by Douglas Messerli
Bob Brown words (Paris:
Hours Press, 1931); new facsimile edition published 2014, with an Introduction
by Craig Saper.
Bob Brown, editor and author Gems: A Censored Anthology (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France: Roving Eye
Press, 1931); new facsimile edition published 2014, with an Introduction by
Craig Saper.
Bob Brown The Readies
(Bad Ems, France: Roving Eye Press, 1930); new facsimile edition published
2014, with an Introduction by Craig Saper.
In his 1974 anthology Revolution
of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914-1945,
Jerome Rothenberg introduced American poet Bob Brown to those of us of a
certain generation, hinting at the wealth of visual poems the man had created
and describing his writing, based mostly on the poet’s 1916 collection, My Marjonary as bearing close kinship
with the later New York School writers.
What a marvelous
surprise and wealth of information we have now suddenly been provided by Craig
Saper, with the facsimile publications of three little-known Bob Brown
collections, words, Gems: A Censored
Anthology, and The Readies, that
not only take Brown beyond Rothenberg’s purview, but reveals the innovative
poet had created an entire series of genres not only far ahead of their time,
but still quite original today.
words, at first reading, might appear
simply to extend the kind of poetic experimentation that Brown was working on
in My Marjonary. If one simply leafs
through this facsimile edition—the original published by Nancy Cunard’s
important Hours Press in 1931—the poems appear to have a great deal in common,
from their witty wordplay, and off-the-cuff observations, to the
semi-confessional observations of Frank O’Hara and even Ted Berrigan. A poem
like “The Passion Play at Royat,” for example, might even have been written in
a prose version by Gertrude Stein as she wandered through a small French
village with her dog Basket, observing the other such animals on her way:
There is no great gulf between the
Love life of the
Dogs in the village street of Royat and
Other dogs or even human beings
Although the slightly more prudish Stein probably would not
have made the beast-human connection, and certainly would not have observed, as
Brown does later in the poem:
They bark and bite, snarl and scratch
Purr and piddle, play ceaselessly at
Fornicopulation
Even as talkie actors in gilt ritzyrooms.
Certainly the last two lines are pure Brownisms,
representing as they do his love of lively word combinations (fornication and
copulation) and his immediate reference to popular culture. I don’t remember a
single occasion when Stein described herself and Alice sneaking out to the
moving pictures.
Like Stein and
even Pound, however, Brown is an unapologetic, pure-bred Amur-i-can, employing
colloquialisms whenever he gets the chance, even while discussing God’s
creation:
It’s all right God
I understand you’re an altruist
Plus God
I know you had a high purpose &
All that God
In breathing your sensen
Semen-scented breath
Into clay pigeons Chinks Brazies
Yanks Frogs Turks and Limeys
It’s a great little old world you made God
But now I’m ready for another eyeful
Mars Heaven Hell &/or
What have you got Gott
So Brown sets up a sort of fallen angel situation, quickly
moving on, more like E. E. Cummings than any other American writer, to a kind
of visual wordplay that can be read down or across.
If I
I would only
O O
Darling Sit
O O
Were
marooned on a Dry-eyed in its center
Little
old Scanning of the seas
Eye
of an islette For you
Dear Dear
Who else could write a love poem, depending upon which way
you choose to read his columns, that simultaneously sings a song of his
imaginary love while wailing out the loneliness of the poor, marooned darling
with her cries of “O O” and “Dear Dear”?
What is even
more amazing about this page of poetry, however, is the little black smudge
that appears at the left side at the very bottom of that page. The smudge, in
fact, is one of many such poems produced microscopically in the volume so that
the reader, if he desires to peruse it, must take up a magnifying glass. I have
long had one lying upon my desk, given to me by someone, I presume, who
thought, as I aged, it might become necessary. Thankfully, my tired old eyes
were restored with what optometrists describe as “second sight,” a condition in
which I suddenly found myself, after years of resisting bi-focal glasses, able
to read very fine print despite the fact that at distances everything remains a
blur! But even my magnifying glass was insufficient to read these tiny
offerings; fortunately my companion Howard brought out a sharper set of
magnifying glasses which he had to better make out the visual images in
old-fashioned photographic slides—once a necessary tool for any art curator.
The micro-poem
on this page, for example, reads:
I, who am God
Wear lavender
pajamas and
Purr poetry
Should I who
am God
Dirty my ear
on the ground
Striving to
catch the
Idiotic
waltzing lilt of
Rhyming
red-eye dervish
Twirling white
pink poet mice
In union
suits?
Thus Brown creates a kind of blasphemous commentary about
the God he addresses in the other part of the poem, explaining his aversion to
the kind of literary conceits usually used in poems addressed to the “All
Mighty,” a commentary continued in the last stanza of the larger font size
poem:
Fancy in
poetry
Now that
aeroplanes
Anchor to
stars
Is a trifle
old-fashioned
In other cases,
such as in “To a Wild Montana Mare” (once more, a poem that can be plumbed by
reading down its two columns or across), however, the situation is reversed, as
the poet ponders the nude Lady Godiva in the larger poem, and merely uses the
micro-poem to suggest how little he was moved by Romantic icons such as the
Sphinx and Mona Lisa.
Accordingly, the
smaller, hidden texts, are not necessarily more outspoken or radical in either
their subject or their linguistic usage. And often the “parallel” poems seem to
have little relationship to one another, even if the reader is somewhat
encouraged to try to discern links between the two.
While we might
expect the micro-poems to represent something created to escape the hands of
the censors such as Robert Hooke’s Micrographia—an
issue of much more importance in Brown’s anthology of poems from 1931 titled Gems—for Brown the nearly unreadable
texts, as Saper argues, play the role of something more like “squibs,” small
jokes and commentary, much like the mistakes from other publications one used
to find at the bottom of the columns of The
New Yorker, a genre in which the poet had had success early in his writing
career.
Moreover, the
varying sizes of these texts, in their alternation of focus, point to Brown’s
continued interest in a “writing machine,” in which one would be able to adjust
the size and speed of texts while reading them.
Finally, the
micro-texts suggest, as Saper implies in his useful introduction, other popular
genres such as the spy story, with its constant references to hidden texts and
disappearing ink, or of mainstream forms of concise writing styles such as
stock-quotes, the fine print on food labels, etc., all of which call attention
to themselves by their near-impossibility to be deciphered by the uninitiated
reader. Certainly, for Brown, his experiment in variable type through his own
poetics shares a great deal with Duchamp, a figure who greatly influenced him,
and who himself, as Saper reminds us, “tried to sell his optical art-toys like
a street vendor in front of his prestigious art exhibits.”
As if to out-do
Douglas, Brown proposes a much more radical alternative. Taking absolutely prim
and proper poems from Shakespeare to the Victorians, many of the works written
particularly for children and young adults, the poet applies to select words
the large black censor’s stamp, used particularly in wartime to delete
sensitive correspondence and to prohibit then-contemporary readers from being
sullied by obscene passages. Of course, by using the same tools of the censor
to excise words from Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Shelley, for example, he
forces the reader to fill in the missing words, often with alternatives that
truly are obscene and blasphemous. At left I reproduce Wordsworth’s “We Are
Seven,” a poetic rendering that I invite any reader to scan without a blush if
not a series of outright guffaws—all of his own imagination!
Certainly there
is something dilettantish about these poetic renderings, and after a few pages
of reading such works, the joke grows thin. If nothing else, however, Brown has
certainly proven his point about the censor’s ink, and through his use of these
utterly boring, mostly Victorian works—the selection itself serving as a satire
of anthologists like Francis Turner Palgrave, whose The Golden Treasury was long perceived as an uplifting compendium
of morally “worthy” poetry—has simultaneously satirized the poetry that used
language in the ways he most opposed. Certainly there is not a better example
of the manipulation of “found poetry” in existence. And once again, Brown has
made good use of popular genres in order to create radical experiments.
Perhaps his most
radical experimentation had less to do with the actual texts used as with how
that language was presented and disseminated. Through the late 1920s and the
1930s, Brown argued, quite seriously—although many interpreted it as another
comic enterprise—for a new Reading Machine, a kind of forerunner of a fiche
machine that would run microscopic texts through a viewer which could be
sped-up, slowed-down, and enlarged to various degrees. For Brown this machine
would make it possible to produce an entire work on the head of a pin, or, as
he expressed it in a poem in words:
“In the reading-machine future / Say by 1950 / All magnum opuses / Will be
etched on the / Heads of pins / Not retched into / Three volume classics / By
pin heads.”
With the
intention of showing off his machine, Brown also edited a collection of works
by various writers, some rather traditional, others experimental, and many now
unheard-of, which he described as “the readies” for his machine. The anthology
itself, except for contributions by Stein and a few others, seems not so very
interesting. But then, Brown was presenting himself as an anthologist, than
simply selecting texts that might demonstrate the flexibility of his invention.
The ideas behind
his reading machine are fascinating, in part because Brown saw it not only as a
kind of futurist machine that is not today so very different from the Kindle
and other computer-based operations, but argued for a new kind of language to
accompany it. Saper and others have, somewhat convincingly, suggested that
these linguist-wists (my own combine from twists
of linguistic expressions) parallel
the kind of computer-based languages we see today in Twitter, Facebook, and
e-mail expressions.
Frankly, I think
Brown-talk—what Stein hinted as being a kind of “Bobbed Browning,” or, playing
his game once more, I’ll describe as “Bobs-ledding,” was far more complex and
interesting than today’s Twitter talk. In The
Readies, published by his own Roving Eye Press in 1930, Brown posits new
combinations of words such as “Verbunions” (Verb, into verbosity plus “I know
my onions”), Shellshallow (an echo of the Yankee shell game played with a dried
pea and three walnut shells), and “Springish sappy” (Bliss Carmen’s “Make Me
Over,” Mother Nature, when the sap begins to stir), doubtlessly the author’s
undying tribute to the greatest of Canada Dry poets).
But the creation
of new words, for Brown, was clearly not enough. As he suggests in his last
chapter, “A Story To Be Read on the Reading Machine,” it is the combination of
these newly-minted words, without all the everyday fillers such as “the,” “of,”
“and,” “to,” “a,” “in”, “it,” “I,” etc. and most forms of punctuation, which he
replaced primarily by the dash, that truly matters. Four lines will have to do
as a sample of his verbal-ized (“verbally energized”) writing:
Bermuda-barmaid-season-Harry-could-play-M’s---
Spring-Song-flawlessly-without-music-before-him—
but-continued-turning-sheets-effectively-Harry---
stood-up-tall-poplar-tree-other-three-sat-down---
The editor of these
three volumes has set up a site to show off a version of Brown’s Reading
Machine. I couldn’t quite get it to work on any of the selected texts, but I
was able to get the sense of its ongoing motion through a tutorial of the
machine. Although one can alternate the speed, stop it, or even go back, the
text itself, however, moves forward, unfortunately, without serious intruding,
moves at its own interminable pace, stealing from the reader the easy
possibility of or accidental (but sometimes fortuitous) opportunity of
repeating, interrupting, or even skipping over passages. The endless scroll
from left to right almost scolds the reader not to jump ahead, in, and about a
text, intentionally slowing down and quickly moving forward again. While this
can, in fact, be accomplished on Brown’s machine, it reminds of using the
fiche—a machine I tackled for several years while working of my Djuna Barnes
bibliography—trying to tame it from its mad rush forward and leaping moves
backward, attempting to adjust its distorting lens into a position between
microscopic and giantized. Frankly I would miss all those simple American
conjunctions and pronouns, the repetition of so clearly defines American
syntax, as opposed to Brown’s hobbled-together word combines.
But no one can
deny Brown his rapacious hunger for words or dismiss his endless attempts—as he
expresses it in the very first lines of his 1931 collection—to “operate” on
words:
Operating on words — gilding and gelding them
In a rather special laboratory equipped with
Micro and with scope — I anesthetize
Pompous, prolix, sesquipedalian, Johnsonian
Inflations like Infundibuliform
Only to discover by giving them a swift
Poke in the bladder they instantly inspissate
And whortle down the loud-writing funnel.
Like a madly inspired doctor, Brown prods, pushes, and cuts
his words into and out of meaning until—I swear—he might even awake T. S.
Eliot’s etherized patient. If there is, most often, something slightly clumsy
about Brown’s insistent linguistic embracement, he seldom shied from his
commitment, determining to never abandon his love of words, even if he had to
create his “Superb swirling compositions / On my back where even I / Cannot see
my masterpieces” (“Lament of an Etcher”).
We can only
forgive Saper if he somewhat overstates the greatness of Brown’s poetic
achievements, while profusely thanking him for sharing these significant,
nearly-forgotten contributions. Knowing Brown makes American poetry profoundly
more interesting.
Los Angeles,
October 30, 2014
Reprinted from Hyperallergic
Weekend (January 3, 2015), published as “Language Lessons: The Poetry of
Bob Brown.”
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