HG on GG

Reading Gabriel Gudding - first appeared in Critical Flame - has been published jointly by Jacket magazine.

Reading Gabriel Gudding

I've written a review of Gabriel Gudding's first 2 books, now out in Critical Flame; also forthcoming in Jacket #39.

Happy 2010

Happy New Year, friends -

My bloggishness has slowed down of late, but I'm still hanging around. 2009 was fizzling out in December, after I made a fool of myself on the Harriet blog, getting into a needless tiff with Franz Wright... but then finally wrote a book review I'd been meaning to do for months (on Gabriel Gudding's poetry), & sent it off on January 31st. So that was a good way to end the year.

Over the weekend, sat down & re-read the whole of the Lanthanum so far. Have had misgivings about it, off & on. But re-reading it, I'm happy! Not perfect, but not a waste of time (let others decide). (A sort of oblique dove-muttering, I say.) On to Part Two, I hope.

Saarinen's tuning-fork

See Gabriel Gudding's excellent essay on the Gateway Arch. I hadn't come across the "tuning-fork" metaphor before, but it made an independent appearance in Lanthanum.

Swamped with work lately, etc. Hence lack of bloggismo.

Today finished G. Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Hope to have something to say about it in a review. Strongly affecting. & I found it fascinating.

& not by any means because of all the "local references". That's just an extra. But Gudding "ploughs his (alternating) verses" with a prosody made up of back-&-forth road trips from Providence RI to Normal IL (he writes the poem while driving, using his very special fountain pens); the turning-points of these repeated journeys are at a gas station 3 blocks down Hope St. from my house.

Today finished RI Notebook, 1:15. pm 3/24/09. (Was one of 2 witnesses at GG wedding, of which he writes. Also, once upon a time, noticed child's artwork in chalk on sidewalk near home; wrote poem about it; sent poem to Gudding 4 yrs later, not knowing artwork had been drawn & signed by his daughter Clio...) Tonight 3/24 go with Sarah to see lawyer, to sign my/our first Will & Testament.

Reading G. Gudding's road poem, Rhode Island Notebook. Not very far along. So far, is HILARIOUS. A "gas". But more than that.

Starting to read Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.

It's not easy driving a car nonstop across half the USA by yourself. I've done it a few times; even with one other person, it gets very wearisome about halfway across Pennsylvania (if you leave from Minneapolis), and you just about fall asleep in Connecticut. Imagine writing a long poem while doing that...

The longest such drive I took was in the summer of 1971. I was driving my grandfather's hand-me-down, an enormous old silver Buick. I drove from Mpls to Alabama to see a girlfriend, whom I had tried to break up with, & then changed my mind. Was hoping to set things right. But I hadn't been able to reach her on the phone. Finally, when I called her home from a pay phone outside a truck stop deep in Alabama (she was living with her mother on the southern end of that state), somebody there told me she wasn't home. She had gone to Texas to visit her brother.

I was about out of money & time. I went back to Minneapolis, nonstop. That's a long drive.

Think I'm going to enjoy this book...

Reading Gabriel Gudding's A Defense of Poetry (in preparation for Rhode Island Notebook). I'm always a few years behind the times.

Plan to write review of both books. Defense is really something.

Peter O'Leary's review of fellow Minnesotan Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.

I have a strange deja-vu, reading this, & am reminded of a poem I wrote in 1968, which was published in the Blake School (my high school) literary magazine, Talisman (1969 issue) :

GOING SOUTH ON U.S. 61

 
rusted rails running to
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.
white farmhouse wanders by among
clusters of contraptions -
a dirty once blue pick-up sits
on concrete blocks
a crazy useless tractor, one wheel
sunk in spring mud
a wind vane creaks on a pole.
the brown once red barn
slides sloping into earth again.
restless freeway runs between
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.
where screaming metal screams past
screaming glass, and billboards flash
sun-scorched, unread scrawls.
dairy queens stretch their spray-paint
crowns across the road, one last try
before they die in the darkness behind.
telephone poles crash bravely through
the barrier, and men in blue shirts dig holes.
the stop lights are always green
and the towns
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake
speed by without breathing
brown brick
Joe's Bar B-Q
gray grain elevator
then gone, flashing dull.
when they have gone, 
only the gray, billboarded, roadsigned
tongue remains -
always running, running to another
Moose Lake, Bruno, Willow Creek
North Branch, Stacy, Forest Lake.

I have been following & mixing it up a little with some of the blog-discussions about FLARF (Ron Silliman has linked to most of it). I have to admit, I like the word "flarf" - sort of a synthesis of fluff, laugh, and a dog barking...

My Theory on Flarf is that it is essentially a kind of Clowning - a primitive form of Comedy... its "serious" critical apologia are just another shtick in the program - Allamistakeo, as EA Poe put it... & those who take them seriously fall into a "serious" trap...

They are the Fellinis of contemporary American poetry (without Fellini's wistful sweet big-hearted so-Italian nostalgia - essence of Clown, purified to Super-Clown-Saint)...

So let's take this thought-experiment a little further : Flarf has become the dominant-hegemonic-canonical form of Contemporary Poetry! Whole Collegiate programs are devoted to studying & celebrating its Heros & Heroines... deeply-considered doctoral theses are defended & even written...

Paradoxically, Gabriel Gudding emerges as the Flarfiste's Flarfiste, since his critical pronunciamentos are both more deadpan-serious & funny than the flarfistas themselves...

Kent Johnson is celebrated as one of the Original Sad Clowns... his plangent personae & rumbustious challenges to the Establishment are recognized at last as nonpareil "bigfoot shuffles"...

Even minor poet Henry Gould gets his due in Flarf Kingdom! As the air-filled Shelley-balloon of Lilliputia - he of the enormous endless epic HENRIAD - there in his own private tiny Rhode Island...

Grad students excavate & debate fine points of the Flarf Renaissance of Dramatic Poetry, rooted as it is in a fundamentally Dionysian attitude - play, play play! -'s the thing...

They will deliberate over the Flarferrians Oedipal relationship with their Father, John Ashbery - since his status as "original Flarfist" is a contradiction in terms (Official or "Tectonic" Flarfism categorically denies the existence of "originality")... this crux or dilemma hits hard, especially on the NY-School-derived Flarffers, such as Jordan Davis, Drew Gardner, Gov. John Connolly, JFK, "Toenails" Lantucci, Nada Gordon, Gordon Nado - who love-hate Ashbery, since their own literary identity derives from a non-identity with Ashbery, who's own non-identity generated the non-identical techniques of Flarf, so that an escape from suffocating identity leads to an identity which circles back to a suffocating non-identity which sounds very familiar... - so where's Berrigan when we need him? Back in Rhode Island, no doubt.

See Mairead Byrne's post of Jan. 3rd, & click on the Artaud line, for a funny video of her trials & tribulations in my place of work (the Rockefeller Library).

What is it with these people? What is it with me? Que pasa? Gabriel writes epic poem while in his car driving to see his daughter, here, in Rhode Island. Mairead makes videos of herself & daughter breaking into my library. I write poem inspired by graffiti on sidewalk near my home, drawn (unbeknownst to me) by their daughter - & send it (all unknowing) to Gabriel...

What's going on, Clio? Is Poetry trying to prison-break the Library???

Gabriel Gudding has a big new book out (Rhode Island Notebook).

Obscure spider threads seem to bind the fate of these two former-Minnesotan poets (that is, Gabriel & me). Members of the School of Embodied Poetry. Minnesota, midwestern homesickness, the wedding (I was their best man), the amazing "Clio" poem serendipity (according to that other RI visitant, Ange Mlinko, sort of a Kieslowski film in embryo), Rhode Island, family history, long poems, epic journeys. Rhode Island is a small cosmos.

(Stubborn Grew, In RI - TWO MORE excessive poems by a Minnesotan about Rhode Island, family break-ups, history, politics, epic journeys (Henry, Bluejay, Roger Williams) - they're companion volumes to Gabriel's book. We're somehow akin in that Eliotic (idiotic?) tradition-realm. Read all 3 together. Teach them in class. That's an order. We're re-writing American culture as Rhode Island poetry.)

Gabe Gudding, like many personalities of comic bent, has an alter ego - the scold, the judgemental moralist. His recent & much-noted post on the dynamics of Narcissism is insightful, but maybe it doesn't go far enough.

Proust is more radical. In the Recherche, self-regard (taken to comic extremes) is not so much a personality trait as a symptom of social dynamics generally - entire societies devoted to pecking orders & vanity. The narcissist is not merely acting out in an autonomous isolation chamber. S/he plays a community role, as representative clown, victim - as an exaggeration of what is the norm.

"All is vanity, & a striving after wind," spake the Preacher.