William Zanzinger, Hattie Carroll, H.L. Hix, and G.W. Bush

Last week, William Zanzinger died in Richmond, Virginia. Who, you may ask, was William Zanzinger? Well, William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, as Bob Dylan sang, and got off with 6 months - b/c, the ballad explains, he was rich and white, and she was a poor black servant woman. This is one form of historic commemoration - or commemoration of "current events" - the way the news traveled and the way legends were preserved, back in the day. If you couldn't read, you listened to someone who could. If you could read and not sing, you read it to someone who could (to the tune of . . .). And the broadsides which the ballads were printed on cost a penny, ha'penny, or less.

Another form of poetic commemoration is on view in the poems of God Bless, by H.L. Hix (Etruscan Press, 2007), which "are constructed entirely of passages from speeches, executive orders, and other public statements of George W. Bush" - or, in some cases, Osama bin Laden. So sure, there are some juicy bushisms. But, by and large, Hix has done a yeomanlike job of making poems (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, no less) out of what must be some of the most incredibly boring discourse ever devised by the mind of man (or lack thereof). For instance, the title is a phrase that was repeated obsessively by the President, in multiple variants - not to mention other tedious iterations of every conceivable reference to an already overworked Deity:

We honor their service to America and we pray
their families will receive God's comfort and God's grace.

We pray for their speedy and safe return.
May God bless our country and all who defend her.

We pray for those families who mourn the loss of life.
We believe freedom is - is a gift from the Almighty God.

And so on. There is something about staying "on message" that seems inherently inimical to poetry (interesting poetry, anyway), and Hix has done about as well as I could imagine anyone doing in trying to turn this stuff into something resembling art. The stuff from bin Laden is also predictable, but it's such a nice break. When you go into the next Bush poem, you think, O - him again!

But it certainly gets the message across - or rather the distilled and concentrated flavor of those days of officialdom from the beginning of 2001 through 2004. The repetition (NOT insistence) is the rhetoric of running in circles - not inappropriate prosody for the war of terror.

Another, subsidiary question, this volume raises is: can this kind of found poetry be "political" by itself, without commentary? And if so, how? Hix follows the poems by a series of interviews that deal with both his poems and other people's books that deal with similar themes. This is perhaps the same issue Benjamin deals with in the "Matter-of-Fact" school of photography. In "The Artist as Producer," he comes to the conclusion that, without the caption, the image is open to appropriation by any political tendency - not least of all "apolitical" art. For much experimental poetry of the last 200+ years, prefaces, manifestos, interviews, etc., have functioned as "captions" - alleviating the burden of Art to convey the Message. That is why Lyrical Ballads had to be explained first, in 1800, but Dylan's ballad lyrics do not, in the 1960s or 2000s.

Ideological Face Apparatus

The weird thing about Facebook (and probably My Space, tho it isn't my space) is that it's a kind of self-profiling. I mean, people are holding demos and filing lawsuits to avoid being profiled, but here I am doing it to myself. How stupid is that? No wonder the NSA and marketeers of all sorts dip into this tasty database.

O well as long as I spell the name right . . .

History, Poem, Story, Lyric (Shimoda and Perez)

I read a couple of books recently that take substantially different approaches to this business of telling history in poetry. And, once again, it has to do with how much narration there is and how much of the narration pertains to the past.

The books are The Inland Sea, by Brandon Shimoda (Tarpaulin Sky 2008) and from Unincorporated Territory, by Craig Santos Perez (Tinfish 2008). In Perez’ book there is both narrative and lyric – a pretty good balance, in my view. In the Shimoda, whatever narrative there is must be inferred.

To be fair, Perez’ book is 90+ pages, and Shimoda’s is less than half that – more of a chapbook. Right off the bat, here’s one of the problems: if you tell the story, you’re going to take up more pages. So one has to decide how much of the story is enough – and by what criteria. So Perez starts us off with a preface, in which we learn that “Guahan [Guam] has always been captured (and thus defined) for its strategic position in the Pacific (as a stopping post on the Spanish Galleon Trade Route, as a significant advancement for the Japanese Army during World War II, and as a continuing military colony of the U.S.).” The poet’s hope is that the island will emerge from these dominations “into further uprisings of meaning.” All of this orients one for the lyric poems that follow, not unlike Susan Howe’s miniature historical essays at the beginning of many of her books.

In the body of the text, we learn about the rebellion of Mata’pang, the terror of the Japanese occupation, and the ravages of the brown tree snake, as well as memories of Perez’ grandparents and the local culture they taught him. But most of the book is taken up with dispersed series of lyrics, interwoven with one another (not unlike Robert Duncan’s Passages, Uprisings, etc.). For instance, the first installment of “from Tidelands” goes:

“edge

closer to the illegible

borders - "let this cast open [hale']*

into razed “temporal fields and

harness

“these tidal” palimpsests

* ed. note: this line is indented about eight spaces in the original. I still haven't figured this out.

Clearly the poem refers to the troubled history of Guahan – its insularity, vulnerability, the uprootedness of people and culture under the pressure of colonization [hale’ = root, in Chamoru], as well as the erasure and recovery of its history. If one saw the poem in an anthology (without a footnote), however, all of that would be, well, illegible. The lyrics function as both elegies and meditations on space (on the page, the ocean, etc.). But the history must be told – including with maps, diagrams and URLs. Though Perez lives on the mainland now, to do less would be to dishonor the memory of the people back home, living and dead.

One gets a very different vibe from Inland Sea. It’s clear, from allusions to the Heike Monogatari and the atomic bomb, that the book contains allusions to Japanese history and culture (and there are a few very concise notes at the end):

is it injurious to wear one’s self around one’s waist

in radiation first is flash

burn, second

flame

The poem “Crucian Carp” contains several such allusions to the bomb blasts and their aftermath. But at other points, there are snippets of narrative that are tossed out and left behind:

a single cloud holding

in the liquid

spilt

to my father

the afternoon after the morning of

the day he said that he liked men

or was it he said ‘boys’

emperor

unbinding from years of rigid fence

you felt not a thing for

Now, I can infer (or construct) a story from all this, and indeed, the form of it encourages me to do so. But much of it – most of it – is elided, redacted, unspoken. Clearly, that’s part of the point. But what does that do to the past? The people – mere characters – where are the ethical edges? I’m not saying I know. But I do think the book succeeds without the gestures toward biography and specific histories:

away

blanched

branches

reach by yonder fast

the reeds of the paradise boat

In any event, both are very good books that speak to the difficulty of telling history (and the problems with information) and feeling it at the same time. I sure haven’t figured it out!

Do You Ever Get the Feeling You Should Be Learning How to Use Automatic Weapons and Forage for Wild Edible Plants . . .

. . . instead of writing (about) poetry, these days? Boy, I know I sure do!

More VERZION TWO meshugas

By "Jeff Harrison" and "Ray Craig" (the latter our first vizpo verzion).

Yet another VERZION TWO pome.

. . . This one by "William Freind"/Bill Freind.

New VERZION TWO poem

From Larissa Shmailo - check it out here.

"Eve Even Christmas" and "Nursing Slaughter Spirit"

Some timely poems by me at 3by3by3.

Fallout from _ISSUE ONE_

Remember a few months ago, how everyone was talking about that faux PDF zine that contained several thousand randomly-generated poems attributed to people who didn't write them? Like you?

Well, I've decided we ought to make lemons out of lemonade. So - if you were one of the "victims," please contribute to VERZION TWO.

This is for real. Honest. Try it out!

Xmas? Bah, Xbox! Loden's _Hotel Imperium_? Three apposable thumbs up!

"When you spoke of the utility of suffering, I knew it was because you heard your death up on the roof like Santa's sleigh and now you wanted me to give it to you as a present."

Thus begins Rachel Loden's prose poem "Carnal Acknowledgments," from her book Hotel Imperium (U of Georgia P, 1999). I'm ashamed to say I haven't read these poems in this collected form until now, but glad I did. Makes me look forward to the next installment, Dick of the Dead (!), forthcoming from Ahsahta. Many of the poems are indeed Nixonesque, e.g., "Bride of Tricky D.," which begins with a news item about the dog Checkers being reinterred near his former owner, and ends thusly:

" . . . 'Let's
slip the Constitution, Richard,

cut red ribbon on the virgin
century. Teach me tonight . . . .' I find

his fierce beard lovely and the shadows
long. Asleep with Pat & Checkers

by his side . . . 'We could do it,'
he'll say, 'but it would be wrong.'"

Checkers. You know, as in the Checkers Speech? Illegal campaign contributions? Red scare? Well, kids, once upon a time, there was this thing called Watergate . . . Actually, many of the poems do come with endnotes, but this one doesn't. The quote at the end, of course, is what Nixon's former Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, tells the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate break-in that he (Nixon) said after agreeing to pay hush money to the burglars, now in prison, but that he never really said. Got it?

Anyway, I like these poems b/c they are a kind of shadow image or muscle memory of politics and pop culture of mid-20th c.-America, and since I already feel like an embalmed relic of that era, I like reading them. Indeed, a lot of these poems seem to be spoken from beyond the grave, or from the political unconscious (a fine distinction, nowadays). I dig the combination of gravitas and wackiness in tone - & elegance and total surprise, in terms of form. The tone and form of some poems reminds me a little of the poetry of the era they're about, but the content has a lot more in common with Peter Gizzi than Randal Jarrell. Or Underworld in verse. Only shorter.