Entries tagged with autobiography

December 30, 2022

Entry 47: Liberating Gertrude Stein

“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)

To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.

The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below). … More

August 21, 2021

Archive 14: World Autobiography

I return to the vexed question of autobiography, which in earlier times I believed one should “start writing” only when all other options—of world transformation, for instance—had failed. The two key terms are brought together in the 1973 cover of The World 28, the “Autobiography Issue” edited by Lewis Warsh. As I recalled when Lewis died late last year, I first met him in Mendocino, on his way down the coast to Bolinas, where I visited him before he moved back east. In his editing of The World, he wanted to radicalize autobiography not as a genre but as a mode of writing. Writing from an immediate perspective of “personhood” in any genre was of interest, from poetry to fiction to memoir, journal entries, letters, portraits, and snapshots.

Autobiography would be the royal road to writing per se; there was a tradition and consensus that “self/life/writing” was what there was to do, in fact was all that could be done. For a brief while there was in fact a kind of period style of autobiographical self-discovery, nothing like the persona poems of the workshop but evoking a tradition from Rousseau and the romantics, Zukofsky’s “the words are my life,” Beat spontaneity, and New York School everyday life. The consensus—and it was not long lived—was that “into the company of self it all returns,” one might say. Warsh’s 1973 project, bringing together writers of several diverse schools, was the highpoint of that moment.

I was the early Language writer in that group, in company with Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bill Berkson, Anne Waldman, all poets who would appear in the first issues of This, but also Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Lee Harwood, Harris Schiff, and John Wieners. The issue should be reprinted in its entirety, to reflect on the question of writing that Lewis proposed: where the fact of writing and the events of life are seen as nearly identical. What historical circumstances obtained for that to be possible, desirable, likely? But there is also a moment of transition here: from person to language—at one pole the iconic representation of personhood, in condensed and presentable form, and on the other the endlessness of scribbling in letters and journals, a fascination of writing per se. … More

August 12, 2018

Entry 35: On Bearing an Inscription

bw tattoo 1200

Yesterday I joined many millions throughout the history of humanity and submitted to ritual scarification, of my own volition and free will: I got a tattoo, my first after many years of sworn testimony that I would never do so. Like any complex choice, there was a before and an after—I had been visually imagining and verbally debating such a decision for years, months, and days leading up to the act, which took place on August 11, 2018, in the company of two friends, at the hand of Zach Hewitt at Signature Tattoo on Nine Mile Road in Ferndale, Michigan. The consequences of this act after resonate across time, space, and my work as a writer, beginning now. … More

September 15, 2013

Event 38: I Met (Memorial Site)

23–26 August 2013

My father died on 23 August 2013, and I posted a brief account below. The response of many friends, writers, colleagues, family—in several media but primarily on Facebook—was both moving and helpful. I want to record the names of those who responded here, making a kind of guestbook for the memorial event this page now is.

Heidi Eichbauer
Stephen Vincent
Susan Schultz
Ben Friedlander
Nada Gordon
Ben Lee
Ruth Lepson
Christine Neufield
Nataša Kovacevic
Scott MacLeod
… More

August 23, 2013

Document 28: In Memory

rhw

Artist: Shiy De-Jinn;
photo: Jan Watten

In memory
Raymond Henry Watten
20 August 1922–23 August 2013
Minneapolis, MN–Santa Rosa, CA

HOME

On Summit Street
across from a marble
monument, a large spray-
painted sign with his
initials in red block
letters. The background
is black. Next to the initials,
RHW, is a high contrast
image, a snapshot of him.
It is late summer, a
humid afternoon with slight
breeze. A bus goes by.
He comes out to meet it.

—from Opera—Works (1975)

I was a new arrival at the Iowa Writers Workshop, c. 1971–72. Given the kind of confessional, autobiographical, narrative poetry the workshop cared about, workshop leader Marvin Bell thought to prompt: “Write a poem about your father!” This is what I came up with. I did not return with a poem in which I was sharpening a tool behind the woodshed, wondering what to do next. The red-on-black high-contrast image appears to be a screen image for Salvador Allende, killed in the Chilean coup in 1973. My father did not represent Pinochet, but he was in his career a military officer and research doctor during the Vietnam War. He wrote a thoughtful support letter in my campaign to resist the draft, I should add. The location of the image (imagined) translates the psychogeographies of Charles Olson and Robert Smithson onto the quotidian landscape of Iowa City. Of course all such cultural references are to my own family romance. It strikes me that the season and weather described in the poem are those of today precisely, 23 August 2013, while in the poem, the bus and his emergence from the “home” of the title do not coincide. As now they just did.

… More

February 2, 2010

Entry 08: Homage to Lee Crabtree

Fugs Second Album.

Recent threads on The Fugs have brought to mind my early encounter with their music, and the band itself, during my first visit to the St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, November 1965. When asked for a short statement on the Poetry Project for Anne Waldman’s anthology Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–91, I wrote:

Thinking back on the Poetry Project, I am reminded of an absurdist question posed by Gerard Malanga to Charles Olson in The Paris Review: “A school is place where one can learn something. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?” From my first involvement with it in about 1972, The Poetry Project seemed a place where a school of poetry—the New York School—was physically embodied in a group of writers who felt free to develop in the confidence of their mutual (and contending) assumptions, and I certainly learned something from that. … More

January 28, 2010

Image 06: Portrait of the Artist as Engineer

Life magazine commissioned a series of photodocumentary essays for the “Life Science Library” in the mid 60s. I discovered this image quite by accident, several years after it was published and I had left MIT for Berkeley. That is the 17-year-old present author at far right.

From The Engineer, Life Science Library (New York, 1966), 89.

(In memory of Jeanne Alderton Watten Agnew, 19 April 1926–28 January 1990.)