Sherry Chandler

I continue to make my way through Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Some pithy observations therefrom (a little string of pearls):

• Philosophizing poets have been a dime a dozen in our epoch but [Wallace] Stevens is the only one who is actually a philosopher. (p.65)
• If the mind can be so constructed, the sensitivity so attuned, principle so unfalteringly adhered to, it is quite possible to produce poetry in which there are no mistakes. This does not mean that the verse of Wallace Stevens should be a model for others; it should not, for that very reason. It is the achievement of an individual poet as a unique being—a style. (p.68)
• The word “precious” is usually a term of condemnation. For Marianne Moore it is the highest possible praise. (p. 68)
• The important thing to remember about Gertrude Stein is that she is nowhere near as deep as she seems. She always said she meant literally whatever she said, and indeed she did. (p. 75)
• A dying social order, a dead language, a value system emptied of meaning—to assault the Old World with the learned arrogance of T. S. Eliot … is to assault it with pride and pride goeth before a fall. William Carlos Williams subverted it with humility. He has been a Taoist revolutionary—”Water seeks always the lowest place and washes away mountains.” (pp 77-78)

Fashion tends to be turning away from some of Rexroth’s opinions, especially about the relative worth of Eliot/Pound and Williams. Still, I find these thoughts worth pondering in trying to develop something like a prosody of my own. And it’s refreshing to find some one who actually considers Williams the deeper thinker.

Every now and then I look over and see my pile of pages from Ulysses and think I should get back to my altered book project. So far, I’ve done a whopping three pages, I think. Typical of my relationship with Ulysses. I never can make any progress with that book.

Someday I’ll do another page.

Meanwhile, I’ll recommend that you take a look at the Altered Books site, if you haven’t been there lately. The project gets more elaborate as it goes on, as the participants get into it I guess. I can’t hope to compete with that, for sure. Anyway, I think my interest will always lean more toward what language I can find through these altering techniques.

Geof Huth at dbqp recently featured Invisible Notes, where you can see the work of Peter Ciccariello, whom I think I would describe as a landscape poet.

Also, if you’d like to see some fine photos, some interesting visual poems, AND practice your French, take a look at L’Oeil Ouvert.

Okay, here’s my first page of Altered Ulysses and I’ll admit it’s a pretty big mess. I’m going to have to get some better tools to work on this old crumbly paper. And probably I’m going to have to learn some patience in working with those tools. But I sorta like the browned look of the thing.

What excites me right now is the way the language works. I’ve found an entwined poem, with a sound theme for Buck Mulligan (”ou”) and another for Stephan Dedalus (”ee”):

Buck Mulligan
mounted the round gunrest
blessed gravely thrice the tower
the awaking mountains

Stephen Dedalus,
displeased and sleepy
leaned
looked coldly

soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please.
One moment. A little trouble about
the loose folds of his gown,
sullen oval jowl

Stephen Dedalus
wearily halfway
watching him still

Looking at Joyce this way keeps me focussed on the language. When my son was admitted to the MFA program at Murray State, he was praised for his ability to develop narrative momentum. And that’s what I tend to look for in novels, some sort of moving plot. But oh my soul and whiskers can I possibly read Ulysses (or here) like an 800 page poem?

Of course, there is the original — it was a longish poem.

This is how the pros do it:

Ruth Bavetta, an honorary Kentucky poet by virtue of her relationship to Gin Petty and me, is the person who introduced me to this idea of White Out poetry. She’s been working on a booklength White Out project, Secrets, and has agreed to let me post one page of it here. Secrets was created as an exercise in a workshop with Sarah Maclay. Ruth tells me that Sarah got the idea from Mary Reufle.

Ruth has the advantage, perhaps, of being a visual artist as well as a poet. She worked with a picture book – a yoga instruction manual – that she picked up someplace like the Good Will. Not only did she white out words – and the lower case is appropriate because, in such a big project, Ruth soon abandoned quick-thickening Liquid Paper for white acrylic paint – but she also blacked out the human figures to make silhouettes and then added bits of color.

When I asked her about the project, Ruth observed:

Some of the people in my group just used the book as a source for the words and order, which they then extracted to form a poem on a clean sheet of paper. Certainly shows how my thinking tends to veer off in odd directions.

Vive l’oddity! Although I like the simplicity of what I achieved with simple text on paper, one of the things I liked most about the exercise was the way it moved away from the linearity of most poetry. Ruth has taken this a step further.

My WaMo colleagues are working with books this weekend. Exciting to think what they may produce.

I’ve chosen “Triangle” to post here because it is very simple and will not overtax your monitor. I’ve put all my talking beforehand so as not to distract you from the thing itself. Click the image to see it full-sized.

I’m working with a collaborative group called WaMo. We’ve spent the last several months looking for innovative (fun) ways to combine poetry and visual art.

The visual poem to the left is the result of one exercise we did that I’ve been calling White Out Poetry. The base document was a print-out of a book review from Powell’s. The review, from The Atlantic Monthly, was written by Peter Beinart about Giles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.

This exercise was suggested to us by Ruth Bavetta. It’s adapted from an exercise she was doing in a workshop with Sarah Maclay.

I thought the result was rather interesting, and the group is going on retreat today to practice more mutilating of text, so I post “Used, New, and Out of Print” here as my Friday graphic.

I like the way the exercise forced me away from linear sense (in a very, very linear base document), the way the words cluster and can be read vertically and horizontally. I also like the texture caused by the White Out (in my case Liquid Paper) as it thickened and became more and more aggravating to work with and the pattern the whole thing makes on the page. I could never get a result like this if I set out to make a random pattern with my own words. I even like the bleed-through from the other side of the page – it’s just cheap copy paper. In short, I’m totally pleased with myself.

This whole exercise was done in an hour so there was little time to think – part of its value. You can see that I had a few second thoughts and wrote words back in but by and large I stuck with what my brush did and if my hand wiped out a phrase my left brain had meant to keep, I let that stand.

Click the image to see the full-sized piece.

WaMo stands for Women Artists Group and Mosaic poets. Our exhibit goes up on March 21 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, and we have an opening reading/performance on March 23 at 7:30. Mark you calendars.