Bicycle Day

Bicycle Day bt Mel Nichols is a beautifully made chapbook containing 21 poems that will make your life better.

I am sure that it may be found at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown.

Or, it may be acquired from:

Slack Buddha Press
4724 Bonham Road
Oxford, Ohio 45056

Deed

I love this book.


Rod Smith, Deed, University of Iowa Press / Kuhl House Poets (2007)

“The great thing about Rod Smith’s work is that it is all risk all the time. In Deed, he has built a substantial architecture whose ‘perilous upkeep’ is dazzling. This is a truly wondrous book.”—Peter Gizzi

“A master poet among us? I’d vote for Rod Smith. With the sweeping vision of Whitman, the noun-play of Gertrude Stein, and the slant political commentary of the New York School, Smith chisels out a place of his own with a tremendous integrity of vision. Deed contains the best of what American poetry has to offer: a place to pause and reflect upon the beauty of language and love flowering up through the mayhem of the world.” —Lisa Jarnot

+ go here and read about it, if you haven't done so already:

http://illuminatedmeat.blogspot.com/

John Ashbery

A number of poets have maintained friendships with the poets of the DC scene. First among these would be John Ashbery. He made several memorable visits to Washington in the 1970s, and read at two venues associated with the DC scene, the Pyramid Gallery and Folio Books. Michael Lally, Terence Winch and Bernard Welt all made personal connections with him, and many others, myself included, enjoyed his company during his visits to Washington.

John Ashbery interviewed by Terence Winch

Ashbery was very important to me at a crucial point in my life, after I had moved to London early in 1970, and I had begun to think that I might have more than the casual and occasional involvement in poetry than I had been used to having to that point. My main attention before that had gone to writing novels. While I was in the process of reading Ashbery's first four books (Some Trees, The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, and The Double Dream of Spring) between 1970 and 1972, a number of things happened.

I heard JA read at the ICA. Eric Mottram published "The Recital" in an issue of Poetry Review. Penguin Modern Poets 19 was published, featuring work by JA, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth. Terry Eagleton reviewed Penguin Modern Poets 19 (I think for some Catholic journal) in a derogatory manner regarding Ashbery, and a derisive, depreciatory manner regarding Harwood and Raworth. I do not recall the order of these events, but they were all part of a crucial learning experience for me, as I was immersed in the realm of poetry as never before.

I loved the way JA read, in what was more-or-less a montone. Michael Roberts had written with some horror of what he named the "chatty" style of poetry reading in his introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Verse. This was way past chatty. This was like the poetry passing through the poet's physicality unedited by inflections of drama or sentiment or whatever. At the same time, the poet's voice was there, unmistakably. I had been exhilarated at reading "Europe" and "The Skaters" and so many of the other poems in the first four books, by all of it, in fact. And I was exhilarated again, hearing him read.

Eric Mottram's editorship of Poetry Review was a major boost for alternative poetry in the UK. The issue containing "The Recital" contained work by Robert Nichols, Bob Cobbing, Elaine Feinstein, Tom Pickard, Gary Snyder, Jonathan Williams, Dick Light, J.P. Ward, Thomas A. Clark, Harry Guest, Kris Hemensley and David Bromige. Poetry Review was the official organ of the Poetry Society, so very la di da. This was like Wobblies in the White House. And "The Recital" was a revealation. It was everything deconstructed and reconstructed, completely, it was the most perfect essay in possibility. Three Poems was issued soon after Eric's publication of "The Recital," and I was completely gone, man.

Having John Ashbery linked to the two most admired "alternative" British poets of my generation in the Penguin book was a moment of great satisfaction and pleasure. And it seemed so right. Terry Eagleton's mean spirited attack of Penguin Modern Poets 19 made me realize just how disturbing this material was to some people.

When I came to the States in 1973, I soon discovered that JA received similar treatment here. Of course, my naîve and dimwit ass was also shocked not to find Ginsberg in every supermarket and thousands of volumes of American poetry books in every bookstore. This was my "immigrant" version of the streets being paved with gold, I guess. Where are the Joanne Kyger books, please? The prevailing attitude among the American literati towards JA was one of confusion and hostility. Forget The New American Poetry. It was as though Modernism had never happened, except maybe for T. S. Eliot.

JA had already been invited to read at Folio Books when he won American poetry's "Triple Crown" -- the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award -- for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The night of the reading, there were people on P street outside of Folio Books, unable to get in because there was no room. It seemed hugely ironic to me. JA seemed undisturbed by all of it. As a poet and as a reader, he was exactly himself. As a person, he was completely charming, considerate, funny, admirable.

I found this quote at the Poetry Foundation regarding JA's having been resistant to canonization. It is Nicholas Jenkins, writing in The New York Times Book Review: "For him prizes and fame seem little more than sweetly scented warning signs that his strategies have become too easily legible, that his poems are in danger of being embalmed. . . . Certainly no other poet has been more diligent about finding new ways of 'starting out' again—of continuously emerging from the shadow of his own previous work."

I agree with that, completely.

And here is Terence Winch, whom I asked to write something for this post:

"John Ashbery has been one of the most transformative writers in modern American literary history. His work anticipates Language poetry (see 1962’s The Tennis Court Oath et al.), while at the same time re-inventing the sestina and other conventional forms. He is an astounding virtuoso who seems to be able to sustain an experimental edge along with an unbelievable level of productivity. Since Flow Chart in 1991, Ashbery has published ten books of poems, an amazing output for a poet who is now 80. Speaking of Flow Chart, I don’t think its monumental brilliance has ever been sufficiently recognized in the literary community. It is one of American literature’s masterworks---a single, long poem that seems to contain our whole language and psyche. In all the endless talk about the “difficulty” of Ashbery’s poetry, few mainstream critics seem to get how deeply comic his work is. Ashbery is essential reading."

And here is the text of Terence's interview with John Ashbery (shown above):

John Ashbery was born on July 28th, 1927, in upstate New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1949 and in 1955 he left the U.S. for a 10-year stay in Paris, where he wrote for the Paris Herald Tribune and for Art News. He returned to America in 1965 to take up the position of executive editor at Art News. More recently, he has taught at Brooklyn College and served as art critic for Newsweek.

Ashbery’s first book of poems was Some Trees, published in 1956. His latest, just out this year, is called A Wave. In between are nine other books of poems, each of them contributing to his reputation as one of America’s most important poets.

For 20 years, Ashbery’s demanding, unconventional work brought him the admiration of the avant-garde, but little in the way of public acclaim. In 1976, however, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, all that changed. The book won the National Critics Circle award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. And John Ashbery became one of the best known poets in America.

A Wave is one of Ashbery’s most impressive books. It includes his customary, diverse offering of both long and short pieces, his experiments with form and language, and his attraction to both comic and serious modes. He is witty, silly, moving, philosophical – sometimes all in one poem. The dialectic in his work between order and chaos, cause and effect, and art and life continues in A Wave. Reading Ashbery can be like having an involved dialogue with a sophisticated, smart, literate insane person. If sometimes he is frustrating and incomprehensible, often he is full of clarity and brilliance.

TW: It seems to be the settled opinion about your work, even from you, that there isn’t a whole lot of the personal in your poetry, of anything that comes directly from your own emotional life. And I don’t get that feeling with A Wave. I get a strong sense of the personal and emotional, of references that seem to be straight from you. And I wondered whether you had any more to say on that subject.

JA: Well, of course, there is a lot of my personal life since that’s all I have… But I think you’re quite right., especially in this book, which came out of certain experiences I had. But I try to objectify them as much as possible, so that readers can find traces of their own similar experiences. So I don’t go around giving specific names and places in the confessional manner. I guess it always seemed to me that that sort of thing tends to exclude readers who have no idea what you’re talking about.

TW: Have you ever thought about writing your autobiography or memoirs?

JA: No, I haven’t. I suppose for the same reason that I don’t write autobiographical poetry – it doesn’t seem to me that I have any autobiography. But maybe I do, and some people might be interested.

TW: I think they would be.

JA: The fact is I’ve drifted through life without paying much attention to what’s been happening to me.

TW: That seems like your poems, more than like you. Do you ever want to write more fiction? I was looking at A Nest of Ninnies…

JA: Yes. I would like to very much, as a matter of fact, but I don’t have time to do it. In order to be a poet, the luxury of being a poet. I have two jobs.

TW: What are you doing besides writing for Newsweek?

JA: I teach at Brooklyn College.

TW: How does your art criticism for Newsweek fit into your own sense of your work? Is it part of your work in your mind, or is it just something you do to survive?

JA: I’d say that I probably wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to make a living. But I find it interesting to write for “a mass audience” about art… And I enjoy the exercise in communication in this way. I think it helps more in my poetry in that my poetry comes out differently. It sharpens my sense of trying to communicate something.

TW: I was interested in something you said in your recent review of the Bonnard show at the Phillips Collection here in Washington. You mentioned something about the paintings having more darkness in them, than was immediately apparent. When I saw the show, I was looking at the Bonnard paintings and thinking, I don’t see any darkness here. I wondered if the comment was a reflection of your state of mind. It seems to me that A Wave was much more painful than any of your other books. It’s clear that dealing with getting older and dying is, it seems to me, part of the emotional impulse behind the book.

JA: Actually, that remark about Bonnard is probably a flaw in the article, because I think I meant to develop that idea and I sort of left it hanging. But I think you can see what I mean in the self-portraits.

TW: The self-portraits definitely had a heavier touch.

JA: It’s even there in one painting Newsweek reproduced. “The Studio and Mimosa, Le Cannet,” where you can barely see the woman’s face – it looks like she’s getting pushed out of the picture by a mass of yellow stuff.

TW: I think of you as one of America’s major poets and it seems ridiculous that you don’t have the financial freedom to just write poetry.

JA: That’s what comes from being a poet. If I were a novelist… But, then, no one ever forced e to write poetry.

TW: Do you write every day, or are you more sporadic about it?

JA: No, I don’t write that much. As it is, I feel I’ve written too much poetry. I took out a lot of poems from the manuscript of A Wave, even ones I thought were pretty good, just because I felt there was too much poetry – and I have a feeling I could have taken out even more. This year I’ve been trying to write a once a week.

TW: I was reading Paul Zweig’s new book on Walt Whitman. He says at one point that Whitman, when he was an old man, called his life’s work, his poems, “a language experiment.” How do you regard your work – is your poetry “a language experiment?”

JA: I don’t know that I would characterize it as something so premeditated as that. I don’t know what I think of it when I look back at it. I sort of live in the near future, where I hope I’ll be writing some more poetry. And once it’s done, I’ve sort of forgotten about it.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/ashbery/

Begin at Once

I just read Beth Joselow's new book, Begin at Once. It really got to me. If it doesn't get to you, it's because something else got to you first.

Beth Joselow, Begin at Once, Chax Press (2007)

The poems in Begin at Once are truly investigations, never simply statements of things the poet already claims to know. They wander– sometimes lightly, sometimes darkly, sometimes with a quiet but sharp irony, but always generously– over all sorts of contrasting subjects with a startling insight that traces the swift and shocking changes of a life lived in a world that’s genuinely right here, right now. Beth Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood.There’s real wisdom in Begin At Once, and the world sure does need more of that.
— Mark Wallace

Joselow’s poems are “tender numbers” for “people who used to be hungry”. We’ve been chowing down on the drill, organizing our lives around days of rain/bells with colors/gears without mesh until we experience more numbers/further use as “…elusive optimism/skin of ice…” So how do we unsettle the daily bout? Joselow suggests we take each poem as “one more time” to be “simply there” “In support of ________” …”To contain _______” so that we have some unslotted space to “sit down now, begin at once.”
— Tina Darragh

Begin at Once is a terrific collection because Beth Joselow is a writer with a great gift, but it’s also a tease. Because this is a book, all 104 pages of it, that leaves you wanting to read so very much more.
-- Ron Silliman

The Faber Book of Modern Verse

Here are the poets included in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (1936 edition):

Gerard Manley Hopkins
W.B. Yeats
T.E. Hulme
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Harold Monro
Conrad Aiken
H.D.
Marianne Moore
Wallace Stevens
Vachel Lindsay
D.H. Lawrence
Isaac Rosenberg
Wilfred Owen
Herbert Read
John Crowe Ransom
Allen Tate

Hart Crane
e.e. cummings
Laura Riding
Robert Graves
Edith Sitwell
Sacheverell Sitwell
Richard Eberhart
Peter Quennell
William Empson
C. Day Lewis
W.H. Auden
Louis MacNeice
Stephen Spender
James Reeves
Charles Madge
George Barker
Dylan Thomas
Clifford Dyment
David Gascoyne

This book was my introduction to modern poetry, although the edition I had was the second one, co-edited by Anne Ridler (1951), and I don't recall what additions there were, except for F.T. Prince. Also, Kathleen Raine, maybe. Hugh MacDiarmid? David Jones? Keith Douglas? Dunno. I just got a copy of the 1936 edition, ninth impression, from Amazon UK, for £1.00, plus postage. It is inscribed: Marjorie E. Birol, Charing Cross Road, 15/7/44. Dear Marjorie, Hello. Where are you now? In my heart.

I was in my late teens when I got the paperback edition of the 1951 version of The Faber Book of Modern Verse. What did I know? Not much.

When I was ten, I got a scholarship to go to Bishop Gore Grammar School for Boys. Dylan Thomas had gone to Bishop Gore, long before. I lasted only two years before being asked to leave, else I would be expelled. While I was a student there, I was obliged to memorize this:

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

-- James Leigh Hunt

My next stop was Dynevor School for Boys, better suited to working class ragamuffins such as I, better than the toffee-nosed Bishop Gore. Didn't do me or Dynevor much good, though. I was always getting arrested by the cops, for one thing. They weren't too happy about that at Dynevor. I dropped out, eventually. We had one English teacher named Brynley Cox, who was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. Mr Cox had a long nose with glasses hanging on it, and he would lick his lips almost lasciviously as he read aloud. The boys would would count his licks aloud, and he would either be oblivious, or he would pretend to be oblivious. The school joke was, "There are 23 masters (teachers) at Dynevor; 22 without Cox." I really learned a lot. I did have one English teacher who was encouraging, Sam Bassett. Sam was a giant of a man, married to a tiny woman. My marks (scores/grades) for both the term and exams in English Language and English Literature were always perfect, or near perfect. Everywhere else there would be zeroes, because I wouldn't have been there. I really learned a lot. The last essay I wrote at Dynevor was on the history of rock'n'roll, which barely had a history (as a pop phenomenon) at that point. Sam gave me ten out of ten. Sam was a very nice man. But I really didn't need encouragement. I didn't give a fuck.

I loved music and movies. Movies brought me to books. And I was off to the races. After I'd started work, unloading trucks in the British Home Stores yard, I began to buy books, American fiction mostly. As far as poetry was concerned, there was always the omnipresent Dylan. Then, in my late teens, I bought the Faber paperbacks of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems and Four Quartets, after I'd gotten the drift that Eliot was the modern poet. I was writing fiction at that time, stories and attempts at novels. After reading Eliot, I wrote some (dreadful, no doubt) pastiches of Eliot + Dylan and who knows what else.

There is so much that could be said about Dylan Thomas, but I'll be as succint as possible. First, here is Kenneth Rexroth in Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation (for New World Writing, 1957):

Now Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker have a great deal more in common than the same disastrous end. As artists, they were very similar. They were both very fluent. But this fluent, enchanting utterance had, compared with important artists of the past, relatively little content. Neither of them got very far beyond a sort of entranced rapture at his own creativity. The principal theme of Thomas’s poetry was the ambivalence of birth and death — the pain of blood-stained creation. Music, of course, is not so explicit an art, but anybody who knew Charlie Parker knows that he felt much the same way about his own gift. Both of them did communicate one central theme: Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense — the creative act. This, of course, is the theme of much art — perhaps most poetry. It is the theme of Horace, who certainly otherwise bears little resemblance to Parker or Thomas. The difference is that Horace accepted his theme with a kind of silken assurance. To Dylan and Bird it was an agony and terror. I do not believe that this is due to anything especially frightful about their relationship to their own creativity. I believe rather that it is due to the catastrophic world in which that creativity seemed to be the sole value. Horace’s column of imperishable verse shines quietly enough in the lucid air of Augustan Rome. Art may have been for him the most enduring, orderly, and noble activity of man. But the other activities of his life partook of these values. They did not actively negate them. Dylan Thomas’s verse had to find endurance in a world of burning cities and burning Jews. He was able to find meaning in his art as long as it was the answer to air raids and gas ovens. As the world began to take on the guise of an immense air raid or gas oven, I believe his art became meaningless to him. I think all this could apply to Parker just as well, although, because of the nature of music, it is not demonstrable — at least not conclusively.

I've no idea to what extent I might agree or disagree with this, but what is undeniable is that Dylan was in his way a radical poet, and he was most certainly one of the few lines of defense against the increasing conservatism and orthodoxy of British poetry.

"Dylan Thomas was made to stand for everything they detested: verbal obscurity, metaphysical pretentiousness, and romantic rhapsodizing," David Lodge, Working with Structuralism (1981).

Looking back, I see Dylan, his compatriot Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine as some of the few poets who were not adhering to the increasing constriction that produced the famous New Lines anthology in 1956. Dylan and Vernon had been associated to some degree with the New Apocalyptics, a self-explantory mode of poetics. Gascoyne was Britain's sole, prominent Surrealist poet, and Raine was deeply immersed in William Blake and Carl Jung.

Kathleen Raine

William Blake

Carl Jung action figure

I've looked at several Kathleen Raine poems online, looking for one that might approximate the kind of feeling I got from her work back in, say, 1959-1962. I could not find one, but that's memory for you. Raine called Vernon Watkins, "The greatest lyric poet of my generation." Vernon was from Swansea, as Dylan Thomas was, and as I was. He was a diffident man, apparently. He worked at Lloyd's Bank on St. Helen's Road. The story was that he had gone home once and left the bank unlocked. Good old Vernon. We saw him on the street many times. He must have been in his mid-forties then. We never approached him. What could he possibly have had to say to Welsh faux-beatniks? I remember his work as appealingly vague, somehow, an impression not entirely supported by what I've seen of his work recently, but not entirely reversed, either. The Dylan/Vernon letters were always a pleasure to read. What came through most was the friendship between them, and the easy ways in which they entertained each other.

Vernon Watkins by Alfred Janes

The mystery to me is David Gascoyne, the youngest poet in the original The Faber Book of Modern Verse. He always represented hope, somehow -- a British Surrealist! Other British poets who were sometimes called Surrealists did not seem like Surrealists to me, such as George Barker and Hugh Sykes Davies.

Yves Tanguy

The worlds are breaking in my head
Blown by the brainless wind
That comes from afar
Swollen with dusk and dust
And hysterical rain
The fading cries of the light
Awaken the endless desert
Engrossed in its tropical slumber
Enclosed by the dead grey oceans
Enclasped by the arms of the night
The worlds are breaking in my head
Their fragments are crumbs of despair
The food of the solitary damned
Who await the gross tumult of turbulent
Days bringing change without end
The worlds are breaking in my head
The fuming future sleeps no more
For their seeds are beginning to grow
To creep and to cry midst the
Rocks of the deserts to come
Planetary seed
Sown by the grotesque wind
Whose head is so swollen with rumours
Whose hands are so urgent with tumours
Whose feet are so deep in the sand

David Gascoyne

The mystery is why he didn't seem a good model for someone such as myself. In a peculiar way he was more distant than Paul Éluard, or even Philippe Soupault. He was no more use than Dylan was, and Dylan was no use at all. The best known Welsh poet of the 1960s, Bryn Griffiths was compared with Dylan endlessly, but there was no way to make use of Dylan, it seemed, without trying to be him. Bryn Griffiths did not do that. What he did do was emigrate to Australia, eventually.

T .S. Eliot and e. e. cummings both provided some inspiration. And Hart Crane. I didn't get Pound. I suspect that he seemed a little bit too much like the British poets of the day, with their classical educations and their allusions and their fart in a thunderstorm poems. Clearly, Pound was more than that, but whatever he was, was too much for me.

I loved Dylan and I still do, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Return Journey; and I still have high regard for many of the poems, such as "Poem on His Birthday" and "Poem in October." I had a hard time with Dylan as a reader, he was so bombastic, with that English preacher's voice. I much preferred to hear Richard Burton read Dylan's work. We read and reread Caitlin's Leftover Life to Kill and John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America -- and I'd like to read them both again now. Also, I'd like to read Brinnin's biography of Gertrude Stein, The Third Rose. Credit must go to Dylan, though, for singlehandedly reviving the oral tradition in American poetry with the tours described by Brinnin in his book. Of course, there were readings going on before that, but Dylan was really the progenitor of all those poets in Greenwich Village cafés and the avant garde of the general outbreak of poetry readings in the 1950s.


192 Caergynydd Road, Waunarlwydd

This is where I lived from aged 13 to 22, with my mother, Anne, and my sister, Synde (then named Daphne). 192 was at the bottom of a long road of row-house flats, one flat on the bottom, one on the top. Ours was the bottom flat of our segment. Our door was the one on the right. The right window was the living room. The left window was my room. The far left-window belonged to the Coopers next door. There was another bedroom which was my sister's. There was one bathroom, a kitchen, and my mother slept in the living-room.


Farrow bungalow

This is the bungalow where Marie Farrow lived with her parents and her elder siblings, a brother, John, and a sister whose name I can't recall. I fell in love with Marie in a small park, where she was hanging around with three other thirteen year old girls, Adelaide Phillips, and Rita and Jennifer Howell. I was the same age. They called me over as I walked through the park. I would never have had the nerve to just go over and chat with four strange girls. Marie and I became fast friends, especially after I corrected the words of a song Marie was singing, "Secret Love." The other girls got the words wrong, too, but it was Marie that I corrected. The girls had called me over because Adelaide was interested in one of my friends and they had wanted to quiz me about him, when they weren't singing. Marie was the only person to see the first poem I ever wrote, a pastiche of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and whatever. No one has ever been as impressed as Marie was that I had written a poem. She kept reading it, over and over, reading bits aloud and looking at me. The last time I saw her, ten years later, I was still in love with her.

I couldn't even get the picture straight.

Or,

This is the bungalow where Marie Farrow lived with her parents and her elder siblings, a brother, John, and a sister whose name I can't recall. I fell in love with Marie in a small park, where she was hanging around with three other sixteen year old girls, Adelaide, Rita and Jennifer. I was the same age. They called me over as I walked through the park. I would never have had the nerve to just go over and chat with four strange girls. Marie and I became fast friends, especially after I corrected the words of a song Marie was singing, "Tammy." The other girls got the words wrong, too, but it was Marie that I corrected. The girls had called me over because Adelaide was interested in one of my friends and they had wanted to quiz me about him, when they weren't singing. Marie was the only person to see the first poem I ever wrote, a pastiche of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and whatever. No one has ever been as impressed as Marie was that I had written a poem. She kept reading it, over and over, reading bits aloud and looking at me. The last time I saw her, seven years later, I was still in love with her.

I couldn't even get the picture straight.

So, it all comes down to this: would you prefer to think of me as someone who knew the words to "Secret Love" or as someone who knew the words to "Tammy."

The fact is that as I was writing this, I realized that my own mythology -- fell in love with Marie when I was thirteen, saw her for the last time ten years later -- was bogus. "Tammy" was the song that Marie and the girls were singing. "Tammy" was released in 1957, so it was unlikely that they were singing it when we were all thirteen, in 1954. My first reaction was to keep the personal mythology, and to substitute "Secret Love" for "Tammy." Everything else is as true as anything I know.

Tina Darragh

Tina Darragh was the second DC poet I ever met. It was in London in 1972, when Tina came to London to record British poets for the Washington audiocassette poetry magazine, Black Box, as Andrea had done before her.

Jack,

Peter, and Tina

That was the connection. Andrea and I were living in a 3-bedroom house in Clapton, and the room Tina stayed in was my former room, a tiny room, with collages still on the walls, and so on, and Tina would write a poem called "The Poet's Room," which she would show to me years later. Tina seemed to be a very gracious young woman, warm, considerate and intelligent. I didn't know. Of course, I had no idea that Tina was soon to become one of my closest and most cherished friends of the next 35 years and beyond, or that she would be one of the poets that I would admire and respect so very much. I didn't know.

I didn't see Tina again until October, 1974, when Andrea and I returned to DC after a year in Berkeley. By that time, Tina had hooked up with my friend Pete (Peter Inman), and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (for me). I've been very gratified by the fact that Tina has received so much recognition in recent years. She deserves every bit of it. The magnitude of her achievements as a poet and of her generosity as a person warrant it.

Tina was born in 1950, and was raised in McDonald, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. She began writing when she was eighteen, and studied poetry at Trinity University in DC, where Michael Lally was teaching at the time. This lead to Tina's involvement in Mass Transit and the DC scene in general.

My sense of Tina's poetics reached critical mass during the readings that she and I did in Baltimore for a recording that was issued by Chris Mason on Widemouth Tapes under the title, Xa. Its's easy to recall the chant-like refrain, "just looking, just looking," and Tina's excursions into concentrated disassemblages of language. Tina's work is not a set of prescriptions for meaning, nor a set of designer accessories for your karma. It is more like a global weather system, complex. dynamic, multidrectional, unpredictable, a vast series of potential interactions. In that regard, her work is the opposite of P.'s work, to which it is connected in many ways. Tina's work is an open system, P.'s consists of closed systems. I don't know how true this is, in fact, but I'm going to do some reading and give it some thought.

Tina's first two books were sidestapled publications issued by Dry Imager, her own publishing venture. Both were roughly made collages. First came My First Play, published back to back with Michael Lally's Malenkov Takes Over. Here is a page:


The caption under the picture reads:

BIOLOGIST HAMILTON
Parthenogenesis on the roof.

The other two pieces of text are, "Just Us Girls" and Labortory Cheese."

Here's another page:

and here is the text from that page, enlarged:


There were hints of things to come, both in the undermining of conventional language structures and in the global social and political consciousness behind the words and images.
The came Living, a collaboration with Tim Dlugos, photobooth images, a recaptioned frame from the Nancy comicstrip, more bits of language, funny stuff.

Tina's final 1975 publication was my hands……to……myself, another Dry Imager moment. There were no dots in Tina's title, it's the only way I could indicate Tina's spacing. Describing this work as innovative is like describing James Brown as funky. It is a question of magnitude.

I always liked D. H. Lawrence’s pronouncement, “Trust the art, not the artist,” as well as Jack Spicer’s idea of the poet as a kind of radio, able to receive transmissions from the “invisible world,” I think he called it, as opposed to writing being all about “self-expression.” I like these ideas all the more these days, when people in the arts are obliged to be at least as serious about their “careers” as they are about their work. As far as Tina is concerned, it’s clear that she was tracking the same lines as the other poets who came to be associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or, were receiving similar transmissions. What is most compelling to me now, rereading my hands to myself for the first time in a long while, and listening to Tina’s Xa recording, is how amazingly self-expressive Tina’s work was. That is to say, a Tina poem was a well made object/system of enormous energy, and a perfect expression of her character and personality. When one reads the first poem in my hands to myself, beginning, “just lookin’, just lookin’,” the rhythm of play between the word pairings of which the lines consist creates a thoroughly persuasive structure, based on dictionary progressions:

Charlie Chaplin / charge-a-plate
oatmeal / objet trouve
dictaphone / different
pidgin / piggyback
(the slashes indicate spaces that can’t be reproduced here).

This is all Tina enough, but when you hear her read the poem on the Xa recording, she interpolates the “just lookin’, just lookin’” phrase between each pairing, creating a more infectious and even more playful rhythm. So, in this case, I would say, “Trust the art and the artist,” because it is a perfectly well made object/system, and it is totally self-expressive, down to the social and political rage that’s always been in back of Tina’s work, and the unique Tina humor. This book was truly her debut as a poet, which is not to discount My First Play and Living. It’s extraordinary. Peter (Inman) now disavows his first book, What Happens Next (although I am deeply fond of it), and moved through a brief period of transition (P. Inman USA) to what became his “identity” as a poet. And to choose another poet from among Tina’s associates, Terence Winch’s Boning Up contains somewhat more conventional poetry than his signature works, which quickly followed. Tina emerged fully formed and rockin’.

The other factor that is clear to me after rereading my hands to myself and listening repeatedly to Xa, is the extent to which Tina creates a multiplicity of potential readings of each work, visually on the page, and vocally when she reads, and these two systems are in some ways kind of divergent. Of course, this idea might be applied quite comfortably to the work of many; but in Tina’s case it is emphatically true.

The year after that, 1976, Tina and Peter got married in McDonald. A small contingent from DC made the journey to Pennsylvania in two cars. When we arrived in McDonald, one of the cars stopped and someone went into a store and bought some rolling papers. By the time we arrived at Tina's home, they had already gotten the call, "The drug-addicts have arrived." It was a fabulous, unforgettable wedding. On the left side of the aisle were the massed factions of the Darragh tribe. The right side was almost empty, save for the small, huddled group of DC bohemian wannabes up front.

Paul, Pete, Tina, Potsy, Doug
Wedding day, 1976

Next came Pi in the Skye (Ferguson & Franzino), in 1980. Material from this text was also included in the Xa reading. Another element of the Darragh/Inman poetics interface begins to assert itself in this text: page as field, a convention given formal status by the poets of Projective Verse. In particular, "fragment of P.'s work -- Number One Son," looks a bit like a Charles Olson text. The visual element gets a good deal of emphasis in both Tina's and Peter's work. What's more, the vocabulary of "fragment" often resembles that of a P. Inman poem. Pi in the Skye is dedicated to "P. Inman and his work," so that it is, in effect, an extension of their marriage into the realm of poetics, a well-made marriage in which their practices would merge and diverge over the next 27 years (this far).

Listening to the sections of Pi in the Skye on Xa, you get a strong sense of Tina's expansiveness regarding connotation. She seems to be tripping through the linguistic mutations of the collective unconscious, like Deiphobe confronted by the spirits in Virgil's underwold, or like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, rushing around the room, touching everything, so that she could install every object in her sense memory.

If the previous paragraph seems extravagant, or ridiculous, I don't mind. I don't mean to edit my thinking, looks like.

on the corner to off the corner was another debut for Tina, insofar as Douglas Messerli's Sun & Moon books were gathering prestige and Tina's publication in that series in 1981 was a step towards national recognition of her work. on the corner to off the corner was took its title from the Miles Davis recording, and has this inscription:

"in appreciation of Francis Ponge
for things that he has given us"

Here is a comment on Ponge's work, found at the library online:

"In the prose poems of Francis Ponge, coming as he does in an un-heroic age fashioned more by scientific than by classical studies, the direction is down rather than up, smaller rather than larger. The subjects of his allegories or fables belong to a lower world than that of the gods and heroes of antiquity, and are treated zoomorphically, as opposed to the anthropomorphism of an Aesop or a La Fontaine. However, like his Renaissance antecedents, he too is creating a new humanism. He states his purpose to be "a description-definition-literary art work" which, avoiding the drabness of the dictionary and the inadequacy of poetic description, will lead to a cosmogony, that is, an account - through the successive and cumulative stages of linguistic development - of the totality of man's view of the universe and his relationship to it."

http://www.kalin.lm.com/author.html

The 26 sections of on the corner to off the corner was do fit with "a description-definition-literary art work," as Tina rambles more-or-less ecstatically through her alphabet as cosmology. And the zoomorphic / anthromorphic aspect speaks durectly to Tina's informed humanism. Peter and Tina have shown consistent vigilance in matters of social conscience throughout the time that I have know them, without piety, pomposity, or pc policity. on the corner to off the corner is as radical a book of poetry as any published post-The New American Poetry of which I am aware.

By the time Striking Resemblance was issued by Burning Deck in 1989, Tina's work had been included in two significant anthologies: In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, and published by the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, in 1986; and "Language" Poetries: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Messerli, and published by New Directions in 1987. Tina was one of four poets associated with DC in In the American Tree (P. Inman, Lynne Dreyer and Diane Ward were the others); and she was one of three in "Language" Poetries (P. Inman and Diane Ward were the other two). Ron Silliman also cited five other names of poets associated with Washington as candidates for a "volume of absolutely comparable worth" -- Michael Lally, Bernard Welt, Joan Retallack, Tim Dlugos, Doug Lang. There were some other, strong candidates, too: Terence Winch, Beth Joselow, and Douglas Messerli, for exampe.

There was no such thing as Language Poetry, of course. Small press magazines such as This, edited by Barrett Watten on the West Coast, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein on the East Coast, had given focus to a particular set of poetics and particular concerns about theory and practice; and there was a more than sufficiently visible "movement" to deserve the name. The product of this movement was the focus of Douglas Messerli's anthology. While the value of that anthology was specific, the phenomenon it documented was too diverse to categorize, ultimately. (I'm not proposing that this was the purpose of "Language" Poetries -- just that what some took for a prescription was more of a lens, really.) The larger picture was that the movement was the epicenter of a continuing renaissance in American poetry that had been most recently documented at that time in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry. While In the American Tree gave full recognition to the movement, it also indicated an awareness of the larger picture, both in the breadth of its inclusions, and in its editor's introduction.

In the American Tree and "Language" Poetries could easily be aligned with other anthologies, such as the earlier An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (1970), and Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, edited by Andrei Codrescu, and published in the same year as "Language" Poetries. It was all good, as they say. In fact, Up Late could have been regarded as the "volume of absolutely comparable worth" proposed by Ron Silliman.

The point is that Tina Darragh was at the center of the Language Poetry movement, and had been recognized as such. And that Tina and Language Poetry were both connected to an ongoing American poetry renaissance. It was very gratifying to see Tina get the recognition she deserved, along with her DC poetry associates. The publication of Striking Resemblance was just as gratifying. Issued in Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop's great Burning Deck series, published out of Providence, RI, it was Tina's first book to be published outside of the Washington area. It began with Pi in the Skye, and contained three other pieces.

I've always assumed that D. H. Lawence's, "Trust the art not the artist," was intended to address both the issue of meaning, that the meaning of a work of art was not necessarily what the artist intended it to be, and to the issue of control, i.e., the artit's desire to control the reader's experience of the work. These issues are addressed readily in Striking Resemblance, in which process is of absolute concern. As Rod Smith wrote:

"Darragh is investigating investigation. One isn't led to conclusions. The manner in which she constructs a context for the investigation is itself the investigation.... When we learn to inhabit [this process] we'll have learned a lot."

And here is Tina:

"You know, in relational database structure there's a whole thing about webs… as opposed to hierarchically structured data bases where you have where you have the primary information up top and then you have these little boxes of secondary information and then you could have comment and other kinds of information off them. But the relational database structure is supposed to open up the possibilities of being able to retrieve the data in different ways."
(my italics)

Tina Darragh interviewed by Joan Retallack, AERIAL #5

In her interview with Joan, Tina cites the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry, as a kind of model investigator, capable of looking at data and seeing entirely new patterns. Tina's intellectual generosity in Striking Resemblance is such that she creates all her readers mini-Mandelbrots. One could write a book about this book. There is the focus on Raymond Chandler (in "Raymond Chandler's Sentence") and on James M. Cain in the last piece in the book (the title of which Blogger formatting prevents me from reproducing with any accuracy); the achievement here in creating object/structure forms, combined with immensely self-expressive material; and more besides. Taking a Montessori course, studying statistics, reading a collection of essays (Demystifying Social Statistics, a collection of twenty-two essays written by social scientists and statisticians), all of these activities are subsumed into the process of an autiobiography as process.

There are several moments here. One of them is indicated by dedications in Striking Resemblance, one to Susan Howe and another to Joan Retallack. At this point in time, the history of close connections between the women poets of the DC scene had evolved into a kind of secondary community, involving Tina, Joan, Diane Ward (even though she no longer lived in DC), Beth Joselow, Phyllis Rosenzweig and Lynne Dreyer, in various combinations of interchange, collaboration, and so on, through several years. If one thinks of Douglas Messerli has having proposed a kind of deliberate coherence with "Language" Poetries, and Ron Silliman as having configured more of a working "coherence" with In the American Tree (the bigger picture), then you could say that the camera was panning back to reveal an even bigger picture; and in some ways, too, a separate picture, within the original bigger picture, at its edges, and on the outside. This would eventually lead to Margery Margaret Sloan's seminal anthology Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, which would include Tina, Lynne, Joan, and Diane.

Joan, Lynne, Tina

Another moment was indicated by the publication of AERIAL #5 in 1989, then in its third year, and clearly demonstrating the imminence of a second surge in the Washington alternative poetry scene. Aside from publishing younger poets such as Daniel Barbiero, Gretchen Johnsen, Joe Ross, Wayne Klein, and A. L. Nielsen, editor Rod Smith had published work by Terence Winch, Douglas Messerli, Joan Retallack, and Phyllis Rosenzweig, as well as Tina Darragh, and a connection between generations was made manifest. The Joan/Tina interview and work by both poets in the same issue all gave emphasis to this. What was more, Rod's publication (through several issues of AERIAL) of work by Rosmarie Waldrop, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Gi Ott, Peter Ganick, Keith Waldrop, Elaine Equi, Susan Smith Nash, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Davies, Julia Blumenrich, Jackson Mac Low, Hank Lazer, Andrew Levy, Ray DiPalma, Eric Wirth, Loris Essary, Janet Gray, Sheila E, Murphy and Stephen-Paul Martin, refreshed and extended DC's connections to the larger scene.

end of part one

Insert No. 7

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