The Death of a Bohemian Poet: a Brief, Fictionalized Account of Martial’S Life· · · · · · · 349 38
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
essays on the peripheries Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) essays on the peripheries. Copyright © 2021 by Peter Valente. This work car- ries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the au- thors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://cre- ativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2021 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-49-3 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-50-9 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0291.1.00 lccn: 2021936144 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Copy editing: Lily Brewer Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Jess, “The Wheel of Fortune: Tarot X” (1971) punctumbooks spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion Contents poets 1. Politics and the Personal: On Tom Savage’s Housing, Preservation, and Development 17 2. I Have Heard the Turn of Fortune’s Wheel: On Edouard Roditi’s “Cassandra’s Dream” · · · · · · · · 27 3. I Surrender to the Seraphim: On Neeli Cherkovski’s The Crow and I · · · · · · · · · 49 4. The Crisis of Subjectivity: On Robert Creeley’s Poem “Anger” · · · · · · · · · · · 61 5. A Brief Review of John Ashbery’s Library of America Col- lected Poems (1991–2000) · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 67 6. On Barbara Barg’s Obeying the Chemicals · · · · · · · · · 73 7. On Murat Nemet-Nejat’s The Spiritual Life of Replicants · · · 83 8. A Brief Note on Murat Nemet-Nejat’s The Peripheral Space of Photography · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·87 9. Your Dark Eyes Don’t Fool Me: A Note on Stephen Jonas’s Poem, “LXVI” · · · · · · · ·· 89 10. Naturally We Are in Love: On James Alexander’s Eturnature · · · · · · · · · · · · 93 11. Thoughts after Reading Michael Franco’s A Book of Measure 107 12. Brief Notes on Thomas McEvilley · · · · · · · · · · · 111 13. Robert Browning’s “Sordello”: A Moral Epic for Poets · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 121 ix 14. “Permanent Invisible”: On the Poetry of René Char · · · · · · · · · · · · · 133 15. Sound As Thought: Notes on Clark Coolidge · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 143 16. Essays on Some of the Prose Poems in Barbara Guest’s The Confetti Trees · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 151 pierre guyotat 17. I Is an Other: Notes on Pierre Guyotat’s Coma · · · · · · · · · · · · 175 henry james and fyodor dostoyevsky 18. A Lamentation As Old As Recorded Language: On Henry James’s Selected Tales 197 19. The Logic of Kirilov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Devils 205 encounters with turkish poetry 20. On Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds by Seyhan Erözçelik · · 215 21. Fragmentary Improvisations of Yearning : Küçük İskender’s “souljam” · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 223 22. The Eda of Ece Ayhan’s Orthodoxies · · · · · · · · · ·231 23. On Ahmet Guntan’s Romeo and Romeo · · · · · · · · · 239 24. Cultural Residue and Melancholy in the Poetry of İlhan Berk · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 243 Reviews of Some Jazz and Free Improvisation Records 25. The Schlippenbach Trio’s Pakistani Pomade · · · · · · · 251 26. Erzuli Maketh Scent: Thoughts on Cecil Taylor’s Music · · · · · · · · · · ·· 255 27. The Ganelin Trio’s Ancora Da Capo · · · · · · · · · · · 259 28. Richard Twardzik’s Trio · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·· 263 29. Stan Getz and Arthur Blythe · · · · · · · · · · · · · 267 x 30. Jimmy Giuffre: A Note on the Trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow · · 269 31. Dave Douglas’s Strange Liberation · · · · · · · · · · · 273 pasolini, balestrini, artaud 32. On Pier Paolo Pasolini · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 279 33. Funeral Rites: On Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout · · · · · · · · · · · · · 295 34. Artaud’s Sacred Triad: A Qabalistic Analysis of a Certain Passage in a Letter to André Breton · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 311 revisiting the ancient world in the twenty-first century 35. This Is Not a Golden Age · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 327 36. The Epigrams of Callimachus: Exercises for the Mind and the Heart · · · · · · · · · · 337 37. The Death of a Bohemian Poet: A Brief, Fictionalized Account of Martial’s Life · · · · · · 349 38. On Ovid’s The Cures for Love · · · · · · · · · · · · · 353 39. The Letters of Pliny the Younger: A Balance between the Public Persona and the Private Life · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·· 363 40. Catullus’s Circle of Friends · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 375 41. On the Letters of Apollonius of Tyana · · · · · · · · · 383 xi Acknowledgments I'd like to thank all the editors of the various magazines, anthol- ogies, online journals, and newspapers in which some of these essays appeared. I’d also like to thank Murat Nemet-Nejat for being a perceptive reader of these essays in their initial form and Ed Foster, who published many of them over the years in Talis- man: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. A special thanks to Lily Brewer for her careful editing of the manuscript, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei for all his hard work in its ini- tial and final stages, and finally Eileen A. Joy for taking on the manuscript and seeing it through to print. xiii i Poets 1 Politics and the Personal On Tom Savage’s Housing, Preservation, and Development I’ve been thinking a lot about poet Tom Savage’s book of poems, Housing, Preservation, and Development, published in 1988 by the Cheap Review Press, and the relation between politics and the personal. I was eighteen at the time of its release. I remem- ber, during the eighties, listening to the Smiths on my brother’s turntable in the basement of my parents’ house in New Jersey, hanging out with friends at the Limelight in New York when the “club kids” dominated the scene, buying records at Bleek- er Bobs and Things from England, drinking too much out of high school and writing poems while finding a second home at night on the streets of New York’s East Village. I remember the Tomkins Square Riots, the AIDS scare, Kenneth Koch’s flam- boyant and sometimes witty pontifications, the crack epidemic, the Wall Street crash. Savage’s book reads like a report from the front lines. The poem, “Mayan Update in the Eighties!,” is his indictment of America’s imperialist tendencies in the eighties which he re- lates to the primitive and violent character of the Mayans. He writes, “Before it was a one-sided conversation / with rocks and dirt … Ancient ball games pitted captives / against one another 17 essays on the peripheries for their lives. Heads of the losers were the balls … Blood was the mortar of life.” In the eighties there was the Nicaraguan rev- olution, various terrorist attacks in Beirut, India, and Rome, the invasion of Grenada, the Iran-Iraq war, the hostage crisis, Tian- anmen Square protests, Ronald Reagan then Bush, etc. And to- day, Michael Brown is shot in the street and as a result racial ten- sions explode in urban communities, the OCCUPY movements spread across the country calling for an end to corporate greed and government lies, unemployment continues to devastate in- dividual lives and families despite the creation of a “millions of jobs,” and more than ever there is no hope our government will help the people who pay heavily for its excesses. Savage contin- ues, “Before going to war, for example, / the king punctured his penis / with a stingray spine while the queen / drew a thorn- barbed rope through her tongue … The name for one king was shield.” Just think of the abuses of the military and of the reck- lessness of our government’s involvement in other parts of the world. “Same as it ever was,” the song says. In “Unfit to Print” Savage writes of witnessing “three young guys standing / Over a young black boy.” “Someone’s been shot, ‘I heard a Pakistani say.’” Savage writes, “On the Evening News the incident got 15 seconds / After a five minute story on an ex-cop in Queens.” Savage concludes, “Not interesting at all. / No capital gains or losses involved. / Not even a powerful union.” Today such an incident becomes major news. Videos concerning the Brown shooting went viral on the internet flooding YouTube channels and sparking controversy and violence in the streets. Savage remains critical about but open to the possibility of love, of real communication and affection. In “The St. Mark’s Baths” he writes of men who are, “Not too old / to be repulsive; not too young / to be conceited” who “know the simple pain of rejection, fear want, know that to be cruel is / to bring cruelty one’s way.” A Buddhist living on the lower east side, Savage is critical of the ego and a what he sees as conditioned behaviors that block real understanding and communication.