David Melnick, Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman

 

            I found Melnick’s work after moving to Berkeley, where he lived in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before moving across the Bay to San Francisco. I had heard tell of his readings of PCOET—his “correct” pronunciations, how only a few could remember the exact sounds his private language formed. I had heard of his famous Homer Group, and read how Melnick’s voice was infectious among the other “Homersexuals,” how his homophonics perversely instigated a kind of Bacchic frenzy. I remember being shown an event flyer from 1974, from the now-defunct Cody’s Books, featuring Melnick reading with Telegraph’s “Bubble Lady,” Julia Vinograd. I would walk past the former Cody’s building daily to feel their presences decades after.

Melnick’s work created a kind of orbit, tugging me to its center, but the force that propelled my obsession was impossible to see. Was it that Melnick gave language to queer feelings I had known somewhere deep inside me, but had been unable to voice? Was it that his work points to a kind of unspeakability of these very “qqrer!” feelings? I am left wondering what kinds of queer feelings we can represent in queer (il)legibilities. Whether Melnick offers us a cipher, a code, a means of reckoning with language and its limits, feelings and the limits of representing those feelings, too. (Noah Ross, “(POETS; EXIST?”)

I hadn’t even heard of San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) before this new collection landed in my mailbox—Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023)—a book that includes preface on the author by poet and critic Noah Ross [see my ’12 or 20 questions’ with him here; see my review of his second collection here], and a collaborative introduction-proper by the four editors. I’m fascinated by these seeming-reclamation projects that American publisher Nightboat Books has been publishing over the past decade or so (possibly longer, but I’ve only been aware of their work for the past dozen-plus years), all of which swirl around particular writers and writings, allowing documentation for a wealth of literary activity, specifically: by, about and through queer writers and writing. Some of the collections I’ve been particularly impressed by include their Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by Alysia Abbott (2019) [see my review of such here], We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, eds. Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (2020) [see my review of such here] and Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (2017) [see my review of such here]. I’d probably also include the collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase [see my review of such here] to this list as well. There is something to be acknowledged and appreciated in Nightboat’s ongoing attentions to providing critical consideration, examination and celebration to these histories that might otherwise have been overlooked, misunderstood or even completely forgotten. As the first poem of Melnick’s posthumous collection, the five-page “I. LE CALME,” ends:

These languages pass away:

                :fellatio, of subjection

            now kings are dead
        because the head is lowered

                “eyes ripe as olives

                “a green sea knobby

bit by worms
stirred, in
the main stream

                “bee keeper seized the earth
                “size of a star

                Walking, sorrow slew me

Nice: Collected Poems collects four previously-published limited-edition works by Melnick across nearly fifty years of scattered production: Eclogs (Ithica House, 1973), PCOET (G.A.W.K., 1975), Men in Aïda (Tuumba Press, 1983) and A Pin’s Fee (Logopoeia website, 2002; Hiding Press, 2019). There’s a liveliness to this work, one that sweeps unapologetically into experimentation and the playfully-ridiculous, a quality that is quite refreshing; the earlier works clearly showcase a poet of his period, employing a particular flavour of 1960s and 70s experimentation, but somehow timeless, offering an expansive play across meaning, sound and the lyric through a poetics of subverted and invented language. It would be impossible not to be simultaneously charged and charmed by the expansive heft of the poem “Men in Aïda,” a homophonic translation of the Iliad, a piece that can’t not be heard aloud, even from within the bounds of quiet reading. The language really is propulsive, and my ears can catch comparisons with language/sound poets north of the border, from bpNichol and Christian Bök to The Four Horsemen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts (among others). Such glorious gymnastics of sound! As Melnick’s poem begins:

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? a day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, every Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aïda, pro, yaps in.
Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’ Rhea to cake Eunice in.
‘Hojo’ noisy tap as hideous debt to lay at a bully.
Ex you, day. tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday.
Arreides stain axe and Ron and ideas ‘ll kill you.

Moving through the material, I’m simultaneously surprised and not that I hadn’t heard of this poet before this book landed, making me wonder just how much material exists in the world by those otherwise-forgotten writers? We move so quickly to the next book and the next book that there are probably dozens of poets left behind: “only alive as long as in print,” to paraphrase a line by the (since late) Canadian poet Patrick Lane. So much literary history is unrecorded and overlooked, and this is a wonderfully vibrant collection, even through the dark elements of Melnick’s later work, as the collaborative “INTRODUCTION” writes:

In parallel with his life, Melnick’s poetry also yields  story, a compact one. Four books comprise his legacy: Eclogs (written 1967-1970), PCOET (mostly 1972), Men in Aïda (1983), and A Pin’s Fee (1987). As the dates of composition show, his years of creativity span a crucial two decades in the rise of queer community: his first book begun before Stonewall; his last written in the crisis years of AIDS. And each book reflects a truth of its moment, though in a manner entirely its own. In Eclogs, the beautiful façade of coded language preserves an experience it screens from view. PCOET yields to the joy of invention, creating a language all its own. Men in Aïda, the pinnacle of this span, is his epic: an act of gay worldbuilding, embracing the past and transforming it through homophonic translation. A Pin’s Fee, the shortest of the four, is anguished: its last word, “DEATH, “ repeating forty-five times. After this, nothing. For the rest of Melnick’s life, another thirty-five years, no other poetry would surface.

 

IF wants to be the same as IS: Essential Poems of David Bromige, eds. Jack Krick, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman

            Poetic labels can be applied to his work, though no single scheme does him much justice. I myself have written elsewhere that the transition from Tight Corners (1974) to My Poetry (1980) shows David moving from “a Black Mountain inflected lyricism to a language-oriented textuality.” But such divisions, with their tacit assumptions about progressiveness (lyricism = retro; textuality = advanced), flatten out the excitement of reading him.

            It is not that David’s work floats free of poetic history. While it is not generally seen as such, Tight Corners is an important moment in post-Poundian poetics. In 1975, I along with many others used an avant-garde map, where there is only one meaningful direction: forward. At that point, forward was best exemplified by Robert Creeley’s Pieces (1969), a book of mostly short poems and notes freed from narrative sequence. In recent decades, Robert Grenier’s Sentences (1978), a box of 500 very short poems on unbound notecards, has been cited as the key successor to Pieces. But looking back now at Tight Corners, and more specifically at the 100+ chunks of justified prose, each marked with a kind of angle iron, that are scattered through the book—the Tight Corners that gave the larger book its name—Bromige seems to have been one of the quickest to respond to what Creeley was up to. (Bob Perelman, “Nearer to the Future Than Ever”)

There isn’t any way to overstate the importance of the publication of IF wants to be the same as IS: Essential Poems of David Bromige, eds. Jack Krick, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman, with an introduction by George Bowering (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018), a six hundred page volume of collected works by the late David Bromige (October 22, 1933 – June 3, 2009). Bromige is a poet both seen to exist in Canadian and American poetries, and yet each side of the border had their own individual, and even incomplete, portrait of him and his work, comparable to considerations of poet George Stanley [see my review of Stanley’s 2014 title, North of California St., here], a poet who, himself, emerged in California before moving north to Vancouver.

Born in England, Bromige schooled in Vancouver, where he began to engage with a number of emerging Canadian writers, notably the TISH poets and other downtown Vancouver poets, before moving to California in 1962. His move south didn’t end his Canadian engagements, despite moving quickly to engage a variety of American poets and poetries, to the point that he published books on both sides of the border throughout his writing career. The multiple perspectives on Bromige’s work is acknowledged, and made clear, through the construction of the collection itself, with introductions/afterword by editors Perelman, Krick and Silliman, as well as an introduction by Bromige’s friend and contemporary, George Bowering. As Bowering writes as part of his opening salvo: “Reading or rereading these hundreds of pages, I am knocked for a loop. That’s my critical response. How often we have tried to peg him, that Brit Canuck Yank songster, while all the time he was making his own door and coming through it.”

For the longest time, you might know, books didn’t cross borders easily, so my own engagement with Bromige and his work came solely through Canadian publications, such as Birds of the West (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1974)—a book I picked up from Janet Inksetter’s Annex Books somewhere in the late 1990s, and found quite generative for my own work for years—or Tiny Courts in a Year Without Scales (London, ON: Brick Books 1991), yet copies of his American titles, whether My Poetry (Berkeley, CA: The Figures Press, 1980), Desire: Selected Poems 1963-1987 (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1988), Men, Women & Vehicles: Prose Works (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1990) or The Harbormaster of Hong Kong (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1993) never quite made it onto the Canadian radar.

When I take a walk with you

I take many 100 steps

then fall flat on my face.

This once I’ll tell you why.

I am trying to alarm you

because I want to harm you.

That clears up a part of it,

but part remains a mystery:

the way that I restrain myself

& when I know to stop. (“9 Pieces For 9 Voices Interrupting 1 For None,” TIGHT CORNERS & WHAT’S AROUND THEM, 1974)

Given the length and breadth of this collection, I’m a bit disappointed that it doesn’t include a bibliography, allowing a sense of the books and what-not (apart from the titles and years) that provided earlier publication. Are we to gather such through our own Google searches, perhaps? Titles and dates are mentioned, but not publishers, making one have to search out information through other means, which is a bit frustrating. Moving through some four decades of publishing history, IF wants to be the same as IS: Essential Poems of David Bromige includes work from The Gathering (Buffalo, NY: Sumbooks, 1965), Please, Like Me (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1968), The Ends of the Earth (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), The Quivering Roadway (Berkeley, CA: Archangel Press, 1969), Threads (Black Sparrow Press, 1970), Ten Years in the Making (Vancouver, BC: New Star Press, 1974), Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1974), Tight Corners and What’s Around Them (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), Spells and Blessings (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1975), Credences of Winter (Black Sparrow Press, 1976), My Poetry (The Figures, 1980), American Testament (1981-86), P-E-A-C-E (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1981), Red Hats (Atwater, OH: Tonsure Press, 1986), Tiny Courts in a World Without Scales (Brick Books, 1991), The Harbormaster of Hong Kong (Sun & Moon Press, 1993), Romantic Traceries (1993), A Cast of Tens (Penngrove, CA: Avec Books, 1994), Vulnerable Bundles (Hartford, CT: Cricket Press, 1995), As in T as in Tether (Tucson, AZ: Chax Press, 2002), Indictable Suborners (Sebastopol, CA: DPress 2003) and Ten Poems from Clearings in the Throat (dPress, 2005). Just to look at his bibliography on Wikipedia (which I could never presume to be complete, or even completely correct), this is only a fraction of his published work, which suggest even further publications could be produced down the road.

My poetry does seem to have a cumulative, haunting effect – one or two poems may not touch you, but a small bookful begins to etch a response, poems rising in blisters that itch for weeks, poems like ball-bearings turning on each other, over & over, digging down far enough to find substance, a hard core to fill up the hand. It’s through this small square that my poems project themselves, flickering across the consciousness, finally polarizing in the pure plasma of life. The reader grows impatient, irritated with my distancing style, coming at him in the rare book format, written under not one but two different kinds of dirty money, & knowing me to be an english teacher. (“MY POETRY”)

This is an important book, one a long time coming. Given some of the attention provided to other poets across North America, might someone even be willing to organize a conference on Bromige’s work, now that such a book as this is finally available?

Rae Armantrout, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001 – 2015

Partly

In this ad

for Newfoundland,

an old woman

steps onto the porch

of the lone house

on a remote cove

and shakes a white sheet

at a partly cloudy sky

as if

            ~

Matched burgundy berries

on adjacent stems,

perfect ear bobs,

with no one

wearing them

San Diego poet Rae Armantrout’s latest collection, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001 – 2015 (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), provides a portrait of the award-winning poet’s past decade and a half, following on the heels of her first selected poems, Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). I’ve complained enough over the years about editions of selected and/or collected poems that lack introductions, so I’ll skip over that for now. Given that this is her second selected poems, one that deliberately begins after the previous one ends (I suspect, in part, because that other title is, one can happily inform, still in print), one of the curiosities of this new title is in how it allows readers of her work, both new and old, to be more aware of some of the shifts in her poetry over the years, and even between the two books themselves (oh, had only someone covered such in an introduction!). There is certainly a finer precision and density to her poems in the years since Veil appeared, one that has deepened with each new collection. Her poems revel in the indirect line presented in the most direct way possible, writing to the heart of a particular matter that might not have been immediately revealed, or even clear. Her poems meander in such a straightforward way that they become remarkably easy to misread, and yet, the simplicity is but one of precision, not ease; of an ellipsis that might lead to clarity, but not through the straight or obvious path. Her poems lead us to such places we don’t realize until we’re already there. In his “Foreword,” to Veil: New and Selected Poems, “‘Aloha, Fruity Pebbles’: The Poems of Rae Armantrout,” Ron Silliman provides a worthy overview of Armantrout’s work up to that point, writing:

In this sense, Armantrout belongs to what might be characterized as the literature of the vertical anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical (and, often enough, more sinister) possibilities. Armantrout’s ancestors in this are not so much Lorine Niedecker, with whom she has been compared more than once, nor her teachers such as Denise Levertov, but rather Jack Spicer, Emily Dickinson, and Arthur Rimbaud.

            It is pointless to characterize Armantrout’s writing as surreal as it is to identify it as an instance of language writing. Nowhere else in either tendency is there anything quite like these works. If they are often disturbing in their subtextual resonances, these poems are also remarkably cheerful and good-natured, written with an ear for (and eye to) American popular culture that is the most acute in contemporary poetry. Imagine David Lynch as rewritten by Frank O’Hara and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark, except that Armantrout’s work lacks the claustrophobic mannerism of the former and the casualness (feigned or otherwise) of the latter.

Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001 – 2015 spans the distance of her six trade collections produced since Veil: New and Selected Poems—all of which appeared with Wesleyan University Press—Up to Speed (2004), Next Life (2007), Versed (2009), Money Shot (2011), Just Saying (2013) and Itself (2015), as well as an opening section of some fifty pages of new material (including the title poem). Whereas considerations of culture, history and the larger world have long been part of her ouvre, her work since Veil has become more focused, tighter: more precise. As the collection Money Shot, for example, referenced the American financial crises, Just Saying explored the complex nature of the American economy. Part of the joy and play of Armantrout’s work, something referenced obliquely through this new book’s title, is in how she seems to revel in the fragment, whether the line or the stanza, employing thoughts that aren’t necessarily incomplete, but certainly thoughts that aren’t articulated out loud in their entirety, allowing or even forcing the reader to pay a far deeper attention. She writes in fragments, and yet, everything manages to interconnect, as she writes in the title poem from Up to Speed: “The Sphinx / wants me to guess. // Does a road / run its whole length / at once?” Armantrout writes so precisely and articulately about what might not be possible to precisely articulate. What does that even mean? Do you know what it is she stopped just short of telling us?

Approximate

Wait, I haven’t found

the right word yet.

Poem means

homeostasis.

“Is as”

As is

Film is enough

like death.

In a bright light

at the far end,

attractive strangers gesture.

They are searching

the system

for systematic threats.

I was going

to pay attention.

Attention passes

through a long cord

into the past

progressive