Ted Pelton, "Something New"

After he shot John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald shot a policeman, Officer J. D. Tippit.

However, it was actually Tippit, a Dallas policeman, who shot the unarmed Oswald, switched clothes with him in further enactment of his own plan to murder Kennedy, under another identity.

Tippit, in fact, was Richard Nixon, dressed as a Dallas police officer.

So Richard Nixon, impersonating a Dallas police officer, shot an unarmed man named Lee Oswald, switched clothes with him, thereby adopting a second new identity, in further enactment of his plan to shoot John F. Kennedy, whose election fraud in Illinois in 1960 had cost Nixon the Presidency.

Nixon was also angry that Kennedy had stolen away his lover, Marilyn Monroe.

Nixon and Monroe had met in California, while Nixon was a Senator and Monroe an up-and-coming actress.

It was Monroe, evidently, who suggested to Nixon that they name their family dog Checkers.

Checkers, coincidentally, died the same day as Kennedy, and was also murdered, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

Many years later, when asked by Madame Mao during the famous state visit in 1972 if she had ever known sadness, Pat Nixon, evidently confusing details due to jet lag, replied, Yes, when someone shot my poor dog Checkers from a nearby schoolbook depository.

Madame Mao replied, through an interpreter, Yes, it was me who did that – a statement whose meaning has been debated ever since.

The most outlandish interpretation of this statement that has been suggested is that Madame Mao, dressed as Officer J. D. Tippit, shot the unarmed Lee Harvey Oswald, changed clothes with him, in further enactment of her plan to murder John F. Kennedy, and confessed to the killing of Checkers, which happened at the same time some twenty-five hundred miles away, in Washington, DC, to create an alibi.

This interpretation is unlikely, a) because Madame Mao was not known to have left China during this time, and, b) because it would mean Madame Mao and Richard Nixon were, in fact, the same person.

Madame Mao and Richard Nixon could not possibly have been the same person because, a) they were photographed together on many occasions during the 1972 state visit, and, b) because even if Madame Mao were real in these photos and posed next to Officer J. D. Tippit, disguised as Nixon, or if on the other hand it was Nixon who was real and Tippit who was Madame Mao in the photos, one of the two of them would have to have been in Dallas with Tippit in order to take his clothes and then exchange a second time with Oswald after killing John F. Kennedy, and so could not have simultaneously been shooting Checkers in Washington, DC, and posing for a photo in China.

As regards Madame Mao and Richard Nixon, all reasonable commentators are in agreement – there had to have been two of them.

Nina Shope, "The Clinic"

This excerpt from a novel-in-progress includes sections first published in Fourteen Hills, then later in New Standards: The First 10 Years at Fourteen Hills. Nina Shope's Hangings: Three Novellas won the 2005-6 Starcherone Fiction Prize.

The Clinic

you stand at the front of the amphitheatre, chalk in hand, the right side of your face drooping and insolent like a stroke victim. your hand curving inward, clenched, right leg dragging behind your left like a vestigial appendage, a half-amputated limb. you play to the crowds—ape paralysis—distort your face until they almost cease to recognize you, wondering if you have not in fact escaped the wards, if you are actually an inmate imitating the great professor rather than the reverse. charcot, le maître. cold. aloof. with a face like an undertaker. under your black stovepipe hat. your dark coat that always smells of damp wool.
the stage is arranged like a set around you—your entire body dedicated to this performance of paralysis, this act—standing amidst charts, drawings, and plaster casts, image after image projected onto the wall behind you. a picture show, a preview of the live performance. the illusion is only ruptured when you add to the illustrations on the blackboard—standing straight so as to draw more accurately, coloring the muscles along the right side of a chalked skull a bright and glaring red, as though you have peeled back the board to expose flesh or struck hard enough to bruise it—leaving a flaring handprint against your subject’s drawn and sallow cheek. only then do you relax the muscles of your mouth, your arm, your leg. only then do you return to yourself—the doctor with the dour face. the professor in the black coat with the brain in his hand.
I am the example. the living proof. no farcical facial impressions.
when the projector screws loosen in the middle of the lecture, the lens pivots so that the images swing sideways and project upon me, and I am covered by the bones of someone else's body, by a portrait of you with another patient. your image superimposed upon me, as if the subject has become le maître, dressed in black coat with a torn white nightgown underneath. neither one of us looks quite real. the students laughing and scrambling for the screws that have fallen under their seats.

our casual sleight of hand.

augustine, you say, looking out at them, your audience, augustine, and you linger like that over my name, making it hover there above us all, so that even I wonder what it is you will make of it, of me, so completely have you taken over that word, augustine, you say, and we are breathless, all of us, breathless. your audience, waiting, for a single word from you. augustine, you say, is the classic example, and we nod, and we let out a sigh. you have said it all so simply, moved us somehow into the realm of art with that one word. classic. and we are now as those contemplating an exquisite nude—you, the master painter, your hand tracing the anatomical charts, your chin raised, and all of us too, somehow raised by your words, the audience suspended several inches above the stage. and they look at me, and I look at them, and we look at you, breathless.

your fascination until death, la grande hystérie.

in the studio at night, next to the wax figure of the emaciated woman, underneath the skeleton strung to the ceiling, you say, augustine, seize for me, and you place your hands under my uterus and below my breast. applying gentle pressure, you release and wait, and I, arching my back, ecstatic, the feeling of your hands under my hipbone, hips pressing upwards, eyes rolling back, teeth clenched, wait for your hand to find that spot, to press it again, to stop all of this with a touch, as you have told the audience you can, your face flushed. augustine, you say, but you do not touch me again. writhing, rocking, unable to stop, legs twisting around themselves, knees hitting the wall, and the bed hardly beneath me now for more than a moment at a time, as if I am levitating, only my head my toes touching the mattress, you whisper, arc-en-ciel, and the reverence in your voice freezes me there, and I cry out maître, and mother, and wait for you to stop this. your notebook out. writing. everything in focus for a moment.

and I am your masterpiece.

note the arched back, you say to your listeners, the infamous arc-en-ciel. you will notice that this patient’s form is nearly perfect: first, we are presented with an epileptoid phase with two parts, tonic and clonic, followed by exotic movements, and then a phase of high emotional pitch. all of this succeeded by these elaborately contorted postures.

the attitudes passionelles. the poses plastiques. like some elegant stilled ballet.

in the mornings, you rehearse your lecture before me. repeating it so often that I can mouth it back to you –like a prompter in the wings, never remembered, never needed—this speech of yours so flawlessly fixed in your memory. each hysteric has her own specific hysterogenic points, you say once more, touching my back, each breast—above, below and upon the nipple, the back of my knee, my thigh. and doctor, how do you expect me to stop from falling, your dexterous thumb throwing me again and again to the floor. the base of my neck, the space behind my ear, my abdomen, there, you say, and there, and I on the floor, hoping it will not stop.

fridays are your grand events, les leçons, the only time that you address an audience other than your peers and students. hours of memorization in which the drawings you will make are traced, erased, and traced again—until you know that every gesture will be accurate, precise. the projector carefully focused. and you in the center of the stage—dark coat, pocket watch, every detail so conscientiously, so conservatively chosen. the amphitheatre empty until you order the doors to be opened. and the interns whisper, there are authors and journalists in the audience, actresses, the women in furs have performed before royalty. and star struck, we step out onto the stage to become the soul and center of it all.

Doug Manson Interview: On Having Fallen In

This week something a little different: I had a chance to publish this interview conducted between two friends of mine who are also terrific writers and people I've met in the great Poetry City of Buffalo, NY, where Starcherone Books is located as well. In fact, the interviewee here, Doug Manson, recently signed on as our new Development Director. He is also the publisher of Celery Flute, a Kenneth Patchen newsletter, and of Little Scratch Pad Books, a micro-press publisher of poetry, and he's the author of several chapbooks as well as of Roofing and Siding (BlazeVox Books). He is interviewed below by Jonathan Skinner, publisher of the wonderful litmag, Ecopoetics.

Jonathan Skinner: So how did you fall into poetry in the first place?

Douglas Manson: This assumes a kind of direction—a relatively useful place to start—the notion of a "fall", rather than a start to a writing practice, or the beginning of a dialog with poetry, which is what it was. My mother used to read to me each night when I was a small child, a “Shakespearefor kids" book, European myth stories, and the Bible. I started writing when I was eight or so: adventure stories, science fiction epics and scripts for my dolls to act out (called "action figures" so boys could play with them). When I was nine or ten, I began writing songs like Roger Waters, after buying Pink Floyd's The Wall. I used to spend my after school hours playing records and lying on the floor with my head between these two plastic clamshell speakers from Sears. I wrote obnoxious and pornographic stories in seventh grade study hall and handed them around to my friends. Then, when I was thirteen, I re-wrote Poe's "Annabel Lee" as "Tony the Tree," which was a real ecological manifesto. I was asked to read it for the entire class. Until high school I was rarely asked to read poetry, or saw very much of it. It was never really a presence in our house. Music seemed much more important to me, and I studied Bob Dylan's lyrics more intensely than Walt Whitman's poems. I started learning guitar when I was twelve. Dylan and Whitman: these seemed to be the two poets of my adolescence who stand out. I started reading and writing much more when I turned fourteen, and I also began smoking a lot of pot.

Just after a really difficult time in my senior year of high school, I became very close to another poet named Jennifer. After an illness that put me in the hospital for three weeks, she took me out to a quarry to go swimming one day and we sat there and talked until I could make sense of what had happened to me—and it was a magical experience. Poet helping poet—profoundly uncomfortable experiences worked through together, made sense of in a way that was real to the way my consciousness had been affected. She taught me what a "paradigm" and a "paradigm shift" were, and so there was a shift in my own realization of what I had gone through. She made a collage out of that conversation I still own. So, I have been writing poetry and song lyrics since I was ten. I don't like to think of them as separate in any great degree. I never fell into poetry, its always been one of those components in my life that has lifted me up, no matter what.

Jonathan: Can you say a bit about what Ohio, or the midwest/ Great Lakes region more generally, has contributed to your formation as a poet?

Douglas: I grew up in a relatively stereotypical whitebre(a)d suburb. Ohio. Flat, with humid summers and cold grey winters. Strict parenting with high expectations, of education and (mechanical/civil/railway) engineering stock, milling and farming ancestors. I often felt myself drawn to Polish moods and Central European authors as a young man. But these facts say as little as they do taxonomize--and seem more mythic to me than real. After living in Buffalo for ten years, all the similarities of experience from Ohio to New York seem simulacral, and being "from" a place only seems to reinforce my need to recognize a distance: cognitively, philosophically, emotionally. Geographically there is something to be found there--forest, river and lake--though "suburban" really trumps all these considerations--cars, TVs, church and school. Garrison Keillor's recent visit to my hometown (aired 6/21/08) featured an author from the same place, and I'm assuming he's near my age, but the prose was so "flat" I wasn't invested in remembering his name [his name is Ian Frazier]--his memoirs reminded me of my childhood, but in a very simplistic way. I felt no nostalgia hearing his words, just a kind of claustrophobia, really. I was one of the "kids in the woods" he describes. And then there's the infamous Cuyahoga River. As a family, we spent a lot of our free time walking in the second- and third-growth trees, or drifting in a sailboat on a wakeless, man-made lake. A lot of stillness, come to think of it. Being without a car for the majority of the last four years has returned me to that kind of stillness. I've obsessed for some time with relative speed differentials and consciousness, the way automobiles have (had?) such a determining quality on our experience.

Hindsight shows this as a very privileged upbringing, especially since I consider myself a poet fully invested in the term. This means economic sacrifice and openness far beyond what my childhood ever encouraged me to expect. In the Midwest there isn't an oceanic/desert existential line of vastness on the horizon. The land seems a bit more generous, nurturing, but also consuming. It’s an intimate space--embowered. Character ranks pretty highly, too. Since I wasn't interested in staying within the neatly drawn lines mapped out for me as a child, I acquired a fair degree of shame for my endless questioning of limits and rules, for my experiments with living. But the truth is I don't like to define my work in regional/geographic terms, though my work may announce this more than I'm aware of.

So, given this, people from quite different circumstances may find my poetry saturated with a Midwestern mind--and I do write about my place a great deal. I like to write as much about the rich human universe here in the city of Buffalo as I do its geographic specificity. This region and my specific background may account for the inward, reflecting, syncretic attempts at meaning in my poems, or show up in the broader activity of writing, editing and mentoring. When you are fully engaged with basic human questions like love, living, dying, time and speed, its a little harder to account directly for place. If I am nothing more than an elaborate infolding of my environment, then all ideas I work with will show it. It is an idea worth pursuing consciously and descriptively, as well. But as you've noted before, I am obsessed with language, with the "conversational implicature of our words". The language I most know (or only know?) is the one spoken in the Midwest, however much it is used as a model in the larger, national society. Likewise, there are a lot of economic, social and technological pressures that ask us to forget about our place and how well our neighbors are doing--just as we know the Eisenhower/Robert Moses epoch effectively divorced Buffalonians from their waterfront with the building of a highway system and suburban rings. It is encouraging to know that the much-needed reconnection of communities and the reconstruction of waterfront access is just now getting underway.

One joy of living in Buffalo, among others, is the quality of the light. Light. period. I agree with Penelope Creeley, the light here is pure magic. It always teaches, it opens the senses. It doesn't mean I bathe in it all day, but its beauty forces me to step outside my own writing obsessions just as emphatically as do the basic pressures and invitations of living in the culture, being open, approachable, and responsible to others. I write my poetry in a room that catches the morning light, my "room of light"; my emails and business writing take place in back, in the windy "night room". I am blessed with ample space to work in.

To sum up these diverse thoughts: the question of “region” is one that I examine in my essay "What is a Regional Poet?" (In Celery Flute issue 3), which does include some of my own personal views on the issue. To compare my work with Charles Olson's enormous and articulate concern for geography, and for the many who follow his example, I have to say that I do not consider my poetry "regional". I am not trying to work on the same issues in my poetry. Because I live on a major ornithology fly-way, I hear a complex, varied & continental music when the birds return or the weather permits. On the street I hear hip-hop, country, rock and Latin music, too. I play my Beethoven records very quietly at 3 a.m.

Jonathan: Are there particular mentors, communities of writing, publications, major figures you might identify with the "Great Lakes" region, who have been vital to your development as a poet?

Douglas: The mentors in Kent I learned the most from were Maj Ragain, Alice Cone, Ted Lyons, and Tom Hines, but many other writers were influential, including Maggie Anderson and Zee Edgell. In Buffalo, I learned from Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Michael Basinski and William Sylvester; though the younger poetics scholars were often my more direct mentors (see below). In Kent, my community was made up of the open-mike readers I met from 1996-98. There was no "formation" label other than place, Brady's Café. My friends were Jayce Renner, Kathy Korcheck, David Snodgrass, Jim Burris, R.J. Wilson, Steve Skovensky, Katie Daley, Ben Pershey among many others. And this led to friendships with Cleveland poets like Ben Gulyas, Adam Brodsky, Christopher Franke, Jim Lang and Daniel Thompson.
At UB in Buffalo, I was lucky to spend time and work with a lot of amazing poets--Loren Goodman, Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, Kristen Gallagher, Alicia Cohen, Tim Shaner, Chris Alexander, Rosa Alcala, Michael Kelleher--the list goes on and on, especially factoring in the 10-15 poets visiting every semester to give talks and readings. The head spins to think of it now.

In the past 3-5 years, I've witnessed the dispersion of this temporary community, and made good friends with poets, artists, writers in Buffalo like Aaron Lowinger, Kristi Meal, Damian Weber, Celia White, Ted Pelton, Ethan Paquin.
The major "Great Lakes" precedents for me are Kenneth Patchen, d.a. levy and bpNichol, and with a little shake'n'stir-up of my "regional" reading in the 1990s: the midwest deep imagist James Wright. The question of publications that are important to me pretty much mirrors the sense of my University at Buffalo communities—there are many temporary coalescences of energies—though Jim Lang's "Split/W*sky" bag-o-zine has been holding steady for the past decade or so. Frank Davey's "Open Letter", certainly. The House Press magazines, though often temporary, have showcased amazing work--Drill, or String of Small Machines. As a starting point, then, in terms of my own publishing, I have to credit Cheryl Townsend's Impetus press for being my first publisher, which was a longstanding magazine in the 80s and 90s, and the soul-child of d.a.levy's renegade and 7 Flowers presses. I’m also interested in whatever Basinski is up to at the moment, and the Slack Buddha series from William and Lisa Howe. After saying all this, to indicate the influence these have had on my development on a personal level would take another day or two to give adequate acknowledgment—if I could do it at all.

Jonathan: I zoomed to Great Lakes contexts in my first two questions, given, yes, your interest in and extensive writing on d.a. levy, bpNichol and Kenneth Patchen. Not that you've focused on and conceived of this as a "regional" project, but I'm wondering if you see yourself carrying forward a certain tradition of "midwest poetics." (Are you a Lake Poet!? And if so, who is your Edinburgh Review?) Whether in the positive sense, as identifying with the geography and its holdouts (including, yeah, James Wright), or negatively in terms of a resistance to the bicoastal polarities that have so dominated the narrative of New American Poetics. Or in terms of something that unites these three important figures . . . ?

Douglas: Well, it’s a seemingly odd formation—Patchen, levy and Nichol—but they really are closely connected, aesthetically. And with the major league poetry teams so sharply divided into the Americans and the Nationals, they may forever be thought of as the Batavian Muckdogs of Modernism. I see my own writing project as less one of carrying any tradition forward, but rather paying it forward, in the time-honored practice of a generalized reciprocity. I hope all my creditors, spiritual or otherwise, can recognize my commitment to this. The amazing scholar Gordon Brotherston had me shaking in my seat one day when he described how the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures initiate novices into the scholars' caste. I felt it such an apt analogy for my own experiences as a graduate student, however buffeted I was by the corporate comforts of the campus lifestyle. It involves the ritual bleeding of the novitiate’s ears for something like four straight days without food. I’m not exaggerating too much to say that it felt like I went through this once every 6 months for 10 years, though after each bleeding we’d all go get starbucks and play kickball with the media studies grads! The problem today is that, after all this, our unspoken model for new scholars is: any non-trust-funded humanities graduate in the 21st century must either slavishly obey dogma for their kibble, or go preach to birds! Or “move to Brooklyn.”

But, okay, Jonathan, I'll try to tease this out: Patchen registered the shock of Fordist capitalism in a poetry of spiritual disjunction. I'm not certain he resolved the contradictions he witnessed the 1930s, because his Furies are still tormenting the landscape—no deal was made with them. He got stuck in the non-cathartic tragedy that is the twentieth-century, and got his back smashed in the heroic rescue of a Hollywood starlet. Riding as we are on Minerva's wings, we should see him as the perfect example of postmodernism before Warhol. You know, Pittsburgh and Youngstown are both on the Baltimore & Ohio railway. For his part, d.a. levy discovered that the midwest wanted nothing to do with modernism, or with any of the deep level remedies to the military-industrial complex proposed by the antiwar generation. So he disappeared into the vortex of his solar plexus. He was the Buddhist precursor to Devo and Pere Ubu. Devo-founder Mark Mothersbaugh was a part of the poetry scene in Kent/Cleveland in the mid-70s, before he realized that music and film were a lot easier to make money from. And both you and I have met Charlotte Pressler, Peter Laughner's widow, who donated a huge underground literature collection to UB. Nichol was able to transcend a lot of this heavy historical baggage, perhaps because he was Canadian. Though it’s more likely that, as he stated, he had to replay the phylogeny of modernism in the ontogeny of his work. Most serious poets in Cleveland understand what levy was doing, though one of the Flarf Popes has recently told me he's still shit. So he still gets under the skin of some of the heavy hitters in the National league, which is, to my mind, a productive relationship—as useful to defining a "midwest" poetics as anything else. The history of this kind of poetry and ethics is like the history of salt—you know? How American expansion was in many ways held back for a century or more by the need for salt, and that most settlements beyond Appalachia depended first on finding salt deposits. So, when the Americans and the Nationals come roaming around the provinces for kicks, they might discover these salt mines. Otherwise, they get chicken wings, or as in your fillip, "holdouts".

What connects these three poets is their maintenance throughout their careers of a serious concern for poetry that materializes across artistic practices. They demonstrated an ethics just as much as a poetics—so that, when you read a visual poem, the effect is poetic: its called kenosis, kind of like a good samadhi kick in the ass. A visual poem is not an example of visual art or design, though laborers in these fields do a good amount of poaching from each other. All the rest of the talk about the subject is rhetorical foreplay. But my idea of it, in this offhand definition, might just be a masculine way of seeing things (because it’s only concerned with the blank). So, if I fetishize the “spasm” of the poem, I also know that the trick is to maintain this state for longer and longer periods of time. Great poets know how to do this. It’s like tantra. And it is a lifelong study.
But Ginsberg was right, d.a. levy got too caught up in the fight, and he let anger take over. Patchen, perhaps because of his disability, knew how to keep the teakettle at just the right temperature. Myself, I'm fully, thoroughly, invested in sustainable and renewable resources. The best example I can give for this poetics is the experience I had when I realized, while studying bpNichol's archive in Vancouver, that he had fucked with his own archiving system for his work, and got me to scramble around for an hour looking for "missing" poems that didn't exist—AHA!

Put the reader into the context, put the context into the poem. Be a good whore, love your clients.

You playfully compare me to the Lake Poets, and ask me what “My Edinburgh Review" is. It sounds like a good title for an self-mythologizing literary study. “Call Me Endymion”. Pretty much any of the beautifully allusive non-recognizing recognitions that spurt out of the bloggosphere these days make up the dismissals I come across. I can't say I taken two across the bow lately. It feels more like the "death by a thousand cuts" process (see Aztec reference above). There must be a decent book out there on the case of Lyrical Ballads v. Edinburgh Review. The most I know about the Edinburgh Review comes from John Brewer's book The Pleasures of the Imagination. As I was trying to tell Dale Smith in his blog—I'm just the guy making the sammiches in the kitchen. They want lunch, I give them lunch. Its very, very difficult for me to get invested in ideas of "formations" and canon-this and canon-that, because it’s such a drain of useful energy. Nor am I very interested in pulling oars on a polytechnic research and development trireme. Midwest poetics: get up in the morning, eat your eggs and drink your coffee, and get to fucking work. Everything else is love-love-love (play La Marseillaise here).

Jonathan: We met in the context of the SUNY at Buffalo Poetics Program. Did that program change you in any fundamental way as a poet?

Douglas: Undoubtably. Oddly enough, I had to carry whatever scholarly ability I had with me to Buffalo, because the point of the program wasn't to refine scholars, it was to keep up the pace. And I wasn't ready for the social stratification. We likes it flat in the midwest!! *yawn* "Buildins goin' up to the sky/ people goin' down to the ground" as some crazy folksinger put it. But, honestly, it was an amazing, intense experience. They brought in just about every important writer you can name. And you don't just learn poetics, you learn parlimentary culture. So there was a year or two of feeling, as Linda Russo once said, "crushed by knowledge." And then I became comfortable to mostly watch the goings-on, as I learned my "place". Lots of maps and retorts, diagrams and genetic sequencing lists. Aaron Kunin has a beautiful book in the works called The Mandarin (excerpted in Fence 11:1) which dramatises perfectly how this kind of artistic incubation works. It was collaborative, anarchic, exhilirating, and enormously disillusioning—all useful experiences in the end.

Jonathan: We came in the wake (backwash?) of a vanguard that had hit Buffalo (from the late 'sixties through the early 'nineties, say) but were ultimately interested in making waves of our own. Where do you see the edge, for language arts in these early (yet accelerating) years of the 21st-century?

Douglas: I hate to shift this question away from a survey of the state of the art, but I honestly feel my view is far too limited to pick out any particular names or obligations for the moment. It seems to depend on what any particular writer, or group of writers, feel they have to do, and how well they stay committed to that activity. I am drawn towards poets and writers who understand that they have the incredibly difficult task to work and gain the continuance of their efforts. Careful consideration of the history of literature shows us that much of the discourse around the work is a kind of shuffling of terms, a chess-game, and an attempt at self-invention. Nick Piombino spoke into the virtual air recently—"I don't give a flying fuck how my personhood is doing!" (on the Poetics list, I think). That's the case for the best work going on—and it may seem selfish, and it may seem indifferent, but when you know that what you can provide in the work depends on a way nobody else may understand, or even dislike, you gain a better and better grasp on its meaning, better and better company, and better and better work. Great works are written by Martians, waitresses, martini-drinkers, dishwashers, subway cellists, and ski bums in their chalets out in Aspen. What should accelerate right now is a diversity of means for the work of art that doesn't wreck the ecology. Any work that pursues its question honestly is one that isn't getting caught up in the schizophrenia of trying to be what it already is. And we all benefit from that. But more often than not, we don't know what it is sufficiently to give it a name—so any names provided for this "edge" are already retrospective. But the comfort of working in retrospection and on familiar tropes may also provide for a career and two-car garage. Right now there is an enormous set of means for writers to discover what has been written, and to narrow that enormous potential into a single list of twenty book that will point the way through is ludicrous—I mean, we're no longer interested in just "buy[ting] a goddam big car and driv[ing]" anymore, are we? The landscape may have been vast, but we know now that it really isn't, because everything is connected. And we have to take care to understand when the frame of our potential literature shifts dimensions/shifts planes of reference. It’s important to recognize when some soils are exhausted, and it seems to me, the best writers know how to get continual harvest, even if only on a subsistence level.

Jonathan: You are the founder, editor and publisher of a unique, ambitious and thoughtfully composed 'zine, Celery Flute: the Kenneth Patchen Newsletter. I am interested in how you manage to serve Patchen's (underappreciated) legacy, while directing many of the contents of the newsletter to the present moment. How do you see Kenneth Patchen functioning as a vortex (or insert metaphor of your choice) for present concerns in poetics?

Douglas: I'm not much into the rehabilitation game for great figures—but I am working on an essay about Melville and Patchen right now. As much as I expend a lot of energy trying to figure him out, Patchen remains an anomaly to me. And there still seems to be no explanation for how or where he would fit into American literature, or Modernism more generally. I suppose resolving this question and making an elegant case for him would have gotten me a nice book contract. But the question is still with me, and though it no longer feels as personally determining as it once did—I get an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure in working on the questions he poses, one of which, to unfairly minimize (and hopefully not to cheapen it) seems to be: "Damn, you human beings are so nasty, but why do I love you so much?"

Jonathan: In "The Guts & Mechanisms" (Roofing and Siding) you quote a mentor we shared at SUNY Buffalo:

"Words are amphibious, says Bunn,
combining a materially transmitted signifier
supplanted by a superstructural signified."

Elsewhere (in At Any Point), you state that "it is irresponsible to make the world seem less complex than it really is."

I'm drawn to how you hold onto both ends of the amphibian. Your poems often address lyric situations they refuse to clarify. And they mobilize language without resorting to chess moves.

Some readers, I fear, have not the depth to hear your hearing. While others may not care to touch "the little green blackbird hiding in pleine sight." (The context you put your reader in.) Who, then, do you feel you are writing for?

Douglas: James H. Bunn's book Wave Forms is blindingly complex on its own terms, but thanks for bringing that into view. His thesis is that wave-forms in language form a material consistency (a constant) that can be followed from the cognitive and the sonic into the basic rhythms of nature. This proposes an empirically verifiable connection that may get us past the sceptical philosopher's "problem of other minds". A radio signal carries the "superstructural" information of language, and we transpose, or translate, the basic wave (electromagnetic) to the sonic (human speech as sound), into our particular language (English, perhaps) and then into the particular message ("Sonic Youth is playing tonight at the Hollywood Bowl"). The resonance doesn't end, and we can find a meaning at every level. But in our experience this doesn't happen sequentially—what we hear is the message, instantaneously—that part we can use. Love, language, and message pass through the most complex entity in the universe—us. But they also pass through a very complex world and its ten thousand things. Love, language, and the message bring traces of all the other waystations they visited along the way. The poet has to learn all the ways, all the transformations that take place to get from HERE (the lover) to THERE (the beloved): "Come here, tired one, and let me love you, soothe you, and make you whole again." OR: "Lover, I am tired and in pain, please touch me and heal me." I guess that clarifies what the message is—but you can find clarity at any level you would like: "here's what I know about how to love" or "here's how I didn't know, I'm sorry. I'll remember."

The "little green blackbird" image I use in "Sines-poem" is from a seven-part sequence in Kenneth Patchen's book Because It Is—which is included in the new compendium We Meet, coming out this week from New Directions!

Who do I write for? I sometimes write for specific people, I write for communities, my society. I write for my lover, and I write for the one who doesn't, or can’t love. I write when I'm out of my own depths and I don't even know what it is I'm writing or who I'm writing for—etc., etc. I've written for you, Jonathan. My parents. For anybody at any point. But I have recently changed, or have maintained a particular direction in my work, in the poem To Becoming Normal. I constantly "revise for clarity" in the same way I ask my composition students to. Being ambiguous or amphibious can be seen as generous if you realize you are not trying to direct or determine what the reader will experience. But sometimes you want to be direct. I often write to someone. To YOU. Everybody wants a big mac, right? A flavor-blast. If you streamline the process and give the reader the product the same way every time, and they don't have to worry about it, they will go there to find what they were looking for. But maybe some readers will find something in my work. I can’t stop to worry about this too much. And then again, there are some people you don't want touching you. Take it or leave it. Isn't that the baseline function of our capacity for judgment? These pills don't work!! or That shit was superfly.

You mention the lyric situations that my poems refuse to clarify. There is some reticence in the poetic "lover's voice" in my poems, yes—uncertaintly about that use of language, and uncertainty about who, specifically, is looking back at me. Language is the same way. But since I trust myself and other people more and more these days, I invite this "other" insofar as I trust myself, and am able to anticipate, to look forward to, what I can't predict. I've made a lifelong commitment to love, and to express that love in what I write. Consciousness is divine suffering, and consciousness is bliss. Some people may find presumption, patronizing attitudes, or a bit too much self-satisfied pride in my work. Yes, I have heard this from others. And I'm sorry. I really am. Pay it forward.

Jonathan: Sound. I love the extravagance of your word-choice, as much when heavy-handed as when deft. Like the actual bolt screwed through the chapbook version of Love Sounds (Like Perfidy).

Indeed, sound is perfidy in this counter-reformation. (I typed the parentheses wrong in that title, but I like it better now.)

Or sound nowadays is used only modestly, or severely, or systematically, or unrestrictedly, or ironically, or between parentheses. But what about sweet nuzzling sounds. Unleashed sounds. Thrushes that make the woods ring. When we use them we lose our hall pass. Yet anyone will listen in, peeping Dimmesdales.

In "That One Thing (on sublimation)," you rap on the feminine endings—expectation, transformation, realization, compunction, duration, anticipation, location—bringing back certain words like a sestina teaser. Or like a quenine. You flirt with oulipian sounds (for instance), but won't grid your poems. (Or did you write one for Stalling's Grid?)

You bring into poetry the non-meaning sounds of your life in music. At the same time, and interestingly enough, your critical rap focuses on visual poetry.

Douglas: Putting a bolt through a book was a heavy-handed thing to do. It left a hole in the center of the text. It split the book into "above" and "below". It seemed at that time that what I had loved betrayed me, and the poem got included in that feeling. I was also feeling that the conversational implicature of the words "I love you" could be heard as a kind of command to do something very harmful to oneself. Of course, one may come home unexpectedly and overhear their beloved having sex with someone else. Or, in turn, you open the door and find a Dimmesdale in the hallway. Its really sad. Yes, I lost my hallpass, but they didn’t tell me until three years later.

I do have a poem in Jonathan Stalling's grid book. I used the idea of the "shell game" for that one: I / You / We –under which shell do we come together?

Jonathan: Where does your emphasis on sound come from, then, and where do you think it is headed?

Douglas: Well, my emphasis on sound isn't from anything I can specifically name. I guess I'm vedic in that way—sound is both source and destination. As for my writing on visual poetry: Visual works vibrate. Great visual works vibrate greatly. Same thing—wave forms.

Jonathan: I won't ask you about America, or the sinking carbon economy, since we know your answers (though I can't wait to read the Melville essay), but do you think now that the future has gone South (God help them), or in the North we can look forward to the benefits of a future in reverse? Will you watch the olympic games?

Douglas: Well, I do love the South! Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas—I've met more generous and genuine people in these states than I can tell you about here. And these are beautiful, beautiful geographies. Read William Bartram's Travels. I guess any "regional" predictions about the future would have more to do with making good rather than bad economic, emotional and environmental choices, and with giving up on the terrible idea that we can't stop doing something wrong once we've started doing it. Any rhetoric of "us vs. them" is exploitative—is used to push buttons and collect $200—it is offensive to the conscience, and offensive to what we really know about ourselves as human beings. Our culture, if American, is a fluid one, it changes. I can't define that identity in any other way. If there is a hope for a "static" American culture, well, then, hand over the embalming fluid, and we will mourn. I like to recite Mr. Rogers’ poem about "what do you do with the mad in you" which he read at a Senate appropriations hearing for PBS back in 1968. If my poetic project is the consistent examination of the components of identity, one of the first to be deconstructed are the false binaries. Hey, I played my first games for the American league! Jonathan, don't paint in such broad swathes: I plan on writing a series of Pindaric odes to the olympians.

But I really have no idea what you mean by a "future in reverse.” And a "carbon economy” is just a buzzword, isn't it? Aren't we made of carbon? Isn't this our house??

Joshua Cohen, "Aim"

Continuing our in-house journal, here's a new short fiction by Joshua Cohen, author of A Heaven of Others.

Aim

He was six or seven and this was fun, it was fun being in the woods, doing everything in the woods with dads and his dad and the other boys their sons, hunting or pretending to hunt or fish, making fire with three matches (collecting tinder, branches), pitching tents and breaking it all down again, the campfire stories, the gear.
When you had to piss you'd go deep into the woods away from camp, always bring another boy with you; it was good and not shaming if the other boy had to piss, too, or only said he did.
Then, if he had to piss, you'd stand about five six feet apart and face each other and, careful not to piss on each other (though that sometimes happened), piss at each other, trying as hard as you could not to cross the streams but to merge them into one stream where they would deflect each other down to the ground. But this skill could only be sustained for a moment or two, at a uniformity of flow.

Later (years) aim was tested from the train platform, the El. Waiting was boring so you'd talk sex while smoking cigarettes with other friends from college. When the tobacco taste hurt your mouth and the cigarette was almost done you'd spit over the railing to the street (careful not to hit a passerby), then drop your lit cigarette butt trying to land it and so snuff it directly in the spit puddle (again, careful not to hit a passerby). You tried for three years including summers, you dropped out; you only hit it once.

For your grandfather it had been taking the gun they'd given them, loading it with bullet then shooting that into a German, and with your father it was similar in Asia: you pulled the trigger and suddenly, motion stopped, behind that shed door outside Aachen or a stand of bamboo … Sometimes you saw your victim, before or after you killed him, other times not. Still, there was no doubt he was there: He, in turn, could kill you. He took aim and you, too, were a target.
Not him. He sat at a desk embedded with a screen. When a light blipped on the screen he pressed a button, a bullet was launched remotely, then the light disappeared, eventually, ten nine eight, the light was destroyed. There was no danger to this work. There was no aim, and his finger could not miss that little white circle that was the same size and shape and color as his mother's nipple. What was necessary was only that he "Pay Attention." Every three hours he was relieved from duty to eat dinner, or take a piss — which he did, pissing, alone and with his eyes closed the entire time.

Harold Jaffe, from "Paris 60: Docufictions"

This month begins a new direction for this blog, as we are going to start featuring recent works by our 13 Starcherone authors, with new works appearing every week or so, creating a type of journal from our list. American fiction is moribund and predictable; its most well-heeled promoters are intentionally looking to print works in already tested formulae, and as a result fiction is the most conservative of all contemporary art forms. This is a small attempt to give voice to an alternative, to renew the art form. Starcherone Books tries to publish and promote the types of non-mainstream authors ignored by big publishing.

The following are from an unpublished manuscript by veteran fiction writer Jaffe, called Paris 60. Its 60 pieces were each composed in Paris, as dated semi-documentary, semi-fictive journal entries.

4.3 Dracula
I saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula walking in the Tuileries gardens.
It was daytime, the sun was out, he looked splenetic, distinctly out of sorts.
His head (with the widow’s peak, Asian eyes) was bent.
He was wearing black.
(Of course French males wear black as a rule.
Whether for reasons of style, tacit devotion, grieving, or indirect satire, has never been established).
Lugosi as Dracula was wearing black for his own immemorial reasons.
Looking hard, I thought I made out a sharpened canine.
At that moment I heard a bird sound—a raven on a dead chestnut tree clacking like a woodpecker.
It was warm, the raven could have been in courting mode.
Bela Lugosi died in 1956, and here we are eight years into the Millennium with a small hyper-ambitious man named Sarko at the helm.
Lugosi didn’t die, his morphine habit and quality time as Dracula on those Hollywood sets sucked up death and vomited it back out as life eternal.
These off-center formulations unreeled rapidly in my chest.
When I came to my senses (if that’s what they are), I thought of following him.
But he was gone, disappeared into nuclear springtime.
Then I remembered the dream I had in my small bed in my small Paris flat.
Alongside someone else, unidentified, I was looking across a broad verdant landscape when suddenly it began to sink behind the horizon until it disappeared.
I turned to the person by my side and said: “It’s over at last.”


4.6 Solitude
Baudelaire in Paris Spleen goes on about the virtues of solitude.
This was before the advent of the Internet.
After despising Parisians with whom you’re compelled to interact daily, returning to your flat at dusk and securing the locks on the door would seem reassuring.
The cask of laudanum, half-open bottle of absinthe, and hashish laced with opium are arguably more productive than surfing the Net or watching a DVD.
I’ve been isolated in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Quito, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Paris.
Paris is the most evocative city in which to be alone.
It is only the French who admit, or do not deny, the fou and folle.
The mad and palpably deviant.
Not the functionally mad: bankers, corporate chieftains, uniformed child-murderers.
Those are welcome everywhere in the First World.
I mean the dysfunctional who smell bad, can’t decipher the métro do nothing “right” but dream and rant.
True, Sade was imprisoned and Artaud institutionalized, but there were mitigating circumstances.
Parisians cross the boulevard at the red.
Drive their cars and motorcycles on the sidewalks.
Litter the Bois de Bologne with condoms.
Love their dogs but don’t pick up the dog shit.
They welcome, at least in principle, the transgressive tradition in art and letters.
After a bad day with bad people, cross-dressing or undressing,
Getting high on anything,
Then going out in the Paris dark to a film festival or gallery opening and sexually groping the human or sub-human to your left,
Stabbing him in the thigh with the poisoned tip of your umbrella,
It’s a rush, cathartic, very satisfying.
And Paris is the only major city I know that grants you your donnée, won’t even turn around to glare.


4.8 Nose
Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Aznavour, Bonaparte, Sade, Le Grand Charles, Sarko himself . . .
The prominent nose accords with the broad forehead of Descartes.
With the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, flying buttresses, gargoyles.
The intricate streets and rooftops of Paris.
Redondo Beach, California, is a Pacific Ocean beach city in Los Angeles County.
Silicon-rather than carbon-based, one might say.
Profile-less as the computer.
Females are blonde and tall with flat, pretty faces.
Males are blond and rangy with flat, handsome faces.
The male voice is low, without timbre.
Like the radiant Pacific when the tide is out.
It came to pass that a well known philosophe from Paris was on
his way to deliver a lecture in the Flemish city of Antwerp.
Sitting next to him in the first-class cabin of the Air France-slash-Delta Airlines aircraft was a champion surfer from Redondo Beach.
He was on his way to a high-level competition near the Flemish city of
Knokke-Heist, on the North Sea, where for obscure reasons, the surf was breaking abnormally high.
Each of the principals was according to type: the philosophe, 49-years-old,
medium height, sallow with an imposingly broad forehead and De Gaulle-like proboscis.
The surfer, 23-years-old, tall, rangy, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, with blond hair, a flattish face, very white teeth, and a small upturned nose.
It might have happened after the complimentary champagne (two small bottles each) that the unlikely pair got into a conversation in English (the philosophe was fluent), and decided to exchange identities.
The six-foot-four-inch surfer with the blond hair and flat face would deliver the lecture (on Gilles Deleuze) at the University of Antwerp, respond to questions from the distinguished audience, be honored at dinner, then return to his senior post at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
While the sallow-faced philosophe with the Cartesian nose, who could not swim, let alone surf, would compete in the surfing competition near Knokke-Heist, from there fly to Hawaii for another surfing competition, then return to Redondo Beach, California and smoke a joint.
This exchange was validated with a handshake, the surfer’s long, tanned hand tenderly enclosing the philosophe’s delicate fingers.
Was the extraordinary transfer of identities implemented?
The aircraft crashed while trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the short Antwerp International Airport runway.
No survivors.

4.9 Cannonball
Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, jazz alto saxophonist and composer, especially known for his bebop arrangements, was living in Paris between 1959 and ’63.
He changed apartments three or four times, first living in the 14th close to Saint Anne Hospital; next in the Marais, then in the Belleville quarter.
While in Belleville he was visited by his younger brother Nat, a virtuosic jazz cornetist.
Cannonball opened the door, he and his brother embraced, Nat said:
--Man, this is a small pad.
Cannonball laughed:
--Yeah, it’s a small pad. But it’s a small pad in Paris.
They both laughed.
Over a drink, Cannonball said:
--Notice the Parisian women?
--Damn right, Nat said. Real lookers. Elegant.
--You got it, Cannonball said.
Nat sipped his gin.
--Are all the bathrooms as small and dark as this one?
--Most of ‘em, yeah, Cannonball said. Some have bathtubs but no showers. Others--it’s the other way around.
--How can a French chick look so fresh in a bathroom like that? Nat said. How can she apply her makeup ‘n shit?
--That’s the 64,000 dollar question, right there, Cannonball laughed.
They sipped their gin.
--How’s the music going? Nat asked.
--Good chops here, kid bro. The audiences dig us. Ain’t many black folks in the audience, true. But you remember that singin’ soul sister Josephine Baker? They loved her in Paris.
--I heard ‘bout that, Nat said. Was a long time ago. And she showed her titties, as I recall. Me, I’ll do some shit, but not that.
They laughed and sipped their gin.
--I can’t tell you how it all goes down, Cannonball said. But they seem to understand what we’re up to much better than that other place.
Nat feigned surprise.
--You don’t mean America?
--Polish your horn, Cannonball said. You gone see fuh yo’sef at our gig tomorrow night.


4.10 Fast Train
First class on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris.
Every seat taken but one, next to a middle-aged man sitting near the window.
I face a family of three: mother, son, grandmother.
The son, about 10 years old, called Alfonse, can’t sit still; he stands on one foot, hops down the aisle, kicks the air like a kung fu warrior, puffs out his cheeks and makes goofy faces.
(Americans would label his condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and attribute it to a malfunctioning brain).
The mother and grandmother appeal to the boy.
“Alfonse, Arrête-toi!.
“Alfonse, Viens ici!”
Alfonse ignores them.
Mother and grandmother glance at each other in familiar futile frustration.
Meanwhile, the middle-aged man who alone has an empty seat beside him has gestured to Alfonse and, astonishingly, coaxes the boy over.
The man gets up from his window seat, sits on the aisle, and manages to get Alfonse to sit by the window.
Once seated, the man talks to him softly, and while he talks Alfonse looks at the floor or actually looks at the man without jerking his body or twisting his face.
Next, the man puts his hand gently on Alfonse’s back and begins to stroke.
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw of one of Mother Teresa’s nuns stroking the back of a severely traumatized Palestinian boy.
Alfonse responds to the gentle stroking the way a feral cat, temporarily appeased, might respond.
Are the mother and grandmother suspicious of the obviously homosexual man stroking their child?
Pas du tout.
The mother and her mother smile and exchange a look which says silently: Unexpected relief. Thank you, Monsieur, whoever you may be.
For his part, the man is now talking softly, almost lovingly to the boy, while stroking his back with longer, more penetrating strokes.
Alfonse occasionally responds with a few words.
Even when he doesn’t talk, the boy seems relaxed, almost at peace.
This continues for the duration of the trip, which is about three hours.
When the train pulls into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, I watch the middle-aged man trade friendly, low-key goodbyes with the mother, grandmother and with Alfonse.
He.tousles the boy’s hair.
The family and the man go in opposite directions.