Long Buckby, Cambridge, Equipage, Elizabeth Willis, Tony Lopez, Caroline Bergvall, Carol Watts, London, David Miller, & Home

We ended our time away from Tucson with three nights in England. First we took the Eurostar from Paris. After a delay of a little less than an hour, the Eurostar people were very apologetic and even told us to keep our tickets and they would be good for one one-way trip free for a year, from London to Paris or vice-versa, or, I think, on one of the other Eurostar routes if we so choose. So we have to return within a year!

British customs found it very amusing that we were going to Northampton, and not on business. "Northampton . . . pleasure?" one of them quipped, and when informed that there is an International Shoe Museum in Northampton, he asked his fellow customs officer if he had "caught that one." The other office had not. When we said we were coming to London for a day after two in Northampton, he joked, "Ah, a little calm in London after the excitement of Northampton."

The photos above are of Clare and Rhod's house, Cynthia by the pond in the front garden, me by the pond in the front garden, and Clare and Rhod in their cozy conversation room.

Truly, we weren't going to Northampton, but to a small village not far away, Long Buckby, a village of a few thousand, with a lot of thatched-roof homes and buildings. We were there for friends, Clare & Rhod & Rob & Diane & Dave & Heather, who we met a couple of years ago when a group of artists in Tucson that includes Cynthia had an exchange exhibition with artists from Northamptonshire. Clare & Rhod live in a marvelous 300-plus year old home in Long Buckby, with terrific flower & vegetable gardens, and they were truly great hosts. I hope we keep finding ways to spend time with them. While there, we visited a country pub ten minutes or so away, were fabulously feasted at a dinner party prepared by Clare & including all of those friends named above.

We also were taken to spend about a half-day in Cambridge, an hour away.

Here is a Cambridge street view.

Here I found, in a local bookshop, the terrific chapbooks from Equipage, a small press in Cambridge directed by Rod Mengham. The four I found were by Elizabeth Willis, Tony Lopez, Caroline Bergvall, and Carol Watts. These are all superbly designed chapbooks in which design plays a key role, and in which the poetry, most often of repeated regular structures, lends itself to such design. While I've only seen these four so far (I hope there are others), they make it clear that there is a consistent vision behind this press, a preference for the invention of forms, or the adaptation of forms, in experimental or innovative ways. This consistent vision, combined with high chapbook production values and fine design, make for a press I find entirely memorable, and for specific books that are serious, playful, and moving.

Elizabeth Willis's the great egg of night is a collection of 16 prose poems, or poetic paragraphs, of roughly equivalent length. They could be examples of the "new sentence," particularly related to Carla Harryman's early work in prose (Property & other books). But the persistent I makes the poems tease more toward narrative, a teasing that is rewarded by the tease, i.e. we are kept perpetually on our toes while reading this work, rather than led to some conclusion that would drop the tension. Here's the first three sentences of the first piece, "On the Resemblance of Some Flowers to Insects."

A smoky vessel drifts east like a slippery elixir. By simple rotation night collapses with its head in the dirt, though from the heights it appears more like cubist swagger. Suddenly curtains. What lives in a room takes on the spirit of the room. This true even of television. Imagine deciding the gulley a life will follow as if choosing breakfast over diligent labor. I don't remember my first brush with pollen yet I've watched words flower sideways across your moth.

Isn't that what is happening here, i.e. words flowering sideways, while the work continues forward at a steady pace. The structure, in other words, of work, sentence, poem, provides an energetically moving frame on which thoughts (words, phrases, sentences) cohere as form and ask to perceive a coherence in subject, which happens only as a tight balancing act. Yet the act is successful, and we read ahead, engrossed.

There is humor here, too, though it is the absurd humor of modern life, where "We all live under the rule of Pepsi, by the sanctified waters of an in-ground pond." Our process in reading the poem may be a good deal like Willis's process in writing it, if we can trust her last sentence.

I read the picture and did what it told me, ducking through the brush with my tablet and pen, following some star.

Tony Lopez's Equal Signs is perhaps less of a following along a path, and more of a constructivist performance, a making of path, even of a perfectly laid series of cobblestone steps. It consists of two complete works, "Equal Signs" and "Sequel Lines" that are related in terms of their structure. The first seems to balance the form of the work with ideas of migration, excess, the "larger field," and a notion that the forces are against us, with implied questions of the possible within such a world. What we encounter may freak us out, but we need to think about what might "free this girl" when "the welfare state" is "a veil of allegory." Or, as Lopez has it in the second of thirty stanzas, each with fifteen lines:

beyond these isles
he gets freaked out
by sheer diversity
a larger field
at the moment when
economic logic
with berries in it
can free this girl
symbolic capital
is full of noises
subtle and profound
in which any item
is a pathway into
the welfare state
a veil of allegory

I love the possibility of an economic logic with berries in it. I think that even in this snippet you can see the sheer joy of this work mixed with a serious cultural critique.

"Sequel Lines," a work with exactly the same 30-stanza form, covers similar territory but is amazingly composed entirely of lines and phrases found in papers delivered at the 19th International Ezra Pound Conference in 2001 in Paris. Yet the same call for inventive play amid a smothering social cage (much like "Equal Signs") informs the work.

met at the salon
invented new genres
of human relations
more orderly than
the name of beauty
to be entangled
in what exists
voices and events
after Gunslinger
the ice cream social
did not focus
a grammar of presence
as it emerges
lingering uncertainty
released from the cage

Tony Lopez at his best, and that is a very good thing indeed.

Caroline Bergvall's & raided the type drawers (or, in these days, the computer font files) to come up with 16 different versions of the ampersand (counting the front cover) plus one figure 8, the title of the book being 8 figs. Each individual poem then begins as a commentary on the figure of the particular ampersand, with two different ampersands preceding each of the poems in the book other than the first, which is preceded by the cover ampersand, the title page figure 8, and a single ampersand page. The ampersands are on pages all to themselves, large figures in black centered in a field of white. The poems take up an entire page each, from the very top to the very bottom, with little room for top/bottom margins. In a sense the book has no outside, as I take the first ampersand to be part of what we are intended to read, and the last poem is literally on the outside back cover of the book. This all sounds rather mechanistic, and the type font chosen for the poems looks rather mechanistic to me at first, although a bit more playful the more I look at it. The poems, though, are about shape, color, emotions, love, intimacy, and the world. And even the figs (which we think on the title page to be figures) turn out to be more, to be figs, as a person may be a fig. I hope I can be forgiven for quoting the entire final poem, and I think I might since it's on the back cover, open to the world, opening for the world.

fig8 is a pattern.
Loud and brash
uneven and exacting
carries colour from colour
into the open skull
shifts bones about, illuminates the heart.
She settles in as she starts to speak.
Courage moves red into the blue.
The call is patient
having sat long enough to stand by it.
Acts of poetry
as offshoots of writing.
Engaged when calm
engaged when in-shape.
What is being proposed.
Any count exceeds its own measure.
Cleaning up my
Act so that today mattes for love.
Declaring conviction beyond the first count
of the first brazen song
queries the demarcations
of intimacy.
Any trace of certainty
conceals a panoply of methods.
The conditions of love that condition poetry.
What is inherited
of what is found
needs testament, not archaeology.
Here in the sense of being
To have my fig
be a fig in the world
and all that moves accordingly.

So that finally the figures of language are the figures of thought are the figures of motion in the world are love and the conditions of love and are poetry. Because of the relationsip of the shape of 8 to the shape of the ampersand, there had to be just eight sections or poems in this book. I would gladly have read many more.

As I think about each of the chapbooks cited above, there is an inclusion of both the world as formidable structure (the machine, the cage, the conditions and methods) and the breath of life within it (flowering, berries, love and the fig), so it may come as no surprise that the final Equipage chapbook I purchased at that Cambridge bookshop, brass, running, by Carol Watts, begins

what is it that brings breath to metal

Watts is the only one of the authors whose work I didn't already know, and it comes as a revelation. These "fifteen poems for Elyenore Corp" who we are told died 23 April 1391, are all sonnets (in their own inimitable innovative sense of what a sonnet might be) in which the imagination soars over and within the circumstances of imagined history. This fifteen sonnet sequence presents a lyricism for our time, invoking all time, working with time. Listen.

V

her gaze without ocupancy is green glass
blown where the curl of a wave reveals
fields and cultivars touched by none but
the operation of water or the stumbling
of submarine limbs caught and netted giddy
at the leagues they have travelled blind
where vacancy turns vitreous she views
heven from her pedestal as the brass
records her she sees it among salt acres
headress rippling lungs gasping at the gale
she runs waiting for her name to fall fallow
yet it emains a small parcel of earth
worked over in the cool of the morning where
her slight back sways time like a windrow

The sounds (gaze green glass, echoed later by giddy, just to bring in one example) are astounding from line to line, but astounding only in retrospect; in the act of first reading they are merely captivating. Then one looks again and finds, at the beginning of subsequent lines, "heaven," "records her," "headdress rippling," and "she runs," where the small parts of the poem echo the overall movement yet are small wonders of poetic sound on their own. Indeed if anything "sways time" in this poem, language does. The poem does. Carol Watts does. This is some of the best poetry I have read in ages.

All of these books together, even if there were nothing else (and there is much else), make Equipage one of my favorite current presses. Bravo, Rod Mengham, who I don't know but wish I did. Please keep them coming.

I'm really mixing book sights with other sites in this trip, literary work with simple journeying, visiting frirends, seeing sites/sights. The other highlight of the trip to Cambridge was a visit to Kettle's Yard, one of the great museums I have had the pleasure to visit. Or not a museum at all, but a home, with art throughout. Once Jim Ede's home, and home to work from artists he knew and befriended, as well as to works left in the studio of Gaudier-Brzeska after he died at the age of 26 during the first World War. Works by David Jones, Ben Nicolson, Barbara Hepworth, Marjorie Nicolson, Alfred Wallis, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore, and many more. The amount of art is worthy of a museum, but this is art as I hope we might all want to see and think about it, that is, as works to live among. This is worthy of being a destination visit for any trip to the area. A real Cambridge highlight!

After Cambridge, a return to Clare & Rhod's house, a beautiful dinner with friends,

a night in the third floor guest room looking over the pond and garden, waking to an English breakfast (eggs fresh from the chickens out back), a ride to Northampton with Rhod, then train to London, hauling bags to our hotel (the only hotel night of our 15-day trip away), a walk to the Tate Britain (Turner everwhere, magnificent!, an exhibition in part chosen by David Hockney), boat on the Thames to the Tate Modern (now one of my favorite museums of modern art anywhere, maybe the favorite), a walk to St. Paul's and a tube to SOHO where we went for glorious Indian food at Masala Zone on Marshall just a block from Carnaby St. David Miller met us there and gave me his new book of poems, In The Shop of Nothing, which I am now devouring for the second time and plan to write about.

Here are David and I (fairly tired by this time) at Masala Zone.

And the next day, goodbye England and Europe, hello New York, & hello Tucson after a very long day of sitting on airplanes (Air India & Jet Blue) & hello to our daughters who it is so very good to see, & to home & dog & cat & fish & bed & jet lag & thinking about & continuing to think about two amazing weeks away.

Paris Images

The view out our apartment window, day & night. In the day photo, you can see a fuzzy Tour d'Eiffel in the far background. The night photo was zoomed a good deal more, and the lights of the tower are almost all you can see.

And one view inside our apartment. Other than the bedroom, this is the room where we spent the most time when we were in the apartment, talking, eating meals, enjoying the views and the company.

Three of very many churches. The dark one with stained glass is Notre Dame. The other interior is St-Germaine-des-Pres. The sculptural head is outside St-Eustache, near Jardin des Halles. We also visited St-Sulpice, St-Germain-d'Auxerrois, and more.

Other street or Parisian scenes. In order, Cynthia at the Eiffel tower, me at the door to Reed House (where the translation atelier was held), me in a cafe near Musee Marmotan and its many Monets, Cynthia at a bench in the back courtyard of the Musee Picasso, Cynthia at the pyramid outside the Louvre, a view of the Seine, and a view of the Hotel deVille.

Three graves in the Pere Lachaise cemetery: Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and Guillaume Apollinaire. On the day of my Double Change reading, we began the day visiting these old friends.

With friends. Vincent & Olivier & I at the Double Change reading, during Olivier's introduction. Afterwards, I read poems, and Vincent read French translations of several of my poems. Stacy Doris and her beautiful children in their La Marais apartment.

In the Jardins de Luxembourg, at Allée Andre Breton.

Cynthia and I in what we came to think of as our regular cafe, Le Cafe Goncourt, next to the closest Metro station to our apartment.

Translating Translating Broqua

Two and a half weeks ago in Paris I was finishing the translation of an 8-page poem by Vincent Broqua, de quoi j'ai l'air. I can not reprint it or the translation here as they will be in another publication brought out by TAMAAS, the sponsor of the translation atelier that 8 poets in addition to Vincent and me. Vincent was translating several poems from my "Pushing Water" as well as a few from "Cardinal."

de quoi j'ai l'air is a multi-part poem that seems in some ways like a journal, where days and sometimes, even sometimes temperatures, are noted. Yet the noting self is absent, and in fact there is much in the poem that questions the singular and plural first person, second person, and third person, in a lively and constantly shifting verbal landscape that also includes a sputtering computer in the process of breaking down, and a marketplace scene that is at once hilarious and a serious critique of the consumer economy or at least the overt advertising that feeds us and constantly tells us to "buy buy buy." All of this is done with not a trace of a heavy hand, in a multi-voiced work that was a delight to both discover, read, and bring into English.

I can let out a few things about the translation, that it is literal much of the way but seeks many English equivalents. For example the title translates into something giving the sense of "Look What You Have Done To Me," but without such a strong "you" or "me." So we (I say "we" because Vincent was a great help in arriving at the final translation; also at help at certain times were others in the seminar, specifically Jean Jacques Poucel, Cole Swensen, Frederic Forte, Marie Borel, Sarah Riggs, Habib Tengour, and Pierre Joris) arrived at Look! What I Look Like Now! that has a kind of insistency, but lacks a causal agent, and that lack seems correct for this poem. One of the highlights of the translation was discovering that what I thought was a request for a grandmother to dance was actually a reference to a traditional and very well-known (in France) French song that has to do with asking grandmother to dance. The important thing to translate was not the literal but some sort of equivalent song that English speakers would recognize, and we settled on "The Band Played On" (while reading the translation I tend to sing that lyric). This was one of the points, in considering various songs, that our translation group broke into various songs. There were other such moments during our five days together.

I suppose I learned that translating with a group to help (but the author & translator retaining responsibility) is possibly the very best way to translate; certainly it was with this very particular and marvelous group. I also learned that translating well may be a matter of carrying over the emotion or the tone or mood correctly, far more than carrying over the literal sense, although I know this may differ from work to work. Sound patterns, so important to both Vincent and to me, often can not be duplicated from language to language, but different sound patterns may occur and work quite well as a kind of equivalent. I learned that most phrases take longer to write in French than in English (but this is not always the case), and that, at least in our experience, it was far easier in English to have nouns without articles, or verbs without subjects; such maneuvers are simply not as strange in English as they are in French, though they can occur in both languages. I learned that developing a relationship with a work when its author is working with you is one of the great experiences a reader/writer can have.

(All images are from the translation atelier sponsored by TAMAAS. In order, the photographs depict: Vincent & I at the final reading, Marie & Ben outside the window of our conference room, Cole at the reading, Frederic & Jean Jacques at the reading, Vincent & Jean Jacques working quite seriously, Sarah entering the room in a blur, Pierre at the reading, Cynthia waiting in a chair at the corner during the final day reading Jean Jacques's book on Jaques Roubaud.)

books in Paris

Here's a little more about books in Paris. This was first posted on the Buffalo Poetics List and is here a little bit corrected & expanded.

I was very impressed by the general quality of literary books in Paris. Paperback books are generally sewn, printed on high quality paper, and expertly printed (registration, consistency, etc.) with good design and a graceful sense of page layout. A good example is POÉSIES: Oeuvres Complètes de Mohammed Dib, introduced & edited by Habib Tengour (himself a terrific poet), which is massive at almost 600 pages, and is an important book by a poet I hope becomes available in such an edition in English (this one is in French), and not a "fine art" book at all, but still a lovely graceful book that is a pleasure to handle even at its size. It's my project to translate, just for myself, with an eye to improving my French (which needs a great deal of improvement) along the way. So far I've finished all of two poems, or really finished one in notes in the book and one in my head.

In terms of smaller presses, I picked up a visually delightful book with text by Nicole Malinconi and images by Jean-Gilles Badaire titled La Porte de Cézanne, published by &esperluète editions, which is not in France but in Belgium. I came home with a beautiful small chapbook (in size, not so small for a chapbook in terms of number of pages) by Sarah Riggs, translated into French and published by Éditions de l'Attente, titled 28 télégrammes. And I saw a couple of books from Minute Editions which looked really good. I looked in a bookstore for the one by Frederic Forte (whose presence at our translation seminar was a definite plus) but could not find it. I also like the books coming out from La Presse, which is bringing out French poets in English. One particularly great one from that press is Wolftrot, by Marie Borel.I saw many more books in bookstores but didn't note all the press names and titles. A return trip will definitely be required.And I might have said that Rod Mengham's Equipage books are published by him in Cambridge, England.

Speaking of England, arranging a dinner with David Miller in London was one of the great things that happened on our trip away. If you share the concerns of this blog & Chax Press about poetry, you will definitely want David's book In The Shop of Nothing from Harbor Mountain Press in Vermont. I'll be writing more about that elsewhere, but it's one of the very best books of poetry I have read in the last several years. It's just out and may not even quite be at bookstores or SPD yet. But look for it; you will be glad you did.

David has also sent me a book he co-edited for the Tate museums (Tate Publishing) titled Music while drowning: German Expressionist Poems. Works by Kandinsky, Schwitters, Ball, Heym, Trakl, Stramm, Lasker-Schüler, and several more, specifically including the visual artist/poetry connections in that Expressionist group of writers and artists. My favorite poem of the moment has to be "The Sun," by Hugo Ball. Stunning! Now I'm looking for the German text, although Christoper Middleton's translation here is superb.