ELENI SIKELIANOS—THE CALIFORNIA POEM

Crossing over the border into Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem is like watching an epic biopic with lots of cameos by many known and unknown actors. One goes through the various scenes playing the game of name-that-face, continually familiarizing and defamiliarizing oneself as the movie continues. Mostly the actors are aspects of California’s flora and fauna, its physical landscape. At times the images appear in such rapid succession that the eye is quickly sated and the mind is overwhelmed. Kind of like Peter Greenaway is the director. Like Greenaway, Sikelianos uses many ornate multi-syllabics and the technical language (genus and species names proliferate like the animals they describe) of biologists and geologists. However, her California also inhabits the fanciful nature of the place by extrapolating the sober references and creating very imaginative Hollywood-like spaces. There is history of all sorts too. All of these are brought together via a playful sounding that is often rhyming or alliterating itself across the expanse of the page. It is a wild place one might hear someone say from the Midwest who has come to visit.

The textual variety within the book is impressive. Not only is personal autobiography present alongside of the copious amount of material on the natural world, but there are photos, the backs of old postcards, sign language demo graphics, collages, small little diagrams [see page 47 on Google Preview above] that look like they are crude representations of networks or patterns of growth among sea slugs or winged insects. Sikelianos is an avid collector of Californiana throughout the book, a hoarder of every word that washes up on the beach. Through it all though, one particularly strong current running through the book is a sense of loss, a sentimentality for the unfettered California of the past. One senses nature is being encroached on everywhere, and Sikelianos is trying to reimagine the script for its players, sometimes in chronicling the goings-on in the neighborhood of the tidepool, sometimes with a deflating gesture toward the artificial world that has been created by the humans around it.

any peasant with a dumb
cow can make whipped
cream but it takes a chemical factory
in California to make Cool Whip

Also, there is ample quotation in the piece, sometimes attributed, more often not. There are a lot of people talking, creating a strange cacophony that enforces the notion that Sikelianos seems to embrace “Suddenly, everything belongs in California.” The residents since birth are forced to be generous hosts. They accommodate by clearing more space.

The language that is used to negotiate the natural world in The California Poem is dense and profuse. Surely, there is a prodigious talent for naming and describing the natural world in the piece, so much so that it seems almost unnatural to carry around that much language about flora and fauna in one’s head. Frequently, I wondered if all this “language about nature” wasn’t a construction from scientific texts as they were applied after the fact of an experience with them. In her Jacket interview with Jesse Morse, she reveals:

Early on, I loved leafing through biology, oceanography and science books. I’ve always loved that language and its richness.

Yet, Sikelianos takes such great care to ensure that the reader is witness to the author’s experience that I was curious about how much was experienced and how much was come to afterwards, constructed in a language game. Indeed, it is not entirely impossible that where many of us see “a pretty blue shell” she is seeing radial symmetry. In fact, we are told, “At Monterey, I collected 136 hermit crabs to uncover the mysteries of population dynamics.” Is this the work of a budding marine biologist who was thwarted midstream with a growing realization that she was a sensualist? [The ecstatic Whitmanesque language throughout the piece suggests that her transformation to sensualist is complete.]

Sikelianos has mentioned in her 2005 “Live From Prairie Lights” reading at the University of Iowa that she did copious amounts of research for the book which took her some 7 to 8 years to write. She looked at the history of flora and fauna and also the rich linguistic history before the conquest of the indigenous peoples. The density of language in its Whitmanesque swirls makes it hard for me to believe that these passages are coming off the top of her head as per Ginsberg. They often feel constructed because of their density. Yet Sikelianos’s ear is so adept that rhythmically a seam never appears. The flora and fauna do seem to erupt out of her in a long effortless flow of source. The conversation is exhausting, but one is taken in by the breadth of it, the way it darts here and there after more prey for the intellect to feast on.

Her breath is Olson’s, but the absurd and surrealist-tinged turns are Ginsberg’s.

I suppose how the lines are constructed doesn’t really matter (except to a wonk like me who is perpetually interested in such technical matters). The rich, dense language, no matter how it was arrived at, serves what she says is the purpose of the piece:

mythologizing the landscape beyond recognition
like some simulacra of Saturday Night Fever

The various opossums and nudibranchia are the stars of the piece though. [Picture them beneath a mirror ball if you have to.] These and the hypnotic and expansive language that always seems to branching off to form another dendrite (symmetry be damned!). One might experience a good bit of frustration as I did when I first started reading the poem. I was lingering over each line, expecting it to deliver its weight. I read it like it was a scientific paper. When I realized the rhythm was more “Beat”, that I needed to read it like I read Ginsberg, skimming over the surface of the language, I began to settle in and enjoy Sikelianos’s topsy-turvy California where it seems

California // is the palace where we’re making continents up

          (sand, sand dollar, rock . . .) Your job is to

tell the history of each & every piece

Hers is a “Beat eye for the ethologist guy.”

The great inclusiveness is reminiscent of Whitman, whom Sikelianos mentions in the Prairie Lights reading as someone she considers to be a California poet as well. Unlike Uncle Walt, though, Sikelianos commingles with gastropods, mesa cliffs, hummingbirds and sea-hares, those citizens whom Sikelianos has deemed worthy of taking up residence in California. Whitman’s eye turned to the human activity of all the people taking part in the great democratic experiment that was the United States mid-nineteenth century. Sikelianos’s nod to the human realm is largely concerned with her personal experiences in California. She recalls where her friend Adam Davies went down in the King River. The memory of Adam Davies is then projected on a metro busker shortly afterwards, but the human chain ends there. At one point she even muses aloud:

What do I have in common with my fellow humans?

Her reverence stops short because “There [in California] reverence is a kind of fear.” One is awestruck and afraid by the complexity and multiplicity that is the many heads of California, some with jaws that bite.

Another personal bit that is dropped into the mix is a short and affecting section that seemingly sums up her teenage years in California:

reprisal:

I was a waitress in a white dress,
an avocado goddess in the land of Phocis
Queen of the Drought in the kingdom
          of Prop. 13
I set forth
It was four blocks to the beach
What did I see there?
    a kegger with lots of young men
          preparing to drink

Go ahead. Say “avocado goddess” three times. That’s fun, isn’t it? Six staccato bursts followed by a hissing “s”.

The sound of the line is very often generative for Sikelianos as she moves through her disparate images and kinds of texts. I’m reminded of Anne Waldman’s work whose blank spots on the page do not measure erasure (like with Cole Swensen) as much as they are rests in a musical score. This kind of presentation is a grateful reminder that the poem, at least many of the more lyrical parts, is still intended to be read aloud. It is not just an artifact bound to the page, which sometimes when I’m reading Paterson or The Maximus Poems, I get the sense they are only alive on the page. The Waldman influence would be perfectly understandable as Sikelianos cut her teeth at Naropa and was probably familiar with how Waldman could expertly perform difficult texts, her graphic presentation directing the page. Perhaps the most significant contribution that the Beats made to American poetry is the development of bop prosody, which allowed American poetry to escape the rhythms of the marching band and the ballad, and begin to explore the explosive multi-syllabic runs which allow complicated language to fit snugly inside of a line. Here is a bit for effect:

bathing bathers of the big black lake, SPACE, bodies like golden
apples hanging on the dark branch, EARTH, like
Great Alexander or Eleni or little children finding the ripest apples, last places to be within;

kissing mystical ventral surfaces, occiscles; rise up
for arboreal views
          of passionate showy brittle stars (Ophiuroidea), mirror or watery earth & sky;


Uncle Aristotle’s lantern, urchin, my mouth remains close to the rock
while the shell falls
off; enter the

sun, such the masseur bully sun
big fiery fruit in his rhymes of ray-on-stone, pounding
the flesh, the one, one, the one
sun was the
melancholy team sun in
matrices whose elements are birds
(words) whose elements are branches,
ladders, shadows, shadders, birds

Each stanza is a distinct musical thought, a complete musical phrase. Between “enter the” and “sun” (that starts the next stanza), the short caesura signals the horn solo is about to head off in another direction a la Sonny Rollins when he cuts from one recognizable melody to another or to a flurry of scales during one of his long and intense solos.

The “School of Disembodied Poetics” (as Naropa is less familiarly known) is also an influence in how Sikelianos likes to remove the speaking voice in the poem from her self. The speaker is invoking mightily throughout, the imagination careening off of the tangible minutiae of the golden State, and this expansive state of the speaker lends itself to an extraordinary amount of inflation which must be regarded as the souped-up construction that it is:

Cilia, spirochete, composite beings
          born of symbiont meanings
(humans) fall apart         Are you speaking of molecules
or cummunity interactions?     I’m speaking here
only of the heart

This direct address to the speaker and challenge to the speaker reminds me of what might be the central project of the Beats, of Whitman: to expand one’s self so that it is no longer a part of you. It has moved on without you, moved on to engage the world and to circle around and check back with you from time to time. It floats disembodied, an almost comical balloon that is so precious one cannot let it pop.

The Eleni narrator becomes an affectation throughout the piece as well. While the collected bits of personal narrative indicate that this Eleni is a marker for an experienced life, especially towards the last quarter of the book, that Eleni becomes unhinged and ready to fly away from its moorings from that experienced life. Eleni is other, one more piece of the mythologized landscape that circumscribes the California.

Like any assemblage the size and scope of Sikelianos’s California, as a reader, one is forced to do violence to it by trying to make it cohere, by trying to insert Tab A into Slot B. Sikelianos’s California is really quite resistant to this readerly impulse though. Besides the autobiography and the persistent references to the natural world, there are not many glaring motifs which are rekindled. If there are motifs, miniature stones resurfacing through the sand on the beach, they become subsumed within dream. Sikelianos’s California is a dream as much as a place to dream:

From Jacket 23

Any dream that includes/ends with Marlon Brando growling, “Get up, you scum-suckin’ pig” has got to be reckoned with.

The “filmy Vistavision” model of California that Sikelianos has created is an experiment in narrative that brings the disparate home to lodge in the self. It interrupts the stable psychological state (mirrored by the instability of the Golden State), which indicates the ego-self as more fluid than solid. Or perhaps an entity engaged in a hundred phase transitions in a single minute. The result is a surfactant able to exist in one realm while clinging to another. More modern chemistry. And like so much modern chemistry, there are many residual byproducts to negotiate within the racemic mix. California is the perfect laboratory for such an experiment. Its space is essential to sort out the chiral sprawl, the radial outgrowths of successive dreams.

Sorry. I got taken up in a little bit of Sikelianos’s verbiage, trying to extend a good hard science metaphor into the world of galloping verse. It’s easy to get carried away by this book.

I found that I was cheering for the language more and more as the book wore on. The impulse to parse all the information was stripped away. However, as I mentioned above, it was not my first impulse to read it that way. Perhaps as time goes on I will want to pick out sections for a deeper reading, do my homework on all of the obscure words found there (I’m still looking for “occiscles”). Is reading Sikelianos’s The California Poem what reading Pound would be like if he had lived in a trailer park and visited the beach?

Another point of reference for The California Poem might be Philip Lamantia’s Meadowlark West. Lamantia, also associated with the Beats, tends a little bit more to the world historical like Pound, but there is a significant amount of California flora and fauna that exists between the covers of Meadowlark Wet. The same hyperbolic language exists, and it works the same way in mythologizing the West, which leads me to wonder if it is always the case that hyperbole and myth go together. Is myth a form of hyperbole? What about writers like Robert Hass who are also trying to mythologize the West to a certain extent, but do it with a very burnished rendition of the quotidian? Would someone challenge that a poet like Hass is not mythologizing the West as much as he is documenting it? Can the documentarian and mythologizer exist in the same room together? And if they can, would they take their clothes off?

All in all, as I go back to The California Poem (and I expect to visit again over time . . . if for no other reason than to help me parse what I’m looking at in the tidepools) I expect that more of its “sense” will leak into me. I will be able to track down more and more of its paratactical moves. However, I suspect that I will be dipping into The California Poem more as a reminder of how ferocious the language can be, how intense its curvatures. I think I will pick it up to help me jumpstart my lines when I feel they are getting too stale, when I resist keeping bodies in motion for keeping them at rest. It’s a primer for how to juggle. The California Poem has so many interactive particles within it that it is a veritable cyclotron of activity. Despite the missing gluons, the particles whirl and swirl like they are in a popcorn maker, the more time spent with them, the more likely it is for each kernel to open. The bodies in motion ricochet off of each other at exaggerated speeds that make each one begin to sweat a little, cry a little, bleed a little. There’s a lot of body sauce flying around.

Other excerpts from The California Poem

From Cento Magazine

From Octopus Magazine

Blake's Violence, Bush's Violence

That in plate 5 of William Blake’s AMERICA a PROPHECY, the figure clasped by Albion’s angel at the top of the engraving and, at the bottom, clutched upside down and headless in the coils of an encircling snake, is the king himself.



That Blake’s images make clear his attraction to the flex of power in violent struggles for liberty.

That in his visionary theology, an apocalyptic revolution of faith and values is imperative. In several manuscripts we see Blake representing revolutionary terror in terms of Christian apocalypse.

That Blake’s depictions of insurrections aren’t limited to his images. Many poems throb with violence, from outrage for the murdered “Little Boy Lost” in Songs of Innocence to the shout of “Pull down the tyrant to the dust” in “Gwin, King of Norway” to the description of “flames of Eternal fury” in The First Book of Urizen.

That there is a yet more subtle violence linked to Blake’s innovations as an artist.

That it is Blake’s re-visioning “hand or eye” which dares to frame a radical catachrestic symmetry in which images cross over into words and words into images.

That Blake rejected the Lockean convention that words are the arbitrary signs of ideas. That for Blake, words are living things. Blake’s ears “have heard,/ The Holy word,/ That walk’d among the ancient trees.”

That by focusing his attention on the phonetic, graphic, and etymological properties of words and by developing a novel technique for engraving words and images directly onto copper plates—a technique that treats words as images—Blake diminished distinctions between the linguistic and the pictorial.

That language and image rehearse as part of a singular performance in Blake’s engravings.

That if we look again at AMERICA a PROPHECY, we will see the A on the title page efflorescing into wheat sheaves. That in the last line of the first stanza, we will see the first stroke of the letter M in Meet dangling into the flame spewing from Albion’s sword. That this flourish is mirrored by the W in Washington, the first word in the next stanza.



That the letters are fuses lit by a “fire fierce glowing.” That Blake’s words are both denotative and performative.

That on the first plate of EUROPE a PROPHECY, the plumed serpent’s forked tongue is mirrored by the Y of PROPHECY as well as by the figuration extending from the R of EUROPE. That the serpent’s body loops in an unnatural way to from O’s that rhyme, visually, with the O’s (and C) in EUROPE a PROPHECY.



That equating spirit and letter, visualizing them in the same dimension, Blake noted to himself on the back of one drawing, “Angels to be very small as small as the letters.”

That violence is an act of possession.

That in Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, we see image seizing word to make it image. At the same time, word seizes image to make of it a letter. This more subtle violence in Blake’s art disarms the continuity of genre: printing and engraving, image and word collaborate in a communion of meaning, an adventure in possibilities.


* * *

It may be worthwhile at this moment in history to remember that Blake set out to yoke together word and image at a time when the difference had collapsed between attempting a violent act against the English king and imagining a violent act. Anyone could be hauled into court, tried, and imprisoned for merely thinking about violence, not to mention representing it.

It may be worthwhile to remember that Blake was in fact accused of sedition and tried. Sedition, in Blake’s time, included everything from criticism of the king to outright acts of terrorism.


* * *

In the 2007 post-Patriot Act United States, legal distinctions between acting violently and imagining a violent act once again have disappeared. Bush legislation has banned habeas corpus, legalized torture by Americans, and decriminalized it retroactively. Bush’s retromingent spray of dogma and crusaderism extinguishes the visionary impulses on which the United States was founded.

In Bush’s tenure, image has been torn away from word.

In William Blake’s work, violence is an expansive creative force. In George Bush’s policies, violence is absorptive. It absorbs freedom, subsuming it into a field of self-interest.

Blake’s violence collides with what restricts imagination; Bush’s violence collides with what lives.

In Blake’s visionary AMERICA a PROPHECY, words and images collaborate in an expansion of meaning and imagination. In Bush’s AMERICA a PROPHECY, the words and images cannot be linked.

For George W. Bush, violence is a means for denying history in the cynical severance of linguistic from perceptual representation.

In contradistinction, Blake believed in the violence necessary to free oneself from confinement in a culture of exploitation and pacification. For Blake, violence is involved in the imagination of a bond between language and image, word and act.

For Blake, violence means transcendence into freedom. For Bush violence has meant ascendancy over freedom.

For all the distance in time and space, Blake’s astonished horror translates too easily into our own:

The weeping child could not be heard.
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They strip’d him to his little shirt.
And bound him in an iron chain.

And burn’d him in a holy place.
Where man had been burn’d before.
The weeping parents wept in vain
Are such things done on Albions shore.

Review of Bobbi Lurie's poetry collection, Letter from the Lawn

Look! It's a post (by a newbie)! Gasp! Applause! Golf Clap!

Cue cross-posting: Jacket Magazine!

DONALD REVELL—A THIEF OF STRINGS

Last week after coaching my son’s soccer games (one a delightful romp in victory, the other a game which featured another goalless loss) I came home to a sobering scene. The dog was lying on its side, breathing heavily and looking kind of glassy-eyed. An attempt to bring her outside resulted in her legs buckling and her falling to the grass. The situation looked dire. A quick trip to the vet confirmed our suspicions. She was dying, a ruptured spleen. The life or death decision arrived at about five o’ clock that evening. My wife deferred. The decision was mine. Do I extend her 10-year-old life through extraordinary means or do I get used to mornings waking up without any heat-sharing hound next me, a den of one?

Donald Revell has provided me with a number of meaningful experiences through the years. His early books like The Gaza of Winter, New Dark Ages and Erasures were instrumental in illustrating the use of recursion as a strategy for coherence beyond any kind of formal structure. This knowledge served as a crutch for many years. Whenever I didn’t know where to turn next in a piece, I luxuriated in the look back. Revell excelled in such Byzantine recursion that it inspired awe at how he could orchestrate his poems so that they coiled so tightly in around themselves.

Of course, now in his recent collection of essays entitled The Art of Attention Revell eschews such “strategies” as a kind of training wheels for the imagination which would be better served if they were just taken off. His aim is for an Eden where the senses are clicking on all cylinders. If one only pays attention with all the energy that attention demands, really paying attention, then one arrives through the imagination at the poem as it can be fully imagined. One keeps one’s senses open, one’s eyes attuned, reacting intuitively. This leaves out a lot of talk of strategy, technique, and craft. In fact, it leaves out all talk of it.

I’m not sure I can fully get on board with an aesthetic that entrusts its leaping to faith. I have a penchant for strategy and technique, and I often find myself trying to elucidate that in many of my essays. I find a cryptic will to be an unsatisfactory explanation for how a poem is put together. Even if there are intuitive moves, there seem to be reasons for them, if only after-the-fact ones. The irrational/sub-rational has its structure too.

Another reason I am wary of letting the intuitive imagination be the essence of the creative act is that without some reflection on technique, the imagination can get locked into making many of the same kinds of intuitive moves. One starts to write the same poem over and over again without some sort of critical faculty stepping in. Perhaps in Revell’s case that critical faculty is intuitively built in as well, but it would be nice to see it in action, evaluating and deciding, not endlessly drifting to another shore.

Also, I suspect much of the leaping of faith that occurs within Revell’s discussion of his aesthetic in The Art of Attention as well as his collection A Thief of Strings is due to his newly found devotion to God, a mystical Judeo-Christian God, who sits smack dab in the middle of the poems with all the associative sparks running through wires to electrodes fastened onto the bashful deity in order to jolt it to life.

Here is an example (the poem that closes out section II):

What If Christ Were a Snowflake Falling into the Sea

The water is taller than itself,
Covering spirits of the air beneath.
And so the land, so mountainous beside,
Does not exist.

Have you thought about the future?
Take your finger and rub it across a stone.
Do you feel it?
Heat where nothing but cold most certainly is.

The water does not suspect.
A distant star is plotting with the center of the Earth
Against the Earth.
And the lake rises. The outlet rivers rise.

There is also an uprising in Kiev.
God is love.

It is interesting how Revell, who seemed more focused on sociopolitical history has taken a more spiritual focus with his later books. In A Thief of Strings this religious outlook is at its most pronounced. One wonders if, after a good deal of one’s younger life spent thinking about the intricacies of sociopolitical and historical intrigues, Revell hasn’t burned out on all the cynicism it generates and has opted to dismiss all of it for a more sweeping view of how social change occurs. Agreement with this take by Revell would hinge upon the debate about the efficacy of the monks demonstrating in Myanmar this week. Are they merely graves?

It is almost as if Revell has reversed the poles on Pessoa, whose sensate poet Alberto Caeiro took precedence early in his writing life only to be displaced by the more complicated, nuanced Alvaro de Campos. I prefer the older Revell in the same way I prefer de Campos to Caeiro.

However, I wonder if my preference isn’t a terribly mean and confining trick I am playing on both myself and Revell, like saying the new Bruce Springsteen doesn’t hold a candle to the classic old style of The Boss whose work at that time captured everyone’s imagination and attention.

Also, I must recognize that as a born-again heathen (who experienced a brief conversion to the God-is-love crowd during a high school Bible camp only to fall back into my slovenly way of thinking once I returned home) my tolerance for Christian platitude is not very high.

I shrink from those who declaim environmental decay, social unrest, and the impending destruction of the planet by a supernova star and then summarize their stance with “God is love.” Unless one believes that God loves us by punishing us. . . you wear the black latex mask and body suit, Christ, O my Commander.

But perhaps I am not being fair to the Christian Revell. Maybe I am not reading his work in the spirit he intends. Perhaps God in his work is not really a deity per se as much as it is the concept of god, an ecumenical habit of mind [though I must admit that a capitalized G in God is loaded; it makes it hard for me to see such a thing as reaching broadly across the religious spectrum despite what supporters for the Pledge of Allegiance to keep “under God” might say]. Certainly he aims again and again at the metaphysical with his God, and I am willing to follow him there despite my not feeling particularly compelled to name things in the afterlife.

I freely admit that I am among the faithless. I don’t believe very well, my genetic shortcoming.

The first half of the book is crowded with references to God and Heaven and Eden and prayer. Angels seemingly appear as “white linen floating in the sky” in the anchor piece of the first section entitled “O Rare.” But apart from these forays into the spiritual superstructure, Revell interlaces copious amounts of witnessing nature, almost as if he has become tired of the travails of men. He is becoming animal, informed by the memory of his father that “my eyes and my sister’s eyes were brown like those of a deer.”

Revell also includes quotations from somewhat obscure literary works: the writings of Goethe and, later in the book, Thoreau’s journal and Thomas Traherne’s meditation no. 28 from one of his Centuries. Often I feel I am caught between the vice grip of the literary Revell who alludes to rather obscure texts and to the Revell who is obliterating himself, his knowledge, his memory, with what is displayed as divine before his senses, his art of attention.

Here in ”Bartram’s Travels” Revell travels alongside the 18th Century American botanist William Bartram who chronicled his explorations through the south among the Seminole and Cherokee to explore and record the flora and fauna of the area. In this poem the crossing over is the central metaphor, and like some tag-along of The Ghost Shirt Rebellion, the speaker here emerges on the other side remarkably unscathed showing “no signs of burn.”

In ”Landscape Near Biloxi, Mississippi Revell flashes his environmental concerns through reference to murdered islands, both figuratively and literally. But it is the dismemberment of both Pentheus (mistaken for an animal hiding in a tree while he spied on the bacchic rites) and Actaeon (torn apart by his own hounds after setting eyes on a naked Artemis bathing in the woods). In the poem it is the shrimp boats and other commercial fare that are degrading the barrier islands. The loss of these barrier islands has been mentioned as a strong reason for why New Orleans and the surrounding area were hit so hard by the recent hurricanes. In this Revell acknowledges that “the god is a destroyer . . . the goddess is a maw.” Revell questions the justice of such gods, but could not a Christian god be implicated in similar acts of destruction? It is curious to me that the Greeks have to bear the full force of Revell’s judgment of being unjust.

In ”The Wisdoms” Revell returns to his contemplation of the sociopolitical realm. In particular, he seems to be commenting on the loss of unity in America. He laments: “Time was, a man or woman had to love me. / That was America. That was a chief concern.” But the disunity he addresses does not seem to be based on religious or foreign policy differences. It is based on the colors: “Broken glass is alive too, / In the colors. In them, I was a republic.” The speaker, a spokesperson for a country, talks of the loss of status as republic. The title appears to make reference to the wisdom lost in not paying attention to the colors. This could be read symbolically, as above, for the ethnic and racial diversity of America or as an appreciation for the dance of light that is reality. Revell seems to be saying that seeing things clearly without any filter, can restore unity. After all, the epigraph seems to refer to the moment of Goethe’s passing and his monumental utterance of “Light! More Light!” on his deathbed. The wisdom that Goethe passed on was that seeing, perceiving, was enough of a reason to linger in the realm of the human.

On top of all of the poetry of witness and the literary Revell is a heaping helping of the apocalyptic vision. The passing of the world of men is treated as a foregone conclusion in many places in the book, especially in “The Last Guitar,” a three-part piece in the last section of the book . In this piece, Revell invokes “the last guitar” as the final song that humanity plays. He is imagining what comes after, and through God, he assures us as readers that “the last guitar is but the first of many.” This would be a hopeful sign if it weren’t for the fact that all but the heartiest of creatures will be dead. It is here that we see mortality as only an intermission in the big musical Herr Direktor has planned.

Mortality also is apparent in the jaunty little “Stoic.” Despite its title and final image, the tone of this piece is not so weighty. It invokes the WWII invasion of Norway (presumably) as a parallel, no doubt, to our own current American disaster of an invasion, but then there is paratactical shift to what seems like an episode of Lassie where we, as readers, await some sort of rescue. However, the only rescue forthcoming is from a blissful ignorance, a return to sensation that feeds the soul and keeps us alive. King Kong, another animal, is watched, and then the ominous animal appears in the last line. Is Revell commenting that the only respite from the current war and the death it brings is to busy ourselves with watching animals as a reminder of who we are, of our fragility?

Stoic

My soul is a mind and a meander, a Mrs. Luxe.
Little Spartan boy, release the animal in your shirt!
It isn’t a wolf cub, it’s a puppy soon
To be Lassie, and she’s needed
For the invasion of Norway, that disastrous offensive.

Her parachute opens.
A minute or so later,
Her paws touch delicately down
Onto the glacier, and instantly
The ice turns a radiant deep sky-blue
Wherever she goes. Peter Lawford
Is rescued and returns to England.
Lassie remains behind,
Changing every inch of the arctic earth into blue sky
Which is becoming my mind.

My soul has turned from now to then.
It’s all a luxury, this being alive.
Read me that women’s poetry, I’m watching King Kong.
There’s an animal up my sleeve and it’s killing me.

The literary forebears Revell invokes are solitary types, and this collection is imbued with a solitary tone. In almost every piece the meandering associative presentation gravitates between a solitary witnessing and the spiritual implications of watching the world, tinged with a copious amount of literary learning. This is not to say that it is boring and plodding. Revell is never guilty of being boring. His associative leaps are almost always daring and fresh. this is the part of the show that everyone who comes to it admires and respects. At times I can’t always ride along with him on his daring mission, and I have to watch as he travels into terra incognito. This is the stuff that second, third, fourth readings are made of. At times it can be a little annoying as when he makes grand surrealistic moves like “The sky is sassafras / And also a balloon landing.” “There are stars / made wholly of woodsmoke.” “Between French and death / The houses sail like baseballs.” These are rather isolated examples and they are taken out of context; however, I could not rope them to any cleat in the larger poem. [When one operates according to instinct, some moves are going to land in a particular reader, others won’t.] Contrarily, Revell also delivers some absolutely zinger lines. My favorite in the book is:

Easternmost archangel, untune my words and teach me tanager.”

I’m not really sure why the easternmost archanagel should be called upon for such tutleage; however, I find that, at times, I would like to learn tanager too.

The untuning of the mind is a large concern of Revell’s too, following in the footsteps of his anti-rational Francophile heroes. Rimbaud appears a couple of times in the book, but paired with an interest in those American writers who lean toward a transcendentalist mode, Revell seems to encourage an overcoming of the mind by dismantling it, suspending reason. This is the way of faith I am told, but I am too weak and exhausted in my present condition to use it as a guide for raising my children. If I don’t keep my wits about me, they’ll start stealing all of my food.

I suppose that Revell would caution me to be mindful that none of what is part of this earth, what is perceived, can be owned for very long. What harm can there be in a little stealing, a little redistribution of wealth if the aim is honorable, such as grasping for a more spiritual plain through song.

In the thirteen-part title poem “A Thief of Strings” Revell introduces us to a thief of guitar strings that he again is witnessing from a distance. He uses the EBGDAE of a guitar’s standard tuning to riff on, one line beginning with a word that corresponds to the E, followed by the next that begins with a B, and so on. These sequences of invention recur throughout the piece and serve as a way to bind the reader to one of the central events in the piece—the stolen guitar strings. Revell seems to side with the motives of the thief who is only aiming to do what birds do naturally. Furthermore, Revell makes an even more radical claim for dispossessing oneself, for “disowning” and “helplessness” such as in the poem’s final section:

from A Thief of Strings

13.

Outside his shop
In the leafy sunlight
The clockmaker smokes at ease,
Singing a little,
Rapping a cadence
Against his artificial leg
With his good leg.
His shop sign is a broken clock face
Filled with leaves.
These metaphors mix themselves,
And I say hurray for helplessness!

Who made my eyes? Not I.
And an almshouse everywhere?

When I am alone the air
is flecked with sassafras.
Crowded before me in shoals
Happy shrieks grow old.
I say hurray for helplessness!
What use to a man is Man?

When I left the train I could hear
Singing in the trees. It was the trees
Who sang. When I was a boy
It was the trees who sang. My whole life
From the end of childhood
Until this very moment
Is one bird nowhere.
Not forgotten. Free.

Revell reminds us that we are paying tribute with our eyes, that everywhere is an almshouse. This is the price we must pay for being free like animals.

I’m reminded of Rilke in the eighth Duino Elegy (tr. by Edward Snow):

If the assured animal that approaches up
on such a different path had in it consciousness
like ours—, it would wheel us round
and make us change our lives. But its existence
is for it infinite, ungrasped, completely
without reflection—, pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see Future it sees Everything
and itself in Everything and healed forever.

Sometimes though, the reality, strangely enough, is elsewhere. A price is attached to the life of an animal. That said, I still could not give up on my dog. I suppose it was not so much for the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to disown the dog and allow it to untether itself from its moorings in this world (though that may be partly true also). The thing I kept thinking about in my rather haphazard anthropomorphic way was that if the tables were reversed, and she were making a life and death decision about my continued existence, she’d let me have one more fighting opportunity, one more chance, rationality be damned. And so it is with Donald Revell and me. That comfortable relationship I’ve had with him as literary kindred spirit has been strained by circumstance. His forays into the spiritual have caused me to question why my meanderings into spirit have stopped short of the chasm of faith. However, there is still enough there, still enough “wet tongues on the nose” to make me want more, to want to see him fight for more of that sassafras air. In the end, I just can’t put the ol’ dog down.


Other poems from A Thief of Strings: ”Sibylline”, Landscape with Warhol and the Coming of Spring, 2003”

RAMSON LOMATEWAMA'S Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

Flagstaff, Arizona is a place of high winds. Perched at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, this Ponderosa Pine forest country is Arizona’s northern highlands. My family has a cabin here—on the northwestern flank of Humphrey’s Peak, at 8,200’ elevation.

I’ve been living here in isolation for two weeks now—working toward finishing a book of poetry I’ve been writing since 1981. Bow hunting season for deer ended on Thursday. The leaves on the aspen trees are faintly yellow. Fall is here.

In the solitude of my nights, I listen to the notorious winds whip the treetops. I walk in and among the swaying timber. Watch the phases of the moon through the thick branches. Some nights I believe I hear the old voices. Like I always do when I sleep out in another home-away-from-home: Joshua Tree National Monument. There, I hear the Cahuilla. And I know it. But here, I’m not so sure I know who or what I hear.

When I woke up today I was determined to find some contemporary indigenous poetry—to help me understand those voices. I cleaned myself up and drove the twenty miles into town, to Starrlight Books on N. Leroux Street, near the busy railroad tracks. Starrlight is a first-rate independent bookstore. Compact and well organized. I was guided graciously to poetry written by both Navajo and Hopi poets.

I live close to the bone financially, so I appreciated the freedom I was given to read through my many choices. Finally, I decided upon Ramson Lomatewama’s Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams (Entrada Books, 1993). Mr. Lomatewama’s biography says he had previously published two books of poetry: Silent Winds: Poetry of One Hopi and Ascending the Reed. He also works with stained glass and carves kachina dolls.

I come from agrarian roots, too, so his frequent references to the weather and to the Hopi’s staple crop—corn—made me feel at home. His poem “Ants” truly won my heart, though. Its initial images could be from a T’ang Dynasty landscape poem, but he achieves an upside-down parable by the poem’s end.


Ants

Silence is reflected in the sky
for the blue haze is but a mirror.

I can feel
the subtleness of the breeze
and the silent fluttering of the moth.

A field of tall grass
sends a gentle wave of light
across the land.

It flows to eternity.

I gaze upon the ants
who toil for their children

for they do not consider
the lilies of the field.


Mr. Lomatewama successfully turns a biblical parable on its head, something I appreciate, being especially fond of Jack London’s upside-down parable: “Dig moved more mountains than faith ever dreamed of.” Amen, brother.

I struggled when choosing a second poem to include in this posting. There are many tender poems, such as “Separation I” and “Separation II,” as well as poems with compelling images. I especially enjoyed the last lines of “After the Rains.” “There is no need / for us to speak. // Silence / will speak / for us.” But the title poem is an anthology of the voices that influence Mr. Lomatewama. This poet of the “Fourth World” is truly a poet of the world.


Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

They come from all sides, these words and songs of ancestors.
They slide out on tongues of Felipe Molina, flowers, and deer,
and from spruce trees, long houses, and Joe Bruchac.
They fly at me across deserts, from summer stars over Awatovi,
and from bottomless silver words of Mike Kabotie.
I see their words are made of bamboo, tradition, and myth,
and images of Jung and Campbell, and long ago walks in cornfields.
They find me and speak to me through memories of Chicago streets,
Lee Young Lee, Sybil Dunbar, and Ofelia Zepeda’s jagged mountains.
Their words and songs come through dreams of Rex Jim and Harold
Littlebird, whose poems, words, and drumbeats dance all around.
They whisper in flights of hummingbirds and high mesas, through
Luci Tapahanso and Shiprock, and through journeys of Simon Ortiz.
Ancestor dreams come to me from your world, from dark skies,
from unborn children, from New Delhi and from Tuuwanasavi.
I dream-travel through ancestor songs; dream over eagle feathers
dipped in honey and rain; around summer clouds and roasted corn.
I listen for ancestor songs in all people and all places.
I am drifting through ancestor dreams,
drifting
to my final breath.

Transcendentalisticism

By James DenBoer

A friend of mine is outraged. So outraged, she's told me this same story more than once, and told it publicly at readings of her poems.

A professor at a University of California campus told her that all poems have to do with the Resurrection of Christ. I can see why she's outraged, even years later. (And so much for the myth of UC professors being atheistic communist terrorists.)

But I think I can understand why someone would say such a thing, and not only because it's exactly the approach to poetry I was taught at my own Calvinist college.

To give the professor the benefit of the doubt, I think he meant to say that all poems are about transcendence of some sort; that the Resurrection was a metaphor for that larger meaning. I'd still argue with his "all poems," but even then half-heartedly.

Many poems are about new life, rebirth, arising from the death of love or battened sensibilities or choked opportunities, breaking into something new and rewarding, meaningful, valuable, liberating. And many standard metaphors clinch that meaning: flowers blossoming, rivers crashing into the sea, the joys of sex, the changing seasons; the list is long, and often used as well in religious discourse.

But not all poems are about new life. Many are about day-by-day life, whether it's looking at the birches in your backyard or noticing the bearshit on the trail. Some are about wounds, crimes, injustice, racism, poverty, war and bad love. Or about back-breaking or mind-breaking labor, welding Hummer frames or making a line of a poem sing. About all the misfortunes and indignities and hurt we suffer. But somehow, stupid humans, we all hope it will be a little easier, and believe it will, someday. As if we might be "resurrected."

I think the professor meant to offer this kind of interpretation, too: whatever a poem is about, the satisfying beauty of nature or the despairing ugliness of much of life, the poem itself is an artifact that celebrates and ameliorates; that the poem as poem is an exemplar of rebirth. I don't so much mean that the poem says this: but that the poem dares to speak, it opens with any word at all and ends with any word at all, and the getting from that first word to the last is a story about and a story of the poem's own progress toward birth; that it moves from blank-page death to formed life, by its own nature. The poem is a living example of resurrection, perhaps, as it, word by brickish word, finds some way to make itself live.

But that can be too easily feigned; I'm also of the opinion that poems ought not to end there, telling you they are alive and you ought to be too. I'd like to write poems that don't end at all: too many poems have punch-lines, as if they were jokes, shaggy-dog stories. Why are good lines often held until last; why do poems "wrap up"? I'm fighting and so far failing to write many (or any) poems that don't "end," that stay open, that leave the reader hanging, that don't essay answers but more questions, that remain mysterious. But that's just me, and also the many poets who feel the same way, all of us struggling to keep poems from closure.

And transcendentalisticism is of course not closure; it is not a metaphysical or logical system that cranks out an answer; it is more of an opening, an opening of the eye, the circle that Emerson celebrated. And that long word isn't even a word, just my own neologism for professorial stuffiness. "Falling" is a word I like instead, much simpler, and the thought that falling is in fact rising.

But the glib shut-the-door statement of my friend's professor, even to grant him a metaphor to mean something larger, is disheartening, because constrictive, banal, too stuffed with a Big Answer, which is the death of poetry. That's what made her so mad all these years; a stupid professor, not a stupid idea.


James DenBoer's newest book is Stonework: Selected Poems, from Sandra McPherson's Swan Scythe Press. He has had grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Authors' League and other institutions. DenBoer lives in Sacramento, California.

JOE WENDEROTH—NO REAL LIGHT

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