I'm trying to stay calm about my new publications.

But it's difficult, I'm having trouble working at the desk.

We are experiencing a new poetry print culture, which is a lot like the old culture (Whitman or Donne or Dickinson, passing around their homemade pamphlets) except... except... it's massively available.

I have nothing against the regular publishing structures, nothing whatsoever. Never was very successful in those venues - but I didn't try very hard, either. Not out of laziness, though!

As with many others, with me writing poetry involves a lot of specific gravity. Plus I have something of an obsessive manic depressive oblique personality. It's all or nothing.

Moreover, the minor skills I picked up editing Nedge & Edwin Honig's mss. make it easier for me to publish meself.

I'm repeating what I wrote a few years ago, when I went into the XLibris mode... my apologies, friends. But I have the feeling this Lulu loop-de-loop is going to work : is going to be a lulu, in fact.

Giddy-up Ol' Mangy. We're a-comin' to your town.

the last of the Nedges

Another of Mike's cover designs - done with Elmer's Glue on black canvasboard

My brother Mike did this cover, which I thought was pretty good. (Mike was at one time guitarist with "famous" Mpls punk band Rendered Useless)

Nedge #3 cover. Old railroad bridge over Mississippi at St. Anthony Falls, with train going over it. Picture was taken for my grandfather's (the g'pa mentioned in poem posted today, his b-day) engineering firm, which had a hand (I believe) in putting up those Pillsbury grain elevators in the background.

small world dept.: someone requested a copy of Nedge #4 yesterday. Someone in Senegal.

Paula's iambic pentameter - smooth, adept, capacious.

How many of you have visited this?

(She was much-published in Nedge, years ago, which was an honor for Nedge.)

(p.s. "Anita Rust" is an anagram.)

Saw the film Pollock on video. Tom Waitts song at the credits:

"On his hand, he wore the ring of another.
The world keeps turning, the world keeps turning."

sad, sad movie. (but this song was even sadder.) great how he tried to re-enact the painting.

a film about the painter being filmed in the act of painting. yes. (Everyman is the vanishing point of every Scripture.)

A little weird to watch, in that Ed Harris in this film looks exactly like my brother Bill, and acts a little like my brother Mike. (see here Mike's cover for Nedge #5, which I think is a little masterpiece.) (while we're at it, here's his cover for #2. not bad either, Clem)

What do I think of this poem by Lisa Jarnot?

I read most of Black Dog Songs (though quickly, at work), and was impressed with the technique. The artful dumbing-down of "poetic diction" (to a kind of amalgam of Blake, baby-talk, and pop songs). I've also heard Jarnot read, & again, was impressed with the fluent musicality of her poems in performance. I've read (or tried to read) her book Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press), an early effort from her Providence days. Wondering if the title was a jab at the Poetry Mission, a local literary group (doubt it).

Her poem reminded me of this old poem of mine (published in the mag A Fine Madness in 1985):

Land of Lincoln

 
It is enough to be with them,
the children like shy seedlings,
and the newspaper shedding its phrases
to the sleepy music in the squares.
It is enough to step out,
wind dusting ashes from the sill,
workmen hauling everything away,
furniture, knicknacks, loveletters
written in robin's egg, and spidery
aquamarine.  A parade, they said,
is a mild form of chaos,
and so we marched, eyes closed,
to the somnolent trumpets and drums -
around the familiar four corners,
the sad mothers fainting, and dizzy
children, dazzled by flags and ice cream.
The mayor spoke under the statue
erected over the slain brigade.  A breeze
touched every bowed head, leading us
to the flag-draped coffin of our lord.
Impossible to step away from summer -
the raft the river carries under us,
and the canoe of the silent ferryman,
lifting his hand for a copper penny.

* The Clearing of the Vaults *

I have a lot of back issues of Nedge. I will send 2 issues of choice to anyone who sends a mailing address, while supplies last. (# 1 is out of stock already; very few copies of # 2 and 3 left.) Email which issues you'd like, and an address, to : Henry_Gould@brown.edu. Please include "clearing vaults" or "hgpoetics" or some such in the subject line of your email. It may take me a little while but I will get them to you.

Blogging along for the past three months, I've been able to reflect back along the trail that began around 1965. I'm writing this from a place other blogriders will probably recognize, a tiny dusty cluttered corner room, with a big bulletin board, a 2-drawer file cabinet with a postcard of Ezra Pound's "Poet out of a Job" want-ad, ceiling-high books. I cleaned out the file cabinet a little this morning, a task which provides a special perspective on the tip-of-the-iceberg nature of a writer's public (me, public?) persona : all those old half-baked derivative sleepy weak poems, rejection notes, news clippings, records of little forays projects & endeavors, charming old letters, children's art work. . . the sweet derelicta of others' gestures, which I never acknowledged or loved enough, mixed in with my own.

It's been nice to mingle poems & precepts & so on, kind of a correlation of unrealized efforts; things I haven't mentioned, but might sometime, like what it meant to edit a micro-magazine (Nedge), or work on the Poetry Mission; the effervescence of the Green Tea project, with Susan & Tom (a high point : my son the 12-yr old composer, setting a poem of Edwin's to music, & then being able to perform it with the Grace Church children's choir at the book party, & publish the score); the abiding presence of Edwin Honig, and in a very different way my children's grandfather, John Tagliabue.

Shem the Penman makes a fuzzy, feeble scratch, a Hen-scratch in the spring mud-midden. I'd like to bury him in the midst of his fritterations, the proven dunce in his local Providence, between the cluttered study & the job at the library: 1132, 132, 11 Fisher. . . following

the signs that mock me as I go

Second thought about epic judgements of previous day. Pound's "failing" method still let in more texture of reality, its violence & alienation, the feel of a speechless powerless person, anonymous. In the interstices between his arrogance & bigotry. In this Olson was history repeating itself with even less (more) success, perhaps.

Still. . . what does form provide? The mistake of the 20th cent. poets was to think that it is functional, in an obvious way. What form provides is distance. Form humbles the poet, or should.

Too many poets trust words & themselves too much - the blather & overreaching comes across as complacency, shallow. Words, words, words. Form provides distance & silence. The song does more with what it doesn't say. We are moved by the mortality & closure of the song, its limits. It's finished. We identify deeply with that.

*

One of my favorite writers is Alfred Schwaid, whom I would never have discovered on my own: he sent some stories to Nedge. I published everything he sent. He writes very short stories. They remind me of Kafka & Beckett but are also completely unique. His only collection, that I know of, is a chapbook called "Everything Else is Everything Else", published in Austin Texas in 1994 by Experimental Chapbook Press.