Little Red Leaves Textile Series: Beverly Dahlen + Sara Lefsyk

One of my favourite American chapbook presses, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions are edited, designed and sewn by Houston, Texas poet Dawn Pendergast, with the covers for each title produced by materials found from a variety of sources. Over the past couple of years, I’ve written about her chapbooks here, among other posts. I keep hoping she might even answer the small press ’12 or 20 questions’ questionnaire at some point, possibly. First off: I like very much how the poem/chapbook of The Rose: A Poem by Beverly Dahlen (2013) is slowly pulled and stretched apart:

death rose

                        immortal rose

mortal rose

the stink of dying roses    black at the heart

hedged  edged  etched  each petal browning

failing   falling

                                    the invisible worm

San Francisco poet Beverly Dahlen’s second Little Red Leaves title—after A Reading: Birds (2011)—is, according to the website, “dedicated to Jay Defeo’s 2000 lb work with the same name.” The reference intrigues, and the internet explains that the late San Francisco visual artist Mary Joan Jay DeFeo (March 31, 1929 - November 11, 1989) was considered to be part of the Beat Generation, and “The Rose” (1958-66) is considered “her most well-known painting,” and one that “took almost eight years to complete and weighs more than one tonne.” Part of DeFeo’s piece is replicated on the cover of Dahlen’s small chapbook. Given the weight of the piece, the lightness of Dahlen’s poem is even more remarkable, able to articulate something of Defeo’s painting, writing “ghastly / ghostly / acid light,” to “sacred [sacrificial] star / dark star / im / ploded [.]” Furthering Dahlen’s ongoing series of response texts, “A Reading,” into the realm of responding to visual arts, I would be curious to hear some of the author’s thoughts on composing such a piece, if she would consider such a straight response, or something even akin to translation.

I TOLD THIS SMALL MAN: if I had a mule, a parachute and long flowing locks, I would jump out of this plane, put you in my shopping cart and push you clean to Brazil where we would change our names, cut our hair and join the local militia. After that, we would lead a small army of chickens to the sea and, after many days of floating, I would catch a small fish and name it Pavlov. Then, we would all jump into the sea and swim until we reached the large island of Europe, where we would start a mariachi band with my birth family and yours and the sun would set and we would all drink sugar water and go to sleep beneath a large curtain of black air.

Boulder, Colorado writer Sara Lefsyk’s second chapbook, after the christ hairnet fish library (Dancing Girl Press, 2013) is the utterly charming A SMALL MAN LOOKED AT ME (2014). Composed as a sequence of short prose sections, the design allows each paragraph/stanza to wrap over to the subsequent page, allowing for something far more compelling than had everything been standardized. It allows an interesting take on the prose, suggesting a more organic and linked progression from section to section. An imagistic sequence of self-contained pieces, each prose-section works to accumulate slowly into the realm of extremely short novella, heading towards a subtle and soft denouement. Where is this short work heading, exactly?

pallaksch. pallaksch. : a poetry journal

In his 1846 account of a visit to Friedrich Hölderlin, Christoph Theodor Schwab documents the poet’s use of a nonsense phrase, ‘pallaksch, pallaksch’, in conversation with those seeking audience and answer from the once pre-eminent, now mad poet of the tower. The idiom served the aphasic Hölderlin as a mode of disengagement, a refusal to refuse or countenance the petitions of a world at once admiring and pitying in its affects. For Celan this amphibology—this ‘Wahnsinnswort’ or ‘madness-word’, to borrow a description from his speech in acceptance of the Büchner Prize—is the inceptive posture of one who would mediate between logos and ethos, structure and praxis—the effulgent babble of a prophetic countenance turned to face this time, always here and now. Hölderlin had attempted such a pose, his eyes “spoken blind,” the poem states, “by their ‘a riddle is the purely originated’”, and it left him in precisely the madness that inaugurates Celan’s poetical stance—not a poetics of absence, as some would have it, but rather of a presence in defiance, in retreat.

            The idea for this magazine came out of a series of discussions on the most general of poetical concerns between myself and Elizabeth Robinson. During these exchanges, it became increasingly clear that Elizabeth and I shared something in our approaches to both the decipherment and composition of such work. The commonalities of perspective did not run along usual lines; a general appreciation for lyrical elements, perhaps—for the materiality of poetical discourse, as it were—but not for any style of experiment or assemblage made manifest thereby. We appeared, rather, to be focusing on a vector in the character of discourse, to use Spicer’s term, a directionality variable in its aim, but particular in its attempts to ground the externalities of reference in a question—the portent of the Seinsfrage, in Heideggerian language, a ceaseless movement towards that’s no less proffered as complete. We’ve conceived it as an annual affair, recognizing that some inclination otherwise may come upon us in time. Both well-established and relatively unknown poets are represented, each given enough space (perhaps rope) to stake a claim, or reach an end, as the case may be. We’ve made a point of selecting work of divergent style and approach, with hopes that in collection there appears some sort of reason, if not precisely rhyme. And so caparisoned with ambiguities too numerous to name, we point our fingers at the real, and…

S. J. Seidenberg, San Francisco

July 25, 2012

With that weighty introduction comes the first issue of the annual pallaksch. pallaksch.: a poetry journal (2012), edited by Steven Seidenberg and Elisabeth Robinson and published by Instance Press, somewhere between San Francisco and Boulder. Building issues through solicitation only, this first contains works by Bridget Carson, Beverly Dahlen, Lew Ellington, Kevin Killian, Colleen Lookingbill, Kimberly Lyons, David Mutschlecner, Steven Seidenberg and Martin Corless Smith. Despite the number of writers working on longer forms, length in literary journals is more a rarity than one might imagine, but for the rare journal such as Buffalo’s P-QUEUE, The Malahat Review’s long poem competition, or George Bowering’s long-late IMAGO carving out space for longer forms. Sometimes, discovering individual poems in scattered journals simply aren’t enough to get a sense of what any particular writer might be working on. Still, I’m slightly frustrated by the lack of bios in their pallaksch. pallaksch. : a poetry journal; I know we have the internet now, but just who are some of these writers?

A Victorian Poem

                        For EB

Yes, dear papa, Oscar Wilde came to tea

And his lips were, what was it,

A liver dissembled? Even though, I

Sat on the lawn at his hem

And wondered at the things he said

And the way he played all around us

With his lazy crazy words and hands

Like something white underwater.

And afterwards Mama, we had taffy

And suet and horribly nice biscuits that

Sank in the sea. Good-bye,

Parasols. My neck itches and so

Does my waist.

I will go read a book and roam.

I will unbutton my throat

And perform on the pianoforte

Something like a march

But that falls apart farther on

Into ribbons of brown split sound

Of a late, fly-driven afternoon. (Kimberly Lyons)

The range here is particularly interesting, from the more visually-attuned poems of Colleen Lookingbill and the stunning stretches of Bridget Carson, to the semi-autobiographical poetics of Kevin Killian and collage-hesitations of David Mutschlecner. Somehow, even with the longer sections, each intrigues enough to make me want to see more. Literary annuals don’t last as long as they should or could, and yet, New American Writing has managed more than three decades so far; any new literary venture is both brave and foolhardy, and I look forward to seeing how this journal develops.

from my window

lumps of clouds and buildings through the pine branches as always

gray rough the news. eating through the seed in the feeder the finches

the street sparrows, a pair of young white-crowns

and the buildings green

gray the towers

the Bank of America a golem a thing

we here spread out along the streets below

a thing that runs through us that makes us quiet or angry

the doves coooooo (rising note) coooo space coo

ding dong bell.

soft fluffy things

the myth of narcissus (Beverly Dahlen, “from A Reading”)

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Beverly Dahlen;

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived in San Francisco for many years. Her first book, Out of the Third, was published by Momo’s Press in 1974. Two chapbooks, A Letter at Easter (Effie’s Press, 1976) and The Egyptian Poems (Hipparchia Press, 1983) were followed by the publication of the first volume of A Reading in 1985 (A Reading 1—7, Momo’s Press). Since then, three more volumes of A Reading have appeared. Chax Press published A Reading 8—10 (1992); Potes and Poets Press: A Reading 11—17 (1989); Instance Press: A Reading 18—20 (2006). Chax Press also published the chapbook A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets in 2004. Ms. Dahlen has published work in numerous periodicals and anthologies. Her essay on beauty and her poem called “A Reading…. the Beautiful” were published in Crayon 5.

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 called Out of the Third.  It was published by Momo's Press (Stephen Vincent) in 1974.  I'm not sure how "it changed my life."  I remember feeling a little disappointed by the rather cool reception, but I myself was quite happy, really, to have published a book at last.  Something validating about it.  I felt that I was really now a "poet.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?    
I wrote my first poem when I was in the 7th grade.  I was walking down a street near where I lived in Portland, Oregon, and the poem simply came to me.  I don't mean anything supernatural, but I knew it was a poem, because I hadn't "made it up."  It was like Creeley said somewhere, "is that a real poem, or did you just make it up?"  It was a real poem in that sense.

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?   
I don't do notes.  The work happens as it happens.  After I published Out of the Third I wrote poems, individual poems, but nothing like a book appeared.  There was a chapbook in 1976 called A Letter at Easter to George Stanley (Effie's Press, Bonnie Carpenter).  I probably published individual poems in magazines here and there.  Much of my work is uncollected.

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 had been, as I described above, mostly writing short poems, not books.  In the summer of 1978, exasperated by my slow process, I decided to write it all.  Everything.  And I began writing something called A Reading.  All of my work now falls under that title.  Except the work that is part of The Main Idea.  I haven't written any "main idea" poems for a long time.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
Yes, I've always enjoyed giving readings, and that's one of the ironies of my title---I'll always have "a reading" whenever I am invited to read.

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? 
Yes.  The epigraph in the first volume of A Reading is from George Steiner:  "Wittgenstein asked where, when, and by what rationally established criterion the process of free yet potentially linked and significant association in psychoanalysis could be said to have a stop.  An exercise in 'total reading' is also potentially unending."  I was intrigued by this quotation, with its allusion to "terminable and interminable" analysis.  I liked the idea of open-endedness, but this kind of writing has its pitfalls.  It is not easy to write without boundaries, but that's not actually so different from Olson/Duncan's ideas of "open field composition," or even Williams' notion that anything can be a subject of poetry.  Mind itself is shapely, Duncan said somewhere, and sometimes one writes to see the shape of that mind.

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?
This is a very vexed question.  What place do poets have in culture?  I don't know.  I think the poet writes poetry.  I think that poetry really can address any issue.  But when the issues are political, poets need to be careful not to mouth propaganda.  There's some very good political poetry.  I think of Blake, his prophecies, or Duncan's prophetic anti-Vietnam War poem.  Poets sometimes have these powers of prophecy, but I'm not sure that's enough to move the entire culture.  And that seems to have always been so---neither did the Greeks really pay attention to their prophets, nor have other nations.  There is something perverse about society---it does not want to hear the truth.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? 
A little of each.  It depends on the editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 
When I was in high school, I was writing very dreamy poems.  One of my teachers said the poems were nice, but why not write about something more tangible?  So I wrote down the bus ride from school to home!  It took up pages.  And it was a great exercise in writing details.  I think that's the best advice to give any young poet, one who thinks poems have to be moonlight and roses.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?   
I don't know about easy.  I've written critical prose, but I only write about poetry I find appealing.  I wouldn't write to put someone down.  My most recent critical work will be in the new issue of The Capilano Review.  The issue is devoted to the work of George Stanley, someone whose work I've known and loved for a long time.

11 - 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 don't have a "routine" so much anymore.  I should try to establish that again.  The main parts of A Reading were written every morning.  I rarely missed a day of work in the morning.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?      
I don't look for inspiration.  I just have to sit down and write.  The recent poem about the birds came to me while I was in bed before going to sleep.  I got up and wrote the first words on a tablet, then worked on the poem for several days after that.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?          
My mother was a wonderful cook and baker.  When she baked, the fragrance of her cookies was in the air at least half a block away from home as I came from school.  But I love the fragrance of flowers too, lavender and freesia and carnations.

14 - 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?    
Yes, I agree with McFadden (obviously) and he's not the only one who said that.  Margaret Mead said something like books don't just spring fully-formed from the brain, they come from other books.  So what I am reading is one of the bases for the writing.   And yes, I'd include everything else you mentioned, thinking about nature, or music, the arts in general, films.  I hesitate to discuss my ideas before they are fully formed but I have something in mind involving the use of visual art as a base for writing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?  
I've named several other writers already:  Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, George Stanley, H.D, Emily Dickinson----not necessarily in that order.  Adrienne Rich has been important, as has Kathleen Fraser, Frances Jaffer---at a certain period of feminist development, these women were the most important to me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
I suppose I'd like to visit the ancestral lands in Europe:  Sweden and Finland.

17 - 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 would have been a teacher.  I was, in fact, a teacher before I retired.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? 
I didn't fancy working in a bank or at the post office.  I thought being a retail salesperson was awful.  I did it in my school vacations.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 
I'm reading Lydia Davis' new translation of Madame Bovary.  I've also been reading The Wide Road (Harryman and Hejinian) and am looking forward to Looking up Harryette Mullen.  I read a lot of things simultaneously.

Films:  Believe it or not, my favorite film is the Brit-com series that ran for 30+ years in England:  Last of the Summer Wine.  I own all the DVD's that are available and watch them again and again.  It's a very funny, very physical comedy that takes place in and around the town of Holmfirth in Yorkshire.  Bill Owen is wonderful but then so is Peter Sallis and Brian Wilde---but I won't go on and on.  It's politically incorrect, lots of sexist jokes, terrible puns, and I love it.  I'm the only fan I know.  Everyone else here hates it.

Also, about movies:  of course I like "serious" movies too.  Godard (Breathless) has left an indelible impression.  Antonioni, and lots of others.  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane are two classics I love, as well as Battleship Potemkin which I first saw when I was in college.  It's a great film, on everybody's list of the one hundred greatest films.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am superstitious about discussing current plans.  I'm between projects.  That's all I have to say.    Thanks.

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

Ongoing notes: late April, 2011

Might I see you at my Pivot reading in Toronto (alongside Linda Besner and Jacob Mooney) this coming Wednesday, May 4th (“may the fourth be with you”)? Thanks to Cameron Anstee and Max Middle, there’s even been some activity lately on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog, which I’m quite pleased with. Might there be those out in the world interested in posting irregular reviews, essays and/or interviews there as well? And have you subscribed to above/ground press yet? There are forthcoming chapbooks from derek beaulieu, Dennis Cooley, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Robert Kroetsch, Ben Ladouceur and a number of others.

There’s a slew of sites I’ve been poking at lately, from The Bull Calf Review to Kevin Spenst's ongoing interview series, Jacket2 to The Winnipeg Review. How can a boy even keep up? And don’t forget that Ottawa’s The Dusty Owl Reading Series celebrates fifteen whole years in May, with two different events, from May 8 (Ronnie Brown’s poetry, John Lavery’s guitar and the return of Steve Zytveld) and May 22 (with a blow-out family reunion at The Elmdale Tavern!).

San Francisco CA: I recently received a copy of San Francisco poet Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading: Birds (little red leaves, 2011), published as part of the little red leaves textile series, “lovingly sewn using recycled curtains and other textile remnants.”

The greater white-fronted goose in that fair field, geese, more than a thousand in the flock moaning, a kind of low hum, singing the blues. The spectacle of the birds, how we go out to see them now, provide for them, shelters, refugees, how we’ve beggared them and set them aside amid the low-lands of the valley, the trucks roaring night at day over l5, San Diego to Sacramento, ripping up the countryside.

Sacramento to Redding to the Oregon border:

above Keeping Still, Mountain

below The Abysmal, Water

the very place, we say, tearing at the air.

For some years now, Dahlen has been composing a sequence of “A Reading” works, beginning with the trade collection A Reading 1-7 (Momo’s Press, 1985) and continuing with A Reading 8-10 (Chax Press, 1992), A Reading 11-17 (Potes and Poets Press, 1989), A Reading 18-20 (Instance Press, 2006) and the chapbook A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets (Chax Press, 2004). Having not experienced her work until this small chapbook, I’m intrigued to see how she manages to explore the world through such an ongoing form, with this graceful collection exploring and responding to the myth of the mourning dove. Composed in short fragments, this chapbook collages a story of birds and the myth of the mourning dove, knitting variations together into a lovely, small unit. Her canvas might be quite broad and even expansive, but beautifully packed into elegant sections.

House finches now, “like a sparrow dipped in wine” with their querulous call, the question at the end, chatter, chatter, and the lesser goldfinch, tuxedo tail. The mourning doves’ hoo-hoo-hoo [how miserable is this imitation], the call of the dove. Softly, thinking of its story, why does it mourn. Listening.

Ottawa ON: For a couple of years now, Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee [see his Apt. 9 Press 12 or 20 questions here] has been building himself up as a publisher of fine looking limited edition chapbooks, and encouraging and producing some surprisingly good writing from corners known and unknown. This new season of three titles includes former Ottawa and current Toronto writer Jeremy Hanson-Finger’s The Delicious Fields (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2011), launched recently alongside new titles by Monty Reid and Claudia Coutu Radmore. A compelling novella in prose poems, the small seems evident in Hanson-Finger’s extended piece, compiling a narrative that bounces around but never loses the reader. What engages is watching him work the difference between what might be hidden, shown or completely lost, and what might entirely be suggested. Is this entirely self-contained, I wonder, or part of something larger-in-progress? Might there be more?

Michelle and Liam wait in silence. With the car’s headlights off, the darkness around them is almost complete. Liam’s eyes might be closed again. Michelle feels for his face. His eyelids are shut, but his chest rises and falls, maybe faster than it should, but still with strength and purpose. She imagines the ambulance has already parked in front of them, its red halogens swiveling on the roof, burning the bark of the trees and the stucco of the houses to ash except for an empty band where the two of them shield the landscape from the light.