Poems: Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen in 1957 with a collection
of his painted books, taken on the rooftop
of photographer Harry Redl's apartment
house in San Francisco. (Photo: Harry Redl,
via FoundSF.com)

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was an exact contemporary of Robert Hayden, whose poem "Monet's Waterlilies" I posted yesterday, yet a very different poet in aesthetic approach and vision. A poet and novelist, Patchen also played with the visual aspect of his poems, sometimes painting or drawing them and collaging in musical verses drawn from the American popular and jazz traditions, and during the 13 years of his life, when he was mostly bedridden, he extended and refined his experimentation, which had included concrete poetry, painted book covers, and silk-screen texts, to created his famous "Painted Poems." Patchen's visually vibrant works invite the reader to multiple possibilities for poetic reading and interpretation, while also functioning overtly as works of visual art.

I had seen some of his Painted Poems before, but I was delighted when I happened upon via Professor Vaughn B. Anderson's former undergraduate comparative literature online course site, "Painting with Words: Exploring Poetry and Image," which he taught in 2013 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He included the Patchen poems in his "Visual Poetry" module, and they are that and more. Out of the dozen that he posted I have selected four, all of which remind me of William Blake's illustrated poems, but updated for the 20th century and, considering the moment of post-Pop Art and post-modernism, the 21st. To quote Patchen, "I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend."

The Academy of American Poets website describes these works as

free verse poems with whimsical imagery using pieces of Japanese paper and common construction paper, glue, tempera, watercolors, casein, crayons, ink, pencils, cloth dyes, cloth string, and coffee and tea (used as dyes). The idea for the painted poems, Patchen’s wife Miriam has said, emerged from his fascination with sheets he received from John Tate, a botanist. The sheets, once used in France to press botanical specimens, became the backdrop to the painted poems, which were bound and published in the collections Hallelujah Anyway and But Even So. Emitting both joy and grief, the painted poems depict the ways of the world—its cruelty included—with mature resignation and playful humor. His last work, Wonderings, contains reprints of his silkscreen pages along with abstract and figurative drawings. Patchen died in 1972, a year after Wonderings was published.

To put it another way, FoundSF says of these works that, "They are celebrations of everyday playfulness as well as realizations of the sadnesses, humor and limitations of the body and mind. Also they are personal protests, insights into the institutionalized notions, both spiritual and political, that corrupt community and creativity."

XYZ

Poem: Adriano Spatola

Adriano Spatola

Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) 1884-86 painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," or "Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," which now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, may be one of the most famous and recognizable works of French art from the late 19th century Neo-Impressionist movement, and a master-work of pointillist painting. A series of carefully placed dots that in combination depict an afternoon world of (mostly) bourgeois leisure on a Seine riverbank. The picture indexes a social world, rewarding repeated viewings, even in reproduction, and provoking a range of possible interpretations.

These everyday, fin de siècle characters are in shade because of the sun, but might Seurat not be implying more? What is the little girl in white, staring directly at the viewer, saying through her steady child's gaze? There are sailboats and rowers, but also a woman fishing; how common was this, and who is she? Is this for sport or sustenance, or both? Why does the one woman with the immense bustle hold the leash to a pet...monkey? Off scene, across the river, lay the working-class suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine, which Seurat, as well as many other important 19th century French painters, including Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, also depicted. Lastly, there is the famous border, which inverts the colors of the painting, as if to underline the idea that another world or worlds lay just at the borders of this one.

Seurat's painting is a flash impression containing a vibrant narrative; the colors, in Impressionist fashion, pulse before our eyes. This informs the approach that Italian poet Adriano Spatola (1941-1988), known for his linguistic experimentation that often uses fragments and run-on syntax, employs in his tribute, translated by poet Paul Vangelisti, to Seurat's painting. Spatola also taps into the darker veins of the scene Seurat painting; supposedly it was a spot where middle class men could, amidst the bathing, rowing and picknicking, meet prostitutes, and that shadowy boundary between the visibly respectable and the invisible desire and vice lurking in the interstices of social relations appears in Spatola's poem in words such as "tricked out," "penance," "shadow," and "anger," among others. He records the social and emotional tenor of the scene more so than what it is overtly depicting: as poetry often can do, he holds up a lyric stethoscope to the image, and shares what he hears.

It is a beautiful image that even spurred a musical--Stephen Sondheim and James Lepine's famous 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George--as well as numerous recreations and parodies, but also repays viewing. I did have the pleasure several times of viewing it up close, and urge visitors to Chicago first to go to the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the nation's best, but above all to spend even a little time with Seurat's painting, one of its treasures. And now, Spatola's poem:

SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND
OF GRANDE JATTE (1884-85), Georges Seurat



by Adriano Spatola



The wonder the sense of lacquered objects
bolted measured tricked out in the clock
generous happy mature penance shadow
that the sun disbanded sews on the leaves
trousers hair parasols and gowns and gloves
anger drowns sighing the groan resounds
against the decorated and blank wall against the scale
unraveled dry whirlpool enameled Gongorism
congenital with thirst with gloomy astonishment
or wonder or the sense of lacquered objects.

Adriana Spatola, from The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992, translated by Paul Vangelisti. Copyright © 2008 by Adriano Spatola and Paul Vangelisti. Used by permission of Green Integer Press.

And here is the painting:

George Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, oil on canvas, 1884-1886, © Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Poem/Translation: Hagiwara Sakutaro

So busy these recent have been that unlike in prior years, including 2009, when I was in Cuba, I have been able to post a daily poem from National/International Poetry Month. I will strive to post a few more before April flows into may, but for now, here is one by Hagiwara Sakutaro 萩原 朔太郎(1886-1942), the late, acclaimed experimental Japanese poet, whose volume The Iceland, translated by Hiraoki Sato, will be published this summer by New Directions.

The poem below, which appears with two others on Asymptote journal's website, displays the quintessence of Hagiwara's work: its use of free verse, rather than traditional Japanese forms (which he also employed during his career); its mixture of linguistic registers, including lofty poetic speech, everyday language, and philosophical discourse; and oscillation between pedestrian and psychologically dark imagery. Several previous volumes of his work, including Howling at the Moon and Blue (Green Integer, 2001), translated by Hiraoki Sato, and Rat's Nest: The Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro (UNESCO, 1999), translated by Robert Epp, have previously appeared, as has Hagiwara's Principles of Poetry: Shi No Genri, from Cornell University Press in 1998.

The Tiger

It's a tiger
wide and vague as a giant statue
you sleep in a cage in the uppermost floor of a department store
you are born no machine
you may tear apart and eat meat with your fang-teeth
but how can you know human reasoning?
Behold, under the orb sooty smoke flows
from the roofs of a factory-zone town
sad whistles rise and spread.
It's a tiger
It's a tiger

It's an afternoon
the ad-balloon rises high
in twilight-close city sky 
on this high-rise building sitting in the distance
you are as hungry as a flag.
When you scan vaguely
you make the worms crawling along the streets
your live food dark and depressing.

It's a tiger
on the roof of prosperity in the midst of Tokyo City
where elevators go up and down
wearing an amber striped fur
you suffer solitude like a wasteland.
It's a tiger!
Ah it's all your afterimage
a useless total view of a void.

Copyright © Hagiwara Sukitaro, translated by Hiraoki Sato,from The Iceland,

New Directions Publishing Corporation, June 2014.

This poem appears on the website of Asymptote Journal. All rights reserved.

Pattern Recognition: Reading/Panel @ MoCADA in BKYN Tonight!

If you are in or around Brooklyn this evening, drop by MoCADA to catch PATTERN RECOGNITION, an amazing exhibit of contemporary abstract art, and then stay for the reading and conversation I'll be participating in!

POETRY READING & DISCUSSION:

EXPERIMENTATION AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC

Friday, September 13

6:30-8:30PM | MoCADA

Evie Shockley, author of the new black and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, will join celebrated innovative poets LaTasha N. Diggs, John Keene, and Dawn Lundy Martin for a reading and discussion on craft, language, politics and the search for a “black aesthetic” in contemporary art. 

Seating is limited, please arrive early. Wine will be served and author books will be available in the MoCADA Shop. $3 contribution.

Poem: Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach

One of the poets I discovered while idly browsing one day in a bookstore in New York City was Ann Lauterbach (1942-).  The book was And for Example (Penguin, 1994). I found the poetry entrancingly difficult, which for me is a good sign. Each page drew me in like a magnet, and after I had read half the book in the store, I had to purchase it. I have been reading her work and going to see her read ever since. Among my favorite of her readings are ones she gave at the old Dia Center for the Arts space in Chelsea, which became one of my staples in the late 1990s, and which is where I first saw her perform her signing-thrumming, which I could not stop talking about; and at the Bowery Poetry Club, where I caught her reading "Litany," the very long and dream inducing poem by and with John Ashbery. "I fainted, honey."

A few falls ago, at the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Politics conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, I saw her read with Mei-Mei Berssenbruegge (another poet whose work I adore), and in her pre-reading comments, she explained, in crystalline language, what her aims had been, from book to book. It was the most revelatory thing, and I even wrote about it on this blog. A key, a golden one, she gave to her readers that day, and it has since made her work somewhat less hermetic, my reading of her work somewhat easier, but Lauterbach's poetry is nevertheless no less enchanting.  And it can be relatively straightforward and moving as well. She is the David and Ruth Schwab II Professor at Bard College, where she directs their MFA program.

Here is a two-part poem by Lauterbach, who is the author of 8 full collections and a book of critical essays. "New Brooms" is not strictly self-reflexive about poetry so much as it interrogates language itself, as its opening section makes clear. Readers of Seismosis will note how some of Lauterbach has seeped into my work; and she was a graduate professor of my collaborator, Chris Stackhouse. Influence!

NEW BROOMS

Of representation (frame)
from one to another (use)
between the articulation (space)
of language (tree)
of clarity by means of (intent)
of humans (speech)
on the contrary (response)
with itself, in its own density (earth)
for it is not (image)
from the first to the second (wave)
seizes upon (law)
within the other (us)
without those of (tradition)
point by point (nature)
of or to (the same)
and so on into a possible good
the waxed carnation's cribbed flounce
shade distinctly wound among new brooms
panache of the ever-tan September
And so what is said is at an angle
architectural
over the floor from which the soliloquy drafts
        upwards, as if restitution
             could be a chant surrounding disaster.
Bruise on the arm lingers in absentia.
Buzz saw in the alley.
Speech, oracle of intention, dissolves
into the sea's remission
as up through an imperfect net comes another exaltation.

    2.

Some here twitch along a heading, out
out, and came thou back along the periphery,
shroud tracked, foregathered,
tune integrating chorale
tautly drawn into rainspit, down
through the breaking mirror's reminiscent shield, bethou
said the maiden, bethou said the monk.
Not yet, said the bird, elongating distance,
high among pines and pale rock.
But had we spoken of the quarry?
Or were we in a room, video-taped, among dry towels
and the humid inquisition of the crowd?
We were in the crowd, "you and I" "he and she" and so
transpired over its edge into
bodily harm: an eye for a hand, some mantra of war.
The stipulating crew began to assert its origins
and what pale and what golden
shimmied into paradox, whittling the streets with monograms,
the walls with cool but generative dust.
The pictures came back from their instants.
A genetic stroke of luck is not to have this receptor.
Yet another instruction, one we still cannot read.

to Thomas Dumm

Copyright © Ann Lauterbach, "New Brooms," from If In Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000, New York: Penguin, 2000.

Poem: Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen (from Reed College's website)

Since I'm going to be very busy the rest of this week (cf. the next post), I need to be more concise with these introductions, and so today I've selected a poem that requires the reader do a bit of the heavy lifting, though it really isn't that tough--though the poem is "heavy," in the sense that people of my father's (50s and 60s) generation used to use that term, which is to say, complex and profound. The poem is "Any Lit," and the poet is one of my favorites, Harryette Mullen (1953-). She once gave me and everyone else in the poetry workshop she was teaching an excellent bit of advice, which was: instead of waiting for the right time to write, to devote even a tiny sliver of each day towards writing a poem--or writing anything--and so by the end of every week, every month, every year, you'd have something before you. It's not always so easy to do, but it does work!

Harryette has published seven books of poetry, and I first learned about her work from members of the Dark Room Writers Collective, who had come across her second, highly innovative book, Trimmings (1991), which formally riffs off the work of an experimental predecessor, Gertrude Stein, suffusing Steinian language with even more play, eros and soul. Harryette was on her way, and the poem, a quintessential example of her work over the last few years, below demonstrates her playfulness, wit and humor, but also her rigor. It utilizes formal constraints but in a different way than rhetoricians urging a close study of Quintilian or Oulipo poets wielding n+7 techniques by combining many of the rules, which is to say, mechanisms of possibility, of the two. So there is the rhetorical device of the anaphora that launches each line, and the epistrophic repetition of the final word beginning with "m," with the constraint that the fourth word in each line has to possess the initial sound "u," as in "yew," followed by the words "beyond my." The regularity creates anticipation as you read and listen, since you have a sense of what's coming but you are continually surprised. Then there is the issue of these metaphorical comparisons in analogical relation, creating their own logic line by line, but then collectively creating a logic (or illogic), that feels like an apt figure for literature or, more specifically poetry. 

Okay, it sounds crazy, but look at what this poet does with it. I find it can't get her poems out of my head for a while after reading a few of them. You are a euchre beyond my Mah Jongg.... A great teacher as well as person, Harryette is a professor of English at UCLA, and in addition to her poetry has published important scholarly and critical works, and fiction. I would love to see what she might do with (and to) a novel!

ANY LIT

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone
You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia
You are a union beyond my meiosis
You are a unicycle beyond my migration
You are a univese beyond my mitochondria
You are a Eucharist beyond my myocardiagram
You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur
You are a eureka beyond my maitai
You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper
You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird
You are a unit beyond my mileage
You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind's eye
You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key
You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe
You are a Utah beyond my microcosm
You are a Uranus beyond my Miami
You are a youth beyond my mylar
You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia
You are a Ukrainian beyond my Maimonides
You are a Euclid beyond my miter box
You are a Univac beyond my minus sign
You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro
You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan
You are a U-boat beyond my mind-control
You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma
You are a eurethra beyond my Mysore
You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow
You are a ubiquity beyond my minority
You are a eunuch beyond my migraine
You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness
You are a urinal beyond my Midol
You are a uselesness beyond my myopia

Copyright © Harryette Mullen, "Any Lit," from Sleeping with the Dictionary, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. All rights reserved.