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"Almost fifty years ago Robert Creeley and I sat almost side by side at Harvard in a course on the eighteenth-century English novel. Not quite together, since the students were seated alphabetically and between us was one named Berlin. We never spoke -- Creeley was much too forbidding-looking for me to attempt that, and perhaps I was too, but one of my keener lesser regrets is that we never sat down together and thrashed out the relative merits of Pamela and Joseph Andrews. At any rate, Creeley -- we also participated in a poetry workshop where the future novelist John Hawkes was also a student -- was a memorable presence on campus, though he didn't stay there long. Later on when one heard of him one realized that one knew one was going to all along.
I don't remember Creeley's poems in the workshop and wish I could forget my own, but we may well have realized then that we were on opposite sides of the poetic fence: me so European and maximalist, influenced by Auden and Stevens; he so American, with perhaps an Asian conciseness gleaned from Pound, stemming obviously from the Pound-Williams tradition to which Olson's presence would soon be added. Yet I've never been able to think of Creeley as a minimalist, which some have called him. If cramming as many possible things into the smallest space with no sign of strain or congestion is minimal, then maybe he is a minimalist. But what strikes me most about his poetry is a sense of richness and ripeness, beautifully contained in a vessel which was made to order by the circumstance of writing the poem. As he writes in "Some Place":
I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.
And lest we misinterpret his accuracy for pride, he adds farther on:
There is nothing I am
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought.
No one, I think, has ever stated what it is to be a poet more cogently and, yes, more succinctly than Robert Creeley. But his succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond."
-- John Ashbery, introducing Creeley at a reading at the New School in 1995. Copied from Ashbery’s Selected Prose (The University of Michigan Press, 2004)
Someone who managed to love and be loved
-- amazing!
[Here's something I wrote a long time ago and never properly finished, a review of the first sequence in Milne's very excellent first book, Sheet Mettle. I think most of Milne's poetry can now be found in one of his volumes from Salt Publishing.]
Sheet Mettle
Drew Milne
(Alfred Douglas Editions, 1994)
The poems of the first section of Sheet Mettle, “Satyrs and Mephitic Angels,” occasionally toys with a visionary Romantic rush, or perhaps suggest Thomas Carlyle’s spiraling hyper-referential prose (in such works as “Sign of the Times”) but whereas these writings sprung from a conviction that vision was possible, that totalities held in the mind's eye could both be in extravagant motion but still as a perfect thought, Milne is constantly descending into the trough of having to engage with a culture that perverts, by its inability adequately to witness these times, any sort of breath from “paradise.” The language is dense, an effect buttressed by several syntactic slippages: words (often names) that were once nouns appear as verbs (“Warhol? I'll Warhol you!” and “Campbell it out along the soup high way”) and words that were not nouns become nouns (“Camera my maybe as I fleet it to crashing / guitars!”), while double adjectives and other aggregating structures are used (“a dispiriting melancholia screen” and “my armour random bores”) as well as reverse word order (“and feels blood apocryphal drive the denizens”). Commas are often missing in complex phrases in which word order itself is both stately yet improvised (“I am not nor hope be lest this history yet...” and “and will be jargoned to those guittara yes strains / by those back to second nature word boys of ach!.” Latin, Greek, German, French, and bits of antiquated English, but also slick contemporary coinages (“lumpen / prole boho”), not to mention a slews of words and phrases that one would unlikely use in conversation (“kandym,” “figaro applique,” “verstehenden application”) spill forth as if proselytizing a new synthetic language – the language of the tribes, not the tribe, creating a sense of motion that is as hotly synchronic as it is diachronic. In opposition to this funneling of effects is both the insistent tone and the form of these poems, and seem in some ways frustrated, angry soliloquies or satires from some partly destroyed face just on the verge of total dissolution. The sequence would have a stronger relationship to satire if could make out its object -- it seems as close to the “objectless satire” that Wyndham Lewis describes as there is in contemporary English poetry), but there does appear to be an object, if one can take the entire pantheon of structuralist-critical practices as an object, or any hope for a stable, objective view of the historical situation -- “scholasticism” in Bourdieu's phrase in Pascalian Meditations – and the language practices that go along with it. That is, the prevalent tone in these poems is that of disgust – it seems one long, serial curse, a Calibaning against the island – but the impurities, or seemingly heretical nature, of its idiom is not leveled against some exterior oppressor but against a sort of language field which Milne (who is a Marxist literary scholar at Cambridge University) is a part of. But equally, there is a stance against the all-over, Dada tendencies of the Language poets, in that these poems -- difficult as they are to “deep read” to the layman not invested in discourses concerning Hegelianism and the state of cultural studies -- are demanding of some sort of deep hermeneutical engagement, making something of a politics of attention amidst the flurry of mindless digital exchange. That the tone, and even some of the images (“blood” and “earth” crop up with some frequency) is more Germanic than, say, French, is not surprising. Milne is not so freely given over to the mystique of “writing” and the blank page, but is coming from a Heideggerian locus that longs for the physis of breath and speech, the grounding of words in some interior point of origin. Like in Language poetry (in, say, Andrews version), the author seems to be most present in the violent torquing and rearrangement of phrases, a sort of “de-socializing” tactic that is not content to simply deterritorialize a few phrases for aesthetic effect, but which has to inflict something like a moral tone amidst an encyclopedic abundance (this is where Carlyle comes in). Unlike Andrews, though, the floodgates have been opened to permit the entire welter of European history in – it is not just noise, but noise with a diachronic counterpoint.
Not to be false
is boring.
To be false is boring.
This voice is false.
[This latest batch seems to me especially groundbreaking! -- BKS]
__ U B U W E B __ http://ubu.com
--------------------------------------
Recent Additions :: Spring 2005
--------------------------------------
--- RECENT FEATURES ---
* UbuWeb Films *
UbuWeb announces the beta launch of its newest section of historic artist's films. In addition to the 37 short Fluxus films (see below), films can be viewed by Kenneth Anger, Luis Bunuel, John Cage, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek, Isidore Isou, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, Harry Smith and Jack Smith.
* 37 Short Fluxus Films (1962 - 1970) *
Dating from the sixties and compiled by George Maciunas (1931-1978, founder of Fluxus), UbuWeb is pleased to present 37 short films ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in length. These films (some of which were meant to be screened as continuous loops) were shown as part of the events and happenings of the New York avant-garde. Films by Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Chieko Shiomi, John Cavanaugh, James Riddle, Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Pieter Vanderbiek, Joe Jones, Eric Anderson, Jeff Perkins, Wolf Vostell, Albert Fine, George Landow, Paul Sharits, John Cale, Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr, Ben Vautier. Presented here in MPEG format.
* Marshall McLuhan *
UbuWeb is pleased to present two archival audio interviews with Marshall McLuhan (MP3): Marshall McLuhan on the Dick Cavett Show in December 1970 (30 minutes; along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers. Both Capote and Sayers participated in the discussion with McLuhan) and Speaking Freely hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall McLuhan 4 Jan 1971 (one hour). UbuWeb also hosts an MP3 copy of McLuhan's out-of-print Columbia LP, The Medium is the Massage (Side A, Side B).
* John Oswald's "Mystery Tapes" *
An early collection (c. 1980) of unnamed audio samples and snippets. According to Oswald: "All known Xperience is potentially confounded by MYSTERY TAPES, little boxes of sonifericity specifically formulated for the curious listener.
Available in your choice of aural flavors:
subliminal, blasted, excerpted,
repeatpeateatattttttedly, these
cinemaphonically-concocted aggregates of trés different but exquisitely manifest, unprecedentedly varied festerings of audio quality fine magnetic cassette tapes are the best of whatever you've been listening for." You can also hear an hour-long interview with Oswald in UbuWeb's Radio Radio section.
* Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate *
UbuWeb currrently hosts eight full-length versions of Schwitter's masterwork, the Ursonate (1922-1932). Kurt Schwitters original version; Canadian poet Christian Bök's rock 'n' roll version; two versions by the Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk: one from 1986, one from 1993; Frenchman Sebastien Lespinasse's speed version; Japanese sound-poet Adachi Tomomi's version; Finnish collective Linnunlaulupuu's group version; and the Vancouver-based Ensemble Ordinature's computer voice version and the John Oswald-produced version by Christopher Butterfield.
I.
All the silence gets writen on a Mac
plugged into a generator in Eugene, Oregon
to eradicate superfluous longing
or placate the teacher who has condemned him
to education under the trees
counting out the hours like one counts bees
through a screen. But faking it wasn't necessary
with friends around to drop a quote
that makes him invisible, away from the
suspiciously categorizing: blankets of circumspect fog
over the precision of seeing on a fitful day.
You couldn't find richer suburban comedy than this growth of hormones
blending in with the cars, moss, and Protestants
as organ music wafts over Laura Dern's monologue
in Blue Velvet, the one about robins
alighting from her hair, her wrist watch, or whatever
(Armaggedon can't always be so distilled)
simple strategy for dispelling the mime of being:
lunging onward to the next quatrain,
turning up the dial to drown out traffic sounds, the
microwave door as it is slammed closed
to keep the vigilent from imploding golf balls in it.
II.
Vandalism of the sincere: that's almost a job
when you think of it, something to iron the gabardine for
day after day, priming the fingers
as if for a recital -- only this time it's the sheer amateur
who wins the ribbon, and can be smug
like any sophomore who's made the cover of Art News
before disowning it. That's kind of like music:
keeping the time interesting for the attentions of the addict
to time, and getting credit for it -- for being human -- in an
otherwise mechanical world. But nothing is so easy.
You have to play fair with your silences, let them sing,
and stopping your breath for a moment, peace as you've come to know it.
I drank a piece of gum
and smiled while she chewed.
Here is a great "autonomous art program" that writes short prose poems and creates illustrations based on your text entry. I've seen things like this before on the web -- "The Impermanence Agent" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et. al. worked on this principle -- but this one works particularly well. Of course, you just gotta type your name in and see what comes up! Keep trying until you get a good one.
A lot of times there's some semi-naked woman parading around in the mix, but never anything obscene. My sense is that Daria takes the Barbie dolls of pornography and, by stretching them out and/or cropping them, turns them into Mannerist or Expressionist figures that are re-anthropomorphized, i.e. made human again. (Click on images below to enlarge.)
