July 2004 Archives

Ten years ago I began a collaborative project with Barbara Nathanson, a painter living in Northridge, California, just north of Los Angeles. In short, I have been writing poems and sending them to Barbara in small batches of 15 to 30 every so often, and she has developed paintings based on her reading of the poems, at least some of them. Just this week I completed the last of the poems "set aside" specifically for this collaborative relationship.

It started in early 1994 while I was still living in the LA area. I had met Barbara one afternoon while stealing some time away from work, on one of my frequent walks around "downtown" LA. (This subject is worth another entry. LA city, is a great place for walking.) I stumbled into an artists' cooperative in an old storefront at 7th and Flower. Barbara was "sitting" it for the day.

We hit it off (partly because I'd met precious few non-finance types in downtown LA to that point) and talked about working together at some point. That point came when Barbara wanted to create an installation using discarded microfiches from the bookstore next door. She's classic in that way--scrounging for material and thinking up ingenious ways to reify or re-visualize the world's discards.

She eventually gave me a shoebox of about 500 microfiches with the idea that I might glean some of the language from their title bars that she could incorporate into the installation, thus creating found poetry from found objects. I spent an entire weekend randomly sorting through the cards. Actually, there was at least some method to it: I had an old oak table I'd bought years before in Wilmington, North Carolina. I "tiled" the top of it with microfiches and then picked cards up three at a time (always 3 for some reason or other). I then assembled locator words from the title bar, again at random, into short lines or phrases, intending to string them together into some kind of found poem.

I got carried away with the project, though, and began to understand that what I was really doing was creating titles for poems that might be written in the future. This idea really appealed to me. After all, it gave me a somewhat defined task (150-160 titles); it was entirely future-bound; it was, paradoxically, built upon outdated, even antique technology; it had the potential for a much deeper dialogue between Barbara and me.

What I didn't realize at the time was how this project would thoroughly change not only my writing process but all poetics related to the process: voice modulation, acquisition of subject matter, attitude toward the poem, understanding of what a poem is or can be. This last issue was perhaps the most important for me, as I learned with the project to approach the poem, the writing of a poem, purely from this perspective: what can this poem be (as opposed to what should this poem be)? It marked the first time in my life that I thought of words truly as the material of poetry, instead of as poetry's referent. (I had been stuck in this referential thinking even after writing a dissertation on Aristotle's Poetics!)

Barbara was surprised, and, I imagine, a little disappointed when I returned her shoebox of microfiches with this new idea in mind. But she could see my excitement, no doubt, and agreed to the collaboration. Something that was to have taken maybe a weekend and result in a one-time installation became a decade-long conversation between me and this painter.

As I wrote the poems and shared them with her, Barbara began reading and absorbing them as only an artist can--as verbal material converted to "made" things. Just like paintings and pots. (None, or virtually none, of these poems is nonsensical. Each is crafted, shaped, directed, and, I hope, singable in the way that all lyric poetry is; that is, available to the voice.) And as Barbara asbsorbed certain poems, she too changed her approach, developing whole new paintings instead that were based on images and lines from the poems. Sometimes, a line from the poem became--de Chirico-like--the title of the painting.

Over the years, a number of the paintings have been sold and some of the poems have been published. So our dialogue has found its way, in pieces and parts, to a more public venue.

Microfiche to poem title to poem to painting to poem line. It has been a most rewarding exchange for a very long time!

I've just returned from a two-week road trip that took me to Florida for a niece's wedding, then to North Carolina to see family, next to Ohio to see a friend from graduate school, and finally back to St. Louis. During the trip I slept in a rest stop south of Macon, Georgia; at my brother's house in Melbourne, Florida; at a friend's house in Jacksonville, Florida; at my mother's in Wilmington, North Carolina; in a Kroger parking lot in Charleston, West Virgina; and another rest stop somewhere in Indiana. I drove along rivers, through mountains, along the coast, through southern low land, then back through foothills and mountains to the Mississippi.

During the trip I finished reading Dan Brown's Deception Point, which I liked much better than Digital Fortress. I've now read all of Brown's books. I'd rate them in this order, from best to worst, which might be the order in which Brown wrote them: Da Vinci Code, Deception Point, Angels and Demons, Digital Fortress.

Also along the way I started reading The Secret Life of Bees. A wonderful story, so far.

Kim and I were chatting yesterday about The Iliad. Kim works where I work, at E&Y, as a researcher and industry analyst for the health care industry. She's one of those fearless readers who will take on something like The Iliad without flinching, even though she doesn't have a degree in literature. Kim said that she was enticed to read the epic after seeing the recent movie (which I missed out on, at least on the big screen). Apparently, a coterie of cognoscenti of the Homeric version hooted and howled through the entire movie, especially at scenes the director intended to be taken seriously. Kim's own review? A thumbs-down. Meanwhile, she's up to Book III, and already awash in body parts, epithets, and feckless gods.

mark(s), an online literary & arts magazine edited in Detroit, has some very interesting content. I prefer the poetry, as always, and look there first. But the magazine, which launched in June 2001, has plenty of remarkable content besides poems: visual art, essays and reviews, sound (of course), and a periodic department named "net.work." It also engages visitors in various ways through point-and-click interactivity with its content.

mark(s) (nothing on the site explains the parenthetical plural) is a quarterly which was ". . . created for the sole purpose of expanding access to contemporary cultural productions . . . The editors are committed to promoting substantive dialogue between Detroit-based artists and the world." That's no small mission! But having the Internet doesn't hinder your chances of engaging "the world." And I assume that by "the world" mark(s)'s editors mean the world of culture producers and consumers, specifically, poets and their readers, artists and their viewers, theorists, and related others.

A good deal of its editorial staff hail from Detroit, and Wayne State University, precisely. This is a good thing, that is, to have a production of this quality not emanating from Ann Arbor (or Interlochen, for that matter). Although, at least one supporter and contributor, Ken Mikolowski, is a UM poet--but he's also founder of The Alternative Press. Another Detroiter, Geoerge Tysh, is Arts Editor for the Detroit Metro Times, and founder (I believe) of Past Tents Press.

So mark(s) is well-grounded in the small press world, not to mention the alternative arts world, as a quick scan of its other supporters shows: painters, photographers, writers, educators. Here's one notable name among mark(s)'s archive of poets: Lyn Hejinian (release 4.03). Her contribution is to be expected, something on the edge of language and sense where language and syntax make up much of the content and intent of the poem. Here's a sample from "Eleven Eyes":

frst Vhtidyins-nr erll
I mean . . .
nrpe jrsy sinf dp . . .

no-ryjomh nsf

But there is no way to correct a dream.

E.E. Cummings redux maybe? This stanza reminds me much of Cummings' little poem on a grasshopper, where he tries to capture the actual grasshopping rhythmically and textually. And how grabbing to finish the little section with an acknowledgement (admission?) that there's no way to correct a dream, that is, our experience of language. Perhaps it's self-correcting. Or not incorrect at all!

But there's another contribution, a poem by William Fuller in release 4.02, that really grabs me as exactly what the editors claim they're looking for (contemporary cultural productions). "Riding North," in its entirety:

was it track twelve now swings wide
our first stop is an apology
whether to distill that quintessence
indestructible, perfect, complete
somehow pouring from the upper deck
I sleep in the sea and clouds
capable of only two activities
which began at the age of seven
the soul is making a drink from external things
which came to know it / because not akin to it
the silhouette of a bird in flight
or does it permit such speculation –
the great sea bear jabs with its tongue
extracting a strange glow
based purely on what the document says

quickly the ship –
stands against reverence for authority
because not intelligible
a repetition of the forms of doubt
a hunting scene with warplanes on the roof
a man outlined in white lights, walking or dead
who comes in to see these books
then pauses on the grate
to inspect his own hand
I feel the back of my neck alive
with an entire conjectural system
which explains my lingering here
under the beams of the dissipating sun
looking only one way, which
is the direction we're taking

said
age, agues
the rain is everywhere
steadily pressing/on
luxury portion of lot/
please display/remorse for not having gone there
or for not having left from there
glued to the center
the unconditional regularly opposes the conditional
here they sleep
the rites of time
you may turn your face continually
your eyes may shine in the distance
the sky may reach into a vast interior –
I had a mind to a sea voyage
not a transformation

what would the grammar support
if I could tame it
I had a mind to cold pie
deeply hung with woods
and arrows, Eros, in this (burnished) bag
with a black-capped chickadee
heading north into tulips
which way the wind blows
that way we aspirate
fragrant bursts of orange and red
gently touching
oceans of systems –
there were pictures of smoke
and peaks emerging
from what used to be my eyes

When I google him, I find Fuller in Winetka, Illinois. I find he's included in some very powerful presses, most recently Flood Editions. All his poems, regardless of "subject," jumpcut like experimental film. Their tone is certain and rhythmic. Their images startle (particularly at line ends and enjambments--like little rewards to getting the eye all the way left to right while reading). They surprise and delight in the best Horatian tradition.

A sometimes feature of mark(s) is its "net.work" department, where I get often the most interactive and involving experience of the magazine. This is where language and visuals and sound and sometimes movement (akin to dance) coalesce. Steve Benson creates a shape-shifting poem in the most recent release (4.04), titled "Does One Thing Lead." I won't "quote" from it here as it has to be experienced online, in sound and motion. But I can say it's highly interactive and fascinating. Another example is Raul Ferrera-Balanquet's "Havana Blues" (3.03), which combines photography, graphic design, sound, animation, and statement into an integrated flow that the author calls a "film." And so it is.

The "poetry" of these pieces leaves me a little cold. In Ferrera-Balanquet's case, there's not much to be said for the rather sophomoric line "I run away to the streets in search of the essence impregnated on my youth." I get the emotive part; it's the rendering that I can't buy. This often seems to happen in art productions that seek to throw everything into the pot. Remember the craze in the '70s and '80s when it seemed like every painter under the (Western) sun had to incorporate words into his canvas? The words always came out sounding, well, like those I just quoted.

Something akin, though not exactly like this, happens with Benson's animated poems. There are six of them. Each is made up of a series of six or seven brief (usually rhetorical) questions. Each poem is viewable, by pointing and clicking, in three versions--always the same questions, but each time configured differently on the screen, once as a simple listing one line after another; once as a verse-like flow in which each question wraps to the next line; and once as a little prose poem. Once I satiated myself with the pointing and clicking activity, I lost interest pretty quickly. The questions themselves are, again, kind of throwaway and unrewarding (and simply rearranging them as lines or continuous sentences doesn't change this), and sometimes even silly.

As for the essays and reviews, there are many, and many good ones, on subjects ranging from the mediated experience of art (e.g., the playing of a musical score) to reviews of shows and exhibitions, books, movements, etc.

mark(s) has good contributor notes. And if you want to support or subscribe to the zine, the editors make a straightforward and convincing pitch (I might do just that!). You can contact them through an email address, but they don't ask for submissions or even imply that they accept them. This isn't a criticism, though. At least as far as the poetry's concerned, they have a fine record of quality. Opening the pub to submissions won't necessarily help them maintain.

In the final analysis? Very strong contribution to the online zine world, especially in the poetry selections.

I think the order of Dan Brown's books, from earliest to most recent, is Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and The Da Vinci Code. I'm limited at discussing what makes a novel good. but I think Brown has gotten better with each book he's written.

The first novel I read was The Da Vinci Code. I liked it a lot. I liked its blending of religion, art, cryptography, and science, and most of all conspiracy. Then I read Angels and Demons, which I didn't like that much. The book seemed to episodic, moving from one murder to another, with the outcome predictable. Though I didn't enjoy the book that much, I did enjoy seeing how the writing style sort of developed into Brown's style in Da Vinci Code.

Digital Fortress, which I just finished, was also a letdown. It wasn't all that believable, it was too contrived, I could predict where the story was going. Maybe it read like an author's first novel. But as I was reading I kept thinking you could simply substitute the code breaking machine with any other machine and still have the same novel.

Now I'm reading Deception Point, originally so I'll have read all of Brown, but now because I'm really enjoying the story. It's the same style as DF but the plot is more complex, more engaging.

Sad to say, according to these Alexa statistics, 2River isn't among the top 100,000 sites on the web. Alexa derives its statistics from those millions of users who use the Alexa tool bar, but there probably wouldn't be much movement up or down if every user in the world were using the toolbar.

Nonetheless, the bright side! The Alexa traffic rank for 2River is 1,333,894. Boutell.com estimates that there are 43 million top-level domains. If I remember how to calucate percentage (1,333,894/43,000,000) 2River is among the top 3% of sites on the web.

So it goes.

I was born at 11:17 pm on July 3, 1951. "Almost a firecracker," as adults used to tell me when I was a boy. The 4th was a wonderful annual event, for me, growing up on Lake James, near Angola, Indiana, and for everybody in America. I remember M-80s and bottle rockets, cherry bombs and sparklers, Kool-ade and Meyers hot dogs, marshmallows and Sunbeam bread, watermelons (chockful of slippery black seeds, for good spitting) and corn-on-the-cob. Oh yeah, and blueberry pie. That was and still is my intoxicant of choice on the 3rd of July.

The 3rd was my day on the beach at Glen Eden, then later on Glen Eyre. All the summer kids were there . . . meaning that on my birthday nobody had to do his math tables, read aloud for the teacher, practice writing, play a flutophone, sit still at his desk. All day in the shallow water or puttering around in the Alumi-craft or, a few birthdays on, swimming out to the pontoon raft anchored just where the lake bottom dropped away to a murky-green depth. The one with the fibreglass diving board and splintery planks whitewashed every spring by some grown-up or other. Dive off the shore side into a gold-flecked, warm shallow, find stones & shells. Dive off the other side into a black-green bottomless cold of weeds.

And the best gifts in the world! Bongoes one year. Always a new bathing suit, rubber flippers, face mask, snorkeling tube. Sometimes a baseball glove, a whiffleball or badminton set. One year, a subscription to Boy's Life. (Now I subscribe to My Generation.) Joe, my younger brother and the youngest of six, always a little steamed that I'm getting all this plus national attention.

Just at sundown, the boat parade. A flotilla of wooden Chris Crafts, fibreglass Crosbys, SkiNautiques, FloteBotes, and assorted trolling craft, canoes, skiffs, small catamarans, Sunfish. All the soft-throated outboard motors set at idle: Johnsons, Evinrudes, Mercuries. Some boats pulling inner tubes full of revellers. Everybody strung with lights and shooting bottle rockets off their starboards & ports, blaring horns, the big inboards growling & snorting, and of course, Old Glory flying from the stern of every floating thing. It's a wonder nobody ever drowned or got ground up in a propeller.

That parade, who organized it? Nobody ever seemed to know, it just happened spontaneously across the lake as the afternoon closed, every July 4th, with a hundred or more boaters falling into this giant conga line snaking its way through Lake James' three big basins. We waved from the shore, ran to the ends of our docks and waved and cheered. We pumped our forearms to get 'em to blow their horns loud, louder, loudest. What a birthday . . . America's and mine.

July 3 and 4, 2004. The 3rd is a Saturday which, as a good friend observed, is perhaps the best day of the week to celebrate a birthday. You get Friday night to prepare and all day Sunday to recover. You get, if you like, because it's still your day, an all-day respite from chores. Perfect strangers are in a celebratory frame of mind. The air pops & whizzes. Your mom calls. The blueberry pie's in the oven. On this day you're nobody's enemy.

On the 4th, we walk over to Ron and Alex's apartment in the 12-story tower across the street. We're invited to dinner and to watch the fireworks after dark. They live temporarily in a two-bedroom unit ten floors up while they finish building a new townhome. The apartment has a balcony with a southern view. From here we can see little downtown McLean, our town. From here we can see Tysons Corner, Gallerias I and II (which I affectionately call Sodom and Gomorrah). We can see a goodly swath of Northern Virginia, with Alexandria to the left, and the Potomac and Northwest D.C. to the right.

Ron's making risotto, his signature dish. He's worried about it, but he's confident too. He orders his arborio rice only from some town in Italy . . . not the kind grown in Texas or Louisiana or California. I watch him work the saucepans and pots and wooden spoons and knives. He's orderly, thinks ahead. He knows the steps & the timing. He produces . . . a perfect curry risotto. I am getting a day-after-birthday buzz (yes, a hair of the dog that bit me on my birthday) on champagne and, when that runs dry, red wine. How fine, how fine.

And then, as we finish our meal, the most spectacular thing happens. A July 4th spectacular thing. One or two fiery, sparkling blossoms appear out on the Virginia skyline, just now turning deep blue, then purple, then cobalt. One or two more colored star-bursts further along the horizon, with delayed rumbles and pops. And soon the entire skyline, from Potomac, Maryland up north to Alexandria, Virginia to our southeast--a full panorama of star bursts, smoke clouds, arcing tracers--lights up as every town with an Independence Day budget puts on its show. Vienna, Fairfax, Falls Church, Great Falls, Reston, Herndon, Arlington, Manassas, Fair Oaks.

It's one thing to picnic at your local community park to watch the fireworks close at hand. That's a good thing. That's America. But to see them all from a height, well, glory be! That's one for the ages. Like I said, what a birthday . . . America's and mine.

Yesterday during the power outage here in St. Louis, I thought of a childhood acquaintance who decades ago had a summer job reading meters for Carolina Power & Light in Wilmington, NC. I hadn't thought of David Huffine in ages. The last time I saw him might have been twenty years ago when I held a temporary teaching position at UNC-W.

Also yesterday Kerry named John Edwards to fill the VP slot on the democratic presidential ticket. This article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch includes a quote by David on Edwards' law school days at Chapel Hill.

The near syncrhonicity of these two events--the memory evoked by the aftermath of a violent thunderstorm and the quote related to what could be a momentous election--could be fodder for a story, perhaps a flash fiction piece, even a poem.

Just as I was getting ready yesterday to add to the blog the mother of all thunderstorms blew through St.Louis and knocked the power out. Shit, I thought, there goes my chance to add another July 4th entry to the millions already clogging the blogosphere. Can't tell about the fireworks from the Eads bridge Saturday night or about the Wallflowers and the fireworks under the Arch Sunday night. Or about the BBQ Monday afternoon. Just as I was firing up the laptop BAM! And the power was out until this afternoon. This is the second year in a row that I've been through a major storm. Last year in De Soto, after straight line winds, I learned how to remove fallen trees. All you need is a chainsaw, a wood splitter, and a chipper. Yesterday wasn't so severe, but today I did have to climb on top of the garage to remove some fallen limbs, and throughout the day I filled 10 yard waste bags. All in all a fun but hecic July 4 weekend.

For a brief few minutes today the 2River home page carried ads from Google. A website costs money--web hosting, software, the new laptop, printing costs for the print issues of 2RV and chapbooks, postage. Over the years I've looked at ways to recoup some of those costs but an elegant way always seemed elusive. Plus I've never been comfortable with asking for donations, for example, via PayPal. A visual artist friend in Texas says I do 2River for art's sake.

Still, I was thinking Google's AdSense would be an unobstrusive way of making a few cents. All I do is use some Google code which places content specific ads on a 2River web page. It's summer, Ann says I have too much free time at hand, so today I worked on adding the code. But much to my disappointment the content specific ads pointed to vanity poetry sites. You can see what I mean by googling POETRY and looking at the sponsored links. In hindsight, I understand that once Google's spider identifies poetry as the content of 2River, AdSense returns those sites that have paid to be Sponsored Links.

Perhaps I'm being delusional and elitest to think 2River's not the place for links to vanity poetry sites. I've written elsewhere that reputable online poetry sites need to avoid the appearance of being vanity sites. Links to vanity sites would blur that separation, and I'm not comforatable with making a penny or two whenever someone comes to 2River and clicks away to another site whose purpose is somehow get the writer to pay money for the printing of his or her poetry.

And that was the end of 2River's brief association with AdSense.