John Godfrey
Push the Mule
The Figures, 2001

In his first book of poetry since 1988’s Midnight on Your Left, Godfrey — normally associated with a later incarnation of the New York School, though he might just as easily be linked to a sort of “post-punk” poetry scene — shows himself to be one of the most observant and imaginative urban poets today. These poems are all in prose, and while the pacing of the writing is not much different than one would read in fiction — this is not the Williams of Kora in Hell or Gertrude Stein, or the ecstatic fables and apostrophes of Rimbaud’s Illuminations — the sentences combine to create swirls of meaning rather than stable narrative environments. “Accede in Kind” builds sentence by sentence into a troubled, at times darkly erotic portrait of a woman, known only as “she” throughout. The drama is in determining which participant — the perceived or the perceiver — should dominate the spotlight, such that the literary battle of formal perspective spills over into the content, which could very well be a battle among minor gods: “I have my hand over that part of her that readies for injury. It is stability that suffers solo. Should she die dreaming of a night passage the silky weathered sail will have her. She will be carried along on waves of heat from roots burning underground. She is not lacking in hatred; why, then, isn’t she the one to decide the fate of creatures?” (18) Like in the Arcimbolo effect (named after the Italian painter, 1527-1593), in which the artist utilized different types of fruit to compose his portraits, this sort of accretion, at its best, is carefully tempered so as to trouble the relationship of poet to subject; even at the end of this poem, when things seem to clear up a bit, the subject disappears into maze of unyielding grammatical hallways: “Ancient dry voices of men come at her and address her as ‘Mother.’ She exhales as deeply as possible and hugs herself in order to get both the original and the duplicates of her body out the door to the flatlands, where everything she will need for proof is ready.” Other poems engage more freely with paratactic sentence structures , a la the “new sentence,” or with classic surreal moments (“The whole hallway is ready to start rising, like an elevator under leaves,” [21]) or with Beat-inspired word twists that point, simultaneously, at beauty of the sublime sort and the grounded, earthy resplendence of trash: “Windshield spit allover by streetside trees breaks out the tunnel into a blinding halo Queens didn’t earn. By seven-thirty morn, the LIE shines golden white while factories either side rend their fumes awry.” (46) A beautiful elegy for the poet Jim Brodey uses this talking-around-the-subject technique, along with Godfrey’s strong penchant for mating opposing ideas by putting unexpected conclusions to his sentences, to marvelous effect: “He fancied meat of dragon swans, as if the gods were always on his lips. You know how wet they look from the foam and under ground soak. I will raise this pitcher to the skeleton man in case he needs to look up on the light through waters. A longing comes over me to tell the abodes of my heart the great nerve sharp has eloped from exile… Without question he was a being struggling in the net, drowning in a dry mouth, weakened by exile into blathering purity.” (43) Poems like “The Big Wingspread” take clear aim at political demagoguery, especially when it borders on the messianic; other poems, like “Same Feet,” are reminiscent of Jim Carroll in their lighter touch, placing just the right of surreal weirdness over the interior fires that burn in love relationships: “Try no matter how many times, I still can’t describe what I feel to see your hair catch fire. I am fond of your anger and proof of your pain.” (51) Like with many books of prose poetry, it’s not easy to read Push the Mule all the way through — sometimes one wishes for more variety in the meters, more discreteness in the individual poems, more torquing of the paragraph form, and maybe some wilder sense of humor to make it a bit less bleak — but the precision of these sentences, taken one by one, are often interesting enough and satisfy careful attention. Godfrey is never less than noble in the care he takes with his work.

Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999
(Wesleyan, 2001)

For decades, Joris has been an important translator of important avant-garde authors such as Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, and Maurice Blanchot, and editor (with Jerome Rothenberg) of such important volumes as the pppppp: The Selected Writings of Kurt Schwitters and the massive two volume anthology of international avant-garde poetry, Poems for the Millennium, from the University of California Press. Joris’s first volume of selected poems, Breccia, appeared in 1987, and was jointly published in Luxembourg and by Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY); Poasis is, outside of several chapbooks and magazine appearances, Joris’s first major publication of his own writing in the United States. He has lived for several years in Great Britain, France, North Africa, and now the United States, and this “nomadic” existence — he has written a manifesto for a “nomadic community,” part of which is included here — strongly informs the stylistics and content of his writing: “He decried the ‘citoyen du / mond’ as some Socratic / blunder — but it is not so, / Charley, the particular is / everywhere, is the cosmo- / politan exactly, the particular is / everywhere, the smallest / unit, the particle is / everything — & it moves, / it crosses bound- / aries, it moves / wherever […]” (164). “Charley” in this quote is Charles Olson, one of the writers that hangs over his work strongly; another is Ezra Pound, and the sense of Europe’s failing in the twentieth century, of the martyrdom and all-around shamanistic function of the artist as vortex of meaning, the globalizing breadth that takes in all facts of history (personal and social) and contemporeinty in one rhetorical swoop not to mention the condemnation of modern times — Pound’s tone and method in the Pisan Cantos — runs through Poesis: “von Hollands Grachten bis tief ins Russische / Reich a Ganovenweise sung in Luxembourg anno domino 3 / post world war 2 all the way to Ancel in the Bukowina / & we still go at it turba scriptorum tralala trying / to wring something from this long night” (84) This gives the writing a bit of an old-fashioned feel, a sense of the “pure line” that one gets in poets like Robert Kelly and, earlier, Robert Duncan (“O that I had Duncan’s eyes to see & hold both this America that Europe planisphere of my sense fine mercator mesh grid of this my prison earth” Joris writes), for whom the coherence of a strong European tradition was of ethical concern, and for whom a loose, speech-based epic lyrical style was the best “American” way to confront it. Tel Quel and the Language poets, not to mention the New York School, all of whom have a more mundane, anthropological and pragmatic appreciation of the poet’s task, troubled the question of whether one can be both an intuitive medium of meaning and be a historical materialist, with its contract with objectivity, at the same time. Many of the poems struggle with this issue, and outside of a general teleological rush and longings for the visionary capacity, there isn’t much touchdown, either into perfectly satisfying poetic form or a detailed, unique personal vision. The better parts of this book are when Joris is just writing in normal prose (or prose-ish poems), discussing why Americans can be so dogmatic in their religions, or in the selections from “h.j.r.” describing his search for the “Nomad Hotel” somewhere in, one presumes, Africa: “Realizing that we were children of no Sheikh, wanderers from another direction that had no direction, they led us outside the city’s perimeter to where the Japanese buses were waiting, drowning in dust and sun. A low building without a well offered itself to us. I overheard talk bout emigrate / immigrate, the different sides of the same coin. Koiné. Porous borders.” (191) Here, one senses the complexities of being an interstitial writer, of existing somewhere on the edge of mediated, globalized culture, away from theories of being and economics, though all the pulp and paradoxes of these issues are delivered in the details. The super-national adventure of Joris’ nomadic existence — through the walls of Europe and Africa and through the wilds of all of Modernism, which he knows better than anyone — might have been better displayed had he sacrificed his commitment to the tone of Olson and Pound, and written more freely of the contradictions of his “particular,” therefore meaningful, life.

Nathaniel Mackey, Whatsaid Serif
(City Lights Publishers, 2001)

Mackey’s third book of poems continues the exquisite “Song of the Andouboulou” cycle inaugurated in his first book, Eroding Witness, and occupying the entirety of his second, 1993’s School of Udhra, also published by City Lights. With a poetic line that is syncopated and improvisational, yet balanced in an elegant, nearly classical style — a sort of “cool jazz” meter — Mackey creates a terrifying, inspiring discourse of spiritual quest in the face of cultural displacement and the ruin of communal identity. Progression and stasis are intermingled in what becomes a suspenseful play of language, sound and sentiment: “Though / the dense woods mocked our / waking, rocked us, robed us / in flammable array… Groped our / way […] flew / but for the weight of Ogun’s / iron shoe, shod ghost we / imagined we rode, running / in place,” he writes in Song 18. There hasn’t been a more pure elegist for a lost culture since Eliot — nor a more phantasmogoric one — but Mackey’s historical fracture is not an industrialized Europe, but the Middle Passage, taking the phenomenon of syncretism — the reemergence of African traditions in the New World after centuries of total suppression — to create a language that is provisionally indeterminate, yet channeling of the old grammar into the new. Puns play a heavy role, surrendering meanings that become re-rooted in an echo of the African past, creating a world of mythic, but rebus-like, ambience: “Notwithstanding we stood miragelike, / outless the world he’d have / given regardless, Ahtt were it / otherwise. ‘What does “Language / is a fruit of which the / skin / is called chatter” mean?’ he / asked as we / sat in Wrack Tavern, Inn / of Many Monikers, Long Night Lounge…” Mackey is also a novelist, often creating a dialogic interior for many of the poems, though the most recurring presence of figures is denoted by the pronoun “we” — the pronoun itself becoming part of the ceaseless, serious play: “He who’d have said / we so assured it / was a plain we / were on, flat for as / far as the eye / could see,” hence questioning — notice the lack of quotes — even this pronoun’s graphemic efficacy. Mackey’s writing synthesizes the non-referential aspect of post-structuralist poetics and the story-telling imperative of a post-colonial politics — “Sound / raveling sound calling itself eternity. No known locale / though names accrue.” — arguing for an artistic urgency that is both beautiful to read and worthy of understanding.

Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts
(The MIT Press, 2001)

Kahn’s elegant and captivating “history of sound in the arts” ranges far back and widely through modernist and postmodern experimentation, providing first-glimpses on the workings of some obscure artists (Richard Huelsenbaeck, Marcel Janco) and some relatively new ones (Michael McClure), as well as unique takes on some of the century’s acknowledged masters. The ride gains momentum swiftly with considerations of the early experiments of the dadaist poets Huelsenbaeck, Janco and Tristan Tzara in the Cabaret Voltaire, whose performances, while pushing the envelope toward a Rimbaudian “alchemy of the word,” ironically also served to unite the multi-ethnic audience in mutual bafflement. A consideration of Italian composer Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” moves into one of many considerations of how noise — in the form of screams and bomb blasts — operates in prose texts, such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, signaling early on that “sound” in Kahn’s sense is the synaesthetic version, not only the recordable, exterior type. John Cage’s monumental works with the most transparent and quietest of materials — water — provides the theme for the central portion of the book, and Kahn, a professor in the Media Arts at the University of Technology in Australia, convincingly argues that Cage’s Water Music of 1952 was at least as revolutionary as his silent pieces. “Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings and Cage’s water sounds heralded a larger concurrence of fluidity, water, sound and performance — the dissolution of media at mid-century in New York, which continued across the arts for many years to come.” (240), he writes. The writing on Cage moves into a lucid consideration of a range of postmodern American composers, such as LeMonte Young and Tony Conrad, who, ironically, chose extreme amplifications of noise to bring the auditors back to “silence” — at least once the ears stopped ringing. The “meat” of title comes from a detailed, “naked” consideration of William Burroughs idea of “schlupping,” which is the “total osmotic ingestion or fusion of one body by another,” (293) but which can also be the sound of “soft innards being sucked out of a body.” (297) It is also, in Allen Ginsberg’s words, “a very tender emotional direction, a desire to merge with a love,” and Kahn deftly negotiates the many paradoxes of this position. Kahn’s writing borders on the metaphysical and, perhaps, “flaky,” but never crosses over, as his consideration of sound’s habitation in the bones of the ear permits an adequate bridge into his less sound-central analyses of passages from prose writers such as Lautreaumont. The entire body is drafted into the art of bearing sound, as the body itself, in some of the most extreme examples in this book, becomes the bowel of an environmental instrument. Though the argument could be made that Noise Water Meat, in its meandering manner and obvious hero-worship of the 99% male artists considered, is just one more coffee-table epithet for the death of modernism, it’s brio and enthusiasm, not to mention incredible range and skillful weaving of discourses, makes it a compelling read and argument for the continuation of this type of, well, music.

Mary Ann Caws, Editor, Manifesto: A Century of Isms
(University of Nebraska Press, 2001)

As Caws states in her breathless introduction, the arts manifesto, which first made its appearance in the late 19th century (about forty years after the Communist Manifesto) relies on an arrogant, overblown stance that was a “deliberate manipulation of the public view,” as unquestioning about the value of the “new art” and as it was about the bankruptcy of the old. During what Caws calls the “Manifesto Moment,” from about 1909 when the Futurists first broke out to 1919 when Lyubov Popova wrote her “statement” for non-objective Suprematist Art, the manifesto had a “madness about it,” but always, even when positing an “us” against a “them,” invited the reader to become one of the new breed, a whole new way of looking at things from just the other side of the paradigm-shift (a strategy and optimism that has since been taken over by the technology industry). The manifesto was not a symptom of a world “waiting to be born,” but was at once a diagnosis the its narcolepsy and the crashing of speeding trains that would cure it forever. In this anthology, Caws expands the definition of “Manifesto” to include milder statements of principles (from the Language Poets), poems (parts of Whitmans’ “Song of Myself”), fragments from the writings of Cage, Duchamp and others that are more seminal moments than statements, Oscar Wilde’s Preface to Dorian Gray, Poe’s The Philosophy of Furniture, one of the few writings of Jacque VachÈ (one of Breton’s inspirations for Surrealism), Schwitters offbeat “Cow Manifesto” and more. Nitpickers, however, will note certain important exclusions: Rimbaud’s proto-Symbolist “Letter of the Seer,” in which many of the tenets of movements from Surrealism to Beat and Language poetry were to be first found; the Brazilian concrete poets’ “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” which was unique in mating a postcolonial agenda with an aesthetics program for “exportable” art and is probably the only South American manifesto that isn’t either Symbolist or Surrealist in origin; and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which if anything was the most concise, most ecstatic and yet most complete expression of the mores and methods of the Beat Generation. Since the book contains visual as well as literary manifestos — writings from Odilon Redon and James Ensor, not to mention Salvidor Dali’s “Yellow Manifesto” — an excerpt from Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography, which outlines the relationship of type and paper-size to social consciousness, would have helped tie several strands together, such as the included manifestos for new architecture and new music (relying on experimental scores), not to mention the valuable, if not entirely satisfying, Lettrist manifestos. The Vorticism section is adequate, though one misses Gautier-Brzeska’s fabulous letter from the front, in which he described carving a sculpture out of the butt of a gun, a more charismatic piece than the Vorticist manifestoes themselves authored by the noxious Richard Aldington (using Lewis and Pound’s language; several of Lewis’s “Blast” pages are included, typefaces intact). Readers of Language Poetry will wonder why none of Bruce Andrews’ famously propulsive essays are included (recently collected in Andrews Paradise & Method from the University of Alabama) nor “The New Sentence” by Ron Silliman, which more than the writing of Nick Piombino and Michael Palmer satisfied several of the classic aims of the manifesto and was very influential. Since poetry has been included, a short poem like Ashbery’s “And ‘Ut Pictora Poesis’ Is Her Name” would stand nicely beside O’Hara’s “Personism” (which is included) as a brief, provocative statement of the New York School’s aesthetic purposes that is both subverting of accepted literary values and — perhaps too warmly — inviting. Nonetheless, most of the classics are here, including Whistler’s “The Ten O’Clock,” several essays by Apollinaire and Marinetti, the Dada Manifestos by Tzara, the Russian Futurists’ “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” South American manifestos by Borges and Huidibros, Olson’s “Projective Verse,” and manifestoes of Negritude by Cesaire and others (yes, it’s quite male heavy). This enormous book is the great companion to the Rothenberg/Joris two volume Poems for the Millennium, and in some ways a less fragmented portrait of world (though not Asian) modernism. Though the scholarship seems often rather sketchy and quickly written — Caws is like the Harold Bloom of this material and doesn’t often stop for reflection — it is a challenging, comprehensive read.

Claudia Rankine, Plot
(Grove Press, 2001)

Like much women’s writing from the avant-garde, Plot is a book-length poem/fiction sequence concerned with the issues of meaning, writing and being, utilizing autobiography but also clearly bizarre naming-conventions (a la Zarathustra and De Chirico’s Hebdomeros) — to create an atmosphere of moderate crisis, philosophical overdetermination and, in any case, super-real dimensions. It immediately appears at the nexus of several different avant-garde projects, from the nouveau roman of Monique Wittig to the scholarly mind-blasts of Christine Brooke-Rose, from the deconstructed spaces of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino right on to last year’s The Words by Carla Harryman (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee also lurks in the background). Plot, which more or less spirals around the story of Liv and Erland and their future child Ersatz, is embedded in the sensations and anxieties of child-birth and -rearing: “Long after she grows tired in the night she hears only the child’s cries. His cries, already recalling, and silence, / the dumbness she wedges herself into. Cowardly, and additionally compromised, she hears each cry, punctuating every space of exception, running through her, meaning to break, to interrupt each moment attempted. She hears and calls it silence.” (20) The main issue seems to be whether this birth is wanted for an escape from self, and whether this second-self is indeed an “other”; Rankine writes: “Liv, answer me this: Is the female anatomically in need of a child as a life preserver, a hand, a hand up? And now, pap smeared, do you want harder the family you fear in fear of all those answers?” This question of self-othering, of viewing the child as “ersatz” meaning, is tied in with Rankine’s sense of herself, and one of the more striking moments is when the three main figures conjoin to render this situation clear: “That same night Erland pressed his ear to Liv’s belly. / What do you hear? Liv asked. / Not you, Erland answered. Not you.” (78) Unfortunately, unlike Rankine’s last book The End of Alphabet, Plot is particularly prone to run-on, obfuscated formulations and indulgent — one presumes “experimental” and yet finally unnecessary — grammatical constructions: “the damaged image absorbed to appear, the exemplar seen and felt as one, having grown thick in the interior, opens on to surface and is the surface reflecting its source.” (39) The Ashberian “taking out” — a mark, one supposes, of the “Ellipticist” school of writing — and the Steinian urge for recursive syntax, while occasionally quite beautiful and engaging, is often colorless and makes one self-conscious about wishing an end to all deconstructive tactics in poetry: “The interest is not with the dissolved, and yet dissolution surrounds, is a feeling in its duration. It observes its own density and is the constituted dissolved toward solidity. To this refuse, / casting its shadow from flesh to canvas, she says, no. But see, the debris is the self within the trace, then the tide is the general condition implicated. She is afraid of herself.” (67) As opposed to the writing of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her Dictee, to which Plot seems most indebted, these moments do not seem linked to any real intensity of vision, any thwarted desire to reveal, but come off as stock stylistic devices of the Jorie Graham variety. Plot is interesting because it contains moments of normative fiction (such as the “Interlude”) and a series of odd graphically charted pages, an effort, perhaps, to anchor this mass of issues and language, but even these moments are unexciting — the dialogue is hackneyed, the graphics insincere. Rankine has tremendous talent as a poet, but one wonders if a better way of expressing the dilemmas of a fluid, ontologically flustered self would be a more concentrated, formally precise, poetry, one that presented the precious rocks that one grasps at for stability rather than simply the grasping.

Noelle Kocot, 4
(Four Way Books, 2001)

A startling debut from this New York-based poet, 4 is a highly technical accomplishment — free-verse sestinas, rhyming quatrains and other verse forms seem to roll from her pen effortlessly — and yet it manages all of these pyrotechnics without the pastiche or irony-drunk qualities of other contemporary quasi-formal versifiers. Her knotty, provocative turn of mind — part Rimbaudian, part Kenneth Koch — mixes darker, often Biblical imagery with a quirky humor, as in these lines from “The Traffic Cop”: “I don’t know how to say what I’m becoming / But it seems that every time / I consider lolling on the banks of the lake / Of infernal fire, the ice-cream truck / Toddles along, hauling its song, / The only music I can bring to listen to these days. / The truth is I’m bored / And conversations about why don’t seem to help. / I’m getting older fast and none too carefully…” (16) Casting herself as the renegade, even the vagabond, but with benign intentions peeking through, this poems concludes on a defiant absurdist note: “Your brand of peace disgusts me, do you hear? / I am the fugitive who drives the stampede / Of aardvarks across your lawns. / I have come to tip your cows.” Swift, intense, image-laden poems like “Ontology Train” are, indeed, like modern versions of “The Drunken Boat”: “The night offers no apology / For its marvelous moody technique bathed in the venom / Of so many charged similes that conjure the hagiography / Of man as a vessel caught in a maelstrom / Which is its own blustery hubris pulsing / Through his homesick blood…” (22) But her poems are usually about relationships, about the heavy burden of love and poetic thought that she shares with her interlocutor, a nameless, mystical “you”: “Yet you are concrete / Somehow; I know, I’ve heard your bee-like buzzing / In all the tiny leaves bursting from their sacs to greet / A magical universe…” (43) Her sestinas offer a somewhat lighter view, if only because the necessary play of the form, as in this brief (fictional?) recounting of an affair: “But in all the San Franciscoes / We could conjure in our souls, / Always there was the debris left perhaps by the quake of chiding souls / In the intermediate world, or by some ironic / Sandman reminding us that we were still asleep. San Francisco / Fantasy aside, you have to admit we sucked / As a couple…” (48). “Le Marteau sans maitre,” dedicated to Boulez, has some of the qualities of Ashbery’s Prospero-like narrator revealing the codes that lie under reality’s deceptive surfaces: “In this way, our reactions to the written word / Open an angle of view increasingly peopled / By our club-shaped shadows, / And by our footprints on the road which lie / In an allegorically restrained / Framework of geometric shapes, as elegantly austere / As the simple arrangement of vessels on a table, ” and concludes: “So you see, the scene / Is quite human after all, a liquid legend / Passing through crystalline sunlight / And flooding our well-supported interiors / With an atmospheric clarity emblematic / Of the essential questions blowing here and there / Like remnants of a foreign language…” Kocot’s images flow freely, perhaps too rhapsodically for some people’s tastes; often she writes unrestrained, and almost approaches a “naive” quality except that her obvious spiritual maturity, not to mention her large vocabulary, deflects this impression. Like other young poets, such as Jennifer Moxley and Chris Stoffolino, Kocot has found a language for her emotions that pulls into her universe an abundance of memories, metaphors, and verbal twists. But she is unique in having found a way to mate an urban “post-punk” sensibility — images of youthful rebellion, cultural disgust, hyperreal love and visceral superworldly elements abound in passionate bursts — with a highly controlled, even learned form that makes reading her poems both an energizing yet cerebral experience.