The Best American Poetry

"The Menu" [by Terence Winch]

The Menu

Watched some videos of you singing about the
famine, which made me really hungry. I ordered
the worst food on the menu, the most powerful
drinks.  I sat below a giant screen on which the
golf championship went on and on, with nobody
anywhere paying any attention, including all the
golfers throughout  the global golfing
community. I hate the word community
because everything is a community these days:
the nose-picking community, the community of
AM radio listeners. Don’t make me part of your
community. I hate golf, too, though I like the
idea of a hole-in-one.  Keep your language
experiments to yourself.  Everyone hates them.

—Terence Winch
from Tight

The Fast Flying Vestibule: I’m Glad I’m Prepared for the Recession (Terence Winch)

terry winch, jesse winch, alan oresky, joe stork, pete adland, doug pell ca.1973.

Once upon a time (actually, late 1971), the strangest old-time string-band in American musical history was formed, and I was there at the beginning.  The Fast Flying Vestibule (named after a train celebrated in a song) did a little bit of everything, from Charlie Poole to Carl Perkins to doo-wop to Kerry polkas. We lived to have a good time. We were not purists like The New Lost City Ramblers, preserving the sacred traditions of the past, or the Red Clay Ramblers, the brilliant North Carolina group that stayed pretty close to the approved text.  We did whatever felt good.

jesse, terry, doug, alan, and joe in the 1970s

The other night, at McGinty’s pub in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, near where I live, I told a friend that my old string-band was having its first reunion in decades on Sunday, 12 July.  “Oh, I love old-timey music,” she said. “What did you play in the group?”  “Tenor banjo and button accordion,” I replied.  “There is no button accordion in old-timey music," she informed me.  “Well, there was in our version of it,” I told her.  There were no tenor banjos in old-timey either, if the truth be told.  But, the FFV was sui generis. 

Flags and shamrocks galore at The Tara House in DC, where "Crazy Guggenheim" of the Jackie Gleason Show once sat in with us, and where I make a rare appearance on the drums

Pete Adland, 5-string banjo player, left the band after about a year and a half, to become a psychiatrist.  Pete has never even met Ric Sweeney (pictured below), our talented guitarist, who is also a terrific songwriter and a singer, with a voice to rival Jimmie Rodgers or Hank Williams, IMO.  Ric---whose show-stopper was a song of his called "Mr. Rain"--- was in the FFV for about the last two years, before we disbanded sometime in 1977 (the year Jesse and I started the traditional Irish band Celtic Thunder).  He replaced Doug Pell, our original guitar player and one of the best flat-pickers you’ll ever hear, when Doug moved to New York.  My brother Jesse (guitar, 5-string banjo, and our genial host), Joe Stork (acoustic bass and ace vocalist), Alan Oresky (fiddle and mandolin wunderkind), and I were the unchanging members of the cast.  Tomorrow will be the first time all seven alumni of the band have ever been together in the same place at the same time.  

We played the Red Fox Inn, a mostly bluegrass venue, in Bethesda, on Tuesday nights for years. We played Ireland's Four Provinces in DC for the first year it was open (we could crank out 4 sets of Irish music if the gig called for it). We went to folk and fiddle festivals, played for antiwar rallies and leftwing fundraisers, and in the backyards and front porches of our friends.  At one event we won a contest, with the prize being three hours of recording time in a state-of-the-art studio, and wound up recording a song of mine called "I'm Glad I'm Prepared for the Recession," whose objectionable last word kept it off the airwaves (until we recorded an expurgated version for an anthology on the Paredon label, now part of Smithsonian/Folkways). We self-produced an album entitled Union Station, after a song of mine (sung by Joe Stork--Download Union Station).  The actress Karen Allen, still a dear friend, can be heard on the chorus of "Goodbye Miss Lisa," another song on the album.  Vinyl copies are still available (for real). 

 

Everyone still plays music—Alan is a great demand for weddings and other events; Doug put out a wonderful recording of teddybear songs he wrote for children; my brother Jesse is in about four bands and is Cathaoirleach (chairman) of the local branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the global Irish music society.  Ric plays and sings in Virginia, where he has a devoted following.  Joe and Pete squeeze the music into very busy professional lives.

It’s been a pleasure writing these posts this week, but I am very rusty on the tenor banjo and have to spend the rest of the day re-learning the words to "FDR's Back Again."

You might also like: Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers

Geoff Young: Style, Insight, and Durability (Terence Winch)

 

Let us now praise Geoff Young.  In particular, the poems in Lights Out, which I think of as one of the necessary books of our time.  In Geoff’s work, all kinds of pleasures and provocations abound—you get the playful silliness and verbal inventiveness of Ashbery, the sharp urbanities of O’Hara, the autotelic experimentalism of the Language school.  Which is not to say that Young’s work is a collage of other writers’ talents.  No, he is a unique voice.  Lights Out, his most comprehensive book, is a full-service collection, in which all your poetry needs are met, whether for wit, narrative, or love and its loss:

 

Geoffrey Young

I am light, comfortable,

and best of all, I really work.

I’m still headquartered here

 

but production takes place

nearly anywhere, having come

a long way from the scissors,

 

tape, and drawing board

of just a decade ago

on the coast.  The inspiration

 

remains the same, however:

To create works that provide

style, insight, and durability

 

for active people of all ages.

Thank you for choosing

“Geoffrey Young.”     

 

###

 

  geoffrey young blessing the multitudes

I sometimes think that those writers who become publishers, editors, or anthologists take a risk with their own reputations as artists. In a universe of very needy and ambitious writers, these brave souls will be seen primarily in their role as servants to the needy. As publisher of  The Figures, a press that put out more than a hundred titles by central players in the Language movement and others (including me), Geoff was probably known more as a publisher than writer.  But, with the press now dormant ("defunct," says Young), the full extent of his creative brilliance is increasingly recognized.

 

The Cover Letter

Enclosed please find

my distinctively postmodern

bourgeois notions, within which

 

I trace the negative dialectic

to its resting place (herein radicalized)

in domestic phenomenology,

 

positing itself at the center of identity,

exclusionary and logocentric

effects which defy narrativity

 

even as they elaborate systems

of domination from beginning to end

in a rather bizarre defiance

 

of reading itself.  Interventions

impose their ambiguities,

to truncate irony, to pique your

 

interest.  I could get you going,

a paean to Adorno’s adage, or just

the opposite truth.  Fragmentation thus

 

is coherence, like the pitch of a flat

roof, yielding to genius and pluck.  I beg

you to consider my length.

 

###

 

22. Remains Concerning Brooklyn

Like a black hole

I discovered more about you

when I stopped seeing you at all.

 

You were a star

whose collapsing core

had become a point of infinite density

 

known as a singularity,

your singularity newly re-defined

by the info that you were involved

 

with someone else.

You’d slipped over the event

horizon, passed the gravitational point

 

of no return.  I can’t call

you anything now, not even a

liar.  Because you don’t exist anymore.

 

[from The Dump]

 

###

 

The Riot Act and Fickle Sonnets: also books of rare intelligence and skill:

 

A Roman Stutter

There was a time

When I didn’t exist

And you didn’t exist.

And there’ll come a time

 

When I don’t exist

Though you do,

Or a time when

You don’t exist

 

And I do. What

Could be more depressing?

If not to remember

There’ll come

 

A time when

Neither of us does.

 

###     

Finally: an interview with Geoff Young by Thomas Fink, full of electricity and yet more style and insight.

You might also like: this photo of geoff young

Chris Mason: Old Timey+Ancient=Brand New (Terence Winch)

Baltimore is a wondrous place whose praises I have sung, literally ("In Praise of the City of Baltimore").  It is the home of the American Visionary Art Museum, my favorite place for outsider art. But in Baltimore, everything seems like outsider art.  David Franks, who practically invented performance art, is still active there as a poet and performer.  Michael Ball runs the excellent i.e. reading series, bringing the work of a wide range of avant-garde poets to an intimate and homey space. The indefatigable Stephen Reichert edits the impressive literary journal Smartish Pace.  Everything is cheap, the drinks are all doubles, the waitresses all tough, everyone still smokes.

chris mason picking out a tune

And Chris Mason, cofounder of The Tinklers and the driving force behind Old Songs, is among its citizens.  I met Chris in the mid 1970s in D.C. and was immediately impressed with his friendly unpretentiousness as a person and poet. He settled permanently in Baltimore in the late ’70s, forming The Tinklers with Charles Brohawn soon thereafter.  The Tinklers, who don’t perform very often these days, make music that is a sure antidote to all that is slick and glib in the music world. It’s as though the Holy Modal Rounders hired William Blake as their lyricist. The musicianship is rudimentary but somehow perfectly suited to their naïve, funny, wise, sometimes even goofy songs.  A documentary about The Tinklers, by a young filmmaker named Brian Averill, is a must-see introduction to this Baltimore phenomenon. 

charles brohawn & chris mason

I hadn’t seen much of Chris since he left D.C.  But four years ago, Mark Wallace invited him to bring his new music/poetry project, called Old Songs, to an art gallery in Dupont Circle for a performance. I went, not really sure what to expect, and I was immediately captivated. In 2002, Chris, along with Mark Jickling and Liz Downing, started translating ancient Greek poets (from the 7th to 4th centuries B.C.), setting their translations to music they composed in what is essentially an old-time string-band aesthetic. Everyone in the gallery that night felt exhilarated at the way in which the three performers brought these "old songs" back to life again.  On the phone the other night, Chris told me he taught himself Greek “as an escape from this modern world.”  In putting the songs together he goes by the sound of the Greek, thinking of the poem “as it was when it was a song, because Sappho, Alcman, and all those guys back then, they sang their poems, and that’s why it’s called lyric poetry, because they used a lyre.” 

 

The group has already recorded six home-made CDs of ancient Greek poems, four of which are available at Penn Sound. And Chris has just published an essay in the Antioch Review beautifully describing the group’s compositional process.  “Sappho,” Chris writes, “shines her poetic light on us, as she has on so many others, across a distance of twenty-six centuries, but ‘It’s the same moonlight.’”

Daniel Cassidy: There’s a Sách úr Born Every Minute (Terence Winch)

Most visitors to this site share a common tool: the English language, which, as the authors of The Story of English wrote in 1986,  “…has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language,” spoken by a billion or so people. They will also tell you that “the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence.”  I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, and he echoes this well-worn notion: “The Irish came in their millions, but gave us only a handful of words, notably smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan (from Gaelic uallacháa braggart), and slew….”  H.L. Mencken, in The American Language, credited the Irish with a minimal contribution to English: “Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list.”  Besides these examples, the one word that I remember long ago being told came from the Irish is galore.  So it looked like a pretty settled matter that the Irish didn’t have much to offer the English language.

 

   H.L. Mencken

Then along came Daniel Cassidy (pictured below).  In 2007 he published How the Irish Invented Slang and set off a donnybrook with his claim that hundreds of slang words in English come directly from the Irish language. His book is not much more than a word list, with common slang words paired with the Irish words he says they come from.  So dude is shown to derive from the Irish dúd (pron. dood, and meaning “a foolish-looking fellow”).  And those “dogies” in the cowboy song “Git Along Little Dogies” that weren’t dogs?  Mystery solved: do-thóigthe (pron. dohóg’ə) is “a sickly, hard-to-feed calf.”  It’s a startling thesis, and one I found compelling and convincing, and not simply out of ethnic pride.  The New York Times ran a piece on Cassidy and his book, and the Irish-American community embraced him warmly.

 

But cold shoulders awaited him among some linguists and etymologists who found him lacking in scholarly rigor and authority. Grant Barrett, in particular, presented the most convincing attacks on Cassidy’s work. The debate seems to continue, with some scholars clearly threatened by an amateur barging into their domain with an exciting new insight that none of the experts had ever noticed. It seems to me, however, that Cassidy has presented a wonderful opening for trained scholars to explore, if they could get over their anger at being scooped (from scuab, to snatch away).

Insights like Cassidy’s are creative breakthroughs whose logical structures are filled in later. Last year, in this space, I discussed “eureka moments” and “tacit knowledge” in my post on Elizabeth Sewell. Cassidy’s book is one of those eureka moments that leap beyond the ordinary to give us a new understanding of the subject at hand. Daniel Cassidy, whom I did not know, led an eclectic and interesting life. He died last year at age 65 (obit).

(For an essay by Cassidy that is virtually an abridged version of his book, see this link.)

Meanwhile, I am currently reading John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. In the spirit of Mencken et al., he announces that “there are, essentially, no words in English that trace to Celtic.”  Ironically, though, one of the primary arguments of his book is that the very infrastructure of English grammar is founded on Celtic influences: English is “…a structurally hybrid tongue, whose speakers today use Celtic-derived constructions almost every time they open their mouths….” 

Baloney (from béal ónna, meaning “silly loquacity”) galore or penetrating scholarship?  You be the judge.    

Sherman Alexie: Comedy Is Simply a Funny Way of Being Serious (Terence Winch)

_{[view from the staff break room at NMAI; photo by T. Winch]}

After making my living for many years as a musician and free-lance writer/editor, I got a job with the Smithsonian in 1985, spending the last 17 years (until retiring on 30 April) at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. It was definitely exciting to have had a role in bringing this museum to life, especially during the era leading to the opening of the new building on the National Mall in 2004. It’s a unique place—not without its problems and deficiencies, of course—that everyone should check out when visiting DC. 

_{[south side of NMAI; photo by T. Winch]}

Though I did not become an expert in Native literature, over the years I became familiar with some of the Indian world’s leading writers. Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, was a not infrequent visitor to the museum. Our excellent Native Writers Series brought many other luminaries to the museum, including Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Luci Tapahonso, songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, Susan Power, and the incomparable and alluring Louise Erdrich. Among my personal favorites were two young poets—M.L. Smoker and Sherwin Bitsui, rising stars in the Native literary firmament. In 2007, I coproduced a CD of contemporary Native writers for the museum called Pulling Down the Clouds, which I believe is the only such recording out there.  My favorite piece from the CD is “How To Make Good Baked Salmon from the River” by Nora Marks Dauenhauen [Download How To Make Good Baked Salmon]. And I don’t even eat seafood.

But today I want to shine the spotlight on Sherman Alexie (left).  Not that he needs the attention—Sherman has been the most famous Native writer in the land for years now. If you caught his poem in the New Yorker a few weeks ago (“Survivorman”; June 8 & 15, 2009), you got a taste of his recent work: formal, yet colloquial; funny, yet profound.  This brilliance pervades almost everything in Face, his new book of poems (disclosure: published by Hanging Loose Press, which has also published my last two books). The extraordinary technical virtuosity in the service of Alexie’s sometimes raw honesty and often hilarious self-exposure is the synthesis that makes this book so impressive.

Let me backpedal for a moment.  In his 1987 introduction to Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry, Brian Swann writes, “The Native American poet seems to work from a sense of social responsibility to the group as much as from an intense individuality.”  While Sherman's Native identity—a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribal member, he was born and raised on the rez—is never far from the foreground, and provides him with a rich source of subject matter, his writing is not shaped by “a sense of social responsibility.” It seems to me that his primary motive is to write really good poems, and if they are also funny, so much the better. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that the work of many Indian writers suffers because of this perceived requirement to speak for the group (but I know that sense of communal responsibility is a very powerful force in the Native universe). 

Back to Face. Villanelles. Poems with footnotes, which themselves have footnotes.  Poems shape-shifting into prose and back again. The personal, political, sexual, physical, spiritual, historical, racial—you get it all in this one amazing book. Some poems, some attitudes, will be irritating to readers, Indian and non.  But the energy, velocity, and creative abundance in this book (qualities that also mark his stunning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a National Book Award winner) are to be prized. Sherman inhales the inappropriate air of genius and exhales all of these unauthorized poems, right in our face.

Ted Berrigan in Irish America (by Terence Winch)

I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate.  A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my friend Bob Callahan, who passed away last year) took place. Bob asked me and a number of other poets to read, and also invited my band, Celtic Thunder, to play a concert set after the reading. In addition to Bob and me, the line-up included Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and Ted Berrigan. It was a historic night — I’m not sure Irish America has seen anything like it before or since.

A friend of Bob’s, whose name I’ve forgotten, took some photos that night, and for reasons I don’t recall, Bob gave me a contact sheet. The photo above is from that contact sheet and shows, left to right, Ted Berrigan, Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, me, Bob Callahan, and Susan Howe (Eileen Myles, for whatever reason, is not in the photo).  At that point in our history, Celtic Thunder included Dominick Murray (guitar, vocals), Linda Hickman (flute, vocals), Tony DeMarco (fiddle), Jesse Winch (bodhran [drum], bouzouki), and me (button accordion).  Tony was sick the night of the reading, but the photo below (taken by the late Pat Cady) shows Celtic Thunder's 1982 line-up at a ceili in, I think, Baltimore.

There were many great moments that night at St. Mark’s. I especially remember Eileen Myles striding to the microphone dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, much to the delight and enthusiasm of the audience, and then delivering a terrific reading. Everyone, really, was at his or her best. But the highlight for me was Ted Berrigan’s uproarious and masterful performance.

Ted had a huge number of friends, fans, and followers, attracted by his charisma and humor, but most of all by his deep love and commitment to poetry and his inventive, expansive, inspiring work. Michael Lally (who, if he hadn't moved to L.A. back then, would certainly have been part of the St. Mark's reading) turned me on to Ted’s book The Sonnets in 1971, right after I moved to D.C. from New York, and I was hooked. Besides the night of the reading, I think I met Ted only one other time, in October of 1977, when Doug Lang invited him to D.C. to read at Folio Books, the site of Doug’s legendary reading series. Ted hung out for a couple of days and we got to know each other a bit. He even signed my copy of Red Wagon  with “For Terry, whose poetry I like very much, best, Ted Berrigan.” That was a compliment I was happy to get.    

About four years ago I bought a CD recorder so I could start digitizing some of my old LPs, which I never got rid of, as well as hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, stuffed into empty tissue boxes.  Last week I digitized the 1982 reading.  I’ll include Ted’s segment (in two parts that overlap: Download Ted Berrigan 1, with intro by Bob Callahan; Download Ted Berrigan 2). Ted once said, in an interview: “My poetry is mostly talk, and sometimes it’s heightened speech.  It’s not the words of rhetoric so much as the tone of rhetoric; it’s an Irish kind of speech—sometimes I’m making speeches, other times I’m talking—like I’m talking a walk to the store to buy the paper and back.”  You'll see what he means when you listen to his reading.

On July 4th, 1983, just eight months after the Irish-American event, Ted died, at age 48. What a tremendous loss this was. There was a memorial reading at St. Mark’s four days later in which a number of his friends (including Kenneth Koch, who concludes his remarks with a reading of the last two pages of Ted's "Tambourine Life": Download Kenneth Koch remarks)  paid tribute to him. I digitized that tape yesterday, and was halfway through the process before it dawned on me that yesterday was the 26th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's death.

-- Terence Winch

"Transparency" by [Terence Winch]

Transparency

We embarrass our friends with our secret knowledge of them.
They avoid us. Never call, speak in languages we don’t know.

It is one going-away party after another.  Farewell lunch.
Disappearances into the south, where days don’t count.

You checked out long ago.  Only your thoughts are naked now.
You used to be the narrator, now you sit and listen in the dark.

You are the windshield wiper to my umbrella.
You are the polar bear to my wedding cake.

You must serve your sentence and your dependent clauses.
It is already eight thirty and words burn in the fire.

I will never stop dreaming about sex with you.

—Terence Winch
from Hanging Loose

Ed Cox, Liam Rector, et al. (Terence Winch)

I had intended to cover much more ground this week, guest-blogging on the BAP site, but it’s funny how time slips away. I would have pointed readers to my friend Toby Thompson and the recent re-issue of his classic contribution to Dylanology, Positively Main Street (check it out). Beth Joselow has a new book of poems out called Begin at Once (which my brain constantly wants to call Bring It On! instead), and her work calls out for more attention (more on Beth). The acting career of Karen Allen—friend, old flame, and a Mass Transit alumna—has been revitalized via the new Indiana Jones movie, which would have been fun to cover (some information on Karen).  Lynne Dreyer’s name and photo seemed to keep popping up this week, which I took to be a direct message from the Great Unconscious to write about her. Bernie Welt, Diane Ward, Phyllis Rosenzweig (all in the photo below), Ted Greenwald, Rod Smith (click for my review), Tina Darragh, P. Inman, Ray DiPalma, and so many other poets who have been important to me, would all have been excellent subjects for this blog. Not to mention such DC novelist friends of mine as Mary Kay Zuravleff and the queen of Irish-American writing, Alice McDermott.

[in my apartment at 1920 S St. NW in Dupont Circle, ca. 1981. Standing, l. to r.: Tad Wanveer, Diane Ward, Terence Winch, my wife Susan Campbell; sitting, l. to r.: Phyllis Rosenzweig, Bernie Welt, Doug Lang, Becky Levenson]

I started working a full-time office job on April Fool’s Day, 1985, just six months shy of turning 40, after having made my living for many years playing traditional Irish music, teaching, and picking up whatever writing and editing gigs I could find. Now, suddenly, I would be joining the herd, riding the rush-hour subway morning and night, living out my own perpetual Groundhog Day, all of which I contemplated with dread, if not angst. So I established one rule for myself as a way of preserving my creative life: I would always say yes to getting together with other writers, whether for lunch or a drink after work. That rule remains in effect.

Back in those early dark days of gainful employment, the two poets I saw most often for lunch were Ed Cox and Liam Rector, both of whom had been key members of the Mass Transit/Dupont Circle School in the early ’70s. Liam also worked downtown, near me, and Ed, always restless,  liked to get out and about.

Ed Cox's personality was an engaging mixture of the soulful and silly. You got his depth as a person immediately. He was a self-made man in every respect—coming from a dirt-poor and dysfunctional family, he made himself into a poet of tremendous expressive power, while at the same time attempting to do good wherever he could (running poetry workshops for the elderly etc.). He was terrible at holding on to money, jobs, apartments, but accomplished at keeping his many friendships in the best of condition.

[Washington Post article from 1973 on Mass Transit, with my first name misspelled]

Championed by Robert Coles and others, Ed won a Lyndhurst Prize in 1989 for something like $100,000 over a three-year period. I remember judiciously advising him to think about buying a condo or doing something with the money that might provide a more permanent benefit. But he got rid of it as fast as he could, which turned out to be just as well. He died of a stroke at age 46 in 1992, taking all of us by surprise. Ed was one of those people who had barely aged; he seemed pretty much the same physically at 46 as he had at 26, only wiser, of course. In a particularly prescient poem, of which there are several versions, Ed seemed almost to predict his fate. Written long before his death, the poem is included in Ed’s posthumous Collected Poems, published by Rick Peabody’s Paycock Press in 2001 (for more on the book click here).      

I Want To Tell Them

There is a clot at the back of my head,
I know it. I’ve told them,

more than once, that it is there,
has been present for as long

as I can recall. I noted it the first night.
I told them last night. They just nod

their heads. No one talks directly to me.
All they do is listen, send for a doctor.

She listens, though more attentive,
and leaves. I can feel it each day

when the sky frames the window red;
the setting sun as sure as the words,

all I’ve said. I taste its hues
in my mouth. My tongue is cloud and wind

with the waste of tissue. I know it.
They know it. There is a clot at the back

of my head—stars, rooms that do not appear
on the charts at the far end of my bed.

---Ed Cox

This month marks the first anniversary of Liam Rector’s death, by his own hand, at age 57 on August 15, 2007. It will be hard for me not to associate August from now on with the terrible news of his passing last summer. I had seen him in New York a few months earlier and had spoken with him on the phone a week or two before he died, and he seemed in great form. He was living out a fantasy, it seemed to me — married to a wonderful woman, living in a terrific apartment in the Village, running the Bennington Writing Seminars, teaching a few courses at the New School and elsewhere, and writing his best work. He had announced to me that he was tired of small press publishing, and wanted his next book to come from a major house, a goal achieved with the publication of The Executive Director of the Fallen World by the University of Chicago Press in 2006 (more on the book). Liam, in his forties, had gone through major heart and cancer surgery, and made no secret of his unwillingness to continue living if his health again worsened. Part of me respects his decision, while I also feel continuing anger and bafflement at what he did.

Lunch with Liam back in the ’80s was a trip. He always insisted on Whitlow’s, a somewhat seedy, inexpensive hamburger joint in downtown DC (at 11 & E St., NW), with a big, green sign out front (it closed years ago and migrated to Virginia, I think). Liam would be eating his burger, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, and talking all at once, with his characteristic humor and exuberance. We never worked together or had any other “official” connection—we were friends simply because of our shared love for poetry and music. His behavior was often over the top, outrageous. But he could just as readily be thoughtful, gracious, charming. I remember calling him from work one day, while he was living in the Boston area and undergoing chemotherapy, and at one point asking him what the chemo was like. He said, “Well, all us middle-aged guys sit around in these big Barcalounges for about three hours. Everyone gets his own t.v. monitor, and we all watch porn and jerk off.” I’m not a gullible person, but this was delivered with such medical-report seriousness, I stupidly said, “Really?” “No, you asshole,” he replied, “that’s not what we do.” At lunch, I would sometimes have to grab him to get him to stop talking so that I could get a word in, which anyone who knew Liam will appreciate. He was a very bright, funny, talented man, and a good friend to me, and I continue to miss him (more about Liam).

Mental Mommy

Home from school at six years old, first grade,
And uncle there to tell me Mommy
Gone, Mommy not be coming back any

Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to
Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown.
Years later Mommy, when she goes out

Of mental, often says, “If you’re
A bad boy for me Liam you’re
Going to send me back, back

Into mental hospital, like you did
First time.” At 13
I find out Mom had been doing years

In a federal prison all that time,
For stealing, so no mental hospital for
Mommy. Breakdown ours alone.

I was on my own.

---Liam Rector 

Elizabeth Sewell & Tacit Knowledge (Terence Winch)

Last week, The New Yorker ran a piece by Jonah Lehrer called “The Eureka Hunt,” about attempts by scientists to explain “the insight experience,” those “moments of insight” that lead to problem-solving breakthroughs. The story is mostly set inside the brain, tracing the efforts by various neuroscientists and others to pinpoint what happens in the brain during these epiphanies. In the end, Lehrer writes, “it remains unclear how simple cells recognize what the conscious mind cannot….” Lehrer quotes one researcher: “This mental process will always be a little unknowable…. At a certain point, you just have to admit that your brain knows more than you do.” I was surprised that the story didn’t examine the ways in which creative breakthroughs resemble scientific insights.

My thinking about the intersection of scientific and esthetic “eureka moments” took shape when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s. One of my most memorable teachers was Elizabeth Sewell, with whom I studied the works of the Romantics. Dr. Sewell, as I recall, had two intellectual idols: Joseph Needham, author of the monumental, multivolume Science and Civilization in China, and scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi, whose many books include one very slight volume called The Tacit Dimension. When I first read The Tacit Dimension in 1969, its simple argument was new and exciting, at least to me:  “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.” In discussing the physiology of perception, Polanyi writes: “Such operations resemble an integration of particulars by means of tacit knowing, and resemble, above all, the seeing and solving of a problem I have in mind, especially problems like that of composing a poem, inventing a machine, or making a scientific discovery.” This book seems to be almost completely unavailable (just 2 very expensive copies on Amazon), and nearly forgotten, which is a shame. (More on Sewell & Polanyi)

I was in love with Elizabeth Sewell, or at least infatuated with her, more because of her brilliance than her sex appeal, though she was not at all lacking in personal magnetism and attractiveness. In 1969, she would have been 50 to my 23, but after my year of study with her at Fordham University ended, she did invite me to her apartment for dinner, at least once, maybe twice. No overt moves were made, but I sensed the invitation might have been about more than dinner. I dismissed those thoughts—I was interested in more of a spiritual bond with her, and I also thought I was just imagining things. But then I heard a year or two later that she had married a former student, many years her junior.  In any case, I don't believe in marriage before age 36. (see also)

[Elizabeth Sewell]

I had never before met anyone like her in my young, Bronx-bound life. Born in India to English parents, she held a doctorate from Cambridge, and had published several books of poems, a number of novels, and a handful of critical studies, the best known and most important of which is The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, dedicated to Michael Polanyi and to an answer to the question: “What power and place has poetry in the living universe?” Although I was able to find, and read, one of her novels, two books of her poems, three of her works of criticism (The Structure of Poetry, The Field of Nonsense, and her short study of Paul Valéry), The Orphic Voice resisted my efforts to take it in, and I have only dipped in and out of it. Still, I remain awed by Elizabeth’s intellectual daring in attempting to reconcile poetry and science.

A few years ago, when my friend Joan Retallack asked to borrow my copy of Sewell's study of nonsense literature, The Field of Nonsense, I realized how much Joan reminded me of Elizabeth Sewell—the same intense intellectual passion, scholarly imagination, stunning critical brilliance. I am positive Elizabeth would have devoured Joan’s book, The Poethical Wager (which I promise I did read and love). “The aim of my essay projects,” Joan writes, “is to attend to alternative kinds of sense and—if possible, if lucky—to come up with some oddly relevant, frankly partial meanings.” Elsewhere, in discussing John Cage’s compositions, she writes: “In this way one’s consciousness is invited to venture beyond, although not to entirely abandon, its most habitual and intrusive preconceptions and intentions. This probative wandering sets the scene for the Ah Ha! experience not only in Zen and the arts and sciences but in any adventuresome investigation.”

 
[Joan Retallack,  Lynne Dreyer, Tina Darragh]

My other great and inspiring teacher at Fordham is Richard Giannone, with whom I studied American fiction (and with whom I am still friends).  He has written beautifully on Willa Cather, Keats, and, most especially, Flannery O’Connor. In 1968, Richard’s way of reading a novel—by the close examination of particular words and images in the text rather than via plot and character analysis—was a revelation to me. I always say that he taught me to read.

[richard giannone]

I came upon a tiny obituary for Elizabeth Sewell in The Washington Post in 2001, reporting that she had passed away in Greensboro, North Carolina, on January 12 of that year, at age 81. This is from her book Signs and Cities:

For Anyone Who Has Lost Anyone
                   D.R.S., February, 1967

They are gone to their host,
To the board, to the blessing,
To the gathering welcome;
They are gone to the dance,
To the giving and taking,
To the wreaths and the garlands;
From the calling and crying,
They are gone to their own,
To the lights, to the singing,
To the turning and finding;
To summers of sweetness
From bodies and spirits
Unheard-of unfolding.