Noah Ross, The Dogs

 

Have to be a pretty large wolf to snap own spine the force can you imagine

Something that out of control in your vocabulary

It’ll heal

If you lick or please especially, one question, if on the way back

The blood left a bad idea

If we know what the game is, if we promised a rite

Somebody’s promise, somebody’s bait

After moving through Noah Ross’ chapbook The Holy Grail (Wry Press, 2025) recently [see my review of such here], I’m attempting to catch up with the rest of his published work, finally moving through his collection, The Dogs (Krupskaya, 2024). As you might already know, The Dogs is Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross’ second full-length title, following Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. In both The Dogs and The Holy Grail, there is something curious about how Ross works through each particular subject thoroughly, completely, and from multiple angles (this new title, providing, in its own way, an echo of Sawako Nakayasu’s classic title The Ants, a poetry collection recently afforded a new edition). As well, both projects were prompted and structured as response-echoes of other works, overlaying his own take over the bones of another. Whereas the structure of The Holy Grail follows Jack Spicer’s own classic sequence, this new project, The Dogs, follows a structure of a source material I’m not familiar with. As he writes as part of a note on the text at the back of the collection:

            The Dogs is the outgrowth of an illicit project—an affair with language that multiplied. Many affairs. A series of unofficial, say, “creative,” engagements—Hervé Guilbert’s Les chiens, dialogue from the 2010’s soap drama Teen Wolf, Marie de France’s “Bisclavret,” that, in their cohabitation, brought to the fore other texts, other pack dynamics, other images and languages of queer love, power, devotion to monsters. What began with Guilbert found itself seeded with Auden’s unauthorized poem “The Platonic Blow” (“The Gobble Poem”), Dom Orejudos’ leather dom comics, my own packs.
            An affair with a question, a question around translation. How to work with a text that will likely remain untranslated (Les chiens)? This plaquette pornographique—dirty, autofictive, bodily, juicy, disturbing, awkward, biting. Personal. Guilbert’s life, Guilbert’s sex, Guilbert’s work. What methods of engagement translate, retranslate, expand, disturb a text until it’s no longer an author’s, an author’s sex, an author’s work—could it ever be mine? Ours? Is it that my desire is heightened by the impossible, the unrequited? Or that a moment of assimilationist legacy making, where monsters are refashioned twink saints for sanitized worship, brings out my own inner wolf? The drive to bite the text, turn it, make it transform. To cut it up, to be cut up, to perform acts of violence, to reflect acts of violence.

Illicit, Ross offers, although this sly intention might underplay what he has accomplished: an ambitious and incredibly playful work, stitching together an array of propulsive language and collaged reference across the bones, presumably, of Guilbert’s original work. One would suspect this a work not purely translated but reimagined, utilizing translation but one of a handful of tools towards constructing an entirely new work.

As if the presence of the text excites me [as if behind this room another where the bodies lapping in] Defiance of this room and the contractions of my ass. [His, His, Theirs, and the letting of a fall to the ground, the barely] Perceptible sound of bellies in motion [just beneath me, somewhere behind me, above this bed] Impossible to even imagine the very thought of falling [asleep the thought of finding positions elongated in the reach across] Walls that I lick, as if to taste our texts, [the bodies heckle, the buzzing of horseplay, as if to taunt me, as if like children] Messing around in the text, throwing bricks where the bellies connect [rooms hitting where my head rests against this wall, letting the juice pour into my mouth, my] Sleep, taking it from behind

The Dogs is structured as a sequence of collage-accumulations, offering lyric prose structures, paragraphs and fragments, across six sections: “Teen Wolf / How Beautiful People Hurt Together,” “The Dogs / Every Hallway Somewhere Else Start Over,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Water He Enters,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Juices,” “A Dream Within A Dream Of Garwolf / Oh Bisclavret” and “A Liquid Sky / Some Night Again.” The collection holds as a kind of book-length suite, an accumulation of stitched reference, movement and playful enterprise, writing around elements of love and violence, human and animal capacity, werewolf/wolf man legends, and language twists. “A string being pulled,” the first section offers, “people whispering: // Remember this absolute Hair of the dog // Take a deep breath and tell me what you feel // Any riddles, are you magnetized, superstitious // Who are you, getting colder, who are we freezing [.]”

 

Wry Press: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail + Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light

 

Longer than any bed sheet called tugging but it happens here too
All the snow on the mountain
As if the hero feared the question nobody could answer (how we’ve seen that before)
Said
“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’”
Forged when the world was young breath and flower, when Arizona, “sweetie,” when melts in your mouth
To float on cliff and sea you ride sniffer and trout
Lance, he came to me last night – like good freak folk to my bed
To kill and be king – (is that all F is for?) (For ‘Twenty, that first sip feeling) searched or
Scale in the back of the tree – lightning –
To be the land and the land in your dream (“The Book of Lancelot”)

I’m intrigued by these recent full-size chapbook publications by Colorado publisher Wry Press [see their write-up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics], each produced in an edition of one hundred copies: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail (No. 19, 2025) and Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light (No. 16, 2024). Sleek and uncomplicated, each title produced sans author biography or anything extraneous, each a small by the front denoting publisher, date, number. Otherwise, the poems simply begin, and then end, and that is enough. I’ve encountered the work of Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross before, having gone through his second full-length title, Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and I’ve even heard tell he’s a new full-length, either out or forthcoming, with Krupskaya, which is exciting. He also wrote the preface to Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman, by the late San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) (Nightboat Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Ross’ chapbook-sequence The Holy Grail seems a play, or at least an echo or throwback, to Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail (San Francisco CA: White Rabbit, 1964), seven poems on the Arthurian legend, offering a similar poem-per-character, two pages per: “The Book of Gawain,” “The Book of Percival,” “The Book of Lancelot,” “The Book of Guinevere,” “The Book of Merlin,” “The Book of Galahad” and “The Book of The Death of Arthur.” Published sixty-one years after Spicer’s legendary sequence, Ross’ pattern echoes Spicer’s, offering long lines clustered and sectioned, not rewriting or even updating but offering his own flavour to even Spicer’s take on the legend, furthering a Queer underlay to the text as a whole. This is an expansive, ambitious project, an ambitious poem, to dare to translate a work by Jack Spicer, one well known, but perhaps fading from view, as the years roll along (oh, to be able to compare, but of course I have two separate editions of Spicer’s Collected my library, neither of which I can find). I like Ross’ long lyric sentences, his long lyric thought-stretches, stretching the mythology by stitching in other elements, other patterns, across this chapbook-length quilt. Or, as “The Book of Percival” ends: “The difference between two forms and the backside bring it: / A statue won’t lift your stiff member, no voice / Not today, not ever is it yours [.]”

Kandinsky 

I entered a dream world
of color and fire
Day and night
garden and field
egg and dragonfly
Flag and football
This form a science fiction.

Sandy Berrigan is a name I’d heard there and here over the years, but been otherwise unaware of. The web page for the title offers that this title is “the first publication of a series of fragments written during the 1980s; mental refractions of a W.S. Merwin reading in Hawaii, or abstracted, glancing impressions of both artworks & visitors on a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Light and thought both solid & fleeting, chiseled into words which dissolve in ‘light clear air’.” Known as the first wife of American New York School poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), the publisher’s site also offers that she “recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in Albion, Ca. Author of Daily Rites (Telephone Books, 1974), and Summer Sleeper (Telephone Books, 1981), she has also over the years self-published a number of other rare & fugitive works, occasionally featuring artwork by painter George Schneeman.” As stated, the poems here that hold dates hold in the mid-1980s, and offer the suggestion that this manuscript sits as a kind of lost classic, something Ottawa chapbook publisher Cameron Anstee was doing as well, through publishing (and re-publishing) some items by the since-late Ottawa poet William Hawkins through his Apt. 9 Press, or even my own publication of a 1970s-era Neil Flowers title through above/ground press. Referencing artwork by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), New York-based poet, choreographer and dancer Kenneth King and American poet M.S. Merwin (1927-2019) (“At the Merwin Reading,” dated November 14, 1985, Maui), the poems here speak to conversation, to community; they delight in their precise small moments, crafted with enormous care and casual ease. “My kisses have the taste of fruit / That would melt in your heart / So then you would disdain me / Farewell.” The publication of this particular title suggests that Berrigan’s work deserves more attention, whether the publication of a new full-length title of previously uncollected work, or even a selected or collected poems; something to gather and acknowledge the work she has done across her writing life. Or, as the poem “From A Letter To Kenneth King,” a piece dated “June 22, 1987,” ends:

We also just said goodbye.
Let us continue to talk.

David Melnick, Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman

 

            I found Melnick’s work after moving to Berkeley, where he lived in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before moving across the Bay to San Francisco. I had heard tell of his readings of PCOET—his “correct” pronunciations, how only a few could remember the exact sounds his private language formed. I had heard of his famous Homer Group, and read how Melnick’s voice was infectious among the other “Homersexuals,” how his homophonics perversely instigated a kind of Bacchic frenzy. I remember being shown an event flyer from 1974, from the now-defunct Cody’s Books, featuring Melnick reading with Telegraph’s “Bubble Lady,” Julia Vinograd. I would walk past the former Cody’s building daily to feel their presences decades after.

Melnick’s work created a kind of orbit, tugging me to its center, but the force that propelled my obsession was impossible to see. Was it that Melnick gave language to queer feelings I had known somewhere deep inside me, but had been unable to voice? Was it that his work points to a kind of unspeakability of these very “qqrer!” feelings? I am left wondering what kinds of queer feelings we can represent in queer (il)legibilities. Whether Melnick offers us a cipher, a code, a means of reckoning with language and its limits, feelings and the limits of representing those feelings, too. (Noah Ross, “(POETS; EXIST?”)

I hadn’t even heard of San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) before this new collection landed in my mailbox—Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023)—a book that includes preface on the author by poet and critic Noah Ross [see my ’12 or 20 questions’ with him here; see my review of his second collection here], and a collaborative introduction-proper by the four editors. I’m fascinated by these seeming-reclamation projects that American publisher Nightboat Books has been publishing over the past decade or so (possibly longer, but I’ve only been aware of their work for the past dozen-plus years), all of which swirl around particular writers and writings, allowing documentation for a wealth of literary activity, specifically: by, about and through queer writers and writing. Some of the collections I’ve been particularly impressed by include their Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by Alysia Abbott (2019) [see my review of such here], We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, eds. Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (2020) [see my review of such here] and Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (2017) [see my review of such here]. I’d probably also include the collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase [see my review of such here] to this list as well. There is something to be acknowledged and appreciated in Nightboat’s ongoing attentions to providing critical consideration, examination and celebration to these histories that might otherwise have been overlooked, misunderstood or even completely forgotten. As the first poem of Melnick’s posthumous collection, the five-page “I. LE CALME,” ends:

These languages pass away:

                :fellatio, of subjection

            now kings are dead
        because the head is lowered

                “eyes ripe as olives

                “a green sea knobby

bit by worms
stirred, in
the main stream

                “bee keeper seized the earth
                “size of a star

                Walking, sorrow slew me

Nice: Collected Poems collects four previously-published limited-edition works by Melnick across nearly fifty years of scattered production: Eclogs (Ithica House, 1973), PCOET (G.A.W.K., 1975), Men in Aïda (Tuumba Press, 1983) and A Pin’s Fee (Logopoeia website, 2002; Hiding Press, 2019). There’s a liveliness to this work, one that sweeps unapologetically into experimentation and the playfully-ridiculous, a quality that is quite refreshing; the earlier works clearly showcase a poet of his period, employing a particular flavour of 1960s and 70s experimentation, but somehow timeless, offering an expansive play across meaning, sound and the lyric through a poetics of subverted and invented language. It would be impossible not to be simultaneously charged and charmed by the expansive heft of the poem “Men in Aïda,” a homophonic translation of the Iliad, a piece that can’t not be heard aloud, even from within the bounds of quiet reading. The language really is propulsive, and my ears can catch comparisons with language/sound poets north of the border, from bpNichol and Christian Bök to The Four Horsemen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts (among others). Such glorious gymnastics of sound! As Melnick’s poem begins:

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? a day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, every Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aïda, pro, yaps in.
Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’ Rhea to cake Eunice in.
‘Hojo’ noisy tap as hideous debt to lay at a bully.
Ex you, day. tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday.
Arreides stain axe and Ron and ideas ‘ll kill you.

Moving through the material, I’m simultaneously surprised and not that I hadn’t heard of this poet before this book landed, making me wonder just how much material exists in the world by those otherwise-forgotten writers? We move so quickly to the next book and the next book that there are probably dozens of poets left behind: “only alive as long as in print,” to paraphrase a line by the (since late) Canadian poet Patrick Lane. So much literary history is unrecorded and overlooked, and this is a wonderfully vibrant collection, even through the dark elements of Melnick’s later work, as the collaborative “INTRODUCTION” writes:

In parallel with his life, Melnick’s poetry also yields  story, a compact one. Four books comprise his legacy: Eclogs (written 1967-1970), PCOET (mostly 1972), Men in Aïda (1983), and A Pin’s Fee (1987). As the dates of composition show, his years of creativity span a crucial two decades in the rise of queer community: his first book begun before Stonewall; his last written in the crisis years of AIDS. And each book reflects a truth of its moment, though in a manner entirely its own. In Eclogs, the beautiful façade of coded language preserves an experience it screens from view. PCOET yields to the joy of invention, creating a language all its own. Men in Aïda, the pinnacle of this span, is his epic: an act of gay worldbuilding, embracing the past and transforming it through homophonic translation. A Pin’s Fee, the shortest of the four, is anguished: its last word, “DEATH, “ repeating forty-five times. After this, nothing. For the rest of Melnick’s life, another thirty-five years, no other poetry would surface.