Qandeel

And nothing I can do about it--
  late evening sun
 

Ode to some of the Gage Park dead

Gage Park

I recently discovered that the grounds of Gage Park sadly conceal hundreds of unmarked graves that still remain, to this day (after only the tombs had been cleared to make room for the prosperous Victorian Gage family). The dead here have really no choice but to speak to the people above, and if they do it will have to be from the feet up. There's no other way of knowing that they're there. And if communication were recorded in the form of a poem, a poem's rhyme and rhythm must reflect that eerie footfall.

I should like to imagine that they will whisper to me, too. Perhaps just one of them, the youngest and most vulnerable, still clutching somebody's swollen hand. I'll take a guide with me, some local historian with map, just to be safe. I believe we bear the dead (even the pre-Confederation dead!) best singly and in cooperation. It's perhaps how we all will die...

____________________

Perhaps below me here was the veiny hand that'd sadly stiffened like
 a sodden turnip farmer's thumb,

quite likely a choleraic child's last hold on life; and a shape of unaired
  flounces of she who's lain near him,

or soiled hips, i.e. of an overwrought mam, who did not die of drink-
  it's these stirring below me in the Park

(and not so much either as a carved letter tooled skilfully to look like
   angel lips or something very uncial)

I think I'll wade among more than one of the many hundreds blurred &
  stinking like the sodden, even in grief

(for what Hamiltonian in pre-Confederation woods wouldn't have been)
  Of those sinking below below below are:

the shrill blowsy dress and dad who had also been lain rather pat, and,
  a child dead, mud-shaped (not just a shape)
_________

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

A consolation



(for Claudia)

if that damn contingent day always does it, and lets light drip
  unequally (on bud & weed); and an eastside

poet, hunched over his angel, isn't always a guide to the world
  like stars ought, then let us see dearer things:

 at least,  you and I can and do

 value to its true heart and call better (as it's right always we can)
  the pain of love and end of a favourite work,

and among living things a language that's written with difficulty
  (paradisal in which you have always suffered!)


Not surprising, eh and highest among the order of angelic things
  is that I like to see you as clear melody and never

 ceasing to be root and branch or art in which two children grow
   (as poet-father had taught you to grow & sing)

   And  you and I have also learnt,

to love the discarded (mismatched) angel wings because these, dear,
  will give us always our best, brightest tragic suns
 

jcu (whose esoteric I really miss)



who's westering til sure a few words of mine drop in empty at a spot
  by a lake, exquisitely full of Genet

and one catches on a length of shore gold like her very self, a shrewd
  impassivity with geese and all                                       
                                  
She's  away and trenchant as her pure mind is, intent on the lake that
  may or mayn't reply to her,

too busy with trenchant leaves I guess, and guys like me who did hurt
  a true dear Acadian in her

She of a dilly verve who moves you instead to discompose the unkind
  and the untrue,  ever--

 til sadly you can just see a patch  of pure land at her bench, emptying
   and never still as you'd like
                                       her to be

I saw rhyme in some fitness class

 

like a Mahfouz I'm in an alley who couldn't
     have made

more tragic nor more weightless, (end-
     stopped with

death or just plain heavy to its dull core),
      young bearded

muscle-head with his pop in hand, aural
     or his spectral girl

that me a poet had been happy to draw one
      beat nearer,

or bear like the childless guy who dust
     will die with but

as the eye is quicker than the pen, Chantal
     skipping rope and

tall fools grown slowly into big daddy gut
     so it's no surprise

that girls, stockings torn down one cute leg
     pick bad boys to wise

contra Satana



(for C.S.Lewis)


If I'll call u out, catholic-wise and I bloody well will,
  --for the fun's in doing it!--

however finicky and rickety female nerves and parts,
   and --how u say it!--love of eyes

and a thing all fun and cordially earful and ven'mous
  (and what early riser isn't!)

that it itself, and for itself, resists and then contracts
  into one stinky roman mouth-- oh!

if I bloody well like & I'll even tear a chipped fang out,
 of all prepossessing shits like u,

who lie 'cross a gap between rot & holy höhere tongues
 who spew nasal views & swallow, too--

If I'll call u out & make it likely that you intended to be
   the same ol' frumious grab and twist

of the dryest wistfullest, most pale sweet heart I e'er saw--
  then let us say, Nu te aud, nu te aud!