Dale Smith

 

New College of California in in the 1990s

First, a little history: any discussion of the Poetry and Poetics of the 1990s for me begins on the West Coast and, particularly, in San Francisco, where I had enrolled in the now defunct Poetics Program of the New College of California in 1994 (Hoa entered the MFA program in Poetics a year earlier). I was reading Ron Silliman and Robert Creeley at the time, feeling a sense of liberation, learning that even a young white kid from Texas could somehow acknowledge his experience in writing—or find ways to write outside the field of that experience—to encounter the intersectional realities enlivened by poetry. Silliman was probably the first author to really help me understand the

1 Some of the critical terms in this essay I take from Raymond Williams, particularly from his Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. He helps articulate the social and literary structures that enable communities of meaning, like those formed by small presses, to adhere in diverse cultural settings.

________________________________________________________________

_2 New College was founded in 1971 and emphasized social justice, Humanities, and psychology; it was located at 777 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco, and ceased operations in 2008. Duncan McNaughton established the Poetics Program in 1980 with Louis Patler. Robert Duncan soon became a committed teacher in the

Program, fulfilling the demands of what he termed “a master teacher,” according to Lisa Jarnot (189). Aaron Shurin and David Levi-Straus attended the program in the eighties where Bay-Area poets like Diane di Prima, Michael Palmer, Joanne Kyger, and others taught occasionally throughout its existence. For insight into Duncan McNaughton’s work at New College and an appreciation of

The poets on the faculty would teach an author course or a context course, focusing on a different period each semester. I remember in spring 1995 taking a seminar with Tom Clark on Charles Olson and another with Lyn Hejinian on Gertrude Stein. David Meltzer in that same semester would teach the social history of modernism, with emphasis on West Coast social activism and the early twentieth-century labor movement. There were other semesters that focused on the Early Modern period, Romanticism, and the American nineteenth century. Of keen significance was Gloria Frym’s yearlong editorial course devoted to the publication of New College’s poetry journal, Prosodia. It was my first experience editing a magazine. I worked with co-editors Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, Cliff Gassoway, and Leslie Davis to produce issue 5 (1995), with a cover by Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat and new writing by Alice Notley, Rae Armantrout, Kevin Killian, John Yau, Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, Anselm Berrigan, and Will Alexander. Gloria’s mentorship was crucial. She had studied with Creeley in New Mexico and brought a fine sense of the history and obligations of editing poetry to us at the time. It was important for her that we shape and give meaning to a community of writers and readers. In a quite practical sense, she also helped us contact poets for work, and we were grateful for the opportunity to learn the responsibilities of publication, ranging from solicitation and editing to print layout, production, distribution, and promotion of a literary journal.

sentence and how to separate the self from language and from the phenomenal reality of one’s perceptions. So, I came with this specific bent to the Program when I enrolled in Lyn Hejinian’s fall course offering in literary theory, “The Language of Paradise.” Other faculty included Gloria Frym, Adam Cornford, the late David Meltzer, and the volatile Tom Clark, who taught from his home in Berkeley, California. These poets brought specific histories, social and creative outlooks, and at times intense pedagogical conflicts to life in their courses. Unlike the creative writing programs that have grown up now all across North America, the Poetics Program was designed so that each semester poet-scholars led students in a specific period of study; we were asked to examine the complex social relationships that make poetry possible in specific geographic contexts and historical periods. Students encountered the legacy of “master teacher” Robert Duncan, whose contributions in the 1980s helped establish the program’s unique, pedagogical outlook, and we received accreditation thanks to the labor and advocacy of Duncan McNaughton, Louis Patler, and others who were involved in the formal establishment of the Poetics Program.2___________________________________________I love
this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his___________________________________________I love

this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___with Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or

__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality? unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___with Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or
__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality?

___________________________________________I love
this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___wit

h Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or
__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality?

Thom Gunn

I can almost see it 
Thin, tall, half-handsome 
the thin hungry sweetness 
of his smile gone 
as he makes up his mind 
and walks behind the barn 
in his thin pointed boots 
over the crackling eucalyptus leaves 
and shoots himself in the head 

Even the terror 
of leaving life like that 
better than the terror 
of being unable to handle it 

Though I hardly knew him 
I rehearse it again and again 
Did he smell eucalyptus last? 
No it was his own blood 
as he choked on it 

They keep leaving me 
and they don't 
tell me they don't 
warn me that this is 
the last time I'll be seeing them 

as they drop away 
like Danny or 
slowly estrange themselves 

There will be no turn of the river 
where we are all reunited 
in a wonderful party 
the picnic spread 
all the lost found 
as in hide and seek 

An odd comfort 
that the way we are always 
most in agreement 
is in playing the same game 

where everyone always gets lost  

August Kleinzahler

 

After Catullus 

Heyho, loverboy 
is that a radioactive isotope you've got 
burning through your shirtfront 
or are you just glad to see me? 

                              Chump - 
you couldn't bear it at her age 
much less now. 
Had you supposed the years made you pliant? 
Look at yourself, 

flesh hanging off you 
same as the old fucks you take steam with 
at the gym. 
Better lay off the piss, buddyboy. 

Think she doesn't notice? 
She sees plenty. 
Ask her girlfriends. Ask the hard-bellied punks 
she has it off with in the dark. 

Why don't you stop licking your nuts in the corner 
like an injured tom. 
...

Fanny Howe

 

Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it's spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless. 

 Stories of New Narrative

September 16, 2017   •   By Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Writers Who Love Too Much

DODIE BELLAMY

IN CHRIS KRAUS’S I Love Dick, published in 1997 and excerpted at the end of the new anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, Chris, the protagonist, writes in her diary, “He asked me why I made myself so vulnerable. Was I a masochist? I told him No. ‘’Cause don’t you see? Everything that’s happened here to me has happened only cause I’ve willed it.’” The man to whom Chris refers is the titular Dick. Throughout Kraus’s electrifying semi-autobiographical novel, Chris writes Dick letters bursting with lust after they experience what she describes as a “Conceptual Fuck” (read: they flirt at a dinner party). Thematically and methodologically, I Love Dick emblematizes the late-20th-century avant-garde known as New Narrative. In typical New Narrative fashion, Kraus eroticizes everyday gestures and comportments. She pursues an abjection so overwhelming that it renders her writing restless, discomforting.

I Love Dick has recently transcended its word-of-mouth popularity, thanks in part to its adaptation by Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins into a TV series. In the endnotes to Writers Who Love Too Much, the editors, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, state that the series “marks the triumph of something.” Their statement made sense when they made it — between the series’s announcement and its premiere — but I Love Dick, the TV show, doesn’t hold up to such optimism. Bridget Read observes that the series diffuses the novel’s unbearable intimacy across a town — Marfa, Texas — “peopled by quirky, David Lynch-meets-Portlandiacharacters, who are somewhere between satirical and painfully earnest.” For Alexandra Schwartz, the show contorts the point of the book — that desire exists to be thwarted — into a will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com plot. The series’s creators never move beyond the trope of the “unlikable female protagonist.” They never move beyond what New Narrative takes for granted: that people are complex, flawed, that they hurt those they love. What’s more, Amazon, which produced I Love Dick, is one of the conglomerates responsible for the disappearance of independent establishments like Small Press Traffic, the bookstore that served as New Narrative’s cradle. The TV adaptation of I Love Dick operates as a test case for New Narrative: a probe into how much writing can be tweaked before what makes it New Narrative is wiped out. New Narrative isn’t in any fundamental way antithetical to popular appeal. However, I Love Dick, a show where characters always seem about to break the fourth wall and ask, “Am I not brave?!”, compromises New Narrative’s commitment, otherwise palpable throughout Writers Who Love Too Much, to an excess simply untamable, one that can’t be claimed righteously, one that just is what it is. New Narrative’s commitment is to loving too much.

New Narrative emerged from the San Francisco poetry scene of the 1970s and was fostered through the workshops Robert Glück led in collaboration with Bruce Boone. Part formal experimentation, part critical theory syllabus, and part gossip column, New Narrative borrows from highbrow and lowbrow cultures — from canonical literature and from television, popular music, and pornography. New Narrative writers also appropriate, with or without credit, each other’s work. Anecdotes on this practice abound: Bellamy was praised in a review for a passage lifted off from Gail Scott; Killian published under his name a poem that he didn’t remember David Steinberg had written. New Narrative flaunts its influences, past and present. And it intimates a context of production, a literary network, sometimes to the point of assimilating individual authorship into what Killian calls “the giant hive of activated writers buzzing all around the bookstore.”

Kevin Killian

Deep Red

Deep red • the submarine blips on the cold surface
in Antarctica • as Mariner’s ship draws near •
frothy surface on the blue wave •
Life is still • so catch as catch can • still evanescent, still

Red, an oar touches the water’s rim • muscular arm buff as
Meryl Streep’s in The River Wild • in Antarctica •   
frothy surface on the blue wave • life is still • “I don’t have
many T-cells left, but I used to have 8” • “now I have 9”

Under the gristle, vein, under the vein, deep red •
the blood of my pal • deeper and deeper this tiny wave, blue
on the surface • alone on the surface •
if you were one-dimensional what would you see?
a one celled mammal swimming for dear life •
to a shore strewn with protozoa bracken • still life
“now I have 6”

the flotsam and • jetsam of living • high
and deep • this the curve that
will kill you • pal
I’m living in • your disgrace
deep • red hatchet • cells
a doll with hands • scuttles across the face •
of the sea for you
come and get these • memories

Kevin Killian

 

He read all his poems twice, thinking,

                                      

 “they did not hear them the first time.”

They hired a team of gay men who do this 
                                            gardening gig to do it for them

If his body rots in the mouth of maggots
                                                        let’s go to Zuni

Down his throat
                                                        poured a river of beer and rum

In the coercive moonlight of Diamond Heights 
                                                       his red hair, gold

He’d like the symbolism
                                             and of course the spring flowers

He was subtle, always said, “Hello my friend,”
                               as though he knew us better than indeed he did

If the words I wrote, and throw up into the sky, in his direction
                                                    mean what I think they do

Then deep into the black earth a post I dig, that says
                                       retention must be paid

I found out who he really was
                          through the name on the bracelet, pink and white beads

A couple of guys from Ireland 
                                   passing through town and one says, “Die faggots”

If there was no poetry there would be no 
                               toy, face, torment, healing, gladiola, prix fixe, heaven

Dana Gioia

 

California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found 
these fields unbearable, who climbed 
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, 
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, 
wishing a few more trees for shade. 

An Easterner especially, who would scorn 
the meagerness of summer, the dry 
twisted shapes of black elm, 
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape 
August has already drained of green. 

One who would hurry over the clinging 
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, 
knowing everything was just a weed, 
unable to conceive that these trees 
and sparse brown bushes were alive. 

And hate the bright stillness of the noon 
without wind, without motion. 
the only other living thing 
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended 
in the blinding, sunlit blue. 

And yet how gentle it seems to someone 
raised in a landscape short of rain— 
the skyline of a hill broken by no more 
trees than one can count, the grass, 
the empty sky, the wish for water.

Dana Gioia

PLANTING A SEQUOIA

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, 
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. 
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, 
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray 
Of an old year coming to an end. 

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth-- 
An olive or a fig tree--a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. 
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's orchard, 
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, 
A promise of new fruit in other autumns. 

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, 
Defying the practical custom of our fathers, 
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord, 
All that remains above earth of a first-born son, 
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements. 

We will give you what we can--our labor and our soil, 
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail, 
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees. 
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, 
A slender shoot against the sunset. 

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, 
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, 
His mother's beauty ashes in the air, 
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and emphemeral to you, 
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.