Jeffrey Side: Carrier of the Seed

Carrier of the Seed is a Blazevox e-book by UK poet Jeffrey Side. Those skeptical about the e-book format would do well to peruse it; it is proof positive that e-books are, in fact, both real and legitimate. This is a single long poem; 63 pages long, and its formal characteristics are unique: it features a single column composed of spare, terse lines, going straight down the page. This gives the poem a sleek, lean look, as is customary with Side. Reading the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, brisk rhythm. There is an obvious connection with some aspects of Language Poetry; the primary difference between, say, Barrett Watten's Progress and Carrier is that Carrier does actually tell a story, albeit elliptically. This is a story of love lost: memory associations, forms of consciousness which accrue to it.

What happens is that Side will often break through the fast-moving, but often opaque surface of language-as-language into something like this:

my love I
need you so
much but more
than else I'm
waiting for you

There is a relationship being posited, and the poem's velocity can be taken as a metaphor for the poet's escape, or attempted escape. It is also important to note that specific scenes do get interspersed in the "deluge" format:

as to how
many erections she
caused in a
crowded room who
can say with
signs and signals
from her hips

The title of the poem implies a kind of address to manhood itself, what constitutes being a man-in-the-world. This address to/of manhood is complicated by the relationship scenario that is enacted in the poem:

all day and
night I fight
for light while
you were with
my mistress it
just makes a
fuck of me
as I go
up to the
south of hills

The relationship is ambiguous, manhood (as presented here) is ambiguous, and it all goes by so fast that the poem demands multiple readings. There is also a song-lyric quality to many of the most memorable bits in the poem:

I can't get
you under I
can't be leaving
you not until
I've done everything
I have to

This visceral, heightened formality is one I look for in poetry right now. It's Language poetry, with greater velocity, more affective drama and intensity, a kind of balls-out sangfroid. Yet, the implied presence of music does not preclude an engagement with poetry-as-history:

calling all cars
calling all cars
Keats let me
down too much
you left before
we could be
strangers this is
a trying time

Burns and Milton also put in memorable appearances. Bits of rhyme jazz the thing up as well:

life with fetters
cut from water
pearl you never

The following bit, for me, is the heart of the poem:

night and you
had a pocket
to keep you
out of sight
as you tried
to be so
helpful but maybe
we never existed
separately so nothing
can be sacred
and I cannot
love or hate
and I have
no care for
fate and it
will be chaos
in the end

This is a poem that extends the thematic range of avant-gardism in the English language. It demonstrates the kind of humanistic gravitas which Barrett Watten does not, yet it maintains crispness, pungent sharpness for its duration. I immediately thought, also, of Chris McCabe and Mary Walker Graham, younger poets who are taking Language Poetry and expanding its parameters. If this is, in fact, a kind of movement (what is now being called "post-avant"), Side fits squarely into it.

Mini Q & A: Karen Volkman

Adam Fieled: I’m struck by the manner in which you manage the sonnet form. You manage to balance the formalist’s impulse to craft and the post-modernist’s impulse to abstract. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how this balance was achieved.

Karen Volkman: I'm afraid it's a bit difficult to say how I came to the "balance" —the sonnet project was a very unexpected development in my work, and took me by surprise — continues to, in fact. I can say my touchstones through the writing have been the trinity of Hopkins, Mallarme, and Rilke. (Valery has also been a reference for some of the most recent poems.) I of course deeply revere the great sequences of the Renaissance, but it was reading Mallarme in French and Rilke's sonnets in German that really pushed me to try the form — something about the intense materiality of sound impacting through the foreign words and syntax.

I hope to continue this conversation at some point in the future...

Blazevox: Beams, and more

The new Adam Fieled Blazevox e-book is called Beams.

Beams is divided into four sections: Beams, Apparition Poems, Madame Psychosis, and Virtual Pinball. 

........................................................................................................

In Opera Bufa news, Chris McCabe is placing two copies of the book in London's Saison Poetry Library.

Simone Muench has placed several pieces from the book in her Chicago-based web-zine Sharkforum.

........................................................................................................

Six new sonnets in Lars Palm's e-journal skicka. 

........................................................................................................

An Opera Bufa postscript. It became obvious, in the Teens, that the book had spawned legions of imitations. And imitations. And imitations. And again. Yeats had a thing about dogs, and fleas. I agree with him.

Otoliths: Opera Bufa, etc.

Adam Fieled's first full-length book, now out from Otoliths, is Opera Bufa. 

Opera Bufa is available to be purchased here. 

.......................................................................................

This picture of me was taken in Brooklyn in March, where I read at Stain Bar under the aegis of Amy King/Mipoesias, who also took the picture. 

Mary came with me, and we met Mary Walker Graham and Briana Winter, also pictured, there.

P.F.S. Presents pictures (Timothy Yu)

                                  

                          Simone Muench

                                        Adam Fieled

Andrew Lundwall, Adam Fieled, Simone Muench, Steve Halle

                        Kate the Great's

Thanks again to Tim for taking pictures at the Philly Free School Presents reading and sharing them.

Dusie Kollektiv: Posit, etc.

The new Dusie chapbook, electronic and print, by Adam Fieled, is Posit.

Posit is being released as part of the Dusie Kollektiv. 

..................................................................................................

I got a nice Dusie chap in the mail yesterday from Jordan Stempleman. His new chap is called Horse Sense. It strikes me as an odd title- horse sense usually implies practicality, an ability to see through blarney and unnecessary complexities to the heart of the matter. The Stempleman poems included here, however, are ornate, complex, and intellectually ambitious. They don't demonstrate horse sense per se, but create a kind of gilded labyrinth for the brain to play around with. I kept thinking of Self-Portrait era John Ashbery. Stempleman may turn out to be a kind of heir apparent to Ashbery; his formal elegance, rich vocabulary, and intricate layering suggest this. The chap is sprinkled with memorable lines- The night to remember is impatiently waiting/ to be left alone (which recalls Ashbery's famous the night, as usual, knew what it was doing), What a difference it is/ to be between the unwritten and the unsaid (this one strikes me as more Eliotic), There is a looseness in tending/ to look back (this could go either way). This particular chap is a pleasure, a reminder that a good chap can be as important as a good book.

Eyeballs

They sent a maid
to clean Jocasta's

chamber, a stout
ex-maenad, still

full of wine. She
happened upon

the two eyeballs
of Oedipus, doused

with blood, beneath
Jocasta's dangling

feet. They were
smooth, tender

as grapes. She
pocketed them.

They became play-
things for her cats.

Perhaps there is
use for everything,

she thought, raising
a glass to her lips;

and if I am a thief,
who will accuse me?

This poem is featured in the Dusie chapbook Posit, as included in the 2007 Kollektiv; and, as of 2017, in the Argotist E-Book The Posit Trilogy. More from Posit in Lars Palm's skicka.  

Theodor Adorno: Lyric Poetry and Society

Theodor Adorno asserted that lyric poetry, which tends to focus on individuals and subjective impressions, can in fact be used as a kind of societal barometer. It isn't what is in the lyric poems, necessarily; it's what is left out. Lyric poetry implicitly implicates an uncaring, mechanized, homogeneous society. Because lyric poetry is traditionally the province of the "epiphanic/Romantic I", and because Language Poetry has the dual aim of robbing this "I" of its perceived hegemony and also enacting an (often Marxist) critique of conspicuously consumptive (American) society, it made me wonder what, in fact, is a more effective method of effecting change: lyric poetry that implicates indirectly, or post-avant poetry that takes, not exactly a direct approach, but a more direct (even when "deconstructive") approach then the conventional lyric takes, in its assault on materiality and societal conventions.

Adorno uses the example of Baudelaire, and the note of despair which runs through his poems. The formal aspects of Baudelaire's poetry were, for Adorno, a way of classicizing his work, separating it from the heavy vulgarian influence of the bourgeoisie. Formality in high art is punkish enough to do that trick. By Adorno's standards, Baudelaire gets tangled, though, because by the time he wrote Paris Spleen he was criticizing bourgeois France rather directly. His allegories all exposed the cold, hard reality beneath the veneer of charm and lightness which dominated nineteenth-century upper-class France. How about the lyricists of today? This is hard for me to address— if there are any genuine ones, I don't really read them. I do write lyrically, and read poets that do lyrical stuff, like Corso, Larkin, and others, sometimes, but these poets don't seem to be pure lyricists. Many lyric textual personas do, in fact, implicate an uncaring "consumerist" society, sometimes directly, and with darkling hints of levels built into society more sinister than the merely consumerist. These seem to move in a dark, miasmic wilderness, from Wordsworth and the English Romantics on out. It seems that they manifest the sort of syndrome Adorno is referencing.