Garrett Caples, Retrievals

 Poets tend to enjoy reading, so when [Kenneth] Rexroth points out a deficiency in this department, he refers not to quantity but kind. The very pleasure poets seek in the act of reading renders many of them incapable of pursuing any topic to its necessary depth, because doing so would likely compromise their enjoyment. They might have to read some pretty boring shit in order to get the information they need to take an informed position. Their own emphasis on aesthetics, poetics, the formal aspect of writing leaves them vulnerable to oversimplification and elegance where substance must prevail and prone to purely theoretical articulation where particularity and application are all that matter. For all its theoretical politics, the present Eurocentric avant-garde displays little curiosity about the actual mechanisms of American imperialism that dictate our day-to-day life in the form of the ubiquitous crap we make other peoples make for us next to nothing. Such realities are too ugly and complicated for theory, and theory’s shown itself unable to cope after 9/11. When the twin towers collapsed, a lot of elegant ideas went with them. (“Philip Lamantia and André Breton”)

Lately, I’ve been going through San Francisco poet, editor and critic Garrett Caples’ collection of essays, Retrievals (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of his most recent poetry collection here], an assemblage of interrogations that circle around a central core of surrealism across the early and middle parts of the 20^th century. The twenty-one essays collected here move from André Breton and Philip Lamantia into Barbara Guest, Richard O. Moore, John Hoffman, Richard Tagett, Marie Wilson, Jean Conner, Arthur Jerome Eddy, Sylvia Fein and multiple other writers, artists and critics, many of whom were well known during their individual periods of activity, but overlooked across and through the years that followed. Originally composed as individual pieces for a variety of journals, magazines and other venues, the essays gathered together offer exactly what the title suggests, attempting to retrieve or reclaim individual names of artists across decades’ of work, most of whom touched upon the central core of surrealism. As he offers to open his essay on Jean Conner, “Becoming Visible”: “When I began work on Retrievals, gathering those essays I’d written on various writers, artists, and ideas that, for one reason or another, had dropped off the cultural map or never fully made it on, I could resist the temptation to add a few more.”

There is such wonderful discovery through these pieces, as Caples writes about seeing a particular artwork and working to dig up information on that particular artist, for example, working to follow a particular loose thread as far as it might go. The pieces are simultaneously critical as well as personal, allowing his wealth of inquiry and research into forms both informative and highly readable. His piece on spending time with Barbara Guest’s last work, as well as spending time with her across her final few years, is quite lovely. Other pieces touch upon his association with City Lights, having been poetry editor there for a number of years now: “As 2013 is the 60^th anniversary of City Lights Books,” he writes, to open his piece “Apparitions: Of Marie Wilson at City Lights,” “I’ve been reflecting lately on its lost history. When I started working there, for example, I came across a catalogue from sometime in the early ‘60s, advertising City Lights publications to the rest of the trade, and I was immediately struck by the appearance, not just of the press’s own titles but the full list of various Bay Area small presses—Oyez, Auerhahn, and White Rabbit, if I remember correctly—which often enough were only available in the bookstore’s then-downstairs poetry section. In a way, City Lights was Small Press Distribution (SPD) avant la lettre, distributing small poetry presses not because it made money but because it was a cool thing to do.”

I’d been a few weeks attempting to find my way into the collection, but found the prologue, “Wittgenstein, A Memoir,” had such an intimidating weight, that I could only find my way in, and way through, by starting to read from the centre of the collection (his piece on Barbara Guest, actually). In certain ways, this collection reminds me of Douglas Crase’s more recent collection of essays (collected across decades of his own critical work on poets and poetry, although covering much of the same period of American poetry) [see my review of such here], in that both collections have allowed me and my own reading new spotlights on a variety of writers that may have fallen into the long shadows of others, especially across the decades since. Some interesting elements through his collection I hadn’t previously considered including Caples’ assertion that surrealism, at least André Breton’s assertion of it, was far more multicultural a movement than anything else occurring during that period across American/French art, writing and thinking, or even the fact that the CIA was deliberately and quietly promoting Abstract Expressionism over surrealism, concerned, in part, over any possibility of revolution or revolt that surrealism might prompt. What is interesting, as well, is Caples’ work around assessing and reassessing the work and life of Philip Lamantia (Caples was also the co-editor of the 2013 collection, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia), a poet I had little to no prior knowledge of. As the essay “Philip Lamantia and André Breton” begins:

That the standard biography of André Breton by Mark Polizzotti, which has all the appearance of being exhaustive, nonetheless excludes Philip Lamantia is a disservice not only to both poets but to the reader as well. For surely the reader would be interested to learn that, during his Second World War exile in the United States, Breton admitted but one American poet into the ranks of surrealism—let us not count Charles Duits, who wrote in French and receives ample coverage—that this poet was only 15 at the time, that he went on to become one of the major poets of a generation that includes Creeley and Duncan, O’Hara and Ashbery, and that he was still alive and living in San Francisco at the time of the bio’s original publication.

Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory: “Surrealism in Canada”

Importantly, for the mandate of Open Letter, we present here several articles and interviews, which break new ground in the area of critical and historical writing on Surrealism. Some of the articles explore the positioning of Surrealism within the larger context of modern literary history, exploring influences from other movements (Romanticism, Symbolism), and Surrealism’s influence on other tendencies (Oulipo, Magic Realism, Situationism). A need to class Surrealist expression is a persistent current in many of these articles and interviews, often attempting to place it inside a timeline, usually within, or in opposition to André Breton’s orbit of influence. Invaluable original research is presented here, including an exhaustive examination of the origins of Breton’s famous work Arcanum 17. (Beatriz Hausner, “What can be”)

I’m not entirely sure when Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory comes to an end [see the profile I wrote on the journal for Open Book: Ontario here], but it can’t be that long, now. The loss will be substantial. Until then, the most recent issue, “Fifteenth Series, Number 3, Summer 2013” is “Surrealism in Canada,” guest co-edited by Gregory Betts and Beatriz Hausner, both of whom have approached the idea of surrealism from different vantage points, including interviews, essays, poems and other materials to give an overview of some of the activity that has occurred within the boundaries of Canada over the past century. Part of the appeal of this particular issue as a whole is in the way it attempts to engage with a variety of threads of what could fall under the umbrella of “Canadian Surrealism,” from contributions on and of fiction, poetry, theatre and the visual arts by Ray Ellenwood, Peter Dubé, Lillian Necakov, Gregg Simpson, Ludwig Zeller, Karl Jirgens and Claude Gauvreau.

The Ensemble of Sleep

What night demands on Monday

sour hand half minutes

when we enter this paradise

love and arms resemble

the ear that I told you yesterday

there is not much to your street

I let my coat enter your hands

with this, amiable

all is tempered by human time

we assemble sleep

my love with fur stars

the sky above us like a drop

I reclose your many hands

and also the tents that tremble love

watch us longingly

in the ensemble of sleep. (Lillian Necakov, “Translating dead French guys”)

The collection also includes Toronto poet and critic Stephen Cain’s lengthy essay, “André Breton in Canada,” exploring the possible connections produced through and by Breton’s brief stay in Quebec in 1944, where he infamously “was inspired to write his last novel, Arcane 17, in the three months he stayed.” As Cain writes, early on in the essay:

But why did Breton come to Gaspé in the first place? There appear to be several contradictory reports but, perhaps understandably, Quebecois literary and artistic criticism has been more precise about Breton’s trip to Canada than international critics and biographers.

For some time, considerations of surrealism in Canada have been limited to relatively unrelated considerations and self-contained pockets, from Betts’ work on poet W.W.E. Ross, the Montreal Surrealists, Brion Gysin, Ludwig Zeller and the predominantly Toronto poets Stuart Ross collected (including Necakov) in his anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadianpoets under the influence (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2007). Both editors include introductions to the collection, with Hausner’s “What can be” providing more of an introductory overview to the contents of the issue, and Betts’ “The Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism in Canada” providing an intriguing overview of how surrealism has impacted upon and through the boundaries of Canada. As he writes, “I approach this issue and this topic not as an attempt to resurrect or invent boundaries by nationalizing the Surrealist movement, but to provide a venue for Surrealist expression and to recognize the wealth of activity that happened in and most often against these borders.” He writes:

It was not until the expats and exiles began seeping into French Canada while avoiding the war over there that the essentially and metaphysically disruptive implications of Surrealism revealed itself here. Borduas, Pellan, Renaud, Leduc, les frères Gauvreau, Sullivan, and all of the other stalwarts of the first active generation of Surrealists in Canada knew very quickly that they had tapped into a powder keg. Unlike in Toronto, the weird abstractions and nonrepresentational experiments in art (including literature, theatre, painting, dance, and music) were recognized as a disruption of reason, which was recognized by revolutionary artist and reactionary critics alike as an affront to God and country. It took a more Catholic context to make that link (and also one far more aware of the Paris scene). In the beginning was the word; the logos, the divine word. But the Greek term ‘logos’ does not just translate as the English ‘word’: it marks the reason and the divine ratio that keeps the universe in balance. If nothing else, Surrealists have always been unreasonable. Thus Borduas decreed in the founding manifesto of the Montreal Automatists, “To hell with holy water and the French-Canadian tuque!” (30). If rationalism and nationalism were the problem behind burning Europe, prudish Canada, and fascist Quebec, then the Surrealists would turn to irrationalism and nonnationalism as antidote.