Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett SEATTLE, WA After spending two years in a haunted apartment in Racine, WI, Pimone, Andrew, and Lukas are happy to be living in an entirely ghost-free house in Seattle. Friday: 02.16.07 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Andrew Feld

March, 2003, Oregon, which means there’s another two months left of rain, and I’m driving Jack Gilbert in my Saturn from his room at the Mountain Writers Center in Portland, where I work running a reading series, to a noon reading at Mount Hood Community College. The doors on my car leak and any good downpour works its way in as a trickle on both the driver’s and the passenger’s outside shoulders. Jack Gilbert, who is as thin as a bird’s skeleton and is wearing a worn grey-green sport coat doesn’t mention the steady drops on his right side, and I think this isn’t so much a matter of discretion or good manners (although his manners are good: he carries himself with an old-fashioned mixture of solicitude and reticence that could be called courtly if you use that word without any aristocratic connotations) so much as a symptom of the intensity of his concentration on our conversation. He is leaning back in his seat and trying to puzzle out the mystery of the image. The subject came out of a discussion of The Cantos and Pound, who Gilbert visited at Schloss Brunnenburg. From what source does the poetic image get its power, he wants to know—seriously wants to know, and so we run through some of the standard explanations, discussing the haiku, Pound, Ginsberg, and cognitive development. I feel I am flunking a test I want to pass, but I feel better when it turns out that, after however many decades of serious consideration, Jack Gilbert also has no explanation. For him fidelity to the image is as much a moral as it is an aesthetic imperative. His life spent outside the country, his poverty and lack of any kind of an income-providing career and his total distaste for any kind of rhetoric or verbal extravagance in poetry (“metaphor is the basement of poetry,” he says, “the bottom. Decoration. Ornament”) are all different aspects of the same thing, his priest-like dedication to his art.

After a few miles the topic changes to what it was like for him to live in San Francisco in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s. He talks about the energy in the air, all the writers, liveliness and excitement of the literary community and I say something suitably awe-struck about the richness of that place at that time, of being in San Francisco with Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Rexroth and Spicer, etc. Do you read them? He asks me and when I start talking about some favorite Duncan poems he cuts me off: nobody reads Duncan anymore he says, nobody reads any of them. None of them will last, he says with complete finality. The other only poet of the San Francisco/Berkeley Renaissance who Gilbert believes possessed true talent is Allen Ginsberg, who he says knowingly and deliberately betrayed his gift for popular adulation (there’s poem about this betrayal, “Halloween,” in Gilbert’s most recent book, Refusing Heaven).

That Jack Gilbert was wrong—who doesn’t read Creeley, Duncan and Ginsberg now? And when Wesleyan releases the Collected Spicer, I’m sure they’ll stock it in the Kenosha Barnes and Noble—doesn’t make his claim less interesting for me: if anything, the opposite. In a time when the idea of poetic movements has been largely replaced by literary communities so united that discussions of the relative quality of texts or authors within that community can be rejected as leading down the slippery slope of elitism, Jack Gilbert would seem to be a Romantic anomaly, a lone hold-out of the masculine “solitary genius” myth. And yet as with most extremes, these two positions blur into each other: if you combine Jack Gilbert’s “I” with the contemporary “we” into a hybrid “I/we” you find in both aesthetics an equally moral and rigidly exclusive component in their poetics.

This is of particular, pertinent interest to me because last Summer I was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Seattle Review, the literary journal published by the University of Washington English Department, and my goal, immediately, was to put together a journal which would not represent any one particular community, but which would be welcoming to vibrant, exciting work from all aesthetics. The Seattle Review, I hoped, would be a place where young formalists bumped against old experimentalists, and the well-wrought narrative would be placed next to the jagged, new-fangled difficult poem. Since as a reader I don’t have to choose between Oppen and Merrill, there seemed to be no reason why as an editor I shouldn’t be able to publish (ideally) Lyn Hejinian next to Gjertrude Schnackenberg next to Phil Levine. In practice, however, the difficulty is: how much democracy can a journal contain before it dissolves into chaos? If you give up the vibrancy and drive that a journal derives from being the public forum of a lively community, how do you give your journal a sense of vital energy? How can you make the journal cohere?

In my next post I’ll discuss my editorial models and ambitions for The Seattle Review, and how I hope to resolve these issues or how to profitably not resolve them. I would love to hear how other journal editors address these problems, and how readers feel these issues shape the journals they read.

An end note: along with poetry, The Seattle Review publishes fiction and non-fiction, but I won’t be discussing my editorial concerns for these genres here, since this is, after all, Poetry Foundation.org.

Pimone Triplett

By most accounts the Sublime is less sublime than it used to be. Its popular usage today is a quick lesson in our culture’s priorities writ small, ranging from the million-selling punk/pop/ska band Sublime to a porn site called the Sublime Directory, offering complete downloadable ecstasy with lots of “adult picture galleries.” Gone from the cultural scene are the primary 19th-century listings for Reason and the Imagination, not to mention the formative experiences of nature or a poet’s gothic scenes amid the Alps. Although there has been a resurgence of recent interest in the Sublime among poets and critics, it has also been considered at times to be reactionary. The traditional sublime suggests ideals like “transcendence,” which we now know to be, if we follow the theorists of our time, a hopelessly totalizing and monolithic concept, something like a cheap pine-scented air freshener that leaves the room smelling worse than when we began.

And yet these qualifications aside, at the heart of the sublime was and is a concern with vastness itself, traditionally, but not necessarily, experienced through place and the powerful forces that can overwhelm. Admittedly, the contemporary experience of nature can in part be reduced to cliché. The vastness of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls has gone the way of tourist postcards and the favorite ‘50s honeymoon. Still, nature’s true terrors and vastness lie well beyond the powers of tourism and economic forces, as natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami all too horribly prove. Furthermore, the sublime is not to be confused with the beautiful. Both Kant and Burke associate the beautiful with a confirmation of already held beliefs; where the beautiful consoles with harmony, the sublime disturbs with terror. In fact, a website called Philosophical Dictionary defines the sublime this way:

“The aesthetic feeling aroused by experiences too overwhelming in scale to be appreciated as beautiful by the senses. The awe produced by standing on the brink of the Grand Canyon or the terror induced by witnessing a hurricane are properly said to be sublime.”

As an aesthetic experience, the sublime plays a dissonant chord, siding on a scale between excess and exile. Kant writes in the “Analytic of the Sublime” that “The transcendent . . . . is for the Imagination like an abyss in which [the imagination]fears to lose itself.” OK, we’re too postmodern to believe in strict transcendence, but what about the vast part? There is a lot in contemporary life and history that is hugely, vastly, beyond individual control. In the paradigm, the poet has a strong emotional response to some kind of power or authority. This overwhelming power is associated by the Romantics with nature, but couldn’t it also stem from another author figure, the international obliqueness of the butterfly effect, or the helplessness of the George Clooney character in Syriana to affect any change upon a vastly interconnected web of accident and evil in which agency, or even responsibility, are hopelessly outmoded notions? And if our experience of the vast and powerful has changed to include such labyrinthine ungraspables as global capitalism, the split atom, or complex and multiples sense of place, how has the sublime been revised and inherited among contemporary writers, or is the sublime so materially altered as to no longer be deserving of the name?

Of course, we live in a world that commodifies and commercializes the sites of ancient origin. What meaning lies in images when that packaging is less than benign? I’m thinking of M. Norbese Philip, a black poet who was born in the Caribbean but was educated in Canada, where she eventually settled. Her book of 1993 was entitled (rather unfortunately, I think) she tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks. She’s a poet whose awareness is burdened by a history explicitly designed to silence her. Moreover, she seems acutely aware of how sacred landscape is, by this time in history, a matter of appropriation, a subject she addresses in her poem called “African Majesty, from Grassland to Forest,” but which is also subtitled, significantly, as located in a museum, specifically, “The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection.”

Hot breath
                    death-charred
winds
                    depth-charged
words:
          rainfall
          magic
          power

the adorn of word
in meaning,
the mourn of loss
safe safety save

mute
muse
          museums
                    of man—
Berlin, London, Paris, New York,
revenge seeks the word
in a culture mined
                    to abstraction;
corbeaux circle
                    circles of plexiglass
                                        death;
circles of eyes
circles for the eyes—

For Philip, there is no easy access to the original place—African grassland and forest, majesty and memory—without facing it’s having been muted, museum’d, collected, displayed, dissected, art’d up, and stolen. There is also no mythic return to an imaginary time before the advent of history, that modernist dream more available say, to a powerful poet of another generation like Pablo Neruda (Heights of Macchu Picchu springs to mind). It is as if the vastness to be approached is no mere literal natural landscape so much as the engulfing weight of history’s erasures, its relentless undermining of self through culture, language, and in this case, slavery. How then does one speak of the sublime when the sacred is also a site of sacrilege?

Philip’s fragments enact a stumbling through the rubble left by the blasts of a particularly brutal collective history. It’s also as if race itself, with its cornerstone of “ancestor,” has now become the unrepresentable phantom that Kant once associated with the sublime, but it’s stripped here of the possibility of any redemptive backward- reaching act, apart from the poem as ritual itself. Within the currency of irony, the magic coin of the realm called “meaning” is part of what the poet mourns.

More next time on the sublime through the quasi “experimental” Harryette Mullen and the “post-avant” younger poet Srikanth Reddy.

Andrew

In today’s post I’d planned to discuss my editorial models and ambitions for Seattle Review, but this will have wait until Friday (although I will address some editorial concerns and ideas today) owning to a certain derailment in our lives. We all flew into Houston last Wednesday, to spend a few days here reading at the University of Houston and conferencing with graduate students. We were supposed to fly out on Sunday, but Saturday afternoon our two-year old, Lukas, started saying “ear hurt: feel better soon?” and after hearing that a couple times we took him to the Clear Lake ER, where it seemed to be power-tool accident night (lots of guys with hands wrapped in bloody towels). The doctor diagnosed Lukas as having an ear infection, and said he couldn’t fly until Tuesday afternoon at the absolute earliest, because the cabin pressure could rupture his ear drum. So we had to reschedule our flight, and make all sorts of emergency revisions.

Lukas got the all-clear (or the clear-enough-to-fly) today, and as a reward for being miserable, achy, and examined and injected by strangers, we took him to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where they have the world’s greatest butterfly room. They also have a fossil of a Giant Sloth, or Mylodon, which features prominently in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, a book I’m teaching in my Travel Writing class this quarter. For some reason I thought the Mylodon was the size of a large bear, but it actually was the size of a standing-up elephant, with hips big as a sideways refrigerator. An impressive beast, especially when you picture it covered with reddish hair—no wonder Chatwin obsessed.

It also seems funny to be posting on poetryfoundation.org the week that Dana Goodyear’s New Yorker skewering of the Foundation came out. I won’t add my voice to the irate chorus quoted in her article, but there is an easy solution to all this antagonism: Poetry Foundation Grants to journals and small presses. Think what Flood Editions, or Ugly Duckling Presse, or The Threepenny Review, or No or Seattle Review could do with $25,000 or $50,000. As it is now, almost all the grants available to literary organizations are project specific: the funds needed for daily and yearly operational expenses (office supplies, printing costs, author payments and tours, staff support, advertisements, and on and on) are raised by sales, contests, begging, borrowing, and, if you’re lucky, by institutional (University) assistance. In truth, most presses and journals run on manic energy and long hours put in by a small, intensely dedicated un-or underpaid core staff. There’s a lot to be said for this model, but it tends to have a high burn-out rate. If the Poetry Foundation became the benefactor of America’s small presses and literary journals, there would be an groundswell of support and gratitude towards the Foundation which could only help it in its other endeavors.

In a comment to my first post Jose Reyes asked about the role translation—particularly from underrepresented languages—plays in my editorial vision, a question which provides a good jumping-off point for a few quick Seattle Review editorial policies.

Anyone who is in the privileged position of having a literary review to run is immediately, or should be immediately, daunted by the number of first-rate and exciting literary journals out there now—and the number of new ones constantly starting up. This is a very healthy time for the American literary journal, and this plenitude forces each editor to determine how their journal will distinguish itself from the others, what it will represent. This dilemma is avoided if the editor comes from, and wants the journal to represent, a particular literary community, but since that isn’t the case with the Seattle Review, here are some of my core Seattle Review decisions:

I want the Seattle Review to be interesting to the “general literary review reader,” without using that term in a way that condescends to or underestimates the intelligence of the reader. For example, I think that most readers of literary journals are open to, and familiar with, contemporary theory and philosophy.

Instead of publishing one or two poems by 30 or 40 poets, the Seattle Review will publish five or six poems (or pages of poems: we love long poems) by 20 or so poets, to give readers a chance to spend time with the poets represented.

We will publish features on poets, which combine work by that poet with interviews and essays written by other poets—essays which can be as theoretical or as plain-spoken (or as plain-spokenly theoretical) as their authors want. This means that is the case of translations, we will publish features on international artists with translations by a variety of poets, and essays by poets on the featured poet. My model would be something like the recent Ugly Duckling Mandlestam chapbook (if you don’t know it and love Mandelstam, you owe it to yourself to own it right away), with essays by the translators.

I want the Seattle Review to be local, national, and international.

More on my editorial ambitions, and the ideas behind them, on Friday.

Pimone

Start with one of the buzzwords of our time: globalization. In speaking of the parts that go missing in translation, M. Norbese Philip reminds us of the increasing homogenization of place as it goes the way of pure display, whether corporate or artistic. In our everyday world amid the contemporary cathedrals of cash, from Safeway to the local mall, we’re used to passing in and out of an artificial sense of place. Increasingly too, this phenomena is what we as Americans export as culture to the rest of the world. One effect is that the most common experience of “the vast” now includes the unidentifiable forces of capital or the seemingly infinite multinational excesses of wealth and power, with the mysteries of economic “magic” beyond the control of any one individual.

As the commodification of the human being merges with the commercialization of the spiritual, the sublime survives in highly skeptical and parodic form. Here is a short prose poem by Harryette Mullen, a poet known for an astringent but playfully punning style in which she tries to recast our commonplace productions of “reality.”

With eternal welcome mats omniscient doors swing open offering temptation, redemption, thrilling confessions. The state of Grace is Monaco. A shrine in Memphis, colossal savings. A single serving after-work lives. In sanctuaries of the sublime subliminal mobius soundtrack backs spatial mnemonics, radiant stations of the crass. When you see it, you remember what you came for.

There is an implicit Oedipal psychology of the sublime, where the vastness at hand is associated with the powers of the archetypal father. This father figure can take the form of the written text, a linguistic paternal order that comes to us through Lacan’s retooling of Freud. In the paradigm, the poet figure is at first overcome by the sublime power’s greatness, but later rises to that same level of greatness upon recovery of his equilibrium. In Mullen’s work, it’s as if the all-encompassing text is that of capitalism itself, a sign-glutted, unmappable, vast terrain that indeed threatens the integrity of the self and never seems to end, swallowing up all that comes before it. Both her fragments and the use of prose mimic the tabloid-ese she speaks of, generating a peculiar sense of isolation as Elvis in Memphis and Grace Kelly in Monaco take on biblical attributes. And if memory, that hallmark of the traditional sublime’s ritualistic return to consciousness, is key here it serves as a reminder that memory itself is part of this environment of a manufactured past, as mysteriously powerful and lacking in agency as the “subliminal . . . soundtrack” that urges our passive, massive buying.

On another track then, Srikanth Reddy is a younger poet whose restraint could be seen as harkening back to a South Asian tradition of the sublime. His first book is called Facts for Visitors, and though he is a multi-homelanded writer who has worked in south India, he draws on an otherworldly sense of travel, where fabrication and fable knit together in strangely ritualistic scenes witnessed by an almost alien persona. Here he gives us this rigorously hushed lyric, “Waiting For The Eclipse In The Black Garden.”

It takes long.
A wind comes worrying the candle-tip.
Our servant’s teeth flicker.
His jawbone flickers.
Once I watched him cut open a goat.
Now no one can breathe.
The black disc locks into place.
Listen. Listen.
Under that box is a snake.
Listen while the unlit places hollow you out.

Action comes slow and deliberate in this ceremony of silence which is further endorsed by the muted end-stopped, double-spaced lines. Reddy includes his servant and there is a tradition of the poet’s including a secondary figure in the sublime, like Wordsworth’s address to his sister in “Tintern Abbey,” or the peasant guide in the Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude. In this poem, Reddy’s servant figure seems to function as a stand-in for the poet in a kind of ritualistic substitution. The servant is further along in an initiation into the mysteries at hand, ominously associated with the wind and the candle’s fluctuations of light, having already acted out the archetypal violence of animal sacrifice. Like the goat whose throat was cut, the human beings of the scene now cannot breathe. As the light is eclipsed, so seemingly is the possibility of whatever has passed for freedom in this enigmatic world, as the sun “locks” into place like a key closing a door forever.

At the final, surprising close the poem, there is that sublime invocation of erasure, a penetrating emptying out of the self which is the culmination of all that has been threatened thus far. Fear, in fact, has driven the piece forward all along. And if it is a commonplace of spiritual transformation that the self-preserving, desire-ridden mind fears its own annihilation, it is also a necessary component of an expanded freedom.

Reddy locates the poem in a mythic rather than a geological setting. Like many poets of his generation and mind, he eschews the old labels and burdens of identity politics. Perhaps as a result, his notion of place/no place is expansive and mysterious beyond the need for explicit references to Indian or American landscapes. The emptiness, the hollowing out, he speaks of at the end has a transpersonal quality to it, even as the poem evolves, so to speak, moving from the personal pronoun “I” toward the universal one of “you.” Of course, the notion of enabling negative space in the self has both eastern and western roots, from Keats’ conception of negative capability to the Buddhist sublime of a radical emptiness that removes the false veneer inherent to an unenlightened existence.

If there are those among us who would lose themselves, if they could, wholly into some single, most beloved place, there are many who carry a jerry-rigged sense of home from here to there. From the vastness of the American freeways laid flat across horizontal reaches of desert, to the sweeping verticalities, the flying buttressed buildings of New York City, the sublime still tells about place in the form of an impossible debt. Clearly some poems are part of paying the balance.

Andrew

In April 2005, Pimone and I had the dizzying experience of a private tour of Harvard’s Houghton Library Rare Book Collection, where Emily Dickinson’s fascicles are housed. The occasion of our visit to Cambridge was not a happy one (sorry—whenever I write about Cambridge I fall into Victorian locutions): we were there to visit a sick family member. So when we were offered the chance to get out of the house for a few hours, we welcomed the change of air and the distraction.

As for the experience of actually holding a fascicle in my hand, it was a little bit of the old-fashioned Sublime—the giddy glee a high school first date combined with the feeling of being a neophyte entering the Tabernacle.

Then our guide took us over to Keats’ library, which is housed in the Houghton Collection, and let us page through Keats’ copy of Samuel Johnson’s 1765 Shakespeare, with Keats’ comments, sometimes agreeing, often irate, in the margins. I remember the word “Fie!” written at the end of one long Johnson critique, and at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Keats had inked thick black lines through Johnson’s moral summary of the play:

In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen.

If I had to summarize the aesthetic stance of the Seattle Review in one sentence, that would be it: “Who loveth not understandeth not.” Of course this doesn’t mean blind, uncritical acceptance of everything sent to us: not all aesthetics are equal, nor all authors in a given aesthetic, nor all poems by a given author. It is the editor’s job to be the filter, to make the selections which give a journal its focus and coherence. What it means is that each author will be judged according to the fullness of their works’ intentions and given the full latitude of their ambitions. Poems fail by their own terms, not all ambitions succeed, and unformed or ill-conceived aesthetics generally result in failed poems—but this should be just passed over in silence. Why waste precious pages dissecting failure? Nothing is easier than not reading—or, in my case, not publishing—a poet whose work you don’t like.

Reviews in which poet-critics demonstrate their superior intelligence by making witty comments at the expense of the work under review are baffling to me: I don’t understand why anyone writes or publishes them. I believe that not so far underneath all these critical commentaries is the desire to establish a kind of absolute poetic standard which would help to establish a more homogeneous poetic landscape. I believe that Charles Bernstein was right when he said in his A Poetics (to paraphrase) that the diversity of poetries in America reflects the diversity of communities in America, and so is a sign of its health. Here I find myself falling into the rhythm of those I believe manifestoes parodied by Steve Martin (“I believe that the Battle of the Network Stars should be fought with live ammunition”). What this means as a practical editorial principle at the Seattle Review is that I will publish generous selections of each poet’s work, and that reviews and essays in the journal will be driven by appreciation and gratitude.

My ideal editorial model for the Seattle Review is the old Ben Sonnenberg Grand Street, a journal where in one issue you’d find an essay by Guy Davenport, a poem-essay by Anne Carson, a play by Kenneth Koch, and a poem by James Merrill: translations, fiction, memoirs and essays, all united by acuity of intellect and a generous, genial love of the written word. To be a contemporary, updated (and, yes, more diverse) version of this ideal seems to me to be (to use another Victorian locution) not an unworthy ambition.