Ariel Resnikoff: A New Poem from �Avoidances,� with author�s note & commentary

[Ariel Resnikoff is best known at this point for his translations from the Yiddish poetry of Mikhl Likht & others, but with �Avoidances� he clearly sets out as a composer of poems in his own right & in a line as well with other poets with whom he shares a name.  His Likht translations & his writings on Likht & Zukofsky have appeared several times on Poems and Poetics, & he has been resident since last September in the doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, where his good works continue. (J.R.)]

Teachings of the Magic Kohl-Rabi

: Aleph

No place

                        but

  constellation;

psephos matter�

ambient                             constant            

 tentative            suspension

�a substance fixed. For            

fluent thought

it orders 

chaos into things

the magic Kohl-Rabi speaks:

 ex          |             peri       |             ment

from danger in

-to experience.

& the question of not

whether it is 

or isn�t 

but if you can see by it.

The glowing speech made

a sea

-faring people

go blind

from  Ellis Island  

to Palestine   

out of necessity

by law of broken mirror 

made all things true

we can-not read

to

babel.

: Beys

Still or text

or local

or imported

exported

four or five 

oil sketches

on paper

leaving Athens. Those

copies

of reproductions

were the �tr� b/w

ship & water

�s language

facsimile:

fat chance.

My avoidance

says the Kohl

shall be  

              

the cut.

: Giml

4 breads,

4 ways  

               I�m fed 

                             

                              -- the thick, coarse

lower stuff

in upper foods called 

forward --  

                              thinner than

thin.

Grinded ash (from gold)

thrown in 

w/ holy 

                              water 

raised

my body 

drunk on bullion  

               dust.   

5 Prepositions 

1 present aim

�s to avoid

the fork�s

language

wants  

weird

what it asks

                              for

language

 breaks

a

part

 

things it forgets

in memory

               or

basic utterance

2 actions

in circle I

changed  

by hand

coordinations

my mouth &

doubled me

3 me�s

I I am am  

 speeching

uncovered

stabbed on the gold

-en prongs 

my presence

entails

4 lives tell

in skin

blood

bone

asking, demanding

ordering

5 gates

from simple

to most

vague statements

command   

a past

-future

body for

bidding

open-closed

exits on

each

(end) 

[author�s note.  The title of the cycle, Avoidances, has multiple connotations across English-Yinglish-Yiddish-Hebrew. In English, "avoiding" solidity, conclusion, paraphrase; producing meaning which does not close on itself but opens outward onto multiple potentials; the avoid-dance of never settling on both feet at once for very long. In this way, I'm interested also in a legacy of nomadic poetry, both modern Jewish & pre-islamic Qasida, which is always on the move, tho not linearly, but, rather, by a process of encircling. In Hebrew "Avoda"; in Yinglish & Yiddish, "Avoyda": understood in modern terms as "work" either in the external world or on the internal self; in the ancient context, Avo(y)da as sacrifice, a ceremony of giving away something precious to God. Also associated with "avo(y)da-zara" or idol worship: sacrifice to the wrong source. Avoidances as a process of vast & contradictory containment, multilingual meaning, which is constantly pivoting toward plurality.

The Magic Kohl-Rabi, whose teachings begin the cycle & reappear thru-out,  also crosses a number of language/meaning boundaries. From a Germanic standpoint, a "Cabbage-Turnip" vegetable; From a Hebraic vantage, the Kohl (=voice) of the Rabi (=Rabbi, sage, elder). The idea of playing on the name came first from my glee at stumbling upon the kabbalistically-infused artichoke & emerald lettuces of Duncan's "What Do I Know of the Old Lore." I find something extremely exciting & powerful in Duncan's ability to attach spiritual/mythic potency to things as banal, but also, as essential, as garden vegetables.  The Kohlrabi is a favorite among the group of poets I spent time with in Israel/Palestine, especially the American Hebrew poet, Harold Schimmel, who ceremoniously prepares & eats it daily & would often comment to me about its unique characteristics. The most important aspect of the Kohlrabi for Schimmel (who, at times, speaks thru the MK"R in the poems) is that the vegetable is a root that takes on visible scars when it is cut from the ground. Its skin tells a story then, (the first taste is with your eyes!) of a cut, thru the strange & beautiful scarring patterns that manifest. The poems in Avoidances are all dealing in some way with the implications of "cutting" -- from place, history, language, etc. -- & the multifarious ways these cuttings become scarred (or scored). The Magic Kohl-Rabi is the muse of the cut: not a singular voice but a constellation of teachings which speaks to the poetics & aesthetics of dis-location. (A.R.)]

Poems for the Millennium, Volume 5: Barbaric Vast & Wild, now published & available from Black Widow Press

POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM, VOLUME 5: Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present
Edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman

Barbaric Vast & Wild is a continuation and a possible culmination of the project that began with Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 and led to the first four volumes of Poems for the Millennium in the 1990s and 2000s. In this new and equally groundbreaking volume, Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman have assembled a wide-ranging gathering of poems and related language works, whose outside/outsider and subterranean/subversive positions challenge some of the boundaries to where poetry has been or may be practiced, as well as the form and substance of the poetry itself. It also extends the time frame of the preceding volumes in Poems for the Millennium, hoping to show that, in all places and times, what the dominant culture has taken as poetry has only been part of the story.

Divided into four "books" - Visions, Voices, Extensions, and Performance - Barbaric Vast & Wild brings together on a global and historical scale - from the paleolithic caves to the immediate present - works from the hieratic and sacred to the mundane and the radically transgressive and politically subversive. The range here is enormous: Egyptian pyramid texts, biblical prophecies, pre-Socratic poet-philosophers, Buddhist wanderers and "divine madmen," along with poems and related language works from dialects and "nation languages," thieves' cants and other argots or vernaculars, working class and lumpen poetries, popular and newspaper poetry, sermons and rants, glossolalia and glossographia, slogans, graffiti, private writings (journals and diaries) or semi-private (correspondence, blogs, or social-networkings), and the "art of the insane" (Art Brut) that marked the early turning of avant-garde artists and poets to the idea of an "outside" poetry and art.  The work as a whole may be taken as another step toward what the editors have called an �omnipoetics� and an �anthology of everything.�

Writes Charles Bernstein of this latest addition to Poems for the Millennium:

"Bararic Vast and Wild is the crowning jewel of the Poems for the Millennium series, just that it proposes a deep othering of the entire project, a movement beyond the radically reconceived visionary canon of poetic invention to an unchartered realm beyond any literary canon formation, from Blake's chartered streets to something that proposes a reimaging of the literary in its re-grounding in the uncharted. � The fact is that the mad eclecticism of this anthology is its greatest virtue - it moves in leaps and bounds, like Nijinsky on peyote. It defies any category previously existing and yet as a reader I feel I get it, get it again, and get it over and again, as I am pulled in different directions. In a way, this book works, even more than Rothenberg's other anthologies, as an epic poem - along the lines of a work, as Walter Benjamin imagined, composed just of quotations. The constellation - or set of constellations - is stunning and unexpected - the connections are themselves visionary or outside rational historical plotting. What this does is to make a book magically readable - not a text book, not a succession of cultural touchstones you "ought" to know, but an autonomous reading experience that changes everything page by page.

And Michael Davidson:

"Rothenberg, and his co-editor, John Bloomberg-Rissman, now turn their attention to poets who may not have thought of themselves as poets, poems that blur into image and calligraphy, texts that aspire to the condition of disappearance. Various terms for such work come to mind-avant garde, art brut, outsider art, "folk" poetry, "subterranean." � By bringing together texts from heretical religious traditions, inhabitants of mental institutions, folk or isolated cultures and placing them alongside poetry by more canonical poets who were themselves at times estranged or mad makes for a much more diverse, complex way of looking at the meaning of "outsider" art."

ISBN: 978-0-9960079-9-3

Black Widow Press
470 pages
Publication date: March 25, 2015
Best discount price at amazon.com:$24.92 

John Martone: from "children�s book" 2014

[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns).  For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write.  It�s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, a minimal work like Finlay's of epic proportions, for which the following can serve as a yet another instance & perhaps (as �children�s book�) a new direction for his ongoing practice.  (J.R.)] 

my morning

a mouse nest

 

mouse-hole

holding

a mind
 

 

 

2 joints of yr

little finger

house mouse
 

 

house mouse �

my thalamus?

amygdala? 
 

 

house mouse

it�s always a children�s book 
 

 

two mice dead of fear in yr live trap
 

 

weak-eyed

feel our way along the wall

mouse & me 

~ 

little worms

in the brightness

eye�s floaters
 

 

 

out of touch

lie down

in snow 

 

suddenly feeling the river below the ice 
 

 

frost-shattered

stone's
a puzzle

knocking the snow
from your boots
no one's home

 

~

in layers

of winter clothes look up

at night geese

 

 

first time

for some

night geese

 

 

night geese

interrupt

a children�s book 

 

night geese

the horizon

passes overhead 

 

night geese

someone slips

on black ice

 

night geese

the old

keep up

 

David Matlin: Excerpt from a Novel-in-Progress

[�The following excerpt is from the final novel of a trilogy which includes the previously published How the Night Is Dividedand  A HalfMan Dreaming.  It is part of an on-going experiment in the Southern California rural dialect I grew up with among not only Jewish ranchers and farmers but a larger community of diverse backgrounds.  Much of the narrative includes multiple portraits of land, water, and a world, for the most part, that has disappeared.�  (D.M.)]

The Kiowa decided his eyes were still good; for seeing, he guessed. He was, though, hand and foot sore, those ends of his body ready for a sling. As for his prick and balls, the fleas had not stopped coming to wake them. And as the sun shone over the world he wondered how to take this son of his friends home.

            They were traveling. Is that the way it is supposed to be written and said? They were traveling and the Kiowa saw far ahead. There were hills that became mountains and mountains that became hills in the thinning darkness. Make the daylight come quickly except for when the Stories are told. Then may the night last long for laughter and miracles, a little mud to make existence, a little quarreling to set existence to breathing; some incest, some cannibalism. Let them swim too in an ocean of riddles.

            They were living � and where?  �There�  -  �Here�  -  �A ways over yonder hills�  -  Near and more Near  -  as Near as the smell of rivers and river fruit. Is that the way to continue a Story. Keep it a step ahead of Evil and how Evil smells and licks the same water, the same flesh impatient to shed its Light so like Light itself washing over the land and sea?

            Tom Green remembered the photography of a fellow Kiowa as the sun began to penetrate a morning full of owl and bat shadow. He�d driven Wesley to the western edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle and wanted to see the silhouette of Black Mesa, Oklahoma�s highest peak at nearly five thousand feet. Not huge as the Waterer knew, but still, he longed for the Jurassic stain of the surrounding soils and the one hundred eighty million year old tongue of lava that had been tasting this section of the world and its appearances steadily as the uncharted nothingness that preens and grows the more men unknowingly swear by it.

            He wandered into this place with its canyons and petroglyphs on his way to California; stood in the tracks of an Allosaur wondering what his Kiowa and Comanche relatives thought of these signatures, whether the most astute warrior/dreamers smelled these faraway creatures buried in the near rock layers as they scouted this huge segment of landscape where the Rocky Mountains slide down into the Short Grass Plains and those horizons that, offering neither mind nor eye companionable poverty and riches, offer instead a kind of beautiful gnawing abyss that swallows the breath that holds time, the breath holding him and this dinosaur, both of them  perhaps overdressed in their skins. Call it beauty or fashion as is a creature�s want, and alternatively, as the Farmer might have said, genetics taking an affluent turn for the refreshment of its labors and wit. The Kiowa wanted also to see the flow of land from that promontory fanning down from the Sangre de Christos, the face of the grasslands southern haunches sprung by aromatic first spring winds and their press against the face, the eyelids and lips become wind pasturage and the inheritance of bone underneath until that be the only speech a human holds underfoot and then walks it with whatever incompetence and restlessness allows, truly, and listening for the sway of grassheads tumbling and serious, bee-like in their oldest vocations. An unbashful neighbor of Death, Tom Green said of it, the wind-grass, and the more bashful neighbors of Life joined to the acquaintances of bird claw and flower, snowstorms and wolf breath as its welling currents plunge and belong and destroy.

            Get up there too and think about Horace Poolaw, the Kiowa photographer. He often, while having lunch at the Farmer�s house, particularly during Southern California spring rains when work meant welding, taking engines apart, helping neighbors, fixing leaky roofs, replacing dead pumps; the tide of chores, which, if one strayed too far from them, water broke, as it might, not as a woman possessed by her time and its wonders, but sprig-by-sprig uncharted wreckage taken root, as the Farmer considered it, pitifully and without simple notice. There were, as always, piles of books on tables and chairs; some of them collections of photographs. Wesley�s mother had a particular respect for two women who made of that art �a secret dress pocket� as she said, and be careful about the ways your hand wanders down there; it was to her the equivalent of sticking your fingers in an old coastal shell heap and touching the shoals of trouble whether despondent or propitious of those inheritances which give tread to imagination. Neither in her mind escaped the divinations of strife and its long body she thought these pictures courted without mercy and yet standing tall in a garden ready to seed. Both women, she thought, had some sort of ice in their eyes.

            One was Margaret Bourke-White. The Kiowa looked through these books while the Farmer�s wife prepared mid-day stews and chili. There were pictures of families and fruit sellers in Russiaand Eastern Europe. People who didn�t have a lot and were not afraid not to have what they didn�t have. You could see it in the way they held their noses, breathe the air coming to them stingily not expecting more of it nor to escape it as if theirs were a late-in-a-day corner with no surprises, the wonders spent and gone missing, but still some sweet herbs to pick for the hidden aromas however lean each will be.

            There was an Okefenokee woman. Thirty-five probably. Behind her right shoulder hangs a strange picture of, what is it, a grandmother from the 1850s with a high collared dress and face proportioned by a still alive dignity, eyes stout with business-like humor that comes with her survival, the mouth hospitable but resolute as a deep rooted weed, her beauty not fancy yet holding its ground ably though children will come and will die. A crumpling chest-of-drawers and frayed pine siding form a natural backdrop of split and bunched shadows for what the Kiowa thought was the grand-daughter who looks at her latest suckling infant as one who stares down a frost killed field, knowing the dull unbroken pity of it and that each day after it will rob the tomorrows no matter the deep enough tenderness with which she cradles her child. Her cotton dress has large white lapels set off by a thick over-all flower pattern. Her left breast is exposed for the child who rests in the crook of her left arm and tastes of what milk her body will offer whether for this day or the next no one can estimate. Her face has dried up long before her breasts. A woman, once, not unhandsome, given to carrying her body easily, and, long before, maybe, an ample dancer loving those thimble-fulls of air by which the feet are awakened. She is now, though, a spare castaway who can entertain little, even of despair and its meager composures. And yet the picture is frank in its full-of-cares distinction. A woman feeding her child of her own body, unafraid to belong to its nearing starvations, to the land of it and its oldest rules.

            As he drove he looked at his friend�s son�s ankles and recalled Bourke-White�s photos of a place called �Hood�s Chapel Georgia.� No town in the pictures he examined but there was a row of trees and a row of prisoners in a ditch digging toward those trees and the ugly horizon of an empty sky. A man stands above the line of men squeezed into their single file of pure brooding weariness and goddamned if they didn�t wear about the same stripped clothes as the �inmates� he saw in that place called �Buchenwald.� The �overseer� stands over them like some sort of well oiled pumpkin, a shot-gun hung over his left shoulder, no decoration, no air, and him, he stands over that cruelty like it is some sort of fine parade he�s figured out, can aim that cannon, and without fluttering the trigger, introduce his own sweetest blooms of violence to his parish of sun-stroked exiles. One of the photographs is a close-up of boots scoured by the furnace of hostilities feeding upon them. The legs above the boot line are covered with prison stripped leggings. The cloth loathsomely wrinkled and sweat rotted with the slow, crushing hours has the stamp of the Grand Tour of Dread the world covets as if it were a mother lode. Each leg is shackled choke tight from ankle to just below knee. What is not noosed by steel is noosed thick by leather calf restraints cinched to a just before maiming of vein and skin. Each man�s legs wreathed and suffocated with slave gear were a bottleneck, the Kiowa guessed, where a God goes in young at the entrance and at the exit comes out inconceivably heavy with the starvations that crush Gods and their offspring into villainous stubs. In one picture two legs from separate bodies are belted together. There is no use in improving the pain, no need for a face to disturb the stillness of ratcheted fatigue and misery. There is a spoon pushed through what appears to be an extra leather loop. It is shiny with being licked, licked hard by human tongues, bare ribbed spit making the little metal trough some famine snare, running late or early, it doesn�t matter.

[note.  As a poet & novelist, as well as in his groundbreaking study of America�s prisons (Prisons: Inside the New America), Matlin gives us a political/mental/visceral mapping of the fate of America, its people, & the other worlds on which it has impinged in the course of our lifetimes.  In his work, then & now, he displays the poetry/history combine that marks the best side of American writing in whatever form it takes.  In an early description of that work Robert Creeley wrote of Matlin�s prowess & promise: �Unremitting particular powers of the human long before it got lost in the junk�where a bird can still sing it.�  And Charles Stein, going still further: �Matlin's work is not a comfortable �read��in fact it is not a �read� at all�but an initiation, possibly, into the predatory condition of one's own vitality. It is a poetry that bears witness to the occluded stain of violence across American life, local and historical; its means are an ear that is tense and accurate, and an attention, particular, conscientious, and cleansing.�  The proof by now is overwhelming. (J.R.)]

 

Jerome Rothenberg: At Huidobro�s Tomb, a Recollection & Lament

                        open this tomb

                        at the bottom of the tomb

                        you will find the sea           

at Huidobro�s tomb

the dirt lies

scattered    beer cans

from a later time

& tiny bones,

half chewed,

the sad detritus

of a world

still not created,

where the stones

under our feet

carry the stains

not from the century

before us

nor looking at it

from across the bay

the bright electric signals

Parra saw

but as we face it now

the sea still there

beneath it

helpless to stop

the spectators who piss

onto its stones

Huidobro�s tomb

receptacle for what

was long forgotten  

a white spot

on a hill of green

beset by grime

the birds that fly

backwards from where

Neruda rests

where overhead the cross

hangs in the sky

unseen* by us                                   * unclaimed

huidobro�s tomb

the place to fly

to land among

the mindless

sightless dancers    

without eyes or limbs

broken bottles

everywhere we turn

the diamond

in your dreams

cracked open

in  a mindless sea

the sound

of distant crowds

marching to join us

Huidobro�s tomb

a lonely outpost

over the void

like a dot

that blossoms

neither good

nor evil

true or beautiful

or left in place

lonely & lost

Huidobro�s ghost

arises from his tomb

& looking down

sees nothing

but a field on Mars

28.ii.15

note. 18.xi.2004.  We had first been visiting with Nicanor Parra, from whose house we looked across the water to Huidobro�s tomb in Cartagena.  The grave there appeared as a white spot set against the green hills in the background.  All of this seemed almost pastoral & truly fitting for a great poet's gravesite, but when we drove there shortly after, the scene we found was one of desolation � devastation really � with beer cans & other debris from local partiers & small stones kicked & scattered under foot.  It was something I didn�t write about then, though the image pained & stuck with me, so that the poem I should have written earlier has just now happened.  (J.R.)

Mark Weiss: "Different Stories" from "As Luck Would Have It" (Shearsman Books)

[The following is from Mark Weiss�s long awaited & very welcome new book, As Luck Would Have It, from Shearsman Books in the UK.  Comments by Ron Silliman & Peter Manson appear beneath the poem � a further tribute to Weiss�s presence & prowess in a new American poetry & poetics.]

1

The man who lives in boring times

bucket by bucket moves a mountain.

Wedded to the trajectory,

a collection of shattered lenses,

a matrix of rituals.

Man, or machete.

A catalogue of expectations.

Cutlass, for instance,

the brute violence of the toolshed

become a scimitar in the hands of pirates.

2

On the subway platform the girl sways

to invisible music.

Maybe she�s gone to the islands.

Different stories.

I knew a girl whose childhood

was her mother�s experiment

in elective surgeries to make her

�beautiful,� new nose, new eyelids,

as the world sees it.

Except that she�d refused the last experiment.

A different story. And what became

of all that perfection,

that one defiance,

that vote for symmetry.

3

Failure to make circles.

Old age, as the young man assured me,

is a state of mind.

In the order of things

there will be fire.

Ownership of islands will be swept by the sound

and all these wetlands.

This has been home

and this has been home

and this has been home.

Much of what you plan for

won�t happen, and what does

you�ll be unprepared for.

Following beasts,

elk and elephant providing wisdom.

�Where grass is good

there will be meat.�

�Salt is aggressive

and rises to water.�

4

Mist

and mystery

in the English

idiom, math

and mastery

in the physics of war.

5

A nice day,

flaxen girl in flat sandals licks

a cone of white ice cream

and strides through the park.

Strides through the park in flat sandals

licking a cone of white ice cream.

So nice a day. She eats

white ice cream.

Oh custard.

Oh sugarplum.

6

A Mayan woman with her Mayan children

at the Delacort fountain.

Hard to imagine a beauty more divorced

from that belle �poque fragility, she

recalling blood and viscera.

But her children

will speak the local dialect.

7

A tendency to swallow whole when excited

(a tendency to excitement)

but masticate, grind,

that the chestnut not

become the death of you. Chew

as if your life

depended on it.

Time enough for the visible world

beyond the restaurant.

8

In his will he endowed a fund

to feed a homeless person once a year

the finest, most expensive,

and record

the recipient�s despair

thereafter.

9

Gleaning the last of an insufficient harvest, he

chops down the final bit of scrub so that his child

will have warm food. Who knows

what luck might bring

to keep them for another day.

First worry,

then despair.

Maybe the last

of insect or mammal

will descend upon them.

Where blond means enough to eat

and brunette not so much.

10

So it turns out

that we�re not the answer

to the dreams of centuries.

Lope of the hunter from field to forest.

�We have adapted wheat to grow on clouds

and grain to fall like rain.�

Laughed, then died, and the living

guess at the joke.

* * *

some comments on mark Weiss and as luck would have it

�This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life�s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world.�

�Ron Silliman

�From point and line to jetplane, �The line articulated / so as to express volume�. In As Luck Would Have It, Mark Weiss plots the trajectory of a life lived between moments relished by the hungriest eye in the language. A rueful, funny and tolerant take on the self allows the wide world in, always in search of the strangeness in seemingly-familiar things, and on guard against the human capacity to dehumanise (April always was the cruellest kid). It�s a trip worth taking, where every flight is a kind of homecoming, the darkness seasoned with sauce enough to carry us through.� 

�Peter Manson

[Order from the usual suspects, on both sides of the Atlantic, or from Shearsman.com.]