Roof / Granary / Figures book party

Just thought I'd mention that I traded for some amazing books yesterday at the mini book fare at James Cohan gallery in Chelsea. (I sold a whopping one copy of my book there, and that only because Chet Wiener cajoled his two French friends to pick one up.) The books are, in order of thickness:

Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, a complete resetting of one day's New York Times into plain text, read linearly across the page (like a scanner) -- it's a huge blue tome that makes his No. 111 look like a Poetical Histories chapbook. Of course we must be sceptical, of course we must be human, but it was actually lots of fun reading about Andre Agassi's 3rd round loss to Arnauld Clement in the 2000 French Open, just riding the wave of his big comeback, showing he's human and also not yet married to Steffi Graf (a little beyond human). There's some kind of weird generosity in this book; everybody from the Wall Street brokers (represented by the largest number of pages, pure numbers and business names), to children (in the ads for children's clothes) to, of course, those folks populating the news and entertainment stories (it was a Friday) are equally represented. I think it makes for a nice piece of anthropology (it certainly gives you a sense of how many WORDS are published a day on this planet -- it really would take a long time to even run your eye over this stuff); it's like putting a bug under a microscope, or flatting a pyramic out into a plain and making it live among the denizens of Flatland (to use a metaphor I've used before). Making a newspaper weigh 5 pounds also does something for ya. Useless, I mean priceless, I mean useless...

George Stanley's much-awaited collection A Tall, Serioues Girl -- the title is taken from the gorgeous final poem called "Veracruz" in which he wishes his father had married his mother's brother, whom he loved, and that his father were a woman, and that he (George) were a woman (the "tall, serious girl" herself) so that he could give birth to a son, the boy he's always loved... etc. (I'm making it sound farcical but it's really a one page poem in the "magical realist" vein, were that tradition to have been founded by John Wieners rather than, say, Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) Well, this book is certainly a find -- it ranks with the collected John James (Salt Press) as a book showing on a lifetime of work that seems to perfect and relevant now but which I'd just not known about. Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin edited it; it reflects much of the precise wit, challenging but always elegant linebreaks and humor of the former, some of the lighter NY surreal, "daily" vein of the latter -- his taste for exquisite miniatures -- well, I'm not about the write literary criticism now, just wanted to provide a quick graph of my enthusiasm for the book, which I half expected to be dull simply because I think honest, meaningful poets are half the time rather dull (hence my general dishonesty in my own work) -- but, of course, so are the peacocks, usually.

Lastly, Rod Smith's new Music Or Honesty -- speaking of honesty -- which features a painting by Reubens on the cover (where did Roof get the cash to swing that?). I can say, on my first quick read, that I think it's his best full-length collection, his style has really developed to represent his channeling of both the absurd and the sublime (or absurd into the sublime, like Turner basing a painting of a tumultuous ocean on the smiley faces painted on the bouys and the angry sunbathers... maybe not) -- it's a style I associate with Ashbery's first books after The Tennis Court Oath, in which he's beginng to use a mellifluous line but still taking in some of that crazy, recalcitrant detail, tossed up like the drowned sailors in blue puke of Berrigan's sonnets (courtesy Rimbaud) -- now, the scale and the form of the poem are matching up more, he's really quite garrulous and words flow like water from a faucet, my hope only being that he doesn't even it out too much and become a "talker" -- a personality -- I don't think that will happen, it should have happened by now. What was I saying? The typesetting is certainly a lot better than In Memory of My Theories and the style more consistent, and the sequences seem more worked out, to me, than Protective Immediacy, though I miss the days when I would get a huge collection of Rod's work in the form of a stapled xerox chapbook from Rob Fitterman or someone like that. Well, I think Rod needs a good essay assessing his style, modes, influences -- not a longwinded academic one, mind you, but one trying to figure out how thematics work in his poems, how symmetry and chaos operate in his forms, etc.

Ok, enough, I'm not going to reread this, I'm tired...

Posted by Brian Stefans at May 30, 2003 06:23 PM