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Lise Clavel reviews
John Fulton
The Animal Girl
Louisiana State University Press
Paula Koneazny reviews
Alice Notley
In the Pines
Penguin Poets
“What makes these stories
exceptional is the revelation that
normal people are in fact
not normal at all.”
“Alice Notley is a fierce and fearless
writer.”
Rob Schlegel reviews
Joanna Klink
Circadian
Gary Lain reviews
Mel Freilicher
The Unmaking of Americans:
7 Lives
San Diego City Works Press
Penguin
“Klink deliberately complicates the
boundaries between the speaker’s
interior landscape and the physical
landscape.”
“Freilicher finally believes that despite
all of its cruel and arbitrary social
barriers, love abides.”
Kara Mason reviews
Pamela Thompson
Fred Muratori reviews
Eileen R. Tabios
The Light Sang As It Left
Your Eyes:
Our Autobiography
Every Past Thing
Unbridled Books
“Every Past Thing is a meditative
novel.”
Marsh Hawk Press
“The Light Sang documents a
restlessness, an ardent quest for a
means of pure saying.”
George Held reviews
Halvard Johnson
Organ Harvest with
Entrance of Clones
Hamilton Stone Editions
Dave Stevens reviews
Michael Horovitz
A New Waste Land:
Timeship Earth
at Nillennium
New Departures
“A New Waste Land shows Horovitz
for the first time at epic scale.”
“Johnson’s affinity for the
compositional freedom
advocated by Jack Spicer and
John Cage can be easily seen in
these poems.”
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September–October 2008
29.6
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Say What Must Be Said
In the Pines
Alice Notley
Penguin Poets
http://www.penguin.com
131 pages; paper, $18.00
The title of Alice Notley’s latest book, In the
Pines, is revealing. In designates the site of burial;
the Pines, the place where all the dead loved ones lie.
Instead of narrating events dependent upon volition
or desire, the poems included here embody the active
stasis of the verb to be. In her choice of the preposition in instead of into, Notley grants her poetry location rather than trajectory. The pine needle, fragrant
and sharp, is “that old pine needle,” the needle of
infection that infuses the long poem “In the Pines.”
On the other hand, pine trees also evoke “Momma,
in the pines,” “the tree of shamans,” and “the tree of
life.” This dance of contradictions, however, is but
a surface feature of a world in which the poet sings,
“to be this negative is an action with no known flower
yet, but I prize it.”
Alice Notley is a fierce and fearless writer.
When she asks herself, “How am I changing the
writing,” I am reminded of Benjamin Hollander’s
imperative that writers must break with tradition,
which Notley suggests is 10,000 years (dating from
the Agricultural Revolution?) of selling the murder
of human beings by other human beings as well as
“ten thousand years. Of this imposed femaleness.”
With this interpretation in mind, her repudiation of
story-telling that caters to a voyeuristic interest in
death and disease can be seen as just as much an
ethical choice as her persistent refusal to make peace
with patriarchy.
In the Pines is divided into three sections, arranged in order of decreasing density or increasing
compression: “In the Pines,” “The Black Trailor,”
and “Hemostatic.” The meat of the book is largely
contained in “In the Pines” and the eponymous first
poem of “The Black Trailor.” If “In the Pines” were
a movie instead of a poem, I couldn’t bear to watch
it, because I find it so disturbing. This lengthy poem,
or series of poems, is discursive: it takes up both
philosophical and physical matters. On page one,
Notley baldly states that she is infected with Hepatitis
C from an injection of amphetamines thirty-three
years ago. She describes her infection as her defect,
the defect from which she now writes. She exposes
and explodes the irony of the injection that kills and
the one that cures, and the deeper irony that love
engenders death. To what extent, however, does this
speaker accept her infection as her identity? She
asks herself, “How far gone / into my defect am I,”
while claiming that the infected are the precursors.
She proposes a new species, one that issues from a
different kind of evolution than that theorized by Science, “Part bird. Part rat. Part voice. Part elephant,”
and an evolutionary code that’s “not just genes but
songs.” Although she calls herself a “philosophical
materialist,” she takes issue with Charles Darwin’s
theory of natural selection, which she claimed, in an
interview with Claudia Keelan published in 2004 in
American Poetry Review, “drives me crazy because
of its pointing towards ‘man.’” As for scientific
empiricism, Notley warns in “In the Pines,” “Keep
your hands off my neurons.” Throughout this section
of the book, she investigates what it means to love,
to survive, to be alive or be dead. Or, rather, not
what these things mean (I use thing advisedly here,
as Notley’s writing is grounded in her sense of the
material) but rather what their condition is. Although
the poem’s protagonist journeys to the other side to
converse with her dead loved ones, hers is an other
side locatable only in voice, memory, and poetry.
As well as discursive, this poetry is dialogic; a
voice speaks to and in the place of an interlocutor/
listener. This you is alternately the
deceased loved one (mother, sister, brother, husband), the reader,
the patriarchal power structure,
and the speaker herself. Pronouns
shift. There are multiple he’s and
multiple you’s. All inhabit a written
world that is intensely and vividly
personal while never maudlin or
self-indulgent. The poet here uses
narrative devices for non-narrative
ends. For example, in “In the
Pines,” she poses a question, “What
about your illness? you say,” and
then answers it, “Oh, the plot.”
Although she recognizes that story
is an object of desire, she nevertheless refuses to create a grand
narrative. She says, ”I’m almost telling this story
but I’m not going to. The old kinds of details aren’t
right any more.”
Alice Notley is a fierce and
fearless writer.
The title of the opening poem in the second
section of the book, “The Black Trailor (A Noir
Fiction),” unsettles with its made-up word trailor.
This intriguing elision of trail and or prompts me to
read the title as “The Black Trail or a Noir Fiction.”
Exactly who is trailing whom remains ambiguous,
as this poem could be described as a monologue
acting like a dialogue. There is a speaker as well as
a “you” who is spoken to, spoken about, and spoken
for, but who does not speak. The appellation noir is
appropriate here because there is a corpse, a dead
body onstage:
Move it,
you say, move the whole corpse of earth
away.
Move the whole planet somewhere?
You say that you’re dead and it’s
dead: can’t it be pushed back
through a hole in timelessness?
Both Science and Religion seem to be the poet’s
adversaries. Her accusations reverberate like curses:
“There wasn’t a reason for the world, I say. It didn’t
last, because we forced our reasons onto it.” She
rejects the supernatural, although for her “natural”
is not defined by science and can’t be decoded or
Paula Koneazny
broken into by scientific theories:
All of my anguish was physical. I had
no soul
………………………………………………
You can open me and look within
my materials.
But theories break
when you leave
the room
later.
In other poems in this middle section, Notley
refuses the old patriarchal stories, but not the voices
of intimates when she admits, “I don’t believe the
stories, but I like some disclosures
of suffering,” and then opines,
“If you are a genius you might as
well not be, because the budget’s
for hacks and the usual format—
discreet pages of poetry.” There is
a certain disingenuousness to this
claim, since some of the poems
in “The Black Trailor” and all of
those in “Hemostatic” are at least
on the surface “discreet.” These are
shorter poems, one or two pages in
length, and at least look like what
many readers might think of as poetry. On the other hand, form here
may be a mask, since these poems
don’t take in enough oxygen to exist independently, and just as much
as the preceding long poems, function as the limbs of
a larger organism called In the Pines. Notley should
concede that for some time already, her poetry has
been published and acknowledged rather widely. In
the Pines, for example, is out from Penguin, not a
small or university press.
Although I find the poems of “Hemostatic” to
be the least satisfying in this collection, hemostatic
does echo hemoglobin, thus reiterating the facts of
blood and infection that infuse the powerful first
poem of the book. Blood here isn’t a symbol. It
doesn’t mean something else. As the speaker muses
in “Hemostatic,” “Maybe I’m just blood. / Whatever
that’s for.” Words always work in Notley’s poems. To
lie around the page merely looking good, or griping
about how difficult the job is, would be intolerable,
for so much depends upon each word, even such
simple ones as the just of “just blood” and the in of
the book’s title.
In the Pines opens with a series of challenges
to readers that culminate in a pointed question,
“Why are you continuing to read,” and a statement
of purpose, “It is time to change writing completely.”
Alice Notley isn’t about to let readers off the hook
for even one line or two. Just as directly, I would
answer her that In the Pines is one of the most useful
books of poetry that I have read recently. And indeed,
it is time.
Paula Koneazny reads, writes, and works in Sebastopol, California. Her poetry has appeared most recently in “The War Issue” of Volt and is forthcoming
in Pool and Aufgabe. Her reviews have appeared in
ABR, Verse, and Rain Taxi.
September–October 2008 Page 1 L
Marginalized Citizens
The Unmaking of Americans:
7 Lives
Mel Freilicher
San Diego City Works Press
http://www.cityworkspress.org
135 pages; paper, $12.95
The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, by Mel
Freilicher, portrays seven tragically exemplary
Americans. In three sections sorted by both implicit
and explicit similarities, Freilicher investigates/interprets the biographies of troubled “divas” Bettie Page,
Dorothy Dandridge, and Joey Stefano; proto-feminists Margaret Fuller and Margaret Sanger; and the
talented, complex and committed black Americans
Billy Strayhorn and Bayard Rustin, both of whom
were openly gay during a time when “they didn’t
even have legal rights.” To provide a loose thematic/
emotional continuity for The Unmaking of Americans, and to bring these very diverse figures into the
context of our own recent times, Freilicher introduces
the character Peripatetic Book Reviewer. An itinerant
scholar and college lecturer, and an amusingly everyday picaro, Peripatetic Book Reviewer dovetails the
ways in which our “7 Americans” were marginalized
by the official culture because of their varying sexual
and gender orientations/preferences/attitudes with
his own autobiography in very personal, immediate,
and moving ways.
Book 1 of The Unmaking of Americans relates
the fate of troubled divas Page, Stefano, and Dandridge. The focus of a recent, trendy cult following,
Page is here portrayed (through the vehicle of her
rather dubious, we are told, biography) as a fairly
complex figure: a sexually adventuresome young
woman and uninhibited bondage photo model, who
later in life becomes a dangerous and abusive moral
fanatic. Page is also drawn as knowing and funny, yet
curiously indifferent as to the larger implications of
her work, and the social sanctions that could befall
her industry at any time. Stefano is viewed here as
celebrity, as gay porn dreamboat, and we gain little
access to his psychology or motivations. He is a vital
and potent figure, and one is heartened by his lack
of inhibition, but he was also a hopeless drug addict
who committed suicide over what was ultimately a
pedestrian misunderstanding.
There is somewhat more to say about the
classy and accomplished Dorothy Dandridge (who,
one might argue, is placed in rather rough company
here with Page and Stefano). Polished, talented,
and beautiful, Dandridge was a groundbreaking
black actress, landing leading roles in major Hollywood films (Carmen Jones [1954], Porgy and Bess
[1959]). Later, Dandridge (taking bad advice from
her mentor/lover Otto Preminger) declined a role in
The King and I (1956). This decision (based in part
on her refusal to play a slave) led to her breaking
her contract Twentieth Century Fox, and she felt
later that this did irreparable damage to her career.
An abusive marriage to dancer Jack Denison left
Dandridge bankrupt; she was later hospitalized at
the California state mental institution at Camarillo,
and finally died of an overdose of anti-depressant
medication at fourty-two.
Freilicher’s tone in these Dandridge passages
is sober, sympathetic, and precise. Yet during the
Stefano passages, he employs a campy and playfully
Page 2 L
American Book Review
lascivious tone. This dialectic sets up a pattern he
employs throughout the novel. (Freilicher approaches
Bettie Page in a spirit of intellectual inquiry well
suited to this down home paragon of sexual deviancy). For example, toward the end of book 1, we
find a set piece involving an imaginary frolic at the
“Cukaracha Club” involving Page, Stefano, and
Dandridge and (later) Hedda Hopper (who here
represents everything that is prurient, opportunistic,
and false). This scene is done with great verve and
is quite funny, very outré. But when juxtaposed with
the somber details of Dandridge’s decline (especially
the long, late-night phone calls to old friends in which
she would sing tunes from younger, better days),
Freilicher’s tonal range allows us to see these “divas”
in their complexity as people who, despite their fame,
were marginalized and done real emotional damage
based on the most intimate aspects of their identities.
Furthermore, the episodic passages concerning Peripatetic Book Reviewer’s life and times (which take
place during our own era, and run through all three
books) serve to provide a degree of thematic unity
to the text, as his own experiences often intersect
the biographies of his seven Americans in elusive
yet revealing ways.
Book 2 concerns two Margarets: nineteenthcentury intellectual Margaret Fuller and twentiethcentury activist Margaret Sanger. Agency is the
major theme of this section, as both women were
indefatigable in their struggles against the dominant
ideologies and institutions of their times.
Freilicher finally believes that despite
all of its cruel and arbitrary social
barriers, love abides.
Fuller was an important figure in the Transcendentalist movement (editor of their journal The
Dial), an accomplished literary scholar, teacher,
and later a journalist and foreign correspondent for
the New York Tribune. She was constrained by the
sexual mores of nineteenth-century America. Not
even Fuller, the author of “a cornerstone of American
feminist thinking, Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
replete with classical paradigms and erudite literary
allusions, underscoring her analysis of contemporary
women’s customary and legalized servitude in marriage,” could escape the inhibitions of her class and
status. For Fuller, the liberation of women in her era
could not allow for sexual liberation (in fact, it’s
not even clear that she considered sexual practice
as another front within the same struggle), as she,
“advocated celibacy until a woman became strong
enough to choose freely whether or not to marry.”
Fuller apparently took her own counsel: “Accepting
the notion that it was impossible for her to be fulfilled
as both a woman and a thinker, Margaret voluntarily
denied her own interests in young men.” Such denials
have their price, of course, and as the engaging and
independent Fuller grew older, she became, “melancholic, priggish, subject to violent tantrums.” Fuller’s
emotional isolation here underscores Freilicher’s
overarching theme: we are damaged in the most
intimate ways by the strictures of our social institutions. Fuller eventually did take a lover (a reserved
but not unkind or insensitive young Italian aristocrat,
Giovanni Ossoli), and they had a child, Nino. After
a few fulfilling though exhausting years in an Italy
undergoing revolutionary social changes (with Fuller
working as the director of a hospital), Fuller and her
family booked passage on a merchant ship bound for
America. However, the voyage was ill-fated, ending
Gary Lain
tragically: “The Elizabeth came in sight of Fire
Island, when it ran aground…a mountainous wave
broke over the vessel…Nino’s body appeared on the
beach a few minutes later; Margaret’s and Ossoli’s
were never found.”
Margaret Sanger led a rather different life. Born
in the late nineteenth century, she “managed to have
it all, including many lovers largely simultaneous
with two marriages. In Margaret Sanger’s uniquely
brilliant, fifty-year career, she developed a network
of independent birth control clinics and engineered a
major movement: transforming women’s rights and
access to birth control services worldwide.” I think
it’s important to note that Sanger is the only figure
here who does not suffer the effects of the profoundly
internalized emotional isolation that “unmakes” the
lives of Freilicher’s other Americans. She serves as
a sort of counter-example of how, given an opening
during a less-restrictive cultural milieu (particularly
bohemian Greenwich Village during the early twentieth century), a non-conformist like Sanger might
live happily.
Sanger’s biography also allows Freilicher to
pursue the theme of agency, which he fruitfully
continues to develop in book 3, which explores the
lives of two gay men: black American civil rights
activist and organizer Bayard Rustin and the socially
conscious jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. Activism
also is part of Peripatetic Book Reviewer’s life, as
we learn in these sections of his own participation
in anti-war and civil-rights protests. An obviously
heartfelt and frankly moving passage concerns the
funeral of Peripatetic Book Reviewer’s friend and
colleague Anne, a black American academic and
writer who overcame substantial social and institutional impediments in the course of her career. He
deals equally well with the death of his friend Kathy
Acker, effectively detailing the cataloging of her
papers and the discovery of her last manuscripts; a
rather remarkable, lushly descriptive dream sequence
involving Acker heightens the sense of her presence
and loss for Peripatetic Book Reviewer, and for us.
Here it becomes clearer as to how Peripatetic
Book Reviewer functions thematically in this text:
Peripatetic Book Reviewer implies that it might be
useful to see, in the ways they are marginalized by
the social institutions of their eras (and the ways in
which they resist, or accommodate, or internalize, or
succumb to this marginalization), a certain continuity
and thereby an implied solidarity between these seven Americans of such widely diverging backgrounds,
and between ourselves, no matter our identifications.
Freilicher ends by quoting Billy Strayhorn’s song
“Lush Life”: “I’ll live a lush life in some small dive
/ And there I’ll be while I rot with the rest / Of those
whose lives are lonely, too.’ The immensely talented,
innovative, and prolific composer Strayhorn, we
learn, essentially drank himself to death, dying of
cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one. Freilicher sees
Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” as a sort of anthem for,
“Billy’s generation of gay people, as well as for those
who came after, especially those who refused to be
dispossessed: despite the crushing loneliness, fighting against what they fully recognized as monstrous
obstacles, yearning for love.”
One senses here, between the lines, that Mel
Freilicher finally believes that despite all of its cruel
and arbitrary social barriers, love abides.
Gary Lain lives in San Diego, California with his
wife and two young sons. He is the associate editor
of Fiction International.
Directing the Dream
The Light Sang As It Left
Your Eyes:
Our Autobiography
Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press
http://www.marshhawkpress.org
366 pages; paper, $19.95
Who is the author of The Light Sang As It Left
Your Eyes? Is it Eileen R. Tabios, prolific Filipinoborn poet, editor, blogger, Barnard graduate, California resident, and daughter of Filamore B. Tabios,
Sr.? Or is it Eileen R. Tabios, the author-function
(as Michel Foucault would have it), the “discursive
set” revealed to the reader through cross-hatched
trajectories of history, culture, ethnicity, gender, and
the borrowed vocabulary of other writers similarly
constructed? Or could it be—in a sense that Coleridge
might have approved—the Eileen R. Tabios who is
neither person nor socio-linguistic nexus, but the
instrument of a “synthetic and magical power” that
achieves its presence in the unique, transcendent
moment of the poem itself?
To answer “all of the above” would be equivocal, but not inaccurate, since The Light Sang engages
the nature of authorship from multiple flanks. In his
essay “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes asserted
that “the Text is always paradoxical,” so we might
be prepared to find that Tabios has assembled here an
omnibus of paradox and exploration, at once textual
and visual; private meditation and public discourse;
self-conscious to the precipice of solipsism yet
inclusively polyphonic; postmodern in concept but
Romantic in spirit. It is less a book of poetry than
a complex: a virtual, almost accidental honeycomb
where disparate forces converge and thrive without
necessarily coalescing into a stable structure. In
her poem “‘Find’ Is A Verb,” Tabios writes: “‘To
collage is to include the world,’” and because that
line is enclosed in quotes, we can’t be certain of its
provenance. In a blog entry reprinted at the end of
the book, Tabios proposes “a poetics of welcome”
through which she literally assimilates and reframes
the work of writers such as Ernesto Priego, Rebeka
Lembo, Nick Carbo, and Cody McCafferty, and
presents outright collaborations with Carbo, Stella
Lai, and more.
Unlike her 2002 Marsh Hawk collection,
Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, a formally
consistent series of rich, deeply focused prose poems,
this book is clearly intended as collage, an assemblage of forms and voices signaled by the subtitle’s
plural possessive pronoun as well as its cover’s alternating, tiled portraits of the author and her father.
But it adds up to something more than pastiche.
With its mash-up of styles and genres—hay(na)ku,
scumbles, diary entries, prose poems, memoirs, blog
posts, questionnaires, translations, cantos, drawings,
visual poems composed with animal stickers—The
Light Sang documents a restlessness, an ardent quest
for a means of pure saying, for a methodology of
comprehending both one’s self in the world and the
world within one’s self. The tongue, poets know, is
a sensory organ that registers more than taste, and in
Tabios’ case, it serves as a register of cultural identity. Born in the Philippines, for the most part she
practices her art in the “enforced,” colonial tongue of
English, which, from a postcolonial perspective, can
be wielded to symbolically overthrow the oppressive
Fred Muratori
influence of that enforcement through sheer mastery
and creative re-use of “this eurocentric speech.” By
incorporating the artful constructs of other, similarly
situated poets, she aims to—if not quite “contain
multitudes”—at least speak with a collective, quasirepresentative force through what Foucault might
call a “plurality of self.” Her assimilative tendencies extend beyond the explicitly postcolonial as
well, resulting in “scumbles”—a term derived from
a painting technique—that literally gloss or lightly
smear texts by other writers, such as Derek Walcott
and John Banville.
Despite this collaborative aesthetic—which
is often felt more than documented, a matter of
texture rather than attribution or homage—the
poet-as-person, the individual “I” who has written/
composed/conceived these texts seizes and holds
the foreground as prominently as any Romantic or
Confessional poet. In an article titled “Maganda:
Thoughts on Poetic Form (A Hermetic Perspective),”
Tabios wrote: “…I try to remove my-Self out of the
way so that all sorts of poems may come to me.”
But the autobiographical strain of The Light Sang is
so insistent that a reader would be hard-pressed to
recognize such removals, unless the authorial performance being witnessed is that of a semi-reconstituted
self, one transmogrified through the act of writing
into a kind of doppelgänger, a mirror image looking
back at its creator through the other side of the page:
“The author dies / when a poet’s name / becomes a
signifier.”
The Light Sang documents a
restlessness, an ardent quest for a
means of pure saying.
As a blogger (what, in pre-Internet days, used
to be called a diarist, albeit sans audience), Tabios
fashions public personae (e.g, “Chatelaine”) to
conduct “poetry/conceptual/performance projects,”
some of which revolve around personal events. The
centerpiece of the book is “April in Los Angeles,” a
blog journal recounting her father’s fatal illness in
120 entries of various lengths. They range from the
flatly narrative:
Returned home to St. Helena this morning. As soon as we walked into the house,
the phone rang. My brother confirmed that
all medical treatment has been suspended
for Dad and he’s now just on pain medication and other treatments to make him as
comfortable as possible. The focus next
is to find the best hospice care facility
for him.
to the strikingly candid:
I have trouble remembering anything
that caused tension between me and my
father. But it all began when I ceased being a child. When I started to become a
woman. When I began to reveal myself
as a sexual being.
to the meta-narrative:
What is this that I am writing? Is this
a poem? If so, then these words form
“lines?”
If lines, definitely written by my body
on my body. Lines like those cut by the
troubled on their skin in order to divert
away from the real pain.
About 2 million Americans, nearly all
female, are thought to be afflicted with
cutting: self-mutilation as a balm for pain
and anxiety.
The theme of the father’s death—certainly
among the oldest in literature—continues in the
sequence “The After-Death History of My Father,”
a series of poems and prose pieces that detail, in
language both literal and figurative, the self-analysis
that follow loss. Casting herself as the Prodigal
Daughter, Tabios documents conflicting feelings and
memories as they converge in random succession,
and notes the protean nature of mourning, the way
its focus changes: “The mourning becomes not just
over Dad’s death, but how disconnections become
realities.” And later: “The mourning becomes not
just over Dad’s death, but regret over shut doors,
over aborted intimacies of sharings.”
True, there is little that one would find remarkable—or even original—in some of these passages,
particularly in a time when the popularity and ubiquity of published memoirs and inspirational books
on illness and loss outsell most fiction. What distinguishes Tabios’s work is the anxiety of contradiction
at its core, its concern with formal experimentation,
and the depth of its self-awareness. Nowhere is this
more obvious than at the very center of the book,
where we find, in a piece titled “The Blank Page of
Death,” a photograph of Mr. Tabios himself lying
in a coffin, a copy of one of his daughter’s books
displayed above his chest. The poet writes:
What is it about the image of someone
in a coffin? While taking photos of my
father in his coffin, I felt appalled—like
I was intruding or that the image should
be something left uncaptured so that it
resides only in memory. Still, I kept photographing…
No doubt many readers will be appalled as
well, prompting questions of taste that rarely surface
in discussions of literature anymore. When does art
trespass on human dignity? Should the poetic ego
acknowledge any limits? Where does the daughterself end and the poet-self begin? What on earth was
this woman thinking? But Tabios, rigorously candid
and determined to represent all dimensions of the
Muratori continued on next page
September–October 2008 Page 3 L
Muratori continued from previous page
experience, anticipates these reactions: “I kept thinking to myself, half laughing and half…appalled, ‘You
sick puppy—what are you doing?’”
Where Barthes and company propose the death
of the author, Tabios oversees the death and transubstantiation of the subject, proceeding from literal Dad
to figurative father, from person to memory, from
memory to acute state of self-consciousness, and
finally to the performance of that self-consciousness,
its unresolved, ongoing conflicts notwithstanding.
She enacts this process of catharsis in what almost
feels like real time, so it’s possible to forget that
the dreamer is all the while not only witnessing the
dream, but directing it.
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes strives to be
many things at once, and—with much of its contents
having been vetted on the Internet before appearing
in print—it creates its own place in the moment
as postmodern discourses and digital technologies
sweep poetry into new media and expose the art not
only to instantaneous, collaborative processes, but
to immediate critical analyses and theory formation.
Always Beginning, Never Arriving
Organ Harvest with
Entrance of Clones
Halvard Johnson
Hamilton Stone Editions
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
113 pages; paper, $15.00
Halvard Johnson’s poems reflect his encounters
with surrealism, music, language poetry, travel, and
politics, among other realms. Dick Allen has praised
previous work for “the complete interest [he] brings
to so many things,” and that also applies to his new
poems. Johnson’s four earliest books, published between 1969 and 1979, are out of print but archived
at http://capa.conncoll.edu. After a hiatus until 2003,
he began to produce a series of e-books at a Finnish
site, http://www.xpressed.org. Organ Harvest with
Entrance of Clones now makes available eightyone of his recent poems in a handsome paperback
edition.
The title poem gives a hint of Johnson’s attention to words, for it begins, “Every autumn in those
parts, harvesters would / bring in from the fields
wagonloads of eyes and hearts” and other organs
to be used to make clones of their donors. He often
adverts to the peculiarities of current language usage, here helping us to recognize the weirdness of
“harvesting” an organ for transplant, as though human beings were grown like a crop to produce usable
“parts,” a word that reverberates in the quoted lines
above, though with a different meaning. At the end of
the poem, as the speaker greets the clones arriving on
barges and rafts, he sees them as “establishing a kind
of preliminary / entente cordiale among our sundry
species.” “Entente cordiale,” which comes from
nineteenth-century diplomat language and means
a friendly agreement between two or more nations,
is a word probably found in school books Johnson,
born in 1936, read in the 40s and 50s. He also uses
tags like “Come back, Shane,” from the Alan Ladd
Western; “Pretty to think so,” from the ending of
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926);
and, in several permutations, T.S. Eliot’s image of
“a patient etherized upon a table.”
In this regard, he brings to mind his contemporary the playwright Richard Foreman, whose stage
work also employs verbal tags to present an idiosyncratic melding of mid-century and more recent
experience. Johnson’s career exemplifies the relative
obscurity of the underground poet, while Foreman’s
Ontological-Hysteric Theater has grown a substantial
coterie, especially in New York City and Europe,
whereas Johnson has traveled extensively but so far
has little presence in the cultural firmament. Like
Foreman, Johnson uses language to disorient his
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American Book Review
readers, as in the line “St. Bebop romped among the
indebted corbels” (“Toccata Giocosa”). Even knowing that a corbel is a weight-bearing piece of stone
or wood jutting out of a wall won’t
make this statement more coherent
or less delicious.
Johnson, who writes free verse,
in irregular stanzas, and, sometimes,
prose poems, is influenced by the
work of Jack Spicer, quoting on his
website Spicer’s Second Letter (from
“Admonitions”) to Robin Blaser:
“The trick naturally is what Duncan
learned years ago and tried to teach
us—not to search for the perfect
poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own
paths, explore and retreat but never
be fully realized (confined) within the
boundaries of one poem.” The other
“required reading” on Johnson’s website is John
Cage’s Indeterminacy.
Johnson’s affinity for the
compositional freedom advocated by
Jack Spicer and John Cage can be
easily seen in these poems.
Johnson’s affinity for the compositional
freedom advocated by Spicer and Cage can be easily seen in his sequence poems, such as “Frequent
Flyer,” which comprises ten numbered stanzas of
various shapes, lengths, and levels of diction. From
the opening description of “a teenager’s party dress
back in the 50s”—“seemingly derived from lipstick
and nylon stockings / swooping up and down like
a roller coaster”—through “biomorphic slivers and
blobs,” “videos of men / impersonating women in
Beijing,” the first-person fragment “so I became
a eunuch / afraid to show us nothing,”and various
other seemingly discrete subjects, Johnson plays with
juxtapositions, ending in
mazes of alleys and buildings
nowhere to get to
tried and failed
to go mad
let me have
one final look at you
Whether this kind of discontinuous narrative evokes
delight or puzzlement might depend on the reader’s
experience of, say, Jackson Mac Low’s poetry. But
it illustrates Johnson’s sense, expressed in his ars
poetica, “Barn, Slope, Tree,” of “the uncertainty of
our narratives,” “narrative itself / emerging from our
hesitations and contemplations, / always beginning,
never arriving,” a condition applicable to fellow
avant-gardists in other media, like Foreman, Cage,
In the midst of this literary maelstrom, Tabios seems
eager to reinvigorate and extend questions of authorship as they apply to contemporary poetic praxis.
Fred Muratori’s poems and prose poems have recently appeared in Boston Review, Electronic Poetry
Review, and Stone Canoe. He is the bibliographer for
English-language literature and film at the Cornell
University Library.
George Held
Merce Cunningham, and Philip Glass.
Johnson’s main bow to traditional verse is seen
in his poems with “Sonnet” in the title. A 2004 e-book
called The Sonnet Project paved the
way for the eighteen so-called sonnets
in Organ Harvest, none of which is a
traditional sonnet, at whose expense
Johnson has fun. In “Sonnet: Another
Long, Sad Story,” the epigraph from
Marianne Moore (“Omissions are
not accidents”) offers a clue to the
poem’s missing fourteenth line, while
“Sonnet: The Sky Called ‘Despair’”
contains fifteen lines, occurring as
five tercets. (This poem also refers to
“Cape Carnivoral,” another example
of Johnson’s frequent wordplay.)
“The G-Rated Sonnet” begins, “I’d
like this sonnet to be as sweet, as
tender and sexless, as any / love scene
featuring Diane Keaton and Steve Martin” (53), yet
earns its G-rating when the word “fuck” shows up. As
the eighteen syllables of the first line show, Johnson
mocks the conventional sonnet’s ten-syllable line,
and he eschews rhyme, while he loves the form’s
architecture—the fourteen lines and their divisibility
into various kinds of stanzas.
In addition to Johnson’s esthetic concerns, his
poems take account of social and political problems:
“Aftershock” mentions “closing loopholes / in the
corporate tax code” and “a deliberate under-funding
of public transportation,” and “Still Searching for
Plan B” worries about the aftermath of the Iraq War,
for Johnson a source of anger. How will “our troops
in Iraq” adjust after they return home from a war
“to protect our freedoms, to wreak / justice on the
world, to keep our store shelves fully stocked”? The
acid tone of these lines, which end the poem, might
make Johnson sound like a village grumbler to some
readers, but others will see his concern for the body
politic as a return to Walt Whitman’s inclusion of
political plaint in his poetry.
While Halvard Johnson epitomizes today’s
underground poet, published mostly in obscure zines
and in e-books, Hamilton Stone Editions, whose
literary journal he edits, deserves credit for publishing in Organ Harvest a substantial collection of this
valuable poet’s work. I hope it helps to elevate him
to at least street level, a place more congenial to him,
no doubt, than Mount Olympus.
George Held reviews for ABR, Small Press Review,
and Notre Dame Review, among other periodicals.
His tenth poetry collection is The Art of Writing and
Others (http://www.finishinglinepress.com, 2007).
Quiet Cruelty
The Animal Girl
John Fulton
Louisiana State University Press
http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress
174 pages; cloth, $16.95
To some extent, all fiction demands psychoanalysis. Whether asking us to wonder if it’s mere
love that results in Anna Karenina’s neurasthenia
or to look closely at the way Holden Caulfield idolizes his younger sister, stories pique an emotionally
interpretative response. What forces the characters
we read about to act one way or another, and, in
turn, what do our answers to this question tell us
about ourselves? John Fulton, author of The Animal
Girl, is well acquainted with the life of the mind, but
not in the usual sense of the phrase. His characters
think and feel, sure, but the states of mind depicted
in these stories always deftly translate themselves
into action.
Perhaps that is just fiction at its best—“show,
don’t tell” and its didactic cousins—but what makes
the stories in The Animal Girl unique is that they
both show and tell. The line between psychology
and literature here is nearly nonexistent. Characters
interact with the world, with their family members
and loved ones, purely based on past experience and
anxieties about the future. A psychologist might read
these stories and say, “Ah, yes, this all makes perfect
sense.” The lay reader, conversely, will probably
think, “Oh, how sad,” even if that judgment is accompanied by the cold tug of knowing that of course
it would work out this way.
Which is not to say that everything ends badly
or that there isn’t love present. Rather, it’s that things
end realistically, but often without the cushion of
hope. And the love is everywhere, but it’s fleeting,
racked with jealousy and fear and general human
dysfunction. Fulton takes a subtly different view of
relationships from many contemporary fiction writers today: for his characters, it’s not love that will
shine through the prevailing moments of boredom
or sadness, but instead the always-unfulfilled desire
for love. A dying woman in “Hunters” wants one
last lover, but the relationship doesn’t even carry
her through to death: “How odd to be heartbroken at
this time in her life. How odd to be left with desire”;
Evelyn never learns to suppress the jealousy she
feels toward her boyfriend’s comatose wife in “The
Lise Clavel
Sleeping Woman”; the title story’s
main character has a crush on her boss,
grief for her dead mother, and need
for comfort from her father and not
one of these emotional plotlines feels
resolved by the end.
What makes these stories exceptional is the revelation that normal
people are in fact not normal at all.
The people living next door to most
of Fulton’s characters might describe
their neighbors as pleasant citizens
who recycle and turn down the music
after ten; they certainly wouldn’t be
privy to the manipulation and quiet
cruelty that drive the actions in these stories. No one
would guess Evelyn’s vehement desire to wrest her
boyfriend from thoughts of his wife, even by resorting to deception, or the criminal escapades of a quiet,
dumpy teenage girl. There are a few lurid exceptions
to this, of course—the scene in “Real Grief,” for
instance, where Holly Morris locks herself in the
car just after running over her grandmother. We,
the neighbors and readers, hear her singing loudly
through the windshield, gesturing frantically with
creepy cheer. The intrigue of this story lies in the
opacity of Holly’s actions, “her trance—or whatever
she was in.” Has she gone mad, or is she just a brat?
Does pscyhologizing encourage lame excuses, or
should we conclude that all conclusions—whether
complex or simple—are, no matter what, simplistic?
What makes these stories exceptional
is the revelation that normal people
are in fact not normal at all.
It’s no accident that these stories are populated
by teenagers whose confusion makes them elusive
and mean and destructive. The adults show only
refined versions of these traits, couching them in
silent stares and unreturned phone calls, rarely acting
impulsively. When they are forced to confront their
adolescent children’s behavior, we see the intersection of consciousness and suppression: the adults are
wrapped in a gossamer of frail disguise, and it is in
their interaction with the un-costumed that we see
they are just teenagers under cover. When Franklin
tells his daughter Leah—who has understandably
rejected the new woman sharing her father’s bed—
that he is tired of making the effort to include her, that
she can join dinner if she likes but will no longer be
invited down from her room, it is clear he’s getting
what he wants in a somewhat guilt-free way. Despite
Violent Violets
Circadian
Joanna Klink
Penguin
http://www.penguin.com
67 pages; paper, $16.00
the story’s depiction of Franklin as a
victim of his daughter’s antagonistic
unhappiness, the fact is that he is just
smarter and more in control; and his
cruelty matches Leah’s.
While Fulton has mastered
the narrative of his main characters’
thoughts, desires, and foibles, he
sometimes falls short on defining the
roles of the supporting actors. The
reader is presented with types: the
annoyingly perfect would-be stepmom who moves in with “her fancy
olive oils, fancy French and Italian
cheeses” and “her bright, souped-up
mountain bike” and “a small waist and noticeable
boobs”; the disapproving mother-in-law who listens
“too carefully to Evelyn, nodding at her every word,
and seeming to watch her so closely”; the protective
son who implausibly accuses his father’s girlfriend:
“I guess you found out just how much you could push
him around. I’d say you’re an expert at that.”
Such descriptions unfortunately fold some of
the stories here into two dimensions, with characters
appearing in shorthand where they should be fully
formed. Similarly, the dialogue these characters
engage in rings false, sounding as if it came out of
a self-help book or empowerment magazine. The
woman in “A Small Matter,” for example, says this
during a fight with her husband: “When I married
you, I thought I would at least be safe. I thought you
were a safe man. I thought you guaranteed me at least
that much.” It’s not shocking that she would think
this, or even express it in some way, but to dismantle
her reasons for marrying with such sterile language
seems almost psychotic, which she is not.
Other conversations throughout The Animal
Girl fall flat in a similar way. Where Fulton has a
talent for explaining complex thoughts, he sometimes
fails in letting the thinkers express those thoughts.
This imbalance appears most glaringly in the last
story in the collection, where Evelyn and Russell
share several scenes of stilted dialogue even though
Fulton manages to express the motivations and facts
of their relationship beautifully. They take walks,
cook dinner, fight, and make love, and at times we
wonder if we’re reading a sit-com script. But then
Fulton defines and dooms their relationship—“He’d
continue to irritate her and she’d continue to provoke
him”—and in one perspicacious sentence snaps us
back to the lovely fiction of The Animal Girl.
Lise Clavel is a freelance writer as well as other
things. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Rob Schlegel
The Irish-born novelist Iris Murdoch wrote
that the direction of attention is constantly outward,
away from the self, which has a tendency to reduce
all things to a false unity. What is required then is
an attention toward the great variety of the world,
and Murdoch suggests that the ability to direct such
attention is love.
In Circadian, her second full-length poetry
collection, Joanna Klink’s direction of attention is
characterized most accurately by its range, precision,
profundity, and the idiomatic subtleties of the book’s
urgent vision.
Klink’s world is not a landscape marshaled by
the external witness-turned-reflective (a landscape
best observed through field glasses) but rather a vast
sea into which—even with all her faculties—poet and
reader are afforded only partial entry. And it is partial
because the voice in her poems is ever-investigatory
as it considers the depth of its own appreciation of
the world:
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September–October 2008 Page 5 L
Schlegel continued from previous page
I have fought
hard to see, have tried to find some way
around this…
the world loved and not loved, two fish
glinting dark-gold beneath the blurred river
surface—have I loved it enough….
Alternately, Circadian’s gift is its ability to
illuminate the “landscape beyond us,” the “pure periphery, cast into the immobile black,” as well as the
speaking distance between two people, above which
“a single star [is] streaking in cracked silence.” This
is true, in part, because of her ability to describe scenarios in which she attempts to imagine alternative
outcomes, as in the poem “Antelope”:
What were our hopes
when we first heard that it broke…
…their bodies ghosted
where our minds would have them stall….
Klink heightens the sense of hurt when we learn of
the antelope’s ultimate fate, an outcome which urges
readers into the responsibility of attention while also
warning us that once we open our eyes, we are no
longer able to choose the depth in which we will
be engaged; the light simply fills them, and we are
forced to abandon any measure of how much pain
we might witness.
In “Terrarium,” one of the most somber poems
in the collection, Klink deliberately complicates the
boundaries between the speaker’s interior landscape
and the physical landscape. The speaker’s ability to
“sense the hinge the field / spacious nowhere torn
by violets” invites the reading “torn by violence.”
The remainder of the poem suggests the speaker’s
sympathy toward an exterior wilderness (which eventually feeds the speaker’s interior wilderness) that is
at risk of being “mechanically” or unnaturally contained. On her part, this is like an act of sympathy that
ultimately underwrites the activities of the senses,
particularly vision. And through this sympathy, the
speaker concludes that she must press against
vast borders stitched
to the disappearing trees
a place I love so much
blurred animal at the edge
…I have waited
uninjured as the others
were injured do you not
answer me I answer you.
And when speaker and reader hear no answer, we
realize that if Klink’s poems are made of perception, the risk they take is how to convey lamentation
for that in the natural world which has been lost or
is on the verge of being lost, rather than merely a
semblance of lamentation. Klink gives her attention to how the mind reacts to what the eyes have
witnessed, thereby exacting perception through the
act of witnessing and thus creating a feedback loop
that is sustained throughout the composition of the
entire collection.
Klink deliberately complicates the
boundaries between the speaker’s
interior landscape and the physical
landscape.
This is a loop that also contributes to Klink’s
ability to incorporate the most subtle of sound patterns, which throughout Circadian, belie predictable
An Emersonian Connection
Every Past Thing
Pamela Thompson
Unbridled Books
http://www.unbridledbooks.com
336 pages; cloth, $24.95
If you are not familiar with Edwin Romanzo
Elmer’s family portrait “Mourning Picture” (1890),
take a moment to study the cover of Every Past Thing,
as the portrait––featured on the dust jacket––plays a
large role in the debut novel by Pamela Thompson.
The painting is the work for which Elmer is best
known, and features the artist, his wife, and their
young daughter Effie, depicted at the age in which she
met her early death. Thompson’s novel is a fictional
filling in of the holes left open by history’s scant
record of the reclusive Massachusetts artist and his
wife, Mary Elmer. Mary, the book’s protagonist, is
depicted in the painting under the shadow of a tree,
dressed in mourning clothes, a severe look on her
face, a sky blue ball of yarn on her lap, but her hands
left idle. Every Past Thing is a meditative novel, and
this haunting image with its many fine details is the
central meditation that runs throughout. Thompson’s
storytelling is cyclical, and she achieves this meditative quality through her use of repetition, so that by
the end of the novel, it is possible for the reader to
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American Book Review
calculation by providing readers with a rhythm that
does more than simply mimic the movement of water (in all of its forms) and other natural cycles, but
allows us to experience moments of brilliant clarity
when vision and sound work in concert so that “Each
thing [is] made in the moment we hear.” (9)
In “Whoever Like You and All Doves” she
writes:
Nothing I have seen on earth
is so lost as this expanse made
precise in the receding light,
a thousand thousand brittle
stems brushes in audible
reverence to air in whose
surround I am imprinted.
Here, and elsewhere, we become vulnerable to
what is there, and by extension are forever impressed
by the sovereignty of the visible. But because the
relationships between language, transcendence, and
the temporal can often suggest great fissures in that
sovereignty, reading Circadian becomes an experience that urges us to feel how love (its deliberate attention) ultimately strains against the unendurable:
I see everywhere the frequent change and the
sorry answers.
And still, what promise is this, what poise,
what poise of what worlds.
Rob Schlegel’s poems and reviews have appeared in
Pleiades, Boston Review, Colorado Review, VOLT,
and elsewhere.
Kara Mason
recreate the painting in his or her mind without having to close the book and look again on the cover.
The death of Edward and Mary’s daughter
Effie is the tragedy that opens the novel. “With the
ones we love, we know from the start the Story’s
end,” Mary writes in her green book, a volume of
hand-bound papers she fills as the novel progresses.
A story within a story, Thompson uses Mary’s own
writing as a framing device to relate the extensive
backstory of the entire Elmer family while at the
same time confining the actual setting of the novel
to one week in New York City in 1899.
Effie’s death is Mary’s central life tragedy, but
it was not the first or last tragic event to befall her.
The green book is filled mostly with her musings on
the complex feelings she has for Edward’s brother
Samuel, who she fell in love with as a girl; the details
of the illicit affair she had with Jimmy Roberts, a boy
many years her junior; her loveless marriage; her
exploration of transcendentalism and feminism; her
father’s death in the Civil War; and the dark secret
of the Elmer family, housed in the body and mind of
Edward and Samuel’s disturbed Uncle Albert.
Every Past Thing is a meditative
novel.
The green book goes through many incarnations throughout the novel. It is at times Mary’s
simple account of her own life; it is at times a letter to
Effie; it is at times an intended gift for Maud, Mary’s
only niece; and it is at times a sacrificial object, bound
for the bottom of the East River.
There is a cast of tertiary characters that appear
and disappear throughout the course of the novel,
as Mary takes the reader through her childhood and
married life in Western Massachusetts. But 1899
Manhattan, the place and time in which the novel
Mason continued on next page
Mason continued from previous page
itself resides, is a character almost as central and
ever-present as Effie’s ghost, or as Mary herself.
Mary and Elmer lived in lower Manhattan for the
year of 1899 while Edward studied painting at The
National Academy of Design. Mary’s love affair
with the city itself is as palpable as those with Jimmy
Roberts and another young man (a student she meets
in Justus Schwab’s saloon at 51 First Avenue, the
address from which Jimmy Robert’s early love letters used to arrive to her from). Leaving behind rural
Massachusetts, Mary throws herself into the rhythm
of city life, spending her days walking “from east to
west and back until she had lost track of logic amid
the crooked streets.” In the beginning, she is searching for Jimmy Roberts, but a moment comes early
in the novel in which it is clear that what she finds
in her search is more a sense of her own identity
than any concrete person, real or imagined: “she
will describe and measure the constant rain of these
afternoons she has spent walking alone down every
street of lower Manhattan. The wide-ocean feeling
at the very tip of the island: From here one can sail
around the world.”
Mary feels a close connection with Ralph
Waldo Emerson, both through his writings, and
through their parallel life experience of surviving a
child. The text is full of short quotes from his essays
“Nature” and “Experience,” and from his poems
“Threnody,” “Bacchus,” “Give All to Love,” and
“Days.” These words, and this imagined parallel,
is another of Thompson’s meditations. For readers
who know well these full texts, the meaning is not
lost; but presenting Emerson quotes in such small
fragments, and in almost relentless repetition, I
Prophecy of Psalms
A New Waste Land:
Timeship Earth at Nillennium
Michael Horovitz
New Departures
http://www.poetryolympics.com
464 pages; cloth, £25.00; paper, £15.00
American readers should pay attention to Michael Horovitz, now emerged as a living international
treasure of poetry. The metamorphosis in people’s
eyes from the rousing poet-on-foot, perhaps a holy
fool or jester, during the anti-nuclear marches of 1959
and on, to an ennoblement for services to literature
may puzzle, but should not surprise. Horovitz is a
committed poet, and his commitment is to truth in
life, society, and art.
The great gathering of poets at the Royal Albert
Hall in London, June 1965, was largely Horovitz’s
creation, bringing together not just Anglophone
writers but others who spoke their words and were
interpreted—all this to an audience of thousands.
This alone should establish his place in world literature. His latest book, A New Waste Land: Timeship
Earth at Nillennium, confirms it.
A little history may now be in order, to clarify
the origins and motive forces behind the Albert Hall
event, and its instigators. Britain at that time had a
author-run, not-forprofit publisher of
artistically adventurous,
non-traditional fiction
http://fc2.org
FICTION COLLECTIVE TWO
FC2
couldn’t help but begin to read over these lines as
if they were a kind of throw-away element that did
not much add or take away from my experience of
understanding Mary better. In the end, I found them
to be a distraction.
The close of the novel leaves many of the narrative threads loose, allowing the reader to imagine
Mary’s next steps in her fateful year in New York
City. Thompson returns our attention again to the
painting, to Mary’s still hands resting beside the
sky blue ball of yarn. She commands her, “Cast on
a thousand stitches, Mary.”
Kara Mason is a freelance writer and an editor at
the Guggenheim Museum. She lives and works in
New York City.
Dave Stevens
community of poets, strongly aware of international
movements in society and words, with links of sympathy despite generational differences. Horovitz was
amongst the younger, Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue of the elder, with Jeff Nuttall as a pivot.
Jazz and performance poetry were common ground,
and poetry as social comment—through polemic or
satire—a shared and declared aesthetic. All were
prolific in the press, with Horovitz founding New
Departures as a performance and printed medium,
Nuttall publishing My Own Mag which has claim to
be the first British underground publication, Logue
performing sardonic poems such as “Why I Will Vote
Labour,” and quietly contributing satires to Private
Eye and the BBC, and Mitchell publishing “Tell Me
Lies About Vietnam” as a broadside poster.
A New Waste Land shows Horovitz
for the first time at epic scale.
The elders had experienced National Service
in the armed forces (a compulsory enlistment for
two years), whilst the younger had escaped when
the draft ceased in 1960. All were opposed to war,
and fell naturally into the emerging Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND) which became a focus
for general antiwar and later anti-Vietnam War political action. The mass rallies and marches of CND
were enlivened by folk singers, jazz bands, and poets,
who became a loosely federated but deeply bound
movement.
Much of the culture shared by the British
underground was accumulated from abroad, from
American folk and jazz tunes and lyrics—“The
Saints,” “Down by the Riverside,” Leadbelly’s
“Goodnight Irene” (the marchers camped overnight),
Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” through Woody
Guthrie and Pete Seeger, European Dada and surrealism, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound,
and so, naturally, to the Beats.
Horovitz and Alexander Trocchi (author of
Cain’s Book [1961]) had formed a “Poets’ Cooperative” to promote public poetry readings as
part of an “invisible insurrection,” as Trocchi put
it. In 1965, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and Allen Ginsberg were touring Britain, as were
European poets Anselm Hollo, Ernst Jandl, Simon
Vinkenoog, and Andrei Voznesensky. At a meeting
in Trocchi’s Notting Hill basement, this group cocomposed a manifesto for their invasion of the Royal
Albert Hall, the biggest available space in London
and a bastion of traditional British culture, as site of
the annual Promenade Concerts of classical music,
at the close of which “Land of Hope and Glory” is
customarily played, and sung by the audience. The
Hall was hired.
Promotion began with an assembly of poets,
performers, and enthusiasts on the steps of the Albert Memorial, a Victorian Gothic spire, gilded and
colourfully inlaid, which stands opposite the Hall.
The BBC filmed and broadcast this on the national
news at 9 p.m., and within less than a week, all 7,500
tickets had been sold, resulting in far and away the
largest ever audience in Britain for live poetry. The
Royal Albert Hall swarmed, and the event was recorded by Peter Whitehead in his film Wholly Communion (1965). Thus came about the first flowering
in Britain of international performance poetry as a
medium of social revolution, and Michael Horovitz
was a principal original force.
The great spirit which enlivened all was that of
William Blake. This was the closest to a love-in with
words celebrated in the UK. Horovitz picked up the
ball and ran with it in establishing New Departures
and the Poetry Olympics, a carnival of wordspeak
which in its twentieth year published an illustrated
anthology (The POT! Anthology 2005), containing
texts—poems and recollections—by most of Albert
Hall poet-performers, along with others including
Stevie Smith, Libby Houston, Fran Landesman,
Grace Nichols, Sujata Bhatt, Linton Kwesi Johnson,
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September–October 2008 Page 7 L
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Slim Gaillard, and Pete Townshend.
Horovitz’s project has always been Blakean—
looking beneath the surface of social structure to the
underlying powers that animate and guide it, through
the personal to the spiritual, and beyond the particular
to the universal. It is fitting that Horovitz’s latest book
should be published in the 250th year commemorating Blake’s birth, and in Blake’s tradition of visionary
synthesis—poetry, prose, and illustration.
A New Waste Land is an extended poem in
twelve sections, with drawings, paintings, photographs, and cartoons enmeshed within the text,
highlighting the concerns not just of our current
political-historical context, but of those enduring
concerns for liberty and humanity which have been
voiced by poets from Jeremiah through Shelley to
Langston Hughes and Ginsberg’s invocation at the
Albert Hall: “Tonite let’s all make love in London.”
Horovitz weaves these poetical threads with skill and
clear vision, through the loom of immense knowledge, into his own tapestry of love and hope.
The text of A New Waste Land is informed by
copious erudite notes in which the hypocrisy of our
political caste is detailed. As example, Horovitz comments on his own section 11, “U-Turn On All This—
or Die,” in which he describes “pseudo-millennial
Britain” as “a new waste land / over which / a cold
central government darkness” prevails with reference
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to an oft-neglected warning by General Dwight D.
Eisenhower as he left the office of US President:
we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence…by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists
and will persist. We must never let the
weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We
should take nothing for granted.
Blake’s words from “America, a Prophecy”
(1793), declaimed by Boston’s Angel, the spirit of
liberty and independence, presage those of Eisenhower and of Horovitz on our own time, with its
ugly surges of wars in the Middle East, rendition,
and imprisonment without trial, cloaked in the fine
rhetoric of “freedom”:
Why trembles honesty; and, like a murderer,
Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his
immortal station?
Must the generous tremble, and leave his joy
to the idle, to the pestilence,
That mock him? Who commanded this?
What God? What Angel?
To keep the gen’rous from experience till the
ungenerous
Are unrestrain’d performers of the energies
of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a
science
That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is
giv’n to the strong?
What God is he writes laws of peace, and
clothes him in a tempest?
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans
himself with sighs?
What crawling villain preaches abstinence
and wraps himself
In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more
obedience pay!’
A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium
shows Horovitz for the first time at epic scale—a
story-teller like the Greek rhapsodies who carried
history with their tongues, a psalmist who cannot but
sing in praise of life’s beauty, a prophet who sees the
future in seeds of yesterday and must speak today. It
is his masterwork.
Dave Stevens lives and writes in London. His lyrics,
from Patsy by Jack Lee (Dead Fingers Press, 2001)
were performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, with
music by Sharon Nassauer, under the title “Hey
Jack,” in August 2007.