Ed Baker

I am very sad to say that Ed Baker, poet, friend and mentor has died. He was my best friend in the poetry world, best critic and best teacher of Eastern and Western sensibilities. I can trace directly to Ed not just my Samperi,  Martone and Corman: it's to him I owe a world of infinitesimally pure language 'stuff' of stone, wood, and drawing and the way they become a work. Because (as he said to me over and over) it's from them the real poem gets made & not just your silly words. Something picked up, felt and textured.

As a tribute to this outstanding poet-artist I will repost an article I wrote a few years ago about Ed's delightful little "DE:SIRE IS", a chapbook that is more artifact than book of poetry: and like everything he did, exquisitely sculpted to minimalist and artisanal perfection. Elemental. Indelible

Like you, kokie-san.

Ave verum
in stone--
Baker

_________________________________________

Ed Baker's "DE:SIRE IS"

                                            

1 of 26 LIMITED EDITIONS signed and stamped by the author, DE:SIRE IS is a welcome addition to my personal library of the writings of American visual poet Ed Baker. This 12 page chapbook published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press (Newton-Le-Willows in the UK) is unlike other Baker publications in that visuals (except for the Chin Fay Ling dancing image on cover & personal stamp) don't appear in the text, and the poems, untitled, printed in a light small serif font (almost too wispy for the page), are set in a long vertical (top-to-bottom) format that gives the act of reading a scroll-like feel. The text is mostly left-justified with the exception of one smaller centered piece that concludes the work's first section.

Ed's written in my copy, "What's a phantasy?" beside a self-portrait, as if it were my own personal epigraph for the poetry ahead. Baker's stamp is another curious way to introduce himself: perhaps a distinctively Eastern take on the idea of authorial intention.The stamp (as Baker's told me in email correspondence) is a chop carved/made by artist Wink K. Leong in Portland, Oregon. Baker's Chinese name was given to him in 1973 by Angela Jung Palandri, a leading teacher/scholar at that time in Oriental Studies." The name reads", as Baker says, " P'ei Ai Te [that] translates to "Truth", "Love". Te is a "proper name" it is Chinese characters not Korean.... though Kanji is Kanji all around."

The work could be the first time (with its absence of Baker STONE GIRL visuals) the poet deals with textuality of the page. Some simple typographical manipulations are alone sufficient to homage his Chin Fay Ling muse who is everywhere both inspiration and addressee. Textuality, yes, but without the usual lyrical void of much experimental writing today. DE:SIRE IS is a lyrical, narrative and minimalist work, seeming to unify a diversity of artistic modes in one dominant muse-figure; and spacing, ellipses and capitalization are among many possible ways to create verses that, far from problematizing, respectfully advance traditional contexts. The effect is not one of hybridity but homogeneity :

                                                                     desire is......

space   everything                                                                              to write into this
                                                                                                         is possibility  as

                                                                      BRUSH MIND

None of the cold, abstract verbal play for its own sake in which the image is substituted for conceptual experimentation. Poetry in Baker's hand (and poetry for him is a manual skill: artisanal, above all) is never ever overlaid with standard language tricks (flarfs & "mash ups") of contemporary Language poetics. Like all significant cultural expression his work comprises of real materials, stone, paint, wood and language and takes its place in a literary continuum from Blake to Oppen to Corman to Hidetaka Ohno: the result of a disciplined and finely tuned Eastern minimalist style (that I've discussed in previous Baker posts here). The materials here are so attuned to the work's general design and impetus that each line (whatever its syntactical status) can be read individually as haiku or as haiku-lines within a larger narrative:

nurture

woman in the moist  towards

who first speaks /embraces/ an erotic first

or speaks careful of what determines   -care

politics become her
nature

Baker's poetry never interrogates its practice and language (as it is fashionable to do these days): it is BRUSH MIND at work, apt metaphor for the artistic impetus of most of his productions as well as a description of the freeing & nomadic style of work. What makes it contemporary (particularly if Baker seen as growing out of a 70s literary period) is its refusal to limit itself strictly to genre: arguably even Baker's  minimalist poetry ("shorties" as he calls them), art, calligraphy, sculpture all derive from the same experimentalist period as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the watershed New American Poets anthology, and Smithson's sculptures. Baker can play with sentences & mine new semantical fields with the best of them, refusing to let his meanings mesh too easily with spacing, punctuation & lineation, creating playful tensions instead: as in "around and dbls  doubles back up on becoming poe m   you set your/down/margins!"

But poetics won't intentionally try to undo poetry itself: there's too much respect for muse, materials and literary ground Baker walks on. There's too much literary sense. When Baker dropped out of writing years ago it was to work as a builder, the years in between serving to solidify an already developing sense of working with real tools, & building real things. A sense of the materiality of work that isn't the vacuous intellectual game that people like Silliman have turned it into.The result is that Baker's is always an art-affirming " yes  yes  yes" to the prevailing no to voice and authorial design. Lovely poetic artifacts (like "glass bowl", "fish's home") can never be subordinated to triteness: the center does hold (even in the age of Language disanalogy & disfigurement):

edge
towards
sun
night
becomes
moon

's black

circumference

dresses up
center

Here the pains to "reach out" can result in contact with a poetry and language. If the page reads down the whole text (like a scroll), a definite sort of textual artifice, it's still the flowing or parted hair of Baker's muse we're actually envisaging. This is the personalized "phantasy" Baker's invited me to read.And (as I've said) if visuals don't appear in this work, his Chin Fay Ling muse still foregrounds the work, completing an otherwise colourless canvas:

                                        what color
                                         demands
                                         demands
                                             she

                                         punctuate

Frank Samperi Trilogy book launch: legacy and celebration

Frank and Claudia



 

Everything that's ever been said to me about Frank Samperi was always out of respect and affection for a poet who'd been unjustly disprized in his own day. I have Ed Baker to thank for introducing the name to me a few years back, Samperi mentioned within the context of a discussion about the Italo-American experience. In Ed's estimation Samperi is the Italo-American poet. But he was also the orphaned poet temperamentally unsuited to crowds and affiliations; a lover of spiritual Truth who'd served his country in Korea and paid a terrible price in terms of its post-traumatic effects: the poet with the purest lyrical heart heartlessly relegated, as he was bound to be in the Objectivist age of Louis Zukofsky, to virtual non-existence. His allegiance to Dante made him all but ignored. I've never known a poet bowed as low by the hard reality of an almost total literary abandonment.

And I've never been more deeply moved, at the same time, by the filial duties of a daughter who's given considerable time, energies and devotion to the legacy of a parent's both published and unpublished works:  even moved myself  to write my own literary biography of Frank Samperi. I am happy to say I'll be attending the 'Trilogy' book launch in March at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA where I'll join Claudia and friends in what will be a "Frank Samperi celebration". The launch of the new Skysill Press 'Trilogy' will take place on 10 March, Sunday at 4:00 pm. Please see Claudia's blog for more details.




Beyond Baroque



Malala Yousafzai tribute at 'Word-Dreamer':& a call for a Canadian Malala Anthology

Dear poet-friends,

as you know I was asked to be a co-editor for a special FutureCycle Press Anthology for Malala Yousafzai and have sent out many invitations to friends and colleagues to send submissions. However, I've been rather unceremoniously removed from that position when it became clear to the publisher(s) that I was being too pro-Canadian in my selection of poems and generally too tough as editor, especially in regards to submissions from Americans. It was only until I first posted my own little tribute to Malala here and Joseph Hutchison his afterwards that FutureCycle, inspired by our posts, developed the idea of a special Anthology edition.

I'm calling out to Canadian publishers to perhaps pick up the impetus I started at 'Word-Dreamer' and begin our own Anthology. I'd be more than happy to share editing duties. In the meantime I'll continue to celebrate Malala here and ask that you please send to me at 'Word-Dreamer' any poetry that the recent shooting by the Taliban of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year old blogger and women's education rights activist in Pakistan, may have recently inspired you to write. I will post all submissions as they are given to me at cdidiodato@yahoo.ca or cdidiodato@gmail.com. Any format & style (provided they be respectful) will be accepted.

Let's celebrate here the exemplary courage and dignity of this remarkable young person.

Thank you!
__________________________


1) Malala--
  walking hand in hand,
   a steep staircase

Conrad DiDiodato

 

2) The Harrows of Halloween
 

This night of black-leaf key

opens the old door between worlds,

the dead I knew flit through, cast no shadows

on the moist opened earth,

the dead I did not know this orbit

come costumed through

grimace at my puzzled witness,

for in this ancient valley

dead-sight is granted

to the fay-touched few.

They affirm connection

the helix thread of everything

since the singularity of creation.

The earth is old

her children seek forbidden revelation

unhallowed Halloween a harrowing.
 

Katherine L. Gordon

October 31st. 2012.

3) Malala

Malala, your name sounds like a song
but it means grief-stricken in Urdu,
language of poets. You are named
after a poet, a warrior woman and
you have so lived up to your name.

The courage it takes to cross borders
defined by others, courage to uphold
freedom to read, learn, speak­ to be
the fully human that is all our birthright.

“Every girl in Swat is Malala. We will
educate ourselves. We will win. They
can't defeat us,” states her classmate.

Now it’s our turn to take up the call,
education for every child for which
women and girls today rally across
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan lands.

Malala, Malala. I hear the ululation
of lament and of celebration for her.
Can you hear what she’s crying? You
can join her common cause. But
how fares the girl in her hospital bed?

That beautiful face blasted. Her voice
silenced, her eyes shut. Hang on, girl,
hang on. There’s work to be done and we
desperately need such spirit among us.
 

Her father cries when Malala falls that all
Pakistan stands up. And now she too can
stand, what will Pakistan do? March on...

Grief is no time for emotion. Let sky open
and open to more sky. Light, we call for
light to dispel the darkest oppression. Her
name on a million lips in many tongues.

Malala, Malala, Malala. Hear the ululation

and respond.

Penn Kemp


4) Ed Baker's haiga tribute to Malala entitled "Sudden Sharp Pain" (click on image to enlarge):

5) Speaking Out
 

Raising the voice to speak against injustice 

puts the speaker on a path of collision

from those who vehemently oppose their ideas.

One young blogger, Malala, dared to do so

Speaking out about life in the Swat Valley

the need for girls to be educated

Pakistan and the world has taken note

of the attempted murder of this girl 

yet where was the outcry when many Malalas

Ayeshas, Ahmads and Bilals were killed by drones?

Who spoke up for them on the world stage?

People like you and me, living out their lives

their existence snuffed  out by unpiloted drones

hope of their families, cut down where they stood.

Injustice is a blight upon humankind

those who perpetrate it will be judged harshly

in the history books of future generations.

People who want harmony and peace

mothers, fathers, sons and daughters

young and old, let us work together

to eradicate injustices.
 

©Wilma Seville2012

6) Malala's Beads

Midway up the mountain,

on the day the bullets struck,

a flock of patterned Chukars,

the Partridge of Pakistan,

stood in feathered silence

as though they knew

your voice was stifled,

and the Sage

who sensed their stillness

strung your words

on mala beads,

said she learned

what lasts forever

when a thousand pairs of wings

filled the sky with sudden flight,

blessing schoolgirls with their shadows

beneath a streaming, soaring sun.

Andreas Gripp

Cid Corman: the poetics

(for Ed Baker)


I'll give Cid Corman the number two spot after T.S. Eliot as the greatest English-speaking literary critic of the contemporary world. I can say my familiarity with the great editor from Utano grows apace, soon to overshadow even my own reverence for Eliot. It's a question of time. Corman's At Their Word: Essays on the Arts of Language Volume II (Black Sparrow Press, 1978)*, among his other books of criticism, is as finely crafted a book of poetry, translation and literary appreciation as you're likely to find in any period. It's a good place to find the always companionable and erudite, the generous-hearted and congenially uncompromising founder of Origin: a quarterly for the creative. But as Eliot's is always an unimpugnable authority, "cut in alabaster", Corman lives and works in "locales" ( 9), averse temperamentally to anything/anyone that wasn't always exactly where they just happened to be. It's a criticism not to be read solely but (as Ed Baker would say) "breathed".

In criticism, Corman has a way of harrying poetries that wont' live in this breathed space; with poets who write them he's usually even-handed but always curt. Judging by the correspondences I've read, I'd say he's reserved his harshest censures for the growing 80s "lang gang" movement of Bernstein and Silliman, and with good reason. Their crime was to "feed language into machined games", not lived spaces: and what ensued from this was a "rubble of brains" that Corman had no time for. Even in regards to the wildly complex and tragical Hart Crane Corman could find enough jeu d'esprit to say of him, "He is Hart Crane and hard up. He is near the long hiatus, quietus." (64) Poetry could never be too much a world apart without suffering consequences. Corman never hesitated, where justified, to upbraid even highly touted academic critics, like R.P. Warren, for sloppy readings: claiming to see what isn't there (again, note the sanctity of the real in Corman's poetics) is strictly anathema to sound poetical procedure. "...Warren in his eagerness to score points and sell his detour to us overlooks details that are pertinent and injects details that are just not there, nor implied." (35)

It was to the credit of Dr. Williams, on the other hand, that his eyes were "full each day",(50) the subject of the poem always expertly fitted to "the inescapably human element." (50) Again, the human and the permanent sanctity of the place where the poem, in its fullness, comes into being. Cormanian criticism is a reiterated statement of life, the human element never at war with creativity and the "concentrated presence" of the poem emanating from that life. The poem is in a master's hand nothing if not miraculous: "How simple! And how movingly concentratedly profound!" (82) There was a predilection for the sacred that made him Frank Samperi's only coeval in spirit. And criticism follows rightfully after the poem --never the other way around--in its own elegant compactness and brevity, never missing a beat. For the near perfect adaptation of the critic's language to poetry, there is the oration to Dylan Thomas,

He wanted his words like a bell to break backwards. He wanted to scatter sound, as it sounded, over a country-side like milkweed or rain. He wanted to tell fortune by the buttercupful. He wanted to roll forever in the grass of first love. Love always first thirst for him. He wanted to be the child that he will for us, or for me anyhow, always be. (69)

 Repetition is never a conceit: it rather unfurls (like great lyricism) the real sound, sight and touch of a poetical world always in its nascency. Corman makes you feel a Welsh childhood itself. And an even more eloquent summing up of a small Creeley poem, "felt" as much as it's read, gives a sense of Corman's reverence for poetical objects trying to "locate ground", Corman's favourite angle-shot. The style is spare, direct (parataxis comes to mind) but the effect is of a luxuriantly extended definition:

Here we have the horizon as distance, as what there is to be seen, objective, what one sees, more firmly, via distance, to be grasped, realized, a fix: a past a future present, but how things grow vaguer growing closer, impinge, enter, and one leans outward to/at something, anything, solid, to make and make hold.To add one's own make and take, a little, to what is there. The placement, the weave, of "there" and "here" is felt, pointed and carried. and the increasing uncertainty, as against the fixed "line" first (immediately) established, finds a quiet pathos at the close. A poem trying to locate ground. (76)

 The only way for the poet (as in the case of Wallace Stevens) to reach the extraordinary is oftentimes to cultivate smallness and intimacy with his simple surroundings: even if it's a matter of going from home to office, office to home. (92) It's perhaps for this reason that voice and music are tightly associated with place: the verse sounds as if it were at home the moment it's spoken and couldn't have been enunciated anywhere but there. As Corman said in "The Feeling in the Make of Poetry" (Origin 5, October 1978), "Ordinary speech does suffice: any word will do. But only when we fully enter it can it fully enter us what it is utterance is -- is song...One knows one is no longer at home in oneself--but rather dwelling in complete abode." What better example of a poetry that dwelt "in complete abode" is there than that of Larry Eigner. Citing the "hospital poems" (145) Corman speaks of Eigner "in his wheelchair" as the poet attuned to essential fixity and straightness, a "directness of vision" (147) that to all but the disabled must seem "grotesque".

Corman's saved his best praise of the poem's "complete abode" for a Lorine Niedecker memorial.  If "The devotion to poetry is the devotion to whatever human community" (91), perhaps his happiest hours were spent with her (With Lorine), at least in letter-writing. The reminiscences here are told in a medium in which Corman flourished: his piece comprising of "characteristic passages" from letters exchanged between them over a ten-year period (183). Corman's correspondences alone could easily run into volumes. They're full of  poetry submissions and spring floods, church-spires and good cheer and even offers of financial help ("if a bit of my pay check at some time in the near future will help you") (184): Corman even recalls how grateful a certain Scottish poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, was to Corman for introducing him to Niedecker. Another volume alone on poets Corman had established, introduced in the making here. She alone, however, had worked up enough nerve in 1931 to write to the Objectivist author of Poetry. Interesting, though, that she'd feared her "own folk impulse" (186) would have gotten lost in that Zukofsky "ice". Interesting the things poets had said to Corman in confidence.

Corman saved Niedecker for last because she was his best example of poetry that was nowhere but where she happened to be:  Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin near Rock River "that empties just beyond into Lake Koshkonong"; a small but tidy home with her own wellstocked library, "brown little stove" (211) & one-armed husband who could be "frightening" to kids; the library, printing press and hospital where she worked; the Black Hawk hotel where Cid and Shizumi stayed on their visit to the Niedecker's; the grave her husband was too "busted up" to ever see. Her poetry sang each place as assuredly as Samperi's sang his own East Side, Stevens's the Connecticut office he daily walked to or even Corman's the Kyoto pastry shop he'd lived and worked in. As is the life so the poetry. And as Niedecker was kind, gentle so were the poems and the "breathed" rhythms of "lake water" and "wing-bone" (208), her little "granite pail" and "clothesline post" (209).

Corman's right to follow the poem (as well as poet) always "along a given still vital line" (73). Nothing short of this very eventful presence is worthy of the critic's attention. Language can work as long as life does and the poem, honestly wrought, can never celebrate life more joyously than this. Life is its limit, Corman seems always to be saying, and at the same time the portal to infinitely more imagined communities. A poet's inward life is heir to the relations, loves and correspondences of the outside world. As he's reminded Samperi in letter after letter, it's in "livingdying" that we live and write the poem.
________________
*I will give page numbers only without specifying title of essay from which sources derive. I consider Corman's book of essay a work in its own right, the texture of commentary always smooth, always of a piece with everything else.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

what you do  (if you do)
is to learn
from writing haiku
is  not how to count to seven
count to five  but
rather
what you come to realize
and to practice
is
that EVERY line
every word
counts
& must       'do their job'
precisely
&
on time
every syllable roams
in it s own field
goes this way
the
that way
on it s
own two 'legs'
it is an huge field
in which
every syllable
every word
has room/space
(in their owned field)
to breathe

to
(as Nanao Sakaki put it , to:
sing
dance
leave

(a spontaneous manifesto as a poem by Ed Baker: composed while listening to
doves coo   Sunday, April 15, 2012.  9:15 a.m.)

The bad...

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means
                ("Introduction to Poetry", Billy Collins)
______________________________________

When Baker and Sakaki do it the form turns magnificently on itself to mirror "every syllable/every word", which is the way to learn writing. It goes without saying that the poem ought to go like this, i.e. in its "owned field", "on its own two legs" but the wise gnomic heart never tires of saying it. With Collins, however, every bit of it's tied to metaphor turned to a silly caricature of itself, and the poem's been said like this so many times, published in so many New Yorkers & so completely gutted it just can't see itself anymore. God! a poem tied to a chair.

My apologies to Baker for the comparison: Issa would have been better. I haven't mentioned haiku either. But in 2012 there's Baker and there's Collins. Collins and the whole mainstream crowd of them who just don't know when to leave.

from Ed Baker

A lovely postcard recently received from Ed Baker (& happily displayed), with poem:

far
away
hearing
woosh/woosh
;morning
              sun

Thanks, Ed, for poetry when I needed it.

My indebtedness to a few haiku spirits

I've lately begun to see the terrible tragedies in Japan as a metaphor for that country's greatest cultural legacy: haiku. Natural disasters, & the terrible displacements and anguish they've caused, cannot ever kill the spirit of a deeply meditative people and nor will haiku shun the purity of form in deference to the fractal poetics of the postmodern world. How easily Western poetry, on the other hand, lacking the profundity & discipline of haiku (& with its penchant for tradition-bashing), shatters at the slightest force into a thousand pieces! The post-avant movement provides ample evidence of this fragility. And how stolidly Eastern poets defend and practice a style of writing that, if done well, can still the spirit itself.

It's the poets (haijin) infused with a sense of stylistic purity who've developed the form & kept it alive through a lifetime of haiku study, teaching and publication: a breed of writer marked by an almost Zen-line focus on their craft. I've encountered some remarkable people in my own brief stint in Eastern writing who've nourished the poetic heart in me, & whom I'd like to personally acknowledge here as teachers, mentors and friends: Susumu Tagikuchi, Karina Klesko and, of course, the irrepressible Ed Baker. They will always be the most formative Eastern influences in my life.

Susumu Tagikuchi

My first exposure to haiku came through Susumu Tagikuchi & his World Haiku Club (WHC) and World Haiku Review (WHR) where I saw some of my earliest efforts make it into print. I was struck almost immediately by both the traditional as well as transnational character of his Eastern poetry network, comprised primarily of Yahoo! groups, publications and conferences.Tagikuchi has globalized haiku, reaching out to an Eastern readership in many countries. Not that haiku hasn't had to adapt to individual poetic sensibilities. It's been subjected to experimention & generated a lot of debate on the purity of its form. The haiku nucleus, however, is the same regardless of differing national styles & temperaments: a cluster of essential principles from which there's really no wavering. Susumu Tagikuchi, a great doyen of haiku & tanka, has kept the debate alive for many years though careful to preserve traditional principles of composition. In an article entitled "Haiku as a World Phenomenon" he mentions, for instance, the recurrent tensions between "permanent values" and "changes" in haiku structure. Both his HAIKU (WHR) 1 blog and WHCvanguard Yahoo! group actively write & theorize about haiku form, one ranging from the most radical to neoclassical. 

Karina Klesko

If Susumu is the architect of his global haiku 'club', the teacher-student is the inspiration and impetus for the daily (mostly online) interactions among haiku practitioners. Tagikuchi is a friendly presence but WHC structure can't help but impose a certain distance between him and his students: only a few, in fact, have actually met him in person. His scale is felt mostly as expertise & group organization. Were it not for Karina Klesko, however, I wouldn't have known either founder or WHC; and without her I certainly would haven't learned the main Eastern forms, such as haibun, tanka, sijo and cinquain nor experienced (as energetically as I did) the simplicity of the creative act. Karina's is a single-mindedness of purpose I haven't seen in many poets. When I think of her worsening eyesight & the strain of constant writing & editing she's had to endure, I can't help admire her tenacity and devotion to work even more. She has an endearing presence that's drawn many to her. There was a time when we wrote together almost every day, churning out a  prodigious amount of work most of which was posted at her Yahoo! group but some even finding their way into the WHR & other online magazines. As she reminds me still, I'm a much better Western writer because of the time I've spent with Eastern forms. Karina currently co-edits the extremely popular Sketchbook E-Journal for Eastern and Western short verse forms.                     

Ed Baker

And without Karina's online poetry group I would never have met Ed Baker. In my opinion (& even Ed may disagree) he's a haiku master who's adapted his 'barebones' minimalism to art, the product of which is his Stone Girl poetics. I've also learned to appreciate the artistic influences in Ed's own work such as Cid Corman whom he'd personally known and corresponded with, ancient calligraphy and brushwork technique and a whole buddhist 'mindfulness' that permeates the man & his work. A friendship has naturally ensued as how would it be possible not to admire one of the most congenial people in the poetry scene today? Ed's also been something of a gateway into American poetry, the first to introduce me to names like John Martone, Carl Rakosi, John Perlman, Geof Huth, Frank Samperi, Jeremy Seligson, etc. and how diminished my familiarity with authors and literary styles would be without him. Ed's a friend and a mentor from whom I learn almost daily through correspondence and conversation, as well as an ally in the battle we wage against the lowering of poetic standards and integrity in the fashionable post-avant movements of the day. I've always celebrated Ed's work as a genre purity that's attributable directly to his Eastern roots.

Ed Baker's STONE GIRL E-PIC: and a note on Forewords to any future stone girl poetics

I'm happy to announce the publication (by Leafe Press) of Ed Baker's STONE GIRL  E-PIC work, a compendium of poetry & art presented in 5 Volumes for which I was very pleased to write the Foreword.

I've commented on the visual poetry (particularly the style & artistic influences) of Ed Baker here and here. It's actually from my blog posts that most of the Foreword material comes. Trying to keep tenor and conceptual unfolding strictly in conformity with both the temperament and spare, minimalist artistry of this remarkable man, I've arranged it as an informal discussion about Vispo to which many bloggers have contributed in the past (my opinion being only one, of course). I've studiously avoided long-winded academic orations on theory & genealogy of art forms.

Ed's work is an impassioned testimony to the significance of tradition, poetry community and, above all, love of muse (Chin Fay Ling) and poet (Cid Corman). I see Fay & Cid in every one of the E-PIC's 515 pages. It was a real privilege for me to appear, albeit very briefly, in that glorious company.

From the blognoscenti: 05 January 2011 (4)

(a) Irina Moga, "The Poem in the Mirror" in The Continuous Poem. "This seems pretty straightforward. But what happens when a mirror - or a poem- inserts itself in the equation? How might our vision be altered then?";

(b) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi. "I have waited/for the evil wind".

(c) Geof Huth, "write as you - read as you write" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "It is called the silver book, and it is a book, not more than a chapbook and maybe less than that, by Jen Bervin."

(d) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "David Antin: 11 games for eleanor (previously unpublished)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "It seems to me that for Antin as for others of us, there has been a strong sense that what we do as poets (more simply: as people responsible for keeping language & reality together) is in danger of an inescapable, premature reduction as it’s forced to enter the unique entropy machine of the modern communications nexus."

(e) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press" by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog. "Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work";

(f) Dave Bonta, "Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke" in Moving Poems. "A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice";

(g) Jerome Rothenberg, "John Martone: Presence of All Colors" in Poems and Poetics. "This is the second set of poems by John Martone to appear in Poems and Poetics."

Sentence: If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

From the blognoscenti: 04 January 2011 (3)

(a) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi." I don't think this poem was ever published.It is one of a collection of poems that come from The Room Is My Refuge From Light which was then called SONG BOOK, published 1960"; 

(b) Geof Huth, "1,2,3,ing"in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "I'm still counting (in order to give a recap of my last year in the world of poetry), and I've come to the disturbing realization that I created over 3,000 poems (visual and otherwise) last year";

(c) Irina Moga, "The Annotated Bee & Me" in The Continuous Poem. “The Annotated Bee & Me is carefully architected creation, a series of poems that aggregate around “the large themes of our lives –Birth, Death, Time and Memory” (a quote from the volume’s back cover) and an original poetic topic: beekeeping";

(d) Bob Grumman,  "Entry 334 — One Reason I’m Not a Fan of Emily’s" in POETICKS. "A major problem I have with Emily Dickinson’s pieces is that they seem to me much more rhymed opinions than poems";

(e) William Michaelian, "In the Forum: He comes with words sublimely dull, / In garb superbly silly, / To tell us of the Beautiful, / The sunflower and the lily", in Recently Banned Literature;

(f) Dave Bonta, "Vinyl Poesie by Christoph Bruns" in Moving Poems. "This is a stop motion video i created around summer last year. It is a selfwritten poem created out of my vinyl collection. i looked out for interesting words and formed this little passages";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited  "Clouds Gather and Part: Tanka" by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk (Dennis H. Dutton) in tel let 2004;

(h) William Michaelian, "The Past Recaptured" in Recently Banned Literature. "Some other books I read during that time: Dylan Thomas in America, by John Malcolm Brinnin; Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski; The History of Reading and The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel; Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét; Selected Poems, by Georg Trakl; A Listening Thing, by William Michaelian; parts of three poetry collections by Lawrence Ferlinghetti";

(i) Bob Grumman, "Entry 335 — “Mathemaku in Praise of Taxonomy” in POETICKS. "This is the mathemaku I hoped to finish yesterday evening–and did.   One of my best, it seems to me at the moment (which is around seven, 3 January 2011)";

(j) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "The John Perlman Collection: A Guide and Inventory" by Jeffrey Rudzinski and John M. Bennett in University Libraries: Rare Books and Manuscripts; "Rim: Woodcuts,Stem, Az Two: Words of Travel, Side-Ways and Fist by David Giannini" in amazon.com; "Twelve Poems by John Levy in tel-let 2006.

Sentence: A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.

From the blognoscenti: 03 January 2011 (2)

(a) Irina Moga, "Of Love and the Island" in The Continuous Poem. "In modern poetry the Embarkation for Cythera appears to be a theme of equally luxuriant mythologies." [See discussion of Verlaine, Laforgues Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire, Andrew Lang, David Ferry, John Glassco & Francis Poulenc];

(b) Don Wentworth, "Dandy in the Underworld: Issa's Sundary Service, #84 in Issa's Untidy Hut. "If ever there was a patron saint of poetry (as well as music), Orpheus is certainly a leading candidate";

(c) Vassilis Zambaras, "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City" in vazambam. "No lyric poetry here, just pure Ionian tragedy";

(d) Dan Waber, "this is visual poetry by Jenee Mateer" in this is visual poetry. "Jenee says: 'I see my work as a meditation on issues of gender, desire, identity and the complexities of language (communication)'";

(e) Dave Bonta, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery" in Moving Poems. "Art student Al Belancourt made this film of Ashbery’s poem as an assignment for a poetry class, he tells me, inspired by viewing Moving Poems in class";

(f) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "Uncollected Poems (18): Found Poems from 'The Emergence Notebooks' (for the New Year 2011)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "This sequence of poems from the early 1960s was recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010, to be published early in 2011 by Mark Weiss & Junction Press";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "On & By Blanchot" by Pierre Joris in Nomadics. "Here is my contribution — a brief remembrance of buying my first Blanchot book in Paris & a reading from The Unavowable Community —to the Maurice Blanchot Celebrations at Bard College in November 2007."

Sentence: The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one.

The blognoscenti: what I've learned today arranged by date, author and source, with brief excerpts (1)

I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.

There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.

Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.

I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).

Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).

The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.

(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";

(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";

(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";

(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";

(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."

Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).

The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"

Ed Baker's memory theater

Poet, sculptor and friend Ed Baker has kindly given me permission to post his wonderful 'memory theater'.

Ed Baker's "DE:SIRE IS"

                                                          Chin Fay Ling

1 of 26 LIMITED EDITIONS signed and stamped by the author, DE:SIRE IS is a welcome addition to my personal library of the writings of American visual poet Ed Baker. This 12 page chapbook published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press (Newton-Le-Willows in the UK) is unlike other Baker publications in that visuals (except for the Chin Fay Ling dancing image on cover & personal stamp) don't appear in the text, and the poems, untitled, printed in a light small serif font (almost too wispy for the page), are set in a long vertical (top-to-bottom) format that give the act of reading a scroll-like feel. The text is mostly left-justified with the exception of one smaller centered piece that concludes the work's first section.

Ed's written in my copy, "What's a phantasy?" beside a self-portrait, as if it were my own personal epigraph for the poetry ahead. Baker's stamp is another curious way to introduce himself: perhaps a distinctively Eastern take on the idea of authorial intention.The stamp (as Baker's told me in email correspondence) is a chop carved/made by artist Wink K. Leong in Portland, Oregon. Baker's Chinese name was given to him in 1973 by Angela Jung Palandri, a leading teacher/scholar at that time in Oriental Studies." The name reads", as Baker says, " P'ei Ai Te [that] translates to "Truth", "Love". Te is a "proper name" it is Chinese characters not Korean.... though Kanji is Kanji all around."

The work could be the first time (with its absence of Baker STONE GIRL visuals) the poet deals with a textuality of the page. Some simple typographical manipulations are alone sufficient to homage his Chin Fay Ling muse who is everywhere both inspiration and addressee. Textuality, yes, but without the usual lyrical void of much experimental writing today. DE:SIRE IS is a lyrical, narrative and minimalist work, seeming to unify a diversity of artistic modes in one dominant muse-figure; and spacing, ellipses and capitalization are among many possible ways to create verses that, far from problematizing, respectfully advance traditional contexts. The effect is not one of hybridity but homogeneity :

                                                                     desire is......

space   everything                                                                              to write into this
                                                                                                         is possibility  as

                                                                      BRUSH MIND

None of the cold, abstract verbal play for its own sake in which the image is substituted for conceptual experimentation. Poetry in Baker's hand (and poetry for him is a manual skill: artisanal, above all) is never ever overlaid with standard language tricks (flarfs & "mash ups") of contemporary Language poetics. Like all significant cultural expression his work comprises of real materials, stone, paint, wood and language and takes its place in a literary continuum from Blake to Oppen to Corman to Hidetaka Ohno: the result of a disciplined and finely tuned Eastern minimalist style (that I've discussed in previous Baker posts here). The materials here are so attuned to the work's general design and impetus that each line (whatever its syntactical status) can be read individually as haiku or as haiku-lines within a larger narrative:

nurture

woman in the moist  towards

who first speaks /embraces/ an erotic first

or speaks careful of what determines   -care

politics become her
nature

Baker's poetry never interrogates its practice and language (as it is fashionable to do these days): it is BRUSH MIND at work, apt metaphor for the artistic impetus of most of his productions as well as a description of the freeing & nomadic style of work. What makes it contemporary (particularly if Baker seen as growing out of a 70s literary period) is its refusal to limit itself strictly to genre: arguably even Baker's  minimalist poetry ("shorties" as he calls them), art, calligraphy, sculpture all derive from the same experimentalist period as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the watershed New American Poets anthology, and Smithson's sculptures. Baker can play with sentences & mine new semantical fields with the best of them, refusing to let his meanings mesh too easily with spacing, punctuation & lineation, creating playful tensions instead: as in "around and dbls  doubles back up on becoming poe m   you set your/down/margins!"

But poetics won't intentionally try to undo poetry itself: there's too much respect for muse, materials and literary ground Baker walks on. There's too much literary sense. When Baker dropped out of writing years ago it was to work as a builder, the years in between serving to solidify an already developing sense of working with real tools, & building real things. A sense of the materiality of work that isn't the vacuous intellectual game that people like Silliman have turned it into.The result is that Baker's is always an art-affirming " yes  yes  yes" to the prevailing no to voice and authorial design. Lovely poetic artifacts (like "glass bowl", "fish's home") can never be subordinated to triteness: the center does hold (even in the age of Language disanalogy & disfigurement):

edge
towards
sun
night
becomes
moon

's black

circumference

dresses up
center

Here the pains to "reach out" can result in contact with a poetry and language. If the page reads down the whole text (like a scroll), a definite sort of textual artifice, it's still the flowing or parted hair of Baker's muse we're actually envisaging. This is the personalized "phantasy" Baker's invited me to read.And (as I've said) if visuals don't appear in this work, his Chin Fay Ling muse still foregrounds the work, completing an otherwise colourless canvas:

                                        what color
                                         demands
                                         demands
                                             she

                                         punctuate

"Rankor": a visual poem by Ed Baker