We’re pleased to present a fine poem by another expatriate poet who washed up on the shores of Meikai University after gaining a degree from Warren Wilson College (where he studied with Heather McHugh). Adam Halbur hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin and is tasked with taming our fiercest listening students. Though he’s a married man with a child and a resident of Japan for more than a few years, it’s obvious to your humble correspondent that he’s still haunted by the prairies of the American midwest.

Groundhog,

bridegroom of Earth, priest of

the prairie parish, paunchy

monk cloistered in dirt-

packed den, traveling

minister to the ditches

of daisies and black-eyed

Susans, saint of the interstate

sunned in all God’s glory,

martyr of the tractor trailer,

woodchuck and whistlepig,

humor us in this hour of need.

Adam Halbur tells us that he’s working on his first book. We’d love to see it when it’s finished.

With Endgames, Marton Koppany seems to be attempting to step beyond his trademark “poor” or minimalist work, which I think is his source of strength. This is indeed a difficult proposition for originals like M.K. who arrive at a form that seems perfectly to fit what they have to say. Where to go next? Armand Schwerner was in a similar situation with his “Tablets,” I think and he eventually arrived at a complicated, totally self-self-self-conscious articulation for his series that–I have to admit–disenchanted me. Marton also takes one or two steps in that direction with his “Graffiti 1-12″ series in which he riffs on his trademark empty frames and cryptic statements, by adding seemingly personal, perhaps even autobiographical, annotations. And this is the point: to anyone who knows the previous work, “Graffiti” comes across as a step toward the self-involved, the more easily indentifiable, even the cute. The genuine shock, the metaphysical humor, of the older work is replaced here with a commentary on the autobiographical narrative that we’ve encountered before.

Finally–a note on my own publishing philosophy for Ahadada books. In 2003 I published a fine little collection of Marton Koppany’s work, which is still available through SPD. I do believe that this book presents some of the best and most brilliant of Marton’s work. We worked hard to produce and promote this book and we find that we still have quite a few copies left. Although I would love to continue to publish Marton Koppany’s work, which I genuinely admire, I’ve decided to forego the pleasure until we’ve sold all we have of Marton’s books. That policy will apply across the board to most of our authors. So if my friend Marton Koppany would like to help us move some of our stock of his books we’d love to see another manuscript. It’s just business.

My friend Del Palmer sent a flyer to me with details about an African-American oral history program that I initiated with the Carroll County Human Relations Commission several years back. The project was awarded a large grant and is now set up to record family histories. This is wonderful, because Carroll County history has–up to this point–been written by whites. It’s high time to preserve the voices of African Americans. The Carroll County NAACP, the Media Center of Carroll County, and the Carroll County Public Library have all gotten behind the project, the final goal of which is a library of video and audio histories and the creation of films based on the information received. For more information contact Jean Lewis, President Carroll County NAACP, 410-751-7667, jjlewis[at]comcast.net or visit www.cmcd.tv.

Thanks to the folks at Rain Taxi and Lucas Klein for a fine review of Jerome Rothenberg’s powerful collection. We’re pleased to have brought it out. Here’s the link. Enjoy!

What is it about particular anthologies that move me? The last one that shook me up was Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996)–(Christ!–over ten years ago, and my copy is turning to curry powder as I pull it from the shelf!). Other great ones: The New American Poetry, of course, Rothenberg’s The Revolution of the Word, and his big door-stoppers from the U. of California Press, Shaking the Pumpkin, The Book of the Book. Carruth’s The Voice That Is Great Within Us. Why did I dig these books so? I think it was because there was a sense of discovery about the poets/ the poems in these books. AND THEY ALL HAD DISTINCTIVE VOICES.

There’s a particular monster from–Norse?–Northern European?–mythology that sums up what I have to say about the poets of the anthologies I yawn over: imagine a trine of bodies –be they ever so beautiful–passing a single eye back and forth between them. They take turns fitting the eye into the single socket in their foreheads in order to SEE. Interchangeable vision/ interchangeable voices. Example: An anthology of AMERICAN POETS OF THE 90′S from a big press I purchased way back when–and the whole book turned into a mannered, affected, cookie-cutter yawn. Ah yes, and add a dash of PRECIOUSNESS as well.

Conductors of Chaos gave me Caroline Bergvall, Brian Catling, Kelvin Corcoran, Andrew Duncan, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Alan Halsey (!), Lee harwood, John James, Barry MacSweeney (!), Geraldine Monk (!), Doug Oliver, Maggie O’Sullivan, J. H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Nicholas Moore, Grace Lake (!), Chris Torrance (!), Denise Riley (!) and the editor himself, Ian Sinclair, whose work I caught up with in a small blue Penguin anthology. Not only are these names, these are also DISTINCTIVE VOICES that gave me permission to work and to experiment in new modes of writing. I think that’s what I seek in an anthology: PERMISSION TO DO, new tools for the tool box, new stories of a life to mull over and imagine as well.

The saddest thing about Open Field: whole swathes that appear to have been written by the same person under assumed names. The same bag of tricks opened and shaken out with a little tired TAAADAAAA and a drum-roll, the same associations, the same mannerisms, even the same line breaks.

Where is the permission to enter something/ do something new?

Where is it for this anthology?

That’s the big question.

We’re still looking for it at 4:47 a.m. while Japan stirs and the old men line up at the Shin-Urayasu bridge for some fishing before the sun comes up.

I wish people writing in English would forget those words for a while. Both have become as ductile as double bubble bubble gum and twice as cheap.

Interesting to try to define this “new” old form of creative activity, especially in the midst of a terrible cold I managed to pick up almost as soon as I returned to Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_Poetry should get you to the page. Or search under the title of the page. Jess

I side with Poetry and, being human, I probably side particularly with mine.

- Eileen Tabios, taken unfailry out of context from “I side with poetry”

There was a cool pull quote though: “Imagine Portnoy’s Complaint set in the landscape of TV’s South Park.”

- Jon Paul Fiorentino, on a lone negative review of his most recent book Asthmatica, “Losing in front of my hometown”

Somebody wanted us know that we were being watched, just to see what we would do. Yet we were never questioned about our activities in the slightest, tho we reminded each other that should the FBI ever come to the door, we should step outside and close the door behind us, so that they couldn’t come in and claim they were invited. Every activist in the 1960s & ‘70s knew that.

- Ron Silliman, “Amidst the backwash of Alyssa Lappen’s attack“