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

Larry Eigner | watching/how or why / 1977 || The World and Its Streets, Places / 1977

broadcasting silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Eigner watching/how or why (New Rochelle, New York: The Elizabeth Press, 1977)

Larry Eigner The World and Its Streets, Places (Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1977)

 

Few American poets have sustained the consistency of voice, style, and poetic integrity that Larry Eigner has. After twenty-two collections of poetry and the publication of hundreds of as yet uncollected poems from little magazines, Eigner's two most recent books, watching/how or why and The World and Its Streets, Places still present a world of people and things as fresh and revealing as his earliest works.     This is even more remarkable considering the seeming narrowness of Eigner's poetic range. Too much has been made of his cerebral palsy and his primarily house-bound life, yet the fact cannot be ignored that Eigner's subject and focus is almost entirely centered around the natural images viewed from the glassed-in front porch of his Massachusetts home. And in vocabulary alone, for example, Eigner's poetry is limited in scope. Words such as "sky," "tree," "squirrel," "street," "bird," and "sun" are key words in poem after poem. His poetry, accordingly, is without many of the effects—the Surrealist juxtapositions, the discontinuous narrative, the exotic images and vocabulary—that are so predominant in contemporary American poetry. Yet for all this, Eigner's work has continued to attract readers of "experimental" poetry and experimentalists themselves. From the Objectivist experiments of the early 1950s to the present-day linguistic experiments of the New York and California-based "Language" poets, Eigner and his work have continued to exert an important influence.

     But it is difficult to describe what it is about an Eigner poem that makes for such an impact. in the first place, Eigner would probably decry any such attempt. Like many poets writing since the 1950s, Eigner eschews intellectual analysis of his poems or poetics. And, secondly, the typical Eigner poem breathes simplicity:

 

                                            ominous

      

                                                sinister

 

                                                        the rain

                             

                                                    smiles

 

                                                                         (TWAIS, p. 11)

 

Poems such as this, in their naive-like use of pathetic fallacy, carry with them an illusion of primitivism, an illusion Eigner himself often perpetuates. Writing recently in a letter to the magazine Là-bas, Eigner remarked of his poetics: "I myself go on serendipity.... I'm another H. Rosseau if not Grandma Moses."

     However, while some of his weaker poems never transcend this primitivist impression of landscape, Eigner's best poems—of which there are many in these two volumes—reveal a personal involvement with "things" that is as intellectually sophisticated as the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Indeed, it is to the Pound-Williams tradition that Eigner is most often linked. As Samuel Charters, in his introduction to Eigner's Selected Poems of 1972, has perceived,

 

                    It [Eigner's work] is a poetry that accepts implicitly the point

                    of language and image that Williams had honed out of the

                    Rutherford, New Jersey, doctor's office windows....

 

Eigner's poetry, like Williams', is of things rather than ideas; as Eigner wrote very recently in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, "behind words and whatever language comes about are things...things and people...." And Eigner's image is something akin to Pound's "radiant node or cluster...through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing." Thus, while Eigner's images are often grounded in the visual and the aural, the poems, like Pounds' and Williams', are dependent upon his engagement with the landscapes he presents. If meaning, as Eigner suggests in The World and Its Streets, Places, "depends on your eyes" (p. 78), it also depends upon the poet's and, ultimately, the reader's participation in this world of things.

 

                                   thunder

                                     planes

                                        I sneeze

                                           a lot

                                                    of

                                              things

                                                  slow

                                                    to take

                                                       slipped

                                                            look

                                                      higher than itself

                                                           some second ago

                                                                      the dam

                                                                                      broke

 

                                                                                              (w/how, p. 36)

 

     In this poem, the thunder, the sound of the plane and the poet's sneeze, are bound in a sequential relationship that results in both the natural and emotional releases expressed in the metaphoric "breaking of the dam" (in rainfall and psychological relief).

     Yet here we also see where Eigner's poetry is radically different from Williams's more tightly controlled "machine of words." What is most important in the Eigner poem is not syntax or even line break, but the relation of words through their placement on the page. Superficially, this appears to have a great deal in common with Olson's theories expressed in his "Projective Verse," but as Eigner has explained, while Olson saw the poem as a field of energy, he (Eigner) thinks of the poem as "spatial quantity" (Charters, quoting Eigner in Selected Poems, p. xiii). This is a crucial distinction. Whereas Olson's kineticism demands that the poem be structured around a connective flow of ideation (as Olson wrote in "Projective Verse," "One perception must immediately and directly lead to A FURTHER PERCEPTION."), Eigner's use of space tends to break connections, to sever ideational flow, to isolate and dissociate words and phrases.

     The effect of this, of course, is to put stress on the word, the syllable and phonemic relationships, which, in turn, forces the reader to examine the word or syllable and to reevaluate it. Even in a poem that is primarily thematic we can see this at work.

 

               what a

               uniform is

              one thing

 

                        yellow yellow yellow

                                            star

 

                                       (allowed publicly not to wear)

                                              Sol Rossi      Mantua

                                                       composer      court musician

                                                 l8th cent. syn

                                                       agog     sound    special

                                                           mark

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

                                                                                   (TWAIS, p. 173)

 

     In the fragment printed above, Eigner obviously is writing about the uniform that Jews were forces to wear in persecution, and the rest of the poem deals with other uniforms which are forced upon people at the expense of their freedom and individual identity. But just as important as what this is about is how the poem breaks up thematic continuity. The repetition of "yellow yellow yellow," for example, pounds yellow into the reader's mind, so saturating it with the color that the word almost loses meaning and becomes a yell of frustration instead. It is only in the next line, with the word "star," that the obsession with the color and that resulting frustration make sense. A few lines later Eigner even takes apart words, as in "18th cent. syn/agog sound special." The abbreviation of century, and the separation of the syllables "syn" and "agog" here allow for all sorts of new linguistic possibilities (including the concepts of "sin," and the intense excitement of being associated with that "sin"; the Sol Rossi to which Eigner refers was a Jewish musician, Salamone Rossi, court musician to the Gonzoga Dukes of Mantua in the Renaissance), as meaning is derived from prefix and suffix and attached by the reader to the words surrounding it.

     In less thematically oriented poems, moreover, this process is carried even further.

 

                                            D e p t h

 

                                      a tree

                                         inches    felt

                                                   distance

 

                                           a phonepole the sky slants

 

                                      Leaves crying death, death, the wind

                                              in the sun

                                                          rises

 

                                                                            (TWAIS, p. 102)

 

Here, except for the possible continuous flow of meaning between "a tree" and "inches," the reader is presented with only fragments. Even more than in the other poem above, the reader must focus on the phrase, the word, or as in "D e p t h," on the letter, rather than the continuous flow of ideas. The language itself, then, its sounds, its rhythms, its denotative meaning wrenched from associative context, are almost all the reader has to go on. It is no wonder that the "Language" poets are so attracted to his work.

     Just as significantly, however, the emphasis on word and partial phrase draws the reader's attention to what is not on the page, to what is missing, to the space which surrounds the isolate fragments. And it is there, as much as in the language, where Eigner's poems grown into meaning. In an Eigner poem it is as if most of the words have been erased, and the few that are left are merely clues to a complex mental process.  The reader must be as attentive to space, to what happens between lines or between words, as he has been previously to the words themselves. In the poem above, for example, everything hinges upon what the reader makes of the space between "distance" and "a phonepole the sky slants." This forces the reader to participate, to search beyond the linguistic surface in an attempt to make meaning. In this process, paradoxically, Eigner's "things"—his "sky," "sun," "tree," "phonepole"—although originally grounded in specificity—become for the reader abstractions, universals which permit him his own specificity in confronting and resolving the void of Eigner's space.

     Eigner poetically expresses this paradox as "broadcasting silence" ("the broadcast silence/like the sky," TWAIS, p. 94), a phrase which recognizes, it seems to me, the separateness of each individual; what for the reader is meaning can only be expressed by the author as silence, and vice versa. The shards of Eigner's language, then, serve as touchstones to the reader's discovery of his own life.

     On the other hand, this does not mean Eigner's poems work primarily through association, that they serve the reader as a sort of Rorschach blot. In his best poems, reader and poet work together to make the world around them startlingly new. And there is something serendipitous about this process. One example will have to serve as illustration:

 

                            noise absorbed

                                           in the air

 

                                       happiness

                                             is quiet

 

                                       have fun,      they say

 

                                           the birds lean on bark

                                                    and sing

                                                              to our ears

 

                                                                               (TWAIS, p. 110)

 

After the thousands of years and thousands of poems containing bird imagery, there is something truly wondrous about Eigner's birds leaning on that bark, upon the noise of their own singing.

 

College Park, Maryland, 1977

Reprinted from PIP (The Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog (June 2013).