WALLS (ANAMNESES) by Marcel Cohen (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009)

I just posted a review of Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard’s translation of WALLS (ANAMNESES) by Marcel Cohen (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009) at Big Other. It’s a fine little book.

A Post-Halloween Collage : “The Ghost of Meter, or Ezra Pound vs. The Metronome”

Cecilia Vicuña’s “A Tongue Within Tongues” (10/21/09)

Last Wednesday evening, Chilean-born polymath Cecilia Vicuña gave a fascinating ritualistic performance on the Douglass campus of Rutgers University. Slowly entering the Mabel Smith Douglass Room behind the audience, modulating a high-pitched tonal chant, she—along with a few assistants—unfurled long strands of brightly colored wool with which they methodically distributed among the audience. Such a gesture both literally and symbolically bound the audience together indicating an alternative community—not unlike what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas, which he describes as a liminal “seedbed…of cultural creativity.”

“Every seed is a space ship, a nomad planet waiting to sprout.”
—Cecilia Vicuña, from “On Behalf of Seeds” (1971)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not surprising then that Vicuña’s performance thematized issues of birth and creation, virtuality and fecundity in which everything at play—each word, each phrase, each sound—seemed to be on the threshold of actualization, of transforming into something else. The poetry shuttled back in forth between languages in an act of creative translation and exegesis, and the unspun wool that was threaded throughout the audience seemed to signifiy potentiality as such.  In the recently released Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009), Vicuña explains in “An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics” the cultural function of such a performance by linking the use of sound in Latin American Poetry to Mayan ritualistic practice: “Through carefully modulated tones in speech and song, ritual participants enter a resonant state of consciousness where mutual creation and renewal occurs…Awaiting this aural nutrition, the earth listens and responds.”  This seemed to be a primary ambition of “A Tongue Within Tongues”: to provide “aural nutrition” for the earth’s “seedbeds” of creativity. 

Vicuña plaintively began her performance, which was part rogue scientific lecture, part polyglot poetry reading, part song and chant, with the statement: “The poems are crying because they do not want to come out.” What followed was a series of poems that ingeniously linked creation myths to contemporary science, bridging the gap between seemingly distinct epistemological systems. For example, Vicuña recounted a creation story of two intertwining snakes of light that inseminated each other and the world and compared this braided structure to the double helix of DNA.  She also poetically elaborated concepts like virtual particles and quanta—which she called ”bolsitas de luz“—arguing that Western science constitutes one out of many powerful mythological frameworks.

Equally eye-opening was the Q & A session that followed in which Vicuña continued to exert her shifty and clever intelligence.  After a member in the audience asked her about her use of etymologies, she noted that she both made recourse to them as well as creatively invented them, and during another answer, she noted that the word “history” comes from the Greek root ”istos,” which means “weaving”—this isn’t at all surprising given that “weaving,” with its connotations of pre-Columbian textile practices, might be the master term (if there is one at all) that animates Vicuña’s poetics.

“In the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya, one of the names of God is ‘Force Entwined’.”
—Cecilia Vicuña, from “The Weaving of Words” (1990-96)

Not until I got home did I realize that “history,” in fact, comes from the word “istoria,” which means “inquiry,” and it was then did I appreciate this wonderfully transformed sense of “history” which includes a willful and wily conflation of both weaving and inquiry.

This “folk etymology” reminded me of Aldon Nielsen’s striking move in the introduction of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (2004):

Interdiction has much to recommend it as a critical term. While the word intends a prohibition, it seems to seek an opening, an in-between space in which folk etymology might read a felt history of differing dictions brought into frictive contact. To interdict racism would appear to require a polyglot tongue-lashing, an interruption and eruption, a critical insertion of oneself into a dangerous space between people speaking in tongues.

This, too, bears much resemblance to the liminal, “in-between” space of Vicuña’s polyglot performances in which she attempts to “interdict,” with a “mestizo” tongue within tongues, the erasure of indigenous contributions to Latin American literary history.

Poetry in Motion: A Spontaneous Spoken Word Poem on the 8th Ave Local

I was on my way to Rutgers University this morning, taking the 8th Ave local from West 4th St to Penn Station, and I witnessed an improbable event that seems only possible within the dense urban heterotopia that is New York City. An elderly woman sitting across from me, who was in the midst of cleaning out her wallet of old business cards and scraps of paper, broke out into a chant-like speech which I can only describe as a performative soliloquy or a spoken word poem (complete with the socially aware consciousness of that genre). She began with a refrain (and here I can only approximate her forceful cadence):

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a lot of trouble making out the middle of her poem, but it recounted, in the first person, an experience of being traumatized in Nazi Germany for being Jewish. And the poem concluded with the same refrain:

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a strong suspicion that the woman was addressing no one in particular (a man beside me was nonchalantly reading a book), that this was, to allude to John Stuart Mill’s famous distinction between eloquence and poetry, an example of “feeling, confessing itself to itself in [a] moment…of solitude.” But, at the same time, I felt utterly convinced that her poetic chant was meant only for me (and this is, in my opinion, one of the potent ways that poetry can interpellate an audience). The woman seemed to have been uncannily aware that I was thinking of institutionalized, state-sanctioned violence; earlier that morning, I was perusing the new “war” issue of PMLA, and while I was having my coffee, I was reading the Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit’s account of the utterly oppressive violence of the Pinochet era.

Before I rose to get off at 34th St, and as if she had anticipated this too, the woman lifted her head (was she looking at me? I don’t remember…) and added a kind of postscript to her poem—”Also MTA police brutality, also MTA police brutality”—which nicely gave her performance a site-specific resonance.

While I do, in certain respects, appreciate the MTA’s Poetry in Motion project (which seems now to be losing steam compared to the newer Train of Thought program which excerpts prose), these decontextualized snippets of verse have never struck me, or unsettled me, in the same way that this woman’s impromptu poem had.

This event also seemed to attest to the particular power of performance, and I am today very much looking forward to seeing Cecilia Vicuña’s performance.

*

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Cecilia Vicuña, 2009-10 Estelle Lebowitz Artist-in-Residence
Public Lecture and Poetry Performance
“A Tongue Within Tongues”
Reception for the Artist: 6pm;
Performance: 6:30pm – 7:30 pm
Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library
New Brunswick, NJ

“In her poetry performances Cecilia Vicuña creates a space for silence and transformation. Words, sounds and the audience are woven into new sensory perceptions. Playing with many languages as she reads and chants she transforms her texts as she goes, incorporating the present moment.”

Big Other!

I’ve just joined a new online venture, a kind of collective blog, called Big Other which is the brainchild of John Madera.

“BIG OTHER is an online forum of iconoclasts and upstarts focusing its lens on books, music, comics, film, video and animation, paintings, sculpture, performance art, and miscellaneous nodes and sonic booms. We will explore how we are made and unmade by images, language, and sound; examine computer-mediated worlds; and dance along with various tumults, genre- and other border-crossings, trespassings, transgressions, and whatever, nevermind.”

Other contributors include Leni Zumas, John Dermot Woods, Sean Lovelace, Jac Jemc, Christopher Higgs, Greg Gerke, Molly Gaudry, Luca Dipierro, Kim Chinquee, and Ryan W. Bradley— I’ll be looking forward to reading what they have to say. Already there are some eye-opening posts.

I just posted my first entry called “American Poetry & The Contemporary Cartoon: From Robert Pinsky to Patrick the Starfish” which contextualizes my previous post “SpongeBob SquarePants and the Value of Bad Poetry” within a larger context of cartoons (like The Simpsons and The Family Guy) that also talk about poetry. Check it out!

Cecilia Vicuña’s *Water Writing: Anthological Exhibition, 1966-2009*

“Water Writing” is a retrospective of Cecilia Vicuña’s visual works—it’s billed as an “Anthological Exhibition”—located in the Douglass Library galleries in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Pieces range from the early precarios of the 60’s to a brand new site-specific installation called Melinko Lauen / Water Cry / Cascada Que Llora which consists of cascading banners of unspun wool affixed to the beams of the library’s light-filled rotunda.

This installation establishes a new limen, a new threshold that one must walk around in order pass into the library’s main sections and access the books—it is an interesting intervention that re-establishes the connection between textile and text, a connection at the root of Incan literacy.

While the Douglass Library gallery space is a bit small and awkwardly split into two sections that flank the main entrance, “Water Writing” nicely demostrates the range of Vicuña’s work—from colorful portraits to prints of famous performances (like Vaso de Leche/Glass of Milk which protested the death of children in Bogota from contaminated milk) to bilingual visual poems drawn on the gallery walls.

While the term “anthological” may evoke notions of a standard, institutionalized text (like how in some quarters The Norton Anthology is, itself, a derogatory term), Vicuña’s work, as seen above and below, challenges the normativity of both the book and the page and disrupts our linear left-to-right reading practices. I particularly like the “not”/”knot” pun in the concrete poem below as the quipu is, of course, constructed out of knotted threads.

The portraits include a wonderful self-portrait that cleverly plays upon the artist’s name as well as homages to important Chilean women like Gabriela Mistral and Violeta Parra (below).

“The wild vicuña is sacred to indigenous Andean cultures…Legend has it that vicuña are born at the sources of springs, and the fiber made from their wool is symbolically associated with the thread of running water, or the stream of life.”
—from Lucy Lippard’s “Spinning the Common Thread” in The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (1997)

In “preparation” for this exhibition (while I was taking the train from New York to New Brunswick), I read the poem “Quipu” by the Chinese American poet Arthur Sze and was particularly struck by the fourth section which offers a series of dazzling questions that are somewhat reminiscent of Neruda’s The Book of Questions. Here are some that I found particularly apt:

Who touched a quipu and made it explode into dust?

…

Did spun wool delineating the corn of the Incas obliterate in a second?

What incipient white fades into pink?

Did the knot of her loves jaguar in an instant?

…

Who can unravel the spin of elegy and counterspin it into an ode?

…

Whose carded cotton fibers are these?

Ross Brighton’s *A Pelt, A Shrub, A Soil Sample* (Neoismist Press, 2009)

A Pelt, A Shrub, A Soil Sample is a limited edition chapbook by New Zealand poet Ross Brighton (with accompanying drawings by Annie Mackenzie). Some of you may know Brighton from his energetic activity around the blogosphere, but if you don’t know his poetry, I recommend checking it out.

Before even receiving this chapbook in the mail—published by Neoismist Press, “a small publishing label based in the extinct volcano of Lyttelton on Banks Peninsula”—the captivating title, which is also the name of Brighton’s blog, had lodged in my head. Because of the syllabic count of the phrase, I had immediately thought of the memorable beginning of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” But after reading this difficult but ultimately rewarding text, I realized that the three terms in Brighton’s title are carefully chosen synecdoches for the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Within the poems we do indeed find references to a “narwhal,” “fir boughs,” and “alabaster.” Despite the slim length of this chapbook, there is an ambitious impulse here to account for the variety, splendor, and strangeness of the natural world. Yes, this is nature poetry, but nature seen through the sophisticated lens of an Objectivist. Think Ed Roberson and his syntactical complexity, his compressed intensity rather than the easy fluency of, say, a Mary Oliver.

“Pay close attention to the mechanics,” says Brighton in “Body,” and both the mechanics of the natural world he describes and the mechanics of the poetic world he creates are wonderfully fresh and dynamic:

the brightly flowing trees
the aerodynamics of
                            this incumbent silence
(from “Lucernal”)

 

the glancing
the dance, from form dove
              to out above
a silent madrigal turning
                           on the axis of equinox
(from “Glissade”)

The density of sound in this last excerpt (the assonance of the short “a” sounds, the anagrammatic slide from “from” to “form”, the “dove”/”above” rhyme, the “x” sounds that anchor the end of the phrase) is quite typical of Brighton’s muscular writing. I also enjoyed the many creative Anglo-Saxon-like compounds that nicely thickened the music of the poetry: “shadow-dapple,” “sun-cut,” “woad-loaded.” Sound-loaded and noise-dappled, this is a poetry that fills the mouth with richness.

I’m also grateful today to see a little shout-out about e.s.p. from Eileen Tabios’ blog THE BLIND CHATELAINE’S KEYS: “smart, witty poems that are deceptively philosophical!”

Thanks, Eileen!

John Yau on *e.s.p.*

I was touched today to find John Yau’s supportive review of e.s.p. in this month’s The Brooklyn Rail. Many thanks to John for his always engaging attentiveness!

e.s.p.
Michael Leong
Silenced Press, 2009

Call it synchronicity or, if you wish, the chance meeting of a potato and a stick of dynamite in the Infinite Seminar on Poetry. Today, in the mail, I received the latest issue of Jubilat, published by Robert Casper, with Guest Editors Cathy Park Hong and Evie Shockley, and a first book of poems, e.s.p. by Michael Leong . Just to be clear—I got Jubilat for free and I bought e.s.p.. The first thing I read was an essay “‘It Must Change’: Wallace Stevens and the Digressive Ars Poetica” by Srikanth Reddy, in Jubilat. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Reddy’s essay seems to me to be the perfect introduction to Leong’s e.s.p. because a number of observations he makes about Stevens also illuminate Leong’s project: “Perhaps no writer since Ovid has so obsessively documented the metamorphoses of our fluent mundo as Stevens.” The documenting of change, and its inevitability, is central to Leong’s poetry.

The first poem begins: “Suppose I wrote it in chalk.” Consisting of an untitled list of italicized speculations about language and its communicative power, Leong begins each line with “Suppose…” “Suppose I sent it telepathically” or, later on, “Suppose I had telekinesis and could drag the point of / that pencil over that sheet of paper to make a series / of marks which you could then interpret as signs.” With generous amount of humor inflected by a self-mocking tone, Leong points to possible worlds, but he knows he can’t get us there.

Writing about Stevens, Reddy astutely points out that “[a] poetics of change, then, serves no particular political ethos exclusively,” and goes on to say “the digressive ars poetica declines to propound any particular form or agenda for art.” He could just as easily be describing Leong’s poems, which meditate on poetry with a zinging humor, as well as repeatedly subvert conventional meaning through puns and word play: “I will ask you politely about proper conjugation.” Open to Surrealism’s penchant for lists, sensitive to the absurdities both prevalent and almost hidden from sight, as well as being attuned to the kind of outrageousness that can only be achieved in language, Leong channels call and response boasting and mixes it with a dark humor:

“I’ll break your abacus but I’ll repair your sextant
I’ll clean your whisper dish and always respect
The orientation of your compass”

The fact that Leong is Asian American adds a refreshing dose of edginess to “abacus” and “orientation” that never devolves into essentialism. Like Reddy, he recognizes that assimilation and essentialism—whether defined by the experimentalists or by what Ron Silliman calls the “quietists” —are ideologically riddled, aesthetic traps to be negotiated and subverted. A poet and translator —check out I, the Worst of All (blazeVOX, 2009), his translation of the Chilean poet, Estela Lamat — Leong goes his own way: Open to trying out all kinds of modes and methods, he is beholden to no one.

—John Yau

Michael Leong & Estela Lamat Reading

Michael Leong & Estela Lamat read for the Multifarious Array, Pete’s Candy Store, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, September 25, 2009…

Thanks to Sommer for posting the sound file!

Poetry Reading – 9/25/09