Kathleen Fraser, m o v e a b le TYYPE

she talks about “frame theory,” the game-bird’s heartbeat under

glass (fluttery to her as a pamphlet or flock of blank ink), wings tied-off.

Song rebuke rescinds the variable. You often measured

pretense between face and thread, when you demonstrated

linen. Corner understood (unsafe on-camera) reading him:

delay’d erasure, giving him 0 or 1. Syllabic temptation (“Orologic”)

Only after she died recently [see my poem for her here] did I realize there was a fairly recent book of hers I had completely missed, Kathleen Fraser's m o v e a b le TYYPE (Calicoon NY: Nightboat Books, 2011), an assemblage of shorter works, including collaborative poems she had produced over the years, responding to and with visual art and artists. A year prior to its publication, Fraser had generously gifted me a copy of her il cuore : the heart, Selected Poems 1970-1995 (Wesleyan University Press, 1997), and I suppose I was so thrilled to be able to start engaging with that volume that I didn’t really look much beyond it. How was I only learning about this book now? What else have I missed? I’m kicking myself, but appreciating that the volume is still available at all, allowing some “new” works of hers to cross my path despite her recent death (although I’ve heard Nightboat has been working on a forthcoming Collected Poems for some time). The volume also includes my original introduction to her and her work, the piece/section “hi  dde  violet  i  dde  violet,” a poem that appeared previously as the first chapbook through Peter and Meredith Quartermain’s Nomados Literary Publishers in 2003.

I’ve been enjoying her lyric and her lyric spaces, including the line added as almost explanation to her piece “L i g a t u r e, for Mr Coltrane,” that reads: “ligature: the structure that in certain type faces joins one letter to the next: in music, a curved line connecting notes to be sung or played as one phrase.” And the poem itself, that includes:

It still felt like winter to me. I had on those cheap wool gloves with leather stitched to the palm side and the coat my father had given me for my trip to the city he’d only dreamed of, along with some of his printed notes on the history of type design, clearly stamped with the certainty that N, Y and C had settled the question of where to begin with an alphabet when you were starting to look for a new type face in the shiny empty field of the metal plate.

There is such a joy and a curiosity to her work, as well as an awareness of the power and placement of individual letters on the page. If I’ve called Lisa Robertson, for example, a poet of sentences, Kathleen Fraser was a poet of the individual letter, allowing each to live on the page, not simply as part of a word, but in sequence, both separate and whole. And through the collaboration, the response, there exist further explorations on those separations, those seeming contradictions, of being both separate, and together. Oh, what we have lost with her death. But there is so much still to learn from what she left with us.

Four poems for Kathleen Fraser

(1935-2019)

1.

If I were to pin my favourite quotes,

this wall might collapse.

Stitched from fragments, and held,

for an instant.

Everything destroyed, Spicer wrote,

must be tossed.

There is always a truth, you wrote,

to such restlessness.

2.

The elegy speaks to an absence

both unexpected

and abrupt. Applies

lyric pressure. She speaks to me

in sentences. Solitude

as capital. Echo, across

these crystalline structures. Poem

as carved diamond, or

a certain uneven panic.

3.

The heart, in whatever language, wants, or

does not care. Incorporate this into what

we have already learned. The water heater

sound like a bird. The furnace

sound like a bird. Everything

sounds like a bird.

4.

The pleasures conflict

from this writing. Loss

is a loss.

A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area, Sarah Rosenthal

The Bay Area, along with New York City, is one of the two major centers of experimental writing in the United States. The Bay Area’s long and vibrant history as a literary center (and one where unconventional activity is accepted and even encouraged), along with its large number of creative writing programs and its bounty of small presses and reading series, make it a magnet for experimental writers. This collection of interviews with Bay Area experimentalists allows us to have our cake and eat it too: We learn more about some of the most compelling experimental work being produced today, and we immerse ourselves in a community which is only the most recent incarnation of a history of experiment dating back a couple of centuries.

I’ve always been taken with any version of literary local histories and archival projects, so Sarah Rosenthal’s recent A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010) is certainly a revelation, compiling interviews she’s conducted with writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, Barbara Guest, Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr and Elizabeth Robinson. As her lengthy introduction reminds, this is an area that once gave us the Berkeley Renaissance (Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan) as well as Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth and numerous others, information she not only provides as length but gives such a wonderful context to, to open up her series of interviews, conducted over more than a couple of years. Just what is it about the Bay Area that brings out such strong writers, such fierce experimentation?

Brenda Hillman: It's a questions that is so upsetting right now. I was talking to Kathleen Fraser a while ago about the opening up of form in the last twenty years, almost to the point of destroying the boundaries of the poem. It is the artist's job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it. I worked on this poem [“Cascadia,” from Cascadia, Wesleyan University Press, 2001] for eight months; it's very carefully structured. But I wanted it to be boundaryless in a way: It's not punctuated, and I wanted it to go back and forth within itself and within time. I thought, “Well, you can have both things: structure and boundarylessness.” And in fact I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you're always bound to fail.

SR: You're trying to let error in, but you don't want error to take over the poem.

BH: I wanted every line to be memorable. Also, I wanted to get at and challenge the idea—not a central idea, because the poem doesn't really have a center—Aristotle's idea of change: that you can tell where something is going because of where it ends up. Final cause, or something like that—which is really kind of an anti-divine notion, and which I love as a philosophy of living. It's sort of like, “I'm not sure where I am going, but I can tell it was my fate to be there because that's where I ended up.”

the second issue of 17 seconds: a journal of poetry + poetics is finally online

the second issue of 17 seconds: a journal of poetry + poetics is finally online at www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds

rob mclennan, editor
Roland Prevost, managing editor

Conversations with John Newlove - by Carla Comellini 

Love, Anne Carson: a fictional essay in the wrong order - by rob mclennan

Joe in the Balkans: an interview with Joe Blades - by Tatjana Bijelic 

An Interview with Dennis Cooley - by Sean Moreland

'in the estuary' and 'funereal relief re-lives' - two poems by Pearl Pirie

Horologic - a poem by Kathleen Fraser 

surveillance of LECTURE: excerpt from a work-in-progress - by Kathleen Fraser

seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics comes out as the natural extension of the eight issues of Poetics.ca edited by rob mclennan and Stephen Brockwell. Highlighting the diversity of voice, style, practice and politic, seventeen seconds continues the resolve to provide a forum for dialogue on contemporary poetics, with a focus on Canadian writing. Over the past two decades, the amount of critical writing published in print literary journals on Canadian poetry, specifically, seems to have decreased dramatically, but slowly returned through a numberof online journals. seventeen seconds simply wishes to help strengthen the dialogue and the ongoing conversation about writing through publishing new writing, and conversation about new writing. How else are we supposed to learn anything, unless we keep talking?  Feedback and submission queries are most welcome.

az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca 

rob mclennan

Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, eds. Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax

So now we are writing letters. The question on my mind this morning has to do with how we negotiate this task of lettering. (Patrick Pritchett to Kathleen Fraser, December 22, 2006)

One of the most interesting collections of interviews I’ve seen in a long time has to be Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, eds. Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008). The idea was simple enough: over the space of a couple of years, the editors solicited various poets across the United States for the sake of a conversation with another poet they wanted to talk to. As the editors begin their introduction:

Letters to Poets developed from an interest in how we could redefine, renegotiate, and extend the concept of collaboration. For this project, fourteen poet-pairs from various regions, races, class backgrounds, sexual preferences, and aesthetics came together and wrote letters during approximately a one-year period. From the start, the Letters to Poets project has been experimental in nature. Having provided no strict formal or thematic guidelines, we had little idea what the poets in this collection would choose to write about. We thought that if poets had the opportunity to correspond with each other over the course of a year, important and intriguing conversations would emerge, prompting further discourse among poets and people in other disciplines. Letters have proven powerful texts. (Consider the correspondences between Dickinson and Higginson, Hughes and Bontemps, Zukofsky and Niedecker, Levertov and Duncan, Celan and Sachs, Silko and Wright, and so on.) We believed the epistolary format would create a sense of intimacy, allowing readers to feel privy to “inside” information about poets’ ideas and experiences.

As stated, there are fourteen pairs of poets, including Anselm Berrigan and John Yau, Brenda Coultas and Victor Hernández Cruz, Truong Tran and Wanda Coleman, Patrick Pritchett and Kathleen Fraser, Hajera Ghori and Alfred Arteaga, Jennifer Firestone and Eileen Myles, Karen Weiser and Anne Waldman, Jill Magi and Cecilia Vicuna, Rosamond S. King and Jayne Cortez, Judith Goldsmith and Leslie Scalapino, Traci Gourdine and Quincy Troupe, Brena Iljima and Joan Retallack, Dana Teen Lomax and Claire Braz-Valentine, and Albert Flynn DeSilver and Paul Hoover. I know I’ve repeated it numerous times, but Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch has always called literature a conversation, so how could such a project not seem obvious and almost basic, in just how appealing it might be for the sake of both readers and participants, and something that Stephanie Bolster and I were very aware of when we did a version of the same about a decade ago, interviewing each other over the space of months, and published online as a single (albeit long) document. But I wonder: is this the sort of project that might be worth a journal taking on as a kind of ongoing project, whether in print or online? Just because the book is finished, does that mean that the idea has to end as well?

Am I wrong to observe that the language of critical discourse has tended—in the last three or so decades—to over-drench our thinking re the making of poems, by smuggling its own list of au courant abstract urgencies into poetry’s more visceral territory? It would appear that many of the current choices pre/scribed from the sleeve of academic authority—patina’d with a certain allure—may have become, at the same time, too revered and yet too familiar, that is, once removed from the actual physical precipice that marks the uneasy edge of writing’s activity. Is it possible that competing concerns (languages) of analysis theory vs. the poet’s invented syntactical/physical arrangements are capable of creating an impasse, even impairing one’s working contract with the imagination? (Kathleen Fraser to Patrick Pritchett, June 25, 2005)