Black Night: An Anthology of Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008), was imprisoned from 1978 to 1981 on the suspicion that he possessed a forbidden book of poetry by Hoang Cam, whose work is also included in Black Dog, Black Night (edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me). I assisted in shaping the English translation of the document below.
The founders of the League are at risk in signing the petition. It is very brave of them to ask for more freedom of expression, because the last time it happened, in the mid-1950s following military victory over the French, poets and writers who made such a request were treated very harshly, including imprisonment, loss of their privileged positions in the Writers Association, and not having their work published for the next 40 years.
I have had the pleasure of meeting several of the signers, including Nguyen Duy, Y Nhi, and of course Hoang Hung. Here is the document:
Proclamation of the Committee to Promote the Founding of the League of Independent Vietnamese Writers
"After 1975, the end of a hundred-year history of war, our country was in need of a substantial cultural renaissance. Unluckily, this grave and urgent rebirth did not happen as expected. On the contrary, Vietnamese culture has evolved from bad to worse, and appears to be in danger of losing the most basic humanistic values. This shortcoming threatens the survival of our nation.
Vietnamese writers must admit that they are partly responsible for this state of affairs. Among literature’s many important functions is to awaken the conscience and to raise the morale of the nation. At this great turning point of history, Vietnamese literature is not realizing its true role.
The weakness of Vietnamese literature is rooted in the indifference of its writers to their social responsibilities, their insensitivity concerning daily events, and, most importantly, their lack of independent thinking, which has also limited their creative capabilities.
In a society like ours, where basic freedoms have been severely limited, it is difficult for writers to speak clearly and forcefully about the conditions of life in society. This limitation blurs and confuses expression; ultimately, it extinguishes art entirely. The freedom to create and publish literary works is a life-or-death necessity, not only for writers as individuals but also for the health of Vietnamese literature. Without minimal rights to free expression, our literary lives will never be adequate.
Literary institutions ruled by bureaucracy and mendacity suffocate the literature they presume to support. The also suppress healthy communication between writers and their ability to offer mutual assistance, both in their private lives and their artistic production.
In response to this longstanding but urgent situation, we, the undersigned writers, resolve to organize a committee for the founding of an independent institution of Vietnamese writers, both inside and outside the country. To be called The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers, this new institution seeks to promote a true, humanistic, and democratic literature, modern and responsive to globalization. As demanded by history, we must act as pioneers in the creation of a national cultural renaissance.
Activities of The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers will focus on following:
1. To improve solidarity and assistance among writers inside and outside the country; 2. To bring forth conditions for professional amelioration, to advance and promote individual creation, and to encourage innovation in creative writing as well as literary criticism and linguistic studies; 3. To defend all legitimate materialistic and spiritual interests of its members, especially the freedom to write and publish, as well as the promotions of easy and complete access to literature by the reading public.
The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers is an organization belonging to civil society. Dedicated to professional solidarity, it is completely independent of any other organizations existing inside and outside the country.
The detailed statutes and program of the League will be set up and made public in the process of establishing of the league. Our email is: nhavandoclap@gmail.com."
Hà Nội, March 3rd, 2014 On behalf of the Promotion Committee Nguyên Ngọc
The Committee to Promote THE LEAGUE OF INDEPENDENT VIETNAMESE WRITERS
1/ Nguyên Ngọc – writer (Chief of the Committee) 2/ Phạm Xuân Nguyên – literary critic (Secretary) 3/ Bùi Chát – poet 4/ Bùi Minh Quốc – poet 5/ Bùi Ngọc Tấn – writer 6/ Chân Phương – poet, translator (USA) 7/ Châu Diên – writer, translator 8/ Cung Tích Biền – writer 8/ Dạ Ngân – writer 9/ Dư Thị Hoàn – poet 10/ Dương Thuấn – poet 11/ Dương Tường – poet, translator 12/ Đặng Tiến – literary critic and researcher (France) 13/ Đặng Văn Sinh – writer 14/ Đoàn Lê – writer 15/ Đoàn Thị Tảo – poet 16/ Đỗ Lai Thúy – literary critic and researcher 17/ Đỗ Trung Quân – poet 18/ Giáng Vân – poet 19/ Hà Sĩ Phu – writer 20/ Hoàng Dũng – linguistic researcher 21/ Hoàng Hưng – poet, translator 22/ Hoàng Minh Tường – writer 23/ Lê Hoài Nguyên – poet 24/ Lê Minh Hà – writer (Germany) 25/ Lê Phú Khải – writer 26/ Liêu Thái – poet 27/ Lưu Trọng Văn – writer 28/ Lý Đợi – poet 29/ Mai Sơn – writer, translator 30/ Mai Thái Lĩnh – philosophy and culture researcher 31/ Nam Dao – writer (Canada) 32/ Ngô Thị Kim Cúc – writer 33/ Nguyễn Bá Chung – poet (USA) 34/ Nguyễn Duy – poet 35/ Nguyễn Đức Dương – linguistic researcher 36/ Nguyễn Huệ Chi – literature researcher 37/ Nguyễn Quang Lập – writer 38/ Nguyễn Quang Thân – nhà văn 39/ Nguyễn Quốc Thái – poet 40/ Nguyễn Thị Hoàng Bắc – poet (USA) 41/ Nguyễn Thị Thanh Bình – writer (USA) 42/ Phạm Đình Trọng – writer 43/ Phạm Nguyên Trường – translator 44/ Phạm Vĩnh Cư – literature researcher, translator 45/ Phan Đắc Lữ – poet 46/ Phan Tấn Hải – writer (Hoa Kỳ) 47/ Quốc Trọng – cinema play writer 48/ Thùy Linh – writer 49/ Tiêu Dao Bảo Cự – writer 50/ Trang Hạ – writer, translator 51/ Trần Đồng Minh – literature researcher 52/ Trần Huy Quang – writer 53/ Trần Thùy Mai – writer 54/ Trịnh Hoài Giang – poet 55/ Trương Anh Thụy – writer (USA) 56/ Võ Thị Hảo – writer 57/ Vũ Biện Điền – writer (Japan) 58/ Vũ Thế Khôi – literature researcher, translator 59/ Vũ Thư Hiên – writer (France) 60/ Ý Nhi – poet
The photo is of Hoang Hung (on the left), yours truly, and Bei Dao on the occasion of Bei Dao's reading with Michael Palmer at University of San Francisco in, I believe, 2003 or 2004. Hoang Hung was on his first visit to the US. In order to make the trip, he was required by the Vietnamese government to resign his position as a journalist for the Labor News.
The following appears in Cole Swensen's excellent collection of Essays, Noise That Stays Noise and deals with a central issue of representation: how true is poetry? Is it possible that poetry, with its mirrors, fables, and syntaxes, makes a higher score on the truth test that philosophy, history, documentary, and even memory?
"We can begin to explore poetry’s relationship to truth by
contrasting it with that of fiction, whose untrue nature is central and both achieved
and announced b the fact that it imitates the true through presenting facts,
entities, actions, situations, etc. that mimic those in the outside world.The distance from the actual world offered by
mimicry and imitation is what allows fiction the perspective to comment upon
that world.However, the alternative
world that poetry sets up, to the degree that it does, aren’t miniature copies
of the world at large; instead, they operate by other logics, according to
other laws, and at other speeds.And for
much poetry, there is no “outside world”; rather, it constructs a new element
in the world we all share, and as an actual element of that world, it cannot not be true.In short, it cannot make truth relations because
it is itself a true act.
"For
instance, just a few lines picked almost at random—these are from Paul Hoover’s
poem “Childhood and Its Double”:
Everything’s more real, once it
finds its mirror,
The gray lake and its gray sky,
Skin and the sound of drums,
And the back end of a costume
horse
Confused against the skyline.
"The
opening line—Everything’s more real once
it finds its mirror—indicates, through its syntax, that it participates in
the truth-economy of the world-at-large, that it is making a positive
assertion, but in fact it doesn’t; the logic it obeys operates only within its
own boundaries (the poem) within which the statement is true, but once taken
outside those boundaries, where it must function on other terms, it would
quickly be called nonsense (which in its own way is also “true”), for, though
stating things about objects in the real world, the line does not attempt to
replicate or represent that world in an accountable way.The images in the lines that follow cannot be
held to the truth test either because they declare only themselves, their own
existence, and make no claims beyond that.
"So
fiction and poetry are both, in their own ways, absolved from the true test,
whereas documentary—no matter what its genre—cannot be:its whole purpose is to present as accurately
as possible events in the outside world. . ."
Cole Swensen:“News
That Stays News,” in Noise That Stays
Noise:Essays (Poets on Poetry, University
of Iowa Press, 2011):54
Here's the opening movement of Maria Baranda's Narrar, published in 2001 by Ediciones Sin Nombre of Mexico City. This translation also appeared in eleven eleven 15, published by California College of the Arts. The word tokonoma refers to a poem by Jose Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet who inspired the neobarroco movement in Latin American poetry. A tokonoma is a room in a Japanese house that is designed entirely to give pleasure and a sense of calm through the beauty and balance of the objects in it. In addition to Narrar, I have translated Baranda's 55-page poem Yegua nocturna corriendo en un prado de luz absoluta (Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light).
Where is the emotion of language? It’s not always clear when and why words can carry the traction of loss to the heart. Many writers, many great writers, have lamented the shortcoming of language when faced with real, intense anguish. In some cases it is the fault of words. In others, the shortcoming might be the emotional and linguistic limitations of their speakers. Writers excavate, sort, defamiliarize, string and distill meanings that strike at once internally and externally. These are experiences of the imagination set to trigger the human, the real, the familiar and the imagined. Poetic language is that which wrests the heart from a daily currency of pith.
If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.
Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.
Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).
These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.
The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.
In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.
Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.
Robin Morrissey is currently working on a Master of Arts in Literature. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has published poetry, essays and plays in Requited Journal, Caffeine Theatre, phoebe, Columbia Poetry Review, Berkeley Anthology Writers, and Chinquapuin, and poetry forthcoming in 3AM magazine. She lives in Chicago where, when not at her computer, she is editing an -anthology of the city's lost pet notices and wild animal sightings.
My anthology Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd edition, to be officially published in March (books in the warehouse in late January for those ordering for the classroom) just received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, see the link below. In the meantime, here's the text of the review:
Hoover, a highly regarded West Coast poet and deep practitioner of the poetics that are the focus of this book, has greatly expanded this important anthology for its second edition. First coined by the poet Charles Olson in 1951, the term “postmodern” is defined by Hoover in his introduction as “an experimental approach to composition, as well as a worldview that sets itself apart from mainstream culture and the sentimentality and self-expressiveness of its life in writing.” That definition suggests both academic and theoretical nature of much of the poetry contained herein, as well as the many unusual formal devices often employed. But the range here is stunning, from Olson’s panoramic histories to Frank O’Hara’s chatty cityscapes to Lyn Hejinian’s bottomless autobiography. What makes this edition so welcome, for both classroom and personal use, is its inclusion of many newer poets whose careers hadn’t yet begun when the first edition was published. Now we have K. Silem Mohammad’s Internet-infused lines, Claudia Rankine’s moral collages, Christian Bok’s vowel experiments, and more, including very new writers like Ben Lerner. There’s plenty of everything—especially strong emotion—if one knows where to look. This will be an essential book for students and serious fans of poetry. (Mar.)
Here's an alphabetical listing of the Arizona banned books list. It is provided by J. Quinonez-Skinner of the Oviatt Library at CSU Northridge to indicate those books on the list that are proudly possessed by her institution. It's not difficult to assess the political motivation behind the banning; note how many authors on the list are Latino/Latina and African-American. Shakespeare, Thoreau, James Baldwin, Isabel Allende, and Sandra Cisneros are included. Thanks to Gerardo Pacheco for informing me of this list.
See http://library.csun.edu/Guides/arizonabannedbooks/
There's an interesting new site established by Sean Manning to commemorate Lorraine Louie's cover designs for the Vintage Contemporaries fiction series. Authors including Richard Ford, Thomas McGuane, Joy Williams, Jill Eisenstadt, Richard Russo, and Jay McInerney comment on their Vintage Contemporaries books and cover designs. The design prototype for the series was Raymond Carver's books in the series, including Cathedral. The link is: http://talkingcovers.com/2012/09/12/vintage-contemporaries/
I found the following while looking online for the word "runes." Straight from Odin's pen to the New Testament? The site is http://en.wikipedia/org/wiki/runic_alphabet. The photograph was taken by Philip Hoover in West Virginia.
The poem Hávamál explains that the originator of the runes was the major god Odin. Stanza 138 describes how Odin received the runes through self-sacrifice:
Veit ek at ek hekk vindga meiði a
netr allar nío,
geiri vndaþr ok gefinn Oðni,
sialfr sialfom mer,
a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn.
This performance of joropo music and dancing was arranged to greet me at the small airport in Barinas, Venezuela, when I arrived as part of the 9th Annual Festival Mundial de Poesia, held in honor of poet and photographer Enrique Hernandez d'Jesus. Sorry for the confusing turns of the camera. Joropo music is played by three instruments, here as is traditional a harp, guitar, and maracas. Barinas is in the south of Venezuela and on Los Llanos (flatlands) not far from the Andes. A book of my poetry, Intencion y su materia, translated by the wonderful Mexican poet, Maria Baranda, was published by Monte Avila Editores and presented at the conference's main site in Caracas.
My book desolation : souvenir was published in early February by Omnidawn Publishing, and there was a publication event at Moe's Books in Berkeley. The book is available at stores includng Moe's and directly from Omnidawn, Small Press Distribution, and Amazon.com, among others. Thanks very much to Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan.
I just had a beautiful bilingual edition of my work published by Conaculta in Mexico City. Many thanks to the publisher and to the amazing poet Maria Baranda, who translated the work and so generously made all this possible. Titled En el idioma y en la tierra (In Idiom and Earth), it consists primarly of work from Winter Mirror (Flood Editions, 2002), Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), and Edge and Fold (Apogee, 2006). The book was just published last week so it will be a few weeks until the book is available to the public at Conaculta's bookstores in Mexico. Thanks also to Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and Alice Jones and Ed Smallfield, the original publishers of the work. I'm pasting in below Maria's translation of "Driver's Song":
Canción del conductor
Nunca llegaré a
Danville, Ohio,
distante y solitaria
Danville.
Carro negro, luna
pequeña,
en el asiento trasero
la cerveza.
Porque olvidé todos
los caminos
nunca llegaré a
Danville, Ohio.
En las llanuras, a
través de Indiana,
donde también estuve
solo.
Carro negro, luna
amarilla.
Mi padre muerto me
observa
desde la ventana de
arriba.
Qué camino más largo
desde California
y en qué coche más
rápido–
invisible para el
alma.
Más allá veo a la
muerte moviéndose lenta en el camino. Sé que tocaré su
vestimenta antes de que jamás
llegue a Danville, Ohio.
Translated by Joshua Edwards Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611238.
Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice:
The sky is in my eyes.
I have fallen silent before the hurricane of its proverbs,
the jaws of thirst rising
from cracks in the mud.
I have fallen silent.
I have fallen silent before the men and children
and women hidden
like raw birds in cloaks of invisibility.
I have felt the shame of being someone
in my own words.
To live in ash inseparable
from filth and extermination,
to accept time covered in mold,
sullen time, time in the throat
that officiates the vertigo
of sacrilege and solitude between its cries.
(Sky Cycle ii)
"The most unusual thing about Maria Baranda's dazzling accomplishment as a poet is that her most recent books are her very best ones. She keeps honing one of the most expressive lyricisms in contemporary Mexican poetry. Her complex prosody—the pitch and tempo rising in plangent cadences that break into sharp, percussive counterpoint—are here, in the poignant, sea-haunted book length poem Ficticia, at their best. And Joshua Edwards, a supremely gifted poet himself, brings out the full force of Baranda's music."—Forrest Gander
"María Baranda is one of the finest poets of her generation, those born in the 1960s, her work demonstrates adherence to the Mexican and Hispano-American tradition—that of the long meditative poem, with sinuous syntax and rich diction—with the not so frequent capacity for conceptual synthesis and precision of imagery and metaphor." —José María Espinasa
"María Baranda is today one of our country's necessary poets. During the past twenty years she has been able to start a conversation between recent Mexican lyric poetry and its predecessors: from the great pre-Hispanic poets to the those who in the 1960s changed the course of poetry in Mexico and in Latin America. María Baranda watches and listens. Her poetic speech passes through the senses before becoming language; it is this that gives her verses their spellbinding quality." —Eduardo Hurtado
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Paul Hoover's most
recent poetry collections are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues
Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that
number, Edge
and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005).
A new book consisting of two poems, Desolation
: Souvenir, will be published by Omnidawn in early 2012. His volume of
literary essays, Fables
of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in
2004. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich
Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), winner of the PEN-USA Translation Award. The
two also edit the literary magazine, New American Writing. With Nguyen
Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night:
Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Beyond the
Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai (1380-1442), published by Counterpath Press
in 2010. He has won the Frederick Bock Award for poems that appeared in the
June, 2010, issue of Poetry and, with Sharon Olds, the Jerome J.
Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review in
2002. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, he edited
the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994)
and currently curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of Fine
Art in San Francisco.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
My first book, Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear
Albert, was published in 1979, and it changed my life to a small degree. I
was 33 at the time, and my students had been asking me, “When are you going to
publish a book?” So they were relieved, and I’m sure I was, too. The book had a
generous blurb by John Ashbery and was “thick” in language, in the sense that
Péret is thicker than Desnos and Breton or Bruce Andrews is thicker than Lyn
Hejinian. The last couple of poems in the book, including “Nature Poem,” turned
toward a more casual, everyday phrasing I would use later on, in balance with
the “thick.” Irony has long been a feature of my writing, but in recent years I
have varied my idiom, from the lyrical tone of Poems in Spanish, Edge
and Fold, and the Desolation : Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012) to the
proceduralist Sonnet 56 and “Gravity’s Children,” a book-length series of
poems based on the Books of the Old Testament.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My first real
engagement with poetry began when, as a senior at Manchester College in Indiana,
I took the Modern Poetry class taught by James Hollis, who went on to become a
noted Jungian therapist and author. My term paper for the course was on William
Carlos Williams, a useful choice as it turned out. I hadn’t written any poetry
yet and didn’t trust poetry as a mode of writing. I had been writing short
stories under the influence of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. I didn’t begin
to write poems until I was 25 and working as middle manager at a Chicago
hospital. Based on the ten or so poems I’d produced, I was accepted by Paul
Carroll to the fledging Program for Writers at University of Illinois Chicago.
Two key moments in those years were James Hollis asking me to get a PhD and
return to Manchester to teach with him, and Paul Carroll telling me, beneath an
umbrella in a spring sun-shower, that I was a “true poet” and he wanted to
include me in the second edition of his anthology, The Young American
Poets.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing
project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do
first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come
out of copious notes?
I keep notebooks, but only occasionally make use
of them. The major instance was in writing a series of five book-length poems,
each in a single 24-hour day. Only two have been published, “The Reading,”
which appears in Edge and Fold, and “At the Sound,” published by Beard of
Bees as an electronic chapbook. I became more conscious of the structure of my
books when I started writing long poems. The book Poems in Spanish was
built around a concept: poems written as if in Spanish. In “Edge and Fold,” my
first attempt at the serial poem, I decided with the first poem on a specific
“look” to the page: no caps, no punctuation, each page consisting of
hesitation, application, swerving, and silence. Once I’m engaged in a project,
I’m persistent and work every day on it. As a result, I seem to work quickly.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
A phrase or concept is enough to begin,
if I’m open to writing that day. It also helps enormously if I’m working on a
series. In my last three books, I had the concept from the start. With
“Gravity’s Children,” I knew would begin with Genesis and end with Malachi, one
poem for each book of the Old Testament. But I had no idea of the tone of the
book and had not read the Bible to any degree before starting. In a serial poem
like “Edge and Fold,” each page is made to cohere by a lash or knot of language
that also sits well with neighboring pages. All the relatedness comes in the
moment of making, not in advance, by intuition rather than a map. 5 -
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy giving readings and
believe that the best test of a poem is to read it in front of an audience. But
there can be a great difference in audiences, and some poems aren’t designed for
a general audience. Charles
Bernstein has a lot of fun with this theme in his recent book, Attack
of the Difficult Poems. The rule is generally: the more avant-garde
your work, the less a general audience can understand you. I prefer to feel a
perfect absorption of the poem by the audience, which can literally be heard as
a silence from the place you are speaking. It’s this exchange of attentions
that probably led Robert
Creeley to define a poem as “an act of attention.” Difficulty can receive
such attention, too, as long as the poet reads her work in its true cadence and
intention—that is, from the inside, with an active interest—as Gertrude Stein does in
her recording of “Would He Like It if I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.”
When the poet places her feelings outside the poem, attention immediately
wavers, and the audience sends back signals of unease and impatience.
The
success of Flarf, conceptual poetry, and Newlipo is due in large part to their
perfect accessibility. Such works carry with them a clear announcement of what
they are and what they are not; that is, their concept and form speak in advance
of their words. They declare: (1) I’m a 900-page transcript of an issue of the
New York Times; (2) a series of prose poems employing only the vowel “a,”
“e,” “i,” “o,” or “u”; (3) a poem consisting entirely of language found online
with search engines. Such works may seem easy, because you don’t have to read
them very carefully to comprehend their value. However, virtuosity and
craftsmanship still pertain in the case of Christian Bök’s
Eunoia or Harryette Mullen’s
Muse & Drudge. Flarf craftsmanship lies in the sculpting of
tone, conceptualism in the crafting of concept. When conceptualist Vanessa Place reads her
book-length work consisting of the letter “u,” she gives up after 60 seconds,
realizing that she, too, is bored by it. Such conceptual works are never
fulfilled by performance, but rather exhausted by it. This doesn’t mean they
are any less as conceptual works. Better to hold the weighty book in your hand
and muse silently on its material existence. 6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying
to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I’m not after anything in my poems that I know how to name,
theoretically or otherwise. Nor do I have questions for the poem. It raises
its own questions. We seem to be at a moment when the materialist motive is
gaining ground and subjectivity is at low ebb. Taking sides in that battle does
tend to prepare the poem in advance by muting or enhancing irony and desire. I
believe that poetry will always remain more or less expressive at base. Finally
there comes a parking lot so dark you have to whistle your way across it.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer
should be?
The rise to political influence of the Mexican poet Javier
Sicilia following the death of his son would never have occurred in the United
States. We say the right things privately, we give money to causes, but,
intimidated by the Homeland Security act and the specter of disappearing into an
offshore torture site, we fall silent. When Maria Baranda, Eduardo Hurtado,
David Huerta, and a dozen other poets of Mexico City announced a march to bring
peace in the war on drugs, 40,000 people showed up in the Zocalo on three days’
notice.
I do believe that writers and intellectuals should have political
influence, as happened when Robert Lowell, Bertrand Russell, and Norman Mailer
headed the march on the Pentagon. Perhaps the problem is that intellectuals
have ceased being celebrities in the U.S. Our most effective political
philosophers seem to be George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. And
there’s no Dick Cavett or David Susskind in the mass media to remind us how
important our intellectual lives are. 8 - Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
There
should be more editing rather than less. When a chapter of my novel was
published in The New Yorker, the editor changed nearly every sentence to
suit the house style. But I changed much of it back for the novel publication.
Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn is a
good line by line editor and improved several passages in Poems in
Spanish. Usually there isn’t much in the way of content editing in poetry;
it’s easier to eliminate the entire poem.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You’re
only as good as your last poem (Dean Faulwell). Run
straight to the heart of the battle as if already dead (The
Book of the Samurai). The greater the distance, the clearer the view
(W. G. Sebald).
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear. 10 – How easy
has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do
you see as the appeal?
I’ve made several genre shifts from poetry:
writing three plays one summer in the 1970s; writing a novel in the 1980s
(Saigon, Illinois, Vintage Contemporaries, 1988); writing critical prose
in the 90s (Fables of Representation, University of Michigan Press,
2004); and translating Hölderlin, Nguyen Trai, and San Juan de la Cruz. Each of
the genre crossings was instructive to my poetry, but translation has had the
greatest impact. Prose doesn’t have much appeal for me right now. I can’t
imagine writing another novel, what a lot of work! The poetry genre is the
fairest of them all, but you would never know it by reading critical prose. You
have to stand in the mirror of a great poem.
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical
day (for you) begin?
If I’m on a writing project, writing begins the
first thing after breakfast and continues until I have to eat lunch. Then I
work a little more, until around 2 p.m. I’m happiest when I’m writing every
day. 12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or
return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I listen to
recordings of poets reading their work or open a volume of Stevens or Vallejo. Lorine Niedecker and Stevie Smith are also
very helpful.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Poison
(Christian Dior).
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come
from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether
nature, music, science or visual art?
Films are inspiring to me, also
gallery visits, especially photography. I rarely listen to music but love good
classical music when I chance upon it. 15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work? Italo Calvino, Carlos Drummond de
Andrade, Fernando
Pessoa, Emily
Dickinson, Thomas Traherne,
and John Clare.
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Italy.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it
be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not
been a writer?
It would be nice to run a small movie theater, where I’d
have a small windowless office near the concession stand. I enjoy physical
tasks, so I might also have thrived as a welder or carpenter.
18 -
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think
there was ever another option. In the eighth grade, I wanted to be a scientist
because Mr. Blazer, our science teacher, was a very nice man, wore well-tailored
suits, and ran successful experiments. My father used to speak of having a
“calling” in the church. I don’t think one calls on poetry; it appears to you
one day on the street, both arms laced to the shoulder with wristwatches,
whispering something you have to lean close to understand.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m not
sure it’s a great book, but I loved Toy Medium:
Materialism and the Modern Lyric by Daniel Tiffany. The most
emotionally satisfying movie I’ve seen recently is the Japanese film, Departures(2008), about an
out of work cellist who takes a job ceremonially dressing dead bodies, as is the
custom, in view of the family. My favorite movie of all time is The Last Picture Show.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m between projects,
so I’m tinkering with two completed manuscripts, “Gravity’s Children,” which
I’ve already described, and “The Windows,” which consists of proceduralist
works. I’m supposed to be writing an introduction to my translation, with María
Baranda, of the Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz, but I’m getting a slow
start due to other tasks like teaching, editing New American Writing,
judging poetry contexts, and writing a book of essays about the moral aspect of
poetry.
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I Traveled to Hong Kong last week for an international poetry conference. Among those invited by conference organizer Bei Dao were Regis Bonvicino of Sao Paulo, Maria Baranda of Mexico City, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko of St. Petersburg, Russia, Tomaz Salamun of Slovenia, C.D. Wright of Providence, Rhode Island, Bejan Matur of Turkey, Paul Muldoon of Ireland and Princeton, Vivek Narayanan of India, Silke Scheuermann of Germany, and Xi Chuan of Beijing, who has a book coming out from New Directions in English translation. Also present were Yuan Jian of Yunnan and Yao Feng of Macao, whom I'd met on a trip to Yunnan in 2005. One afternoon, Maria and I encountered these figures at the nearby Thousand Buddhas Temple.
[The photo of Adorno with headphones was found online]
My book of essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. The title essay on the New York School was made possible by series editor David Lehman, who, on seeing that the manuscript had only a few short newspaper reviews of Kenneth Koch and others, suggested I write an essay on the entire group. His own critical study and history of the NY School, The Last Avant-Garde, is of course definite. After I wrote the 50-page essay, it became the major feature of the manuscript and we lent its title to the entire volume. I don't recall if the following exam from the book has been published online, but here it is anyway.
The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam True or False / Multiple Choice (two points each):
1. Art of the postmodern period is: a. minimal b. mystical c. mannerist d. post-literate e. all of the above
2. The filmscript operates at the speed of attention, novels at the speed of history, poetry at the speed of myth, and myth at the speed of time.
3. The past is conditional, the future absolute, the present open to negotiation.
4. The past is ungendered, the future impotent, the present having an operation.
5. Transgression is sentimental.
6. The closer writing comes to theory, the more narrative it becomes.
7. Without language, the world would vanish.
8. Nature is bored with the truth.
9. Photography relies on the unfamiliar.
10. Polaroid photos of snow are more poetic than snow itself.
11. Poetry tells fewer lies.
12. Irony is the best disguise.
13. Apples can no longer be understood.
14. Music at its most social resembles literature; literature at its most hermetic resembles music.
15. There is no difference between a censorate and an aesthetic.
16. Bad art is central to the concept of pleasure.
17. There is no tyranny like that of "the new."
18. The best poets of the avant-garde are those who most betray its mission.
19. Poetry is the science of the irrational.
20. "The inarticulate voice makes a real place disappear" (Greil Marcus).
21. "The brand-new arrives already worn out" (Vincent Canby).
22. The answer to America's problems is: a. corporate enrichment poverty programs b. corporate diversity whitewash spokesmen c. holistic cappuccino overdose remedies
23. Obsessional repetition assumes classical proportions--the music, for example, of Philip Glass.
24. Mothers are transparent, fathers opaque.
25. The future is bright for dead white men.
26. The moon's authority is on the wane.
27. Which is true? a. "The source of all writing is boredom" (Marguerite Duras). b. The source of all boredom is writing.
28. Imagination is voyeuristic.
29. Nothing is less mimetic than a mirror.
30. Equality of mediocrity has been achieved.
31. Choose one: a. "An image is a stop the mind makes between two uncertainties" (Djuna Barnes). b. A photograph is a pause between two eternities.
32. The deepest point of postmodern attention is the pause button on a VCR.
33. Watching television is a pastoral experience.
34. The beauty of trompe l'oeil, like life, is when it starts to decay.
35. Pomposity is necessary to any aesthetic.
36. "There is no great idea that stupidity cannot put to its own uses" (Robert Musil).
37. The greatest writers have the worst characters.
38. The future isn't what it used to be.
39. America lacks a folk culture.
40. Things are useless without their metaphors.
41. Theory has completed its mission.
42. Scientists and engineers are the poets of our time, the poets its cultural technicians.
43. The speed of attention is altered by language.
44. Everything "new" in literature had its exact precedent in 1898.
45. Banality was once an original concept.
46. The only way of "proving" a poem is to test it on one's nerves; in this, it resembles sex.
47. Only the poor have gods; only the rich achieve redemption.
Tobias Wolff Reads from His Work Friday, November 12, 7 p.m. de Young Museum of Fine Art 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco
Parking is available in the museum on Fulton just east of Park Presidio Drive For further information: (415) 750-7634
$10 museum members and students; $20 non-members Order in advance for this event: https://tickets.famsf.org/public/
Tobias Wolff is one of the country’s most widely admired fiction writers. His works of fiction include Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Barracks Thief, and the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, among other notable publications.