On Robert Gibbons Olson/Still: Crossroad

A version of this review (and a better edited version) may appear in a future issue of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose issue 17, due out in fall 2013.//

What is art and where does it come from? What is its source? These are questions Charles Olson and Clyfford Still pursued around the same time, in different locations, and unaware of what the other was up to while arriving at similar conclusions. It reminds me of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz arriving at the development of calculus at the same time, in different locations, unaware of what the other was up to, but Olson and Still have a less dramatic story. This story, though very interesting, is told by way of an adventurous, energetic, and original style of study in Robert Gibbons’ Olson/Still: Crossroad (Nine Point Publishing, 2013).

Clyfford Still, if you don’t know as I didn’t know, “was among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II” (Clyfford Still Museum).  (Some of his artwork that is mentioned in Olson/Still: Crossroad appears in this post.) Charles Olson, as you probably know, was a significant post-World War II poet, who was involved with Black Mountain and Projective Verse and helped bridge the way between the Moderns and Post-Moderns.

Clyfford Still – 1938-N No.1

The book consists of 16 bursts of concentrated thinking. Most bursts are a paragraph or two long and read like short essays or charged notes. Each essay while focused is discursive, or perhaps, it would be better stated that the short essays follow the thoughts of Gibbons thinking. A thinking that pulls in obscure and not so obscure sources from Olson and Still and a few other places and people in a fury of entangled associations. For instance, in “Two Men, Two Letters”:

Olson wrote to Elaine Feinstein in May 1959, “The ‘source’ question is damned interesting…” Then begins to “hammer” the “help archaeology” is, as well as languages of North American Indians, including space-time of Hopi & Northern Californian Yani, driving as far down as Hittite & “the prime-abstract…” Eventually, the poet returns, as if drawing a spiral, or drilling cup-holes in language to Landscape (which he spells large as he had “SPACE… from Folsom Cave to now… Large, and without mercy.”) Here he finds Image & Truth equal to narrative. A month afterward, in June 1959, Clyfford Still writes a letter he refrains from sending, until making it public in Artforum four years later, “The truth is usually hard…,” in this context reminding one of stone, adding, “Dig out the truth and one man is a match for all of them.” (Gibbons 4)

I like to think of those cup holes being connected by a string of some sort, like those cup-strung phones or tin can-strung phones many of us played with as children, but here the cups are language and landscape, but one landscape in the thinking of this book is time. One end of this string is attached to those ancient cave painters in Altamira, for instance, that go back 50,000 years, as Olson has it. And Olson can stand in an ancient artist’s literal footprints to see the art. He can sense the source. Or as he would say:

[T]he mind is so ignobled in  our time (or was) exactly as sex has been, the way both these joys have been turned into mechanics, too, when surely, by our own testings, our own deepest knowledges, loves, these two, the brain and the cock, are what we stand on, more than our legs. (Gibbons 8)

Gibbons would stand in this same spot but would look to the back of the cave and see black (see “1957-D No. 1″ below). His standing allows him to see the back of the cave “‘was never a color of death or terror’ […] but ‘warm – and generative’ & that from color, texture, image, ‘wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit’” (11). Olson’s standing also called up “THE GENERATIVE as a focus of attention.” It’s this standing around that leads to a Max Raphael conclusion about the cave artists, “signs… stand for abstract concepts derived from concrete events” (11). In other words, the cave artists anticipate the Symbolists (my conclusion), who were the first to suggest ways at creating art that speaks to or is abstracted from the unconscious – drilling cup holes from the conscious to the unconscious, or drilling cup holes from the self to “the cave of yourself” or as Olson says, to “ethos [which] means the cave of yourself… I mean a cave… It means literally a house inside itself” (20).

Clyfford Still – 1957-D No.1

Gibbons has acted as a tour guide through a house in this slender volume. A house with many more rooms than the one I’ve examined. There are rooms with generative sources from stones, from the vertical, from the vortex, etc. It’s a house built by Olson and Still using different overlapping blue prints that Gibbons interpreted for us in his very unique and insightful way.

Olson/Still: Crossroad is a thin house or book, but by the end of this vertical (10.25″ inches tall by 6.25″ inches wide) and slender book, I was surprised by how much I experienced. The experience certainly seemed more expansive than 25 pages can allow, especially when four of the pages are end notes, and I’m still listening.//

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Gibbons, Robert. Olson/Still: Crossroad. Bridgton: Nine Point Publishing, 2013. Print.//

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Clyfford Still – 1950-B. (My side note: compare this to Henri Matisse’s “Le Bonheur de Vivre” and then to Wassily Kandinsky’s “Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love)”.)

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Clyfford Still – M-No.2 (PH 776)

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Clyfford Still – PH-998

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Clyfford Still – PH-1123

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Lucille Lang Day’s The Curvature of Blue (2009)

Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 12, which was published circa November 2009.

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The following interview may or may not have occurred with Lucille Lang Day on Tuesday, May 12. I was inspired to interview her after reading her most recent collection of poems, The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva Press). I was especially drawn to her book because of the cosmological poems. They are some of the finest ones written. And if you enjoy science, cosmology, physics, color, love, death, and poetry, you’ll enjoy this book.

Tom Holmes: I’m here with Lucille Lang Day, a poet I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Since I and others may be new to you, I first want to know if you could briefly describe yourself to me and the readers?

Lucille Lang Day: I will defer to the book and let it speak for itself.

TH: Okay. So, The Curvature of Blue, could you describe yourself?

The Curvature of Blue: “There’s no one quite / like me” (p 13).

TH: I’m sure that is true, but could you be a bit more specific, please?

TCOB: “I am one / with bees and ants creating // their chambers” (p 24).

TH: Okay, and what can the reader expect from you?

TCOB: The reader will “hear cinnabar / olive, raw umber, magenta, / violet and chartreuse / mingling in counterpoint” (p 19).

TH: That’s fine. I noticed the patience of your poems. They seem at ease. Would you agree? How would describe the momentum?

TCOB: Yes. It’s like when “Rain sifts down like fine flour” (p 8).

TH: I also noticed an evolution as the book moved forward. It’s almost sequential . . .

TCOB: Oh, I couldn’t disagree more.
“Moments are shuffled and reshuffled
to give the illusion of time and history.
Everything happens at once and forever” (p 34).

TH: So, you are atemporal. That’s a very interesting way to create. Could you describe your creative process?

TCOB: Well, it’s a bit like
“The one sperm that enters,
cells cleaving to form
a hollow ball, bouncing
down the oviduct, the infolding
and implanting in the muscular
wall of my uterus, the welldeveloped
tail, pharyngeal gills
just like those of a fish
forming before finger buds,
heart and brain, the long
months of turning and turning
like a vase on a potter’s wheel,
the finished child sliding,
wet and shining,
into her father’s palms.” (p 14)

TH: Awesome. Now, is that what it’s like when you actually write the poem, too?

TCOB: No, when I write, it’s more like there is something
“stirring inside me, walking
the long corridors of my brain,
searching for something
irretrievable, precious, still there.” (p 38)

TH: So, why do you write?

TCOB: “To waken the angels” (p 54).

TH: That reminds me, death seems important to you. How would you describe death?

TCOB: “When the end draws near,
light descends, thunder roars,
and all of heaven enters
the body through a slender
glass column. The brain lights
up as galaxies spin, planets
of every imaginable color
turn in their orbits, and
billions of moons, stony
or gaseous, glow inside
the cerebrum. In that
instant you finally know
the meaning of it all.
Then one by one the stars
blink out, constellations
disappear, and you
are a barren cave.” (p 55)

TH: I like that. It seems we only have time for two more questions. The penultimate question, what caused the curvature of blue?

TCOB: “[. . .] the moon
circling earth, dragging
the oceans like flowing
blue gowns; the human
heart pumping blood
through a network of rivers” (p 68).

TH: Nice. And one last question. Do you have any advice for the young writers?

TCOB: “To be an artist, you must be crazy” (p 28).

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Day, Lucille Lang. The Curvature of Blue. West Somerville, MA: Cervena Barva Press, 2009.//

Nathan Graziano’s After the Honeymoon (2009)

Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 12, which was published circa November 2009.

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Who doesn’t like Nathan Graziano? Raise your hand. You! You who raised your hand go read After the Honeymoon (sunnyoutside press). He’ll swoon you like you’re in Niagara Falls.

Graziano writes in the language of today, even though he has no cell phone or a Facebook account. His tone is contemporary, too, with a seriousness of actuality mixed with ironies he “never intended” (p 35).

This is certainly true in the alcoholism poem, “Cracker and Me,” where he gets into the depths of their aging through drinking. He witnesses the shift from wild writers to suburban parents. And at the end, after the sudden realization of the alcoholism sickness merging with the old-age sickness that he writes:

   [...] the only thing we have to say is:
   Can
   someone
   pour me

   a drink?
                          (p 38-9)

You would think those closing four lines would undermine everything that was written before, right? In this case, no. This is the seriousness mixed with ironies. This is the unintended irony when he utters the phrase of a young binge drinker, as if the older person is saying, “I can still do this.” But look at spacing and pacing of the line. They are short and slow. It creates an inner desperation he needs to connect to youth, to connect to writing, even though it is really complacency (another contemporary emotion) of what he is and where he is headed.

Yes, the title of the book is appropriate, as it is well After the Honeymoon, but for the reader it is an enduring experience through, poetry, prose poems, and emotions.//

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Graziano, Nathan. After the Honeymoon. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside press, 2009.//

William Heyen’s A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008)

Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 12, which was published circa November 2009.

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I know William Heyen, so you might think I might be biased in this review. However, I am well versed in Heyen. I’ve about three feet of Heyen’s books. Of those three feet, this A Poetics of Hiroshima (Etruscan Press) is his strongest book, yet. Enough said.//

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Heyen, William. A Poetics of Hiroshima. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2008.//

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Cinema Muto (2009)

Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 12, which was published circa November 2009.

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God is so silent up there. I wonder if God can hear me down here? I wonder what God thinks and sees. Jesse Lee Kercheval has these questions, too, in Cinema Muto (Southern Illinois University Press). The poems in this collection are about silent movies, of course, but really they are a way for Kercheval to push her imagination to understand God and life and even reincarnation. Yes, “The Acting Career of Charles H. West Considered as Bad Karma” (p 67) is the best (if such a thing exists) reincarnation poem I have ever read, even if it is a prose poem. This poem is concrete in reality, it’s as if Kercheval were the God in charge of reincarnation. The metaphor is ridiculously brilliant — why hasn’t anyone written this poem or had this idea before? An actor, as he is used in the poem, is the perfect metaphor for reincarnation, because the actor is continually reincarnated in each new role and movie. After reading this poem you will intellectually and within your bones understand and feel the what and how of reincarnation. Here’s the first section of the prose poem:

where is it where is it where is it written that reincarnation is a good thing? what if what it what if reincarnation is like the film career of the actor Charlie West? the failure or the weakling in nearly three dozen Griffith films /1909-1912/ each film a new incarnation at the rate of three a month O the cruelty of casting! to be born the jealous miner who almost shoots his brother in His Mother’s Scarf only to die & be reborn the “evil companion” in The Crooked Road who persuades the young husband to choose a life of crime – never never never once a rebirth as the hero who save Blanche Sweet / Lillian Gish from the brustish invading Yankees in the nick of time

Cinema Muto also has fears of death, which not only come across in the poems but in how the book ends. The book is like a good piece of classical music that doesn’t want to end because it wants to keep living and exploring. So each of the last six poems of Cinema Muto are attempts at ending, or closing, the book. After each of those poems, I felt the book could be at its end, but luckily there were more poems. Kercheval could not fail to find the right poem to end the book, except for the silence that fell after the last line of Cinema Muto.//

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Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Cinema Muto. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.//