Poems and Poetics

[As a follow-up to Barbaric Vast & Wild,the gathering of outside & subterranean poetry that John Bloomberg-Rissman & I assembled several years ago, I’ve been giving further thought to the poetry imbedded in the lyrics of so-called popularsong as manifested in particular in the orbit of contemporary blues- and rock-derived singer-poets from Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen through Patti Smith, Jim Carroll & Nick Cave, among so many others. In Cave’s case, as I scan some of his later work in printed form, the poetry leaves traditional line & rhyme behind toward a kind of open or projective verse that places him among the experimental/avant-garde poets of my generation & somewhat later of his. Of the separation of words from music – long viewed as a stumbling block to the recognition of song lyrics as poetry – Cave himself notes in the present instance: “Jesus Alone is fine. As Rings of Saturn is mostly extemporised I'm not sure how it actually holds up on the page. It gets a little ropey at times which is maybe part of its charm. As songwriting is performative, the beautiful thing about it is that much is left in just because it sounds good. For me Rings of Saturn feels like a bit of a grab-bag of stuff made good because it's sung with all the heart in the world. But beware putting it down on paper!” And yet it’s precisely on the page that its kinship to the new/old world of poems and poetics (both form & content) becomes clear – as another & necessary step toward a living omnipoetics. (J.R.)]

Rings of Saturn

Upside down and inside out and on all eights, like a
     funnel-web
Like a black fly on the ceiling, skinny, white haunches
     high in the sky
And a black oily gash crawling backwards across the
     carpet to smash all over everything
Wet, black fur against the sun going down, over the
     shops and the cars and the crowds and the town

And this is the moment, this is exactly where she is
born to be
Now this is what she does and this is what she is
And this is the moment, this is exactly where she is
     born to be
This is what she does and this is what she is

Her eyes that look at me through her rainy hair
Are two round holes where the air buckles and
     rushes in
Her body, moon blue as a jellyfish
And I'm breathing deep and I'm there and I'm
     also not there
And spurting ink over the sheets but she remains,
     completely unexplained
Or maybe I'm just too tongue-tied to drink it up
     and swallow back the pain
I thought slavery had been abolished
How come it's gone and reared its ugly head again?

And this is the moment, this is exactly what she is
     born to be
And this is what she does and this is what she is
And this is the moment, this is exactly what she is
     born to be
This is what she is and this is what she does

And now she's jumping up with her leaping brain
Stepping over heaps of sleeping children
Disappearing and further up and spinning out again
Up and further up she goes, up and out of the bed
Up and out of the bed and down the hall where she
     stops for moment and turns and says
"Are you still here?"
And then reaches high and dangles herself like a
     child's dream from the rings of Saturn

Magneto

Mostly I never knew which way was out
Once it was on, it was on and that was that
The umbilicus was a faucet that fountained rabid
     blood
And I spin on my wheel like a laboratory rat
I was an electrical storm on the bathroom floor,
     clutching the bowl
My blood was for the gags and other people's
     diseases
My monstrous little memory had swallowed me
     whole
It was the year I officially became the bride of
     Jesus

In love, in love, in love you laugh
In love you move, I move and one more time
     with feeling
For love, you love, I laugh, you love
Saw you in half and the stars are splashed
     across the ceiling

Oh, the urge to kill somebody was basically
     overwhelming
I had such hard blues down there in the
      supermarket queues
I had a sudden urge to become someone,
     someone like you
Who started out with less than anyone I
     ever knew

In love, in love, I love, you love, I laugh,
     you love
I move, you move and one more time with
     feeling
I love, you love, I laugh, you love
I'm sawn in half and all the stars are splashed
     across the ceiling

Oh, and oh, you come shyly
And softly to the hole to drink
Come as far as the edge of my blood, then swim
And in the bathroom mirror I see me vomit in
     the sink
And all through the house we hear the hyena's
     hymns

Of love, I love, you love, I love, you love, I laugh,
     you love
I move, you move, you move, and one more time
     with feeling
I love, you love, I laugh, you love
We saw each other in half and all the stars have
     splashed and splattered across theceiling

Jesus Alone

You fell from the sky crash landed in a field near
     the river Adur
Flowers sprang from the ground, lambs burst from
     the wombs of their mothers
In a hole beneath the bridge, you convalesced, you
     fashioned masks of clay and twigs
You cried beneath the dripping trees, a ghost song
     lodged in the throat of a mermaid

With my voice I am calling you

You're a young man waking covered in blood that is
     not yours
You're a woman in a yellow dress surrounded by a
     charm of hummingbirds
You're a young girl full of forbidden energy flickering
     in the gloom
You're a drug addict lying on your back in a Tijuana
     hotel room

With my voice I am calling you
With my voice I am calling you

You're an African doctor harvesting tear ducts
You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation
     for this belief now
You're an old man sitting by a fire, you're the mist
     rolling off the sea
You're a distant memory in the mind of your creator,
     don't you see?

With my voice I am calling you
With my voice I am calling you

Let us sit together until the moment comes

With my voice I am calling you
With my voice I am calling you
With my voice I am calling you
With my voice I am calling you

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[In an effort to rescue poems & poets from the last century who may otherwise be lost in the rush & crush of time, I will be reposting a number of works originally published only in the blogger version of Poems and Poetics. The intent of these excerpts from Frank Kuenstler’s oeuvre was to celebrate the publication in 2011 of his posthumous book The Enormous Chorus (Pressed Wafer, Boston), by posting Michael O’Brien’s Introduction and two of Kuenstler’s poems. In praise of Kuenstler and his work I wrote the following: “The retrieval here of a fair portion of Frank Kuenstler’s prolific work is an event of the utmost importance toward the mapping of a true history of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also a delight to see & to read so much of it now & to marvel, as I did for the small part of it I knew from before, at the brilliant flights (of ‘fancy’ I would like to say) between different worlds & levels of discourse. Others have tried & some have succeeded, but none with more grace & élan than what he shows here.” The Enormous Chorus can still be ordered in paper from Small Press Distribution. (J.R.)]

BLIND OSSIAN ADDRESSES THE SUN AGAIN

A day of snow on the Riviera, the burlesque queens

are mermaids, simple as the moon. Another New Year’s

Day in Havana, without discourse, they who cultivated

the dimensions of their bodies, like lizards

are regimented as our shadows. That’s bad news,

The natural gambler opined. A traveller on the steps of Odessa

in distress & the going is hard & slow,

Enormous snowflakes stripped as the voice you know.

I should really be writing a letter to everybody

saying what I mean. I mean the bodies are blonde, brown

as sunshine, while my feet are cold. There is no news

in the world for us, only images grasped at, or fed us

like straws. The possible dimensions are what remind

Us that we were born once upon a time, & yelled like dawn.

The gamblers have moved south to oil & coffee country.

The television sets up north transmit pictures.

Snow is socialized. A rumor persists

that estimates of the life of the sun have been wildly exaggerated.

In the thirties it was Egypt & the other Alexandria

You cannot know.

I will walk in the snow & get my feet wet. I will go

to the movies. I will hope. The bloody braille of the sun

is my tongue. The king was executed just because he thought

he could be happy. He enjoyed his job. He enjoyed

having his friends around. He enjoyed having money.

He enjoyed Marilyn Monroe, if such a thing was possible.

Degree by degree I went blind, thinking of the sun in Havana,

thinking its eye was as narrow & wide as a pair of hips.

I will walk in Autumn. The Eiffel Tower will greet me, tell

me in Turkish the way to Afghanistan. Apollinaire & Vergil

will guide me, because I am blind, the way to the Far East

dimension of the world’s highway, O South

The way musicians named Ossian have always been led by clarinets

& apprentice butchers since the world was young.

THE ENORMOUS CHORUS

& nobody alive knows no more what love is supposed to mean

because poets are engineers of the soul who build machines

for living; & anthology succeeds anthology as the night the

night; & the Cockney movie had no subtitles; & the banana

cake was delivered with tea leaves in it, reminiscent of tong

wars, from New Jersey, baked by a chicken-sexer; & still

they tell me, “Say ‘Garden State’”, & I say, “Garden State”;

& the Princeton tiger came like Christ the kite, in September;

& TS Eliot read his poetry to a packed house; I mean auditorium;

& the best modern furniture is designed by architects;

& Jack Smith is gonna die of happiness; & there’ll be peace

in Viet Nam & we’ll all be beautiful again (the typewriter

will write a poem entitled “Manufacture”, or “War & Peace”

just for the poet & his friend); & the coin will stop spinning

& all the plays will be witty & largely beautiful; actresses

will acquiesce in their diction; & the gangster movie will be

produced, shot on location in Kansas, directed by a Frenchman;

the ‘new wave’ will roll to a dead halt on a black & white

highway; successful tycoons will burn all their paintings,

like nihilists, or Rouault, each in his Golden Pavilion; & the

lunch waiters will run the country, having taken over the newspapers;

& Grace Kelly & Robt. Kelly will tour paradise & Heaven,

remark Billie Holiday teaching Robt. Young how to play Daddy

& the saxophone; & Michelet will give us a worthy cosmology;

& the FBI will invent a twittering machine that works; &

there goes Richie Schmidt all dressed up, looking like a priest

INTRODUCTION(by Michael O’Brien)

Frank Kuenstler’s “Canto 33” opens

In medias res, the human voice, crystal,

making a kind of rubric: three propositions at the outset of something said, or,

better, Duke Ellington laying out the terms of a song. In medias res comes from

Horace: “in the midst of the thing,” the place where we begin a story, a day, between a beginning we can’t remember and the end which is an end to all remembering. Here. Now. In what Wallace Stevens calls “The the.” And what we find, in all this immediacy, this perpetual ongoing middle, is the human voice. The poems show a constant appetite for it, for engaging with its unbroken rivers of talk. And that voice is crystal: “clear as crystal,” as we say, but also “a structure consisting of periodically repeated, identically constructed congruent unit cells.” (This sounds like a description of Lens, his first, most radical book.) To crystallize is “to take on definite and permanent form.” Granted the way his mind worked, crystal is also probably not far from a crystal set, a radio housing voices, nor from Stendhal’s On Love, in which crystallization is the process of an emotion finding its form. A lot of work for seven words, and with a rhyme as well. But consider the associative processes that run these poems, their density of reference, the swiftness of their transitions. The internet works like this, all interacting simultaneities. And the glue that holds it all together is human speech:

The world hangs by a thread of verbs & nouns.

The poems’ openness to the overtones of words is unfailing, sometimes to the

exclusion of their everyday workhorse lives. The point was to find a way to bring

that abundance to bear in the moment of the poem. Many poets proceed by cutting out the overload; he tried to make room for it. He didn’t write as if English were in a museum, and he didn’t write to put it there. Poetry was, by its nature, provisional; that’s why he wrote so much of it. He was steadily intelligent but not at all high-minded; if puns were good enough for Joyce, they were good enough for him. Likewise gobbledygook—“trying to talk to Mama,” as he once described it. He was discerning without prejudice: junk had its uses—cartoons, cheesy movies, newspaper headlines. To move between the sublime and the ridiculous, as he did, programmatically, all the time, and with great rapidity, wasn’t a blunder—they were parts of the same terrain. He never treated his materials with superiority, though often with compounded ironies. There is great sadness and anger in some of the poems, and sometimes a blank opacity more troubling than either. But, inexhaustibly, there is something like joy at the level of language.

Sometimes he says it into being:

If summer is the image of a string of pearls

There is music everywhere.

where assertion does the work of discovery. Other times the world is not posited

but simply, or not so simply, given as found. For his findings were seldom simple.

Simplicity surprised him, as it surprises us when it turns up in the poems.

One mustn’t leave out how funny they are, how much pleasure they give, how

responsive their quickness—“Who runs may read.” At their best, as, say, in “Blind

Ossian Addresses the Sun Again,” their reach is immense. Over and over inchoate

feelings take shape, change, move on. Fixity is rare in them, something stale and

lifeless. It often seems as if he were doing six things at once, changing trains and

levels of thought as he speaks: more than one person is talking, and all at once.

Precarious to negotiate such a Babel. The stakes of the poems were very high: to

come to some kind of terms with the rich, rolling chaos of the world, make something commensurate with it. What they do is this:

Praise what was ordered a second in the mind

Hard to make a selection of the poems of someone whose every impulse was for

inclusion. Much remains to be done. A reprint of Lens—for the book defies editing—is the next thing needed. Then manuscripts need to be looked at—this selection draws only on the books that he published. The Rabbi Kyoto Poems should be gathered and published, and The Baseball Book, meant to secure his old age. Friends should be consulted: sometimes the post office was his publisher. He was abundant.

There is good news: tapes of two of his readings can be found at PennSound

(http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Kuenstler.html), likewise five of the films, restored by Anthology Film Archives; his last two books, In Which and The Seafarer, B.Q.E., and Other Poems, are available from Cairn Editions (jcfmob@verizon.net). But time passes. When Lady Murasaki is asked by the Prince why she writes she says So there will never be a time when people don’t know these things happened. His work should not be lost.

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[On my way to Buffalo to celebrate the life & work of Dennis Tedlock, with whom I founded Alcheringa in 1970 & launched what we were already calling ethnopoetics, I thought to post this selection of his own poems which we were first able to show in the pages of that magazine. Additional poems from this series appeared earlier in Poems and Poetics,and his original work in its entirety should, when it finally appears, add to his reputation as an exemplary poet & ethnographer. His contribution to my own sense of poetry & poetics was enormous. (J.R.)]

The Year

First comes

Broken Branches Moon

the snow is heavy

Snowless Road Moon

it snows

but it doesn’t stick to the road

Little Wind Moon

when the snow is in patches

Big Wind Moon

Nameless Moon

Turnabout Moon

Broken Branches Moon

also called Rooster Pull

the time of the rodeo

Snowless Road Moon

also called Get-together

Look-at-one-another

Little Wind Moon

Big Wind Moon

also called Pick-the-ears-of-corn

Nameless Moon

when they set the date for the dancers

Turnabout Moon

All these twelve together are called

time-surpasses-itself.

Winter Solstice

Here is the place of fear

for four days

no greasy foods are eaten

there is no coffee

no trade

all places of business are closed

for ten days

no sweepings

no garbage is taken out of the house

no fire is taken out of the house

not even cigarettes are lighted outside

people shouldn’t use their cars

the street lights are all turned out

this is the middle of time.

Recipe

Fill a bowl with hot water

add, to taste:

dried leaves of wild mint

ground chili

onions

dried chinchweed flowers

wolfberries

& venison jerky.

This is called

hot-bowl

it is

an ancient dish.

Cornshucking

Pull down the husk

all around

then twist it all off at once

with the stem

put the dry ears in this pile

for us

put the damp ears

the moldy ears in this one

for the hogs

& throw the shucks out there

some of the ears are yellow

some are blue

red

white

some are pretty

the multicolored ones

some are black

look for the Fully-Finished-Ear

without a single kernel missing

right to the very tip

a deer, a buck

wears that one on his breast

& the Flat-Ear

with a forked tip

a doe wears that one on her breast

& the Road-Ear

with a groove down its whole length

runners wear that one on their backs

now here it is

a Fully-Finished-Ear

but it’s wet

I’ll put it at the edge of the good pile

& here is an ear

yellow, but

each kernel

is tinged with red

it’s sort of pretty

there’s no name for this one

I’ll put it here on the fence rail

maybe I’ll do something with it later.

When The Witches Are Out

On the road at night

we caught a deer in the headlights

he didn’t know which way to go

he came toward us

turning left & right

in the lights

we stopped

he cut left through the sunflowers

into the dark

we went up to the house

so our nephew could get his rifle

on our way back down the road

there was another car coming

far off

his lights went out

we rode all the way down past

where the deer was

& there was no deer

& no car.

The Two Of Them

The Zuni

& the anthropologist

walk a narrow road

to the tip of the mesa

to see the Hopi Snake Dance

between two sheer drops

the Zuni says

to the anthropologist

- Both sides!

You jump one way

& I’ll jump the other.

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[Re-posted from the Blogger version of Poems and Poetics, February 1, 2010]

“Do you have any books by Rose Drachler?” I ask the book dealer in a New York second-hand bookshop that is known for its immense collection. “Rose what?” “Drachler.” “Never heard of her.” Nevertheless, I go to the bookshelf and scrutinize all poetry under the rubric “D.” Nothing there. Suddenly I notice a book behind the row. There is more! I move the first row only to find what I was looking for—The Collected Poems of Rose Drachler besides a number of other forgotten books.

For most Jewish poets, the name Rose Drachler does not ring a bell. In literature circles, she was probably never known except by a small group of avant-garde poets and writers in the ’70s and ’80s, such as, Charles Doria, Jackson Mac Low, David Meltzer, Charlie Morrow, Rochelle Ratner, Armand Schwerner, Diane and Jerome Rothenberg as well as John Yau and John Ashbery. They encouraged her writing and published it wherever they could.

Drachler wrote in a variety of styles that demonstrate her awareness of innovative, contemporary poetry. Some of her poems are composed in a prose style, while others are lyrical (in fact, they are reminiscent of Rilke or Yeats). Some poems appropriate Jewish texts, while others deal with purely personal subjects. Certainly, the poet’s far-ranging experimentation deserves attention.

I first saw a poem by Drachler in Rothenberg’s anthology A Big Jewish Book. It was a very weird poem about ritual counting:

The counting made
The corners
Of the building
True

One
One and one
Two
Two and one [...]”

I have never forgotten the strangeness of this piece and found it repeated over and over again when I read her work. Drachler’s poems are lucid on the surface, but complex and opaque if one really tries to comprehend them. The poet pays a lot of attention to detail and makes use of an excruciatingly precise language. To invoke the specificity of her materials, she takes particular care to name plants, animals, and places correctly. Whether she writes about ritual prescriptions or about her garden, she never becomes vague. Yet she is always mysterious:

Touched I ooze
Sticky, I dry rubbery
A nuisance, exposed to air
Coagulate

As sowthistle, Brimstone-wart
Sunspurge, North American scelpius
Videlicet milkweed

[...]

To appreciate these poems on plants and animals, we need to feel with them. We need to “feel ourselves into” an old cat, an inchworm, a llama, a dog, a shark, an oak tree woodbine, or shrubbery, as they evoke emotions or symbolize certain states of being. Imagine, for instance, the “Llama:”

[...]
It looks far along its nose but sees best
Inward
Does not appreciate companionship other
Than llamas.

Perhaps the serenity of Drachler’s poems results from such introspection and her highly reflective character. In his preface to The Collected Poems, Rothenberg calls her “a genuine kabbalist: a poet whose work is totally comprehensible--& totally mysterious.” It was the mystical side of her poetry that fascinated a group of young American-Jewish poets who were deeply involved with kabbalah and with making their own canon of Jewish writing.

Surprisingly, Drachler only began to publish poetry when she was in her sixties. Her first publisher was a young poet—David Meltzer, the editor of the kabbalistic magazine Tree and publisher of Tree books. Drachler’s first books were two chapbooks, Burrowing In, Digging Out (1974) and The Choice (1977).

To Meltzer and his friends, Drachler personified a riddle full of contradictions: On the one hand, Drachler was an orthodox woman steeped in tradition (her father was a rabbi), on the other, she was an innovative poet open to new thoughts. Besides poetry, she read philosophical and historical literature as well as literary criticism. Her unconventional and original thinking is revealed in her correspondence with her peers as well as in her diary. The following passage from her journal demonstrates the breath and depth of her reflections. Drachler writes about her difficulties in gaining insight from the torah service and then goes on to think about the role of inspiration:

Sometimes a passage will glow up new and sharp, jump out of the run of loaded, time-filling custom. Even so there is a good, calm feeling of accomplishment, even on the least inspired Saturday. Inspired! Breath, full of breath. When a passage is strongly felt I perceive a change in my breathing. I breathe more shallowly and much less. [...] When I used to come to the unwanted and premature ending of one of my pregnancies, after a number of such occurrences, I learned how, by slow deep breathing, I could help the inevitable [...]. Breathing, too, is related to orgasm. Incorrect breathing can impede its oncoming. In certain societies where the focus is on these natural accomplishments it may be that instruction in breath-control is part of the secret learning of adolescents [...].

Her interest in anthropology and archeology connects Drachler with the Jewish poets of the ethnopoetics movement. Their common goal was to try to find meaning by forging a link with the past. Drachler finds continuity by writing poems on natural history as well as prehistoric and archaic themes. But she also dwells on her own ancestral history—the history of the Jews from biblical times onwards. Her poetic imagination is captured by midrashim about the patriarchs and prophets. Other poems deal with the biblical history of the temple, and the captivity, exile, and return of the Israelites as well as the coming of the messiah. To avoid sentimentality, Drachler undercuts the solemnity of her subjects with fantastic images: she envisions the messiah wearing “an Italian silk / suit cut in the latest mode / and drive a fine, white sports.”

However, other poems are permeated by a sense of melancholy and a feeling of loss, for the temple is no longer there. The past of the Jewish people needs to be consciously repossessed—through prayer, ritual and meditation. Thus, Drachler tries to come to terms with the modern condition: “We cannot see that wall [of the temple] / Those curtains, that time.” Here Drachler’s consciousness meets with that of her young Jewish supporters, who likewise attempt to reappropriate Jewish tradition, yet often in a much less observant way. In an unpublished letter to Rothenberg, Drachler suggests to the Jewish avant-garde poet that he should translate “the impossible, stuffy, Latinate translations in the Siddur” into strong contemporary poetry.

Meanwhile, Drachler continued to write her own liturgical poetry. In these Jewish poems, she meditates on the texts of the Jewish prayer book or the weekly torah portion; she ponders the sacred and anthropological significance of ancient sacrificial and purification rituals. Their purpose is to invoke a sense of the sacred and the numinous. Several poems conclude with a scene of deep awe, with “[h]alf a shudder.” They summon the God of Hiob and the Psalms: “The blast of His nostrils breaks the windows of the sky / He sends hail, snow, vapours, stormy winds obeying His word.”

Incidentally, Drachler perfectly fulfills Cynthia Ozick’s requirements for an American Jewish literature as voiced in her essay “Toward a New Yiddish”: “[Liturgical literature] is meant not to have only a private voice. Liturgy has a choral voice, a communal voice: the echo of the voice of the Lord of History. Poetry shuns judgment and memory and seizes the moment.” Ozick’s definition of Jewish literature in terms of liturgy may be criticized for being too narrow, but it certainly fits Drachler’s work, which strives to transcend the confines of the poet’s individual life by merging her into the chain of tradition.

Many of Drachler’s poems reveal that as an observant Jew, she feels a sense of duty toward the God of Israel. Yet this loyalty is threatened by the experience of history, especially the Holocaust. Drachler elaborates a story by Emmanuel Levinas in her powerful poem “We Love Him Absent.” The sardonic tone of this piece expresses the persistence of faith. The grandmother — a woman! — battles with God, but continues to believe in justice; she strives to live a just life, even if God himself seems unjust:

[...]

She scrubs away suffering sent by a veiled and
distant God. She renounces all beneficial manifestations.
God does not triumph except as tidiness.

That is her conscience, to bring order from chaos.
She is Jewish because that is what she insists on being
a daily follower of order. The suffering of the just for
justice makes her Jewish. God does not love her.
She loves God. There is no tenderness here.
They are not equals. There is no sentimentality.

That strain of defiance against God makes Drachler’s poetry impressive and memorable. Rebellion and doubt, even bitterness, are balanced out by faith, obedience, and acceptance. Meltzer comments [in an email correspondence]: “The 'control' in her poetry was the ambix for her deep 'out of control' knowing.”

Some of these contradictions and paradoxes vouch for Drachler’s appeal to the poets of the Jewish counterculture, who published in Meltzer’s journal Tree. No simple affirmations. Nevertheless, she was a natural kabbalist and a feminist, who applied her visonary imagination to ancient archetypes and symbols. Many of her poems portray the feeling of being overwhelmed by some spiritual or natural power—by God, by inspiration, by strong passions, or by water — waves, rain and tears: “rising and swelling / we drown to be born.” Drachler’s poems fuse the spiritual and the sensuous:

In the tunnel
Light is haloed
Sound dissolved
The skin of separation
Is softened

Thought approaches
Airy and bright
Soft but pervasive
It penetrates rock
[…]

Reading Drachler’s poems is like meditating. Each poem deserves attention and elaboration; each poem can be read over and over again. Drachler reveals and conceals at the same time. In fact, concealment and obscurity run through her life. The poet and her husband, the book artist Jacob Drachler, lived a quiet and withdrawn life in a gated community (Seagate in Brooklyn). Drachler regularly went to synagogue, but she did not really belong to any local literary scene and often felt isolated. Out of this loneliness, Drachler created poems and shared them with young poets who admired her poetry and her wisdom. Thus Rothenberg writes in the preface to her poems: “The voice is quiet, not insistent, yet the poet’s wildness sounds beneath it.” It was that wildness and passion that enabled Drachler to have close friendships with poets twenty or thirty years her juniors.

Despite Meltzer’s sustained endeavors to familiarize the poetry world with Drachler’s work, she has been almost completely forgotten. This is surprising as the quality of her writing surpasses much of the poetry featured in Jewish journals and anthologies today. Was it Drachler’s pious modesty (tsni’utin Hebrew) and her tendency toward self-deprecation that prevented her from advancing her own work? Or was this oversight motivated by the fact that she associated with the non-canonized avant-garde?

For the small group of admirers who continue to cite her as influential on their own writing, she represented a “poet’s poet.” Her marginality appealed to the poets of the Jewish counterculture. When Drachler died of cancer in 1982 at the age of 71, she was greatly missed by everyone who knew her. The Collected Poems were published one year later as a kind of last tribute to her. However, neither this assemblage of poems nor the fact that she briefly studied with John Ashbery, who thought highly of her writing, seems to have sufficed to popularize her poetry. Drachler envisioned herself in an image that still is an apt description of a role in Jewish literary culture: “In the sea, far out. I am alone with a gull.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE. Rose Drachler’s virtual disappearance in death is one of those inevitable but disturbing realities that confronts a number of heroic & gifted artists. Her presence in her final years, as Christine Meilicke testifies, was important for many of us – not only the Jewish poets among us but many others as well. John Ashbery wrote of her: “Rose Drachler’s poems are strong and sweet, firm and quirky, but this oddness soon comes to be perceived by the reader as a new canon.” And my own assessment in a preface to her posthumous collected poems is one from which I wouldn’t back away, even now, a quarter of a century past her death: “Her book — like all poem-books since Whitman brought the message home — is the life, the song of herself created in the work. ‘My own,’ she says, ‘I do not conceal/ Or deny what I am’: a Jewish woman into her late 60s: who has been (for how long?) like those secret wise men in each generation, one of the 36 poets whose work stays hidden in the world.” Several of her poems will appear shortly on Poems and Poetics, while the full text of Burrowing In, Digging Out can still be found on Karl Young's Light & Dust web site by clicking here. (J.R.)]

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[Originally published in Burrowing In, Digging Out(1974) and The Choice (1977), both from David Meltzer’s Tree Books. See also the note at bottom of this posting & the essay on Drachler’s work by Christine Meilicke, which appeared as the posting on Poems and Poetics for April 19, 2017.]

THE COUNTING MADE THE CORNERS RIGHT

The counting made

The corners

Of the building

True

One

One and one

Two

Two and one

Four horns

Corners

One and seven he counted

One and six

The goat stayed fluid

It steamed

Yellow eyes, square pupils

Fringes of flesh at its throat

They beat him with sticks

They threw stones at him

They sent him away

The goats were a gift

Both goats

One to die and one to drive away

One

One and one

Two

Two and one

The counting was washing

It was clean

It was for the building

THE LETTERS OF THE BOOK

Aleph the cow with wide horns

Her milk in the night sky

Walks slowly on clouds

Aleph to the tenth power

She leads with symbolic logic

To the throne of milky pearl

Aleph the sky-cow with lovely eyes

Wide-horned giver she gives mankind

Her sign of is-ness. The cow

Bayz the house snug

Under the heat of the sun

Out of the rain and the snow

We curl up in a corner

Under the roof of Bayz

Out of the daily sorrow

Bayz the comforter

Inhabited by humanity

Cat-like and childlike

Inside of his Bayz

Ghimel the camel

Carries man into the book

The leaves and waves

Of the forest the sea of the book

Boat of the desert the camel

Long traveler drinking the task

Ghimel drinks the dry road of daily observance

It slakes the thirst for communion

Daled the door like a wall

No hinges no handle

Daled the mysterious opener

Into a place with a road

The six hundred and thirteen small roads

I have swallowed Vav the hook

It had something tasty and nourishing on it

A Promise of plenty and friendship

With someone more than myself

I’ve got Vav the hook in my gut shift to rearrange the discomfort

Like a sharp minnow inside

When he draws up the line

Attached to the hook

When he rips the Vav out

There will be strange air around me
Burning my gills

Yod the hand

And Koff the palm

Rested gently

On Raish the head

Of Abraham our father

Who crossed over

Burning the idols

Behind him in Ur

He looked upward

At stars sun and moon

Then looked further

For a pat on the head

From Yod and Koff

The unseen hand and palm

In the crook

Of the Lammed leaning forward

I put my neck when I pray

My shepherd makes me meek

He makes my knees bend

H guides me I follow

With the loop of the Lammed

On my throat

I go

Mem is the water

Sweetly obeying

The red-raging water

Which parted

Mem came together

And drowned the pursuers

Stubborn refusers of freedom

The enslavers Mem drowned them

Mem was the water

Brackish tormenting

Sweetened with leaves

By our Moses

The waters of trust

Which he struck from the rock

Mem mayim water

The jelly-glowing eye full of love

Sees past the eye the Ayin

Like a dog it perceives the hidden

It turns and stares at its master

It pleads with him to come home

the longing for certainty

Fills him too full

Return, my master, he says

Your eye to my eye

Ayin

Peh the mouth speaking hastily

Praying easily fast without reverence

Full of gossip causing estrangement

Let my soul be as dust to Peh

The loud quarreler the prattler

The carrier of tales to and fro

The beguiler the mouth Peh better still

Shin is the tooth

It chews on the word

(With the dot on the left

It is Sin)

So much sharper than Shin the tooth

Is learning in the study

Together by dimlight

Chuckling together at the tooth

The horn that was known to gore

The tooth for a tooth in our story

The sharp-toothed father

Of our fathers

Who was wont to gore in the past

COUNTING THE BIRDS

a scorner
a watcher
a screecher
a warner
a crested commander
a blue demander
a four colored blue
a jay
a tree top caller
a fire
a green dusted fire
a crier
a crested sayer
a ten time prayer
a two a pair
bright fallers
quiet hoppers
a fair pair
a touhee
a touhee
a four color bird
a three color bird
a one eye a one eye
a stare on the stair
an imp
ertinent hopper
a stopper a stayer
a one eye a touhee
a thrasher
a scraper
a searcher a lurcher
a red brown thrasher
a focus in motion
a leaf mold searcher
a brown leaf thrasher
a ground watcher
a searcher for motion
a brown searcher
a pair
a true crew
a nodder a prodder
a weaver
a figure eight dancer
a crew of two
a true trait
a constant mourner
two mourning doves
two

NOTE & AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. Drachler’s poems are in a line with other works of the 1970s & 1980s that reflected an early fascination with the powers of the Hebrew alphabet (or any other system of writing, by extension), both as letters & as numbers. Their kinship, before we ever knew of her, was to my own Gematria & to aspects of the poetry and poetics of practitioners such as David Meltzer, Nathaniel Tarn, Jackson Mac Low (his magnificent Presidents of the United States of America, among other alphabetic works), or the letter-based collages of Wallace Berman. Her self-effacing & precise “Biographical Note” from her notes to The Choice is clearly worth reprinting here; viz: I am truly a non-person. I have been mistaken for the janitor’s wife, a nurse for dogs, an aunt, a good witch, a poet, a distinguished (dead) actress, a mother. I suffer from the spiteful machinations of my grand piano. I am compelled to continue a needlepoint rug the size of a ballroom by the lust of the eye of the needle for friction with wool. Strangers tell me the most intimate story of their lives and drunken Ukrainians propose marriage to me on the subway on Friday afternoons. I am old and ugly. I was born old but interested. Water loves me. I have been married to it for more than half a century. I know the language of fish and birds. Also squirrels and toads. I am a convert to Orthodox Jewry, also I have tried riding a broomstick. I had a vision of the double Shekhina on Amsterdam Avenue and 110th Street. I have taught cooking and sewing to beautiful Cantonese girls and the affectionate daughters of Mafiosi. I am married to an irascible but loving artist. A nay-sayer. My parents drove each other crazy. Me too. Which turned me to books and poetry and I thank them for it.

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[Authors Note: The poems in this suite (cor)respond to a group of ancient Akkadian exorcism incantations, several of which I first discovered in the form of Jewish-Aramaic adaptations in the Babylonian Talmud. I read the radical hybridity of the Talmudic discourse here as both precedent for, & invitation to, my own contemporary translinguistic praxis, one which engages writing as a mode of perpetual displacement—translating languages in wide spirals out-ward, to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide—while gleaning materials for poetics from even the most minute residues left behind. I’ve begun, in these terms, to compose & transpose from homophonic transliterations, as well as Aramaic & Hebrew translations, of the Akkadian spells, stitching together poems from the translingual dregs between the gaps of the adapted texts.

The phrase, “Lick and Spit”, I take from the Ashkenazi-Jewish folkloric expectoration ritual of licking a person’s forehead three times, spitting between each lick—a physical gesture I associate most closely with the act of sucking venom from a snake bite—in order to excise the “evil eye” from the body. I continue here then my ongoing inquiry into the tense & intensive micro-socio-poetic ritual relations between translingual utterance, psycholinguistic stigma & the pre-literary Jewish curse. –A.R.]

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[Anne Blonstein died much too soon on April 19, 2011. She had by then created a remarkable series of works in which she employed and transformed traditional numerological and hermeneutic procedures (gematria, notarikon) in the composition of radically new experimental poems. Too little known, her oeuvre, as I would read it, is in a line that goes from Abulafia to Mallarmé and Mac Low and various poets of Oulipo and Fluxus, among others, while the devotion and precision that she shows throughout is clearly and powerfully her own. The following, published before her death and reprinted here from Salt Magazine, issue 2, is available at http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/02/text/Blonstein_Anne.htm, along with five of her poems. A previous posting on Poems and Poeticsincluded her short essay “On Notarikon."There also now exists an Anne Blonstein Association in Münsingen, Switzerland, aimed at keeping her work alive. (J.R.)]

SEVEN POEMS BY ANNE BLONSTEIN

1.

Jewess undresses
........noun garments
...............fall
...............round an uncircumscribed parenthesis

...............the room assumes exile
...until mouths
— eyestormed nightboats —
..........drop
....clamour

2.

...................Dance
........eyes
............referrance

Keeping ontological masks
if
kaleidoscoping epistemological rhythms

3.

.....Pandora encounters ruth
seeding enchancements
under stones.

.....................(Danced exilically rosed

...............Words infiltrate the zonedself

her and this

.........unlessened each becoming
each recombines

dreams ash sentences

....Limited expressions incorporate
.................damage

gifted exspellent soritude
.......i exones
.....gene terminations.)

4.

................Water excels in bonding

..........until.

...................Thirst intimately excells responsability

5.

Kissing odontological margins
i've
keeps epidermally resonating

6.

.....Destruction
..................ruins
.........or how ends never delete
...earth's semiosis

............Her
aspirates
.........unopened palatial
.torns

7.

...Democrat anarchist situationist

...........Keyworker or notepadder
.......zeitmassed experiments
.............redeme
.......tradition

......dancer
........eat
....................rest

...Pariahs and refugees
.tune ectopolitical instruments
.......echodislocate
..............now

(Lead is both
exhausted radioactivity
and lettoral insulator
softly mysnomering)

* * * * * * *

AB Notes by Charles Lock

From Salt Magazine, issue 2

Anne Blonstein’s poetry has developed a deep and integral sense of encryption, which may be to say that, in her work, poetry extends its propensity to code, its hospitality to the cryptic. All poetry is coded, in the sense that it observes conventions, of metre or rhyme or whatever. To read poetry one must come to terms with those codes; the reader is prepared to negotiate language that is true not to what a speaker wishes to say, but is true to the codes of its writing. Experienced readers of poetry look for complexities and refinements of the code. In what we know as avant-garde or experimental verse (since Mallarmé and Pound), those codes have shifted markedly from the phonetic to the graphic. Typographical possibilities now extend beyond the shape of the stanza; Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) may be the earliest poem to use a typewriter’s double space within a line of printed verse. Modern poetry, its development of free verse and open forms, has given shape to print, and has made a significant space of the page, most obviously in what we know as concrete poetry.

Graphic experimentation puts the emphasis on space; by contrast, phonetic experimentation, such as we find throughout the history of poetry, not least in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has designs on time. Rhythmical variation in Tennyson, consonant clusters in Browning, the sprung rhythm of Hopkins, the lexical isolates of Hardy, all use the codes of metre, including the conventional pauses at line-endings and middles, to disrupt expectation and to force the reader to renegotiate the ratio between language and time. Pound and Eliot remain primarily concerned with phonetic effects, that is to say with designs on time, not least on the reader’s time, and sense of timing. Poetry that foregrounds graphic experimentation solicits the eye to take cognizance of shape, of visual patterns. In doing so, time is suspended, or deemed irrelevant: there is no chronic measure by which to order the experience of a painting or a sculpture. In Anne Blonstein’s use of notariqon, notably in “worked on screen” (Salzburg 2005), the reader must pick up the initial letter of each word in order to compose a new word or ‘hypogram’. Such spatially distributed words keep the eye busy, but they leave the ear somewhat frustrated.

A challenge for the contemporary poet is to reconcile space and time, to realize the compounded or compacted power of words both spoken and written, whether arranged in sequence for the voice or disposed as pattern for the eye. This is, of course, no merely poetic challenge, nor is it a whimsical indulgence. Our sense of time has been largely constituted by the rhythms of spoken language, as our sense of space is given by the activity of reading, whether what’s read be a situation or a page. There is nothing fanciful or obsolete in Shelley’s claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators; the less acknowledged they have become in modernity, the more powerful their legislation.

The poems in this issue of Salt are from “and my smile will be yellow”, a sequence of 66 poems written through the Hebrew year 5766 (spanning October 2005 to September 2006 in the Gregorian calendar). There is one book in the Hebrew scriptures that has just sixty-six chapters and each of the sixty-six poems in Blonstein’s sequence is thus coordinated with one of the chapters of Isaiah. Each poem encrypts time, not rhythmically but calendrically. The number of lines in the second section (stanza, verse paragraph) varies from one to twelve, and discloses the month of the Hebrew calendar. The number of words in the poem’s title indicates the day of the week, running from Sunday the first day to Saturday the seventh. The number of words in italic in the entire poem is not the day of the month, though it gives us a clue.

What has all this to do with poetry? There is nothing Kabbalistic or hermetic in Anne Blonstein’s practice: there is no idea of a secret message being buried deep within these poems, to be extracted only by the most determined reader. Encryption to serious purpose masks itself behind or within the banal. Here is nothing banal. This poetry celebrates the joy and inventiveness of encryption for its own sake. The aesthetic aspects of encryption have a value quite apart from any message or information that might be therein encoded. What matters is the life that a cryptic device methodically applied gives to words: ‘lying on an acquired bed of latin'. Naive readers, those who are resistant to poetry, will always protest that if something needs to be said, it can and ought to be said plainly. Those who enjoy poetry are in on the open secret: that in a poem, any poem, it is the code, not the message, that matters. The art of poetry, the trajectory of its newnesses and renewings, is to be plotted along the line of shifting and sophisticating codes and encryptions. The only ‘real’ secret embedded in these poems is the date of each one’s composition. Hardly a state secret; yet it is a trade secret, or a craft secret: in the history of poetry there has never to our knowledge been a sequence of poems each of which embodies the date of its own making.

Thus these poems, spaced and shaped in ways that are hardly amenable to fluent articulation, yet conceal a temporal aspect. And it is a temporality that searches far beyond the poetic line. Language in its graphic emphasis makes for words embedded and embodied, not to be dissolved in the ephemera of voicing. Anne Blonstein’s sequence suggests that if the embodiment of words is not to be a slack and vapid figure, words (and phrases, and poems) must be reckoned within time, as organisms that come into being on particular dates. A poetic sequence is a conventional term, slightly technical; however, now that computing and genetics have made of the root a verb and a gerund — sequencing — we are brought to realize how close, how all but inseparable, might be the cultural and the natural, the physical and the mental, the organic and the inorganic, the word and the thing. These constitutive distinctions of all western thinking are rendered vulnerable by what we are learning about our selves. And when we think of DNA and genetic sequencing, we will also attend phrasally to the encryption of genetic information. Such information includes the marking of time; and of course every transaction on the internet is chronically encrypted. Anne Blonstein’s poetry, of sequence and encryption, offers us a model of how we are.

[Charles Lockwas educated at Oxford, and received his D.Phil. for a dissertation on John Cowper Powys; he is the editor of the Powys Journal. After teaching for many years at the University of Toronto he was appointed in 1996 as Professor English Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on contemporary poetry (Geoffrey Hill, Les Murray, Derek Walcott, Roy Fisher, Tabish Khair) as well as in literary theory (Bakhtin, Jakobson) and on texts ranging from The Cloud of Unknowing to Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. For the past twenty years he has been studying and admiring the work of Anne Blonstein.]

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Mind-degradable Manifesto

I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to issue a manifesto like in the good old days, but any such assertion nowadays always seems to splinter into its ambiguities, leaving the motivating impulse unmanifest. The burden of poetic process is how easily it spoils even the finest dogma. However, if one located a principle that exists outside as well as inside art, stating it would not be a manifesto but a poignant observation.

Heroes of Mind-degradability

We’ve lost so many of the greatest (re)thinkers of poetic possibility in recent years that it’s important to keep reading out from their gifts and to rethink our own work in relation to them. Powerful among these are certain poets whose work literary critics and historians once doubted was poetry at all (deniers remain)—a distinction not in itself limiting, as there are ample instances past and present: Blake’s Miltonand Jerusalem had virtually no readers in his time. David Antin and Jackson Mac Low are especially on my mind here, along with Franz Kamin, the latter by far the least known of the three. Their work was not based on literary models but an exploration of principles that required a radical revisioning of language. Some of these principles are hardly limited to language art, narrowly defined.

It’s a curious moment to be thinking about these matters as we awake daily to find out what major mischief our country is falling into now. It takes a special effort of mind to keep a focus—a double vision really—that both recognizes a terrifying process underway and nevertheless stays tuned to an other vision of possible being. Yet we return to this and related sites for what goes by the vexed name poetry—a name in dispute from many sides and within itself, ranging from accusation to Mental Warfare, Blake’s term for the crucial alternative to Corporeal Warfare. Which of these represents the recurrent and newly resurgent Poetry Wars?

Poetry has always excited antithetical passions, which pretty clearly attests to its fundamental power, however little it figures in the consciousness of our society at large. There’s the ever present question, which heats up at times like this, of how poetry can have an effective social role or “be relevant,” and the discussion reflected recently in social media shows that many think the issue can be resolved by leaving behind one kind of poetry, say, Conceptual writing, and embracing another, like a species of socially engaged writing. Often poets still seem to believe in these abstract distinctions as what matters, that a particular group or movement will make the difference, or that one approach or theory will win the debate. There’s no escaping ideology and there’s no denying the charge it carries. Yet when we look at powerful work it’s not so easy to characterize its genre or social position; it might have taken the charged issues into its language body and done something outside the categories we use in order to think.

I’ve written about Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) on this site before in conjunction with John Cage, but I want to think of him now in the context of a poetry of principle. We call him not only poet but composer, performance artist, playwright, and in addition to the usual string of identifiers we could add political activist, anarchist, experimentalist, artist, and more. It’s hard not to use these abstract framing terms in our zeal to represent intricate identity in so radical and influential a practitioner, but he deserves better: we need to read him beyond what we already know. His work is hard to encompass in categorial description because he was always working on the outside of definition, even his own. Despite what some may think encountering his work, or the poet’s often elaborate notational commentary, it was not the product of concepts, rules and theory as such; he used strict procedures to work through and test out theories and concepts connected to philosophical issues that excited, preoccupied and perplexed him, and he oriented them toward opportunities for unrepeatable solo and group performance, which emphasized refined listening. His body of work is huge and, true to the person, full of contradictory extremes with contrasting dynamics—e.g., the systematic chance operations of Stanzas to Iris Lezak vis-à-vis what at the time was an almost alarming intimacy in Odes to Iris; performance “vocabularies” and processual thinking in the Light Poems, etc. At the center of all this was a writing practice serving as full-scale pervasive life practice. It was driven by a commitment akin to religious devotion yet without dogma or even belief; in fact, it was simultaneously meditative, mantric, proto-Buddhist, fiercely skeptical, politically activist, philosophical at root, and intimately personal. He’s viewed as a forerunner of/influence on Language poetry (a term he respectfully argued with) as well as Conceptual writing, included in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing,an invaluable and historically revisionist collection edited by Craig Dworkin& Kenneth Goldsmith (2011). You could say Mac Low contained multitudes including the poetry wars in his own body electric, although he was too modest and thoughtful to say a thing like that about himself. In my experience with him, he was uncontentiously responsive to the work of others beyond genre or fashion.

Other frames

At 22 in NYC I met Jackson at the same time as David Antin (along with Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, Diane di Prima, Diane Wakoski, Armand Schwerner, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, et al.) at Café Le Métro on 2^nd Ave. where as a senior at NYU editing the student magazine Apprentice (begun by Blackburn years before) I would go most weeks to the readings. They fascinated and tormented me. At 14 in Miami, Florida I had suddenly realized I was a poet the moment I heard the mysterious and to me incomprehensible words, read aloud by a friend late one night, “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past…,” and years later I was still carrying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens in my back pocket; so I kept returning to Le Métro to find out why this also was poetry. It hit home one day that its not seeming to be poetry was one of its actual powers.

Jackson had set up a reading in which there was no apparent reader, as readers were spread out through the ample audience and uttering fragmentary phrases in no discernable pattern; it was eerie to me as I’d never conceived of such a thing. But not only to me. A cop came in to inspect the place under orders from “City Hall” to crack down on cafés as violators of the cabaret law, which required an expensive license (out of range to coffee-serving establishments patronized by indigent poets, some even sneaking in whiskey). I was standing in the back, all seats already occupied, and happened to see the cop, obviously confused and nervous amidst sourceless voices in unaccountably reverent quiet, go up to Moe, the proprietor, and say, “I’m issuing you a citation!” “For what?” countered Moe. “I don’t know but it ain’t right!”

Jackson wasn’t the only enigma; David and others read texts that I found perplexing as well. After all, I was spending the rest of my week reading the Metaphysical poets, Chaucer, Beowulf, and the like. The turn came one day as I was walking along Waverly Place and it suddenly hit me with startling force that I could no longer deny that Jackson Mac Low and David Antin et. al. had changed everything for me. Like that day in Le Métro, the chair where the poet sits was empty but new sounds were everywhere. I was at a loss to say what it all meant but it no longer mattered.

My story is not particularly remarkable except as an instance of the way poetry can be powerful in a certain frame, which is to say not only in the grand categories of understanding and influence but in discretely important ways to oneself at a given time and place. Beyond the “personal” but not beyond the experiential. Poetry at different points has reoriented my sense of myself and what it means to have a life work centered in questionable language. Poetry may be a life accident waiting to happen and poets are probably born and made, trapped and liberated by the prison-house/stormed-Bastille of language, and subject to unanalyzed psychonautic insight. Whatever its possible social function it could never not be the site where being sees what it is, or as Stevens wrote, “The poem of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice….”

What sort of mind-action is the poem and what are the implications?

The strong devotion many of us still feel to Jackson Mac Low is due in part to an experience of his readings and performances, which bespoke a path in poetry but also a way of being grounded in listening. After performing with him or being present in a performance we heard language differently, as materially different as going from New York’s air to the Yucatan’s where you breathe the ocean at one moment and a Mayan ruin at another. To listen was to be instructed. Jackson’s reading did not strive for stylistic effect or attempt to persuade or impress but to realize actual qualities of voiced language that require “the body itself—one’s own ‘corpus’,” as Charles Olson said in Proprioception, “the cavity of the body.” The principle that drives this level of realization is hard to characterize but it has to do with an actual power of the poetic that recreates the reader/listener—creates not by way of a literary persona but an impersona, a new and possible receptive intelligence inside one’s own body and mind. You could describe it as momentarily getting free of one’s own identity just by being fully present there in the performative language sounding in space.

Early on Mac Low had the issue of getting beyond ego or the limitations of self, which had a Buddhist and anarchist resonance, and it motivated the procedural work with systematic chance operations. But he noticed that the self did not change much, let alone disappear. In my view he accomplished what is most important in that concern, namely, that by realizing an intention of the work to be itself transformatively, the issue of self faded away or, rather, woke to a species of non-duality by which self and non-self, poem and world, language and mind are experienced as inseparable. His performance work as well as his textual realizations took the powerful lessons of the procedural work into his greatest reinvention of writing. I first became aware of this development in Bloomsday, which we published at Station Hill Press in 1984, but it continued in a number of works after that and found its fullest realization in Forties, which Franz Kamin alerted me to as the “greatest Mac Low”; the first book was 20 Forties (Zasterle, 1999) and the final magnificent full edition edited by Anne Tardos, 154Forties (Copunterpath, 2012). What was so startling and for me re-orienting was that the procedural work had transmuted into an unheard of species of processual, intuitive, spontaneous textual performativity. Jackson’s “language mind” now fully embodied the long-evolving experience of his work. This helped me conceive what I was understanding as principle—especially an axial principle of radical centering within language and the voice. It’s self-organizing with a free-moving zero point, and “self” discovers self-variance in response to the surround.

[Reposted from the full essay, which can be found at the Harrietweb site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/04/poetry-in-principle/.]

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AGAINST

I try to recall rain or crying. The obstacle of things that don’t want to go down the path of innocent desperation. Tonight I want to be made of water, want you to be made of water, want things to slip away like smoke, imitating it, showing the final signs—gray, cold. Words in my throat. Stamps that can’t be swallowed. Words aren’t drinks for the wind, it’s a lie what they say, that words are dust—I wish they were—then I wouldn’t now be saying the prayers of an incipient madwoman dreaming of sudden disappearances, migrations, invisibilities. The taste of words, that taste of old semen, of an old womb, of lost bone, of an animal wet with black water (love forces me to make the most hideous faces before the mirror). I don’t suffer, I’m only expressing my disgust for the language of tenderness, those purple threads, that watered-down blood. Things hide nothing, things are things, and if someone comes up to me now and tells me to call a spade a spade I’ll start to howl and beat my head against every deaf, miserable wall in the world. The tangible world, prostituted machines, an exploited world. And the dogs insulting me with their proffered fur, slowly licking and leaving their saliva in the trees that drive me mad. [1961]

DESCRIPTION

Falling until you touch the absolute bottom, desolate, made of an ancient silencing and figures that keep saying something referring to me, I can’t understand what, I never understand, no one could.

These figures—drawn by me on a wall—instead of displaying the motionless beauty that was once their prerogative now sing and dance since they’ve decided to change their nature (if nature exists, if change, if decision...).

This is why my nights are filled with voices coming from my bones, and also—and this is what makes it hurt—visions of words that are writtenyet still move, fight, dance, spurt blood, and then I see them hobbling around with crutches, in rags, cut from the miracles of a through z, alphabet of misery, alphabet of cruelty. The one who should have sung arcs through silence while it whispers in her fingers, murmurs in her heart, in her skin a ceaseless moan...

(You have to know this place of metamorphosis to understand why it hurts in such a complicated way.)

[1965]

DISTRUST

Mama told us of a white forest in Russia: “... and we made little men out of snow and put hats we stole from great-grandfather on their heads ...”

I eyed her with distrust. What was snow? Why did they make little men? And above all, what’s a great-grandfather?

[1964]

A MYSTICAL BETRAYAL

Behold the idiot who received letters from the outside.

—Paul Éluard

I’m talking about a betrayal. I’m talking about a mystical deception, about passion and unreality and the reality of mortuaries, about bodies in shrouds and wedding portraits.

Nothing proves they didn’t stick needles in my image. It’s almost strange I didn’t send them my photo along with needles and an instruction manual. How did this story begin? That’s what I want to investigate, but in my own voice and with no poetic design. Not poetry but policy.

Like a mother that doesn’t want to let go of the child that’s already been born—that’s how its silent takeover is. I throw myself into its silence, drunk with magic premonitions of uniting with silence.

I remember. A night of screams. I rose up and there was no possibility of going back; I rose higher and higher, not knowing if I’d arrive at a point of fusion or stay with my head nailed to a post for the rest of my life. It was like drinking waves of silence, my lips moved like they were underwater, I was drowning, it was as if I were drinking silence. Inside me were myself and silence. That night I threw myself from the highest tower. And when we were at the top of the wave, I knew that this was mine, and even what I’ve looked for in poems, in paintings, in music, a being that was brought to the top of the wave. I don’t know how I gave myself over, but it was like a great poem: it couldn’t not be written. And why didn’t I stay there and why didn’t I die? It was a dream of the highest death, the dream of dying while making the poem in a ceremonial space where words like love, poetry, and freedom were actions in living flesh.

This is what her silence intends.

It creates a silence in which I recognize my resting place when the litmus test of her affection must have been to keep me far from silence, to bar my access to this region of exterminating silence.

I understand, understanding is useless, no one has ever been helped by understanding, and I know that now I have to go back to the root of that silent fascination, this gulf that opens for me to enter, me the holocaust, me the sacrificial lamb. Her person is less than a ghost, than a name, than emptiness. Someone drinks me from the other side, someone sucks me dry and discards me. I’m dying because someone created a silence for me.

It was a masterful job, a rhetorical infiltration, a slow invasion (the tribe of pure words, hordes of winged discourse). I’m going to try to extricate myself, but not in silence, for silence is a dangerous place. I must write a lot, capture expressions so that little by little her silence will grow quieter and then her person will fade away, that person I don’t want to love, it has nothing to do with love but rather with unimaginable and therefore unspeakable fascination (getting closer to the harsh, to the soft fog of her distant person, but the knife sinks in, it tears, and a circular space made from the silence of your poem, the poem you’ll write afterwards, in place of the slaughter). It’s nothing more than a silence, but this need for real enemies and mental lovers—how did she know that from my letters? A masterful job.

Now my nervous she-wolf footsteps around the circle of light where they slip the correspondence. Her letters create a second silence even denser than that of her eyes from the window of her house facing the port. The second silence of her letters gives rise to a third silence made of the absence of letters. There’s also the silence that oscillates between the second and third: encrypted letters in which she speaks in order not to speak. The entire range of silences while from the other side they drink the blood I feel myself lose on this one.

Nevertheless, if this vampiric correspondence didn’t exist, I’d die from the lack of such a correspondence. Someone loved me in another life, in no life, in all lives. Someone to love from my place of reminiscence, to offer myself up for, to sacrifice myself to as if with that I could provide a fair return or restore the cosmic order.

Her silence is a womb, it is death. One night I dreamt of a letter covered in blood and feces; it was in a wasteland and the letter moaned like a cat. No. I’m going to break the spell. I’m going to write like a child cries, that is: it doesn’t cry because it’s sad; rather, it cries to inform, peacefully.

[Published in La Gaceta de Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, February 22, 1970.]

[COMMENTARY. Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was born to Russian Jewish parents in an immigrant district of Buenos Aires. During her short life, spent mostly between Buenos Aires and Paris, Pizarnik produced an astonishingly powerful body of work, including poetry, tales, paintings, drawings, translations, essays, and drama. From a young age, she discovered a deep affinity with writers and artists who, as she would later comment, sacrificed everything in order to “annul the distance society imposes between poetry and life.” She was particularly drawn to “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” and, perhaps most importantly, the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering” (“The Incarnate Word,” 1965).

Like Artaud, Pizarnik understood writing as an absolute demand, offering no concessions, forging its own terms, and requiring that life be lived entirely in its service. “Like every profoundly subversive act,” she wrote, “poetry avoids everything but its own freedom and its own truth.” In all of Pizarnik’s writing, this radical sense of “freedom” and “truth” emerges through a total engagement with her central themes: silence, estrangement, childhood, and—most prominently—death. An orphan girl’s love for her little blue doll pumps death gas through the heart of her avatar. The garden of forgotten myth is a dagger that rends the flesh. A grave opens its arms at dawn in the fusion of sea and sky. Every intimate word spoken feeds the void it burns to escape. Pizarnik’s writing exists on the knife’s edge between intolerable, desolate cruelty and an equally intolerable human tenderness. As she remarks of Erzébet Báthory in “The Bloody Countess:” “the absolute freedom of the human is horrible.” And the writer’s task, she added in a late interview with Martha Isabel Moia, is “to “rescue the abomination of human misery by embodying it.”]

N.B. Additional poems by Alejandra Pizarnik appeared hereon Poems and Poetics, and her important essay on Antonin Artaud appeared here.

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[In preparation for the final publication Summer-Autumn 2017]

PRE-FACE (2017)

Something happened to me, now a full half century in the past, that has shaped my ambition for poetry up until the very present. Not to focus too much on myself, it was a discovery shared with others around me, of the multiple hidden sources & the multiple presences of poetry both far & near. I don’t remember clearly where – or when – it started, but once it got under my skin – our skin, I mean to say – that which we could hope to know as poetry drew in whole worlds we hadn’t previously imagined. Nothing was too low – or high – to be considered, but the imagining mind & voice, once the doors of perception were opened or cleansed, were everywhere we looked.

This also tied in to the search to create new forms of writing & thinking & to bring to light experiences & actions heretofore closed to us: a move that began with an earlier avant-garde & that we now repossessed/reclaimed as our own. A result of that – from the beginning, I thought – was an expansion of what we could now recognize as poetry, for which our inherited definitions had proven to be inadequate. In that sense that which was traditional in other parts of the world or buried & outcast in our own came across as new & unforeseen when placed within our own still too narrow framework. For myself, the discoveries, once I opened up to them, proved as rich in possibilities as what we & our predecessors had been creating for our own place & time. That so much of this came from an imagined “outside” or from long outcast & subterranean, often brutally repressed traditions was evident even before we named them as such.

Why did it happen then? Why in the 1950s & 1960s when I was first coming into poetry? The old explorers, the avant-gardists from the first half of the twentieth century who had gotten some of this rolling, had paused or retreated during the war (the second “world war” in the lifetime of some then among us), which in turn had changed everything around us. The early cold war that followed drove things/thoughts underground for some, while for others it brought the reassertion of a more conventional literary/poetic past. (That last was good, by the way, as a prod for actual resistance.) In the underground & at the margins, then, a new resistance was born in which the rigid past was again wiped clean & the new allowed to flourish. (Not the newness of novelty & fashion, as we saw it, but a newness that could change the mind & in so doing change the world – something shared with other arts & ways of thought & mind.) And with that came a kind of permission to remake the order of things & the changes began to come in helter-skelter; & as they did they changed the idea of what poetry was or could be in all times & places. For myself—early along—I turned to “reinterpreting the poetic past from the point of view of the present” – words I used in a manifesto I wrote in those heady times when so many of us were writing manifestos.

With this as my impulse I began to scour areas that had been closed to us as poetry – hidden, outsided & subterranean – to discover what was clearly poetry but also forms of languaging that had never been within poetry’s domain. The first area I approached was what had for too long been labeled as “primitive” & “archaic” & that surfaced, when it did, (the “primitive” in particular) in specialized books that took up space in libraries & book stores (but also in academic curricula) outside of poetry or literature as such. My own discoveries, once they started, came in lightning-quick succession, & as they did, they brought to light works in no sense inferior to what we sought or created as poetry in our own time & finally in no sense inferior to what had been delivered as the poetry & poetics of the normative “canonical” past. Furthermore they provided rich new contexts for poetry – not as literature per se but as a means, both public & private, for experiencing & comprehending the world, by which the visions of the individual (along with their translation into language) were at the same time what Mallarmé had called “the words of the tribe” (& Ezra Pound “the tale of the tribe”), words whose purification Mallarmé saw as the poet’s principal task. That the poems in question were largely oral – free of writing in the narrow sense – made them all the more intriguing & played into the draw we felt in our own work toward a new poetics of performance. (That the “tribe” in this sense was the human in all times & places is another point worth making.)

For this I found the anthology a nearly unexplored/undeveloped vehicle, one too in which I was given unchecked control during the heady days of the late 1960s, so that I could handle it as I would a large assemblage or a grand collage of words & images. That was what came to me anyway as I assembled Technicians, the idea of a book that worked through a series of juxtapositions & with a free hand that was given me to include whatever I thought needed including. And I found myself free as well to create a structure for the book & to include an extensive section of commentaries that could both point to the original/aboriginal contexts & to the relevance & resemblance of those poems or near-poems (Dick Higgins’ term) to contemporary works of poetry & art, but particularly to newly emerging experimental or avant-garde writing. It was that approach to the works at hand that allowed me to find poetry (or what I came to call poesis or poetic word & mind) in acts of language that had rarely been recognized as such. I was also able to drop the notion of the “primitive” as a kind of simplistic or undeveloped state of mind & word, & to begin the pre-face to the book with a three-word opening I can still adhere to: “Primitive means complex.”

In the original edition of Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, & again in the expanded 1985 edition, the three opening sections end with one titled “Death & Defeat,” which I’ve come to think of as a marker of the tragic if secondary dimension of the original work. The final poem in that section, however, was a small prophetic song from the Plains Indian Ghost Dance”:

We shall live again.

In the years since then, along with the continued decimation of many poetries & languages, there has been a welcome resurgence in others of what was thought to have been irrevocably lost. This has taken place both in indigenous languages (sometimes called “endangered” or “stateless”) & in the languages of conquest – in written & experimental forms as well as in continuing oral traditions, & as often as not showing both a continuity & transformation of the “deep cultures” from which the new poetry emerged. It is with this in mind that the old Ghost Dance song becomes a harbinger for me of what can now be said & represented.

My own experience here has been largely with the new indigenous poetries of the Americas, both north & south, but in the course of time I have also begun to explore similar outcroppings across a still greater range of continents & cultures. The new indigenous poets with whom I’ve had direct contact in mutual performance & correspondence write & perform in languages such as Nahuatl, Mazatec, Tzotzil, Zapotec, & Mapuche, among those in the Americas, while I can also draw on others (both poets & translators) in Africa, Asia, & Oceania, to maintain the global balance that characterized the earlier Technicians. I have also chosen to represent pidgins & creoles, as well as poetry written in languages like English & Spanish but tied in formal & semantic ways to the deep cultures from which they emerge.

In all of this it seems clear to me that when I speak here of “survivals and revivals” the reference isn’t to a static past but to works that are open both to continuity, however measured, & to necessary transformation. It is good to remember in that sense that change – of form & vision both – has been at the heart of the older poetries gathered here as well as of our own. As Charles Olson wrote, now some time ago: “What does not change is the will to change,” and it is in that spirit that revival appears here as renewal: to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound once had it, & the Emperor Taizong T’ang some thirteen centuries before him, & so cited. In the paradise of poets, to which I’ve alluded elsewhere, the old & the new are always changing places.

. . . . . . .

A Final Note. In the world as we have it today many of the indigenous & tribal/oral cultures foregrounded in Technicians of the Sacred are again under threat of disruption & annihilation. If the older colonialisms are less apparent than in the past, new forces unforeseen thirty years ago, both ethnic & religious, are threatening to wipe out vestiges of the alternate traditions & to eliminate those who remain their inheritors. In the process the deeper human past has also come under attack, rekindling memories of previous iconoclasms – the smashing of statues & the burning of books brought into a present in which the fear of difference & of change now reasserts itself. At the same time, & much closer to home, we have witnessed an upsurge of new nationalisms & racisms, directed most often against the diversity of mind & spirit of which the earlier Technicians was so clearly a part. To confront this implicit, sometimes rampant ethnic cleansing, even genocide, there is the need for a kind of omnipoeticsthat tests the range of our threatened humanities wherever found & looks toward an ever greater assemblage of words & thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide & diminish us. That the will to survive arises also among those most directly threatened – as a final & necessary declaration of autonomy and interdependence – is yet another fact worth noting.

Jerome Rothenberg Encinitas, California

May Day 2017

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[No longer readily available, this section of A Seneca Journal was an early attempt of mine toward a poetry of minimal means – observations & off-the-cuff translations during my first viewing of the Seneca Indian Midwinter ceremonies at the Allegany Seneca reservation in western New York State. While I’ve intercalated much of A Seneca Journal in later gatherings of my poetry I was never able to provide an alternative place for these poems, though I still find them crucial to the work that was then unfolding for myself & others. At this later point in my life they present me with a kind of personal dreamtime, a little mysterious in retrospect & in no sense the true Seneca story as such, but vital to me in figuring what it means, both then & now, to be living in a state-of-poetry.]

Amanwhowasacrowwastraveling.Hedidn’tknowwherehehadcomefromorwhichwayhewasgoing.Ashemovedalonghekeptonthinking:“HowdidIcometobealive?WheredidIcomefrom?WhereamIgoing?”

THEHEADS

(1)

big

(2)

bushy

(3)

flying

STIRRINGTHEASHES

sun bear
moon buffalo

4SONGSOFTHEDAWNSOCIETY

(1)

dawn

(2)

dawn

(3)

dawn

(4)

dawn

THEBEARROBE

hadnoclaws

THE BUFFALOROBE

washeadless

MIDWINTERVISION

paddles&ashes

EVENTS

firearifle

•

touchthesun

THEBIGHEADS

husk shoes
husk belt
husk crown
bear snout

THEBIGHEADSSENDAMESSAGE:

HELLO        STAYCLEAN       DONTBE CONFUSED
DON’TSTEPONTHINGSWHENMOVING
(signed)   YOURUNCLES

THEBEAR

his paw up
to the sun

THE BUFFALO

head crowned
with flowers

BUFFALOPUDDING

like the mud
he stamps in

BEARDANCE

snort
snort
berries

BUFFALO DANCE

sniff
sniff
mush

THESYMBOL

pine branch
on men's room wall
above
the thermostat

•

pine branch
on mask

THEFACES(1)

blew ashes
thru my hair

THEFACES(2)

whose big mask
cools it down

THE FACES (3)

with hanging little balls of medicine

THEFACES(4)

had gambled for
the earth

FALSE FACES

& phony smiles

THE SIGNATURES (1)

pounders for corn

paddles for soup

THE INSTRUMENTS (2)

water

drums

horn

rattles

FIRE EVENTS

put out an old fire

•

kindle a new fire

•

do a war dance in the name of peace

(interlude)

speaking to Ham
was flicking my ashes into
Leslie Bowen's
soup pail

SIGNATURES(1)

theirnamesonapaddle

SIGNATURES(2)

EmoryJacobsDoubleFlower

SIGNATURES (3)

18–

SYMMETRICALPOEM

shakingthepumpkin

•

shakingthebush

•

shakingthejug

POUNDINGTHEWOODENFLOOR

WITHBROOMSTICKS

THEWOMEN SANGSIXSONGS

going walking

in the middle of the room a garden

I was alone

we all came back

& sat here

MIDWINTERMEMORY

GreenCorn

SONG

****************************

*I*love*my************world*

****************************

*I*love*my*************time*

****************************

*I*love*my*growing*children*

****************************

*I*love*my*******old*people*

****************************

*I*love*my*******ceremonies*

****************************

PRAYEREVENT

dancing

OBSOLETEQUESTIONS

who’s got anolddream?

•

who’sgotanewdream?

•

who’sgot a whitedog?

DREAMEVENT(1)

Seesomethinginadream&tellitasariddle.

Letsomeoneguesstheriddle, lethimgivetheobjectasagift.

DREAMEVENT(2)

Actoutadream.

Leteverybody’sbrainsturnupsidedown.

THEPUMPKIN

hasalakeinsideit

THEBEADS

seen in my eyes withmanycolors

* dream-guessing riddles

MIDWINTER

whenIcough

THEANCESTORS

Handsome
Lake

•

Happy Hoolihan

CONCLUSION

itwasallIcoulddo

•

itwasallIhadlearned

•

it wasallthat therewas

[N.B. A special boxed edition of Seneca Journal: Midwinter, “with objects & collages by the author & Philip Sultz,” was published by Singing Bone Press, St. Louis, in 1975. The cover of that edition appears above.]

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[Heriberto Yépez is a well-known Mexican poet, novelist, translator and essayist, whose writing has been gaining recognition on both sides of the north-south divide. Working from a home base in Tijuana, B.C., he is the author of numerous books in Spanish, and some of his pieces in English have appeared in American magazines like Tripwire, Shark, XCP, and Chain, along with a controversial critique of Charles Olson, The Empire of Neomemory, in both English & Spanish. The essay that follows was written shortly after the appearance of María Sabina: Selections in the short-lived Poets for the Millennium series (University of California Press) and was first published by me in Ubuweb Ethnopoetics (on line). Its republication here brings it into the orbit of Poems and Poetics, where it can be read in conjunction, say, with Henry Munn’s “The Uniqueness of María Sabina” and related writings. Over the last several years Yépez & I have been planning a Technicians-sized anthology of “the poetry of the Americas” (both north & south and in multiple languages) in which María Sabina would surely be a crucial player. (J.R.)]

1

Back in 2003 the UC Press released María Sabina: Selections (2003), edited by Jerome Rothenberg. I have been a reader of the Sabina world for some time now, but after getting to know this new volume – the best single compilation on her world that I know of – I immediately wonder what other interpretations of her work could appear in Mexico or the U.S. This volume is a gathering of points of view that invites us to start a re-reading of her practice. I take books as provocations, and I think this book should be read that way.

The book includes a very insightful essay by Henry Munn, which gives some hints into some of the cultural meanings of the artifacts enlisted by Sabina in her chants. I think Munn’s piece is the decisive one, apart from the "The Life" which occupies pages 3-79 of the book.

There are also pieces by Anne Waldman (a revision of her essay included before in Fast Speaking Woman), texts by Álvaro Estrada, Pavlovna/Wasson, Rothenberg, Gregorio Regino and an account of the last days of Sabina written by Homero Aridjis (which, btw, I co-translated into English for this assemblage).

Sabina is associated with the counter-culture poetic scenes. That’s one of the reasons why the Mexican mainstream-lit (the Mexican ‘Republics of Letters’ as O. Paz called it) hasn’t paid much attention to her: they see her as an interesting ethnographic phenomenon but not as a poet or verbal artist. And the association with the sixties atmosphere is something Mexican writers don’t want anymore –something which I think they share with contemporary American writers, and so returning to Sabina is something which is risky in terms of literary (little-)politics. Sabina = icon of hippie culture. "Indigenismo".

So I wonder what do Language and post-LangPo writers make of shamanism and María Sabina in particular? Can they create a new approach to her work and shamanism in general -- in relation to the one produced by anthropology or ethnopoetics?

2

From my side I have a few comments on current hegemonic Mexican ideas on Sabina, which, I think, derive mainly by whom else but dear Mr. Paz.

In his piece in María Sabina: Selections, Álvaro Estrada –Sabina’s interviewer and translator– comments on the opinion Paz gave after the Sabina oral-biography project:

"On finishing the text I polished it various times before sending it to Gordon Wasson, whom I had met in Mexico City in 1975, and to whom I had promised to send it. (Our initial meeting was in the house of Henry Munn.) Wasson then asked the Mexican poet Octavio Paz for his opinion of the manuscript. Paz expressed his appreciation for the work: he said it was a document with anthropological and human value. Notwithstanding, he suggested that the author eliminate terms and words that didn’t seem in accord with the personality of María Sabina, both in the text and in the translation of the chants. He suggested greater simplicity in the words, and in a letter to Wasson, he said that one ought to give the literal meaning of the shaman’s words without it mattering whether the reader understood them or not".

Is it a coincidence Paz didn’t mention anything about the literary / poetic value of her work, and only mentions her "anthropological" and "human" value? I don’t think so.

I think Paz was denying Sabina’s poetic stature, because he saw her as a sorcerer (in an essay on Breton he describes her as an "hechicera") and just a traditional healer, and not as a verbal artist as well. I think Paz thought Sabina’s poetry lacked the signs of "modernity" or structural complexity. He didn’t look carefully.

Paz's suggestions on eliminating terms and words could be a sign of that. If he saw Sabina as simply a traditional healer, his ideas on her personality were certainly wrong, so his suggestions could be erasing key notions and simplifying them in both the Spanish translation and, subsequently, in the English version. But that’s something which only Estrada could know.

In case Estrada accepted those suggestions, in my opinion he made a mistake, whatever they were, simply because Paz had no real insight into Sabina’s world and wasn’t particularly sympathetic to her as a poet, which she clearly was, even though Paz wouldn’t acknowledge her as one.

Estrada himself is suggesting the firsts drafts of his translation show a more complex Sabina. So I hope one day we can see the first versions of the bio and the chants, or have a second translation of them directly from the Mazatec transcripts.
Who knew Sabina more, Estrada or Paz? I don’t think Paz knew her at all. But Paz's cultural importance could be the reason why Estrada followed his suggestions. But if Paz didn’t consider Sabina a poet and didn’t really know her how could he know what was and what wasn’t in accordance with her ‘personality’?

3

Sabina's poetic praxis consisted in a re-reading –not "improvising" (whatever that means)– of a "book": the tradition of Mazatec language. Sabina is quoting. Her chants are a reorganization and a series of personal add-ups, a rewriting of prior quotes and linguistic-patterns. Sabina’s chants are not a practice of spontaneous creation but of reappropriation.

In his key piece ("The Uniqueness of María Sabina") Henry Munn explains how Sabina inherited from her culture a repertory of themes and motifs on which she, as other shamans, based her own individual variations. We cannot forget this if we really want to understand her verbal production.

What this means is that Sabina was a wise-one not because she ate mushrooms and got into trips, but because she dominated a dynamical dictionary of meanings.
She re-produced those meanings in the ceremonies; she rewrote that dynamical dictionary throughout her life. She was trying to revolutionize the praxis. That’s why she even allowed foreigners to participate. She was trying to go beyond. She wanted to open the book. Maybe trying to open the book too much was the reason why her own book fell apart.

Understanding her praxis consisted in quoting means to reestablish the context. Understanding the recontextualization practice she made. Understanding that time was her page. Her chants are the remaking of a cultural history. She was a woman working very consciously in the field of socio-metaphysics.

When she calls herself, let’s say, "opossum-woman" she is not referring to the animal but to a string of myths. Munn (using as sources the books of Carlos Incháustegui) synthesizes how the opossum represents for Mazatecs the power to play dead and gain invulnerability, the task of stealing fire -- which is key because stealing fire creates "culture." So if at first "opossum-woman" can bring images of Sabina identifying with "nature," reading her more carefully brings us to the fact that Sabina's chants are an interweaving of artificial meanings and not an animistic exercise or "flow-of-words" or a simple litany of plants, objects and characters. From the Moon to the Water, Sabina quotes cultural artifacts. Signs-with-histories. She re-constructs the order of words, meanings, contexts, subjects, cultures and things.

When reading

I am opossum-woman

we should read

I am the interplay of nature and culture-woman.
I am the performance-of-death-woman.
I am the recasting-of-myths-woman.
I am the keeper-and-changer-of-the-meanings-of-‘opossum’-woman

Our traditional understanding of Sabina (Paz included) falls very short of what she was really doing. Words for her are a therapeutic instrument and a way to depict visions, but also a self-conscious flesh that remakes and investigates prior texts.

There’s nothing spontaneous, naïve, automatic or unconscious in María Sabina’s poetic praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting.

Sabina represents a critique on those who believe (like Paz and most mainstream poets) that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, "inspiration" or the unmediated unconscious, an ahistoric otherness, those who consider poetry is an individualistic practice by essence or solitary compromise. She challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible, of those who try to produce a voice without a context, an impossible purity.

But Sabina's is also a critique on those who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing or see the poet as a sophisticated specialist whose social role is just writing, those who act in the mere sphere of literature and who don’t break up the boundaries that separate the different domains of their own culture. "Poets’" without radical wisdom, wisdom that comes from the roots; "poets" who don’t go to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice, and poverty.

Sabina was without a doubt a poet. She was not only a poet, but more importantly poetry’s wholeness. Her activity’s goal was totality. She reached for the impossible. Searching for a book-beyond-the-book. Having a new poetic body. Breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing, and silence. Removing pain from others. Fighting for the survival of a great culture. Investigating sounds, meanings and languages. Increasing wisdom. Teaching. Being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.

Being a writer is easier.

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Translation from Spanish by Scott Ezell and the author

[editor’s note. In his new gathering, The Whipping Boy (El niño de varas), Javier Taboada fuses all his resources as a poet (investigative poetry, translations, total transcriptions, news excerpts, etc.), in the great tradition of his avant-garde & modernist predecessors, at once broadly international & markedly American (both north and south). In the process he uses the procedures of extreme collage to create a narrative, brilliant & foreboding by turns, of the modern & ancient ways-of-the-scapegoat as an instrument of political, social, & religious overreach & cruelty. His is a world, in short, in which present & past come together to stand as images of our own time & of the real dangers that we face & will continue to face as we try to move forward & evolve. (J.R.)]

1/ Pharmakós event

preparation

Choose 10 bums.

Feed them and keep them clean.

Place them at 10 points in the city.

Force them to beg for one year.

Collect the money

put it in a common treasury.

settlement

Gather the 10 in case of these calamities:

a) fire

b) drought

c) famine

d) foreign attack

e) plague

selection and dress

Select the ugliest. Name him pharmakós.

Dress him in special clothes.

Give him a backpack with cheese

bread barley and dried figs.

Wreathe his head with garlands

a headwrap or a conical cap.

Flog his testicles 7 times

with fig tree branches.

Give masks to the other 9 and undress them.

procession

The pharmakós and the 9 will set off from a public square

directly to a river

lake or stream.

no wells no ponds

If there is no water,

go to a road or train tracks.

The 9 will escort the pharmakós.

Spectators may line both sides of the path

and cast stones curse spit

or beat the pharmakós.

If they do (and as a sign of repentance)

they should scratch their faces

or rip out their hair.

The 9 may beat and intimidate the spectators

without consequence

while theprocession lasts.

final

After crossing the city:

1. If there is a water flow

the 9 will beat the pharmakós

and try to drown him

2. If there is no water flow

the 9 will beat the pharmakós

tie him to the first tree they find

and try to burn him

If the pharmakós survives

he may never return to the city

If the pharmakós survives and reaches another town

he’ll be greatly honored

and considered a god.

Give the common funds to his relatives.

Elect a new member for the following year.

2/ Pit of Bones, cranium 17

the perimortemfracture

entrance vector

or exit wound

the shape a bat

(rorschach’s fifth card)

two blows

half an inch apart

from bregma / or fontanelle each

and both

at oblique angles:

the chopper’s

chop

a beam repeated

            high-energy concentration      the first maybe
                                                lower than the second
                                                            (consider adrenaline)

an opening towards light

the thunder
and its four pebbles

the spirit dwells in the forehead
he knew it?

te cavero le budella

            he maybe said     or thought(in his tongue)
                                    looking for a glance
                                                between the curled fire

maybe he mumbled the name
            (and with it the cause of death)

maybe he rehearsed his moves

maybe he rehearsed lying down

                        his gestures
            and dreamed his tone of voice
                        his scream between each blow

maybe he considered an hour

the waning shadow

of the second sun
the old sun bending on the mountains

maybe he planned a hoax

it’s certain he was right-handed

and pre-Neanderthal cranium 17
a young individual (male or female)

whose third molar attests
to recent passage
into adulthood

and they were face to face

430 thousand years ago

"the earliest clear case of deliberate, lethal interpersonal aggression in the hominid fossil record”

maybe he
dragged the body to the pit

maybe he misjudged the weight
and had to ask for help

and maybe
maybe just that noise

            its slight delay
                                                            (what is the speed of a body
                                                                        in free fall?)
                        made him feel something akin to joy

. . . . . . .

Some Notes on the Preceding

Pharmakósevent is a reconstruction of the “scapegoat” ritual (called pharmakós, with its double meaning: illness and remedy) in ancient Greece. The old polis need of purge, lead us to a present in which a certain ethnic, religious or political group (always marginal) is thought to be a threat to the safety of the city.

Pit of Bones, cranium 17 is about the discovery of “the earliest case of lethal interpersonal violence” in the hominid fossil records. I’m trying to recreate/ elucidate the cause for that murder (its motivations, planning, corpse disposal), since there are no evident “ritual” tracks in the cranium. Maybe the murderer just wanted to get rid of someone annoying, or just different. And with that in mind, remark the deliberate nature of cruelty, violence and hate in us.

Javier Taboada (Mexico City, 1982). MA in Classics. Poet and translator. Among others, he has translated the full works of Alcaeus of Mytilene (Poemas y Fragmentos, 2010), Jerome Rothenberg’s Testigo & Milagros (A Further Witness& A Poem of Miracles, 2017), and Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and other stories (upcoming, 2018). He is the author of Apothecary Poems (Poemas de Botica, 2014) and Nacencia (2017).

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[In the order of the letters of the alphabet I am making use in these poems of a system of mental relations which by the act of writing becomes the poem, a cosmic meditation. (R.O.)].

“Cerebral Cortex”

Begin to understand

the nature of the leavening process

The letter H

catches in the throat then she steps

backwards and flings

a handful of earth beyond the edges

Of a page you hear a hollow sound

The dry external covering

of an ear of corn then stepping forwards

she scatters letters cut out from

the skull spine bones

The form of a human body

When I in my youth

in a blue wool dress I strolled

in a circle of blue

sings the poet Maudite

The cerebral cortex a sliver of brain

barely thicker than a credit card

The letter I vertical

under an occult sky once upon

a time I sat cross-legged

in the crotch of a tree

Grape wine grain bread

From roots of plants

that bear the grain in darkness

light heat cold focus on

a common scene

Chasms in the fissured earth

The story of the baker

a set of skills in sequential order

the finished loaf A to Z

in place and space

Recognize in some dozens of milliseconds

a written word

The letter J the shape

of a hook and on the hook

the butcher’s coat

wind heat cold drought

Blood and mud flows out

of the right sleeve

One animal

gut head and tail measure

body length jaws claws

diameters of holes

The zones of inclusion exclusion

Salt for the stew salt for the bread

once upon a time my mother

was sold from me when I

could but crawl

Dispatches from the frontiers

of neuroscience

The letter K stands apart

like a barley plant

in three dimensional space

the dry external covering

A snarl of fibrous hairs

Drifting in circles

wind heat cold drought

and dead white the barley plant

cut down

Deboned and buried

Then the reading brain

follows one letter after another

beyond the edges

of a page

One millionth one millionth of a second

an episode

[Earlier sections of “Solarpoetics” were published January 24, 2017 on

Poems and Poetics.]

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Commentary and translation by Betty De Shong Meador

These seven hymns are among the forty-two “Sumerian Temple Hymns” attributed to the high priestess Enheduanna, 2300 B.C.E. While some literary texts have been found in what was ancient Mesopotamia, dating from 2600 B.C.E., the texts of Enheduanna are the first by a known author. There is strong evidence that the Sumerians invented and developed the first written script in the final third of the fourth millennium B.C.E. The territory of Sumer encompassed the southern half of present-day Iraq.

Enheduanna was the daughter of the first king to build an empire, Sargon. He appointed his brilliant daughter, Enheduanna, to the position of high priestess at the temple of the moon god, Nanna, in the ancient city of Ur. There she presided for forty years over the prestigious temple in Ur. Holding the most important religious office in the land, she spread her theological ideas throughout the country, writing hymns to each of forty-two major temples.

Each hymn is written to the temple itself, as though it were a living being with power and influence over its divine occupant, in most hymns the patron deity of the city. Enheduana addresses the

temple in the second person: “O house you wild cow,” she says in Temple Hymn 22. The temple seems to listen as she describes its resident: “your lady a water bird - sacred woman of the inner chamber,” she says in TH 40 as she describes Inanna to the temple in the intimate conversation that characterizes each hymn.

The expression ‘wild cow’ as a description of the goddesses comes up over and over again. Inanna is the principle ‘wild cow’. The image conveys the unpredictability which the goddesses all embody in one way or another. With Nanshe, the hymn describes her paradoxical character. She is carefree playing in the waves, but also a great storm / strong dark water. The Sumerians had great respect

for the whims of nature on whom they so depended. The wild cow is unexpected in a docile herd, but there she is!

Each hymn ends with an identical two-line colophon, except for the final hymn 42. There, instead of ending with a colophon, Enheduanna signs her name, saying she herself gave birth to this composition, something never before created.

Temple Hymn 7
The Kesh Temple Of Ninhursag The Lofty

high-lying Kesh
in all heaven and earth you are the form-shaping place
spreading fear like a great poisonous snake

O Lady of the Mountains Ninhursag’s house
built on a terrifying site

O Kesh like holy Aratta
inside is a womb dark and deep
your outside towers over all

imposing one
great lion of the wildlands stalking the high plains
great mountain
incantations fixed you in place

inside the light is dim
even moonlight (Nanna’s light) does not enter
only Nintur Lady Birth
makes it beautiful

O house of Kesh
the brick of birthgiving
your temple tower adorned with a lapis lazuli crown

your princess
Princess of Silence
unfailing great Lady of Heaven
when she speaks heaven shakes
open-mouthed she roars

Aruru    sister of Enlil
O house of Kesh
has built this house on your radiant site
and placed her seat upon your dais

Temple Hymn 15
The Gishbanda Temple Of Ningishzida

ancient place
   set deep in the mountain
   artfully

dark shrine    frightening and red place
   safely placed in a field
   no one can fathom your mighty hair-raising path

Gishbanda
   the neck-stock    the fine-eyed net
   the foot-shackling netherworld knot
   your restored high wall is massive
   like a trap

your inside the place where the sun rises
yields widespread abundance

your prince the pure-handed
shita priest of Inanna heaven’s holy one

Lord Ningishzida
his thick and beautiful hair
falls down his back

O Gishbanda
   has built this house on your radiant site
   and placed his seat upon your dais

Temple Hymn 17
The Badtibira Temple Of Dumuzi                  Emush

O house

jeweled lapis herbs fleck the shining bed
heart-soothing place of the Lady of the Steppe

Emush brickwork glistening and pure
its burnished clay placed firmly (on the earth)

your sky-rising wall sprawls over the high plain
for the one who tends the ewes
and over the Arali House for the shepherd

your prince   radiant one of the Holy Woman
   a lion pacing the steppe back and forth
   the wonder-causing pure breasted one
   the Lord    spouse of pure Inanna

Dumuzi     master of the Emush
   O Badtibira    (fortress of the coppersmith)
   has built this house on your radiant site
   and placed his seat upon your dais

Temple Hymn 20
The Lagash Temple Of Ningirsu                     Eninnu

Eninnu
right arm of thick-necked Lagash in Sumer
with heavy-cloud bird Anzu’s eyes
that scan insurgent mountains

Ningirsu’s crowd-flattener blade a menace to all lands
battle arm    blasting storm drenching everyone
battle arm   all the great gods    the Annuna
      grant again and again

so from your skin of bricks
on the rim of the holy hill green as mountains
you determine fates

a holy whirlpool spins in your river
blowing whirlwinds spawn from your glance

at the gate facing the Holy City
they pour wine into fine stone vessels of An
out under the sky

what comes in cannot be equaled
what goes out never ceases

at the fiery face of the Shugalam gate
its radiant brilliance the fate-cutting site
Lord Ningirsu besieges with hair-raising fear

all the Annuna appear at your great wine festival

your prince   furious storm-wind
destroyer of rebel cities
your king    angry bull flaunting his brawn
    savage lion that makes heads shake

warrior the lord of lords who plots schemes
king of kings who mounts victories
mighty one great hero in battle has no rival

son of Enlil lord Ningirsu
O Eninnu
has built this house on your radiant site
and established his seat upon your throne

Temple Hymn 22
The Sirara Temple Of Nanshe

O house you wild cow
there to conjure signs from divination

you arise splendid to behold
bedecked for your princess

Sirara    great and princely place
    you    dream-opener
    highly prized in the shrine

your lady Nanshe

a great storm
strong dark water

born on the shore of the sea

laughing in the sea foam
playing playing in the waves

divine Nanshe    mighty Lady
    O house of Sirara
has built this house on your radiant site
and placed her seat upon your dais

Temple Hymn 26
The Zabalam Temple Of Inanna

O house    wrapped in beams of light
wearing shining stone jewels    wakening great awe

sanctuary of pure Inanna
(where) divine powers the true me spread wide

    Zabalam
               shrine of the shining mountain
    shrine that welcomes the morning light
    she makes resound with desire

the Holy Woman grounds your hallowed chamber
with desire

    your queen    Inanna of the sheepfold
    that singular woman
    the unique one

who speaks hateful words to the wicked
who moves among the bright shining things
who goes against rebel lands

and at twilight makes the firmament beautiful
all on her own

great daughter of Suen
pure Inanna

O house of Zabalam
    has built this house on your radiant site
    and placed her seat upon your dais

Temple Hymn 42
The Eresh Temple of Nisaba                           Ezagin

this shining house of stars bright with lapis stones
    has opened itself to all lands

a whole mix of people in the shrine every month
lift heads for you Eresh
all the primeval lords

soapwort the very young saba on your platform
    great Nanibgal    Nisaba    Lady of Saba
    brought powers down from heaven
    added her measure to your powers
    enlarged the shrine    set it up for praising

faithful woman    exceeding in wisdom
    opens [her] mouth [to recite] over cooled lined
    tablets
    always consults lapis tablets
    [and] gives strong council to all lands

true woman of the pure soapwort
born of the sharpened reed

who measures the heavens by cubits
strikes the coiled measuring rod on the earth

praise be to Nisaba

the person who bound this tablet together
is Enheduanna
my king something never before created
did not this one give birth to it

[Note: Betty Meador worked with a specialist in the Sumerian language at the University of California, Berkeley, John Carnahan, to create a word-for-word literal translation of each hymn based on variants from numerous tablets, from which she rendered the final poetic version. A fuller posting with notesappears at http://www.atanet.org/publications/beacons_10_pages/page_15.pdf, American Translator Association Publications, for which grateful acknowledgement. (J.R.)]

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[from the official announcement of the event at the lincoln memorial in washington, d.c.

In 1967, one of America's most original bands, The Fugs, went to Washington D.C. on a mission to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise the evil war-mongers who were expanding the Vietnam War. NOW — 50 years later, The Fugs (Ed Sanders, Scott Petito, Steve Taylor and Coby Batty) have returned to save us all from the new crop of evil-doers who have taken up residence in the White House. With the inspiration and guidance of Ed Sanders, Bob Holman, and the spirit of Tuli Kupferberg, Chuck Smith created a music video to accompany The Fugs brand-new song "Exorcism of the White House.”
THE FUGS — "Exorcism of the White House" (Official Video) youtube/sRgVXPaEdJs

OUT DEMONS OUT!!!]

1.

In the name of the Amulets
of Friendship & Civilisation
& against Border-Bashing
& manias for Regime Change

In the name of triumph
over the curse of explosions & drones

In the name of ahimsa & nonviolence
between heretofore rival civilisations

In the name
of Peace & Love & Sharing!

We call upon the powers of the Cosmos
to protect our ceremonies!

In the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis,
God of the Dead, in the name of all those killed for causes
they do not comprehend—

in the name of the millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan,
& the East

& in the name of the blown-apart Americans
on war-zones in the U.S.A.
& in other countries as well!

2.

In the Name of Rosa Parks, Lilith, Mary, Aphrodite, Hera, Rose Pesotta…..
we call upon the Malevolent Spirits in the White House
to be Banished and Exorcised! Out, Demons, Out!!!
Out, Demons, Out!!!

In the name of Dionysus Zagreus, Jesus, Iao Sabaoth, Mohammed,
Yahwah the Unnameable, the Quintessential Finality,
the Zoroastrian Fire, Buddha the All-Reaching, in the name
of Hermes Trismegistos, in the name of the Beak of Thoth, in the name
of the Restoration of the Eye of Horus, in the name of Peace Eye and the
Universal Scarab, in the name of Ra and the Solar Boat, in the name of
the Virgin Mary, Osiris, Joseph, the Supreme Archangels, Isis, the mouth
of the Ouroboros

We call upon the Spirits of Eternity
to raise the White House
from its foundations
spin it around
& cleanse it of Evil & Malevolent Demons

We summon the Spirits of Benevolent Destiny
to exorcise the White House
of its violence, ill-will, and ill-intentions
from now till the End of Time!
in the name of Peace, Love & Economic Justice!
in the name of Harmony among Nations on Earth

(Ahh! here of peace and harmony)

3.

Out Demons, out! Out Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out!

Out Trump-Cabinet! Out! Out Trump-Demons, out!

Attorney General! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
CIA Director! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
Head of the EPA, Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
Secretary of Agriculture! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
Health and Human Services! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
Secretary of Housing & Urban Development! Demon-out Demon-out!
Labor Secretary! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
Treasury Secretary! Aieee! Demon-out Demon-out!
Secretary of State! Aieee! Out, Demons, out!
Interior Secretary! Oi oi oi oi! Aieee! Demon-out!

Demon-out! Demon-out! Demon-out!

O-u-t! Demons, O-u-t!

4.

(image of White House, it begins to spin and whirl,
slowly, then faster. Demons begin to fly away as
it whirls)

Voices
& Music: Whirl o White House Whirl
Climb o White House climb
Upward o White House Upward
Up Up Up o White House Upward
Whoosh! White House Whoosh!

(white house spins and rises up)

Out, Deeeeemoooon! Out, Deeeeeemooon!
Out, Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!
In the name of the Most Sacred of Names,
Out, Demons, out!
Out, Demons, out! Out, Demons, out!

© 2017 Ed Sanders

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The Australian Association for Literature’sannual conference for 2017, Literary Environments: Place, Planet and Translation, will be held at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus on the 17th to 19th July, 2017.

This year’s conference organisers, Peter Denney and Stuart Cooke, have assembled a stellar line-up of keynotes for the conference:

Ursula Heise (UCLA): “Planet of Cities: Urban Environments & Narrative Futures” Alan Bewell (University of Toronto):Place, Emotion, & the Colonial Translation of Natures”
Stephen Muecke (UNSW): “Theorising Literary Environments”
Jerome Rothenberg (UC San Diego): “Technicians of the Sacred: Ethnopoetics & the New Indigenous Poetries”

Literary Environments is concerned with the different environments in which literature can occur, and our methods of translating between them. At this critical juncture in the Anthropocene, planetary responsibility and situated knowledges need to be entwined in propositions for social and environmental justice. Bodies, texts and artworks are converging in old and new forms of politics and earthly accountabilities. The task of translation between these increasingly interconnected modes of existence is a crucial one: life in all of its manifestations – from DNA to forests – has textual qualities. What does it mean to ‘read’ such a staggering variety of data?

While this conference is primarily concerned with literature, we envisage it as a multi-disciplinary event. We have therefore invited and scheduled papers on any aspect of the environmental humanities, from environmental history to environmental philosophy. We have also welcomed papers addressing literary environments that are not ecological in orientation, such as studies of literary spaces, communities, and so on.

Spread over a three-day period the conference will consist of some ninety papers and thirty panels.

What follow here are abstracts of the four keynote speeches:

Stephen Muecke

‘Theorising Literary Environments’

Literary texts live and die through the environments in which they are nurtured. When cradled in networks of devotion, or at least attachment, literary forms not only survive, but can expand their spheres of influence. I like to think of this expansion as reproductive: not only Benjamin’s ‘mechanical reproduction’, but also organic, generative and multispecies reproduction. Expanding, or rather extending human capacities is the ‘business’ of literary experimentation, but we are never quite sure where ‘the human’ and ‘capacity’ begin and end. Examples from oral literature and poetry will describe chains of reference, chains of affect, technological extensions and those necessary hiatuses—risks of reproduction—that remind us that aesthetic creation is best conceived of not as communication (bridging subject and object), but something more like the miracle of germination.

Jerome Rothenberg

‘Technicians of the Sacred: Ethnopoetics and the New Indigenous Poetries’

Coincident with the publication of an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition of Technicians of the Sacred, I will explore the early history of ethnopoetics for which that book was one of the early starting points. Drawing from the new introduction to the book I will begin with the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of a specifically delineated “ethnopoetics” as a collaborative work of poets and scholars to which I was a close witness and active participant. I will then propose a linkage to the survival and revival of many indigenous languages and poetries in the early twenty-first century, with a sense that change rather than stasis has been at the heart of these poetries as well as of our own.

Alan Bewell

‘Place, Emotion, and the Colonial Translation of Natures’

Through a discussion of colonial natural history and John Keats’s Lamia, this paper will

emphasize the degree to which colonial natural history can be understood as being inherently a translational activity available to analysis from the perspective of translation theory. I will argue that the experience of translation, the feeling of being in translation , of having been translated to a new place where strange things seemed somehow familiar, or familiar things took on an uncanny strangeness, the feeling of being between-worlds that were themselves in motion, was not restricted to colonial encounters with other cultures, but also fundamentally shaped, in diverse ways, how people, during the colonial period, related to the natures around them. My hope is that this paper will contribute to the important work that is currently being done on the history of emotions by suggesting the manifest ways in which translation shaped how both settlers and indigenous peoples came to understand the natural world.

Ursula Heise

‘Planet of Cities: Urban Environments and Narrative Futures’

In 2008, humanity crossed a historical boundary: more than 50% of the global population now lives in cities, and future population growth will mostly occur or end up in urban areas. This means that humans' most important habitat now and for the future is the city, a historical shift that entails important ecological as well as social and cultural consequences. "Planet of Cities" will focus on the new interest in urban ecology in disciplines as varied as architecture, biology, design, literary studies, political science, and urban planning through the lens of narrative. How are the city and its relation to nature being envisioned in contemporary fiction and film? What narrative strategies work and which ones fail when it comes to imagining the environmental futures of rapidly growing cities? How do stories focusing on the present and future of cities integrate human and nonhuman actors and networks? The presentation will approach these questions theoretically and through a comparatist analysis of urban narratives from different regions and languages, with a particular focus on science fiction.

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[At the start of a month’s visit in Australia I thought it appropriate to re-post the following, included also in Barbaric Vast & Wild: Outside &Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present. (J.R.)]

(As dictated to Joe Byrne)

Any man knows it is possible to swear a lie and if a policeman looses a conviction for the sake of swearing a lie he has broke his oath therefore he is a perjurer either ways. A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him, in the first place he is a rogue in his heart but too cowardly to follow it up without having the force to disguise it. next he is traitor to his country ancestors and religion as they were all catholics before the Saxons and Cranmore yoke held sway since then they were persecuted massacreed thrown into martrydom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation

What would people say if they saw a strapping big lump of an Irishman shepherding sheep for fifteen bob a week or tailing turkeys in Tallarook ranges for a smile from Julia or even begging his tucker, they would say he ought to be ashamed of himself and tar-and-feather him. But he would be a king to a policeman who for a lazy loafing cowardly bilit left the ash corner deserted the shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty to serve under a flag and nation that has destroyed massacreed and murdered their fore-fathers by the greatest of torture as rolling them down hill in spiked barrels pulling their toe and finger nails and on the wheel. and every torture imaginable.

More was transported to Van Diemand's Land to pine their young lives away in starvation and misery among tyrants worse than the promised hell itself all of true blood bone and beauty, that was not murdered on their own soil, or had fled to America or other countries to bloom again another day, were doomed to Port Mcquarie Toweringabbie norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyrany and condemnation many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke Were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains but true to the shamrock and a credit to Paddys land.

What would people say if I became a policeman and took an oath to arrest my brothers and sisters & relations and convict them by fair or foul means after the conviction of my mother and the persecutions and insults offered to myself and people Would they say I was a decent gentleman, and yet a police-man is still in worse and guilty of meaner actions than that The Queen must surely be proud of such herioc men as the Police and Irish soldiers as It takes eight or eleven of the biggest mud crushers in Melbourne to take one poor little half starved larrakin to a watch house. I have seen as many as eleven, big & ugly enough to lift Mount Macedon out of a crab hole more like the species of a baboon or Guerilla than a man. actually come into a court house and swear they could not arrest one eight stone larrakin and them armed with battens and neddies without some civilians assistance and some of them going to the hospital from the affects of hits from the fists of the larrakin and the Magistrate would send the poor little Larrakin into a dungeon for being a better man than such a parcel of armed curs.

What would England do if America declared war and hoisted a green flag as its all Irishmen that has got command of her armies forts and batteries even her very life guards and beef tasters are Irish would they not slew around and fight her with their own arms for the sake of the colour they dare not wear for years. and to reinstate it and rise old Erins isle once more, from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yoke, which has kept it in poverty and starvation, and caused them to wear the enemys coats. What else can England expect.

Is there not big fat-necked Unicorns enough paid to torment and drive me to do thing which I dont wish to do, without the public assisting them I have never interefered with any person unless they deserved it, and yet there are civilians who take firearms against me, for what reason I do not know, unless they want me to turn on them and exterminate them without medicine. I shall be compelled to make an example of some of them if they cannot find no other employment If I had robbed and plundered ravished and murdered everything I met young and old rich and poor. the public could not do any more than take firearms and Assisting the police as they have done, but by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be fool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police in any way whatever or employing any person whom they know to be a detective or cad or those who would be so deprived as to take blood money will be outlawed and declared unfit to be allowed human buriel their property either consumed or confiscated and them theirs and all belonging to them exterminated off the face of the earth, the enemy I cannot catch myself I shall give a payable reward for.

NOTE.

[The following was pieced together from entries elsewhere on the world wide web.]

Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger, carried out a series of daring robberies with his gang in Victoria and New South Wales from 1878 to 1880, after which he was captured and hanged.

Only two original documents by Ned Kelly are known to have survived. The most significant of these is the Jerilderie Letter, dictated by Ned Kelly to fellow gang member Joe Byrne in 1879. It is a direct link to the Kelly Gang and the events with which they were associated. This lengthy letter has been described as Ned Kelly's “manifesto,” and brings his distinctive voice to life. The Jerilderie Letter provides a detailed account of Ned Kelly's troubled relations with the police. The passionate tone of the letter makes plain the intensity of Kelly's antagonism towards the police, and his sense of injustice about the treatment that his family had received at the hands of the law.

The letter was written immediately before the Kelly Gang's raid on the Riverina town of Jerilderie in February 1879. In that raid, the gang held up the Bank of New South Wales and escaped with more than £2000. While the gang controlled the town, Kelly sought to give the letter to Samuel Gill, editor of the Jerilderieand Urana Gazette, with the specific demand that it be published. However, to Kelly's anger, he discovered that Gill had already escaped from the town after becoming aware of the gang's presence.

To pacify Kelly, the bank's accountant, Edwin Living, offered to take the letter and to pass it to Gill. Kelly gave it to him—his clear purpose in seeking to have the letter printed was to provide an explanation for his situation, and an accurate record of what had passed between the Kelly family and the police. Edwin Living lent the letter to the police in Melbourne and a copy of it was made. The original document was eventually returned to Living. It seems that at no stage did Living ever take steps to have the letter printed.

Originally penned in 1879 by Joe Byrne as dictated to him by Ned Kelly, this letter was first published in the 1948 edition of Max Brown’s novel Australian Son, which was based on it. Introducing it, Max Brown said, “Following is an 8,300 word statement I have called The Jerilderie Letter This is the document Kelly handed to Living. The text is from a copy of the original letter made in 1879 or 1880 by a government clerk, and is printed here with such spelling, punctuation, etc, as the clerk or Kelly and Byrne, or all three possessed. Nevertheless, it is one of the most powerful and extraordinary of Australian historical documents, and represents over half of Kelly’s extant writings and by far his best single written statement.”

Not poetry as such, it possesses a quality of writing outside the box of literature that has more than passing interest.

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Publisher Jacob Smullyan writes:

“On June 4th, 2016, poet Jack Foley’s wife, Adelle Foley, who was (as she told her doctor) ‘never sick,’ was diagnosed with stomach cancer; she died on June 27th. They had been married for nearly fifty-five years and were an exceptionally close couple. Adelle was also a poet and, like Jack, had published widely. He wrote about her, ‘How can there be sunlight and you not in it?’

“In the months after her death, with extraordinary courage and directness, Jack opened his heart with a series of poems and letters to his friends, many of whom responded with poems of their own. These documents of intense necessity, brought together, make up the deeply moving collection that is Grief Songs: an expression, certainly, of a year of desperate grief, but more essentially, of a lifetime of love.”

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THE DEAD EXIST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

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What do we do with the dead
And with what the dead left behind
Especially when they left behind so much.
Dead the with do we do what
Behind left dead the what with and
Much so behind left they when especially.

—Jack Foley

NOVEMBER 13, NOVEMBER 18

I think that, recently, neither

of us

remembered

the date

of our first

meeting

but it was preserved

in a cartoon:

November 18, 1960.

Today,

I sat

in an ice cream shop

with my friends

Paul and Vu

and Vu’s daughter Kaitlin.

I fell silent

uncertain whether

the date were today, November 13

or the next Friday, November 18.

The 18th won out

but I had to wait

until the sweetness and good humor

of my friends had ended.

We parted, smiling.

But tears poured out of me

as soon as I was alone.

I suddenly remembered

the moment when Adelle and I first tongue kissed

in a “date parlor”

in Towson, Maryland

(November 18)

and I began to feel

the love

that will stay with me

till the end of my days

BEFORE HER DEATH…

Matthew Fox writes, “One of the most wonderful concepts that Hildegard [von Bingen] gifts us with is a term that I have never found in any other theologian...the word viriditas or greening power” (Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen). The word suggests “veritas,” truth, as well as “veridicus,” speaking the truth. Wikipedia: “The definition of viriditas or ‘greenness’ is an earthly expression of the heavenly in an integrity that overcomes dualisms. This greenness or power of life appears frequently in Hildegard’s works.”

Some years ago, Poetry Flash editor Joyce Jenkins challenged me to “write a nature poem” for her Watershed event. I found my mind returning to Kore / Persephone, especially to her aspect as seed, thrust underground but emerging to flower. I remembered as well W.C. Williams’ poem, “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” and Denise Levertov’s book of nature poems, The Life Around Us. Adelle was diagnosed with cancer on Saturday, June 4, 2016. I told her doctor, “We want to keep her.” Adelle chimed in, “I want to be kept.” The doctor remarked that Adelle was “taking the news well.” She then asked, “What about him?”—me. Adelle answered, accurately, “A little less well.”

In 1960—we were both twenty—she sang an ancient French song, “A la Claire Fontaine,” to me. It was a sweet gesture of young love. The refrain of the song is “Il y a longtemps que je t’aime / Jamais je ne t’oublierai” (“I have loved you for a long time / I will never forget you”). Over the years we often sang the song together. In 2016 I sang the song to her as she lay dying in the hospital: “I have loved you for a long time / I will never forget you.” She died at 5 a.m. on June 27, 2016. I wrote many years ago:

It’s not a dream

We lose those we love

but we love

anyway

I read “Viriditas” to Adelle shortly before her death.

VIRIDITAS

Viriditas—

the dream

of a green

world

It is not

enough

to say

“the life around us”—

we are

“the life around us”

it is not possible

to be

apart

from

nature

(“natura naturans”)

the conditions

in which

consciousness—

“this”

consciousness—

happens

are serious, tentative, and limited

this dream

of green

I am that flower

you hold

in your

hand

we are

light

coming to consciousness

itself

men & women

of light

what is mind

but light?

what is body?

“Make LIGHT of it,”

writes my friend

James

Broughton—

Walking,

I vanish into light—

Kora—the seed—

above ground—under—

the need

to follow her—down the rabbit hole

following the

idea

of resurrection—

seed-

time vanishes/returns we grow

in branch and root

in winged or finny stuff

or cloven hoof

in bird-

sound, animal alarm or

pleasure

(describe a scene—

scene vanishes—

mind appears—)

Kore woman

under

ground

No need

that is not satisfied

of food

or sex—

…

greenness, love:

as you lie in this moment

of danger,

as you sleep

wondering if the next sleep

will be death,

“this greeny flower,”

this green

comes to you

the power of life

Viriditas

MY WIFE ADELLE’S DEATH

What you discover in such a situation

is what Rousseau called

le néant des choses humaines

the nothingness of human affairs

Adelle’s concerns—the laundry, our finances,

her plants, dinner, people at AC Transit, people

in the local community, poetry people, whether

I parked the car close enough to the curb,

her VISA card, the Toyota, her haiku, the goldfish, me,

the light in the leaves as she passed by in the morning,

credit cards, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, Miss Fisher’s Murder

Mysteries, the egrets at Lake Merritt,

the homeless on her way to AC Transit

(to whom she gave money and boxes of raisins),

her son and daughter in law,

hundreds of others

in a complex web of caring—

all disappeared poof in a few moments

on the afternoon of June 25, 2016

in a Kaiser hospital room

when she fainted in “septic shock” and her dear heart stopped.

Suddenly, all of that was gone

as if it never existed

le néant des choses humaines

I remember it, some of it—even most of it—but for her

it’s a spider web someone brushed off a window—

gone.

It is this that we make poems and stories and beautiful lies

to avoid:

this sudden view

when a long-loved, long-known, long-accepted person dies

& we see it

deep and clear

AUGUST 15, 2016

It’s your birthday

My dear, dead love

I had begun a birthday poem

My wife

My life

And had already bought some gifts for you

A Monday—Moon Day

“Looney” in our Dellwackian fantasy

Who paired with the tiny sun,

“Salvador Dully”

You made a cartoon for me

Eight days before your death

(Six before the day

You forever lost consciousness)

I am trying to find

Another life to fit me

But what could ever fit me

So well as the life we made

As Moon and Sun

As Dell Dell and Jack Wack

As the EEE Monster

And the DDD Monster

As all the phantasmagoria

That rose out of our love,

That kept our love

Forever alive:

They never stopped loving

Even when you and I faltered

They wondered why Dellwackia

Suddenly looked

Like a hospital room.

I’ve cooked dinner for you tonight

Polpette, purpettes,

A meal you loved

That came from my mother’s

Long Calabrese line.

Dear friends will join me

And then we’ll watch

A favorite film:

Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent

Looney and Salvador Dully

Will watch it too

And Dell Dell and Jack Wack

And the Monsters.

Everyone loves

The poems I’ve been writing

About your death

You were always my Muse

And today is the birthday

You could not celebrate.

Our love remains

In all these figures

In all these words

While you

Whirl through the universe

(If such things are true)

Forgetting birth and death

Forgetting Dellwackia and me

Remembering only

The deep configurations

Of Life and Love.

[The names mentioned are cartoon characters in a joint fantasy that Adelle and I maintained for years. We drew pictures for each other and gave the characters voices. She was Dell Dell—a name her father gave to her when she was a child. I, “J.W. Foley,” was Jack Wack. The DDD Monster and the EEE Monster, etc. all figured into this fantasy, which took place in a country named for the queen and king: Dellwackia. We had a ritual for turning out the bedroom lights at night. The Dellwackians didn’t understand electricity but they would all gather and in their various voices “blow out the candle.” After the lights were out, I would say, “’Night, Dell.” She would answer, “’Night, Wack.” The lights are still on in our bedroom.]

YAHRZEIT (June 27, 2017)

for Adelle

It is

What the Jews call Yahrzeit,

A year since your death.

The word stings.

If you retain any consciousness of the world

You know

That I have found a new love.

She has been

A wonder and a comfort

In my grief for you.

I think you would have liked her

(And mothered her!).

Going through your dresser drawer

As we attempt to find room for her things,

She found

A fancy, almost comically sexy garter.

I had forgotten it

But recognized it immediately.

You wore it only once,

On the night of December 21, 1961,

Our wedding night;

You kept it, as you kept many other things, for all these years.

How we formed each other.

How we treasured each other’s hearts.

If the stories are true,

You may be in bliss

While I find my way through this quivering wall of sorrow and tears.

And love.

My first love, my dear first love,

It has been a year

(Has it been a year?),

Yahrzeit.

Your ashes

Remain in the vanishing morning light.

[N.B. GRIEF SONGS is currently available at SPD:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781944697488/grief-songs.aspx

$15.00]