Patrick James Dunagan : The Fire, by Steven Manuel

The Fire, Steven Manuel
New Books/New: The Journal of American Poetry, 2023

 

 

 

 

Poet Steven Manuel’s first full collection, The Fire, is poetry verging towards—if not outright embracing and rooted within—occult underpinnings of Modernism. This is an approach towards the poem few employ these days. Manuel, however, admirably stays the course, brazenly heading off into the currently unexplored territory. The results are terrific.

Manuel risks accusations of haughty pretension, as some will find his poetry mired in obscure references, often utilizing language in an arcane manner, yet he shows little care or concern for whether readers are interested in following where he’s gone or capable of appreciating what he’s returned with. He’s too busy recording what he discovers of interest to his own ear coursing along the avenues of his reading and listening.

He conjures and accepts guidance from his own poems.

“The flame in his voice, then,

turned me round

in the mirror,

 

nitid moon night lets hang

beside me.” (69)

(Note: “nitid”= Bright, shining; polished, glossy. per the OED.)

Manuel achieves an exacting textual richness. Evident of how he reads as means of looking to understand, i.e. hear. Even at the barest of syntactical levels churning out richly imbued syllabics.

“SONG TOWARD NIGHT: THE OMEN

 

aul eve lae den lor carmina

hym tuneye men rust per age

 

level lies mine eye, sticht oer.

 

                          (fr. Ausonius’ BISSULA)”  (36)

Here naming his source text, it’s of interest to learn, after doing a bit of on-line searching, that the ancient Latin poet Ausonius (310-395) wrote the poem “Bissula” praising the servant woman of that name whom he had freed from slavery. Clearly love of a sort is a theme intended. In the harsh visual image of “mine eye, stitcht oer” (stitches sealing over one’s eye) a Blues song such as “blood in my eyes for you” might be heard.

With the poem “GROUPED WORKS OUT OF EURIPIDES, HUGH OF FOUILLOY, BION, HERODOTUS, PINDAR, DANTE, HOMER, PEIRE VIDAL, & LORCA”. (64) the title alone gives clear sense of the range of historical works from out which Manuel’s poems arrive. “Out of” here might span in meaning from finding inspiration to outright directly lifting words from the historical text to graph out the poem heard emerging. As with the following closing lines of another poem where all the words come in toto from out the 1921 Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music by Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews (a quick search via Googlebooks revealed this). Manuel might plausibly be seen to align Matthews’s words within principles of William Carlos Williams’s thoughts regarding The American Idiom, a poetry particular to patterns of North American speech.

“‘Being English, his song is a possible rendering

of Thomson’s

‘Come gentle spring’;

 

but to the American ear

 

his tongue is

hopelessly twisted,

 

which affliction

may be

due in part

to the

violence

 

of the American

 

spring.’” (72-73)

It’s easy enough to hear Williams in “violence//of the American//Spring” echoing, as it does, his title Spring & All (1923) containing the well-known epithet “the pure products of America go crazy”.

Regularly composing in poem-sequences, akin to the serial poem, Manuel brings an often sparse, fragmentary feel to the work, individual poem titles are a rarity, often with touches of Imagism spread across, “owls perched in the arches / Asheville Transit”. (57) Never hesitating to give bare, direct description. Which extends into emotional content as well. Again, echoing Williams (“no ideas but in things”).  

“gaudy, it had

the waves / of the sea

in it, her skirt,

as she / walked, etc,

across Goodwill parkinlot” (98)

or

“beauty, hard servant,

they say, I once

popped you open

by a trash can

on sleeping pills.” (96)

The classics arrive mixed in with hanging round garbage down backstreets and out front the Goodwill store, explicitly working-class settings. Likely breaking with expectations, Manuel seemingly steps into poetry from outside standard literary confines. His listening is absolute in its assuredness, recognizing with whom he’s playing alongside.

“What birds

populate

—catch

the mime—

the trees

 

, pines, poplars; …

 

A bliss of thrall

 

(“For Cecil Taylor”)” (86)

And again, whittling away at the words to pare down the image to its core essentials.

“thickest

thickets

thickset

         with

stars” (48)

Manuel welcomes the poem as enchantment. Imbuing our era with alchemical glow from out another time when the words of a poem led not to imagined shores of an individual’s personal concerns but rather broadened out to encompass and alter the scope of an entire community’s conceptions of reality. From a perspective when hidden meanings lay occluded in plain sight of extraordinary speech.

“Apollo hiding his sun.

Hermes aflame in his laughter,

   picker of locks,

director. ‘The white cypress’—

 

     map carousel

(you learned it as

     infant).

 

There is a river there.

Prayer and a field,

      chant and subterranean

skies

      to walk under

as you chant.

Clarities

 

      sounding anemoes.

 

Renew calumny, work

      plain speech to strange speech.

Simonides

      among sparrows.

 

The green eyes

      in the mesh.

Apollo

 

       hiding his sun.”

(“Hear the Bard” / Od. 13.9  [for Charles Segal]) (41)

The Fire offers readers the opportunity to glimpse that world of poetry once again. A poetry wherein the stakes are nothing less than essential and necessary. One that leads the poet to ask himself:

“Is my bow for killing

or to

sing

to?” (45)

And never fully be sure of the answer.

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick James Dunagan recently edited Roots & Routes: Poetics at New College (w/ Lazzara & Whittington) and David Meltzer’s Rock Tao. City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights) is forthcoming. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi and other venues.

Patrick James Dunagan : Measure’s Measure: Poetry and Knowledge, by Michael Boughn

Measure’s Measure: Poetry and Knowledge, Michael Boughn
Station Hill, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Olson Out: Michael Boughn’s Measure’s Measures

 

Since his death in 1970 poet Charles Olson has been alternately championed and pilloried by North American poets and critics. The worst attacks portray him as some rambling tyrannical woman-hating white cis stereotype of United States bullying hegemony. While the highest praises hold him as a standard-bearer of experimental poetry in which the words of the poem are moved freely around the page with assured sensibility based upon elements of the poet’s own breath and delivery. On one hand, he is seen to be a failed minor figure trading heavily upon Ezra Pound’s Modernism, while on the other, he is the foremost successful inheritor of the same tradition passing onward a path forward to each new generation. Whether celebrated or rebuked, Olson’s influence perseveres.

 

Measure’s Measures: Poetry and Knowledge gathers together some twenty years’ worth of poet editor and scholar Michael Boughn’s engagements responding in large part to various assaults from across Poetry World’s many quarters upon Olson’s work, staking out his claim on the side of valuing Olson’s enduring relevance. Boughn’s title places emphasis upon the plural, measures not measure. There is no singular course towards composition of a poem any more than there is one trajectory to follow as a poet. Poetry is an ongoing process.  He asserts, “the possibility of discovery always lurks in measure” (30) and “measure is never simple or singular. It amplifies.” (18) It is “the question of how we are to be here now, which, for Olson, was the knowledge the poem bears—or can bear, if it is opened to the potential.” (35) Boughn celebrates in Olson the potential of the poem’s occasion as an active moment full of undetermined energy dispersal capable of yielding unforeseen results without predetermined expectation. No poem should fit into preconceived standards but rather represent a challenge to the very idea of such a notion being applicable to poetry.  

 

Boughn contends that Olson’s infamous essay “Projective Verse” favors action over theory, stressing it as example of harnessing the capability to move against forces at work in Poetry World directed towards minimizing the immediacy of each poem’s unique occasion as paramount in favor of a hierarchical ordering concerned with marketplace factors. “The projective, not as idea, but as exposure, the dynamic of exposure and the refusal of the disciplinary regime that emerges to limit its opening by commodifying and institutionalizing it.” (190) He argues against what he sees as “the loss of poetry’s contact with the immediate, the revelation of language’s naked entanglement with liberty.” (190) To which Olson’s poetic practice might be seen as serving as an antidote. In the act of each poem under hand, the poet continually takes measure, not only of their own ability to respond in the moment, but also of the occasion itself—of whatever offered in the passing act may prove useful to moving forward.

 

Despite Olson’s ties to Black Mountain College in the 1950s and to SUNY Buffalo in the 1960s, Boughn pushes back against thoughts of Professor Olson. At the core of Boughn’s approach is recognition of Olson's communal embracing of unknowable potential over and above achievement of discernible goals assertible as evidence of any sort of academic or professional reward. Even when acting in academic settings, Olson encouraged open-ended interest in discovering fresh knowledge—though not necessarily recently produced—preferably shared among a group of closely connected fellow practitioners. In such gathering, there was no hierarchy to climb to the top of, but rather a continual asserting of the latest newly discovered material to be put to use in creating ongoing creative endeavors among the group. “Whatever else such a ‘community’ may be, in Olson’s practice it was a ‘place’ where hierarchical/non-hierarchical orderings were dissolved in a synergistic circulation of authoritative finitudes that egged each other on toward their further possibilities”. (235) Effort was directed towards increasing opportunities achievable with ongoing creative work and avoiding stalling out or circling back to a particular point of stasis, particularly in search of any official reward or recognition.     

 

Certainly, this is not how one goes about winning awards or garnering other honors that might lend themselves to achieving benefits such as publishing contracts with the larger presses or tenured professorships. And Boughn proposes that the immediacy of such communal-oriented creative output launched towards the peripheries of any institutional-oriented goal is “confusing for those entangled in a writing culture based on individual achievement and reward, ideas of autonomy and originality, and a separate, regulated zone called Literature, in which one can accumulate prestige and power.” (143) Boughn’s Olson-centric focus is not beyond skepticism. There are poet communities well outside of Olson’s influence (although Olson-affiliated figures like John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, and Diane di Prima might factor into their poetic lineages) formed with similar orientation towards bucking the isolated path of individual career-oriented advancement, for instance factions of LGBTQ and BIPOC poets operate in a fashion just as much opposed to ideas of “autonomy and originality” with utter disregard, if not disdain, to the thought of utilizing poetry in order to “accumulate prestige and power”.    

 

Boughn never directly addresses the work of these other groupings of poets, yet he would no doubt value their stance as being as exemplary as Olson’s and just as justified. He notes how oppositional grouping and accompanying arguments opposed to those more establishment-oriented result in the poetry wars which prove so fruitful to furthering the development of poets: “The poetry wars exist and are important. They force us to pay attention, to think of the struggle to keep alive and active the knowledge of the interstitial space of poetry’s dwelling within the poet.” (110) Where and how a poet positions themselves regarding such points of contention in Poetry World has long lasting consequential regard for how their work is looked upon in years to come.

 

For Boughn, a poet to hold back from embracing the potential possibilities of the imagination lit up according to Olson’s principles is unpardonable. There is nothing left to enliven the poetry if the poet chooses to abide by mealy-mouth platitudes of the status quo. Better to stand against infirmities of the imagination than dish out what is expected. Boughn’s take on how Olson compadre Robert Creeley’s work is “political” serves as example:   

“Creeley especially has suffered from the criticism that his work never engaged with the political issues of the day, but there is nothing more political in our circumstance than to reclaim the world from the cultural banalities, political moralisms, and aesthetic idiocies that expunge experience in some universal lock-down of the imagination.” (46)

 

The perfected chrysalis of achievement vaunted by so many of the book awards, poetry contests, and rarefied submissions procedures of prominent magazines is not the sort of thing Boughn would have Olson's work considered as encouraging. And yet any astute reader familiar with Creeley might recall how much Creeley himself represents that perfected chrysalis of achievement with a lifetime of poetic fame, professorship and sundry awards. Boughn’s essay “Robert Creeley’s Anger” doesn’t tackle this conundrum head on yet does intimately engage the multi-faceted conflicting nature of the older poet’s response to heated debates regarding Olson’s legacy.

 

While Olson is Boughn’s predominant concern here, several essays cover related figures, such as Creeley. Boughn first came to Olson via encountering poet Robin Blaser’s classes as an undergraduate in Vancouver. This led him to apply for graduate study in Buffalo, where he encountered Creeley and also the Blakean scholar and poet John “Jack” Clarke, a pivotal figure in Boughn’s own poetic development. Boughn’s dissertation covered the work of the modernist H.D. who has remained a touchstone in his poetics, leading him to editing the wondrous treatise of another Olson compadre, the poet Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. All these poets are focal points of one or more individual essays. This collection represents Boughn’s paean to the back history of the poetics program in Buffalo, its founding in the late 1960s with Olson at its core on up into the controversies of the 1980s/90s surrounding that very beginning and the vast accompanying poetic history of our era.

 

Tracking Olson's ‘group’ activities from Buffalo out, as it were, Boughn offers no summation other than continual reinforcement of a key point. Namely, that when the poet is in the moment of the making of the poem nothing is fixed, all is happening and possible within that ongoing activity. As Goethe says, “The corpse is not the whole.” To be that very thing you are, joining Whitman, amorous, awry with news of what's freshly seen. Olson's 'istorin: to look with one's own eyes. Reporting back, that's from where the poems arise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick James Dunagan recently edited Roots & Routes: Poetics at New College (w/ Lazzara & Whittington) and David Meltzer’s Rock Tao. City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights) is forthcoming. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi and other venues.

Patrick James Dunagan : CORSO’S DOT

 

 

Student: Do you get in arguments, Gregory, with Ginsberg about anything that goes down at Naropa?

 

Corso: No I don’t bother with that one. That’s his choice. Fucking consideration. Whatever people want let ‘em take the shot man, they’re not going to live very long. What is it, a hundred years? or some shit.

 

- THE BALLGAME’S OVER the dialogues of Gregory Corso and Tom Clark on The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, unpublished transcript once held in New College of California’s library, edited by Poetics student Allen Ensign

 

…

  

Spirit

is Life

It flows thru

the death of me

endlessly

like a river

unafraid

of becoming

the sea

The above lines serve as epitaph upon Corso’s grave in Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery. His ashes are buried just across the way from Shelley’s own. There’s footage “out there” of Corso at the site in his later years, hanging out, taking notes, while the feral cemetery cats wander about. Keats is buried in the far corner of the same cemetery and there’s a photo of Ed Dorn in his last years standing by that grave similarly with notebook out and feline nearby. While Pound is laid up to the north on Venice’s San Michele Cemetery Island with lizards by the dozens crawling in and out of the tombs there.

Italy is a poet-pilgrimage well worth making and Rome a fine locale for hosting Corso’s remains. As he puts it in “Is Love Instinctive” one of a number of late poems gathered in The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997-2000 (Lithic Press, 2022):

I loved things romantic

most things I loved

seemed lifeless

I loved beautiful Greek statues

I loved young dead great poets

And so how fitting he now lies amongst them.

Throughout The Dot he also frequently imagines entering into eternity via The Mermaid Tavern, that infamous poet’s watering hole of Old England frequented by the likes of Donne, Marvell, Herrick, etc.    

say when my time is up

will I be welcomed at The Mermaid Tavern?

There’s Joyce standing at the bar

with a booted foot on the brass rail

It looks like [with] a haughty eye he’s on me

 

It doesn’t look good

there’s Keats seated alone

looking dejectedly down upon his death mask

The bartender was standing at the far end

It was Andrew Marvell and he was conversing with Milton

There was Auden; him I knew

I acknowledge him

he smiled…or was it a grimace?

I moved away from the door

and began looking at the Blakes on the walls

These lines show how truly “in process” the writing in The Dot remains. I’ve added “with” to attempt smooth out the haughty eye line, it only sort of helps out. Corso abruptly shifts perspective, moving from imagining being at the scene inside the Mermaid to as if describing an actual past visit within those walls, perhaps recalling a literal dream experience? While his wondering whether Auden smiles or grimaces at him offers a rather touching glimpse of self-judgement and regret over his well-documented abrasive social antics over the years, which—from the references he makes to them in The Dot—appear to have plagued his conscience.

The Mermaid also appears in “I feel like writing a beautiful poem…” (many entries in The Dot are untitled, the editors thankfully supply an index of titles and first lines):

          The Mermaid Tavern sign creaks  

like a mouse caught in a windy creaky door

each squeak lets go a dot of blood on the hinge

within the velvet suits have a boot up on the bar rail

“Brightness falls from the air” was your best

And “Fat as butter; cheap as egg” yours

back and forth it went

Each poet reciting the other’s best line

Once again, he is back to imagining the visit. An exercise he repeats yet another time in “When the year 1 arrived for the descendants…”

the labor is in dwindling the redundancy;

the finite-infinite thing can make it in a line or two—

To tailor the brown velvet suit when I enter the Mermaid Tavern

with Joyce and Allen seated at a table; and the Immortal Bard

a booted foot on the brass rail; I’ll order a stout and vow

my soul to keep my mouth shut the entire stay—

It’s rather impossible to imagine Corso ever managing keep such a vow…yet there’s no doubt he’s now at The Mermaid Tavern, in velvet suit with booted foot on brass rail as he wags about and swaggers his way through the endless night of elevated bombast and ridicule challenging everybody and anybody as outside rain falls and the poets inside warmly cheer him on.

for Tate Swindell
from notes presented on 9/21/2022
at The Golden Dot release reading
Bird and Beckett Books, San Francisco

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick James Dunagan recently edited David Meltzer's Rock Tao and Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California (eds. Dunagan Lazzara & Whittington). His new book of poems, After the Banished, variations off of ancient Chinese poets Li Bai&co, is dedicated to Tom Clark.