reading in the margins: Bobbie Louise Hawkins

  

BARBARA [HENNING]: Did you get there?

BOBBIE [LOUISE HAWKINS]: Oh God, nobody ever gets there.

During pandemic mornings lifeguarding our young ladies in their e-schoolings, I sit on the couch with notebook and pen, amid various drafts of in-progress short stories, and a copy of Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ reissued 1984 novella, One Small Saga. Produced with a new introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, as well as a long out-of-print short story, this new volume also includes a lengthy excerpt of an even longer interview that Barbara Henning conducted with Hawkins across 2011. Throughout the book, Hawkins’ prose is sharp, attentive and coiled. Her prose is descriptively expressive in this really lovely subtle way.

I’ve been attempting to be more proactive about seeking out prose that strikes my attention. It isn’t as easy as one might think: as an active reviewer, I’ve received books in the mail almost every day for more than two decades, but the kinds of prose that really strike are few and far between. Lydia Davis, Sarah Manguso, Miranda July, Anik See, Kathy Fish, Heather Christle. Lorrie Moore. I pour through literary journals and pry open envelopes, but much of what I encounter reads as too straightforward; narratives that might be easier to adapt into film, but harder to hear the music of the language.

As part of a post-reading panel at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October 2007, the late Quebecoise novelist Gil Courtemanche complained heavily about English-language North American novelists. “You don’t want to write books, you want to write stories,” he proclaimed, thanks to my notes from the time. He was on a panel alongside British writer Marina Lewycka and Newfoundland writer Michael Winter, both of whom he dismissed with a wave of his hand. Courtemanche declared the problem with “our” fiction was that we all wanted to be filmmakers. It was no longer about words, he said. It was no longer about anything more than action. He went on, of course, saying that he doesn’t bother reading North American fiction anymore, because something always has to “happen” in them, and writers can’t just write anymore. Where is the interiority, he accused.

He also complained about being prevented from smoking indoors, claiming we were a culture of barbarians. Once he left, we christened a side-room of the festival hospitality suite the “Gil Courtemanche smoking room.” It was where all the conversation occurred.

Hawkins’ is a name I’d heard for quite some time, but never quite got to, in those ways in which we all do, filing an ever-increasing list of names of writers that one wishes to get to, but haven’t quite been able to, yet. Julia Cohen, Paige Lewis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. In my own way, I do wish to get to everyone, but it does take some time.

My prior of Hawkins’ work was limited to the fact that she published a novel with Coach House Press at one point, and had been one of Robert Creeley’s wives. I only mention Creeley for how important his work was for me throughout my late twenties and into my thirties, having spent an enormous time learning through his rhythms and lines, and those other writers that surrounded him, although I seem not to have paid nearly enough attention. I first caught her name through the association, and possibly her Coach House title catching my eye in multiple second-hand shops over the years.

I slip downstairs through our fiction shelves, and there it is, Almost Everything (1982), a co-publication between Toronto’s Coach House Press and East Haven, Connecticut publisher LongRiver Books. A paperback set amid Elizabeth Hay and Fanny Howe and Sheila Heti titles. A price sticker on the front cover is dated January 1999, $3.99, from Toronto’s late, lamented community bookstore, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library. A whole book by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, there on my bookshelf, entirely unread. And so, to begin.

I’m fascinated by the ways in which Hawkins utilized the information of her life to shape fiction, writing out a narrative propelled by observation and commentary, composed over her own situations and experiences. She married a Danish architect when young, and begin to travel; so, too, did the narrator of One Small Saga. She was deeply pregnant during the cruise across the Atlantic; so, too, was her narrator. She uses the structures of her own life, but her work is fueled by her observations, her language. Her clipped articulations of what might not have been spoken of in fiction by male writers, or even caught at all. Her paragraphs expand, and then curl into conclusion. There is nowhere to go but the next line, the next thought. The language itself, propels. Hers is the most wonderful music, and one I regret not spending time with before this.

Here We Come A-Noveling:

 

Robert Duncan once said there is no such thing as fiction. And that makes more sense than almost anything. And when at one point I started looking back through my stories, I thought, I have almost never written a fictional line in my life. Your mind gets on something and you just meander along with it. I don’t think that’s fiction. It’s all autobiography.
            Bobbie Louise Hawkins, interviewed by Barbara Henning, One Small Saga (2020)

Okay, so that’s a stupid title for a post, but I’m going to leave it that way. I’m reading Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ (1930-2018) newly reissued One Small Saga (2020), by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse, with an introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, along with a portion of an interview conducted with the author by Barbara Henning back in 2011. I’m struck by the idea she referenced in her interview, that fiction is not but reworked autobiography, and I think I both agree and disagree with that entirely. Is that even possible?

Fiction is written out through experience, certainly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. I think of Hawkins’ work, or even Robert Creeley’s fiction, both of which emerged from direct experience, writing fictionalized accounts of their lives, or even Michael Winter’s first few published books. Is it fiction when it comes from life? Well, yes. Even a memoir is but a version of events, one that perhaps not everyone surrounding those events might agree on, and to tell a story is to provide a narrative structure of beginning and ending. To tell a story in a pub is to make narrative choices of where one begins, and where one ends, whether or not the facts of the story might remain intact.

In my own fiction, whether short stories or the novels, there are little threads, little elements I’ve gathered from my own experience. Much like the main character in white (2007), I have stood as a child in front of a mirror, and speculated on my biological origins: which elements came from either of them, and which may have been mine alone. As my main character, Alberta, did in Missing Persons (2009), I have sat on the back of a snowmobile that ran through fields and over fences, nervous about being caught up in the fencing. And yet, neither of these are autobiography. I know those speculations and I know those fields, thus can offer them to characters to add to their own experiences, although I have never lived in the prairie described in Alberta’s immediate surroundings, which I considered to be a fictionalization of an unnamed Lumsden, Saskatchewan (a geography I visited but one, but attempted a great deal of research during the novel’s composition). When I am constructing fiction, it feels akin to weaving, with multiple threads woven in to allow for what might emerge through the combination of elements. And after a while, the character, or characters, or story, begins to move in its own direction, the foundational elements providing their own suggestions of where to go next.

In my current project, I imagine the rural house belonging to one character to be that of the house immediately next door to where my father lived; the house where he died, actually. I spent a weekend there, caregiving, during my final weekend with him. I got to know the house rather well, and can see it, there, as I write. I write the widow, Patience, sitting quietly on her covered porch each morning, sipping her tea. She faces east, as the neighbours do.

And here, another untethered fragment of this novel-in-progress, one that utilizes some of the local knowledge gathered from being raised on that farm in Eastern Ontario. Years ago, poet John B. Lee mentioned a story of his bachelor uncle, who would take a load of garbage to the dump, and always return to John’s parent’s farm with more than he left with. A moldy set of Encyclopedia Brittanica he retrieved relegated to the barn. I’m sure John’s uncle wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to gather refuse with more enthusiasm than reason. This short scene also references my unfinished novel, "Signal Fires," composed as eventual precursor to Missing Persons (a manuscript where we meet numerous characters, including a twenty-something girl named Alberta, but who needed further development, thus Missing Persons emerged), that explored a stretch of deliberately-set barn fires that same summer, nearly twenty years ago by now. The randomness of it, and the violence of it, combined with the sheer amount of instances that year, made the whole of it rather frightening. In the end, it was a volunteer firefighter who was setting them, attempting to make himself the hero, once he set out to fight the fires. How many barns, how much livestock, may have been lost to this man's ego?

*

After lunch, Peter unspools a reel of electrical fencing. He stands at the boundary of backyard and field, beyond the garage, to repair a fresh break. Beyond their lone Douglas Fir. After days spent cutting and baling, the rain fell, before they could return to the fields to retrieve them. And to place wet bales in the haymow would mean a pressure of heat and the potential of fire. That’s the last thing he needs. He recalls the summer when he was seven or eight, a sequence of local barns in their area that burst into flame. Most had been arson, of course, but there were still some that investigators couldn’t determine. Or, what his father had said at the time.

He unspools, walks the length of the property there to the back, stitching new electrical fencing around where bales of straw sit in sextets, in pyramids. The girls chase along, climbing each stack in turn, laughing and scratching bare legs. The dog rushes at birds, runs on ahead. Next year, Peter will relocate the cows from the other side of the barn over here, so the fence needs to be settled. Once he turns back the switch, the sound of rhythmic tic from the back of the garage.

Standing out in the field, Peter is somehow reminded of a story he’d heard as a boy, of a great-uncle who had buried a car in the bush. He’d grown tired of owning it, and for reasons unknown, decided that hauling or driving it deep into the sixty acres of bush across from the farmhouse was the best way to dispose of it. He buried a car in the bush. When Peter was young, he and his brothers tried to figure out where it lay, where the car would have landed, roaming overgrown paths and occasionally finding themselves lost in the brush. Their father never believed it was actually true, but a story his uncle told the children to trick them into looking, the way uncles tease children. Uncle Rick, who returned from the dump every time with more than he’d left with. A perfectly good set of thirty year old encyclopedias. A concordance of lamps. Everything set into a corner of the barn, as Peter’s grandmother wouldn’t let any of it into the house.

He most likely took it to town and sold it, their father would say. Who would be stupid enough to bury a car? But the thought is still there. Peter can’t shake it. Does it have to make sense for it to have happened?

The fence finished, he turns to the house, calling the girls from the creek. Their legs are covered in mud.

 

 

Barbara Henning, Digigram

Raining

—a full moon—wake up late—open my mail—a refund check—damp and cold—off to the credit union—an American flag strikes the flag pole—on Avenue B—an archbishop guides parishones—catholic-leaning alternatives—for girl scout cookies—during the crusades—thousands of children marched to their death—children crowding—into the earth school—a lanky guy wearing earmuffs—makes the air quotes with his fingers—says the word “safe”—at 9 pm the storm thins—brownish fog—the outlook for 2016 somewhat gloomy—German business leaders urge Russians—uphold a cease-fire—in the Ukraine—all agree—it’s going to stay warm now—walking home—on Avenue A—a man asks—do you want cocaine—

25 Feb 2016

The poems that make up Brooklyn poet and editor Barbara Henning’s latest poetry collection, Digigram (New York NY: United Artists Books, 2020), are built as curious collage-accumulations, quick poem-sketches that stitch and string together a series of connected and unconnected phrases, thoughts, descriptions and ideas. The poems emerge through the accumulation and the rhythms, the immediate thoughts and moments that blend threads of the intimate, the immediate, the domestic and the political, writing about where the dishes came from, walking down Avenue A, overheard conversation, newspaper reports and the emergence of Presidential candidate Donald Trump. As the poem “It All Depends” begins: “—upon a wizened old woman—missing two front / teeth—an old skull cap—big men’s levis—full of holes—a / shopping cart—no tax loopholes—she scowls at me, / then apologizes—trains seem safer than the 80s—I / say—depends on who you are—and where you are—true, / true [.]” The effect of her hyphenated sketches provide an immediacy to her poems, almost a point-form journal-entry effect, comparable to that of New York poet Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2016) [see my review of such here]. These poems provide both a portrait of a particular time, and an examination of where we currently stand, threads that continue across 2020 as easily as 2016, 2017 and 2018, when these poems were first composed. The world has changed, but it is still the same world.

What I find interesting, also, as she writes in her “Process Note” at the end of the collection, is that this collection was originally prompted by Body Sweats:The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (MIT Press, 2011):

In 2016, I picked up a collection of writing and art by the Dadaist, Elsa Von Freytag-Lorenhaven, also known as the Baroness. I pored over this book, laughing at the way she took William Carlos Williams to task (old observation minted wisdom). She was the ultimate beat/punk artist, scoffing at bourgeois society. Reading her poems, I thought to myself—they are like ecliptic telegrams to the world. At the time I was collecting poetic material from my journals, arranging, rearranging and collaging in news from the days before and around. Meanwhile I felt desperate—as did many others—about the political situation unfolding in the country. Trump had not yet been elected, but the hate on mainstream media was shocking. Then he won the election—how horrifying. Greed, wealth, ignorance and hate arm-in-arm. While I’m nowhere near as anti-establishment or as abrasive as the Baroness, I did pick up on her rhythms and started translating my poems into ecliptic digital messages that I called “digigrams”.

WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER (1983 – 2009), ed. Anselm Berrigan

This is not an oral history of The Poetry Project, for instance, though a great deal of information that might qualify as anecdotal history of The Project and its numerous social and artistic contexts can be found within. It’s not a scholarly book or a book “about” poetry, though one may find out a great deal about poetry as a living art form flowing through the costume of each interview. It is an anthology of a type, and many readers will naturally jump around the book while reading it, but the book is also a collection of stories filtered through the form of the interview into one longer story made of overlapping circles. As such, it will reward readers who take on the experience of reading it from beginning to end. Characters appear, recede, and pop up again in surprising places. Jobs, death, illness, war, and money problems come up as frequently as references to the arts, and the chronological structure of the book belies a sense of time that often reaches back to the 1960s and earlier, while examining the future from the perspective of that particular day a conversation is taking place. It is not a linear chronicle of an era, but it is a chronicle nonetheless, an assemblage verging on accidental chorus that presents ideas and discussion about poetry in the charged words of the poets, not in unreadable academic speak, and not in insulated literary terms divorced from the broader ground of the world and its inexhaustible complexities. Its necessity is bound up with the casual intensity of its invitation: you won’t find many people who speak on and for poetry, or anything else for that matter, in such high and ordinary terms. The ride is for anyone to take. (Anselm Berrigan, “INTRODUCTION”)

Produced to “coincide with the fiftieth anniversary season of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church” in New York City, is the hefty anthology WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER (1983 – 2009), edited by Anselm Berrigan (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2017). As Berrigan writes in his introduction, the series was originally founded “in 1966 out of the need for a stable ongoing reading series/gathering point/community center for the overlapping circles of poets in downtown NYC. Those circles included and came to include poets variously associated with the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, Umbra, Language writing, and the Nuyoricans—associations which are variously highlighted, fleshed out, made ambiguous, undermined and otherwise reformed in the interviews found herein. In one sense, these groups and their outliers are a source-in-common for the poets and artists this book casts its light upon. But The Poetry Project has always been a site of challenge and respite for individual poets who refuse to take conventional paths, who want live experience with fresh material right now, and who, as Ted Greenwald puts it in his conversation with Arlo Quint, ‘want the work out front.’ That’s the ethos.”

7:44 PM 7/29/96 Dear Barbara, …Writing in fragments seems to be a very contemporary response to the postmodern distraction, the channel-surfing attention span, our fractured sense of time, on the one hand. People I know, poets and academics, are writing literally on the fly, taking their laptops aboard airplanes. That’s what we share with the business passenger working on a spreadsheet or annual report. On the other hand, when I think of poetry in fragments, I also think of Sappho, whose work comes to us, like classic Greek art and architecture, as enigmatic shards and evocative ruins. Given the human capacity to destroy civilization “with the touch of a button” the same way we microwave lean cuisine, ancient ruins stand as a figure for the obliteration of ourselves and our own culture. We imagine that some extraterrestrial archaeologists might someday examine our fragments, and wonder what manner of beings we were. In some contemporary work, including my own, the artist is engaged in a kind of archaeology of the detritus of consumer culture, the artifacts of the electronic age. That’s why I immediately recognized Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Houses, in Detroit, as visual art equivalent of what I was trying to do in Muse & Drudge. David Hammons has a similar approach to recycled resources. I’m also inspired by the work of Leonardo Drew, which is more abstract, but still carries the emotional charge of abandoned and reclaimed materials. (“An Interview With Harryette Mullen,” by Barbara Henning; October/November 1996, No. 162)

As Berrigan writes, the interviews collected in this volume were originally done for publication in The Poetry Project Newsletter, with a collected thirty-eight interviews that range in dates from 1983 to 2010, conducted with poets (some who are included here more than once) including Red Grooms, Paul Schmidt, Bernadette Mayer, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel R. Delany, Renee Gladman, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Larry Fagin, Tina Darragh, Edwin Torres, Brenda Coultas, Will Alexander, Ron Padgett, Ted Greenwald, Eileen Myles and Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers. As fascinating as the interviews are in the collection, editor Berrigan presents a whole array of information and insights on The Poetry Project in his introduction, including the suggestion that perhaps a proper history of their five decades-plus might be worth someone finally putting together. There are ways in which the interviews, collected here as they are, do present a portrait of the ongoing activity and environment of The Poetry Project, one that comes with friendships, apprenticeships, arguments and pitched battles, all while attempting to do the work of writing and continue a writing life. This is an enormous volume, and one that should already be seen as enormously valuable in terms of both history and craft, and showcasing the value of The Poetry Project itself, for hosting, assisting and developing a wide array of writing and writers. And, if nothing else, this volume should point readers into understanding just how important it might be to start reading the contemporary issues of The Poetry Project Newsletter, to keep up with what else is happening.

Lisa Jarnot: I want to talk to you about Allen Ginsberg. Partly, what was your relationship with Allen like?

Ed Sanders: I was a senior at high school and read Howl and I bought Howl actually at the University of Missouri Bookstore on a fraternity weekend. And it seemed like, as a young man, about everything I’d been looking for in terms of a model for writing poetry and combining poetry with your personal life in a way I thought would be appropriate, although I was living in the Midwest, in a ‘50s type all-American environment. Then I moved to New York later and saw him from afar. I attended poetry readings at places like the Gaslight on MacDougal Street or the Living Theater on 14^th Street. I saw him read as I did other poets—Edward Dahlberg, Kerouac, Corso; I saw Frank O’Hara read. So wherever I could go to find poets that I admired to watch them read I went, but I never considered introducing myself or trying to be a part of it; I was just a witness. And I was going to New York University trying to study languages so I didn’t really meet Allen until 1963 when he came back from a long stay in India and Japan and Cambodia, Viet Nam, and other places—he went to the Vancouver Poetry Festival—and then he came back. And before that I had corresponded with him. I sent him Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts in India and he liked it and sent me this really important poem, “The Change,” where he kind of changed spiritual directions and came to terms with his body on atrain in Japan after visiting Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder on the way back to Vancouver. So anyway, from 1963 on, when I formally met him, and he took me to a party at Robert and Mary Frank’s house, I began hanging out with him any time we were around in the same area until he died 34 years later. We had many, many capers and adventures and he called all the time and we saw each other now and then. A number of people could say the same thing. He was part of my life, and part of my family’s life. He was part of the household. He gave us advice, a lot of advice. And you know, he’d give advice on what kind of furniture to have in your kitchen; he was very much a teacher. (“An Interview with Ed Sanders,” by Lisa Jarnot; October/November 1997, No. 166)

The book does make me wonder if it might be worth putting some of the other interviews online, a la The Paris Review, for the sake of a wider readership and even scholarship. Given there are more than two hundred interviews (at least) to date, what else is out there worth reading?