Poetry Beat

On Ethan Paquin's Post-Postmodernist Poetry

"Something that can be written about is the lack of promises in poetry, the lack of promising poetry," wrote Ethan Paquin in a prose poem called "Poetry Is No Cure" from his much praised second book The Violence published in 2005 by Ahsahta Press.  That clever bit of wordplay notwithstanding, the collection--which was picked as the runner up selection for the Poetry Society of America's prestigious William Carlos Williams Award--marked the breakthrough of an influential new voice on the

Buffalo

area literary scene, and one that has already garnered significant international recognition.

Now, at age 32, Paquin--a New Hampshire native who is founder and editor of the online international literary journal Slope and the related small poetry press, Slope Editions as well as Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at Medaille College--returns with My Thieves, a substantial follow-up volume published this month by Salt, a leading United Kingdom based independent publisher of new poetry and innovative fiction.

At the heart of Paquin's poetry is a remarkable set of dichotomies that animate his work and provide it with a kind of dissonance and internal tension not unlike that which made the early work of Robert Creeley so compelling.  On the one hand, in his formal presentation and approach to poetic space, his pastiche of shifting vocal registers (everything from Latin phrases to the archaisms of the King James Bible), his appropriation of various literary tropes and the largest vocabulary of any Generation X poet I've yet encountered--Paquin is an unalloyed postmodernist with strong leanings toward the deconstructive strategies of "language" poetry.   

There is, on the other hand, a countervailing grammar of moral consequence and religiosity that manifests itself with stunning effect in Paquin's work, sometimes as a Book of Job-like questioning of the existence of God and his nature, and more generally as an unmistakable sense of spiritual longing that culminates in an unfashionable search for meaning.  As a former student of both James Tate and Franz Wright at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, it is perhaps not surprising that his work would be drawn in seemingly contradictory directions, but all the more impressive for making a virtue of these paradoxes.

In "Post-Post Poem" from The Violence, Paquin locates himself in a lineage of poets that recalls the "begats" of Chapter One of the Bible's Gospel of Matthew:

"Cicero"/ becomes/ "Keats"/ becomes/ "Stevens"/ becomes/ "Ashbery"/ becomes/ "Bernstein"/ becomes/ "Paquin"

But the seeming bravado of this assertion gives way to what is ultimately an expression of vulnerability and self-doubt:

“…the critics/ are right, my poems are not/ poems but they/ are evidence in/ a really dinky/ in a murky/corner of the/chain of human/ stuff that will be burned…when trumpets/sound and poets, whose work meant, / will be lifted and/ saved while I will/ pay for abusing/the only thing I ever knew how/to use except my/ [expletive] …and burn.

Poems which move from grandiosity to self-loathing in a single stanza are rare, but the oppositional nature of Paquin’s writing exposes too much inner life to read as simply a composition of arbitrary signifiers or postmodern exercise in confessional irony.  To coin a phrase the work itself suggests, it would not be unfair to call Paquin a “post postmodernist poet.”

In a sense, My Thieves picks up where The Violence left off with Paquin exploring the interstices between art and experience, between language and the self:

"My thieves are letters and words/that like wheelbarrows/cart bits of me off and then , FLIP!, and over an edge—like into a sea… I do the dumping on my own, the pushing the wheelbarrow,/the sanctioning the carting/ the colouring the sea seaish colours/the caring about the sea at all!

What’s new is the poet’s sense of diminution (he concludes the title poem writing “Ethan Paquin is an aggregate/ of sinew and worn things/ that wrinkle easily”) and alienation from his own work.  It’s a theme he returns to repeatedly in this collection to consider what he calls “the dissipation of the author”—as in “Where Has the Pastoral Gone?” where he writes of a “working poet” writing a tract “that slowly reveals the theft that/ has occurred over three decades/ theft of the author disappearance and/ dissipation of the author the/ working poet become a carriage for/ the continuity of others’ ideas.”

With his creative ego under siege, Paquin—who has often described himself as a poet with a painter’s sensibility—moves toward forms that apply language to the space of the page in a more tactile sense.  In homage to the abstract minimalist poet Robert Lax (“Lax Lax”) and a subsequent series of poems including “What is Language?” “Simplicity” and “Simplicity Through The Logotext,” he experiments with the possibility of recovering lyricism through visual form.

What remains essential about Paquin’s work is its boundlessness and sense of ambition, its eagerness to raise “a gravestone to the violence of language,” and its persistence in “Spanning the edge with a thread in dark spare-times/to measure the guts of the thing...”

Plight of independent bookstores

If you've ever suffered through the frustration of trying to find a specific collection of poetry by a living American poet--even a relatively well known and accomplished poet who might even happen to live in this city--at one of the half dozen or so major book retail chains in the Buffalo area, you're likely to encounter disarray and confusion on the shelves and an attitude of benign indifference on the part of the staff.

Even if you're looking for something more prosaic--say, a short story collection by a promising young writer that happens to be published by a leading independent or university press rather than by one of the big six major publishers--you're likely to get a vacant stare and a half hearted offer to order the book for you.

Less than 12 hours after the official announcement last week of the death of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--whose Slaughterhouse Five was the first work of contemporary fiction I read as a 16 year old in 1972--one of the major book chains send me an e-mail announcing 20% discounts on all of his books.  "Celebrating Kurt Vonnegut Jr." the e-mail was titled, but the message might better have been "Everything must go!"  If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that Vonnegut--black humorist that he remained to the end--would somehow have appreciated the cosmic indifference of the sales pitch.

From the point of view of the major retailing chains across America, books are not so much precious objects to be discussed, debated, savored and revisited as they are consumer products with a finite shelf life.  They matter less as repositories of ideas and experiences, and as the essential tools of a free society than they do as non-perishable commodities in a market economy.

For this reason, independent book stores are an important component of the social and intellectual fabric of any community that aspires to have a freestanding, freethinking literary culture apart from the sponsorship of institutions of higher learning (and their often self-serving agendas).  Independent bookstores contribute to literary culture rather than exploiting it by sponsoring readings and book signings by authors not expected to generate large sales volumes.   They stock books published by small and independent presses as well as those marketed by the mainstream literary publishers.  And the employees of most independents are not only literate--they tend to be borderline obsessive about customer service.

Yet in community after community across America, independent bookstores are closing at an alarming rate--nearly half the nation's independent booksellers in 1995 were no longer in business in 2005--most of them the victims of predatory pricing tactics on the part of the major chains who've expanded their cappuccino slinging operations into virtually every regional mall and more than a few bucolic villages in America.

Contributing to the demise of independent bookstores in a significant way are the anti-competitive sales practices adopted by major publishers and book distributors, who offer best sellers wholesale to the chains at a considerable discount over what independents are forced to pay for the same books.  Add in changes in tax law that have made large inventories of books prohibitively expensive to maintain, and soaring rent and real estate prices in most of our cities over the past decade, and we are now in a situation where virtually every independent bookstore in America is in peril.

A new documentary by filmmaker Jacob Bricca called "Indies Under Fire" examines the plight of three independent bookstores in Northern California as they fight to remain open in the face of all the market forces that would undermine them.  Bricca will be in Buffalo this Saturday as Talking Leaves Books sponsors a screening, talk, and panel discussion of the issues raised by the film at 8 p.m. at Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave. (at Tupper).

Joining Bricca on the panel will be Jonathon Welch of Talking Leaves, Amy Kedron of Buffalo First!, fiction writer Mick Cochrane of Canisius College, and moderator David Landrey, a retired English professor from Buffalo State College. The event kicks off a series through April 28, organized by Buffalo State sociology Professor Allen Shelton, to celebrate Talking Leaves and its 32 years of independent book selling in Buffalo.

Charles Olson's Legacy in Buffalo

Although it's been nearly four decades since his death in 1970, anyone searching for evidence of Charles Olson's continuing influence on contemporary American poetry in general and the Buffalo literary community in particular would have found it in abundance at last Saturday's OlsonNow 3 event at Hallwalls.

The marathon length event brought Olson scholars and enthusiasts together to examine the legacy of the towering (6 foot 8 inch) author of The Maximus Poems through the lens of his brief (1963-1965) but momentous appointment to the University at Buffalo's English Department. The hiring established Buffalo (both the university and the city) as a beachhead for innovative writing, postmodern thinking, and a spirit of experimentalism across the arts.

Just as he had been a decade earlier as rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in Buffalo Olson became a catalyst for transformation whose best known line "What does not change/ is the will to change" could be read as his personal credo.

Olson's principal contribution to 20th century American poetics (aside from his own larger-than-life persona) was the introduction of what he called "Projective Verse"--an "open" form of composition in which lines are determined by measures of breath rather than metrical units, and the poet engages the creative space in terms of a principle known as "composition by field."

As a writer not known for brevity, he was fortunate to have as his colleague and life-long correspondent Robert Creeley, who put it  more concisely: "Form is never more than an extension of content."

Among the highlights of Saturday's afternoon program was a screening of Henry Ferrini's new documentary "Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place" followed by question and answer session with the film maker.  It was the evening event featuring participants in earlier talks and discussions reading from their own work, however, that showcased the impact which Olson's ideas have had on three generations of poets of widely divergent backgrounds.

On Saturday night, we heard seven markedly different readers engage with Olson's legacy on their own terms.  Ben Friedlander tapped into the comic energy of open form with his staccato-beat 21st century juxtapositions, while Bill Sylvester offered an unforgiving trumpet of patriarchal regret.  Mike Basinski, whose performances are text based improvisations that often incorporate props, found a way to have his metaphor and eat it too, while David Landry gave perhaps the evening's most faithful rendering of open form in the Creeley-Levertov mode.

Michael Kelleher, one of the organizers of OlsonNow, read a dense, minimalist soundscape that served as a counterpoint to his co-organizer Ammiel Alcalay's Proustian excursion into the back streets of his poetic consciousness in a passage from his recent book Scrapmetal.  Jonathan Skinner read a series of poems set in Buffalo's Tifft Nature Preserve, reminding us that one strand of Olson's thought leads directly to the field known as ecopoetics.

The final reader was Anne Waldman, co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (now Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado, and author of over 20 books including "Fast Speaking Woman," who was the only woman performer and one of the few women participants in OlsonNow.  Without specifically addressing the charges of sexism and patriarchal bias that are sometimes leveled against Olson, Waldman launched into a virtuoso reading from her forthcoming Iovis Book 3, the latest installment in her series of epic meditations on "the nature of male energy and its attendant strife & delight" that is widely viewed as her feminist response to Maximus.

If you've never seen Waldman perform one of her written texts, you've missed one of the most ferociously intelligent and rhapsodic voices in contemporary poetry, and one capable of almost operatic shifts in vocal register and emotion.

Owing to her association with Allen Ginsberg and Naropa, she may always be categorized as the youngest member of the "Beat" movement, but her work over the past quarter century stands on its own as our era's most engaging and political link between literature and performance art.

Derek Walcott: Poet as Oracle

A new volume of Selected Poems by the West Indian born poet Derek Walcott is out this month from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.  For readers unfamiliar with the work of Walcott--the 1992 Nobel Prize winner in Literature who is perhaps the essential voice of post-colonial experience in the Caribbean and surely one of the half dozen or so greatest English language poets alive--this 300 page volume would be a good place to begin.

I had the opportunity to interview Walcott seven years ago for this newspaper and found it to be anything but a routine experience.  A mutual acquaintance had given me his phone number on the island nation of St. Lucia--his ancestral home--and had suggested the interview, which was helpful as Walcott is protective of his privacy and has a well earned reputation for not suffering fools gladly. 

I spent the better part of a week pouring over Walcott's work from his Collected Poems, 1948-1984 to the mid-career volumes The Arkansas Testament and Omeros--his adaptation of Homeric legend set in the island culture of the modern Caribbean that many consider contemporary poetry's most successful revival of epic form--right up to Tiepolo's Hound, a book that focused on the relationship between painting and poetry, which was at that time his most recent publication. Then at the appointed hour, I took a deep breath, and dialed the 11 digit international number.

A woman picked up on the other end and spoke with the brusque efficiency of a concierge, although she turned out to be Walcott's wife.  After a brief pause and some out-of-range discussion while I fumbled with my tape recorder, Walcott himself took the phone.  I introduced myself, thanked him for granting the interview, and plunged into my first prepared question.

The interview proceeded cordially and more or less predictably.  Walcott professed to appreciate my questions and was extremely generous with his answers, at one point complimenting me on a question he said he'd never been asked before.

The only discordant moment occurred when I asked him about "The Capeman," the 1998 Broadway musical he co-wrote with singer/songwriter Paul Simon that had been savaged by critics despite the presence of two major Latin stars--Marc Anthony and Reuben Blades--in the cast.  Walcott stiffened a bit and defended Simon's role in the project, claiming that critics were lying in wait for him after the critical acclaim and commercial success of his previous exercises in appropriating the musical traditions of different cultures on his "Graceland" and "Rhythm of the Saints" albums.

My surprise, however, occurred the next day as I attempted to transcribe the tape recording of the interview.  The tape was audible, but the narrative flow seemed entirely missing.  Although our exchange seemed to make perfect sense in "real time," Walcott's responses to my questions seemed cryptic and elliptical when transcribed on the page.  Then I noticed how his answers scanned almost perfectly as iambs.

It was as if I was interviewing an Oracle--not the famous one at Delphi (who was, of course, a priestess)--but a Caribbean Oracle who carried the entire weight of his people's collective memory and imagination in the cadences of his speech.  Each question had an answer, to be sure, but each answer read like a riddle to me.

Thanks to an abundance of material--we had spoken for over 40 minutes--and some rigorous editing that stripped away everything that wasn't a declarative sentence, I was able to produce a 1,500 word interview that read like a model of concision.  Out of courtesy, I mailed a copy of the published interview to Walcott in St.Lucia.

Several weeks later, when I had the opportunity to meet him in person following an event here in Buffalo, I introduced myself and shook his hand.  He gave me a wry smile.  "So much effort, so little poetry," he said.

Is National Poetry Month A Good Idea?

If one were to search for the inspiration for the recent and peculiarly American phenomenon known as National Poetry Month, you might find it all the way back in The Prologue to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales :

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

These lines of Middle English celebrating the arrival of spring echo through six centuries of English verse to find their rejoinder in the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Every April since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has joined with a coalition of publishers, booksellers, librarians and literary organizations to sponsor National Poetry Month to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry among the general public.

In small towns and big cities, historic villages and well-heeled suburbs--and pretty much from sea to shining sea across America--poetry is read, spoken, distributed and discussed in in public libraries, high school auditoriums, assembly halls and community centers for thirty lyrical days, at which point the lights come up, the music stops, and everyone discovers, as in the classic play by Moliere, that they've spent their entire lives speaking in prose.

In market terms, National Poetry Month is a seasonal campaign that tends to concentrate the sales figures for published poetry in the U.S. market into a six week period.  A great many anthologies and book releases--the publishing industry now refers to them alarmingly as "launches"--by America's "major" poets are now advanced or delayed for April roll out.  This may be a successful commercial strategy for the publishing industry, but what is its effect on the nature and practice of poetry itself?

In his witty and provocative contrarian essay "Against National Poetry Month As Such,"  ( http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html ) the poet/critic Charles Bernstein (who during his 13 year stint in Buffalo was co-founder of UB's Poetics Program) argues:

"National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way.

"Accessibility," argues Bernstein, "has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry...But [accessibility] to what? Not to anything that would give a reader or listener any strong sense that poetry matters, but rather access to a watered down version that lacks the cultural edge and the aesthetic sharpness of the best popular and mass culture. The only reason that poetry matters is that is has something different to offer, something slower on the uptake, maybe, but more intense for all that, and also something necessarily smaller in scale in terms of audience. Not better than mass culture but a crucial alternative to it."

I find myself in the curious position of agreeing with virtually all of what Bernstein says, but still having a genuine appreciation for all the self-generating and self-sustaining community-based poetry events that have taken root in the Buffalo area in celebration of National Poetry Month without official Academy of American Poets funding or sanctioning.

Bernstein's objection, after all, is to a kind of "risk free" poetry imposed upon the masses by an "Official Verse Culture," but events like Celia White and Joseph Todaro's "Urban Epiphany" (April 29)--a marathon reading featuring 100 or more Buffalo area poets each reading two minute segments or the Buffalo/Williamsville Poetry, Music, and Dance Celebration (April 26)--which each year brings a "major" American poet (this year it's Sonia Sanchez) into contact with high school students for year long performance projects of their own design are events uniquely rooted in Buffalo's egalitarian ethos of do-it-yourself experimentalism.  They are authentic expressions of the community's creative spirit.

What do you think about National Poetry Month?  Has it had any impact on the way you relate to poetry in your life?