[these listener’s notes were first published in GUEST 20/Yellow Field 12, November 2021]
These notes intend merely to notify readers of this memorial reception for Anne Blonstein [1958-2011], held (belatedly, due to Covid) to mark the safekeeping of her archive in the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo, where its original ordering has been preserved and its contents described. The symposium was entitled “to be continued,” also the name of one of Blonstein’s collections (Shearsman, 2011), and held on Thursday, March 11th, 2021; it was opened by curator James Maynard, followed by a warm introduction by the poet’s brother, Steven Blonstein.
I hadn’t planned to take any “listener’s notes” but as the forum progressed, I found myself compelled to. Anne was lucky enough to have a cohort of friends concerned for the life of her writing—Charles Lock, Pat King, and (though they never met) Maria Cecilia Holt. These three took care to preserve and safeguard their friend’s meticulously-kept archive, eventually transferring its entirety to a home where it can be cared for and accessed continually. And because these notes were unplanned, I lack commentary on the remarks given by Anne’s dear friend Charles Lock, and can only piece together, for example, when he cited Diana Collecott’s comment that AB wrote to her how she wanted language like a virus to join at the molecular level of the poem; or how Collecott asked: “Who else but she would know this better?”—as AB had trained in plant genetics; how Blonstein worked as descriptively by nucleic contrascription as she did through Notarikon. I offer these notes as compelling evidence of what has been continued—or is yet to be.
PANEL 1
Diana Collecott | Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Jerome RothenbergDC: AB was interested in H.D.’s word play; it perhaps influenced her poemcards, always meticulously typed and dated. DC’s copy of Hairpin Loop is inscribed by AB: “the botany of memories.” DC focuses on a poem from one of these poemcards, revised for book publication: the remove to 3rd person, thus becoming more ambiguous—a postmodern sonnet! These revisions seem in favor of more sonic operations and a helical moving of meaning.
RBD: Introduced by DC to AB. They met in person at a conference in Germany in 2005, and enjoyed an intense, sporadic correspondence. AB herself was intense, learned, and project-oriented; also elusive, and private. Mina Loy and Paul Celan were influences. Scholarly & witty, she found clarity around definitions. The two shared interests in seriality, Feminism, Jewishness (AB more so than RBD), Celan, and snakes. They were explaining themselves to one another, and to themselves, as epistolary friends. They shared also an interest in models of textual generation.
For example, in Notarikon—RBD wouldn’t try to define it, but it’s really interesting to try to define! RBD links or likens the “no” in Notarikon to three “no”s in AB’s work. For one, there is the minority stance of a Jewish claiming of religiosity against the Christian idiom of most poetries in English (European and American). Secondly, No also relates to Celan and Shakespeare, both of whom AB worked into her Notarikon, continuing the chain of language experimentation begun by them, approaching a secular specularity. Thirdly, the woman in culture: “I’m nobody—” and our culture’s refusal of the difficulty of women artists, including those in the Jewish tradition. AB answered to these cultural facts, reconstructing Jewish thought and culture, which of course Nazism had tried to destroy… The phrase “dynamic junction” among texts is something AB wrote to RBD; also: “I am a post-Holocaust writer.” What she left us, without her presence, is her thinking through these poems. RBD notes how she misses her solitary, driving ambition.
JR and AB were in touch briefly, near the end of her life, though he was not aware this was going to be the end for her. JR had undertaken poetry writing practices close to her Notarikon, and saw her in a tradition of Mallarmé, Jackson Mac Low, Oulipo, and Fluxus… JR first read her in the Infinite Difference anthology [subtitled Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter (Shearsman 2010)]. As compliment to AB’s work, JR reads from his own work using Gematria; usually one-word texts in which the numerical and logical values are identical…
[Q&A]
Alison Fraser commented on the vast materials in AB’s archive: notebooks, diaries, travel notebooks, juvenilia; how notebooks seem essential to how AB worked, and also serve to show her method of composition. AB’s process is also revealed through private conversations—not only in printed-out emails, but in cocktail recipes, ticket stubs, notes on Egyptian magic… and especially in letters to her mother.
James Maynard commented on AB’s poems as a type of experiment, carefully documented in her notebooks, as though a laboratory methodology.
Charles Lock commented on AB’s personal Notarikon: “this is merely the ABC of AB.”
PANEL 2
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne | Elma HoffmanJWB first met AB at a conference, also attended by Luce Irigaray, on medieval women—medieval women as hidden from our contemporary vantage by today’s views. Most of the women discussed (and subsequently included in AB’s poems) were not included in canonical works about holy women, like Juliana of Mount-Cornillon and Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles. Juliana had a vision of the eucharist as a moon, signaling that there should be a feast day for the eucharist, now known as the Feast of Corpus Christi. This was incorporated by some churches, and eventually adopted into the calendar, but with a new writing of the office by Thomas Aquinas, which helped to obscure Juliana from our current view. AB’s piece mixes Juliana’s mass and Juliana’s life into one text. Her life is sometimes silent, being partially unknown to us… JWN suggests that AB’s poem is itself a type of “office.” Also of note, AB’s the butterflies and the burnings (Dusie Press, 2009), which JWB sees as akin to Christine de Pizan’s The Book of City of Ladies.
EH: the butterflies and the burnings restores agency to martyrs through their bodies: through their abilities to touch, to hear, to suffer… There is no pattern to who AB has chosen; most are women, though not all. She also included holy people not yet canonized: a communion of saints, not emphasizing canonization but works. The texts live outside the Church, the way many women were outside of Latin learning (using scribes or amanuenses). The church has no control over martyrdom, even if it controls who is considered a martyr. AB is making her own scheme; she restores the personhood of the figures, reversing the exaltation of spirit over body.
PERFORMANCE
An excerpt from a recording of canthus to canthus, a collaboration between Anne Blonstein and composer Mela Meierhans, was played. This is a score of 16 text fragments AB sent, day by day, to Mela, who later gathered them into a collection. Canthus—sounding like “canto,” Charles Lock notes—is the word for the corner of the eye.
PANEL 3
Leslie Morris | Marina Camboni | Maria Damon | Andre FurlaniLeslie Morris discusses poems AB wrote for her and her wife while LM was in a coma from an autoimmune reaction that occurred just after learning that her father was not an only child, but one of seven… having been only one of two siblings to survive the Holocaust. These poems were collected in Correspondence with Nobody (Ellectrique Press, 2008). These words will hopefully help her to one day know her own coma.
Marina Camboni: Start with a consideration—the enmeshing of the personal and the poetic. This was a part of her friendship with AB. They hiked and talked in the Swiss mountains. There’s a link here to Rosalyn Franklin, another female geneticist who died from ovarian cancer. Diffraction; transposition—these refer to scientific discoveries, discoveries by scientific women: Franklin; and Barbara McClintock, “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements.” These scientific processes are identifiable in AB’s poetry. For example, “Poem from Rahel Varnhagen’s Chin, 1995,” dedicated to Else Lasker-Schuler. DC reads the poem…
The “Silkworm DNA project” was a lengthy study AB was working on at the time of her death, which included a focus on women’s labor history, using the DNA structure of silk to generate the structure of the poem. Maria Damon decided to weave a piece based on this DNA sequence, or rather, that of the silkworm, as tribute… To do so, MD color-coded 4 nucleotides, using these as the weft; a fine white silk served as warp. AB and MD had talked a lot about text and textile as nexus between materials and language. The sequence for silkworm goes on for 4 pages, with no discernible pattern to fall back on. (MD joshes that she didn’t want to cause any “genetic mutations” in the textile!) MD shows beautiful slides of the weaving; after the first sequence, she began to play with the colors. She has left the weft sequence hanging and unfinished, in honor of AB’s unfinished project… MD plans to give this textile work to the Poetry Collection—whenever she can come see what is in the archive from AB’s unfinished silk project, and put these works together.
Andre Furlani runs through the “nexial discourse” of AB’s poetry [a phrase from Kathrin Schaeppi, if I have that right], situating it among contemporaries, as well as noting its Kabbalistic significance. Celan; Notarikon; “kabbalistic malpractice” [Jerry Rothenberg]; continuing a chain of inventions Celan and Shakespeare began. Also noted: LEXSY cells à particles that only function when attached to a stem! First, parts of Celan’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into German; a reference again about virus DNA from a letter to Diane Collecott; John Berryman’s taking of Wyatt’s freely translated Petrarch à an unlikely similarity; Mac Low’s “Blessed Chants”; making nouns into verbs; these very experiments paralleled in Berryman. Even as we find this form of poetry “recalcitrant,” it has a tradition: particularly, a sonnet tradition. AF is struck by these terms from genetics that MC pointed to, like “diffraction”: to break something into pieces, such as a beam of light at the edge of an opaque body… like AB’s work, as breaking against this (perhaps male) recalcitrant body… the way sound waves might also have to break against a shore. AB asks the reader to do this; as everyone has done today, diffracting around AB’s poems.
PERFORMANCE OF RECORDINGS OF ANNE BLONSTEIN READING (FROM
THE ARCHIVE OF THE NOW)[Her intonation] [Her spacing] [Her echoes, either moving within, or outward…] “how to reconnect oracle / and still song…” “there is no arriving // there / is only / paths…” [breaks as interpreted by this listener]
As Charles Lock states in his closing remarks, this is not only an occasion for grief, but an initiation of a critical reception; also, it is finally releasing him to his own “disinterested rereading” of AB’s work, without grief and the weight of guilt… There are 9 unpublished collections in her archive. Charles names the presses who invested in her work while she lived. He also announces the establishment of a fund in her memory. “Here’s to new publications and new conversation,” he toasts, reminding everyone that Anne loved a good drink—so raise a glass!
[to see the holdings of the Anne Blonstein Collection at the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, visit: https://findingaids.lib.buffalo.edu/repositories/3/resources/747]
