Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography

Tom Leech, Director of the Palace Press, asked me to write a poem based on a pinhole photograph from the upcoming exhibit Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography that opens on April 27 at the New Mexico History Museum.  The photograph I chose was Gregg D. Kemp's "Jane Always Dreaded Flying Home." This is the resulting broadside. I just happened to drop in as Tom was printing the first one. It's beautiful. Check out the ligatures on the "st"! (Yes, we poets get excited about the oddest things.)

Other events associated with the show: 

Friday, May 30, 6 pm, “Santa Fe Poets 5,” the fifth of six group poetry readings Davis is organizing as part of his tenure. Joining him in the History Museum Auditorium will be Chee Brossy, Joan Logghe, Carol Moldaw, Henry Shukman, and Farren Stanley. Free.

Sunday, June 1, 1 – 4 pm, “The Poetry of Light,” a writing workshop building on inspiration from Poetics of Light images. Open to high schoolers and older, the event is free, but reservations are recommended. Call  476-5096. 

The Full Essay on David Mutschlecner's "Martin Heidegger / Ezra Pound"

David Mutschlecner, author of three books with Ahsahta Press, lives in Los Alamos. He is a devoted reader of poetry and philosophy and a careful viewer of art. In “Martin Heidegger / Ezra Pound,” he links an existentialist philosopher and an American poet in a meditation on being and meaning and art.

            I was first drawn to this poem by the care-filled voice, the subtle musical effects, the questioning and self-questioning that move the poem forward. Among the many questions lurking in the background is Martin Heidegger’s question from “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence?”

            The poem is beautifully made, and I could write an entire column about the musical effects, but it’s also highly-allusive and subject-driven, so probably the best thing I can do in this small space is provide some background information.

            Martin Heidegger was a German existentialist philosopher whose philosophical masterwork was Being and Time. Poets, though, love Heidegger’s late work, especially Poetry, Language, and Thought. And why wouldn’t they? In that book, he places poets at the center of the human endeavor to connect meaningfully with the world.

             The subtitle is a quote from Heidegger taken from a much-annotated and discussed passage in Being and Time, the meaning of which probably involves the complexities of defining the abstract term Being in relation to the individual beings in the world. Or simply to complicate the notion of Being and beings, to suggest that we don’t know how we are in the world, that it is a point of discussion, this being-in-the-world, that there is a deep unresolvable puzzle, an enigma. (Enigma’s roots in the word for “fable” suggest that an enigma cannot be spoken about in the direct, propositional language of science and reason.)

The poem begins with the poet apparently looking out his window at a parking lot, casually observing at first, until the scene begins to take on a metaphorical charge. Time passes quickly in this poem—one month between stanza one and stanza two, when Heidegger arrives. By stanza three, Heidegger’s question—“what is the Being of [human] beings?—has been “taken down” like the lupins in stanza one. His question “jetties,” metaphorically, from its beginnings in continental philosophy. The visual metaphor established in the opening stanza undergoes its first of several transformations.  But how have Heidegger’s questions about Being been cut off? By what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “the age of epistemology,” this postmodern age that does not interrogate Being but instead interrogates the questions we ask, where knowledge comes from, and how knowledge is authorized. All questions that arise in the wake of Existentialism and of Heidegger himself, who hoped to end metaphysics and ground life in the physical world.

The “isolation” of the lupin is mirrored twice more in the poem, in the isolated Heidegger, whose question has been sidestepped for a century and in the isolated rock singer, who walks out on his own jetty. The singer seems to enact, in his public isolation, the existential dilemma.  On own hand we find ourselves “thrown” into the world, already in a context in which we must try to construct a self and an ethics. On the other hand, we must become “authentic” in private, since, for Heidegger (in an ultimately ironic prouncement vis a vis Heidegger's own complicity with the Nazis), to accept the mass's values--to fall into what Heidegger calls the "they"-- is to fail to be authentic.

Dasein is Heidegger’s term, more or less, for “the Being of human beings” or, according to other accounts, “the being for whom Being is a question.”  The one who has an enigmatic relation with Being (that which is) itself. The singer from a “heavy band” is a “self-/searcher,” Muchslecner writes, using the line break to intimate an entire philosophy: Is he a self? A self who searches? A searcher of himself? Or all of the above?        

            Here we have the “front man,” “dasein,” “the being for whom Being is a question,” “thrown” into the audience, but his true audience, his true hearer, is himself. “He is wireless, // without connection."

In stanza ten, Muchslecner takes an ironic turn. “We have done our best,” he writes, to “sever being from meaning.” What would it mean to sever being from meaning? This statement of the problem suggests that meaning is outside us, either in a deity or in the world. The poet’s job, according to Heidegger, is to use language to call things into revealingness, into a relationship with human beings, to enact “the undistorted / presencing of the thing.”

But this stage’s “meaning is exhausted in constructed charisma.” Charisma, originally related to grace, a gift of power or talent, lately come to mean “a compelling attractiveness.” “Constructed” charisma, then, so not divinely gifted. A modern charisma.

Once again the image of the jetty returns, this time as something going past the voice into the audience. “Stillness reclaims us,” he writes, “even while the solo sears us.” By stanza sixteen, though, something has survived despite or because of the searing. Mutschlecner plays on the word “mass,” the “mass of sound,” and the word “missa,” meaning “mass” or “liturgy.” Could there be a “mass” here, a sacredness? It seems so. Heidegger’s theories turn around a sense of implicit sacredness, and a calling into the open, into presence, of the sacred world—this world—through language. The way a flower opens (the way a flower’s name opens, also), revealing itself, Mutschlecner writes, is alethia.

The flower that opens into unconcealedness leads us by association to the second figure behind the poem, the poet Ezra Pound, who wrote “In a Station of the Metro,” a two line poem based on his study of Asian poetry: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” “The surge of the irrational” leads us to Ezra Pound’s poem, which leads us to the faces in the Metro, which lead us to the “faces in [the] crowd” at the concert.  (Interestingly, both Pound and Heidegger (in his late works) were influenced by what they knew of Asian poetry and philosophy.)

By stanza nineteen, it’s dark. Presumably the speaker is returning from the concert. Mutschlecner asks us to imagine a “beginningless beginning.” Heidegger himself was fascinated by origins, whether “art can be an origin” or only “a cultural phenomenon that has become routine.” (As in “the metal posture” that becomes “reflex.”) This is where Heidegger joins hands with Pound’s “make it new.” The poem ends with “a far nub of thought / where late headlights turn over lupin.” The poem suggests that art can be “a nub of thought,” an origin. A “nub”—both a small protruberance suggesting growth and the crux of the matter.

[NOTE: In Michael North’s Novelty: A History of the New, there’s a fascinating account of Pound’s phrase “make it new,” the phrase that is often seen as the slogan that instigated Modernism’s pursuit of novelty. In the account, North traces the phrase to Pound’s willful mistranslation of an inscription on a Shang Dynasty washbasin that dates from 1766-1753 BC!]

(NOTE: Heidegger’s complicity with the Nazis has made an asterisk necessary every time one discusses him, but his failures as a human being should not cancel his fascinating writings on language--though I suppose his writings on responsibility and ethics are fair game. Ditto Ezra Pound, whose broadcast rantings on economic policy on behalf of the Italian fascists landed him, ultimately, in a mental hospital. His work, especially his prose, is often marred by his mad, wrongheaded brilliance.)

[NOTE: I use the word “crux” deliberately here to hint at a mysterious sacredness, one which also haunts Poetry, Language, and Thought:

Crux, n. 1814, "cross," from Latin crux "cross." Figurative use for "a central difficulty," is older, from 1718; perhaps from Latin crux interpretum "a point in a text that is impossible to interpret," in which the literal sense is something like "crossroads of interpreters." Extended sense of "central point" is from 1888.]

The poem can be found at The Santa Fe Reporter's website: The Yawp Barbaric

David Muschlecner will give a rare reading at Collected Works on Sunday, March 30, at 4 pm in the Muse Times Two series.

Santa Fe Poets 3

Printed at the Press at the Palace of the Governors

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch, on Wednesday, March 26, 2014, at 5:30 pm

SANTA FE, NM — On Wednesday, March 26, 2014, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 3,” the third of six readings, the remainder of which will take place over the next four months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. The March reading will take place in the community room at the Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch. The event is free.

At this reading, Davis will read from his new manuscript and from his most recent book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 23 years.

Joining Davis for Santa Fe Poets 3 will be:

Will Barnes, who was awarded two Academy of American Poets’ Prizes at the University of New Mexico. He has poems in CutBank and the Taos Journal of Poetry and Art and has completed his first manuscript of poems.

Monika Cassel, who is chair of the English Department at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide charter arts school. She is working on a translation of the German poet Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan.

Matt Donovan, who is Co-Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at Santa Fe University of Art & Design. He is the author of Vellum (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner, 2007), which won both the 2006 Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the 2008 Larry Levis Reading Prize. Donovan is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Christopher Johnson, who is Production Manager at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse and host of the Collected Words poetry show. He is a member of the Artist Collective Meow Wolf and a poet, freelance writer, and reporter whose articles and poems have appeared in Photo-Eye Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and The Weekly Alibi.

Kim Parko, who teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the author of three collections of poetry and flash fiction, The Rest of the World Seems Unlikely (Achilles Chapbook Series), Three Acts with Vincent (Mud Luscious Press), and Cure All (Caketrain Press).

The Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch, is located at 6599 Jaguar Drive. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

Forbidden Words!

I recently unearthed, or rather unstacked, this list of "forbidden words" that I've used over the years with beginning poetry students. It's interesting how often, in young writers' reach for the grand gesture, they dip into this gothic vocabulary. I did. And some of the most promising young writers do, too. Unfortunately, instead of the drama we hope to produce, we get melodrama. The words, by the way, were collected from an anthology of "best" high school writing.

I often assign students to use as many of these as possible. Hilarity, as the movie blurbers used to say, ensues!

The Care and Feeding of Poems

This past month's Yawp Barbaric dealt not with a New Mexico poet, but with a poem by the little-known poet Terry Stokes that my younger brother carried in his wallet. And with Julia Kristeva's theory of language, and with guidelines for the care and feeding of poems. Read it here: The Yawp Barbaric

Writers Festival at the Institute of American Indian Arts

JANUARY 2014 WRITERS FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

[All events free and open to the public. All events in the Center for Lifelong Learning Common Room unless noted.]

Saturday, January 4, 6 p.m. Natalie Diaz & Jon Davis

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She has been awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency and the 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. The winner of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language. 

Jon Davis, Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing, is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry—Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements, for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Lavan Prize. He has also received two NEA Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland. He has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts since 1990 and is currently Santa Fe Poet Laureate.

Sunday, January 5, 6 p.m. Chris Merrill & Melissa Febos

Christopher Merrill has published six books of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles his travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East, in the wake of the war on terror. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. A member of the National Council on the Humanities and the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Glamour, Salon, Dissent, New York Times, Kenyon Review, Post Road, Bitch Magazine, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, The Portland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, Anderson Cooper Live, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction prize, she is the recipient of a 2012 Bread Loaf nonfiction fellowship, and 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellowships. Melissa is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). A member of the board of directors for VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, she grew up on Cape Cod, and lives in Brooklyn.

Monday, January 6, 6 p.m. Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Ramona Ausubel

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Calvocoressi's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women Writers' Award. Her poem "Circus Fire, 1944" received The Paris Review's Bernard F. Connors Prize. She teaches at the MFA programs at California College of Arts in San Francisco and at Warren Wilson College. She also runs the sports desk for the Best American Poetry Blog.

Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.  The novel was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post Best Book of the Year.  Her new collection of stories, A Guide to Being Born, was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, The Best American Fantasy and shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

Tuesday, January 7, 6 p.m.  Joan Kane & Chip Livingston

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award for her first poetry collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, published in its first edition by NorthShore Press Alaska and in its second edition by the University of Alaska Press. Her second book, Hyperboreal, was chosen as the winner of the 2012 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has received an individual artist award from the Rasmuson Foundation, a fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Native Writers on the Environment award, a Literature Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She is the School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence for 2014.

Chip Livingston is the mixed blood author of the mixed genre collection Naming Ceremony, forthcoming in February from Lethe Press. He’s also published two poetry collections – Crow-Blue, Crow-Black and Museum of False Starts. Chip has received writing awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, the AABB Foundation and University of Colorado. Chip divides his time between Montevideo, Uruguay, and Lakewood, Colorado. 

Wednesday, January 8, 6 p.m. Sherwin Bitsui & Ken White

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.

Ken White is a poet and screenwriter who divides his time between Montana and Southern California and teaches Screenwriting in the MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He co-wrote and co-produced the feature film Winter in the Blood, and has adapted Debra Earling's Perma Red for the screen, which he is attached to direct. He is currently adapting the YA novel Stolen for the screen with Lucy Christopher. He is the author of one book of poems, Eidolon (Peel Press 2013).

Thursday, January 9, 6 p.m. Linda Hogan & Santee Frazier *In IAIA Auditorium*

Linda Hogan, Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, screenplay, and essays. Her books include Rounding the Human Corners, a Pulitzer nominee; People of the Whale; Mean Spirit, a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power, also a finalist for the International Impact Award in Ireland. WW Norton has published her fiction. In poetry, The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a Lannan Fellowship. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.

Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a 2013-14 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. His first collection of poetry, Dark Thirty, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.

Thursday, January 9, 8:30 p.m. Student Showcase 

Students in the Institute of American Indian Arts' Low Residency MFA Program will read from their works.

Friday, January 10, 6 p.m. Sherman Alexie *In IAIA Auditorium*

Fiction writer, poet, performer, screenwriter, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories from Grove Press; War Dances, stories and poems, from Grove Press; and Face, poetry, from Hanging Loose Press. He is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Award, PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, American Book Award, and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award. He was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. In 1999, he was selected by The New Yorker as one of its “20 Writers for the 21st Century” and, in 1996, Granta named him one of the “Twenty Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40.”

Barbaric Yawp 3

A Poem is Not a Puzzle to be Solved, but a Chocolate to be Savored

In the third installment of "The Yawp Barbaric," I discuss Dana Levin's poem, "Moo and Thrall." I've been trying to foreground a discussion of the pleasures of poems rather than their thematic concerns, though the two are, of course, entwined. As the poet John Ciardi wrote long ago in his essay  "How a Poem Means": "The human-insight of the poem and the technicalities
 of the poetic devices are inseparable. Each feeds the other. This interplay is the poem’s
 meaning, a matter, not of WHAT IT MEANS (nobody can say entirely what a good poem
 means) but HOW IT MEANS–a process one can come much closer to discussing." At any rate, this is an old-fashioned idea with feet stuck in what some would call the mud of New Critical reading. 

In fashionable classrooms these days, we're apt to leap straight to the "social position" of the author,  the political context in which the poet authored the poem, and the way the poem circulates in society--how it challenges or supports the power structure. And that's a valid enterprise. Certainly languages are socially constructed and carry the weight of imperialism, occupation, and border negotiations; and the author is partly socially-constructed, either carrying or rejecting (but never stepping entirely outside) historical and cultural circumstances. But this process commodifies the poem, asks What kind of product is this? It's a useful approach if your interests are political, but what if you're interested in everything about the poem? 

We may, in fact, at least sometimes, not be bearers or resisters of power. We share most biological traits across cultures, and we have made our various rituals around births, comings of age, marriages, funerals, and our negotiations with the universe.  All of this living can, of course, be seen through the lens of power, but as with any single lens, we miss more than we see. A wedding, for example, involves all sorts of powers--a battle between church and state over the right to sanction the wedding, a ritual whose existence might be traced to either patriarchal concerns about womens' independence or the tribe's concerns about the men's commitment to their families or both, etc. etc.  But also, within that arena, a man and a woman (or, at last, a man and a man or a woman and a woman) vow to remain together, often in total ignorance of the historical conditions that precede and surround them. And if you asked them whether their kiss was the pope's or the king's... Well, you do want to stay for the reception, don't you? 

So I have chosen the lens of pleasure, the lens of the kiss. Depending on who you talk to, the lens of pleasure is a decadent distraction, the only lens (because meaning is illusory), or one among many qualities that make a poem a poem. Which raises another unanswerable question: What is poetry? We humans created and keep recreating poetry, but like the economy, we don't always agree on what it is or how it works. In most ages poetry is marked by an intense interest in life (and, Lorca reminds us, death), in embodying aspects of life and death in language, and in bringing an intense focus to the language we use in this process. Finally it's the intensity of the tradition that distinguishes the poets. As the poet Chuck Calabreze likes to say, "Poets experience life more intensely than the rest of us--and then make us feel bad by writing about it." 

Avoidance and Confrontation: Dana Levin takes on women's rights in the age of spectacle