On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes

Keith Tuma's amazing new book, On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes, is just out from Salt. More than a collection of random tales, it's also a daybook, a meditation on the role of the anecdote in literary criticism, and some first rate readings of a wealth of great poems. It's brilliant and impossible to put down.

Besides recounting numerous anecdotes, delightful in themselves, about literary figures, Tuma provides a useful history of the genre and its study, while formulating a theory that tries to account for the vital role of the extra-literary in criticism. It's less a method, though, than a style; Hugh Kenner figures as one of its great exemplars.

The anecdote strand is counterpointed by two others. The first is an intermittent daybook of public and private events modeled after Hannah Weiner's Weeks. Here's a brief sample:

"Cubs off for the day; talk of recession follows talk of housing slump. Gonzales quits. A white bag of finch food hanging out back blows in the wind. One can't be bewildered forever; eventually you're just a clod of unknowing."

Tuma's wit is delightful and these passages prove every bit as enthralling as the classic anecdotes woven throughout. The practice of the daybook here becomes less about the recounting of events, then the flow of experience through language.

Tuma's peregrinations while on leave from Miami University, Ohio, form the second strand. Among these are his trip in 2008 to Orono, where we bumped into each other and he described the project to me. (Our hotel rooms were adjacent and I remember coming back from a panel and hailing Keith and Tom Raworth as they enjoyed an afternoon drink on the measly patio that opened out on to the parking lot. I was in too much of a conference funk to join them, though).

Then there are the anecdotes. Tuma has a fresh and easy way with them; indeed the whole book reads like a lark. There's the oft told classic of Jeremy Prynne and Tom Pickard's dust up at Sparty Lea, which I first heard from Ric Caddell in Durham. (Or was it Peter Quartermain in Boulder?) And another one about Alan Golding singing up a storm at Orono in 2000, well into the wee hours. I was at that party, too, matching drinks with Mark Scroggins, David Bromige, George Bowering, Linda Russo, and Tom Orange. It was my first big conference and I thought, if this is academic life, I want more of it. Of course, I suffered from a massive hangover all the next day.

And there's this, a recounting of a story told by Alan Shapiro (anecdotes are nothing if not promiscuously transmissible) that's a barbed allegory of the writing life almost too good to be true:

"Marvin Bell and Mark Strand walk into a Barnes and Noble and head over to the poetry section. Bell looks at the books shelved under B, Strand at the books shelved under S. There's not a book by either poet in the store. 'I guess they don't carry my books here,' Bell says. 'Mine are sold out,' says Strand."

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.

Core Samples from the World

Forrest Gander's remarkable new book, Core Sample from the World, has just been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. Gander, who studied geology as as an undergrad, makes sharp use of the idea of a core sample by shifting it from the vertical to the horizontal axis. Yet the book drills deep into the stratigraphy of the global human.

I've never studied with Forrest but he's been an extraordinarily generous supporter of my work, the kind that every poet dreams of. People revere him, and rightly so. Friends and colleagues who've worked with him, like Anna Deeny, Raul Zurita's translator, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, whose powerful work on Edmond Jabes and Rosmarie Waldrop benefited from his eye, sing his praises. I think Peter O'Leary put it best when he said to me, "I'd take a poetic bullet for this guy." So would I. This nomination is richly deserved.

Here's what I wrote about Core Samples for Steve Evans' Attention Span 2011.

Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011

An itinerary of otherness, strewn with uncanny moments of tenderness and glancing blows that crack the fragility of conscience. The earth’s alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of everywhere. Poem, photo, and prose fold into and out of each other, remapping their own contours. The overlap and feedback amplifies into a kind of 21st Century global witness that is porous and humbling and strange. I can’t think of another book like it. Utterly extraordinary.

"Peculiar Language" or, Tuning into Gnostic Frequencies

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Wordsworth's "Descriptive Sketches"
Biographia Literaria, Chapter 4

"In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is an harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity."

A Poetics of Failure: On Paul Nelson, Walter Benjamin, Ross MacDonald & Basil Bunting

The heartbreaking season of job applications is now fading gracelessly from the sharpness of ignominy to mere disappointment. The season of breaking the soul in love with a word down to a fine, bitter dust. Of scholarship and bureaucracy. Of hope and the grind of midwinter, as Lowell says in one of his more maudlin poems. Or as Beckett writes, “Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes.”

Somehow it puts me in mind of the legendary rock critic Paul Nelson who, after his prescient early success, became even more notable for his failure. Reading the reviews of the new book on his sad career, Everything is an Afterthought, I was reminded that I met him once, in 1991. I’d flown to New York to see Jay Cocks, who I was working with on his script for Kathryn Bigelow about Joan of Arc. Paul and Jay were in the middle of watching Robert Siodmak’s classic early noir, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (an amazing film which I highly recommend along with Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss-Cross, both with a young, wire-coiled intense Burt Lancaster).

In a hired town car, we set off for a destination that turned out to be The Bronx of all places. As we passed through the Burnt Over district. Jay pointed out where his buddy Brian DePalma shot scenes from "Bonfire of the Vanities." We turned down an improbably well-lit, nicely kept boulevard, Jay reassured me that, “for certain reasons, this is a very safe neighborhood.” It soon became apparent what those were. We disgorged at a pavilion of late modernist neon called Mario’s where we were greeted by a very wide man in a pink dinner jacket whose neck, I swear, was larger in circumference than my thigh. I’m not even sure he had a neck. He extended a huge pink paw which was surprisingly gentle as he ushered us in.

I don’t remember anything about the conversation that night. What Jay said. What Paul said. All I remember was being made to eat a lot of Italian food. I mean a lot a lot. More than anyone should be made to eat. And thinking that if I didn’t the sinister guy named Nick who had an evil grin would shove my lifeless body into a back alley dumpster. That was my evening with Paul Nelson.

I recall it now because in this season of my own defeat it’s instructive to contemplate his odd, willful withdrawal into a self-imposed exile from writing. After creating a name for himself with groundbreaking pieces for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy he ended up clerking at a video store and died a pauper, having subsisted, apparently, on little more than cokes and cigarettes in his final years. It’s a sad story of self-destruction, though I can’t help but feel that David Hadju’s review in the Times is more than a bit smug even it as struggles to assert the value of Nelson’s work.

Nelson idolized some of my own pantheon figures: Peckinpah. Chandler. Ross MacDonald. But his life stands as a cautionary tale for writers who embrace a certain kind of fatalism. Perhaps Hadju has a point, after all. Who of us doesn’t recoil from the logic of extremity, no matter how weirdly it may beckon? In that most magical and haunted of books, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin recalls how his childhood wish to get his fill of sleep was ironically granted as an adult. “I must have made that wish a thousand times, and later it actually came true. But it was a long time before I recognized its fulfillment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain.”

I sometimes think these are the saddest lines I’ve ever read. For if hope cannot set us free, what can?

Which leads me, roundabout, to the detective fiction of Ross MacDonald. A couple of summers ago, Jay Cocks urged me to read The Doomsters. I found it gripping, but also overly plotted to the point of garishness. Nevertheless, I was hooked by MacDonald’s dark way with a sentence. I’ve since read The Underground Man, The Goodbye Look and The Barbarous Coast. What at first I resisted in his byzantine contrivances I’ve now come to see as the singular mark of his spiritual critique.

MacDonald’s baroque plot structures are not simply elaborate arabesques spun out for the purposes of prolonging the reader’s pleasure. Their intricacy – the way they unfold, double-back, and loop around – maps out the floor plan for the haunted house of history. The mind’s cunning labyrinth of justifications and self-deceptions – among the innocent and the guilty alike (the distinction is slowly obliterated in each novel) – mirrors a larger pattern: the way all social networks – family, friends, business, the law – are implicated in each other’s traumas, as Cathy Caruth puts it. History is indeed what hurts, and while Archer may set right some small wrongs, in the end he has always arrived too late to do anything but bear tortured witness, offering hope, as Benjamin writes, only for those who have gone past it, the hopeless.

For if history is to be more than an unbroken pageant of triumphalism then it must, as both Benjamin and MacDonald knew, attest to the failures – to those who were crushed beneath the wheel, cast aside; spurned, neglected, forgotten, and abused. I once thought of writing my dissertation about the poetics of failure, taking up the examples of Oppen, Niedecker, Bunting, and John Wieners, with Beckett as a kind of happy Charon (though I could have drawn just as easily from the life of Delmore Schwartz – who reads him anymore, that burned out glory boy?). It seemed too depressing.

But now, in midwinter’s solar hiatus, when the sun is a brief blinding flare above the horizon, I’m haunted by Paul Nelson’s legacy of abandonment. I think of MacDonald’s grim, doom-chased characters and of Lew Archer stumbling doggedly after them, as if he could catch and break their fall. I think of Bunting’s “Briggflatts” and the ejection of Alexander by the Angel of Judgment from the peak of a mountain into the Northumbrian grass and the song of the slowworm. Failure re-configured as the occasion for coming into the riches of humility.

Somewhere Terry Eagelton writes: “the mortified landscape of history is redeemed. Not by being recuperated into spirit, but by being raised, so to speak, to the second power – converted into a formal repertoire, fashioned into certain enigmatic emblems which then hold the promise of knowledge and possession.”

Just as in Benjamin, where “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe,” so the work of failure, like the work of mourning, is predicated on how traumatic loss is metabolized. Downfall produces rescue. And failure re-inscribes loss into the hermeneutical circle of self-possession: a re-reading that turns depletion into plenitude.

In “Briggflatts,” the poetics of failure transforms a fall from grace into a fall into grace. The expulsion from the violence of ambition leads to the welcome of Gelassenheit.

"But who will entune a bogged orchard,
its blossom gone,
fruit unformed, where hunger and
damp hush the hive?"

In other words, midwinter's counsel is to be secret, and exult.

For The New Year

"When the bells jostle in the tower
the hollow night amid,
then on my tongue the taste is sour
of all I ever did."

-- A.E. Housman

Gnostic Frequencies

I'm delighted to announce the publication of my second full-length collection of poems, Gnostic Frequencies, from Tod Thilleman's Spuyten Duyvil. It's available through Spuyten Duyvil's website and from Amazon, and will be listed next year with Small Press Distribution.

"Patrick Pritchett’s Gnostic Frequencies boldly and brilliantly takes up the Romantic quest to make an infinite Book. Just as Pritchett’s previous volume Burn offered a visionary revision of the Joan of Arc legend, here the poet ‘rewrites the myth’ of the Archive as a self-renewing ruin of absolute meaning, ‘a scripting of / impossible flowers.’ In musical measures, Pritchett aligns ancient paradoxes of the inspirited Word with post-postmodern meditations on the virtual body. This new book stands as a major contribution to the tradition of American radical lyricism."
-- Andrew Joron

The following is excerpted from the book's End Notes:

What is a gnostic frequency? And how do we hear one? Is it the poem we tune into, in the dark? The strange language in the middle of the way, on route, that speaks from the other side of knowing, the voice (who speaks?) that murmurs, in the middle of the night, from within not-knowing, out of hope for another kind of knowing? The poem that desires, above everything else, some small vision of the otherwise?

This is a book of poems about tuning into the hidden legacies and hermetic inheritances of modernism. A book of endarkening, as Duncan might put it, of a way of knowing that is encrypted, not in musty séances and etiolated rituals, but in the quickening mysteries of logos as it arises from, yields to, and reshapes matter. Becoming gnostic means listening to the heretical speech of the caesura, to the extravagant pulses and rhythms of the unspeakable as it swirls about us, allowing language itself to speak.

The poems of Gnostic Frequencies pay tribute to the thread of hermeticism that runs from high modernism to postmodernism. They make special demands of the reader in as much as they ask her to undergo an immersion in the a-signifying stream of language as though it were a form of rhapsodomancy. They are deliberately excessive, intentionally overflowing with an excess of signification and repetition, a kind of archaic ebullience.

A gnostic poetics (always lower-case) militates against positivism, against totality, against knowing-as-such. Such a stance invites charges of obscurantism. But what gnostic poetics really calls for is not a reading of the world, but a way to undergo it. Taken together, they comprise a haphazard map of my desire to write a postmodern sophianic poem. But any wisdom to be found here will be of a purely musical, self-cancelling, order.