"Santa Barbara dry": a reminiscence

Queen of the Missions church

Pierre O'Malley's red-tiled by the sea: some wateringhole
with stars or whatnot! And stranger still’s a sign saying
reason's the life of this town, for the road to the Missions
& rows of los olivos
is the one to adobe walls, too, built by masters of the Channel:
grainy bench and lavanderia both, under red-palmed heat
I saw the grape for baptism deal at a dry Spanish fountain-
just like that!

And gone with the Masters I’m first at the shiny lavanderia

where wine here isn’t any more a heady dope that runs
trickling to the Presidio ,by the cudgel & a good fat grape.
The place is a
quake leveller felt as far as Capistrano! A lime-lighted

square for lovers, too:—"¡Ay, Bernarda mina!",Padres say;
"my lips to yours are near: a twin-breasted red-eyed Queen
you'll always be”

And since she’s slung on the backs of the Chumash, & still
the adorable colour of an acorn-mashed & leached hills,
romance-mad me who's first to go through the doors
of a church
finds instead whale spine stools & kneelers of a Rancho

where presto! at the sly side-altar a portrait of a Lady’s
animistic-patriarchal face voids her sad waters out!
Sun & drink!

And a garden of Nile lilies, yucca outdoors, a ginger paradise,
lush, looking about ready to burst bloody to its toenails
And through a side-entrance (a mostly mossy wall )a grave
of notched bones,
of one Comprador in particular, at a end of a cactus lane
"I want rest" (who doesn’t!),” from skull-bones and war”,
says good-ol' Daniel Hill, who lies here with his whore,
in Santa Barbara dry

"Looking Through Stone": poetry and the eco-text

There is in poet Susan Ioannou's Looking Through Stone an interesting development of the idea of the poem as 'stone' that makes it a " both solid and beautiful" undertaking. But it's more than simply a collection of poetry, or a typology of stone poems (as the book is divided about equally between the geological and mythical-folklorish): she offers the reader an even interestingly wider window on ecology in general. If the ecological is not a gratuitous personal preference it's because treating Ioannou's text as both poetry and a type of environmental activism is the best way to reach through to its literary 'stone' heart. Ioannou's is an eco-text. For all its poetic and mythical richesse, there are also the "horror stories" of disease, human exploitation and environmental mismanagement that have to be chronicled in verse, too.

And nowhere does the heart of the eco-text emerge more clearly, introducing subject and environmentalist attitude, than in the "Prologue" piece, "Why" (13),

Why fondle a rock?

It shares the rugged body

where we were born

Our passionate shift and shove

mirror a moment

erupting in fire

slowed to eons' crystalline trickle

thickening, building

collapsing, melting.

Great ages echo and shiver,

playing themselves out

within our puny bones.

where poet treats the subject 'rock' not just as mineral but literary origin of the human and animal in us: from earth's outer "rugged body" through to its "erupting" and "thickening" core. Earth is no sterile moon landscape: apart from its purely figurative associations, the planet is literally ours as both quintessential rocky place and repository of our own puny natures. That's why the rock can be fondled as it though it literally sprang from us: "It shares the rugged body/where we were born".

And if the 'Prologue' gives poetic object, the 'Epilogue' is the place to introduce the "Petrologist" (104-5), chronicler and conveyor of stone history, whose "instrument is intuition" (104) and primary tools the drill, pick and maps with which to begin looking through to stone's ineffable heart. Everything in between, Parts I to IV, is that unearthing of stone's twin scientific and mythic natures, with the concomitant stories of mineral exploration and exploitation. The petrologist shares in the myth-maker's sense of awe at this crib of Love and Death that is the Earth:

In sunlight, one by one,

he lays out his stones,

loving their tints,

silky or ragged faces.

He fondles, speaks to them,

wonders when they will whisper back

where each formed,

what it grated against,

where some day it would go. (105)

Believing that the "inanimate is prickly with soul" ("Mineralogy Lesson" 33)poet is perhaps earth-mother herself to her son's coldly dispassionate scientist; her "murmur of mysteries" (33) to his ions and diffusion Not that there is every any consistent dialectic of feminine and masculine throughout, nor is Ioannou suggesting that male attitudes towards the earth are exploitative in nature, but the reader can't help sensing that, inside the poetic classifications, lies a need to restore 'stone' to a kind of pre-scientific, paleolithic purity. The analysis of stone in poetry works in just this double lyrical-environmentalist vein, as a way perhaps for the author to help the scientist son to look for a truer meaning in the "minerals' hum" and "fissures and dust" ("He Sits" 36). The story of 'stone' the poet wants to tell threatens everywhere to be obscured by the very scientific technology that makes that story possible.

At the beginning rock has not just being but a name, "Petra" (15),: images of her abound as "a breathing, magical, loved stone" who's "spiky as bornite" or "lethal as molten gold". Able to listen for its pulse with a magnetometer ("Geologist" 16), the geologist can feel the 'stone's' "attractions and repulsions" ("Magnetometrist" 19); and compass needles swing wildly sometimes because there are traces of ancient solar bombardments the planet carries inside like subconscious trauma, ("Exceptions" 17). Stone is a live organism with wildly pulsing inner chambers and a dark primal neolithic Ur-mind. It's a magnificent resilient structure on its own but, Ionnou suggests, it can also be wounded, scarred.

Petra has not just body, made out of elemental clay ("Clay" 80) but soul, one "invisible anima" ("The Link" 22) that lives in all marine and terrestrial eco-systems. The heart of her is true but passionate to the extreme. If she could write her own poem, the "Earth's poem, unspoken/thick with her possibilities" ("Geode" 31) it would describe a pure love of "melting groundwater ("Sedimentary Rock" 27) or even picture its sorrows as a "pyromaniac's dream" ("Devitrify" 24), "cracked open", and rupturing into lava or the scaly geode. She is a book of myths, too, telling how shy Diana was "hardened to stone" ("Amethyst" 66) or garnet originally "petrified from goddess Isis' blood" ("Garnet" 68).

Petra, old as sidereal time, is subject of a veritable Ages of Stone every bit the equal of Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Minerals thunder out of the skies, dropping down as "metal of heaven": limonite, magnetite, hematite ("The Metal of Heaven: Iron (Fe)" 41), rich Promethean gifts. All the known elements: iron, copper, and silver, gold, mercury, lead and tin—all are facets of the one Petra, each etymologically distinct and each bearing uniquely the special qualities and powers received from her. She's personified as oracle ("Oracle Stones"61),of pure gem light ("Gem Lure") and time "that vibrates at 30,000 cycles per second" ("Lithotherapy", 64).The "blue-eyed geologist" maker her Northern pilgrimages to her("Prospector"83-85), an interesting type of the feminine-explorer more attuned to poet's own mythical sensitivities.

But pilgrimages aside, and dispassionate scientific inquiry and appreciation, there are the "Horror Stories" (96-99) to consider. Not all things excavated out of the earth resonate with poetic and mythological meaning: for oftentimes mountains trickle down their acid poisons ("Iron Mountain" 96), holes gape in the landscape wide enough to "swallow the CN Tower" ("Hole" 97), and diseases like silicosis ("Silicosis" 98) and radiation poison ("Prophecy" 98-99) quietly develop for years without detection Poetic elixirs have become toxins that pose real threats to the environment.

Ed Baker: and 'Stone Girl' poetics

(STONE GIRL E-PIC: POEMS AND ART)

"The Whole'll have her again!—So absolves me the role.
But: She's your happiness!—No, I am too immense,
Too thing. Of course! But my being here presents,
True to its reflection there, the appearance of the Whole:
From Woman to the Silence hence!"

Jules Laforgue (from "Complaint of Consolations")

Ed Baker's STONE GIRL E-PIC (Volume I: parts S and T) is poetry that doesn't call out for the usual 'signifieds' of subject, attitude and mood. For how could a bare bones minimalist writing conjoined to art without borders do it? If poetry is only a question of structure and verbal precision, then it's a delicate house of cards, at best. But here is work that manages to retain all these and yet bring 'traditional' poetry crashing down, leaving us to search among the fragments for just the essentials: a minimalism that matters and the most purely 'concrete' art I've ever seen. Writing that cuts to the bone, iconoclastic and original, and a 'Stone Girl' art sprung out of the lines themselves. Writing and art on Baker's terms.

How do we describe the poetics of this 'bare bones bonze' (as he calls himself)? Since acceding to Western canon's not his thing, again, how does Baker do it? Well, let's say the business of writing's a little more visceral for him; and that the artist's studio is his yard in Takoma Park, Maryland and the artist an impassioned buddhist whose implements (rocks, a tree stump, and sun) lie always ready to hand. And that the product, a poem or sculpture, can be even a bit more earthy than the usual cultural artifact: in fact, it'd be appropriate to speak of it as having a sort of scaly chitinous body (the poem) that somehow seems indistinguishable from both the painting and sculpture (and from perhaps poet himself). Let's say Baker works as an artisan-poet ( in the way Blake did), alone, under a full moon as "Stone/Girl" looks on. There's a start.

In an email conversation with Baker I discovered 'Stone Girl' has prototypes in ancient Hindu (Uma) and Semitic mythology (Asherah and Ashima),as well as a possible place of origin (Shilin, a stone forest in Yunnan province, China), the mythico-literary Asherah-Ashina-Stone Girl lineage being clearly drawn. Among the more influential contemporary linguistic-mythological studies Baker recommends are The Language of the Goddess (Marija Gimbutas, 1989),Habitations of the Great Goddess (Cristina Biaggi, 1994) and The Story of Stone (Jin Wang, 1992).

And the poetic 'style' (I'd prefer to say atmosphere) of STONE GIRL? Along with artistic production I recognize literary influences. It's in the technique, haiku-inspired, of reducing subject matter to the fewest possible words that we detect the presence of the Masters before him (Cid Corman, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Edmond Jabès ) and of the contemporaries ( John Perlman, John Martone, John Pillips, Jeremy Seligson, David Giannini) with whom Baker works today. So let's say Baker's the irrepressible haiku Master-artist, alive equally to tradition and influences, who's effected the most startling sort of art and nature fusion, and done it his way. And that by scaling the world and language down to the fewest possible syllables and strokes, he's made an artistic figure mesh with lines of poetry. And what he's created out of elemental rain, mud and heat is a 'stone girl' who gives Baker's poetry not just meaning but both mind and motion. How's that for style!

And given Baker's temperament, the style and thrust of the poem is to peer between the lines, and into a place of pure imagination, for any way you see her Stone Girl is always 'there, branching and encrusting senses like a growing thing. She can be persona, metaphor or even the most mongrel literary form imaginable: any way you like to see her. She's certainly a problem for what Barthes calls the "readerly reader" looking for easy codes and continuities because that reader's now faced with the work's radically fluid sense of artistic design. She's a product of artistic intention and work: and the result's a creation real enough to be kissed, seeming to walk now with a mind of her own, and picking up speed as she goes. "Walking/faster/mind".

It's best to see 'Stone Girl' then not so much as cultural artifact as artistic processing, primal and pure as blue skies, an overhanging tree and yard with some rough, readily available materials for poetry and sculpture. There's nothing forced about it! See how Baker has released from matter this creative interplay of form, technique and literary influence to do it, using only basic, simple tools like the mindless Walking- Mind he is. It's getting hard to separate Stone Girl art from the poet himself; perhaps Art itself from its own means of production.

So is she a literary artifact only, imaginative representation only: Eve, Asherah, Uma, Marilyn Monroe, or something more? No summery goddess of Takoma Park, this; no West Hollywood airhead either. And more than a girl, and a picture, beside a poem, she's both stony permanence and genuine inward mindfulness for what begins "in water" or in air or in a sunny day, ready to be shaped and conceived by the poet-artisan, becomes our artistic plinth...a bedrock. Baker ("Walking Mind") and Stone Girl, both turned into the poem, come together as one (yin/yang) inseparable principle: not abstract theory but rather "a/fecundity" itself, the resultant birthing of a unique event.

'Stone Girl' is not exactly an idea only nor just art work rough-hewn out of the earth nor even a crude Aristotelian synthesis of both but the "thing" itself, announced in Baker's words as "noh/ideas/but in/Things". The purposeful conflation of adjective (no) and noun (noh) is interesting not just linguistically but in the way it reverts to the idea of the poem's bare (haiku-like) staging."Wallace Stevens might have expressed a similar sentiment in "The poem is the cry of its occasion,/Part of the res itself and not about it." (from "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven").

Young and full-lipped, and ever loved by reader and poet as Walking Mind, now 'stone girl' begins to exert a downward pull, for she's also a thing of willfulness, and she wills that the poem, as product of art and Neolithics, return to its pure elemental beginnings, taking us with her. There's no escaping the beginnings of her in elemental water, mud and heat.

Full of gravitas, and even ecstatic in the way the STONE and GIRL in her are inseparable, she cannot be dismembered like sad Orpheus singing to cruel woodland nymphs. None of the epic's armature of brag, trope and exaggerated scenery will do here, for parts only of STONE GIRL take up space too incongruously, too chaotically to be a true narrative. Perhaps only an art unaccompanied by poetry, relying on strident colours and motifs (such as that of the contemporary German artist Marion Lucka ) can do this. But not a joyous, life-affirming STONE GIRL E-PIC.

This is true E-PIC narrative told in a first 'primal', pre-literate language. It seems to have been Baker's primary intention to let a silent 'stone girl' speak, at last proclaiming that art is by design lowly and pure and ultimately driven by Love. And, most importantly, that the object of love, never restricted to individuals only, is a much more universal Love of creation itself, the whole of a Walking Mind rather than any of its parts alone. It's what, in Baker's poetics, radical design and reworking of the traditional implements of poetry really amount to.

Erland Lee poetry reading: or return to a Canadian poetics

"Readings are the central social activity of poetry. They rival publishing as the most significant method of distribution for poetic works. They are as important as books and magazines in bringing poets into contact with one another, in forming generational and cross-generational, cultural and cross-cultural, links, affinities, alliances, communities, scenes, networks, exchanges and the like." (Charles Bernstein)

If any poetry venue can claim to inspire participants and, at the same time, give visible proof of the 'urban' and 'rural' mix that is the essence of Canadian poetry, it'd have to be the Erland Lee house in Stoney Creek. I was happy recently to organize a second poetry reading there, in the red adz-barn (as poet Katherine L. Gordon calls it) lying just adjacent to house. A sturdy plank two--tiered structure(technically a 'drive house'), it displays some of the original farm implements of late nineteenth-century Stoney Creek , while outside, on almost every side , stretching to the very horizon, lie the mostly uncultivated fields of an Ontario landscape that has virtually remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Everywhere is the rural poetic landscape of Isabella Valancy Crawford and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: the same grid work of roads and orchards, same lush verdure of weed, grasses, & the same forest wildlife that had called a distinctively Canadian pioneer poetics into being.

But when you look directly ahead, & see cityscape sweeping below the escarpment to the shores of Lake Ontario and beyond to Toronto ( CN Tower always looking as if it's about to poke through the clouds!) naturally names like Al Purdy, Earle Birney and Milton Acorn come to mind, and all their literary descendants. A year ago a statue of Al Purdy was unveiled at Queen's Park, Toronto as testimony to one Canada's most popular city poets. And what may also come to mind is the terrible 'two solitudes' syndrome to which Canadians have grown accustomed because it now translates into split allegiance to the 'rural' and 'urban' literary consciousness. Behind us an early Canadian pioneering poetics but everywhere else, encroaching on the countryside, a city's own sensibility and distinctively jarring rhythms.

Who (and what) are we as poets: purveyors of a pioneer poetics, nostalgic for the old British 'models', or a contemporary poet attuned to a very different type of human buzz, always ready for novelty, experiment and academic discussion? Are we colonialist or postmodern in temperament? I posed that question at our Erland Lee reading and let each of my poet-friends give their own unique responses in verse.