Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

Slow Poetry in America: #7, 9-11/12

MICÓN

I am the gentle swell the

soft at the end of things hard

                      shiny water

No ham nude youth no

                but hear

adonis—striped eye   holy

grove   never hung

so much game noose as I—in

  the sea’s green

                  beard (Hamish Ballantyne)

It has been a while since I’ve seen new issues of the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, a quarterly pamphlet series of poems, each featuring a single author, edited by Michael Cavuto, Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith [see my review of the first three here; and the second three here; see my interview with Dale Smith on the series here], so I am very pleased to see copies of some of the more recent entries: issue #7: Clearly Present, by Cedar Sigo; issue #9: Góngora, by Hamish Ballantyne; issue #10: Pollinate, From Dark Trees, by Cody-Rose Clevidence; and issue #11/12: Nervous Incomparable Dictation / Curious Spectral Fragments, by Will Alexander (I’m still missing issue #8: Journal for Ted, by Stacy Szymaszek). I’m fond of series’ such as these, the ephemeral nature of the pamphlet working in direct opposition to the strength of the work included, and the possibility of being able to read a self-contained work, and enough work by a particular author to have a clear sense of what it is they are doing, especially as introduction (I think back to Sylvester Pollet’s infamous Backwoods Broadsides, or those pamphlets The League of Canadian Poets were doing in the 1980s).

I was curious to explore the handful of short lyrics in Suquamish poet and San Francisco resident Cedar Sigo’s poems through his Clearly Present (summer 2017). I’m fascinated by the pacings, line breaks and rhythms through these poems, almost existing as a sequence of meditative pings and bounces across the page, as the poem On The Way” begins:

Have the swallows

                              returned

            to my porchlight?

I may have left it on

                    through the night

                    I may have burnt them out

                    when the wind

                    shakes

                                the window glass

                                I step out of the house

                    hoping for the smell

                    of rain

twisted

            and waking up the earth

                                the dust

dispersed

                    over again

On the other hand, Vancouver Island poet and translator Hamish Ballantyne, a founding member (alongside Cavuto) of the pure-sound collective Sex Panic!, is a name entirely new to me. The ten short lyrics that make up his Góngora exist as a curious extension of the author’s translation work (as this pamphlet appears to be an original work, as opposed to a translation), composed as quick lyric sketches around the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora y Argote (July 11, 1561-May 24, 1627). As the note at the end of the short pamphlet reads: “When Luis de Góngora lost all of his money, his greatest rival Quevedo sensed opportunity, moving quickly to buy the poet’s home and evict him. Disgraced and destitute, more unhinged every day, Góngora fled to his childhood home and began his final book, about the wanderings of a heartbroken stranger shipwrecked on an impossible island. He completed less than half of the work before he died.” Cody-Rose Clevidence’s work is a personal favourite [see their Touch the Donkey interview here; see my review of their latest here], and I suspect POLLINATE, FROM DARK TREES will shape itself into something book-length, akin to what I’ve seen of other of Clevidence’s writing. The poems are sharp, accumulative and densely-packed, composed as small moments of a far larger, more expansive work:

what doesnt bear plums, are cedars

what doesnt grow flowers, are rocks

th columbines cling to th rock-face

where th water seeps a river with a simple

harness, even th sturdy nets cast out let

th bright water rush through, come up

dripping. all fish are bass. th waters

abound with them.

California “poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, aphorist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist” Will Alexander’s Nervous Incomparable Dictation / Curious Spectral Fragments is constructed as a double issue, opening with a longer prose piece, and then a series of shorter lyric poems/prose poems. Having only been peripherally aware of Alexander’s work prior to this, there is an enormous amount to unpack in his incredibly dense and vibrant language, one that writes through human need and detailed, abstract thought to explore the requirements of both soul and body. Even as the opening sentence of the prose poem begins: “BLANKNESS as co-equal to blankness siring initial seismicity by which initial balance is shifted, is ignited beyond its prior capacity so that prior balance engaged can only gift itself by means of vertigo, by seeming ruin that never instigates demise, but opens onto a primordial plane sans replication such as names and dates and habit.” The final poem of his pamphlet, “Closing Commentary,” writes:

As an ignition worker under present planetary circumstance, I remain counter to exteriority as capturable entity. Ignition remains a maze for me. A maze in the psyche without recourse to pedestrian entanglement and its mechanical detritus. Instead language neurologically blazes and condenses as an operatic sundial suddenly spinning. Thus sonic irrigation transpires and becomes material confluence transmuting in their cells. The latter being sound that emanates from one psyche to another via what I understand to be the circular infection where one’s vibration existentially accelerates meta-cellular aspiration so that the latter begins to heighten and transmit a climate that prevails as carking psychic yoga.

Issues are $3 each, and “Subscriptions & contact can be made through slowpoetryinamerica.wordpress.com or mcavuto@gmail.com”

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part one,

[knife│fork│book's Kirby, visiting Anstruther's Jim Johnstone]

Another year has come and gone! And we will see you this weekend at the 25^th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair, right? The reading tonight and/or the fair itself tomorrow?

Toronto ON: The poems collected in Toronto poet, editor and publisher Hoa Nguyen’s latest offering, the chapbook ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS (knife│fork│book, 2019), appear different than the work I’ve seen from her previous full-length collections. The poems in ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS shift from the predominantly shorter, meditative lyrics of As Long As Trees Last (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here] or Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016) [see my review of such here] to poems a bit more expansive and storytelling, with lines pulling and even stretched apart, such as the middle third of the poem “Why This Haunted Middle And Door Hung With Haunted Girl Bones,” that writes:

Go into your tree      roll on a rabbit fur blanket

Refuse to eat for thirty days     plus ten days

        Unremembered        does it matter

Misremembering the baby she lost     a different baby

(unborn       never born        the unnamed)

        This rain reminds me of rain

There has long been an element of Nguyen’s work that has featured remembering, memory, loss, melancholy and acknowledgment, but there is something here that feels heightened, almost as though the text of some of these pieces have been crafted from interviews (or even family story, perhaps), citing more specific and sprawling details than before. In these poems, a story is developing, and one I would very like to know more about, such as the poem “Mexico,” that includes:

She named her stand Mexico

      and Minh came by often

would send his soldiers there to buy drinks

from her Mexico

      Mexico became the most popular

juice spot on the river

                  but sometimes his soldiers were

boisterous and caused trouble and other

merchants were jealous

of her success         Minh too

wished to control her

and insisted later that she move

away from her Mexico to Saigon

                         to be near him

                                       and next was that

Thorold/Burlington ON: I’ve been increasingly interested in the work of Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese (he had an above/ground press title earlier this year, as well, with two more forthcoming), the most recent title being tekster (Simulacrum Press, 2019). Through his work generally (and this title specifically) Cortese explores both accumulation and accent, punctuating and excising, all of which make for fascinating visuals that might be difficult, or even impossible, to perform aloud (but it would be interesting to hear, if he was willing or able). He is also one of more than a couple of younger poets that have emerged over the past couple of years who focus their work on the blending of visual poetry and constraint (British poets and Penteract Press co-publishers Anthony Etherin and Clara Daneri, and British poet Lucy Dawkins being further examples of the same). For example, the poem “ROTO,” a poem I could only imagine as a typesetting nightmare, opens: “mióşiş šøws hiş homõ shims” (and I don’t even have every typesetting symbol on my computer to replicate this properly). The effect is stunning, and deliberately overwhelming, and further considerations I’ve seen other poets explore (including Gary Barwin), but nowhere near this far. Cortese’s description at the back of the collection writes that “ROTO consists of a phrase exhibiting reciprotational symmetry (and which, as such, serves as a sort of axially-inverted palindrome), followed by a loosely-constrained lipogram composed exclusively of letters found in that reciprotationally symmetric phrase.”

aphet

‘im

‘er

‘twixt

‘tis

‘n

‘twas,

‘verse

‘tween

‘rents

‘n

‘cause

Slow Poetry in America, A Poetry Quarterly: #4-6

CHASE SCENE

we’re playing chess on the unfinished concourse to nowhere. you take off your gas mask and look at me. a train slides under us, the heart flutters, the homeless who sleep in waves around us. are we homeless, you say, the city unridden in your face, the lines unbuilt. you want to organize the ocean. unwrap the fish, i say. you unwrap the fish, and the fish squints. we begin where we are. the king is dead, and the queen is dead, and the night is fat with pawns. (Ryan Eckes)

Produced in Toronto by poets Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen and Michael Cavuto [they even have a facebook page], the Slow Poetry in America pamphlet series [see my review of the first three here; see my Queen Mob’s Teahouse interview with Dale Smith on the series here] continues with “Eight Poems” by Joanne Kyger (Issue #4: February 2016), “Storm Work, An Icarus Opera in Three Movements” by Fan Wu (Issue #5; July 2016) and “5 Poems from General Motors” by Ryan Eckes (Issue #6; January 2017). Given that timeline, one might expect a new issue to appear over the next few weeks. Subscriptions and contact can be made through slowpoetryinamerica.wordpress.com or mcavuto@gmail.com

I put my son in his body. His mother,

gracious waif of bountiful giving,

gave my son his form or flesh, yet

never put him in his place. Soup

and quilt. Laundry and porcelain.

One lifetime of ill-fitting delicacies.

To put a body to a son is precise

work: less a question of upbringing than

the transmission of synapse & false start. (Fan Wu)

There is something ultimately graceful about a small pamphlet, larger than the single poem, yet more compact than a chapbook, allowing for a pocket of work by a single author. The simplicity of the pamphlet form allows for a good enough selection of work to get a sense of what the author is doing. I’ve been aware of the work of Ryan Eckes for some time now, and have been curious about what he’s been working on lately; Fan Wu is an entirely new discovery, and a delightful one. And then, of course, there is the tug that comes through reading a small selection of previously unpublished poems (all dated 2014, but for a single 2015 poem) by the now-late Joanne Kyger:

This “I” is a Very Suave Guy

with a quicksilver ear

Super pensive darkly dense but casual lines

Now you hear it, now you see it

on the threshold glaring

through eternity’s open door policy

Who was it told you all this?

We have lots of mourning doves over here

if you want to borrow some

                                                                                                  August 15, 2014 (Joanne Kyger)