The New Yorker‘s recent gatekeeping effort to separate Rae Armantrout from the rest of her friends in the Language school. While it is never true that negative reviews sell books—they can kill a book as often as they sell it—here the demon of curiosity can only be let out of the bag with tantalizing references to an entire literary history a middle-brow readership has never heard of, and of course will only want to know more about:
Stephen Vincent, in response to my entry on Sylvia Plath [Entry 06: “Sylvia Plath’s Collage”], sent a poem by little-known California poet Laura Ulewicz. Ulewicz, who was born in Detroit, spent the early 60s in the U.K., where she met Plath, returned to San Francisco in the late 60s, then lived in Locke, Calif., where she died in 2007. Vincent is editing a selection of her work. His note follows the first section of the poem (which is set in Detroit). Of particular interest to me is the narrative/sentence interface, between confessionalism and the New Sentence:
from Nightmares to Be Born
I. Reality
Elizabeth Barrett hunched up in a book
While the foxes in my head ran round a tree
The foxes in my head ran round a tree
Under the ether. The nurses joked together,
“Freud at five.” Everyone (my father
And mother) disapproved. Baba, I cried
Because they’d bury the foxes that were so happy.
I hid the foxes alive inside my crying.
The Brontë sisters—But my own real friends.
Detroit a sex machine. Joey
And I, thirteen, peddling into Duns Scotus.*
Trees. Sanctuary for birds, God.
But then she was racing, racing. The boys put a stick
In my spokes. Falling I hit them. Hit them old
As the naked man in the basement who pumped his head
And lied. Oh, if I should grow up Beatrice.
Morning turns inside out. The engine
is diseased, as it floats along
approximate ice. High contrast
geometry of persons straightens out from
meandering road. Desperate focus
never looks back. Progress makes possible
a paralyzed attendant, set apart
an end to himself (moral noise).
—Frame: 1971–1990 (Sun & Moon, 1997), 13
Avenue Poupelard in the center of this devastated city pulses with life and reeks of death almost two weeks after the earthquake. Before what Haitians call “the event,” it was a chaotically bustling street of lottery kiosks and cybercafes, gated homes and shacks, churches and schools. Now, a coffin maker spends the day hammering wood as fast as he can get it, while the body of a 6-year-old boy decomposes in the ruins of a school. … More
“Plasma,” the lead poem in Plasma/Paralleles/”X” (Tuumba, 1979), has been translated into Italian by Gherardo Bortolotti in the online journal G A M M M (joining previous translations into French, Dutch, and site-specific sculpture). The text and link are provided below. The next thing for me to do, clearly, is to attempt a homophonic translation!
Plasma
Un paradosso è mangiato dallo spazio che gli sta attorno.
Ripeterò ciò che ho detto.
Far diventare una città una stagione è come indossare occhiali da sole dentro un vulcano.
In 2007 or thereabouts, I ran into Detroit poet Chris Tysh on W. 26th Street in Chelsea. It must have been Saturday. Simultaneously, we were hailed (as it were) by the poet George Quasha, who invited us in to the White Box Gallery to take part in a video project he was making. In another version of this story, I must have been contacted by Quasha, who invited me to the gallery, and I arrived at the same time as Chris Tysh. In a third version of the story, Carla Harryman was also present, to be hailed or invited by George Quasha.
In any case, Quasha asked me to compose myself, face a video camera and speak in whatever manner I chose, at whatever length I might, to the topic “Poetry is . . . .” After giving it some thought I did so. Carla Harryman likewise spoke to the question. Chris Tysh composed herself and spoke, while I remained at a respectful distance, not wanting to interfere. Kristin Prevallet may also have been there, composed herself, and likewise spoke.
Later, I wrote George Quasha about whether the project had come to fruition. He answered in inspecific terms. From that time forward I heard nothing more until, clicking on a Google link to an rss feed site called Tumblr, I came across evidence that the work existed and that I was in it, along with almost anyone else who might have an answer to that question. The resulting video is a compilation of some interest that just might speak to what “poetry is . . . .”
The video has been out for about one week. My segment can be found at 34:45.
A direct citation of my poem “Complete Thought,” without permission or credit (by “permission” I mean some form of notice or request) could be found (until I posted the link), at: http://withhiddennoise.net. It has since disappeared; I would be happy to have the poem online, but just with some credit and communication.
A direct citation with permission (accompanying translation into Dutch in the print journal Parmentier):
The second meets the “alterity” test of my previous post. In the first instance, it was not clear whether this was an extract or the whole poem (twenty-five of fifty sections were printed), nor where the complete poem could be obtained. There are also at least two parodic rewrites of “Complete Thought”: one by Lisa Jarnot, “Complete Hog,” Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008); and a second in an ephemeral chapbook which I will post when I find it.
