Saturday, April 07, 2012
Clearing My Throat...
It's been a weight on me for a long time that I have stopped blogging...I've had my reasons, but I should not have let them conquer me!
For instance...I have been disheartened by what has been going on in the Internet universe that any blog is a part of, especially Ron Silliman's calling a halt to commenting/conversation on Silliman's Blog, (and, what's worse, his destruction of the record of all such previous discourse); and the painful shriveling of the Buffalo Poetics List to ALMOST NOTHING (which amazingly I don't see anyone talking about).
For two or three years, I have been back in Buffalo, where I studied English at SUNY/Buffalo in the 70s, and this return provides me with so so much to talk about...and I haven't known where to begin!
[Geez!--I'm the sort of person who sees good things as a problem!]
For instance...I have been disheartened by what has been going on in the Internet universe that any blog is a part of, especially Ron Silliman's calling a halt to commenting/conversation on Silliman's Blog, (and, what's worse, his destruction of the record of all such previous discourse); and the painful shriveling of the Buffalo Poetics List to ALMOST NOTHING (which amazingly I don't see anyone talking about).
For two or three years, I have been back in Buffalo, where I studied English at SUNY/Buffalo in the 70s, and this return provides me with so so much to talk about...and I haven't known where to begin!
[Geez!--I'm the sort of person who sees good things as a problem!]
Labels: blogoverse, Buffalo, Buffalo Poetics List, Silliman
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
House Organ, Di Prima, Buffalo
About two weeks ago, the wonderful Number 71 Summer 2010 issue of House Organ arrived at my doorstep in Buffalo New York, where I've been living for about a year, doing a lot of interesting things, though not, as you can see, up to now, blogging. [I took a look at this tall thin stapled publication just now to see what the postmark date was, but it is not readable--anyway, how excellent!, alongside of it is a striking Richard Wright 61 cent stamp.]
Kenneth Warren, who has kept this exemplary mag going dependably--4 times a year through thick and thin!--for a very long time [now how many 'unofficial' literary magazines can say that!], has recently also moved to the Buffalo area, to rural Youngstown--having retired from his library duties in Lakewood, Ohio--so it's great to speak with him at events sometimes [we had known each other at SUNY/Buffalo in the 70s]--and we will have to have dinner sometime on Niagara Falls Blvd., as he has suggested.
There's much I'd like to speak of in Number 71, but to make sure I indeed post today, let me limit myself to Diane Di Prima's 4-line poem "Madhyamaka".
That alone is a wonderful thing about House Organ, that one can find in various issues, new work by Diane D. P., that legendary but rather neglected first generation member of the Beats. Readers can be excused for having the impression that she is no longer publishing; and in terms of releasing books, she does appear to have taken a vow of long mid-career abstention, akin to that of Robert Duncan.
It's important to note, however, which I myself didn't know or remember until doing some research today, that the 1998 edition of Di Prima's mythic/feminist epic Loba contains 16 sections, as compared to the 1978 Loba's 8 sections. [I definitely will have take a look at the 1998 expansion at the SUNY/Buffalo Special Collections: Poetry Room, scandalously the only library site in Buffalo where one can find any edition of Loba, and not a place from which any book can, like they say, circulate.]*
I must not forget to mention this: that Di Prima certainly has not been abstemious as regards offering her insights and perspectives on the Buffalo Poetics List in recent years. It has been a delight to read her comments there; one of the few delights the List has provided in these years.
OK, on to the Di Prima poem from the new House Organ:
Madhyamaka
so engrossed in the refutation
of the Imputed Self
I forget to turn on
the Giants game
The poem is enjoyable after the few second it takes to read it, but it's rich in implication. It's pared down writing, elegant in its vocabulary, and witty. It is very much at rest, but it provokes important questions.
Di Prima speaks of involving herself, as part of her practice of Madhyamaka, a Buddhist Mahayana tradition, in the intricacies of the argument against the Self, widely "imputed" to be the basis of any human's consciousness. She wants to cut this Self down to size, temporarily suspend it, show it to be an illusion, or whatever precisely she seeks to advocate and argue (I can't claim to know much of anything about Madhyamaka, or any, Buddhism).
I do know that when Di Prima invokes "the Giants game" droll and important matters are opened up. Perhaps, we think, it could simply be a matter of that there's a time for Religious Devotion, and a time for Entertainment. Or, more conceptually, and somewhat condescendingly, that there's a time for extinguishing the ego, and a time for enjoying the skills and antics of talented athletes who, in the nature of things, surely are mostly great egotists. Or can it be that one's meditational work on the Self, which shows one that one is "really only very small", as per the Hinduism of George Harrison's "Within You, and Without You", also provoke feelings sometimes of LARGENESS in one's newly organized consciousness, so that viewing "the Giants" will be quite appropriate after one's meditation?
I want to note finally that since the poem considers questions of the Self's largeness and smallness, the word "engrossed" quite wittily chimes in with this theme. (I imagine that Diane D. P. stumbled upon this very appropriate word choice via the Unconscious, as someone whose life is immersed in words is so often liable to do, and then later understood what she had done).
"Gross" is Middle English for large [derived from Old French gros and then Late Latin grossus, meaning thick.] There's an economic meaning for "engross", which I had never known about before, which refers to acquiring most or all of a commodity (monopolizing). To be "engrossed" by something is to be occupied exclusively, absorbed.
______________________________
*So the latest poetry we have in book form from Di Prima is the 2001 Pieces of a Song: Selected Peoms [is there anything added beyond the 1990 version?]; the 1991 Seminary Poems [I just learned about this today}; and the 1998 additions to Loba. In prose there is the 2001 Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.
Kenneth Warren, who has kept this exemplary mag going dependably--4 times a year through thick and thin!--for a very long time [now how many 'unofficial' literary magazines can say that!], has recently also moved to the Buffalo area, to rural Youngstown--having retired from his library duties in Lakewood, Ohio--so it's great to speak with him at events sometimes [we had known each other at SUNY/Buffalo in the 70s]--and we will have to have dinner sometime on Niagara Falls Blvd., as he has suggested.
There's much I'd like to speak of in Number 71, but to make sure I indeed post today, let me limit myself to Diane Di Prima's 4-line poem "Madhyamaka".
That alone is a wonderful thing about House Organ, that one can find in various issues, new work by Diane D. P., that legendary but rather neglected first generation member of the Beats. Readers can be excused for having the impression that she is no longer publishing; and in terms of releasing books, she does appear to have taken a vow of long mid-career abstention, akin to that of Robert Duncan.
It's important to note, however, which I myself didn't know or remember until doing some research today, that the 1998 edition of Di Prima's mythic/feminist epic Loba contains 16 sections, as compared to the 1978 Loba's 8 sections. [I definitely will have take a look at the 1998 expansion at the SUNY/Buffalo Special Collections: Poetry Room, scandalously the only library site in Buffalo where one can find any edition of Loba, and not a place from which any book can, like they say, circulate.]*
I must not forget to mention this: that Di Prima certainly has not been abstemious as regards offering her insights and perspectives on the Buffalo Poetics List in recent years. It has been a delight to read her comments there; one of the few delights the List has provided in these years.
OK, on to the Di Prima poem from the new House Organ:
Madhyamaka
so engrossed in the refutation
of the Imputed Self
I forget to turn on
the Giants game
The poem is enjoyable after the few second it takes to read it, but it's rich in implication. It's pared down writing, elegant in its vocabulary, and witty. It is very much at rest, but it provokes important questions.
Di Prima speaks of involving herself, as part of her practice of Madhyamaka, a Buddhist Mahayana tradition, in the intricacies of the argument against the Self, widely "imputed" to be the basis of any human's consciousness. She wants to cut this Self down to size, temporarily suspend it, show it to be an illusion, or whatever precisely she seeks to advocate and argue (I can't claim to know much of anything about Madhyamaka, or any, Buddhism).
I do know that when Di Prima invokes "the Giants game" droll and important matters are opened up. Perhaps, we think, it could simply be a matter of that there's a time for Religious Devotion, and a time for Entertainment. Or, more conceptually, and somewhat condescendingly, that there's a time for extinguishing the ego, and a time for enjoying the skills and antics of talented athletes who, in the nature of things, surely are mostly great egotists. Or can it be that one's meditational work on the Self, which shows one that one is "really only very small", as per the Hinduism of George Harrison's "Within You, and Without You", also provoke feelings sometimes of LARGENESS in one's newly organized consciousness, so that viewing "the Giants" will be quite appropriate after one's meditation?
I want to note finally that since the poem considers questions of the Self's largeness and smallness, the word "engrossed" quite wittily chimes in with this theme. (I imagine that Diane D. P. stumbled upon this very appropriate word choice via the Unconscious, as someone whose life is immersed in words is so often liable to do, and then later understood what she had done).
"Gross" is Middle English for large [derived from Old French gros and then Late Latin grossus, meaning thick.] There's an economic meaning for "engross", which I had never known about before, which refers to acquiring most or all of a commodity (monopolizing). To be "engrossed" by something is to be occupied exclusively, absorbed.
______________________________
*So the latest poetry we have in book form from Di Prima is the 2001 Pieces of a Song: Selected Peoms [is there anything added beyond the 1990 version?]; the 1991 Seminary Poems [I just learned about this today}; and the 1998 additions to Loba. In prose there is the 2001 Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.
Labels: Beats, Buffalo, Di Prima, etymology, House Organ, Ken Warren, poetry journals
Monday, July 06, 2009
Blaser, Buffalo, circa '76: a memory
I think it was in 1976 when the State University of New York at Buffalo Student Association Poetry Committee (isn't it great that there was such an entity--I imagine that there isn't one now)--invited Robin Blaser (May 1925-May 2009) to be part of its reading series and he graciously accepted. I don't think that any of the other people we invited from outside the University were from such a distance as Vancouver, British Columbia--the other Student Association poetry reader from that year that I remember was Armand Schwerner, from New York City. (I don't think I was an official member of the Poetry Committee but I attended some of the meetings and otherwise heard about developments through my committee-person friends).
All of us on or close to the Committee were absolutely horrified when the student-artist who had been tapped to create a poster unveiled his or her creation: the visual art component was fine, but the print read "ROBIN BLAZER: THE BEST-KNOWN UNKNOWN POET". The Poetry Committee member(s) who spoke to the artist had indeed used the offending phrase at one point, attemping to deliniate RB's status in the Poetry World. It certainly wasn't desired though that such a phrase appear on the actual poster--nor that Blaser's name by mis-spelled. I told my best friend on the Committee that "The Best-Known Unknown Poet" formula sounded like Madison Avenue; she said what do you mean Madison Avenue, it was like Chippewa Street (at that time the Buffalo street most associated with hookers).
We were braced for trouble, but, surprise, surprise, the first words out of Blaser's mouth when he reached the microphone were "I liked that poster!" Or at least he liked the "best known unknown" characterization. He said he could do without the mistaken "z" since that evoked a long history of unfortunate Germanic/French entanglements...And then, what can I say, the absolute enchantment of a Robin Blaser poetry reading.
Various people I knew, including of course the Poetry Committe people, and the professor I most venerated, John Clarke, hung out with Blaser at a bar that evening. My God!--I have no idea why I wasn't there; some frigging test I had to study for? (Btw, I don't think Robert Creeley was present at the reading or at the bar, I think he was out of town at the time). Later, of course, I heard a little bit about what was discussed that night, which I learned included the question of why the Working Class wasn't more interested in listening to Beethoven.
My Best Friend from the Poetry Committee said she enjoyed sharing stories with Robin that night about Disappointing Men. And wow, the next day she arrived at the scheduled final meeting without the check she was supposed to hand him. He was gracious about even that; other arrangements were made.
All of us on or close to the Committee were absolutely horrified when the student-artist who had been tapped to create a poster unveiled his or her creation: the visual art component was fine, but the print read "ROBIN BLAZER: THE BEST-KNOWN UNKNOWN POET". The Poetry Committee member(s) who spoke to the artist had indeed used the offending phrase at one point, attemping to deliniate RB's status in the Poetry World. It certainly wasn't desired though that such a phrase appear on the actual poster--nor that Blaser's name by mis-spelled. I told my best friend on the Committee that "The Best-Known Unknown Poet" formula sounded like Madison Avenue; she said what do you mean Madison Avenue, it was like Chippewa Street (at that time the Buffalo street most associated with hookers).
We were braced for trouble, but, surprise, surprise, the first words out of Blaser's mouth when he reached the microphone were "I liked that poster!" Or at least he liked the "best known unknown" characterization. He said he could do without the mistaken "z" since that evoked a long history of unfortunate Germanic/French entanglements...And then, what can I say, the absolute enchantment of a Robin Blaser poetry reading.
Various people I knew, including of course the Poetry Committe people, and the professor I most venerated, John Clarke, hung out with Blaser at a bar that evening. My God!--I have no idea why I wasn't there; some frigging test I had to study for? (Btw, I don't think Robert Creeley was present at the reading or at the bar, I think he was out of town at the time). Later, of course, I heard a little bit about what was discussed that night, which I learned included the question of why the Working Class wasn't more interested in listening to Beethoven.
My Best Friend from the Poetry Committee said she enjoyed sharing stories with Robin that night about Disappointing Men. And wow, the next day she arrived at the scheduled final meeting without the check she was supposed to hand him. He was gracious about even that; other arrangements were made.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
"What is not permitted is recognition": Dorn visits "Dog"
"Walking The Dog". It must have been in 1979 or 1980 that Robert Creeley presided in Buffalo over a graduate seminar he idiosyncratically so titled, consisting predominantly of guest appearances by friends of his engaged in various fields of human endeavor. The visitors I remember as appearing are poets (my ordering is alphabetical) Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov and Margaret Randall; sculptors John Chamberlain and John Duff; a Scientist whose name and even particular field of activity I can't recall; film-maker Stan Brakhage; and the hard-to-classify, and surely immortal, team of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Besides what occurred in the classroom, there were associated events, such as the screening of a curious and unsettling film about tattered realms of New York City made by Arakawa and Gins; and presentations of the wonderful 1960's National Educational Television interviews of Duncan, Levertov, and Olson, including not just what made it to TV screens but also outtakes.
This whole delightful panoply had been made possible by the resources that come with the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, which had just recently been conferred on Robert C. I should note that the class was cross-listed with the Art Department (I'm pretty sure Fine Arts rather than Art History), and a prematurely gray-haired artist/professor whose name I don't recall was officially Team Teacher alongside Creeley; as I recall he was extemely shy and never said all that much--perhaps because few if any students of Art had elected to take the class.
As the day came for Dorn's visit, my friends and I feared that his words for us were going to be but pointless and preening. For we had all been shocked by the recent release of Hello, La Jolla , which seemed pulverized, crabbed, and dopey--an incredible and arrogant drop-off from what previously he had done. After reading La Jolla, someone I know suggested the creation of a formal Anti-Dorn Society.
We couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised. Dorn was one of the best & most focused of all the visitors. His sly discourse, and the subsequent q&a, was gripping--he had come carefully prepared with striking contentions.
He said he was very suspicious of the way Singleness was being promoted everywhere as a wonderfully liberated way of life. He said that this catered to the interest of all sorts of Enterprises, since you could sell a Single person anything.
He said that people say no sincerity is allowed in the Workplace--but actually there has to be a degree of sincerity, or everything would grind to a halt : that which is not permitted is recognition.
He said everyone looks down in the 1950's, but that actually there was a certain legitamacy to that decade's development.
He said that people then felt freer to move around the country--he said that people now feel stuck because of the demands of bureacracies like those that give out Unemployment Insurance.
He said you could have much more privacy then--you could blow into some town, and get a job somewhere, without revealing much of anything about your past.
He said that when someone tells you that a policy must be pursued because of the needs of the Future, you should not listen.
(Yes, Dear Reader, that last one is rather problematic).
He said that the rigorous writings of geographer Carl O. Sauer were a lot more legitimate than what passes today for Ecology.
He said he that liked to put some things in his poems that were slippery & perplexing: "it's a service that you do for the reader".
During the q&a that followed, some Traditionalist graduate students (not members of the class, and not people who often or ever came to others of these sessions--I should note that this seminar was held in a very large room within the English Department building & anyone at all who wished to partake was always welcome) asked questions probing the relation of Dorn's earliest poems to British pastoral and lyrical traditions, but E.D. brushed these questions off.
Except for the question I myself asked, I don't remember more about the q&a, except that, as in his lecture, Dorn's discourse was not at all shabby. My comment/question was about "An Opinion on a Matter of Public Safety", the anti-airbag poem from Hello, La Jolla. I had found this poem to be both anti-poetic and rather callous. In addressing Dorn, I hardly wanted to speak of what I took to be the poem's aesthetic thinness; but I did want to discuss the public issue in itself, and in so far as Dorn's position was possibly a quite unhealthy warping of the Olsonian/Black Mountain concern for Attentiveness.
I cannot say Dorn "converted" me, but in our back and forth I was very impressed by the seriousness with which he backed up and defined the poem's argument. Whatever one made of it, aesthetically or morally, there was clearly a lot of thought behind his "Opinion" (a full account of what I remember of this dialogue may or may not be posted at some later date).
This whole delightful panoply had been made possible by the resources that come with the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, which had just recently been conferred on Robert C. I should note that the class was cross-listed with the Art Department (I'm pretty sure Fine Arts rather than Art History), and a prematurely gray-haired artist/professor whose name I don't recall was officially Team Teacher alongside Creeley; as I recall he was extemely shy and never said all that much--perhaps because few if any students of Art had elected to take the class.
As the day came for Dorn's visit, my friends and I feared that his words for us were going to be but pointless and preening. For we had all been shocked by the recent release of Hello, La Jolla , which seemed pulverized, crabbed, and dopey--an incredible and arrogant drop-off from what previously he had done. After reading La Jolla, someone I know suggested the creation of a formal Anti-Dorn Society.
We couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised. Dorn was one of the best & most focused of all the visitors. His sly discourse, and the subsequent q&a, was gripping--he had come carefully prepared with striking contentions.
He said he was very suspicious of the way Singleness was being promoted everywhere as a wonderfully liberated way of life. He said that this catered to the interest of all sorts of Enterprises, since you could sell a Single person anything.
He said that people say no sincerity is allowed in the Workplace--but actually there has to be a degree of sincerity, or everything would grind to a halt : that which is not permitted is recognition.
He said everyone looks down in the 1950's, but that actually there was a certain legitamacy to that decade's development.
He said that people then felt freer to move around the country--he said that people now feel stuck because of the demands of bureacracies like those that give out Unemployment Insurance.
He said you could have much more privacy then--you could blow into some town, and get a job somewhere, without revealing much of anything about your past.
He said that when someone tells you that a policy must be pursued because of the needs of the Future, you should not listen.
(Yes, Dear Reader, that last one is rather problematic).
He said that the rigorous writings of geographer Carl O. Sauer were a lot more legitimate than what passes today for Ecology.
He said he that liked to put some things in his poems that were slippery & perplexing: "it's a service that you do for the reader".
During the q&a that followed, some Traditionalist graduate students (not members of the class, and not people who often or ever came to others of these sessions--I should note that this seminar was held in a very large room within the English Department building & anyone at all who wished to partake was always welcome) asked questions probing the relation of Dorn's earliest poems to British pastoral and lyrical traditions, but E.D. brushed these questions off.
Except for the question I myself asked, I don't remember more about the q&a, except that, as in his lecture, Dorn's discourse was not at all shabby. My comment/question was about "An Opinion on a Matter of Public Safety", the anti-airbag poem from Hello, La Jolla. I had found this poem to be both anti-poetic and rather callous. In addressing Dorn, I hardly wanted to speak of what I took to be the poem's aesthetic thinness; but I did want to discuss the public issue in itself, and in so far as Dorn's position was possibly a quite unhealthy warping of the Olsonian/Black Mountain concern for Attentiveness.
I cannot say Dorn "converted" me, but in our back and forth I was very impressed by the seriousness with which he backed up and defined the poem's argument. Whatever one made of it, aesthetically or morally, there was clearly a lot of thought behind his "Opinion" (a full account of what I remember of this dialogue may or may not be posted at some later date).
Labels: Buffalo, Creeley, Dorn
