It has been a sorrowful week
for poetry, but I am determined that in this introduction to Peter Gizzi, who
has known in recent times his share of sorrow, I shall not let elegy overshadow
encomium. For what he shows us, and what poets know, is that writing is one of
the most effective grief management technologies we have. In an interview with
Leonard Schwartz, Peter spoke of his love of listening to poets read their
work, which becomes, in his term, a kind of “lived social fabric” or
dimensional space to inhabit –a kind of occupier’s tent, maybe – protective,
but also exploratory, a staking out of new territory. At the same time,
language, he says, comes from “that which is gone – it is aware of both the
living and the gone,” and it is language’s “incredible job” to encompass both
“grief and joy, the living and the dead.”
He speaks of art practice or poetic practice as a kind of “salvage” (as
distinct from the totalizing notion of “salvation”) – picking up the pieces
and, rather than simply reassembling them, transforming them into something new
and galvanizing.
Poets, then, are
transformers. I am thinking of electricity (and by extension, Spicer’s poet as
radio) rather than toy monsters (although, come to think of it, both analogies
work). Writing and reading, Peter says, “light up the system,” and our nervous
systems, he says, are what constitute a poet’s style. His own style pays
tribute to the authors whom he feels “authored” him – notably Spicer and Oppen
– and carries the torch for lyricism and the aesthetic of American modernism.
Wikipedia’s definition of an
electric transformer grants us an instantly recognizable metaphorical overlay
(almost an exact paraphrase of Olson’s “energy transferred from where the poet
got it”) onto the figure of the lyric being:
A transformer is a device
that transfers electrical energy from one circuit to another through
inductively coupled conductors—the transformer's coils.
Peter is a virtuoso at
“inductive coupling, “ creating in the coils of his poems startling weaves of
discourses and moody, subtle perceptions and receptions. His books include The
Outernationale, Some Values of
Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and, most recently, Threshhold Songs,
which received just this very week a nearly two-page review in the New Yorker! The
caption to the drawing that accompanies the article reads, “Gizzi is a
lunch-pail mystic, at once ecstatic and mundane,” but I’d prefer to
characterize him as the lyric soul singer of the Rust Belt.
Listeners, please welcome…
Peter Gizzi…
2/18 Anne Tardos
It is so very right that Anne Tardos is reading here at
Segue today. I’ve spent a lot of
time with her wonderful new book, Both Poems, and I can’t help but notice how this space, and this
community, have helped to serve as a hothouse for her writing. Segue even comes up explicitly:
“Segue Zen coffee house Segue haunted lightning Segue
offerings.”
So do names – Mitch Highfill, Bob Perelman, Adeena Karasick,
among many others… and this serves to situate her work in a network of human
connections. At the risk of sounding like Creeley, or like a Martian, I’d
venture to say that Anne’s writing is marked by how very human it is. It’s about love and confusion and what are we
doing here and other puzzlements.
One of the poems in Both Poems, Nine, is composed according to the following
principle: “Nine words per line
and nine lines per stanza.”
Conveniently, that is also the first word of the poem.
I have written the rest of this introduction under that same
compositional directive. Here
goes:
Anne Tardos’ poetry has everything I want from poems.
It’s formally inventive but not a slave to “inventiveness.”
It’s philosophical – without irritable-certainty-reaching –
but playful, too.
Her meticulous sense of timing, as in koans.
I feel myself suffering, laughing, pondering, exulting with
her.
Macaronic metrics and amiable speechlike measures amuse and
welcome.
Dark humor, whimsy, sometimes tousled syntax – serious, and
not.
Autobiography, community, love, mortality – all this in its
sweep.
I love love love Anne’s poetry. Please welcome her!
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2/25 Corinne Fitzpatrick
Corrine Fitzpatrick’s poetry is serious, delicate, and
spare. It gives a sense of care and also of tentativeness.
Rodney Koeneke writes, of Corrine’s chapbook, “On Melody
Dispatch,”
“Fitzpatrick [has a] sure feel for internal rhyme,
assonance, and sharp alliterative thrusts that turn the readers’ ear to
relatively short but dense verbal units.
The writing displays a close-knit, tightly embroidered formal panache
that reminded me of the work a boxer does up close in a clinch with opponents.
Melody undefeated.”
Twin urges of description and listing seem to function as engines.
I notice:
a catalogue of similes
lists of testimonials, time expressions, instances of
waiting, physical disturbances
She describes a painting. This in itself seems a painterly
gesture.
She describes a political uprising, using “the people” in
each line, without commentary. Commentary isn’t necessary. It builds to its own crescendo.
Please welcome, for the first time to Segue, Corinne
Fitzpatrick.
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3/3 Ariel Goldberg
Here we are.
Bipedalian, large-headed, upright…sinuous and lipid, filled with all
manner of bio-liquids and viscosities … each square inch of flesh covered with
more than 1000 nerve endings… all utterly strange. TONGUES also are very strange, but strangest of all, I
think, are EYES - these little jelly balls, these headlights of our faces, the
windows of our souls. That such devices should have evolved – with their little
rods and cones and beautiful variegated irises –underscores a truth: we are
creatures of light. More than any other sense, vision informs us that we are
not alone, but in ceaseless dances of negotiation with others and with objects.
That we have developed technologies that record patterns of light is even more
astounding. Rolling about as we do in a constant bath of images, though, we
scarcely even think twice about it, although the extent to which photography
has bent, is bending, our world is something that we are only just beginning to
investigate - Benjamin, Barthes,
Sontag, and their spawn having only just scratched the surface.
Enter poet-as-cultural anthropologist Ariel Goldberg,
obsessed with the photographic revolution and its meteoric impact. But before I write another sentence I
need to say something about pronouns. In Ariel’s original Segue bio, “they”
replaced “she” as pronoun of preference, while retaining the second person
verb. Of course, “they” got edited out somewhere along the chain. It made someone too uncomfortable. Not
me, someone else. So now I will continue the introduction as I believe Ariel
would want it. Their works explore the language of photography from myriad
angles – the hobbyist, the pro, the fetishist, the tourist, and so many
others. I experience the
multivocality as operatic. This operaticity, indeed, begs for the use of the
plural, nongendered pronoun.
Ariel and I both work as ESL teachers at Pratt Institute. It
is the sort of profession in which one’s own language is constantly happily
being made strange for one – a poet’s dream. Yesterday, we took our students to
see the Cindy Sherman show at MoMA. I commented to Ariel that so many of the
people around us looked as if they could be Cindy Sherman subjects; they
responded that “everyone is Cindy” – I might modify that to read “everyone is
Ariel.”
Here’s what I know about them. They is a museum junkie, and
they is always making art.They is a photographer and performance artist as well
as a maker of artist’s books. They
loves photography – real analog photography- in that fervent way that makes
them express disappointment that Cindy has recently switched to using digital
manipulation. They does museum guide/talks about photography. They does
performances in which they pass out writings to be read and then take them
back, and then they gives away photos. They is writing an epistolary novel
around encounters with photography. They created a talk show, in the Bay Area,
with Charity Coleman. The mission of the talk show, called Write This Down TV
was to critique the form of the
poetry reading. The shows are transcribed. You can find the transcripts online,
and they are really great. Here is
a little excerpt:
AG: The thing with not using the mic is really obnoxious
because I feel like people are trying not to have an ego, to be more modest.
CC: It’s like cheap rebellion.
AG: It is cheap rebellion.
CC: I’m not buying into it. And guess what? Not everyone can
hear everything if they’re in the back of a room that has bad acoustics. You’re
giving a reading, use the mic! Just own up to what you’re doing and don’t feel
like you have to apologize for being a poet.
AG: I always want a mic. When I read, you know what people’s
response is? “That’s intense! You’re so serious”. And I’m like well, what else
is the point?
Indeed, what else is the point? So, dear audience, ready your cameras, and say cheeeeese.
Here comes Ariel Goldberg.
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3/10 Tracey McTague
|
Edgar Allen
Poe famously wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in
the proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one
begins to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some
mysterious way doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still. I think of how Huysmans recognized this
dynamic in his catalog of weird flowers in A Rebours. He described, for
example,
the Cypripedium, with its involved, incoherent,
incongruous contours that seem the invention of a madman. It was shaped like a
wooden shoe, or a little rag-bag, above which was a human tongue retracted,
with the tendon drawn tight, as you may see it represented in the plates of
medical works treating of diseases of the throat and mouth…
Similarly, Tracey Mc Tague’s
poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding just the
right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and
spiciness.
It just so happens that Tracey has
one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn, so she has likely looked closely
at a lot of flowers and been seduced by them. I’m not sure whether she has
transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or whether
the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like enchanted
terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown tongue.”
The lines are short, rarely more
than five words each, and this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite,
sound-attentive moments as “prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’
“porch minks,” and “faux pas paw prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria
infested” poems gemlike, with their strange and unembarrassed (i.e.
uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare them to amber.
With her fine and surreal sense of juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is
sure to work in insects and delicate mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph
detainment center”, a “chocolate
mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey [that]
yells,
‘Titans – show us your tits’”!
To which one can only respond:
Tracey! Show us your
poems!
Please welcome Tracey McTague to Segue.
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3/17 K. Silem Mohammad & Rick Wiggins
Despite Flarf’s brilliant
fluorescence flickering maniacally over the landscape of contemporary poetry,
there are still and perhaps always will be those who regard humor in poetry as
a kind of degradation of the art, saying that they are “deeply suspicious” of
it, or that they do not “go to poetry readings to laugh.” I’d like to entreat
such endorsers of modulation and gravitas to consider for a moment just how
remarkable, how literally visceral, is the near glossolalic state of being
possessed by uncontrollable laughter. In such states,
Fifteen facial muscles
contract and stimulation of the zygomatic major muscle (the main lifting
mechanism of your upper lip) occurs. Meanwhile, the respiratory system is upset
by the epiglottis half-closing the larynx, so that air intake occurs
irregularly, making you gasp. In extreme circumstances, the tear ducts are
activated, so that while the mouth is opening and closing and the struggle for
oxygen intake continues, the face becomes moist and often red (or purple).
The power of laughter, then,
goes beyond even rhetorical forms of influence causing these profound,
neurological, physical, and affective responses. It’s manipulative, to be sure,
but also therapeutic, and there’s even a field of inquiry called Gelotology
that studies the ways that humor and laughter act upon the human body. Among
the health claims made for laughter are these:
Laughter can increase blood
pressure, lower blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes, increase heart rates
which burns calories, boost the immune system by increasing antibodies, T-cells
and B-cells, increase oxygen levels which aids in healing, and reduces anxiety.
Laughter can reduce levels of cortisol, growth hormone and catecholamines and
is studied in psychoneuroimmunology.
What better and more
salubrious way, then, to down the bitter pill of poetry?
I mention all this today
because the work of the two poets you are about to hear, Rick Wiggins and K.
Silem, or Kasey, Mohammad, in that order, is hilarious almost beyond measure.
Such hilarity doesn’t just happen. It is the product of obsessive prosodic
craftsmanship and, and it lays bare the ridiculousness at the core of, well,
everything.
For more biodata on these two
you may consult the world-wide web, but here are a few salient facts. I found
Rick in a crevice among some digital bulrushes – where exactly may become clear
in his reading – and learned later that he has a great fondness for Popeye as
well as inexpensive peanut butter.
Kasey is a nutty professor with a thing for Shakespeare, and I have it on very
good authority – that is to say, Kasey himself - that he is good in bed,
although I can’t attest to that from personal experience. I do know that when he taught at Naropa
a few summers ago, his young female students appreciatively tossed their
panties at him at his faculty reading.
The tenor of their work is
similar. They are both, in a way, writing multiple-personae poems, and surely
their influences have a good deal of overlap – like, uh… movies? rock and roll?
the internet? But there are distinctions, too.
Where one is crumbly, the
other is thick. One is more fluffy, citrusy and dry, the other barnyardy and
velvety.
One is perhaps more
herbaceous, flaky, tangy, rich, aged, lingering, waxy, fresh, grassy, grainy,
weeping, and fruity, while the other is soft, bold, mellow, creamy, veined,
peppery, rustic, rubbery, and stinky.
As to which is which, I will
let you be the judge of that, should you actually have enough presence of mind
while your internal organs contract and expand involuntarily, your face turns
beet-purple, and you are wiping away floods of hysterical tears.
So, without further
cheesiness, please welcome to his Segue debut on this St. Patrick’s Day, the remarkable
Rick Wiggins.
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