The translator and author for Du Fu: A Life in Poetry is David Young. Not being familiar with Young I did a google search and found his website, which includes samples of his poetry. Not surprising, there is a notable Asian influence. An easy to recognize example being how the poetry makes note of which season the poem is placed within, which is a quality attributable to all of the Asian arts. Young publishes a sample poem each month and the following is for May, 2007, and also happens to be one of my favorites on his website:

Walking Home on an Early Spring
.....Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn’t seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield ---
who hasn’t heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you’ll feel part of it for once,
you’ll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you’ll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you’ll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we’ve made
and then the one we haven’t.

Watching the Rain From
The West Apartment
--Du Fu

Here in this upper chamber
rain has wet the curtains

chill air from the mountains
moves through this river city

the path on the sandy shore
has to be higher now

when the river recedes
we'll see sharp rocks again

chrysanthemum petals
are sadly scattered

but the distant pine forest
shows itself fresher

rain beats down
on the red lacquer balustrade

brooding as usual
I stand by a pillar on the veranda.

A similar poem to 'Rain On A Spring Night', but importantly different in that the bucolic tone also includes Du Fu's personal hardships, which is more the norm than the exception in his poetry. David Young includes Wallace Stevens' phrase "the pressures of reality" within the introduction. The poem was written with several others while Du Fu was living away from his family in what he called the River Pavilion, living quarters while on duty for the governor.

Rain On A Spring Night
--Du Fu

Congratulations, rain
you know when to fall

and you know quite well
you belong to spring

coming at night, quiet
walking in the wind

making sure things
get good and wet

the clouds hang dark
over country roads

there's one light from a boat
coming downriver

in the red morning
everything's wet

flowers all through Chengdu
heavy and full of rain.

Like many of Du Fu's poems, a simple clarity that requires no explanation. Especially if you live in Michigan at the moment. The saturated ground is laid over with new green, the air is dripping with moist color, not at all a contained season to stay inside-- to drown in anything.

Du Fu (lived 712 - 770, his name sometimes translated at Tu Fu) has been one of the great Chinese poets whom I have known about but never sat down to intensively read. He is often paired with Li Po as they were friends and because of their backgrounds and artistic styles embodying a sort of yin-yang relationship, Li Po being the Daoist wanderer, floating through the world on wine, tears and cherry blossoms, while Du Fu was the Confucius poet, as a result of his living a more domesticated existence and tied with government positions.

While Du Fu did have a family, his life was anything but the orderly existence which I had presumed. For starters, while he made attempts at advancing through the ranks of the Tang Dynasty, fancying himself one day to be a scholar who could then acquire the prestige of retiring as a hermit poet, in reality he was at the bottom rungs of the ladder and never advanced to any such honorable position. As a result, his positions were only tentative and minor. Additionally, during Du Fu’s life, China was embroiled with rebel groups and under the constant threat of attacks from Tibet, placing nearly all of the Chinese citizenry of the region into an itinerant mode of living. A truly difficult time for everyone as one of the world's greatest civilizations began to crumble.

While Du Fu’s life was presented with hardships, throughout he was still able to document his life through poetry. In David Young‘s recent translation, Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, there is a focus upon the poems which directly represent Du Fu’s biography, the historical events around him more as setting than actual subjects (and from what I understand, there are a large number of Du Fu poems which directly speak to the political and moral situations around him, as why he is identified as a Confucian poet, but these don't appear to be the focus in this collection). As a result, this is a collection which seems to be a representation of his personal works, revealing more of the growth of the mind and life behind the poetry than the ideals he meant to uphold or the social-cultural-political situations which he encountered.

This makes for an interesting read for a couple of different reasons. First, because the poems are placed in chronological order, and with a map of China to show the different locals where Du Fu lived, there is a certain amount of narrative taking place which gives this collection the same appeal as any historical biography, or a work of fiction for that matter. Second, with the personal there tends to be innovations beyond the traditional forms, such as his poems which satirize the royal court– an example being where he documents a rainstorm that hits a whole boatload of heirs and decorated costumers, or a love poem written while being away from his wife– the more common love poetry in China being of one’s mistress or friendship with another male, or an unrestrained self-pitying- which previously was often expressed through general 'sorrow' rather than anything so specific.

Taken as a whole, there is a tremendous imaginative relationship with the world being revealed, but all the more accented because of the social structures Du Fu lived within:

As we see in the lake's middle
we see in its dark depths

the southern mountains, mirrored
upside down in the water

here and there a quiver
as if the mountain moved

maybe our boat will collide
with a high mountain temple

maybe the moon will swim
out of the mountain pass

--from 'Meipi Lake'

One could argue that throughout Du Fu’s life there was a yearning for a more Daoist lifestyle, to favor a prominent inflow/outflow of imagination over a life built upon social structures, but was never able to leave or ignore these structures. Even towards the end of Du Fu’s life when he largely wrote Daoist poetry, there remained the interference of political wars and the subsequent displacements, keeping him from ever overcoming the demands of social realities. And this to me is what gives Du Fu’s poetry its appeal and emotional tension, as the reader knows the life Du Fu desired-- a quite farming life with a cottage and a reasonable pension-- but is never able to fully achieve because of the historical disruptions. And this is maybe why I now find a bit more substance in Du Fu’s poetry than Li Po’s, as the conditions of his life are relatable thousands of years later in our contemporary times.

[A Morning Song; Shi Yi]

4.
Simple, the trees placed on the landscape
Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.
The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,
Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene
For our position alone.
Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things
One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.
For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.
This number having lost its indescribable fineness,
Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.

--from 'French Poems'; John Ashbery

Mickey Hart and the Global Drum Project.

From a CNN article published earlier today:

(Evo) Morales addressed the United Nations in observance of Earth Day. He called for the nations of the world to accept a set of principles that would protect the planet's resources and "right to life."

Morales, the first indigenous president in Bolivia's history, told the U.N. General Assembly that people cannot put their interests above those of the Earth.

"Not just human beings have rights, but the planet has rights," he said. "What's happening with climate change is that the rights of Mother Earth are not being respected."

Telling the U.N. delegates that "we have the challenge to agree on a universal declaration for the rights of Mother Earth," Morales outlined four principles that he asked them to consider:

The right to life: "The right for no ecosystem to be eliminated by the irresponsible acts of human beings."

The right of biosystems to regenerate themselves: "Development cannot be infinite. There's a limit on everything."

The right to a clean life: "The right for Mother Earth to live without contamination, pollution. Fish and animals and trees have rights."

The right to harmony and balance between everyone and everything: "We are all interdependent."

Morales pointed out how indigenous people in Bolivia have rites and rituals to honor the Earth.

"We now must begin to realize that the Earth does not belong to us," he said. "It's the other way around. We belong to the Earth."

from Ascending Flight, Los Angeles
-- Nathaniel Tarn

2.
Birds from colorless to color; flowers color
to colorless. To stop life's turn to nightmare
adopt the colorful patience of birds. Flowers
take flight and become birds, add color to
the birds in sky, so high, their colors hit in-
visible. This is the level we desire to reach:
bird high, plant low-- famose cosmogony.
Out there in Hollywood, air-breasted women
trying to become birds and failing even, why
at ascent to flowers! To conjugate, lone mind,
all that is beautiful way and above all man, &
human understanding. Planes in their traces
along sky move white from unknown city-
unknown city, and this for no known purpose
you can witness low-- but bird is clear in
purpose how much high, as hummer was at
nose the other day while gardening. Since I
was raising flowers to the power of air. As
child, remember Mitchell in the movie, eyes
up intently at a lone seagull-- and she'll be
loveliest ever to fly, him whispering, and so
she was in metal clad, flying countries alive.

While not at all immediately apparent, Jasper John's Perilous Night was modeled after Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. Most specifically, the shapes sketched into the encaustic on the left side. But the use of the hands has a more obvious connection, as well as the block-framing shapes, only in this case, two dimensional and set into place, not capable of opening outward like an altarpiece. While I don't know if Tarn was thinking about John's work when writing Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, a resemblence in the themes exists: the blocking of the viewer's vision, the forced compartments, the limited access to the totality of the scene, all of which Tarn is concerned has happened to our vision of life. Tarn's poetry also making direct reference to hands and feet, which are aspects of the crucifixion, and also re-emphasize the notition of the 'particular' and the relation to the 'whole'. Its through our hands, our bodies, that we relate directly with life, this being a much different relation than through ideologies. From Tarn's poem 'Hands':

...............On the floor a closed box. Can it contain
persuasive numbers of human hands, cut from their too
possessive bodies? Is it natural that a body should need
its hands? Not in the present circumstance, not in these
politics. Evanescent, rapturous clouds dream way above
the mortal scene while soldiers move forth under orders,
sliding round walls, darting from post to post, kicking
doors in with their remaining feet. A dark within there,
darkness of poverty devoid of fire or even lamps, a dark
lost to pretence. Asleep. Three to kill, one to rape.

Early on in Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers Tarn provides a lengthier poem, 'Mathis at Issenheim', which gathered its inspiration from the Isenheim Altarpiece, an artwork by a relatively unknown German in the early 1500's named Matthias Grünewald (translated as “Green Forest”). Tarn claims in his notes for the poem that “hardly any art in the Western tradition surpasses it in power” and his emphasis is upon the crushing depiction of the crucifixion, as it being truly capable of expressing all of mankind’s suffering. Not an easy task for an artist. From this poem forward, Tarn offers non-traditional perspectives throughout the collection upon the cornerstones of Christian thought, primarily original sin, evil, the resurrection, salvation and eternal life. Briefly, from 'Mathis at Issenheim':

No consolation
from the presented victim
of the torture scene,
awaiting you as you approach.
No sugar daddy figure
rains blessings down from the sky
crooning "it's all o.k.--
you'll be here in a minute."
And no companions, not even thieves.
The sky stark black
and will remain so
and light will never seem to to see again
out of dead eyes,
words never fall again
from purple maw.
No suggestion of life
behind those sockets--
this is all death, absolute death,
the nothingness itself of "nothing"
which we in thinking death cannot
encompass, absolute shutdown
of all conductors, all electricity.
The feet gone animal,
scales and smoked armor,
or like advancing roots
ready to enter ground.
The torture instrument,
hacked out from trees
is bricolaged and rudimentary:
no elegance or balance in this cross.
A victim has become a tree,
he is the tree that the cross hangs on,
decaying green as his opponent seems,
himself the thorns grown in and out of tree
and out the slime of all disintegration.

(another version of the crucifixion, placed on a

smaller panel within Grünewald' masterpiece)

Nathaniel Tarn was born in France in 1928 and has a long career composed of anthropology and poetry. His newest collection, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, just published last year, draws upon all of his developed skills to present poetic material which challenges the major modes of thought which have evolved from Western culture, focusing specifically on its predilection for destruction as a means for survival. While this includes the ways in which we relate to the natural world, the heart of his analysis goes deeper and upon the modes of thought (systems, ideologies, etc.) that have, under the pretext of security, dominated over life, life which could instead be based upon the adaptive and experiential, restoring the balance between the definite of the personal ( the “particular”: one’s personal life, how that life dreams, how that life socializes with other life, the internal) with the indefinite of entirety (the “whole”: inevitable change, time, all of material reality, the temporal, the external); “the whole being meaningless without the part and the part must be as carefully examined and expounded as the whole.”

The book is composed with individual sections, beginning with Tarn’s philosophical positions and then moving to more open and artistic modes of writing. And to get something from the poetry, a basic understanding of Tarn’s argument first is necessary. Without going into a full dissection, Tarn proposes that the ways in which we accept, or don’t accept, death, including our inability to comprehend the ‘void’, is critical towards how we begin to relate to life. Because Western traditions (the “soul”, original sin, immorality, technology) have, in essence, dissolved death or placed death into something partially known, through definitive conditions, the closed systems which support these lines of thought have replaced the myriad particulars of open creation. And its not that Tarn concludes all such traditions need to be dissolved, as he believes that dreams and such grander visions are necessary for basic human survival, but that they must not present themselves as being 'the whole', as 'the whole' is always made from ‘particulars’ and the attempted reduction to present a 'particular' as a 'whole' only leading to anti-creative, reductive, and at worse, violently destructive acts.

What Tarn proposes instead is to not just accept but even ecstatically embrace the ephemeral qualities of existence, to have us recognize that we are also only aspects within the continual creation of the material world, which at the most imperative is to have us understand that individual death is also a contribution to the inherent continuity of creation. When Tarn moves into this area of his presentation, the poetry begins to take on a life of its own, forgoing logical momentum for disjunction, personal emotions, images, metaphoric symbolism, surreal comedy, shifting qualities within the poetry which express the multitudinous possibilities of life, which in turn further expands Tarn’s philosophical thoughts by finding a balance between the human need to place form upon the infinite and the inability to have any sort of final and conclusive form: “let the bird joy, live, signify there is some purpose in the purposeless”, clouds which pass through the ocean of the sky as models for the “definite indefinite”, “from day to day, a gift in fragments”.

Its in this that Tarn’s poetry becomes affirmative despite his doubts and pessimism. As he approaches the material world through the realms of philosophy, and without downplaying his lament for the tragedies of our environmental condition, there is a recognition that a complete annihilation of nature is impossible, a suggestion of it being capable of creating new forms. Although this does require a reframed understanding of time, “On billionth trillionth evening of the world” , and there remains the concerns over the rapidity of the changes that have occurred in the past two-hundred years. This also keeps Tarn from ever sentimentalizing nature, recognizing that impermanency has a greater truth than anything that could be considered 'pristine'. What Tarn does want though is to emphasize why we have been so undeniably destructive in our behaviors so that we can begin living in ways which are inclusive of further creation (life) rather than reducing us to death-like monoliths.

Jackrabbit
--Gary Snyder

Jackrabbit,
black-tailed Hare
by the side of the road,
hop, stop.

Great ears shining,
you know me
a little. A lot more than I
know you.

Drive-By Truckers albums have been in heavy rotation at my house for the past few months. Alt-country based on retro 70's Southern Rock licks, while rounded out with American roots music, drawling thick songs about characters and stories from the South (most of which are dark; gothic mystique; the fall of the south; Faulkneresque), "southern rock opera", Wes Freed as artist in residence, reving through on three threatening guitar leads, the "three axe attack", Angels and Fuselage barreling with lots of guts and heart.

BECAUSE FULFILLMENT AWAITS

An arm reaching back through a hole in a ceiling

for a box of poison........"Now"........the dark talks

"I hate being a man"........An arm offering a box of poison

in the direction........of a hole in the ceiling

A handkerchief offered........"Wait"

comes the warning from below......."Cover yourself"

Even in touching........retouching

steeped in words........in the proliferation and cancellation

of words........one tends to forget........one forgets

the face........the human face........One wants

to create a bright........new past........one creates it

--C. D. Wright; from Tremble (1996)

OVER EVERYTHING: up through the wreckage of the body, in its
troughs, and along its swells, tangled among its broken veins,
climbing on its swollen limbs: a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush,
optimistic green; the verdancy rising even from the foundations
of its ruins. Weeds already amid the bruises, and wildflowers
bloomed among its bones. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish
bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and daylilies, purslane and
clotbur and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at
the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not
only standing among the blown remnants of the same plant but
pushing up in new places, among distended folds and through
rents in the flesh. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle senna
had been dropped. On the eighth day...

from---Just Whistle a valentine
------C. D. Wright; 1993

From "69 hidebound opinions" by C. D. Wright:

10

Much has been declared about the musicality of poetry. Not so much about the physicality. The adamantine practice of poetry as it pertains to touch--an impression of which can be lifted off the ends of the fingers. These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother’s folding money, the poet’s anus; the black holes in his heart, where his life went out of him.

13

We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new fat, lean and particularly the rarely visible, nocturnal art of poetry.

14

We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power* is not an acceptable surrogate.

*The eclectic Bulgarian scholar Elias Canetti fastidiously stylized his 550-page study Crowds and Power to conclude simply, "To be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every real seeker after power."

15

I am even naively willing to argue passion is what separates us from other life forms--that is, beyond the power to reason is our ability to escape from the desert of pure reason by its own primary instrument, language. And if it be poetry that makes the words flesh, then it is no less or more escapable than our bodies. But it is at least that free.

20

The bottom dropping out of a sack of black apples is dramatic enough for what I want to tell, which is after all proposed, not actual. If I tried too hard to be revelatory, well that was then; I don’t try that hard now. I know life is strange and reveals itself on its own terms. The word is all that is the case. Now: a man joins a woman in the kitchen. They touch the soft places of their fruit. They enter in, tell their side and pass through.

Never deprive the reader of opportunities for multiple exegeses.

22

To opt to be a poet, is to have some resolve. It leaves you free--to sing as you will, with the lungs god gave you--even if no one but god might hear. It leaves you that naked and obligated to sing your best. Suzuki teaches that "in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilites; in the expert’s mind there are few." Beginner’s mind then, is not only where you start, but where you must remain. It is what will keep you--long after you have children, job, house, dog, too many keys on your ring--free.

31

What landscape is: not a closed space, not in fact capable of closure. With each survey the corners shift. Distance is the goal; groping the means. Imagine flying in concrete.

53

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is a necessity.

Extended awareness, isn’t that central to the art?

69

WHAT IT IS: a rhomboid. Brilliant. Impenetrable. Which occurs in a pure state. ("As dense at the edge as at the centre"). A widely distributed non-radiocative element. therefore, not to be confused with uranium. What is brought about by some of the most lustrous, least attractive wordsmiths. What cannot be fashioned into prose. Let that go as a very hard and a very cold definition.

Comparisons can sometimes be made between graphic novels and books from contemporary poets. C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining being a perfect example. Drawing upon the specific locale of the back roads and small towns of Arkansas, Wright’s native state, she has composed a book length poem that presents its subjects to the reader through snippets of phrases, brief lines and snap-cut images which resemble the frames and individual drawings placed upon the pages of graphic novels. Another comparison could be made with the visual qualities of cinema and photography, which Wright uses as an ongoing conceit throughout the book (“the persistence of vision, the eyes’ ability to perceive a series of still images as continuous motion.” 52)

Though, in lieu of a straightforward narrative, as typically found in graphic novels, Wright relies upon only the fragments of narrative to deepen the drama of her writing. A host of characters is developed, such as the mythical duo of boneman and snakeman, a bobcat, occupants in passing cars, various individuals with medical ailments, including a dying 32 year old man in the hospital or a baby with scooped out eyeballs (gothic grotesqueries abound), Pattycake, maybe or maybe not straight from the nursery rhyme, and an old earth-spirit woman named Louise. Also as detailed are the locations where these characters can be found, focusing upon the map names of various roads and towns (Closeburn Road in the second line of the book). But Wright refrains from solidifying these specifics into complete stories, instead, leaves the details hanging on loose vines in the wild abandonment of the South‘s mucky verdure,

Trumpet vine in profusion over every brick and windowpane.

Mystery, mystery and a curse.

Wright continues with this use of specific language throughout and reflects her ties with the Language poets in the 1970’s. Which creates a unique duality in her writing. On the one hand, the descriptions, verbiage, syntax, vocabulary, idioms, lyrics, paragraphs, etc. (all of which are used by Wright throughout the book) contain a definitive concreteness that verifies and replicates the material world within the poetry. Wright’s earlier writing known for being grounded in the carnality of the body, sex in particular, and a substantial aspect of Deepstep Come Shining as well.

This vividness to recreate the South suggests a certain corporeal mass existence. However, because of it’s seeming totality, also an opposite, transparency resulting from definitive opaqueness, with sight, blindness, a known with the unknown, the open space around and necessary for the composition of language. This notion begins early on in the book through a notion of ‘whiteness’, specifically, a white piano that “floats on a black marble lake, mute swan in a dark room”, suggesting qualities that are brought to ‘the material’-- the realm where exists the imagination, subjective interpretation, dreams, death, spirit, absence, art, and poetry:

Love it Leave it Love it Leave it Love it Leave it Love it Leave it Lo

Just stay quiet. Listen awhile. The white piano misses us. The white dog dreaming under the white bench is catching up with the cottontail.

The Mexicans say, not the man in the moon, but the rabbitt strumming his guitara. Wonder what they say in Seoul. Or in Poetry.

When you go to pee, shut your eyes and grab a tree.

Reminiscent of Wallace Stevens? An analysis of the book’s title could also explain this notion. “Deepstep” making me thing of the deep imagists, but “shining” suggests the ecstatic of the transcendent. And of course the sexual conjoiner between the two.

The yard
from the bathroom window
is another matter:

Here everything
is clear. The wind
sounds, I can make out

the yellow of the flowers--
For half an hour
I do not move.

It is Easter Sunday

--from Two Pendants: For the Ears
....William Carlos Williams

Hejinian dedicated A Border Comedy to John Zorn. [art videos by Hans Richter, 1921/1923]

[Russian Ballet I; August Macke]

Love substantiates comedy
You may be hearing the
.....social increase its regularity, with
.....milk, thunder, and aluminum siding
.....and other evocative recurrent forms
.....unconsciously conscious of the urge
.....to make cohere
But being so easily influened
.....is coherent
The habit of fibbing to
.....the left side, or of
.....puffing in sleep
I think of a singer
.....with a strong roar of
.....straw so relentless and inverting
It's only the smallest thing
A person has a favorite
.....food
Such is life
The urge to make copies
.....is sociable, a very inviting
.....use of friendly symmetry
The urge to make poetry
.....which is ominous is intimate
Its sex is like a
.....human hilarity for building
So it must show itself

.................November 5, 1986
.................Lyn Hejinian (from "The Cell")

[Red Kanji Bird; Billy Martin, 2007]

While A Border Comedy is published in 15 sections, and with each section presented as a singular long poem, these long poems are somewhat composed with smaller poems stacked upon one another. As an example, this lyrical moment from Book Five, where I imagine Hejinian's pen lifted off from the page when originally written:

Familiarities
Points of vulnerability
All points of flesh, of course
But other points of contact too between familiars
To say nothing of adequate cactus and catches
I can say I shall will it but not I will shall it
The syntax is susceptible
To it is added it
There is an intrinsic connection between the meaning of this and where you
.......find it
But the concert was about to begin, leaving only a moment for conversation
SINGER: In the sound?
SOUND: Yes, then sense follows

Or this mixutre of imagery and surrealism from Book Fourteen, as another standout for me:

Call within ash, ash within tale, tale within end
By that they mean head
As we heard, all moving together
Repeating but never ourselves
Repeating oddities, repeating birds
Repeating buttons
But they will say we forgot to button
To photograph lightning on the delta in pajamas
Or the blood pooling under the elbow from a wound
Made by an ice pick perhaps
Something that might be its handle is jutting into the light from the shadows of
......the broken spindles that are holding up the crooked banister
Something that may be a heron settles back
We set foot
Almost something
Thumbing, perhaps
I myself like to be nettled in a search

In a December 2001/January 2002 edition, Boston Review published an informative article on Lyn Hejinian's poetics, much of which is applicable to A Border Comedy:

she uses her metaphorically-tinged psychological language to give a deep reading of the nature of the interactions at the borders of consciousness. She writes: "Poetry at this time, I believe, has the capacity and perhaps the obligation to enter those specific zones known as borders, since borders are by definition addressed to foreignness," and continues:

The border is not an edge along the fringe of society and experience but rather their very middle—their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter which being foreign to a situation (which may be life itself) provokes—a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone, with checkpoints and bureaus of exchange, a meeting place and a realm of confusion.

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background.

Meaning, for Hejinian, is at once fluid and contingent, not static and predetermined; the mind comes to experience it when a certain friction is created with the "other" of meaning—the guest/host dynamic, in which a guest (stranger, other) only becomes guest in the presence of a host (and vice-versa), is her chosen metaphor here. For her, "we have no other experience of living than through encounters," these encounters being on the level of the word, the "flash of an instant," which she terms—to foreground the ambivalence and contradictoriness of this exchange—xenia, the Greek word xenos being the root of both "guest" and "host." Her world resembles that of a child, where the constituent objects are always surprising a not quite "developed" mind.

"A not quite developed mind", I like that, as if there really is such a thing as a 'fully' developed mind. The article also dicusses the poetry of Bruce Andrews, whom I am not familiar with, and concludes with an elucidation towards why this style of language poetry is not meant to be polarizing:

"marginal" language... is therefore not intended to drive a wedge between the poet and a non-initiate... but as a problematizing interface, as a troubling of the ways one approaches the "page" as a structure for conveying meaning, to show that meanings are not discrete units "carved in stone"—- authoritative edicts, ineluctable dogma—- but a flowing current, like a river viewed through a glass floor. This interface illustrates "truth" by wringing the "true" of its claims to permanence; the contortions remind us of, and are truer to, this semantic flux, setting language against language in the determination of conversational terms, but with syntax also on-board as conspirator against false stabilities.

A sample from Book One of A Border Comedy can be found at EPC (link).

While there is no easy definition for what constitutes Language Poetry, I would say, in general, focus is upon the ways in which language is used to create, develop, relay and explain our understanding of reality, as composed of the ‘self’, or its absence thereof, and its interaction with the material world, including the personal, social, political and/or aesthetical. This is accomplished through a poetics that both constructs and deconstructs the ways in which language (words, phrasing, syntax) is traditionally used and understood. It’s a school of poetry that interests me from an aesthetical standpoint because language poems require an active rather than passive interaction with the poetry, as sometimes can be lacking with forms of poetry that have an acknowledged 'speaker' behind the poems. The downside of it, for me at least, is when the theory outweighs the poetry, as when the poems become examples of the philosophical theories behind their construction rather than being complete through their own artistry. In other words, the poetry should still be able to stand on its own (which is my same view on contemporary art). Two Lyn Hejinian books that I’ve recently read did just this, where I never thought there was a need to stray beyond the poems an order to elucidate an experience from the reading.


The Cell (1992) was written over a period of about two years and the poems are presented in chronological sequence, with dates but without titles, and with each generally being about a page long. The subject matter for all of the the poetry is fairly uniform as it deals with the extent to which relations exist between the subjective poet and his/her environment, the poem as a medium between the two. The tone is observational and one can easily imagine Hejinian sitting at her desk when writing each of the poems, taking note of the momentary environment around her. But the content is more dynamic in that a fluxing tradeoff between the derived transcriptions and the inherent existence of the objective world is what is on display within the language of the poems. The title of the book as a recurrent metaphor for the body and our limited comprehension/relation with life, words being what extends and helps to create this consciousness.

While there is a philosophical backing to the poetry, its movement is still largely lyrical, which I tend to prefer. However, this is not the sort of book you can read straight through, the poems being too similar in composition and subject matter to read for extended periods. Instead, The Cell is one of those perfect bed stand reads, or there on your desk for when you might be looking for a 10 minute ‘poetry break’.


Hejinian’s A Border Comedy works the other way. Where the poetry in The Cell needs an open window of space and air to create a lyrical presence within the reader, in A Boarder Comedy the approach is about a string of presence through an ongoing reiteration of the ways in which language simultaneously develops and eludes meaning, particularly with respect to personal narrative. The form is through stacked phrases, void of punctuation, each line working from an associational extension from the preceding. Each of the 15 sections are about 10 pages long and the effect is maybe what you would find with reading from a scroll, as a sort of chant but holding attention through rhythmically related ideas rather than repetitious vocal sounds.

With the quick changes in images, the interpolating subject matter, the humorous euphemisms and sudden anecdotes, a variety of multitudes takes over and makes the book quite enjoyable through these stimulative effects. An esctatic Whitman not of the body, but of the mind. "Uniformity always reduces our joys". And unlike The Cell, I think A Border Comedy is meant to be read at a quicker pace, willing to risk having the reader miss a line or two for the sake of compounding the poetry with Hejinian's subtle phreneticism. Disaray being part of the comedy. Although there is still a methodical control to Hejinian's lines through the uniformity of presentation, which is what allows a reader to so easily reenter the poetry if they find they have strayed in their concentration. An analogy could be made to a jazz soloist, such as maybe what you would hear from Hejinian's saxophone playing husband, Larry Ochs.

[The Poet (Half Past Three); Marc Chagall, 1911]

Told to a thing
In consciousness
And don't forget the unconscious
In the unconscious we are very often awful!
The ugliness that you find there may be unique
Without form to change
Or figure to imitate
That keeps me to the border
Out over ants
In an exterior interim, an impersonal landscape
Spontaneously in character
As the guard of the body of implications
Which I still desire to see

--from "A Border Comedy", Book 15; Lyn Hejinian

Dream Song No. 29

From time to time, in moments of lyrical integration, a graciousness enters into Henry's fragmented psyche. Though, usually brief and still intermixed with other aspects of his fragmented speech. But in this particular poem, a rare continuity occurs. It is also one of the few poems with a title.

233
....................................Cantatrice

Misunderstanding. Misunderstanding, misunderstanding.
Are we stationed here among another thing?
Sometimes I wonder.
After the lightning, this afternoon, came thunder:
the natural world makes sense: cats hate water
and love fish.

Fish, plankton, bats' radar, the sense of fish
who glide up the coast of South America
and head for Gibraltar.
How do they know it's there? We call this instinct
by which we dream we know what instinct is,
like misunderstanding.

I was soft on a green girl once and we smiled across
and married, childed. Never did we truly take in
one burning wing.
Henry flounders. What is the name of that fish?
So better organized than we are oh.
Sing to me that name, enchater, sing!

But it can be the cryptical ones that a reader can find himself wanting to envelope into again and again:

272

The subject was her. He was the object. Clings
still to these facts affect. If little cats
come to the parapet
and hurt my shoulders, growing there like wings
where most I should go safe: let's face it, that's
the looking to a wet.

-I'll see you in the a.m., Dr Bones.
-Don't leave now. An eminence of man,
an imminence of her,
boils on by brothers' deaths. Nobody owns
much, good friend. A parapet with wings,
an egg lined with fur.

-I really gotta go. You don' make sense.
-I don't try to. Get with it. When's said & done
all that we did & said
& drank & dreamt, a hundred seasons hence,
who'll forgive sunspots & the stains of the son
where all we crawled & bled?

With today being April 1, it seems appropriate to consider whether Berryman’s overall tone in The Dream Songs tends more towards the comedic or tragic. It could be argued that since the format has similarities to a vaudeville show, there is an underlying humor throughout Henry’s monologues, though tinted with pathos and self-deprecation. However, with Berryman I am unable to separate the poet from the poetry, or in this case, Henry. Seeing as how Berryman was troubled with depression and alcoholism, eventually killed himself by jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis, that his father also killed himself when Berryman was 12, that the book hints of death through its entirety, and that Berryman draws upon a form of insensitive entertainment that was derived from one of America’s worst moral infringements, the comedy of which being a sick farce, I really can’t see how the book is anything but tragic (although, I would allow that to be qualified with 'pathetic'). And this may be one of the reasons why a lot of the poetry is so damn-awful good.

165

An orange moon upon a placid sea
glistened for criminal Henry's fiery arm
fractured in the humerus:
no joke to Henry, nothing humorous
about his broken, he loved emptily
the rest of his body, warm

but not too warm, like this delinquent member,
His fingers wiggle, wiggle too his toes
like a sound person's.
He found himself okay, save for dispersings
of pain across his gross shaft, hard as blows
that in deep woods fell timber.

O prostrate body, busy with your break,
false tissue forming, striving to recover,
when will you make do like the moon
cold on a placed sea, with three limbs, take
the other for a cruise, like an elderly lover
not expecting much.


166

I have strained everything except my ears,
he marvelled to himself: and they're too dull--
owing to one childhood illness--
outward, for strain; inward, too smooth & fierce
for painful strain as back at the onset, yes
when Henry keen & viable

began to poke his head from Venus' foam
toward the grand shore, where all them ears would be
if any.
Thus his art started. Thus he ran from home
toward home, forsaking too withal his mother
in the almost unbearable smother.

He strained his eyes, his brain, his nervous system,
for a beginning; cracked an ankle & arm;
it cannot well be denied
that nearly all the rest of him came to harm
too... Only his ears sat with his theme
in the splices of his pride.