Prose at the Poetry Center: Futurism Now, Or, My Trip to San Francisco

I went to San Francisco to give a reading with Renee Gladman at the SFSU Poetry Center. Along the way a few things happened.

[Honolulu to San Francisco flight, 10/13, a woman and a man across the aisle begin to talk, at first about health care]

--We're just going to have to suffer through this for a while.
--They're so starry eyed.
--They play the race card all the time, but they won't admit it.
--They don't see the evil that's being done underneath.
--You know how much they hated Bush. Those liberal bozos.
--Yes, George Bush and Cheney were good men who cared about this country.
--I sometimes don't say these things out loud.
--We've been in business for 40 years; it doesn't get easier. I never noticed the mortgage crisis.
--It was because the Democrats in Congress insisted that minorities buy houses with bad loans.
--And WE worked so hard to get what we have.
--The economy was very good there for a while.
--I'll think of you when I'm suffering through this.

__________

Steve Vincent shows me the Mission District's murals. He rings the bell at Hamburger Eyes and someone named Roy peers out from the second floor, remembers Steve, invites us up. No public gallery any more, need to make money. He shows us the case of publications, points to the roof, which leaked during the recent storm, says he grew up on O`ahu and do I know Naomi Long? Yes, I say, wishing I could send him a link to Radiant Field.

__________

Norman Fischer, Buddhist priest and poet, sits at Mel's Diner in the Mission District and asks, "what is the role of poetry now?"

__________

It was prose day at the Poetry Center, SFSU, on October 15. Renee Gladman and I read, she from a 60 page novel and I from my retrofitted Dementia Blog book. Renee is obsessed with the sentence, not so much as a unit of grammar as with a unit of experience. We live in sentences, she says, and our lives are as confusing as they are. She spoke of wanting to write of experiences that don't go anywhere in particular. Her character lived with a sentence that moved around her room. The sentence flew to the window and sat on it for a while. The character was supposed to murder someone. The character had occasional outbursts. The world (and the sentence) were so changeable that plots erupted and disappeared in their course. This seemed like my Dementia Blog, whose concerns are more quotidian, more "true" perhaps, but recall a world every bit as like dandelion fluff. Stephen Vincent's haptics were good maps to the breaths of air that scattered those seeds. The Q&A was about our being publishers and writers, about Gertrude Stein's distinction between the sentence (unemotional) and the paragraph (emotional), about doing research, genre blurring, sentences.

__________

Marjorie Perloff lectured on Futurism at SFMOMA during the President Obama traffic jam on October 15. She began by invoking a blog post by Julian Myers that Rachel Loden told me about, in which a writer announced he would boycott the Futurist events of the weekend because F.T. Marinetti wished for the "hygiene of war" and hated women so. Perloff did not take the position I might have taken, that while Marinetti's positions were horrid things, his style and energy remain significant, his attempt to deal with the machine. But Perloff's narrative excused Marinetti, citing his humor, the context of his Manifesto, and the way in which his Manifesto turned--later on--into a Manifesto more about writing style than revolution. That his use of the word "war" was misunderstood. She lost me there, but the slides kept coming and the wonderful details and the definitions of Manifesto and the "words in freedom" divorced from syntax kept appearing in gorgeous typographical manifestations. Free words, not free verse, which drew a caustic commentary from our speaker, who lamented the bane of the form that refuses to fold. Afterward, Johanna Drucker joined Perloff on stage; they sparred verbally over Marjorie's allusion to Russia as "backward," even as she spoke glowingly of its Futurists. They agreed with one another that Manifestos are "quaint" and have outlived their purpose.

__________

Rusty Morrison and I had breakfast in Berkeley and talked small presses. I broached my current train of thought, a very heavy and smoky one, about the ways in which small presses can make arguments, and wondered if she'd had the experience of having Omnidawn's argument misunderstood (or taken otherwise). She spoke about books as singularities, about the way in which she looks in manuscripts for an instance of inspiration. So that certain singularities of vision seem to be her way of organizing a book list. I said I wish that more people wrote reviews of presses, rather than simply of books.

__________

[BART train from Berkeley to Powell, 10/16: two men and two women with bicycles get on; across from me is a man reading a book called The Intelligence of Dogs. One woman gets off with her boyfriend; as she leaves, her bike gets caught up with the other woman's bike, the one who is wearing gray shorts, a helmet, and running shoes. Her bike is a Specialized. The woman in gray begins to shout in Russian-accented English]

--Get off the train; fuck you! No FUCK YOU!
[The man reading]--Just be quiet, you are a MAGPIE!! Shut up!!
--I have hurt fooot. My fooot had surgery. My fooot hurt.
--You shouldn't be riding a bike, then.
--You should be encouraging me; I am getting help for my fooot.
--I hope they amputate your foot. I hope your foot ROTS OFF.
--Oh, Fuck You.

As I exit the train, a woman is saying to her grown son:

--You should NEVER talk to anyone in BART. Never.
--What did you say? [I ask, wondering how others absorbed the shouting match).
--I told him he should have just kept reading his book. It was cruel to egg that woman on.

__________




San Francisco Center for the Book had a open house on Friday to show off their presses and have visitors make their own broadsides of a Futurist poem, "Let me have my fun," written by Aldo Palazzeschi, and translated by Paul Vangelisti, who was there to talk Futurism, discuss and read the poem and watch visitors (who included Standard Schaefer's entire writing workshop) print over a John McBride broadside with bright red letters and signs. Kathleen Burch was very warm and accommodating; she co-founded the center in the mid-1990s and has been going strong ever since, with series of workshops and classes. People wandered in and out. When Paul Vangelisti began to present his own new book AZUSA, designed by Rebecca Chamblee of Otis, a curious man began to videotape the performance. It became clear that no one present had any idea who the man was. He had a strong accent, gray hair pulled up into a small bun, tinted with remnant orange dye. And he loved the letter H, kept asking Paul to read the H page of his alphabetarium. H, he wanted H. He wanted H to have more space in the book; he noticed that I followed more closely than did most letters to one another. So Paul read from A-H, as the man, who proved to be Rumanian, roamed around the large table with his video camera.



__________

By then I was fast friends with one Ann Tashjian, who introduced herself as "the driver." For her husband, that was, the man with the white mustache in a bright green shirt and a hat. The man who buys fine books, rare ones. Standard says he studies Joseph Cornell, taught at UC Irvine. Ann says she watched the inauguration to "make sure nothing untoward happened" and then, when she ("an avid smoker") thought of the sadness of Obama's attempts to quit smoking, she decided to quit for him. And she did. She was talking to a man in his 70s about Obama, a man in L.A. who had gone to Punahou, then Harvard. She had asked him if his wife was Hawaiian. "His entire body changed position," she said, "and he turned to me and said, 'NO, she's Japanese!'" Ann found this story odd; I confessed that I did not. She had once seen a man in skin tight pink, shoes and hood to match, who rode his unicycle back and forth in her BART car. It was his day to ride about town on one wheel.

We attended a concert played on 16 Futurist "noise intoners." The instruments resemble stereo speakers of various sizes, with large cones attached; at the top of the wooden box are levers, and behind the box is a crank mechanism. The players of these instruments were thus engaged in a lot of pulling, pushing, and cranking; occasionally they beat upon their boxes. There were singers, too, who sang sounds, not words, and a woman who both sang and played a violin. She was accompanied by a man who blew into a small instrument with a keyboard, then moved to his noise intoners (one stacked on the other), and by another man who played something that might have been a xylophone had it been a normative instrument. He also had a drum he banged. It was the concert of a lifetime. I will not need another such, but was delighted to see that 400 people came to a concert to hear the music of asthmatics and difficult to start cars and tuning violins. The wheezy spirit of it was immense.

__________

When I left town this morning, the women's marathon runners had arrived to take the places of the intricately name-tagged Oracle conventioneers. The Futurists were still in place for the weekend, Obama was leaving the city, and all the voices were noise intoners until they could be transcribed. So here they are.


Thanks also to Janine Scancarelli, Steve Dickison, Carrie Takahata, Rachel Loden and Jussi Katonen, for making the trip such a rewarding one.

Save as evidence of your voyage

My husband loves the wording on airplane ticket stubs, advising you to save them as evidence you have traveled. There's something wonderful and spooky about the idea that you might, in fact, forget that you had. At 50, however, I find it's often less interesting to think about what you remember than of what you have forgotten. But there's no evidence for the latter, so what are you to do except take sharp intake of breath when someone else remembers.

We have been traveling, a family trip to San Francisco, where we met Radhika's birth sister (and Sangha's sister by affection and fiat) and adoptive mother. We also saw an elementary school friend of mine who was visiting her parents and brothers in California with two teenage boys I'd never met--they had not existed when last I saw her. I spent two days in L.A., reading with Deborah Meadows and attending a Dodgers game with her, Andrew Maxwell, Aaron Belz and son Elijah. Already I've misplaced that internet-generated ticket as proof, but there are photos.

As proof of voyage, some moments, thoughts, in no particular "order":

--The questions. They still catch me off-balance. "Where do they come from?" "You said 'your kids' sister'; what did you mean?"; "Oh, Radhika's sister"; "Was she an orphan?"; "Do you know their origins?"; "How old were they when you adopted them?"; "How did you find her sister?" And on and on. The questions are not hostile, but they are insistent. I choose fluttering like a butterfly or I choose rope-a-dope, and I usually change the subject. I have a vocabulary for our extended family, but no one else does; I only have it because I've developed it. Sangha's two sisters. My calabash sister (mother to my kids' sister). Then realize I no longer care so much about categories; remember that once I did. Somewhere in there an active forgetting of terminology, of names for families that do not fit my own.




--The Bridge. Joseph Stella's (Brooklyn) bridge painting is at SFMOMA, but the bridge that dominates San Francisco is Golden. We biked across it (two tandems and two single bikes) in the fog, rode through Sausolito to Tiburon, returned on the ferry. Deborah Meadows reminded me later that I criticized Michael Palmer for aestheticizing the shoe piles at Auschwitz. Beauty and horror. The emergency phones on the bridge that assure you--no, inform you--that jumping will be fatal and tragic. Call here. I watched, in short sections, Eric Steel's documentary on the bridge in my hotel room. He videoed the bridge for a year, caught (as in filmed) most of the jumpers. Some only witnessed as splashes, others seen pacing the bridge back and forth, those who looked nervous, furtive, climbed over the railing, jumped. Variations on that theme. The bridge in sun, fog, rain, gorgeous. Steel found witnesses, families, friends. The guy who survived assures us he changed his mind as he lept. But my sound didn't work that evening, so I don't know what else he said. So many ethical questions. The act is public as soon as it occurs on the bridge; to film and then show it adds another layer on. The jumpers' odd non-privacy is our own. We don't know what to do with it. I wish he had not ended with the most dramatic jump but with the most banal. But who's to judge that!? What he does best is get at the histories behind symbolic acts. If the jump is as symbolic as it is deadly, it represents not just pain, but long histories of pain.


--At Duchamps' urinal a grandmother leaned over her tow-headed grandson (age 6?) and said, "this is an important work. This destroyed art. If this is art, then everything is art, and nothing is."


--At SFMOMA, Sangha asked me, "what's so special about this?" He did like layers of paint on a canvas.


--Simplicity is an acquired taste. Rothko is not so simple.


--SFMOMA had a Robert Frank exhibit. I saw it there, and again in L.A., where there were fewer rooms of "The Americans." Frank as Whitman, tucked between bride (wrote "bridge") and bridegroom. Frank as bridge. An open casket at an African American funeral in South Carolina in the 1950s; two shoes on a desk at a military recruiter's office (no body attached, just the shoes); horn in front of/ instead of face at a parade; a black couple turning to stare at the photographer (I overheard a guide say this was one of Frank's favorites); the photographer's exhausted family in the front seat of an old car, lights illuminated; from New Mexico or Arizona, photo of the three large photos for sale at a rest stop (1. beautiful canyon, 2. beautiful foliage, 3. beautiful atom bomb explosion); starlet blurred, her fans crisp. More than hints of what was to come. Race, gender, cars, wars. Like Ginsberg, a Whitmanic vision after the fact of optimism. And yet . . .


--Needle Woman: Kim Sooja. LACMA. A room with screens. On/in each screen you see a woman's back. She has long hair in a pony tail, a light blue jacket on, and she is standing perfectly still looking out toward a river of people coming toward the camera, toward us, around her. Nepal, Chad, Tel Aviv, Havana, Yemen, Sao Paulo. Couldn't always figure out which was which. Kids mugging for the camera. A boy in Yemen(?), one eye directed at us, the other away. Evasion of eye contact. Stares (mostly in Tel Aviv); a man running his hands over his chest and belly (this made the children in the room laugh). The guard--it's his first day, he says--has decided that people pick their noses in all cultures. He's seen at least one nose pick per screen.


--If I answer people's questions about my children, what do they do with the answers? There is a need for closure when someone dies. How did it happen? The answer quiets us, for a time. Is there a complementary need for dis-closure, for knowing the prequel? Those who search their own origins would say yes. But the rest of us, why do we feel we have earned the right to know? The need? [The cat meows loudly. He was found 15 years ago at the Early School in Honolulu, lived 11 years with another family, which disintegrated. The new dispensation did not agree with him. He came to us, a new being in double digits.]


--Installation of hanging plastic ware, many rows of it. Like a garden of Babylon except made of plastic salad dryers, tubs, bowls, cups, hampers. Children thread the cords of it and laugh.


--Installation of street lamps, short ones, middle ones, tall ones. A gray forest with globes on top.


--Buses, trains, cable cars, BART, CalTrain, electric, diesel: San Francisco. Cars cars cars (L.A.)


--Rachel Loden's husband, Jussi, asks me to explain Language poetry. I gather he's asked before, and perhaps often. I do my best. He's skeptical. I try another tack. He's skeptical. I gather he's been skeptical before. Radhika asks for mango ice cream to follow her mango milk shake.


--Omnidawn, Cusp Books. Editors, Rusty Morrison, David Lloyd. To blog about. Both presses are what we call eclectic, though that word resembles "quietude." Rachel Loden says the word demeans silence; she does not like that. We talk about Silliman's categories: location, generation, inclusion, exclusion, avant, post-avant, school of quietude. Then there are the poetic dangers. "You have 7 readers and I have only 5!" 7 deadly sins, at least. Though if we're lucky, only 5.


--Daniel Tiffany tells me that Dementia Blog contains a mystery. What is the relationship of the observer to her mother? I say I tried hard to leave myself out. He says he knows. I'm reading Peggy Schumaker's Just Breathe Normally; she puts herself in. Uses a near death trauma to expand into family narrative. Marvelous exfoliation, in starts and stops. DB so claustrophobic. Six months and nothing else. Two ways of reading trauma. As wide angle, or as microscope. Either angle magnifies. Horrifies.


--Aaron Belz tells me it's funny. Why am I a bit taken aback? He's right.


--Marjorie Perloff says, "at my age!"


--Diane Ward says at 50 we need to figure out how to live with others for the duration. We agree that we think differently at 50. Quotient of remembering, forgetting, and the prospect if not diminished, then put in intense focus. My eyes in the morning refuse their focus.


--Deborah Meadows: "the most interesting poets are not in groups." She reads new letters, and a piece on primate thought, along with poems from Goodbye Tissues. We are at a salon. How Bryant laughed at that word last summer! Americans have reduced it to a word about hair, perhaps.


--I fly back to San Francisco; the plane lands wing to wing with another United plane. I hear my name called; our friends Joe and Hans are in the airport. We fly to Kauai to save money. The clocks there are all at the same time: Bikini Atoll, Honolulu, London, places whose names we don't recognize. Nothing on-line about whose project this is, this bank of clocks running at the same time, the same second. Hawaiian musicians, a hula dancer, Radhika dancing too. Radhika performing a chant for Queen Liliu`okalani as we land in Hawai`i, her hula arms telling part of the story.


[Detail]