Dorothea Lasky, Animal

            In this brief compendium of four lectures, I will talk about poetry and its relationship to ghosts, colors, animals, and bees. In each of these discussions, I will be thinking of poetry at least a little through the lens of an idea I have termed the metaphysical I. although the idea is never named within these lectures, it affects them, as it is the crux of my poetics. It functions as a ghost haunting this book.

            The metaphysical I is not a new idea really, just maybe a new term. I define this I as a wild, lyric I, one that has no center and has no way to predict where it will go. An I that is a shapeshifter. A persona that uses unexpected language and imagery, that is inconsistent, frightening, funny, and beyond the idea of a singular self. (“AN INTRODUCTION”)

As I am quite an admirer of her poetry, I was curious to see New York City poet and editor Dorothea Lasky’s latest, Animal (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019), a volume described as “a compendium of four essays.” Originally composed as part of The Bagley Wright Lecture Series, earlier versions of these essays were individually delivered by Lasky in Chicago, Washington D.C., Seattle WA and Cambrige MA from October, 2013 to January, 2014. I’ve been enjoying the books Wave has been producing in this series (I’m still working though the dual-volumes by Joshua Beckman from 2018), allowing the possibility for engaged and engaging contemporary working poets the length and breadth to stretch out their thinking and see where it goes.

Lasky is the author of five full-length poetry collections—AWE (Wave, 2007), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Rome (Liverright/W.W. Norton, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Milk (Wave Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]—so it is fascinating to see her essays that speak to and around her thoughts and structures around poetry, as, in her opening essay “Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” she writes

            As a poet, I think a lot about belief, the belief in what my mind might bring to me. There are a lot of things that enter my mind that I choose to translate into language. All poems contain images and these images have been in the poet’s brain and hang in the balance always, to be given to the reader upon reading. And in a poem images have weight, so that you cannot help but believe in them.

            Emily Dickinson said of belief:

On subjects of which we know nothing … we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.

In four lectures that exist as consecutive sections of a larger, more expansive thesis—“Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” “What is Color in Poetry or is it the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word,” “The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human” and “The Bees”—Lasky is akin to Anne Carson in the way she opines to write in one particular direction, and uses that to also write into and around the subject of poetry and imagination. Lasky threads her thinking through lines and thoughts from film (The Shining) and theory, and an array of examples from poets including Wallace Stevens, Bernadette Meyer, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Sappho, Rimbaud, H.D. and Octavio Paz, among others, as well as her own juvenilia.

Lasky seems quite fond of imagination, as well as dreams, both as writing and thinking tools and of subjects for inquiry. Responding to a quote by Goethe in her second essay, “What is Color in Poetry or is it the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word,” she writes: “I love this idea that even in the absence of light, our imagination is readily capable of producing it in dreams. That the imagination houses a dormant light. I think that poets and writers have very strong dormant lights just waiting to be shared. Sometimes I think that if all poets used their dormant lights extensively, it would have a viral effect, and the brains of all of us would be even more lit up.” What is fascinating, as well, is how she writes on not just language, but on words, and ideas, constantly in motion across the space of the page and the paragraph. She speaks on different ways of writing, and thinking, and seeing, all working to expand her range of thinking through inquiry. Lasky’s meditations move at lightning speed, as she writes as part of her second essay, writing through colour:

            What I am trying to say here, though, is that color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color makes an expanse—a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination—a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, and gives it weight. Color makes this expanse—a colorless idea—into something solid.

            Recently, I learned about the Pirahã society in Brazil. It is said that the Pirahã have no specific words for colors like the ones I am talking about here. So, whereas if we were to describe a red flower, someone who is part of Pirahã might describe the color of it as “the thing that is like blood.” Likewise, a blond girl’s hair might be described as “the thing that is like the sun.”

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend

You might suppose this page is the beginning of my novel. Why? Because it’s the first page. On this page a writer is supposed to tell you what he’s about (or what you’re about) so you’ll know if you want to read further. Okay? Try this:

            I telephoned Bob last night and, among other things, told him I was going to write a novel, sort of a spiritual autobiography. “What are you going to write about,” he asked. I replied: “Oh, my friends, my experiences, parties I’ve been to, famous people I’ve met, about my darling daughter Alysia-Rebeccah. She is six months old tonight you know.”

            “Why are you writing it,” Bob asked.

            “For myself, to understand why I’m so fucked up. Isn’t that why anyone writes?” Bob wisely refrained from questioning my intentions. We both knew they’d probably never pan out. (“WRITING MY FIRST NOVEL”)

Until I received a copy of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by Alysia Abbott (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019), I’d not been aware of the work of the late San Francisco “poet, critic, editor, novelist and artist” Steve Abbott (1943-1992). A well-known Bay Area writer, publisher, activist and provocateur, Abbott produced poems, fiction, poetry comics, essays and artwork, and was, according to Townsend’s essential introduction, the individual who first coined and championed “New Narrative” amid his tight-knit community of peers, many of whom would go on to become legendary. Books such as these become essential touchstones for writers that, for a variety of reasons, drift out of print and out of public consciousness, and to begin to understand Abbott’s place and literary achievements make his early death from AIDS-related illness, that much more heartbreaking. What else might he have accomplished? As Townsend writes:

            With such a generous, forward-thinking practice, who better than Steve to dream up the idea of a “New Narrative,” his designation describing the work of intimate colleagues including Bruce Boone, Bob Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, and a host of others outside this often recognized core group: Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Leslie Scalapino, Aaron Shurin, Judy Grahn. New Narrative, as Steve imagined it, as a mode of writing first and foremost: “language conscious but arising out of specific social and political concerns of specific communities,” making use of “the enabling role of content in determining form rather than stressing form as independent or separate from its social origins and goals,” as he states in his introduction to Soup issue #2. This vision of New Narrative expands from a small group of friends in the San Francisco writing scene to touch upon a broad survey of work by his contemporaries, writing which merged the personal, political, and emotional; a group of writers who were smart, gossipy, and perhaps most importantly, self-aware.

Fortunately, anyone who isn’t familiar, or simply wishes to be more familiar, with the work of the New Narrative writers wouldn’t have far to go, as the volume Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] is recent enough, I would think, that it would most likely still be in print. The collection also includes a fascinating post-script by his daughter, Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, adding context to him as an artist, an activist and as a human being, from her recollections as a child and his terminal diagnosis during her twenties, to her renewed appreciation of his work as an adult. She writes:

Although I once felt jealous of my dad’s work—and often it was his generosity with others that took him away from me—I know now how lucky I am to have loved and been loved by a writer. Friends who’d lost lawyer-dads have legal briefs to read in their absence. Accountant-dads might leave tax returns. Yet I have this marvelous wealth of his poetry and prose, criticism—and cartoons!—as you can see in this beautiful collection. In the more than 25 years since he’s been gone, I’ve had time to truly sit with this work he’d shaped in the compromised privacy of his home office (which was really just a corner of his bedroom) and I can read it as an adult, a fellow writer, instead of as his daughter.

Abbott’s work through this collection, much of it widely available for the first time, has a wonderful and wild energy to it, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and jumping from project to project. The book itself is a curious collage of styles and experiments, as Abbott’s literary shifts echoed very clearly the shifts in his own interests and concerns, all with an urgency that moves back and forth from wildly energized to desperate. In a recent interview with Townsend on the new volume, conducted by Jamie Bradshaw for Full Stop, they speak to Abbott’s energy:

Steve is a pretty unique figure in the history of Bay Area writing. Like a lot of queer young men in the 1970s he was a transplant to SF, but unlike many others he was a recent widow (his wife Barbara died in a car accident just months earlier) and a single parent, moving there from Atlanta with his young daughter Alysia in early 1974. When he arrived he threw himself into a number of writing, art and organizing projects. This work seemed both informed by his new locale and a natural extension of his previous experiences as a social justice advocate and conscientious objector during the Vietnam War (a position he was almost jailed for as a draft dodger), comic artist, writer and editor/publisher. Steve’s idiosyncrasy, in part, comes from this mélange of varied skill sets and lived experiences, but also from his position as the father of a young girl, living as an out gay man in the middle of a robust queer community where parenthood was not the norm. I think this added layer, being a young, single gay father, provided social difficulties, but perhaps gave his work a sense of urgency and perspective as well. As a working-class writer and a dad at the same time, Steve knew how to hustle.

One of the passages that struck me was the utiniki (a Japanese poetic structure—one favoured since by Canadian poets such as bpNichol and Fred Wah—utilized as first-person blend of prose and haiku, often composed as travel journals) sequence towards the end of the collection, “SKINNY TRIP TO A FAR PLACE,” a mix of straightforward journaling and lyric jokes and turns. The second in the twenty-one poem sequence reads:

OUR ARRIVAL

Landing in a foreign country, tripping over your tongue. As a cushion I took a crash course in Japanese before leaving. I can say “Excuse me” (Sumi-mausan), “Water please” (O misu kudasai), “Thank you” (Domo) and “Where’s the bathroom?” (Oteari wa doku des ka). The words we hear upon entering Kyoto:

                        Hankyu Dept. Store,

                                Hankyu Subway,

                                        Hankyu very much.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Martin Corless-Smith

Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He studied as a painter and a poet. His books include Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace (Miami University Press, 2019), The Fool & The Bee (Shearsman, UK, 2019), and a novel This Fatal Looking Glass (SplitLevel Texts). A collection of essays, The Poet's Tomb is forthcoming from Parlor Press in 2020. He lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was a bit of a fluke (Of Piscator, U of Georgia Press). I sent it off very quickly after pulling together recent things. It had a certain whimsy about it. I suppose it got me the job I still have, so in that way it made me employable. I was of course pleased to get a book out, enjoyed the object, liked being able to give it to friends, family and poets. Actually I think what struck me most when I saw the book was that it takes some distance to read one’s own work. I think my most recent collection of poems, The Fool & The Bee (Shearsman) is more like it than anything in between, a gap of 20 years or more. It seems part of the same journey. Maybe I like Of Piscator most in some ways, because it never expected an audience.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I think poetry seemed more capable of directly engaging with emotions and thoughts: vague shapes and colours that needed some kind of immediate evocation. I never particularly worried about what genre it was. It was surrogate for painting.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

How long is a piece of string? My novel, which died many times on the table, took 7 years to put in a nearly satisfactory shape. Some books have taken only a year. My first efforts are almost always finished drafts. If they are not what I need then I don’t use them, but I tend to write the poem out in one go, even if it is a very long one. I will change places where I can’t follow my own initial attempts, but I don’t just get rid of weird and awkward moments. I very rarely make big edits. I write them by hand, which maybe gives me time to feel the poem happening the way I want it to. And if I feel they have hit on something then they shape the book they are in. I’d say 35% of my poems don’t survive to a public viewing, even if I like them as poems. It just depends what they are doing and if I feel I need that in the book. Sometimes poems find a purpose decades later.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m always writing, or making notes or letting my mind wander towards a phrase or an idea or a galvanizing feeling. Books are the most common arrival point, a way of putting together and moving on (though often I don’t go very far).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I am almost always happy to read, though I prefer to keep it short and sweet. I’ve been at too many readings where the poet ruins any sense of connection by simply going on too long. Once in a blue moon I’m sad and there seems no point in it, or in anything, but thankfully that is rare.

I will say I nearly always feel the audience isn’t there for my work in particular, more to support poetry or taking a class or being good citizens, so I often feel, especially in America, that my work is hard for them to hear. My language can be dense and the ideas difficult or opaque, so there isn’t always that easy payoff some readings give the “ahhing” and “sighing” audience. I also don’t want to explain or anecdotalise, so it isn’t always the love fest! I’m not interested in selling myself or my work to anyone, so I suppose I just hope they like it, but people very rarely come up to me after a reading and say anything, so who knows what they are thinking. They are probably thinking about getting a drink or catching a bus! I do sometimes wonder why I do it. It’s not for any obvious gratification.

That said, I write with sound as an important engine, a central element in my poems, so it is good to have to perform that.

Honestly it feels like I’m a chef and I put my heart and soul into preparing the food and I want it to be loved and consumed, and even if sometimes going out into the dining area is kind of fun and exciting, in the end it’s not really my business. No one wants a chef breathing down their neck when they are trying to taste a dish.

I would be fine never to read again, or to read more than I do. I have thought, when reading from The Fool and the Bee of dressing up in clown make-up, but I suspect I’d never want to take it off!

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’t separate theoretical concerns from emotional ones, or formal or spiritual ones. To me, the fact of being cuts through everything, and so my work wants to be as much about philosophy as it is about sex or sparrows. I’m very much interested in poetics and in thinking about how poems are part of the way of shaping thought and being.

Right now I want poetry to offer an alternative to capitalism! I feel poetry has a wonderful ambivalent place where it both ignored/ridiculed and somewhat held in esteem (probably this is a residual cultural effect). The fact that there is really little direct financial gain is part of that ambivalence as well.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writing is an essential part of culture/history/society/selfhood. We wouldn’t have a sense of culture without it. Nor who we are, and what love is, what loss is, what being is. Culture today (in the bits I mostly attend) has crawled into a terrible corner where materialism and blind accumulation, even with the truth of the emptiness of that accumulation spelled large in our faces, has replaced almost even the possibility of any alternative. It’s not just that we are shallow money grabbing assholes, it’s that we can’t really think of another way to be. Writers have to be able to write new ways of being alive to remind us of our humanity, of love, of the free gifts of being.

All epochs shift and crumble, all world-views are in flux, and poems are one thing that tells us where we are in the process.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I did a few books with Fence, and Rebecca Wolff was really a great person to interact with. She’s very smart, and a terrific poet herself, and we’ve known each other for years, but most of all she is honest, and cannot not be, it seems. So she’s an ideal reader. She never badgered but had great questions. I don’t recall if she ever convinced me to change anything. Mostly she just wanted to know what I thought was going on. Keith Tuma was a microscopic editor to my recent Horace collection. Very handy! But in general my work is not a collaboration until it gets out of my hands and into the hands of an unknown reader. And then who knows…

I’ve had one or two good friends over the years who have read things: Cathy Wagner, Alan Halsey (also a publisher of my work), Dan Beachy-Quick, but again, did I ever change anything because they felt I should…maybe I did? I had some good teachers who read my work and took it seriously which was really important to me: Jorie Graham, Marvin Bell, Donald Revell…without their input I don’t know where I’d be, even if I fought against direct influence and suggestions, the support was vital.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I wish I could remember.

When I was a student at Iowa, my work was getting very dark and Marvin Bell told me I had a choice to change my direction, which I did. He didn’t want me to conflate creativity with darkness, and risk unearthing some of the potential dangers that that might. It was kind and true.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I read too much shitty news. So I try to get away to my studio where I don’t have the internet. I teach, so reading is around what I am teaching. I’m lucky, very lucky, because I make up classes, and am allowed to, around topics I want to think about. So I might theme a class on Beauty, or the Soul and read a range of books about that. My writing and painting and teaching are all of a piece.

I write all the time. I have a notebook or two on the go all the time (some pocket notebooks in various jackets). Then, when they are full or I feel I have gone on a while I type them into the computer. I wait to see if a book is happening.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don’t worry about not writing. If I don’t write for a while then so much the better for everyone else!

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Roast chicken. Fresh line-dried laundry. The leafy mulchy earth in old deciduous woods.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Comes from anywhere you are paying attention.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’d never have thought to write without reading other writers of course. So many of them are dear companions. Of our contemporaries I always wait excitedly to see what Alice Notley has just made, or Lisa Robertson, or Alan Halsey, a few others. But there are always new surprises. There are wonderful presses like Canarium, Ugly Duckling and The Song Cave that keep bringing great things into the world.

Of poets from the past, Petrarch, Leopardi, Keats, Wordsworth, Herrick, Donne …makes me sound like a stuffy old white dude…huh. Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector, Aime Cesaire, W.G. Sebald, Vallejo, Pessoa, Trakl, Beckett …I read lots of other genres, and am always excited when Giorgio Agamben has another book translated, though they mostly prove the same points over again through a slightly different metaphors or subjects, they are brilliant reminders and filled with lovely moments and helpful formulations.

Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Heidegger.

I read fiction because I don’t like TV very much very often. I feel annoyed by the silliness of much TV. Some is great of course, but not enough to keep me busy. And I can’t watch TV during daylight hours. I also never listen to podcasts, I just don’t want a voice talking at me during the day. I seem to read a lot of great fiction by young women these days.

Relationships and Nature (birds especially) are always very present in my life and in my work.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

So much. Live by the sea for an extended period. Live in another country. See India. See my son happily through college, out into the world. Maybe get rid of all of my things. Paint the interior of an atheist chapel. Die well.

If you mean as a writer, probably a short book of philosophy.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d have been a painter. I still might, I have a studio and I paint 3 or 4 days a week. I don’t like to sell them which is an issue. I might have to start. I was a gardener during my summers when an undergraduate, I could have stood doing that.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I finished a graduate degree in painting in the States and moved back to London with no money and no materials. I had no studio…poetry was the closest thing I could do to painting without a studio.  

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Well I’m teaching the last two chapters of The Prelude tonight, but I suspect you mean which great book did I last read for the first time…

Fiction: Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing

Recent WTF in translation: Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street

Recent Poetry in new translation: Surrender to Night: Collected poems of Georg Trakl

Contemporary Poetry: Timothy Donnelly’s The Problem of the Many

Contemporary Fiction: Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes on the Form of a Mortal Girl

Contemporary Art Theory: Cesar Aira’s On Contemporary Art

Contemporary Philosophy/Theory: Giorgio Agamben’s Creation and Anarchy

Random WTF: Orpheus and the root of Platonism, Algis Uzdavinys

It could have been an entirely different list. These are just very recent. Last two months?

Film: Roma

19 - What are you currently working on?

A book of prose pieces about the disintegration of selfhood. I have a book of essays coming out soon, The Poet’s Tomb (Parlor Press), so I am picking out the weeds. A large oil painting of what appears to be a Victorian factory.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;