ORIGIN

So yesterday, I was treated to two hours of examining 30 copies of Cid Corman's Origin. These are some thoughts (off the cuff). Some details might be a little off.

Origin magazine was started in around 1950 by Cid Corman who at that time lived in the Boston area. As the magazine came to fruition, there were a series of letters between Corman and Charles Olson as to what a 'good' magazine should be composed of. These are now published in Letters for Origin. Olson was Corman's first (and for a time, nearly sole) contributor. The first issue of Origin is nothing less than magical. It included (the first publication of?) Olson's opus Maximus - and having read Maximus twice, it appears to me to be an early draft (not the final). Origin was for sale for 3$ but this was optional. The first copies were printed by Divers (Creeley's press) in Mallorca, Spain. The early editions are ALL  letter 
press. 


As I read through these issues, I do feel forced to recognize the absence of women. However, I refuse to act with dismissal or anger. My reaction is one (more) of distant curiosity. I have a complex relationship with feminism anyway - as I feel like it pretty systematically discounts disability. And poetry isn't television. The gender problem is much more complicated. I want to just look at what happened and figure out why. To say Black Mountain men just hated women is too much of a simplification to me. 

Origin was very, what shall we say, male-oriented. Of the many issues I looked though women included were Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker (most people know that Cid was fixated on her), Barabra Moroff, Carol Berge, Jane Robinett, and, interestingly, Daphne Marlett - a feminist Canadian poet. Corman did a number of issues dedicated to one poet- and he did an issue on her - also did issues on Francis Ponge, Lorine Neidecker, Frank Samperi, and others. 


O and one more woman! How could forget HORRAH PORNOFF. This is a 'real person' -named Clayton Eshleman. In an essay in Attack of the Difficult Poems, Charles Bernstein writes, "HP poems inspired by a negative reaction to a review by Marjorie Perloff that Eshleman felt had challenged him to create works, with a female persona, of 'horror and pornography.....for Eshleman, the persona allowed him to create poems "free to be AND not to be me...(poems that were) an expression of the extent to which the feminine aspects of my personality had fought over the years for their rightful place in my work.' After finishing the series of poems, Eshleman took out a post office box and sent poems out in Pornoff's name, with the poems soon appearing in Fag Rag, Momentum....4th series of Origin. (did Corman know?) Eshleman notes that he kept up a few correspondences for his made-up poet, even fending off people who wanted to date her."




Corman did publish largely men - but I do know that he was utterly fixated on LN's work and is partly responsible for bringing her work to the surface. 


I haven't yet read all of Olson's work - but I don't find Maximus overwhelmingly sexist. Olson, famously,  did not want women in his class. However, in Michael Davidson's "Guys Like Us - Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetry"  he notes, "the recently published letters between Olson and Frances Boldereff suggest that the re was a third interlocutor in the production of "projective verse" who may have exerted as much influence on the manifesto as Creeley.... The letters between the two figures, written from the late 1940's to the 1960's, testify to an intense intellectual and sexual involvement, especially during the period of Olson's apprenticeship as a poet." (Olson "became" a poet relatively late after life as a Melville critic, postman, etc). Davidson argues, "Projective Verse" appears in an early draft among the letters, and it seems clear that Bolderoff contributed certain ideas about language as action to the essay. The absence of any reference to this powerful woman intellectual can, of cousre, be explained (as Sharon Thesen does in her editorial introduction to the letters) by Olson's common law marriage to Constance Olson during the 1950's. But this occlusion of Boldereff's influence is also informed by Olson's phallic theory of literary inheritance that can admit the authority off Williams, Pound, Creeley, Dahlberg, and others, but not of strong women."

Happy (near) Birthday Charles!!!

Letter from Larry Eigner to Bessie Eigner from Camp Jened

"My social experience always must be pretty discontinuous. And to have it going on and on wd never be enough anyhow. One example is, this girl (i) thought was a counselor – to give her a brief mention—I’ve on stumbling over her quite a bit, esp. yester…. Actually, I’ve been all through it before – ages 14-18 or thereabouts – and don’t plan on going all through it again.. (Back in my teens I fell out of propriety I shd tell you of it but was scared I’d wiggle too much if I did. Thinking it had something to do with the STARS or something. Etc.) I’ll see what I can make of the whole vacation later. All the material will take some time to assimilate.”

Photo Essay on the Seattle Public Library

me and charles dickens

blury silliman books

Dewey Decimal Runway

dots

This is a huge machine that transports books.

This is the floor, made to look like letterpress.

My Body is (the) Marginalia; The Sun Drawn a Saw Across the Strings//A Memoir in Progress//for Andrea

how much does one's ability to feel the other depend on one's feeling for oneself

                                                            how much does one's ability to be for the other

depend on one's ability to be for oneself

                        we are all windows

hold still in the light

the edginess / every year /o it's so painful/ to let go

etched on the river’s sound

the water has to suffer

I was a kind friend

held in the branches of dreamers

*

We were a perfect triangle. The three of us. There were systems, habits, clues to go by. But there was that missing element: longing. All I wanted to do is write, all I wanted to do is write things that people couldn’t read. You need your anger. I learned to love solitude.

*

My husband is trying to help our son to his homework. My son wants to put they to signify a genderless he or she. My husband is sympathetic, but wants my son to know that he is grammatically incorrect. I keep my memoir in a children’s book titled Grammar Can Be Fun. If you leave, husband, I will be able to keep books and cats strewn across my bed.

 *

The facts of my life are minimal, and I’ve named most of them here. I have mild cerebral palsy due to a trauma at birth. I grew up around able-bodied people. My parents divorced. My grandmother died. My mother was found temporarily insane (which is now, perhaps attributed to post-partum depression) and committed briefly to the mental hospital. During those few days my infant sister and I were in an orphanage. My father moved to France. My mother remarried. I had many responsibilities and few freedoms. I changed parents. I fell in with the gays. Ashley died. I met friends who would stay with me for life. Emma died. Then college, then more college. A love affair. A move East, poetry and so on. Marriage. Elizabeth died. Then John & Louis shot themselves. A baby who grew up to be a brilliant, obstinate boy. Dion died. Sasha died. 

* 

I was an orphan for a short period. That my life occurred at all appeared, to me, strange and miraculous. I was born dead, after all. In another dream, I am walking toward and toward these places you inhabit, which are repetitive and timely, but I cannot not reach you. It is due to these dreams that with wonder, I stood outside the adobe house, gazing up the street through midnight. It was my father who always promised to call.

*

There are too many items in this house. I am one of these items. The cat is an item. Jeffrey and Geo are items. The husband with potatoes is an item. My dreaming. The dogs, items. My sorrow, an item. The Lithuanians, they are items too. Lucy is also an item. These books are items. My prayers for Swathi are an item. My unmade bed, my namelessness, my attempt at words, my copy of Cancer Ward, my desire, my wish to go to Russia, the love of this family, mail, the tiles, the titles, my heart.  Items, all.

*

My parents met when she was fourteen, and he was fifteen. My mother had an affair as a young woman when my father was in graduate school. She confessed this to him in the grocery story. The man’s name was Bill. My father would not forgive her. My father later left my mother for another woman. Her name was Mary. At first we were all together; we lived across the quad from each other in married student housing. I was stung by a bee. I had the chicken pox. I watched the Wizard of Oz every year on channel 4. These are ordinary girl things.

*

Difficult to rest in ambivalence.

Quiet.

Here.

                                                            Hi.                    Remember the house.

The last things before sleep: Allen chanting, animal record, and the thought that this is the third birthday in a row that D. has not left a message and never will again. Nevers do exist. This is what happens when I sleep. Sometimes it happens naturally, sometimes it happens chemically. Remember the child. I have had two soul mates. Neither were, nor would ever be, lovers, and that was strange to me. One died. The other lived. I creaked through the days without her.

*

At a certain point, it became important to know the cause of my sister Emma’s death. I had said that the cause of a death is irrelevant. I had said this many times: now it seemed no longer true. In my mind there were two reasons to go to the hospital: to give birth and to die. I had trouble finding my way through emotion to the logic of this. So that, when the neighbor’s child was hospitalized with pneumonia, I was crippled. My mother said she thought Emma had had cystic fibrosis, but no one was really sure. Now, it seems that this is no longer true. I had to learn that not every situation is the same, no matter the emotional response. Still, I waited for all the tiny deaths.

                                                                                    Burning.

It was a mild winter and the sun drawn a saw across the strings of our awkward hearts.

                       

 *

                                                I flit away.

I want to live my life in poetry. If only I could get my body to be complicit & yet, the legs stay put.

I leaned into sleep in so much pain that I was breathless.

*

I had plans of how to behave when the social worker arrived, actions. I would yell. I would cling to my father. I would resist. How did you feel when she took me? She was kind & I had empathy for her. Davis. I remember the corner of our apartment building where we stood on the grass. It was sunny. I do not remember her car. The place was in Woodland. It was right before Christmas. It was an old Victorian house. They had horses there. Two? We had our own bedroom. Did she sleep next to me? They bathed my infant sister in the sink. The house was dark and silent. The people were kind. I want to meet the people who were kind to me in the days that I had neither a mother nor father.  When I was free floating. This is the time I fall apart.

*

I am trying to figure out what marriage is for. Marriage is for security, economic and emotional? Is it to properly raise children? Is it for passion? I want to skip to the end of my life, when I no longer need passion and so want security. I did, I do love my husband, but I thought that marriage could provide security and it can’t that can only come from within. The degree to which I can rely on anyone is limited.

I wish that I could take a small knife and cut passion out of my heart.

*

The Chowchilla kidnappings happened in 1976.  Twenty-six children and a bus driver were ‘stolen.’ The bus itself was concealed in a drainage ditch. My mother told me this story. Every day after school, I was responsible for my three sisters and brother. If I was in tenth grade, they would have been in fifth, fourth, and second, respectively. Every day I waited for my brother and sisters. If they were a moment late, the anxiety would spread throughout my body. I found out recently that the bus kidnappings were true – not something, as I suspected – that my mother told me to keep me on my toes. Now, it is time for my own son to begin walking home alone.

EOACH at the Chapbook Festival

In a few minutes, Ill be grabbing an ice coffee and heading over to the CUNY Graduate Center to read for EOACH and the fabulous Tim/Trace Peterson. This reading is dangerously close to the store with the $35 pretty dresses. Chapbooks? Pretty dresses? Hmmmmm


1pm-2pm – EOAGH:
Ana Bozicevic
Filip Marinovich
Andrew Levy
Christopher Schmidt
Jennifer Bartlett
Mina Pam Dick (aka Hildebrand Pam Dick)
Suzanne Wise

Denise Levertov’s Introduction to On My Eyes by Larry Eigner Jargon Press 1959

First let it be said that Eigner is never careless. If he seems arbitrary it must be understood that he is deliberately arbitrary. Whether from the personal circumstances of his life or not, he sees the world from an unusual angle. Often in his poems he is noting the disconnected passage of objects as seen from a moving car. He notes these caprices of the unintegrated world- a world unthinkingly modified by self-absorbed human activities – with the precision of an innocent, but intelligent mirror. In a room, at a window, -- it is always, not what you would see, nor I but a view narrower and wider – more aware of some humble details, More aware of greater spaces also. In a world where anything may happen, since, deprived of some wise-guy logic most of us acquire, Eigner does not let perceptions close in his horizons.

In his best poems, he shares with us this wide open filed of vision in which disparate objects activate themselves, move apart of closer to each other, or at great distances from each other reveal to us an essential connection of which they remain unconscious. He gives to the humblest pebble the same attention- and so the same value by implication – as to. let’s say, a man. Instinctively, our pride cries out against this- until perhaps pride breaks and we look again and see there is no contempt for man n this attention given to a pebble only the sense that both are strange unknowable unpredictable.

Reading Eigner the reader has to keep his imagination at work and leap from line to line as fast as the seagulls sweep across the square of sky in a window joining a lonely chimney to a cloud by the line of their flight: Seagulls fly in and out of many of his poems,. The landscapes are mainly suburbaian, there is the sense of the scattered and sporadic one has at the edge of cities, where bits of old fence and field still hang about undecidedly, wondering if the country won’t come back after all.

There are some lines of Henry James (in the Bostonians) that several years ago I copied into a notebook under the heading “Quality of Eigner’s poems’: perhaps that was not precise, but these words do continue to express for me the atmosphere of a great many of the poems. (I didn’t copy the quote…)

The sea, the great life-giving unchangeable ocean, is nearby but not often seen is nearby always, but not often seen full and clear. It is usually back of other things, other people’s things, streets, houses, telephone poles, other people’s needs and decisions – for Eigner can’t get to the ‘real’ sea unless through the agency of others. Yet how much more present it is to him than to them, as force, as space, as the unconscious. He has to do a lot of guesswork about living, as most people know it: and he never pretends to definitive knowledge of anything but what he sees.

When I was asked to select from the mss. of this book what I thought the flower of it, I began tentatively putting aside those poems which I did not understand.  After a while that came to seem stupid. If one becomes familiar with Eigner’s work it becomes apparent, as I began by saying, with what care and intension he writes: and again, that more than almost any poet I can think of, he demands a suppleness, an imaginative agility to leap with him from image to image: so that I distain to judge (as I would with another kind of poet) which are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’ poems. It is a question of which I can keep up with – and those I would have thrown out might be epiphanies  to another reader. It is only where there is a right degree of care and craftmanship that one can thus abandon ‘judgment.”

He does some things with spacing and punctuation: I don’t think that they always work, but what is important is that they are always designed to work, to function: that is, it is never a matter of unthinking mannerisms, much less of vanity, with Eigner. He regards spacing and punctuation rightly, as tools, and does not voluntarily obtrude them between the reader and the poem which they should be unnoticeably supporting. I myself dislike the unclosed parenthesis, as a poor tool having no function that can’t be performed better by other typographical means. But in Eigner I accept it for it seems expressive, again and again, of his own oblique (?) modest, set-aside yet not to be quenched, enquiring spirit.

           

What is most likely to be criticized here is a lack of coordination, or (and in this case it is the same thing) a lack of economy. It is admittedly hard to see form in such unique poems. There is no repetition, he makes for himself and the reader no precedents. But the answer to these charges is the same: each poem is in fact a searchingly experienced area having the form of its limits- it is for the reader to say with it, to realize in his own responses the connections between object and object,

No one reader in going to find his way in everyone of the poems. But there are many poems, many possible readers. Such poems make me think of floating seeds in September, their lovely hesitant apparently hazard movement passing by. The next year there are new patches of williowherb – ‘’’fireweed” – in unexpected places. So Eigner’s seemingl7y random words drift across the mind. And later one finds a flowering of new perceptions, perhaps in some part of oneself one had thought sterile.

DL  June 1959

Frida Kahlo/She is not easy/Her beauty is a verb

Professors at a University calling a Frida Kahlo painting "inappropriate"? As Basquiat/Jeff Wright says "I mean what year is this?" Below you will find a letter from my friend Denise Hill with a link to the video performance //poetry they did as a response. (I can't seem to get the actual video pictured - and Ted's not here). 

Hi Jennifer –

I wanted to write to tell you about this performance:

http://bit.ly/H1QB2u

During Women’s History Month at our school (Delta College), there are cardboard cutouts of famous women placed around campus with information posters along with them.

New this year was the image of Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait in “The Broken Column.”

There were several complaints made – by staff, not students – that the image was ‘inappropriate’ (among other labels), and should be removed.

Members from the WHM committee were called into the college Equity Office  and were made to defend the cutout.

In response, I (standing in the middle) and two of my colleagues (JodiAnn Stevenson [on the left] and Chey Davis [on the right]) each separately wrote poems. JodiAnn then took them, mashed them, divided them into speaking parts, and we performed it unannounced at various times over this past week.

The poem and performance were very well received – in this final version video, there were about 70 people ‘in attendance’ – some who came because we had tipped them off as to day/time, and many because they just happened to be there.

The idea was like a “flash mob” – only it was our poetry reading.

I tell you all of this because my poem focused a great deal on the fact of Kahlo’s disability, the brace she wears in this image, and the idea of “normal” and “normalcy.” It was my perspective that those trying to censor the image were also attempting to silence this image of disability and the pain associated with what Kahlo suffered.

In my poem, I used the line/idea of “beauty is a verb” in direct reference and connection to your work with the anthology and disability poetics.

There will be no publication of the poem itself – it was purely meant to be performed as an act of protest against censorship.

In telling you this, I hope you will be okay with use of the phrase that comes from your book, and understand it was meant in solidarity and as a result of being inspired by your work.

Thank you.

Thank You !!

The Larry Eigner Kickstarter was funded! Thank you to the following people who donated!

Kat Yeary $25

Charles Bernstein $40

John Gianvito $60

Megan Burns $100

Valerie Wetlaufer $100

Nancy Wendel $25

Ellen McGrath Smith $10.00

Claire Askew $5

Cathy Carver $30

Bob Holman $25

Jim McCrary $25

Noah Eli Gordon $25

Fanny Howe $50

Eric Baus $10

Samuel Ace $25

Joy Harjo $25

Gregory Laynor $5

Ej McAdams $100

Gabriel Furtado $10

Sam Lohmann $25

Marie Stewart $50

Chris Piuma $10

Jay Bianchi $50

Cathy Wagner $30

Royal Alvis $50

Alicia Cohen $25

Jessica Smith $25

Joe Esparza $40

James Yeary $10.01

John Byrd $25

Brooklyn Copeland $10

Jon Stone $10

Juliana Spahr $25

Sheila Black $25

Gloria Frym $25

Jordan Davis $25

Amber $10

Carol Berg $30

Future Poem

Mike Northern 

Janet Rodney

Nathaniel Tarn

The 612 Project/Jim makes Jeff into a Marxist, Lenin Oversees

The 612 Project Youth-in Asia Say Stop Da War Now!

One Less Thing to Worry About: Voting

I'm a busy poet, mother, copious animal owner, Brooklynite. Now, I'm relieved. I have one less thing to worry about: voting for president.

A week or so ago a soldier named robert bales killed 16 innocent people in Afghanistan. Bales was a victim too. Sent into war numerous times, turned down for a promotion, leaving at home a wife, two children, and failing mortgage. After the crime, according to the Times, the government erased all internet information about Bales.

This didn't happen because of Bush or Cheney. It happened on Obama's watch. This happened on the watch of a man who I walked into a voting poll,  pulled a lever and voted for. My one millionth of an opinion contributed to this situation. For me, that percentile is too high. I won't let that happen again. Ever.

Larry Eigner Kickstarter

I am doing a Kickstarter to travel to Standford Library to research my Larry Eigner Biography there are only three days left and we have almost reached the goal! Please Help!

Congrats to Sheila Black

I wish to extend my happiest congratulations to my dear friend Sheila Black. Sheila was recently awarded the Witter Bynner Award by Philip Levine through the Library of Congress. Although Sheila's poetics are slightly different from mine, she has been a constant source of help and support the past few years. Sheila and I met three years ago when we decided (with Michael Northen) to edit Beauty is a Verb. Over those three years, we have had nearly a daily correspondence.

Sheila is a brilliant poet and thinker with boundless energy - in addition to being a wonderful poet, she is a successful grant writer, a mother to three amazing children with her fabulous partner Duncan (one of whom just got a nearly full scholarship to Mills College). She got us panels at AWP twice! She has been a constant support in both my poetic and personal life. She has helped countless women through her work on the Mexican border, and she is a strong disability activist.

I love you Sheila!

Larry Eigner Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/894916256/limits-are-what-any-of-us-are-inside-the-life-larr

A Hero in a Stange Place

Last week, I had the honor of being invited to Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island via NYU to give a short class based on a writing assignment and the anthology. The entire trip brought up many issues for me. I did not know that people with disabilities still reside in hospitals. By this, I don't mean ill folks, but just ordinary disabilities where folks could function alone or in Independent Living Centers. This surprised me. However, the residents were wonderful and the NYU MFA students I met where astounding. They were just the kind of students a poet hopes for - utterly interested in poetics.

I taught the class and all was fine. But, at the end was the most significant part of the trip for me. I met a woman who I will call V. I don't know what V's original disability was - but she had also had a stroke. She could only move her eyes and one foot. Yet, she clearly had all her mental facilities, was intelligent, and wrote a number of poems with the help of two (lovely!) NYU students. The way V. communicated was by pointing to a letter on a clear plastic chart with the alphabet.

I felt like V. taught me a number of lessons. Her condition brings into the entire question of the 'able' body and worth. At what point is someone's life worthy? Do they have to have movement? In intelligence? Capitol worth? Many, many people believe that people who merely use wheelchairs or have a disability slight as my own would be better not existing, let alone someone who cannot more at all!

The most important lesson was my continuing feeling to resist pity, empathy yes, pity no. And I thought about what a whiner I can be when my own life is relatively easy. I thought about two of my best friends - one lost her husband suddenly in a car accident and the other is a victim of domestic abuse, and I thought about how these two women just get up day after day and do what they need to do. And I thought - wow.

My friend Dion who passed a few years ago once told me -"fabulous people come in all kinds of packages." I'll never forget that.

Letter in the New York Times!

letter in the New York Times

The 4-303 Weekly

Occupy Oakland

On the one hand this happened. On the other hand, we win.

A quiet film about protest - for John & Tammy