Thursday, May 30, 2013

untitled

by Todd Clouser

We are in a small hotel in the southern Baja
A city called Constitution
It's all the romance you imagine
Cold night wind, men huddled in front of televisions
At sand bars
Gripping at their sweaters

I was here six years ago
The circumstances were different
The person I'd fallen in love with
And moved to Mexico to be with, this was all a secret at the time
Was from here, this little town
We'd been living together in Los Cabos for a few months
I wanted to drive
We had just been to the store and he bought a necklace and a couple new t shirts with some work I got him taking care of a friend's apartment

His name he had originally told me, the first time we met, because I could not pronounce his real one, was Elijah
He had written the other on a napkin
That took place at a bar, soft lights

But we had arrived together to this town to visit, a couple blocks from the town square
Where I had once picked him up with my dog, arriving from 
Minnesota by car
And I always knew he was hiding things
Not for malice, but for shame

And I got a hotel room for us to rest in
I wanted to meet his family, he said he would love that
I had spoken to them on the phone
When the hour came, he went walking alone
I could not go
I did not inquire
I knew

I couldn't have cared less if it was a tent or an estate
What's the difference anyhow, really
In some years people will see that about us
How misguided we were, this want world

But Elijah had watched TV
And had seen the big dreams and false smiles
And he was ashamed
That is tragic

So he wore his new necklace, a cross, and a sweater
And went on down the road
I watched out the hotel window, small hotel, two lane streets, gas stations and small markets
It was ok

We lived together for 2 years or so
It was beautiful but impossible
Manic in every way
I was a heavy drinker at the time and his shame often turned resentment
It ended, didn't dissipate, really ended, no hate, but gone
I was the first person he had lived with, maybe not fell for, but loved in the way partners can
The same was true for me

He went on to live for and with many others
Older men would come and offer to take him away to San Francisco, he liked this
That sounded like Hong Kong with Disney rides and heroin that never hurts sounds to me
He moved to Puerto Vallarta, and was desperate and alone
He was desperate and alone with me as well, looking back
I could not fix that, he was cut and still bleeding, not scarred
That's what I do, think I can control and fix, and lose
But Elijah was type of person we all know has a heart, is tender, impossible not to, impossible to, love


I am here in this little hotel room
And so much has happened since then
The trip we took to Prague together
The photos of his family when a middle-aged man from California sent me an email with the news 8 months ago
He had this photo of himself framed, at about 9 years old, in a school uniform, smiling
He loved to look at it, and sometimes cried

I was in Prague again
With the band
On a day off
And Elijah died
of AIDS
Syphillis, a stroke, and then AIDS
I cried and emailed my father
And went to the hospital to get my blood taken again
I was fine

He wanted to be loved but didn't know what that meant
Or how to allow it to happen
And that's all I can know about that
I travel through this little city
He grew up in
With a cinder block unfinished bedroom
And a pale of clean water for the week
Maybe I should have left him here

_______________________

Todd Clouser, a regular contributor to this blog, is a jazz-rock musician name one of the top 100 musicians worldwide in all genres "on the verge" of making a big contribution. His latest album is The Naked Beat (Royal Potato Family).

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Death

by Dan Ryan


How can a letter be declared dead?
     Are we talking about one, singular letter  
        - Z - 
for instance,
     or a sheet of paper covered in letters,
arranged into words?
     Be the words from a dead language,
are they incomprehensibly dead?
     And, just how should one dispose of a dead letter,
singular or otherwise?
     Little information about the Dead Letter Office
has ever been made public.
     Is burial, or cremation, preferred?
I think I’ve come to a dead end, here.

_____________________________

Dan is a regular contributor to this blog. His work also appears in AlteredScale.com 3.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Tom Cassidy—Untitled

(Click to enlarge and isolate)


_________________________

Tom Cassidy appeared in AlteredScale.com 3 and is a regular contributor to this blog.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Untitled by Kerri Pullo



_____________________



Kerri is originally from the Chicagoland area and currently resides in Tucson, AZ. Her art is primarily asemic and references abstract expressionism as well as street art, graffiti, and Arabic influences.  Kerri utilizes pigmented India Inks and acrylics on substrates of recycled photo paper, marketing mailers, and various foodstuff packaging.

“If you gaze upon her densely layered work for a time, we are confident you will start to see the shapes of letters, words and even phrases that never quite coalesce into a coherence one experiences when reading. This is one defining quality of asemic writing that is magical when done well: the suggestion of language, the ghost of language, an apparition of language that appears and disappears without ever bestowing meaning yet very possibly expresses something ineffable in the mind of the viewer.” - De Villo Sloan, International Union of Mail Artists.

See  http://annetrixiemona.blogspot.com/ for more.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Scrawlex at Patrick's Cabaret, MPLS




AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Re-launch Launch: Jefferson Hansen



The raucous AlteredScale.com issue 3 Launch Reading, which began by quoting punk band The Magnolias—"complicated fun"—and ended with a fist-pumping yell, "Let's party," was not video recorded because of technical difficulties. Five of us who participated in the reading came over to christen my new apartment with a....party....and a reading. I made pesto, cole slaw salad, chicken, and guacamole. The Brannens brought fine cookies. Dan and Mary brought bread, cheese, and beer. I was even in dress pants. We were mighty bourgeois. A good time was had by all.

Jefferson Hansen is the editor of AlteredScale.com. He is the author of the novel ...and beefheart saved craig (BlazeVox) and the selected poems Jazz Forms (Blue Lion Books).

(This is the fifth in a five-part series. All five of us are part of the Uptown Writers Group, which includes visual artists and musicians, in addition to writers. If you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to get involved, contact me at jh4090 (at) gmail.com.)

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Re-launch Launch: George J. Farrah



The raucous AlteredScale.com issue 3 Launch Reading, which began by quoting punk band The Magnolias—"complicated fun"—and ended with a fist-pumping yell, "Let's party," was not video recorded because of technical difficulties. Five of us who participated in the reading came over to christen my new apartment with a....party....and a reading. I made pesto, cole slaw salad, chicken, and guacamole. The Brannens brought fine cookies. Dan and Mary brought bread, cheese, and beer. I was even in dress pants. We were mighty bourgeois. A good time was had by all.

George J. Farrah is a visual artist and poet. His paintings have shown in galleries around the country. His first full-length collection, The Low Pouring Stars (Ravenna Press), will appear later early in 2014. He holds an MFA in writing from Bard College.

(This is the fourth in a five-part series. All five of us are part of the Uptown Writers Group, which includes visual artists and musicians, in addition to writers. If you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to get involved, contact me at jh4090 (at) gmail.com.)

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Re-launch Launch: Dan Ryan



 The raucous AlteredScale.com issue 3 Launch Reading, which began by quoting punk band The Magnolias—"complicated fun"—and ended with a fist-pumping yell, "Let's party," was not video recorded because of technical difficulties. Five of us who participated in the reading came over to christen my new apartment with a....party....and a reading. I made pesto, cole slaw salad, chicken, and guacamole. The Brannens brought fine cookies. Dan and Mary brought bread, cheese, and beer. I was even in dress pants. We were mighty bourgeois. A good time was had by all.

Dan Ryan contributes regularly to this blog.

(This is the third in a five-part series. All five of us are part of the Uptown Writers Group, which includes visual artists and musicians, in addition to writers. If you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to get involved, contact me at jh4090 (at) gmail.com.)


Monday, May 20, 2013

AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Re-launch Launch: Mary Kasimor




The raucous AlteredScale.com issue 3 Launch Reading, which began by quoting punk band The Magnolias—"complicated fun"—and ended with a fist-pumping yell, "Let's party," was not video recorded because of technical difficulties. Five of us who participated in the reading came over to christen my new apartment with a....party....and a reading. I made pesto, cole slaw salad, chicken, and guacamole. The Brannens brought fine cookies. Dan and Mary brought bread, cheese, and beer. I was even in dress pants. We were mighty bourgeois. A good time was had by all.

Mary Kasimor has published three full-length collections of poetry. Her chapbook, Duplex, is available at TheAlteredScalePress.com.

(This is the second in a five-part series. All five of us are part of the Uptown Writers Group, which includes visual artists and musicians in addition to writers. If you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to get involved, contact me at jh4090 (at) gmail.com.]



Sunday, May 19, 2013

AlteredScale.com Issue 3 Re-launch Launch: Jonathan Brannen

The raucous AlteredScale.com issue 3 Launch Reading, which began by quoting punk band The Magnolias—"complicated fun"—and ended with a fist-pumping yell, "Let's party," was not video recorded because of technical difficulties. Five of us who participated in the reading came over to christen my new apartment with a....party....and a reading. I made pesto, cole slaw salad, chicken, and guacamole. The Brannens brought fine cookies. Dan and Mary brought bread, cheese, and beer. I was even in dress pants. We were mighty bourgeois. A good time was had by all.

Jonathan Brannen will be the Featured Artist in AlteredScale.com 4. His poetry has been translated into three languages. He is also a visual poet, in addition to being an Americana and electronica musician. Two of his books are available at TheAlteredScalePress.com.

{This is the first in a five-part series. All five of us are part of the Uptown Writers Group, which includes visual artists and musicians, in addition to writers. If you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to get involved, contact me at jh4090 (at) gmail.com.)


Friday, May 17, 2013

CONVERSATIONS THAT DON’T TAKE PLACE BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO WILL NEVER MEET: A CONVERSATION WITH BUCK DOWNS


by Dan Gutstein & Buck Downs

"Dan (L) and Buck (R) disassociated and rokken, ca. unknown"


DAN: So I’ve been going back and forth with Jeff & he’s like, I’m spozed to axe you about the Corin Tucker (I know not these) poems but after that, he wants you to axe me some questions, too. So, I’d axe you a question, then you’d answer all Buck Downs and then you’d axe me a question, if that makes sense.


BUCK: That shouldn’t have to count as your first question—we think a lot about what counts, huh? the riddle of where jump ends and rock begins, stuff like that—but Jeff refers to “I Wanna Be Your Corin Tucker”, a series of poems from a few years back. Parts of it appeared in Altered Scale last year, is why he asked, & you can look them up there.

The title plays on a Sleater-Kinney song, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”, and so there’s a pantheon renovation or upgrade project referenced there. 90s rock stays on my mind at least as much as “classic punk”, odd phrase to type. The poems more or less happen there, taking place in some Black Cat of the Mind.

So I met you after you moved here, I guess? ten years ago, more? then you moved away for a while, and then you came back, & you’ve been here for a while, but moved around within DC, and now make the commute up Baltimore for work. I was at your place to hear Cathy Wagner & Susana Gardner read a few months ago, and it seems to me that you’ve had to make a lot of “no” decisions when it comes to keeping stuff. So different to me—I’ve been living in the same house for almost 20 years, and the house is just piles of stuff. So what about moving, getting rid of stuff? Do you miss any stuff? What does that mean?


DAN: Ah, I just read the Corin Tucker poems at Altered Scale 2 and I dig. They seemed a little bit different in tone for you—praps cuz I’m used to hearing your voice thunder through a reading space, I’m used to getting personal problem postcards in the mail, I’m used to your Florida armadillo-kickin’ persona, and I really enjoyed them. We kinda go “I Just Wanna Be Your Dog” to Joey Ramone to Corin Tucker just like that!

It’s true, but I do live very minimally, and it’s a thoughtful observation for you to make. I don’t have much furniture, just about the only luxury I allow myself is a huge bookshelf of jazz CDs, and I only keep about 100 or 150 books around. Part of that has to do with the ‘temporary’ feelings that I’ve always had as a writer, who constantly has to worry about where his next dollar may be coming from, but my Baltimore job has been very stable over the past few years, and so I’m like, humph, why no clutter? It is good, as with the Cathy/Susana reading, to have some central space, and I enjoy hosting parties, as well. I’ve held a few legendary shindigs over the years, including the one (in my Kalorama Rd apt.) where Rod poked his head in through the hatch and in asking Tom for a match, somehow, psychically collapsed the chair from underneath Mr. Orange. But I digress. Yes, I think you and I have known each other for 15 years, at least. I used to work for you over on New York Ave!

Part of our shenanigans as friends, has involved the Gus Burger. We’ve both eaten one, and we both know the record for eating Gus Burgers—3 Gus Burgers in 8 minutes. Do you think you could beat that? How much mayonnaise have you seen in the hands of a dude who just sprang out of the floor? I think what I’m getting at is—you’re a writer who (among his many gifts) can synthesize the oddities and humor and human behavior, etc., around us, and make it ‘everyday accessible’, thoroughly unique, and at that, revitalizing to the spirit. At least for me it is. What are you after, as a writer? What drives you to say what you say? What are the internal guide-posts that meter or free your language?


BUCK: The Gus Burger from the White Spot in Charlottesville, Va., involves a lot of mayo and a fried egg. It seems conceptually suspect, but is tasty enough to make anyone (well, at least you & I) think that eating three of them in 8 minutes would be pretty easy. FWIW, you can get something similar at Mr. Henry’s, on Capitol Hill; they call it a “hangover burger” and features egg, cheddar, and bacon. Kind of a two-fer, in case you missed breakfast.

What is the deal, that I am after? I have been a person who has intrusive thinking, racing mind, conversations that don’t take place between people who will never meet, and some other related stuff going on more or less all the time. It’s quite a show, up in here. If I don’t write it down, it gets pretty tiring. So that’s what the source material is—the end result of trying to cope with a semi-continuous crypto-discourse that’s going on in and around me.

That stuff fills up notebooks, and when the notebooks get filled, they get typed up, making something like a 150pp. answer to the question, “dude what *were* you thinking?” Reading back through, cutting and pasting, rewriting: I get to set what I am thinking today alongside what I was thinking two years ago; a kind of parallax view.

And so, two questions for you: up until a few years ago, the highly varied kinds and numbers of jobs you’ve done seemed to be a significant source of material or ground from which your writing grew. Now you’ve had the same job for quite a while, and actually have kind of homed in on the specific kind of writing/teaching job you do at MICA. What does it mean for you, not to be doing a variety of jobs for the time being, and what does it mean for the writing you get to do?

And second, are you the editor who added “Gus Burger” to the Urban Dictionary?


DAN: The Squirrel, our after-readings haunt, offers the possibility of an egg atop a burger—as a “fixin’” but not as a formal sandwich with a name. I mean, I think about that guy, Gus, who must’ve been so well known for his eggburger fondness that the White Spot bemonikered its eggburger, or, you know, it could be that generic Get off the Bus, Gus, kinda thing, so it may be an Everywhere Gus sitch, but I doubt it. Lo, I am not the editor who placed Gus Burger up at Urban Dictionary. I’m responsible for a few other things there, but, alas, not the Gus Burger dernit.

There is Buck Downs the writer, and I’m grateful for those insights into your writerly machinations, but there is, to be sure, Buck Downs the reader-aloud. Anyone who has been to a Buck Downs reading, will remember it. You holler, you sing, you cool it off, you speak the words. I kid you a little bit, by calling you The Champ, but actually, I mean it, you have impressed audiences for quite some time, and there aren’t too many poets who soar like that—who also bring content to the table. Did this style just erupt or did it evolve? Did you study any literary types or peeps from other worlds?

Also, somewhat up that alley, what is the status of the Buck Downs Smile? It is the most disarming smile in American letters. I mean, I think it’s doing just fine, but could you give a few examples of people, situations, explosives, rhetorics, etc., that you have disarmed-by-smiling?

As for my work situation, yes, I’ve been commuting to Baltimore for more than 5 years, mostly on the MARC train. It’s the second position in a sequence that, by now, represents about eight years of full-time employment, whereas I, like many writers from time to time, used to have (and enjoyed) holding as many as 3 to 5 jobs at a time. It sounds chaotic, but actually, if done properly, it would save and create time ... for writing. So, does the one-job full-time system work, as a writer? I think so. Like any schedule, you just got to get wise to it. It’s true that the many-jobs system usually did produce a host of characters to study and perhaps capture in a piece of writing, but this has been replaced by my exploits on the MARC, as well as in the streets, gutters, alleyways, pubs, and byways of Baltimore.


BUCK: Having a good set of teeth is a blessing, so I can’t really take much credit for that. Of course, there’s more to a smile than just the teeth, but again, there’s not much that’s original with me. More than a little of my life philosophy comes from or sounds like bumper stickers of the sort they used to sell at e.g., Stuckey’s, and maybe still do; for example, “SMILE—It Makes People Wonder What You’re Up To!”

There are a lot of models to list that I heard & who gave me license to follow the sound of the voices in & out of my head. There’s a cassette anthology Watershed did from the Naropa Archives, where I heard Anne Waldman’s “Light and Shadow” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Ego Confession”, among many others; there’s the Exact Change Annual, which included “Imaginary Elegies” by Jack Spicer and “At Night the States” by Alice Notley. There’s Lenny Bruce Live at Carnegie Hall, and Rant in E-Minor by Bill Hicks.

But before and after all the models have been chased down, there is a matter that I call something like cultivating a basic sense of friendliness toward yourself and the work you do. What could come out of that is as numerous as the people who are seriously working at writing and reading their work. For me, it comes out as free changes in tone and register, from joke to admonition to verbal hard bop, across the space of the poem. The freedom to really let that out comes from a practice that involves reading my own work to myself, aloud or silently, hundreds of times, as part of an everyday writing practice, to develop a friendly and thorough familiarity with the work as it is.

It’s something that came into its fullness in writing the books of Pontiac Fever, which is to say it took twenty years of writing poetry to get to a state where I was writing poetry that I wanted to read and reread every day, and still do.

It’s good for me to remember the very long time it took, because it’s easy for me, listening to someone read their poems to think, they don’t seem to like their own poems much, or even know them particularly well.

The idea of a daily practice and personal development doesn’t come naturally to me, lazy guy that I am. I kind of stumbled upon and stagger through it here at middle age. But I think for you, it is something that, if not innate, was picked up much earlier than it was for me, since your story has included and still includes a regular athletic regimen. I think now and then that you could write “Strength Training for Poets” and really change the MFA world, by reintroducing the P.E. class, in a friendly way, to our peers who grew up hating gym and gym class and gym rats and all that.

So tell us a little bit about your practice as an athlete, and where it comes together or pulls away from your practice as a writer.


DAN: Man, I couldn’t agree with you more, about an author who just “goes through the motions” during a reading. It happens more often than not, and it’s perpetrated by “some of our most famous authors”, and the implication seems to be that the audience must acknowledge this funereal drudgery as unavoidable and necessary. All too common and ugh.

When you mention great comedians like Bill Hicks, and also touch upon the jazz genre, hard bop, it brings to mind the many forays that writers make into other art forms. I know, for instance, that you’re very active in the DC Arts community, given your many associations with spaces like DCAC, as well as the many bands who play at your readings. What do the terms “multi-genre”, “collaborative activity”, and “artistic cross-pollination” very literally mean to you and your writing?

In a bit of a related vein, why do you gravitate toward certain writers? Who are some of your favorite dead and buried writers, and who are some of your favorite living writers—that is, who are breaking ground in a different way?

It’s interesting that you bring up my past athletic travails. There are, as you suggest, positives and drawbacks, alike, to that past. The positives are probably obvious enough. The discipline of training establishes a certain regularity, and so, it was never hard to sit down for three or four mornings in a row and write out a bunch of crap. To sit there, as tedious and painful as it may have been, and really delve. A healthy body also makes for an active mind. I really believe that. John Coltrane, one of the most brilliant Americans, spent too much time, by his own admission, strung out on various substances, and admitted that he was rarely productive in those stretches.

The down side to the “athletic past” is the kind of “locker room conservatism” that once attached itself to me. When I began writing poems, they were really, really dreadful. They were narrative, and confessional, and they were wimpy. When I came back to DC in 1995, and began to meet a few people in the DC Poetry scene—i.e., Mark, Rod, you—was when I really began to see a host of different possibilities. Whereas the physical nature of a sport and its attendant ‘worldview’ influenced me on some level to craft predictable narrative works, the avant/experimental crowd really threw me into a new mindset. For which I’ve been very grateful.

BUCK: The topic of favorites brings me back to the idea of cultivating a basic sense of friendliness towards yourself and the writing you do. It sounds pretentious, I’m sure, to say “I Am My Favorite Poet”, but at the same time, if I didn’t like what I was doing, I hope I would either change or quit, and in fact, I have.

Here in DC we have this great little scene that continues to remain happily and substantially sub-rosa. It has been good to me, and has waxed and waned for some 40 years, before I got here, even. I am specifically thinking of the poetries that came about under the moniker Mass Transit, which is a great example of a self-supporting, mutually-sustaining creative community, and the waves of creativity have spiraled out from it since the 70s. Mass Transit is so great to me that it is completely beside the point and actually very nice that it is not more widely known, and has been allowed to grow and play in the shadow of power, undisturbed by institutional care.

And I was typing the part above yesterday, and Tina Darragh walked by the window where I was! and I completely lost the bead of what I was thinking/typing. So yeah, mad obeisance and lifetime membership to the Mass Transit/DCPoetry.com continuum for me.

From time to time I get into a string of correspondence with a writer who’s not in DC, and they almost always remind me how great it is to have landed in DC and wound up in this poetry constellation (Joe Ross, I am thanking you today!). By comparison, it seems like it kinda sucks to be a poet almost everywhere else in America, and I am at a loss to understand why that would be. But then I’ve been living here for 25 years now, and my perspective is probably challenged. What do you say, Dan—is DC the best, or what? If So,Why? If Not, Why Not? & you can have the last word on all these things, unless something else comes up.


DAN: I think that poetry communities will thrive for a few good reasons. The biggest one is—there must be cheap-enough quarters in town for young, interesting writers to inhabit, and in so milling-around, find a scene such as ours, hang out with us, give readings, attend readings, and slay us with their mayhem. And I think that we have a cadre of excellent young energy in our midst: folks recently enough like Ronan the Barbarian, Fitz, ‘The Voice’ Marston, the other Fitz, the second other Fitz, and Pook, and so forth. I realize that one of them Fitzzes is about my age, and I’m just goofing around.

Then, I would say, the writing has to be excellent, and boundary pushing, and innovative, and languagey, and so avant that it’s Cossack, and it is, it is all of those things and more.

I’ve always argued that we have enough for a ‘School’, i.e., an anthology that could become famous, but folks with level heads have properly thwapped me on that front, which is probably for the best. Still, I do believe that the Mass Transit/DC Poetry.com reservoir of writings could be condensed into a major anthology, and so—yes, DC is among the best, and I don’t think there is a city fulla poets who could take us, simply put. I’d like our chances vs. Enny-City. 

____________________________

Dan Gutstein and Buck Downs both appear in AlteredScale.com issue 2. (Link is to contents page.)

Blood and Gutstein, Dan's blog.

Dan Gutstein at wikipedia.

Buck Downs at Lulu.com

DCPoetry.com

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

“WHAT THEN?” SANG PLATO’S GHOST: CHRISTINE TOBIN’S SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

by Jack Foley


Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?



            —W.B. Yeats, “The Scholars”

To write for my own race
And the reality
            —W.B. Yeats, “The Fisherman”

On the way to Berkeley radio station KPFA and on the way home I listened to Irish, London-based jazz singer Christine Tobin singing her versions of poems by Yeats. The CD is called Sailing to Byzantium and it came out from Trail Belle Records. I think it’s not at all a CD for Yeats critics, but it is entirely a CD for lovers of Yeats’ poetry—though they have to be lovers of Yeats’ poetry who are also interested in new sounds. For such, Sailing to Byzantium is an amazing experience.

Tobin has an ear utterly fearless of dissonance but also tuned towards harmony—with free jazz flavorings. What she brings out in Yeats is the wild, reckless, utterly subversive quality of his imagination. I doubt that Yeats would have liked what she does—and, personally, I’m not sure that I “like” Tobin’s voice— but I found this CD an immensely rewarding experience.

I think you first need to know the poems in Yeats’ own terms—the way one finds them in the collections—and then to see what Tobin brings to them, what light she sheds. Even when you disagree with her emphasis—“Their hearts have not grown cold” in “The Wild Swans at Coole” is, in my view, “Their hearts have not grown cold”; “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, / The falcon cannot hear the falconer” in “The Second Coming” is not an image of chaos, as Tobin imagines it, but an image of escape—you cannot deny the immense passion Tobin brings to the poems or her brilliant recognition / re-creation of aspects of the poet that are almost entirely covered over in the immense padded mattress of the critical enterprise that has grown up around his work. “Do you think you understand Yeats?” Tobin asks. “Listen to this.” And we’re off on a wildly imaginative, utterly stunning, utterly disturbing roller coaster ride that, amazingly, brings us into the very heart of this mad, reckless, brilliant, crazy poet.

Who but a non academic, free jazz, woman singer—put an emphasis on the “non,” the “free,” and the “woman”—could possibly have achieved such a thing? You’ve never heard Yeats presented in such terms, and yet—once you’ve heard them—the terms seem utterly appropriate. It is not a desecration of his work but a revelation that drives you back into it, ready to see it anew, ready to re-experience the dangerous newness of these much-recognized, much-praised, much-memorized, much explained verses.

Oh, the chances Tobin takes! “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is one of Yeats’ most beautiful poems, and one would expect it to be set as a delicate folk tune—something to be sung by Joan Baez at her purest:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Instead, Tobin notices that this poem is about someone hallucinating, having a spell of madness, and the music reflects that: after a haunting, deliberately “strange” flute introduction, everything flies apart into various layers, dissonances, vocal riffs, all whirling together. Perhaps the most complexly beautiful of all the pieces is Tobin’s setting of Yeats’ wonderful “In Memory of Eva Core-Booth and Con Markievicz”:

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossoms from the summer’s wreath;
The older is condemned to death....

On three of the tracks, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Pity of Love,” and “The White Birds,” Gabriel Byrne reads the poems relatively straight. Byrne has a lovely Irish voice but the readings have a slight Poets Corner feeling. One can see why Tobin included these readings—Can’t we have someone just reading these poems?—but Byrne’s renditions do little to illuminate the work. (One remembers Yeats’ own vowel-mad  reading of one of the poems Byrne recites, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”)

It goes without saying that when a poet is welcomed into the enormous, fame-granting
academic apparatus, much is gained. Where would we be without the literally thousands of books, theses, articles, classes and websites that deal with James Joyce—who in point of fact courted such attention. (Joyce is reputed to have said during the writing of Finnegans Wake, “Wait, this passage is not yet obscure enough!”) And yet something is lost as well. What is lost is the sheer strangeness of the poetic gift, its out-of-bounds quality, the fact that it always takes us elsewhere, whether to the cottages of the peasants Yeats visited or to his séances or to the wild speculations of the immensely talented, simultaneously genuine and phony con(mystic)woman, Madame Blavatsky. Even at his most bourgeois, celebrated, or medaled, the poet remains some sort of ausländer:

            The children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty year old, smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledean body....
            (“Among School Children”)

Fifty years ago, Paul de Man took on the Yeats Industry—with little success. De Man was the only critic to determine exactly how Porphyry’s essay on the cave of the nymphs (De antro nympharum: referred to often in Yeats’ work) functions in Yeats’ poetry, and his essays remain ground-breaking, maverick explications of Yeats’ work. (Yeats critic Thomas Parkinson once told me that he was “sorry” de Man wrote about Yeats.) Christine Tobin’s work is of another order of illumination, but illumination it is.

Make no mistake about it, however: Tobin may be Irish and London-based but her vowels and consonants are thoroughly American. The work on this CD is jazz.  But it is jazz showing as clearly as in a Miles Davis solo that no one really knows where this art form can go, what its boundaries may be:

The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but Time.
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till Time catch.
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know:
We the great gazebo built;
They convicted us of guilt:
                                    Bid me strike a match and blow.

____________________


Jack Foley’s radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard on Berkeley, California radio station KPFA every Wednesday at 3; his column, “Foley’s Books,” appears in the online magazine Alsop Review. He has published 11 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, and Visions and Affiliations, a chronoencyclopedia of California poetry. In 2010 Foley was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. A webfestschrift celebrating his life and work can be found in the Fall 2012, vol. 5, no. 1, Tower Journal (www.towerjournal.com; go to Archive).
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Foley_(poet)#Biography.

Jack Foley contributes regularly to this blog.






Terrence Folz Reading From "Bunt Burke"

  Terrence Folz's chapbook  Bunt Burke will appear from The Circulatory Press in August 2021. The above film features him reading some o...