Ashbery to Zukofsky

The Glen Baxter Poetry Reading Group

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DiPrima | Elmslie | Fagin

DiPrima, Diane Revolutionary Letters

[811.5 El] Elmslie, Kenward The Champ

[811.5 Fa] Fagin, Larry I’ll be seeing you : poems 1962-1976

I finally made it to the November session of the Glen Baxter Poetry Reading Group a few minutes late and was pulled straight into discussion of Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. These letters, written in the late sixties, introduce themselves better than I can: ‘I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life’. Due to my current predilections I was instantly taken to Hamlet’s triple ‘Except my life’ Act 2 Sc 2, but I needn’t have been. The language that followed felt very immediate in its imagination of life after the revolution — these are letters addressed to me who is you who is anyone after that time. There is an ambition to be all encompassing — life. But not life in an abstract sense, there are lovely details about how to survive on your own. Some very real, some quaint. A list of suggested foodstuffs to have in store:

 20 lb brown rice 20 lb whole wheat flour 10 lb cornmeal 10 lb good beans — kidney or soy 5 lb sea salt 2 qts good oil dried fruit and nuts add nutrients and a sense of luxury to this diet, a squash or coconut in a cool place in your pad will keep six months. 

 Other details seemed alarmingly outdated. This post-apocalyptic survival manual now might be misconstrued as a manifesto against eco living: ‘fill your bathtub every day’, ‘drink bottled water’, ‘keep hibachi and charcoal, CHARCOAL STARTER a help / kerosene lamp and candles’. But we are reading at a time of significantly increased awareness. Not to mention the absence of institutional or corporate energy consumption, and the implied vegetarianism, all of which would already be significant mitigating factors. 

 There is an excitement which the letters give off through di Prima’s imagining life after the revolution, it draws on an animalistic spirit of survival. Oh my god, the revolution has really happened —what do we really need to keep going? —what will sustain us? REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #5: ‘at some point / you may be called upon / to keep going for several days without sleep… you may have to crash…you will need painkillers’

 Yet it is all imagined. What di Prima is describing feels real, but it is all away, in a future. Is she locking it in a future by writing it? Reading it now I cannot work out whether we are with or whether we are receiving her. The solution lends itself to both.

 Though we are being offered all this advice, we are really left to ourselves as readers. The poem too is left to itself. There is no form, no defining structure to hold onto. The various numbered letters range dramatically in length. It is a poem because there are line breaks. But they are also letters. They are for us to read, and they were written to be read, they just don’t belong to us, they are for everyone: REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #8 ‘NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down’  

 With these revolutionary rhetorical pieces I often find myself wondering what this thing is, this uncertain, occluded authoritarian object. Is it the government? No, says di Prima, ‘don’t kid yourself: government / is not where it’s at: it’s only / a good place to start’. The anarchist writer has a difficulty; to use language is, inevitably, to employ a system. As such, formlessness must remain an ideal — there are always problems.  ‘Left to themselves people / grow hair’ diPrima then uses this start of the line two more times, ‘Left to themselves they / take off their shoe’s. / Left to themselves they make love / sleep easily.’

 In the last letter, frenetic ‘Free them’ in line after line — ‘Free all political prisoners / Free Billy the Kid / Free Jesse James / Free all political prisoners / Free Nathan Hale / Free Joan of Arc’ gives way to ‘DANCE’, and I feel the velocity of, speeding down, free this free that — there is a ‘Polar bear at San Francisco zoo’ that should be freed. For me, herein lies a problem. To free the polar means taking it where, back to the wild? But what would happen then? It would surely die, it hasn’t lived in the wild — how would it know what to hunt, where to sleep, would instinct alone be enough to go on? Nono, I don’t think so. Nor does di Prima. But she cannot write a letter to a polar bear. Instead she writes a letter to us, in the hope that we would survive outside of the zoo. The letters tell us what to do. 

 The spirit of the letters is strong and sustained. There is a lot of energy and a lot of hunger and power. That is what I got from them anyway. Not to mention some tight aphorisms:

 REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #9 ‘None of us knows the answers, think about / these things. / The day will come when we have to know / the answers.’

 ***

 Kenward Elmslie — The Champ

 Looking at the pictures, there are lots of pictures, Elmslie — who is a long-time collaborator with Joe Brainard — worked in theatre and collaborated with composers on opera and musicals. I am listening to a song 'Chain of Love’ from the musical Grass Harp (1972), words by Elmslie, getting a sense of horrible slush, very slushy and not enjoyable — too sweet.

 But in the writings in print, like The Champ, the sweetness is hollowed out sufficiently so that the reading experience is bearable, there are the elements that are childlike, fairy-tale, simple, but hollowed out, there is a framework that is still in place for sweetness, but it no longer attacks the blood in such a strong and horrible way. Here in the poems there is something that speaks, gets more awake, more careful, cautious ‘Each tired day (an orgy of clichés)’.

 We talked about Dadaists dressed as ninnies.

He assassinates his mother, is born, flowers. Perfume. Boredom. Asparagus. The tree map smells of asparagus. Ever find a coin in a church  

covertly? It’s like stepping on friends (wheezing from obvious dreams) under newspapers.

 Anti-cliché detonation is what Bruce Andrews describes it on the back of the book in the blurb? — but it is also funny — having worked on the New York musicals circuit, he certainly has the right credentials for being aware of cliché, and of wanting to separate himself from it. But what does avoiding-cliché actually achieve? And does Elsmlie manage to do it?

 ***

 Then came Larry Fagin’s I’ll be seeing you: poems 1962-1976, including 7 Poems. The seven poems, to see them in their original form in the little yellow-covered chapbook, are very beautiful and sparse: little squares of text surrounded by lovely blocks of white space. Geometric? They are eerie, hollow statements — Fagin uses logic words, clauses that don’t seem to lead anywhere, and seemingly empty ‘I’s and ‘you’s. So many monosyllables especially in the first — hard to read out — there was something lacking of the usual rhythms, I tripped over the words. We also compared Fagin to Gertrude Stein, a clear influence to many of these second wavers, and Ashbury, a seemingly all-pervading presence. Also enjoyable were the recorded speech style mixed with internal monologue — like this; ‘but, how do I look? / and look away, to be loved, and how do you know it's / a lie, you look fine, just fine, a certain way to be / seen’

 We tried to piece together what is going on — definitely a house, two people, thought at first it was a male speaking to a female, but then realised that that was not necessarily the case. In the final poem, the seventh, everything seemed to slot into place, we read it and we saw the ‘I’ differently. The ‘I’ became ‘the poem’ in a more literal sense. I am the poem.

There, there, because you see the way I look, and in the time you take to tell me, I am changed

 Is this literally the telling of the poem? We got excited by this idea for a while, felt the need to go back, to look over the earlier poems for further clues. But perhaps this was only a suggestion, the spark of an interpretation that could never be brought to a conclusion. Then we thought of Plato, and his cave, and this change that occurs in the poem:

 …part imaginary, part yours, a thing, trembling before another, whose eyes fix me in the shadow and lose you in the light…  

Ultimately Fagin is quite far out there and away, abstract, in the world of ideas — the opposite to di Prima — Fagin doesn’t offer any prescriptions for a way of new, rawer life. Which approach is more appropriate, in New York then, or to us now?

— Will Kemp, November 2015

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Autumn/Winter season starts 6th October

6/10/2015 from 6pm in Special Collections & Archives at Goldsmiths we will be reading:

Wanda Coleman - We're looking at a selection from Coleman's 'Mad Dog, Black Lady' (Black Sparrow Press, 1979) which can be read in her selected works: https://goo.gl/0U85fp. The titles are ‘Decor’, ‘A Black Woman’s Hole’, ‘Wanda in Worryland’, ‘Today I am a Homicide in the North of the City’, ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Luz’

Clark Coolidge - Polaroid (Big Sky, 1975) is online in its entirety thanks to the excellent Eclipse archives here : http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/POLAROID/polaroid.html We’ll discuss the collection as a whole but don’t feel you need to read (or print) the whole thing.

Robert Duncan - The selection of Robert Duncan's poems we'll be reading are from his late collection 'Ground Work II: In the Dark'. I have decided to go with his selection from the 'Reading in Buffalo, 1982' archived on the excellent PennSound website.

I’ve tried to make sure as much as possible is freely available online but, as ever, do email me at [email protected] for a printable copy of the texts.

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Berrigan | Brainard | Brown

[811.5 Be] Berrigan, Ted. poems from Many Happy Returns and Train Ride, for Joe

[811.5 Br] Brainard, Joe, texts from Selected Writings : 1962-1971 ‘Back in Tulsa Again’ and ‘Some Train Notes’

[811.5 Br] Brown, Bob. 1450-1950

I had never read any Ted Berrigan before. I'm pretty sure that makes me a loser, but loser or not I was grateful.

He was an explosion of evocative nouns. He was poetically hyperactive and constantly, 'high on poems, or pills.'

His was a poetry of chocolate milk and best friends and 17.5 milligrams of Desoxyn and lettuce heads and declarations of transitory love and always the time – 8:30 p.m., 5:15 a.m., 3:17 a.m. – forever early for he never went to bed he just wrote about Dick and Joe and Pat and Ron.

And Goldsmiths’ Glen Baxter Special Collection is full of his books, these delicate first editions with thick cream and ecru paper which Angus passed to us on this soft white pillow, which has no technical name other than book pillow. I think it perhaps prevents the spines from splitting but it looked as if one of us might deliver Mass from the church of Berrigan.

Then we read Joe Brainard’s Some Train Notes, and when he wrote 'A man is staring at me. Too bad he's not cute', I fell in love with him a little.

Funny how I feel closer to gay poets. Something which I was embarrassed to admit but Laura confided to the group that she felt the same way with female authors. I felt buoyed up and less idiotic.

Joe Brainard was an artist primarily, known for his male nudes and collages, but text was one of his mediums and his highly-confessional poetry was, at first read, a painfully honest diary; his poem 'Queer Bars' reads in it's entirety:

After an unsuccessful night, going round to queer bars, I come home, and say to myself “Art”.

I knew exactly what he meant although I had always said “Fuck”.

Brainard feels like a collector of the near-forgotten homosexual past. He feels necessary. The page that 'Queer Bars' was printed on was well thumbed and pleasingly stained with a fleck of jam or blood. I'm glad to have seen it. I'm glad to have touched it.

We also read some Bob Brown, his magical and spidery cartoons, but I was too focused on Joe's pith and heart to focus. Sorry Bob.

-- Richard Scott, August 2015

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Ceravolo | Clark | Codrescu

A quick note to point out the Spring/Summer 2015 schedule has been updated with links to the reading for our next meet. Don’t worry if you’re not able to access the texts in advance, we’ll be reading some of the work aloud and the books (which are very beautiful) will be present for your careful inspection.

Week 3  Tuesday 7th July, 6pm

[811.5Ce] Ceravolo, Joseph 'Spring in this world of poor mutts'. Some of the poems can be read here.

[811.5Cl] Clark, Tom 'At Malibu'. Selected works can be accessed via ProQuest Literature Online or via Tom Clark's personal blog.

[811.5Co] Codrescu, Andrei 'The History of the Growth of Heaven.' Can be accessed via ProQuest Literature Online

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Bill Berkson - Expect Delays

A nice write up of new collection ‘Expect Delays’ by Bill Berkson, whose work we read in week one, here on Hyperallergic.

No delays for us however - our next meeting will be on Tuesday 2nd June. All reading and further details can be found here.

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Ashbery & Schuyler  |  Baxter  |  Berkson

[811.5 As] Ashbery, John and Schuyler, James. ‘A Nest of Ninnies’, chapter one.

[827.9 Ba] Baxter, Glen. ‘The Works’, poems from ‘The Khaki’.

[811.5 Be] Berkson, Bill. ‘Blue is the hero : poems, 1960-1975’.

 We began our inaugural meeting with Ashbery and Schuyler’s collaborative novel which began as a car game. Ashbery began with the sentence ‘Alice was tired.’ To which Schuyler replied ‘Languid, fretful, she turned to stare into her own eyes in the mirror above the mantelpiece before she spoke.’ On it went like this, sentence by sentence over years until the game turned into a novel. While the term ‘surrealist’ is one often lazily misapplied it provided an entry point to linking the texts together and something to talk against. Freud described the ‘highly structured ego activities’ of the Surrealists and we might say the same of A Nest of Ninnies. It recalls the surrealist parlour game the 'exquisite corpse' but here the missives in the text - questions left in the air, characters rapidly changing then recalling earlier subjects - are deliberate and highly conscious, more so than in the exquisite corpse in fact. Ashbery is a figure often described as a surrealist, Schuyler more attentive, tender. The result of the collaboration is a pleasantly peculiar suburban parody. The playfulness and possibly the desire not to be outdone is felt as the driving force of the text. It’s a source of great humour and here and there a certain uncanny strangeness, that same feeling so often mis-termed 'surreal'.

 Glen Baxter, the namesake and curator of our reading list, is another figure often described as a surrealist. Michael Wilson refers to ‘a kind of social-surrealist comedy comparable to the achievements of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Vic Reeves’ (Artforum, October 2005) in Baxter's single-panel cartoons. The social aspect is important in distinguishing the surrealist elements at play here. Baxter’s drawings feature cowboys and librarians, boyscouts and archbishops, often discussing ‘high’ culture in either mad or mundane settings. The poems we looked at in The Khaki give Baxter room for movement not available to him in the single-panel form his drawings take. It’s the difference between still and moving images, illustrated explicitly in the use of framing in ‘Utopia Parkway’ which unfolds in a point-of-view description: ‘The eye observing this moves through an angle of ninety degrees and focuses on the hand holding the pen.’ Many of the poems stride in as casually as a knock-knock joke and lead us through a ‘duck turn’ in a plane to ‘a lounge crammed with Cezannes’ in a deadpan manner that reminded some of the group of Armitage’s ‘Seeing Stars’ poems – which are derivative of James Tate’s prose poems in any case – but is completely Baxter’s own voice.

 Bill Berkson’s collection Blue is the Hero : poems 1960-75 would have been a fairly recent release at the time Glen Baxter purchased it for the collection here at Goldsmiths. It is interesting to note a few similarities between the two: Kenneth Koch gave Berkson early encouragement and tutelage as a poet and introduced him to many of the same ‘New York School’ poets Baxter would meet ten years later through Ron Padgett taking an interest in his early poetry (more on this here). Another point of contact is their connection with the art world; Berkson is as prolific an art critic as he is a poet. The poems here are undoubtedly influenced by his thinking about art. In ‘Floors’ the ‘beginning’ in this first stanza seems to be the beginning the act of painting:

                 Beginning with you

               a hole      a pleat

               having it sent up scribbles

               onto a blue and white erasable landing

 though the text itself, not having this explicit context (what hole? what it? what?) the poem feels like a cut-up while it acts like a painting. Again, these are not surreal poems but the use of lines with normative grammar deployed in a non-linear narrative produces the kind of effect lazy or misinformed critics might term surreal.

 [by Angus Sinclair]

The next meeting will be 2nd June in Special Collections & Archives from 6pm. The reading can be found here, you can let us know you’re coming here and if you have any questions please feel free to email [email protected]