Posts Tagged ‘New Directions’

Tribute to Louis Zukofsky’s “A”

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

New Directions published a beautiful reprint edition of Louis Zukofsky’s “A” in 2011. Here is a tribute to the book featuring poems and short essays by Marina Blitshteyn, L.S. Asekoff, Adam Day, Ted Dodson, Seth Graves, Michael McDonough, David James Miller, and Erika Moya.

Introduction

by Ken L. Walker

The general anti-Louis Zukofsky consensus is not one of hatred or disgust, but it mainly seems to be centered around this notion that his work is difficult to pierce, that it inhabits a kind of flesh no reading needle is going to make bleed. I disagree. What “A” illustrates about the philosophical concept of the individual is that a direct connection to the historical movements that surround and encompass the individual are solidified mainly in being and observing. Zukofsky, in “A-6,” writes: “And to rise in the morning,/Like nothing on earth,”. There it is. An individual, separate but connected. An individual, whole in its body within another whole body. The pregnancy, the planet spinning.

“A” is a long work, epic-mocking but epic and filled with densely-crammed research granules from times and places lost, forgotten, overlooked, and repressed—an 806-page red mammoth, written chronologically (with one exception—“A-24”), accompanied by a nineteen page index of name and object. Its musicality does not overwhelm or encompass but meditates on the many miniature environments within and around it. This is a life’s work, research-based, a collage deeper than a canyon and bigger than New York. The perpetual processes of research that Zukofsky engaged came “out of deep need” and out of rotation and/or movement. Not only does a human being possess a bottomless need to make but a human being is vibrating, moving and sounding. Is it possible to put this all into one poem? Zukofsky certainly believed so and so did. The determination and the scale does not say more about “A” or make “A” any better; it simply acts as component.

If a poem can be a field, or an open grid and can be plotted, then the poet must ask the obvious question: how do I plot this? When to ask that question is even more important. Zukofsky was an intricate professional at this type of crusade, plucking ideations from innumerable sources (Karl Marx, Alexander Hamilton, Jonathan Swift, Vico, Henry Adams, thousands of newspaper articles, Spinoza, Appalachian subculture, Baudleaire, Wagner, The Buddhist Fire Sermon, etc.). A research-based poem does something that other poems do not seem to do as well—to connect the individual and society but to assert both equally, in chorus. Why is this important? Because the one is part of the many and the many is emptied of false meaning and practiced without a single one.

Barry Ahearn points out that Zukofsky preferred “to read American handicrafts as relics of labor processes best understood according to Marxist economic analysis,” but, also believed that such vestiges “reflect the lives and loving care of the individuals who made them.” One less ambiguous example of this happens when Zukofsky, in “A-10,” writes: “Credo I believe//Shame//Ashamed of all people put to shame/And all planets emit light/and indeed all bodies do.”

Zukofsky long claimed that “A” is “of a life,” one trying to revive the century with a panoply of collected objects. It’s clearly a misnomer that readers feel they cannot penetrate “A” ; all one is obligated to do with this poem is spend time with it, to enter into the same simple dialectical process that one enters into upon birth—the process of one letter becoming the use of language which is the same process of one object becoming the ability to use and be used. I’m excited to present this project with dedication pieces from many talented poets. This is a tribute, no doubt.

“Heimweh Funicular” by Adam Day

Two Poems by L.S. Asekoff

“Pulp” by Erika Moya

“Uppity Young Women Exit Your Zenana” by Michael McDonough

“This Boy is a Dead Man” by Seth Graves

“I’ll Bite” by David James Miller

“Dangling Modifier” by Ted Dodson

Two Poems by Marina Blitshteyn

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in features


Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

by Ernesto Cardenal (edited by Jonathan Cohen)
New Directions 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

6_5stars_6

The Bleak Duplicate

cardenal coverThe public “we” voice and claim a la Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski has a history of being misunderstood, but a strong history, nevertheless.  Defining “I” has been a long tradition in poetry without, of course, an authoritative solution.  Speaking for others is incredibly thorny and should be trotted with caution.  It requires one of two things—appointment/election or selfish egomania.

Ernesto Cardenal is a key example of the “we” voice, of the candle by which all vigils are held, at least the vigils in and around his Nicaraguan cipher (including parts of Kentucky, New York City, and some of Japan).  New Directions recently released Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems and featured Jonathan Cohen (a lifelong Cardenal translator) as the editor along with Coney Island stroller Lawrence Ferlinghetti (on the foreword) in January of this year—a star studded cast for a not so well known Latin American poet. 

Sure, folks have heard of Neruda and Lorca, barely Machado or Dario, but Ernesto Cardenal?  Ernesto Cardenal is a strange bird but nowhere near as full of himself as the repeatedly egomaniacal Pablo Neruda.  The two are associated all too often for their subversive stances as well as their romantic orbital patterns; but they are not in the same galaxy; that is to say, perhaps the common denominator is derived from a public of ignorance, a reading public that has no idea of the process of translation and how large corporate publishers pay for quick translations so they can make a buck or because they think the faster the better.  (See:  Roberto Bolaño’s Romantic Dogs, one of the weakest Spanish translations in recent years.)

Pluriverse, however, has no Spanish language (original) versions present, easily the most disappointing facet of the book.  The song of the open mouth (Español) has been closed.  The bulks of Spanish words, when pronounced properly, end with the mouth in an open position; the preponderance of English words keep the user’s lips sealed.  Not having at least a typeface facsimile of the original is insulting to readers and detrimental as to whether or not the translation—in this case, the entire poem—can be judged at all.  Whatever word would put pity to shame is what I am looking for.  Commiseration.  Grief. 

The twelve-page poem “Epigrams,” Cardenal’s dedication to Catullus, is a superb example, a carousel of wit—vignette little lime chunks that possess extremely witty concept-reversals which becomes darkly comedic. 

2

Be careful, Claudia, when you’re with me,
because the slightest gesture, any word, a sigh
of Claudia, the slightest slip,
perhaps one day scholars will examine it,
and this dance of Claudia’s will be remembered for centuries.
I’ve warned you, Claudia.

It’s not nearly as raunchy as Catullus but nowhere close to overt sentimentality and Cardenal, in this case, keeps with the tradition of remaining metaphysically-layered—of being the poet discursive with time, history, the current and lover.

And in traditional Sandinista fashion:

14

You’ve worked twenty years
to pile up twenty million pesos,
but we’d give twenty million pesos
not to have to work the way you’ve worked.

There are many other parts to these epigrams that coerce smirks, laughter, raised fists, and may even break a tear or two; but it is a shame that the Spanish is absent as the desk of a student who committed suicide.  With translation (and this comes from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, among others), the original text should always be displayed because without it, readers may think they are receiving the truth and they are getting bleak duplicate.  Thus, the translation can not only be emotionally read and felt but the translation as its own gray entity can be intellectually absorbed as well as sonically heard (at least when read aloud).  The original presentation is the only necessity, its own card deck of subtlety.  Without it, a reader may be left to wander an unidentified wilderness, not knowing the primordial song, sound, cadence, manifestations, emergences, and narrative. The collection performs a damaging disservice here to Cardenal veterans and rookies alike.  One cannot blame the poet.  And the translators can only be blamed for their under-pronounced lack of effort.

Luckily, Cardenal has close ties to the United States and American thought and poetry—through the editor Cohen along with his old friend and teacher Thomas Merton, the Kentucky Trappist monk who sojourned at the Abbey of Gethsemani and brought the Dalai Lama to the U.S. on two different occasions.  Liberals, libertarians and activist-hippies alike will love this poetry, especially the long, misleadingly manageable “Zero Hour”.  It begins:

Tropical nights in Central America,
with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes
and lights from presidential palaces,
barracks and sad curfew warnings.

And ends, after seventeen full pages of slightly surrealistic narrative poetry like so:

But the hero is born when he dies
and green grass is born from the ashes.

“Zero Hour” was what a couple of E.C.’s friends called underground poetry (poesía de la bajo tierra) and could only be read aloud at rebel campfires, or passed by way of shredded paper notes.  The poem plucks a hefty majority of its content from the April Rebellion, an aggressive act of defense directed at the brutal Somoza and his Presidential Palace.  The rebellion failed.  Many of the April Rebellion leaders were bitter with each other which, in the end, did not matter because Somoza either tortured or killed all of them.  The book’s introduction tells readers that Cardenal was “lucky to avoid arrest.”

The poetry, over a span of fifty six years, does not differentiate from its form; at times, Cardenal experiments with line breaks and placement of next line—particular poems (“Managua 6:30”, “Coplas on the Death of Merton”, “New Ecology”, etc. . . ) look on the page like choreographed tango sequences.  The earlier work hugs the left margin.  The later work swirls and dances, many lines beginning with “and” or “the” (i.e. y o el/la).  E.C.’s plural, radical-flag-waving first person sometimes beautifies an imperative; other times, it cultivates an opaque screen of who specifically the “we” (nos) is.  Nicaraguans?  Oppressed Latinos continually having to (as an Other) respond to imperialist racism?  Liberation Theologists?  The proletarian in general? 

In “Coplas on The Death of Merton,” he writes, “And we are alone/immortal grains of wheat that do not die, we are alone.”  Is that “we” (nos): Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, spiritual advisors, or every human individual?  Then, in “In The Half-Light,” the we amends itself into a smooth lyricism, directly romantic and sharply clever: 

Irene moves among the tables
and we walk together, reclining,
until midnight, beneath the orange torches
what am I saying? until the Sunday dawns.

A model example of his beguiling drollness, from the “Coplas . . .”

Time? IS money
it’s Time, it’s shit, it’s nothing
it’s Time with a celebrity on the cover

It could either go in a direction of Lord of the Flies or trek on a pathway of serious attentiveness.  That is the usual with Cardenal—once out of the consistent rejection, a reader will make plenty of realizations, come across epiphanies.  His often childish word play shows readers the buried semantics a culture of consumption wants to forget rather than to dig up—slogans are seized and accessibility becomes a misnomer.  The three best poems (outside his multi-paged carry-on narratives) are:  “The Lost Cities,” “In The Half-Light,” and “Managua 6:30 PM”.  The swirling lines, sparsely minute descriptions, liberal politics, and buzzing heart that thump in those are swelteringly nuclear. 

Walter Benjamin is posthumously present to remind us that it is the translator’s mandate to “liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.”  If that is found true, this edition has failed the greatness of Ernesto Cardenal by leaving out the original and including many lackluster, decaying translations.  However, reading Cardenal in English (esp. from US publishers) has thus far been impossible.  The book’s epigraph comes from Cardenal his self:  “I have tried, above all, to write poetry that can be understood.”  That, he did.  But, he also wrote gorgeously alive minimal lyricism that necessitates a bit more energy, oomph and demand.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Descartes’ Loneliness

Monday, August 25th, 2008

by Allen Grossman
New Directions 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

6_5stars_6

Lens Crafter

grossman cover

In his new book Descartes’ Loneliness, Allen Grossman subtly displays the affects of a life of thought: the knife-edge between intellect and passion. As the first and titular poem shows, when Grossman strives for pure intellect, he comes face to face with the realities of being a subjective human: “But in fact, toward evening, I am not / convinced there is any other except myself.” This line encapsulates the strongest images in the book: the poet himself, the mind, and the passage of time as seen through light. It also capably establishes the poet’s major themes: objectivism vs. subjectivism, perspective vs. reality, and truth vs. experience. Overall, the book is an interesting read for anyone dedicating his/her life to Liberal Arts academia.

Intermittently, Grossman inserts bold, imagistic poems such as “A Day’s Work” and “Timor Mortis, Inc., A Switchboard Memory.” Each of these poems revolves around the mother figure, who serves as a counterpoint to the character of Descartes. In “A Day’s Work” he writes:

Bobbed hair conceals
ears. Starched white shirt (Sleeves
rolled up with fierce intent.)
Hands in pockets of a straight skirt
of heavy material. She is looking
at the ground.

There are a few moments like this throughout the work that impact the reader both directly and broadly. The poet’s mother represents all things vague and human. These are the poems that seem most honest and effortless for Grossman. The intellectual connection here is vague, but not invisible.

The majority of Descartes’ Loneliness is focused, obviously, on Descartes, although it is not as readily apparent as the title indicates. Two of the poet’s greatest notions come when considering Descartes. First, he indicates that a profound given is a type of ownership. And isn’t that true? That first person who truly blew your mind will forever occupy a piece of your life that you cannot extract. As Grossman puts it in, “A Kiss for You,”: “Take this kiss. / You are mine forever.”

Second, Grossman makes the self-important claim that truth in science, or direct scrutiny, cannot be ascertained, but can be detected through the lens of poetry. In, “Caedmon,” “Invention of Night,” and “A Long Romance,” Grossman does achieve moments of great poetry, exposing the truth of the Descartes mind that can only be understood, through metaphor: “You Will be Wrapped in Silk.”

The book is at its weakest when Grossman falls into explaining, which he does through direct address and, too often, exclamation. This is partially forgivable, as Grossman sometimes assumes the identity of Descartes in his letters to Princess Elizabeth. However, within the poems, the exclamations draw the reader out of the moment and put too strong a Grossman stamp on the poem.

There is a balance to be had. In the final poem, “Votre Altresse,” the reader sees a thinkers’ sympathy between Grossman and Descartes. Descartes’ final days are spent in a foreign court where he is beleaguered and misunderstood. He will die as a showpiece, a novelty, in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Grossman sets a high intellectual bar with his new book, and he touches that bar, I think. But I did not detect anything novel in the conversations of philosophy or poetry. Although he does a nice job of framing the classic dilemmas of Descartes, he does not add anything new.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Splay Anthem

Friday, November 10th, 2006

by Nathaniel Mackey
New Directions 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8_5

Andoumboulosity Recursion

mackey coverTitle sound familiar?  More than vaguely P-Funk?  It should.  What’s new about Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem is that it’s P-Funk for Academe. What I see is an historic opportunity to heal the breach that has festered since 1967, when Le Roi Jones was arrested during the Newark riots on trumped-up weapons charges, and quickly sentenced after one of his poems was read as evidence.  After that, it’s not hard to understand that Jones might ditch his white friends, change his name and go home to the black nationalist ghetto, never to return: how a remedial action might become a long-term breach.

Part of what I think should be remembered about Jones is a book called Black Music, a collection of insistent, urgently vernacular reviews of Free-Jazzers.  His brilliant folk wisdom is marred by a despair that whites can’t understand this music, that white thinking is crabbed, top-down reasoning, while black thinking is body-wise and never the twain shall meet: all this even as Jones is exercising his own prodigious powers of logic and reason to build the wall.  I read such divisions with pain at the loss: even Olson was saying, Hey! Universities! You might be able to USE ‘em.

Nicole Terez, who came up through Cave Canem, a program for African-American writers, led me back to Baraka’s book.  She sees this musical tradition as speaking to America as a whole: no reason to dis Louis Armstrong as a sellout: it’s all good.  It’s not that she is blind to Baraka’s nationalism, but that she won’t throw out the good stuff, of which much remains.  She trusts the reader: and as noted by others, the threads, though braided, stand out as visibly wrong—a nod to the 9/11 poem he’d write suggesting the Jews were all conveniently evacuated, and that the attack was an inside job.  It’s tragic.  Baraka tends to bring down with him a tradition of amazing variety and life, the relevance of African tradition to America as a whole.

Nathaniel Mackey’s intro to Splay Anthem is a masterful naming and reclaiming: a jazz critic and poet healing the breach heralded in Black Music.  Other disciples of Olson address rifts in academia, but not the hyphen in African-American.  This is what Ralph Ellison was talking about for all those years, and getting called Uncle Tom and worse for his pains.  Reread Mackey’s introduction: it’s a pretzel, but keep at it: every one of the artists he mentions takes us right back to the mid-60’s moment when Le Roi was letting us in on some heavy shit, still on the same train with Olson and Creeley, Duncan Bending the Bow, and Ayler, Coltrane and Coleman blowing their hearts out (and minds) to tell us what was going down. And the poems—a weaving of two series that mark another chapter in a project that’s marked his career—are equally smart, rhythmic, and rewarding:

                                                    Death
Lake also there… Where we were rubbed    
    earth in our faces, a feeling we had
        for debris. Nub, no longer standing,
      filled the air, an exact powder, fell
                                                    as
      we ran through it, earth-sway swaddling
                                                    our
   feet

Up till now, the roadblock to reclaiming this tradition was partly a sense that avant-jazzers had left mind for moan, that tweeds couldn’t in good conscience cotton to tribal neoprimitivism: look at the sulfurous rifts widening beneath their feet.  Just as I can’t blame Baraka for taking his ball and going home, I can’t blame the tweeds for not committing suicide.  See how Mackey reclaims the vernacular bite for the brain: “the imperial flailing republic of the Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub.  In a match that seems to have been made in hell, hijacked airliners echo and further entrench a hijacked election, cycles of recriminatory assault further confirming a regime of echo the recourse to echo would cure homeopathically if it could.” 

See if you don’t agree that since the midterm elections, that statement is now much more mainstream.  Baraka has been saying that for 40 years, but without the nod to ecology linking American crabbiness with planetary crabbiness.  The vicious circle of isms has been stretched by history into a spiral, a spring.  We are ready to reclaim and leap.  Tweeds can vote for Mackey, welcoming the cool music and deep cultural critique without fear, with a real need for common cause.  This is just the time to hear Mackey’s voice.  The healing he offers is real and relevant: which is why I think Splay Anthem is a contender.  Don’t miss Nathaniel Mackey’s anthology of jazz writing, either.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews