Kyger “seventy-seven…” response by Andrew Miller

Coming across Kyger’s poem “Seventy-Seven Beautiful and Adorable Things for Arthur Okamura’s 77^th Birthday” was very interesting given its construction as a list, and it reminded me of some points that were made by my cohort member, Dameion Wagner, about how wide ranging Kyger is without ever being demoted to “jack of all trades … master of none.”

In Kyger’s interview with Lawrence Nahem for Occident, Nahem brings up the fact that Kyger has been involved in multiple media forms, including television and music. Here Nahem is curious if the integration of poetry with different mediums overpowers the poetry, or is somehow a distraction to it.

Kyger’s response is to say: “…I think poetry is strong enough. I don’t think some poets are adventuresome enough about the space they can make … poetry is storytelling and it’s acting and it is music too and it’s theatre.”

Why I bring all of this up is that I really appreciate Kyger’s range and I think that she was iconoclastic in this respect. Here in this same interview she talks about poetry being trapped on the page too long. Personally I think one issue I have is an uncertainty as to how to free myself from the page itself. Not that I’m unaware of the options – and boy are there ever options these days – but I’m unsure of my ability to make use of the outlets in a productive way. I’m unsure if my poetry “is strong enough.”

A good example of how this works could be drawn from the podcast Heavyweight, the “Milt” episode (season 2, episode 9). Host Jonathon Goldstein helps to reconnect his friend Greggor’s father, poet Milton P. Ehrlich with Milton’s estranged poet friend. Goldstein’s interest is in the blame put upon his podcast for ruining this friendship in the first place; but, of course, discovers it is significantly deeper than this. The culmination of the episode being that Ehrlich’s only emotional outlet is his poetry, and it is through a poem that the friendship is mended – both live on a telephone call, as well as in recorded performance as broadcast within the podcast.

For Kyger to have embraced early home video production and television broadcast as mediums for further poetic adventure, I think that if she were still alive and producing we would find her similarly embracing technologies such as online video, podcasting, and who knows what else. The Heavyweight example is likely a bit too on-the-nose though and I’d like to return to the poem I’m focused on itself, the one that brought this line of thought to life.

In “Seventy-Seven…” Kyger shows how something as basic as a list can be transformed into its own form of storytelling, the shape of an honorarium. I imagine her reading it out for Arthur Okamura before a dinner crowd or perhaps ahead of singing a drunken version of the Happy Birthday song. I find the use of two closely related adjectives: “beautiful” and “adorable” serve to shape the praise and highlight dissimilarities. For example, how lines 18 – 21 refer to the “disgustingly un-adorable” until broken by the “refreshingly beautiful” of lines 22 – 26 with both terms being reunited in line 27 the “Beautiful and adorable things that you never paint are unicorns and cherry blossoms”.

The repetition of the word “and”, particularly as the launching off point for so many of the list-item-stanza’s feels very spoken-word to me as well. Reading the poem feels like someone rushing to get in every last bit of emotion they feel for the subject. The reader learns so much about the energy of Okamura, and that energy transfers to the reader not only on an intellectual level, but very much in an auditory way.

Finally, lines 74 – 77 provide such power that I feel as if I am at this party – that I desperately want to be there:

74. and terrific use of color
75. to transform air [what?! That’s magic right there! APM]
76. into this birthday celebration
77. for without You we would have nothing to have a beautiful and adorable

party about

Kyger’s interview with Dale Smith & Michael Price for Jacket begins with a comment from Smith: “Your poetry is very much in your mouth. You hear the voice thinking and exploring, revealing…” which is exactly the experience I find myself having here.

Responding to the statement, Kyger says that: “It’s a physical voice, yes. I think that’s the best you can do sometimes, trying to “score” it as closely as you can on the page. … to get the little subtleties of breath and tone, or change of tone or character emphasis.”

This in a nutshell is the genius of Kyger and the thing I believe I am learning as the direct connection to our previous poet studies on Olson and Niedecker. Breath and tone … breath and tone.

My selection for this week’s paired reading is Joanne Kyger’s poems “The Art of Living Slowly” and “Summer Sorting”; which appear back to back within her collection On Time. While I have noticed the connection of Kyger’s work to Niedecker and Olson (among many others), I think what is interesting is how often her poems stray from the more strict adherence to the latter two poets Objectivist mandate. In fact, when I was reading some of the more current (as in G.W. Bush era) affair oriented pieces I saw very little connection back to the readings we’d done so far. All of this is to say, that I’ve really enjoyed all of our readings, and the selection of paired poems for this essay were decided by how they reminded me of Niedecker – while still being very much in their own voice (that of Kyger).

“The Art of Living Slowly” is an interesting title to me given the background Kyger has with Buddhism and Zen studies. In the title the set up seems to be that this will be a meditative piece about balance and, well, living slowly – such as with intention. Instead of a subtle poem that eases the reader into such a meditation – slowly – this piece throws the reader into a rather vain and extremely public drama.

• How I wish I had had
• my hair cut before being photographed
• at the local Figure Drawing Show

…

• on the front page of the Local Costal News

The juxtaposition of the title to this opening created a sense of anger or perhaps betrayal in me; but, that also became the energy for moving me into the next half of the poem wherein the title rings more explicitly true. Hung on the word, idea of “air”, the reader takes a breath and then realizes that the poet is not so interested in this minutia and is in fact somewhat offended by the idea that they have been put out there, for the public to see. Instead the true interest is in the age of things. “How old is air” the poet asks. The resulting answer brings circles back upon the opening. Instead of looking at the vanity of the individual, Kyger now looks at the vanity of nations – of human existence itself – “holding the sorrowful remnants of little nations” … “whose names we don’t even know anymore”. Ultimately the realization made by the poet is that:

15        the ground is always changing, always changing

From here we know that this was never about the individual (explicitly) nor the group/nations (explicitly) but about the broader meaning of what it is to live, and to be exposed, and to be private. In interviews within There You Are a recurring theme is change, likely due to how frequently Kyger moved in her youth, the struggles within her family, and then her constant shifting of place and in some cases partnership throughout her life.

“Summer Sorting” tackles the theme of living slowly through “simplicity” and continues the dichotomy of individual v nation:

5          One hears the nation needs “energy” “growth”

6               what about “repose”

7                                                   it takes about five minutes

8                                 for graciousness to set in

…

11            Assume the world’s wealth is in pebbles and leaves

12                              freely laying there

The pace of this poem is very similar in “The Art of Living Slowly”, beginning with the title which bears little resemblance to the first stanza, the set-up, which is instead about judgement and in particular, what is failure. In the previous poem we are treated to the idea of nations failing, being won over by other nations, and yet for all of it, even the names do not remain: “whose names we don’t even know anymore”. Within “Summer Sorting” these nations are seeking what is next without taking time to consider, what is now? The individual too, because once more we realize the trick being played is not tied to the size of the subject. Kyger almost threatens the reader into accepting the slow and the simple: “Unless, of course, you like overabundance” – which surely we do not.

“Summer Sorting” tackles the sorting of thought right out of the gate; which is in a way different from “The Art of Living Slowly” which is more sly about getting to the matter at hand.

• It’s amazing how articulate you can be
• Without any idea what you are saying

This reminded me of the first interview in There You Are, with Paul Watsky, where Kyger mentions how journaling is often full of negative thoughts, ideas and attitudes. “[H]ow articulate you can be” when your mind is free to sort through the day or week or year in a journal, and hash out what impacted you in a memorable way – usually meaning negatively. As the cliché goes, you don’t learn anything by winning, you learn through failure.

Ultimately in the end, both poems shift back to the earth and no longer are the individual or the nation-state of any importance at all. Kyger elegantly ties these constructs off by reminding the reader of the history of dirt, and how unimportant our personal realities are in comparison.

Place as Bioregion, Poems as Series
“From I-94”

Paw Paw, the Pokagon
Great migrations to the House of David sent
the seventh messenger
the Christian commune amusement park
now this Potawatomi Zoo
Michiana
mish mash
the bluff and the casino

Shinglediggens
capital cut through
red oak and red bud
shipped to St. Lawrence
profits and pelts

Dickersville
white pine manifest destiny
cut through and cleared
lumber labor lost
no dollar left to dicker over

Coloma
California gold rush
good luck
Brought back nothing new
but a name, and
eventually
one of one-thousand
one-hundred
and fifty
farmers
fields to be reduced and split by that divided progress

“Why don’t you go play on ninety-four?”
joked mother
pushing sister and I out the door
Russian olive trees, thick with thorns,
ash and oak and evergreen
a forest of fern separates house from highway

my hideaway among the coreopsis
my hemlock and yarrow
my poison ivy home

I built shelters of broken sticks on paths
pioneered by deer, foxes
history
lean-to / tee-pee \

Little Paw Paw lake feeds the creek
waste water run-off
snakes eating frogs
turtles

Toughskins and white tennies
thick with green bog mud
phosphorus
a gully to cross with willow tree rope

gladiola and sweet fruits in Farmer Friday’s field
competes with acrid air
the county dump four lanes and a median away

Lorine Niedecker “Lake Superior” by Andrew Miller

I entered into “Lake Superior” as a displaced Michigander, whose final earthly wish is to have my ashes set a float on a lake breeze, landing where they may along the coast. Niedecker has provided me a far better eulogy for that eventual event than Hemingway’s “The Big Two-Hearted River” ever could. For two pieces set within a similar time and place, one speaks far more to the Heidegger, Olson, et al. temporal sense of logos – as opposed to the “logic and classification” (ascribed by Spanos, to Aristotle) found in the latter.

• In every part of every living thing
• Is stuff that once was rock

The theme of commonality vs. classification is striking to me throughout. In the beginning the reader is meant to accept the universality of carbon (ostensibly so) – their very blood courses with the same minerals that make up the earth.

5          Iron the common element of earth

Here I wonder if the reader is only to accept that “iron” (as in ore) is a common element, which is of course suggested in the next line:

6          in rocks and freighters

or if in fact the reader may take this a step further and see “iron” (as in the act used on clothing); as in, to flatten everything and make it even. Of the two, which is the more Olsonian ideal of logos? By lines 10-12 we see this sort of cooperation between entities:

10        The waters working together

11                    internationally

12        Gulls playing both sides

Interestingly, this point where the poet brings a sense of cooperation and commonality to fruition is also where the reader realizes how the Gulls portend classification, and thus competition. Internationally transitively means multiple nations; while in “playing both sides” the reader understands that these multitudes are in competition.

It is lines 13-18 that the reader is introduced to the ultimate antagonism occurring here. Pierre Esprit Radisson was the first known European to survey the now famous Pictured Rocks on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Niedecker ascribes a quote to him, calling the area:

14        “a laborinth of pleasure”

Unmistakable in the post-modern form is the (mis)spelling of the word labyrinth. Using the word labor within Niedecker’s spelling suggests that Radisson conceives of this area as one of utility, industry. His ultimate fate ends with torture at the hands of the Mohawk Indians – who in life he had betrayed. Thus the reader knows now what they are up against and throughout the poem, Niedecker uses the theme of temporal sensuality, generally portrayed through natural scenery, in opposition to judgement and competition portrayed as nationalism and religious fervor.

Each section of the poem set apart in this serialized format that is almost like the rowing of an oar, circling back around into the same water, only slightly different because the reader, the rower, has moved one stroke further along in the lake. Lines 19-23 describe a canoe as having been made of Seder not Cedar, and the reader must consider the new category of religion being put upon the land. Following on this, the next section (lines 24-26) the sign of the cross is set upon the “Beauty: impurities in the rock” – a judgement made by who? Possibly Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit priest who founded Sault St. Marie on behalf of the French and is referenced in lines 27-35. Those same Seder [sic] woods cast as “ribs” – fitting both of boats and of bone, both once more referenced in the same passages on Marquette.

This round and round of nature > native > voyager (voyeur?) continues through Joliet, Englishmen, Schoolcraft, Chippewas and the Soo. Not until lines 50-56 does the reader (possibly) meet the poet themselves:

 

50        Greek named

51        Exodus-antique

52        kicked up in America’s

53        Northwest

54        you have been in my mind

55        between my toes

56        agate

With this section the reader learns that the poet themselves are struggling between the temporal and the logical, the mind and the touch of the toes. This precedes my favorite section to read out loud because it is so pleasing to my ears:

57        Did not man

58                    maimed by no

59                                stone-fall

60        mash the cobalt

61                    and carnelian

62                                of that bird

Finally, a pure aural aesthetic that engages the reader with energy and movement without expecting any direct translation. This shift in form remains a pronounced feature throughout the final four sections of the poem and seem to encourage ever more playfulness with words. As the history of the region comes nearer in time to the poet and the poem’s writing, the poet shows themselves more and more to the reader. Ultimately the historical content of the poem, the temporal sensations, and the poet become one.

Lines 79-100 show in quickened pace this back and forth, the deermeat called back by the poet’s dear. The voyagers crossed – of time space and religiosity – while “we successfully passed”; until “we hurry / home”. Ultimately what the reader seems most clearly to come away with is how the Olsonian/Niedecker logos of “lake” is superior to anything else ascribed within.

Comparative Criticism of Charles Olson by Andrew Miller

Olson’s use of the stasis of the moon as a prominent phanopoeia in the two pieces selected for this close reading may seem a bit on-the-nose, but I was interested in how two similar openings can lead a reader through significantly different narratives.

In “Moonset, Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 AM” the poem opens with the two lines: “Goodbye red moon / In that color you set”. This opening is mimicked later in Olson’s writings with the piece “May 31, 1961”, with the opening phrase: “the lilac moon of the earth’s backyard”.

Both phrases set up the reader with an understanding that the Field is to be set within the context of that state of the moon. The first, a “red moon”, invokes a sort of power which a reader expects to consume the poem. A red moon feeling less settled, more mysterious than a yellow moon – or merely a moon, new or otherwise. Followed with the phrase that this red is the color that has been “set”, as well as being the color of the moon as it sets – leads the reader’s emotions to feel the power of this moon consuming the new day.

Juxtaposed from this however is “the lilac moon” which casts an image of calm, settled existence. Reading of “the earth’s backyard” furthers this notion, asserting that we are in a familiar and relaxing place. The following two lines then in “May 31, 1961” explain that we are here, also, at the moment when the moon is setting.

2          which gives silence to the whole house

3          falls down

Only the words “falls down” feel specifically energized and awakened – with greater impact as it is set in opposition to words such as “lilac”, “backyard”, and “silence”. “Moonset, Gloucester” instead used a single word, red, to deliver the reader into high energy. This departure is merely the setup however, resulting in the coming disparate poems.

“Moonset, Gloucester” becomes violent with the setting of this “red moon”.

3          west of the Cut I should imagine

4          forever Mother

Olson connects the moon and the mother in the next three lines, somewhat obtusely using the words “you set” and “I rise”, allowing for a good deal of interpretation.

5          After 47 years this month

6          a Monday at 9 AM

7          you set I rise I hope

Is this the birth of Olson? Was his mother killed in his delivery? Researching the matter has not turned up any answers as of yet. Olson’s second wife, with whom he did not have any children, died in an automobile accident in 1956, so I questioned what motives may have been found from that incident in this poem, but no connection seemed plausible for me. No answers are to be found in the second half of this poem either. Further bluster, but no resolution. Oddly, this section is where the path of each poem find yet another intersection with each other; not of content, but of context.

From an image of this thing – the moon – we are drawn into a dialogue. Within “May 31, 1961” the dialogue turns the tables on the reader’s initial perspective. Instead of viewing the moon from the earth, the reader finds themselves firmly planted on the lilac moon gazing upon the “silence” and “quiet” of the earth. Here, the reader hears what it is that the moon has to say to the earth and its inhabitants.

6                                  poor planet

7                      now reduced

8                      to disuse

9          who looks so big

10        and alive

11        I am talking to you

Conversation of “Moonset, Cloucester” is automatically energized and violent, as the way the poem’s first line opened had been.

8          a free thing as probably

9          what you more were Not

10        the suffering one you sold

11        sowed me on Rise

12        Mother from off me

13        God damn you God damn me my

14        misunderstanding of you

Then, with the final line, these poems diverge significantly again.

15        I can die now I just begun to live

As opposed to the final lines of “May 31, 1961” sleepy eyelids entering the new day: “lilac moon / old backyard bloom”. Olson follows through on his promise from the first line to the last in these poems. Similar subjects and structure – both poems being fewer than 25 lines (one page), invoke the shared human experience of the moon, and of conversation – result in drastically different narratives. First the reader experiences the anger of an aging person, who seems upset with their mother over having been born into the world; potentially without the mother remaining in it to help them along the way. In the second, the reader meets the moon and learns the perspective of what plant Earth might appear like to a body only viewing it at slumber, and conceptually at peace.

12        The shades

13        on the windows

14        of the Centers’

15        place

16        half down

17        like nobody else’s

18        lets the glass lower halves

19        make quiet mouths at you

Objectionist, as defined in his manifesto by Olson, is represented in both of these poems by giving an equal amount of emotional intent to the moon-object as to the human-animal-object. Similarly, a sort of consciousness is even bestowed upon “the windows” with their “quiet mouths” from “May 31, 1961”.