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)

Lee Ann Brown, Crowns of Charlotte NC ODE

BEFORE DAWN

upon looking at Romare Bearden’s mosaic of the same name

at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library

The door opens, backlit

On a round purple rag rug mimosa mosaic

Before Dawn opens the mosaic door

Backlit onto round rug rag in spiral

Broom propped near another mother watching

Her daughter carry a bowl of green, round

Figs or sprouts? Her grandmother beckons

Open palmed over patchwork tablecloth

Of orange ball & bluegreen squares. At the same

Moment my mind flickers to my mother

Taking care of my daughter. I am the woman

Shadowing the doorway watching them play

Watching thy/ my mother

It feels as though I’d barely finished and posted my review of American poet and filmmaker Lee Ann Brown’s third solo trade poetry collection, In the Laurels, Caught (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2013) [see my review here] when another collection, Crowns of Charlotte NC ODE (Durham NC: Carolina Wren Press, 2013), appears on my doorstep. Fifteenth in their “Poetry Series,” Crowns of Charlotte NC ODE follows very much in the footsteps of In the Laurels, Caught. Where the earlier collection explored a more general territory, composed as “a collection of lighthearted, deep rooted-poems written around the Appalachian region of North Carolina in Madison County,” the focus of Crowns of Charlotte NC ODE is far more specific, exploring the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, where the author was raised. Existing as an extension and companion volume to In the Laurels, Caught, Crowns of Charlotte NC ODE is a study of Brown’s own point-of-origin, adding, with these two collections, to a tradition that includes Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems (1976; 2006) and Arkansas poet C.D. Wright’s ongoing work, as well as Toronto poet Sharon Harris’ work-in-progress writing Sarnia, Ontario, or my own collections writing Glengarry County, Ontario: bury me deepin the green wood (ECW Press, 1999) and Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011). Brown explores the history, geography and people of Charlotte, North Carolina, digging deep into the language and lilt of the locals and her own family stories and archaeologies, as well as the history of she whom the city is named for, utilizing details and exploring the space.

A LIST OF 19 SUITORS

So elegant my grandmother

So close to her father

That someone recognized her

A thousand miles away

Aquiline nose, large eyes

Skin translucent in photos

I knew her in wrinkles

Where I must have gotten

My under-eye designs

She had very fetching hats and

A sense of style to beat the band

When she brought the preacher

A cold glass of water

Clear eyes flash

Green goblet of glass

O perfect Love

He wasn’t on the list

Brown seems to favour the song and the sonnet, as well as the ode, structures that keeps coming up in what I’ve seen in her writing. Her poems are rich with sound and rhythm, childhood recollection, historical anecdote, the music of John Coltrane, juvenilia and a deep, abiding love. Sound, song, rhythm and speech play integral roles in poems such as “ACOUSTIC WINTER,” “CAR CONVERSATION,” “HOMECOMING” and “‘SCUSE MY BOARDINGHOUSE REACH,” running deep throughout the whole of the collection. As the first stanza of “BALLAD OF WINSTON-SALEM” reads:

Sweet Deborah, she is dead, pretty baby, O

Sweet Deborah, she is dead, pretty daughter, O

Sweet Deborah she is dead

We lay flowers at her head

And across her final bed in the air-ee-o

One of the strongest parts of the book comes from the final sequence in the collection, the fifteen sonnet sequence, “Double Crown for Charlotte,” writing directly around Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818), including the rumours of her African ancestry. Queen Charlotte, after whom the city of Charlotte was named, was wife of the “mad king,” King George III. In each poem, Brown explores Queen Charlotte’s history, and uses the final line from each poem to open the next piece, finally accumulating in the fifteenth sonnet, constructed entirely out of these repeated lines. Through repetition, and variant usage, the repeated lines shift, alter and change weight, turning themselves around into new shapes. The sound of similar lines in a short space bring weight to the poem, and to each line, altering all that emerges around them.

The town I grew up in is feminine—

To crown us all with a laurel wreath

I saw a map early on of North and South.

A gloss written in between lines:

The greatest monarch of the north must bow

in the bedroom. King George whines:

            O sing

of human DNA’s complexity—

A dog which shows its teeth but never dares

to decode a painting. One has to get close.

Who didn’t want to let go of their Queen?

Sophia Charlotte was also a painter,

but my favorite is a photograph.

Do me the favor to burn this if you love me and believe me.

Lee Ann Brown, In The Laurels, Caught

SARVIS

I’ve seen the Sarvis bloom

diaphanous white from far off

while the mountainside

is still brown

It’s almost Japanese

though I’ve yet to see

white on white

blooms over snow

 A kind of canny lullaby

A historic caution

Sarvis is the way the old folks say

Service – as in when the

circuit rider preacher

came through after ice thaw

to conduct weddings, baptisms

and funerals

that he couldn’t reach sooner

before the first breath of spring

alighted

When Uncle Dudley was a boy

brightly he brought his mother a branch

flowering white

and because she had showed him

an earlier flower which she named

The First Breath of Spring

He said, Look! Mama!
Here is

The Second breath of Spring

As the press release states for American poet and filmmaker Lee Ann Brown’s third solo trade poetry collection, In the Laurels, Caught (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2013), this collection “is a collection of lighthearted, deep rooted-poems written around the Appalachian region of North Carolina in Madison County.” Composed by an “adventurous, intellectually restless native” and “transplanted outsider,” Brown explores the details of a geography through its spoken language. Recognizing both the arbitrariness and specificness of place, Brown’s poetic study is reminiscent of the work of Arkansas poet C.D. Wright, or the Ontario Gothic of Phil Hall, exploring the dialect for the sake of exploring the stories, storytelling and myths of this fraction of the American south. Through Brown’s study, the words, phrases and references she weaves throughout her poems speak to the culture and the population of the area, from the sing-song lilt of casual speech and laid back conversation to the rougher ends of such a folk-collection of country music. The collection opens with both a travelling companion, Lorine Niedecker, and an open, uncertain eye, one attempting to gather as much and as quickly as possible before beginning to settle into the poems. It almost reads as though Brown was channeling Niedecker to help open the potential manuscript, channeling Niedecker’s scientific approach to writing her own “pastoral” in exploring natural and human histories through the poem, such as in her own poem “Lake Superior” [see my review of the recent edition of Niedecker’s Lake Superior title here].

RURAL SURREAL

lorine niedecker

wanted to get away from the anecdotal

into an arc of sound

vertical

cicada skins

we’d wear as pins

circadian skins

we’d swear as kin

The author of two previous trade works – Polyverse (Los Angeles CA: Sun and Moon, 1999) and The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), as well as numerous chapbooks – Lee Ann Browns’ In the Laurels, Caught is a polyvocal text, from the poems within the main body to the handwritten script that edges along the lower margins of each page, sometimes as appearing as a kind of Greek chorus, and other times, entirely separate from the action of the main text. Held as the final section of the collection, “River Codex,” is sketched in reverse through the whole of the collection. In the “NOTES ON THE POEMS” at the end of the collection, Brown explains: “Throughout, italicized lines are either quotes, overheard, or should be sung. RIVER CODEX is designed to be read either forwards or backwards, stanza by stanza, throughout the book.” The section helps give the collection the appearance of a living document over a fixed text, as a kind of working notebook.

IF I DON’T SHAKE YOUR HAND

OR HUG YOUR NECK

Just know I want to,

Billy in the low ground

This song has an Extry Part

that I made a little bit crooked

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

This is a new song

that sounds like an old song.

That’s why we like it.

You’re every song I ever heard

Sing for me my mockingbird

Usually we start slow and taper off.

Thank you to the folk up in Madison County

for welcoming us in

Two big reasons I can’t be Dolly Parton

I’m busted

So Bless your hearts and other vital organs

What do we know of Madison County? Predominantly, what Brown tells us. Any geography can’t help but be thick with its own language, dialect and references, and Brown’s project, in many ways, is no different than Lisa Robertson writing out meteorological language in The Weather (New Star Books, 2001) or Michael Holmes exploring the patter of professional wrestling in Parts Unknown (Insomniac Press, 2004). Brown’s is nearly a scrapbook of poems as signage, conversation, journal entry, letters to friends, reminiscence, historical fact, observational note and the occasional ballad, all wrapped up in an engaged, sustained and ongoing love for the people and the place. As she writes to open “A LETTER OUT”:

So it’s one of my first days writing here. I take off to the old turnpike and stop in at the Ramsey cemetery. It reminds me of the one Linda took me to with a view of the Flatirons where we searched for the unmarked grave of Edward Steele and instead found a heart-shaped rock. A blue and grey vista of ridges fold around my home. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies: 5 million years old, Appalachians: 500 million.

The poem ends:

I want to meet you people but I am only on the first level time-wise. Even though it’s my home state, I’m way out in the country now. There’s something in this impulse that wants me to write it with light.