Edric Mesmer : A Listener's Notes from the Anne Blonstein Virtual Symposium

 

 

 

 

 

[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 Rothenberg

DC: 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 3^rd 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 Hoffman 

JWB 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 Furlani 

Leslie 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]

 

 

 

 

 

Edric Mesmer edits Among the Neighbors, a pamphlet series on little magazines published by the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, where he works as a cataloging librarian—To subscribe to the series, just send him an email! His book, POEMS: now & then, is out from BlazeVOX [books].

Edric Mesmer : KAFKA | KAFKAESQUE

Our Animal, Meredith Stricker
Omnidawn, 2016 

Flash Mob, Lori Anderson Moseman

Spuyten Duyvil, 2016

Trumpl’oeil, Tyrone Williams

Hostile Books, 2017 

Tray, Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Make Now, 2017

 

 

“On or about [2016-17] [thinking about] human nature changed”…at least here in the U.S.

And while the coronavirus and the pandemic that ensued had yet to be encountered, pandemics infusing the social, political, historical, and bodily well-being—like miasmas—became undeniably visible, if not acknowledged hence. Around then, I’d been trying to bring together a 12th issue of Yellow Field, and, while intended to be the last, I suddenly felt a complete sapping of energy to turn toward the project of a magazine, even though two of these texts were already on my nightstand (with the other two soon to arrive). I continued to revisit these four publications over the years that followed, and continue to read these four authors whom I came to know through the collating of Yellow Field. Now, after—or because of—the long, terrible maw of the last presidency, I hope I’ve found adequate words to say about each work and how I’ve come to see them, individually and together.

 

Kafka , [ ~Kafkaesque ]

Meredith Stricker’s Our Animal figures Franz Kafka (literarily and historically) as guardian angel against the pandemic Amnesia.[1] Kafka’s writ small and large, and quotations from the neo-surrealist of Bohemia permeate Stricker’s writing, calving mitochondrial imagery from the work of as well as from the life. Collage proffers one line of descendance, but one where visual cacophony complicates “coherence”; still, the quantum of line remains the stratum meaning coheres around in these poems—even as they demonstrate diversity of length, leading, font point, orientation, illustration (a photographic likeness of Kafka drops in!), and simultaneous layering. To the last quality, the layering of texts and spatial partialities aren’t ruinous architectures, as they might initially seem, harkening to a more familiar poetry that looks similar on the page… Stricker’s spectra of lines are concurrent, leveling at history a countenance. Kafka is a scion, but a scion among us. Forget for a moment that the Anthropocene isn’t privileged here, become synonymous with “history’s glories and progress, / corrosive rust on medals and speeches” (45). Estrangement from the intimacy of reading is everywhere familiar! This is what cacophony has to offer—that it’s actually a choir if we can learn how to listen. Stricker orchestrates the countenance necessary: “the color blue / approaches, falls down, was once heaven now / litter pushed sodden into gutters” (26), as again and again the forsaken illumines in “the corolla / of strangeness” (45).

 

[ ~Kafka ] , Kafkaesque

Lori Anderson Moseman’s Flash Mob queues up, or clues us in to, activist selves—as through failure-learnt, grassroots-won apothegms, like: “it is best to negotiate with guardian angels in flight” (77). Arisen between twin pandemics of Climate Change and Societal Apathy, this flash mob is the antidote to plutocracy—Hades, after all, being not only god of the underworld but also, etymologically, of wealth (in precious metals and gems). The book itself works visually by means of devices: device of hieroglyph; device of prose poem; device of hashtag qua device of couplet-like sonnet closing; device of inner-referentiality… all of these “illustrating” the interlocking machinations of bespoke bureaucracy.[2] Instead of a multiplicity of voices in concert, Flash Mob presents an uncorrelated coterie; that self that is cohort; the multiplicitous aspects we lend to tend causes. From the section Old Settlement, the poem “fingerlake scout denies halo around her big feet” displays the happenstance, folly, earnestness, and grace involved in addressing the coming (or present) crises:

The phosphorescence field forms every fifteen steps with no regard for sacred places. The halo comes on schedule whether water flails off a glacier-carved cliff or the trails hide in a thicket. Flagstone well placed by CCC crew can brighten its glow. Any chipped thing that won’t budge is brightest. Halo-foot doesn’t see it; when her troop does, they elect her dues-collector (45).

The vise is cipher: through the many namings, “Halo-foot,” et al., the poems hold a mirror to tall tales in the making. Not dwindled down to a single set of events or episteme (the Occupy movement, for example, or any unilateralism), the tone metronomes between political and personal, all the while satirical: “# No angel, Halo-foot can’t soar or zap. Her power is a steady gait” (ibid.).

 

Kafka , Kafkaesque

The poetics of Hostile Books encourages formats that dissuade the reader [i.e. bar of soap set with glass; book inside watery bag], and Tyrone Williams’s Trump l’oeil may even exceed this parameter of “materiality” with an invitation to disgust. Foregoing the issue of used Kleenexes, Williams answered a call for work from the publisher “four days after the [2016] election, with a proposal: fifty-two crushed tissue boxes containing epithets directed at the president-elect, though largely inspired by the campaign season.”[3] Symbolic in number and by misuse, the crushed-boxed epithets challenge the systemically racist origins of the electoral college while also resisting narratives of dismay prevalent in white, left-leaning America (following Donald Trump’s presidential win) that such an election result could occur in this country. These faux-consolatory tissues, dispensed with a not-so-soft touch, bear witness to as many “pandemics” as there are strains of flu: “Blister-shout” reads one; “WEAPONIZED ENDANGERED SPECIES” another. No panacea, “tolerance” is subverted thirteen times over in these messages unbottled: “the ‘illusion’ of three-dimensional space as isomorphic with, for lack of a better word, ‘reality’” [Williams]; Pandora’s already been here; this is not a goddam tissue box. Elsewhere in this review I’ve mentioned a leveling countenance redressing pandemics; here, the play from tromp to Trump fixes that gaze, akin to undoing electoral math:

SAME+AS-IT
                   EVAH
                     | |
                 WASP

N.B., the library catalog warns: “Dimensions of crushed boxes may vary.”

 

[ ~Kafka ] , [ ~Kafkaesque ]

Nielsen’s Tray feels like two sets in the same night’s session; the first highly focused, the second more varied; but let’s say all the instruments remain, and the audience is in this together… The collection/first section takes its name from Trayvon Martin, in a more familiar calling—the way one might call out to a family member. The particular finds frame quickly in the poem, through settler, colonial, political, and religious relationships: “George / The father / Of his / Country / Another country another James / Another George told / King George of King James / Version sold” (6). Furthermore, these frames bring to the fore—as Cornell West would remind—the double-sin of two genocides at our country’s founding: the taking of land from Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples: “Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed / Bright ironies / Ivories tickling unseen sea bed” (7). Nielsen’s double-spaced lines and “unfinished” phrasing leave ludic passages for the reader to go down; one can here/see how echo undoes distortion of hear/say in lines like:

The boy in the

The boy from the

The hooded boy

Was watched by the neighbor

Hood                                (9)

The poem engages the discourse of our long, long pandemic (before social distancing, before George Floyd Square, before Tray) through devices, like re-echo, which swing the static soundbites and memes we’ve become accustomed to—“hoodie,” “neighborhood watch,” “stand your ground”—into: “He stood the ground / Dearborn/Stillborn / Standing on a porch while black / Renisha / Renisha” (36). “Tray” also enacts use of naming, lists, numbering (“numerology”), and typographic symbol… perhaps most hauntingly in the lines of pipes [ | ], or bars, that draw divisions and make comparisons across. That Nielsen’s poem can reach such pathos is matched by “Escamotage,” the second section of his book, where the reader finds love poems, blues rhythms [“Against the boasts / Aghast / Gold Coast” (48)], consumer culture plus capitalist critique, and puns, as in the poem “Adam and Eve in MacArthur Park,” quoted here in full: “Someone left the / Snake out / In the rain” (45).[4] Lyricism remains throughout, and a consciousness of absence; as though a reminder of all of our pandemics and their complementary, competing—at times obscuring—contours. As if to say, even when there’s not music, there’s still this:

          Not the notes themselves
          […]
                             but the moan

          Meticulous and terrible
          Tell us where
          The music lives when
          He is not playing              (92)

 

 

 

 

Edric Mesmer edits Among the Neighbors, a pamphlet series on little magazines published by the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, where he works as a cataloging librarian—To subscribe to the series, just send him an email! His book, POEMS: now & then, is out from BlazeVOX [books].

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[1] While I wasn’t conscious of the title of Mary Jo Bang’s marvelous introduction, “Our (Kafkaesque) Animal,” while writing this review, it undoubtedly informed the terms of consideration.

[2] The first section of the book, “Full Quiver,” was also published as an artists’ book (Propolis Press, 2015), featuring Luwian hieroglyphs and QR code.

[3] Williams, Tyrone. [Hostile Books tumblr entry for Trump l’oeil]. https://hostilebooks.tumblr.com.

[4] Kudos, too, to the publishers at Make Now for setting the poems in a font so reminiscent of that used in the books of Lucille Clifton from BOA Editions—she being one of the dedicatees of Tray.