T.C. MARSHALL Reviews
Poems to Work On: The
Collected Poems of Jim Dine. Edited with Foreword by Vincent Katz
(New York: Cuneiform Press, 2015)
Woodrat Flat by
Albert Saijo
(Kaneohe, HI: Tinfish, 2015)
Guantanamo by
Frank Smith. Translated by Vanessa Place
(Los Angeles: Les Figues,
2014)
“Three Angles on View”: A Combined Review
The idea of
reviewing these three books together rose out of my first look into them, when
I saw the radically different angles on poetry that they embody and what they
have in common. I had chosen them from Galatea’s “purse,”
http://grarchives.blogspot.com as Eileen
Tabios calls it, based on interest in the three writers. One, Albert Saijo, was
a naturalist and a companion to a few of the famous Beat poets. He was also the
brother of an admired acquaintance of mine, Gompers Saijo, who painted the
wildflower poster that most of us used back in the day for learning to
recognize and name California’s botanical highlights. I was pleased to see new
poems from this sentimental old favorite poet and anxious to see how the
concerns of the naturalist fit with the attentions of the poet.. Another was a
great NY painter, Jim Dine, whose “Hearts” adorns a poster on my covered back porch.
He is another sort of sentimental favorite, but his sensibility is from that
other coast and from that other world called “painting.” I wanted to see if I
could discern a clear relation between his acts of painting and his poetry. The
third was an un-sentimental un-favorite that I had only recently first encountered
because of the furor over her work that re-inscribed Gone with the Wind as a series of tweets. Vanessa Place’s name is
there only as translator for this book by Frank Smith, who is said to be “a
French journalist, nonfiction writer, and author of multiple books of poetry,”
but it was her name and concerns that drew me. As the press release says,
“translated into English by Vanessa Place, Guantanamo
unsettles the categories of law and poetry, innocence and guilt, translation
and interpretation.” It is her “Translation and interpretation” intermixed as
something like “trans-terpretation” that engages me with this book because of
her efforts in this realm of “conceptual poetry” and the meanings that they
have taken on for progressive poets and readers of poetry. I wanted to see what
she was putting forward for us, whether the concept was all there might be to
“get” from the original “trans-terpretation” by Smith of interrogations of
prisoners. It is these admixtures that engage my attention in all three books:
the lyricism and naturalist leanings of Saijo’s late work, the poetry and
painterly sensibility in Dine’s Poems to
Work On, and the unsettling of categories pushed into each other by Frank
Smith and emphasized by Place.
“Appropriating
language from the interrogation minutes, Smith shapes these questions and
answers into a literary world as faceless and recursive as the interrogations
themselves, leading us away from the comfort of reason and the hope of
resolution,” says that press release that Les Figues inserted into my copy of Guantanamo. What is especially
interesting about this is how it speaks to the other two books as well. We are
asked to recognize this shaping as poetic. In Smith & Place’s text it might
be purposely questionable to call it poetry, and this helps in questioning the
relations in the other books between natural science and poetry or a painterly
eye and poetry. These two last combos have become naturalized for us as poetry
readers and writers. Even Smith chooses as his opening epigraph William Carlos
Williams’ “no ideas but in things.” This
is the sign under which our poetry mostly gets written and read, the catalogue
of the seen. If we step back and ask each of these books about what it sees and
shows us, we may see that the three are not as different as all that because
they all use a mixture of angles to make their meaning.
Start with
Saijo’s book. With his Beat friends and all that has come out of their impetus
over the last half century, Albert Saijo appears to just be making poems here.
Great claims are made in Jerry Martien’s intro about “a post-apocalyptic
wisecracking prophet, speaking the language of the human future,” but that also
is the to-be-expected of poetry these days and right in line with that Beat
heritage. What’s actually in the book is more than that. Martien has it when he
points out that “what further connects, and makes each entry [in the daybook
middle section] more than a brilliant or quirky perception, is the
autobiographical poem that weaves through the journal.” This sense of the
sensibility of the poet is a primary characteristic of our dominant poetry
aesthetic: poets tell their own story and we benefit from their perceptions.
What’s tricky about that here is the way Saijo is more than one of those poets.
As Martien puts it, this is a “poet and outlaw gardener, the lover and husband
and dissident, the guy who calls himself Nature Boy and regards his doomed
nation and his place in the animal world with equal curiosity and amusement”
(17). All this creates an admixture of detachment and engagement, the double
bind of our world and its aesthetics. Often in this book, I get the feeling
that that is what Saijo is really writing about.
Much of the book deals with outlaw
growing back in the day, and it expresses opinions about the law’s various
approaches to stopping people, but it also hangs loose and speaks science and
sharp-eyed observation of what nature tells us. The “doomed nation” of policing
is recorded just as the growth of plants is. “Smart Plant” is one such nature
observation, but in the company of poems like “Toward a Legend for Our Time and
Place” it takes on socio-political meaning. That one makes observations about
C.A.M.P. and ends with
UNDER THIS FOREIGN DYNASTY IT’S
DEFINITELY HARDER TO GROW BUT WE WILL SURVIVE AS WE SURVIVED THE PREVIOUS LOCAL
DYNASTY—SO HUM IS PROBABLY THE WORST PLACE IN THE STATE TO GROW NOW BUT YOU
PLAY THE CARD LIFE DEALT YOU—NOW IT IS A GAME OF WIT & CUNNING AGAINST
AIRBORNE FOREIGN DYNASTY DRONE—THE YEAR SNOW FELL ON THE COAST AND STAYED AND
FROZE (127).
That last bit is the “Nature Boy” staying present to the
world even through his more engaged thoughts.
To be the “Nature Boy” that first comes to mind in the late twentieth
century, through the voice of Nat King Cole, is to be a wise wanderer who knows
that the greatest power in the world is love. This seems true to Albert Saijo’s
life and vision. In “Long Gone,” near the end of the book, Saijo writes of an
attempt to “sue the govt for nonlegal status.” Harassed for his efforts to grow
“a plant that teaches you what freedom means,” he chooses to disappear instead.
At the end, he says
NOW I’M NONLEGAL—LIKE LIFE—I’M
NATURE BOY BUT I’M SURE GLAD I KNOW THE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE HERE (129).
Cole’s song has some resonance here because the models for
its writer came out of a 1940s Hollywood raw-and-health-food cult seeking “lebensreform”
through the tenets and practice of the “wandervogel” movement, a hippie-ism of
late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.
Saijo’s model in this book reaches
back a little further, as it seems to be Thoreau’s journals, which he brings
into focus a few times in the book, three times on page 86:
THOREAU
OF JOURNALS IS THE FUTURE AMERICAN
THOREAU DIDN’T HARM ANYONE HE
DIDN’T BENEFIT ANYONE—ALL HE WANTED WAS TO BE ABLE TO STEP OUT HIS DOOR &
RECOGNIZE EVERY FACE THAT GREETED HIM FROM NATURE
THE SUN CLIMBS TO THE ZENITH DAILY
OVER ALL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
--THOREAU
JOURNALS
This stance sets Saijo just a little apart from the Romantic
vision of union with nature or the Beat critique of our “doomed nation.” He
mixes both these elements to hold himself outside the law and the common
culture, loose from both the critical “comfort of reason” and the transcendental
“hope of resolution.” Woodrat Flat is
an exercise in maintaining this balancing act without a leg to stand on.
Jim Dine’s
poems balance on the gap between seeing and saying or hearing and seeing. They
are not as imagistic as you might think a painter’s poems would be, though many
of them had their original setting among his painted or collaged or
photographic images. Vincent Katz’ foreword tells us the history of Dine’s
progress as a writer and how there was an early period, a hiatus of two
decades, and a later period that continues now in his eighties.” Both Dine’s
early and later poems play with the language of common speech, glorying in it
and confuting it by odd word choices and difficult syntax,” writes Katz (20).
These gestures, rather than cancelling each other out, enhance the poetic sense
of free play combined with focused effort. In Katz’ estimation, the later poems
“leave more out” and depend more on the arrangement of letters on the page.
Some of these poems are written by hand but often on large sheets of paper
pinned to the wall of his studio. Katz reports that Dine “says he can really
see the poems that way.” This palpable quality demonstrates that “the words are
visual objects” for him (21).
The book’s pleasant design, by Kyle
Schlesinger working with Dine, makes this clear for us in examples from the
graphic works where some of the poems originally appeared. One such piece is
reproduced facing page 21 in the foreword, and the poem in it appears alone on
page 173. The latter version, with the words set in type, is visibly different
from the graphic “chromogenic print” version. The generous presentation of that
version unfortunately creates the feeling that many of the other poems would
have been more interesting in their more painterly presentation. The
reproduction of the print shows that each letter is painted onto the wall with
attention to its shape and its relation to the other shapes around it. We also
see, by comparing the typed version, that several words of the poem are
“erased” in the painted version; they are obscured by being lightly painted
over or brushed in a much lighter way. Dine himself notes at the end of the
book that erasure is an “important tool” in both his poems and drawings
(un-numbered last page). This pair of pages works well to show us the use of
erasure and other graphic tools in these poems, but most of the poems do not
enjoy such a pairing.
Dine’s words are engaging, fun,
sometimes mystifying, and always delightful in small ways. The sense of their
employment as visual objects is missing, though, from most of the poems. The
book is already a fifty-dollar one, and it couldn’t include much more without
going over the top in pricing. That’s just simply too bad because the value of
Dine’s poems lies most often in this graphic engagement with the words. He is
working with what the words make us see and with the poetic work of saying what
he sees, but beyond both those angles is his thrust past “the comfort of reason
and the hope of resolution.” The poem on page 173 says
This
morning, when I was young
I
went into a little room where there was
A
CLEAR MIRACLE LIKE
OBJECT A big sculpture
In
the room—
CONFUSED
YET CLEVER
I
VISUALIZED a non-material ACT.
A
MIRACLE—
IT
CAN APPEAR OR NOT APPEAR
ANYWHERE
On the page in the foreword, words are erased or corrected
so that this poem says
This
morning
I
went into a little room
where
clearly a miracle
caught
your eye
in
the room
confused
I
visualized
A
MIRACLE
APPEARING
ANYWHERE
The poem-only version is more of a poem, but it leaves out the
erasure of those several particular phrases that exhibits the “non-material
ACT” of Dine’s hand and mind reaching beyond resolution or reason into the
aesthetic act.
The
aesthetic act is the center of Guantanamo’s
balancing. Its content is taken from the transcripts of interrogations at our
prison facility in Guantánamo , Cuba. The small fact of that being occupied
territory is not given any attention, though I will always remember a Jacques
Cousteau special where the marine scientist visited Fidél and was shown a
drawer full of rent checks from the U.S. government never cashed by El Lidér
that he said he was holding in protest. The protestations of the interrogated
prisoners might seem to be the inflammatory material of this book, but Smith’s
arrangements of the Q&A in French and Place’s translations of them into
English focus our attention more on form as we read. We get several variations
in his presentation of segments, and even more variations in her choices of
different ways of translating the idiomatic phrasing of the impersonal
third-person as in “On dit.” The achievements of this book by Smith and by
Place are also in some ways its limitations, as it moves our focus away from
content to event and the framing of voices.
Frank Smith
presents, in his French version, several different frameworks for the question
and answer of interrogations. The book delivers segments, some of them
apparently repeated, in a variety of formats. Each is given a Roman numeral,
ending at XXIX. Some are framed as “Question:” and “Response:,” imitating a
simple transcript. Some are put into unified objective narrative. Others are
redacted as sequences of “On dit” or “On demande” and “On répond.” Still others
have narratives containing the framing gestures of naming the two voices as
“the interrogator” and “the interrogated.” There are other variations including
giving all one voice’s words in one paragraph and then all the sentences of the
other voice, so that you can put the back-and-forth of it together in your
reading. Other sections simply concentrate on one voice, usually that of the
interrogated, and give a narrative encapsulization of that person’s claims.
Reading through these, what we notice is mostly the variation and the different
qualities it brings to each statement. This is most noticeable where segments
of interrogation are repeated in different forms. Sections XVII and XX tell
apparently the same story in two different frameworks.
For us as
reading poets looking for the “poetics” in the book, these variations are its
contribution much more than any revelation about the content of the
interrogations. We tend to know already most of what was being said. The tone,
though, changes as the framings make for different emphases. We feel for “the
man” in XX or XVIII, while in XVII the emphasis of “We” as the focal pronoun
sounds maybe more protesting. And in the sequences given with “Question:” and
“Response:,” we feel more of the antagonisms passing back and forth. In “on
dit” fragments, the blurring of persons sometimes occurs as “we” shows up
within what the character designated as “They” is reported as saying. This
actually happens because of Place’s choices about translating the construction
of the “on” that is so natural to both objective reports and gossip in French.
Place makes
several variations work for this phrasing in her English. She has passages that
mark the exchange by using “they” and “we,” while others use our casual “they”
for both persons. She has some, like the very first in the book, where person
is only suggested through verb forms and pronouns are left out: “Asks” such and
such, and “Answers” like so. These further variations add to the rich texture
of the book, but also seem to lead us to think more about these frameworks of
“person” than about the persons incarcerated and tortured. Torture is mentioned
at a few points in the interrogations; medical help is even asked for in
earnest pleas. The expected denials and accusations are also made. The
intervention of the poets is on another level and scale. Place comments about
it at the end in her “Translator’s Note” (154-155).
She says
that pronouns were her focus, and she comments on shifting these deliberately.
The way she frames her own acts of translation takes its direction from Derrida
and Spivak, it seems. Her biggest claim about the meaning of this book is that
“the language lesson of Guantanamo is there is no point of origin” (155). This,
of course, tips the book toward being about translation and choices. The voices
in it are pushed into the shapes of the translator’s concerns with languaging. Place’s
focus is on her insistence that “no fidelity to any event that can be counted
by calendar or clock” will find the truth “because the text event as such is
the only event which counts.” She sees this book as having created a sense of
an original through its “doubled text” of French facing English, and we can see
that the necessity of that doubling is created by her multiple choices of
translating the “on” phrases. She claims that none of the “usual substitutes,”
including “one,” was “sufficiently close yet impersonal, particular yet
universal, … inclusionary yet exculpatory.” Because pronouns are “relational,”
she says, she “thought to shift these relations commensurate with their
possible alliances, linguistic and otherwise” (155). This work is admirable,
but the politics of the book get their strength elsewhere.
The final
section is poignant and obviously chosen for that position in the book because
it depicts a “detainee” who, when asked by the President of the Tribunal about
where he would like to go if released, says “I would like to … go to the United
States, this is what I wish for most in the world” (xxix 153). The irony is
almost too heavy here, but it implies an “innocence” that seems characteristic
of many of those interrogated. The ironies of expression and voicing that are
played up by the author and translator are put in their place by this irony.
The irony in that ending section is preceded by an almost greater one in the
penultimate bit. Faced with accusations beyond his comprehension, one detainee
identifies himself as “an insignificant person” and puts all of this interrogation
in perspective with a plea that is both frank and sadly humorous: “No one has
time to feed his family while doing what you accuse me of doing” (XXVIII 151).
This
closing, those last two pieces, carry the book back past the intellectual
concerns of Smith and Place. Their doubled look at framework and content, at
the powers of form, is not in conflict with the focus in XXVIII and XXIX. Those
two sections, though, manage to bring the focus back to the detainees by
letting them have the last word in doubled contexts and in social as well as
linguistic ironies. The doubling of the form is the real strength of Smith and
Place’s work, just as it is with Dine and Saijo. Each of them works to put at
least two angles into play in making meaning with words. This is the labor that
all three of these books exemplify, in varying ways that should illuminate both
their subject matter and our work as poets.
*****
T. C. Marshall has never left home; he has
taken it with him from Toledo to Phoenix to Tucson to La Mesa to San Diego to
Toledo to Covina to San Diego to Berkeley to San Diego to La Jolla to San Diego
to Tsawassen to New Westminster to Burnaby to Vancouver to Fort Collins to
Boulder to Vancouver to Fairfax to Palo Alto to San Diego to Santa Cruz to
Aptos and to Felton. And now he's thinking of Toledo again, or Ithaca.
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