Sunday, September 19, 2004
Eleni Sikelianos
The California Poem
Coffee House Press
2004
200 pages
Softcover, $16
I have a pretty spotty record with regard to long poems, epics, or the famous long books of poetry. Only because it pertains, I am going to put forward these results—(I’ll get to The California Poem after this):
Flow Chart by John Ashbery (unread) (merely read around in it)
Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer (read)
Ko, or a Season on Earth by Kenneth Koch (unread)
Dream Songs by John Berryman (read)
"A" by Louis Zukofsky ("reading", since 1998—am now on page 112). Have read his Prepositions, A Test of Poetry, and am "beginning" his & his wife’s Bottom: On Shakespeare.
The Cantos by Ezra Pound (read) (save the Pisans)
The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson (nearing "read" status—on page 571 right now (about 60 pages from the end). But have been reading this off and on since 2000.
Paterson by William Carlos Williams ("reading"?). I don’t remember finishing this book. I’ve just taken it down again, and it seems familiar up to page 160 or so.
The Alphabet by Ron Silliman (have read Lit, Paradise, What, ®, currently reading Demo to Ink).
BlipSoak01 by Tan Lin (read)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (read a good portion of it, not the entire book)
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (read, I think, mostly all of it)
Paradise Lost by John Milton (read)
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (read)
The Aenied by Virgil (read)
The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spenser (never will finish it—that’s a promise) (read portions of this as an English undergrad)
Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda (read perhaps a third of the book) (read other work by him)
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford (read parts of this)
Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright (read)
The Crystal Text by Clark Coolidge (read)
*
These are the ones that come to mind at the moment.
I find my history with John Ashbery’s Flow Chart especially strange, as I’ve read nearly all of his other books. So why not Flow Chart?
The difficulties I have with the long work are various. The form seems to be able to swallow anything thrown into it, any narrative/imagistic/mental thread fishtails and folds into the emerging themes as the tide of the text pushes onward. I find this exciting, of course, and unpredictable. I sometimes like that sense of being lost, being hurtled along, with mostly the tone or voice of the narrator being the only stability. At other times, though, the onrush of images, new narratives, and the distance of the end, the final statement, seems like it’s all too confusing, too unfocused. In the long poem, one must let go and experience the poem to a higher degree than when one reads a sonnet or shorter serial poem; one must trust the poet to a higher degree, that when one begins down the road—ocean?—it will be worth one’s time.
I think my hesitancy with regard to the long poem is a mixture of the form’s onrushing displacing-re-placing-placing actions and the time commitment. Perhaps I also have a shorter attention span than most. My mind is already given to associative-thinking, however, and so perhaps the pell-mell of the long poem’s/epic’s text can make things doubly/triply (Tripoli?) confusing to me. That is, words take me places apart from just the text, so that I am following multiple lines of thought and feeling, and the experience can be exhausting for me if there isn’t—or I can’t make out—at least threads of thematic ideas/feelings.
In her earlier collection Earliest Worlds, Eleni Sikelianos investigates the poem as essay, as lyric, jointly, and as a populated space of geography and microorganisms, animals, amphibians, minerals, personal matters. In that book she worked in shorter forms, and the breathlessness achieved by her line-breaks (she’s in a class by herself) and her large concerns—environmental, linguistic, personal—could already be seen, albeit in a kind of boxed-in setting. Looking backward, it’s as if her voice needed to break free of the shorter forms. (I’m reminded of David Antin’s changeover from the keyboard to the tape recorder, because his typing couldn’t keep up with his thinking). Her writing in Earliest Worlds is denser and less conversational in tone than in her next book, The Monster Lives of Girls and Boys, and the one supposedly under review here, The California Poem.
I admit to enjoying the denser, shorter work more, but not that it is better written, more imaginative, more thoughtful. I think I like it because there is a sense of intense, narrower focus, which, for me, is plenty all by itself. The California Poem is all these things, but the focus is myriad; it is everywhere and every-once. It takes on the diurnal and the eternal. I think part of this could have been reduced had the poem focused more on a specific city in California, or region, which may seem laughable, but to take on all of California in a poem that is just short of 200 pages is quite a tall order. Parts of the poem engage with New York as well.
To summarize what The California Poem is about is really to be presumptuous and foolish. One throws guesses at it, like one does with most things. Is it an expansive nature poem, decrying the abandonment of animals, Native languages (Chumash), the destruction of habitat? Yes. Is it a poem about man/woman’s encroachment into nature, the unsettling of it, the hopes to harmonize with eskers and beavers? Yes. Is it populated wonderfully with so many names of towns and animals, grasses, microorganisms, descriptions of California’s land and water that it overwhelms the I along the way? Yes! And this may be my most singular joy found in the book: Sikelianos’s constant awareness of things non-human, of the ego-less air and trees, the constant space given to other matters of the world, beyond the human mind and the human predicament, that sad beast of navel-gazing. Here’s a section:
California did not hold its shape
when [ the condors ] were laid end-to-end
to form a replica of California
with photographs & balsa wood & glue
which was later
beamed to space
(from Big Sur). The message is in regards to
gardens of the sea: graphed
in the scallop’s eyes (bright), amid its tentacular
fringe: writ
in fossil guts of hermaphroditic oysters hanging
out in kitchen middens, a theatre
acting on land-
masses between bivalves (motory "self-powered
castanets" fluttering
in zig-
zagging arcs) and hungry
bipeds. This heroic
fantasy is set
in an ominous landscape, a dark world that mirrors our watery arms
and legs but not our muscular
hearts
*
As well, there is humor, pop culture references—especially from films—and a great deal of playfulness, as the pieces of what seems like a real and imagined California childhood intermix with the sense of unbounded life that fills her book. There is sometimes a giddiness almost, of things sprung loose, colorful flowers growing, the Pacific waves coming in, of dreams of California forming and dispersing into more movements and more flux. This flux plays out in her syntactical arrangements and also her content, as in:
blue & green & the penny arcade, my dream is just like that:
a thousand miles
long & deep into the otter ice water cliffs
almonds Fresno when I was nearly blond & knees straight
as an arrow & my name
was Dylan-in-the-grass-blue-grass, when my home-
stead read: Mary-of-the-villas
of-the vocables-of-conches Jalama ice plant and Spanish
mosses
*
Like Olson in The Maximus Poems, like Williams in Paterson, there are also local histories, local colors. Sikelianos includes a timetable of California, a postcard of an unseen Yucca, photographs of whale bones, landscapes, beach-scenes, artwork, cars stuck in trees, listings of extinct California animals and fishes.
California has always been symbolized, falsely or not, as the land of making dreams (Gold Rush, sunnier weather, Hollywood), and so it is fitting the book begins with:
I want to tell you about the dream. The California is a paradise lake with colorful animals dream.
The when I go back to my homeland California is a paradise I am happy for you dream
*
The California Poem is about a world created, marketed, fantasized, unreal, dying and living. But, above all, made. The California of Sikelianos’s imagining is akin to Christine Hume’s Alaska-of-the-mind, in that it is from someone that the various notions of California, the various Californias possible, emerge. Therefore, and forever:
My mouth
opened wide & out
came the world howl
They cut
the umbilical too far
from the heart, a
stump—this
was the marvel, the navel
California came out of, round
& warm as an orange
lament on a trembling
tongue
The California Poem
Coffee House Press
2004
200 pages
Softcover, $16
I have a pretty spotty record with regard to long poems, epics, or the famous long books of poetry. Only because it pertains, I am going to put forward these results—(I’ll get to The California Poem after this):
Flow Chart by John Ashbery (unread) (merely read around in it)
Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer (read)
Ko, or a Season on Earth by Kenneth Koch (unread)
Dream Songs by John Berryman (read)
"A" by Louis Zukofsky ("reading", since 1998—am now on page 112). Have read his Prepositions, A Test of Poetry, and am "beginning" his & his wife’s Bottom: On Shakespeare.
The Cantos by Ezra Pound (read) (save the Pisans)
The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson (nearing "read" status—on page 571 right now (about 60 pages from the end). But have been reading this off and on since 2000.
Paterson by William Carlos Williams ("reading"?). I don’t remember finishing this book. I’ve just taken it down again, and it seems familiar up to page 160 or so.
The Alphabet by Ron Silliman (have read Lit, Paradise, What, ®, currently reading Demo to Ink).
BlipSoak01 by Tan Lin (read)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (read a good portion of it, not the entire book)
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (read, I think, mostly all of it)
Paradise Lost by John Milton (read)
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (read)
The Aenied by Virgil (read)
The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spenser (never will finish it—that’s a promise) (read portions of this as an English undergrad)
Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda (read perhaps a third of the book) (read other work by him)
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford (read parts of this)
Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright (read)
The Crystal Text by Clark Coolidge (read)
*
These are the ones that come to mind at the moment.
I find my history with John Ashbery’s Flow Chart especially strange, as I’ve read nearly all of his other books. So why not Flow Chart?
The difficulties I have with the long work are various. The form seems to be able to swallow anything thrown into it, any narrative/imagistic/mental thread fishtails and folds into the emerging themes as the tide of the text pushes onward. I find this exciting, of course, and unpredictable. I sometimes like that sense of being lost, being hurtled along, with mostly the tone or voice of the narrator being the only stability. At other times, though, the onrush of images, new narratives, and the distance of the end, the final statement, seems like it’s all too confusing, too unfocused. In the long poem, one must let go and experience the poem to a higher degree than when one reads a sonnet or shorter serial poem; one must trust the poet to a higher degree, that when one begins down the road—ocean?—it will be worth one’s time.
I think my hesitancy with regard to the long poem is a mixture of the form’s onrushing displacing-re-placing-placing actions and the time commitment. Perhaps I also have a shorter attention span than most. My mind is already given to associative-thinking, however, and so perhaps the pell-mell of the long poem’s/epic’s text can make things doubly/triply (Tripoli?) confusing to me. That is, words take me places apart from just the text, so that I am following multiple lines of thought and feeling, and the experience can be exhausting for me if there isn’t—or I can’t make out—at least threads of thematic ideas/feelings.
In her earlier collection Earliest Worlds, Eleni Sikelianos investigates the poem as essay, as lyric, jointly, and as a populated space of geography and microorganisms, animals, amphibians, minerals, personal matters. In that book she worked in shorter forms, and the breathlessness achieved by her line-breaks (she’s in a class by herself) and her large concerns—environmental, linguistic, personal—could already be seen, albeit in a kind of boxed-in setting. Looking backward, it’s as if her voice needed to break free of the shorter forms. (I’m reminded of David Antin’s changeover from the keyboard to the tape recorder, because his typing couldn’t keep up with his thinking). Her writing in Earliest Worlds is denser and less conversational in tone than in her next book, The Monster Lives of Girls and Boys, and the one supposedly under review here, The California Poem.
I admit to enjoying the denser, shorter work more, but not that it is better written, more imaginative, more thoughtful. I think I like it because there is a sense of intense, narrower focus, which, for me, is plenty all by itself. The California Poem is all these things, but the focus is myriad; it is everywhere and every-once. It takes on the diurnal and the eternal. I think part of this could have been reduced had the poem focused more on a specific city in California, or region, which may seem laughable, but to take on all of California in a poem that is just short of 200 pages is quite a tall order. Parts of the poem engage with New York as well.
To summarize what The California Poem is about is really to be presumptuous and foolish. One throws guesses at it, like one does with most things. Is it an expansive nature poem, decrying the abandonment of animals, Native languages (Chumash), the destruction of habitat? Yes. Is it a poem about man/woman’s encroachment into nature, the unsettling of it, the hopes to harmonize with eskers and beavers? Yes. Is it populated wonderfully with so many names of towns and animals, grasses, microorganisms, descriptions of California’s land and water that it overwhelms the I along the way? Yes! And this may be my most singular joy found in the book: Sikelianos’s constant awareness of things non-human, of the ego-less air and trees, the constant space given to other matters of the world, beyond the human mind and the human predicament, that sad beast of navel-gazing. Here’s a section:
California did not hold its shape
when [ the condors ] were laid end-to-end
to form a replica of California
with photographs & balsa wood & glue
which was later
beamed to space
(from Big Sur). The message is in regards to
gardens of the sea: graphed
in the scallop’s eyes (bright), amid its tentacular
fringe: writ
in fossil guts of hermaphroditic oysters hanging
out in kitchen middens, a theatre
acting on land-
masses between bivalves (motory "self-powered
castanets" fluttering
in zig-
zagging arcs) and hungry
bipeds. This heroic
fantasy is set
in an ominous landscape, a dark world that mirrors our watery arms
and legs but not our muscular
hearts
*
As well, there is humor, pop culture references—especially from films—and a great deal of playfulness, as the pieces of what seems like a real and imagined California childhood intermix with the sense of unbounded life that fills her book. There is sometimes a giddiness almost, of things sprung loose, colorful flowers growing, the Pacific waves coming in, of dreams of California forming and dispersing into more movements and more flux. This flux plays out in her syntactical arrangements and also her content, as in:
blue & green & the penny arcade, my dream is just like that:
a thousand miles
long & deep into the otter ice water cliffs
almonds Fresno when I was nearly blond & knees straight
as an arrow & my name
was Dylan-in-the-grass-blue-grass, when my home-
stead read: Mary-of-the-villas
of-the vocables-of-conches Jalama ice plant and Spanish
mosses
*
Like Olson in The Maximus Poems, like Williams in Paterson, there are also local histories, local colors. Sikelianos includes a timetable of California, a postcard of an unseen Yucca, photographs of whale bones, landscapes, beach-scenes, artwork, cars stuck in trees, listings of extinct California animals and fishes.
California has always been symbolized, falsely or not, as the land of making dreams (Gold Rush, sunnier weather, Hollywood), and so it is fitting the book begins with:
I want to tell you about the dream. The California is a paradise lake with colorful animals dream.
The when I go back to my homeland California is a paradise I am happy for you dream
*
The California Poem is about a world created, marketed, fantasized, unreal, dying and living. But, above all, made. The California of Sikelianos’s imagining is akin to Christine Hume’s Alaska-of-the-mind, in that it is from someone that the various notions of California, the various Californias possible, emerge. Therefore, and forever:
My mouth
opened wide & out
came the world howl
They cut
the umbilical too far
from the heart, a
stump—this
was the marvel, the navel
California came out of, round
& warm as an orange
lament on a trembling
tongue
Thursday, September 16, 2004
My partner is a social worker. She brings home a lot of fascinating material. A few years ago, she brought home Mouth Magazine, which is the Voice of the DisLabled Nation. I have recently subscribed to it, and they have an article about Terri Schindler-Schiavo and the Florida Supreme Court in their latest issue (see: "Florida Supreme Court Imposes Death Penalty For The Crime Of Disability"). I wanted to bring this case some wider attention.
Another review will be coming soon.
Another review will be coming soon.
Monday, September 13, 2004
I will read from my non-fiction manuscript Workbook on Tuesday, 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.
Monday, September 06, 2004
Donna Kuhn
Purse No Birds
Chapultepec Press
2004
30 pages
Softcover, $5
Interested in a kind of cut-up lunacy (the moon shows up often), Donna Kuhn—visual artist, poet, dancer/choreographer, and videographer—creates poems with an off-kilter rhythm and a conversational tone. They have moments of direct address mixed with descriptive details of internal landscapes, self-questioning, and phantasms of memory and/or longing, seemingly half-heard/half-seen. Here’s "cold rain" from her chapbook, Purse No Birds:
thighs like yam cream, cold rain
someone jumped out a window
i couldn’t figure out why i was
writing u i forgot about lip
plumper thunder i was writing
u in the forest don’t breathe
the paint dream fine whoosh
i have to go out yesterday
i asked for cold rain a vegan
throat i was writing i couldnt
someone jumped don’t breathe
i have to cold rain thighs turn
i can i want to it was yr face
i was writing to rain figure out why
whoosh u in the forest i was
writing writing u
I think I am drawn to this writing for a few reasons. I like the insistent registers of talking and almost the need for over-talking, which confronts the basic anatomic problem of having multiple things going on in one’s mind and having only one mouth. So, naturally, censoring, false starts/true starts, occur in the mind continually. Kuhn has made this editing-quality of thinking and speaking the place for her poetry. There is also a fixed element of forgetfulness and doubtfulness on display, which I deeply enjoy, as the things people don’t know easily overwhelm the things people think they know. It gives voice, a welcoming voice, to uncertainty, to bewilderment.
Amid the questions and moons, there is also dream-state diction, which can be humorously unsettling. Here’s "egyptian liposuction":
i would rather give up almost anything.
have the fat sucked out of my whore.
u want to get liposuction in eqypt?
that is the where the whore is, thank you.
was yr dads name on her thighs?
was yr dads name almost anything?
my fathers name was green stuff.
its digusting. i think to throw things.
i could swear its george burns.
what’s with the fetuses?
what’s going on? u said he’s not dead.
dead people in a fancy drawer.
yes, please come here stuffing yr face.
i dont want to have almost anything.
i dont want to have my fat sucked.
why are we talking? i would rather give up.
death and thigh fat and stuff.
was my fathers name bernards thighs?
when i’m in the tub i like to throw things.
Thankfully, Kuhn doesn’t go for quick one-liners in her work. One could see where she could easily enough. Her poetic worlds expand by not doing so, even when repeating certain words, and the result is a kind of exploratory focusing of attention toward the ongoing poem rather than the singular elements of the poem itself.
There are many imaginative, convulsive lines throughout the book, however. At random, from "can i put the bird back":
gentlemen, i cant carry that
im not any river in yr face
from "birdseye":
i curl birds like landlord skin
from "Poetry Dolls":
hello, i’m confused now
i shouldn’t be, of course u can
use me for my body
from "make-up boats":
i’m afraid yr face can bark a song, a business
and from "baby toys":
thanks for the bizarre pot roast wheelbarrow
*
To which all I can say is: No, thank you!
Purse No Birds
Chapultepec Press
2004
30 pages
Softcover, $5
Interested in a kind of cut-up lunacy (the moon shows up often), Donna Kuhn—visual artist, poet, dancer/choreographer, and videographer—creates poems with an off-kilter rhythm and a conversational tone. They have moments of direct address mixed with descriptive details of internal landscapes, self-questioning, and phantasms of memory and/or longing, seemingly half-heard/half-seen. Here’s "cold rain" from her chapbook, Purse No Birds:
thighs like yam cream, cold rain
someone jumped out a window
i couldn’t figure out why i was
writing u i forgot about lip
plumper thunder i was writing
u in the forest don’t breathe
the paint dream fine whoosh
i have to go out yesterday
i asked for cold rain a vegan
throat i was writing i couldnt
someone jumped don’t breathe
i have to cold rain thighs turn
i can i want to it was yr face
i was writing to rain figure out why
whoosh u in the forest i was
writing writing u
I think I am drawn to this writing for a few reasons. I like the insistent registers of talking and almost the need for over-talking, which confronts the basic anatomic problem of having multiple things going on in one’s mind and having only one mouth. So, naturally, censoring, false starts/true starts, occur in the mind continually. Kuhn has made this editing-quality of thinking and speaking the place for her poetry. There is also a fixed element of forgetfulness and doubtfulness on display, which I deeply enjoy, as the things people don’t know easily overwhelm the things people think they know. It gives voice, a welcoming voice, to uncertainty, to bewilderment.
Amid the questions and moons, there is also dream-state diction, which can be humorously unsettling. Here’s "egyptian liposuction":
i would rather give up almost anything.
have the fat sucked out of my whore.
u want to get liposuction in eqypt?
that is the where the whore is, thank you.
was yr dads name on her thighs?
was yr dads name almost anything?
my fathers name was green stuff.
its digusting. i think to throw things.
i could swear its george burns.
what’s with the fetuses?
what’s going on? u said he’s not dead.
dead people in a fancy drawer.
yes, please come here stuffing yr face.
i dont want to have almost anything.
i dont want to have my fat sucked.
why are we talking? i would rather give up.
death and thigh fat and stuff.
was my fathers name bernards thighs?
when i’m in the tub i like to throw things.
Thankfully, Kuhn doesn’t go for quick one-liners in her work. One could see where she could easily enough. Her poetic worlds expand by not doing so, even when repeating certain words, and the result is a kind of exploratory focusing of attention toward the ongoing poem rather than the singular elements of the poem itself.
There are many imaginative, convulsive lines throughout the book, however. At random, from "can i put the bird back":
gentlemen, i cant carry that
im not any river in yr face
from "birdseye":
i curl birds like landlord skin
from "Poetry Dolls":
hello, i’m confused now
i shouldn’t be, of course u can
use me for my body
from "make-up boats":
i’m afraid yr face can bark a song, a business
and from "baby toys":
thanks for the bizarre pot roast wheelbarrow
*
To which all I can say is: No, thank you!
