Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
43
Email: bpreditors@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bpr
Editor'snote
Berkeley is hallowed ground for artists and freethinkers. T he town,
named after a philosopher-poet (one who, poetically enough, declared that esse
est percipi: ?to be is to be perceived?), has stood as the backdrop for the Beat
epoch, the Berkeley-San Francisco Renaissance, and the Free Speech
M ovement. T his is, obviously, far from a complete list; nothing I could say in
an introduction like this one could do justice to the history that precedes me,
to the formidable ark of talent and willpower that has partly sailed into, partly
sunk beneath, the canon of American cultural history. Jack Spicer, now a
poster child of the Berkeley Renaissance, prefaced his recitation of a part of his
poem ?Imaginary Elegies? at a reading he gave on April 11, 1957, to T he
Poetry Center in San Francisco with a dedication to Robin Blaser and an
epigraph from Yeats's A Vision: ?All that a man knows, and needs to know, is
found in Berkeley.? To the great amusement of the audience, Spicer
pronounced Berkeley ?berk-lee,? the city's name, though it was assumed that
Yeats had been speaking of the aforementioned philosopher-poet, the Irish
idealist whose name is commonly pronounced ?bark-lee.? But Spicer's pun has
a further layer. Yeats was not the line's original source: he quotes it, towards
the beginning of A Vision, as received from ?a young revolutionary soldier who
was living,? he says, ?a very dangerous life.? So began Yeats's endeavor to load
up on philosophy to improve the first proof of his great mythic work? spurred
on by the gnomic dictum of a soldier, which filtered up through the decades to
resurface in Spicer's reading, where it was playfully misattributed to Yeats as
something he had said in his own person, and to which was added a sonic
modification that shifted the referent of ?Berkeley? from the philosopher to
the town, thereby, to well-tuned ears, referencing both.
T he genealogy of this incident can say a few things about the mazelike
qualities of poetic transmission? a phenomenon that (in a more extraterrestrial
form, granted) Spicer was interested in. T he pun itself suggests a connection
between knowledge and geography, the idea that knowledge might be found
somewhere in just the sense that any town is found somewhere. But there is
something special, Spicer must also be facetiously, even mockingly, saying,
about the city itself, the university, and the academic and artistic communities
that congregated there in the middle of the 20th century. Given the amount of
era-defining work that traces its lineage to that time and place, this seems
difficult to deny. And the act of referring to the philosopher popularly known
for his denial of the existence of material substance, via Yeats, suggests an
attention to intellectual achievements found outside the realm of poetry proper.
T he zeitgeist that gave birth to so many lasting works of mid-century
American writing and theory, and which later gave birth to the Berkeley Poetry
Review, was rooted in part in the conviction that aesthetic pursuits could lead
to, or otherwise importantly engage with, knowledge? of a familiar and an
unfamiliar sort, and across disciplinary boundaries. T his conviction, which I
share, appears with clarity in the opening editorial statement of the
Experimental Review, a magazine published in 1940 in N ew York by Robert
Symmes (later known as Robert Duncan, another figure at the center of the
i
up too much space. But now that I have undone some of my acquired myopia
it seems to me strange? puzzling, even? that longer poems, poems that
require their readers to think beyond the space of a page or a few pages, do not
appear more frequently in mainstream publications. A few explanations of
competing simplicity are available: they are not being written; they are not
being published; when they are written and published, they are not read, or, at
any rate, not read as often as their briefer counterparts. I suspect that a
combination of all of these causes has conspired to exclude the long poem
from the everyday conception of what a poem is; but I also suspect that
something of the climate of reductionism, wittingly and unwittingly cynical,
that hankers for what contributor Lyn H ejinian has described as small, perfect
?gems? of poems has contributed to the scarcity of a practice that asks, in
general (though certainly not necessarily), for more sustained thought and
attention from readers and for more argumentative and aesthetic risks taken by
writers. A few important qualifications are in order. T he first is that longer
poems do not, solely in virtue of being longer, avoid the pitfalls of their shorter
counterparts; some do succumb to them. T he second is that the longest poems
included here are dwarfed by the hallmark ?long poems? of the English verse
tradition? so they might be seen, then, not as examples of vanguards of the
form but as movements away from the reigning standard of the poem as gem,
origami crane, or cut rose. All of this is not to say that a poem may not be any
of these things, that there is anything wrong with gems, origami cranes, and
cut roses. T hese may be valuable aesthetic objects. But the concept of the
poem ought not to be exhausted by them.
Robert Pinsky once wrote, somewhat self-deprecatingly, that he was
drawn to poetry rather than other written forms because he got bored more
easily than most people. ?T hat is why I like poetry,? he writes in the
introduction to his poem ?Impossible to Tell? in the anthology T his Is My
Best, ?because it moves so quickly: one second you are talking to the Western
W ind and thinking about the small rain, then suddenly it's 'Christ!' and then
immediately after that it's wanting to be in bed with my love again.? Poems
swap incisors for the molars of novels; they puncture and tear rather than mill
and grind. Ars longa, vita brevis: one wants to get to the heart of things while
there is still time. Yet the idea that poems offer condensed what novels offer
sprawling should, I think, be tempered with the caveat that the comparative
incisiveness of poems and novels is not strictly a matter of length or form but of
the quality of a work's attention, of its intensity. T hink of a novel like To the
Lighthouse, its pages lit throughout by lightning-strikes of social and
psychological insight, many as seemingly capricious to the characters whose
thoughts they are as to the readers who receive Woolf's charged reports of
them.
T here may yet be a difference between the prose of To the Lighthouse
and properly ?poetic? writing (the latter, one might suggest, is in principle
more preoccupied with the machinery of language as such, even if it also cares
to describe experience), but the point here is that the lumens of a focused
attention need not be more at home in a poem than in a novel, or vice versa.
T his leads to another, albeit roundabout, reason for my inclusion of several
iii
longer series in the journal. I have endeavored to choose poems that justify
themselves? that, to stick with the ?lumens? metaphor, keep the bulbs lit? at
every point in traversing them, that tend to produce beautiful or provocative
figurations not only for their own sakes or for pleasure, that engage in poetry
not as pastime or frivolity but as part and parcel of the activity of
understanding. Pleasure seems an important goal of art, but I suspect that not a
little sap is taken out of the defense of the worth of artistic pursuits if no other
goal can be found to supplement it. I have done my best to select poems that
do not take up the resources of poetry as mere accessories to understanding,
but which see that some problems and questions? many having to do with
giving an accurate phenomenology of experience, including the experience of
confronting what are often taken to be strictly ?intellectual? questions? call
for, maybe even necessitate, those resources in order to even begin to be
adequately dealt with. T his is what I understand by the work that poetry can
do to ?extend the understanding.?
And yet this work will often fail, or produce imperfect fruit, or
otherwise disappoint. In T he Long Schoolroom, Allen Grossman, the
recently-deceased giant of American poetics whose poem ?T he Piano Player
Explains H imself? is reprinted here, tells of reading one morning in a public
library to discover ?how poetry comes to be.? T his leads him to Bede's story of
Caedmon, ?the first poet in English who has a name.? T hen he says: ?M y
intuition was then, as it is now, that valid poetry comes to be only when the
man or woman with work to do has exhausted all means other than poetic for
doing the work that needs to be done.? I agree; and I suspect that what
Grossman describes as ?the bitter logic of the poetic principle?? the fact, if it
is one, that any poem will inevitably betray the impulse that gave rise to it by
distorting it through the structures and institutions (one thinks here of
N ietzsche's ?prison house?) of language, the very medium the poem depends
on for its actualization? is an apt characterization of the fate of aesthetic aims
more generally. While this is a saddening state of affairs, I also suspect that its
inescapability is less a reason to abandon those aims, or to relinquish in
frustration what incomplete understanding they do give us, than to knuckle
down and forge ahead. T his struggle may actually be a mark of sublimity. As
H elen Vendler writes of Stevens's later poems, ?effort, undone by fate and
successful only in fantasy, is finally the quintessential definition of life as art,
and the product, the poem, in order to be sublime, must remind us always of
the effortful process that gave it birth.? Bitter principles need not lead only to
embitterment.
While addressing (?recovering? is too decisive a word; ?addressing?
has all the right connotations of speech and transcription) the illnesses that
caused the release of this issue to be delayed for several years, I not infrequently
found myself turning to poetry. T here is something about venturing into the
world again after an episode of illness that causes even the trappings of ordinary
life to appear alien, absurd, not to be trusted: one's self, one's home, the public
sphere. And there is something about poetry that, in its reproductions and
reconfigurations, combats that alienness, something that shores up the
intelligibility of the world as a whole. It seems intellectually unfashionable to
iv
talk of art as therapy; but therapy, it is worth noting, has its intellectual
projects, one of which is the project of self-understanding. Like Pinsky, I
admit I found myself sometimes attracted to poetry because it seemed to offer a
speedier, if more haphazard, route to understanding? especially on those
occasions when I felt that the uncertainty of the future made it wise to invest
in what could be more quickly obtained. O n other occasions, when the
waning of time was less of a concern (though it was never more than
something I temporarily wrestled to the back of my mind), poetry offered
another cabinet of balms: within it, the satisfaction of an aesthetic experience
that borrowed from any area of life or study, without compunction, whenever
it saw fit. T he conception of art as therapy is not unique. T herapeutic
conceptions of philosophy, in one sense or other, can be found at least as far
back as Epicurus and as recently as W ittgenstein. By ?therapy? I do not mean
simply the provision of comfort, nor by ?comfort? simply a feeling of security.
By ?therapy? I mean the endeavor to make some sense, however vague or
piecemeal, of where we are now, at this moment, in this world; by ?comfort? I
mean only the notion that, wherever we are, we are not quite as lost as before.
We have a better sense of how to go on, of how to write the next line.
I am as grateful to my contributors for their patience and kindness as
the issue was brought to publication as I am for their pieces. For support and
advice I thank M ike Cassady, April Chan, Danni Gorden, K atie H indenlang,
Bryce T hornburg, and Rob Sean W ilson; I also thank Yaul Perez-Stable and
Andrew Reyes. For assistance with correspondence pertaining to the issue I
thank R achel Feldman, Samantha N ichols, and Jules Wood; for his editorial
input, I thank Chiang M an H in. And I thank my family, without whom I
would be nothing.
Table of Contents
Editor'snote
Danni Gorden
Corey M esler
Wesleigh Anderson
M atthew Z apruder
Angel Dominguez
Allen Grossman
Bryce T hornburg
Robert H ass
Yaul Perez-Stable H usni
rob mclennan
K aren An-hwei Lee
Janis Butler H olm
M ary-Catherine Jones
Robert Peake
i
Temblor
I Have Cleansed Myself
Autostadt
Poem on the Occasion of a Weekly Staff
Meeting
Little Demon of Kiss
Vestibule 1a
Dwellprints#1
T he Piano Player ExplainsHimself
Oh the PlacesYou'll Go
Mark Me
Second Person
Self-Portrait
Essays, before a sonata
Breath of Spiracles
Songof Black Sage
Sound Poems
T he longdrive
Peony
A Short Essay on Priestsand Kissing
ReadingJamesJoyce at the Berkeley
Marina
R al Z urita (translated by
Andrew Reyes)
What isParadise?
D. A. Powell
T he Sundial
N a H ui-Dok (translated by
M onica Lee & M argaret R hee) City Treasury
David M offat
Gopher Wood
Daniel W.K. Lee
Beginnings
M argaret R hee
T he University Dreams
Chris Carosi
On the Grid / At the Gate
Sun Grass
Linda N orton
Prayer (I Have No Money)
Feminine
Street
T hree Gardens
In My Girlish Days
from W ite-O ut
John Ashbery
M ichael Ives
1
2
3
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
18
19
20
21
22
27
28
29
31
32
36
37
40
41
42
54
55
56
57
58
59
62
63
[a selection of artworks]
67
Strange Reaction
from T he Ghost in the Field
86
87
Tel Aviv
96
Heartsand Queens
97
Sent Sense (Unfollowed)
98
Consenting
102
Tuna
107
SoCal Tattoo Poem N. 11
108
SoCal Tattoo Poem N. 14
109
[untitled]
110
Everyday Poem
111
Study No. 30
112
When the Nephrologist TellsMy Father
He Must Stop EatingAnythingwith Eyes
or that Comesfrom Anythingwith Eyes 113
ArsImpotens
114
Autobiography of an Ex-Kike
115
Sanguinesque
Blessed
Rest
Because the Snow Which Falls
translation by T EE K im Tong
Naugatuck River Flow
[untitled]
[untitled]
Anchorite
Parable of Old Swedes
Still Plum
116
117
118
119
120
122
134
137
138
139
140
141
Canon of Proportions
Abandoned
PART I: THE IMAGIN ED
PLAST ICIT Y OF THE VISIBLE
Sylvia
y
[y]
Y
from Attribution Error (2/3)
from Stratal Geometries
167
168
Being
Holy Words
I'm Nobody
212
214
216
169
196
197
198
199
200
207
W illiam Dow
Larry R uth
R ainer M aria R ilke
(translated by Len Krisak)
Giuseppe U ngaretti
(translated by Len Krisak)
Aaron Shurin
Lawrence Eby
Laura M ullen
Goethe (translated by
Samuel Garrett Z eitlin)
Longing
Madness
If You're Not in Love
Last Walk
Outtakes
Saint Jeanne, rue Saint Marcel (1985)
Happy Hour
Two or T hree Stanzason Salvation
218
220
222
224
226
228
233
234
T he Square
Sappho to Eranna
236
238
Canzone
T he Exchange
T he Part Unseen
from Flight of August
Eye Exam
Close Your Eyes. Now, from Memory...
240
244
245
246
249
250
Freed T hought
Songand Creation
Elements
252
254
256
Else Lasker-Schler
(translated by Samuel Garrett
Z eitlin)
My blue piano
Karma
Eros
To My Friends
We three
So longisit since.....
H enry Wei Leung
Still Life at Terezin
John Olivares Espinoza
T he Sound and Sgt. Fury; Or, T he
Onomatopoeia of Combat
ComingSoon To A T heater Near You
Leonard J. Cirino
A Parallel Universe
Brendan Ian Cohn-Sheehy
To J
Andrew R idker
I Only Lend Out What I Don't Like
Gerald N icosia
Noteson contributors
258
260
262
264
268
270
272
274
275
276
277
281
283
288
Danni Gorden
Temblor
T he night you took me into your bed out of guilt
there were riots in O akland. During the earthquake
I was watching Blue Velvet for the first time. I
thought I was seeing those horse-cranes, apparitions
of N ordicness, but it was just you, just you in your
underwear yelling in the porchy dark of your porch.
Increasingly my body is the police presence at O scar
Grant Plaza. Every day here is Sunday. But now
I am a cyborg and what I mean to say is boundedness?
Fuck that shit. M y body is all bodies; I am the universal
signified. We don?t know who will play the cyborg in this
film. M eanwhile a man and a woman are run over by a
M ercedes and the popular response is that they were asking
for it, which is something like they had it comingbut less sexed.
Silly thing to say. Silly thing to trust I am, I say, I know.
To think that language doesn?t mean before we enter it.
Corey M esler
Wesleigh Anderson
Autostadt
Rest assured that every precaution has been taken to ensure the safety of you
and your children,
from the first step you took inside the boundaries of the mini electric car
course at LernPark,
such as this eclectic selection of vibrantly painted but otherwise identical
electric cars,
the colors of which it is strongly recommended that parents and guardians take
careful note,
so that you will know where and who your children are at all times while they
are on the track,
because at great distances children are like colors that bleed and become
indistinguishable,
and are also like colors that have a tendency to escape the eye when even
briefly disregarded,
and only watchfulness can keep you safe from all of these undesirable fears,
which children will tell you are like colors that become real only when they are
believed in,
for although care has been taken to protect your children from the drab and
colorless outside world,
and although all available resources have been employed to make LernPark a
place of stimulation and exploration,
it is possible to lose sight of the brightness of these colored cars and the bright
electric blue sky above them,
and to fall prey instead to frantic delusions of conspiratorial grey factories and
achromatic machineries,
somehow imperceptible except from obscure angles and an uncontrollable
imagination,
which purport to expose some truth about the superficiality of the color of
these cars,
but while the utter implausibility of these inventions is self-evident to all
attentive parents,
and LernPark's promotional materials clearly show that no such factory is
present,
and there is nothing in these photographs that contradicts your children's
colorful electric cars,
and therefore such imaginings are no more than an incredible and childlike
fancy,
3
Angel Dominguez
Vestibule 1a
Dwellprints#1
Allen Grossman
Bryce T hornburg
Oh the PlacesYou'll Go
Popeyes, Boston M arket, Starbucks, Arby?s,
Panera, Cinnabon, and Au Bon Pain.
Q uiznos, Togo?s, Subway, Blimpie, H ardee?s
(Carl?s Jr.), Papa M urphy?s, Auntie Anne?s.
Taco Bell, Del Taco, Taco M ayo,
Baskin Robbins, Ben and Jerry?s, Dairy Q ueen.
Taco John?s, Chipotle, Taco Bueno,
Whataburger, Burger Chef, and Burger K ing.
Benihana, Denny?s, Wendy?s, Baja Fresh.
Sizzler, Chevys, Chili?s, Church?s Chicken.
Little Caesar?s, KFC, Seattle?s Best.
Cold Stone, California Pizza K itchen.
W ingstop, I H OP, Checkers, In-N -O ut.
Weinerschnitzel, Wetzel?s Pretzels, Waffle H ouse.
11
Mark Me
T his was the first word of the sonnet: me.
Yes, you came first; between us, there?s a pair.
I suck my teeth for skin that isn?t there
And taste a little song. T hen I go home.
M y orchards turn, revolting like a poem
U nplucked and left to rot. T he juices flow.
I get real hurtful when in need, you know.
I only want you so long as I can break
You open and take what you?ll have me take.
I orchestrate my meat to make mistakes
Like these. I shoot my mouth off and I bleed.
I fingerbrush my wine teeth. Point being:
A poet has a hungry heart and eats
H is cuties. H eaven H eaven H eaven H eaven H eaven help me.
12
Robert H ass
Second Person
T hat summer, after your friend had shot herself the previous N ovember in her
backyard garden? it was the morning after T hanksgiving?
And after the sudden death from cancer of another friend, a prose writer, who
had been living in Italy with his fourth wife
And seemed after a long struggle to be working suddenly at the top of his
form, you had left off writing a tribute to be read at the memorial service
For the one friend in order to go to the hospital to visit the writer, who was
also your wife?s first husband
And who, it was clear, his family gathered around him, his new Italian wife
and children from two marriages,
Cancer was finishing off, a fact which he seemed to regard with bitter clarity,
almost with contempt.
H e?d had a gift for expecting the worst, and here was the thing itself, he was
leaving behind a beautiful woman and an unfinished book
And the silver green of wheat fields in the U mbrian dusk. H e had liked coffee,
fussed over its preparation, loved the high gloss of the leather on Italian shoes.
You did get your brief memorial talk written, and delivered it, mourning in a
room full of mourners, mostly her friends,
M ostly people in middle age and late middle age and so getting newly
accustomed to the frequency of memorial services,
And, yourself new also to this experience? not of death? but of a subtle,
though not that day that subtle, acceleration in the occasions for mourning,
You felt death there in the wood-paneled room with its elegant, coffered
ceiling, its busts of authors and composers, its bookshelves where,
13
You saw suddenly, the dead were sleeping like the princess in the fairy tale, and
could be awakened and set speaking by the caress of attention,
Someone opening a book, felt death, that is, to be a somber and dignified
presence, a figure of some authority, not a funeral director exactly,
M ore like the respected principal of an honorable but famously formal school,
or even a valet, a gentleman?s gentleman
Who was older than you and wiser and understood all the forms of the world?s
etiquettes and had acquired the habit of waiting patiently
While people experienced themselves, because they were, after all, living and
death wasn?t,
So it also occurred to you that death must watch the living live the way some
dogs watch humans at their feasts,
And afterwards your own life continued according to its various contingencies
And you found yourself in Paris in the O deon neighborhood on a little street
near the medical school with its loud, late cafes and bars
For the students and interns getting off work at the hospital, so you did not
sleep well but woke anyway to fulfill the promise you had made
To finish a translation of Pablo N eruda?s ?Baracole? and ?Slo La M uerte,?
the poem in which, in the last lines, death is an admiral standing on a hill in
the harbormouth
Reviewing his fleet. And this is why you needed the second person singular, to
describe the mornings walking up R ue de Q uatre Vents to the Caf M air
O n the wetted-down cobbles of the summer street, looking in shop windows
as you went, death in the etchings of old boats and in the rich rotogravures
O f tropical flowers, to your coffee and the view onto Saint-Sulpice, and, a line
at a time, N eruda?s poem. You could have said, ?T hat summer
After my friend had shot herself? or ?T hat summer after his friend had shot
herself,? but it was you who walked the streets those mornings,
14
Wavering a bit among the other grammatical propositions as you woke to the
early summer coolness in the air,
You studying the piles of fruit in the little markets and the gilded Empire
sewing chairs in the antique shops,
You lingering over the shop specializing in anthropological texts with its
sheets, torn probably from old books, to be sold separately, of cannibals from
Borneo
And high-necked, barebreasted N ubian queens, because you had the strong
sense that death was tending it all,
T he little pears wrapped in paper on the espaliered trees in the Luxembourg
Gardens, the house you passed sometimes on R ue de Fleury
Where Gertrude Stein had spent her days writing sentences like ?Tea towels
aren?t necessarily?,
Past the small hotel across the square from Saint-Sulpice where Stein put up
T horton W ilder when he visited and where, now,
T he young woman brought her green wooden wagon piled high with white
and blue irises to sell separately or in bunches?
What is it about irises that makes you want to describe a sheaf of them as
?lithe,?as if they were longlegged young women bathing together
After a round of golf or tennis? you were in that sort of neighborhood, and
wondered briefly how the day
M ight have been different, been colored differently, were the woman at the
wagon old and M orroccan with dark brown, well-worn hands
And not a Sorbonne graduate in pigtails and a jaunty longshoreman?s cap,
moving like a dancer as she unloaded and heaped up her flowers,
And you did not have a Spanish dictionary, so after you had done a morning?s
work, had written in long hand
N ext to the Spanish text, ?its incessant red waters would come to flood, and it
would ring out with shadows, ring out like death?,
15
You would gather up your books and walk back down R ue Valmont to Q uatre
Vents and then to R ue Princesse and the Village Voice bookshop
Where you knew O dile and M ichael would not mind if you went upstairs into
the alcove of foreign language dictionaries
To look up the word you?d translated or guessed at translating with your
sketchy Spanish as ?incessant.? You did this for weeks,
And began, as you walked, to notice the young men from the suburbs ,
M artiniquean or Senegalese, Arabic-looking, perhaps Algerian or Tunisian,
And the young Vietnamese, sweeping the street in front of the restaurants that
catered to the well-off folk of the arrondissement and to visitors like you,
Specializing in the cuisines of the French countryside, the home cooking of
Gascony and Alsace and the Languedoc,
T hat the children of the proprietors didn?t want to cook anymore, and you
thought of the young black men in your country,
Shot by police in a train station after a scuffle, or shot coming home from a late
trip to an all-night convenience store
And you wondered about the mothers in the Parisian suburbs, in what
uniforms or regalia death appeared to them when their sons went out into the
night,
And you felt mildly sick, thinking about the courtesies of death and the sense
of propriety with which it distributed its presence in the world, social class
By social class, war zone by war zone, brutal here, gentle there, as if you were
being wakened again by and to an unfairness
As labyrinthine as the city itself, whose districts, whose boulevards and alleys,
gardens and arcades, you wandered in the afternoons
And so you came more and more to look forward to the quiet mornings with
the poems,
Looking up different words each day, taking N eruda a line at a time? ?with a
sound like dreams or branches or the rain?,
16
?and the great wings of the sea would wheel round you.? By the middle of July
it was hot and you walked long hours in the city
And by eight o?clock? you had begun living in time? when you came back to
the neighborhood of Saint-Germaine-de-Pr,
And you would sit at one of the outdoor tables and the proprietor would set
down in front of you, with a delicate glassy sound,
A chilled glass of Lillet, the proprietor was not death, nor was the Lillet, nor
the handsome couple at the next table ordering grilled river fish.
17
Self-Portrait
A geography at the end of it:
Body thins into the plural absence of
Forest past the doorway. I have been here
And here and not here. Signs stuffed with pines
Step through portraits? that self-reflexive
Refers to what hasn?t been painted. T hey line up
For execution by green, and so into a landscape
Transparently. Tomorrow I am there then there.
Tracing paper over the narrators of a map. T hose voices
O utline the missing stones, water them,
And they grow and grow until not here.
18
rob mclennan
Essays, before a sonata
no questions,
1.
2.
3.
19
Breath of Spiracles
I hear acacias breathing in the night
although one would say
it is inaudible. Wangari told us,
forestsare the lungsof the earth.
I darken
as a natural tinder-box
a rough mesa
salt-beaten
twisting chapparral
I am wild sage
M y nutlet-seeds
in aromatic rain
21
Sound Poems
from R abelaisian Play Station
Q uantify the stillness of the grackle and the cubbyhole. M ust she hustle
citronella for their appliqu? Fugitive percussionists have ravaged all the booster
seats. R arely does our urban curry disrespect his verse. Enter holographic
loggers, giddy and itinerant. T hanks to reconfigured maple, barracudas chill.
O ne could safely postulate a sea of forks and engine blocks. Which of these
medieval bistros feathered your reply?
22
II
23
III
24
IV
25
26
M ary-Catherine Jones
T he longdrive
We weren?t looking for apples / not in the market for orbs / we were more
the line types / unmeasured, a snore in rewind / we weren?t looking for apples.
T he orb? think gold / Grand Central clock stirring / energy, the stories
around her? backscatter. T hen the curious / yes: face to folded clothes / in
suitcase, your own: to discover that personal / smell that everyone but you / can
smell. Recall / the hitting of the sack, slaking / the fisherman star? / we the
lines, discussed / unscripted, all texture? there are pros and cons you
know? / and until the apples we weren?t / looking for? persimmon, pear, the
sting / of sonnet 18? the fruit softening.
27
Peony
Bowl of fringe / drunk in silken / striations? perfumed with purpose / I can?t
seem to find. Suspended ungrasp / and beetle cave? we stoop / to stare and
stare into / you like the fridge? peckish / hoping that that / something that is
not there / will appear this / time inside of you.
28
30
Robert Peake
ReadingJamesJoyce At T he Berkeley
Marina
I had been up all night in an O akland diner, talking
about not very much. N ow the sea keeps me awake, gulls
eye me like a suspect, and the long poles sway.
H ere, the wind blows in all directions,
flipping my pages, churning the algal spray.
Beside me, the hooded fishermen pace for warmth.
I will leave college as I entered, a ghost.
I will study the planks of the boardwalk for syntax,
debate the existence of God, and miss my finals.
In a darkened room, capacity three hundred,
I will find enough space for my thoughts.
In the sea, a companion; in books, the broken word.
I study the globe of my fist, the chapped knuckles.
T he fishermen are shouting jokes above the wind.
T he one-eyed man on the cover cracks a smile.
31
R al Z urita
What isParadise?
translated from the Spanish by Andrew Reyes
Qu esel Paraso?
34
Q u es entonces el Paraso?
El cielo ha sido desde siempre el lugar que hemos ido llenando con las
carencias de la vida. Como tantos, despojado, el ao 1975 inici mi trabajo
entendido como una prctica para el Paraso, no para el cielo vaco. El inicio de
su camino se abre con el acto de haber quemado mi cara porque todava no era
posible marcar el cielo con el hecho corregido de nuestras vidas, pero en el
documento de esa quemada se relaciona este acto con las estrellas de la noche.
Yo s (y mis amigos tambin) que cuando podamos redisear nuestros trabajos
y por ende romper con cualquier obligacin al servilismo fsico o mental,
todos? muertos y vivos? podremos por fin revertir nuestras carencias y por
ende corregir el cielo. Ese es el camino de mi vida, como uno ms repetido, el
Inferno, el Purgatorio y el Paradiso del M ein K ampf de R al Z urita (y este
ttulo es apenas una pequea, nfima metfora del Inferno). All tambin se
menciona el amor, aunque creo que es mejor no insistir en esa palabra, al
menos por ahora.
Pero la nueva marca en el cielo, no en la cara, ese ser el Paraso.
(Fragmento encontrado entre tus ruinas)
35
D. A. Powell
T he Sundial
Who has set you in the dell, cherry
blossom and bee.
You can?t look God in the face
and not be blinded.
When a petal lands its body here
it is a truant child, searching
as we all are searching
for a little shade.
36
N a H ui-Dok
City Treasury
translated from the Korean by Monica Lee &
Margaret Rhee
38
?? ????
???
??? ??? ???
-? ??? ??? ????
???? ?? ??
??? ??? ?? ??? ????
???? ??? ?? ??
?? ???? ? ?? ????
??? ?? ? ??,
??? ??? ?? ???? ??? ??
??? ?? ?? ??? ??? ??
? ? ? ? ,? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
???? ??
??? ??? ???
??? ???? ???? ???
??? ?? ?? ????? ???
?? ?? ?? ?? ?????
? ? ? ? ? , 4.19? ? ? ?
?? ???? ??? ? ????
??? ? ??? ?? ?? ?? ??? ? ???
???? ?? ??
?? ??? ?? ? ?? ????
??? ??? ???
39
David M offat
Gopher Wood
H andel and ginger:
scent and sound
as I find
Isabella d?Angoulme
under a scarf
in a withering cold.
A neck cloth. H al?s
dukes, his dear
brothers, laugh
when I ask if her
U lster overcoat
has too many buttons.
She dreams later
in her own right:
candy stripe bottoms,
well-worn jeans and
nothing else, half-sleeping
with a paperback
in a Stockholm tower:
the harbor deep beneath her
after the window glass.
In rusty books accordioned
with cords of rice-paper
Jung?s flood of blood
threads our lives together:
the girl and I
lost in his eternal winter,
building an ark of Turkish fossils:
Adam and Eve separate again.
40
Beginnings
Let me be the one who?
Twenty fingers and a few?
H ong Kong, a distance still too?
Ginger-spiked wind blew?
From the waist, slumber grew?
Lines in sand never drew?
Pain too precise to rue?
A half-glass or sudden slew?
T he standard lie saw it through?
By SM S, an angel withdrew?
H esitation frames the true?
Final threat overdue?
Everyday exiles to?
O vercome the need for blue?
You, alas, the last that knew?
What do I do with you?
41
M argaret R hee
THE
U N I V ER SI T Y
D R EA M S
T here are whispers, shouts. Cuts will be made. N ow, heads roll.
42
I.
T he U niversity functions on its own terms. Its own dream of a brain. Is it a
smart brain? T hink on the kind of dream prerequisite for T he U niversity.
II.
Students are at the building. T hey stand on the building?s rooftop between
heaven and hell. M ore important than midterm essays. M ore important than
?campus life.? T he U niversity is not a machine, he reminds the other. T he
U niversity is unclean, she responds.
III.
T he U niversity?s Dean picks up the phone. Before it all, she asks her staff
member, what is the bastard department and where is it located? She gets the
number and the location but not the history. Phone in her hand, she asks her
assistant, have you been dieting? She sets down a bowl of chocolate sweets with
her other. T hen she dials, and after a few seconds, cordially says hello.
I V.
Five people were fired in succession. H ow to kill a department? Livelihoods
not acknowledged. In historical timelines? N ot at all. H ow to tell a story of one
person?s life. O ne has three children, one has breast cancer. O ne will pass away
in a year from now, remembering T he U niversity as it were. She attended
every student graduation. N ow desert is in her mouth. T he staff devoted their
whole life to T he U niversity, only to be cut away. T hey chose T he U niversity
but T he U niversity did not choose them.
V.
T he U niversity blasts off emails. Strategic. Every hour writes T he U niversity.
T hese are not love letters. T hese are stalker tactics. Strategic communications.
O peration Excellence. We need to conquer all of their cameras, their phones,
their tweets. We must get the message, any message, out first.
VI.
T he U niversity lives on. So all the staff gets cut and goes. T he U niversity lives
on as the number of email announcements grows. T he first time T he
U niversity really reaches out for the purpose of, well, reaching in. T hen T he
43
creamy? T he lightsin the hall so hallow and perfect? Asthe wind blows, my whisper
carriessweet nothingsinto your ear. Desire me, says T he U niversity. I suffer from
self-esteem issuesand anxiety. I try my best to like myself. T he U niversity sees it's not
working, and gets giddily desperate. Come here to me. T he children are too
young and smart to know what a chronotope is. T hey love their brown and
yellow and black mothers who love them so. But they know T he U niversity is
not so nice and friendly as they view from their homes in O akland and the
Bayview. T hey stand still before the buildings in a line and quiet even before
being told. W ith T he U niversity, you just know.
X II.
T he activists will set up tents. T hey will stay there until they die. U ntil T he
U niversity saves them. W ill T he U niversity?
X III.
T he U niversity does not bleed. It does not shit. It does not do anything that it
says it will. It pulls professor?s hair, jabs students in the ribs, holds janitors
without pay. T he U niversity scares the undocumented students to never bear
their hearts. U niversity, you promised to be good to me? You promised to be
kind, till death do us part. Till death do us part.
X I V.
T he student-activists want to stay, make it work, what can we do if professors
only care about T he U niversity and themselves? N ot all professors are like that.
U niversity, don?t break my wrist please. I dreamed of writing calligraphy
someday.
X V.
If you want to perish, stay. T he students, the adjuncts, stay.
If you want to stay, you must say. T he students, the adjuncts try to say.
X VI.
T he U niversity has a space of refuge, around the corner, in the margins of the
lined paper. Come here, come to my breast, T he U niversity sighs, let me hold you for
a minute, dear child. T he U niversity heaves knowing what she had done. And
we huddle in because there is no one else around.
45
X VII.
T here is a Prison next to T he U niversity. T he U niversity keeps people out.
T he Prison keeps people in. T hey are twin sisters one might say. T hey are the
best of friends, T he Prison and T he U niversity. T he U niversity says to T he
Prison, we don?t want who you have. I know, says T he Prison. I don?t want who you
have either.
X VIII.
Education spending:
Prison spending:
Do the math.
X IX .
Public Confession: I am Asian American and I have never gotten above a C in
math.
XX.
T he student-activists land in jail. No, she says, they don?t belonghere. We must
beat them to teach them. H ow dare they try to realize a university that is free?
T he U niversity and T he Prison are illicit lovers. In the night they whisper
together. T hey are one. And they make one another tick tock tick.
X X I.
But activists also love. T his love feels good. Make a banner together, raise those
fists. Let me paint your fist red so our banner can bear your imprint. We?re goingto make
a banner together. We?re goingto make it good. So good.
X X II.
T he student-activists ran when the police came. T his will be a problem. But
the real problem and solution is when they came to stay. T he U niversity smiles
but only when it gets fat. T he U niversity I loved, T he U niversity I hated. You
dichotomousdevil, you. T he U niversity groans again and again at this very word,
characterization. T his stanza.
46
* & ^%$
T he student-activists are made of flesh. T heir hearts are all ventricles and
pump. In comparison, T he U niversity feels envy. Like the strawman, the
tinman, the lion; T he U niversity wants a brain, a heart, and courage. T he
U niversity desperately wants to fall in love.
OLP.
Oz is not T he U niversity but T he U niversity can dare to dream.
POL .
To qualify, within T he U niversity there are good ones. Good professors, good
students, good janitors, who all want to make it better. But T he U niversity has
the tendency to forget them once they?re in. H ow can you make up with T he
U niversity, whose terms are so impossible? I tried and I tried, the
student-activist shares, I really did everything I could. T he U niversity seems to
disagree. T he therapist tsked with her tongue. Inside her head, she?s thinking,
this is a really mismatched pairing. And later in private, even though she?s not
supposed to, she says to the student-activist, don?t worry you?ll be fine when
this is all done.
LLL .
Whose U niversity? O ur U niversity! Don?t fight the Power, Be the Power. Do
you U C M e? and so on, and on and on.
Ethnic Studies
Ethnic Dreams Ethnic Lives
Ethnic Archives
Ethnic Pens Ethnic M oves
Ethnic Type
Ethnic Fingers
Ethnic Records
Ethnic Lies
What do we want? Ethnic Studies
When do we want it? N ow!
47
IIK I.
When T he U niversity woke up this morning, she felt really depressed. When
T he U niversity gets depressed she drinks a lot of coffee and wine and eats a lot
of sugar filled things. Why was T he U niversity so depressed, she asked
himself, and her therapist shook her head inside. Why are they all so angry at
me? Why doesn't anyone like me?
M .O.T.H .E.R . Poor U niversity. You want to resist, but it?s almost like you
don?t know how.
48
49
50
51
52
53
Chris Carosi
54
Sun Grass
this is all I have to do and all I say
all I have said? this is the finest voice
the finished voice I have used
this boring stanza sits upon
my understatements, some fine details
do stay dormant in the picture
perturb the tail in my pants, suggest the crown
the attic room reflects
broken lights in candled homes
a rabbit ran lost in there
where a few vague dramas unfist
between the valleys flooded broken circles
observation comes true, pausing
the film of the flywheel exchanges
the surface of the eye with its purchase
a permission won?t allow weakness
one bad idea in its tissue is one germ
it relives the event and considers it permanent
there is a hilltop on the sun
that mere suggestion of sunshine
lasts as the expression listening
55
Linda N orton
56
Feminine
Last night when I said I was king
you pulled me closer.
57
Street
M y grape-colored street: dark skin
squeezed dry, pavement with mica in it.
A pregnant woman thinks it?s good enough to eat
because she?s starved for something she can?t get.
You have just one tube of paint, titanium.
U se your fingers, taste it.
T his may be the only chance you get.
So what if your street?s all white?
T he ocean-colored blood in the tips of your fingers
tints the paint, and soon your picture of the street
is complicated, not dark, not white.
Low tide, the smell of tears paved over. Sweet.
58
T hree Gardens
Adam noticesthat Eve isholdingsomethingclose as
they leave the garden. He asksher what she carries
so carefully. She repliesthat it isa little of the apple
core kept for their children.
- W illiam Butler Yeats
Am I one, too?
Which one?
T hey?re all so? rich.
*
A long time ago: In a garden in Rome, tired of walking, tired of
arguing in such a glorious place, we rested on the grass. I was happy,
irritated, invisibly with child. A bickering mystery.
A boy of four was walking with his mother on a path in a painting. T here
were cypresses in the distance. We too were in the painting.
T he boy, an angel, gestured in our direction: ?L?amati.? H is mother didn?t
laugh at him or silence him or drag him away. She let him finish his
sentence with a gesture, a flourish. She looked at us and smiled.
Lovers: that?s what we looked like in the grass at twilight, in another
language. And we were. Tucked into each other. Aedicular. Two plus her.
61
In My Girlish Days
It took the 8-year-old female [shark] 21 hours to eat the 5-year-old male
inside a tank at the COEX Aquarium. According to video of the
consumption, the female shark started with the male's head and slowly went
about consuming the rest of his body.
T his act of shark cannibalism likely was the result of the sharks bumping into
one another. "Sharks have their own territories," an aquarium official
told Reuters. "Sometimes, when they bump into each other, they bite out of
astonishment."
Twenty-one hours?
I would have made a meal of him
in the time it takes to listen
to every song
on Sinatra?s ?In the Wee
Small H ours?
(O r something.)
62
63
*
At flea market:
?Is this a hand-painted tablecloth??
?I don?t know, but it?s from India, where people do all kinds of outrageous
things by hand.?
*
Daniel in meditation class: anecdote about his road rage, dissipated when he
realized the driver was a beautiful woman.
*
Remembering Elaine K aufman suddenly. I hardly knew her, haven?t seen her
since 1993, but I have never forgotten her. She grew up in N ew O rleans.
H er mother kept candy in a locked cabinet, bottom shelf, behind the couch.
She also kept a book of H olocaust photos in there. Elaine used to unlock the
cabinet, sit behind the couch, and eat candy and look at horrifying pictures
while her mother was out.
*
In Walden Pond African American guy is trying to sell used books. Piles of all
the ?for Dummies? books and also a beautiful old book with embossed covers.
?Would you take something like this?? Seller holds up the holy book.
"Sure, I like to keep a Q ur'an or two around when I can."
*
Rear window smashed in last night on San Pablo. N othing taken from the car,
not even T he Communist M anifesto or the sneakers in the trunk. M aybe my
sweaty gym clothes made them run away.
64
I was scared. I was alone and it was late. I didn?t know who to call or what to
do. Who cares?
I called A.
T he dream of a male protector outlives all men.
*
Found an old book filled with things to use in my collages.
T he Conflict as Seen T hrough Collectibles. (T he conflict being: the Vietnam
war.)
Downloaded images from the Library of Congress web site. All the outtakes
from the WPA/FSA series. Roy Stryker punched holes in the ones he didn?t
like. N ow the archivists have scanned the negatives and posted the images,
hundreds of them, with the holes punched in them. Fascinating. Gonna make
good use of them.
*
Tweets amputations
Tweets the death of child
Googles slaughter
Yelps a review of rape at Valley State Prison
Yahoos her mother
*
At the Y, Roxanne, my friend the evangelist, stops to talk to me while I?m
showering. H er eyes glitter as she talks about Christ?s suffering on the
Cross? she says happily, ?Pastor says it was even worse than it was portrayed
in the Passion of Christ.?
*
65
66
Linda N orton
U ntitled works, 2014
Cut paper, Sharpie, acrylicpaint on canvaspanels; originalsin color
From ?Dark White? series
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
Linda N orton
?Ain't,? 2007
Cut paper; original in color
From ?T he Great Depression and Me? series
85
John Ashbery
Strange Reaction
O ur networks will be joining you in progress.
Let's break for lunch here, dry-eyed,
shouting, and see what everybody's talking about.
We can always resume our travels for what they are,
and if that is so, if they're fun and expensive,
why not number them? T hings sag if you make them,
or not. Elders give up
within the appointed time? Get your lifestyle together
or something, miles from here, much of it downstairs.
Go lie on the couch. Why, you scheming... From the cast-iron
villas of the sanctimonious to the feathery huts
of the poor in spirit, a hush fringed all night,
the way they move up in harmonies based on grounds.
Dawn put in its two cents.
By then we were far in imagination.
Storks and secretary birds rose in a single wave
charming in its generality. A pink sarong
stroked the trees. So, where were you?
T his was it? What we got all cleaned up for?
Tomorrow will rob today of croutons, I don't think.
86
M ichael Ives
87
*
launches another lost voyager
N ASA / put the onus on / a wobbling pivot inside a gyroscope
at / not in / the notional N ew Jersey
me ?n Spats on his Lyman quarterbacking the whole mess
in nineteen hundred and colonoscopy
but no one never factors in the human dimension
*
while drought
cancels out the absence of a divine face
or else powerful orifices must open up in the land
ripe and electric
with a proof of having navigated through
to the center of the corn?s rage
*
in America we have a saying
but it?s all silted up
have you seen me / ?
mind-state dating from the glorious period of unities / ?
please call the following number after 5 PM
at the following number
*
88
*
of deepest space / its faceless nature
accounts of it can?t tranquilize the core enigma / quite
otherwise it?d ruin the atoms
hysterical martyrs to this shimmering mood piece
we?re not quote unquote designed to wake up
out of anything
*
in an overgrowth of tendrils
the afternoon wears like an armlet
according to his Lord?s fleet of water clocks
with whom the H eavenly M andate seduces
autumn?s step-daughter
inside the medallion of total surveillance
*
where phantom Budapests
engraved across timbals of the far cicada
ripple with thousands of suns in their glint planes
as agents of consensus / darts in their foreheads
amidst sudden movements and cresting panic
slide to the floor of the caf
*
89
*
poisons and clotting factors raise on their cheeks
the florid crest of the sovereign occasion
it hurries unnoticed across the atrium
trailing behind it flickers of raw vega
of violently lucid Kyotos
and opened veins
*
the death mask?s morning will sire an ocean
if you?ll only look at it with an unlensed eye
the fireman pulls the cat down the tree
the cat pulls the fireman up the tree
stands at the center of the chiasmus
language busy building its Christ
*
estuarial each life a timed relinquishment
contains the incessant thinking grain of now deposits
fronds in wind thousands of years no comment
who listened a way into this silence
pilgrimage toward nothing?s not an eye
which no eye had witnessed
*
90
*
on the subject of visions
some enter into friendly relations with their hosts
others grip the flail and put on grimaces
you have it but you don?t have it
blast of seeing / shoaled briefly
in the warp of your fissures
*
by sacred road to those pictures in the mind
whereas halibut swim upright when young
?til its migrating eye should settle on the upside plain
for a ray of sun is the snow angel?s drinking straw
or be it the sun?s / it cannot matter
the way in and the way out are one and photonic
*
if yet no clear image in the mind
crystalizes on the eye beam
paint with not thinking
no image of no mind
leaves coin my history when they fall
was missing all the time I clung to it
*
91
*
so how about a garden of amulets
which as itself a darkened place
the removal of night alarms no one
sleep in the palm of an alien vigilance
its motive / : / the night in transit
sends a current of brain through the dream
*
semiotic profusions of the Cretaceous
into horsetail-cycad crosstalk drops a pearl
infinite consanguinity it bears
and speech a late-phase distillate from this turbulence
its rhythms filtered all ways through
the animal recently born now stone
*
great yearning locked up in the ice of hiatus
pumps super clusters into distant reaches
at the opening bell stone priest opens gate
in a ruined pagoda between striated plates of sleep
I park my urgency alone
with cloud scope under cloudless sky
*
92
*
took a world into my world-shaped hand
caressed it into the next five minutes
to remember / : / an ocean forgets to forget
a workable paradise / your listening to it
that this hour shall slip into the next
along a chain of connecting verandas
*
sound and touch carom across the visual field
whose musculature
always a few seconds old
tremulous as an Amsterdam at noon
shadow of the cathedral cutting into
your laugh breaks through
*
the ocean tells you it?s bolted to a flux
but you haven?t been unlistening the flange
of now beached into yesterday?s Q value
wanders before into after?s kitchen
and when you read it all back to me
I try to catch the words with my hands
*
93
*
untenable preference for terraces and dusks
sent through underground conduits
to pleasure gardens written in serotonin
no illusion but carve it in stone
is the root of being
this ratty shelter guessing cobbles
*
for the end of time I serve myself to myself
?tis meet I should thus cannibalize
by so feeding into its crop my substance
the muscles will have had their motions
and words their brief endlessness
so screw the hose back into its spigot
*
child out of time
a true coral warding off the bounders
with its growth rate
your land slopes gently as a lesson
plumage of hours pressing against
the anguish already strange and fossilized
*
94
*
on the north side of the pharmaceutical
animal transcendence is itself an animal
as much as the much one makes of a leaf
falling to earth makes autumn
O tropical life of silence
I?m a hot coal drifting through
*
planispiral out-spew of stars the r text of the ammonite
innumerable ages of grass bowing under storm
come nacres of iridescent look-at-me and gone
Arcturus and R igel the groaners of those nights
as now upon now shored in cliffs
across the parsecs drone
*
the insect wars their silence unrecorded
waves of pitched battle
oblivion dark as if it had never been
no great spasm of a world knowing itself
silence of the never was a straw adrift
on the was but is no longer
*
that ghost of me running in a field
falls out of time at the edge of thinking it
put out the clock behind the word
put out the word behind the head
put out the head behind the world
ghost of a field running in me
*
95
Tel Aviv
for Annie
96
Heartsand Queens
T hank you for dinner I tell my father
As we pick a dirty path up Broadway
Past the darkened space where Shakespeare?s had been
T hrough a grove of old men just staggered out,
Blinking like bears from some grotto or den
Where I picture cards? jokers, hearts, and queens?
Smell beer and rum? Schlitz, Ron R ico, Don Q ?
Taste the hot, metallic tang of Chubbys
And Chesterfields, the blue ghosts of which cling
To these brown, unhaunted men who have laughed
And had their fill of this hot summer night
Far from the heckling of children and wives
Who stare wistfully from windows or droop
Like willows from painted fire escapes and sigh.
97
Lyn H ejinian
Everyone stopped
Somewhere unsullied by my thoughts exist pure memories, entirely free of
what I?d make of them, wholly unremembered
If you can write a tragedy you can write a comedy
Perhaps we are the victims of false recognition taken by an acquaintance to be
a tree
Vice versa ditto
Sweetness spilling over sour is essential to the sensational flow that
characterizes the continuum we call chocolate
W ith rapid eye movements I follow the hummingbird over the horse
I don?t have much capacity for nonchalance, indifference is a poor substitute
H eel, Fido; fetch, Pal
Time brings whole pieces to the puzzle but not the whole puzzle, the whole
picture
It?s really her! It?s really him!
98
Silently
Bring, buy, catch, seek, teach, and think, unrhyming in the present but
rhyming in the past
I?ve just gone out for a good laugh at sunset
L is for language, P is for baked alaska
T he middle of a sonnet? that which holds its parts and holds it apart? will be
found at its end
Along comes a boy skating on the ice with a hundred-and-four degree fever
T here?s a statue in the little park that I revisit to circle, go back to chastise,
return to admire? it is said to love solitude
Let?s bring two things together that don?t seem to have anything to do with
each other? a wet windowsill, say, and a white tiger? and see what
they have in common
M y eyes have filled
For example, a cormorant cannot? and should not? be said to have any point
at all
T hat?s a bushel of wheat; that?s a secretary; that?s a night flight to
Bangkok? but which one?
I don?t much like epigraphs: they tend to offer false promises in the guise of
false conclusions
Very slowly with my eyes I follow the lines between boards that link the
bedroom floor to the equator
53 degrees Fahrenheit near dark at midnight, the curtains hanging still, no
birdsongs, nothing defies gravity, only occasional street sounds break
up the lack of experience, the failed attempt, the infinity of possible
degrees at whose center stands the imaginary pole toward which the
dipper dips
99
T houghtsound, background
For the painter had grown wild, the dead girl: how murdered
Let?s sleep out on the porch on this moonless night and barely glimpse the
Pleiades
M usic of delicate arrivals, pluralities predicted in a statistician?s handbook
Living an unstraight chain, she? , or I? , and we? ., they? , then she, he? ,
she, you, ? but she
We utilize the valorizing conditioner, the volumizing shampoo, the volatizing
mousse
T here once was a woman with assurance and wit who considered all isms
counterfeit
Portage, voltage, cartilage, wiggle-room
T he male turkey with the raging battle wattle and gaping mouth whose
outspread sprawling tail feathers he turns to us we name Bad Beggar
and his every expression is an angry supplication
And she?s never ever won?t
T he saint in question, the baroque saint fiddling in the heraldic painting, is
ungovernable life itself
Scrambled is the logosphere, perpetuous is the contrasphere
I am a rhino and the grass is gray, the prairie undulates as if there were only a
single mind to which one goes for one?s thoughts
Is that ever irreverent?
A dream is a poor location for memories of things one hasn?t noticed, things
scarcely worth noticing
Whew? my head is like a chrysanthemum held upright on my neck
U nderwriting the stick figure with its stock-still demeanor is its caption:
?Another M inute H as Gone By?
Figs on a spot
In due course anti-lions and anti-asps will befriend wandering humans on
sailing ships propelled by calm1
Enter two guinea pigs, one black and one white, gender of each only to be
imagined
1
101
K ayla Krut
Consenting
for PQ
1
T his, says the head, is why translation matters?
does that answer it? She found K ing dead
in June, dredged from his pool at 46?
in press photos, Laguna waters like candy.
From Church Street, the glistening bridge.
K illers who live by parks are in best keeping,
round shoulder sharp shoulder. T hey see
the bird under the bench, a pumpkin scarf
caught on a post, path patterns
dry-carved by Labradors?growling.
Down Parker: a cream-collared shirt in
otherwise peach, heeled oxfords. Beyond,
the window ice-cream cone appliqu green.
Evenness something attainable. Two old men
who lean on each other enter a caf.
Is that why a striped shirt bought two vodka-tonics.
After upstairs at the city club in square vases
dog-green stems wrapped, folded or tied
peaky and drenched in water, like long leeks,
their red-gold heads less interesting.
102
2
In the yard of the French school on Downey
wail dozens of small bodies. Were it doable,
decentering experience would be this (Ariadne
aborts regicide in a labyrinth; abode
and consort listed later).
Transcriptions of wails curl as tendrils,
a snake in a donut?s shape. An iron hired
to demonstrate competency. Whole days pass
where all that happens is you open and
close blinds, fresh summer place a bellows?
T his to neutralize brushing off origins. Black
velvet chaperones, half-cider, waft by rings
of dancers, narrow, former, not ungainly.
A 415 might be the hospital.
N Judah jerks, belching passengers.
O ne tic you admit has maternal cause:
once finishing a cup or plate
of coffee or food, pushing it away. T his
to signal doneness. T he table accepts
and, unassuming, makes a little sound.
103
3
At least ask be ground to tortilla, thrown to jackals.
Candles froth like grape juice on long
Sabbaths. T hey were more boring than school
and challah sometimes came with chocolate chips.
Solve the problem if there isone, or don?t.
Tonight ten years ago you dance foxtrot, sheathed,
gloves slick, the Fairgrounds ballroom
stellated with children, flat Sprite,
stiff shortbread; tonight last week in ratty
hair you shoot pool in a draped jacket.
Light qualifies the metal of jewel chains;
silver and gold slide thinly through.
T he emerald couch becomes a guest bed
and mythic slap, imperative, bring, order.
At midday, heads down, animals lick limbs.
N ot the teak chair across the live-oak table;
neither grapes nor reupholstered slingback,
not the basket for raw linen, not tarnished
rings, not mewling from next door; not ruddy
Gerbers: the front mudroom.
104
4
H ere your Cole Valley companions:
hall light, ridgebacked dogs, rosy shortcuts.
Olympus is not salient. H e had two names.
Artemisslew her in seagirt Dia for it.
You push away a plate: two blackberries.
H ydrangeas at the French school flinch
for shrieking (rippled antlers, the stag Greg killed).
A hundred feet from shore and the mountain base,
wild boar. What comes is not yours, but yours to pass on.
T hey flaunt velvet from their haunch of wall.
T he sleeves of the green grapes frosted.
If surgery succeeded, we?d see her
after dinner. O dd to live so near the school,
there was certain frustration in the choice.
I.e., to choose not easily to hear a call.
Shrugging is most at-one, would be more blissful,
the sigh when you forget to breathe for focus,
the self-healing body?s nod in concert,
silk filter of curtains for tall windows.
O r scaling back, assenting to remove these.
105
5
You make a thing specific by pointing at it.
H ere, M argaret with Valentine?s body,
dark hair of a twenty-ninth bather. In
the afternoon, swimminglessons. In this,
a boutique built of ablatives.
French school voices sick with shouting
run out, cars slam, R ico snaps the gate.
T hey teach both tongues that neither be suppressed?
cheating loyal, then. Before each dinner
long baths burnish faces to shine like ice.
Parents renounce cinnamon syrup from bistros
preferring collared flutes of K ir Royale
or peaches, gulped, fatly distended by water.
An animal-woman sits overlooking the city.
Do you know the city? What doesit say?
H er day jewelry clinks in a night dish
prepared by the bed, glass of water hanging.
T he sun out might not mean anything,
but least it?sout. T here is no olive bay pair.
People converse in a nearer room with windows.
106
Tuna
A salt-water fish, an arm span of greyblue flesh, an ocean stone,
slimed through my fingers and I,
pissed as a fly stuck on a screen,
hands like claws, groped dark water.
While I dreamt, catching the tuna,
the chain, dragged through mud
by my dad?s tractor, carried our colt,
eyes open, through the front fields.
Days before, the injured colt
twisted himself, knees knocked,
tucking under and over each other.
M y dad, head down, warned us.
T he tarped lump was there till morning.
M y stepmother?s flowers splayed
when the truck came to get him.
107
Daniel Aristi
108
109
Alex Taitague
110
Everyday Poem
Important now but otherwise trivia,
T he categories of time, time to study,
Time before midnight begins let slip
T he finality of the trivial. Ten minutes
Behind amounts to a quirk in geography.
N o account that I live there
And walk to the buildings there
U nconscious of the everyday leaves
T hat pass these categories of time
Before beginning which have always
Evaded this study.
111
Study No. 30
O pposite the installation in the concrete
Space might still be a table to suggest
T he rolls of paper in between as much belong
To the table as they do composing songs.
112
Tricia Asklar
113
Charles Bernstein
ArsImpotens
Poetry is made not of ideas but of words.
Poetry is not made of ideas but words.
Poetry?s made not of ideas but of words.
O f words, poetry?s made of, not ideas.
Words is what poetry is made of, not ideas.
N ot of ideas, poetry?s made of words.
Is made of words, poetry, not ideas.
M ade not of ideas but words, poetry.
114
Autobiography of an Ex-Kike
I am so
tired of arguing.
Time to cross
over. But they
just won?t let
me. Fuck ?em.
115
Sanguinesque
after Virgil (G. 2.429-30)
116
Blessed
after Virgil (G. 2.458-461)
fortunate to toil
close to soil
far from armies
117
Rest
after Virgil (G. 2:541-542)
118
119
??????? ?
??????
?? ? ? ?? ??
?? ??????
?? ? ? ?? ?
? ? ??
?? ??????
? -? -? ?- ? ?
??? ?? O ?? ?? ? ?
????????
?? ? ? ?? ? ?
? ????
? ? ? ? ? ? ?? ?
? ??? ? ? ? ?? ??? ? ? ?
? ???? ?? ?
?? ?? ??? ? ? ???
??? ???? ?
?????
?? ?? ? ????
? ? ?? ?? ????
?? ? ? ???? ?
?? ?????
??? ????
???? ?
? ? ?? ???
??? ??
120
??????
? ? ? ? ? ??
? ? ??????? ?
??? ? ?? ?
? ? ??? ? ?
121
123
7.
?Buddha of the rock? over the N augatuck flowing
to the Red R ivers and N ikita M oon of China coheres at some deep
level now if the world will only come around to Four Fold blessing
pudgy town-drunk angel in lumberjack shirt hovers heaven-wings over
town, blessing the Rock and youm, the N augatuck R iver in a smiling second,
rare? he shall lead these works like H oly Red R iver and beget
When the N ikita M oon Rose to a literary agent, for the Lord ismy agent.
8.
H is muse to Ozymandias, say:
I?d sleep and forget it, mon; I had my own one life,
my own sad and ragged life, forever.
9.
Stars fell on Alabama drinking too much into the Love R iver
in K aohsiung, where a tree speaker blares out Broadway love songs
across four languages, forty codes: ?formerly polluted and now
pristine Love R iver? which stinks of a toppling Dragon Boat
cum oars and green-light mosquito quiver or Serena she of the
Li Po drinking Taiwan land into acupuncture, Sunday-solitude-stuporover a new mass of darkest German beer down from China: so weave
a songa songof riverlove a water flow back flowingto the land
10.
Blood flow of the riverine muse, she
comes with the cleanly rain that rages up with the rubbertown air
with storms of tin-soldier Brits or Chinese acrobats declaiming.
Across dark fields of O ctober, sutras
flow into the long O not my
gods indifferent to cannons inside canons.
To sleep in the ague of a red song, a red riverine musing
dangerous plants, falling cups, plangent magus rings of a Saturn-knight tempest potentate him who tempers into grief, or rage.
124
11.
As he looked up the clouds assumed, as assumed, faces of hermits
faces of hermits becoming like Lew Welch
becoming Sierra cloud-assumptions, Lenore K andell the scent:
Ti Shan, Cold M ountain, Ti Jean drinking in heaven, havened.
Faces of hermits becoming Sierra cloud-assumptions over N augatuck?
H an Shan, Ti Shan, Cold M ountain, Sappho:
Ti Jean still drinking in the heavens like a happy priest.
12.
Adrift across rainy morninga in my monk?s moan cell
composing a song or two or a river or three
letting a ghost in letting another ghost
out with the window, seventy times seven frenemy angles,
airs and lights, ponds
when these waves of the Red R iver flow in, no longer reckoninglost time
walking Friday and Saturday, the San Lorenzo R iver
at the Boardwalk overflowing banks
threatening the walkway, eroding the beaches
13.
O f twentieth largest container ports in the world,
thirteen are on the Pacific R im, ocean
O ne of them abuts outside my window, ocean
O ne of them is in the crazed taxi driver?s pocket
Six of them are in my battered luggage
Seven of them are laden on the fragrant road, ocean
transit besides the warm green waters of the moneyed harbor
O ne of them is filled with Costco peanut butter
O ne of them is laden with Giants baseball bats
& tickets to a Prince concert, D ylan?s harp, Victoria?s secret.
O ne is them is labeled Diamonds from Sea to Shining Sea
125
14.
Who threw out the H ollywood shirt I wore here,
who felt so worn out
under sweater
our bags are so heavy
Kyoto
T he snow that was supposed to fall,
T he snow that did fall, once,
T he kind cab driver who never left Boston
who treated me like a native because I lived here
T hirty years ago, ?on the poor side of Beacon H ill?
who had an idea for a new novel
idea for an energy drink
who would fill you with the H oly Spirit, ocean
T he time that slipped away, forgotten in brass muck,
T he riverine poem that never stopped being written.
T he time that never would return, that never came,
T hat never left, the time of our time, the heart attack machine
T he life that got away, lifted up, made four-fold, here.
15.
T houghts tangled into black hair, stare, back at lair
the Lamb of God who takes away the night riding mare.
M ists rise memories linger moods tank
have as broken proof a bent finger, Saint Pharma, stank
Vermont maple leaves floating on the Kyoto river,
Send me the quiver, mute sycamore, not this death dust.
Weep at parting from you I
Weep at parting from me into two.
A firefly aflame with metaphor,
Send in the bombastic senator man to explain.
Bewildering dream of the apple tree by the convent
Algebra of the convicted memory, free.
126
129
N othing special about this day except like D ylan you are turning out another
version of an old song with the help of the Grateful Dead.
N othing special about this day except you have forgiven it all, including
yourself, for blockages and let downs and states of getting lost.
N othing special about this day except the glowing cover of a road across.
N othing special about this day except the details in which the spirit moves and
takes place.
N othing special about this day except it keeps happening as a day like the sun
turning across the sky.
N othing special about this day except your breakfast has turning into the
energy to write words, to know thoughts, to spell a few words, to forget a few
names like that of David M eltzer last night.
N othing special except the will to let go, to fall into the ground, to recall high
heavens.
N othing special about this day except the ripe avocado on the window sill.
N othing special about this day except the sheer fact of language being
exchanged for things.
N othing special about this day except Donna H araway.
N othing special about this day except the digestive system workings.
N othing special about this day except three thousand years of prosody.
N othing special about this day except the culture that invented glass and Glad
Bags.
N othing special about this day except the emails coming in as I write.
N othing special about this day except the coffee beans from R wanda.
N othing special about this day except the mood lifting up, the possibility of an
influx of grace and care and good will to all, Easter promises.
131
132
133
Ben M azer
136
137
N ick Admussen
Anchorite
T his situation is that nothing is it with me,
except the fictional father-ghost at my shoulder
and the screen ahead, simile for an eye.
What else I can say about it
disinvolves the word "you."
Prepended with a colon, a statement
will be parsed as an action.
:descends wild and hungry from the mountains.
:disappears into himself as in religion.
I have my palms flat on the keyboard
as if trying to heal the sick.
I am ordering the apparatus to make love.
138
139
Still Plum
Botched light, unrightly
splaying down from the shade chink:
all this time and I am still for hire.
I mean, I have arrayed my objects
and my gray ladies. I have thorn
protection, thorn audience, thorn factory,
and I claim the little buds inside,
whose existence I assert.
Why, then, sharks turning. Why magnet
tether anchored in the cheek. Why whore
clothes and the hand-lettered sign
cheap asyou like it, which also says
screw you for being debased
and eat me, so sweet and so cold
140
141
Lyn H ejinian and others have stressed that the year 1974 impacted
Berkeley/Iowa/Berlin as some kind of crucial ?constellation? of elements,
forces, and forms, thus indicating a shift or turning point towards something
different and new. Coming in the wake of the liberating energies of Free
Speech and the mongrel plenitudes of Golden Gate Park, 1974 was also the
date the Berkeley Poetry Review was published on the campus of U C Berkeley as
a ?journal of emergent poetics? as it came to be called, standing (then and
now) for a multiplicity of forms and voices and embodying a push towards
representing a fuller sense of student voices and an emergent multiculturalism.
T his was what Josephine M iles had been supporting inside ?the English
Department of the soul? (as Jack Spicer notoriously troped it) by long
advocating a more pluralist poetics as voiced in figures as diverse as Arthur Sze,
David M elnick, M organ W ines, Rochelle N ameroff et al. and as posited
against what we felt to be the N ew York-turned style hegemony of the campus
literary journal Occident.
I had a column in the Daily Californian called ?Berkeley Inscapes? at
the time and came to Jo with the student-based review idea for the BPR, and
she got me put on some chancellor?s committee to get funding and an editorial
room in the publications space of the Pelican Building as it was called.
Anyway, that the journal is still going close over 40 years later is testament to
the social institutional fact that we opened a "worlding" space and form for
something that needed to be supported ?in progress [process]? however
unknown, under-theorized, or half-baked and mongrel it all was etc. T he
other thing at U CB in 1974 I would point to stand for those place-based
energies of emergence and difference is that T heresa H ak Kyung Cha (whose
Dictee would come to transform Asian Pacific studies) was giving some of her
ethereally estranged and Korean uncanny art space performances in the Art
Department building, which has to be considered a part of some left-coast
?avant-garde? as much as was happening in Iowa or N ew York City, in the
impact as space, form, and language it would have on generations in the
emergence of multiple ethnically inflected forms and languages. Josephine
M iles was a driving force in Bay Area poetics and was way ahead of her time in
embodying the interactive energies of poet and scholar, wholeness of theory
and practice, in the American sublime tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and
R ich. T hat the BPR still lives on, under the able editorship of changing
generations of students, from myself to A.D. K ing, is testament to such deeply
rooted pedagogy and vision of radical democratic emergence.
H ere are a few comments on these ?semi-ancient? documents that
track the founding of Berkeley Poetry Review and some of the early trajectories
from Berkeley to H awai?i and into the American and Pacific-Asia poetry scene.
John Gage [pgs. 158-160] was a learned doctoral student in the U CB R hetoric
Department and a fine poet himself in the Leonard N athan formalist tradition
of skeptical wit which was an important part of the Berkeley scene, if avowedly
on the conservative end of the student pluralism. ?Inscape? [pgs. 156-160] was
a weekly column on poetry and poetics that appeared in the Daily Californian
and was avowedly pluralist in its portrayal of the existing poetry scene; it was
edited by the artistically deft Christine Taylor, a medievalist Ph.D. candidate in
142
the English Department who was an important ally of all the work I was doing
in poetry and poetics at U CB and in the Bay Area as was her partner Leroy
W ilsted who designed the first two issues of the BPR, covers and all. David
Linn [p. 155] was a contributor unknown to me or others on the editorial staff.
David H enderson [pgs. 156-157] was a much respected N ew York city poet in
the Afro American musicality and U mbra tradition who had moved to
Berkeley and became a cultural force there with Ishmael Reed et al.; David
had been a doo-wop singer at one time (perhaps with the Dells), and later
wrote a book on Jimmy H endrix, edited Bob K aufman?s poetry, and much
else. I wrote an article on H enderson?s poetry for the ?Inscapes? column.
H enry N ash Smith [p. 164] was a venerable senior professor in the English
Department at U CB, one of the founding fathers of American civilizational
studies in the U SA in the myth and symbol tradition. H enry N ash Smith was
on my doctoral exam committee and the professor who introduced me to
Professor M asao M iyoshi who was looking for a research assistant interested in
American relations to Asian cultures, especially Japan, so I did 19th-century
American literature research for him on the book that became As We Saw
T hem, a book still in print and influential in Japan and U S cultural studies in
the pre-Said ?orientalist? moment on mutual interaction on the Pacific R im. I
kept in touch with people in Berkeley via mail, in the pre-internet and
pre-email days, and would bring writers to read in H awai?i like Robert H ass
and Leonard M ichaels et al. M iyoshi would always visit on his trips to East
Asia, and he would ?debrief? me on my own stay in South Korea when I
would go back to Berkeley where my daughter Sarah was attending schools
there. Robin M agowan [pgs. 162-163] was a crucial beloved undergraduate
mentor to me at U C Berkeley in English: the last class he taught at Cal in the
summer of 1969 included my classmate, N ancy Ling Perry, who later played a
key role in the rise of Symbionese Liberation Army attacks and died in a
shootout with the police in Los Angeles as my family watched it on television
at 2641 Forest Avenue. Robin was a surrealist poet in the visionary mystical
tradition from a prominent San Francisco family who was well connected to
writers and artists from James M errill (his uncle Jimmy) to Larry R ivers and
Kenneth Koch, all of whom he would try to connect Bay Area people via
wonderful parties at his home in the Berkeley hills behind M emorial Stadium.
I remain eternally grateful; he is still my friend and mentor, and lives in my
home state of Connecticut now and is a gardener and a poet still. John Ashbery
[p. 166] is John Ashbery, just becoming world famous then. W.S. M erwin [p.
161] is always W.S. M erwin in H aiku, M aui, or anywhere, and he shared the
Z en influence of Roshi Robert Aitken from his zendo in M aui where I used
to talk about American poets like Stevens and Whitman with him, and took
the poet Louis Simpson for a cordial funny visit once. O f course Josephine
M iles [p. 165] was my key mentor as a graduate student in English at U CB and
way ahead of her time as she embodied the interactive energies of being a
scholar and a poet in the American sublime tradition of Emerson and
Whitman; she was poetic mentor to generations in the department including
Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, A.R . Ammons, T hom Gunn, Sze, and, well,
me? hers are the praises forever. I might add here that M erwin and Ashbery,
143
along with Robert Creeley who was the poet?s poet then in the Bay Area, were
the key poets I was drawn to then: tactics of elision and minimal syntax and
anti-rhetoric (as in M erwin and Creeley) warred against the more maximalist
geo and surreal forms of expansive vision in Charles Olson, Creeley, and the
ever-present Walt Whitman. In her work Eras and Modes in English Poetry,
Josephine M iles was an acute scholar of the ?American sublime? which she
singularly elaborated as a prosody of phrasal accumulation and expansive
visions of the spirit drenched cosmos in biggish forms of poetry. I was drawn
to that, and would write a book on it with W isconsin U P, my first book,
American Sublime: T he Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, before I turned to fuller ties
to the local and international ties to the cultural poetics of Pacific and Asian
sites based on my 24 years of teaching at the U niversity of H awai?i at M anoa as
well as visits to teach at universities in Korea, Taiwan, H ong Kong, and
California.
- Rob Sean W ilson
144
Covers of the first (front) and second (front and back) issues of the
Berkeley Poetry Review
145
Flyer for the Berkeley Student Review, which soon after became the Berkeley Poetry Review
Page 1 of 2 (page 2 facing)
M ay 28, 1974
146
147
Berkeley Poetry Review application for official recognition from the O ffice of Student Activities
N ovember 21, 1974
148
151
Letter from David H enderson, a founder of the Black Arts M ovement, to Rob Sean W ilson
c. N ovember 6, 1973
156
Proposal for an anthology of black avant-garde artists and writers by David H enderson,
enclosed in letter to Rob Sean W ilson reproduced on facing page
157
Returned Berkeley Inscapessurvey from poet and R hetoric doctoral student John Gage to
Rob Sean W ilson
c. N ovember 2, 1973
158
Poem by John Gage included with correspondence to Rob Sean W ilson reproduced on
facing page
159
163
M ajor Jackson
Canon of Proportions
H ow unnatural the body cattle-ranched,
and yet one feels one?s laughter seeping
like an unplanned gun-fight, zig-zagging
a queue only to pause for two seconds
in a full-on, arms up, frozen jumping jack
when the scanner half-circles and backscatters
one?s genitals, ionizing into a potentially dangerous
phantom. T homas Jefferson was never
a frequent flier, and I wonder if Reverend Al
Sharpton, whom I stand behind
at Reagan International contemplating
adult things like cerulean flowers
and millennial breathings, ever deployed
a furtive power fist above his head.
At this hour, the safety of a nation requires
I abandon explosive shoes and double-shot
lattes, and model my best Vitruvian M an.
It is either this or lonely rail yards.
I choose the amateur in the skies
like I choose a right knee in prayer.
Still it must be said: the occasional lament
of a train is an unremembered dream
and arousal might lead to a pat down,
a tell-tale pistol of flesh to grieve.
167
M ax Goudie Pujals
Abandoned
for FrancisPonge, Jack Spicer, and Barbara Guest
I.
When you take penned rhododendrons
out of R ichmond Park,
ship them out to talk them up
sad they have gone from regularities
to needing sheepdogs that picked up everything down ferns
would collect England, then clouded commons and woods,
spurn England and go home bringing it back,
and you find bridges that go with other countries?rivers,
even other men?s rivers in books, as ones rumored to be yours
and find yourself stopping, blocked by H enry M oore-shaped islands
or anything which slowly from a quiet walk
says hold out for the imagined and unowned.
II.
In night fording solemnly
to track the wildflowers
we forget we loitered on with autumn dear
and the crickets ripping on
while maple wings fell through flooding
the feet of foreigners.
For us night shifts
redresses redresses and shifts
the flood made of the maple wings
and the past day.
168
G. C. Waldrep
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
Jessica R ae Bergamino
Sylvia
Today there are ways to cure the body
before it is ever born, to unhinge it
from spectrums of quiet and being
crooked in the ways of love. A mother
is a river that her children bathe inside,
washed in vitamins and echo.
Even the saints are endangered, unstitched
from prayer while the rest of us long
to become part of recorded time.
Still, someone must forgive us women
gone retrograde while the stars, the planets,
the moon, and everything else aligns.
196
Changming Yuan
y
?yes, yes, with your
yellowish skin, you enjoy
meditating within the shape of
a wishbone, inside the broken wing
of an oriental bird strayed, or
in a larger sense, you look like
the surfacing tail of a pacific whale
who yells low, but whose voice reaches afar
far beyond a whole continent, to a remote village
near the yellow river, where you used to sunbathe
rice stems, reed leaves, cotton skeletons
with a fork made of a single horn-shaped twig
when i was a barefooted country boy
on the other side of this new world
197
[y]
You are really haunted by this letter
Yes, since it contains all the secrets of
Your selfhood: your name begins with it
You carry y-chromosome; you wear
Y-pants; both your skin and heart are
Yellowish; your best poem is titled
Y; you seldom seek the balance between
Yin and yang; you never want to be a
Yankee, but you yearn to remain as
Young as your poet son; in particular
You love the way it is pronounced, so
Youthfully, as a word rather than a letter to
Yell out the human reasons; above all
Your soul is a seed blown from afar, always
Y-shaped when breaking the earth
198
Y
U sing my yellow tail
I yellow-swam
From the Yellow R iver
As a yeast of the yellow peril
Against the yellow alert
In yellow journalism
W ith a yellow hammer
And a yellow sheet
I yielded to the yellow metal
At a yellow spot
million yards away from Yellowknife
People call me yellow jack
Some hailed me as a yellow dog
When I yelped on my yellow legs
To flee from the yellow flu
Speaking Yerkish* like a yellow warbler
I have composed many yellow pages
For a yeasty yellow book
To be published by the yellow press
M ark Tardi
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
208
209
210
R umi
a collection of translationsfrom the Persian by Amin Banani & Anthony A. Lee
Being
To be or not to be? well, I don?t care.
Forget them both! T here is no honor there.
If I?m not mad by now, then that?s madness.
M y heart is filled with joy, so I don?t care.
212
213
Holy Words
Last night, I saw him sit with others here.
I couldn?t take him in my arms for fear
of them. So, I brought my face to his? faked
some holy words to whisper in his ear.
214
215
I'm Nobody
M y cloak, my turban, and my head? all three:
Together they are not worth a penny.
H aven?t you heard my name, known ?round the world?
I?m nobody. N obody! N obody!
216
217
Longing
I lie with my lover a hundred days,
and still my heart cannot end its longing.
H ey! You may laugh at that. But you?re still
an intellectual. Wait till you go mad!
218
219
Madness
I have gone mad, and madmen never sleep.
A madman, what does he know about sleep?
You know: God doesn?t sleep. So, none of that!
You know: I?m mad with Love, so I can?t sleep.
220
221
222
223
W illiam Dow
N o longer
set in a decisive blow,
struck left-handed, face down,
for any tactic one tried to use.
225
Outtakes
What seemed great movements
you walked yourself backward
dwelling in small,
227
228
229
230
231
9
Clouds ease off. Green flesh, eyes, hair of green,
the longcommotion out of words,
so that even the Dominican, crucifix sprinting,
provoked by the scrolls of her testament,
cannot console her.
232
Larry R uth
Happy Hour
Line and shadow an eccentric conflict between
plot and something else, a bird in hand is worth
two null hypotheses striving to recall the present
imagination, allegory, all the new thinking
about loss gone west, creative misinterpretation
east, takes refuge behind an ironic curtain, shows
of solidarity, hilarity, feints of the unforgotten
barren or bereft, vowels, diphthongs dissolve,
improvised explosive pronouns equivocate,
expunge contingency, syllable and sentence,
its music made, the M bius band disaggregates,
demurs meaning and multiverse, dissolves arc
and sphere, there and here, real against rhyme,
space and string, have one last dance, text
and time.
233
235
T he Square
translated from the German by Len Krisak
Furnes
236
Der Platz
Furnes
237
Sappho to Eranna
I want you filled with agitation;
Shaken like a vine-choked stave.
Like death, I crave your penetration.
I want to pass you, like the grave,
W ith all these things, to all creation.
238
Sappho an Eranna
U nruh will ich ber dich bringen,
schwingen will ich dich, umrankter Stab.
W ie das Sterben will ich dich durchdringen
und dich weitergeben wie das Grab
an das Alles: allen diesen Dingen.
239
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Canzone
translated from the Italian by Len Krisak
Canzone
N ude, le braccia di segreti sazie,
A nuoto hanno del Lete svolto il fondo,
Adagio sciolto le veementi grazie
E le stanchezze onde luce fu il mondo.
N ulla muto pi della strana strada
Dove foglia non nasce o cade o sverna,
Dove nessuna cosa pena o aggrada,
Dove la veglia mai, mai il sonno alterna.
Tutto si sporse poi, entro trasparenze,
N ell'ora credula, quando, la quiete
Stanca, da dissepolte arborescenze
R iestesasi misura delle mete,
Estenuandosi in iridi echi, amore
Dall'aereo greto trasal sorpreso
Roseo facendo il buio e, in quel colore,
Pi d'ogni vita un arco, il sonno, teso.
Preda dell'impalpabile propagine
Di muri, eterni dei minuti eredi,
Sempre ci esclude pi, la prima immagine
M a, a lampi, rompe il gelo e riconquide.
Pi sfugga vera, l'ossessiva mira,
E sia bella, pi tocca a nudo calma
E, germe, appena schietta idea, d'ira,
R ifreme, avversa al nulla, in breve salma.
R ivi indovina, suscita la palma:
Dita dedale svela, se sospira.
Prepari gli attimi con cruda lama,
Devasti, carceri, con vaga lama,
Desoli gli animi con sorda lama,
N on distrarr da lei mai l'occhio fisso
Sebbene, orribile da spoglio abisso,
N on si conosca forma che da dama.
241
242
243
Aaron Shurin
T he Exchange
Is it a turtleneck? N o, it?s the calendar. Is it smeared lipstick? N o it?s his pucker
of shame. Are they wilted dahlias? N o they?re his stoner eyes? An exchange
of value, a tranny shift, a cache of noms de plume or guerre or charactre?
Are they vestiges of youth? Yes, they are scavenged buds, stoner rhymes. What
are the implements? T he quills of night. What is their natural habitat? T he
vellum of sleep. Are you sleeping? Yes I am working? A cognate pool, a feast
of semblance, a gift of seeming? Is it a clean slate? N o it?s crammed with
erasure. Are you scribbling? N o I am being scribbled. What is your nom de
plume or guerre or charactre? Silvered Tempest or Cauldron Sheen or By the
Light of the Full M oo. Who named you that? Fate, Chance, and ?She did? ?
Can I go now? You?re already there. Stoner paradox? N o: street trees in full
bloom late summer, gleaming as though wet; cool sun inside a sleeve of ocean
air; branches swish in the breeze, lift? a high visible hush? the light light?
yes/no, no/yes? I am given to write?
244
T he Part Unseen
Is this the something else, the part unseen, the antidote of clouds, the sculptural
path revealed, the winding staircase tucked behind a maple door? ? Is there a
person crouching in the foreground, among the rocks and reeds, or jumping in
the background ? up into the pogo sky with arms akimbo or folded like a
chair, daring the bourgeois clouds or of them? I think he can?t decide whether
to fly or die? T he toreador pants grip his shins ? or are those plum trees
athwart the Plain of Jars? ? Is this his lonesome cataract, the last bushwhack,
the foxed and spotted contract, the raison d?tre welling up, the parallax? ? I
think he isn?t really there, couldn?t see the door, didn?t need to cure himself of
clouds? Is this an alphabet of blood, or disappearing ink? I saw the river
peacock-blue mirror from the slowing train in the blue dusk. I think there was
a seagull streaking at the bend. It may have been a person in a boat, hauling up
his oar to float the curve?
245
Lawrence Eby
246
42.
Clock shop smashed in the riot
the riot. Two burning
cars in the street, melted
dash, the pedals pinned
to the floor. T here?s no gas
left in
the
?s
station
bathroom
locked shut
water running down
the drain
the aisles
emptied of their goods.
A stag in the street
in the crosshairs.
247
43.
When thinking of flight, the body emerges a wing. Its feathers transparent
against the blue-gray, those subtle tones
roof tones
wall tones
a checkered floor with a layer of dust, a hand-trail cleared black and
white squares with a corner tugged up. T he underneath on the cusp
of bloom. H ow many people have traveled through this kitchen? T he thin
cabinet doors open, bare shelves. O n the counter, the telephone is off the
hook. U npaid bills, a calendar marked
in X ?s. A stencil of a wasp on the kitchen table is bedded with dust. T he
desperate animal abandons its nest, flees gliding to the tundra?s deep burn.
248
Laura M ullen
Eye Exam
Letter by letter the lines appear:
T here was this sense of trustWorthy vision, then...not so much.
I tried to speak of the difference:
Smear or blur or uneasy overlap,
M ore or less out of alignment.
T here will be this weakening?
What other word, some other word,
O f the grasp, the apprehension.
M aybe a ?T ? maybe a ?Y, or?
I tried to show how the shadows...
T here will be this loosening?
Put it like that if you wish. Letters
Like specks of darkness washed
In a long box of brilliant light.
T hat last one, a ?Q ? or ?O ? perhaps?
Slowly all the ways I learned to try
To resist the recognition of what
We call feelings come to seem
U seless (?useless?)? at best.
T here will be this...what? ?But
I?m guessing,? I said, something
Close to terror in my voice.
I wanted to talk about how
I?d begun to notice faces
Wouldn?t quite completely
Resolve: not that there was
An actual double, but I wasn?t
Sure which of the too many eyes
To try, moment by moment,
M eeting. Blink if you need to.
I don?t know what to do, I wanted
To say, now I see that what
I?d thought of as the world
Is ?information?? more or less
Clear? better or worse. Try it
Again: Better? O r worse?
249
or escape
appearsto establish
distance
I stopped the rocketship to take a snap shot
O ut of range of the sound of your voice
A polka-dotted dog dropped by
So close its name was all
250
I could
spot
closed
fixed
Away
H idden images no sooner
Found than forgotten with
T he eyes they never were
Intended for (lean over this
M y obedience) Someone
Imagined someone seeing from
love
correct
Away w
With thisn
Negative space
T hose numbered stops at last let loose use another sense to sketch a quicker
picture
U nexpected curious
Connections stretch past the space
Stations to several now I see them
N ot where you said they were
Vanishing
vanishing points
251
Freed T hought
Let me accept myself only in my saddle!
Stay in your huts, your tents!
And I ride joyous all from afar,
Above my cap only the stars.
H e legislated to you the constellations
As conductors to land and lake;
T herewith on them you delight,
Steady, glancing in the H eights.
252
Freysinn
Lat mich nur auf meinem Sattel gelten!
Bleibt in euren H tten, euren Z elten!
U nd ich reite froh in alle Ferne,
ber meiner M tze nur die Sterne.
Er hat euch die Gestirne gesetzt
Als Leiter zu Land und See;
Damit ihr euch daran ergtzt,
Stets blickend in die H h.
253
Songand Creation
Likes the Greek his clay
To shake to form
T he hands befitting son
To heighten his delight;
But it is winsome to us
In the Euphrates to grasp
And in the flowing element
Back and forth to roam.
Blotted I thus the soul brand
Song it becomes resounding;
Created of the Poet's pure hand
Water itself to clench.
254
255
Elements
O ut of how many elements
Should a song of the outlaw be nursed?
Such that Laymen feel it with pleasure,
M aster it listening with friends.
Love set before all T hings
O ur T heme, when we sing;
Could she be penetrated through the Song,
T he fuller around, the better becoming to Sound.
T hen must sound the tones of glass,
And glisten the ruby of the wines:
T hen for the loving, then for the drinker
W inks one the loveliest of wreaths.
T he sound of arms is also called out,
T hat also the drums blare;
T hat, if Fortune to flames flares,
H erself to idolize in the Victory of the H ero.
T hen to the last, it's all unruly,
T hat the poet is hated of the many,
Which uncomely is and ugly
N ot as Beautiful life allows.
K nows the Singer these Four
Primeval M ights to mix,
Like to H afis he becomes the People
Eternally to rejoice and to refresh.
256
Elemente
Aus wie vielen Elementen
Soll ein echtes Lied sich nhren,
Da es Laien gern empfinden,
M eister es mit Freuden hren?
Liebe sei vor allen Dingen
U nser T hema, wenn wir singen;
K ann sie gar das Lied durchdringen,
W ird's um desto besser klingen.
Dann mu K lang der Glser tnen
U nd R ubin des Weins erglnzen:
Denn fr Liebende, fr Trinker
W inkt man mit den schnsten Krnzen.
Waffenklang wird auch gefodert,
Da auch die Drommete schmettre;
Da, wenn Glck zu Flammen lodert,
Sich im Sieg der H eld vergttre.
Dann zuletzt ist unerllich,
Da der Dichter manches hasse;
Was unleidlich ist und hlich,
N icht wie Schnes leben lasse.
Wei der Snger, dieser viere
U rgewalt'gen Stoff zu mischen,
H afis gleich wird er die Vlker
Ewig freuen und erfrischen.
257
Else Lasker-Schler
a collection of translationsfrom the German by Samuel Garrett Z eitlin
My blue piano
258
Mein BlauesKlavier
from M ein blaues K lavier: N eue Gedichte (M y
Blue Piano: N ew Poems, 1943)
259
Karma
260
Karma
from Styx (1902)
261
Eros
262
Eros
from Styx (1902)
263
[Dedication]
To my unforgettable male and female friendsin the citiesof Germany? and to those who, like me,
were driven out and are now spread out in the world, In Solidarity!
To My Friends
264
[Widmung]
Meinen unvergelichen Freunden und Freundinnen in den Stdten Deutschlands? und denen, die
wie ich vertrieben und nun zerstreut in der Welt, In Treue!
An Meine Freunde
from M ein blaues K lavier: N eue Gedichte (M y
Blue Piano: N ew Poems, 1943)
265
O ut of manifold farewell
Ascend nestled in one another the threads of golden ash,
And not a day remains unsweetened
Between the wistful kiss
And reunion!
N ot the dead rest?
T hus I love to be in the vastness? ..!
U pon earth with you in heaven already.
In all colors to paint upon the blue ground
Eternal life.
266
267
We three
268
Wir drei
from Der siebente Tag (T he Seventh Day, 1905)
269
So longisit since.....
270
271
1.
H ere the birds thrive. Swallow droppings
stain each threshold like welcome mats
of old eggs. Twigs, mud, spit
scribble the walls. O ne swallow
rises daily on the same perch
to sing its breast?s cry.
A square cut out of a brick room
looks far out across the moat
into another window. T hrough this,
distantly, a door opens inward,
and beyond, a tree has dropped two pears.
O ne slit open when it hit the ground.
A fist of bees has been pulling free
the pear?s green flap, its uneven wing.
T he queen lies dead beside.
Where, where else to go?
W ithin the tunnel walls, footfalls sound
like pebbles being chewed eternally.
Dead ends could be dark turns.
In some corners, skylights cast down
dim circles. But to stand in a beam of light
is not to know light? one knows moss,
veins of dirt, and more droppings.
272
2.
O ver the R iver O rze, the smokestack
disguised as a glass factory
towers still, over shaking aspens.
T he twenty-two thousand were emptied into this water.
N ow, fish plop out so often
the dust won?t settle.
And here, a golf course has been built.
M en pull their bags around the bends.
T he bags are black? as large as bodies.
273
274
275
Leonard J. Cirino
A Parallel Universe
after Mara Negroni
1
Even if it's prison we love the places we leave behind. M emory
moves forward and back, bewilders us. O ne smell gathers like
a barnyard or crushed straw, another leads to sores on our
cheeks, even boils on our backs. We treat them secretly, as if
hours had passed in their making. In truth, it was an entire
century of terror. Back then it all seemed normal. O ne could
stand on a street-corner and whistle at girls, go to the movies
and watch horror shows, even a day at the park seemed like
casual fun. What happened? All the films got spliced and
slashed, long shots became portraits. Even the match that
Lawrence struck ignited so much fear we couldn't look. In the
still, black and white newspaper photos, the stubborn eyes of
an actor hailed ensuing genocide. People applauded and
wanted to be like him. Far away, on an island named after a
holiday, the tribal chief laid his head on a stone and slept. It
was his downfall. N o more weekdays gathering coconuts, no
more beautiful women.
2
N o, the world had encroached on space and his space.
Everything became as small as a seed. T he seed was buried for
several generations. T hen it sprouted and came back to haunt
us like a dead sibling. Destroyed towns were mired in dry
riverbeds, there was no protection against evil, the wind
became a prison. O ur senses left us as beauty darkened at
dawn, the moon betrayed us at noon, and the heat and storms
became insurmountable.
276
To J
ON E
Is music is jazz
to jabber to jive
babbling in five
take five take ten beats
and it?s half a phrase
from the chorus, Dave
Brubeck springlike comps
to twenty repeats
ready to jump the
sax breathes into the
T WO
Jass, the first sound of
dripping juice, peaches
sweating with salty
palms poplar shades blue
as contorted mouths
stretch sundried, fly
flocking to strange fruit.
Don?t worry, blessd
Billie, child. Someday
Ray will singGeorgia.
T H R EE
Stride along Scott
Joplin. Ten fingers
277
SIX
is to John Taggart
is to giant steps
is to slow tempo
is to subdivide
is intonation
is sonic contour
is heard as giant
stepsis spoken once
and then too is sung:
isisisisis
SEVEN
sea of soundwaves speaks
Ti Jean?s native tongue
toms low Big Sur rock
beds, symbol crash
San Francisco Jack?s
back, Doctor Sax! see
sunrise shapes, J?s crash
Seamus hears two Js,
JamesJoyce?
eluctible modality
EIGH T
waves
Dublin-dirtied
ship jolts Patrick John
Sheehy, John Patrick
left father left church
for jazz, for M arie
marrying R uth, Jack
Cohn returns from war
to N ew York Jazz, to
join John, two J?s enjoined
279
to grandfather
N IN E
to grandfatherless
juxtaposition
unjust position
of Jacob, identi
-fication; just
-ification
Jew
a jarred skull width
singing
to jazz guitar, to play to
electric Jacob
to J
T EN
to appreciate the
counting to the
tenth letter
to O ctober born nine past January
to return to the hooked
tenor sax bend
returned to jump to join
Johns Jacks James Jacobs
to jump sax, to jazz
280
Andrew R idker
281
282
Gerald N icosia
O n July 24, 2009, Judge George Greer, known as ?the toughest judge
in Florida,? ruled the unthinkable? at least unthinkable for the Sampas/
Viking Penguin literary empire? that the will of Gabrielle Kerouac, giving the
Sampas family the right to exploit Jack Kerouac?s works, image, belongings,
and even his gravesite, was a forgery. Greer couldn?t have been more forceful
in what he said about that crime.
?She [Gabrielle Kerouac] could only move her hand and scribble her
name,? Greer wrote in his landmark ruling.1 ?She would have lacked the
coordination to affix that signature. T he [probate] court is required by law to
use a clear and convincing standard in determining these matters. H owever,
even if the criminal standard of beyond all reasonable doubt was the
requirement, the result would certainly be the same. Clearly, Gabrielle
Kerouac was physically unable to sign the document dated February 13, 1973
and, more importantly, that which appears on the W ill dated that date is not
her signature.?
M any people like myself, who were familiar with the dynamics of Jack
Kerouac?s last years had long suspected that something was wrong about that
will? even if we weren?t sure it was a case of forgery.2 I used to think that
there was undue influence? perhaps the old lady was just ?out of it? when the
will was signed. But it was a well-known fact that Gabrielle Kerouac loved her
grandson, Paul Blake, Jr. T he Blakes and the Kerouacs lived together for long
stretches of time? on Long Island; in Rocky M ount, N orth Carolina; in
O rlando, among other places. Gabrielle taught her grandson Paul to sing
French songs and she cooked French treats for him. Gabrielle was absolutely
devastated by the early death of her daughter Ti N in, Paul?s mother, in
1964? after being devastated by the death of her first child Gerard 38 years
earlier. It was inconceivable that she would then, in her right mind, write Ti
N in?s child, the grandson she loved so much, completely out of her will.
Jack died in 1969, leaving everything to his mother in his will? which
also said that if his mother wasn?t around to inherit his estate, he wanted his
nephew Paul Blake, Jr., to get it. Gabrielle, ?M emere,? outlived Jack by four
years, and when she died the will leaving everything to Stella Sampas Kerouac
was suddenly filed in the Pinellas County Courthouse. O nce Jan Kerouac
filed her lawsuit against the Sampases, challenging her grandmother?s will as a
283
forgery, the Sampases responded in the media that they had had nothing to do
with the drafting of Gabrielle?s will, but there are many facts that suggest
otherwise, including the fact that Stella?s own personal lawyer, George
Saltsman, was the lawyer who drafted Gabrielle?s will. In addition, Saltsman
never witnessed Gabrielle signing the will; in fact, he stated in sworn
testimony that he never saw her again. H e simply mailed the unsigned will to
Stella for her to take care of.3 H ow the Sampases managed to hide the theft for
so long is a long story. It involves the fact that neither of Gabrielle?s
grandchildren, Jan Kerouac nor Paul Blake, Jr., was notified of her death,
though the Sampases had the addresses of both.
In one of Jan?s notebooks, now on deposit at the Bancroft Library in
Berkeley, she scribbled at the top of a blank page: ?T he Greeks Who Stole
Kerouac.? She never lived to write the story.
T he Sampases were banking on the fact that the victims they were
robbing were two dysfunctional kids. Jan had grown up on the streets of the
Lower East Side in the drug-ridden Sixties? with no dad, and a marginally
effective mom. H er veins were filled with methedrine and LSD, and at 13 she
was working the streets to pay for drugs and parasitical boyfriends. T hat this
kid had any chance of discovering a forged will was virtually nil. As for Paul
Blake, Jr., he came home from high school at sixteen to find his mother dead
on the couch? having starved herself to death to punish herself, a good
Catholic woman, for losing her husband to another woman. H e rambled
through Alaska and elsewhere, working as a carpenter and losing job after job,
as well as two wives, because hitting the bottle was the only way to quiet his
ghosts. Again: no chance this deeply troubled kid was going to start probing
courts for an answer to his disinheritance.
W ithin weeks of Jack?s death, the Sampases had scooped up his
manuscripts and papers and spirited them to a small apartment above N icky
Sampas?s bar in Lowell. A close friend recalls Tony Sampas tapping on one of
the cardboard boxes of Kerouac files, saying, ?T hese things will be worth
millions? not now, but some day.?4
After Jack?s widow Stella died in 1990, her youngest brother John was
elected by the Sampas brothers and sisters as their literary representative, and
he took off selling Kerouac papers and belongings as quick as he could. But
apparently, rich collectors like Johnny Depp were a little uncertain about
dropping 50,000 bucks for items they weren?t sure Sampas had a right to sell.
So Sampas began handing out copies of Gabrielle?s will to his best customers.
O ne such customer sent me a copy of the will a few weeks before Jan Kerouac
and her lawyer Tom Brill arrived at my home in January 1994, planning to talk
about her problems getting royalties from the Sampases.
284
Instead, Jan took one look at the will on my kitchen table and yelled,
?T his thing is a forgery!? H er grandmother?s signature was way too strong to
have been made by an old lady who?d been lifted on and off a bedside potty for
seven years. You could see where the lines started and stopped, and the last
name was misspelled ?Keriouac.?
T he Sampases fought for fifteen years to keep that case from going to
trial. When Jan died in 1996 and made me her literary executor to carry the
case to trial, the Sampases made a deal with her heirs, John Lash and David
Bowers, to dismiss the case? and when I refused to dismiss it, the Sampases
and Jan?s heirs fought together to get me thrown out, succeeding in 1999. But
Judge T homas Penick in Florida refused to let Lash dismiss Jan?s entire lawsuit.
H e let Lash dismiss Jan?spart of the lawsuit. Penick pointed out that there was
another potential heir, if Gabrielle had died intestate: Jack?s nephew. Paul
Blake Jr.?s lawyers Bill and Alan Wagner finally won that forgery verdict from
Judge Greer on July 24, 2009.
T he Sampas family, the brothers and sisters of Stella who had inherited
the Kerouac Estate from her when she died in 1990, immediately took an
appeal of Judge Greer?s decision. Co-heir and Literary Executor for the family,
John Sampas, told British journalist Stephen M aughan ?We do not believe the
W ill of Gabrielle Kerouac was forged and do believe the Judge based his ruling
on fictitious accounts by a doctor who never met Gabrielle Kerouac.? Sampas
also lamented that a strong defense of the will had not been put on before
Judge Greer. Why he and his family did not mount such a strong defense, he
did not explain. ?O ur lawyers,? Sampas claimed to M aughan, ?would have
demolished Alan Wagner and his corrupt father Bill Wagner.?5
While the appeals process continued, Paul Blake, Jr.?s lawyers were
prevented from going after assets of the Kerouac Estate, and even from getting
any sort of accounting of those assets. All that is now changed. O n August 10,
2011, the District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District, ruled against
the Sampas family and affirmed Judge Greer?s ruling that Kerouac?s mother?s
will was a forgery. T he way the decision was written ensures it cannot be
appealed further. It is therefore considered a final decision. T hat means it is
now in the history books that the Kerouac Estate, arguably the most valuable
literary estate in recent history, was stolen. As things now stand, however, the
Sampas brothers and sisters are still sheltering under the protection of a Florida
?non-claim statute? that allows people to inherit stolen property, and keep it,
so long as no one complains within two years.6 Since Jan did not see the forged
will until 1994, the two-year waiting period after the filing of Stella?s will (in
1990) had expired; and unless Paul Blake, Jr., can find a federal law to go
around the Florida state law, the Sampases will get to keep all their literary
loot.
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Notes
1 George Greer,
O rder, July 24, 2009, ?In the Circuit Court of the Sixth
Judicial Circuit in and for Pinellas County, Florida, Probate Division, Case
N o. 73-4767-ES-003, In Re: T he Estate of Gabrielle Kerouac.?
2 From
6 Florida Statute,
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Jan Kerouac and Paul Blake, Jr., at Gerald N icosia's Corte M adera residence, April 1995
Photograph by Gerald N icosia
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Noteson contributors
Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with M ark H alliday, 1991)
and T he Long Schoolroom: Lessonsin the Bitter Logicof the PoeticPrinciple (1997). A
professor first at Brandeis U niversity and then at T he Johns H opkins
U niversity, he received the Bollingen Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and
Guggenheim and M acArthur Fellowships, among many other awards. H is
poem in this issue, ?T he Piano Player Explains H imself,? appeared in T he
Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected (1979-1991) (N ew Directions,
1991), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of his wife, Judith
Grossman.
Rober t H ass teaches in the English department at U C Berkeley. H is most
recent book is What Light Can Do (Ecco), a collection of essays.
Lyn H ejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. H er academic work is
addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and
poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social
practices they entail. H er most recent book is T he Unfollowing (O mnidawn
Books, 2016). O ther volumes include T he Book of a T housand Eyes(O mnidawn
Books, 2012) and T he Wide Road, written in collaboration with Carla
H arryman (Belladonna, 2010). And in fall 2013 Wesleyan republished her
best-known book, My Life, in an edition that includes her related work, My
Life in the Nineties. Wesleyan is also the publisher of A Guide to Poetics Journal:
Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital
Archive, both co-edited by H ejinian and Barrett Watten. She is currently the
co-director (with Travis O rtiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and
publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory
and Claire M arie Stancek) of N ion Editions, a chapbook press.
Janis Butler H olm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate
Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. H er prose, poems, and performance
pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. H er
sound poems have been featured in the inaugural edition of Best American
Experimental Writing, edited by Cole Swensen.
Y aul Perez- St able H usni lives, reads, and writes in San Francisco. H e
graduated from U C Berkeley in 2015 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature.
H is favorite words include "still," "of," and "perhaps."
M ichael Ives is a writer, musician, and sound/text performer whose poetry
and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and journals in the U nited
States and abroad. H e cofounded the sound/text performance trio, F?loom, in
1995. H e is the author of T he External Combustion Engine, (Futurepoem, 2005),
and wavetable, (forthcoming from Dr. Cicero Books) and has taught in the
Written Arts Program at Bard College since 2003.
M ajor Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Roll Deep
(N orton: 2015). A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the editor of the Library
of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. H e is the R ichard Dennis Green
& Gold Professor at the U niversity of Vermont.
291
M ary- Cather ine Jones was born and raised in the south and now divides her
time between working in M anhattan and raising a family in N ew H ampshire,
where she and her husband live on the Contoocook river with two children,
one dog, and seven chickens. H er poetry has appeared in Poetry International,
elimae, Cultural Society, Scapegoat Review, Z one 3 and others. H er photography
has been featured on N PR ?s All T hingsConsidered and TedX . She?s the founder
and director of the Datum:Earth reading series in Peterborough, N H , now in
its fifth year of programming.
L en K r isak's latest books (both translations) are Ovid's Erotic Poems and
Catullus's Carmina. W ith work in the Hudson, Sewanee, PN , Antioch, and
Southwest Reviews, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, R ichard
W ilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, and a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
K ayla K r ut is an M FA candidate at the H elen Z ell Writers' Program at the
U niversity of M ichigan. H er work has appeared most recently in Contemporary
Verse 2, White Stag, and American Chordata. www.kaylakrut.blogspot.com.
A nthony A . L ee, Ph.D., is a lecturer of history at U CLA and at West Los
Angeles College, specializing in African American history, African history,
and the African Diaspora in Iran. H e was awarded the N at Turner Poetry
Award (Cross Keys Press) for 2003. H e received the N aomi Long M adgett
Poetry Award (Lotus Press) for 2005, and the M erton Institute?s ?Poetry of the
Sacred? Award in 2012. H is first volume of poems, T his Poem Means (Lotus
Press), was published in 2005. H e collaborated with Jascha Kessler (U CLA)
and Amin Banani (U CLA) to translate the volume Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry:
Selected Poems of Qurratu?l-?Ayn (K alimt Press, 2005). H is translation with
Amin Banani, Rumi: 53 Secretsfrom the Tavern of Love: Poemsfrom the Rubiayat of
Mevlana Rumi (Islamic Encounter Series) is forthcoming (2014). H is poems
have been published in various journals in the U nited States and Europe,
including: ON THEBUS, Warpland, T he Homestead Review, Hrter, Beyond the
Valley of the Contemporary Poets: 2003 Anthology, and Knocking at the Door: Poems
about Approachingthe Other (Birch Bench Press, 2011).
K aren A n- hwei L ee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo
2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the N orma Farber First
Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God?s One Hundred Promises
(Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earnsfor a Living (Q uaci Press 2014). H er
book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary
Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the
Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M .F.A. from Brown
U niversity and Ph.D. in English from the U niversity of California, Berkeley.
T he recipient of a N ational Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting
member of the N ational Book Critics Circle.
M onica L ee was born in Seoul, Korea and has lived in California since 1979.
She has two daughters. Currently, she resides in Southern California.
D aniel W.K . L ee is a Seattle-based writer whose work has been seen in
various online and print publications. H e is also a cultural critic,
sex-relationship advice writer, and puppy-daddy to an insanely beautiful
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whippet puppy known formally as H is Lordship, the Earl Camden. Daniel and
Camden can be reached at strongplum@yahoo.com.
H enry Wei L eung is the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe
2012), and the recipient of Kundiman, Soros, Fulbright, and other fellowships.
H e is now at U H M anoa working toward a PhD.
Ben M azer was born in N ew York City in 1964, and was educated at
H arvard, where he studied with Seamus H eaney and W illiam Alfred, and at
the Editorial Institute, Boston U niversity, where his advisors were Christopher
R icks and Archie Burnett. H is most recent collections of poems are T he Glass
Piano (M adH at Press) and December Poems, out this spring from Pen & Anvil
Press. H e has recently edited a critical edition of T he Collected Poems of John
Crowe Ransom (U n-Gyve Press, 2015). H e also discovered the forgotten
Berkeley Renaissance poet, Landis Everson, and edited his Everything Preserved:
Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). H e lives in Cambridge,
M assachusetts, and is the Editor of T he Battersea Review.
Born in O ttawa, Canada?s glorious capital city, rob m clennan currently lives
in O ttawa. T he author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, he won the John N ewlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for
the Arts in O ttawa M id-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the
CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. H is most recent titles include notes and dispatches:
essays (Insomniac press, 2014), T he Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere
Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a
fragment(BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground
press, Chaudiere Books, T he Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/), Touch the Donkey
(touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the O ttawa poetry pdf annualottawater
(ottawater.com). H e spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the U niversity of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices atrobmclennan.blogspot.com
Corey M esler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals
including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and
Esquire/Narrative. H e has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5
full-length poetry collections. H is new novel, Memphis Movie, is from
Counterpoint Press. H e?s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 2
of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor?s Writer?s Almanac. W ith his
wife he runs a 145 year-old bookstore in M emphis. H e can be found at
https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.
D avid M offat is a writer and historian who works at T he H ouse of the Seven
Gables. H e studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at
Bucknell U niversity, and has published poetry in journals such as T he Berkeley
Poetry Review and Spillway. In 2015, he coauthored A Gracious Host: Visiting the
Gables through the Years, an exhibit and companion book on T he H ouse of the
Seven Gables as a tourist destination. H e has lectured locally on the lives and
work of Joseph Priestley, Samuel Johnson, N athaniel H awthorne, and Charles
Dickens, as well as the history of American U nitarianism. H e is a member of
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the Board of Directors for the Salem H istorical Society and the
Editor-in-Chief of the Essex Genealogist.
L aura M ullen is the author of eight books, most recently Complicated Grief.
Recognitions for her poetry include a N ational Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She lives and works in Louisiana.
Peter A dam N ash is the author of a recently published biography called T he
Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight and of a
novel called Parsimony, soon to be published by Fomite Press (2016).
Additionally, he has published poems and stories in Desideratum, T he Avalon
Literary Review, and T he Minetta Review. In 2012, he co-founded and now
writes a bi-weekly post for a literary blog called Talented Reader:
http://talentedreader.blogspot.com/. H e lives in N ew M exico with his wife
and two sons.
Born and schooled in Chicago, Gerald N icosia is a biographer, historian,
playwright, and novelist, whose work has been closely associated with the Beat
M ovement as well as the 1960?s. H e came to prominence with the publication
of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouacin 1983, a book that earned
him the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the N ational Society of Arts
and Letters while it was still a work-in-progress. It was highly praised by
writers as diverse as John Rechy, Irving Stone, W illiam Burroughs, Bruce
Cook, and Allen Ginsberg, who called it a ?great book.? N icosia spent several
decades in both the Chicago and San Francisco literary scenes, making a name
for himself as both a post-Beat poet himself and an organizer of marathon
literary events, often in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library and
the Friends of the Library. H e edited major poetry collections by both Bob
K aufman (Cranial Guitar) and Ted Joans (Teducation). H e was also involved in
several video and film projects, including the public television documentary
West Coast: Beat and Beyond, directed by Chris Felver, and the movie version of
On the Road, directed by Walter Salles. A lifelong friend of peace activist Ron
Kovic, N icosia spent decades studying, working with, and writing about
Vietnam veterans in their long process of healing from that war. H is definitive
work on that subject, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans?Movement,
was picked by the Los Angeles Times as one of the ?Best Books of 2001,? and
has been praised by notable Vietnam veterans like John Kerry and Oliver Stone
and also by veterans of America?s later wars, such as Anthony Swofford, author
of Jarhead, and leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War.
Among his other books on a Beat theme, he has published Jan Kerouac: A Life
in Memory and One and Only: the Untold Story of On the Road. H e has taught
Beat literature, the Sixties, and the Vietnam War literally around the world,
including in China, where he adopted his daughter Wu Ji. H is experiences in
China have found their way into a forthcoming book of poetry, Night Train to
Shanghai, which was published by Grizzly Peak Press in 2013. H e is also
working on a book about racism and the death penalty in America, Blackness
T hrough the Land, as well as a biography of N tozake Shange called Beautiful,
Colored, and Alive, which will be published by St. M artin?s Press. H e spoke at
the First International Beat Conference in the N etherlands, September 5-7,
294
2012; and more recently, he organized and M C-ed a marathon Beat poetry
reading at Bob Weir?s Sweetwater M usic H all in M ill Valley, California, on
January 8, 2013, which went on for almost four hours with over twenty poets
and musicians. In June 2009, he was given an Acker Award ?for avant-garde
excellence? in his writing.
L inda N or ton?s first book, T he Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed
Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny H owe) was a finalist for a LosAngelesTimes
Book Prize. She lives in O akland and works at the Bancroft Library at U C
Berkeley. In 2014 she received a Creative Work Fund grant and the Phillip
Dickey Fellowship from SFSU . T he poems published here are from a new
manuscript called Wite-Out. O ther work from the manuscript has appeared in
Z en Monster, Eleven Eleven, New American Writing, and is forthcoming in
Amerarcana, Hanging Loose, OccuPoetry, and Fourteen Hills. She appends the
following notes to her work in this issue:
?In M y Girlish Days?: ?All of my playmates is now surprised / I had to
travel before I got wise. / I didn?t know no better / Oh boy / In my
girlish days.? ? M emphis M innie.
?I eat men like air.? ? Sylvia Plath.
?Disambitious? ? John Berryman
Rober t Peake (English, ?99) is an American-born poet living near London.
H e created the Transatlantic Poetry series, bringing poets together from
around the world for live online poetry readings and conversations. H e also
collaborates with other artists on film-poems, and his work has been widely
screened in the U S and Europe. H is newest collection T he Knowledge is now
available from N ine Arches Press.
D . A . Powell is the Tin H ouse Writer-in-Residence at Portland State
U niversity and a 2016 Civitella R anieri fellow in Italy. H is most recent books
are Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and UselessLandscape, or A Guide for Boys(Graywolf,
2012), recipient of the N ational Book Critics Circle award in Poetry.
Born in M iami, Florida, M ax Goudie Pujals earned his B.A. in English at
U niversity of California Berkeley in 2013 where he took an interest in
translating Spanish Caribbean poems hoping to improve the perception of
writers who are important to the education of American immigrant culture.
H is experiments in inversions of form take their cue from attempts to invoke
art with the same energy as nature. H e has gone on to direct his writing to
communities of cooperative farmers in Latin America.
A ndrew R eyes likes grammar and etymology. H e has a B.A. in Comparative
Literature and Philosophy from U C Berkeley, which perhaps helps qualify him
for his current job of teaching English and Spanish things to kids in his
hometown of Chino, CA.
295
M argaret R hee is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and
Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015).
Literary fellowships include positions as a Kundiman Fellow, Squaw Valley
Poetry Fellow, and the K athy Acker Fellow at Les Figues Press. She holds a
Ph.D. from U C Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies, and a BA in
creative writing and English from the U niversity of Southern California.
Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor in Women and Gender Studies
Department at the U niversity of O regon. A portion of ?T he U niversity
Dreams? appeared as ?Lecture Poems? in the June 2013 issue of comma, poetry.
A ndrew R idker is the editor of Privacy Policy: T he Anthology of Surveillance
Poetics. H is work has appeared in Guernica, Boston Review, T he Believer Logger,
St. LouisMagazine, SmokeLongQuarterly, and elsewhere.
At fourteen, L ar ry Ruth and a friend set out from Yosemite and hiked the
John M uir Trail. T hey spent the last night on M ount Whitney in a snowstorm
in July. Larry now works as consultant in natural resource and environmental
policy. For many years he taught, conducted research and handled
programmatic responsibilities at the U niversity of California. Recent research
focuses on wildland fire, environmental assessment and the sustainability of
natural resources and ecosystems. Publications include articles of federal
wildland fire policy, ecosystem management, forest policy in the Sierra
N evada, and adaptive management.
A aron Shur in is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the M FA
program at the U niversity of San Francisco. H e is the author of more than a
dozen books, including T he Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks
(U niversity of M ichigan, 2016) andCitizen (City Lights, 2011). H is honors
include the Gertrude Stein Award, the Bay Area Art Award, the Gerbode
Poetry Award, and fellowships from the N ational Endowment for the Arts and
the California Arts Council.
A lex Tait ague is a poet and resident of the East Bay who graduated from U C
Berkeley in 2013. T hough continuing to write, he now works in San
Francisco in the field of advertising and analysis and enjoys working with the
precision of numbers that writing often eludes.
M ark Tardi is the author of the books Euclid Shudders and Airport music. A
former Fulbright scholar, he earned his M FA from Brown U niversity.
Previously on faculty at the Department of American Literature and Culture at
the U niversity of Lodz, Poland, he is currently a lecturer in the Department of
Foreign Languages at the U niversity of N izwa, O man. H is newest book, T he
Circusof Trust, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2017.
Bryce T hor nburg is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. H e
currently teaches creative writing at the U niversity of Iowa.
T EE K im Tong [Z hang Jinzhong in pinyin romanization system] has
published a number of fiction and non-fiction books in the Chinese language.
H e lives in K aohsiung, Taiwan RO C, where he teaches at the N ational Sun
Yat-sen U niversity and directs the Center for the H umanities.
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Front cover:
Back cover:
Bil Paul
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