Spahr Scavenged from Silliman

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

OR

http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/article.php?article=juliana_spahr

begin with martians, ectoplasm, clairvoyancy...

ectoplasm splinters, pale – gentle --
taken into blue – a watery kind
to move through more transition -- now a gravestone
root and hard slab organically moving -- weathered
skin undone and too many pills, a fire, a puff of smoke
abstractions of love giggling in a different space --
a watery voice then
meditation in feathers, words -- what
do you predicate (your) existence
on? posterities?
not to haunt but a bit to live these bones
a communion, totality in fragmentations
then in light
we are what we discussed – the individual swimming,
emerging in a song and a whole movement

I See Words

Hannah Weiner on EPC

Hannah Weiner reading Clairvoyant Journal

"Introduction, Avant-Garde Journalism: Hannah Weiner's Early and Clairvoyant Journals" by Patrick Durgin

"With the publication of Weiner's major works of the 1970s, we come a long way toward filling in the missing links between the so-called "New York School" and "Language Writing," while we witness another literary-critical incursion: the mingling demands of a formalist and phenomenological approach indicative of the larger "radical modernist" tradition in USAmerican poetry." ~ Patrick Durgin

Some Spahr and Gizzi

Juliana Spahr: "After-Language"

Spahr: Online Works

Charles Bernstein and Juliana Spahr

Peter Gizzi -- EPC

Peter Gizzi and "If" (In Jacket Mag)

"If today and today I am calling aloud

If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt
bits of sun, the din

if tires whine on wet pavement
everything humming

If we find we are still in motion
and have arrived in Zeno’s thought, like

if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up
we might know we were loved, are loved
if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain"

and

"If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional if of arrows the
condition of if
if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so
if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that pictures the
fluted stem if lavender"

Language and Postlanguage Q&A by Mark Wallace

Denise Levertov

Links and More for Denise Levertov:

Kevin Gallagher: "Templum, Introduction to Denise Levertov Feature"

John Felstiner: "'that witnessing presence': Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov"

Tino Villanueva "Poet in the World: A Tribute to Denise Levertov"

Rachelle K. Lerner: "Ecstasy of Attention, Denise Levertov and Kenneth Rexroth"

Kenneth Rexroth played an important role in the development of Levertov's writing career.
He admiringly wrote about Levertov's writing:

clear, sparse, immediate and vibrant with a very special sensibility and completely feminine insight. She is not only the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, she is far and away the most profound, and what may be more important, the most modest and the most moving. She can communicate the same vertiginous rapture as the great imagist poet H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]. (“The New American Poetry” originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review (12 February 1961) and was reprinted in Assays (New Directions, 1961). Copyright 1961. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.)

In 1969, Denise Levertov dedicated “3 a.m., September 1” to Kenneth Rexroth:

Warm wind, the leaves
rustling without dryness,
hills dissolved into silver.

It could be any age,
four hundred years ago or a time
of post-revolutionary peace,
the rivers clean again, birth rate and crops
somehow in balance…

In heavy dew
under the moon the blond grasses
lean in swathes on the field slope. Fervently
the crickets practice their religion of ecstasy.

(Denise Levertov, Summer Poems/1969. oyez/Berkeley, 1970)

---

Critics have also been very interested in the spiritual components of Levertov's work and life...

Here are two articles focusing on this vein:

Dougherty, James. "PRESENCE, SILENCE AND THE HOLY IN DENISE LEVERTOV'S POEMS." Renascence 58.4 (Summer2006 2006): 304-326. "Denise Levertov claimed that from the age of about ten she knew she was 'an artist person and had a destiny'."

Greene, Dana. "A poet's pilgrimage." National Catholic Reporter 43.25 (27 Apr. 2007): 14-15.

“Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” and “The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination"

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

I just said I didn't know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.


While women seem to have been tokenized within The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Barbara Guest’s presence is a relatively substantial one – with four poems included in the anthology. Guest was closely tied with the New York School of poets (including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, etc.). She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1943 and remained, primarily, in the Berkeley area throughout her life. Also a lover of the art world, Guest wrote for Art News Magazine during the 1950s – the heyday of William de Koonig and Jackson Pollock.

Her ability to use poetry as a way of cutting into (and creating) something that is sensual and moves outside the bounds of the time-space continuum is what draws me to her work. In the above poem – “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” – the reader can be simultaneously suspended in a love affair, the ocean, the air… and most certainly become submerged in feeling. Yet, while there is this ambiguity, and room for the reader to move, she does not fully depart into abstraction. We are able to cling to coral, pomegranates, parachutes, as well as the repetitions of phrasings. For me, this is a delightful, and yes, perhaps, “characteristically female” play-space for my mind, feeling, and viscera.

Furthermore, despite the delicately beautiful imagery and feeling, Guest employs a very direct diction: “How kind,” “They are beautiful” etc. So, there is a sweetly balanced dichotomy -- she speaks in a matter of fact manner, drawing the reader into a familiar space of language, yet, then leaving the reader hanging in the surreal space of parachutes and pomegranates.

Also, reading "'Literature as Destruction of Space': The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination" by Robert Bennett, I am interested to note how this delicacy of her work is held up to the horrors – primarily those of WWII – inherent to her time, and how, the beauty of her work and its disconnection from political and social referents had its own intrinsic value, a value that has been sustained through time. So, this, too, leads me to think about the constant debate about poetry – “Should it be politically engaged?” “Should it be purely an act of aesthetic rebellion (against practicality and politics)?”etc… I feel both sides of the equation can certainly be of value (and, indeed, even a poem intent upon being disconnected from politics can be a political statement in and of itself). However, Guest’s work is a testament to the power of beauty (perhaps even comfort) within a world that can be challenging to all of the senses.

From “Literature as Destruction of Space': The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination.":

"In opposition to... rigid social structures and architectural and urban spaces, Guest's writing attempts to imagine more complex literary spaces or "chamber[s] of ambiguity/where two equals may meet before disappearing" (Collected Poems 35). Even though Guest's writing infrequently raises these social and political issues, at least in any explicitly political manner, the "precarious architecture" of her spatial imagination extends far beyond mimetic representations of the "physical reality of place" to encompass not only a more complex exploration of the aesthetic and philosophical "metaphysics of space" but also a critical awareness of how spatial practices reflect, encode, engage, and imagine alternatives to various social and political antagonisms. In the "square" context of post-WWII America, the "precarious architecture" of Guest's "cubist angles," "extraordinary disorders," "chamber[s] of ambiguity," and other "destruction[s] of space" did indeed forsake the "topical nature of realist art in favor of the more `abstract' project of transforming the viewer's awareness" (Belgrad 21). The enduring legacy of Guest's writing proves, however, that such "abstract" transformations are not without significant aesthetic, intellectual, psychological, social, political, cultural, and material consequences."


Bennett, Robert. "'Literature as Destruction of Space: The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination." Women's Studies 30.1 (Mar. 2001): 43.
(This article is available in Full PDF format via the MLA database for SOU students in the Hannon Library.)

I am also looking into the life and work of Denise Levertov… so that post is impending…

(The above image is of Jackson Pollock's "Number 7," which hangs at The National Art Gallery.)

Dada and our "Postmodern Society"

Dada was emerging at a similar time as Futurism. However, I have a bit more respect for it!

Dada, in a sense, was a bridge between the movements of Modernism and Postmodernism. It stripped Modernism of its roots. It valued an even more collage-like and free-for-all/freeform approach to art and life. A poem could be drawn at random from a hat. A work of art could be a signed urinal.

Appropriation was key, was alive and kicking.

Meaning could be found in meaninglessness. And, indeed, Hugo Ball, who wrote the Dada Manifesto, believed that Truth resided in its lack; meaning was to be found in chaos, randomness, etc..

We see much of this in our western world today – "what is meaning?" Life seems to be a bit of a rootless free-for-all for many people in today's society – just floating out in one's own created or chosen meaning. We are often flippant, irreverent towards ideas about meaning, purpose, rootedness. And, again, unlike many of the Modernists (and even Dadaists) who were directly responding to events and forms of their time -- who were often consciously rebelling -- much of the Postmodern movement seems not to know where to turn. It is not rebelling against anything. It is often just standing there, screaming.

Linked to these sentiments of Postmodernism (which were issued in by the ideas and practices of Dada) was nihilistic thought. The popularity of nihilism and existential thought was on the rise during the time of the Dada movement, and Fredrich Nietzche was an influential figure of the time. Nietzche’s existentialism and nihilism informed and often spurred Dadaists. Ideas of “meaning/purpose” were on their way out, and to refer back to Nietzche, God had died. And again, for better or worse, we see this in our society today – “What and where is God? What structures do we cling to? Is it all random?”

All history informs all history.

Short distillations of Nihilism and Existentialism:

Nihilism: Existence is void of meaning.

Existentialism: Existence precedes essence; meaning is created and not inherent.

Happy happy thoughts!