Anne Portugal | Nude / 2001

at point zero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anne Portugal Nude, translated from the French by Norma Cole (Berkeley, California: Kelsey Street Press, 2001)

 

With over four books of poetry published in France—all on the list of the distinguished publisher P.O.L—Anne Portugal is fast becoming recognized as one of the major French poets. Her book Le plus simple appareil has been translated in a beautiful edition as Nude. Before I go any further with this review, however, I must admit that it was originally to have been published by my own Sun & Moon, but given the financial duress of the last few years, it was taken on by Kelsey St. Press. So I am prejudiced to like it. However, in rereading the work—years after my original encounter—I do feel I have some observations to make.

     The work, divided into seven parts—“the bath,” “the exhibition,” “the garden,” “the elders,” “the visitors,” “Susanna’s letters,” and “the painting”—is really one long work thematically based on the Biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders. That story, canonical in Catholicism and apocryphal in Protestantism, added sometime in 100 B.C. to the Hebrew-Armaic version of Daniel, tells the story of Susanna, a beautiful woman married to Joakim, whose house is the site of the local court. Two of the elders of that court desire Susanna and plot her rape. As she takes a bath in the garden, they hide themselves, observing, and then offer her the choice of sexually submitting to them or being accused of adultery. When Susanna refuses to give in to their demands, they denounce her, trying her in the court and sentencing her to death. Enter Daniel, who interrogates the two elders, proving their guilt and Susanna’s innocence. Praised by her parents, Daniel becomes a hero among the people.

     Portugal’s work, however—although containing the bath, garden, nudity, elders, and sexual encounters—is hardly a literal retelling of the Bible tale. Rather, for this author the work is an interweaving of what it means to be a woman in contemporary France and a study in formal structures, a kind of verbal painting, which she lays out early in the book with a series of panoramas. Indeed, the work is addressed to an unknown who “knows painting” (“You really know painting”), presumably the individual to whom the book is dedicated, Marc Silvain. But the author could be addressing anyone else, even possibly the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to whose poems Portugal makes reference throughout Nude, and, who, as the author of The Cubist Painters, certainly did also know painting. Already in the second section, “the exhibition,” Portugal alludes to Apollinaire’s poem “Annie,” which describes a Mennonite living on the shores of Texas between Mobile and Galveston, passing a garden filled with roses by a villa “Which is one huge rose.” And in “the garden” she connects that poem with images from Apollinaire’s “White Snow” and “Palais.” The last section reverberates with Portugal’s references to Apollinaire’s “Rosemonde” (“the rose of the world”), and again to “Palais,” as Susannah turns back to Rosemonde’s palace.

     To focus on these echoing patterns, however, would be to mislead the reader. Portugal’s work, far from being a sort of academic compilation of literary references, is lyrically dense and complex in its structure. And for that reason, if for no other, I long for a bilingual edition, where I could compare the complexity of the original—its multiple puns and enjambments—with Cole’s translation. For, if the poem begins with the simple image of Susannah at the bath, a plump and blonde Swede, as the author sees her, “limned” by “the two elders’ heads,” it soon swirls into a series of multiple images, of numerous Susannahs, a woman naked in a field in Normandy while at the same time a passionate girl in a sateen nighty. The poem becomes a “vessel borne upon multiple waves,” just as Susannah comes to represent opposing visions of women, both Venus and “a plump woman who’s put on weight she’s put on weight.” Portugal’s work, in fact, is like a cubist painting, a series of images overlaying each other which together portray not an instant in time, a symbolic flash of womanhood, but all women through time, being both preyed upon by the opposite sex and sensually aroused by its attentions, a woman moving forward in history while turning back to the romance of Rosemonde’s palace—which leaves man eternally starting out again “at point zero.”

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2004

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, I, no. 2 (April 2004), in slightly different form

Ece Ayhan | A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies / 1997, 2015

flying

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997 / Reprinted by Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2015)

In 1994 or 1995 poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat sent me a manuscript of his translation of the Turkish poet, Ece Ayhan. If Nemet-Nejat is to be believed, he had attempted to get this manuscript published for more than 10 years. I immediately was drawn to it, and in 1995 I gave him a contract which, through a series of underground figures, was passed on in Turkey to Ayhan, apparently in hiding from his government for failure to pay taxes or some other infraction, who signed and dated it 14.12.1995.

      The manuscript Murat had given me seemed to me to have many similarities to the American poet John Wieners, who, like Ayhan, was a gay writer who had begun his early life at the edges of academic and socially responsible behavior—Wieners began his education at Boston College, later enrolling in Black Mountain College to study with Charles Olson and Robert Duncan before working as an actor and stage manager at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge; Ayhan graduated from the school of Political Sciences in Ankara before serving as a civil servant—while later gradually moving out into the underground and sexual fringes of society.

     According to Nemet-Nejat, by the time of Ayhan’s third major collection of poetry, Orthodoxies (1968), he had moved to the streets of Istanbul’s Galata section: “historically both its red light district—of transvestites, girl and boy prostitutes, tattooed roughs, heroin merchants, that is, the unnamed or ‘euphemized’ outcasts of Turkish culture—and the district where minorities—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, etc—lived.”

       The two works that made up the Sun & Moon book, ultimately published in 1997, A Blind Cat Black (which I inexplicably published as The Blind Cat Black) and Orthodoxies, reveal Ayhan’s spiral out of the social center.

      Nemet-Nejat describes the first work as a story of exile “masquerading as an adventure sea romance.” “One has a fairy tale with pirates, treasures, á la Peter Pan, whose child hero does not fly home at the end, but joins the secret and street society of homosexuals: a fairy tale, a misadventure of trauma, shame, torture and rape in deep sea.” Nearly all these elements, for example, are represented in the title poem:

 

                    An absent-minded tightrope walker comes. From the sea

                    of late hours. Blows out a lamp. Lies down next to my weeping

                    side, for the sake of the prophet. A blind woman downstairs.

                    Family. She raves in a language I don’t know. On her chest a

                    heavy butterfly, broken drawers in it. My Aunt Sadness drinks

                    alcohol in the attic, embroiders. Expelled from many schools.

                    A blind cat passes in the black street. In its sack a child just

                    dead. His wings don’t fit, too big. The Old Hawker cries. A

                    pirate ship. Has entered the port.

 

Already in this section “the wings don’t fit,” and by the end of the poem the author-hero’s inability to fly away ends in no longer caring, the narrator of the poem hiding “himself in dust with apoplectic kicks.” In a sense, Ayhan seems to be suggesting that it is impossible to be gay, to be a fairy, without the magic possibility of flight:

 

                    You don’t understand. Being without wings. And it gets

                    dark, weeping in the sea of a sea. A child waiting. The sail

                    boat.

 

     By the time of Orthodoxies, the translator argues, Ayhan no longer was interested in presenting a center against which his figures were judged, but turned to a focusing upon on the word, particularly puns and slang, that made clear that language itself could be the destroyed of things outside its boundaries, that “part of history, is a trap/tomb, a cribdeath, where the peripheral is buried,” something that needed itself to be rejuvenated before the misfit might escape.

      In the strange night world of Orthodoxies, even the perpetual sufferer Jonah has escaped the whale only to himself become a dolphin. While he may symbolize, however, a joyful aspect of the community (joy and community both connected with the image of the dolphin), this Jonah is, as Ayhan jests, “A sight. Cruising. Bedecked with holsters, stirrup, harness.” This horsey leather queen combs “his hair in cum water. Then is treated to flowers. A garland of braids. From time to time blinking, with vast hanging earrings.” In this work devoted to questioning notions of “orthodoxy,” (the translator points out that in Turkish the word means not only the holy, pious or virtuous, but also in Turkish slang suggests “whore, homosexual, pederast, betrayer, etc.”) Ayhan asks:

 

                      What is an Orthodox lad doing at Maidos? Banged about by

                      agitation which is after the knowledge of knives.

 

Along with Gallipoli, Maidos a nearby city to the South, was heavily damaged in the World War I battle of Gallipoli, the Allied assault on the Ottoman Empire—the last great battle of that Empire before being transformed into the Turkish Republic under Atatürk, himself a commander at Gallipoli—which resulted in the deaths of more than 300,000 people. The horse imagery associated with this new Jonah is appropriate given that one of the major attacks on the Turks occurred at the Battle of the Nek when The Third Australian Light Horse Brigade futilely attacked, a battle depicted in Peter Wier’s film Gallipoli. 

     In short, the poet seems to take pleasure in the paradox that, out of the Ottoman battle to save the Dardenelles from invasion, another being, capable of creating a new world, had been spewn own, like Jonah out of the whale: a preposterous “dolphin,” a sea mammal associated for centuries by sailors with Christ. Accordingly, in Orthodoxies, Ayhan’s figures at least regain, through language, their wings, even if they are only artificial, sad and silver:

 

                       She cannot cover the sadness of her silver wings, the Greek

                       Hag….

 

Drunk, her world reversed (“Boots in hand and parasol on her feet”), Ayhan’s outcast has, at least, the potential to fly away, to be forgiven or, if nothing else, to pray to be forgiven: “But she does know how to cross herself efficiently with index and third fingers.”

       It was with great sadness that I learned of Ece Ayhan Çağlar’s death on July 13th, and I soon after determined to reprint these moving books in my Green Integer series.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2008).

  

Ernest Livon Grosman, ed. | The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996 / 1997

xul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Livon Grosman, ed. The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996, translated from the Spanish by Jorge Guitart, Kathryn A. Kopple, G. J. Racz, Garciela Sidolai, and Molly Weigel (New York: Roof Books, 1997)

 The Argentine magazine XUL began publishing, with Jorge Santiago Perednik as editor, in the beginning of the 1980s, at the height of the mad military dictatorship that killed thousands of individuals. As editor of the The XUL Reader (a collection of writings from the journal) Ernesto Livron Grossman writes, the poetry of its contributors was, in part, a reaction to the regime; but unlike the guerilla movements of the political left—with whom many contributors shared sympathies—the resistance took language itself as its method and subject. Like the American “Language” poets, the XUL writers sought in the purposeful complexity and density of words a way to resist the failed language of seemingly “transparent” statements of both sides, both the victims and the victimizers, who as the editor points out, were interdependent for their existence. Like their American counterparts, these Argentine poets sought models in the avant-garde of the past, most particularly in the vernacular-based poetry of the gaucho (or cowboy) poems, and in avant-gardists such as Oliverio Girondo, Xul Solar (one of the sources of the magazine’s name), Osvaldo Lamborghini, and more recent authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and the Brazilian concretist Augusto de Campos.

       Writing in their fourth issue, a collective of XUL poets argued that their goal was to “translate.” “To translate is to work in one language from another. Translating is the linguistic exercise that most privileges the breach between two texts because it is actually a previous reading that produces a new text in which writing claims to make a former text legible even as it disrupts and obfuscates one text by subtracting from it a legibility that it confers on another…. Translation only acquires significance, as far as XUL is concerned, when it affirms itself as a writing process that voluntarily exhibits its relation to other texts.” A little further in this statement the XUL writers proclaim what might have as easily appeared in the pages of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein): “XUL’s commitment to reality is actually a commitment to language: to again make legible that which has been used for coercion and deception. Language belongs to everyone.”

     This revelatory anthology begins with a few examples of the historical influences upon the XUL writers, themselves (particularly Girondo and Xul Solar) worthy of further exploration, and then presents work selected from the ten issues of the journal. Each reader will find his or her own favorites, but given the context of the few pages devoted to each poet, I was most impressed by the work of Laura Klein, Néstor Perlongher, Susana Cerdá, Ernesto Livon Grosman, and the XUL editor Jorge Santiago Perednik. I was less taken with the concretist-influenced work as in the poetry of Arturo Carrera, Gustavo Röessler, and Jorge Lépore—but that may be just my own aesthetic at work or a product of the anthologizing. The important thing is that this is a truly brilliant collection of writing that cannot be ignored by anyone interested in contemporary, innovative poetry.   Although the poems are presented bilingually, I do wish the Spanish had appeared enface instead of in small type at the bottom of each page; and I am desperate for biographical material and source information for the poets included. But these are small quibbles with a book of such significance.

 

Los Angeles, 1997

Reprinted from Mr. Knife, Miss Fork: An Anthology of International Poetry, No. 1 (1998); reprinted in My Year 2003: Voice without a Vice (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003).

Remco Campert | This Happened Everywhere: Selected Poems / 1997

a simplicity of saying

by Douglas Messerli

 

Remco Campert This Happened Everywhere: Selected Poems, translated from the Dutch by   Manfred Wolf (San Francisco: Androgyne Books, 1997)

 

Of the major Dutch experimentalists of the group known as the “vijt-tigers” or The Fiftiers—consisting of Bert Schierbeck, Jan G. Elburg, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Lucebert, Sybren Polet, Hugo Claus, Remco Campert, and others—Campert most resisted the radical experimentalism with which their poems are associated. Nowhere is this made more apparent than in this small, rather badly produced, collection.

    At his best, in poems such as “Sparrows,” “Falling,” “Hurray, Hurrah,” “Poetry is an Act...,” and “A flag on a device,” Campert combines everyday observations, social concerns, and his recurring theme of love in a disjunctive, often humorous narrative that unsettles the reader just enough to transform the banal into a kind of wondrous inevitability. Some of his best poems, collected in The Year of the Strike (1968), reveal a joyful self-consciousness that generates the excitement of the poem:

 

                                    I,

                                    No, it was Caligula, fat

                                    Half-bald and 29

                                    (if you remember that winter),

                                    died

                                    a dishonorable, prosaic death

                                    in the darkened entrance to a theater

                                    at the whispering hands of an assassin.

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

 

                                                           (from “Sparrows”)

 

     The poems of the new collection, This Happened Everywhere, chosen evidently from a number of Campert’s books, reveal little of that joy and even less of his considerable craft. The poems brought together by Wolf center upon two themes: love (Campert’s lifelong topic) and old age. Throughout this tiresome assemblage, the poet speaks directly to the reader about the futility of poetry itself:

 

                                      The way you move

                                      through the room from the bed

                                      to the table with the comb

                                      no line will ever move–

 

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

 

                                      The way you’re silent

                                      with your blood in my back

                                      through your eyes into my neck

                                      no poetry will ever be silent.

 

                                                                  (from “A Futile Poem”)

 

Too many writers, it seems to me, fall into the delusion as they age that a simplicity of saying what one means necessarily results in a more honest poetry. Indeed, most of these poems presume a shared world with the reader and, accordingly, fail to communicate much else but the sentiments of the media for the nostalgia of the past:

 

                                       Deborah

 

                                       When I die

                                       I hope that you’re with me,

                                       that I’m looking at you,

                                       that you’re looking at me,

                                       that I can still feel your hand.

 

                                       Then I’ll die quietly,

                                       then no one need be sad.

                                       Then I’ll be happy.

 

The reader has little admission to such private desires. Let him knock instead on the door of the three good poems of this collection: “As in a Dream,” “Someone Poses the Question,” and “Lamento”:

 

                                       Here now   along the long deep water

                                       that I thought I thought that you always

                                       that you always

 

                                       here now   along the long deep water

                                       where behind the shore’s reeds   behind the sun

                                       that I thought you that you always but always

 

                                       that always your eyes   your eyes and the air

                                       always your eyes and the air

                                       always rippling   in the water rippling

 

                                                                      (from “Lamento”)

 

 

Los Angeles, 1997

Reprinted from Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, No. 2 (August 2003).

Reprinted from Jacket, No. 31 (2006).

Bob Perelman | Primer / 1981 || Bruce Andrews | Wobbling / 1981 || Charles Bernstein | Stigma / 1981

wordscape artists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Perelman Primer (San Francisco: This Press, 1981)

Bruce Andrews Wobbling (New York: Roof Books, 1981)

Charles Bernstein Stigma (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1981)

 

Perhaps the most serious-minded and influential literary development in this country is the rise of poetry that basically renounces narrative structures and challenges both symbolic, thematically unified poems in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and imagistic, assemblage poems in the tradition of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The young practitioners of this poetry, who are often grouped under the rubric "Language poets," look instead to the Russian Futurists, Gertrude Stein, and ancient charm songs for their roots. What they share with the likes of Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and Stein is an emphasis on the mind in process, a focus on the jumps, leaps, fissures, cut, aural patterns, and patter of public and private language – of the phoneme, word, phrase, line, sentence, and paragraph. How they differ from these earlier poets and from one another is apparent in three recent books – Primer by Bob Perelman, Wobbling by Bruce Andrews, and Stigma by Charles Bernstein.

     As the title suggests, Perelman's poems, speaking of themselves and the processes through which they were created, serve as a presentation of elementary principles. Like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and other associated with "field" poetry, Perelman understands poems as "fields of speech," landscapes generated by the placement of lips and teeth. But whereas Olson and Duncan's poems generally refer back to nature, history, and myth, Perelman's – taking Olson's theories to their logical conclusion – refers little to "us or use." The poem, for Perelman, is energized by instant-to-instant shifts in thought and conversation. Meaning is not something affixed to the poem, or to which the language is directed, but is itself the language in motion. Language, accordingly, is the necessary and proper focus of poetry. As Perelman, with Steinian clarity, expresses this idea, "The proper study of trees is trees."

     But as Gertrude Stein anticipated, such emphasis on language in motion leaves the poet without a past. For Stein that was liberating; but for many readers and writers, such anti-traditonalism narrows the poetic context. It is fine to be able to "...predict/The present, hearing a future/In the syllables' erasing fade," but what of the self, society, and memory as shaped by past experience? Criticism of such blatantly vanguard poetry is to be expected in these times of retrenchment. And in their relentless call for the creation of a new language – their demand for what Perelman describes as "a new world.../To stomach the images/Floating on the headless/Torso of the old" – these poets have understandably seem themselves as alienated from the poetry establishment. Whether Perelman has been affected by such criticism or by his own self-doubts – he seems to have been free of such dilemmas in his exuberantly intelligent previous book, 7 Works (The Figures, 1978) – it is evident that, while arguing in Primer for a "new world," he is simultaneously attempting to locate the poems within the Great Tradition as he defines it. Throughout the book there are references to poets as radically dissimilar as Chaucer, Shelley, Baudelaire, and Rilke; and several of the poems play with quasi-traditional structures.

     Such an attempt at rapprochement is admirable. But, unfortunately, most of the poets and forms Perelman employs tend to contradict his expressed ideas. It is one thing for the poet to encourage us to "leap across/Cracks between words," and quite another for him to structure a series of poems around variations on the same sentences. The first dislocates, and forces us to reevaluate and reshape our knowledge; the second calls upon our memory, and asks us to repeat and reconfirm our understanding. The one challenges most traditional principles of structure; the other accepts them pretty much on face value. Throughout his work, Perelman calls for a poetry of linguistic discovery ("Have you ever seen a school fence?") that seldom operates in the poems themselves. Even the "new world" for which he argues ends up sounding strangely like the old one of the Romantics:

 

 Each word

 Floats through us.

 Piney mountains on memory clouds

 Visit in starlight, inconstant

 

 ("Hymn to Intellectual Beauty")

 

While it contains beautifully wrought poems, Primer ultimately fails to marry language-centered poetry and poetic tradition because Perelman compromises with rather than answers, the criticisms of those who condemn such poetry in general.

     In Wobbling Bruce Andrews makes it clear that he has no intention of compromising – with either critics or admirers of his work. He is attempting to create poetry more encompassing than traditional structures permit: "there are twists and turns in events and resultants, so, the search for a more inclusive vision – of standing, falling, sitting still." Structure recalls for Andrews the "vivid forms," "puzzles," and "games" of childhood which adults understand as myth; it is "What effects/Character." In fact, the reader of Wobbling is faced with several pieces which seem less like poems than crossword puzzles or acrostics. In "Fidel," for example, Andrews limits himself to the use of only seven letters: A, E, L, M, P, S, and X; in "Jeopardy," the words are organized primarily by alliteration; and in the 22 lines of "Prepositions," there are no prepositions.

     Yet the playfulness and humor of Wobbling merely point up Andrews's sincerity, his conviction that truth is the palpable and mutable reality of the "social hieroglyphic" we call language. And in his passion to "purge man from/look of light" – in his desire to free us from the "antiqued rhetoric" which daily convinces us it is truth, but is merely a conventionalized imitation of experience – Andrews issues his "inclusion vision" with the zeal of a missionary among the uncomprehending natives. If such an attitude occasionally results in incomprehensible poetry, it also imbues each poem with a sense of urgency and consequence that draws us in, compelling us to make meaning for ourselves, to "separate and sort" our lives "out of this confusion and regard." In poems such as "Gossip," "And the Love of Laughter," "The Problem of Titles," "Twining," and "So," Andrews uses a "private speech/That settles self together"; he builds up a range of semantic possibilities that unites the reader and poet who together create a new world not on any map.

     So Andrews addressed, in part, Perelman's problem of language and the past; language, he suggests, is inherently tied to both the cultural and the individual past; but it is only through removing it from those contexts that we can make it fresh and reform our futures. For Andrews the tradition is not defined by older poetry as much as it is expressed in the present by the quality of writing, by the impact of language on the lives of his readers and himself. Engaging the world through the only medium – the language of mind and sensation – in which it can be understood, Andrews provides no answers and asks few questions. What the reader of Wobbling primarily experiences is the fluctuation of her own thoughts and emotions as she works her way through its parts. And in this respect, Wobbling is less a book of what is usually meant by lyric poetry than an imposing and exhilarating encyclopedia of all our loves and lives.

     Charles Bernstein's Stigma is more modest in both size and scope. While the book lacks the impact of Bernstein's best work – Shade, Controlling Interests, and Islets/Irritations – it typifies much of his writing. Unlike Andrews, the crusader, Bernstein is a conciliator, a poet of amends and recompense. For Bernstein, as for Perelman and Andrews, language, the dominant enterprise of poetry is also the motivating force of human acts and thought. But that does not mean that we always recognize it as such. Like the tales of Samuel Beckett, Bernstein's poetry is riddled with memories of pain, hurt, and loss which often result in a quietude that the reconciler/lover finds difficult to penetrate. But Bernstein does not sentimentalize such breakdowns in human relationships, those "quiet oas[es] of a stall"; for him there is no value to be found in our isolation, no benefit in being unable to share one another's suffering. As he says in "March," "Refused for want of hurting, gain/Else that quiets. . .." Conventional syntax tells us that there are words missing before and after "gain": "I" (or "we") and "nothing." Language is the only healer; words "Like towers make amends...." There is an insistence about Bernstein's work, a tireless attempt to regain our attention, to "loose the emotion laden umbrella" and bring us from inertia into discourse once again. If Bernstein's poetry seems more accessible than Andrews', it may be because of this incessant prodding of the reader – his perennial attempt to return us to the "legless hope" of language; to bring us into "The gravity of a peaceful/Chat...." And if, in all this concern, Bernstein reveals that he lacks Andrews' faith in being understood, we recognize that it is because his poetry is more philosophically than politically inspired.

      In American culture, there is a stigma attached, in fact, to such a preoccupation with words. There is a distaste, almost, for this compulsion to speak. Perhaps the vastness of our landscape has helped to instill in us a reverence and admiration for the laconic and concise. Bernstein obviously is aware that he, Andrews, and Perelman must face the "ageless glowering/At shudder speed"; in some respects, their poetry goes against the American grain. That they continue to construct such powerful landscapes of language in the face of a society that prefers its art realistically precise is testament to what Bernstein describes as his "hope/Of a future persuasion." Whether or not they change the course of American poetry, there is no doubt that it will be said of each of them, as Andrews has written of himself, "he made language in his own eager style."

 

College Park, Maryland, 1982

Reprinted from The Village Voice, 1982