Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, October 16

That’s the title of Jennifer Bartlett’s recently released biography (The University of Alabama Press) of the poet Larry Eigner (1927 - 1997). On this evening Jennifer Bartlett was in conversation with the poet & critic Charles Bernstein at The Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, NY, with projected images of Eigner & of pages from his manuscript. 

Eigner lived most of his life in Swampscott, MA, & later in life in Berkeley, CA. As a result of birth trauma he had cerebral palsy & nearly all of his 3,070 poems were typed on a manual typewriter with his thumb & forefinger. He was meticulous in his spacing of his poems on the page, even to the point of correcting his published poems, even when only 1 space off.

Bartlett said that the seed of this book was reading the poet Charles Olson’s magnum opus The Maximus Poems. Olson lived in Gloucester, MA not far from where Eigner lived, & was an influence on Eigner’s approach to poetry, particularly through his (Olson’s) essay “Projective Verse.” Bartlett said it took her 17 years to write & publish the book, the first book-length biography of Eigner.

Charles Bernstein described Eigner as “a great poet of the everyday” — a reader can often tell the time of the year a poem was written by his details description of the weather; he also proposed he could be a great poet of New England, against the work of Robert Lowell, writing at the same time, whose work is so different. Bernstein said that Eigner did not "thematize" his disability, that there is “no self-dramatization in Eigner.”

The next day at the Albany Public Library weekly Book Talk, sponsored by the Friends & Foundation of the APL, I delivered my review of Sustaining Air, which we had scheduled much earlier in the year before the book was published. & Jennifer Bartlett, on her way to Buffalo, stopped by & helped me field questions from the audience. One might call it an example of “synchronisitry” — or simply good luck. 

Sustaining Air is a very readable & informative biography of Larry Eigner, an important figure in the mid-20th Center poetry scene. I highly recommend it. 

 

Ann Charters at Gloucester Writers Center, August 25

Many of my readers know how much I like Cape Ann, & that I go there throughout the year. I haven’t been there, except for an overnight in April. I was able to book 2 nights at the Good Harbor Beach Inn, then found out that Ann Charters, the 1st biographer of Jack Kerouac, would be giving a lecture for the Gloucester Writers Center on my 2nd night of my stay. The talk was held at the North Shore Arts Association just down the road from the renovated GWC, where Charters was staying as writer-in-residence. 

I was an avid reader & collector of the works of Jack Kerouac from the time I read about him & other writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, in a Look magazine article about 1960, & found a copy of On the Road in the Delmar (NY) Public Library. I remember where I was (in my girlfriend’s dorm) when I heard he had died in 1969. So when Kerouac: A Biography by Ann Charters was published in 1973 I immediately bought a copy, $7.95, hardbound, could not wait for the paperback. I brought my copy with me this night to have it signed by Ann Charters.

Henry Ferrini, Executive Director of the GWC set the stage by reading Allen Ginsberg’s early description of Kerouac’s work, then a passage from Charles Boer’s memoir of the last months of poet Charles Olson, & Olson’s own poem from Maximus III, “I live underneath the light of day…”

Charters said she was testing out a paper she was about to present at an academic conference, the paper titled “Kerouac’s Concept of the Duluoz Legend” & read excerpts. She included a handout which arranges Kerouac’s books by the Duluoz legend (see attached illustration). This is similar to my shelf's chronological arrangement (following Kerouac’s biography) of his books, not by publication date, but where they fit in his life events, i.e., “the Duluoz Legend.” He had hoped to publish his books with the real names of his friends & players & characters in “one long novel.”

This raises a question I have always wondered about, that if Kerouac was writing his books today, with the market being flooded with Memoir, would they be marketed as Memoir, rather than Novels as they were when first published?

Once again I am grateful to the Gloucester Writers Center for having this event, for the lively discussion it opened up, & for the opportunity to meet Ann Charters.

No Borders, No Walls: Exploring Truth, Beauty and the Creative Self, October 17

This is was actually a noon-time reading by poet Frank X. Gaspar but because it was at Hudson Valley Community College, an academic institution, they had to give it a fancy title rather than “poetry reading” — as some poet once said, “a rose by any name…” I had read a few poems by Frank Gaspar over the years in various print & online poetry venues & this reading was a good chance to hear a bigger chunk & to buy an autographed copy of one of his books.

Bonnie Cook of HVCC introduced Frank to an audience of mostly students, but a fair number of older folks (like me, & younger), both faculty & literary & poetic community folks (like me). The poet began by singing the praises of his black pocket notebook, & read “Black Notebook #1, Gideon Bible, Los Angeles,” & “Black Notebook, Day Six, Canadian Rockies” both from his collection Late Rapturous (Autumn House Press, 2012); other poems from the same book that he read were “Sometimes God Saves a Fire” & the book’s title poem, that mixes memories, descriptions of Los Angeles & New York City & the paintings of deKooning. He also read the night-time/whisky musing “One Thousand Blossoms” & even a poem about a cat.

His poems are discursive, meditative, written in full, sometimes complex, grammatical sentences so that they sound like poetic essays filled with vivid images of the world around him. In the book, some of the poems are set like fully-justified prose, others with the lines so long they could be prose that is not right-justified, begging the question of genre, poetry or prose? My vote is “poetry.”

He ended with a long “spoken piece,” as he described it, set during the Viet Nam war, titled “Microphone.” Ironically, during the first part of his reading there had been some annoying feedback from his mic so he was moved to another at a podium just before reading this. The piece took the form of a long letter from a Portuguese kid from Provincetown, Cape Cod now living in New York City, to his girlfriend, written on a typewriter with a period key, leading to Kerouacian stream-of-consciousness mixing memories of his time with the girlfriend, longing & scenes of music in the Village — an energetic way to end a good reading.

The following Q&A began with probing questions by students, & other questions from the broader audience. As is often said, Frank said he has been influenced by everyone he has ever read, but did single out Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman & Edna St. Vincent Millay; he said he writes at night (as evidenced by some of the poems he had read), & to a question about “creativity” & the rest of the world, said he tries to “live in creativity,” which is another world.

Hudson Valley Community College does have a regular program of lectures, performances & art exhibits that are open to the public, visit their website for more information.

Book Talk Series: Therese L. Broderick, July 3

This is a regular series of book reviews & other literary discussions at the Albany Public Library Main Branch, sponsored by the Friends of the Albany Public Library. This day, local poet Therese Broderick, gave a talk about her poetic technique & a reading from her new book of poems Breath Debt (Page Publishing, 2018).

Therese Broderick has been an active member of the local literary scene for many years, serving on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild in the past, & a frequent reader at area open mic & other poetry events. She recently served as judge of the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize contest. It is with joy & anticipation that we greet her book Breath Debt. She began with a talk about her inspirations & her techniques, & began that with advice for new writers to “engage & persist” — engage with the community & persist in writing — as she paid tribute to the community here & to institutions such as the Hudson Valley Writers Guild & Albany Poets. She is also meets regularly with other local poets to go over each other’s work, to provide & receive comments & feedback.

She described how she studied the book of poems Mayweed by Frannie Lindsay, analyzing the poems & even memorizing some of them. In addition, the poet April Ossman has edited Therese’s poems. She demonstrated some Tai Chi moves & talked of “words dancing with numbers,” all to add to the rhythm & sense & play of words in her poems. She even passed around copies of her poetry workbooks that showed the dynamic energy of her notes, or, more accurately, sketches.  Talking about her book, she praised her publisher Page Publishing for giving her the “certitudes” she needed to produce it as she envisioned it.

One of Therese Broderick's notebooks

Then on to a reading of the poems from Breath Debt, some of which I recognized from past open mics, although in different versions, beginning with the first poem in the book, “Reverdie.” The poems she read dealt with the perils of aging, “Consulting the Shovel,” “Bringing Up the Rear,” “With Ease” (about her personal coach), & “Routine Mammogram.” She also read poems about her parents, “OT & PT” & “At Mother’s Cremation” about her mother, & “His Funeral Mass” & “Heeding the Call to the Colors” about her father. She concluded with the multi-voice “Motet Set to War Poetry” in which she was joined in reading by her husband Frank Robinson & myself.

The usual Q&A extended the exploration of her themes & talk of her technique of exploring the etymology of key words in poems even in other languages such as Spanish & German, which led her to read still one more poem, the tender “Errand with Stranger.”  I look forward to reading the rest of the book & to hearing Therese's new work at area poetry open mics.

The Book Talk Series takes place every Tuesday at 12:15 in the auditorium of the Washington Ave. branch of the Albany Public Library, often a review of a book by a member of the Albany community, sometimes an author discussing her or his book. Come a little early for coffee & home baked sweets & conversations.

Bennington Translates: Eliot Weinberger, May 17

I’m a fan of the translations, essays & poetry of Eliot Weinberger so when my comrade-in-poesy & now Bennington, VT resident, Charlie Rossiter, told me that Weinberger would be giving a lecture in the series Bennington Translates at Bennington College we made a date to go. After drinks & a lovely dinner at the home of Charlie & his wife, Mary Ellen Munley, & their guests from Oak Park, Illinois, we drove to the nearby campus, to the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) symposium room.

Mr. Weinberger was introduced by Marguerite Feitlowitz, founding director of Bennington Translates. He had prepared a lecture, but began it with reading a piece about dreams from the Lacandons, native people of Chiapas, Mexico. The lecture was titled “Ancestry” & was an erudite, scholarly meditation taking off from the poet Nathaniel Mackey’s book Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015), which Mackey explains in his preface, “samples two distantly related black musical traditions, the West African griot epic The Dausi … and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic ‘Blue Bossa’ …”

Weinberger led us through the story of “Gassire’s lute” (a myth of the Poet) & the lost city of Wagadu (as first presented to the West by Leo Frobenius), then on to the myth’s appearance in the poetry of early & mid-twentieth century poets, including Ezra Pound’s Cantos, to Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, the poets of the Negritude movement, even to Robert Johnson’s blues & the legend of the crossroads. He described it as “following one small word in many poems…”

This led to a consideration of writing & “crossing borders,” & the use of stories, ideas, sentiments from cultures not our own; he said, “in the arts anything can belong to anyone who thinks & takes the time to learn it.” Weinberger also discussed 2 ends of the poetic spectrum, the autobiographical “I” poets versus the poets concerned solely with the words, finding both lacking. Talking about the old saw, “write what you know,” Weinberger countered that Poetry is Imagination (sounding to my ears much like William Blake).

He ended with a long, chant-like piece “The Stars,” a collaboration from his book An Elemental Thing (New Directions, 2007), followed by a short question & answer period which ran from the erudite to the hyper-theory-ridiculous (to which Weinberger simply said that he didn’t understand the question).

One of my favorite books on the art of poetry & translation is Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which examines 19 different translations of one of Wang Wei’s poems, sometimes translated as “The Deer Park.” It was originally published in 1987. Before coming over here I went to retrieve my copy to get it signed only to realize that I’d given it away (which shows how good I think it is). Happily, when speaking to Mr. Weinberger before the lecture he told me that there is a new edition just out from New Directions, which was for sale at the reading. The new edition includes “more ways” & some, at times hilarious, commentary.  I highly recommend it to any poets, but particularly to those interested in Chinese poetry or translations in general.