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

On my 55th

Through dawn, noon & dusk, grass goes
     —clumsily juggled—
and sumac works quietly at the edge (or slows!)

 and  what the killer is  —woken or alive—
or isn't, comes only by going to the kill

Still you're kissed by the book (as the weak are)
  poem at a time,
and tea and the hour don't mix anymore

Safety in touch, at the doors, and any relief
from intolerable grief (my dear!)

  fine for now,
  will go for the kill

(as you know)

A pwoermd a day

                                                                 taminate (posted Wednesday, July 07,2010)

The poet sometimes resorts to radical half-measures (like the removal of the prefix 'con-') to make things consistent. Scission is not murder but a sort of simple division (like Grumman's 'Mathemaku No. 10'), language always divided by  a user-reader & resulting in a significant poetical remainder. After all, what do you call the heart quotient in a Grumman poem?  Churchill's famous "end of the beginning" phrase (at war's end) is another case in point. I guess it operates by the same principle of slotting surprises into the commonplace and seeing what you get: a case of wilful insertion (or, as in this case, scission) that language always opts for, if given a chance. I think Grumman's heart or Huth's taminate are both unforeseen products that couldn't have been expressed better.

Maybe the pwoermd taminate (produced by scission), the mathemaku (produced by division) are dangerous nomads (after Deleuze). Significant literary forms that happen when you're not looking, an attack by night. Since traditional "page-based" ways of describing them seem outmoded already, we could even call them hyperlexical items. Is there a hidden 'code' at work that makes the mathemaku, pwoermd "interface texts"?The pwoermd is now (after Grummnan & Churchill) an uncontaminated product of superartful division:  Grumman's mathemaku being no more reducible to a simple 'visual heart' times 'poetry' rule than, say, the pwoermd to simple act of cutting. And yet they obviously are remainders of a sort, vital and active products of poetical imaginations not afraid to transgress material boundaries, both enjoying (in Grumman's words) "a widening/existence".

A "dissolution and resolution".

Used in a sentence: Taminate the springs before you drink deep.

A pwoermd a day

                                                                        Sperson (posted Monday, July 05, 2010)

Sperson is the degradation of a person. Take that anyway you like. The propensity of pwoermds, in general, to disperse the unity & solidity of words. Show the rearing serpent itself. A random letter-addition, though bearing the shame of not being a real prefix & prefatory to anything real (to be keyed to a normal lexical entry), can still punch a hole in the world. Perhaps inverting (as pwoermds do) the expectation that words are immune to lexical misadventures like this. What's in that person that a nomadic, stray 'S' can't disclose as so much language verbiage, if we let it?

Sperson's maybe an icon instead of word. We can't seem to interact with the world safely through words all the time: and even with the appearance of something new (like stray 'S's), play can also turn dangerous. Not a country for old language-users.

Used in a sentence: We haven't been able to find the true second sperson of the trinity

A recently published prayer

From all the sad imperfections
  I did stations,
& got as far as the throwing of dice
  —sad Veronica, too!—

Meeting crucifer at the double-doors
  (boy in a cassock),
  was old carmine glass

Out of my head with all the shit,
  like father, grate
I ratcheted up a gallery: —out of shit in
  my skull—

of the sadness in life's see-through mist
  where the flesh's lost
  in spored and thistly scent;

and  lakes green-whipped to shore
  may spring
 whole to a young hegelian (waters
  that holy at 24!)

Ugly ghosts behind the eyes, hipshot
   kill sanctuary joys
   for which I mewed

The grey-haired in black, sandals
  dragged up, or alone
live (I find) as plentiful as gristly boys
  I find

A pwoermd a day

                                                                          ogject (posted Saturday, July 03, 2010)

The shift from labial ('b') to guttural ('g'), the difference in a single sound-production, makes the putative forward-looking model 'object' a lot more problematical than it already is. Now literally stuck at the roof of the mouth.The ob-prefix doesn't find its exact semantical corollary in og- in any sense I can discover (except as its comical 'other'). Unless, of course, you sound out each letter. OG is street slang for original gangster and, by extension, may make 'ogject' a candidate for intercity dialect or a metaphor for the endearing clumsiness of first things. Perhaps 'ogject' is both what's to be found in a primitive 'protowriting' stage in language development (if ever there was one) and today a remnant, almost iconic, of that mythic past. Maybe the faint trace of the classical 'ogee' creates the nostalgia for more comforting classical world. Huth's pwoermd releases the kind of will to change that marks the 'dimentional': a transformation through simple letter substitution made possible by soluble language-reality ties. Perhaps a linguistic and socio-economic gridlock is envisaged here, a reluctance to be too self-assured in matters of things, words for things and the language-communities (the 'hood') they both come from. To encode experience and language in prearranged realities.

'Ogject'. There's something machine-like about it, a cyborg quality that stresses the relatively easily recombinant properties of all words. It chafes somehow. 'Og- now's an unconscious revulsion at the alien (and silently embedded) 'cog' nature of every object (and every object-creation): I see now Haraway couldn't have been more serious about the 'prosthetic' nature of culture-making activities. Say it. Feel it. 'Ogject' is hard to hear and touch: in precisely the way a primitive raw orality and tactility can be uncomfortably rediscovered through the acquisition of any new cultural trade. In the way that learning to write (as Melanie Klein's shown) can reveal initial primitive "gestures" as the hand goes stodgily to the page,  letters seen as a store of erotic and kinetic energies. 'Ogject' is perhaps the way a cyborg or child or old gangster writes the world of things.

Used in a sentence: The ogject of love is a little grainy to the touch.

A pwoermd a day

                                                             dimentional (posted Thursday, July 01,2010)

First transposition (as in the case of 'caugth') and now a simple substitution, a 't' for the normal 's', to the degree that any word-formation modelled on patterns of resemblance and relationship seems simple. But Huth's letter-substitution is far from simple. Being both necessary (vital harbingers for any future semantical development) but also playfully loose and gratuitous, as if thought of at will. Perhaps the pwoermd is a way to ground the possibility of semantic newness in language's very renewable course: or perhaps even to show that meaning and the evolution of language can oftentimes take parallel courses, weaving close to but never touching each other (asymptotically). So that intersections have to be wilfully inserted.The problem of slotting linguistic surprises into normal readerly expectations like 'dimentional' is worth taking a critical look at for otherwise the language-reality paradigm to which we're still committed (surprisingly still Carnapian and analytical) might not appear wooden, stodgy enough to get anyone's attention. So much for origins. What about the pwoermd itself?

Where did 'dimentional' come from then? And how was it formed?  Well, it seems to have been: self-sprung. Sui generis but in a more whimsical sense (like the poet writing in his bathing suit).We perhaps seem to need the same space, speed and technical styles of digitized modes to arrive at anything like the transpositions & substitutions (among others) in pwoermd-formation: all necessary but in the end radically gratuitous conditions. Perhaps it's the 'dimensional' subtext of Huth's pwoermd. The kind of send-up of depth in poetry that underlies most of new media poetries. And Huth is also a media poet. Making poets as much "digerati" as literati. How did the 't' for 's' substitution suggest itself really perhaps if not as freely as the decision to write a HTML-based poetry in the first place?We can do without Internet literacy as long as books & handouts are still considered okay alternatives: living forms (as Gould has taught) that can turn back without actually being regressive. The asynchronous, nonlinear, and everything radically virtual—what are these but (in Lockean parlance) just secondary qualities, more imagined & disposable than real: gifts of the imaginative head only.

But 'dimentional' itself? The thing itself? Perhaps in the pwoermd itself is just a taste of the 'space' and 'speed' and 'digitzed' feel of hypertext works: the semblance of the reality that the play of letter substitutions feels like it's imitating and never really is. A taste of verbal madness: after all, if 'e' subs for 'i' we've also got a case of 'dementia', don't we? Or just jouissance without senses jostling into position. Perhaps poet, cyborg-like, has morphed into a poetry-writing machine. As if the pwoermd is saying, 'Look at what the poet, in his wetsuit, who transposes, substitutes freely is doing rather than the pwoermd itself.' The wetware between the ears rather than the hardware in the sand.

Used in a sentence: Einstein discovered the dimentional properties of space-time in his sleep.