Sunday, December 06, 2009
Cave paintings, Sharon Doubiago memoir, and other news
Sometime back when I was looking through back issues of American Poetry Review at the library, I found an essay by Clayton Eshleman, "The Backwall of Imagination," about his researches into prehistoric cave paintings and his visits to cave painting sites in southern France, through the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Eshleman did the research in part as background work for what became his long poem Juniper Fuse. I've never read Juniper Fuse, but I found Eshleman's account of his cave painting research fascinating.
The essay mentioned above, "The Backwall of Imagination," is available now in Archaic Design, a collection of Eshleman's essays published in 2007 by Black Widow Press. (This link is to the main page of the publisher's website -- I couldn't find a page for the book in their website, and someplace they mention they'll be publishing the book -- the information may not have been updated for a while. The book was definitely published, I have a copy in front of me as I write this. You might try the "Contact" link in the website and ask the publisher about it, or order through a bookstore.)
Here are a couple of excerpts from "The Backwall of Imagination," to give a little sense of it. The first excerpt is from a visit Eshleman and his wife Caryl made to France in 1974; Movius (mentioned in the passage) is H.L. Movius, an archaeologist then working in France.
"It turned out that Movius's secretary (a 'liberated' English woman who answered the door naked to the waist) lived on the first floor of our building. She told us she would ask Movius to arrange a visit to Lascaux (closed to the public since 1963; in 1974, groups of up to five people were allowed in the cave for forty-five minutes, four days a week.) Caryl's sister, Jayne, and the painters George Herms and Margaret Nielson, joined us for our May visit. The guide, Jacques Marsal (one of the original discoverers of Lascaux in 1940) made us all wait in total darkness at the entrance to the Rotunda (having passed through steel doors and cleansed our shoe souls in a formalin solution tray). He walked away and after a minute or so, turned on the muted lights. Four immense aurochs, at once moving swiftly yet static, appeared, occupying nearly sixty feet of a curving, crystal-white wall space. Across and below them, as if sprinkled there, moving in different directions, were small horses and deer. All of us were spellbound. I think that it was that "moment of moments" that sounded something in me that I could only respond to and realize through the writing of a book.
"On occasional drives north from St. Cyprien down into the beginning of the Vézère Valley, I had a strong sensation of being released from all earthly constraints. The third time this happened, I tried to see what about our location might explain this extraordinary feeling. As we descended, we entered a narrow, pretty vale on the far right side of which was a limestone wall which increased in height and massiveness as we drove further into the vale. I knew that the Font-de-Gaume cave was at the far end of this rock formation and that the path leading up to the cave's entrance could be glimpsed right before our road dead-ended into a road that, were one to turn right, would pass by the trail leading to the Font-de-Gaume's entrance. Was it the magic of this particular composite that made me feel that I was passing through a hallowed place? Had files of deer come down this vale to drink at the Vézère? Were they hunted here? Were the reindeer depicted in Font-de-Gaume based on such deer? I intuited that the extreme ancientness of the cave's imagery acted as a kind of roving, ensouled wiring that I had abruptly plugged into. The landscape I was passing through received and reflected its charge."
The other excerpt here is from a visit to the same region in 1976:
"We will never forget our first visit to Niaux. We approached the cave via the one-lane, hairpin, curving road that leaps up a limestone spur rising more than one thousand meters above the Vicdessos, a small river that runs along the road below. We rounded a bend to suddenly face a one hundred and fifty foot high triangular cavity seemingly clawed out of the rock. It looks like either the entrance to, or the exit from, the world. In a postcard photo of this teepee-shaped entrance, the visitor cars parked out on the porch seem to be the size of tiny bugs.
"Most of the hundred or so animals depicted on the walls of Niaux are in a single large circular chamber called the Salon Noir, seven hundred meters inside. Bison and horses have been painted in black manganese over charcoal sketches. Unlike the trotting, frisking, and leaping animals of Lascaux, those in Niaux hover the walls like suspended pelts -- they seem to be absolutely still. Some appear to have been rapidly sketched (I thought of Franz Klein's intersecting black strokes), while others have a lot of detail: the texture of animal coats is indicated, now heavier, now lighter. Certain hooves are beautifully handled. S. Giedion, author of The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art, compared them to sketches by Rafael.
"Back in Los Angeles, I came across a book-length essay by James Hillman, 'The Dream and the Underworld,' which, while not concerned with the pre-Grecian past, helped release me from the traditional viewpoint that cave imagery was primarily a response to hunting anxiety, or involved "sympathetic magic" for successful hunting. Hillman proposed that dreams were not merely the reflection of daytime activities, but autonomous psychic stations, as it were, with a mythic geography that constituted what some cultures have called the underworld. Perhaps, I conjectured, cave images painted or engraved 25,000 years ago, via dreaming and imagining, transformed cave 'insides' into an underworld construction."
Most of the other essays in Archaic Design are about various writers, artists, and literary and artistic movements; in a couple of them, Eshleman writes about some of the poetry translation work he has done. I don't remember now which issue of American Poetry Review had the essay "The Backwall of Imagination" in it -- it may have been Jan./Feb. 2006, though I'm not positive about that.
***
I recently finished reading My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume 1, by Sharon Doubiago, published this year by Wild Ocean Press. Doubiago has written a devastating and riveting account of her childhood, dealing centrally with her father's sexual molestation of her as a child. The range and reach of her memoir are wide and vast, drawing in the history of her family going back several generations, mingled with the broader history of the United States and the world, as well as the political and economic conditions and daily life during the 1940's and 1950's in Southern California where she lived.
Sharon Doubiago's website includes links to excerpts from My Father's Love that are available online: in the main page, click on the link to the book title in the right-hand column: that will go to a page with an excerpt from Doubiago's Introduction to the book; and in the right-hand column of that page are links to sample chapters that have been published in various online literary magazines.
I can't recommend My Father's Love highly enough.
In the main page of Doubiago's website there are also links to sample poems from two of her books of poems. I've loved Sharon Doubiago's poetry since I first read some of her work in 1981. She's also a long-time friend.
***
One other note -- the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Great River Review includes a feature section of writing in tribute to the 20th century Greek Communist poet Yannis Ritsos, compiled by poet and Ritsos translator Scott King. The Ritsos ribute section features short essays, poems, translations of Ritsos, and a short interview with him, by poets and writers including Peter Constantine, Dale Jacobson, Thomas McGrath, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, George Kalamaras, Chrisa Prokopaki, Lyle Daggett, Fereydoun Faryad, Angéliki Kotti, and others.
Yannis Ritsos was born May 1, 1909, and died in 1990. The Ritsos tribute feature noted above was done in observance of the 100th year since his birth; many commemorations of his life and work have been taking place in Greece and elsewhere around the world during the past year.
If you're not familiar with the work of Yannis Ritsos, a good introduction is Selected Poems, 1938-1988 edited and translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades, published 1989 by BOA Editions. Ritsos was a massively prolific poet, even in the face of long years of imprisonment by military governments and his sometimes poor health; even a selection as large as the one noted above covers only a fraction of his work, and new translations of his poetry continue to appear in English.
I've written a little about Yannis Ritsos previously in this blog, here.
The essay mentioned above, "The Backwall of Imagination," is available now in Archaic Design, a collection of Eshleman's essays published in 2007 by Black Widow Press. (This link is to the main page of the publisher's website -- I couldn't find a page for the book in their website, and someplace they mention they'll be publishing the book -- the information may not have been updated for a while. The book was definitely published, I have a copy in front of me as I write this. You might try the "Contact" link in the website and ask the publisher about it, or order through a bookstore.)
Here are a couple of excerpts from "The Backwall of Imagination," to give a little sense of it. The first excerpt is from a visit Eshleman and his wife Caryl made to France in 1974; Movius (mentioned in the passage) is H.L. Movius, an archaeologist then working in France.
"It turned out that Movius's secretary (a 'liberated' English woman who answered the door naked to the waist) lived on the first floor of our building. She told us she would ask Movius to arrange a visit to Lascaux (closed to the public since 1963; in 1974, groups of up to five people were allowed in the cave for forty-five minutes, four days a week.) Caryl's sister, Jayne, and the painters George Herms and Margaret Nielson, joined us for our May visit. The guide, Jacques Marsal (one of the original discoverers of Lascaux in 1940) made us all wait in total darkness at the entrance to the Rotunda (having passed through steel doors and cleansed our shoe souls in a formalin solution tray). He walked away and after a minute or so, turned on the muted lights. Four immense aurochs, at once moving swiftly yet static, appeared, occupying nearly sixty feet of a curving, crystal-white wall space. Across and below them, as if sprinkled there, moving in different directions, were small horses and deer. All of us were spellbound. I think that it was that "moment of moments" that sounded something in me that I could only respond to and realize through the writing of a book.
"On occasional drives north from St. Cyprien down into the beginning of the Vézère Valley, I had a strong sensation of being released from all earthly constraints. The third time this happened, I tried to see what about our location might explain this extraordinary feeling. As we descended, we entered a narrow, pretty vale on the far right side of which was a limestone wall which increased in height and massiveness as we drove further into the vale. I knew that the Font-de-Gaume cave was at the far end of this rock formation and that the path leading up to the cave's entrance could be glimpsed right before our road dead-ended into a road that, were one to turn right, would pass by the trail leading to the Font-de-Gaume's entrance. Was it the magic of this particular composite that made me feel that I was passing through a hallowed place? Had files of deer come down this vale to drink at the Vézère? Were they hunted here? Were the reindeer depicted in Font-de-Gaume based on such deer? I intuited that the extreme ancientness of the cave's imagery acted as a kind of roving, ensouled wiring that I had abruptly plugged into. The landscape I was passing through received and reflected its charge."
The other excerpt here is from a visit to the same region in 1976:
"We will never forget our first visit to Niaux. We approached the cave via the one-lane, hairpin, curving road that leaps up a limestone spur rising more than one thousand meters above the Vicdessos, a small river that runs along the road below. We rounded a bend to suddenly face a one hundred and fifty foot high triangular cavity seemingly clawed out of the rock. It looks like either the entrance to, or the exit from, the world. In a postcard photo of this teepee-shaped entrance, the visitor cars parked out on the porch seem to be the size of tiny bugs.
"Most of the hundred or so animals depicted on the walls of Niaux are in a single large circular chamber called the Salon Noir, seven hundred meters inside. Bison and horses have been painted in black manganese over charcoal sketches. Unlike the trotting, frisking, and leaping animals of Lascaux, those in Niaux hover the walls like suspended pelts -- they seem to be absolutely still. Some appear to have been rapidly sketched (I thought of Franz Klein's intersecting black strokes), while others have a lot of detail: the texture of animal coats is indicated, now heavier, now lighter. Certain hooves are beautifully handled. S. Giedion, author of The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art, compared them to sketches by Rafael.
"Back in Los Angeles, I came across a book-length essay by James Hillman, 'The Dream and the Underworld,' which, while not concerned with the pre-Grecian past, helped release me from the traditional viewpoint that cave imagery was primarily a response to hunting anxiety, or involved "sympathetic magic" for successful hunting. Hillman proposed that dreams were not merely the reflection of daytime activities, but autonomous psychic stations, as it were, with a mythic geography that constituted what some cultures have called the underworld. Perhaps, I conjectured, cave images painted or engraved 25,000 years ago, via dreaming and imagining, transformed cave 'insides' into an underworld construction."
Most of the other essays in Archaic Design are about various writers, artists, and literary and artistic movements; in a couple of them, Eshleman writes about some of the poetry translation work he has done. I don't remember now which issue of American Poetry Review had the essay "The Backwall of Imagination" in it -- it may have been Jan./Feb. 2006, though I'm not positive about that.
***
I recently finished reading My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume 1, by Sharon Doubiago, published this year by Wild Ocean Press. Doubiago has written a devastating and riveting account of her childhood, dealing centrally with her father's sexual molestation of her as a child. The range and reach of her memoir are wide and vast, drawing in the history of her family going back several generations, mingled with the broader history of the United States and the world, as well as the political and economic conditions and daily life during the 1940's and 1950's in Southern California where she lived.
Sharon Doubiago's website includes links to excerpts from My Father's Love that are available online: in the main page, click on the link to the book title in the right-hand column: that will go to a page with an excerpt from Doubiago's Introduction to the book; and in the right-hand column of that page are links to sample chapters that have been published in various online literary magazines.
I can't recommend My Father's Love highly enough.
In the main page of Doubiago's website there are also links to sample poems from two of her books of poems. I've loved Sharon Doubiago's poetry since I first read some of her work in 1981. She's also a long-time friend.
***
One other note -- the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Great River Review includes a feature section of writing in tribute to the 20th century Greek Communist poet Yannis Ritsos, compiled by poet and Ritsos translator Scott King. The Ritsos ribute section features short essays, poems, translations of Ritsos, and a short interview with him, by poets and writers including Peter Constantine, Dale Jacobson, Thomas McGrath, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, George Kalamaras, Chrisa Prokopaki, Lyle Daggett, Fereydoun Faryad, Angéliki Kotti, and others.
Yannis Ritsos was born May 1, 1909, and died in 1990. The Ritsos tribute feature noted above was done in observance of the 100th year since his birth; many commemorations of his life and work have been taking place in Greece and elsewhere around the world during the past year.
If you're not familiar with the work of Yannis Ritsos, a good introduction is Selected Poems, 1938-1988 edited and translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades, published 1989 by BOA Editions. Ritsos was a massively prolific poet, even in the face of long years of imprisonment by military governments and his sometimes poor health; even a selection as large as the one noted above covers only a fraction of his work, and new translations of his poetry continue to appear in English.
I've written a little about Yannis Ritsos previously in this blog, here.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Poet Will Inman
Poet Will Inman died October 3, of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 86. Although he published a number of books through during his life, his poetry mostly didn't receive higher-profile publication, due in part, no doubt, to his progressive activist politics. I've known of him for many years, though have only read a scattered few poems of his that I've been able to find in anthologies and magazines.
Found a nice obituary for him in the online Arizona Daily Star, here.
And, a small well-picked sampling of his poems, here.
And another touching tribute to him, in Issa's Untidy Hut, blog of the literary magazine Lilliput Review, here.
Thanks to Jaded Prole of the blog Blue Collar Holler (of which I'm also a blog member), where I first saw word of this.
Found a nice obituary for him in the online Arizona Daily Star, here.
And, a small well-picked sampling of his poems, here.
And another touching tribute to him, in Issa's Untidy Hut, blog of the literary magazine Lilliput Review, here.
Thanks to Jaded Prole of the blog Blue Collar Holler (of which I'm also a blog member), where I first saw word of this.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Beats at Naropa
One of the things I've been reading recently is Beats at Naropa edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright (Coffee House Press, 2009), a collection of lectures, panel discussion transcripts, and similar material, drawn from the audio archives of Naropa University over a period of more than thirty years. I've only read part of it so far, am liking most of it.
Here are a few passages, picked from the book, that particularly struck me and have stayed with me as I've been reading.
"Then, we get the latest batch from the Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review -- and I thought we had killed all those people."
-- Amiri Baraka, from "Pulling It Down or the Good Manners of Vampires," originally June 18, 2004.
"There are certain elements in folk literature that crop up worldwide, such as the motif of someone being chased by an ogre or a demon, and as they flee they throw objects over their shoulder. They throw a comb over their shoulder, it becomes a forest and blocks the way to the pursuer. They throw a pencil or a piece of stone over their shoulder, it becomes a field of stones. This is the magic chase motif that's found so widely that we have to assume it represents a really archaic stratum of literary consciousness that gives it an antiquity, twenty thousand years maybe. Since these are found in North and South America as well as in Asia and Europe, this special number of globally distributed motifs -- and since human beings have been in the western hemisphere for at least forty thousand years, and since we'll continue to think for the time being that they came from Asia, although that may be turned over eventually, then we'll have to say that by one way of transmission or another, these motifs go back to early Homo sapiens times. That's the longest span that you can hope for. And that implies that these tales and motifs have traveled through thousands of different languages." [...]
[...] "It should be remembered that without writing, a culture is perfectly able to have a full, aesthetic literary culture. Semi-professional raconteurs in a culture without writing have very well-developed memories. They can carry with them an enormous amount of lore and material. There was an old African that Melville Jacobs worked with in Dahomey in the thirties, who recited for him over three thousand different folk tales from memory. And that wasn't considered particularly extraordinary. In the village tradition of India, the great Indian classic, the Mahabharata, within which the "Bhagavad Gita" is just a chapter, is even today recited by professional raconteurs who knew it by heart, out in the villages of India. It can be a five-day performance. The raconteur comes into the village, puts up her or his banners, makes the announcements that starting on a certain day we will have the full presentation of the Mahabharata, and the people, maybe mostly the kids and the old people who have the time, will be there for five days."
-- both of the above, Gary Snyder, from "Basic Definitions," originally August 8, 1983.
"There's only one really good text, prepared also by David Erdman for Doubleday, Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake. The reason the text is important is that if you don't use the Erdman text you'll wind up with a text that somebody else has punctuated and put capitals [in] -- cleaned up Blake's capitalization and punctuation -- so you miss Blake's original nervous system imprints. The Oxford Blake, the big book of complete Blake, Oxford Press, changes it and I don't know what they do [in the Norton anthology]. Let's take a look at "Tyger." You have "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright" in the first stanza and in the last stanza you have "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright." Now in the original manuscripts it's completely different. Blake has "Tyger tyger, burning bright," I think, as the first one. "Tyger tyger," or some mark, or a period, "burning bright," but not exclamation points and the two "tygers" are together as one breath. In the last stanza it's "tyger, tyger burning bright." And if you're singing it you realize you really need that extra breath."
-- from "Sidebar: Allen Ginsberg on William Blake," originally April 19, 1991.
"That day, or another within the same week, I had to move from Union Theological Seminary, following Lucien Carr, who had moved to a hotel on 115th Street. So I decided I'd move out and go to the hotel, and I asked Jack to help me move. So we had to walk down to Columbia campus from 118th to 125th Street, through the campus, and up seven flights, down a long wooden corridor in the Theological Seminary setting to an arched brown oaken door, where I brought out my valise. I took my valise out and turned to the door, closed the door, and said, good-bye door. And Jack said ooh. Then we walked down the rest of the corridor and I said, good-bye corridor. He said, mmm. Then I said, good-bye step number one, good-bye step number two, and we had seven flights of steps to go down. He said, what do you mean? I said, well I know I'll never see it again in the same body, or if I'm in the same body it'll be twenty-five years later or forty years later and so it'll be like walking back into an ancient, interesting, classical dream." [...]
[...] So those were the kind of questions that Kerouac and I both thought about. Our first rapport was over the fact that both of us said good-bye all the time to the space where we were at that moment, realizing that the space was floating in the infinite universe and the universe was changing and that we were transient, interesting, charming phantoms, appreciating the space around, and that we were only there for an hour or two, so we were constantly saying good-bye."
-- both of the above, Allen Ginsberg talking about Jack Kerouac, from "Recollections and Gossip: First Meetings with Jack Kerouac," a panel also featuring David Amram, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, and Edie Parker Kerouac; originally July 28, 1982.
"In relation to the women of the Beat Generation, I think of this quote from Jacob Lawrence, the painter who recently died. 'We all like headlines and that type of thing. But this shouldn't be confused with the real meaning of your work. In fact, I think an artist is most fortunate when he doesn't get too much attention. The so-called art movements usually come after the fact. If you're unfortunate enough to get swept up in a movement then you'll find your self following yourself.' The first thing I thought of when I read that was Jack Kerouac, who I only knew as a drunk under the tables. I came to New York City to meet this person who really was a hero to me, and he really was only drunk all the time, beautiful, sweet, and very drunk, then I can only say that perhaps, had fate been kinder, he might have just gone on writing in relative, just relative success so that he could maybe have said more than he did.
The literary path as I see it has several components. There's the writing, for which time is usually at a premium. That's the first love, the losing of the self in the process of creation, the poem, the short story, the children's story, the novel. Then there's the research and the considered work of book reviews, essays, commissioned articles, translations, editing, where as a writer one performs part of the weave of intellectual thought of one's time. And there's the teaching, the kids, the adults, the prisoners. What all the components share is the idea of service, of serving something other than the ego, serving as the glue of a civilization, serving clarity of thought, the specific vision of your truth."
-- Janine Pommy Vega, from "Women and the Beats," a panel also featuring Anne Waldman, Hettie Jones, and Joanne Kyger; originally June 15, 2000.
Here are a few passages, picked from the book, that particularly struck me and have stayed with me as I've been reading.
"Then, we get the latest batch from the Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review -- and I thought we had killed all those people."
-- Amiri Baraka, from "Pulling It Down or the Good Manners of Vampires," originally June 18, 2004.
"There are certain elements in folk literature that crop up worldwide, such as the motif of someone being chased by an ogre or a demon, and as they flee they throw objects over their shoulder. They throw a comb over their shoulder, it becomes a forest and blocks the way to the pursuer. They throw a pencil or a piece of stone over their shoulder, it becomes a field of stones. This is the magic chase motif that's found so widely that we have to assume it represents a really archaic stratum of literary consciousness that gives it an antiquity, twenty thousand years maybe. Since these are found in North and South America as well as in Asia and Europe, this special number of globally distributed motifs -- and since human beings have been in the western hemisphere for at least forty thousand years, and since we'll continue to think for the time being that they came from Asia, although that may be turned over eventually, then we'll have to say that by one way of transmission or another, these motifs go back to early Homo sapiens times. That's the longest span that you can hope for. And that implies that these tales and motifs have traveled through thousands of different languages." [...]
[...] "It should be remembered that without writing, a culture is perfectly able to have a full, aesthetic literary culture. Semi-professional raconteurs in a culture without writing have very well-developed memories. They can carry with them an enormous amount of lore and material. There was an old African that Melville Jacobs worked with in Dahomey in the thirties, who recited for him over three thousand different folk tales from memory. And that wasn't considered particularly extraordinary. In the village tradition of India, the great Indian classic, the Mahabharata, within which the "Bhagavad Gita" is just a chapter, is even today recited by professional raconteurs who knew it by heart, out in the villages of India. It can be a five-day performance. The raconteur comes into the village, puts up her or his banners, makes the announcements that starting on a certain day we will have the full presentation of the Mahabharata, and the people, maybe mostly the kids and the old people who have the time, will be there for five days."
-- both of the above, Gary Snyder, from "Basic Definitions," originally August 8, 1983.
"There's only one really good text, prepared also by David Erdman for Doubleday, Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake. The reason the text is important is that if you don't use the Erdman text you'll wind up with a text that somebody else has punctuated and put capitals [in] -- cleaned up Blake's capitalization and punctuation -- so you miss Blake's original nervous system imprints. The Oxford Blake, the big book of complete Blake, Oxford Press, changes it and I don't know what they do [in the Norton anthology]. Let's take a look at "Tyger." You have "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright" in the first stanza and in the last stanza you have "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright." Now in the original manuscripts it's completely different. Blake has "Tyger tyger, burning bright," I think, as the first one. "Tyger tyger," or some mark, or a period, "burning bright," but not exclamation points and the two "tygers" are together as one breath. In the last stanza it's "tyger, tyger burning bright." And if you're singing it you realize you really need that extra breath."
-- from "Sidebar: Allen Ginsberg on William Blake," originally April 19, 1991.
"That day, or another within the same week, I had to move from Union Theological Seminary, following Lucien Carr, who had moved to a hotel on 115th Street. So I decided I'd move out and go to the hotel, and I asked Jack to help me move. So we had to walk down to Columbia campus from 118th to 125th Street, through the campus, and up seven flights, down a long wooden corridor in the Theological Seminary setting to an arched brown oaken door, where I brought out my valise. I took my valise out and turned to the door, closed the door, and said, good-bye door. And Jack said ooh. Then we walked down the rest of the corridor and I said, good-bye corridor. He said, mmm. Then I said, good-bye step number one, good-bye step number two, and we had seven flights of steps to go down. He said, what do you mean? I said, well I know I'll never see it again in the same body, or if I'm in the same body it'll be twenty-five years later or forty years later and so it'll be like walking back into an ancient, interesting, classical dream." [...]
[...] So those were the kind of questions that Kerouac and I both thought about. Our first rapport was over the fact that both of us said good-bye all the time to the space where we were at that moment, realizing that the space was floating in the infinite universe and the universe was changing and that we were transient, interesting, charming phantoms, appreciating the space around, and that we were only there for an hour or two, so we were constantly saying good-bye."
-- both of the above, Allen Ginsberg talking about Jack Kerouac, from "Recollections and Gossip: First Meetings with Jack Kerouac," a panel also featuring David Amram, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, and Edie Parker Kerouac; originally July 28, 1982.
"In relation to the women of the Beat Generation, I think of this quote from Jacob Lawrence, the painter who recently died. 'We all like headlines and that type of thing. But this shouldn't be confused with the real meaning of your work. In fact, I think an artist is most fortunate when he doesn't get too much attention. The so-called art movements usually come after the fact. If you're unfortunate enough to get swept up in a movement then you'll find your self following yourself.' The first thing I thought of when I read that was Jack Kerouac, who I only knew as a drunk under the tables. I came to New York City to meet this person who really was a hero to me, and he really was only drunk all the time, beautiful, sweet, and very drunk, then I can only say that perhaps, had fate been kinder, he might have just gone on writing in relative, just relative success so that he could maybe have said more than he did.
The literary path as I see it has several components. There's the writing, for which time is usually at a premium. That's the first love, the losing of the self in the process of creation, the poem, the short story, the children's story, the novel. Then there's the research and the considered work of book reviews, essays, commissioned articles, translations, editing, where as a writer one performs part of the weave of intellectual thought of one's time. And there's the teaching, the kids, the adults, the prisoners. What all the components share is the idea of service, of serving something other than the ego, serving as the glue of a civilization, serving clarity of thought, the specific vision of your truth."
-- Janine Pommy Vega, from "Women and the Beats," a panel also featuring Anne Waldman, Hettie Jones, and Joanne Kyger; originally June 15, 2000.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
From A to X
Earlier this summer I read From A to X: A Story in Letters, a novel by John Berger published by Verso Books in 2008. I've read much of Berger's art criticism over the years (and wrote a little about it previously in this blog, here) -- Berger is the only art critic I've been able to read more than a page of, let alone whole books. This is the first of his fiction I've read.
From A to X is written as a series of letters from a woman, A'ida, to her lover Xavier who has been sentenced to prison for two life sentences for his political activities (political activities in which A'ida is also involved). Interspersed among the letters are comments Xavier has written on the back of the pages of some of the letters. The tone is alternately lyrical, journalistic, passionate, heartbreaking, stubbornly committed.
"I've been seeing Soko a lot these days. Her nephew has disappeared without a trace. Her sister-in-law is dying in hospital. Her husband's taxi cracked up, so he's not earning, and Soko's sewing takes much longer now, and she can't take on more because her eyesight is failing, and she needs a cataract operation which she'll never be able to afford.
She laments every evening and God knows she has reason enough, and in her nightly lamentation all the misfortunes become equal so she can weave them together as strands in the same continuous prayer asking God to forgive and have mercy on her, Amen.
And this evening while she was lamenting, I thought: if only it was you listening to her! You would show her how to separate her complaints out, and then examine them, one by one, to decide what can be changed and what can't be changed."
In the novel, A'ida works as a pharmacist, in a kind of improvised neighborhood pharmacy, in a city under intermittent political and military siege. Occasionally in her letters, when the threads of the story lead to it, she talks compellingly about the capabilities of one medication or another. Xavier is a mechanic, skilled at fixing machines, and knows how to fly an airplane. In his comments on the back of A'ida's letters he sometimes gives statistics and bits of news about the economy and politics of the world; occasionally he describes in detail the interminable routines of prison life, the limits of the tiny space where he and the other prisoners are confined.
A'ida recounts a visit by Manda, "immense Manda, the music teacher":
"She hasn't changed much. Her shock of hair is dyed black and she still shakes it in the same way. Her dark eyes still alter their size dramatically, according to what she's hearing. What's new is that she has learnt to play the lute.
I'm not certain of the details. She pretends that playing a lute can give her an entry to somewhere she wants to be. Some institution. Some committee. Maybe some building. So she took lessons.
The lute is like no other instrument, she says. As soon as you hug a lute, it becomes a man! You're playing a man. You feel it immediately. You pluck the strings--seven, thirteen, or twenty-one according to your taste--you pluck the strings of his chest, his neck, his shoulders. A lute's music is male, male. You remember all the men you've ever played.
With her thick arms she imitates the gestures of playing a trombone, of making a trumpet call, of hiding a mouth-organ against the mouth, of wheedling a cello. There's a kind of turtle without a shell, she goes on, who's called a lute, because he's beautiful and has the same shape as the musical instrument! But who wants to play turtles, when you can play a man?"
In the time scale encompassed by the novel, A'ida apparently continues writing to Xavier, and going about the details of life, over a period of at least some years. A'ida can't visit Xavier in prison, no possibility of it, because they're not married; their requests for permission to marry are repeatedly denied by the government. In her letters she reports news of the world, the events in the lives of people they both know, the people in her life. Occasionally she makes a reference to playing cards (specifically canasta); in a kind of brief author's preface, Berger suggests that the mentions of card games are coded references to political activities. "I doubt," writes Berger, "whether she played canasta."
Here and there A'ida briefly mentions a letter she's received from Xavier, though his letters are not included as part of the novel, only his sometime comments on the back of A'ida's letters. Though it's obvious that they miss each other profoundly, at no point does either of them seem to lose heart; their abiding love for each other sustains them with no end. They never lose hope of seeing each other again.
"One by one the birds appeared; they didn't fly into the tree, they appeared on its branches like prayers. Gassan's house was destroyed by a missile, aimed, they claim, at a hide-out! The birds perched there on the branches of the apple tree like answers, answers to questions which have no words. Watching the birds, I finally cried.
Gassan wasn't there when his house was destroyed. He had gone to the market and was playing cards with some cronies. When he heard the news, he foundered and fell to the floor, making no sound.
The next day I accompanied him to the ruin. There were several epicentres where everything had been reduced to dust, surrounded by tiny fragments. Except for pipes and wires no recognisable objects remained. Everything which had been assembled during a lifetime had gone without trace, had lost its name. An amnesia not of the mind but of the tangible.
He walked several hundred meters down the road to one of the ancient ruins, where a window-frame was still a window-frame, even if there was no glass, and a chair was still a chair with two legs missing. There he found in an outhouse what he was looking for--a broom.
Then we returned to what a few days before had been his home and he began to sweep, looking not at his feet but into the distance. My instinct was not to interfere, and to treat him as if he were a sleepwalker. I'm not sure how long it went on. It covered a lifetime."
The specific location of the events in the novel is kept a little vague; much of the description suggests the middle east, possibly Palestine, though never comes right out and says. The names of people in the novel are likewise various, suggesting many parts of the world, names that sounded (to my ear) Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, possibly from places in Africa, and elsewhere. I'm sure Berger did this intentionally, to avoid seeming to suggest that the political and economic conditions the novel depicts are limited to any particular city or country or region or population. Beginning her letters, A'ida variously addresses Xavier as Mi Soplete, Ya Nour, Mi Guapo, Kanadim, My on-the-ground-lion (a literal translation from Greek, she says, of "chameleon") and other names.
All of the lives and scenes in the novel are of daily life of people without money or property wealth, without institutional political power. The wealthy and powerful of the world appear in the novel only as distant and indifferent instigators of the catastrophic events that disrupt and cut short the lives of the billions of the earth.
A few of A'ida's letters are marked "letter not sent;" withheld by her presumably because they contained political statements or accounts that it would be too dangerous to send in a police state. Although From A to X doesn't have a plot or storyline in the conventional sense, though in one of the letters (one that's marked "not sent"), A'ida tells of joining a large number of women in the city who have gathered, facing down army tanks and helicopters, forming a human wall, defiant and singing, around a building where several members of the resistance movement are sheltered. This scene makes a kind of climactic moment in the novel.
From A to X is one of the few novels I've read in which the people in it reminded me of people I actually know. I loved reading it. I didn't want it to end.
A'ida visits a bakery she hasn't been in before. Telling about it in a letter she writes:
"You are not outside on the road because you never were. You are in your cell no. 73.
So I walk up the hill alone, wondering what you'll make of the story. I have completely forgotten the biscuits.
When I get home I put on some water to boil to make tea and then I remember them. I unwrap one. Oval and the colour of baked bread. The size of a tongue. Yours or mine. Polvoron Artesano de Almendra. A slight smell of cinnamon. Weight 32 gr. each. I take a small bite for both of us. The baked wheat flour and almond dust, sweet and a little greasy, lines the top of the palette, it sticks tot he curved roof of the mouth, whilst below, on the floor, on our tongue lie tiny fragments of roasted nut to shift between the teeth to bite into.
Munching a Biblia is like pulling an almond blanket over our two heads to keep out sand, rain, the wind or the probing searchlight from the mirador.
He gave us 12. 6 for me, 6 for you if they reach you. If they don't, remember I've taken you inside my mouth.
A.
Last week I was in Suse. And I stood under the same street lamps you'll walk under when you come out. Everything looked broken except the miradors and barbed wire. Everything looked makeshift."
And Xavier's comment, written on the back of the letter:
"All usurpers do their utmost to make us forget that they have only just arrived.
To glimpse the sky I climb above the bunk. The sky is a reminder of what may be temporarily forgotten--e.g. the private equity funds available for financial speculation are today worth 20 times more than the sum total of the world's gross national product!
The wind, rendered gently visible by the clouds, is enough to suggest how the time of such illusions is running out."
From A to X is written as a series of letters from a woman, A'ida, to her lover Xavier who has been sentenced to prison for two life sentences for his political activities (political activities in which A'ida is also involved). Interspersed among the letters are comments Xavier has written on the back of the pages of some of the letters. The tone is alternately lyrical, journalistic, passionate, heartbreaking, stubbornly committed.
"I've been seeing Soko a lot these days. Her nephew has disappeared without a trace. Her sister-in-law is dying in hospital. Her husband's taxi cracked up, so he's not earning, and Soko's sewing takes much longer now, and she can't take on more because her eyesight is failing, and she needs a cataract operation which she'll never be able to afford.
She laments every evening and God knows she has reason enough, and in her nightly lamentation all the misfortunes become equal so she can weave them together as strands in the same continuous prayer asking God to forgive and have mercy on her, Amen.
And this evening while she was lamenting, I thought: if only it was you listening to her! You would show her how to separate her complaints out, and then examine them, one by one, to decide what can be changed and what can't be changed."
In the novel, A'ida works as a pharmacist, in a kind of improvised neighborhood pharmacy, in a city under intermittent political and military siege. Occasionally in her letters, when the threads of the story lead to it, she talks compellingly about the capabilities of one medication or another. Xavier is a mechanic, skilled at fixing machines, and knows how to fly an airplane. In his comments on the back of A'ida's letters he sometimes gives statistics and bits of news about the economy and politics of the world; occasionally he describes in detail the interminable routines of prison life, the limits of the tiny space where he and the other prisoners are confined.
A'ida recounts a visit by Manda, "immense Manda, the music teacher":
"She hasn't changed much. Her shock of hair is dyed black and she still shakes it in the same way. Her dark eyes still alter their size dramatically, according to what she's hearing. What's new is that she has learnt to play the lute.
I'm not certain of the details. She pretends that playing a lute can give her an entry to somewhere she wants to be. Some institution. Some committee. Maybe some building. So she took lessons.
The lute is like no other instrument, she says. As soon as you hug a lute, it becomes a man! You're playing a man. You feel it immediately. You pluck the strings--seven, thirteen, or twenty-one according to your taste--you pluck the strings of his chest, his neck, his shoulders. A lute's music is male, male. You remember all the men you've ever played.
With her thick arms she imitates the gestures of playing a trombone, of making a trumpet call, of hiding a mouth-organ against the mouth, of wheedling a cello. There's a kind of turtle without a shell, she goes on, who's called a lute, because he's beautiful and has the same shape as the musical instrument! But who wants to play turtles, when you can play a man?"
In the time scale encompassed by the novel, A'ida apparently continues writing to Xavier, and going about the details of life, over a period of at least some years. A'ida can't visit Xavier in prison, no possibility of it, because they're not married; their requests for permission to marry are repeatedly denied by the government. In her letters she reports news of the world, the events in the lives of people they both know, the people in her life. Occasionally she makes a reference to playing cards (specifically canasta); in a kind of brief author's preface, Berger suggests that the mentions of card games are coded references to political activities. "I doubt," writes Berger, "whether she played canasta."
Here and there A'ida briefly mentions a letter she's received from Xavier, though his letters are not included as part of the novel, only his sometime comments on the back of A'ida's letters. Though it's obvious that they miss each other profoundly, at no point does either of them seem to lose heart; their abiding love for each other sustains them with no end. They never lose hope of seeing each other again.
"One by one the birds appeared; they didn't fly into the tree, they appeared on its branches like prayers. Gassan's house was destroyed by a missile, aimed, they claim, at a hide-out! The birds perched there on the branches of the apple tree like answers, answers to questions which have no words. Watching the birds, I finally cried.
Gassan wasn't there when his house was destroyed. He had gone to the market and was playing cards with some cronies. When he heard the news, he foundered and fell to the floor, making no sound.
The next day I accompanied him to the ruin. There were several epicentres where everything had been reduced to dust, surrounded by tiny fragments. Except for pipes and wires no recognisable objects remained. Everything which had been assembled during a lifetime had gone without trace, had lost its name. An amnesia not of the mind but of the tangible.
He walked several hundred meters down the road to one of the ancient ruins, where a window-frame was still a window-frame, even if there was no glass, and a chair was still a chair with two legs missing. There he found in an outhouse what he was looking for--a broom.
Then we returned to what a few days before had been his home and he began to sweep, looking not at his feet but into the distance. My instinct was not to interfere, and to treat him as if he were a sleepwalker. I'm not sure how long it went on. It covered a lifetime."
The specific location of the events in the novel is kept a little vague; much of the description suggests the middle east, possibly Palestine, though never comes right out and says. The names of people in the novel are likewise various, suggesting many parts of the world, names that sounded (to my ear) Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, possibly from places in Africa, and elsewhere. I'm sure Berger did this intentionally, to avoid seeming to suggest that the political and economic conditions the novel depicts are limited to any particular city or country or region or population. Beginning her letters, A'ida variously addresses Xavier as Mi Soplete, Ya Nour, Mi Guapo, Kanadim, My on-the-ground-lion (a literal translation from Greek, she says, of "chameleon") and other names.
All of the lives and scenes in the novel are of daily life of people without money or property wealth, without institutional political power. The wealthy and powerful of the world appear in the novel only as distant and indifferent instigators of the catastrophic events that disrupt and cut short the lives of the billions of the earth.
A few of A'ida's letters are marked "letter not sent;" withheld by her presumably because they contained political statements or accounts that it would be too dangerous to send in a police state. Although From A to X doesn't have a plot or storyline in the conventional sense, though in one of the letters (one that's marked "not sent"), A'ida tells of joining a large number of women in the city who have gathered, facing down army tanks and helicopters, forming a human wall, defiant and singing, around a building where several members of the resistance movement are sheltered. This scene makes a kind of climactic moment in the novel.
From A to X is one of the few novels I've read in which the people in it reminded me of people I actually know. I loved reading it. I didn't want it to end.
A'ida visits a bakery she hasn't been in before. Telling about it in a letter she writes:
"You are not outside on the road because you never were. You are in your cell no. 73.
So I walk up the hill alone, wondering what you'll make of the story. I have completely forgotten the biscuits.
When I get home I put on some water to boil to make tea and then I remember them. I unwrap one. Oval and the colour of baked bread. The size of a tongue. Yours or mine. Polvoron Artesano de Almendra. A slight smell of cinnamon. Weight 32 gr. each. I take a small bite for both of us. The baked wheat flour and almond dust, sweet and a little greasy, lines the top of the palette, it sticks tot he curved roof of the mouth, whilst below, on the floor, on our tongue lie tiny fragments of roasted nut to shift between the teeth to bite into.
Munching a Biblia is like pulling an almond blanket over our two heads to keep out sand, rain, the wind or the probing searchlight from the mirador.
He gave us 12. 6 for me, 6 for you if they reach you. If they don't, remember I've taken you inside my mouth.
A.
Last week I was in Suse. And I stood under the same street lamps you'll walk under when you come out. Everything looked broken except the miradors and barbed wire. Everything looked makeshift."
And Xavier's comment, written on the back of the letter:
"All usurpers do their utmost to make us forget that they have only just arrived.
To glimpse the sky I climb above the bunk. The sky is a reminder of what may be temporarily forgotten--e.g. the private equity funds available for financial speculation are today worth 20 times more than the sum total of the world's gross national product!
The wind, rendered gently visible by the clouds, is enough to suggest how the time of such illusions is running out."
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Anti-war actions in the military
Found a good article online by John Letman, basically a review of the book The Will to Resist: Soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan by Dahr Jamail, published this year by Haymarket Books. I haven't read or seen the book; according to Letman's review, the book traces the steadily growing resistance to the wars among soldiers in the U.S. military, and also addresses related issues, such as violence and sexual assault against women soldiers, homophobia in the military, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.
The article, in the website of IPS News, is here.
The publisher's webpage for the book is here, and includes YouTube videos of author Jamail reading from the book and an interview with him from March 2008.
Thanks also to Philip Metres, who posted about the book in his blog Behind the Lines.
The article, in the website of IPS News, is here.
The publisher's webpage for the book is here, and includes YouTube videos of author Jamail reading from the book and an interview with him from March 2008.
Thanks also to Philip Metres, who posted about the book in his blog Behind the Lines.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Poet William Witherup
Poet William Witherup died June 3 at age 73, in Seattle, of leukemia after a brief hospitalization.
I first read Bill Witherup's poetry in the fall of 1971, my last year in high school, in the poetry anthology Quickly Aging Here edited by Geoff Hewitt. The handful of his poems in the anthology stuck with me over the years since, poems of gritty working-class grappling with life, an unsentimental warmth, and at times nightmare visions of the political events of the larger world. An aura of mythology is present in many of his poems, as a part of the texture of ordinary things, a continuous amazement with living beings and the movement of life.
Although I would occasionally find a poem of his in a magazine or anthology over the years, it was only a few years ago that I got my hands on a book of his poems, Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems, published in 2000 by West End Press. All of the passages quoted here are from that collection.
A few years ago a mutual friend put Bill and me in touch by e-mail, and we corresponded sporadically. We met face-to-face once, at the Albuquerque Cultural Festival on Labor Day weekend in 2007, and we had a chance to talk a little here and there during the three days of the festival. I remember him as a large tall man, quiet almost to the point of shyness, with a soft somewhat self-deprecating humor. A mild irrascible muttering in his voice at times. And I also had an impression of delicacy in his movements, an eye for minute detail in things, an almost fragile quality.
These the impressions I came away with from a brief meeting and a few conversations. I sensed him as someone hard to get to know well, though still with a disarming openness about himself. I didn't find out till later of his long struggle with bipolar disorder. It's not easy to cross the vast distances between each of us, even under the best circumstances.
Witherup's more politically explicit poems sometimes remind me a little of William Blake in their visionary quality, though the tone is always thoroughly 20th century, always with a tactile immediacy. Bill Witherup was a poet who wrote with his hands. From the poem "Living by I-5, August 6, 1995":
I first read Bill Witherup's poetry in the fall of 1971, my last year in high school, in the poetry anthology Quickly Aging Here edited by Geoff Hewitt. The handful of his poems in the anthology stuck with me over the years since, poems of gritty working-class grappling with life, an unsentimental warmth, and at times nightmare visions of the political events of the larger world. An aura of mythology is present in many of his poems, as a part of the texture of ordinary things, a continuous amazement with living beings and the movement of life.
Although I would occasionally find a poem of his in a magazine or anthology over the years, it was only a few years ago that I got my hands on a book of his poems, Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems, published in 2000 by West End Press. All of the passages quoted here are from that collection.
We were each alone:(From the poem "We Were Each Alone.")
San Francisco is a desert to the shyness of love.
You sat in a rocking chair by the window,
wanting to die. The streetlight on the corner
shone on your face and bathrobe with the bluish-whiteness
of desert moonlight. I looked in your eyes
and the pupils were as wide as a Saharan night.
You were not in the room, but we were walking among ruins,
trailing a broken wing.
A few years ago a mutual friend put Bill and me in touch by e-mail, and we corresponded sporadically. We met face-to-face once, at the Albuquerque Cultural Festival on Labor Day weekend in 2007, and we had a chance to talk a little here and there during the three days of the festival. I remember him as a large tall man, quiet almost to the point of shyness, with a soft somewhat self-deprecating humor. A mild irrascible muttering in his voice at times. And I also had an impression of delicacy in his movements, an eye for minute detail in things, an almost fragile quality.
These the impressions I came away with from a brief meeting and a few conversations. I sensed him as someone hard to get to know well, though still with a disarming openness about himself. I didn't find out till later of his long struggle with bipolar disorder. It's not easy to cross the vast distances between each of us, even under the best circumstances.
A thousand miles and two months away(From the poem "A Day of Scattered Rain.")
and I am still disturbed
by these metaphors of your skin.
Nose, pores and heart
are overloaded with memories of your smell.
I have become a cloud
swollen with blossoms and moisture--
the pain of left-over love.
Take me, wind, over the mountains
and let me break open!
Witherup's more politically explicit poems sometimes remind me a little of William Blake in their visionary quality, though the tone is always thoroughly 20th century, always with a tactile immediacy. Bill Witherup was a poet who wrote with his hands. From the poem "Living by I-5, August 6, 1995":
Woke up to "Yes, that freeway susurationOr this, from "Elegy for George Jackson," a section of the poem sequence "The Soledad Prison Poems" originally written 1970-71:
Is Hell-flame"; cars and trucks hurtling by
Are ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dead
Yet fleeing that quick lick of white fire.
Melted faces looking for a lost eye,
A missing breast--
Souls tortured as at any Auschwitz,
Belsen, Dachau flayed for lampshades--
These dead are burning headlights at 2:00 am.
And there are demons on the overpasses
In labcoats and dark goggles, checking
Dosimeters for permissible radiation levels.
At dawning the sun explodes--
An orange flash shakes my windows.
Swallows, after the first stir and seethe
Of insects, ignite in air.
There is a terrible stench from the freeway--
Each car has an aura of blue flame.
They say you died in a patch of sunlight.Poet William Witherup strove to tell the truth of the beauties and horrors of the world and our lives, no matter what effort it demanded, or how painful or difficult. We are greater for what he left us. As briefly and slightly as I knew him, I nevertheless found my life on the earth and my life as a poet made fuller by the little that I did know him, and, in abundance, by his poems. Having known Bill Witherup and his poetry, I feel just a little less alone.
After ten lightless years.
Gunned down from behind.
Black man running through the woods
for two hundred years.
Gunned down by the sheriff.
Strung up and burned by the Klan.
Gunned down by the tower guard.
Gunned down running through the alley
toward that patch of light,
that open space where you might breathe
at last.
I hope it is true
that you died in the sun,
that at least they are not lying
about that.
Bless the grass that sponged your blood.
Bless the ant that drank from your tears.
Bless your mother's pillow
that has turned to a block of salt.
Out getting wood again(From the poem "For the Alders Again.")
I draw my bow across
the bones of your dead
and play saw music.
The morning light flashes
from leaf to leaf
from leaf to saw
and back to leaf.
I am a blessed man.
I shine in a new skin of sweat
as I lift in my arms
your great spinal discs.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Poefrika on the 1976 Soweto events
Found this in the blog Poéfrika, a powerful deeply moving post by bloghost Rethabile on the events in June 1976 in which residents in Soweto, South Africa, rose up in rebellion against the apartheid system there. Rethabile's blogpost is here.
