tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34890690854362191302024-03-05T22:00:33.904-08:00douglangsdcpoetryblogdouglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-90366046456055587212008-07-04T03:38:00.000-07:002008-07-14T07:29:33.885-07:00Poetry of the 1970s part 2<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjizUt3l-WPkC481jkBT89JlX39Bansloa6yyvxBKaAf-KtnCBvlUCsU717Z4mnLxOD5L5DeNuzCHWjCtiYDE3hp2fPqfb1Rto15iTrv04YHtwneIw4zXQmsYOq6Qfb4hhDYwka5IcfAK8/s1600-h/clark.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjizUt3l-WPkC481jkBT89JlX39Bansloa6yyvxBKaAf-KtnCBvlUCsU717Z4mnLxOD5L5DeNuzCHWjCtiYDE3hp2fPqfb1Rto15iTrv04YHtwneIw4zXQmsYOq6Qfb4hhDYwka5IcfAK8/s400/clark.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219109691018884066" border="0" /></a>Clark Coolidge and audience<br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(including Lee Ann Brown and Eileen Myles)</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Ben Friedlander</span></span><br /></div><br />On Saturday morning the conference moved from the Orono campus to the Colby College Museum of Art, where there were exhibitions by Alex Katz and Joe Brainard, and plenary readings by Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, as well as a gallery talk by Ann Lauterbach on Joe Brainard's <span style="font-style: italic;">Nancy</span> works. Mayer and Coolidge have both been closely associated with the "New York School of Poetry" and "Language Poetry," both of them having appeared in<span style="font-style: italic;"> An Anthology of New York Poets </span>(1970) and <span style="font-style: italic;">In the American Tree</span> (1986), seminal anthologies representing the two "movements" respectively (the latter published by the National Poetry Foundation, incidentally). I don't imagine that any school or movement in the world of alternative poetry would not want either of these two poets to be associated with them, such are their achievements and their reputations. Their readings befitted their status. It was a great treat to hear them.<br /><br />I didn't get to really see the Alex Katz exhibition. As always at this conference, there was much more offered than one had time to enjoy. I did view the Joe Brainard exhibition. I've been a Brainard fan forever and a fan of Nancy since Terry Winch turned me on to Ernie Bushmuller long, long ago. Not for nothing did the second issue of Dog City have Nancy on its cover, shown via power-point by Joan Retallack during the DC poets panel. Ann Lauterbach's gallery talk was a tender and moving reminiscence, as well as a finely detailed account of the Nancy works. It was another very memorable moment.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwpQFkgAjVXHuZlgWiZtragAoAmmZueTOhDBsBRe932bXIYoB47O4X6Pda9_pqRWVkrY08LpSnCg5O6lah27X46dw2s6qFe-rqTbc8MgbOn5zJ941LdJ-qhmpCaXa2U9mLn7R0iiI_c4/s1600-h/NancyThumbsPage.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwpQFkgAjVXHuZlgWiZtragAoAmmZueTOhDBsBRe932bXIYoB47O4X6Pda9_pqRWVkrY08LpSnCg5O6lah27X46dw2s6qFe-rqTbc8MgbOn5zJ941LdJ-qhmpCaXa2U9mLn7R0iiI_c4/s400/NancyThumbsPage.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219109492163921506" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGhBs1J2kCAFWAtUyFNyqY0ACJ7f5BpDu-5S2nRwsZzN7zn2N82W47iPklMDryCJrDd_Q-W9bEDZKqnpryQci1XepxfGjoXvKxe9iLG3fcJ5lRoXyepsu9aL_STHaOtFLMoEIGDMnYtdE/s1600-h/ann.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGhBs1J2kCAFWAtUyFNyqY0ACJ7f5BpDu-5S2nRwsZzN7zn2N82W47iPklMDryCJrDd_Q-W9bEDZKqnpryQci1XepxfGjoXvKxe9iLG3fcJ5lRoXyepsu9aL_STHaOtFLMoEIGDMnYtdE/s400/ann.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5222157644383328386" border="0" /></a>Ann Lauterbach<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Tom Orange</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">Back at Orono, I attended the 4:30 p.m. panel "All Middle": Tom Raworth and Ted Greenwald, where Kit Robinson talked about (and read from the work of) Ted Greenwald, and Keith Tuma talked about Tom Raworth's <span style="font-style: italic;">Writing</span>. These were two perfect matches. Like Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, Greenwald and Robinson fit within both New York School and Language Poetry parameters, although I don't believe that Kit has ever been speciifcally associated with the New York School; come to think of it, I'm not sure that Ted has, either. Of course, the key is disjunctiveness, maybe less obviously so in Greenwald; and both poets have tremendous wit that runs the range from disarming to fierce. Kit's talk about Ted's world was more than a reading, it was a kind of personal recognition of value; it brought to mind the focus of meditation in the first volume of The Grand Piano, the collaborate memoir by ten poets associated with San Francisco: love. Tom Orange has posted this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cacCpad801g">video clip</a> of Robinson reading from Ted Greenwald's <span style="font-style: italic;">You Bet</span>. I just wished that Ted had been there to read some of Kit's work.<br /><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9INW_8SkVbsFmRK5LbrNqGBJA5jDiXQH3lE4Th1SMuHX62rofWYAzw0R6wG9Uw0c790GFAuF2Kv37QfifeHwgkiFoL0GQahS50Dl5W5vxWkmXaGFGoEqdZoXLN7RC4dRVfMr36GXsL1c/s1600-h/kk.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9INW_8SkVbsFmRK5LbrNqGBJA5jDiXQH3lE4Th1SMuHX62rofWYAzw0R6wG9Uw0c790GFAuF2Kv37QfifeHwgkiFoL0GQahS50Dl5W5vxWkmXaGFGoEqdZoXLN7RC4dRVfMr36GXsL1c/s400/kk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219106788939713122" border="0" /></a>Keith Tuma and Kit Robinson<br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(+ Clark Coolidge right)</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Diane Tuma<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;">Anyone with more than a passing familarity with Tom Raworth's work would be familiar with Keith Tuma's attention to it. Just google his name and it will lead you to various examples of this, or, better still, read his "Collaborating with 'Dark Senses' " in <span style="font-style: italic;">Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth</span>, edited by Nate Dorward. Tuma's talk was a good complement to Robinson's: intimate, contemplative, and open rather than instructive, regarding Raworth's <span style="font-style: italic;">Writing</span>. It was possible to sense in Tuma's approach a correlative to Tom's plain refusal to make himself the subject of his work, as respondent at this panel. As noted above, Tuma and Raworth was a perfect match. What Tuma's presentation gave me was a sense of possibility, a generous investigation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Writing</span> as a text that resisted contexualization, but invited <span style="font-style: italic;">reading</span>.<br /><br />Where could one go from here? Exhausted and energized at the same time, I went to the 4:30 plenary panel, Queering the 70's, to hear Dodie Bellamy ("The Feminist Writers' Guild"), Kevin Killian ("John Wieners' Transvestite Passion") and Eileen Myles ("Queerness, Perforamance and Prose").<br /></div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFO3IWik6LI1PEXrkXf3LwkXoIyA-PO_8LlGgPwCu3vMw4tVYkFSe7bFuNjgJoK17ai3k5XFRPAU5x2bpLcdtKxcNs4UW4qlRDkcZ4er6a-MRfpLmUSfK3IvrvaR_8hL5_MX2bmFrsh_k/s1600-h/eileen.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFO3IWik6LI1PEXrkXf3LwkXoIyA-PO_8LlGgPwCu3vMw4tVYkFSe7bFuNjgJoK17ai3k5XFRPAU5x2bpLcdtKxcNs4UW4qlRDkcZ4er6a-MRfpLmUSfK3IvrvaR_8hL5_MX2bmFrsh_k/s400/eileen.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5221965384147457778" border="0" /></a>Eileen Myles<br />at the Queering the '70s reading<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Tom Orange</span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">These three were amazingly, fully present. Each one of them was courageous in their presentation, displaying a degree of humanity that obliterated any division between self and text, celebrating the moment and its context, totally giving. Dodie Bellamy provided what was for me the most telling line of the conference, "Back then we answered each other's telephones," (fairly accurate paraphrase). It underlined the difference between then and now, between the community of the 1970s, when poets enjoyed the luxury of greater connection with each other and with some kind of meaningful struggle, and the 2000's, when such connections must overcome increasing isolation exemplified by the cell phone. All three brought passion and humor to their recitations of history, and they made it clear why we were all there at Orono. It was a magnificent performance.<br /><br />The last event I attended was the 8:00 p.m. plenary poetry reading at Minsky Recital Hall. No one has more gravitas than Tom Raworth. No one is more admired and respected. No one is more intense as a reader. No one has sharper wit or greater social relevance. His reading of <span style="font-style: italic;">Writing</span> was really pretty good. Yes it was. Writing would have to be on any list of brilliantworks of the 1970s, and this might have been its definitive reading.<br /></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixXlT2YgizlXBRNjI0FOd9X1Rk_U3jyIdOm9eh2GOqci-MAdIY3h1t-PJaYXZv7LbG8Fve0cK9FKVvYEb2X1CiX17GmyxOv4QrieJR-x0uaS4pOQB4uhJhuJSH15BQlSMA_iWR8S6-dEI/s1600-h/tom.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixXlT2YgizlXBRNjI0FOd9X1Rk_U3jyIdOm9eh2GOqci-MAdIY3h1t-PJaYXZv7LbG8Fve0cK9FKVvYEb2X1CiX17GmyxOv4QrieJR-x0uaS4pOQB4uhJhuJSH15BQlSMA_iWR8S6-dEI/s400/tom.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5221965311103210418" border="0" /></a>Tom Raworth<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Tom Orange<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;">There was so much at the Orono conference that I missed and wished I hadn't: just in terms of my DC compatriots, Barry Alpert's presentation on his legendary magazine, <span style="font-style: italic;">Vort</span>, Chris Nealon's presentation on John Ashbery, and Kaplan Harris on "The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation." I missed readings by Fred Wah, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Eileen Myles, Jayne Cortez, Ann Lauterbach, Nicole Brossard, and Rae Armantrout. And so much more. Browsing through the Poetry of the 1970s program, I was so sorry to have missed so much.<br />But that was a tribute to the value of the conference. To paraphrase dialogue from the end of a less than spectacular Howard Hawks movie, when one character asked another if he thought history would remember something, another replied, "I know I'll never forget it."<br /></div></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-1361303609574902532008-06-29T03:28:00.000-07:002008-07-04T13:24:39.098-07:00Poetry of the 1970s part 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgNAb32j2j5BmgfyNdFf19IsW4iKaWg3_1pAup8eaQjFF2VWcxonfNScoXwQ74e0aULPfBwtRIVYxf9rSrgJzMQKtEzhyphenhyphen1wt_Yz-1vxM9ZRGvjZziHlk6Mk_STbcEzNFQtohJ1tjTJrc/s1600-h/70s.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgNAb32j2j5BmgfyNdFf19IsW4iKaWg3_1pAup8eaQjFF2VWcxonfNScoXwQ74e0aULPfBwtRIVYxf9rSrgJzMQKtEzhyphenhyphen1wt_Yz-1vxM9ZRGvjZziHlk6Mk_STbcEzNFQtohJ1tjTJrc/s400/70s.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217274163190078194" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> Photograph by Tom Raworth</span></span><br /><br />Tina and Peter and I arrived at Orono in the evening of Thursday, June 12, the second day of the Poetry of the 1970s conference, in time to hear Bruce Andrews read at 7:30 at Minsky Recital Hall. He gave a fantasic reading, more or less a retrospective of his work through four decades. The eloquence and the biting humor of his work has never been more evident than it has been in recent readings, including the last two he gave at DC/AC in Washington. In the first of these, last year, he read from his "White Dialect" project, using language culled from midwestern vernacular, and in the second, this year, he presented another sequence based on Appalachian dialect. One goes to a reading by Bruce Andrews with all the expectations appropriate to his deserved reputation as someone whose body of work is a significant achievement in contemporary poetry. However, this does not prepare you for the experience of hearing him perform his dialect works. They are astonishing in their concentrated music and in their almost mystical delving into the depths of language. The text of <span style="font-style: italic;">Libretto from White Dialect Poetry</span> may be found at <a href="http://www.ubu.com/ubu">/ubu editions</a> There has been some discussion regarding social issues relating to the poet's attitude towards his sources, but this seems to me to be cavilling in the face of this extraordinary achievement.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEfIoBQzCzTW3rQkF40XGjwBS_wAxMUKwZ50-MDtaD43YtXwrbCxEHwdg3Lgjpfwtb8azPki83jEaPM-vq1mKat9tqsWHNV9Nhhd1iouwGe-FaWnCPjBAgg5GbrJfR2rkCbXWCbMT6Z1k/s1600-h/bruce2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEfIoBQzCzTW3rQkF40XGjwBS_wAxMUKwZ50-MDtaD43YtXwrbCxEHwdg3Lgjpfwtb8azPki83jEaPM-vq1mKat9tqsWHNV9Nhhd1iouwGe-FaWnCPjBAgg5GbrJfR2rkCbXWCbMT6Z1k/s400/bruce2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217272829125873314" border="0" /></a>Although I regretted having missed the reading given by Fred Wah on June 11, the reading given by Bruce seemed to me the perfect start for my experience of this event. I first read his work during my first months in the US when I was shown the initial series of chapbooks published by SOUP, including Bruce's <span style="font-style: italic;">Edge</span>, and I continued to read his work from that point on.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> Photograph by Tom Orange</span></span><br /></div><br />I've heard him read many times in DC and in New York, and I know him some. There's no better representive of the poetry of the 1970s in my view. Also, the 1980s, 1990s & 2000s..<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWqTdte6nAEhVVGY2xo4FblhJbwQNzn-hx417n4fITOPSpAFByOlmPSxZLbczPYM7pQdwKCCbFENC_9fBsPEqWJfpG8K3g0FYwqOdFFsqpLgJnE8Lyer_yHOnCrrxiAplwisWdyy926UU/s1600-h/piano.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWqTdte6nAEhVVGY2xo4FblhJbwQNzn-hx417n4fITOPSpAFByOlmPSxZLbczPYM7pQdwKCCbFENC_9fBsPEqWJfpG8K3g0FYwqOdFFsqpLgJnE8Lyer_yHOnCrrxiAplwisWdyy926UU/s400/piano.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217349180980296754" border="0" /></a>Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Tom Orange</span></span><br /></div><br />At 10:00 p.m. that Thursday evening in the Black Box Theater upstairs from Minsky Recital Hall, Barett Watten, Steve Benson and Kit Robinson read from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Grand Piano</span> project, an experiment in collective memoir involving Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, currently up to six of ten planned volumes. Like Bruce Andrews, these three poets and their Grand Piano cohort are famously associated with the creation of what became known as Language Poetry, a name that is useful in describing something that did not exist, actually, but was any number of events, positions, developments, etcetera. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Grand Piano</span> project us all about recasting memory, memory as imagination, imagination as a collaborative ivvestigation. The reading was as much about a rendition of process as a rendition of text, complete with trading passages, overlaps, spontaneous composition being folded in, and I thought it was a riot, a gratifying riot, and, like the original texts, a perfect model of revisioning. There is an excellent <a href="http://allpurposemagicaltent.blogspot.com/2008/06/grand-piano-elephant-in-room.html">report</a> by Lytton Smith at thoughtmerge.<br /><br />There was more of Barrett Watten at 10:30 a.m. on Friday morning, when he presented "Late Capitalism and Language Writing in the 1970s." I can't tell you what this was about, not because of any lack of clarity in the presentation, but because it was too perfectly integrated to allow a successful dismantling for the purpose of summary. The presentation was delivered under the designation, "Periodizing the 1970s" and one particular argument it contained was in resistance to the idea of Language Poetry as a period register or genre. I've gone to the Thesaurus three time already, writing this paragraph -- the anxiety of inaccuracy. Also, the presentation included a reading of Watten's poem "Tibet" and some well-worked power-point material. It was a completely exhilarating event, and this extended to the questions from the audience, most especially the first question, asked by Chris Nealon.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLkGeT82FJSKL3hbC2Aprh1e1B16sAzoySeRQ_L6oOLjuckn0yWIq5mVnNr3KDoh5vYU45IaxNCdLPu2yv6Z8ncSwZzlvLCPJbo9ih49JYvqSSkA7VCtXskFNQtkl2rHH_9EMs4-8RcMg/s1600-h/bw.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLkGeT82FJSKL3hbC2Aprh1e1B16sAzoySeRQ_L6oOLjuckn0yWIq5mVnNr3KDoh5vYU45IaxNCdLPu2yv6Z8ncSwZzlvLCPJbo9ih49JYvqSSkA7VCtXskFNQtkl2rHH_9EMs4-8RcMg/s400/bw.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5218795728217273554" border="0" /></a>Barrett Watten at the banquet<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Photograph by Tom Orange</span></span><br /></div><br />The DC panel followed at 1:00 p.m., and at 2:30 p.m. I attended a panel titled "Fluxus, Intermedia, and Hypertext." This involved the one unhappy moment during the conference for me. Because of time restrictions, presentations by Patrick Durgin (on "Becoming Literature: Jackson Mac Low and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E of Intermedia") and Kasey Mohammad (on "Bern Porter and Dick Higgins" Blank Structures and Found Poetics.") were cut short. Presented in abbreviated forms, these two statements whetted the appetite for more, given both the compelling material and the obviously outstanding work of the presenters. Patrick Durgin's work can be found <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/60.php">here</a>.<br /><br />The 4:00 panel I attended was on Clark Coolidge, with presentations by Michael Golston, "Clark Coolidge and the Allegorical Imperative," Tom Orange, "The Uncollected Clark Coolidge," and Paul Stephens, "Coolidgean Ex-cavations: Landscape, Memory and Masculinity in the 1970s Poetry of Clark Coolidge," with Coolidge present as respondent. All three presentations were brilliant and absolutely convincing, but there was an amusing disconnect between the material presented and Coolidge's own perceptions, made evident by his response. Of course, this said less about the validity of the considerations of Golston, Orange and Stephens and more about their creativity. I came to Orono with some anxiety about the possibility of being exposed to academic posturing, but this was not the case. On the contrary, I always wanted more. Panels would end at a point where they might have started, at a point where extended discussion would have been in order, including this one, as well as Barrett Watten's after the comments/questions by Chris Nealon, Joshua Clover, Aaron Kunin and others, and the DC panel, expecially after the exhanges between Peter Inman, Barrett Watten and Bob Perelman. As Phil Metres asserted in his <a href="http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/2008/06/thinking-about-experimental-poetry.html">report</a> on the conference, "Even though there is great beauty in the harmonies created at Orono (and there were also plenty of creative dissonances as well), a part of me always holds to the Blakean principle: There is no progression without contraries." I would have been happy to have had those harmonies and dissonances continued.<br /><br />Around 7:00 p.m. I went back to my room and crashed like a house coming down.<br /><br />The DC poets reading was at 11:00 p.m. in the Black Box Theater -- more about that in a separate post.<br /><br />After the DC poets reading, I stuck around for the open reading, also in in the Black Box Theater, graced by the presence of Bill Howe. Rod Smith and Mel Nichols were among the readers, all of whom were more than worthy of full-length readings. My main regret regarding the conference was that I missed the other open readings. There was something about the poetry of the 2000s that gave great resonance to the poetry of the 1970s.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaQ81-U4X63YYNpEo98fSjZEf8WAKLrYsVCdLP4a2514tD4IbSnkH26aYjWW85vvEajtzfgHxvfAyZr_BsJM4P-Wx9DJDbvA61y-bLRvYfP8hhZ3OQEVzJEq95i4PZI9drRWn5GDy0qiA/s1600-h/howebill.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaQ81-U4X63YYNpEo98fSjZEf8WAKLrYsVCdLP4a2514tD4IbSnkH26aYjWW85vvEajtzfgHxvfAyZr_BsJM4P-Wx9DJDbvA61y-bLRvYfP8hhZ3OQEVzJEq95i4PZI9drRWn5GDy0qiA/s400/howebill.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5219098146900179122" border="0" /></a>Bill Howe<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">photograph by Ben Friedlander</span></span><br /></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-7909268443702161602008-06-28T05:15:00.000-07:002008-06-29T09:35:03.905-07:00DC in the 1970s<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-f-nj-bHtl7cUsG0nZrPt4FjyubqoOFCSDEgivGh944UP5TAoo_J9BTZ5ZHel2CyjT5gd3rjd8j7CAu2OirXkebjZz5wb6RRSm0Xj4ScDhsMAf-lROqofi9cCN_WY3DjgGbJGHl0fcwU/s1600-h/dog+city.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-f-nj-bHtl7cUsG0nZrPt4FjyubqoOFCSDEgivGh944UP5TAoo_J9BTZ5ZHel2CyjT5gd3rjd8j7CAu2OirXkebjZz5wb6RRSm0Xj4ScDhsMAf-lROqofi9cCN_WY3DjgGbJGHl0fcwU/s400/dog+city.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217342818766797346" border="0" /></a>Here is the substance of my talk during the DC panel at the Poetry of the 1970s conference at the University of Maine at Orono, somewhat extended.<br /><br />I want to talk about validation.<br /><br />I believe that during the 1970s we were the beneficiaries of a transition that had been going on for a long time. I’m talking about the shift from what had been an underground literature to what became an alternative poetry network. Among the crucial factors in this change were, first, a huge increase in the number of younger practicing poets during the 1960s, many of whom identified with the poetry and poetics that had been represented in Donald Allen’s anthology <span style="font-style: italic;">The New American Poetry</span>. Second was the continued rise in popularity of public readings, which had begun with the celebrated performances of Dylan Thomas in America, and had blossomed with the advent of the Beat Generation. Third was the development of new and improved publication technologies such as offset printing and Xerox. Fourth was the intense interest in community fostered by the counter-culture. No doubt there were other factors, also.<br />(I have always preferred the term “alternative” to others such as “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because it is not a critical term but a descriptive one, referring to the publishing apparatus that allowed an separate poetry network to develop outside of the literary mainstream.<br /><br />This new population of poets formed communities in cities across America (and in Britain and elsewhere), as well larger national and international communities independent of what Charles Bernstein has famously called “official verse culture.” During the time of the Beat Generation, the term “underground” was used to describe literature that was outside of the mainstream, known only to an “underground” audience until something of its form or content or both lead the established literary world to pay attention. Quite often it was a term used in a patronizing manner, intended to put whatever potentially offensive material was at hand in its place. This was the time of literary trials, when the publishers of such works as <span style="font-style: italic;">Lady Chatterley’s Lover</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic of Cancer</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Howl</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Lolita</span> were prosecuted for obscenity. Validation at hat time came only via the established literary world, and was often critically qualified. By the 1970s, alternative poetry’s population was sufficiently developed to provide its own validation, with enough intellectual vigor and literary finesse to enter its own house justified.<br /><br />It is impossible to talk about alternative poetry in Washington DC in the 1970s without talking about the Mass Transit readings above the Community Bookstore on P Street near Dupont Cirlce, and associated events and publications, such as Some Of Us Press and the reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, also on P Street, And it is equally impossible to talk about alternative poetry in Washington DC in the 1970s without recognizing the importance of Michael Lally, Lee Lally and Terence Winch, all of whom were crucial to the creation of the DC community, And it was at the time of Mass Transit in the early to middle 1970s that the poetry community was most closely aligned with the counter-culture. And it was the creativity and work of those involved at this time that made everything else possible.<br /><br />What created such excitement and incredible energy during the 1970s in Washington was the fact that recognition and validation did not require endorsements from the established literary world. It was available through our own resources. Thanks to everyone and everything that had been represented in the <span style="font-style: italic;">New American Poetry</span> we were all free of the oppressive conformity that had ruled poetry and writing previously. And as it was in Washington, so it was elsewhere in the US and abroad.<br /><br />I believe that the alternative poetry network continued its transition to the point where it became to some extent a doppelgänger of the larger literary world. The enormous growth of Creative Writing programs at American universities created an ever-increasing flood of new, younger poets. The advent of Language Poetry with its emphasis on theory in some regards took alternative poetry back into the academy, previously one of the major resources of mainstream literary culture. As a result, alternative poetry has become a kind of demographic in which literary and academic careers are negotiated via alternative poetry publications, readings and so on. It is something of an industry now. This is not a complaint. I have the greatest respect for the younger generations of poets, those born in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. I think it is much tougher for them than it was for us who were born in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s there was a kind of intimacy in alternative poetry, a sense of shared projects and thinking, and even the illusion that one could pretty much have a sense of everything that was going on, and the knowledge of pretty much everyone who was involved. That was an illusion, of course, but it was possible to sustain it them. It would be nowhere near possible now.<br /><br />As a footnote, I will say that my favorite personal account of the transition from underground to alternative poetry is in Aram Saroyan’s memoir, <span style="font-style: italic;">Friends in the World</span>.<br />It was Aram who caused the most publicly dramatic conflict between alternative poetry and the established literary culture, when the latter was represented by President Ronald Reagan’s railing against “one word poems” being supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (soon thereafter to be eviscerated), because of his one word poem, “lighght.”<br /><br />And as a footnote to my footnote, please know that Aram Saroyan’s <a href="http://www.uglyduclingpresse.org/page-Complete.html">Complete Minimal Poems</a> is available from Ugly Duckling Presse.douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-88410089703116604732008-06-27T14:54:00.001-07:002008-06-28T03:37:16.369-07:00Having a Good Time<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p><object height="350" width="425"><param value="http://youtube.com/v/x9wgUi2-Ark" name="movie"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://youtube.com/v/x9wgUi2-Ark" height="350" width="425"></embed></object></p></div>In coversation with Ben Friedlander at the Poetry of the 1970s conference at Orono.douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-65502730587416651132008-06-27T14:37:00.001-07:002008-07-03T03:16:14.041-07:00DC at Orono<div style="text-align: center;"><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaqPbK0cuW8RYB-0An0WZzaWJpx8Mh6zHGtrM3CCK1Z6GB9Rx5_-NvcWwzsSO8QkZqSQ3Fod7GS9tXqZ_YSO8DgvvE4MWw7yKVHyjQvmPuGqHSL9KHOL9Q31XZJI1k0zQDJdRX_iYd-q8/s1600-h/dcpan3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 601px; height: 223px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaqPbK0cuW8RYB-0An0WZzaWJpx8Mh6zHGtrM3CCK1Z6GB9Rx5_-NvcWwzsSO8QkZqSQ3Fod7GS9tXqZ_YSO8DgvvE4MWw7yKVHyjQvmPuGqHSL9KHOL9Q31XZJI1k0zQDJdRX_iYd-q8/s400/dcpan3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216679211057406914" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Retallack, Inman. Darragh, Lang, Dreyer, Rosenzweig<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Photomerge by Tom Raworth</span><br /></span></div><br />A group of DC poets (and DC expat poets) went up to Orono two weeks ago to participate in The National Poetry Foundation’s Conference on The Poetry of the 1970s, at the University of Maine. Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Peter Inman, Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig and I constituted a panel to discuss Washington in the 1970s. The same group plus Diane Ward gave a reading. Kaplan Harris, Chris Nealon and Tom Orange presented papers. Rod Smith and Mel Nichols gave great support and read in one of the late night open readings. I was also glad to see Barry Alpert there. It was very gratifying to be there with everyone, and the whole conference was rewarding, inspiring, enlightening and fun. For me it was a completely new experience, since I’d never been to an academic conference before. Although I’ve taught at an art school for 40 years, I’m not an academic by training or inclination (not a pejorative statement). But this was just fantastic – a large gang of people all talking about and reading poetry. The one odd thing was how few women were involved. I’m not getting all PC here, it was just something you could not help noticing.<br /><br />The conference schedule was intense. A typical day had five panels from 9:00 to 10:15 a.m. Then a single (plenary) panel from 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p,m. Then five more panels at 2:30 p.m., and five more at 4:00 p.m. Following this, one (plenary) reading at 7:30 p.m. and another at 8:30 p.m. Then a group reading at 10:00 p.m. and open readings at 11:00 p.m. The fact that there were often five panels running simultaneously that you might want to attend was both frustrating and exciting. There are links to reports, photographs, and other material (including a link to ThoughtMesh where some of the papers presented at Orobo have been uploaded) at<a href="http://www.nationalpoetryfoundation.org/news/"> The National Poetry Foundation</a><br /><br />I'm going to write about the DC panel and reading here and write about the conference in general elsewhere.<br /><br />On Friday, June 13th at 1:00 p.m., there was the plenary panel: DC Poetry in the 1970s. Tom Orange introduced the panel. Joan Retallack presented a paper titled The New Spirit in Dog City, and remarks from the rest of the panel members followed, as well as questions and answers. Joan gave a really terrific account of the DC scene in the late 1970s, as expected, and ended with a powerpoint(?) display of pages from the two issues of Dog City magazine, which were published in 1977 and 1980 respectively. Peter and i had both prepared short statements and I had circulated mine to Joan and Tom and the rest of the panelists via email, but neither one of us read our statements. I felt totally anxious during the time before I was to have an opportunity to read, and I was particularly anxious about the possibility of my nervousnees being apparent to a room full of people that I so admired and respected, some of the best minds of my generation as it were (including the other panelists). Fortunately, I realized that I was feeling pressure to be something that I was not, and as soon as I decided to just be myself and to just talk, I was fine. I talked very well. We all did. The question and answer period was very lively. It was all very exhilarating. I loved it. And we finished on time, which was a serious rarity at the whole conference. My favorite moment came duringthe Q&A with a rhetorical question from Rod Smith. During my talk, I had mentioned that in DC during the Mass Transit days, the alternative poetry scene in DC was closely aligned with the counter-culture, at which point Peter interjected a remark (clearly humorous) that he had never used drugs during that time. Later, during the Q&A, Peter was engaged with Barrett Watten in a discussion of the apparently minimal interest shown in theory among the DC poets in the 1970s, at the end of which Rod asked Peter if he thought the fact that he had not taken drugs explained his lack of interest in theory back then.<br /><br />I will compose an approximation (and slight extension) of what I said in my talk in a separate post.douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-17805922655124652622008-04-18T05:46:00.001-07:002008-04-18T06:00:19.792-07:00Bicycle Day<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSbm1NX_UimRzCn3jEavVoh63H4XfEPWzFxsoxLJF8FzCNtk1UhSVovu0gCV44lwv9thgYohuOhfgwKAE5AdDpZdPi627Uv8_X-smnlgY10VKfAdd67Ol3594hKbibOyvRKwMEWj4O_A/s1600-h/bicycle+day.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSbm1NX_UimRzCn3jEavVoh63H4XfEPWzFxsoxLJF8FzCNtk1UhSVovu0gCV44lwv9thgYohuOhfgwKAE5AdDpZdPi627Uv8_X-smnlgY10VKfAdd67Ol3594hKbibOyvRKwMEWj4O_A/s400/bicycle+day.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190566076882190930" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Bicycle Day</span> bt Mel Nichols is a beautifully made chapbook containing 21 poems that will make your life better.<br /><br />I am sure that it may be found at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown.<br /><br />Or, it may be acquired from:<br /><br />Slack Buddha Press<br />4724 Bonham Road<br />Oxford, Ohio 45056douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-89896517807282772642007-09-14T05:38:00.000-07:002008-06-28T03:34:21.753-07:00Deed<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgItR7mXcdVvgFZEZbvE4brN7nwWVgoO9el7-B4bT4OfFNzr4vPs8l-Ox3jfBbfL9clZT0tPzQJ3yX3cw6o5I5-zAt_2QEfcO35BvVyUIMIRiScNDtnhrZFQceudEYYrvnAR8nnRAQ1xhc/s1600-h/deed.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgItR7mXcdVvgFZEZbvE4brN7nwWVgoO9el7-B4bT4OfFNzr4vPs8l-Ox3jfBbfL9clZT0tPzQJ3yX3cw6o5I5-zAt_2QEfcO35BvVyUIMIRiScNDtnhrZFQceudEYYrvnAR8nnRAQ1xhc/s400/deed.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5110038726611825794" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I love this book.</span><br /><br /><br />Rod Smith, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Deed,</span> University of Iowa Press / </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);font-size:85%;" >Kuhl House Poets</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"> (2007)<br /><br /></span><p style="color: rgb(0, 51, 0);">“The great thing about Rod Smith’s work is that it is all risk all the time. In<em> Deed</em>, he has built a substantial architecture whose ‘perilous upkeep’ is dazzling. This is a truly wondrous book.”—Peter Gizzi</p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 51, 0);">“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.<em> Deed</em> 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<em><br /></em></p><br />+ go here and read about it, if you haven't done so already:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >http://illuminatedmeat.blogspot.com/</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br /></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br /></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-20254295479327809332007-08-31T19:23:00.000-07:002007-09-14T05:51:18.136-07:00Begin at Once<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZm8YeLjHgD228zwARYsgY5QX0pPTAO3TKBU3FlCzHjsMFT3Gwh2qKiq5OVC2kXQnaUbYXeY5CqHi9mPDS7vVaB8XoOdo2V3qCmf4xXtAgYJe9imeS7kiMvHR4HM4nCBugBHHXnyFOj8A/s1600-h/beginatonce.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZm8YeLjHgD228zwARYsgY5QX0pPTAO3TKBU3FlCzHjsMFT3Gwh2qKiq5OVC2kXQnaUbYXeY5CqHi9mPDS7vVaB8XoOdo2V3qCmf4xXtAgYJe9imeS7kiMvHR4HM4nCBugBHHXnyFOj8A/s400/beginatonce.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5105056149315311970" border="0" /></a>I just read Beth Joselow's new book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Begin at Once. </span> It really got to me. If it doesn't get to you, it's because something else got to you first.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Beth Joselow, <span style="font-style: italic;">Begin at Once,</span> Chax Press (2007)<br /><br /></span><p style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);" class="content">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.<br /> — Mark Wallace</p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);" class="content">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.”<br /> — Tina Darragh</p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);" class="content"><br /> 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.<br /> -- Ron Silliman</p>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-69750671848390268432007-08-27T15:14:00.000-07:002008-06-28T03:31:35.887-07:00Bruce Andrews<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvKKgSPk68FqRkBfRUfM7Lov4yezdy5hzVZa9yTl3YA6hMF8dmQSJKrS4rj82WOWToRoby16jAx6A4EwQGGlWRrnViyB8nPmuBUq32LCGXDtSsXQLGzAKFFdikuGFh5uuMezBMIqqK8M4/s1600-h/bruce.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvKKgSPk68FqRkBfRUfM7Lov4yezdy5hzVZa9yTl3YA6hMF8dmQSJKrS4rj82WOWToRoby16jAx6A4EwQGGlWRrnViyB8nPmuBUq32LCGXDtSsXQLGzAKFFdikuGFh5uuMezBMIqqK8M4/s400/bruce.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104154566960404690" border="0" /></a><br />There have been several poets who have established connections was the DC alternative poetry scene over the years, via repeated visits, readings and friendships. Not only is Bruce Andrews one of them, he was part of the DC scene early on, attending Mass Transit readings, and being published by SOUP. <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 153);"><br />visible:</span> <span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 153);">Bruce Andrews, Doug Lang,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 153);">Michael Lally</span><br /></div><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 102);">Nothing passes unalarmed.</span> </span><span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 102);">When we read Samuel Becket's statement "To find a form that accomodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now" we are reminded of Beckett's consummate ability to find that form. It may be Bruce Andrews' unique gift to have found the mess. I cannot think of a twntieth century artist that approximates Bruce Andrews' breadth of </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 102, 102);">critical </span><span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 102);">reference. Like Joyce or Mac Low, the range of Andrews' vocabulary demonstrates the measure of the mess, whilst, like Burroughs or Debord, his rabidly articulate criticality negates those that would frame politics (i.e. this life) as anything other than a struggle, with stakes.</span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 102);">Rod Smith, "introduction" AERIAL 9</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjot4AQgbo23LUKdCqISFhSd4vwWgVGMuLYAbZBFB58eNyhQ1wr4awkHNgFtFfP5EhHcsCFzGgNnWJB3wf7YxYQHR7kr6a1JQ-Kk5LF_EotzgF2-zp1gNBXhgko0_eXezBJmYVzCs7Agn4/s1600-h/B's,jpg.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjot4AQgbo23LUKdCqISFhSd4vwWgVGMuLYAbZBFB58eNyhQ1wr4awkHNgFtFfP5EhHcsCFzGgNnWJB3wf7YxYQHR7kr6a1JQ-Kk5LF_EotzgF2-zp1gNBXhgko0_eXezBJmYVzCs7Agn4/s400/B's,jpg.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104154725874194658" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">2 B's bonding at Folio Books</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-76507053223135739402007-08-26T05:46:00.001-07:002007-09-01T12:44:37.606-07:00The Faber Book of Modern Verse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit_o93lhVzpz9FudodXD0HC0TiB3N52BUVyVWlhUG-x8VCgDydx0Y9n-BzW5n-kCJQ_F5P4O6um5q_qApqY-Hgmz-j9zpj6FzLmHSr8Hs61u8V_GeeO2es4Kzz6GStC-5h_MFK7MJQHJA/s1600-h/youngdog.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit_o93lhVzpz9FudodXD0HC0TiB3N52BUVyVWlhUG-x8VCgDydx0Y9n-BzW5n-kCJQ_F5P4O6um5q_qApqY-Hgmz-j9zpj6FzLmHSr8Hs61u8V_GeeO2es4Kzz6GStC-5h_MFK7MJQHJA/s400/youngdog.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104613853583169778" border="0" /></a>Here are the poets included in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Faber Book of Modern Verse</span>, edited by Michael Roberts (1936 edition):<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Gerard Manley Hopkins<br />W.B. Yeats<br />T.E. Hulme<br />Ezra Pound<br />T.S. Eliot<br />Harold Monro<br />Conrad Aiken<br />H.D.<br />Marianne Moore<br />Wallace Stevens<br />Vachel Lindsay<br />D.H. Lawrence<br />Isaac Rosenberg<br />Wilfred Owen<br />Herbert Read<br />John Crowe Ransom<br />Allen Tate<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Hart Crane<br />e.e. cummings<br />Laura Riding<br />Robert Graves<br />Edith Sitwell<br />Sacheverell Sitwell<br />Richard Eberhart<br />Peter Quennell<br />William Empson<br />C. Day Lewis<br />W.H. Auden<br />Louis MacNeice<br />Stephen Spender<br />James Reeves<br />Charles Madge<br />George Barker<br />Dylan Thomas<br />Clifford Dyment<br />David Gascoyne<br /></div><br />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.<br /><br />I was in my late teens when I got the paperback edition of the 1951 version of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Faber Book of Modern Verse.</span> What did I know? Not much.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255); font-weight: bold;">Abou Ben Adhem</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">And saw, within the moonlight in his room,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">An Angel writing in a book of gold:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">And to the Presence in the room he said,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">And with a look made of all sweet accord</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Write me as one who loves his fellow men."</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">It came again with a great wakening light,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> --<span style="font-style: italic;"> James Leigh Hunt</span></span><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice in Wonderland. </span>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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Selected Poems</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Four Quartets,</span> after I'd gotten the drift that Eliot was <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> 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.<br /><br />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 <em>New World Writing</em>, 1957):<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">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.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">"Dylan Thomas was made to stand for everything they detested: verbal obscurity, metaphysical pretentiousness, and romantic rhapsodizing," David Lodge, </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">Working with Structuralism</span> (1981).<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">New Lines</span> 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. </span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsmzKyJc1WI/AAAAAAAAAQM/n188AlJEfmk/s1600-h/raine.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsmzKyJc1WI/AAAAAAAAAQM/n188AlJEfmk/s400/raine.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100805050815272290" border="0" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br /></span></span></div></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAE2Pd0qCYkMsGI1QfrSnbrRSeqWIzGLD2XtUUyAbtsD6fNrvcoeFKEAc_KAWv5Qwx9VfELe0GZ8lSI-R9Mx_iZwd2uBmDrmqqcxscFCVCpFR9_ZasF3W_2hCJ0A2cmV-02OJwTD1bxl8/s1600-h/raine.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAE2Pd0qCYkMsGI1QfrSnbrRSeqWIzGLD2XtUUyAbtsD6fNrvcoeFKEAc_KAWv5Qwx9VfELe0GZ8lSI-R9Mx_iZwd2uBmDrmqqcxscFCVCpFR9_ZasF3W_2hCJ0A2cmV-02OJwTD1bxl8/s400/raine.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104615013224339762" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Kathleen Raine</span></span><br /></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQlvOgY72qs8-ST5QKpXr4TLrDhqZ49wTIiRMfDhHs1XF7c5KCMUgC3YbccySaIMTpc9rAcel1v2tDJekrPtYcrUnYDWk3lCJ7Vo1cTz4Z97tYNlsbR_zUtgLGsUOqBNeycJlTTJpdDt8/s1600-h/blake.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQlvOgY72qs8-ST5QKpXr4TLrDhqZ49wTIiRMfDhHs1XF7c5KCMUgC3YbccySaIMTpc9rAcel1v2tDJekrPtYcrUnYDWk3lCJ7Vo1cTz4Z97tYNlsbR_zUtgLGsUOqBNeycJlTTJpdDt8/s400/blake.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104614918735059234" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">William Blake</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZXuK4ufvoZDjpeQ4LwbIZI667-ZHqM0QSAKeu4pofaPifzsbTbgEQ4Is4tz4F8I0wGkMPAywBrrgBF-X5PFHdiJuNM7GFIOlnuO7WipTJBXjcasHNOLz47bHRPy1lPee9v4OE008Kps/s1600-h/jung.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwZXuK4ufvoZDjpeQ4LwbIZI667-ZHqM0QSAKeu4pofaPifzsbTbgEQ4Is4tz4F8I0wGkMPAywBrrgBF-X5PFHdiJuNM7GFIOlnuO7WipTJBXjcasHNOLz47bHRPy1lPee9v4OE008Kps/s400/jung.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104614798475974930" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Carl Jung action figure</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.<br /></span></span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguUP5iNY6YC_eo2enSE8ljOmHH5Ey_Fh50hvdwzjM0UdDe2PRX3k4lIs_DmFJ5Aykh1YaQQJdsIvj3YyKSIuxJQDSztjbl7y-24oQ9wJsFTeNBqyfFHU6KXWNCxvRJfwxvOmKQhq4-v5o/s1600-h/vernon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguUP5iNY6YC_eo2enSE8ljOmHH5Ey_Fh50hvdwzjM0UdDe2PRX3k4lIs_DmFJ5Aykh1YaQQJdsIvj3YyKSIuxJQDSztjbl7y-24oQ9wJsFTeNBqyfFHU6KXWNCxvRJfwxvOmKQhq4-v5o/s400/vernon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104614682511857922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Vernon Watkins by Alfred Janes</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">The mystery to me is David Gascoyne, the youngest poet in the original <span style="font-style: italic;">The Faber Book of Modern Verse. </span>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.<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Yves Tanguy</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br /><br />The worlds are breaking in my head</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Blown by the brainless wind</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />That comes from afar</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Swollen with dusk and dust</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />And hysterical rain</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />The fading cries of the light</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Awaken the endless desert</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Engrossed in its tropical slumber</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Enclosed by the dead grey oceans</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Enclasped by the arms of the night</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />The worlds are breaking in my head</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Their fragments are crumbs of despair</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />The food of the solitary damned</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Who await the gross tumult of turbulent</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Days bringing change without end</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />The worlds are breaking in my head</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />The fuming future sleeps no more</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">For their seeds are beginning to grow</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />To creep and to cry midst the</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Rocks of the deserts to come</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Planetary seed</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Sown by the grotesque wind</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Whose head is so swollen with rumours</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Whose hands are so urgent with tumours</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br />Whose feet are so deep in the sand</span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">David Gascoyne</span></span></span><br /></div><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I loved Dylan and I still do, especially <span style="font-style: italic;">A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Return Journey</span>; 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Leftover Life to Kill</span> and John Malcolm Brinnin's <span style="font-style: italic;">Dylan Thomas in America </span>-- and I'd like to read them both again now. Also, I'd like to read Brinnin's biography of Gertrude Stein, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Third Rose. </span>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.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssMNSJc1hI/AAAAAAAAARo/lpTWrQNzHxk/s1600-h/192a.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssMNSJc1hI/AAAAAAAAARo/lpTWrQNzHxk/s400/192a.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101184425276528146" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPTcwET7OqG6cOZOPDcNjPzSygYpELvvOd3ricyAo83-g4tC01TXaLDO7huyg6pJyAfX5W3jH44ztm7IR24txk1fmn1iqs_0jxwfx1gOORCbpTH5J-ZEtZeTT9tQC58mvmGwxPxNxLdBw/s1600-h/192a.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPTcwET7OqG6cOZOPDcNjPzSygYpELvvOd3ricyAo83-g4tC01TXaLDO7huyg6pJyAfX5W3jH44ztm7IR24txk1fmn1iqs_0jxwfx1gOORCbpTH5J-ZEtZeTT9tQC58mvmGwxPxNxLdBw/s400/192a.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5105047151358826834" border="0" /></a>192 Caergynydd Road, Waunarlwydd<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwBLtf4nviDVDAFb8I51aTkhwRaNQovB9hqenpQrlcgw3eBUQHSfwLQ4foC_QfTqxGI5-4QSw2xahnMbnT3e2KzgM35Fv-BbbNLEb8pT1eTV7b6woNuAWFY8PFBCbCUOd8BKDnaqpx6c4/s1600-h/bungalow.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwBLtf4nviDVDAFb8I51aTkhwRaNQovB9hqenpQrlcgw3eBUQHSfwLQ4foC_QfTqxGI5-4QSw2xahnMbnT3e2KzgM35Fv-BbbNLEb8pT1eTV7b6woNuAWFY8PFBCbCUOd8BKDnaqpx6c4/s400/bungalow.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5105047009624906050" border="0" /></a>Farrow bungalow<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I couldn't even get the picture straight.<br /><br />Or,<br /><br />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 <span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">sixteen year old girls</span>, 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, "<span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Tammy</span>." 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, <span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">seven</span> years later, I was still in love with her.<br /><br />I couldn't even get the picture straight.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssMHyJc1gI/AAAAAAAAARg/UH2UEWWAdOY/s1600-h/park.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssMHyJc1gI/AAAAAAAAARg/UH2UEWWAdOY/s400/park.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101184330787247618" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssL6SJc1fI/AAAAAAAAARY/Ak2A8TwiD0g/s1600-h/DL+paros+booth.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RssL6SJc1fI/AAAAAAAAARY/Ak2A8TwiD0g/s400/DL+paros+booth.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101184098859013618" border="0" /></a>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-83589197122159637602007-08-26T02:15:00.000-07:002007-09-02T10:38:59.552-07:00Tina Darragh<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF5iXi7niaoybxNnXxrLz9BWVCAFli8TKNZoeLdFa1jLx1yzhMSGVurIrwYP-dnAevuN4lWlusaBorUei8VsmKqzBV7YOT0jruQRNe4uxvEhVkTyymK3Ca0h-aEEYgBY3FzOdBovSozWg/s1600-h/3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF5iXi7niaoybxNnXxrLz9BWVCAFli8TKNZoeLdFa1jLx1yzhMSGVurIrwYP-dnAevuN4lWlusaBorUei8VsmKqzBV7YOT0jruQRNe4uxvEhVkTyymK3Ca0h-aEEYgBY3FzOdBovSozWg/s400/3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101146861492557234" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-style: italic;">Jack,</span></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-style: italic;">Peter, and Tina</span></span><br /></div><br />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<span style="font-style: italic;">.</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>Xa</span>. </span>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.<br /><br />Tina's first two books were sidestapled publications issued by Dry Imager, her own publishing venture. Both were roughly made collages. First came <span style="font-style: italic;">My First Play</span>, published back to back with Michael Lally's <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>Malenkov Takes Over</span><span>.</span> </span>Here is a page:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKISXB_DqtjNmxOxSCEqn_n0e91rvsqwJMr-2cZwOjF9Oyccis6wGc_83wwX7exzKkmZ40UGDVXK2qwFUgq8CQzUvdfUyaAm4xO0Ut73p1-iHUR9l8ciNfbY9ya7EOCBKqDo0d9M82X8A/s1600-h/mfp1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKISXB_DqtjNmxOxSCEqn_n0e91rvsqwJMr-2cZwOjF9Oyccis6wGc_83wwX7exzKkmZ40UGDVXK2qwFUgq8CQzUvdfUyaAm4xO0Ut73p1-iHUR9l8ciNfbY9ya7EOCBKqDo0d9M82X8A/s400/mfp1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102337026995050258" border="0" /></a>The caption under the picture reads:<br /><div style="text-align: center;">BIOLOGIST HAMILTON<br />Parthenogenesis on the roof.<br /></div>The other two pieces of text are, "Just Us Girls" and Labortory Cheese."<br /><br />Here's another page:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4gkHE3-WkwXokC5suTU3HA82zU1zKpUkIqdp9PtOdgAlCt70Kn7_26AvKbk8TQf_gqfBvI7nsX6QG0zcvL_pPJF2LYKE5RL3G0tFkL6udvcse9DComPfqOFP5qjnkdl3J7UNx8w6IwvA/s1600-h/mfp2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4gkHE3-WkwXokC5suTU3HA82zU1zKpUkIqdp9PtOdgAlCt70Kn7_26AvKbk8TQf_gqfBvI7nsX6QG0zcvL_pPJF2LYKE5RL3G0tFkL6udvcse9DComPfqOFP5qjnkdl3J7UNx8w6IwvA/s400/mfp2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102336777886947074" border="0" /></a>and here is the text from that page, enlarged:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBVs2JTuP4uVn-TtsOjoIJgDKYiy8_taOt5JLDOW9-tip2_dDb65iOnLlsX1BsfNPDI8i_ZFrR0ki4PRaNTbiMLPqQzOdiigkgqbEKLRp4v7ibWO90mPaojc-q2ikTdxFnFo5-WVpXVu4/s1600-h/mfp3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBVs2JTuP4uVn-TtsOjoIJgDKYiy8_taOt5JLDOW9-tip2_dDb65iOnLlsX1BsfNPDI8i_ZFrR0ki4PRaNTbiMLPqQzOdiigkgqbEKLRp4v7ibWO90mPaojc-q2ikTdxFnFo5-WVpXVu4/s400/mfp3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102336627563091698" border="0" /></a><br />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.<br />The came <span style="font-style: italic;">Living, </span>a collaboration with Tim Dlugos, photobooth images, a recaptioned frame from the Nancy comicstrip, more bits of language, funny stuff.<br /><br />Tina's final 1975 publication was <span style="font-style: italic;">my hands……to……myself</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">,</span> 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">my hands to myself</span> for the first time in a long while, and listening to Tina’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Xa</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">my hands to myself</span><span style="font-style: italic;">,</span> 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:<br /><br />Charlie Chaplin / charge-a-plate<br />oatmeal / objet trouve<br />dictaphone / different<br />pidgin / piggyback<br />(the slashes indicate spaces that can’t be reproduced here).<br /><br />This is all Tina enough, but when you hear her read the poem on the <span style="font-style: italic;">Xa</span> 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 <span>M</span><span style="font-style: italic;">y First Play</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Living.</span> It’s extraordinary. Peter (Inman) now disavows his first book, <span style="font-style: italic;">What Happens Next</span> (although I am deeply fond of it), and moved through a brief period of transition (<span style="font-style: italic;">P. Inman USA</span>) to what became his “identity” as a poet. And to choose another poet from among Tina’s associates, Terence Winch’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Boning Up</span> contains somewhat more conventional poetry than his signature works, which quickly followed. Tina emerged fully formed and rockin’.<br /><br />The other factor that is clear to me after rereading <span style="font-style: italic;">my hands to myself</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>and listening repeatedly to <span style="font-style: italic;">Xa</span>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFhrTFRXqoknRge4YtUoYFMVnGPkrNuUjRrATNn00Ix1Or5mTF0e5NRZhYK1DwVIbzgJXtgft98MxCBtkQTt9ovDIWXGVWmhbypAQCV64MOS_3uYzdlYlrKonF2Zu5Yn-xTSbW-BUnfTc/s1600-h/PTwedding.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFhrTFRXqoknRge4YtUoYFMVnGPkrNuUjRrATNn00Ix1Or5mTF0e5NRZhYK1DwVIbzgJXtgft98MxCBtkQTt9ovDIWXGVWmhbypAQCV64MOS_3uYzdlYlrKonF2Zu5Yn-xTSbW-BUnfTc/s400/PTwedding.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101183596347839970" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Paul, Pete, Tina, Potsy, Doug</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Wedding day, 1976</span></span><br /></div><br />Next came <span style="font-style: italic;">Pi in the Skye</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(Ferguson & Franzino), in 1980. Material from this text was also included in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Xa</span> 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. <span>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.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span>Pi in the Skye</span> </span><span>is dedicated t</span><span>o "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).<br /><br />Listening to the sections of </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Pi in the Skye</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>on<span style="font-style: italic;"> <span>Xa</span>, </span>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 <span>Deiphobe confronted by the spirits in Virgil's underwold, or like Greta Garbo in <span style="font-style: italic;">Queen Christina</span>, rushing around the room, touching everything, so that she could install every object in her sense memory.<br /><br />If the previous paragraph seems extravagant, or ridiculous, I don't mind. I don't mean to edit my thinking, looks like.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;">on the corner to off the corner</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span>was</span><span> 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. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">on the corner to off the corner</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span>was</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span>took</span><span> its title from the Miles Davis recording, and has this inscription:<br /><br />"in appreciation of Francis Ponge<br />for things that he has given us"<br /><br />Here is a comment on Ponge's work, found at <span style="font-weight: bold;">the library</span> online:<br /></span><span><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">"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."</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">http://www.kalin.lm.com/author.html</span><br /></div><br />The 26 sections of <span style="font-style: italic;">on the corner to off the corner</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span>was</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span>do fit with </span>"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. <span style="font-style: italic;">on the corner to off the corner</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span>is as radical a book of poetry as any published post-<span style="font-style: italic;">The New American Poetry</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>of which I am aware.</span><br /><br />By the time <span style="font-style: italic;">Striking Resemblance</span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> </span><span>was issued</span> by Burning Deck in 1989, Tina's work had been included in two significant anthologies: <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>In the American Tree</span>,</span> edited by Ron Silliman, and published by the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, in 1986; and <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>"Language" Poetries: An Anthology</span>,</span> edited by Douglas Messerli, and published by New Directions in 1987. Tina was one of four poets associated with DC in <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>In the American Tree</span></span> (P. Inman, Lynne Dreyer and Diane Ward were the others); and she was one of three in <span style="font-style: italic;">"Language" Poetries</span> (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" <span style="font-style: italic;">-- </span>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.<br /><br />There was no such thing as Language Poetry, of course. Small press magazines such as <span style="font-style: italic;">This,</span> edited by Barrett Watten on the West Coast, and <span style="font-style: italic;">L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>"Language" Poetries</span> -- </span>just that what some took for a prescription was more of a lens, really.<span>)</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>The New American Poetry</span>.</span> While <span style="font-style: italic;">In the American Tree</span> 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. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><span>In the American Tree</span> </span>and<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span>"Language" Poetries</span> </span><span>could easily be aligned with other anthologies, such as the earlier <span style="font-style: italic;"><span>An Anthology of New York Poets</span>, </span>edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (1970), and <span style="font-style: italic;">Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970</span>, edited by Andrei Codrescu, and published in the same year as </span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span>"Language" Poetries</span>. </span><span>It was all good, as they say. In fact, </span><span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span>Up Late</span> </span>could have been<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span>regarded as the "volume of absolutely comparable worth" proposed by Ron Silliman.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Striking Resemblance</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Pi in the Skye,</span> and contained three other pieces.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Striking Resemblance, </span><span>in which</span><span> process is of absolute concern. As Rod Smith wrote:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">"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."</span><br /></span> <br />And here is Tina:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">"<span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">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 </span></span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">open up the possibilities of being able to retrieve the data in different ways.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">"</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >(my italics)</span><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tina Darragh interviewed by Joan Retallack, AERIAL #5<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Striking Resemblance </span>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 (<span style="font-style: italic;">D</span><span style="font-style: italic;">emystifying Social Statistics</span>, 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.<br /><br />There are several moments here. One of them is indicated by dedications in <span style="font-style: italic;">Striking Resemblance, </span><span>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. </span>If one thinks of Douglas Messerli has having proposed a kind of deliberate coherence with <span style="font-style: italic;">"Language" Poetries</span>, and Ron Silliman as having configured more of a working "coherence" with <span style="font-style: italic;">In the American Tree </span>(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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, </span>which would include Tina, Lynne, Joan, and Diane.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCees_kMfebYHmQYYfHQJ5hnomMWInCK-D-iLSMeGX1Njk2KY1CZ_B4T6KjbP-1cylgajNP5eNuR2IsXq1Ewp1XhuRFY4eJcZ6209wDuZvAV1syi5aFkohpN-99AtqWuY6DtgavHDW9Lc/s1600-h/JLT.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCees_kMfebYHmQYYfHQJ5hnomMWInCK-D-iLSMeGX1Njk2KY1CZ_B4T6KjbP-1cylgajNP5eNuR2IsXq1Ewp1XhuRFY4eJcZ6209wDuZvAV1syi5aFkohpN-99AtqWuY6DtgavHDW9Lc/s400/JLT.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101183411664246226" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Joan, Lynne, Tina</span></span><br /></div><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">end of part one</span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-34210494829380040612007-08-25T13:31:00.000-07:002007-08-25T13:36:18.813-07:00Insert No. 7<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Lb69PrQwvw4Qv7WXd-1kePqNPAAog01aMUuYZw0fzqn1CY5g-xklaw-5TqIoKFL3bXBHHGXIflwoPP17mvjmVmBZB7q_VJDMmGVyJOFqZzCH87TXyfHjSb_BATHPx-AT4oX0LVPg7k0/s1600-h/rod.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Lb69PrQwvw4Qv7WXd-1kePqNPAAog01aMUuYZw0fzqn1CY5g-xklaw-5TqIoKFL3bXBHHGXIflwoPP17mvjmVmBZB7q_VJDMmGVyJOFqZzCH87TXyfHjSb_BATHPx-AT4oX0LVPg7k0/s400/rod.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102739250682320738" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 102, 0);">Go here:</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">http://illuminatedmeat.blogspot.com/</span></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-47955717243743350392007-08-25T06:41:00.000-07:002007-09-02T10:26:53.542-07:00Insert No. 6<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSEJF-gwVIIC89Zpofo-wnQZenTTyDRd0O2lgb-skKlh0_Sy6b7pBDSsWWyaJS-LHjODGzMcr0ke7U5oDcAJvnoCI0aNKIIOVKNyv2p4n6BmYt3Z6lJ9-Gw-WtGYIvf8X3ugW3ZlRzyp0/s1600-h/blue+skies+2.jpg"><br /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9m5rMi5978ElJq06hVv6-3J3P1GFg9gwL4Vd8sWR8tHK9Lmt9Yo_IjwBqhsxBtQy24NQCBBRX0CNfanFYr5aT-jX8BSaTEs-3a_75lB1NfsB6qWd6s_Z7EmpAsEEvljeY3arxmud9A8o/s1600-h/blue+skies+1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9m5rMi5978ElJq06hVv6-3J3P1GFg9gwL4Vd8sWR8tHK9Lmt9Yo_IjwBqhsxBtQy24NQCBBRX0CNfanFYr5aT-jX8BSaTEs-3a_75lB1NfsB6qWd6s_Z7EmpAsEEvljeY3arxmud9A8o/s400/blue+skies+1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102633431278081858" border="0" /></a>In my post on Michael Lally there was a list of the 31 poets included in the anthology, <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above,</span> edited by Michael. To my dismay, it was brought to my attention that the list contained only 30 names, and that Simon Schuchat's name had been omitted. Simon was the prodigy of the Mass Transit era. His first book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Svelte</span> was published when he was seventeen, I believe, with an introduction by Lewis MacAdams. His second book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Blue Skies</span> was one of my great favorites among the SOUP publications. The first poem in Blue Skies,<br />"To Mayakovsky," begins,<br /><br />You are distant, boss.<br />Made beautiful by the advantages<br />of poverty war and injustice.<br /><br />He had me right there. In fact, he had me with "To Mayakovsky." There were many mini-Ted-Berrigans around back in those days. What separated Simon from them was his audacity, impressive in one so young. Ted Berrigan was audacious, but Simon's audacity was not copied from Ted's, it was all his own. Here is the first of his poems from <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span>:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">THE MIRACLE OF SIMON SCHUCHAT</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br />Howdy my names Simon</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />I'm almost twenty years old</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />I go to the University of Chicago</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br />I take no shit from no one</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />Whatever that means</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />I'm trying out something new</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br />When I was fourteen I won a poetry prize</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />Given by Scholastic Magazine</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />Honorable Mention Junior Division</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br /><br />I been writing ever since</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />My favorite poet is John Ashbery</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><br />Do you think I write as good as him?</span><br /><br />You've got to love that. There was no poem in <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> that I liked or admired better. Simon went on to edit a terrific NYC mag, 432 Review, and later worked for the State Department in China and Hong Kong. There 's a poem in Svelte, "adapted from Tu Mu" --<br />coincidence?<br /><br />This is by no means the last you'll read about Simon at this weblog. Meanwhile, here's a poem written in 1980 in Shanghai, taken from Jack Kimball's East Village Poetry Online: <span style="font-family:arial,helvetica;"><div align="right"><span style="color: rgb(238, 238, 238);font-size:85%;" ><br />The East Village</span></div><span style="font-weight: bold;">Belly</span><br /><br />Staring at your lips so red<br />In black and white from 1947<br />A little before dawn -- the<br />Liberation, day of bright hope<br />Some children now have never seen<br />They live the same as their fathers<br />Families are separated the same<br />And hunger is ugly to just hear<br />About it, whether you blame it<br />On the big noses or bad eggs<br />And so long as they love their face<br />Like that their belly will be<br />A stone<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;">http://www.theeastvillage.com/t/schuchat/a.htm</span></span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica;"></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSEJF-gwVIIC89Zpofo-wnQZenTTyDRd0O2lgb-skKlh0_Sy6b7pBDSsWWyaJS-LHjODGzMcr0ke7U5oDcAJvnoCI0aNKIIOVKNyv2p4n6BmYt3Z6lJ9-Gw-WtGYIvf8X3ugW3ZlRzyp0/s1600-h/blue+skies+2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSEJF-gwVIIC89Zpofo-wnQZenTTyDRd0O2lgb-skKlh0_Sy6b7pBDSsWWyaJS-LHjODGzMcr0ke7U5oDcAJvnoCI0aNKIIOVKNyv2p4n6BmYt3Z6lJ9-Gw-WtGYIvf8X3ugW3ZlRzyp0/s400/blue+skies+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102637867979298642" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">back cover of Blue Skies</span></span><br /></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-46904065853370980772007-08-24T18:41:00.001-07:002007-08-25T06:41:19.597-07:00Insert No. 5<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XJvxGFTB_sK_DSbGNWnA6xpz6GuaeIvKlCCFKWfLUYK_gD7Qg_mP4CzpvuBWxjk_zA6-ktFir4WWvj-jpgVK83eYOMQ0ChaeP0m3kBrccqDzizaGmPl0QZmZ_wv9woYMtCMWHEZMDHE/s1600-h/dandarepilot.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XJvxGFTB_sK_DSbGNWnA6xpz6GuaeIvKlCCFKWfLUYK_gD7Qg_mP4CzpvuBWxjk_zA6-ktFir4WWvj-jpgVK83eYOMQ0ChaeP0m3kBrccqDzizaGmPl0QZmZ_wv9woYMtCMWHEZMDHE/s400/dandarepilot.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102448000360044338" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I've nothing new to say here, I only wanted to show off this artwork that I just received from Tom Raworth:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrGV1aurp3CvuqSIfMwLYGEEtlp3I4V0-T0RsvMx1Tp2xmVz_Zfipj1I0unYcjoBKHf0QHowccgZi3ChzZL4fh9VOpThGpba1iVQzS_lk-YgGnyO88sMO_YSa3f0RGG3BB3T45uitb8jw/s1600-h/mek.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrGV1aurp3CvuqSIfMwLYGEEtlp3I4V0-T0RsvMx1Tp2xmVz_Zfipj1I0unYcjoBKHf0QHowccgZi3ChzZL4fh9VOpThGpba1iVQzS_lk-YgGnyO88sMO_YSa3f0RGG3BB3T45uitb8jw/s400/mek.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102447755546908450" border="0" /></a>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-29280689614703757912007-08-24T18:41:00.000-07:002008-06-28T03:29:43.551-07:00Insert No. 5<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XJvxGFTB_sK_DSbGNWnA6xpz6GuaeIvKlCCFKWfLUYK_gD7Qg_mP4CzpvuBWxjk_zA6-ktFir4WWvj-jpgVK83eYOMQ0ChaeP0m3kBrccqDzizaGmPl0QZmZ_wv9woYMtCMWHEZMDHE/s1600-h/dandarepilot.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XJvxGFTB_sK_DSbGNWnA6xpz6GuaeIvKlCCFKWfLUYK_gD7Qg_mP4CzpvuBWxjk_zA6-ktFir4WWvj-jpgVK83eYOMQ0ChaeP0m3kBrccqDzizaGmPl0QZmZ_wv9woYMtCMWHEZMDHE/s400/dandarepilot.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102448000360044338" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I've nothing new to say here, I just wanted to show off this artwork that I just received from Tom Rawoth:<br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrGV1aurp3CvuqSIfMwLYGEEtlp3I4V0-T0RsvMx1Tp2xmVz_Zfipj1I0unYcjoBKHf0QHowccgZi3ChzZL4fh9VOpThGpba1iVQzS_lk-YgGnyO88sMO_YSa3f0RGG3BB3T45uitb8jw/s1600-h/mek.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrGV1aurp3CvuqSIfMwLYGEEtlp3I4V0-T0RsvMx1Tp2xmVz_Zfipj1I0unYcjoBKHf0QHowccgZi3ChzZL4fh9VOpThGpba1iVQzS_lk-YgGnyO88sMO_YSa3f0RGG3BB3T45uitb8jw/s400/mek.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102447755546908450" border="0" /></a>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-35375355948918288252007-08-21T06:28:00.000-07:002007-08-24T03:56:41.002-07:00Bibliography<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsrZmCJc1aI/AAAAAAAAAQs/QQuXJK8ph5M/s1600-h/thesedays.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsrZmCJc1aI/AAAAAAAAAQs/QQuXJK8ph5M/s400/thesedays.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101128775385273762" border="0" /></a><span>This is the beginning of my attempt to compile a list of publications of work by poets closely associated with the Washington DC alternative poetry scene, as well as publications out of DC of works by poets not directly associated with it. In my post on Michael Lally, I did not discuss his record as a small press publisher beyond his involvement with Some of Us Press. Between 1974 and 1979, Michael's O Press issued seven titles, all of them valuable contributions to the traditions given greater coherence by Donald Allen's <span style="font-style: italic;">The New American Poetry.</span> As always, Michael's choices were idiosycratic, and the work he promoted covered a diverse set of poetics.<br /><br /></span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Highlighted titles indicate poets not directly connected to DC poetry</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />1970<br /></span>Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">What Withers</span> (Doones Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">MCMLXVI Poem </span>(The Nomad Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Lines Are Drawn</span> </span>(Asphalt Press)<br />Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Three Rooms</span> </span>(Oyez Press)<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />1971<br /></span><span>Michael Lally,</span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Stupid Rabbits</span> (Morgan Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1972<br /></span>Lee Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">These Days</span> (SOUP)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">The South Orange Sonnets</span> (SOUP)<br />Terence Winch, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Boning Up</span> (SOUP)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1973<br /></span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Bruce Andrews, </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Edge</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> (SOUP)</span><br />Susan Baker, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">She's a Jim-Dandy </span>(SOUP)<br />Ed Cox, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Blocks </span>(SOUP)<br />Tim Dlugos, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">High There</span> (SOUP)<br />Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Moving Violation</span> (SOUP)<br />Margaret Gibson, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Lunes</span> (SOUP)<br />William Holland, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">How Us White Folks Discovered Rock and Roll</span> (SOUP)<br /><span>Michael Lally,</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Late Sleepers</span> (Pellet Press)<br />Leonard Randolph, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Scar Tissue</span> (SOUP)<br />Simon Schuchat, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Blue Skies</span> (SOUP))<br />Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Poems of the Morning, Poems of the Storm </span></span>(Oyez Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Mass Transit #1</span> Summer 1973, edited by Terence Winch</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1974</span><br />Martina Darragh, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">My First Play</span> (A Dry Imager Production)<br />Lynne Dreyer, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Lamplights Used to Feed the Deer</span> (SOUP)<br />P. Inman, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">What Happens Next</span> (SOUP)<br />Beth Joselow, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Ice Fishing</span> (SOUP)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Malenkov Takes Over</span> (A Dry Imager Production)<br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Robert Slater, </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">A Rumor of Inhabitants</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> (SOUP)</span><br />Terence Winch, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Irish Musicians</span> (O Press)<br />Ed Zahniser, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">The Ultimate Double Play</span> (SOUP)<br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Mass Transit #2</span> Fall/Winter 1973-1974, edited by Michael Lally<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Mass Transit #3 </span>January 1974, edited by Ed Cox & Tina Darragh</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Mass Transit #4</span> Spring/Summer 1974, edited by Michael Lally<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Mass Transity #5</span> Fall 1974, edited by Beth Joselow and </span><span style="font-family:arial;">Peter Inman<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">1975<br /></span><span>Martina Darragh & Tim Dlugos</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">, <span style="font-style: italic;">Living</span> </span>(A Dry Imager Production)<br />P. Inman, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">P. Inman U.S.A.</span> (A Dry Imager Production)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Oomaloom</span> (A Dry Imager Production)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Sex/The Swing Era </span>(Lucy & Ethel)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">My Life</span> (Wyrd Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Dues</span> (The Stonewall Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Mentally, He's a Sick Man </span>(Salt Lick Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Rocky Dies Yellow</span> (Blue Wind Press; second edition, 1977)<br />Phyllis Rosenzweig, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Seventeen Poems</span> (O Press)<br />Terence Winch, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Beautiful Indifference</span> (O Press)<br />Terence Winch, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Where the Yellow Went</span> (A Dry Imager Production)<br /><br />Michael Lally (editor), <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> (The Crossing Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1976<br /></span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Bruce Andrews, </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Vowels</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> (O Press)</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">David Drum, </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Facade</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> ((O Press, 1976</span>)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Charisma</span> (O Press)<br />Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Founding Fathers: Book</span></span> <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">One</span> (LLanfair Press)<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">1977</span><br />Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Movies</span> (Jawbone Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1978</span><br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Just Let Me Do It</span> (Vehicle Editions)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Catch My Breath</span> (Salt Lick Press; second edition, 1995)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">In the Mood </span>(Titanic Books)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1979</span><br />Diane Ward, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Theory of Emotion</span> (Segue/O Press, 1979)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1980<br /></span> Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">White Life </span>(Jordan Davies)<br />Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Jurassic Night</span> </span>(White Dot Press)<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1982</span><br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Attitude</span> (Hanging Loose Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Hollywood Magic</span> (Little Caesar)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1984<br /></span>Andrea Wyatt,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Baseball Nights </span>(Renaissance Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1996</span><br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Cant Be Wrong</span> (Coffee House Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1999</span><br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Of</span> (Quiet Lion Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose</span> (Black Sparrow Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2001</span><br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">¿Que Pasa, Baby?</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(Wake Up Heavy Press)<br />Michael Lally, <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">It Takes One to Know One: Poetry & Prose </span>(Black Sparrow Press)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2003</span><br />Michael Lally,<span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> March 18, 2003</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">(illustrations by Alex Katz)</span> (Libellum) (third edition, Charta, 2006)<br /><br />2004<br />Tom Orange, <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">25 poems</span> (The Interrupting Cow)<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-81536301005113818732007-08-21T00:44:00.000-07:002007-08-21T06:30:44.700-07:00Insert No. 4<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8AIGd8K6HuuwdOy25_TU-fR8TfoDGmzo5mTtwYCMwG9uxlkPrWgKghA08hGTOja8NRooX1oIdQ-ZM_KGdhps56xL_BoA6vON5cgvB7RzG5fTygr57eC5Ap6dS6cV_9ZoHaaUk3CaGsXc/s1600-h/michael-miles.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8AIGd8K6HuuwdOy25_TU-fR8TfoDGmzo5mTtwYCMwG9uxlkPrWgKghA08hGTOja8NRooX1oIdQ-ZM_KGdhps56xL_BoA6vON5cgvB7RzG5fTygr57eC5Ap6dS6cV_9ZoHaaUk3CaGsXc/s400/michael-miles.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101057556237571474" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">Michael Lally</span><br /><br />I had not seen either of Michael's two Black Sparrow books when I did the post on him. Now I have them both, and I want to recomend them. <span style="font-style: italic;">It's Not Nostalgia</span> (1999) is a perfect place to begin reading his work. It has two great introductory pieces of autobiography, "The South Orange Sonnets" and "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," a really excellent choice of work from Michael's DC period, 1970-1975, and from his New York period, 1975-1982. The DC section contains "The Swing Era", "My Life" and "Oomaloom," the New York section has "In the Mood," and there is just a whole lot of Michael's greatest writing. Besides, how can you not dig a book that begins with a quote from Sidney Bechet? <span style="font-style: italic;">It Takes One To Know One</span> (2001) is packed with prime Michael, too. Here's one:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sonnet for My 33rd</span><br /><br />Brigitte Bardot<br />Abbot & Costello<br />Hound Dog<br />The Dickey Bird Song<br />The Girl Can't Help It<br />T.S. Eliot<br />Cassius Clay<br />JFK<br />Thelonious Sphere Monk<br />On the Waterfront<br />Bird<br />Pope John XXIII<br />Ezra Pound<br />Clifford Brown<br /><br />Together, these two books serve as an ideal Michael Lally primer.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">Acknowledgement</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">:</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">In my post on Michael I neglected to credit George Mattingly of Blue Wind Press for </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">Rocky Dies Yellow, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 51, 51);">while crediting other publishers. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">The self-portrait of Miles & Michael Lally above was included in the Burt Britton collection, Self Portrait (Random House, 1976).</span></span><br /></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-25562707285085873582007-08-18T11:08:00.001-07:002007-08-21T01:28:33.201-07:00Self-Portraits<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtnWgaAF_hP4IvtbOFFUycdMyvBw4jYmW3wQsLVbyJyKRntGn7PVAeDxeeWaMr32iEjpEd8h_FgTKoesNVEn0Sj27BmFc_TFsUPT2f7bnwEzQ74qMm1xT1jB6E2lNdNr8u5vqQuZQZpqs/s1600-h/inman.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtnWgaAF_hP4IvtbOFFUycdMyvBw4jYmW3wQsLVbyJyKRntGn7PVAeDxeeWaMr32iEjpEd8h_FgTKoesNVEn0Sj27BmFc_TFsUPT2f7bnwEzQ74qMm1xT1jB6E2lNdNr8u5vqQuZQZpqs/s400/inman.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100105091405108514" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Peter Inman, done for a benefit reading at Folio Books, 1977<br /></div><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7IctI_a4HgqstFyDjIeVcHEGbQX-5TcWDl3LE9WOXP3RBhV1VGlxENCRRgmpo3xDQLEhBJjXTTd8S0t5VqWhkXVddy7bfIhrlI_Mf9R9v8-478b2laAPeIbFnfcOLRKyBWHDW5fYY1pc/s1600-h/TPW.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7IctI_a4HgqstFyDjIeVcHEGbQX-5TcWDl3LE9WOXP3RBhV1VGlxENCRRgmpo3xDQLEhBJjXTTd8S0t5VqWhkXVddy7bfIhrlI_Mf9R9v8-478b2laAPeIbFnfcOLRKyBWHDW5fYY1pc/s400/TPW.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100104520174458114" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Terence Winch, done on the spot in the basement at the Strand Bookstore<br />in New York City, and later published in the collection of instant<br />self-portraits that Burt Britton had solicited over many years, 1976<br /></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTWs2mzHpTNMbGT7lp3dg8nPi6l7l4lef_vXthePFd-WzUuUem0F_ZqiZbUFDhzcPqgHcyz6G9_ibWlVuAyBtn8PnXSqx2sCJvkEjtHeUM4F92kL8h-lMXsgRpEVyqXugkjdWKGS_ztW0/s1600-h/diane.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTWs2mzHpTNMbGT7lp3dg8nPi6l7l4lef_vXthePFd-WzUuUem0F_ZqiZbUFDhzcPqgHcyz6G9_ibWlVuAyBtn8PnXSqx2sCJvkEjtHeUM4F92kL8h-lMXsgRpEVyqXugkjdWKGS_ztW0/s400/diane.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100104417095242994" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Diane Ward, done for the same benefit reading at Folio Books, 1977<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOhCFWzgsQcOadv_rqVn4vNget9SU0SA1xhnzFam-BZeDp124HAbtxbZyHVWrdFj-zq69Ns0RQVxK-JrjuRE5b9TXi39g8pC1wWFUJ91W42g1r0GQZPN3aM9cA5rGJFcUB2dC-GEUSWjQ/s1600-h/langdoodle.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOhCFWzgsQcOadv_rqVn4vNget9SU0SA1xhnzFam-BZeDp124HAbtxbZyHVWrdFj-zq69Ns0RQVxK-JrjuRE5b9TXi39g8pC1wWFUJ91W42g1r0GQZPN3aM9cA5rGJFcUB2dC-GEUSWjQ/s400/langdoodle.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100104275361322210" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">yours truly, a doodle from circa 1982<br /></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-72620879324420220552007-08-18T10:33:00.000-07:002007-08-23T05:49:30.214-07:00Lee Lally<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWdDNGg-9MUr7XVz64IY3Ba73YnEGB1vnLDc81HJA9kV9E1PpoFvkqQ1a5fhz8J9GMi3uCjffMu-e4O333t_NlPGnBxxhE4nU55B20hUw8Rsf3sgEiQLNNUAzhlpIYdrKRvM5_eT3WEY/s1600-h/Lee+in+Balt..jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWdDNGg-9MUr7XVz64IY3Ba73YnEGB1vnLDc81HJA9kV9E1PpoFvkqQ1a5fhz8J9GMi3uCjffMu-e4O333t_NlPGnBxxhE4nU55B20hUw8Rsf3sgEiQLNNUAzhlpIYdrKRvM5_eT3WEY/s400/Lee+in+Balt..jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101874149779625666" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span>Back in the day,</span><span> I used to shop at Count's Western Wear up in Tenleytown -- cowboy shirts, cowboy boots, and a suede vest which I still have, all beat up and way too small. The seamstress at Count's was Lee Lally, one of the key figures of the Mass Transit activities in the early to mid 1970s. I never did know Lee very well. I would see her around once in a while. She gave a memorable reading in the Folio Books series, with Lee Howard, and that was about it. I never spent time with her socially, really. The night of her Folio reading she was surrounded by friends after the reading. She was a really good reader. Very present, very good at<br />projecting feeling in an oblique kind of way, even when the content was very direct, there was always something very subtle going on.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span>There wa</span><span>s a lot of passion and humor in her work, although the humor was subtle, too, as I remember it. Her SOUP chapbook, <span>These Days,</span> sold out its first run, I want to say one thousand copies, I'm not sure, and was reprinted. I don't have <span>These Days</span> anymore, but I remember it as a very well made set of poems, not so much confessional as confrontational, i.e., with the self, with her experience, with everybody and everything, with the world. And, clearly, it resonated through a lot of people's lives.<br /></span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span><br />Lee and I liked each other. In our casual exchanges at Count's, I saw someone who was very watchful, probably as hypervigilant as I was, with a warm but wary countenance. I wish that I had known her better, Because of my lack of first hand knowledge of her, I asked Michael to contribute to this post. Here is what he wrote:<br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Michael Lally on Lee Lally</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Lee and I met in the Spring of ’61. She was a high school senior and I was a college freshman about to be kicked out, after which we became faithful correspondents. That Fall she entered the University of Buffalo (she grew up outside that city) and had poetry published in their literary magazine. Another student published one of Lee’s poems as his own, causing a minor scandal! She also played guitar and sang (blues and old style country music) in local coffee houses, and drew and painted well, was a New York State merit scholar and the state women’s fencing champion, as well as a prize winning skier and a professional puppeteer. Oh, and she sang and danced in her Catholic girls high school in musicals, e.g. she played “Bloody Mary” in <span>South Pacific</span>.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />In August 1964 she left her job as a puppeteer on an island amusement park in Lake Erie (Fantasy Island?) and gave up the U. of Buffalo and her friends, including a pre-med student she was engaged to, to marry me and move to Spokane, Washington where I was stationed as an enlisted man in the Air Force, meaning I made less than a hundred bucks a month.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The wedding was a last minute decision, after not having seen each other since we met in ’61, instigated by various changes in my life, including most of my scene in Spokane getting arrested on various drug and sex charges. I was playing regularly in Spokane area clubs, but soon gave up drinking and the night life and we spent time writing collaborative poems, playing music, drawing, reading books aloud, going to plays (I was in my first professional play there, and underground film) and hanging with my bohemian friends who weren’t in jail.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Lee claimed to have no interest in publishing or performing publicly or going back to school. She was an incredible seamstress and cook, as well as artist, writer and musician, so she kept busy. By the time we left Spokane in ’66, I was getting published regularly in little mags around the country as that phenomenon began to take off, while she said she was contented to just write things for me.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />One of the people who published me, and paid me for my poems and a short story, was a woman who was convinced I was going to write the great American novel and wanted to be my patron. She put us up in a fancy apartment in Brooklyn Heights where we lived from February ’66 to June. Lee was jealous of the woman, so when my mother passed that May, we made arrangements to move in with my father in Jersey and left the patron, the apartment, and the money she was giving me to live on.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> I went to work at Overbrook Hospital, while Lee cooked and took care of the house and my dad. By the end of the summer she was fed up with that role and a Spokane friend who had moved on to the U. of Iowa Writers Workshop convinced me to come out to Iowa City and try to get in, so I did, just days before the semester started.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Lee instantly became a well known figure in Iowa City, due to her style—partly her own creations, including a cape and granny boots before they were big—as well as her unusual looks—tiny but voluptuous, black hair and penetrating green eyes, a slightly deformed chin and lips from a car accident she told me, but her parents later said it was a congenital condition from childhood (she had a scar that wrapped around one ear and ran along the bottom of the jaw line to her chin, which had no bone in it but was constructed of tissue from elsewhere).</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />One of the first people we befriended, outside of our Spokane friends Roy and Karen Harvey, was Ray DiPalma, a poet in the graduate workshop (I didn’t have a BA so I didn’t get in the graduate workshop until the following year) who Lee dug, and later the poet Robert Slater, who adored Lee from the minute they met and had a deep connection with her. When Ted Berrigan came to the workshop to teach around ’68, he too fell under Lee’s spell and they had a special connection as well.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />A lot of the younger women students at Iowa dug Lee, and when the feminist movement of that period began to take shape, they came to her and wanted her to lead them, which she declined. She was wary of my developing politics—like running for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa on the Peace and Freedom ticket—which took me away from home and made me a target of right wing death threats as well as gave me opportunities to appear in various student and underground films etc. Especially after she became pregnant and gave birth to our daughter in February of ’68 and then became pregnant with our son in ’69.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> I met Gary Snyder that year, who hand wrote, in a calligraphy style that Lee sometimes was paid to do, one of his poems for her, which we framed and now hangs in our daughter’s home.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Upon getting my MFA from the workshop in August of ’69 I wanted to move to San Francisco where all the action seemed to be, or to Chicago, where I was working with a project attempting to turn white street gangs into revolutionaries called Rising up Angry, but Lee insisted I have a job somewhere before we moved. Through the auspices of a famous writer at the just started American Association of Writing Professors (or something like that, unfortunately I can’t remember the writers name), who I had never met but nonetheless recommended me to Trinity College in DC, a Catholic girls school, and they hired me sight unseen for their English Department.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />So, we left for DC via Buffalo (detouring around the traffic mess at Woodstock, where we had intended to stop but decided it was too much trouble) and New York and Jersey. Our first apartment was in Hyattsville, because everywhere else we tried in the city wouldn’t take us with one infant and another on the way. Until we reached a “garden” apartment complex next to a huge intersection where two major roads intersected and there were no sidewalks.</span><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZgm7NG1ANrnNpN4o3aG320_f6H5qkzmBiGz-3tMjIh1VCDCXaGCuLkS5wJV8uFuAo401R5bG21kZ0mM1XQ_N4SvBwFhpd74zqTyS6T1xZiJKuB4nUdkidFE2MUh6MbEP5er_PT2tUuM/s1600-h/Lee.+me+%26+kids+1970.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZgm7NG1ANrnNpN4o3aG320_f6H5qkzmBiGz-3tMjIh1VCDCXaGCuLkS5wJV8uFuAo401R5bG21kZ0mM1XQ_N4SvBwFhpd74zqTyS6T1xZiJKuB4nUdkidFE2MUh6MbEP5er_PT2tUuM/s400/Lee.+me+%26+kids+1970.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101873965096031922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Lee and Michael with their children, Cailtlin and Miles</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There were a lot of ethnicities in the complex—Korean, Mexican, everything except African-American—and a lot of white “country folk” who Lee instantly befriended (her mother had been a country girl from upstate New York and Lee had many aunts and uncles and cousins who grew up and still lived on farms where she had spent her summers as a kid). That’s where we were when our son was born, and where we often housed visiting radicals, like the gang kids from Chicago in for demonstrations in DC, or poets, like Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, who were staying with us when our kids accidentally ate rat poison (Ted wrote about it in a diary style piece of prose that was later published in an issue of The World).</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Ray DiPalma was there when our son was born (he is his godfather). The place was usually filled with people, either from out of town or neighbors or new DC friends. It was while living there that Lee ran into an old friend from Buffalo in a supermarket who talked Lee into joining her at a “consciousness raising session” with several women at the home of a woman who talked about how she only married her husband to show the guy she wanted to marry up, because he wouldn’t marry her and it was all his fault and—as if you could ever invent this shit—it turned out that the guy was me.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I had met her the winter before I met Lee, at another upstate New York college. She was a beautiful and brilliant Italian-American woman who edited her college literary mag. When I wouldn’t marry her, she married this other guy and had three kids and now was unhappy! For which Lee came back pissed off at me! That was the beginning of the end for us, though we didn’t see it.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />On a pot run to the Midwest in ‘71, I cheated for the first time in our then seven years together and brought back more than the pot. After that, I slept on the couch for weeks, and Lee went to more and more meetings with her growing feminist network. That same year an anthology of “movement” poetry came out, <span>Campfires of the Resistance</span>, with some of my poetry in it, so I organized a reading by anyone in the DC area in the anthology, at the Institute for Policy Studies (if I remember correctly) at which a very large standing room only crowd showed up to hear us.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Lee and I had already encountered the local academic poetry scene, which didn’t interest us, and I had been organizing readings at Trinity by all kinds of outré poets since ’69, but after the Campfires reading I decided to start a weekly reading series at the new location for the Community Bookshop on P Street. Dave Mancuse had started the shop around the time I arrived in DC in its first location on M I think, but had recently moved it to P near Dupont Circle. Lee became a regular at the new reading series, which we pretty quickly called Mass Transit (forget who came up with the name) and out of which some of us started a magazine by that name.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdo07BK2C_lYK3wyc1KZJbo_h_STGmex1RPs7FzxQ5nR6gHZsWggE3cFcXkcSnRpxSuyTKtgsNSdMfwYCrJPbqykcW2XaqVFBuqnbkrElULUkbU3tXA9R5TySONezsc56ct3ZkP94GSo4/s1600-h/Bruce.+Lee.+Nathan+%26+%3F.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdo07BK2C_lYK3wyc1KZJbo_h_STGmex1RPs7FzxQ5nR6gHZsWggE3cFcXkcSnRpxSuyTKtgsNSdMfwYCrJPbqykcW2XaqVFBuqnbkrElULUkbU3tXA9R5TySONezsc56ct3ZkP94GSo4/s400/Bruce.+Lee.+Nathan+%26+%3F.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101875927896086242" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-style: italic;">Bruce Andrews, Lee Lally, Nathan Whiting, unknown student</span></span> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-style: italic;"><br />at Trinity</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">By the time we rented a house on Emery Place in “Friendship Heights” in early ’72, Lee had become a full blown feminist and I had been affected by the ideas as well. That same year we started a press called Some Of Us Press, along with Terence Winch and Ed Cox and others. My idea was to publish a chapbook of poetry by a local poet every month, which we managed to do for awhile.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Lee helped choose and design some of the books, one of which was hers, These Days, which gathered the poems she had started writing again under the impetus of her feminist education and experiences. Some were published in feminist and gay and women’s publications that were beginning to crop up around the country, and all had been tried out at Mass Transit.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Lee wasn’t much to talk about her emotions, and didn’t care for others speculating on what she was thinking or feeling, but her poetry made it clear. She later claimed that she hadn’t been writing much poetry since her Buffalo days because of sexism, and that it was the nuns in her high school and her artist and feminist friends (Lee had many women artist friends over the years, including Joan Hanor, who designed the SOUP logo) who gave her the inspiration to take up poetry again.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> I always felt a little hurt by that explanation, because I had encouraged her to write, to publish, to do music and all the rest, even to return to college, but she always resisted. I also helped her put <span>These Days</span> together and got some of the poems in it published (in the Trinity Record and December, etc.) but she didn’t acknowledge me, or any of her other male friends and supporters, like Terry or Slater or Ed Cox et. al. in the book, just women.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />At any rate, once she returned to writing and sharing a more public kind of poetry, she was an instant hit. Feminists adored her work and <span>These Days</span> had an immediate impact on many women, as well as men. The title came from a song that a feminist singer/songwriter whose name I don’t remember wrote and sang at a concert Lee attended in DC around ’71 (there’s a plethora of songs with that title on Google but not the one that Lee was referring to).</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The poems in it were influenced by the blues Lee loved (Memphis Minnie was a particular icon of hers) and old timey country (Mama Maybelle Carter another of Lee’s great influences and loves). And of course it was influenced by the sexual politics we were living through and experimenting out of. Lee had taken a female lover and encouraged me to take male ones, as part of what we thought was going to be the liberation of future generations from the bonds of gender and sexual discrimination.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The house on Emery had quickly become a “commune” in which all kinds of people lived or visited (Valerie Salinas was famously dropped off on our porch after she got out of prison and ended up a good friend of mine but intimidated the women in the commune because she didn’t like their brand of feminism, as she went back to hooking for her money and claimed to enjoy it even though she preferred women for romantic and long time sexual relations, she made the point that her idea of feminism was to create a world where women could do whatever the fuck they felt like doing, not follow some politically correct dictums).</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> In ’74, I moved out of what by then had turned from a crazy collection of all kinds of lefties, to a strictly lesbian feminist collective. Lee remained in the house with the other women and our kids, and I moved to apartments in the Dupont Circle area until in Spring of ’75 I moved to New York where our kids joined me for the summer and our son stayed. Our daughter returned to DC and her mother and the commune.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Eventually the commune fell apart and Lee ended up with a boyfriend, a younger man whose nickname was “Boo” from the movie of <span>To Kill a Mockingbird</span>. Lee’s female lover, who she was with for several years before Boo, was nicknamed “Atticus” from the same movie. A favorite book and film of Lee’s I might add. What are the odds.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />In early ’80, our daughter made the decision to come live with her brother and me in New York. The move was to take place at the start of the summer. But in March I think it was, Lee got sick and didn’t see a doctor and our daughter came home from school one day to find Lee unable to get out of bed. The boyfriend finally came home and took her to a nearby hospital, where they discovered a serious infection in her ovaries caused by an old IUD. During the operation to remove the IUD and the ovaries, Lee stopped breathing for a few minutes, and when they revived her, she was in a coma, which she remained in for six years before finally passing away.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />There was a malpractice suit brought by the court appointed guardian for Lee (we were divorced by then and her parents signed over any rights). It ended up being I think the largest sum ever awarded in that part of the country, six million dollars. But they appealed and it was eventually reduced to two million, out of which the government took a third, the lawyers took a third and court costs, and the remaining money was used to care for Lee. Some of that money was invested by the guardian, and the kids ended up getting some after Lee passed.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />By the time that happened, Some Of us Press had long folded and Lee’s <span>These Days</span> had been reprinted by a Baltimore feminist press called Diana’s (if I remember correctly). Lee accused the women at that press of ripping her off, by reprinting the book without giving her any royalties, and by understating the amount of copies printed and reprinted in several editions never marked as such, according to Lee.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> As of this date, they have never been accountable, or others who have reprinted Lee’s work, to Lee or to her children, though many of the same women claim Lee as a role model and an icon in their feminism.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />I think a poem from These Days, “The Reading,” best expresses what I tried to recount here in terms of Lee’s relationship to her life and art:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" > The Reading</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sitting</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">listening</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">to the readers.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Painfully some try to decide fast</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘what two poems will make them love me?’.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Still sitting</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">hearing all the cries,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">a different hand stretches</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">over air</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">to pat my belly.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I decided not so fast</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">but long ago</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">it didn’t matter. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsSPXSJc1BI/AAAAAAAAANc/TU7YgLIsc9M/s1600-h/Lee+in+Balt..jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_NJo0e-iZyKY/RsSPXSJc1BI/AAAAAAAAANc/TU7YgLIsc9M/s400/Lee+in+Balt..jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099358308261483538" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-40256523283912012692007-08-15T19:20:00.000-07:002007-08-16T10:53:20.256-07:00Liam Rector (1949-2007)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQAJwMvZ4RMwIu6dTBlicb4JmgUCY0GpyP-ZXA3q_sr03eys_R-I6AOWfFO1_pdXRnP9P64qfuxf5Jbfnbws_ep5GHLy9uDpqnuSCD36dzist3e28XBxcSK-GCmM_Z592SDnBwQp3PtOE/s1600-h/379_LiamRectorSmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQAJwMvZ4RMwIu6dTBlicb4JmgUCY0GpyP-ZXA3q_sr03eys_R-I6AOWfFO1_pdXRnP9P64qfuxf5Jbfnbws_ep5GHLy9uDpqnuSCD36dzist3e28XBxcSK-GCmM_Z592SDnBwQp3PtOE/s400/379_LiamRectorSmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099117858812384226" border="0" /></a><span class="TITLE">I just heard from Terry Winch that his good friend Liam Rector has committed suicide. Liam had had severe health problems about a decade ago, and his health had been detiorating recently. He shot himself.<br /><br />Liam was very much connected to the DC poetry scene. He was involved in Mass Transit, and read in the Folio series with Ann Lauterbach.<br /><br />Here is more information about him from the Academy of American poets.<br /></span> <p>Liam Rector was born in Washington, D.C. in 1949. He holds an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.</p> <p>His books of poems include <i>The Executive Director of the Fallen World</i> (University of Chicago Press in 2006), <i>American Prodigal</i> (1994) and <i>The Sorrow of Architecture</i> (1984). </p> <p>His poems have appeared in <i>Agni, Paris Review</i>, <i>American Poetry Review</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, <i>Boston Review</i>, <i>Slate</i>, <i>Ploughshares</i>, and elsewhere. </p> <p>His reviews and essays have appeared in magazines and books that include <i>American Poetry Review</i>, <i>The Los Angeles Times Book Review</i>, <i>The Boston Globe</i>, <i>Hudson Review</i>, <i>Bostonia</i>, <i>The Oxford Companion to Literature</i>, and <i>Contemporary Poets</i>.</p> <p>"Liam Rector is one of the most linguistically liquid and gifted poets of his generation," said poet <a href="http://www.poets.org/lbroc">Lucie Brock-Broido</a>. "His is the oddest and most hallucinatory romance with Romance in American letters."</p> <p>Rector's honors include fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he received the Friend to Writers Award from PEN New England. He has served as poetry editor of <i>Harvard Magazine</i> and as associate editor of <i>Harvard Review</i> and <i>Agni</i>. </p> <p>Rector edited <i>The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall</i> (1989), and co-edited <i>On the Poetry of Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page</i> (University of Michigan Press, 2007).</p> <p>Rector has taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and has also administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. He lives in New York City.</p><br />My condolences to his family and to his many friends.douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-30027705465851898682007-08-14T13:14:00.001-07:002007-08-31T18:36:45.283-07:00Ahmos Zu-Bolton II<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq2GcIllcwnlffX8OAh6445vFryzKi1s6boyFYgC8qUOLwe_uo42Fl68maD_sewDV7IHBMKmzA_8NgJUFUDT4o2D7Ea9hOlCescOhDkUdSmhlC72-S07H0S5N3If7_cmwBbsdFTn8oYSw/s1600-h/zubolt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq2GcIllcwnlffX8OAh6445vFryzKi1s6boyFYgC8qUOLwe_uo42Fl68maD_sewDV7IHBMKmzA_8NgJUFUDT4o2D7Ea9hOlCescOhDkUdSmhlC72-S07H0S5N3If7_cmwBbsdFTn8oYSw/s400/zubolt.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5098652273534076210" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">I did not know Ahmos Zu-Bolton. I heard him read one time, but I do not remember the context. We spoke a few times, and that was all. He was a man of enormous presence and charm, one of those people that you just liked and respected at first contact. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Ahmos was born Oct. 21, 1935, in Poplarville, Mississippi, and</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> he died March 8, 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He was 69 years old.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Solo Press published <span style="font-style: italic;">A Niggered Amen: Poems,</span> in California, 1975. <span style="font-style: italic;">Ain’t No Spring Chicken: Selected Poems,</span> was issued by Voice Foundation, Inc. in New Orleans, 1998.</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> He was co-editor, with E. Ethelbert Miller, of</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Synergy D.C. Antholog</span>y, published by Energy BlackSouth Press, 1975.</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-family:arial;">Ahmos ZuBolton II and Haryette Mullen</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Here's a post from Ethelbert Miller's blog:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Tuesday, March 08, 2005</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> </span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Miss Walker, Miss Walker, your true love is dead</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">He sent you a letter to turn back your head</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Ahmos Zu-Bolton was the author of A NIGGERED AMEN (1978) and AIN'T NO SPRING CHICKEN (1998). Yep. Little Zu was born in 1935. So he leaves us in his 70th year.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Here is what I wrote about him in my memoir FATHERING WORDS:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">"He carried a bag of magazines or maybe it was just a pouch filled with goober dust, cat eyes and rabbit feet. The man was southern in the way he walked, dressed, and spoke. If it were earlier in the century, it would be a perfect example of the Great Migration. Here was the type of guy Langston Hughes would meet while in high school in Cleveland, the guy who spoke in the rhythms poets wanted to capture on the page.</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> Henderson had introduced me to the blues and African American folklore. Ahmos Zu-Bolton introduced me to himself."</span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">And here are three pages at Chicken Bones: A Journal:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">the first, about Ahmos</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >http://www.nathanielturner.com/zubolton.htm</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">the second, a poem by Ahmos</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >http://www.nathanielturner.com/zubolton3.htm</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">the third, announcing a candlelight vigil for Ahmos</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >http://www.nathanielturner.com/candelightvigilforahmoszubolton.htm</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Ahmos was part of the Mass Transit scene, and was in a couple of the mags.<br /><br />Here's a poem:<br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Basketball Star</span><br /><br /></span></span> </span><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left; font-family: times new roman;"> We define:<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Livewire Davis. The one</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />with the million-dollar jump-shot.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Livewire as bebop star:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">torn between his body's genius</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />for fast breaks</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />and a questionmark</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">called rage. Stumbling</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />thru a lifetime of all-star games</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(he never hit the winning points</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />but was always a frontpager.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Livewire's days</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />were lawless theater</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />(except for the 8 o'clock class,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />except for the poetry of bullshitting</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />with the women,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />except for the ritual of practice:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />run jump "shoot their eyes out"</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><br />defense</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >defense</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />except for the terrible puzzle of books</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">he was free.</span><br /><br />& here is another<br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >into my final books of poems</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">this is to say that i am</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">coming round the bend. the darkness</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">inside your flashes of light know me,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">i throw you curves because i wanted to be</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">a pitcher, a sidearming hero you could turn to</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">in the late innings. (i would save the game</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">before my wounded brother got to</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the shower.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">but this ain't no playground</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">they told me - that & the fact</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">that i never mastered</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the screw-</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">ball</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">is the reason i am here.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">I was always an admirer of open parentheses.</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">& I will always be an admirer of this poet.<br /><br />I need to get another copy of </span></span></span><span style="font-family:arial;"><span>the</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> Synergy D.C. Antholog</span>y, as well as copies of the two books by Ahmos. </span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />If any of the Mass Transit folk would like to add more about Ahmos in a comment, that would be a big plus.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">& here is more from Ethelbert Miller: some notes for an article on Ahmos Zu Bolton </span></span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:arial;">that was published in Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices Revue a few months after Ahmos died:</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></span></div></div><span style="font-weight: bold;">Spacedream Struggle</span><br /><br />In his poem “Spacedream Struggle” one will find the use of Zu-Bolton’s favorite word- that word is “struggle.” One would have to look at other Zu-Bolton’s poems as well as his life to understand how he defines struggle.<br />Is it simply a racial one? It is an inner struggle to better define oneself?<br />Is it similar to the Muslim concept of Jihad, a struggle in which righteousness is a goal or objective.<br /><br />Zu-Bolton’s three part poem begins after the conflict. If the first stanza we notice immediately that narrator of the poem is on a space ship. And he is heading home. One must ask the question – where is he coming from, and where is home? Is it earth? In the literature of many African American writers, the concept of home is a very important one. It can be a way of talking about the South as well as Africa. I think Zu-Bolton’s poem forces us to look at home in a much larger sense.<br /><br />We find the narrator not in control of the ship and relying on music to determine its definition. Notice the reference the general reference to music in the poem and not to jazz or blues.<br /><br />In the fourth stanza of the first section of “Spacedream Struggle” Zu-Bolton make one of those “Zu” leaps in his poems. A twist that defines logic and opens the door to his creative imagination.<br /><br />“I am in the memorybanks/of the ship’s psychiatrist”<br /><br />Why a psychiatrist? Why a person who treats mental disorders? Is this the person responsible for the care of everyone on the space ship? Why is there a psychiatrist on board in the first place?<br /><br />And now one might wonder if this is a poem about inner space instead of outer space. We find the narrator becoming linked to the psychiatrist.<br />A joining of doctor/and patient; someone sick with someone well.<br /><br />“He goes to sleep mumbling<br />and my voice takes-up<br />where he left off<br /><br />In the second section of “Spacedream struggle” we find the narrator/psychiatrist fighting the Christians. So here it seems as if the use of the word “jihad” would not be out of place, in describing the conflict. What we find in Zu-Bolton’s poem is that Jesus is on his side fighting the Christians too. The narrator seems to have a kinship with Jesus, even as he rejects Jesus’ suggestion of turning the other cheek. Here Zu-Bolton places the words turn the other cheek in italics, as if spoken by Jesus. These words seem to be punctuated by the use of the word nigger.<br /><br />The narrator and Jesus team up like a dynamic duo. They are fighting inside the spaceship and not outside. Jesus is fighting while standing on the narrator’s desk. It seems an interesting place to do battle.<br /><br />If one was to look at the some of the larger questions raised by “Space Dream Struggle” one would find that Zu-Bolton is critical of the church and organized religion:<br /><br />“I /had my back to the wall/sidekicking their preacher.<br /><br />As Zu-Bolton describes the conflict taking place he relies on the visual use of white space on the page. He pulls in the folkloric reference to John Henry.<br />Along with a word like struggle, Ahmos would also frequently use the word dance, here we find “the ghetto in my eyes/was a firedance .” Dance must be viewed as ritual, as a term of engagement. Dancing underscores the movement of life as well as the language of the poem.<br /><br />In the third and final section of “Space Dream Struggle” one finds the psychiatrist waking up, screaming and turning the narrator’s voice off.<br />It is the psychiatrist who gets up to leave and not the narrator. Payment is a bible. Why is payment a bible? What is the psychiatrist doing with a bible<br />in the first place? It’s also obvious that it is the psychiatrist who is not well.<br />Ahmos Zu-Bolton’s poem raises a number of philosophical questions about<br />religion as well as Jesus, and the role they play in political struggle.<br /><br />Now,what follows the third section of Zu-Bolton’s poem is nothing but white space; about 2/3 of the rest of the page is blank. The absence of words seems to lead the reader back to the “weightlessness” mentioned at the beginning of the poem.<br /><br />What one finds missing from the end of Zu-Bolton’s poem is a reference to the space ship. The narrator seems to be lost in space. One wonders if and when the music will lead him to his destination.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >Spacedream Struggle</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">1.<br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />It has been a long day</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and I am on a spaceship<br />going home.<br /><br />I am not<br />at the controls, so I lean back<br />in my weightlessness<br />and let the music<br />carry me.<br /><br />Sleep<br />will disarm me, but<br />I surrender to it, being<br />the direction of the music<br />that the ship<br />chose.<br />I am in the memorybanks<br />of the ship's psychiatrist.<br />He is on the couch<br />spilling his life<br />to me.<br />I take it all down<br />in a shorthand that I can't read.<br />He goes to sleep mumbling<br />and my voice takes-up<br />where he left off.<br /><br />2.<br /><br />I fought the christians today.<br />Me an my man Jesus, who is<br />on the mission with me.<br />and who would have me<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">turn the other cheek</span><br />nigger.<br />But<br />we teamed up this morning, with<br />love in his heart and rage in mine<br />we turned the sky of this ship<br />into a battleground.<br /><br />Jesus stood on my deck<br />turning both cheeks<br />at once. I<br /><br />had my back to the wall<br />sidekicking their<br />preacher.<br /><br />We fought the good fight.<br /><br />The heat of battle<br />dripping<br />down<br />my body<br />like sweat,<br /><br />the ghetto in my eyes<br />was a firedance<br />while<br />my fist<br />became John Henry's hammer<br />and the side of my feet<br />became the switch --<br />blade<br />they say we all<br />carry.<br /><br />3.<br /><br />The psychiatrist woke up<br />and turned my voice off. He<br />left convinced that he<br />was not as sick<br />as me.<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">(unable to reproduce the spacing of the original poem).</span></span><br /><br /><br /></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7AgiIJTKKsOM-Kb9MIR_iFDcNs1tJsQjg161cex2nOPQZ1bMleODJRKJkRhp3EbQn71xgvLGH0u8IEGbvmE-sE8enr_mDL_PCKQsBEBqoEzL026x2dLRpp4PL-DUZxBxqOrPOgl-uHQ/s1600-h/ahmoszu+bolton.jpg"><br /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7AgiIJTKKsOM-Kb9MIR_iFDcNs1tJsQjg161cex2nOPQZ1bMleODJRKJkRhp3EbQn71xgvLGH0u8IEGbvmE-sE8enr_mDL_PCKQsBEBqoEzL026x2dLRpp4PL-DUZxBxqOrPOgl-uHQ/s1600-h/ahmoszu+bolton.jpg"> </a>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-51618128363430160592007-08-12T08:00:00.000-07:002007-08-12T08:05:02.198-07:00Insert No. 3<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkhyphenhyphendp18ro7gmM0A3VsWbTO5o90tdkXbB_-Qd3wJdaF9fOoS5NgclLhatc9GJFjOmf1jsrv-ULaXFNNj9rnPXf_xO7HXHfwW1REwleuFqW69WMq8_j-S5VUnvNd2QLcjZlLJpLByAmoMU/s1600-h/dandarepilot.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkhyphenhyphendp18ro7gmM0A3VsWbTO5o90tdkXbB_-Qd3wJdaF9fOoS5NgclLhatc9GJFjOmf1jsrv-ULaXFNNj9rnPXf_xO7HXHfwW1REwleuFqW69WMq8_j-S5VUnvNd2QLcjZlLJpLByAmoMU/s400/dandarepilot.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097829963390551186" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lallypalooza</span><br /><br />My Michael Lally post is pretty much done. There's a good bit more material than there was before (see below).douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-33411678618177131372007-08-12T07:44:00.000-07:002007-08-13T04:29:10.052-07:00Dylan<a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz0AfeluU-HhFIrM_t_Phyphenhyphen1a_BY3bBZQjHJlY-SiV4RUUezuhcRIFY6bmUHjoOSZP8srIwZONfV-lAeSNDY3frDn4-1pGZ5zuGnwlBHAmeeSz_cageSxvXlolYD9T7D5q5BMLDVOSXnzU/s1600-h/dylan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz0AfeluU-HhFIrM_t_Phyphenhyphen1a_BY3bBZQjHJlY-SiV4RUUezuhcRIFY6bmUHjoOSZP8srIwZONfV-lAeSNDY3frDn4-1pGZ5zuGnwlBHAmeeSz_cageSxvXlolYD9T7D5q5BMLDVOSXnzU/s400/dylan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097827622633374834" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" >Around 1960-1962, we used to go down to Laugharne to visit the boathouse and Dylan's grave. David Dooley, Ivor Curnock, Marie Farrow and I used to take the bus down there and stay at a B&B. Our friend Ray James came with us once, too.<br /><br />Dylan was a cultural icon in Wales even before he died in 1953 at the age of 39. After his death, he was the cultural icon, especially in Swansea, his home town, where I lived. You'd meet all kinds of people who had had encounters with Dylan, or claimed to have had them, invariably in pubs, the bar at the Grand Hotel, or the Hanbury, or the No. 10, or The Three Lamps, or The Cross Keys.<br /><br />We used to read the poems, listen to records of Dylan reading the poems, listen to a record of Richard Burton reading the poems, and listen to the record of the BBC's 1954 broadcast of <span style="font-style: italic;">Under Milk Wood,</span> with Richard Burton as First Voice.<br /><br />In 1964, Ivor Curnock was First Voice in the Swansea Little Theatre's procuction of <span style="font-style: italic;">Under Milk Wood</span>. Ivor is dead now. David Dooley became an actor, and he has been First Voice in a number of productions of </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Under Milk Wood</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" >. He still lives in Swansea.<br /><br />Dylan was everywhere, the ghost of Dylan was everywhere, and, if you were a poet from Swansea, well…<br />…but I've never been sorry to be asked to read "A Child's Christmas in Wales" at Christmas; I've done so many times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">After a reading I did in 1977, Tim Dlugos told me that the poet whose work my work reminded him the most was Dylan's. Tim had this great, mischievous grin on his face, as though he'd said something very perceptive that was going to make me uneasy, or embarrassed. I miss Tim. He had a great spirit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:85%;" >(I've never understood the American pronunciation of "mischievous," as though the 'i' came after the 'v' and not before it. It's almost as bad as the case of "aluminium." Do people not see the second 'i'?)<br /><br /></span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBDW0EALMNpsAXkuX0qwuhRql1enuQF1iBkrBOxgkLZpFBEGhTHbhl5ZWIf9kefApyPtg5JWxc8QkBmwbQGkzxBcDjR3-sBo1ax1rHnhROgOhUV2B9RNvEzrqmlTBTt0AUbN3cx8-6CMc/s1600-h/dtgrave.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBDW0EALMNpsAXkuX0qwuhRql1enuQF1iBkrBOxgkLZpFBEGhTHbhl5ZWIf9kefApyPtg5JWxc8QkBmwbQGkzxBcDjR3-sBo1ax1rHnhROgOhUV2B9RNvEzrqmlTBTt0AUbN3cx8-6CMc/s400/dtgrave.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097827824496837762" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:100%;" >Recently, I've taken to deconstructing some of Dylan's poems for readings, and that's been fun. I'd like to go back to his grave in Laugharne and read one of them there.<br /><br /></span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-73455309831146013012007-08-10T07:06:00.000-07:002007-08-10T08:50:57.166-07:00Insert No. 2<a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNhfP7qZ2M0a15PsxlWGzKuCT3ovmhF1hctf6hPZROt86X67LZn8NDUcKxUBL977Wr13rnVHvD0uUWN9aFBKv4msB_SwtrMJ9Gtuy2nA9ZXWet2zNYGrsYVJDzNMYkL-O2RaVdh3hpoo/s1600-h/dandarepilot.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNhfP7qZ2M0a15PsxlWGzKuCT3ovmhF1hctf6hPZROt86X67LZn8NDUcKxUBL977Wr13rnVHvD0uUWN9aFBKv4msB_SwtrMJ9Gtuy2nA9ZXWet2zNYGrsYVJDzNMYkL-O2RaVdh3hpoo/s400/dandarepilot.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097085121572144082" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">Typical autodidact, I've always got to be learning something. This blog is no exception. As well as remembering, researching, documenting, and so on, I'm learning. Maybe it's the same for everyblogger. I'm finding out exactly what I think, as opposed to kind of what I think, or what I think I think. And I'm gathering and organizing data. And I'm learning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">This blog has four threads.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >History Project </span><span style="font-family:arial;">is my attempt to place what I "know" or may (re)discover in some kind of context. </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1975</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> will be the next post in this thread.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poets</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> is a combination of portraiture and memoir, with some "literary" history and appreciation. I'm kind of anti-literary, hence the quotation marks. I have not completed my post on </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Michael Lally</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> yet; the next one will be about </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ahmos ZuBolton II.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Texts</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> is all about reading. I don't want to write reviews. Not at all. It is a little bit tricky, because what I'm doing is going public with my own reading habits. I try to document my own thoughts regarding the text at hand. It's pretty much what I do in private, without concession to the fact that others will be reading it, to whatever extent that is possible. The next text up will be Heather Fuller's </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >perhaps this is a resuce fantasy</span><span style="font-family:arial;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The <span style="font-weight: bold;">Inserts</span> thread is for material I don't want to put into other posts, announcements, explanations, asides, odds and ends, whatever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">There will be a fifth thread of autobiographical material.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">So, like <span style="font-size:130%;">Dan Dare</span>, in the old Eagle comics back in the UK, I'm going to explore the universe, and fight the Mekons…</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.dan-dare.org/Homepage.htm</span><br /><br /><a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJC-Q_7keMZrzpExQzbV5Kt0Jux1UEsg370VqHBaNdpeSh8A5GlnbJfIkRPnKhrdafGVMrMR18zKxu6prJIOIXcBC5LyXu7uUICuujOPKos2QXTrJjswg65oPGNNb7-gL9eI1j8vBhMW0/s1600-h/mekons.jpg"><br /></a><a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkbg4piNq1pyvVeWB8yrqzrZbsMYpnXmDCZoOAM_oXRLCkfwSdwlJlWPC1SxfwWMFfmmYmf0DtskFcTuVySJA-2aVoPemL54q5eLyQGpS7TIcIwEmW_q5qSHjnazVFfXiSk-GTlnjMsWE/s1600-h/Mekon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkbg4piNq1pyvVeWB8yrqzrZbsMYpnXmDCZoOAM_oXRLCkfwSdwlJlWPC1SxfwWMFfmmYmf0DtskFcTuVySJA-2aVoPemL54q5eLyQGpS7TIcIwEmW_q5qSHjnazVFfXiSk-GTlnjMsWE/s400/Mekon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097085405039985650" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">Yes, that is where the Mekons got their name.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNKM7y0WBA1iCsroDtbzxAnMhfCmCwCC9dPHQbGIccSViYiLOOwHM-wXplmMir99ogub3QaBDwk7IGa9PGGbta_YRnCRbvciVvbefKllrwl_FmOy9OYM92JoF0iSJ_YZcAop4oJG7OT8/s1600-h/mekons.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNKM7y0WBA1iCsroDtbzxAnMhfCmCwCC9dPHQbGIccSViYiLOOwHM-wXplmMir99ogub3QaBDwk7IGa9PGGbta_YRnCRbvciVvbefKllrwl_FmOy9OYM92JoF0iSJ_YZcAop4oJG7OT8/s400/mekons.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097085340615476194" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-family:arial;">So Good It Hurts</span></span><br /></div>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3489069085436219130.post-73105604294594799852007-08-09T03:47:00.001-07:002007-08-26T01:54:29.825-07:00Michael Lally<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7DfR1wWNpbocCcMgaJpCMopMGlvY7ekbuTVHUeNLvx8nj54R5OknUBMXfPwb6439EngHPwFzt9wqqIQhR6Yzy-P-zYFDu8moa-LShJ_Ldrtk8bJl7r52RHkb95ieIc9hx2cb5lQaYg0Q/s1600-h/Folio+Books+MDL+%2777.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7DfR1wWNpbocCcMgaJpCMopMGlvY7ekbuTVHUeNLvx8nj54R5OknUBMXfPwb6439EngHPwFzt9wqqIQhR6Yzy-P-zYFDu8moa-LShJ_Ldrtk8bJl7r52RHkb95ieIc9hx2cb5lQaYg0Q/s400/Folio+Books+MDL+%2777.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097070797856211778" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">It’s a commonplace that the two great literary subjects of the 20th century were sex and the self. I think of Michael Lally as a Beat poet, essentially, devoted to the investigation of the self and of sexuality in the context of everything. His work as a whole may be read as an ongoing autobiography, the confessions of an American poet. It is revealing, often raw, full of self-mythologizing, self-praise, self-doubt, attitude, discourse, speculation, exhortation, and a whole lot more. The last book that I read of Michael’s is <span style="font-style: italic;">Of,</span> a book-length (100 pages) poem, which reminded me of another commonplace, this one about novelists: that the novelist brings to each novel everything they know and think and feel about the world, and that they embark on a journey during which they will learn more. <span style="font-style: italic;">Of</span> seemed not just a restatement of previous material, or an extension of familiar themes, although it was both of those, but a new hazard. I do not intend to attempt to tell you Michael’s life-story, because the definitive version is available in his work. Visit his blog (see links) and you will be able to make your own discoveries.<br /><br />In fact, I believe that the very best introduction to Michael is the anthology he edited, <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, </span>published by The Crossing Press in Trumansburg, New York, 1976. It contain work by 31 poets:<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:arial;">Maureen Owen</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Darrell Gray</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Ed Cox</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Bruce Andrews</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Robert Slater</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Merrill Gilfillan</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">David Drum</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Philip Lopate</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Ron Silliman</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Joe Brainard</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Bernadette Mayer</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Dave Morice</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">George Mattingly</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Joanne Kyger</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Ray Di Palma</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Patti Smith</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Jim Gustafson</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Nathan Whiting</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Terence Winch</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Joe Ribar</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Hilton Obenzinger</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Lynne Dreyer</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael Lally</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">P. Inman<br />Simon Schuchat<br /></span><span style="font-family:arial;">Barbara Baracks</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Tim Dlugos</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Lorenzo Thomas</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Paul Violi</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Paula Novotnik</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Alice Notley</span><br /></div><span style="font-family:arial;"><br />There were poets in there I’d never heard of. One of two of them I still haven’t heard of. It was a wholly eclectic selection, reflecting Michael’s populist approach to everything, including poetics. There were some jokes at Michael’s expense a few years ago about his claiming to have started “language poetry” – I don’t know that anyone believed that he had made such a claim in any seriousness, but the fact is that six of the poets included in Ron Silliman’s anthology, <span style="font-style: italic;">In the American Tree </span>(1986) were in <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span>: Silliman, Andrews, Mayer, Di Palma, Dreyer and Inman. Three of them were included in Douglas Messerli’s much less expansive <span style="font-style: italic;">“Language” Poetries</span> (1987): Di Palma, Inman, and Andrews. The fact is that Michael was supporting what would become the “Language Poetry movement” at its onset, and I wouldn’t be surprised if <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> was the first anthology in which these poets were published together. There were six poets associated with DC in the anthology: Cox, Winch, Dreyer, Lally, Inman and Dlugos. There was Patti Smith, prior to her music career taking off. There was Joanne Kyger, an associate of the Beats and the California Renaissance. I had been in love with Joanne Kyger since I’d read <span style="font-style: italic;">Descheo Notebook</span> in 1971. The main reason I might have regretted not having done enough to warrant possible inclusion in <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> was that I might have been published with Joanne Kyger and my DC friends. Not that the rest of the company was too shabby. However, my first point is this: Michael’s identity extends in all kinds of directions. This anthology reflects his social and political inclinations, as well as his literary interests. And this really was alternative poetry, of many different kinds. Most of the poets in <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> would have been extremely unlikely candidates for publication by any of the mainstream publishing houses and presses. My second point is that <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> contains Michael’s “My Life,” i.e., his signature as well as his life story to that point, his poetics and his science, his money and his mouth.<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoBFbV3kqCzKg7SM3TFzULQIVoDFuspztf8SCwTCQULJqBSuliWThNPGgUCB8167W2Ih2IQpJgB_TBwI-KIKcqKHv4bKaao-ia8lzqRr6bWFlD7-YrlBjEPF8OL5xLZVMwPpFIhwHiyi4/s1600-h/NOTA2"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoBFbV3kqCzKg7SM3TFzULQIVoDFuspztf8SCwTCQULJqBSuliWThNPGgUCB8167W2Ih2IQpJgB_TBwI-KIKcqKHv4bKaao-ia8lzqRr6bWFlD7-YrlBjEPF8OL5xLZVMwPpFIhwHiyi4/s320/NOTA2" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097070179380921122" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Amazon.com has only one copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">None of the Above</span> available, $22.00.)</span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael is an actor, too (under the name Michael David Lally, due to SAG restrictions). He's been in a bunch of movies and a good deal of television shows, including L<span style="font-style: italic;">A Law, NYPD Blue</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Law & Order</span>. My favorite work of his so far was in <span style="font-style: italic;">NYPD Blue</span>, second season, episode 16, <span style="font-style: italic;">UnAmerican Graffiti</span>, in which he played an artist who agreed to testify against some very bad people after witnessing a violent crime. I didn't have to look it up. I have the DVD. His Walter Coy is an unforgettable character, with a convincingly distracted demeanor, explaining his sense of aesthetics to the cops, and then having a huge amount of moral fiber and fortitude . It was very gratifying to see an artist not portrayed as a buffoon, but as a genuinely heroic character. Henry Fonda heroic, not Bruce Willis heroic. There was an excellent 1997 follow-up episode featuring the same character: <span style="font-style: italic;">NYPD Blue</span>, Season 4, Episode 10, <span style="font-style: italic;">My Wild Irish Nose</span>. </span><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael also had a great bit at the end of the first <span style="font-style: italic;">Deadwood</span> series.<br /><br />Anyway, Michael is a performer. He’s an actor, he’s a performance-oriented reader, and he’s a performance-oriented writer. Every poem is a performance. Every poem is Michael interacting with his own domain, his connections, his history, his psyche, his ego, his mood, his karma, you name it. What drives him there drives him in the world at large. Whatever that is, it’s the same thing that made him such a force in the DC poetry scene in the 1970s.<br /><br />I didn’t spend that much time around Michael during my first year in Washington, 1973-1974. It was clear that the radical spirit of the 1960s was thriving still during that time around the Dupont Circle scene, and that there was a huge amount of energy coming out of the alternative poetry community in particular. Michael was at the center of that. He and Terry Winch were the driving forces of Mass Transit and SOUP, with Lee Lally and Ed Cox in support. One of their most important endeavors was the reading series at the Pyramid Gallery across the street from the Community Bookstore on “P” Street, but closer to 21st Street. I did my first ever reading in America at that gallery, Sunday, January 26, 1975, with Paul Violi.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Lally and Winch were Li Po & Tu Fu, Abbott & Costello, Slim 'n' Slam, Ginsberg & Kerouac, Starsky & Hutch, Ren & Stimpey, all rolled into one duo. Aside from Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos, Peter Inman and Lynne Dreyer, other DC poets such as Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Bernard Welt and Phyllis Rosenzweig received early support and encouragement from Michael and/or Terry, as did many other poets. Of course, there were plenty of conflicts, issues, disagreements, etceteras, during this era, and Michael was often at the center of them. Issues of power and perceived power always cause divisiveness, even in regard to poetry publications, reading opportunities, and so on. And, also, this was the time in which ideas of “political correctness” (as we now know it) were being formulated. I don’t mean “political correctness” in terms of the zealous application of the letter of the law, as it is now interpreted very often. I mean ideas regarding appropriate behavior, attitudes, and speech, receiving serious consideration and attention. There were always differences in opinion about this, about what was right, about what was the right application, about a lot of things. Everything in the garden was not always lovely. Differences about these things sometimes escalated into personal animosities. Michael was no saint and he did not enjoy universal approval within his own community. And there were some “mainstream” poets, and some poets who were not attached to either the mainstream or the alternative communities, who regarded Michael (and others in the Dupont Circle gang) with hostility. As the 1970s progressed, I found myself to be the subject of this hostility by association, sometimes. Aside from whatever hostility I might have earned directly, that is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael has always been very generous. He has always made things happen. He has made many good things happen for a lot of people, including myself. And he is an amazingly prolific writer. Some of his very early writing was what might be termed experimental, more so than his signature work, which was well established by 1972, when SOUP published <span style="font-style: italic;">T</span><span style="font-style: italic;">he South Orange Sonnets</span>. His signature work was distinct, and remains so. The experimental edge did not disappear from his work. It simply became part of his style of writing, and part of his persona as a poet. A more realized version of that style developed between <span style="font-style: italic;">The South Orange Sonnets</span> (1972) and <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky Dies Yellow</span> (1975), that was very much his own, very clear and recognizable. Its apotheosis was <span style="font-style: italic;">My Life</span> (1975). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The language in <span style="font-style: italic;">The South Orange Sonnets </span>went beyond the vernacular into a kind of anti-literary version of American speech, and the attitudes it expressed were defiant, in-your-face, and provocative. The language reminded me of what the great American novelist James Jones had devised for his novel, <span style="font-style: italic;">From Here to Eternity</span>, an approximation of raw speech, although Jones’ language represented a particular subculture (the US military), while Michael’s represented his own New Jersey roots and identity. <span style="font-style: italic;">The South Orange Sonnets</span> was an unflinching portrait of Michael’s social context, in which his persona emerged in the form of voice and posture. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig4FQRJPXLoXboYcmrT1SYpD7atPSU5jxK_6Wf-O8N9R3V9sLbjIuv2BVTUcYO3CypgweaN_6NWiNE3k36chKQnvFhcuaQ3-wkmwEYG2f_KVZ7DwgMSYdc51oImtSpYId486h1paM3gis/s1600-h/SO.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig4FQRJPXLoXboYcmrT1SYpD7atPSU5jxK_6Wf-O8N9R3V9sLbjIuv2BVTUcYO3CypgweaN_6NWiNE3k36chKQnvFhcuaQ3-wkmwEYG2f_KVZ7DwgMSYdc51oImtSpYId486h1paM3gis/s400/SO.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097453037060654098" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:arial;">The cover of <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky Dies Yellow</span> shows a still from the 1938 movie, <span style="font-style: italic;">Angels with Dirty Faces</span>; the young street punks who would later become the Bowery Boys are contemplating a newspaper headline announcing the death of James Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan, an Irish American, New York City hood. And it’s all there. Just as the cover of <span style="font-style: italic;">The South Orange Sonnets</span> depicted Michael’s social roots, the cover of <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky</span> depicted his true cultural roots: the movies in general and Cagney in particular. One high literary effort to accommodate Michael’s work named him the American François Villon, but, no, he was poetry’s Cagney, poetry’s Bowery Boy, a fast talking Irish American tough guy. This was not simply a matter of Michael finding his “voice” in the traditional, literary sense. Michael was an actor long before he was cast in the low-budget horror movie, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nesting</span> (1981), featuring John Carradine and Gloria Grahame. He was a natural actor. What Michael did was create the perfect role for himself: himself, out of Cagney and company, out of the autobiographical traditions of the Beat Generation, and out of his counterculture experiences. This was an authentic, postmodern moment. The counterculture aspect related to another aspect of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky Dies Yellow</span>: “The meaning of that title and cover for me was that, like Cagney's Rocky Sullivan, I was pretending to be softer and less macho than I thought I really was, so that my kids and all kids wouldn't grow up like we did, with all that tough guy model shit, but instead would be more sensitive to women and gays etc. etc. In other words, the times in which most of Rocky was written, were when feminism and "gay revolution" were first having an impact on me and those I knew."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"></span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhde45QDHXpXKNgf1M4Lp7aMGF6NuaJAt8RB_weg-DmN3qmFDWoPKhyphenhyphenk8p2CtKvZZVqfLPcBUQkcoaH_4Howy5p1Otgc_ncaHyZIRiHOZQYpPOL_9Jx6Y3rglGMszsV8XnRDWyB1MS0sa4/s1600-h/rocky.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhde45QDHXpXKNgf1M4Lp7aMGF6NuaJAt8RB_weg-DmN3qmFDWoPKhyphenhyphenk8p2CtKvZZVqfLPcBUQkcoaH_4Howy5p1Otgc_ncaHyZIRiHOZQYpPOL_9Jx6Y3rglGMszsV8XnRDWyB1MS0sa4/s400/rocky.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097452865261962242" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">This “softer” side was evident in the lyrical tendencies of Michael’s work, also. Here is one of the poems from <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky Dies Yellow</span>:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:times new roman;" >IN THE DISTANCE</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In the distance called My Father</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I rode my innocence down, rode it</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">down on its hand and knees like</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the people whose dance created the world</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What do we know about the world</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">or the distance we create for our personal atmosphere</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What we know is the way we fall</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">when we fall off the little we ride</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">when we ride away from the things we’re given</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">to make us forget the things we gave up</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">How far is it to where my son</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">will break my bones and dance on them</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">& here is the first page of <span style="font-weight: bold;">My Life</span>:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I ate everything they put in front of me</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">read everything they put before my eyes</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">shook my ass, cried over movie musicals</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">was a sissy and a thug, a punk and an</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">intellectual, a cocksucker and a mother</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">fucker, helped create two new people,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">paid taxes, voted and served four years</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and a few weeks in the United States Air</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Force, was courts martialled and tried</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">civilly, was in jail and in college, kicked</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">out of college, boy scouts, altar boys</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and one of the two gangs I belonged to,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I was suspended from grammar and high</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">school, arrested at eleven the year I</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">had my first “real sex” with a woman </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and with a boy, I waited nineteen years</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">to try it again with a male and was sorry</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I waited so long, I waited two weeks to</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">try it again with a woman and was sorry</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I waited so long, wrote, poetry and</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">fiction, political essays, leaflets and</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">reviews, I was a “jazz” musician and a</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">dope dealer, taught junior high for two</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">weeks, high school Upward Bound for two</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">years, college for four years, I got up</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">at 5AM to unload trucks at Proctor and</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Gamble to put myself through classes</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">at the University of Iowa, I washed</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">dishes and bussed tables, swept floors</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and cleaned leaders and gutters, washed</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">windows and panhandled, handled a forty</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">foot ladder alone at thirteen, wrote </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">several novels not very good and none</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">published, published poems and stories</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and articles and books of poems, was</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">reviewed, called “major,” compared to</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“The Teen Queens,” mistaken for black,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">for gay, for straight, for older, for</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">younger for bigger for better for richer</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">for poorer for stupider for smarter for</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">somebody else</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">There is so much material that I could write about. I am extremely partial to the two chapbooks Tina Darragh published in her Dry Imager Production series, Malenkov Takes Over and <span style="font-style: italic;">Oomaloom.</span></span><span style="font-family:arial;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Malenkov</span> is a twofer, with Tina’s <span style="font-style: italic;">My First Play</span> starting at one end and M<span style="font-style: italic;">alenkov Takes Over </span>at the other, collages in both cases, collage as writing, writing as collage, image as word, word as image. Very cool. Also very cool, <span style="font-style: italic;">Oomaloom</span>, a book of prose, autobiography, poetics, and counterculture history, containing Michael’s famous “The Dress Incident.” Tina Darragh is the greatest publisher ever. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-style: italic;">In the Mood </span>is another favorite, and not only because I was one of its publishers, along with Diane Ward, Bernard Welt and our fearless leader, Terence Winch, all of us editors of Titanic Books. <span style="font-style: italic;">In the Mood</span> could have been called “My Poetics.” It’s a tribute to Frank O’Hara. The Titanic edition has a fabulous front cover designed by me. Xeroxed-down-to-pixels photograph of O’Hara, smudgy rubber stamp work for the author’s name and title. Wow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Some good places to start reading Michael’s work would be <span style="font-style: italic;">Hollywood Magic</span>, published by Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar in 1982 and containing a lot of poems, including “My Life,” and <span style="font-style: italic;">Can’t Be Wrong</span>, published by Allan Kornb</span><span style="font-family:arial;">lum’s Coffee House Press in 1996, also containing a lot of poems, including "Where Do We Belong" a long poem about Michael's return to Ireland and his clan's roots poem which he also reads on the <span style="font-style: italic;">What You Find</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">There</span> DC <span style="font-size:85%;">(see below)</span>. But, really, the Lally oeuvre is outré in all directions, so its all win win.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">One of Michael’s strength’s a an actor and as a reader is his voice. There’s a CD available, <span style="font-style: italic;">What You Find There</span>, there’s a recording of a reading Michael gave at the West End Bar, NYC, March 12, 1978,</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> at pennsound (along with the material that’s on the CD):</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lally.html</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;"> And there’s a very good 1997 KCRW Bookworm interview by Michael Silverblatt,:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw970130michael_lally</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael’s long poem <span style="font-style: italic;">March 18, 2003 </span>has been described as the greatest poem of our time. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.cyberpoems.com/march18.htm</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Michael read the poem at The Great Hall at Cooper Union on Tuesday, Feb 20th, 2007, prior to a talk by Howard Zinn, to an audience of a thousand plus. Bob Holman introduced Michael as “Whitman to Zinn's Lincoln” (the podium at Cooper Union is the one where Lincoln gave his great anti-slavery address): <span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);">"As a poet, a fearless, edgy poet, Michael Lally has been giving readers his version of history for the past 35 years. He has done so with the political forthrightness and performance punch of Ginsberg, with the wit and language skills of O'Hara. But because of the place of poetry in this country, a bard like Lally, while a member of the Pantheon to all manner of poets, remains unknown to the public at large, even an audience like tonight's cognoscenti." </span>Michael's reading was a huge success.<br /><br />You can read more about <span style="font-style: italic;">March 18, 2003 </span>at Stephen Vincent’s blog:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://stephenvincent.net/blog/?p=280</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The most crucial period of Michael’s development as a poet was spent in DC, and the impact of his presence here is still an ongoing reality, as are the benefits (for so many) that resulted from his presence and his activities. As far as “alternative poetry” is concerned, no city outside of New York and San Francisco can rival the achievements of the poets of Washington in terms of publications and reading series, and general ambience. Poets in their twenties, thirties and forties associated with DC are the beneficiaries of that prestige, as well as being the creators of its continuation. Michael was there at the beginning, and, for those who care about these things, he deserves the highest regard.</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center; font-family: arial;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9uf7ewGxbOgsWNzdWpCb6PY2YJw9MRInxNH5G4Y-U1sbc0uig0Tr8AT9-WaoCuBTW9DvVi01ZCDjK6lX_Aomq0Tm5U5WM3GTY8PsjA3V1AwSCCuQvr_r8qSVwjMBspcFmPz-iwo-u70k/s1600-h/3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9uf7ewGxbOgsWNzdWpCb6PY2YJw9MRInxNH5G4Y-U1sbc0uig0Tr8AT9-WaoCuBTW9DvVi01ZCDjK6lX_Aomq0Tm5U5WM3GTY8PsjA3V1AwSCCuQvr_r8qSVwjMBspcFmPz-iwo-u70k/s320/3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097069565200597762" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" >Lang, Winch & Lally</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" >at my apartment in the Dupont East</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" >1978</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" >photograph by Rain Worthington</span><br /></div> <span style="font-family:arial;"><br />Michael Lally’s books:<br /><br />What Withers (poetry, Doones Press, 1970)<br />MCMLXVI Poem (poem, The Nomad Press, 1970)<br />The Lines Are Drawn (poetry, Asphalt Press, 1970)<br />Stupid Rabbits (poetry, Morgan Press, 1971)<br />The South Orange Sonnets (poetry, Some Of Us Press, 1972)<br />Late Sleepers (poem, Pellet Press, 1973)<br />Malenkov Takes Over (poetry/collage, A Dry Imager Production, 1974)<br />Oomaloom (prose, A Dry Imager Production, 1975)<br />Sex/The Swing Era (poetry, Lucy & Ethel, 1975)<br />My Life (poetry, Wyrd Press, 1975)<br />Dues (poetry, The Stonewall Press, 1975)<br />Mentally, He's a Sick Man (prose, Salt Lick Press, 1975)<br />Rocky Dies Yellow (poetry, Blue Wind Press, 1975; second edition, 1977)<br />Charisma (poetry, O Press, 1976)<br />Just Let Me Do It (poetry, Vehicle Editions, 1978)<br />Catch My Breath (poetry and prose, Salt Lick Press, 1978; second edition, 1995)<br />In the Mood (poem, Titanic Books, 1978)<br />White Life (poetry, Jordan Davis, 1980)<br />Attitude (poetry, Hanging Loose Press, 1982)<br />Hollywood Magic (poetry, Little Caesar, 1982)<br />Cant Be Wrong (poetry, Coffee House Press, 1996)<br />Of (book-length poem, Quiet Lion Press, 1999)<br />It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose (Black Sparrow Press, 1999)<br />¿Que Pasa, Baby? (prose poem, Wake Up Heavy Press, 2001)<br />It Takes One to Know One: Poetry & Prose (Black Sparrow Press, 2001)<br />March 18, 2003 (book-length poem with illustrations by Alex Katz, Libellum, 2004) (third edition, Charta, 2006)<br /><br />& a CD:<br /><br />What You Find There (poetry compact disc, New Alliance Records, 1994)</span>douglanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00045305196252862765noreply@blogger.com9