The State of Poetry Lists in 2016, with Special Reference to Small Presses

This is not a “best of” list since the very idea of ranking books fetishizes the new and builds obnoxious hierarchies; it also reinforces spurious notions of critical omniscience. Most year-end Best Of lists ignore the vibrant word of small press poetry publishing. They’re less about critical acumen than the dominant market forces of Big Publishing and the ways in which the circulation of the eternal same flourishes thanks to the alliance between publishers and the press.

It depresses me when I read a review of the same middlebrow lackluster poetry book (Sharon Olds, anyone? Merwin? Rita Dove? ) over and over and over in The Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NYRB, LRB, etc., when there's no mention of two of our greatest poets: Peter Gizzi and Michael Palmer, each of whom brought out works of astonishing beauty this year. This is why a review publication like Rain Taxi is invaluable for its devoted attention to the small press scene, where so much vital literature is being published. The public relations machine of Big Pub exists to produce a monotonous conformity of taste and a banal chorus of critical yea-sayers who seem incapable of or unwilling to consider books not published by the major houses.

So “best” poetry is perhaps a meaningless category, finally, when so many reviewers, from David Orr to Dan Chaisson, seem to write in an echo chamber. The fact is, as Steph Burt noted a few years back, there’s too much poetry appearing in any given year for any critic to take in and far too little of it that comes my way. I wish, for instance, I’d read Daniel Borzutsky or Monica Youn, or David Lau, or Ocean Vuoung, or Don Mee Choi – but my time and money are limited. I can’t pretend to have been aware of more than a very small percentage of the work circulating through this year’s poetry sphere. This list simply represents books (many of them, I confess, sent to me by the authors themselves) which I found brilliant; works that challenged the boundaries of what poetry can be. And nearly all of them were published in the invisible world of the small press.

Probably the most diverse and intriguing list I've so seen far appeared in Entropy Mag. It's populated with poets whose work I admire and a great many younger ones I'd like to check out. Almost all of them were published by small presses so at least someone out there is paying attention.

N.B. Of the 21 published titles here, only two appeared from major houses -- FSG and Norton -- (unless you count New Directions, which makes three). Three of the publishers have brought out books of my own: Pressed Wafer, Spuyten Duyvil, and Talisman, though that didn’t influence my choice in any way.

Lists, as Don DeLillo once remarked, are signs of "cultural hysteria." He is not wrong. Nevertheless, they're rather fun to write.

The Ratio of Reason to Magic | Norman Finkelstein | Dos Madres Press
Archeophonics | Peter Gizzi | Wesleyan UP
Of Beings Alone (complete) | Lissa Wolsak | Tinfish
Day for Night | Richard Deming | Shearsman
Falling Awake | Alice Oswald | Norton
Poesis | Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Textile Series
Lay Ghost | Nathaniel Mackey | Black Ocean
The Laughter of the Sphinx | Michael Palmer | New Directions
Poems Hidden in Plain Sight | Hank Lazer | PURH (France)
Exile’s Recital | Andrew Mossin | Spuyten Duyvil
Spool | Matthew Cooperman | Parlor Press
The Sampo | Peter O’Leary | The Culture Society
Ask Anyone | Ruth Lepson | Pressed Wafer
Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series | Susan M. Schultz | Talisman House
I Rode with the Cossacks | Bill Corbett | Granary Books
Fugue Meadow | Keith Jones | Ricochet
Self-Portrait as Joseph Cornell | Ken Taylor | Pressed Wafer
Dianoia | Michael Heller | Nightboat Books
Sowing the Wind | Ed Foster | Marsh Hawk Press
House of Lords and Commons | Ishion Hutchinson | FSG
Gap Gardening | Rosmarie Waldrop | New Directions
You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior | Carolina Ebeid | Noemi
Ravenna Diagram | Henry Gould | Lulu Press
Song of the Systole | Matthew Gagnon (ms.)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "Graphic Novella"

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ latest work, Graphic Novella, (Xexoxial Press, 2015) represents both a break from and a continuation of the work she began in her path breaking five volume long poem Drafts. Break, in the sense that new formal techniques are being explored; continuation because the key themes of Drafts are still in play, albeit in a more micrological vein.

In The Collage Poems of Drafts, an outlying, post-Drafts work, DuPlessis pushed into new territory, territory already implicit in the jagged jointures of Drafts. The Collage Poems (Salt, 2011) stakes its claims on our attentions through its enticing and uncanny melding of text and image, forging new collage-ideograms as part of its extra-verbal texture: a way to both embody the fullness of the word and at the same time, point beyond it.

Jack Spicer once wrote that a poem should be a “collage of the real.” “I would like to point to the real,” he remarked, “to disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.” What’s missing from this mystical pop-Zen vision is that a poem is nothing, of course, without sound; indeed, a poem is in some ways nothing but sound. That is what constitutes the desideratum of its thingness, Spicer’s impatience with mimesis notwithstanding.

DuPlessis does not ignore this, even as she intervenes – cuts into – the word by way of the image. She, too, turns to the power of pointing, or rather, presenting clusters of images, not for commentary so much as a way to disrupt the intrigues of plot. The images offer a density not easily submitted to meaning. Rather, they are part of a plot for “cutting down the rays of the plot,” as she puts it. “Rewiring, rerouting, rewriting.”

The oversized format of Graphic Novella is designed to foreground both its amplitude and its skeletal anti-plot, which unfolds as a series of returns, re-visitations of past work and recursive reticulations of outrage and frustration against the systematic rendering of the subject’s increasing invisibility via the reifying properties of plot. Plot here might be understood more broadly as scheme, as in the universal scheme of capitalist culture to erase personhood. In contemplating the image of two Canon EOS 70 cameras (remember cameras?), the lower one inverted, DuPlessis writes:

The working conditions of being under the sun in the vast
and nimble spaces
of aggressive ruptures and attacks on civic coherence
are such that
cannot hold to one lens when the splay of directions
intensifies, when the twists of connection and misses get more grotesque
and garbled. As they do
round the clock. Insomniac almanac.

“Insomniac almanac” might serve as the motto for the 24/7 cyber-culture we live in now, with its ongoing destruction of time and solitude, a new kind of seasonal calendar in which all seasons are reduced to an empty sameness.

The poem-essay’s major tone is interrogative and in this it follows Drafts; the poem as inquiry and investigation into memory, cultural constructions of the self, and the possibilities of language to resist or unsettle such constructions. Graphic Novella undertakes a kind of auto-textual archaeology, exhuming the fragments, shards, and bones of abandoned writing and, by way of subjecting them to intimate scrutiny, re-constructing them, in whole or in part.

Arrests. Burn-out. Wrong decisions. Rectitude. Rigidity. Premature summaries. Presumptive entitlement. Loss of focus.

Has this begun? Well, a process is accelerating. Forget “art.” Paper scraps. Commodity pix. “Flat waste.” A few notes perhaps.

The sense of loss, of the struggle to reconnect with origins, or rather, beginnings, false starts, pervades this book-length poem. When is a start real and when does it fail its promise? This is the dilemma of every writer and DuPlessis has made it her central concern in this labyrinthine poem, privileging process over product.

“Forget art,” she admonishes herself and the reader. If you came looking for pretty here, you’re in the wrong place, bub, though many lines ring with a crystalline vibration. In the wasteland of commodity culture, the poet must become a bricoleur, focusing not on unified vision, but on the scraps and fragments left in that culture’s wake – a detective of the whole. This is the fate of late modernism. Shoring up is hard to do.

One gets the sense that in composing Graphic Novella DuPlessis created the collages first, then wrote her commentaries on them. This impression is reinforced by the book’s layout, with the images occupying the right-side pages and the text laid out on the left. If we were to think of this as a bilingual (bi-visual/textual) work, the relationship between the two would be that of collage cluster translating original text. Yet this isn’t quite right either. The poem forces us to read in reverse, as it were. And commentary is too blunt a term to describe the interaction and dynamic tension between word and image. It’s a more oblique, sidelong process – inviting and forcing the reader to take in the image first, then read the text, then turn back to the image, then re-read the text. The very acts of reading and seeing are thus the actual subject of the poem, an intricate mesh of post-mortems. Perhaps, the poem seems to suggest, all readings are post-mortem. But if they are, they are also resurrectional, a calling up of the lost, the forgotten, the abandoned, as a way to bear witness, or as DuPlessis wittily puts it “withnessing.”

The poem closes on a haunting provisional note: “looking for/a page that cannot be turned//because it is inside the page.” These lines are spread out between three mysterious photos of unknown strangers, dressed in their Sunday finest, gathered at some event decades ago. They stare back us as we stare at them. What is it that is inside the page, then? Not essence, not resolution, but the desire for another page. Each page has the potential to open a narrow messianic gate through which another word, another image, another page, might slip.

Linda Oppen at Harvard

Last October, I had the great pleasure of hosting a panel discussion at Harvard on George Oppen with his daughter, Linda, his Eagle Island friends, Bob and Helene Quinn, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. You can now view the event in its entirety on You Tube.

In addition, a separate interview, conducted by Columbia professor and oral historian Gerry Albarelli, can be heard on the Woodberry Poetry Room's website.

None of it would have been possible without the vision, passion, and extraordinary commitment of the Woodberry's Curator, Christina Davis. Scholars and lovers of Oppen's poetry owe her a great debt of gratitude.

Drafting Beyond The Ending: On Rachel Blau DuPlessis

I'm very pleased to announce the appearance of Drafting Beyond The Ending, a special feature on the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, at Jacket 2's site. Curated by myself, it offers thirteen essays, some of them substantial, all of them generous with insight, plus two book reviews and a new poem by DuPlessis.

My deep thanks to Julia Bloch, Mike Hennessey, and everyone else on the Jacket team who worked so hard to produce this.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Drafting Beyond the Ending – Patrick Pritchett

Un-scene, ur-new: the history of the longpoem & The Collage Poems of Drafts – Ron Silliman

Openings: Some Notes on the Political in Drafts – Eric Keenaghan

“The Force of an Intervention”: DuPlessis’ Response to Oppen in “Draft 85: Hard Copy” — Libbie Rifkin

Envoy: Postings on the Digital Form –Paul Jaussen

How to Mourn-Touch: The Redactive Prosodies of Rachel Blau DuPlessis – CJ Martin

Take Your Time: The Ethics of the Event in Drafts – Catherine Taylor

A Little Yod and a Rocking Enormity: Reading Drafts – Daniel Bouchard

Inverting the Middle: Turning Points in Drafts – Thomas Devaney

“The page is slowly turning black”: Torques: Drafts 58-57 — Harriet Tarlo

“All serifs are seraphim”: Midrash as the Angel of History – Patrick Pritchett

At the Critical/Poetic Boundary: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Arguments with Adorno – Naomi Shulman

Drafts and The Epic Moment – Bob Perelman

Drafts and Fragments: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ (Counter-) Poundian Project – Alan Golding

Ghost Tracks: Reading the Signs in Pitch: Drafts 77-95 – Chris Tysh

On Pitch, with Special Reference to “Hard Copy” - CJ Martin

Debris Field – Patrick Pritchett

Draft 109: Wall Newspaper – Rachel Blau DuPlessis