Barbara Henning's blog, Paul Klinger leaves

One of my favorite blogs is kept by Barbara Henning. Check it out for her current review of Brenda Coultas's new book, The Marvelous Bones of Time, as well as for posts on Roberto Bolano, Bill Kushner, Burt Kimmelman, and more. I've just added Barbara's blog to my list on the right (a list that needs more additions and much editing, but that will come). Barbara has been an integral and most positive part of the Tucson poetry community for the last year and a half. That community is now slightly less than it was, with the loss of Paul Klinger to Austin, Texas. Certainly Austin's gain, and we will miss Paul here.

pushing water 43 (maybe, and probably not finished)

hedge crickets in hedge rows sing hedge songs
while we hedge our bets against whatever hedges
are hardly hedges in a race hedged against
authenticity

forgotten lamentations of forgotten moments
that caused a certain sadness now forgotten
amid edges of skies and seas whose waves
we have forgotten

can you see me why are you looking where are
you looking why not look up an old address or
down the hatch across the skin over the shoulder
beyond the curve that stays alive

arcades with arches spring up from underground
and arch a back supporting another back and
hind supporting a hart whosoever lists the where
for art upon a turning dime

CURRENT READING

JOHN KEATS
The Eve of St. Agnes
Ode on a Nightingale
Autumn
For a reading group. Enjoying these so much, particularly St. Agnes and Autumn. Incorporating them into current teaching, too.

MAUREEN OWEN
Erosion's Pull
Heard Maureen read much from this book last night. Spinning out and in, delightful.

YI-FU TUAN
Escapism
Is all of human culture an attempt to not encounter the world "as it is"? Intriguing hypothesis, smart and absolutely crisply written book. For those who follow the cultural geography of Carl Sauer, this is essential. Maybe for everyone.

WALTER BENJAMIN
vol. 4 of the Selected Writings
Much on Brecht & Baudelaire, which is some of my favorite writing by Benjamin.

DAVID JONES
In Parenthesis
One of the essential 20th Century poems, all too often ignored. I couldn't find an in-print copy when in England this past summer, which was shocking.

LAYNIE BROWNE
The Scented Fox
A beautiful new book by the author of Daily Sonnets, of which I have blogged previously.

STEVEN E. WEISLER and SLAVKO MILEKIC
Theory of Language
Something of a textbook for linguistics, from the generative perspective. Good for me to renew my ongoing interest in the field. Great to apply linguistic perspectives to poetry/poetics.

DAVID SHAPIRO
New & Selected Poems
Aren't these a wonder? David Shapiro, always so young and at the same time so wise. Knock socks off poems, some of the best of our time.

TED BERRIGAN
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
I seem to re-read Berrigan every few years, like a necessary bath or entry into the flow. Terrific edition of terrific poems.

cAtChInG uP

Someday I'll snap a new photo of self, since I now have a new Mac, which bodes well for future books from Chax Press. Not so well, the cost, its effect on press budget, etc. But the big thing that got in the way ALL this past year was the eviction notice from the Steinfeld Warehouse, the fighting and lobbying (bureaucrats & politicians), to create a 7-month delay of that eviction, and then, finally, the move, which took from August 1 until November 10 (just a week ago) to accomplish, recover from, sort out, and have a studio in true working shape again. Even saying that, it's a smaller studio, less room for book storage (WHAT do we do when we have four or six more books published? that's still unknown), less room for press tools, less room for everything. If it doesn't work, we may move again, but this time with more of a plan. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Other updates:

a September reading in Norman, Oklahoma, planned by Linda Russo, read with the amazing Mike Kelleher, and met Jonathan Stallings, who I hope and think will become a good friend.

Mike then came here to Tucson to kick off the POG series for the 2007-2008 year, along with Tyrone Williams. That was a terrific reading. But POG struggles with space, having had two readings in the adequate but not compelling Stone Ave. Gallery space away from downtown. The other reading there featured Tucson's own Frank Parker with a visiting David Gitin. This was a musical reading in a very intimate, somewhat miniminalist way. The Kelleher/Williams reading was adventurous, somewhat more abstract, also music but more like Ornette's free blowing crossed with Cecil Taylor's unit structures. Gitin/Parker was a bit more early Miles cool jazz, with a bit of bop as well. With the third POG reading of the season, last night, the venue changed to the Poetry Center at the Univ. of Arizona. Tenney Nathanson was literally flying, i.e. I get the sense of surfing into different tumble zones down the rabbit hole up the windpipe through a cloud and beyond, complete with birds calling and dogs howling (even a chihuahua with a BIG bark), all in a kind of monkey-mind meditation that embraces the given world as completely as I might imagine. I've always liked Tenney's work a lot, but right now I LOVE his work and hope Chax has the opportunity to publish it some time again. Tenney followed by the divine Miss M, that's M for Maureen Owen, whose grace is also of the pinball variety, i.e. hitting all the pins, bouncing here and there, entering a hole position where it spins a phrase around and around, then shooting out again to the horizon, and maybe beyond. OK, I'm exalting her here, but she deserves it. READ HER WORK -- she read primarily from her most recent book from Coffee House, EROSION'S PULL. It's very very good. Both these poets also remember (and later talked about) Kenneth Koch's admonition that, as serious as you want to be, as singing/lyrical as you want to be, as (anything) as you want to be as a poet, remember it's also crucial, at least every so often, to be funny. Yet in both of them, while humor abounds (or leaps and bounds), the humor itself is also serious matter.

Chax hasn't published a book in several months due to our eviction & move. But keep eyes open for books very soon by John Tritica and Jeanne Heuving, and, not too long following, by Michael Cross, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Hilton Obenzinger, Standard Schaefer, Elizabeth Treadwell, Jane Sprague, Nico Vassilakis, Robert Mittenthal, and several more. Authors, please be patient. We're slow but reliable, or at least that seems to be our history, even though once in a while we're fast and reliable. Right now, still post-move, we're even slower but still plan on being reliable.

Finally, the Chax Press begun, lately POG co-sponsored Cushing Street Bar & Restaurant reading series. We had some really good readings this late summer and fall, featuring Wendy Burk, Maryrose Larkin, Eric Magrane, Simmons Buntin, Jeremy Frey, Mark Salerno, Roberto Bedoya, Laynie Browne, and Stephen Vincent. But I'm finally saying that running Chax Press as a press, co-directing with numerous others the POG Poetry in Action reading series, developing independent presentation projects in poetry for the community (a mini-Charles Olson festival coming this spring), writing and reading my poems here and around the country and beyond, and, at present, teaching 5 classes, is more than I can do, and I'm stopping my involvement in the Cushing Street series. And I don't see anyone waiting in the wings to start directing this series (and if you're there, please come out, because I'm not going seeking), so it looks like it will end. It's been a good three years, primarily featuring local poets of all stripes and persuasions, but also having some key visitors. Some day I'll list everyone who read in it. I also want to thank Dawn Pendergast and Paul Klinger, who did take it on for three months last spring, which was a welcome relief for me.

If you haven't got the Chax Press change of address, we're at 650 E. 9th St., Tucson, Arizona 85705. Phone number and email remain the same.

And finally, to end with some really good news, EOAGH issue four is now up . Tim Peterson is doing an amazing job as editor of this journal Chax Press is happy to host on our web site. Check it out.

SPRING ULMER: BENJAMIN's SPECTACLES

Spring Ulmer: Benjamin's Spectacles, published by Kore Press 2007

Benjamin’s Spectacles writes into history, into shadow, into spring. Into, not through. History as in the times of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Simone Weil. Shadow as the shadow in which nothing casts a shadow, nothing has substance or meaning. Spring as “May fled to a place so barren / as to be of no contest” or “April existed . . . in harm’s way . . . to pay the living / for the dead.” Or spring as the author, Spring Ulmer: “My mother comes in, stomping snow from her boots. / Where’s Spring? she asks.” Spring is nowhere in the snow, Spring is a muffler, silence, in the family, Spring wants to write herself into the shadows, out of existence, or perhaps to the only place existence can be found. If you read and find Spring here, you have paid the price, for this is one of the most bleak books of poetry I have ever read. One of the most bleak, and one of the most beautiful.

The obvious allusions in the book are to Walter Benjamin, and they are throughout. But let’s begin with the less obvious. In “Allegory I,” “Shadows beckon” as William Carlos Williams’s descent beckoned. And it is descent, to the ground, to the underground (digging her own grave was Antigone’s response). Williams’s spring occurs in the final grip of winter, on the road to a contagious hospital, but promises reddish, purplish things erupting out of the mud, into life and sun again. But in Spring Ulmer’s world,

i brace myself for the emergence of sun. it is beyond the horizon, blocked by what’s in front of me. soon it will be blocked by what is behind.

And in “Allegory II,” much later in the book, “Javelinas rummage through garbage, snorting, strewing compost,” and calling forth the sexually rummaging “Pig Cupid” of Mina Loy’s “Love Songs for Johannes,” but whereas Loy’s pig seemed a celebration of the messy physicality of erotic love, Ulmer’s javelinas strew the compost, making it unlikely to enhance growth, and Spring’s mother in the poem chases the pigs “through the streets in the darkness.” Erotic love in the poem is an impotent love involving misshapen bodies, darkened minds, and an erasure of both eroticism and love.

In a poem (and I read this book as a single poem), a book, a world without reason/raison (where the word even collapses, as raison is not reason but raisin, and the speaker doesn’t like raisons), a world of shadow without end, a world where there is “nothing but dust” and where the heart is “monstrously out of tune,” and where, in “The Mechanics of Reproduction,” “It’s hard to separate / one face from the next,” there is no hope, or, if there is, it is in the very act of disappearance, which brings the ground, the stone, groundedness. Benjamin’s dream, as retold in this book, is that language will be no longer able to make meaning, and instead become what grounds people, possibly what grounds people together. Because it is not in transcending, but in being a stone in a field (“B’s Lost Letter to A”) that you can “really absorb all the fieldnesses,” and

My own liberation comes
from being able to care

without caring

Not only do “We collapse / to uphold,” but, as a friend tells Benjamin, who in this poem seems to stand in for the author/speaker of the poems, “Your nothingness is the only experience the age may have of you . . . / You and your nothingness”

Much of Benjamin’s Spectacles is perfectly balanced, with perfect (though not closed) endings, off-kilter but so finely graceful that I find myself wanting more of a disturbance, less of an eerie coldness, more air. But sometimes, and to me this is where the book moves from good to stunning, poems threaten to break open from fullness, despite the suspicion that all is for naught. Such poems manifest “Poetry unhanging itself.” One of the richest is “Letters to the Dead.”

Fresh figs on the counter—
Fellini’s 8 ½—
What happens after betrayal?
I don’t want to hold a man’s hand—
The hunger it spruces—
That flying green—
A beetle shell—
A wish not to be windexed—
These excommunications—
Thimblefuls of relation—
Inner conversation—
Hopkins’ letters to the dead—
Heart-shaped leaves outside my kitchen window tremble—
How it disturbs me—
Knocking food off my fork—
Like a hair shirt—
A man withholding love—
Is this all he can give—
Am I ungrateful?
Gesammelte Briefe, Passagen-Werk, Berliner Chronik, Illuminationen—
The order of books on my table—
Smell of old pages—
The hunger-striker undoes his stitched lips—
Poetry unhanging itself—

In such poems (and there are several) language is willing to be messy, bushy, open, breathing. I wouldn’t quite say that such parts save the book, because it is indeed a very good book without them. But with them, stunning.

In this shadow world dust world nothing world stone world of care without caring, gender blurs, the individual becomes linguistic counter (“B touches A’s lips”), the body is crippled, hunchbacked, sex is a matter of bodily shapes that fit together, but sex is impotent with no fruition, yet “spring” (or, at least once, “Spring”) is all over the place, not quite “busting out all over” as the song would have it, because nothing escapes the shadows, but in language the word “spring” occurs some 15 times in the book, at least 10 of them in the last third of the book. And while only twice does it name the author, it is more than tempting to read each “spring” as contributing to an identity that never quite takes place, that never can take place. Because “spring” is a word, and words ground us and keep us from meaning, but help us to commune, to absorb being (“all the fieldnesses”). We are not like, rather we are “B and E—two stuck typewriter keys.” In this shadow word world, I would willingly be stuck with the keys in Spring Ulmer’s first book. We are all here, with Benjamin and Brecht, and with another B unnamed in the book, but one with which I cannot help but associate this horror, and this communion with the hypocrite lecteur: Baudelaire. But let’s end with Benjamin, as the book ends:

when I was walter benjamin,
a woman helped drag me

up a mountain.
could that woman be this man?

I bow my head and let him stick the darts in.

Who is I? Who is he? Who is that woman? Who is this man? Aren’t we all them? Who bows to endure? Don’t we all?

OOOOOklahoma

where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

I always liked those first lines about the wind & the rain & my honey lem & i (which took me a long time to understand was not my honey lemon eye).

I was in Oklahoma for the last four and a half days, in the terrific company of Linda Russo, Jonathan Stallings, Michael Kelleher, Lori Kelleher, my mother Meryle Alexander, and several inquisitive and smart students from the University of Oklahoma. Mike Kelleher & I read together for SOUNDS OUT, a program of the Expository Writing Program of the Univ. of Oklahoma, at the invitation of Linda Russo. As a poet, I love the company of Mike & Linda, who are terrific poets. And meeting Jonathan was a great surprise, finding out he is an Arkansas spelunker and master of Chinese teas (or, at least as much a master as one is likely to find in the states ranging from oklahoma to arizona). I loved drinking various teas with him, and I think they prepared me well for my poetry reading.

From the ages of 11 to 18 all my friends were in Oklahoma. In the last 14 years I've had many friends (too many to count on two hands) from Buffalo New York, or who at least were in Buffalo long enough to be students or faculty members in the Poetics Program there. And on this past Tuesday at least, I had 3 Buffalo friends in Oklahoma. Accidental occurrence? or not . . .

Mike & I read in front of a commemorative Oklahoma football, white with beads on all the seams, a Native American work of art in a Native American art gallery. He read from his two books, and on the plane on the way home I read his magnificent book, HUMAN SCALE. I'll have more to say about that after introducing him, and hearing him again this Sunday in Tucson, where he will read with Tyrone Williams, for POG & Chax Press.

To Linda & to Jonathan: much love & thanks!

again again yes!

Long time no blog, all during a move that began at the end of July and has lasted . . . well, it is still lasting. Life remains in boxes, books remain in boxes. But the bulk of it is out of boxes, the press no longer has plastic wrapped around it, and we're working.

Chax Press has a new address:

650 E. 9th St.

Tucson, AZ 85705

Now I'll try to blog at least a post per week, although I have to admit that I like it that blogs can ebb and flow, be really busy, then not at all.

love to all those who have supported Chax Press recently; your support has lifted spirits, possibilities!

charles