Thanks to John Phillips for bringing this to my attention and to Alan Halsey for sending the link!—Jesse
Food for thought Sarah Crown on The Narrators | The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems
Sarah Crown
Saturday April 29, 2006 Guardian
The Narrators, by Nicholas Murray (Rack Press, £6)
Food plays a central part in the lucid landscape poems of Nicholas Murray’s latest collection. It features in treasured childhood memories of “ham and salad teas”; in the here-and-now of his life in Wales, where a “bowl of succulent beans / cools … and a knife / slices another wall of cheese”; in an evocative Greek sequence, in which “dry, Samian wine” and “plate[s] of battered squid” give the landscape sensual texture. His quick, vivid snapshots of nature often suggest food, too; the sight of “berries on their rambling stalks” leads him to imagine “their oozing weight / dark beneath a sweet and sugared crust” with mouth-watering zest.
Away from the table, Murray’s occasional tendency to overdo the whimsy (as in the rather mawkish image of old men “affecting gravity and beards / as a reproach to folly”) is offset by the moments of real style that his clear sense of internal rhythm and strong feeling for the well-honed phrase produce. In “First Day of Summer”, for example, the opening lines - “All day the sun had struggled with this paste / of lumpy cloud, occluded light and hampered heat. / Until, late afternoon, the curtain rolled away / and sunlight splashed the gravel yard” - cast a glow across the page.
The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems, by Jesse Glass (West House Books, £9.50)
In his latest volume, Jesse Glass prefaces a selection of poems from his 35-year career with a new, book-length sequence in which he considers the life of Phineas Gage, a figure exceptional enough to merit the attention of this accomplished experimental poet. Gage’s story is justly famous. In 1848 an explosion shot a three-foot-long iron bar through the air into his brain. Incredibly, he survived, but his sense of morality was permanently erased. In a virtuoso evocation of Gage’s life from that moment onwards, Glass intersperses contemporary accounts of the accident with a series of brilliant and moving poems. In those voiced by Gage, the painstaking fumble of his thoughts, perfectly evoked by Glass’s insertion of a comma between each word, contrasts electrifyingly with his unexpectedly sublime language, which in turn contrasts with the far more constrained voices of the other speakers. The doctor’s assessment of his patient (”Pulse 72; tongue red and dry; breath foetid … “), for example, pales before Gage’s description of his shattered head resembling a whale, “a, Nantucket, oil, well, / gushing, ambergris”.
The selected poems provide further evidence of Glass’s ability, but it is the remarkable opening sequence that stays in the mind.
Thank you so much for your letter. I see, of course, poets like Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn here, as well as a few young ‘uns, but I simply no longer have any sense of a reading ‘community’. I just write em and send em out in high Xerox to 15 friends, even then I seldom hear anything sensible except from Guy Davenport. Everyone liked my books so when I was starting, I always thought how wonderful to get to the point where no one could yet look at it. Well, being there is wonderful, but it is true no one looks at it. The first book of ARK was Northpoint’s first book, and so there were no reviews to speak of (unlike their books now). It was up for a National Book Award, but who remembers where that prize went?
But not to complain–I’ve got beyond Zukovsky at last, and how lovely the language lies ahead, and up! After the Foundations, there are to be 33 Spires, then 33 Outworks. What is now RADI OS will become ARK 100. (I felt I cannot write a Cantos, or A, or Patterson, etc. without a superstructure.) I am now half way through, Spire 50 having been completed, and there are first drafts of RADI OS & VI.
The Palms part of The Foundations was written by extraction from the Psalms: at least one word per psalm, and it all–punctuation even–had to be in strict sequence. These are kind of Shoenbergian kind of devices, but they yield music. They are also what Zukovsky often did, like translating Catullus’ latin into english rather than the words. Or 80 Flowers! In the Spires there is Prospero’s Songs to Ariel, which is made like a sampler of only words and phrases culled from Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to Western Birds. Following, is Ariel’s Songs to Prospero, made as a musical tape (and the aid of a sound studio) from recorded songs of Eastern Birds. But of course no one these days thinks about any technical innovations in the humble art of poesy.
Yes, you can have a Spire for your Cream, if I can have proofs. After Clayton butchered my beautiful 12 line stanzas in Sulphur, I really must be able to see, before. I’m sending the first fountain. There must be a beautiful cap of S at the beginning (like the beginnings of Milton’s books), and the kind of ‘concrete shapes’ out not to be hard to set: the Bach has to be square and the shape has to be a circle…(Easy on a typewriter, but not so in type).
Cheers–
Ron Johnson
[Note: is in paragraph one, line four is underlined. This program doesn’t allow me to indicate this. The Cream Ron mentions is my first issue of the Cream City Review. Jesse]
As Dan mentions in a previous posting, I’ve been going through my archives—scattered between Shin-Urayasu, (Japan), Westminster, Maryland, and Burlington, Canada and stretching back in time to 1973.
Here are two from Guy Davenport:
18 October, 1991.
Dear Mr. Glass:
Thanks for “Lexical Obelisk”. I thought it was going to be Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Very dense, these darkish poems! But they make sense and are well written. Some are too much in everybody else’s style (look at page 13), but most are nicely original (”To A Bird Killed on a Power Line”). Cultivate your gnomic gift; e.g. “The devil remains unconvinced”.
Good luck with Die Young. (What ironies crowd upon that sentence!) Yes, the Volsi saga fragment is thoroughly Icelandic. And you have an impressive round-up of writers.
I wish I had something to submit. None of the things I’m working on is suitable (that is, they are prose, and far too long).
best wishes,
Guy Davenport.
&
6 May 1992.
Dear Jesse Glass,
I sometimes wonder about audience. For whom are you writing? This isn’t a challenge but a question that interests me, probably because I taught for 37 years (and you turn out also to be a teacher). Do you have a sense of readers? In a civilized and highly literate culture you would have readers. My sense is that a poet like you is preserving an invisible kind of language and imagery. Also an intelligence and a sensibility. Quite an activity!
You are by no means alsone: that makes it the more interesting and mysterious. I don’t mean of course that all your poetry is mandarin and arcane–”Picture Postcard (1916)” is available to all. Perhaps all poetry is difficult (the scholars are still deciphering Dante, and one of these days I hope to understand Cocteau and Yves Bonnefoy, never mind Rimbaud).
I’ve been reading Horace. If he’s poetry, what is Holderlin? Thanks for sending these poems; it’s a privilege to be aware of them.
Another review! This one of Glass’ The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems from Rupert Loydell’s Stride Magazine. Writes Ian Seed:
I remember seeing Jesse Glass’s work back in the seventies in magazines such as Dave Cunliffe’s Global Tapestry Journal and Colin Webb’s Sepia. His work was a distinctly experimental presence in those magazines. This collection gathers together much of Glass’s work from that period to the present. What I really like about the poems is their powerful imagery and their willingness to go deep beneath the surface. Glass is uncompromising in his approach and I think he is not happy unless he has disturbed the reader and himself in some way.
Recently back from Maryland where Jesse and I pored over his little magazine collection, notes & letters spanning a few decades. Saw lots of amazing things within that collection — and tooks some home with me. Regardless, check out that review here.
Paolo Javier is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Award. He lives in New York.
Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her MFA at SF State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Oakland, CA.
Rodrigo Toscano was a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). Originally from California, Toscano has been living in NYC for the last seven years.
Joyelle McSweeney offers a generous review of Paolo Javier’s two books in the latest issue of Rain Taxi. Some excerpts:
on the time at the end of this writing:
“The title of The Time at the End of this Writing is like a rhetorical burning fuse, signaling the poems urgency to get written and get read. In service of this urgency, Javier fills up rhetorical and lyric form with lashings of popping, aurally kinetic language. This makes for a various collection, by turns sentimental and syntactically experimental, gestural and thinky.”
on 60 lv bo(e)mbs:
“In his second book, all of Javiers literary and intellectual power sources, private and public languages, political stances and pop references are fused into one relentless, brilliant material which stretches unabated for 84 pages.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise that Johnson, Gatza and company have dropped my mock review of his epigram book from their blog. The fact is, his response simply doesn’t stack up and he knows it. Is this his version of having “the last word”–the coward’s way of erasing the competition? Let’s even the playing field, Dr. Kent. Include my review on the site and in your book and we’ll see who walks away with the last word. Or is the roaring fool (as I suspect) afraid to do that? Oh, and also, include Kent’s full name in the heading of that post on your blog, Geoff Gatza, if you continue to carry it, so that everyone clearly sees that he wrote it. Kent first came up with the anxiety business and tried to apply it to me, but it seems that he’s been manifesting quite a bit of anxiety about his “epigram” ever since.
Richard Peabody’s teaching a course on Experimental Fiction Writing at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, for the first time in nearly six years. Those of you who’re looking for something that will force you to create 6-7 new pieces of fiction will be intereted in this.
An intensive hands-on workshop that will allow you to flex your wings and try out something new—stylistically and otherwise. We’re going to encourage the wildly imaginative, the flamboyant, and the ridiculous. You will write to prompts and you will be expected to read your work aloud. Students are also encouraged to bring in additional experimental test-flights for my eyes only.
Richard Peabody, a prolific poet, fiction writer and editor, is an experienced teacher and important activist in the Washington , D.C. community of letters. He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle magazine and editor (or co-editor) of eleven anthologies including Mondo Barbie, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Alice Redux and Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women. He is the author of the novella Sugar Mountain, (Argonne Hotel Press), two short story collections, and six poetry collections including Last of the Red Hot Magnetos and I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl (Paycock Press). He is currently working on Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women (forthcoming 2006). Peabody holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in Literature from American University. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, The Writer’s Center and at Hopkins, where he has been presented the Faculty Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement. Peabody lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area.
Noon; Journal of the Short Poem
Philip Rowland, editor
506 Brillia Gaien Dewazaka
4 Minami Motomachi
Shinjuku-ku
Tokyo 160-0012
Japan
Subscription 300 yen, 15 pounds, $28
200 copies printed and bound Japanese style.
A physically beautiful production always, Noon is a delight to hold in the hands. The gray and cream washi papers truly make this book a treat to linger over–which is exactly the strategy of the editor: Philip Rowland asks that extra time be spent over these short-short poems and sequences so that subtleties of nuance can be teased out. Noon Three doesn’t disappoint: among the many well-known names Thomas A. Clark, Carlos Louis, Theodore Enslin, and Alan Halsey give us memorable pieces. The Yin/Yang award for most natural crazy-cloud writing goes to Edward Baker–
moths
just
beyond
glass
splattering
on
and:
far beyond frog moon leaps
I really like that last line! Alistair Noon`s translation of Li Bai’s “Thoughts on a quiet night”–
Bright moonlight in front of a bed–
at a guess, just frost on the ground.
A raised head gazes at the moon,
sinks, and thinks of home.
is just wrong, especially the last two lines, which make Li Bai`s lyricism sound more like Trakl’s. Still, it’s a bold rendering that gives me much to think about.
Philip Terry wins this issue’s cleverest concrete award with his palindromic “Abandoned Poem” as well as “The Bookworm`s Song.”
The issue tops out at 77 pages, so there’s plenty to discover for yourself. Highly recommended!
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