"Soffits and eaves". A late autumn poem

In a pure high turret
burning crimson-patch

—the pine on high!—

& the soffits and eaves
clogged with leaves

The niftiest part of moon's
not so much a croissant

as cute flake on a lip!
And the gash of autumn, too

(a type of glissando, dear)

like a leaf edge bleeding
into sight as the child goes

and cool sprinkle of dust
on a cool urban stream—

the light & kick of water
It's part of a vital fall:

final finishing sunflower
(before the spill)

acorn mashed under foot,
shades of flighty jaytail—

just when you thought
dews sop up too much sun

Penn Kemp named First Poet Laureate of London

My first meeting with Poet Laureate Penn Kemp

Congratulations to Penn Kemp on being chosen the First Poet Laureate of London: Canada's most distinguished sound poet, & essayist, playwright, and the most recognizable name in the participatory poetry movement. I've already praised her work here as the poet of the "dithyrambic, lyrical and elegiac", qualities to be found in written, performed or recorded forms.

I met Penn for the first time in August, 2009 at the "The Aeolian Performing Arts Centre" in London at a performance of the "Summer Soirée Festival Event" and enjoyed her seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry, her lyrics wonderfully adapted to music and dance. Both event and venue represented for me the very finest in sound opera, interpretive dance and chant. Poetry of sound, movement and music, all marvelously coming together under Penn's masterly control.

Penn is an elegant spokesperson for poetry and the type of poetry community she's worked tirelessly all her life to nourish and develop. I fully expect the Inaugural Poet Laureate distinction to lead one day soon to that a Governor-General award in recognition of her even more significant contributions at a national level as writer-in-residence, literary ambassador for Canada and contributor to a 30-year history of avant-garde poetry.

I am particularly happy for her because she's also been the voice of encouragement and support: in fact, one of the few editors to publish my own poetry. I can't recall the number of times she's contacted me with information about her projects and upcoming Pendas and Gathering Voices events. Always welcoming, always positive. Penn stands, in fact, among a group of exceptional poet-activists I've been privileged to meet over the years, people like Margot Van Sluytman and Katherine L. Gordon who are to me poetic visionaries. But this is Penn's moment, and to her I dedicate this humble blog post.

An invitation by Canadian poet Tom Konyves to consider Vidpo. And so I did.



Ron Silliman, Tom Konyves and Geof Huth

I was pleasantly surprised not too long ago to receive an email from Canadian videopoet Tom Konyves, Visual Poetry, screenwriting, journalism teacher at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia, who asked me if I'd ever considered videopoetry. I wondered if the email wasn't a sort of 'mass letter' sent to many Silliman readers at once, more self-promotion than a personal invitation. I thought I'd heard the name before and when he told me he'd met American poets Ron Silliman and Geof Huth at a poetry conference in Manchester, England, last year I instantly recalled an article Silliman had written on videopoetry in his Tuesday, May 12 2009 blog post ,one that's very supportive of Konyves and his work in general though he seems to feel also that the form hasn't fully found its stride yet, still waiting (as Silliman puts it) for its Baudelaire.

The article came with a very arresting picture of the three of them, the caption reading "Langpo, vidpo, vispo: RS, Tom Konyves, Geof Huth". Konyves, not knowing perhaps that Silliman has given his readers til the end of October to retrieve comments from his site, said it was a shame I couldn't now follow the discussion that had followed the article, a place where a lively exchange of viewpoints about vidpo was certain to be found. "After meeting Silliman and Huth in Manchester last year, he wrote a brief piece on my "mission"; interestingly, now that the comments have been removed, so has an exchange you would have enjoyed."So off to the comments stream I've gone to examine some pretty invaluable commentary by Konyves (and other readers) on the art form for which he is becoming known. I will return the courtesy of his invitation (whatever the intention) by considering the Vidpo genre here.

The theory (extracted from Silliman's article, & Konyves's own formulations of it in the comments stream and at http://discussion.movingpoems.com/tag/tom-konyves and http://www.vehiculepoets.com/videopoem.htm) can be stated fairly unambiguously. In reply mostly to objections from readers of Silliman's May 12th blog post that it's really a type of music video or just another fanciful poetry genre of no interest to anyone except creative writing students, Konyve gives in a May 15, 2009 response the following very useful characterization of videopoetry:

Music videos are commercials, aimed at promoting the song, the artist. (Mind you, my Buenos Aires poet friends would create playlists of music videos to dance to.)
 
Videopoetry is a genre of poetry. It is the inextricable, integrated blending of text, image and sound that produces a "poetic experience". This poetic experience emerges when the viewer's engagement with the work leads to an awareness of the "inner meaning" of the work - what Geof Huth calls the 'poem identity'. (If the imagery in a videopoem illustrates the text, it is no longer a videopoem.)

What differentiates videopoems from experimental (non-narrative) films is that videopoetry is based on the considered, sometimes curious juxtaposition of language (spoken or visual text) with images and sound. It is the text that drives the work; its presence is the essential link between the identifiable parts (edits or scenes). It is also the source of inspiration for the work.

It is true that many narrative and non-narrative films are often called "poetic" for no other reason than a lack of adequate descriptors to identify and give closure to feelings/perceptions of a "higher order". Andre Breton called poetry what all the other arts aspire to.

In a June 12, 2009 discussion at Silliman's blog with skeptics and detractors, he provided both a history and defense of the "innovation of videopoetry", even aligning it with other cognate forms like the "videohaiku":

To my knowledge, the "vigorous period of experimentation" began in the mid-70s, sputtered in the '80s, established itself as a viable form in the '90's and, with the distribution afforded by the web, has produced a body of work whose categories and features are now discernible and a valid field of study. The 'doing' - as in "definition comes AFTER the doing" - has been done. But, how well? That's a different discussion.

"Visually compelling and sophisticated poetry films may not constitute a new literary hybrid unless they rest on good literature." - Completely false. The innovation of videopoetry has been one of introducing the "poetic integration" of visual, textual and sound elements to create a unique entity whose "poetic quality" does not reside in the visualization (illustration) of 'good literature' but in the curious, non-illustrative juxtaposition of text with image. When successful, these works produce the effect of a poem, whose elements are incomplete until integrated into the finished work. It is in the process of blending text, image and sound that a transformation takes place, a transformation of not-necessarily-poetic texts into poetic elements.

Of "videohaiku": a few months ago, I came across the work of Eric Cassar. In his short (30 sec or less) videopoems, the introductory thought, thesis, or observation of the haiku – often the function of the first 12 syllables or two lines of the traditional western written haiku – is presented as a brief video image that is subsequently "tagged" with a verbal poetic comment. He has made a number of these, establishing a videopoetry-equivalent of a haiku.

And in response to a charge of artistic frivolousness & of novelty-pandering, videopoetry being just one more among a growing number of course offerings:

"and I am sure there are 10,000 vidpo courses as we speak being in or being added into every "hep" university on the planet" - I would be very surprised if 999 other courses exist. I only know of one.

It's in his own more deliberate (and reflective) pieces on the form that Konyves offers the most detailed rationale and artistic methodology. It's a genre at least 30 years old, as he says in his Moving Poems forum discussion, the product of continuous research, collaboration and related work in the visual and production fields. Liberated from the printed page, videopoetry (or film poems) is an artform "displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of text with images and sound." Silliman in his own article seems not to have completely appreciated its split from the printed page, making almost snide references to the multimedia "gumbo" of its present state, as though any new artform that wasn't primarily reducible to poetry innovations (of his choosing) were necessarily ill-conceived or hopelessly amorphous: and offers to give it some solidity by emphasizing  its reliance on vispo, visual and concrete poetry, and the influence of a bit of langpo, New York school, Burroughs and even flarf and conceptual poetics. In fact, the only videopoem, worthy of the name, is Frank Film by Americans Frank and Caroline Mouris.

Konyves is eager to distance the videopoem from cinematic technique purely & perhaps this Sillimanesque chauvinism (a type of objection he's encountered already in the comments stream); he emphasizes, in fact, that it's not a matter of visualization only but a "juxtaposition of text with image":  not to be seen in terms of edits and scenes per se, the videopoem combines its elements always with a view to creating a unique "poetic experience". That "poetic experience" phrase seems to be key. As he says, "The poetry is the RESULT of the juxtaposed, blended use of text with imagery and sound."The videopoem relies on the creative juxtaposition of image & sound elements, in loose or more formal arrangements, in the same way the poem on the page emerges from the sum of its sound & sense techniques.

"Juxtaposition" and "judicious blending" are other terms Konyves uses to describe that vital fusion. Even the rhythms result from the creative editing of parts.T.S. Eliot might have said of the textuality of a videopoem (used in Konyves' unique sense) that it represents "a more finely perfected medium" than poetry on the page: perhaps (to extend the famous analogy further) image & sound are the elements of a catalyst for artistic creation. It's likely that for Konyves (as for Eliot) the catalyst is, of course, the poet. Konyves's own "Poem for the Rivers Project" created with his son serves as a good illustration of this vital textual confluence.  Perhaps the poem and videopoem difference (especially in the world of Web 2.0) is an illusion only, ingeniously contrived by its practitioners via the essential interconnectedness & fluidity of its multimedia boundaries.Within the framework of the primacy of the notion of videopoetry as text, Konyves offers 5 principal types according to the way the artist configures textual elements: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance and cin(e)poetry."

                                               Poem for the Rivers Project

In his email Konyves had also mentioned an "Anthology of Videopoems" and referred me to the "Vehicule Poets" site where excerpts from an article originally published in "Slope", entitled "Notes for an Introduction to an Anthology of Videopoems" appear. A source for more interesting discussion of its scope and potential for growth as literary genre. It's particularly intriguing to consider the metamorphosis of the filmmaker's art (Konyves' métier) into a new hybrid form, just as concrete and visual poets revolutionized the traditional page, & see now, more than ever, Internet technologies in a partnership with film to produce a radically democratized artform along the lines of avant-garde poetry. Perhaps if Silliman had read the "Slope" article he'd have recognized even better examples of early types of the visionary "poet/filmmaker" such as Marcel Duchamp (Anemic Cinema), Richard Kostelanetz (Video Strings), Augusto de Campos (Cordeiro), bp Nichol (First Screening) and Colin Morton (Primiti Too Ta). A more representative group of pioneer artists than the one or two names he gave.

I hope I've adequately repaid the courtesy of Tom Konyves' invitation to considerVidpo. My discussion of it has been necessarily sketchy, references & illustrations coming from only a few online sites. What are my own views on it? I can't say I'm qualified enough to critique something that I'm only half acquainted with, having written only poetry, & that of a principally traditional type. The language and methodology of Vidpo do seem a little vague in places (particularly where does that significant fusion of text and image & sound occur?) but that may be due to my own relative ignorance of film theory & practice. I can be, at least, grateful to Tom Konyves for the opportunity to learn something new. And I certainly have.

The Chilean miner that ran: my personal tribute to Edison Peña

                                               All visible visibly
                                               Moving things
                                               Spin or swing,
                                               One of the two,
                                               Move, as the limbs
                                               Of a runner do,
                                               To and fro,
                                               Forward and back,
                                               Or, as they swiftly
                                               Carry him,
                                               In orbit go
                                               Round an endless track ( W. H. Auden) 

                                                                                                                   
Miner Edison Peña ran everyday 5-7 miles through the tunnels of a collapsed Chilean mine to survive his horrible imprisonment. Officials of the New York City Marathon are trying to get Edison to participate, either as guest or runner, in the famous annual  Nov. 7 event. How I'd love to meet Edison Peña! How I wish he goes to New York!

Only the distance athlete who runs everyday, mile after mile under any conditions, undeterred by physical and emotional fatigue & always living for that final exhilaration of one more run completed can appreciate the remarkable feat that was Peña's daily ritual in the Chilean mine. What a thrill it'd be to meet this remarkable man!

I've run myself pretty consistently for about 25 years now & can attest to the almost remarkable 'saving' properties of daily physical exertion. I run not because I'm competitive (though it certainly brings out the competitiveness in me) but rather to feel the earth's and body's rhythms in the stride and arm swing: to feel the bird's flight as a companion to breath and engage the moon's mystical babble at pre-dawn. Yes, mystics and runners converse with the moon. I believe in the runner's power of one, the monomania & Sisyphean urge to conquer the enemy of human limitation: I believe, most of all, in the running form (the only real trace of the eternal left in us) & the way it takes us through need and personal anguish.

This is as close as I can come to describing what I and  & anyone else committed to conquering the enemy of distance & time share in common with Chilean runner Edison Peña. The comparisons between us end abruptly here. The run is actually Edison's gift to us since what I've described here can only serve as a partial reenactment of his own daily mythical journeys through the gold and copper passageways deep inside a desert. A glimpse only, palpable and genuine, into the man's ferocious heart & spirit.

It's to Edison I dedicate my own  6 mile journey into tomorrow's pre-dawn night.

Ron Silliman and the victory of the closed comments stream: a reply

 Ron Silliman, young poet-radical

Ron Silliman in his Thursday, October 14th blog post (2010) has claimed to have lost no significant readership as a result of his decision in late July (2010) to shut down the comments stream: in fact, his famous  "Silliman's site" is poised to welcome its "3 millionth visitor", clear proof that disgruntled free speech advocates (like me) have not stopped visiting. And I haven't because I am, after all, a Silliman reader.The most influential contemporary American poet and theorist is brazenly crowing victory (at least here), even going so far as to momentarily "open up the stream" (but without accepting new comments) so that contributors to his blog can retrieve old posts out of the archives. It's as though Silliman's blog were an extended manor, and to relieve some of the growing frustrations among the peasantry the most prosperous of the gentleman-poets is opening his doors to them, just this once (after the manner of the medieval 'Lord of Misrule' ritual), for a day or two of permissible conviviality and even laughter at his expense. Perfectly harmless fun until, of course, the doors shut tight and workers are returned to their lives of quiet anonymity.

This momentary relaxing of the restrictions on free speech is interesting posturing on his part. (It reminds me of the "mutuality of the oppressed" idea developed by Marxist critic Raymond Williams). And all this after a post on the demise of the bound book and large "brick & mortar bookshops", & a good inquiry into the causes of a shrinking reader-to-title ratio. Besides the obvious condescending tone of the piece, it's also  incredible to me how unaware Silliman is of the inconsistencies (and incongruities) between his own theory & practice. He condemns himself (as they say) out of his own mouth. To begin with, he praises the democratizing effect of blogging, saying it's been "a means of communicating with one another without the funneling process of the academy", and is changing the nature of poetry itself, presumably for the better, and yet he's resorted himself to a similar academic type of vetting whose outcome is to turn the clock back on literary development. That's an inconsistency on an obvious general level.

As for the particulars, Silliman also doesn't recognize in his description of the e-book the same post-avant impetus of most of his own poetry theory.If he had, he couldn't have possibly envisaged a case for any sort of freedom of speech restriction. He gives a respectful nod to the advent of Internet publishing, rightly anticipating a new regime of writers no longer subject to the restraints of distribution, warehousing, & pricing. He's right as far as that goes: "E-publishing changes, or will eventually, the entire dynamics of the enterprise of reading & writing", and presumably because of the different ways a networked world frees us from the slavery of "industrial" and academic publishing. Silliman almost charts for us the course a poetry can take once it's been made fully accessible online.

The real task facing poets, beyond the blank page or screen we confront every day, will be in defining how best to set up the networks so that our writing is able to reach the people who will be most apt to find it useful, challenging, even thrilling. This would be an excellent moment for poets not to be like so many tic birds atop the rough dry skin of the industrial publishing rhino. Poetry has been ill-served by 99.9% of all brick-&-mortar bookshops, and virtually all trade publishers. With a handful of exceptions, its treatment within the academic publishing universe has not been much better.

Sagacious analysis, to be sure, from the poet of the quotidian (after Frank O'Hara) who's made it his mission to stand language & poetry conventions on their head, and who sees in this new interchange between the old "book community" and an emerging e-literacy a kind of transforming energy that's very reminiscent of the New American  poetries in which he played such a vital role. Substitute Internet technology for the New Sentence credo of "open-endedness" & "word play" & "the torquing of poetic form" and you have the same post-avant celebration of newness. And how do we reconcile that to the characterizing of free speech at his blog as an "open sewer"?

The disdain for radicalness (of which he once formed part) unrestrained by conventions of old guard literacy, unafraid to offer wildly differing ways to read & write poetry is, to me, still shocking. The distinguished Language theorist, the pariah to every form of "anti-modernist poetics" that he's disdainfully dubbed Quietism, is sounding to me like a mean-spirited academic advisor, editor & critic, ready to cut comments down to a shape & size more to his own liking. The former Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere to whom established & fledgling poets turn for support has turned mainstream, the doors to his house of poetry permanently closed. Silliman gave to one of his sections in the essay "Z-SITED PATH", a clarion call if ever there was one for a new poetry, the subtitle "Why the MLA Can't Read". The last few sentences in the article are worth copying out in full:

From Gertrude Stein to the present, poets have increasingly emphasized that meaning in poetry falls on the side of the signifier—and that it is not deferred to any hierarchic abstraction such as character, plot or argument. It is only through the signifier that the cultural limits of the self, the subject, become visible. It is there, and there only, that direct perception takes place in a poem. This above all else is what still separates the tradition of poets who move into the new form from the rest. More than any other critical text I can think of, Ahearn's book demonstrates just how the hidden agendas of academic training, bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified, rob intelligent people of the ability to read. (The New Sentence, 146 Emphases mine).

Ron Silliman has joined the ranks of the Barry Ahearns, "bureaucratizing meaning into a fetish of the signified" when he decided to label a category of free speech as an "open sewer". I'll go a step further and say, with deep regret, that Ron Silliman has taught us now how not to read anymore.

Poetry for the Chilean miners rescued at last

As the Chilean miners emerge out of their living death deep in the earth, I think of the following lines by the great Pablo Neruda (from Verses Against the Darkness). Which I dedicate to them.

"No quiero para mí tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,
de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muriéndome de pena." (Pablo Neruda)

I never asked for so much misfortune.
I don't want to live like a root, tomb anymore,
alone underground, in a place of death,
stiff with cold, dying of grief.

Why Canada never wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Canadians are never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and for a good reason: quite frankly, they can't qualify. Detractors of the prestigious prize accuse it of being too political: they don't accept that a true literary body of work (as the Nobel committee rightly sees it) is always one fraught with danger, and the price the writer must pay for his/her ideals is oftentimes imprisonment, enforced isolation and possible death. Those have been the usual criteria and the committee is right to justify their choices by them. Authors and their work are, in short, a palpable life-narrative in which real perils lie strewn in the path towards a complete & genuine artistic representation of the contemporary world.

Do any of these criteria apply to Canadians? The question causes laughter. Or to Americans recently? The biggest setbacks to American fiction writers these days, faced with stiff e-book competition, is the loss for debut fiction writers of lucrative advances & royalties. When was the last time anyone in Canada was imprisoned for human rights advocacy like Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo? Again, more laughter. Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of this year's Nobel for literature, is a name deeply ingrained in the dangerous vicissitudes of Latin American politics. Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), also considered a top candidate for the Nobel, has always criticized, at great risk to his own life, the political & religious uses to which Arabic poetry has been put.

The problem is that culture in Canada, on the other hand, is politicized so heavily in the opposite direction— creativity of any kind ordered by bureaucratic decree & doled out in language that fears to offend anyone— that the vision of a significant national expression is all but impossible. What comes directly from a highly subsidized culture of entitlement is mediocre work that was so obvious even to former high commissioner, Lord Moran that he made the following disparaging comments :

Anyone who is even moderately good at what they do - in literature, the theatre, skiing or whatever - tends to become a national figure. And anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once." (Lord Moran, high commissioner in Ottawa between 1981 and 1984)

Canadians will never get the attention of the Nobel committee so long as this fateful divide continues to exist between the state and a cultural expression that's rooted in real life world conditions, ones that may oftentimes result from real oppression at home. The only two writers (within recent memory) to have merited a Nobel-type recognition for the threat they posed to Canadian governmental policy & way of life are Thomas Berger and Pierre Vallieres: the former for his untiring defense of the land rights of Indigenous peoples as Commissioner of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (1977), and the latter as a result of his own FLQ activism and the work White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec Terrorist (1968) that he wrote in exile.

MarioVargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

It's too easy to write in Canada: state intervention is usually anything but oppressive. Cultural productions in this country, in fact, are the result of a system of "literacy by bureaucracy" in which artistic output is tied directly to publicly funded Canada Council (and other various regional) grants & subsidies programs. A kind of 'royal privilege' granted to permissible writings. Envisaged as a strategic plan ,with objectives and strategies aimed at blending as many "traditions, practices, and media" into one national body of work, it's no wonder so much of our national literature looks bland and uniform. Any kind of protest is bound to come (as it has lately with news of more Harper government arts cuts) when artist-recipients stop receiving their arts monies or not as much as they've been accustomed to. Nothing stirs more heated debate than any form of cuts to cultural spending. I don't ever recall a national debate on literary innovativeness nor any sort of impassioned oratory from poets & artists to equal the fervor of government funding.

 The same outcry is heard even when cutbacks affect big-circulation magazines. For example, government funding agencies,such as the Canadian Periodical Fund, have recently put a $1-5 million dollar cap on what any one magazine can receive. In fact, so enmeshed is artistic production in government bureaucracy that the work of Canadian musicians, poets and composers, artists, journalists and filmmakers etc would come to a grinding halt if the arts were entirely privatized. How can victims of funding cuts ever win the sympathy of international observers with a more sanguine sense of political danger of the kind that imprisons, tortures and kills?

If Canada does produce a Nobel laureate, it might come by proxy: the prize given to a writer who flees his or her own country, and takes residence here. Canada is a nation of mostly subsidized artistic whiners (there are always notable exceptions, of course: I am purposely excluding small publishers, artists and writers who don't receive any form of government assistance) who seem quite incapable of creating on their strengths alone. A whole mainstream arts network, comprised of such tax-payer funded luxuries as the digitization of literary archives, investment in independent films,an artists' travel support fund, etc. etc. would collapse. If perhaps Canada could arise out of the ashes of a destroyed Canada Council regime, ready to face alone the real anguish & risks of literary activity (such as Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern writers have always had to endure), we might one day be entitled to a Nobel laureate of our own. Just might.