Eileen Tabios's EXCAVATING THE FILIPINO IN ME is now available.

The chapbook features Eileen's self-interview on her poetics, as well as a long poem.

http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=excavating-the-filipino-in-me

Talisman #42: The Women's Occupation

When I was in college in the late 1970s I carried around a blue heavy hardcover edition of the Norton Modern anthology; that book was my education in poetry (I was a history major then). When someone told me that John Ashbery loved the work of Laura Riding, I was able to track her down in its thicket of thin print-clogged pages. That was before she renounced not just poetry, but also anthologies, refused further permission to put her work in the Norton. Or so I recall. That anthology, like so many teaching anthologies, was organized chronologically. The sense of history that emerged from its pages was like an old film-strip, a sequence of images that lurched across a tiny temporal space, and suggested the coherence that in fact eluded it. But what seemed most important about that book was that it was full of conversations. I was at the institution best known at that time for a theory of literary influence, but I'm not talking about that father-son family romance model so much as about a larger social space, where poets' words called out to each other. It was a big, messy neighborhood, that Norton. While later reading offered more neatness, tighter narratives, meaner-spirited arguments over poetics (oh, Laura Riding!), that one was the big event that drew me in, as if it were the slide show to introduce me to poetic time shares.

I thought about Laura Riding's rejection of anthologies, especially her distaste for all-women anthologies, when Lisa Bourbeau wrote to ask me for work several months back for a "women's section" in a forthcoming issue of Talisman. One of the best literary experiences I've ever had was a Russian-American poetry conference in Hoboken in the mid-90s, organized by Ed Foster in the spirit of his Talisman House Press and journal. The two or three days were full of cigarette smoke, drink, loud voices, men bonding over hearing gunfire in the streets of American and Russian cities, and poets who (in one instance) bounded over the backs of our chairs, and (in another) tried to walk out of his own reading. It featured animated arguments between Russians; I remember asking Lynn Hejinian at one point to tell me what was going on. But it almost didn't matter, there was so much energy in the room, and because so much of the poetry was performative. There was Forrest Gander standing on a desk reciting a poem, asking Michael Palmer to help him when he faltered. Looking back, this seems a model for the journal, albeit a very noisy one. Talisman has always, with a tremendous lack of assumptions, presented experimental work that matters. The plain covers, whose insides were covered with dense type, were decoys for anyone wanting flash with their poetry. Those of us happy with the pan itself got another poetry education in its pages.

But Talisman House has never published many women. In the 1990s, there was a Selected Poems by Alica Notley, which kicks a pebble in my mind, but otherwise not many. (Talisman published a chapbook version of my first Memory Cards before the full-length book came out.) I go now to their website and find, under their "new" section, a list of 20 new books. Of the books by a single author, which number 15, two are by women, one by the Turkish poet, Gulten Akm, and the other by Donna de la Perrière. Otherwise, there are books by Leonard Schwartz (his If is a terrific book, by the way), Joe Donahue, Brian Henry, John High, and the late William Bronk, among others.

So it seemed a good thing that Talisman was going to publish women. I suggested doing it without marking it as a "women's section," to see if anyone noticed. But that did not happen. Instead, the new issue (read it here) comes in several sections: a section of miscellany running from Artaud to Marjorie Perloff's fine interview of Hank Lazer, with photographs of William Bronk in the bundle; a section on gnostic poetry; "The Occupation: The First of Three Major Selections of Works by and about Women Writers Around the World"; "Poetry"; and then, finally, "Commentary." The subjects of the first section are men; the writers of the second are all men; the "Poetry" section is male, and the commentator is Thomas Fink. Islanded in the middle of this male sea is the "Occupation," a fulsome gathering of women's work from Alice Notley's introductory essay on dreams to poetry by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge . . . Anne Tardos, and many others. Just after this occupation by women poets who write in English there is a section on translation that features women poets with their both-gender translators.

 

"The Occupation": In New York City, the occupation resonates with the after-echoes of the Occupy movement of 2011, with people reclaiming public spaces, living in them, setting up tents, small villages engaging in direct democracy, places from which to speak out. That makes sense, this occupation at the center of Talisman's male space. "Wall Street" is not simply an economic hub; it's also, at least according to its name, walled off. It will keep you out. Occupying it forces you in. But as someone who's lived in Hawai`i for any length of time knows, "occupation" is primarily what colonizers do, what armies do. (In Hawai`i, the Occupy movement changed their name to "de-Occupy.") They take up space that is not their own, and they do it by force of weaponry or culture or economy. Israel occupies Palestine, we're reminded daily. The USA occupies the world's movie theaters and radio waves. The English language occupies a vast territory, across continents and oceans. And so, Thomas Fink, in the "Commentary" section of the issue, writes this about Paolo Javier's work: 

“English Is an Occupation,” the title of a poem in 60 lv bo(e)mbs, embodies a metaphor performing a metonymic linkage between the imposition of the English language on Filipinos during the nearly half-century U.S. occupation ( resulting in the devaluation of Tagalog and other local languages) and the occupation itself. However, confirming Cura’s notion of “mongrel identity,” it also reflects the job of an English teacher or professor and of the “polyglot” poet writing in English: “persevere      counter ardor mystic parables/ today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you” (7). In this poem and in the book as a whole, density of allusions and the syntactically unpredictable juxtaposition of fragmentary utterances make the critic’s “occupation” of “translation” challenging, (Fink)

Here, the poet occupies more and less than a public space; he occupies the reader himself or herself--"Paolo occupies you." Paolo is not an English word, and many of the words Javier uses are Tagalog, so the English-only reader is carted off to the margins of this public/private square (El Centro Paolo). Fink writes about Javier's as "immigrant" poetry. He's the guy from the occupied place who leaves it, only to occupy the imperial power's language, space. He's the guy who gets translated and now occupies those translations. He's the guy who causes discomfort. After all, he's living in a tent, and he might not be washing himself enough with imperial soap!

At the end of Fink's long, patient, cogent review of Forrest Gander, Paolo Javier, and Stephen Paul Miller under the concept of "(un)translatability," he makes a kind of apology. While he has written about a white guy steeped in Mexican culture, a Filipino guy who lives in Queens, and a Jewish poet who loves Meher Baba, he has not written about any women, as he admits here: 


In the early stages of developing this essay, I believed that the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge would be especially suitable for it. My impression, it turned out, was based on a handful of fragmentary utterances in different poems, and each time I tried to read Berssenbrugge’s powerfully abstract yet imagistic, disjunctive yet meditative poetry in relation to (un)translatability, I found that the work’s particular flux disabled whatever generalizations I hoped to cull from it. (Fink)

In other words, her work was so untranslatable that it defeated his attempt to write about it. To critique a poem is to describe it, and if the poem cannot be described, put into context, or otherwise closely read, its "particular flux" defeats the writer. Fair enough. He notes that he has written about three male poets, notes the absence of women poets. But it's not that there are not women in the work of these three men, however: "My subjects are three men, the first of whom engages in ekphrastic conversation with the art of a woman and the second of whom deploys the persona of a woman." So he hopes for some work on "translatability" between men and women: "That fact reminds me that one possibility for future criticism in this vein is the area that psychologist Deborah Tannen has so compellingly investigated: cross-gender communication. How do men and women foreground their efforts to translate what they wish to communicate to the opposite gender? How do they think about translating the “language” of the opposite gender to themselves? And also, for transgendered poets, how are the complexities of translation enacted and absorbed?"

I want to think about the difference between "cross-gender" and "transgender." To cross genders means to move back and forth between them, for men to communicate with women and vice versa. To be transgender means a crossing over, a leaving behind, a movement from one to another place. Both posit difference as the most important feature of communication. (And who am I to disagree?) But given that most of the essays and poems in this issue where there is cross-gender communication involve men writing about women (Gander, yes, but also the gnostic critics writing about Dickinson and Notley) that's like a Chris Christie bridge. You can cross it only one way. 

Thus far, I've left the women poets out of this conversation, as I engage with the men who seem walled off from them. Does Fink's notion of Berssenbrugge's "flux" and untranslatability apply to the women's section? Is that why it's walled off, lest it flood the other more masculine boroughs? In 2013 do we still need special sections devoted to women's writing? What IS women's writing? I'm loathe to say it's got flux, while the men do not; after all, gnosticism seems to reside in brokenness, which is a non-state of flux. (What new gnosticism is is still vague to me, even after reading much of the section.) There's no sense given by Bourbeau or Ed Foster of what they mean by "women's writing," so I'm going to the first essay of the "Occupation" by Alice Notley for clues. And here I find what Fink might call a cross-gender moment, or is it trans-? The essay is about dreaming, how poems emerge from dreams, how communication occurs (about the past and the future) during dreaming. And it's also about how Alice Notley becomes Allen Ginsberg:

"In 1997, after I had been informed that Allen Ginsberg had died, I became afraid for him in death. I wanted -- because he was my friend -- to be sure that in death he was safe. I dreamed that night that my stepdaughter Kate, who is deceased and in dreams is often my messenger from the world of the dead, came for me, in a rich dark blue skirt and sweater, to take me to the ‘second world.’ I gathered that this second world was an afterlife with an active artistic component, for there was a professor there who was trying to achieve an intense enough red for the second world’s mosaics. Then, my name became Ellen Goodman (yes like the columnist), so I knew that I was Allen, the good man, and I waited in a small apartment to die."

The woman poet becomes a "good man," who occupies a small apartment in his dying. Notley's dream-life is all flux, all symbol, all transformation. Dreaming reshapes the world; it is the world. Is this women's work? I don't think this "occupation" answers that question, nor do I think it really even poses it. But what it does is to open a space in a journal that has welcomed some of the best experimental writers now alive--especially those with spiritual affinities toward gnosticism--for women writers, however you define them. To define is to wall in and wall out, as Robert Frost would say, but the act of definition can also mend differences by creating a space where they can exist gently. Frost's wall was of uneven stones, not the barbed wire of many an occupation. To "disobey" is what Notley has often said she does. Next time, I hope Talisman disobeys its own categorical imperative and admits the company of men, women, transgender people, people of color, to the gathering. It might feel like the mob around security in the Madrid Airport, but things sort themselves out, we "translate" ourselves elsewhere, occupying our languages, ourselves.

A final digression that is not one. I'm about to embark on a course in small press publishing on the graduate level; it scares me, as I know so little about the subject. I collect poems, I even sometimes edit them a bit, but mostly I glory in the designs of others who are more talented than I am visually, and work the tired mill of publicity. But I do know that I will emphasize the need for a small press to have a mission, for young editors to find gaps that need to be filled, and to fill them. I will also ask them to consider that there is a difference between collecting poems and curating them. This issue of Talisman has collected some of the best poems I've seen in a long time. But the issue's curation is what troubles me. To collect marvelous poems by women, which is what Bourbeau has done, is one thing. But to organize an issue in which those women "occupy" a central and yet highly marked place, is problematic. Why is the last section, called "Poetry," composed only of poems by men? Why is the gnostic section composed only of men (even if it's based on a panel at a conference--another problem)? Why are there so few poets of color within the category of "women," and how do white women fit with international women poets with American "immigrant" poets like Eileen Tabios? This is not to say they do not, but to occupy those questions is where Talisman might move next--or we. Most of all, there's a difference between counting how many men and how many women are published (an activity that's telling, to put it mildly, as Spahr and Young have shown in "Numbers Trouble") and organizing a public/private square where they are not blocked off from one another in groups of apparent same. 

My own contribution to the new issue is here. It's a long prose poem in sections about baseball for my son on his 14th birthday. In other words, it's a long poem by a woman for a young man and about young men.


An after-thought: a diagram could at least be made of some of the crossings in this issue. Gnostic men joined by gnostic women (Notley, F. Howe, DuPlessis); gnostic women joined by members of the Talisman "poetry section," and so forth. A flow chart to suggest flux, rather than a group of isolated groups, in other words.

Springtime (in London) is for Alzheimer's

When is jet lag a lag, and when is it more a loop, like a scratched cd, or the mind when it's called upon to navigate the differences in time zones? It's from within that loop, or outside the time to which I've been assigned (8:43 a.m. Hawaiian time) that I'll write about my trip to London, April 5-12 (or 13th, if you include the flight lag on the last leg from Los Angeles). Kind of a flight log of lag. Stop me before this gets too silly. And forgive the errors, as they are induced by over 48 hours of travel in one week across a cumulative 22 time zones. Or so.

I went to London to attend the New Cultures of Ageing Conference at Brunel University on April 8 and 9. (The "e" in Ageing has a similar power to set my brain in a loop, so from now on I'll write "aging," which will ease my American mind.) The conference was smaller than most I attend, but also more interdisciplinary, incorporating oral history projects, reading group reports, histories of aging in England, demographic frenzies, discussion of organization and management, an "argument" between Will Self and Faye Weldon, and afternoon panels on literature. The focus was on narrative, but there were at least some calls for ruptured ones.

Which brings me quickly to a pivotal moment during my visit in Ealing with Giles Goodland and
his family, when Giles handed me a book by B.S. Johnson, entitled House Mother Normal, published in 1971, shortly before the author's suicide. I'd been telling Giles about my dissatisfactions with linear narratives about Alzheimer's. And suddenly I realized that this was the book I should be talking about, a book that belonged to Giles, a book I could not possibly read that evening and talk about the day after. The day after my talk, during which I mentioned my encounter with B.S. Johnson, a graduate student from Paris-Diderot, Karen Zouzouai, delivered a paper on Johnson's novel. A day after that, I bought Johnson's Omnibus from the London Review Bookshop at Russell Square. Two days thereafter I read the novel on the plane from London to Los Angeles. It's an astonishing text. While I'm still not capable of doing it justice, I want to begin to say why.

I find a paragraph by Frank Kermode that says it best, but only if you reverse its field, transposing Kermode's negatives into positives like a wide receiver running behind the quarterback and heading up the other hashmarks. Because what I find valuable about Johnson's House Mother Normal is its refusal to trump up a linear narrative about residents of an old people's home. Instead, Johnson offers us the residents themselves, each telling the same story, some in sentences, others (the ones with Alzheimer's) in words only, strewn across the page. So here is the regressive Mr. Kermode:

His [Johnson's] basic error arose from his belief that the truth of narratives was incompatible with the usual way of presenting them: that is, in books which by their very technology insisted on a spurious sequentiality. At the same time, he thought that the neglect of all manner of various typographic opportunities, long since exploited by Sterne and now shamefully ignored, was another enemy of the truth. That the material structure of books can affect their contents is of course true. The use of the codex in preference to the scroll made for a decisive difference between the Gospels and the books of the Hebrew Bible; the codex made easily available relationships between pages remote from one another, and these books, with numbered and turnable pages, may have influenced the writers and probably affected the early course of the new religion.

Johnson, it seems, was a fiction writer obsessed with "truth," one for whom the form of "realism" was not realistic enough. It was in the interest of telling the truth, getting at something authentic (a word I distrust, but seems right in this context) that he experimented, and it was his experiments that renders him a "forgotten writer," or--for this reader--simply an unknown one.

One of the moments in his book that provides access to the ways in which he enacts memory and forgetting is in the renderings of a song the nasty House Mother (hardly "normal") through the memories of each resident. Sarah Lamson, whose narrative is fairly straightforward (realism as a marker of an intact memory), records the first stanza of the song this way:

The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And brightly welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we'll be,
What matters most is that we're free:
The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long. (11)

"She is in her happy place," a nurse once said of my mother and her colleagues at Arden Courts. The myth of happiness is one held most firmly to by those who are witnesses to their relatives' decline. At Brunel, the elders would often intervene to point out that things were not so good, that old age was not simply an era for dispensing wisdom. That old age hurts.

Two residents later, Ivy Nicholls renders the song this way:

Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And di-dum welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we've done,
What matters most is that we're errrr (55)

By the time we get to George Hedbury, whose words are scattered across the open field page (ironically denoting a shutting in), we read:

No matter if the future's dim
keep right on and suffer hymn (143)

A final resident, the aptly named Rosetta Stanton, whose tablets are least recognizable as language (in the sense of language as a communicative vehicle, in any case), repeats nothing of the song, although her author (who comes out as such near the end of the book) does put sounds like "addurno" in her mouth (13), perhaps to remind us of the problem of the lyric post-Alzheimer's.

The nefarious "House Mother" gets many of the lyrics wrong, herself, proving the emptiness of her own propaganda. She shifts Lamson's "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and see it through" (11) with the ever more cynical and deliberate, "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and screw and screw" (187), which is what she does with her dog while the horrified residents look on, attempt to enunciate their disgust. That the House Mother's narrative is most tidy, most linear, spoken with the most clarity, most "in control," is only one of the ironies Johnson employs. The real truths, we sense, are on the pages that remain entirely blank (as with Rosetta's) or on which a fractured language scatters in islands.

Frank Kermode, in reviewing the biography of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe, can barely bring himself to summarize the argument about House Mother Normal. "Coe argues that this makes the book ‘richly polyphonic’. The House Mother has the final word: she describes herself as ‘the concoction of a writer’ – another sop to Johnson’s conscientious objection to making things up." And so the arch critic demeans an author for trying to "get it right," because getting it right is so damn difficult. Earlier in this same review, Kermode the curmudgeon wrote it thusly: "Johnson was very serious about these innovations, but they kidnap the notion of experiment or estrangement by making it appear that the violation of narrative order in the interests of what he thought of as truth must be blatant. In fact these tricks simply prompt one to ask what the point of this sort of innovation really is. They distract attention from the novel, the true interest of which is independent of them." In the interest of his own version of "truth," Kermode asserts that the novel has a form divorced from forms, that it does not contain "tricks." I'll stop before spilling more bitter beans, but you'll see where I'm going--or, more importantly--where B.S. Johnson went in his forensic investigation of the "home" and its residents.

My only problem with the novel is that Johnson moves so quickly from early or non-Alzheimer's into late-stage Alzheimer's. Missing is the stage where there is a lot of language, but little coherence; this was the stage I discovered here in my mother's home. (It might otherwise be termed the Modernist stage of Alzheimer's, as conceived by Gertrude Stein.) And his presentation of the House Mother's narrative at the end, which confirms all our suspicions about her perversity, offers perhaps too much sense to us, as if to close down the questions and to show us the awful answers, lest we not know. But these are quibbles. What is beautiful about the book is the way it illustrates the absolute necessity of the experimental in the face of Alzheimer's extremities.

Once the conference ended, I went on a two day traipse through London, finding old friends and inventing new ones (that sounded right, so I wrote it). The sun was shining and the English were getting sunburns. On the top deck of the red buses, young Sikhs were wearing traditional turbans, while negotiating cultures with American teeshirts and diamond stud earrings. The voices sounded in myriad tongues; no one spoke in a single language, but words danced in and out of Punjabi, English, African French, English, Hindi, English, Polish, English. Much as I love taking photographs, I would also want recordings of these voices, for that is the London I heard as I looked out if its bus windows.


____________________

Jacket2 is now out, published by the indefatigable Al Filreis with a staff of brilliant editors, including Sarah Dowling. It's all worth reading (and grows over time, rather than according to the usual schedules), but please check out the Pacific Poetries section, which I edited, and the introductory essay, which includes my usual Tinfishian spin (away from identities and toward conversations between them--if that sounds paradoxical, it is).

Eileen Tabios's marvelous project, Poets on Adoption has also launched, here. My offering is here. One of the many virtues of this site is how various are the perspectives offered by adoptees, adopters, and birth-parents.

Memory Cards from my latest series will appear in Eleven Eleven, among other venues. I've almost finished the Lyn Hejinian series, wondering where to go next, and thinking a lot about why nearly all the writers I've riffed off of are white (Albert Saijo being the only exception so far). Something about meditative poetry, the poetry of abstraction, as more possible (or, indeed, interesting) for white poets. To write about later, when the lag is o'er. And without assigning too much identity to their and my identities . . .

The next Tinfish Retro Chapbook is by Adam Aitken, called Tonto's Revenge. Announcement soon, here and elsewhere.