Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Hayden Carruth
Beside the Shadblow Tree—A Memoir of James Laughlin
Copper Canyon Press
1999
154 pages
Softcover, $14
One of the few memoirs that I’ve read that actually (and thankfully) foregrounds forgetfulness as a generator of stories, Hayden Carruth’s Beside the Shadblow Tree, his remembrance of his friend and boss James Laughlin (the late publisher of New Directions), is most importantly a casual investigation into economic classes and how class positions and usually holds one in its different confines. For me, there isn’t a more important topic than class. Race, gender, sexual orientation, creed, all fall short of the great bonds of class, simply because money is the most pervasive and invasive structuring element of existence. Even people eating out of trashbins rely on someone to have purchased or rented the trashbins. Class stretches through race and gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality, Muslim and Seventh Day Adventist.
Money is certainly worthless, of course, unless one buys into the faith of its worth, of the stock market, which is what everyone does, as they are forced to. Money is supposed to equal the worth of work, of one’s time. Sweat or no sweat equals paper. From William Gaddis’s JR:
—Money…? in a voice that rustled.
—Paper, yes.
Carruth is often helped out by Laughlin, given shelter, given a purpose, earning his keep, and this cannot be dismissed. Still, one watches the world of Laughlin through Carruth’s eyes, and it is hard not to come away with the opinion that the privilege Laughlin was born into is the trap and the mode—yes, the mode—through which he interacts with others. Laughlin often tells others what to do, as if this was his calling in life. Those under him, like the underclass everywhere, go about doing his bidding. We see Laughlin easily jetting off to all corners of the world, leaving Carruth to do, for instance, the laborious (tedious) business of filing all New Directions correspondences for a particular time period. Carruth doesn’t complain about this—in fact, he seems thankful. This seems to me to be the confines of class speaking, however, where one should kiss the ring of the nobles. It appears to be culturally embedded.
On one page in the book there are two pictures—the top picture shows Laughlin lackadaisically making some point, in an offhanded way. Below this picture is one of Carruth, leaning intently over his typewriter, working. The captions themselves explain much, and are almost exactly the same in wording, save the type of study:
James Laughlin at his Meadow House study reads the first caption.
Hayden Carruth at his Vermont cowshed study, 1964, reads the second caption.
No doubt Carruth is making a tiny joke here, as his humor sometimes expresses itself in blunt irony.
Carruth seems at times bewildered by Laughlin’s life, hardly able to equate his friend’s life with his own, as if their individual existences were not meant to be bridged. We witness them skiing together, wherein they barely speak to one another. Laughlin comes across as aloof, painfully shy, embarrassed by emotion, and a benefactor to many writers, often wholly subsidizing their lives. Carruth counts at least seven people in this column, and with little thanks in return.
It is often a funny book, with Carruth’s penchant for wry observation, even if gruff and crotchety at times, rolling throughout the episodic storytelling. There is some backtracking and repetition also, but one feels comforted by this, really, rather than bored, as this is exactly what people do. They go back over already mentioned things, adding a few new hues here and there before moving forward again. Or sideways.
Carruth is quiet, reflective, grumpy, and admirably informational, even if he says he can’t remember when something happened, or if it even happened the way he remembers it. He provides an insider’s gossip and commentary on one of the past century’s important literary figures, while writing the memoir his way. It’s just the right size, and a really nice read.
Beside the Shadblow Tree—A Memoir of James Laughlin
Copper Canyon Press
1999
154 pages
Softcover, $14
One of the few memoirs that I’ve read that actually (and thankfully) foregrounds forgetfulness as a generator of stories, Hayden Carruth’s Beside the Shadblow Tree, his remembrance of his friend and boss James Laughlin (the late publisher of New Directions), is most importantly a casual investigation into economic classes and how class positions and usually holds one in its different confines. For me, there isn’t a more important topic than class. Race, gender, sexual orientation, creed, all fall short of the great bonds of class, simply because money is the most pervasive and invasive structuring element of existence. Even people eating out of trashbins rely on someone to have purchased or rented the trashbins. Class stretches through race and gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality, Muslim and Seventh Day Adventist.
Money is certainly worthless, of course, unless one buys into the faith of its worth, of the stock market, which is what everyone does, as they are forced to. Money is supposed to equal the worth of work, of one’s time. Sweat or no sweat equals paper. From William Gaddis’s JR:
—Money…? in a voice that rustled.
—Paper, yes.
Carruth is often helped out by Laughlin, given shelter, given a purpose, earning his keep, and this cannot be dismissed. Still, one watches the world of Laughlin through Carruth’s eyes, and it is hard not to come away with the opinion that the privilege Laughlin was born into is the trap and the mode—yes, the mode—through which he interacts with others. Laughlin often tells others what to do, as if this was his calling in life. Those under him, like the underclass everywhere, go about doing his bidding. We see Laughlin easily jetting off to all corners of the world, leaving Carruth to do, for instance, the laborious (tedious) business of filing all New Directions correspondences for a particular time period. Carruth doesn’t complain about this—in fact, he seems thankful. This seems to me to be the confines of class speaking, however, where one should kiss the ring of the nobles. It appears to be culturally embedded.
On one page in the book there are two pictures—the top picture shows Laughlin lackadaisically making some point, in an offhanded way. Below this picture is one of Carruth, leaning intently over his typewriter, working. The captions themselves explain much, and are almost exactly the same in wording, save the type of study:
James Laughlin at his Meadow House study reads the first caption.
Hayden Carruth at his Vermont cowshed study, 1964, reads the second caption.
No doubt Carruth is making a tiny joke here, as his humor sometimes expresses itself in blunt irony.
Carruth seems at times bewildered by Laughlin’s life, hardly able to equate his friend’s life with his own, as if their individual existences were not meant to be bridged. We witness them skiing together, wherein they barely speak to one another. Laughlin comes across as aloof, painfully shy, embarrassed by emotion, and a benefactor to many writers, often wholly subsidizing their lives. Carruth counts at least seven people in this column, and with little thanks in return.
It is often a funny book, with Carruth’s penchant for wry observation, even if gruff and crotchety at times, rolling throughout the episodic storytelling. There is some backtracking and repetition also, but one feels comforted by this, really, rather than bored, as this is exactly what people do. They go back over already mentioned things, adding a few new hues here and there before moving forward again. Or sideways.
Carruth is quiet, reflective, grumpy, and admirably informational, even if he says he can’t remember when something happened, or if it even happened the way he remembers it. He provides an insider’s gossip and commentary on one of the past century’s important literary figures, while writing the memoir his way. It’s just the right size, and a really nice read.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Reading/Thinking About:
Eleni Sikelianos' The California Poem
Raymond McDaniel's Murder (a violet)
Laura Sims' Bank Book
Hayden Carruth's Beside the Shadblow Tree--A Memoir of James Laughlin
Stacy Szymaszek's Some Mariners
Ron Silliman's Demo to Ink
Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel
Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee
Too diffusive to review at the moment.
Recommended film: Decasia, written and directed by Bill Morrison, 2002
Eleni Sikelianos' The California Poem
Raymond McDaniel's Murder (a violet)
Laura Sims' Bank Book
Hayden Carruth's Beside the Shadblow Tree--A Memoir of James Laughlin
Stacy Szymaszek's Some Mariners
Ron Silliman's Demo to Ink
Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel
Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee
Too diffusive to review at the moment.
Recommended film: Decasia, written and directed by Bill Morrison, 2002
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Lyn Hejinian
The Fatalist
Omnidawn
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12.95
Not many philosophers are funny. They’re not, because they’re usually trying to explain jokes rather than tell them. The philosopher Henri Bergson charts why we laugh in his famous little book Laughter, explaining, for instance, that we often laugh when the formal is broken, as when a man in a suit and tie and serious expression slips on a banana peel. It’s for this same reason that a clown slipping on a banana peel is not as funny.
Many people innately sense there is something false/disturbed/unhealthy about the overly-serious person, and by this I don’t mean to suggest the common notion of anti-intellectualism, but more that the serious person is struggling with life’s seriocomedy. As well, people seem to like to laugh, to feel distracted from the hassles of living, the remarkable insensitivities, the endless deaths, the continual lying, the sickening greed, and so on. Perhaps the classic example of this serious person railing hopelessly against life is found in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s short, glorious, snarling comedy of irritation, "On Noise"—an unintentional comedy, of life frustrating Schopenhauer’s desire to control a neighboring world and to keep it quiet so he could think and write.
Lyn Hejinian, who received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University, has now, with The Fatalist, officially become the philosopher who’s also funny. To me, Hejinian’s foregrounding of humor in this book marks the fullest showing of her powers as a writer. She seems to be free with it. We have become accustomed to her sometimes austere, exquisitely succinct and thoughtful collages of sound and memory, of language and desire, as she has done consistently since A Thought Is A Bride Of What Thinking, but her conscious attention to humor in this book is new, and this layer adds incredible weight—she’s let life fully in, with all its accidents. And the best part of this is the feeling that she’s not trying to manage the humor, but letting it happen all by itself. Of course, the poems are crafted, but they are crafted so well that the structures are hiding, and language and meanings are dancing seemingly apart from Hejinian’s writing. Because of this, bewilderment is created, and there are beautiful collisions. Here’s a piece from The Fatalist:
I’m not sure my marks will make sense. They are incomplete
sentences which I thought
and that seems like all and all the more reason
they’ll be pencilled if you like. And/or
if they are illegible, leave them "as background"
"as American" "as blasting"
"as yams"—I stopped to examine that. It’s an American bird.
Down the hall is the East-West road which sounds like punctuation
whose phrasing reference is "off." But here goes almost
but not quite all. The "disappearers"
would be, e.g., those who work. One can never have
enough kisses, one cannot have any. For seven years?
Things dematerialize, to vanish. The "sentence" is passed
by a witch in mere seconds. Those who shout
"under the sagging chairs" are toy swans and would be
shouters though openings
and closings—finding shelter (a room
and perhaps a hut?) or a bodily aperture,
e.g., the anus? Perhaps sex is a way of keeping
out the heat and/or the rain. Perhaps the "bent nails" are too.
Perhaps you know the work. Snakes, tusks
and nozzles, the fingers of a hand—it is all a little frustrating, rushed
but how or why we never know. We have no control over the heat
we only know we’ll have to accommodate more details.
Above, we see a cobbling together of sentences, and/or we see a series of interrelated moments, fissures and blank spaces. The structure of the piece seems to take the method of a daybook, of one’s continual jottings, displaced by time and each sentence’s initially understood context, if there ever was one to know about. Hejinian has been working along in this mode for some time now, combining personal narrative (for lack of a better term), critical prose, dashes of thought, quotes from other books, and conversations. The occasions for this writing are continuous and the creating of the text and its spacetime-bound contexts are subsequently erupted, lost, made over again from new, neighboring information.
Hejinian’s work seems like evidence to some larger sociological/cultural machinations, to increasing mysteries apart from just the life of Lyn Hejinian. In her earlier books, the denuding of the narrator was accomplished in part by a general flatness of vocal register. But for me the controlling nature of the flat tone was overly-conspicuous, as if sides of life were not getting through. She seems to have allowed not just multiple sources into her newer books but multiple tones as well. One could spot the beginnings of this multi-tonality in A Border Comedy, and it has grown beautifully in The Fatalist.
Miles Davis once said that he thought standing in one place while playing his trumpet was boring for the audience, and it was boring to him, so he liked to move around. Hejinian is just as discontent with stasis in her books of poetry. She’s always questioning herself, her perceptions, her ways of making books, and when this restlessness is matched with her gift for the sounds of language, writing doesn’t get any better.
The Fatalist
Omnidawn
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12.95
Not many philosophers are funny. They’re not, because they’re usually trying to explain jokes rather than tell them. The philosopher Henri Bergson charts why we laugh in his famous little book Laughter, explaining, for instance, that we often laugh when the formal is broken, as when a man in a suit and tie and serious expression slips on a banana peel. It’s for this same reason that a clown slipping on a banana peel is not as funny.
Many people innately sense there is something false/disturbed/unhealthy about the overly-serious person, and by this I don’t mean to suggest the common notion of anti-intellectualism, but more that the serious person is struggling with life’s seriocomedy. As well, people seem to like to laugh, to feel distracted from the hassles of living, the remarkable insensitivities, the endless deaths, the continual lying, the sickening greed, and so on. Perhaps the classic example of this serious person railing hopelessly against life is found in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s short, glorious, snarling comedy of irritation, "On Noise"—an unintentional comedy, of life frustrating Schopenhauer’s desire to control a neighboring world and to keep it quiet so he could think and write.
Lyn Hejinian, who received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University, has now, with The Fatalist, officially become the philosopher who’s also funny. To me, Hejinian’s foregrounding of humor in this book marks the fullest showing of her powers as a writer. She seems to be free with it. We have become accustomed to her sometimes austere, exquisitely succinct and thoughtful collages of sound and memory, of language and desire, as she has done consistently since A Thought Is A Bride Of What Thinking, but her conscious attention to humor in this book is new, and this layer adds incredible weight—she’s let life fully in, with all its accidents. And the best part of this is the feeling that she’s not trying to manage the humor, but letting it happen all by itself. Of course, the poems are crafted, but they are crafted so well that the structures are hiding, and language and meanings are dancing seemingly apart from Hejinian’s writing. Because of this, bewilderment is created, and there are beautiful collisions. Here’s a piece from The Fatalist:
I’m not sure my marks will make sense. They are incomplete
sentences which I thought
and that seems like all and all the more reason
they’ll be pencilled if you like. And/or
if they are illegible, leave them "as background"
"as American" "as blasting"
"as yams"—I stopped to examine that. It’s an American bird.
Down the hall is the East-West road which sounds like punctuation
whose phrasing reference is "off." But here goes almost
but not quite all. The "disappearers"
would be, e.g., those who work. One can never have
enough kisses, one cannot have any. For seven years?
Things dematerialize, to vanish. The "sentence" is passed
by a witch in mere seconds. Those who shout
"under the sagging chairs" are toy swans and would be
shouters though openings
and closings—finding shelter (a room
and perhaps a hut?) or a bodily aperture,
e.g., the anus? Perhaps sex is a way of keeping
out the heat and/or the rain. Perhaps the "bent nails" are too.
Perhaps you know the work. Snakes, tusks
and nozzles, the fingers of a hand—it is all a little frustrating, rushed
but how or why we never know. We have no control over the heat
we only know we’ll have to accommodate more details.
Above, we see a cobbling together of sentences, and/or we see a series of interrelated moments, fissures and blank spaces. The structure of the piece seems to take the method of a daybook, of one’s continual jottings, displaced by time and each sentence’s initially understood context, if there ever was one to know about. Hejinian has been working along in this mode for some time now, combining personal narrative (for lack of a better term), critical prose, dashes of thought, quotes from other books, and conversations. The occasions for this writing are continuous and the creating of the text and its spacetime-bound contexts are subsequently erupted, lost, made over again from new, neighboring information.
Hejinian’s work seems like evidence to some larger sociological/cultural machinations, to increasing mysteries apart from just the life of Lyn Hejinian. In her earlier books, the denuding of the narrator was accomplished in part by a general flatness of vocal register. But for me the controlling nature of the flat tone was overly-conspicuous, as if sides of life were not getting through. She seems to have allowed not just multiple sources into her newer books but multiple tones as well. One could spot the beginnings of this multi-tonality in A Border Comedy, and it has grown beautifully in The Fatalist.
Miles Davis once said that he thought standing in one place while playing his trumpet was boring for the audience, and it was boring to him, so he liked to move around. Hejinian is just as discontent with stasis in her books of poetry. She’s always questioning herself, her perceptions, her ways of making books, and when this restlessness is matched with her gift for the sounds of language, writing doesn’t get any better.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Steve Timm
Averrage
Answer Tag
2004
20 pages
Softcover
Steve Timm is a friend of mine, and basically a legend in poetry circles in Madison, Wisconsin, but also moving outward into Milwaukee and Chicago. He is now 50 years old, but he still has the unbelievable enthusiasm and energy for poetry that he had when I first met him twelve years ago.
But, it has to be a certain kind of poetry. "Poetry with an edge," he would say. "Otherwise," he would also say, "what’s the point"? And by edge, he doesn’t care how it’s generated. It can be generated by combinations of stylistic innovation, diction, syntactical experimentation, emotional intensity of content, bewilderment, by humorous tones, by political acumen, by anything, really, that has a pulse. Steve hooked me on César Vallejo, Gertrude Stein, and Jack Spicer when I was in my early twenties. He also got me hooked on the films of Rainier Werner Fassbinder and the Marx Brothers, the music of Eric Dolphy and Sun Ra, and a great deal of world literature, memorably the Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz, to just name one. He has been a mentor of mine for as long as I’ve known him, and his humor, kindness, and willingness to teach others have been a constant source of inspiration for me. Steve teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received his master’s degree in linguistics in the 80s.
It is important to remember that he has a background in linguistics, I feel, when reading his poetry. It is also important to know that he loves jazz and jazz rhythms. And he is wonderfully funny. His poems in Averrage, as well in other poems, frequently foreground ruptured words, phonetic dead-ends and dead beginnings, blips, much like jazz phrasing. The tone is most usually conversational, and his voice is unrestrained. After my explanatory Note, following, there's an example from Averrage:
[Note: there are various spacings, tab stops, etc., that I am not able to show in the two examples of Steve's work, which make Steve's work move slower, become more nuanced. The encoding used in this weblog, Unicode, does not accept these spaces, and so flushes everything together. It's a real drag.]
I have an alley what kind i do
not know the distant rumbles rumble in a
distance i do not know listen a coming
a listen coming this is who i am
it is what is up this ‘alley’ lain
sidelong just as well ear ground gr
ounded unidentifiable unindenti
fied waste management, inc. their
alley big contributions lower tipping fees
it is a question of showing up i
really have no question when you look
at a mirror what is ‘behind you’ be
side myself whatever happens to be
reflected that which imaged happens
to be in my vicinity found protruding
risingly a smell if desired may be
associated of a desire may be all
otted one smell perhaps identifi
able i think this answers
In the above, note the slipperiness of the first line. Is it just one voice? Are there two people speaking? Is the second person asking what kind? Does the first person respond to this question of what kind of alley it is, with a typical Timmian multiple answer, in "i do/not know"? The break after "do" fractures assurance, as if the narrator is not listening to the second narrator, and only repeating to himself that he does have an alley. But then the line continues, or does it?, with "not know". The continual blurring of sentences, of subject and object, of relationship, frees the text and opens meanings. But Steve, I feel, controls the realms of meanings here, mostly by tone, and doesn’t send it into rampant phrasal salad, like Bruce Andrews’ work, for instance, though Steve has done this elsewhere, in other poems.
In recent years, Steve has incorporated much more use of morphemes, the segments of words, into the sound texture of his poems. Like the separation of ‘gr’ from ‘ounded’ or the ‘all’ from ‘otted’ in the above. Apart from his eager disrespect of normative syllabics, the point he makes is to release the sounds from the meanings, to open up that wonderful ‘otted’, and to hear ‘otter’ there, even ‘i did’. He wants to stop the reader from his or her expectations, and he does this by the ways above, but also through his rewordings of common phrases and words. In a later section of the book, he says "there you don’t go a/gain". On the same page, "parsnips" gets rendered tellingly as "parse nicks".
Averrage, though, also contains many plaintive pieces. He has told me the book was written during and after a number of his pets died or were dying. Two large pigs, two dogs, and a cat. There is no overt mention of this, but the impact of it is glimpsed in the sequences of the book. Here’s another piece:
there are those quite dying room for it
that is a question mutter gaff & gack a
like is it the swiss’ll drop you anywhere the
space I remove remains renewal gentrification
in spades nothing confidential about as sure
as words for it preaction is a practice alone if
the ears for the indictment needn’t be read though
if it is a ‘making’ it is an error a taking
down under you would think but it
is peerless in moment of after ‘not quite’
or now-gone is it a case for mourn
ing the sis of instance rather loamy enthusiasm
saying waved on benedicter elect pre
position of one’s once choosing when the
hearing of it cease is
Averrage is printed on linen, bound by a nearly unnoticeable, thin, white string, with a much heavier paper acting as the dust jacket. On the light blue cover is a black illustration by Dave Pavelich, the publisher of Answer Tag, based on Vasyl’ Iermilov’s design for Verse of Ekaterina Neimaer (1920). It resembles a tulip atop a bugle (a common enough sight). Maybe an Asian bugle. It is an elegant book visually. It is of comfortable size in the hand, and the ample white space around the text makes for easy reading.
Answer Tag does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Anyone interested in a copy of Averrage, however, can contact Dave Pavelich at pavelich@wisc.edu. All of Answer Tag’s chapbooks are limited editions, labors of love, and the price, at least for now, can’t be beat: they’re free.
Averrage
Answer Tag
2004
20 pages
Softcover
Steve Timm is a friend of mine, and basically a legend in poetry circles in Madison, Wisconsin, but also moving outward into Milwaukee and Chicago. He is now 50 years old, but he still has the unbelievable enthusiasm and energy for poetry that he had when I first met him twelve years ago.
But, it has to be a certain kind of poetry. "Poetry with an edge," he would say. "Otherwise," he would also say, "what’s the point"? And by edge, he doesn’t care how it’s generated. It can be generated by combinations of stylistic innovation, diction, syntactical experimentation, emotional intensity of content, bewilderment, by humorous tones, by political acumen, by anything, really, that has a pulse. Steve hooked me on César Vallejo, Gertrude Stein, and Jack Spicer when I was in my early twenties. He also got me hooked on the films of Rainier Werner Fassbinder and the Marx Brothers, the music of Eric Dolphy and Sun Ra, and a great deal of world literature, memorably the Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz, to just name one. He has been a mentor of mine for as long as I’ve known him, and his humor, kindness, and willingness to teach others have been a constant source of inspiration for me. Steve teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received his master’s degree in linguistics in the 80s.
It is important to remember that he has a background in linguistics, I feel, when reading his poetry. It is also important to know that he loves jazz and jazz rhythms. And he is wonderfully funny. His poems in Averrage, as well in other poems, frequently foreground ruptured words, phonetic dead-ends and dead beginnings, blips, much like jazz phrasing. The tone is most usually conversational, and his voice is unrestrained. After my explanatory Note, following, there's an example from Averrage:
[Note: there are various spacings, tab stops, etc., that I am not able to show in the two examples of Steve's work, which make Steve's work move slower, become more nuanced. The encoding used in this weblog, Unicode, does not accept these spaces, and so flushes everything together. It's a real drag.]
I have an alley what kind i do
not know the distant rumbles rumble in a
distance i do not know listen a coming
a listen coming this is who i am
it is what is up this ‘alley’ lain
sidelong just as well ear ground gr
ounded unidentifiable unindenti
fied waste management, inc. their
alley big contributions lower tipping fees
it is a question of showing up i
really have no question when you look
at a mirror what is ‘behind you’ be
side myself whatever happens to be
reflected that which imaged happens
to be in my vicinity found protruding
risingly a smell if desired may be
associated of a desire may be all
otted one smell perhaps identifi
able i think this answers
In the above, note the slipperiness of the first line. Is it just one voice? Are there two people speaking? Is the second person asking what kind? Does the first person respond to this question of what kind of alley it is, with a typical Timmian multiple answer, in "i do/not know"? The break after "do" fractures assurance, as if the narrator is not listening to the second narrator, and only repeating to himself that he does have an alley. But then the line continues, or does it?, with "not know". The continual blurring of sentences, of subject and object, of relationship, frees the text and opens meanings. But Steve, I feel, controls the realms of meanings here, mostly by tone, and doesn’t send it into rampant phrasal salad, like Bruce Andrews’ work, for instance, though Steve has done this elsewhere, in other poems.
In recent years, Steve has incorporated much more use of morphemes, the segments of words, into the sound texture of his poems. Like the separation of ‘gr’ from ‘ounded’ or the ‘all’ from ‘otted’ in the above. Apart from his eager disrespect of normative syllabics, the point he makes is to release the sounds from the meanings, to open up that wonderful ‘otted’, and to hear ‘otter’ there, even ‘i did’. He wants to stop the reader from his or her expectations, and he does this by the ways above, but also through his rewordings of common phrases and words. In a later section of the book, he says "there you don’t go a/gain". On the same page, "parsnips" gets rendered tellingly as "parse nicks".
Averrage, though, also contains many plaintive pieces. He has told me the book was written during and after a number of his pets died or were dying. Two large pigs, two dogs, and a cat. There is no overt mention of this, but the impact of it is glimpsed in the sequences of the book. Here’s another piece:
there are those quite dying room for it
that is a question mutter gaff & gack a
like is it the swiss’ll drop you anywhere the
space I remove remains renewal gentrification
in spades nothing confidential about as sure
as words for it preaction is a practice alone if
the ears for the indictment needn’t be read though
if it is a ‘making’ it is an error a taking
down under you would think but it
is peerless in moment of after ‘not quite’
or now-gone is it a case for mourn
ing the sis of instance rather loamy enthusiasm
saying waved on benedicter elect pre
position of one’s once choosing when the
hearing of it cease is
Averrage is printed on linen, bound by a nearly unnoticeable, thin, white string, with a much heavier paper acting as the dust jacket. On the light blue cover is a black illustration by Dave Pavelich, the publisher of Answer Tag, based on Vasyl’ Iermilov’s design for Verse of Ekaterina Neimaer (1920). It resembles a tulip atop a bugle (a common enough sight). Maybe an Asian bugle. It is an elegant book visually. It is of comfortable size in the hand, and the ample white space around the text makes for easy reading.
Answer Tag does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Anyone interested in a copy of Averrage, however, can contact Dave Pavelich at pavelich@wisc.edu. All of Answer Tag’s chapbooks are limited editions, labors of love, and the price, at least for now, can’t be beat: they’re free.
Monday, August 09, 2004
I will read from my non-fiction manuscript Workbook on September 21, 7 p.m., at:
Dixon Place
258 Bowery
Second Floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212.219.0736
Stories from Workbook have appeared or will appear in Castagraf, Cimarron Review, Fence, 5_Trope, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Dixon Place
258 Bowery
Second Floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212.219.0736
Stories from Workbook have appeared or will appear in Castagraf, Cimarron Review, Fence, 5_Trope, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Danielle Collobert
Notebooks 1956-1978
Translated from the French by Norma Cole
Litmus Press
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12
The audacious ridiculousness of reviewing someone’s notebooks seems, of course, remarkably beside the point. Notebooks contain many things but are most generally the places for one’s private thoughts and swirling concerns, written in forms and styles undeterred by the hassles of public decorum and socialized punctuation.
Danielle Collobert’s fragmented, intensely sad and distracted notebooks reveal a traveler of the world and an investigator of self. The notebooks detail her joys and frustrations with life. But more than once she locates in herself:
lassitude
something broken—inside
She was a tremendously gifted poet—see her It Then and here, too, in her Notebooks 1956-1978—who took her life in 1978. Her notebooks are filled with the staccato delays and quick shifts of consciousness achieved by her use of the dash. The dash is the classic ambulating marker of Emily Dickinson, of course, but Dickinson used it much more for formal control, for creating near rhymes and concision, for instance. Perhaps the poet Aaron Shurin, and his use of the dash, with his deft digressions, would be a similar model to Collobert’s. Or Leslie Scalapino’s. Though Scalapino’s work seems more worked into shape. With Collobert’s writing, the sense of artifice sometimes seen in intention is gone, as if Collobert were dispensing with it to get to an urgency that literary forms sometimes mask. Here’s a section of her notebook entry from July 23, 1973:
Nothing—desert
a shift perhaps—the refusal to think anything whatever—close
—close—shut down—no more—disappear—would be time
—but no—to go on—go along with all/in all the petty daily
nonsense—nerves on edge—jumpy
insegnando il fredo agli sassi
not really cold—absurd tension—not even well in the sun at
the beach—empty head—long to go back to Paris shut myself
in rue de la Liberté—in the usual state of torpor up there—
no excuse to go on
But all my craft talk about dashes seems, as well, remarkably beside the point, as the pain and disconnection Collobert felt as a human being is really the deeply affective imprint one takes away from her notebooks. How does one comment on another’s anquish? How does one take the absurd leap into imagining what another is going through?
Whenever someone’s, especially a suicide’s, notebooks are published without his or her wishes being known, I sometimes feel like there is a sense of betrayal at work, of one’s inner worlds being pushed out into a world that didn’t have much use or care for the person in the first place. To read Collobert’s notebooks and to "see" her via the text, running all over the world, longing for some connection of importance to another human being, is excruciating enough. One can only wonder, with wonder’s sense of disconnection, what Collobert actually felt.
I said that I sometimes feel there is betrayal at work, but I also sometimes feel thankful to those people involved in making available notebooks that display such responses to life and living. I am mixed. Collobert’s focused explorations of her inner worlds on her various travels are at once her reactions to living and her expectations of death, but they also transcend her own private world and connect to a reader most powerfully by their inherent privacy and by her endlessly questioning mind, a mind that saw fractures everywhere and used the fracturing dash to show them.
Thank you to Litmus Press for bringing out these graceful, lonely notebooks, and thank you to Norma Cole for translating them. Cole translated Collobert’s It Then as well, and I—a shady monolingual (some German)—am profoundly in her debt.
Notebooks 1956-1978
Translated from the French by Norma Cole
Litmus Press
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12
The audacious ridiculousness of reviewing someone’s notebooks seems, of course, remarkably beside the point. Notebooks contain many things but are most generally the places for one’s private thoughts and swirling concerns, written in forms and styles undeterred by the hassles of public decorum and socialized punctuation.
Danielle Collobert’s fragmented, intensely sad and distracted notebooks reveal a traveler of the world and an investigator of self. The notebooks detail her joys and frustrations with life. But more than once she locates in herself:
lassitude
something broken—inside
She was a tremendously gifted poet—see her It Then and here, too, in her Notebooks 1956-1978—who took her life in 1978. Her notebooks are filled with the staccato delays and quick shifts of consciousness achieved by her use of the dash. The dash is the classic ambulating marker of Emily Dickinson, of course, but Dickinson used it much more for formal control, for creating near rhymes and concision, for instance. Perhaps the poet Aaron Shurin, and his use of the dash, with his deft digressions, would be a similar model to Collobert’s. Or Leslie Scalapino’s. Though Scalapino’s work seems more worked into shape. With Collobert’s writing, the sense of artifice sometimes seen in intention is gone, as if Collobert were dispensing with it to get to an urgency that literary forms sometimes mask. Here’s a section of her notebook entry from July 23, 1973:
Nothing—desert
a shift perhaps—the refusal to think anything whatever—close
—close—shut down—no more—disappear—would be time
—but no—to go on—go along with all/in all the petty daily
nonsense—nerves on edge—jumpy
insegnando il fredo agli sassi
not really cold—absurd tension—not even well in the sun at
the beach—empty head—long to go back to Paris shut myself
in rue de la Liberté—in the usual state of torpor up there—
no excuse to go on
But all my craft talk about dashes seems, as well, remarkably beside the point, as the pain and disconnection Collobert felt as a human being is really the deeply affective imprint one takes away from her notebooks. How does one comment on another’s anquish? How does one take the absurd leap into imagining what another is going through?
Whenever someone’s, especially a suicide’s, notebooks are published without his or her wishes being known, I sometimes feel like there is a sense of betrayal at work, of one’s inner worlds being pushed out into a world that didn’t have much use or care for the person in the first place. To read Collobert’s notebooks and to "see" her via the text, running all over the world, longing for some connection of importance to another human being, is excruciating enough. One can only wonder, with wonder’s sense of disconnection, what Collobert actually felt.
I said that I sometimes feel there is betrayal at work, but I also sometimes feel thankful to those people involved in making available notebooks that display such responses to life and living. I am mixed. Collobert’s focused explorations of her inner worlds on her various travels are at once her reactions to living and her expectations of death, but they also transcend her own private world and connect to a reader most powerfully by their inherent privacy and by her endlessly questioning mind, a mind that saw fractures everywhere and used the fracturing dash to show them.
Thank you to Litmus Press for bringing out these graceful, lonely notebooks, and thank you to Norma Cole for translating them. Cole translated Collobert’s It Then as well, and I—a shady monolingual (some German)—am profoundly in her debt.
