Just saving the best for last: Dan Sendecki, Mom and Pop Sendecki and Katie. They’re all from the C-place too!
Plus the fact that Dan and I drove from New York City a couple of years back, all the way North to Burlington. We arrived at the border in the early morning. Dan rolled his window down and you could hear Niagara falls roaring far off in the distance. The lady border patrol officer was leaning back in her heavy coat in the warm booth asking questions. I leaned over and grinned:
What’s your name?
Jesse Glass
Where you from?
Japan.
[Silence. I knew the officer was weighing the fact that I didn’t look or sound like I was from Japan against a possible complication at a hellacious early hour in bitingly freezing weather.]
Trying every way I know how to like Open Field. Here’s a theory, folks: it could be the type face, the super-fine paper they printed it on, the red cover with the white and mustard-colored letters. I’ll test it out and try to imagine this book recast on rough paper with dark, dark letters! Hey–I’ve got some time to kill here!
Joni Mitchell! Yeah, why the heck not? Every time a young lady put on a Joni Mitchell record I knew I was going to get lucky. So oink! oink! (But it’s true!)
Sure, Neil Young–though I always thought his falsetto was kind of creepy.
The Band. The Band. The Band. The Band.
Jesse Winchester. (From Canada, right?)
All of which reminds me of this neat fellow–an electrical engineer–who used to work at Gould, Inc., where I pulled night shift security while going to school back in the mid 70’s. A nice fellow with the standard shoulder-length hair (slight male-pattern baldness happening though), fu-manchu (almost) beard. Somehow we got to talking and he invited me over to his house for a great low-keyed party with wife and kids and friends and he and his buddies singing blue grass and folk. Whatever happened to them? He was a Jesse Winchester fan. And I became one too, though I haven’t listened to J. W. in many a year.
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.
Her pages rock in Open Field, because her lines, her associations, her repetitions, are startling–crazy startling. They have a bit of Kit Smart’s thrash and a lot of Gertrude Stein at her usual. Yeah, she’ll do. Would to god that some of that craziness carried over to the writers in this volume who want to startle. Anne Simpson? Mary Dalton? Anne Carson? The difference between Twyla Tharp and Twyla Tharp’s imitators.
So I’m hepped up thinking good thoughts about Canada and I slip back to Open Field. Among all the names that call for my attention, this side of bp Nichol ( and yes, they don’t have enough of him in this book)–one of the first is George Bowering’s. I recall really liking this guy back about 24 years ago when I read his stuff (ALLOGENES? Also recall a selected from Talon Books with a beautiful cover, plus his work in THE LONG POEM ANTHOLOGY) at Woodland Pattern Books. There was a restless intelligence–an energy– in what he did that attracted me. I guess one of the great things that Nichol and Bowering could do was to open up the page in a way that poets stuck in the memory game cannot do. Memory game poems–this is what passes for poetry in most of the anthologies these days. The memory of mother or father, or etc., is the good contemporary poet’s cue to get “intense.” Here’s an example from the late Roland Flint, a poet I once met in the mid-70’s in Maryland, and even published:
Well, mother, tomorrow night
I will be born, if this were 57
years ago, and you were 29.
Twenty-nine! How young you
would be to me now, mother!
and it goes on, artlessly, sentimentally, from there.
Bowering would never do that. (Would he?) Never get sickly sentimental, I mean, yet Queyras chooses to include a selection from Kerrisdale Elegies, which is not only based in memory, but is steeped in the same kind of sentiment that is a poet like Flint’s stock in trade. In fact, Flint could have written lines exactly like these on a good day, if he’d developed a liking for indenting a line or two per stanza once in a while:
Maybe I should walk along 41st Avenue
where mothers in velvet jogging suits push prams
and imitate the objects of my first lyrics.
Maybe I should comb my hair
the way I did in high school.
Ok. ok. Prufrock, right? Or am I just reading into this. If it’s Prufrock, it’s Prufrock without the crisp line breaks, the tension between form and content–the craft.
Or how about this:
Isn’t it about time we said to hell with agony?
Shouldn’t we be rich with hit parade love by now?
Aren’t we really free to choose joy over drama,
and haven’t we come through looking pretty good,
like a line-drive off a perfect swing
in the ninth inning?
George Bowering has written better than this. I swear he has.
Still thinking here about Canada. Another solid point in Canada’s favor is my neighbor Kevin Wood, who calls himself “The Reverend” and has a sign outside his apartment door that says, simply, “The Woodshed.” He also runs a blog of similar name. Kevin is one of the most politically astute people I’ve ever met–in an age when most people consider politicians as trustworthy as a pack of alchemists–he outdoes most people and almost matches me in considering politicians as trustworthy as candiru fish–guaranteed to follow the scent of urine and stop up your urethra any time they catch you with your pants down directing your flow into the Amazon, or to mimic the actions of a certain crustacean that invades its host’s mouth, quickly gnaws away its tongue–and–without much fanfare–becomes a whole new tongue for its host! Anyway, Kevin and I often reminisce on Saturday afternoons while drinking coffee at the ‘Shed, and we both once swapped stories about how wonderful it was to attend great pig roasts–in fact, I had been thinking about a pig roast that my friend Bud threw for a huge number of family, friends, and associates way back when. Bud never really said the reason why he was giving the roast, but trust me (as Kevin says)–it was a good idea. One of the most pleasant things about the roast was the fact that a few of the guys sat up all night the night before the day of the get-together watching the pig cook and making sure it was done to the right turn. I, of course, was one of those attendants, and I recall sitting out under the late autumn stars sipping whiskey and listening to the men swap stories against a background of crickets and tree peepers, while that pig, in its bed of clay and embers, made itself more and more a meal worthy of the honest men and women of Carroll County. It’s not often that you get total agreement about these rather primitive feelings that well up concerning pig roasts and such, but Kevin (God bless him and hurrah for those Canadians!) not only agreed, but added his own all-night roasting story in which he actually turned the handle on the spit, so that the great hunk of meat was savory through and through by the next morning. Once in a while some obliging lady or gentleman would hand him a beer and Kevin continued on with the job like a long distance runner, or even that little Dutch boy with the finger in the hole of the dike, making sure that no disaster befell what turned out to be one grand bash for the carnivores.
Yes, Kevin, in validating my primal, pig-roasting feelings, again reminds me that Canada must be a pretty darned good place to be and even to be from!
I went to junior high school with a young lady named Ann D., who was much picked upon by everyone for being plain, gawky and geeky. If I recall, she was a straight A student, and the fact that my fellow students decided that she was fair game was not a bad point in my book–I knew that the majority of my classmates, energetic boys and girls one and all, were well on their way to becoming vicious provincial assholes and assholettes. Well, one day, Ann suddenly disappeared. The rumor was that she was sent to a private school.
I ran into this same young woman several years after I’d graduated. She’d blossomed into a fairly attractive person, who knew all about folk singing, and appeared, to my somewhat experienced eye, to be about six months pregnant. I spent a day hanging out with her in and around Westminster, and late on that long-gone summer day, she told me she was heading back to Mcgill the next morning. “Mcgill?” “Yeah, the university. You know–up in Canada?”
It was then that I began to think that Canada must be a pretty good place to be.
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