Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse

 

Dick Gallup’s Things to Do

Modulate your feelings

Make the spaces real 

Keep the intellect in tune

Charge your batteries regularly

Remember what happens. (Donald Guravich)

Patrick James Dunagan was good enough to send along a copy of the first (and possibly only) issue of Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse (San Francisco CA: fall 2021), a side-stapled full-size journal containing an incredible wealth of contemporary poetry, many of whom are either San Francisco-based or have publishing relationships with City Lights Books (or: both). The list of contributors is over fifty names strong, and includes Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Margaret Randall, Edmund Berrigan, Ammiel Alcalay, Joshua Beckman, Norma Cole, Kit Schluter, Cedar Sigo, Stacy Szymaszek, Ryan Newton, Sophia Dahlin, Eileen Myles, Philip Lamantia, Gillian Conoley, Chris Carosi, Anselm Berrigan, Dunagan, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Will Alexander, Josiah Luis Alderete and Diane Di Prima. At sixty pages in length, the scope of this collection is stunning. Published by “S. Keletor” and edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples, the second of whom a poet who also edits at City Lights Books, there is a simultaneous element of established and subversive elements mingling through this collection, from elements of form and production, to some of the well-established contributors running through a printed, side-stapled offering. “even the / sense / sets beat,” Norma Cole writes, to close her short lyric, “from Lost Dance.” Or “Stranglers in Love” by Julien Poirier, an extended, single-page rush to a punch that ends with: “where you and I were once locked / midair / like a couple of sumo wrestlers / in a soap bubble / like a couple / of spelling bee finalists / in an elevator / demolishing each other in a fury / whose key ingredient is trust. / It was exhausting / but we got what we came for.” Or, as the final stanza of Edmund Berrigan’s “Dream with Doug in It” reads:

Trust no one’s advice, but know their point of view,
see the world through other eyes, can I borrow
your vision, so much repeats from stage to stage,
borrowed wisdom with age expanding the shroud.

How could anyone not be charmed by an editorial, “From The Desk of Skeletor,” that opens: “Every now and again, I get the urge to read poesie, and yet all the landscape of poetry publications these days is a vast wasteland of online nothingness, very often just a PDF of a bunch of poems with so little editorial investment the poems appear in the same font in which the poem submitted his or her or their work! WHAT?!?! This is unacceptable in a day and age in which an editor has so much at hand, so many fonts that the editors of yesteryear would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal. It won’t do, my friends, it won’t do.” This is a publication put together relatively cheaply by someone (or multiple someones) with a remarkably good (combined) editorial eye (or eyes), able to produce a single-issue (possibly) one-off of work that is just too good to not get out into the world. There is the sense of what bpNichol referred to as “serious play” in the work of all of these writers. While those who found and continue poetry journals, there is something uniquely wonderful about the oddly-distributed one-off, reminiscent, slightly, of the sequence of journal one-offs that Stuart Ross has been producing over the years (The Northern Testicle Review, for example), or even some of the more ongoing, occasional and sadly-defunct journals such as Vancouver’s TADS (George Bowering et al) or Toronto’s COUGH (Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn et al) [see my review of the last one I saw here], or even our ongoing The Peter F. Yacht Club (although the editorial suggests that “Skeletor” might not approve of my design work on such). There is just some incredible work here, some of which really needs to be seen to be believed.

Naturally, there’s no contact or ordering information anywhere in the publication, although I would suspect that copies might be possible through the Bookstore at City Lights.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Edmund Berrigan

Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a memoir, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). He is editor of the Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). He is an editor for poetry mags Vlak and Brawling Pigeon, and is on the editorial board of Lungfull!. He lives in Brooklyn.

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 Disarming Matter, published by Owl Press, run by Albert DeSilver. It was both great and a little scary to have it published. I remember walking in the woods and talking with Albert about whether it was worth putting more objects into a world that was already saturated with them.  But luckily he convinced me. And occasionally now people will tell me that something about that book has meant something to them, which gives it purpose. My work now is still connected to my initial interests, and doesn’t feel different to me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up in a household full of poets. My mom gave me my first blank notebook when I was 8, and I wrote poems on and off until I was teenager.  My mom gave me a new blank book when I was 15 or 16. I watched an episode of the TV show Quantum Leap in which Jack Kerouac was portrayed.  It was terrible, and I left the house with my notebook and walked around the West Village in NYC and wrote 4 or 5 poems, and that was when I decided that I was a poet for life.

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?

My last book, Can It!, took fifteen years from the initial writing until publication as a finished book.  I had a few learning curves to grapple with. Poetry manuscripts usually go through several drafts.  Sometimes a poem will come out exactly right the first time, but I also use processes that require rounds of editing.  I also do additional editing when manuscripts are coming together.  I do take a lot of notes, and failed works also become notes. Whether or not I have a full time job is also a factor.

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 have more success when I just start writing based on the impulse to write, and keep the decisions based in the process. Having chosen a life as a writer, everything I write is a small part of a larger practice.  I’m always working on a manuscript, but Can It! is the only book that had a predetermined formal idea.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I really enjoy reading, especially making changes to and decisions about works on the spot, based on the feeling of the performance. It offers new possibilities for the work, and it’s fun. Poems are meant to be vocalized, and it’s good to explore this part of the practice.

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’m not really sure what a theoretical concern is, or else the answer is everything, but I tend to take a more unconscious approach to writing, so probably I wouldn’t know or would refuse to.  I’m not trying to answer questions particularly. I recently wrote down a quote from my dad’s book, Clear the Range: To be is nothing compared to being.

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?
The role of the writer is to provide information and escapism. Good writing makes people smarter and more compassionate. It directs their attention internally and externally, and gives them a different point of view.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s always a good idea to have another set of eyes, but it is not essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“You are a writer, surely you know that.”  Robin Blaser said that to me after I sat in on a workshop he gave at Naropa in 1992 when I was 17. It was empowering. I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do, but it was really great to have someone there to say keep doing it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose to memoir)? What do you see as the appeal?

I started writing the pieces that became Can It! when I was unemployed and sleeping in an office in 1999.  After a while I got a job as a copy editor. By the time I finished Can It!, I had been a copy editor for over a decade, and I knew how to make editing decisions that I was unable to negotiate previously.  The appeal is being able to provide a range of situations and dimensions. The poems reflect lines of thinking, the diaries represent actions and responses, the interviews and conversation reflect what actually comes out when I talk, and so on.

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 schedule or set routine, I just make sure to have a few notebooks handy. Most of recent writing has occurred on subways and airplanes.

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

If my mind isn’t ready, then I just do something else. Otherwise, anything that crosses the path of my senses is a potential inspiration.   

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cooking, marijuana, and cat shit.

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?

The first time I saw cubist paintings my mind fell apart. I’ve also had important moments in my education at shows of Franz Kline’s paintings, Kurt Schwitter’s assemblages, and at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Musically, Bob Dylan has always been important for me, and led me into folk and country blues. I’ve played guitar since I was 8, and write, record and perform songs.  Nature, science and history are among my favorites.  I also read a lot of medical and pharmaceutical materials as part of my copy editing work.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My dad died when I was 8, and I spent a lot of time when I was young reading all of his poems to try to understand him, myself, and to continue our relationship.  I read everything by my mother, brother, sister-in-law, and wife (all poets) and then I try to read as much of what is going on in my writing community as I can stand. So that’s quite a lot already, and all of it poetry, without getting into historical poets.  Currently, I get paid to read pharmaceutical advertising for 40 hours a week, and I follow baseball writing on a daily basis. I just finished Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, which was interesting for me as a fan of western literature. I read Geronimo by Angie Debo awhile back, and that was also amazing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a science fiction novel.

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 like to be a geologist, physicist, astronomer, and archeologist. 

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

I was already a writer before I had a chance to think about it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Clear the Range by Ted Berrigan. I read it in on the subway during my morning commute. I really enjoyed my experience of reading and rereading it. I took a lot of notes. It’s a cross out of Twenty Notches by Max Brand, which I also read.

20 - What are you currently working on?
An essay about the Clear the Range.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Edmund Berrigan, Can It!

[…] It brought to mind some lines I had found meaningful when I was in school from my dad’s cut-up cowboy novel Clear the Range:

            Suppose then, he had been a quarter of an inch

            greater, the little tiger! In that case, he’d shrink;

            he’d be pestered by a howling cloud of boy-wasps.

            He would have been drinking free of charge,

            in the bar. He’d lie in a corner, with a sack over

            his face, and a pool of red flies all around. For

            nothing was easier than to drive air through the

            heart of the enemy.

    Why were these the kinds of words I latched onto? At various stages of growing up I was also adapting to what it meant to do so without my dad. His writing was a lens I could use to gauge the situation. It was tangible. It represented his voice but also his absence. The intuitiveness of poetry (both in his and my own writing) was a vehicle I could use for continuing our relationship. Our interest was behind the words. This was not about education or aesthetic principles; this was about adaptation and survival.

    So I’ve been looking to make a book that can carry this kind of information, that works as both a whole and as parts, that might be visited from any point like a memory, that doesn’t rely on classification for definition, that feels infinite but remains brief, that tells a whole story by showing a fragmented record. A place where I could store intangible information while letting myself off the hook. For nothing is easier than to drive air through the heart of the enemy. (“Foreword”)

It would be hard to not be affected by the forward to New York poet Edmund Berrigan’s collection of short poems and prose, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). I’m fascinated by the suggestion he brings forward that writing is a connection he has with his father (the late New York School poet Ted Berrigan), as it would most likely also be a language throughout his family (including brother Anselm Berrigan, their mother Alice Notley, and step-father Douglas Oliver, from whom Berrigan borrows a quote as epigram for the collection). What advantages or disadvantages might that allow for Berrigan as a writer, over any other writer? It’s a curious question.

7/4/98

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of Ted’s death, the same day Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter for the Yankees. “Yanks Bop Sox” was the Post headline. You see the flashbacks a lot if you follow the Yankees. The soccer World Cup games are in all the bars and conversation. Too bad I don’t care. I have to work at Spinelli’s this afternoon, another day of schlepping coffee for San Francisco’s hippie yuppies. I hope the creepy guy who hit on me then came in with his family the next day doesn’t show up. The Fourth of July. I drank a six-pack last night to celebrate and cut up an article about planets:

The Movements of Stars & Galaxies

    The sun tries each day, but

the moment is an illusion used by the

earth’s rotation. Yet the sun does long

with her stars in our galaxy. We do

not see the real motion, for it speeds

through space, the whole family

along with it. That includes us: where our

go, we follow

    We, the real motion of stars.

    The ancients believed that the stars

fastened the “dome” of the sky. This

“dome” thought the inside of a hollow

sphere revolved around the earth.

Thus the stars

explained: it was the “dome” of hat

not stars. The stars were fixed in

unchanging positions, as men

observed. But after men learned to serve

better, the stars gave way.

    Of my

posits

of stars change. Astronomers call these

changes the rope motion of stars, even

for Barnard’s star, the test star. (“San Francisco Diary”)

The title of the collection comes from the entirety of a poem by Ted Berrigan, reproduced and explained towards the end of the collection:

It was an Alternative Press card from the 500 that Dad worked on in 1982, leading up to his last book A Certain Slant of Sunlight. The front had dad’s scrawl on it from a felt tip pen, signed Ted Berrigan and dated “24 Aug ’82.” There were blotches of white-out here and there. The title, in quotes with a thick blue-inked line outlined in black underneath, is “Song For The Unborn Second Baby.” The message is centered, in all caps and with an exclamation point[.]”

The collection of pieces that make up Can It! is a conversation with his father through their shared experience with and of writing—from journal/diary entries to interviews to a short play—and Berrigan the younger constructs a collage of twenty-five pieces around ideas of loss and being, memory, influence and family, and what remains. Berrigan’s book becomes homage to both his father and step-father through short passages. As Berrigan suggests in the opening passage, the best way to communicate directly to either and both of them is directly through the writing. Further in the collection, the pieces that explore the death of his step-father Douglas Oliver are especially poignant, as he writes in the last line of the piece “Paris Diary”: “Doug had come into our lives and filled in some of the empty space. Now he was leaving.” The strengths of the collection are multiple, from the emotional content to the narrative threads that ride deep throughout, and the breaks that exist between them through the collage-aspect of the final text. Can It! is a book of memory, comfort and being, and works through some difficult territory, from the loss of his father to the loss of his step-father. In the end, this is a conversation Berrigan is able to have through writing, and one that we should consider ourselves fortunate enough to have access to. 

Forms drop above a frieze drawer

On the Water Board

Matter is Butterfly form drops leaves

in front and rake them with fire

Once had in a mask permanence

One of questioning as being evolved from a sense

Butterfly forms drop leaves above a frieze drawer

When I was glorified questioning

Crossed the enemy on the Water Board

Chose Matter is eternal and still life Unproductive

Crossed the enemy front and raked it with fire

Once had glorified Once when I was Mask Permanent

Once of those as being evolved from a sense

A frieze drawer When I was on the Water Board

Matter is eternal and unproductive

Crossed the enemy front and raked it with fire

Once had glorified in eternal and rake

Unproductive and mask permanent

One of those questioning

As being evolved from a sense

a frieze drawer

forms drop (“Frieze Drawer”)

What is impressive is just what Berrigan is capable of in the form of short passages of prose and poetry, the accumulation of short, sharp pieces becoming far stronger than the sum of their parts, some of which can be read directly as short fiction, memoir and literary history. Through wrestling, also, with some of his own histories, it helps clarify some of his own distinctions, beyond any association with Ted Berrigan, Douglas Oliver or anyone else. It makes me very interested to see what Edmund Berrigan might come up with next.