T H E D I S T A N C E S and / or C I T I E S (4)

In my own reading and writing cosmology Alice Notley looms large. I playfully think of her and Joanne Kyger as two big witches of poetryworld, alternating the realms of light & dark between each other, with Bernadette Mayer assuredly right there in the mix as well. The vast range of Notley's oeuvre is of such stature that I can't imagine how anybody is not utterly blown away. She's the colossus in my book. A rejected Notley proposal I put forth the last year went something along the lines of a creative critical engagement, similar to her own Dr. Williams Heiresses, using Philip Whalen as one possible hinge with Waylon Jennings being the other. My working title was WAYLAID, WAYLON, WHALEN: Alice Notley, California, and Masculine Waste. In truth I had the songs of fellow Californian Merle Haggard in mind rather than those of Jennings but couldn't resist the harmonics of the three Ws in my proposed title. Notley was raised in the desert town of Needles, CA. She lives in Paris these days and spent much time living in the Lower East Side, but together with Ted Berrigan she did pass through Bolinas/San Francisco as well in the seventies.

California and the West make numerous appearances in her at times memory-drenched writing. Her work sparkles like gutted out rock crystal. A dazzling spookiness drifts through her hypnotic blaze of revery and visionary trance. As I wrote regarding her book Culture of One:

Notley undergoes a descent into the folds between her conscious and unconscious states in order to write. I recall watching a video recording made of a community writing workshop she gave in San Francisco shortly around the time she was likely working on the intensely autobiographical poems found in Mysteries of Small Houses and she encouraged participants to try such a practice, imagining digging a pit into which to lie one's self down in the dark and therein greet whatever poem is to be found. The peculiar tale told in Culture of One arises from out such darkness. It tells the various stories of "Marie" (very much a Hecate-like figure) and her dogs living in the town dump of a small desert community which is vaguely situated sometime in an American southwest of the 60s or 70s, but could just as easily be the 90s, and unfolds within a dreamy but nonetheless hard, precise realism.

Notley's also spoken on multiple occasions about how central a place the landscape of The West from out her youth plays in her imagination. And Berrigan's poem "Wishes" contains one of the most superb lines of poetry ever written about California: "I wish I were driving alone across America in a gold Cadillac toward California, & my best friend." The feeling of penultimate excitement and wonder expressed here is a key element of the enduring myth at the heart of California/The West's hold upon the American imagination. Perhaps no other poet of the same generation than Ed Dorn so thoroughly embraced The West as a subject, routing out its vagaries of promise and wasted ambience. For Notley and Berrigan alike Dorn proved a committed friend and comrade. Notley recalls a poignant memory of bonding with Dorn over her being a Westerner while the two of them were out alone together having slipped away from their respective families:

Ted and I came to Chicago just before the inception of 1972, as Ed and Jenny and Kid and Maya prepared to travel to Mexico. Ted and I and Ed and Jenny "did" some desoxyn, on New Year's Eve '71; some time later Ed informed Ted that there was now a character in the poem [Gunslinger] named Taco Desoxyn. This is how the poem worked; the words come out of the air, out of currency, is the answer to Where do the words come from? On New Year's Day night Ted and Jenny were completely wiped out, but Ed and I went to find some dinner, and the only place open in Old Town — our neighborhood, which is several times named in Slinger — was a rather poor-grade so-called Mexican restaurant. Is this how "Taco" came into it? I was a young woman from the Southwest and took my Mexican food seriously; I think I complained about the meal but I had a great time. This was my first real conversation with Ed, who focused it on me. He was delighted to discover I was a Westerner, had been born in Bisbee, Arizona — see the wife of the mayor of Bisbee passage in Book IIII — had connections in Prescott (I had lived there too as a small child), and had grown up in the Mohave Desert town of Needles. I remember describing Prescott's Whiskey Row to him, and the whiskey-and-stained-wood smell of the bars. God, he loved it! I think he gave me credence as a poet, thereafter, because I was a true Westerner; he was the only person, later, who seemed really to get and savor the melancholic last three words of my poem "At Night The States": "Montana. Illinois. Escondido."

The geographical and spatial orientation found on the ground in the Western states registers a whole shift of consciousness that's inescapably other compared to the East Coast. Dorn explored this heightened sense of locale in poems spread out across his lifetime as he moved not only all around the West but crisscrossed the country and the Atlantic, as well, spending notable time teaching in England during the 1960s. Donald Wesling recounts Dorn beginning a seminar in San Diego during the late 1970s/early 1980s with a vivid demonstration of his historical literalness. Dorn looked out at the class silently with a stony, bemused stare, then reached into his satchel and pulled out a long tube, unfurling an old railroad map of the western United States onto the table, announcing with a wry smile "This is our Territory." Or so goes my memory of it anyway from reading Wesling's Introduction to Internal Resistances: the Poetry of Ed Dorn.

Among the wryest of Dorn's prose commentaries concerning The West is found in The Shoshoneans. He skewers Nevada in a manner sure to gain him no friends in the Silver State, e.g. "Everything in Nevada, we notice, as we go through it, is nonexistent." I read his bitingly cool—in its judgment—recounting of his visit through Reno while in Reno last year when I happened to be there for a poet-pal's bachelor's party. His words remain ever true. As I read I looked up to gaze roughly northeast out floor to ceiling windows towards downtown Reno from a suite upon the fifteenth floor of the Peppermill Casino and Hotel with all the dizzying array of distant casino lights ringed by mountain ranges. The city up of the high plateau only amplified his remarks when we headed out later onto the streets. Although in fairness, the modern art museum was rather impressive and there is something to be said for the noir feeling of afternoon cocktails outdoors in such deserted and decrepit small cities littered across The West.

Carcanet Press published Dorn's massive 1,000+ page Collected Poems in 2012 and in the fall of 2014 San Francisco State Poetry Center hosted a reading to celebrate its release. I was extremely thankful to be asked to take part. Poet Alan Bernheimer has a terrific sideline going as a photographer of Bay Area poets during readings and he snagged one of me that night.

Our host Steve Dickison requested we read for about five minutes from out Dorn's poetry as found in the Collected. With over a dozen readers participating chances were good that more than one reader might choose the same poem/s. Having recently reviewed the book for American Book Review my copy was well thumbed and dozens of poems came to mind as possibilities for what I might want to read. As I started looking through the book I thought why not compose a cento taking lines from individual poems in chronological order of appearance. So that's just what I did.

20 FROM OUT THE COLLECTED DORN 

1. My true readers have known exactly what I have assumed.
(Preface, Collected Poems '74)

2. It is a real mystique, not a
mystique. A mystique of the real.
("The Land Below")

3. That memory 
of how he lay out
on the floor in his great length
and when morning came,
late,
we lingered
("From Gloucester Out")

4. My desire is to be 
a classical poet
my gods have been men . . .
and women.
("Idaho Out")

5. I am not amused by
your speech
don't grate my ear
with thin brilliance.

And stop spitting peanuts
into my drink
as you say you adore
poetry.
("The Reception")

6.      The fact is there is no art
  no vision in the West there is no
definition cannot be made the "reason"
for unalterable and predictable action.
("A Theory of Truth/The North Atlantic Turbine")

7.      Everybody admits
Churchill was a fool.
No one needed to say
Eisenhower was a fool, he carried
his own placard. It said Kansas
and Texas.
("Oxford") 

8. I have felt already the reality
of the last breath I draw in.
I want to say something.
                 I want to talk
turn myself into a tongue
("Wait by the door awhile Death, there are others")

9. My dear love, when I unsheathe
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us
(Twenty-four Love Songs)

10. The strict eye
of a sparrowhawk evenly
in her survey of reality
("Niedecker")

11. And when, above Janos
we asked permission of the women
to strangle the children
the women consented
and the suicide gripping
of the throats of our own children was done
and those delightful voices lay silenced
in absolute sacrifice
("The Moving, Invisible Spectre of the Phratry on the Traitor Peaches")

12. I held the reins of his horse
while he went into the desert
to pee. Yes, he reflected
when he returned, that's less.
(Gunslinger)

13. Well, I don know, said Taco
Yeah I think I can work with Portland Beel
if Portland Beel ever work
He's so low
he's solo
I hear he's good
at climbin trees
but I ain't seen any trees
around here
(Gunslinger)

14. The sky for sure
is soup de jour
("Tuesday 2 March 1976: Weather Report")

15. Meanwhile
Mr. James Merrill is about to repeat
the messages his "wife" picked up
from Dante, in the Ouijaboard Room.
("Some More Ostentation")

16. the Mullahs are obviously
not connoisseurs of Satans.
They should stop using the word great.
They should read Milton.
("Solo Pretendre")

17. the 'ped writing this must be the biggest nutcase
In modern poetry to lead with a Rottweiler.
("Aboard the Tan Am/ Odin, a Dog of Judgement")

18. you know it's just still
the Inquisition, booked up, forever
persuading or dismissing the heretical
barbecuing the truly insistent,
pulling apart, an inch at a time
the uncertain, since, if they
can reason enough to be unsure
a visitation from the devil is presumed.
("Albi, a Day Trip")

19. But I've had a Denver Upbringing
And you can't take that away from me
And you can't steal my Freedom
Because I never ever had any.
("Denver Upbringing")

20. How can I solicit even
a particle of it
for the relief of my singularity
("The Garden of the White Rose")

I aimed to both demonstrate and celebrate the at times severe yet ever admirable versatility of the continual transformative nature of the speaker throughout Dorn's poetry. This is a trait his work shares with Notley's own. Indeed nearly all poets, if not all, must have the space within their poems to embrace the demands of those voices which have previously gone unknown and unheard. Yet these voices are not just "characters" or some other "literary device" to cull a bit of ambient variety from out of or to switch the mood up. Rather, these integral shifts of consciousness do in fact bring poets to a state of near dementia. This process will "test the steel" as it were of any poet's temperament. When the accomplishment registers at the level it does in Dorn or Notley's work it manifests definite discomfort and will estrange readers by way of syntactical and narrative challenge, as the poet attests the limits of experience. The crystalline exactitude of wit mixed with acidly dry exuberance shatters the inhibitions of the small-minded offering up nothing short of a possible new universe.