More books and writers to recommed: Catherine Wagner. Miss America and Macular Hole. Catherine Daly and Catherine Wagner both display the same nervous intelligence, flashes of wit, allusions to pop culture, etc. Both write self-aware, self-conscious, self-referencing, self-self-self work, and yet we’re strolling into dangerous territory here because we know that I=Another. We’re doing doubles here today: Cid Corman and David Jaffin, and now Catherine Daly and Catherine Wagner! All of these doubles, are of course, brilliant and worthy of more words than I have time for at the moment, as I have to rush out and earn my daily (or should I say Daly) bread. Here’s a poem by Catherine Wagner from Macular Hole:

My greed was outrageous
power-outageous

I felt all better & feverish
my braincase was
hypertranslucent
& exercised with rumpling
tumbling skin
which I held gently
over my brain
like a blanket
or a weird threat
of cutting it off
from the world.
Oh my god. My
chest got cut off in
the mine.
I was mine & I was going
to dig myself a jewel.
I dug a little bone in me
I dug a little boneshaped
hole in me, I loved it
Hello you fuckers!
Dug around in there making
my emergencies go off
I thought they were lovebells
or runaway truck ramps

I’m hungry.

I think what I like most about Catherine and Catherine is that they are introducing myth back into post-post-modern poetry. That’s really great, considering that the L=A=N=G folks appear to have made myth uncool. And pardon me if I still say the names Yeats and Blake and David Jones and those other workers of and creators of myth with a smile and a steady look in my eyes.

Baudelaire and Poe, Poe and James Clarence Mangan, Cid and Dave, and Catherine and Catherine!

Not poetry at the margins, but literally, poetry written in the margins of books as the author was reading. Some characteristics: usually short, written as a response to the reading at hand, and cryptic, especially if the “target” is not identified in the title or somewhere in the text. I was fortunate enough to have been able to xerox Cid Corman’s annotated copy of Oppen’s collected. As well as identifying many of Oppen’s sources, the book also contains about 50 marginal poems, and what I’d like to call embryonic poems, somewhere between annotations and poems. I’ll share some of these in future notes.

Another poet who appears to do this is David Jaffin. Interestingly enough, Jaffin appears to be a kind of shaggier, and more allusive shadow of Corman. Both were published by Elizabeth Press back in the 1970s. Both practice the same subtle manipulations of syntax and use penny words to make dollar thoughts, albeit Jaffin is not quite as good at it as Corman was, in my opinion. Jaffin also uses captalization and the lack of punctuation to his own detriment, with capitals obtruding at awkward times in the flow of the poem, and sentences and stanzas flowing willy nilly into each other. Perhaps the capitalization has something to do with his living in Germany, or perhaps both of these eccentricities are a rather late tipping of the hand in the direction of e.e. cummings, but it feels gratuitous, and, in my opinion, takes away rather than adds to the effect.

This is not to say that Jaffin is not an interesting writer and a good poet. I have his A Voice Awakened (Shearsman Press) here before me as I write, and will include several of his poems.

Sleep

wakes me a
light Candles

of impercep
tible quiet

tude as waves
woven in

to a time
less shore.

A thirst for Words

There’s

a thirst
for words

Like
the need for

splitting
wood to that

coldness
of fore-

telling

hands.

Wheel-chaired

to her help
less fin

ding feet’
s Eyes rest

lessly a
bandoned their

permanent
ly ground-

place.

At the Psyvhoanalysts

Dr. W.

sat listen
ing.

Dr. W.
longer than
his look
could appear
sedately self-
encompassing
sat listen
ing.

Dr. W.
attempting
a smile that
could quite
break out
from the ser
iousness of
the situation
arose The way
Gluck’s heroes
do in a semi-
operatic sit
uation.

I especially like the portrait of W., but wonder why Jaffin does not hyphenate correctly in a consistent manner, as he appears to choose to do so with semi-operatic, but not, for instance, with the word situation.

A similar sensibility seems to be at work behind Corman and Jaffin’s poems. It would have been interesting to have listened in to whatever conversations they may have held via letters or in their dreams, as they surely knew/know of each other’s work. I’ll see if I can answer this question.

As I was writing this the postwoman rang the doorbell with an incredible package: Blythe’s Haiku, Vol. 2, 3, and 4–the seasons! I’d purchased Blythe’s volume on Haiku the Eastern background and brought it with me on the plane when I came to Japan in 1992 and finished it during those early, stressful months when I visited Mr. Donuts in Issahaya, Nagasaki Presfecture several times a day. These are wonderful books.

I’ve been enjoying Jon Paul Fiorentino since his release of Transcona Fragments, a great collection about his youth in the suburban community of Transcona - a small railway town that has been stitched to the city of Winnipeg

His most recent work “is a book of synaptic syntax entitled Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004). The metaphors contained herein purportedly reenact the nature of neural activity. Indeed, there are flashes of synaptic brilliance.

On the advice of Jon Paul Fiorentino, Poety MD, I took the recommended dosage of one copy of Hello Serotonin and further medicated myself with 3/5’s of scotch.

The problem with over the counter serotonin taken orally is that it does not pass into the pathways of the brain. This is due to the blood-brain barrier preventing serotonin in the blood stream from affecting serotonin levels in the brain.

However, these poems, in my non-clinical trials, solve this problem; they are capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.

While the efficacy of these poems on depression may be called into question — the mode of action of these flashes of lyrical brilliance on their direct target is nonetheless powerful

This selection from Hello Serotonin also appears in the Muse Apprentice Guild’s Second Anniversary Issue, August, 2004:

p r a i r i e LIT

Piles of hometrips.
Strips of mallkids.
Dreams of sleeptext.
Miles of phonesleet.
Steads of fencedhope.
Drips of graindrain.
Sheets of inkstrain.
Streets of wheatlash.
Sinks of draindrought.
Drafts of litwaste.
Fits of lispdraft.
Tastes of christdust.
Weeks of seedspite.
Maps of frostnode.
Wisps of glasstrips.
Trips of streetdrift.
Homes of angstsong.

Fiorentino’s currently working on Post-Prairie - a collaborative effort with Robert Kroetsch (Talonbooks, 2005). I wholeheartedly recommend Fiorentino’s prescription, and remind the reader that a nice 12 year old scotch won’t heart, either.

Check out Fiorentino’s website. Complete with ordering information.