And then there's this sort of thing, also from Tender Buttons:

A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since.

The only way I can read this is to speak it aloud, as a type of sound-poetry, somewhat along the lines of Hugo Ball and the DaDa movement, though Tender Buttons was published two years before the DaDa manifesto. Amazing. A true original.

Here are some short poems:

A BLUE COAT

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.


ANGST

I had angst


THE GREEN SEA

Above his head clanged
Turning
And there were no dreams in this sleep
Over this table


OUT OF MINE

rather than melt the ice passes through my hand
i pass through another way
dead surrounded by white
light flowers out


EYE GLASSES

A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley.


A NEW CUP AND SAUCER

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.

Recognise them? The second and third poems were written by Ted Berrigan in the 1970s, the fourth was written by Tom Raworth in the 1960s, and the others were written by Getrude Stein, a woman born 134 years ago, and who published these poems in 1914. The poems in 'Tender Buttons' wouldn't be out of place in a poetry collection written now, and they seem to prefigure a lot of contemporary work, including LANGUAGE poetry and much of what we'd currently call post-modernism. All of the poems above, by their very abstraction, are questioning the relationship between language and the world - a contemporary preoccupaton, but not in 1914 (I'm ready to be contradicted here). It strikes me that Ezra Pound now reads like a great poet from another era, while Gertrude Stein reads like a great contemporary.

Hotel February

by

Alan Baker

£4/$8 (postage free - contact Leafe Press in the UK). pub. Bamboo Books. Cover image, Bob Rissman. Stapled pamphlet.


Read a poem from this pamphlet on Todd Swift's blog.

I've been reading Gertrude Stein's 'Picasso' to while away the evenings in my hotel this week. It's quite something: a highly personal and insightful description of Picasso's life and work (at least up to the 1930s). It's also a triumph of style: plain, direct and yet with a clever use of punctuation, mainly using commas where you'd expect a full-stop, that throws you slightly, and makes you read more carefully. Her comments and asides on art, history and psychology are masterful:

"The spirit of everybody is changed, of a whole people is changed, but mostly nobody knows it, and a war forces them to recognise it because during a war the appearance of everything changes very much quicker, but really the whole change has been accomplished, and a war is only something which forces eveyone to recognise it. The French revolution was over when war forced everybody to recognise it, the American revolution was accomplished before the war, the war is only a publicity agent which makes everyone know what has happened, yes, it is that."

That final "yes, it is that" clinches it: giving the impression that she is talking to herself, that she has just realised something as she speaks/writes.

Francophone?

Having described the poet Abdellatif Laâbi as a "Morrocan francophone poet" I found this statement by him in an interview in Double Change magazine

"I don't really like the term 'Francophone.' Aside from the fact that it's politically charged, the term is reductive. It's a means of confining very diverse literary experiences, each of which are distinct, into a singular issue with language."

Laâbi argues that Maghrebian, African, and Caribbean literature in French has parallels with writers like Milan Kundera (Czech, writing in French) and Salman Rushdie (Indian-origin, writing in English), and that they constitute a new kind of literature emerging from the peripheries.

The whole enlightening interview can be found here.

I meant to mention the poetry/artwork by Ed Baker which is now available on Litter, soon to be followed by poetry from Morrocan poet Abdellatif Laâbi, in a new translation by American Gordon Hadfield. Work is hectic at the moment. After the delights of John and Kathy's visit and our French holiday, it's back to the grind. I'm working in Bracknell, Berkshire this week, next week in Prague (an improvement on Bracknell, admitedly), then, I hope at home to catch up.

I might add to my previous post, that the charming provincial towns of France idealised in my last post saw large-scale and prolonged riots in 2005 by sections of the population that official France likes to pretend don't exist. Toulouse was a scene of burning cars, smashed windows and police baton charges. The situation was worsened by the inflamatory statements of the Interior Minister, who became a divisive hate-figure before he was elected President by a different section of the population.

Just spent a week in south-west France on a family holiday - took the cheap Ryanair flight to Carcassonne. We took a day trip by train from there to Toulouse. Cold, wet and windy, just like home, Carcassonne's 14thC fortress tremendously impressive, the town like something out of Madame Bovary - what little was there closed after 6pm, and it felt very provincial (tho welcoming and relaxed). Watching vast flocks of starlings circling the town in the dusk to roost in the trees of the main square, as shop-keepers closed their shutters and took their wares indoors, it occured to me that one of the attractions of France to certain English people - myself included - is nostalgia; partly, I think, for a time when Britain was not totally at the mercy of the free market. Carcassonne was full of small family businesses and locally owned patisseries and cafés - not a Starbucks or Cafe Nero in sight. In Toulouse I found several excellent independent bookshops of the type that have simply disappeared from the UK. One in particular had a huge stock, and I managed to pick up books by two poets I'm interested in - the Morroccan francophile poet Abellatif Laâbi, and Edmond Jabès. What with John BR's book delivery last week, I don't know when I'm going to find the time to read all this stuff.

My family and I had the considerable pleasure this week of playing host to John Bloomberg-Rissman and his wife Kathy on part of their UK vacation. We did the tourist things, like visiting Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, that we don't normally get to do. John does a good job of keeping me up to date with developments in American poetry, and he arrived with a gift of a pile of books, some of which I'll maybe get round to reviewing, or at least mentioning at some point. They were:

Ron Silliman, "The Alphabet" (a 1000-page life's work)
Lyn Hejinian, "My Life"
Christian Bok, "Euonia"
Hannah Wiener's Open House
Jared Schickling, "Submissions"
Donna Stonecipher, "Souvenir de Constantinople"
Gertrude Stein, "A Reader" ed. Ulla E. Dydo

Plenty to get my teeth into there. The last book mentioned should cure my shamefully superficial knowledge of Gertrude Stein, a writer who seems bigger and more important the more I find out about her.

The BBC recently reported on one Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words. Here are Mr. Shea's thoughts on the experience, with the word 'dictionary' replaced by 'poem':

"I've always enjoyed reading poems and they are far more interesting than people give them credit for. And I think everything you find in a great book you would find in a great poem, except for the plot.

"All the normal emotions - grief, happiness and loss - exist in a poem but not necessarily in the order that you would think."

The article includes a quote from Auden: "For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways."

That last phrase could easily have been used by one of our more innovative poetry practitioners to describe their poetry - the notion that the reader of a poem is at least as responsible for the meaning as the writer. This got me thinking, in a digressive way, about Auden's poetry. I've thought for some time that his repudiation of poems like 'Spain' and 'September 1 1939' was wrong-headed in the sense that it regarded the poem's literal message as paramount. If one believes that a poem can be "legitimately read in an infinite number of ways", then it doesn't make sense to repudiate a poem because of its literal message. Nevertheless, I admire Auden for his moral stance.

This train of thought brings to mind another poet, one whose achievement seems ever more slender with the passing years: T.S. Eliot. I've always thought it shameful that Eliot never publicly renounced the anti-semitic passages in his early poetry. I appreciate of course, that my views on this may contradict my previous views on Auden, and that there seems no easy answer to this vexed question, which raises the further question of whether poetry, made out of language, can ever really be divorced from the "real world" and the things it references.