Noah Ross, Active Reception

 

not touching /

myself / being touched / myself // not milked / but being / milked / not writing /
myself // to be bred / against the rules / of writing // in a voice / to be / written / of
verbs / deponent / that is passive / in form / alone / active / in sense / alone // this is
not a new / line of thought / in the field of / authorial vision // Experience, though
noon auctoritee // in the Village Voice / Dodie writes the new / millennium / a mixed
marriage / reading Kevin / and other queers/ performing a new / erotic

writing / a new / (“cheek”)

Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross’ second full-length title, after Swell (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2019), is Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021), self-described as a “vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.” Structured in a triptych of sections—“cheek,” “(w)hole” and “ch/eek”—Active Reception is constructed out of text mangled, marked, turned upside-down, structured in blocks, rearranged in rows and across the length and breadth of the page. “I TAKE IT IN as I give it,” Ross writes, as part of “(w)hole,” “as in, a kind, of versatility, as if, so below, as above, the bower, or my torso, as an archive, as a subject, looking/feeling backward, I assemble, a mixture, of liquids, or dusts, altogether, vibrant, as matter, of fact or refuse, animated, an altar or affect, glued kitsch, a Lanigan-Schmidt, an architecture of diction, comes to love, once inside me, reverberations, abound, in me, about, from me…[.]”

Ross does reference (see above) writers Dodie Bellamy and the late Kevin Killian, and there are echoes one can easily see of the writings of the New Narrative [see the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Bellamy and Killian (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as my review] in this work, as both the New Narrative writers and Noah Ross’ Active Reception are deeply influenced by their prose explorations of pop, punk, theory, sexuality, queer theory and social struggle. While Ross’ explorations explore prose closer to a prose-poetry vein, the echoes, and the concerns, remain, as Ross writes as part of the accumulative “(w)hole”: “the ritual of production as a labor there is no right to a rectum has no straightness [.]”

Active Reception is a polyphonic chorus of chaos and lyric complexity, textual overlays, breaking apart and reassembling. It is a structural myriad of lyric, sexual swagger and the body composed to argue and articulate a freedom that is quite luxurious. There is a bounce and parry of sound and rhythm that Ross employs, a guttural, gestural openness, from sound to the mechanics of text on the page, running the gamut between the boundaries of meaning to sound to visual structures. This is a book of ambitious and wonderfully playful structures, fully realized as a book one can enter at any point, but not possibly, or easily, leave.

spring & chaos in the air in yr workplace, at the festival, in the offices of yr friends, neighbors, loved ones, former housemates, in yr institutions, relations, desires, I take it in, in strides, as I’m updated, by the hours, by the books of ours, growing grasses haven’t told me what they’re growing they don’t have to, the ceiling ripped open, unusual for buildings built of this era, somewhat stilted, or patchwork of nettings, or skins splayed as if newly applied, a kind of self-(re)generation of unintentional entrance, doorway or function, or flow of water, or seminal fluids, falling from a /

 

                        bove the bower or

                        a nightstand there i

                        s something moving

 

                                                can can

                                                hear it

pick the flowers over fumes / four-to-the-floor for Sunday noons / a pre-lunch drinks situation ground green grass golden in showers feeding off dandelion wild, even wilted, leaves full force, in yellows, made a wine, so hesitant, to reach out into an ether, a void, that is, avoidance, a boy, that is, a boy dance, losing a self heading straight into source of smell that is neither bad nor enviable as position, fallen two steps behind, this waltz off key, notes too distant to settle, the stillness in the evening light still, some day, stiller, roots won’t sit once plucked, tooth moving deep into a center, no gap in this dirt til we make it, the jasmine dried from the holy cit, in the book itself a relic, these trees don’t grow here anymore, haven’t for a while, let it sit on the counter, on the right page, at the right time, itself begins to flower, a resonance of muscle, a memory of encounter, setting pace in tasteful measure, deepest as surrenders, the slow spit the spit still lowers, alone with you is how we’ll grow it, tending to the end bits with a nibble, around the thing, a meditation on circumference, what light is that those flailing pinks draped against the woods of the crossing or the red stick poking out from the fronts, what harboring soundscape blistered in what mists aplenty

 

TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014

Tender Buttons was created in a time of radical awakening to feminism, and its complications in regards to race, class, sex, gender, and being “avant-garde” each of which had complex truck with official literary culture.

I remember Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and how she played with the impulse of the source text of Stein’s poem Tender Buttons to make it completely her own.

I remember the storms of necessary debate Trimmings stirred up, pitting the efficacy of straight-forward political poetry versus poetry which operates on the level of language itself. Like most things, I don’t see it as two poles of “either or,” but as an opening for multiplicity, as are all Tender Button titles in their specific way.

What happens when women get together and take the mode of production into their own hands to create their own terms for living and existing? (Lee Ann Brown, “INTRODUCTION”)

The six hundred-plus pages of TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014 (New York NY: Tender Buttons Press, 2016) includes Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets (1989), Anne Waldman’s Not a Male Pseudonym (1990), Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings (1991), Agnes Lee Dunlop Wiley’s Agnes Lee (1992), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), Hannah Weiner’s silent teachers   remembered sequel (1994), Jennifer Moxley’s Imagination Verses (1996), Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (2001), Laynie Browne’s Pollen Memory (2003), India Radfar’s the desire to meet with the beautiful (2003), Michelle Rollman’s The Book of Practical Pussies (2009) and Katy Bohinc’s Dear Alain (2014), as well as “an Introduction by Founding Editrix Lee Ann Brown.” As the website informs: “Tender Buttons aims to publish the best in experimental women’s writing. […] The poetics of all Tender Buttons books gives rise to an extraordinary range of innovative forms and modes including conceptual projects, cut-up, the boundary between life and art, documenting consciousness, refrigeration of poetic form, radical intertextuality, the question of generations and generativity and how to write against, out of, and around another’s writing.” An incredible collection that deserves to be on multiple course-lists, TENDER OMNIBUS: The First 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press: 1989-2014 highlights both the work of the press and the authors themselves, all produced in part to shift the perception of literature as male-dominated, as Katy Bohinc, “Star Arkestress, Tender Buttons Press,” writes in her “Preface”:

Without a proper history, how can we think about what poetry is? How can we say avant-garde isn’t a spoken-word poem that derives from an ingenious secret-code Underground Railroad song? How can we talk about “what’s modern” when what’s not white & male is barely in the conversation? And how can we look our daughters in the eye and say “sorry, there aren’t any books your color.”

Even if you haven’t read most of the works in this anthology, the individual titles have become well-known, even classic, texts by now-prominent American writers, most of whom are still producing stunning works of literature. The only Canadian comparisons I can make to this collection is the anthology series that Michael Ondaatje began for Coach House Books (1979), that Sharon Thesen continued via Talonbooks (1992, 2001)—The Long Poem Anthology—or even Michael Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar’s Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (New Star Books, 1999), curated volumes acknowledging multiple entire works of contemporary innovative poetry that deserves to remain in print. The anthology highlights, also, through producing a volume of, as the website for the press suggests, its entire back catalogue, the stunning curatorial vision of the press, one that is fierce in its choices, even if occasional in its appearance. Having produced only a dozen titles in twenty-five years, one wonders if the press deliberately works to produce a new title only when something of incredible value comes along, or if there are other factors in play? Given the strength of the work collected here, i would suspect it is worth keeping an eye on the two titles that the anthology lists as forthcoming, suggesting classics even before they’re produced: Julie Ezelle Patton’s B and Truck Darling’s The Hunger Notebooks.

The concept of an inner picture is misleading. Like those on the screen, it takes the outer picture as a model, yet their uses are no more alike than statistics and bodies. Figures, we know, can proceed without any regard for reality, no matter how thin the fabric. True, the missing pieces can be glued in, but if you look for the deep you won’t frighten your vertigo away. An ambition to fathom need not hold water. Stay on shore, put on more sweaters, and let the roar of the breakers swallow your urge to scream. If not the clouds themselves, their reflections withdraw with the tide. Then there is the familiar smell of wet sand and seaweed, debris of every kind, including hypodermics, condoms, oozing filth. My outer self comes running on pale legs to claim my share, while my inner picture stands dazed, blinking behind sunglasses, demanding a past that might redeem the present. (Rosmarie Waldrop)

Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian

Why New Narrative and why now? Writers Who Love Too Much arrives in the wake of renewed critical and scholarly attention to the movement; enough, at any rate, to convince us to revisit, reprint and revive some of the original documents of the 70s/80s/90s avant-garde. Founded in the San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1970s, New Narrative responded to post-structuralist quarrels with traditional storytelling practice for reinscribing “master narrative,” and attempted to open up the field to a wider range of subjects and subject positions. It would be a writing prompted not by fiat nor consensus, nor by the totalizing suggestions of the MFA “program era,” but by community; it would be unafraid of experiment, unafraid of kitsch, unafraid of sex and gossip and political debate. Novice writers have been lectured since forever to “show, don’t tell,” but one thing New Narrative did was tell and tell and tell without the cheap obscurantism of “showing.” In the years since 1977 the roots of New Narrative have become obscured, partly because it was an ill-defined movement from the beginning, partly because its point(s) of origin are in debate, and partly because a welcome host of second and third generation writers later altered its character in significant ways. Our anthology will go back to a putative beginning and proceed warily through the decades since Gerald Ford was president, and it will stop twenty years later, right at the beginning of what might be called New Narrative’s second wave. An important anthology from 2004, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (edited by Robert Glück, Mary Burger, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott), shows that new wave in full flight, with a galaxy of brilliant young writers disparate as Rob Halpern, Renee Gladman, Douglas Martin, Heriberto Yepez; but Writers Who Love Too Much presents work made during the first wave of New Narrative and stops itself only by immense self-control, at a place that fairy demands a sequel. (“New Narrative Beginnings 1977-1997,” Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy)

Constructed, as the back cover informs, as a “new map of late 20^th century creative rebellion,” a “movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle” is the massive anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and KevinKillian (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017).  At over five hundred pages, the bulk of the anthology includes prose (whether self-contained pieces or excerpts of longer works), but also includes other writing, interviews, essays and talks by Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Bruce Boone, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D’Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecilia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Robert Glück, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson and Laurie Weeks. Centred around San Francisco, the loose movement of “New Narrative” is provided thorough context and history through a lengthy introduction, co-written by Bellamy and Killian, and swirls around conversations and “concurrent writing developments” “across the Americas, Asia, and Europe” that include Language Poetry, “French, German and Russian philosophy,” revolution, difference, Canadian writers Scott, Marlatt and Brossard, and the queer community, among other elements absorbed, lifted and borrowed to attempt to write something entirely new. Even for their self-described “definitive sampling of a wide range of original New Narrative texts,” this is such a massive and rich undertaking, one that is deeply personal for both Bellamy and Killian. As they write: “Because we were there, we feel we need this range to display the writings most important to us.”

Bo is called both Bo and Butch. Bo likes to be called Butch but he writes his name Bo. I think it’s a spelling problem. I call Bo “Bo” just because he likes Butch better than Bo. Also I can’t say “Butch” too well, I always end up saying “bush.”

Me though, I’m named Squeaky, after Squeaky Fromme. Squeaky Fromme was an anarchist and killed a movie star. I’m supposed to turn out to be a butcher of stars (butcher than Butch). I’m called Squeaky, Pip-squeak and weasling, which is weasel + weakling.

I’m making my brother into a big porno movie stud so he can be in the Hollywood Wax Museum. Real brothers are big in Hollywood porno movies. (“BO-HUNK,” Richard Hawkins)

Beyond all of that (as if that weren’t enough material to spend the rest of the year sifting through), the anthology also includes pages upon pages of notes at the end, expanding upon editorial choices as well as providing a great deal of context for certain of the pieces. As they write in the notes for “Judy Grahn, Interviewed by Steve Abbott and Dodie Bellamie”: “We wanted our anthology to show more than a series of texts now canonically arranged; for we wanted to present a vivid picture of a particular avant-garde, and we knew that to do so we must include the ephemera. Maybe you’d want that in every anthology, to show the social construction of the writing, but ephemera itself seemed especially apropos to New Narrative writing, which began as a body of work torn, like the Living Newspaper of the WPA project of the 1930s, from the headlines, reacting to social and political actions as they occurred, or as we worked for them to occur.”

GOOCH: Yeah, genre writing. In the classical period poets would do an elegy and then do an ode, then a lyrical poem and everyone knew what they were doing. Now poetry’s gone into this kind of mess in a way—which is good, I don’t mind that—but in writing life there are these very definite kinds of writing: magazine articles, stories, novels.

SA: The 80’s as the pastiche of all these things being thrown together.

GOOCH: That connects with what’s going on in painting. In fact there are these connections between certain kinds of painters and writers I’m starting to see, which I hadn’t thought about much before, and one of them is that, being free to throw in everything, and the other is being free to tell a story again, without having always to be reminding everyone that one knows one’s writing a novel, drawing attention to “this is language”—all that kind of stuff which was popular, which was need, which now we really know. Novels are old-fashioned; and we can just go on and do it anyway.

            I guess I’m interested in the popular thing, not popular like being the most popular person in the class (although that’s all right). I wrote an article for GQ about Dennis and the L.A. poets, about Ed Smith and Jack Skelley, about California and the excerpts from their poems were completely accessible. They were about high school life, that kind of stuff, and anyone in the world could get that stuff. I kind of like that. A lot of writing being done actually is accessible. (“BRAD GOOCH: interviewed by Steve Abbott”)