Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

imogen xtian smith, stemmy things

 

i am not a woman. My gender is feminine.
Even the moon travels farther for what
it wants. Mostly i am water—swollen,
mourning, tie a blue ribbon round my finger
& forget me. Do you think me monstrous,
wanting my body my way? My poem
is a dream saying teach me where
you’re brittle & maybe we can rest there,
where breath tethers limbs to toes
wrapped blue knit, where nothing alone
is useful. Deep in the quiet i touch myself
undone, stars still stars over turns
& brambles, a dark wood weaving beyond
city light. You love the mess, don’t you,
the way consequence gives & gives—
stony dismay, a sweetness of rest. Here’s
a poem for my body, stemmy thing—it
begins & ends in dirt. (“deep ecology”)

There is such an electricity to the lyric of Lenapehoking/Brooklyn-based poet and performer imogen xtian smith’s full-length debut, stemmy things (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022). “Poetry both is & is not a luxury.” they write, to open the “author’s note” included at the beginning of the collection. “My intention has been to trouble the worlds in which i move, support, fail, live, struggle, love & continue trans-ing, addressing with rigor the circumstances that continuously shape me.” Through a book-length lyric, smith writes an extended sequence of sharp moments across narrative thought, one deeply engaged with numerous threads, all of which wrap in and around identity, self and gender. “Nothing is ever finished,” they write, as part of the poem “deep ecology,” set near the beginning. “Consequence gives a body / shape, says you cannot build home in a lie.”

One immediately garners a sense of Bernadette Mayer’s influence echoing through these poems (a quote by Mayer is one of two set to open the first section), as well as Eileen Myles, both of whom offer a fierce and even straightforward directness in their own ongoing works. Across the poems of stemmy things, smith unfolds a sequence of diaristic offerings of narrative examination, utilizing the suggestion of biography (whether actual or fictional, or some blend of both) for the sake of exploring and defining truths and discoveries across the length and breadth of becoming who they are meant to become. “By way of explanation,” they write, to open the poem “so the maggots know,” “i am / an unreliable narrator of my body / living gender to gender, marked / at birth yet far flung of phylum / straddling difference / between impossibility & lack—woman / & man—i, neither, though always / with children, a queendom / of eggs to the belly [.]” There is such a confidence to these lyrics, these examinations, reaching across vast distances with clarity and ease. If only a fraction of the rest of us could hold such fearlessness and poise while navigating uncertain terrain. “You need to know a radical touch,” they write, as part of the opening poem, “open letter utopia,” subtitled, “after Audre Lorde,” “that my yes means yes, my no, no, that yes & no / & maybe may shift while we linger, articulate, break / apart as moments ask. Does your blood taste iron?”

Gina Myers, Some of the Times

 

New city same shit
Moving through
the streets
pre-fall golden
in late afternoon
sunlight / bright red
crumbling brick
& shoddy griffiti
asks freedom?
Each year I fight
& each year
the things that hold
me back feel stronger
Shirking the day’s
responsibilities
to sit by the river
this afternoon
I wouldn’t give this
up but no it’s not
freedom. (“PHILADELPHIA”)

From Philadelphia poet Gina Myers comes her third full-length collection, Some of the Times (Baltimore MD: Barrelhouse Books, 2020), following A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), two books I now regret having missed. Some of the Times is a collection of first-person lyrics that explore her lived experience and geography, that being the city of Philadelphia, a city that to her was fairly new at the moment of composition. Most of the poems are shorter, almost clipped, but provide the sense of being very much part of a larger structure, suggesting the collection less an assemblage than a suite of contained lyrics. Myers writes on paying rent, police brutality, tenuous employment, chronic illness, labour camps in Cuba, baseball games and thunderstorms. Her poems occupy the ground level of a city in ruin amid dangerous heat. There is a particular flavour of working class ethos that permeates the culture, and the poetry, of Philadelphia that is reminiscent (positively, of course) of work I’ve seen over the years out of Hamilton, Ontario, or even the border city of Windsor. Myers aesthetic, of course, is very much that, but blended with an influence from the lyric of the New York School of Poets, something she wrote about in her short 2016 piece “Is there room in the room that you room in?” for the ottawa poetry newsletter:

In an interview, Eileen Myles defines what it means to be a New York School poet: “As an aesthetic it means putting yourself in the middle of a place and being excited and stunned by it, and trying to make sense of it in your work.” This, putting one’s self somewhere and being excited to be there despite all that being there involves--the joyful as well as the heartbreaking and ugly--and trying to make sense of it, is what poetry is for me. And I am happy to be here. And I’m happy you’re here too.

The poem “PHILADELPHIA,” a longer sequence near the beginning of the collection, sits as a poem of arrival and of placement, rife with self-dismissal and regret: “How much of / an asshole am I / that I live / somewhere / for a month / & think I can / tell its story / Every day there / is news of / a new police / brutality / What use / is love / right now?” According to the notes at the back of the collection, the poem was composed from August to October, 2014 (which is, curiously, exactly during the time I was in Philadelphia, and was first able to meet Myers). In a conversation with Krystal Languell, posted at Entropy on September 26, 2017, Myers discusses the poem, which had appeared earlier that same year as a chapbook with Barrelhouse:

Philadelphia was written within the first two months of my move to Philadelphia, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability for me personally. The book wrestles with that instability along with wrestling with larger social and political issues. The world outside of me has remained to be uncertain and unstable, certainly hostile and perhaps increasingly so under the current government–or at least whatever veil of “democracy” and “justice” there was has been lifted. In that sense, not much has changed from the time of writing the book. However, personally, I am feeling more settled in, more at home here in Philly, though I’m reaching my three year mark, which is when my wanderlust usually comes on strong.

There are elements of influence in her first-person explorations of self and the crumbling infrastructures of city and culture, from Eileen Myles to fellow Philadelphia poet ryan eckes; structural echoes to her poems that run similarly down the page and through the excess of sirens, unkempt streets and the ravaged potential of human accomplishment. This is her restlessness, her “wanderlust,” as she calls it, alongside a hardscrabble lyric, one pulled together from lyric scraps, struggle and observation. “I don’t need your theories,” she writes, to close out the poem “4.18.14,” “to understand my lived / experience. There is / an anger I carry / inside I will never / let go of. Something basic / to hold onto while everything / else disappears.”

 

TRIPWIRE 16 : PERFORMANCE/WRITING

So much has been said that has spoken to all of us, about Kevin as a writer, about Kevin as a supporter of so many writers and artists, about Kevin’s gift for making us all feel like we were stars, about Kevin’s incredible relationship with Dodie. Kevin’s inclusion of me into the world of Poets Theater gave me laughter, lasting friendships and joyous moments of being a ham. He taught me that it is ok to laugh at what you love and to love the ridiculous in everything (including one’s self) with depth and heart. In 1994 he wrote the play Flophouse for the tenth anniversary of The Lab. In it we jumped to the future and at the end he wakes to find Dodie telling him it was all a dream. He asks her if he is “more divine than the sun and moon?” She answers that she doesn’t “have an answer to that one. Not yet.” Jump now to the future again and the answer is most clearly yes. All my love to Dodie and to everyone who was blessed to know Kevin Killian. (Michelle Rollman)

The first element of the new issue of David Buuck’s TRIPWIRE: a journal of poetics I went through was the lengthy “Kevin Killian Tribute,” titled “A Poets Theater Tribute to Kevin Killian,” around the late San Francisco writer, editor and enthusiast Kevin Killian [see my own small tribute to him here]. The feature includes tributes by Eileen Myles, Scott Hewicker, Cliff Hengst, Karla Milosevich, Craig Goodman, Michelle Rollman, Anne McGuire, Wayne Smith, Tanya Hollis, Steve Orth, Lindsey Boldt, Maxe Crandall, Arnold J. Kempt, Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, Susan Gevirtz, Laynie Browne, Patrick Durgin, Norma Cole and Jo Giardini. “I honestly don’t know what to do with this moment in time when my peers are dying,” Eileen Myles writes, to open her “Don’t Go.” She later on writes: “There was always a youthiness about Kevin Killian. To be young is to be an unabashed fan. He had it as an elder. Kevin had a marvelous instrument for effusing, his changeable expansive reckless grand dame elegant surprising voice sourced from an endless bucket of light from somewhere that scattered love and fun and wit and bitchiness around us all and offered a lawn and a fence to hold us in.” Scott Hewicker begins his tribute writing: “The first play I saw by Kevin Killian was Life after Prince at Kiki Gallery in 1993. It was a beautifully messy spectacle in a cramped gallery full of people. What was exciting about it was its unpredictable mix of amateur flatness and high camp. I’m not sure if they were always fun to sit through, but they sure were a lot of fun to be in.” To introduce the section, editor Buuck writes:

In addition to his work as a poet, novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary organizer, and Top-100 Amazon reviewer (not to mention holding a full-time day job), Kevin Killian made time to write or co-write (and often direct) over 50 Poets Theater plays. Almost always performed as staged readings, with one or two rehearsals, minimal sets and costuming, Kevin’s Poets Theater work demonstrated a commitment to a community-based, non-professional ethos where sociality and shared laughter was as important—if not more so—than how the work may have lived on the page.

At over three hundred pages, there is an enormous amount going on in this issue worth looking at, including an absolutely fascinating interview Michelle N. Huang conducted with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Teddy Yoshikami around a writing/dance collaboration the two of them did .As Huang offers as part of her introduction: “I first encountered Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s work in graduate school, where her poem ‘Fog’ became something of a touchstone for me as I worked through my dissertation on molecular aesthetics and posthumanism in Asian American literature. When I learned the poem was part of a triptych on the transitional states of water—the poem ‘Fog’ preceded by ‘Mizu’ (water) and ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ (ice)—and that all three poems had been created as poetry/dance performances during the early 1980s in collaboration with the Basement Workshop, the foundational Asian American Movement organization in New York, I wanted desperately to see them. My search led me from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory (where one of the 80 copies of the artist’s book containing ‘Mizu’ can be found), to uncatalogued boxes at Beinecke, and eventually to the choreographer, Theodora (Teddy) Yoshikami, of Morita Dance Company, who still lives in New York. She had given the VHS tapes to the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, where they waited in a box, for me (I felt) to find.” This is really is an interesting interview, especially on a project forty-years distant that hasn’t (it would appear) received the acknowledgement, critical or otherwise, that it deserves (should interviewer/critic Huang be considering putting a volume of this text plus a critical introduction together, say, the way Wave Books produced Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior?). I would even say that this interview is worth the price of admission alone (I would also say that for the Kevin Killian section, so I’m basically telling you that you would be wise to pick up a copy of this issue). The interview, also, is immediately followed by a stunning four-part poem “YOU ARE HERE” by Berssenbrugge, the first part of such reads:

We’ve powerful analytic tools to simplify an experience, so we can absorb it emotionally.

There’s joy in transmuting a supernova into science and wonder, at the same time.

World’s a net of relations in which appearance is one; to correlate the visible with the personal makes it real.

Seeing, a kind of consciousness, materializes its form.

Then everything constellates out to the farthest star.

The issue also includes numerous other features, from poetry to scripts to a whole slate of book reviews at the end.