Early Work

302. Early Work. Alice Notley (2023). Here is a delightful collection of the early books and uncollected poems of Alice N, one of my favorite poets. What I like about it is that she uses New York school poetry techniques to talk about her own experience as a person. She never hides behind a style not her own, but uses certain features of that style (or set of styles) for her own ends. For example, she refers to Denby's sonnets. Now those sonnets by a man 42 years older than her are nothing like her own, but she read them in order to get where she is. The same with her influence from her husband Ted Berrigan, or Berrigan's model, Frank O'Hara. When she was writing, she says that nobody had written this kind of poem before, and she is correct. She says nobody had written about pregnancy and childbirth before 1972, and she might be correct. The NY school poets were mostly gay men, like Denby or O'Hara, or men of the other persuasion who were their disciples. Look at this cool cover art. 

 

Manifest

301. Manifest and Furthermore. William Bronk (1987).

I was just reading Proust and I came across this: "The way Swann, his whole life, loved / Odette and she was not even his type, is the way / contrarily, we each of use have, / in spite of natural inclinations, our lives. / We trust the tact of others because we know / they know and won't speak of it. Things are far / more complicated than we say they are."

North Point Press in San Francisco became Bronk's publisher and put many books of his during this period. You could argue that the poem I have cited is not a very good one. You would be right, but maybe Bronk had to write a lot of poems like this, trying out ideas in various forms, and only once in a while hitting the mark completely. I can still love the tone of voice here without defending it as a small lyric gem. It is like talking with an old friend. 

 

Own Face

301. Own Face. Clark Coolidge (1978, 1993).  

This is one of my favorites. I bought it in Columbus, Ohio, at a bookstore on High St. across from campus, where they had language poetry books. I marked the poems I liked most, and with two check marks for the absolute best ones. 

 

Baffling Means

 300. Baffling Means. Clark Coolidge / Philip Guston (1991)

This came out several years after its creation (1972-6). 

Here's another collector's item. I guess would have searched on Abe's Books and paid whatever the asking price was. It has drawings by Philip Guston, as you can see, in Guston's late, cartoonish phase that just makes me laugh with surprise. They seem perfectly complementary to Coolidge's sensibility: 

"Baffling means because we wouldn't know what we'd get. 'Who wants that?," waving his hand toward a window, and you can't have that anyway.'"

Creeley, 30 Things

299. Thirty Things. Robert Creeley (1974)

Here is a nice collector's item. It has monoprints by Bobbie, Creeley's second wife. Noting this I realize I don't know what a monoprint is. I bought this at the Strand in NYC for $50.  This is number 13 of 250 copies.  The poems feel slight, but in a deceptive, Creeleyesque way:   

A Loop

No 

one 

thing 

anyone does

Diario cómplice

 

298.  Diario cómplice. Luis García Montero (1987). 

Alberti's widow says that Luis wrote his own prologue for the book, which is outrageous in many respects. We have to lose some respect for Alberti himself for allowing that to happen, also for the cursilería of the prologue itself: "Pero yo amo a Luis García Montero, cada vez más escapado de moldes y vaivenes, todavía capaz del verso y la actitud en medio de una plaza, ante este admirable pueblo que lo entiende y aplaude y lo recibe como una paloma mensajera de also que está ansioso de oír." 

I remain immune to the charms of LGM.  

9000 books

 Here is my earlier project, 9000 books. I think I will rename this project "9000 books," and then reorder the 15 entries I've already done. I got into the high 200s with the first project, abandoned more than 10 years ago. 

Altair

 297. Canciones para Altair. Rafael Alberti (1989). 

Alberti wrote these poems, and did some drawings, for a much, much younger woman, his second wife. They are skillful if a little slight. I read them because I just read the memoirs of Altair (María Asunción Mateo). The central metaphor is of an star descending from a constellation. "Alta Alair del Cielo, / tú, tan sólo, esa estrella." A little bit cursi?  But Alberti is not among my favorites. When she answers the question of how she can be involved with a man more than 40 years older, she would say, "well, what about the dullard you are with?"  I find it distasteful, obviously. 

Diosas

 296. Las diosas blancas. Ramón Buenaventura (1985, 86).

Two things happened in the early 1980s. In Granada, the group of "la otra sentimentalidad," and this anthology of young women poets. The women became the avant-garde (with a few male avant-gardists along for the ride, and the Granada group, with additions from other parts of Spain, became the poetry of experience--a mostly male movement.

 The anthology is notorious for the outrageous prologue, and the idea that what matters most is the anthologist's personal relationship to the poets. Also, the use of the Robert Graves idea of white goddesses, well, that is an idea from a male poet. 

Also, at the last minute, he had to exclude a few originally included. He lists their names and apologizes to them. One of them, Concha García, ended up being one the better ones. 

Despite these flaws, this is a landmark book. 

Compás binario

295. Compás binario. María Victoria Atencia (1984)

The title means "binary rhythm," basically. Her lines are in alexandrines of fourteen syllables, breaking up nicely into two parts. 

The poetic subject is under siege, threatened by ominous unnamed forces. 

El pabilo se agobia en la cera fundida

y en las sillas se apilan efímeros ropajes

que un rostro sostuvieron más allá de la cerca. 

Después de haber tejido tantas horas del día

cuando tiendo las manos fuera de su recinto

solo palpo mi nombre en su pared desnuda. 

[The wick is smothered in the melted wax and on the chairs the ephemeral clothes pile up that sustained a face beyond the fence. After having woven so many hours of the day when I extend my hand beyond its enclosure I only feel my name on its naked wall.]

 

Descripción de la mentira

 294. Descripción de la mentira. Antonio Gamoneda (1977, 2003). 

I was more impressed with this when I first read it, because Libro del frío did not yet exist. Now it seems a little portentous. It is interesting that, even though Spanish is Romance language, some vocabulary seems more Latinate than others. In Góngora's day, mozo was used instead of joven. Now joven is perfectly colloquial, whereas mozo is antiquated. Gamoneda's expresses gravitas through his diction. 

At the end of this edition is a critical essay by JJH, which takes the unusual form of a glossary, in alphabetical order by word. 

Ferocidades

 293. Ferocidades. Néstor Vidal (2023). 

I have done the first ten in this series, so I only have to do this 9999 more times. I'm down to four figures. This is not a book of poetry, but a savage denunciation of the poetry of experience, represented here by Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Juaristi, Villena, etc...  He practices the technique of denunciation by quotation. 

Ya nunca, nunca,

sucederá de nuevo 

la tarde aquella:

una muchacha,

que eras tú, me miraba

por primera vez. 

I love to hate the poetry of experience. It gives me great satisfaction.  

Oculta transparencia

292. Oculta transparencia. Ángel Crespo (1997) 

This is selection of poems Crespo wrote in the 1950s. I'm not convinced by him at all. He's the kind of poet who can use the phrase "sumamente importante" without any irony.   

Trasluz

 291. Trasluz. Antonio Méndez Rubio (2002). 

Méndez Rubio and I would probably agree about what kind of poetry we like in the context of Spain. I think he has an interesting mind in his prose, whereas his poetry is a bit too much in the Valente mode of "poetry of silence." 

Failures of the Poets

290. Failures of the Poets. (Anthony Robinson) 2023

Tony is a friend of mine and I am in the acknowledgments. He is a good poet, surprisingly good because I'm always surprised when someone is this good, and also because his poems are full of surprises, not predictable at all. He is my friend in part because we share a certain aesthetic, though he is far better.

"A poem is a collection of words used improperly."  I like that. 

He was getting an MFA and his teacher insisted he write out of his ethnic experience. (Tony's mother is Mexican.) They clashed because that isn't the type of writer he is. 

Decir la nieve

289. Decir la nieve. Menchu Gutiérrez (2011)

Not a book of poetry per se, but a meditation on a poetic image, snow, that goes from Kawabata to Morton Feldman to Rilke in unpredictable ways. She is one of my favorite novelists / poets / essayists in Spain. I've only met her once, but I've been a fan for many years. She has other books that are similar meditations on a single image. 

 

The Anger Scale

 288. The Anger Scale. Katie Degentesh (2006)

Here is a classic flarf book, exploiting the inherent surrealism of google search non-sequiturs. I met Katie on a trip to New York. She had studied with Gary Snyder in Davis. 

The anger scale is a psychological test. All the poems have titles based on questions in the survey, so "I sometimes tease animals" would be a statement that you would agree with or strongly disagree with, etc... Out of context, these questions also acquire a surreal air. "I believe I am no more nervous than most others." 

I was a defender of flarf back in the day, not a member of the group but friends with several who were. I guess I would still defend it, for its wit and fearlessness. This book is a good example of that, along with some Drew Gardner work from about the same time. 

RJ

287. Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses. Ronald Johnson (1969, 2023) 

Reading Levertov and Hollo, and now Johnson, I am struck by how white poets of this period could use American Indian culture quite unselfconsciously--something I would not do myself now, for example. Anyway, this is RJ just before he embarked upon ARK. Some very good things here, including the letters to Whitman. The back cover calls it "an underground classic of visionary and queer poetics." But you wouldn't know Johnson is gay until the letters for WW, the next to the last poem in the book. Mostly, he is a great naturalist, immersed in plants and the earth itself. 

Egea

285. Paseo de los tristes. Javier Egea (1990)

286. Raro de luna. Javier Egea (1982, 1986).

I've been curious about Egea's work. He was associated with the García Montero group and killed himself in 1999. Paseo de los tristes is more interesting, with drawing by Alberti and a Lorcaesque feel. Paseo de los tristes is very 1980s Granada. I'd like to think it's better than LGM, but is it really? 

I am restarting my project of reading 10,000 books of poetry [update: now 9]

 283. O Taste and See. Denise Levertov (1964) 

284. The Coherences. Anselm Hollo (1968) 

Two poets associated with American poetry, but Levertov is British, Hollo Finnish. The Levertov is more religiously based than I had remembered, including in the title poem. I like her fresh earnestness and sense of daring at this stage in her career, occasionally a bit pretentious even. Hollo is closer to my own sensibility, though. He notes that Vallejo had a special way of walking so as not to wear out his shoes. Hollo, in large stretches, can seem a bit inconsequential.