White as the wall against
the eye there are seven hooks
that hold the stars
could I breathe now she
who walls asks
paint
some swatch of summer dream
buried in vacation
after that kiss
I’m all lips
no way you’ll ever hover
where the treetops hum
breathless among
each laugh brings another
hole where you thread
your yarn of
understanding.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Famous Poets
I didn't sound off about what Silliman commented on regarding Bill Knott's recent statement about how old, failed poets should be taken out and shot. It seems like sour grapes to me. How someone who's books sell for hundreds of dollars (whether anyone is buying them is another matter) could be considered a "failure" is interesting. Knott's been published by FSG, as well. FSG is a huge name in publishing, so that would be indicative of a certain level of success in my opinion. Poets simply do not attain a celebrity status in mainstream society, but who's comparing and why? Poetry is marginalized, but I think that's what has preserved its credibility. Those writing poetry obviously aren't in it for the money. Other types of success arise because of one's skill at writing poetry, but success in conventional terms isn't attained by writing poetry.
"But if you think that beyond a certain point, the 'failed poets' should be taken out & shot, Knott’s modest proposal, there is something seriously wrong. I feel about failed poets the way Larry Fagin & C.A. Conrad feel about “neglectorinos” or, to use one term I’ve employed in the past, “the disappeared.” That disappearance – usually from print first – is invariably tragic. It robs me of my heritage as a poet that I can’t find the work, say, of Gail Dusenbery on the Web. I’ve already been robbed no doubt of many good poems by Weldon Kees, Lew Welch or Dan Davidson because they acted on an impulse not so different from Knott’s."
-Ron Silliman
"But if you think that beyond a certain point, the 'failed poets' should be taken out & shot, Knott’s modest proposal, there is something seriously wrong. I feel about failed poets the way Larry Fagin & C.A. Conrad feel about “neglectorinos” or, to use one term I’ve employed in the past, “the disappeared.” That disappearance – usually from print first – is invariably tragic. It robs me of my heritage as a poet that I can’t find the work, say, of Gail Dusenbery on the Web. I’ve already been robbed no doubt of many good poems by Weldon Kees, Lew Welch or Dan Davidson because they acted on an impulse not so different from Knott’s."
-Ron Silliman
Dimwit
My word gun is
undone here atop
the chaffe of
splitscreen defaulted
faultlines. I crop
mop-topped slop
amid midnight ice skies
Try to fly
you’ll capsize
doll faces
careen streetside
my idiot bean
needs screening
but I fail to make stain
instead streak hapkido
Commercials moan
above flatscreen
dojo here in the
future so jello.
undone here atop
the chaffe of
splitscreen defaulted
faultlines. I crop
mop-topped slop
amid midnight ice skies
Try to fly
you’ll capsize
doll faces
careen streetside
my idiot bean
needs screening
but I fail to make stain
instead streak hapkido
Commercials moan
above flatscreen
dojo here in the
future so jello.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Brief Statement on the Snow Leopard
Let it be known that on page 12 where the
description of the snow leopard begins, an
egregious error was made in its description.
In no way does a snow leopard resemble all
the demons of hell. It seems that a catatonic
fear set in upon seeing the snow leopard for the
first time, which results in a rather inaccurate
description. Also, on page 43 there is a long
pause followed by a blood-curdling scream.
What follows is an attempt to describe the gurgling
sound of copious amounts of splashing blood.
On page 67, a certain schlick noise is mentioned,
this is the sound of a can of cheap beer being opened,
as the hunter, much later back at the lodge,
found it necessary to consume a quantity of
said beverage when it was finally discovered
that he had completely lost the rest of his hunting party in
the bush. That was a completely different adventure, which
won't be elaborated on here, but let it suffice to say
that his ill-fitting shorts were riding up in the
crotch, which probably led to his finger grazing,
ever so gently, the trigger of his elephant rifle,
causing him to shoot himself almost nearly in the brain.
On page 69, when the aardvark is introduced,
the reader may wish to access certain reference books
in order to reveal its unlikely habitat in its
entirety. The likelihood of sighting an aardvark
atop such a mountainous peak was merely used
to lend page 70 a certain ambiance of horror.
If the stream-of-consciousness effect
which was employed on page 78 was a hindrance to the
narrative, the reader may insert these words
in place of the aforementioned passage, . . . god-
damned barnacles, wherever you go they're all over me!
Perhaps it should also be mentioned that the incessant
drumming that begins on page 112 is not foreshadowing,
but if the reader would like, it could serve to explain
the absence of any dialogue for the rest of the following
chapters.
description of the snow leopard begins, an
egregious error was made in its description.
In no way does a snow leopard resemble all
the demons of hell. It seems that a catatonic
fear set in upon seeing the snow leopard for the
first time, which results in a rather inaccurate
description. Also, on page 43 there is a long
pause followed by a blood-curdling scream.
What follows is an attempt to describe the gurgling
sound of copious amounts of splashing blood.
On page 67, a certain schlick noise is mentioned,
this is the sound of a can of cheap beer being opened,
as the hunter, much later back at the lodge,
found it necessary to consume a quantity of
said beverage when it was finally discovered
that he had completely lost the rest of his hunting party in
the bush. That was a completely different adventure, which
won't be elaborated on here, but let it suffice to say
that his ill-fitting shorts were riding up in the
crotch, which probably led to his finger grazing,
ever so gently, the trigger of his elephant rifle,
causing him to shoot himself almost nearly in the brain.
On page 69, when the aardvark is introduced,
the reader may wish to access certain reference books
in order to reveal its unlikely habitat in its
entirety. The likelihood of sighting an aardvark
atop such a mountainous peak was merely used
to lend page 70 a certain ambiance of horror.
If the stream-of-consciousness effect
which was employed on page 78 was a hindrance to the
narrative, the reader may insert these words
in place of the aforementioned passage, . . . god-
damned barnacles, wherever you go they're all over me!
Perhaps it should also be mentioned that the incessant
drumming that begins on page 112 is not foreshadowing,
but if the reader would like, it could serve to explain
the absence of any dialogue for the rest of the following
chapters.
Read about the mimeo revolution.
Poetry Magazine publishes more prose than anything else…hmm…
Octavio Paz is not very happy with you.
Between Going and Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause
-Octavio Paz
Raining Volvos
Moving magnificently she coos
some moon above us as Venus
cries, some aerodrome, these doves
pass a few crows, leaving
grossly an excuse to only show
the poem that is her mind.
She there chanting Om
as outside the frozen glow
of Ohio spreads drear calm knowing
that she is a monopoly full grown
and as impossible as raining Volvos.
some moon above us as Venus
cries, some aerodrome, these doves
pass a few crows, leaving
grossly an excuse to only show
the poem that is her mind.
She there chanting Om
as outside the frozen glow
of Ohio spreads drear calm knowing
that she is a monopoly full grown
and as impossible as raining Volvos.
Orbiting Planet You
If I could fondle your anesthetic, and
tell the forest leaves to quit their labor
then among autumn clocks I would quince.
Question: Are there enough thieves in
your ocean to echo twelve years?
And my shimmering voices wonder
about the quality of your amber.
But here in my studio of dreams
your heart is a candelabra of dice.
tell the forest leaves to quit their labor
then among autumn clocks I would quince.
Question: Are there enough thieves in
your ocean to echo twelve years?
And my shimmering voices wonder
about the quality of your amber.
But here in my studio of dreams
your heart is a candelabra of dice.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Mantra
Somnolent vase
just this
there silently
laughter
held inside
also
drowning in a
pool of.
Perpetuity’s tomb!
First snowflake!
Tree that
falls without anyone
hearing it!
*
Note. This isn't to be taken as easily as water inside caverns. See the woman walking down the road, and here another poem is setting just like the sun. It's almost over, can you see almost the color of her steps as she shifts toward shadow. Her curves like a tree, no sun now: irregular pastel afternoon (almost).
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Kultur
SIBIU, Romania - This medieval Saxon city has become one of Europe's official culture capitals, drawing attention to centuries-old buildings that were once ordered demolished during Romania's communist period.
Sibiu, in the region of Transylvania, set off fireworks and held concerts and light shows to celebrate its designation, timed to coincide with Romania's accession to the European Union on New Year's Day.
"Sibiu shows clearly this year an important aspect of what Romania brings to the EU: its cultural contribution," Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu said at inauguration of a newly built library.
Sibiu, also known by its German name of Hermannstadt, joined Luxembourg as an official European city of culture for 2007.
______________
By LUCIAN FILIP, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 5, 1:52 PM ET
Continuity
Tim Yu's insightful piece on poetry in Chicago ...
____________________________
I think it’s fitting that two of the four papers on this panel have question marks in their titles. Because I think the title of this panel itself, "Experimental Poetics in Contemporary Chicago," is itself a question: can such a thing really be said to exist? Without presuming to speak for the other panelists, I would guess that most of us would like the answer to this question to be yes--that we would like to assert that a discernable and robust experimental poetry "scene" has emerged in Chicago over the past decade or so--but that we also harbor some serious doubts about whether this is the case.
My own contribution to this debate will necessarily be a mix of the critical and the anecdotal, since in raising the question of whether a new "school" of Chicago poetry has arisen in recent years, I am really looking at two linked phenomena: first, the rise of new institutions, such as reading series, journals, and presses, that offer an alternative to established venues for poetry; and second, any distinctive aesthetic that may have been nurtured and propagated through those institutions. So this question of a New Prairie School is a question that is simultaneously aesthetic and social, as much about friendships, networks, and ephemeral connections as it is about texts.
First: what’s the origin of the term I use in my title, the "New Prairie School"? I’ll freely confess that it’s a term of my own invention. When I moved back to Chicago from California in 2003, I began collecting links to Chicago-area poetry websites, journals, venues, and blogs in the sidebar of my own blog, tympan. Needing something to call this section, I decided, on a whim, to label it "New Prairie School." Perhaps I was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, which, as a resident of Hyde Park, I walked past most days. Perhaps I was also thinking of the "New Brutalism," a similarly tongue-in-cheek, architecturally inspired name adopted by a group of young poets I knew in San Francisco. Most likely I was just grasping for some sense of a regional aesthetic. But as the list grew, including the blogs of Gabriel Gudding and Jeremy P. Bushnell, Ray Bianchi’s Chicago Postmodern Poetry site, and the homepages of the Danny’s, Discrete, and Myopic reading series, I had to admit that something like a scene for experimental writing was indeed developing. So was all this coherent enough to constitute a "school" of Chicago poetic practice? And what about my improvised label? What, if anything, did the new Chicago writing have to do with the horizontal lines and open spaces of Prairie style?
Let’s begin with the institutional signs of life for experimental poetry in Chicago. Again, I’ll emphasize that this is largely an anecdotal account based on what I’ve seen since coming back three years ago; others with more experience should feel free to correct or add to my impressions. Experimental poetry’s profile on the Chicago scene has been most visibly raised by the emergence of new reading series. Most prominent among these is the reading series at Danny’s Tavern in Wicker Park, which tends to host better-known names: local luminaries like Mark Strand, high-profile visitors like James Tate and Peter Gizzi, and events with national journals like Fence. The Discrete Series, started in 2003 by Kerri Sonnenberg and Jesse Seldess and housed in several art spaces around the city, has been both more consistently avant-garde and more locally focused in its programming, pairing visitors such as Lisa Jarnot and Cole Swensen with Chicago poets such as Mark Tardi and Chuck Stebelton. In 2004, Stebelton himself took over the reading series at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, a series established some 15 years earlier by legendary poet Thax Douglas. The series quickly progressed from a few chairs gathered in the bookstore’s rec-room like basement to capacity upstairs crowds for a diverse range of poets including Daniel Nester, Linh Dinh, and Kristy Odelius. The most recent addition to the scene—and the first to break the North Side mold—is Bill Allegrezza’s series A, at the new Hyde Park Art Center.
Reading series, while crucial to bringing together a face-to-face poetry community, can be notoriously short-lived, so it’s worth noting that several of these series have been able to survive the departure of their founders. But perhaps the most significant thing about the emergence of the experimental reading series in Chicago is the challenge it poses to that standby of Chicago poetry: the poetry slam. While New York and San Francisco are known for their diverse poetic cultures—and for nurturing experimental writing in the tradition of the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance—the contemporary Chicago scene is still thought of primarily as the birthplace of the slam, an association that is probably as welcome to some Chicago poets as the miming of a machine gun. Since slams at places like the Green Mill are still going strong, reading series are crucial to building a space for experimental writing in Chicago.
Now, I’m making a big assumption here: that the Chicago poetry scene has, to this point, been actively hostile to experimental writing. Is this justified? Well, we can begin thinking about this by observing that the preferred word in Chicago for the kind of poetry we’re talking about is not "experimental." It is, in fact, "postmodern"—as seen in the title of Ray Bianchi’s website chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, which has become an indispensable resource for its listings, interviews, and reviews. I must confess that I’m not so fond of the term "postmodern" to describe contemporary poetry, probably because it is simultaneously programmatic and vague, and reeks too much of the academic. But I think that’s precisely why it’s become the term of choice for Chicago experimental poetry, both for its proponents and its detractors.
Take, for example, a post from early 2005 by poet C.J. Laity on his slam-oriented site ChicagoPoetry.com, which dubs itself "The Center of Chicago’s Cyberspace Poetry." Laity denounces ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.com as "an attempt to dig the rotted corpse of postmodernism out of its shallow grave and reanimate it" by Bianchi and his "academic camp." The association of the "postmodern" and the "academic" was no doubt reinforced in Chicago by the authority of Paul Hoover, formerly of Columbia College’s writing program and editor of the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry. Without any stable venues for experimental writing in Chicago outside of Hoover’s domain, performance poets have been less likely to see experimental writers as peers and more prone to view them as arrogant interlopers from the academy. If "experimental" and "performance" poetry seem more polarized and pugilistic in Chicago than in other cities, this may be, paradoxically, because of experimental poetry’s relatively weak presence on the scene, and its restriction to a very narrow academic realm, until recently.
Institutionally, then, experimental poetry in Chicago does face an uphill battle. But I think there’s good reason for optimism. The reading series I’ve described have endured and flourished; in the past year I’ve seen packed houses at Myopic and the Discrete Series turn out for poets from Chuck Stebelton to K. Silem Mohammad. Just as important has been the rise of journals and presses devoted to experimental writing, from online venues like Bill Allegrezza’s moria and Larry Sawyer’s Milk, to print journals like Kerri Sonnenberg’s Conundrum and Jesse Seldess’s Antennae, to the new press Cracked Slab Books. Such endeavors provide a more permanent home for new Chicago writing.
But the question remains: has a new aesthetic emerged from these growing institutions? Can we really speak of a "new Prairie school" in poetry? In the time that remains I’d like to address this question by looking at the work of a poet I’ve already mentioned several times, Chuck Stebelton. There’s some irony in my choice of Stebelton, who has recently left Chicago to become manager of literary programs at Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern--an institution that’s often pointed to as an example of what Chicago’s experimental scene is lacking. But I think Stebelton’s curious mix of density, seriousness, openness, and sense of place may best embody Chicago avant-garde writing. Stebelton’s deadpan, enjambed, sharply etched sentences give his poems urbanity and, often, a political edge. Yet some of his most powerful pieces also effectively evoke the Midwestern landscape, not through nostalgia but through suggestion and abstraction. Stebelton’s "new" prairie may be a highly built environment, but it retains an awareness of the wider and perhaps more open spaces that structure it.
When I first heard Stebelton read, I was struck by the density and uniformity of his linguistic surfaces, a stark contrast to the casual, fluid, and often jokey surfaces characteristic of contemporary Bay Area writing, or to the rapid switchbacks and self-consciousness of post-New York School poetry. Indeed, it took me some time before I felt I could find a point of access—just as it took me a few weeks to find the entrance to Wright’s Robie House. Again, I don’t think the analogy is entirely inapt. H. Allen Brooks’s classic treatise on Prairie School architecture asserts that the main characteristic of the Prairie style is the way in which the horizontal line dominates and unifies every element of design, from roof to foundation, leading to a "continuity of line, edge, and surface." "Short vertical accents" play off this horizontal structure, and conventional ornament is rejected in favor of what Brooks calls "the textural expression of materials and the often lively juxtaposition of various shapes and forms."
I think Brooks’s architectural analysis gives a reasonably good description of a Stebelton poem like "To My Father’s Emperors," drawn from his first full-length collection, Circulation Flowers, which was published by California-based Tougher Disguises Press as the winner of the 2004 Jack Spicer Award. Syntactically, the poem is a single, unpunctuated, run-on sentence, a free linguistic flow. What orders this flow is not any narrative structure but, quite simply, the poetic line itself, breaking the sentence up into thirteen roughly equal units, with about four beats per line. But just as the horizontal planes of a Prairie house are not symmetrical, but overlapping and projecting, the grammatical ambiguity created by Stebelton’s line breaks creates an overlapping effect, where each new line seems to be revising or restating a part of the previous one: "to be the city they had hoped he would come to / be by this next act and looked around the watch." The city of Chicago is, perhaps evoked in this poem, but not through realistic depiction, nor by using obvious landmarks as poetic ornaments. Instead, I would say Stebelton evokes the city texturally, through the juxtaposition of images: "gray garages," "silver balls," "lost tunes," "chrome toasters," "bird shaped pool." The only proper noun is "Loomis," unlikely to be recognized by anyone but a native.
That Stebelton might think of this poetic mode as a distinctively Midwestern practice is suggested by his 2005 chapbook Precious, published by Chicago’s Answer Tag Home Press. Stebelton’s horizontal structures are even more severe here, with the book broken up into numbered sections, most of which consist only of a single line. The urban scene here is not Chicago but the town of Xenia, Ohio. While the narrative we expect might be that of a poet’s looking back at his provincial past from his urban present, Stebelton makes clear that his project is not a nostalgic one: "I come to bury Ohio, not to blame him." In fact, Precious suggests not only the continuity of the Midwestern town and the metropolis, but the continuity of the
Midwestern landscape and its cities, creating a sort of urban pastoral. Stebelton’s isolated lines place cattle and casements, turtles and flaneurs in parallel. As in Prairie architecture, the definition of separate planes paradoxically results in a breaking down of borders, a sense of unity, even between the city and the country. Stebelton writes: "Internal conflict inside or outside the park / to walk the city according to plan." If city parks are "green spaces" within the urban fabric, samples of nature set off from the street, Stebelton breaks down those boundaries; we can’t resolve our internal conflicts by displacing them onto artificial distinctions between civilization and nature. In fact, the natural world might provide the perfect "plan" for thinking about the city, just as the open spaces of the prairie suggest a pattern for organizing urban living.
The distinctive textures of Stebelton’s work, and its structural analogies to wide-open Midwestern space, suggests that the idea of a new Prairie School of poetry is not so fanciful after all. New institutions for experimental writing have given work like Stebelton’s a home in Chicago, and Stebelton, along with other poets of the Chicago avant-garde, have responded by marking Chicago writing with a distinctive style. The accomplishments of such work suggests that Chicago’s experimental poetry is becoming a major force not only here, but on the national scene.
____________________________
I think it’s fitting that two of the four papers on this panel have question marks in their titles. Because I think the title of this panel itself, "Experimental Poetics in Contemporary Chicago," is itself a question: can such a thing really be said to exist? Without presuming to speak for the other panelists, I would guess that most of us would like the answer to this question to be yes--that we would like to assert that a discernable and robust experimental poetry "scene" has emerged in Chicago over the past decade or so--but that we also harbor some serious doubts about whether this is the case.
My own contribution to this debate will necessarily be a mix of the critical and the anecdotal, since in raising the question of whether a new "school" of Chicago poetry has arisen in recent years, I am really looking at two linked phenomena: first, the rise of new institutions, such as reading series, journals, and presses, that offer an alternative to established venues for poetry; and second, any distinctive aesthetic that may have been nurtured and propagated through those institutions. So this question of a New Prairie School is a question that is simultaneously aesthetic and social, as much about friendships, networks, and ephemeral connections as it is about texts.
First: what’s the origin of the term I use in my title, the "New Prairie School"? I’ll freely confess that it’s a term of my own invention. When I moved back to Chicago from California in 2003, I began collecting links to Chicago-area poetry websites, journals, venues, and blogs in the sidebar of my own blog, tympan. Needing something to call this section, I decided, on a whim, to label it "New Prairie School." Perhaps I was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, which, as a resident of Hyde Park, I walked past most days. Perhaps I was also thinking of the "New Brutalism," a similarly tongue-in-cheek, architecturally inspired name adopted by a group of young poets I knew in San Francisco. Most likely I was just grasping for some sense of a regional aesthetic. But as the list grew, including the blogs of Gabriel Gudding and Jeremy P. Bushnell, Ray Bianchi’s Chicago Postmodern Poetry site, and the homepages of the Danny’s, Discrete, and Myopic reading series, I had to admit that something like a scene for experimental writing was indeed developing. So was all this coherent enough to constitute a "school" of Chicago poetic practice? And what about my improvised label? What, if anything, did the new Chicago writing have to do with the horizontal lines and open spaces of Prairie style?
Let’s begin with the institutional signs of life for experimental poetry in Chicago. Again, I’ll emphasize that this is largely an anecdotal account based on what I’ve seen since coming back three years ago; others with more experience should feel free to correct or add to my impressions. Experimental poetry’s profile on the Chicago scene has been most visibly raised by the emergence of new reading series. Most prominent among these is the reading series at Danny’s Tavern in Wicker Park, which tends to host better-known names: local luminaries like Mark Strand, high-profile visitors like James Tate and Peter Gizzi, and events with national journals like Fence. The Discrete Series, started in 2003 by Kerri Sonnenberg and Jesse Seldess and housed in several art spaces around the city, has been both more consistently avant-garde and more locally focused in its programming, pairing visitors such as Lisa Jarnot and Cole Swensen with Chicago poets such as Mark Tardi and Chuck Stebelton. In 2004, Stebelton himself took over the reading series at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, a series established some 15 years earlier by legendary poet Thax Douglas. The series quickly progressed from a few chairs gathered in the bookstore’s rec-room like basement to capacity upstairs crowds for a diverse range of poets including Daniel Nester, Linh Dinh, and Kristy Odelius. The most recent addition to the scene—and the first to break the North Side mold—is Bill Allegrezza’s series A, at the new Hyde Park Art Center.
Reading series, while crucial to bringing together a face-to-face poetry community, can be notoriously short-lived, so it’s worth noting that several of these series have been able to survive the departure of their founders. But perhaps the most significant thing about the emergence of the experimental reading series in Chicago is the challenge it poses to that standby of Chicago poetry: the poetry slam. While New York and San Francisco are known for their diverse poetic cultures—and for nurturing experimental writing in the tradition of the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance—the contemporary Chicago scene is still thought of primarily as the birthplace of the slam, an association that is probably as welcome to some Chicago poets as the miming of a machine gun. Since slams at places like the Green Mill are still going strong, reading series are crucial to building a space for experimental writing in Chicago.
Now, I’m making a big assumption here: that the Chicago poetry scene has, to this point, been actively hostile to experimental writing. Is this justified? Well, we can begin thinking about this by observing that the preferred word in Chicago for the kind of poetry we’re talking about is not "experimental." It is, in fact, "postmodern"—as seen in the title of Ray Bianchi’s website chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, which has become an indispensable resource for its listings, interviews, and reviews. I must confess that I’m not so fond of the term "postmodern" to describe contemporary poetry, probably because it is simultaneously programmatic and vague, and reeks too much of the academic. But I think that’s precisely why it’s become the term of choice for Chicago experimental poetry, both for its proponents and its detractors.
Take, for example, a post from early 2005 by poet C.J. Laity on his slam-oriented site ChicagoPoetry.com, which dubs itself "The Center of Chicago’s Cyberspace Poetry." Laity denounces ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.com as "an attempt to dig the rotted corpse of postmodernism out of its shallow grave and reanimate it" by Bianchi and his "academic camp." The association of the "postmodern" and the "academic" was no doubt reinforced in Chicago by the authority of Paul Hoover, formerly of Columbia College’s writing program and editor of the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry. Without any stable venues for experimental writing in Chicago outside of Hoover’s domain, performance poets have been less likely to see experimental writers as peers and more prone to view them as arrogant interlopers from the academy. If "experimental" and "performance" poetry seem more polarized and pugilistic in Chicago than in other cities, this may be, paradoxically, because of experimental poetry’s relatively weak presence on the scene, and its restriction to a very narrow academic realm, until recently.
Institutionally, then, experimental poetry in Chicago does face an uphill battle. But I think there’s good reason for optimism. The reading series I’ve described have endured and flourished; in the past year I’ve seen packed houses at Myopic and the Discrete Series turn out for poets from Chuck Stebelton to K. Silem Mohammad. Just as important has been the rise of journals and presses devoted to experimental writing, from online venues like Bill Allegrezza’s moria and Larry Sawyer’s Milk, to print journals like Kerri Sonnenberg’s Conundrum and Jesse Seldess’s Antennae, to the new press Cracked Slab Books. Such endeavors provide a more permanent home for new Chicago writing.
But the question remains: has a new aesthetic emerged from these growing institutions? Can we really speak of a "new Prairie school" in poetry? In the time that remains I’d like to address this question by looking at the work of a poet I’ve already mentioned several times, Chuck Stebelton. There’s some irony in my choice of Stebelton, who has recently left Chicago to become manager of literary programs at Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern--an institution that’s often pointed to as an example of what Chicago’s experimental scene is lacking. But I think Stebelton’s curious mix of density, seriousness, openness, and sense of place may best embody Chicago avant-garde writing. Stebelton’s deadpan, enjambed, sharply etched sentences give his poems urbanity and, often, a political edge. Yet some of his most powerful pieces also effectively evoke the Midwestern landscape, not through nostalgia but through suggestion and abstraction. Stebelton’s "new" prairie may be a highly built environment, but it retains an awareness of the wider and perhaps more open spaces that structure it.
When I first heard Stebelton read, I was struck by the density and uniformity of his linguistic surfaces, a stark contrast to the casual, fluid, and often jokey surfaces characteristic of contemporary Bay Area writing, or to the rapid switchbacks and self-consciousness of post-New York School poetry. Indeed, it took me some time before I felt I could find a point of access—just as it took me a few weeks to find the entrance to Wright’s Robie House. Again, I don’t think the analogy is entirely inapt. H. Allen Brooks’s classic treatise on Prairie School architecture asserts that the main characteristic of the Prairie style is the way in which the horizontal line dominates and unifies every element of design, from roof to foundation, leading to a "continuity of line, edge, and surface." "Short vertical accents" play off this horizontal structure, and conventional ornament is rejected in favor of what Brooks calls "the textural expression of materials and the often lively juxtaposition of various shapes and forms."
I think Brooks’s architectural analysis gives a reasonably good description of a Stebelton poem like "To My Father’s Emperors," drawn from his first full-length collection, Circulation Flowers, which was published by California-based Tougher Disguises Press as the winner of the 2004 Jack Spicer Award. Syntactically, the poem is a single, unpunctuated, run-on sentence, a free linguistic flow. What orders this flow is not any narrative structure but, quite simply, the poetic line itself, breaking the sentence up into thirteen roughly equal units, with about four beats per line. But just as the horizontal planes of a Prairie house are not symmetrical, but overlapping and projecting, the grammatical ambiguity created by Stebelton’s line breaks creates an overlapping effect, where each new line seems to be revising or restating a part of the previous one: "to be the city they had hoped he would come to / be by this next act and looked around the watch." The city of Chicago is, perhaps evoked in this poem, but not through realistic depiction, nor by using obvious landmarks as poetic ornaments. Instead, I would say Stebelton evokes the city texturally, through the juxtaposition of images: "gray garages," "silver balls," "lost tunes," "chrome toasters," "bird shaped pool." The only proper noun is "Loomis," unlikely to be recognized by anyone but a native.
That Stebelton might think of this poetic mode as a distinctively Midwestern practice is suggested by his 2005 chapbook Precious, published by Chicago’s Answer Tag Home Press. Stebelton’s horizontal structures are even more severe here, with the book broken up into numbered sections, most of which consist only of a single line. The urban scene here is not Chicago but the town of Xenia, Ohio. While the narrative we expect might be that of a poet’s looking back at his provincial past from his urban present, Stebelton makes clear that his project is not a nostalgic one: "I come to bury Ohio, not to blame him." In fact, Precious suggests not only the continuity of the Midwestern town and the metropolis, but the continuity of the
Midwestern landscape and its cities, creating a sort of urban pastoral. Stebelton’s isolated lines place cattle and casements, turtles and flaneurs in parallel. As in Prairie architecture, the definition of separate planes paradoxically results in a breaking down of borders, a sense of unity, even between the city and the country. Stebelton writes: "Internal conflict inside or outside the park / to walk the city according to plan." If city parks are "green spaces" within the urban fabric, samples of nature set off from the street, Stebelton breaks down those boundaries; we can’t resolve our internal conflicts by displacing them onto artificial distinctions between civilization and nature. In fact, the natural world might provide the perfect "plan" for thinking about the city, just as the open spaces of the prairie suggest a pattern for organizing urban living.
The distinctive textures of Stebelton’s work, and its structural analogies to wide-open Midwestern space, suggests that the idea of a new Prairie School of poetry is not so fanciful after all. New institutions for experimental writing have given work like Stebelton’s a home in Chicago, and Stebelton, along with other poets of the Chicago avant-garde, have responded by marking Chicago writing with a distinctive style. The accomplishments of such work suggests that Chicago’s experimental poetry is becoming a major force not only here, but on the national scene.
Lifting the Lid
Ferrari thought, baroque thought,
beneath the surface,
models in leisure suits flatten cities.
We’ll sift among them, our gills billowing.
Hello, happy vampires.
Hmm…look up: notice the light
in which a great ship is riding.
Will it brave the deep
and take us,
over dormant lacquered waves?
Of what do I speak?
The receptor cells quake
taking in the last hours
businessmen roasting on spits.
Worry is my tequila.
beneath the surface,
models in leisure suits flatten cities.
We’ll sift among them, our gills billowing.
Hello, happy vampires.
Hmm…look up: notice the light
in which a great ship is riding.
Will it brave the deep
and take us,
over dormant lacquered waves?
Of what do I speak?
The receptor cells quake
taking in the last hours
businessmen roasting on spits.
Worry is my tequila.
Here's a link to the NPR story about the recent alien visition here in Chicago. Who will ever know what it was? I doubt that United employees would put their jobs and credibility on the line for no reason, however. Only after a Freedom of Information Act petition was filed did the FAA have any official comment on the incident. United denies their employees even reported that anything happened. Where are Mulder and Scully when you need 'em? The X-Files was a pretty good TV show. I'd rather not see any UFOs around here anytime soon, though.
Suspended
Here beneath precisely
words are bracelets
eyes of snapdragons
a roomful of mercury
bamboo exoskeletons
just another day in
the Deep South
I insert a comma
like a yacht
there in the liquid absence
of that taunting vertigo.
words are bracelets
eyes of snapdragons
a roomful of mercury
bamboo exoskeletons
just another day in
the Deep South
I insert a comma
like a yacht
there in the liquid absence
of that taunting vertigo.
Apt Antlers
Your maze is a trust of tornadoes. At last my hands are the receiver, electric gestures pleasantly current. Just beyond the blackberry, the container yellows. Come out of the bath, I wanted you nicely. Dutch simplicity doesn’t rhyme with Zukofsky. Fate is a wingy flame and a ruffled jungle. I need buffalo but I’ve never been a bystander. Some breathe loudly, I parse instances. Within which the poem operates. It is dark, this Republic of Ireland. Yet, your lips have a number of linings. Wolves are clean and flying. What prompts meaning in the moonlight? Moon, moon, why don’t you leave me alone?
Polyester: An Ode
Dormant volcano,
I love
you.
Comb the
porn from
your hair, beautiful as
concrete.
Someday, your
joi de vive,
you say
sipping an empty
bottle of hours.
Could it be
that we’re
lunch to
some
unseen
hand?
Silence, gallop
across the
land.
I love
you.
Comb the
porn from
your hair, beautiful as
concrete.
Someday, your
joi de vive,
you say
sipping an empty
bottle of hours.
Could it be
that we’re
lunch to
some
unseen
hand?
Silence, gallop
across the
land.
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