Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel and Zachary Martin: The New Prose Poets & a Neo-Baroque

"The nature of my involvement in the subject of Gloucester keeps me always in Ward 4 and in Heaven simultaneously." -- Charles Olson to Joseph Garland

"If one thought in terms of sacrament (and as a child Charles had absorbed an awareness of sacrament) it was a kind of sacrament of the 'chance' presentation of existence that he met anew every day." -- Gerrit Lansing, concerning Olson



Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel, and Zachary Martin write verse- and prose-poems of attentiveness, drama, complexity, persona, care, cartography, and performance -- tuned to an urban sacrament of chance -- by turns soliloquy, gazetteering, hagiography, legend, hearsay, rumor, myth, city hall debate, protest, lament, eulogy.

To start with, Donald Wellman, editor of O.ARS, the journal of poetics and phenomenology, author of Prolog Pages (Ahadada 2008), and two new series, "A North Atlantic Wall" and "Urika." His work appears as eighteenth-century travelogue, as gazette; but Wellman enters into his observations, although he is an outsider he approaches with sympathy and imagination, collapsing (to the extent one can) barriers of self to other, observer to observed, through persona the ego can subside; he is no imperial agent, no colonial traveler, but a refugee, a self-exile, sharing, as he wrote, bread and cheese of the refugee by the beach-fire.

Wellman, too, has a kind of neo-baroque method: mapping cities; patterns that fold in on themselves, repeat, shimmer, combine and recombine; using persona, history, medieval bestiaries; and more. His poems do not pare away specifics, do not corral away the particulars life draws richness from. Rather than practice a slender poetics of ellision, a poetics often quiet, narrow, and bourgeois, Wellman is a poet of excess in the best sense -- a poetics of the wide embrace -- an embrace, given how wide the arms and mind must extend, an embrace that dispells, exorcises the will to power (although there is, as Wellman has written, an oar and a steersman).

James Cook, who edits Polis, writes verse- and prose-poems in a species of Shakespearian persona. His modern soliloquies, like Cavafy's antique characters or Pessoa's heteronyms, is a persona that goes beyond the masks of Yeats (though indebted to, partially sustained by, Yeats); it flickers -- between coordinates that have yet to fully reveal themselves -- governed by no a priori role, more stance than fully-realized dramatis persona. Cook's "Fool," both like and unlike Lear's (or for that matter Melville's), is a radical emergence, leaping alive, anew, in each poem, wild like a hot, Pentecostal night, speaking both plain and cryptically before the noose -- the emergency in and of emergence.

Polish-born poet Ewa Chrusciel, whose book Strata has been circulating recently as a manuscript, writes prose-poems that glint in a crepuscular shine between Soviet and Roman Catholic Poland, between Poland and the United States, a folk spiritism uprooted but un-transplanted, on the ground yet on the run, ancient and mystical but confined by -- dizzied by -- modern bureaucracy. Her persona of the naive yet resilient traveller, the artful yet guileless alien abroad, turns white-collared modernity up on itself, in a magical realism that evades the trap of preciousness; her poems are playful, shaggy, yet weird as a Medieval icon is weird -- an ornate, glittering, inexplicable axis mundi.

Zachary Martin, author of Why America Works, is post-avant in the Italian sense, like Adriano Spatola who, after the crackdowns and disillusionment of 1968, gave up with profound sadness his revolutionary Mayakovskyism -- moving to a poetry of distance and observation, of alienation. Jose Marti, the Cuban poet of revolution, appears like Old Hamlet's ghost on the first page of Why America Works, stepping off a West Coast city bus -- even he, Marti, no longer believes literature can effect economic revolution -- and like a ghost he disappers.

The ghostly apparitions, catalogues, mysteries, maps, dialogues, monologues, episodes, topographies, personae get in to the prose-poems of these four. They're poets humble before mysteries they perceive (appear to perceive) dwelling within and between objects and people. In contrast -- stark contrast I think -- to much of what the young and academic and pseudo-academic are writing now, the fashionable poetries of brevity and obscurantism -- the lingering scent of perfume, say, on the pillow the following morning -- these four poets write with a method I would call neo-baroque, with more affinity for the neo-baroque of post-colonial Latin America, omnivorous and wide-ranging in content, accumulating, recombining, preferring an unfolding and refolding complexity -- performative, dramatic -- to the slender, bourgeois, Neo-Classical mineralness of post-avant American poetry. Life, in confusion, repetition, feedback, sorrow, regret, love, appears in the prose-poems of these four -- a potentially divine mess of death, body, and birth.

Jonathan Bayliss: 1926 to 2009

Last April the novelist and systems-analyst Jonathan Bayliss died in Gloucester at the age of 83. He was the author of the post-modern mega-tome Prologos, a novel conceived of not as story but as meta-system and circuit. Inspired by Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, Prologos follows Michael Chapman through the Bay Area, as one world is reduced to ashes by the Second World War and another world, of techno-capitalism and anti-communism, whirrs to mechanical life under Truman and Eisenhower. Bayliss was also the author of an as-of-yet unfinished trilogy based in Gloucester and loosely drawn from Hermann Broch's own trilogy The Sleepwalkers, as a cast of characters, tripped up by private obsession and foible, all but fail to see socio-tectonic shifts below them, to halt the de-naturing, de-racinating cultural changes of mass tourism and hyper-capitalism. For the Boston Globe obituary for Jonathan Bayliss, click here. For an appreciation written by Jonathan Bayliss's long-time friend, the novelist Peter Anastas, click here. For a write-up of Bayliss in the online arts journal Art Throb, click here. The above photograph of Jonathan Bayliss was taken by Mark Power.

Rain Taxi Interview with Michael Rumaker

In the newest online installment of Rain Taxi, Black Mountain-educated novelist, poet, and playwright Michael Rumaker is interviewed by Leverett T. Smith Jr. Process: One gets special mention for being the first to publish even an excerpt of his controversial play Queers (and Lisa gets a good quote in). Read it: Here.

Charles McCarthy, Ward and Precinct Man

Charles J. McCarthy Jr., longtime Chairman of the Gloucester Democratic City Committee who passed away this January, will be memorialized at the Annual Gloucester Democratic Brunch (click here) on May 17. Somerville-born Charles (whose Cape Breton-born grandmother was the sister of my dad's grandmother) was a civil-rights worker in Alabama in the Fifties and Sixties, teaching adult literacy classes, organizing and registering black voters, and helping to form the National Democratic Party of Alabama, which supported Hubert Humphrey against populist, segregationist governor George Wallace in the 1968 Democratic Primary. Returning to Massachusetts in middle-age, Charlie was an even-handed, popular Chairman who, mindful of the tendency of committee-work to stifle enthusiasm and creativity, never micro-managed. A charming, resilient, determined, beloved man and leader.

Posted to Jacket

I. SLU-Madrid professor Anne Dewey, author of Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry, an extended study of Charles Olson, has an article at Jacket on Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, gender, and social space. (Read it here.)

II. Clayton Eshleman, that cartographer-poet of the intestinal unconscious (and Process: One contributor) has an essay at Jacket entitled, "Tavern of the Scarlet Bagpipe: On Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'" To read, click here.

A Fondness for the Ballad

I have a new-found appreciation for the drama of Longfellow's Gloucester-based poem "The Wreck of the Hesperus," having heard it recited several times in full by a drunk Manx Man at a Gloucester sports bar last summer ("Cameron's, where culture happens"), a man who was repeatedly heckled by an equally drunk but far more belligerent cripple at the bar ("I want people to know why they hate Gloucester: it's because it's cooler than where they live").

Fanny Howe and Tom Raworth at Pierre Menard Gallery

Tuesday March 17, at 8 pm, Fanny Howe, of the Quincy-Morton-Huntington-DeWolf-Whitney-Howes, reads with Londoner Tom Raworth at Harvard Square's Pierre Menard Gallery, that charnel house of recycled Eighties shock-art, that Teutonic faux-abbatoir where poets politely if uneasily sip the wine of ironic catacombs. Regarding the readers, there are several Gloucester connections here: Fanny Howe's mentor Edward Dahlberg (whose letters to Howe we published in Process: One) was also the mentor to Gloucester poet Charles Olson, whose first U.K. collection was published by Raworth's Goliard Press; the East Gloucester home of painters William Meyerwitz and Theresa Bernstein (which doubled as a rooming house) being where Olson and Dahlberg first met.

The Longfellow Institute

Let me put this out there: if we read only English, then we can appreciate only a sliver of the literature written in the United States in the Nineteenth-Century, and then not even the most exciting, challenging, adventurous slice. If we read only English we miss the rich, Nineteenth-Century tradition of French-Creole drama written in New Orleans; we miss Omar Ibn Said's American slave narrative, written in Arabic; we are shut out of the German-American radical press of the Nineteenth Century, its polemic poems; Yiddish plays and poetry; a host of novels written by and for immigrants, in Gaelic, German, Welsh, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, and on and on. Every anthology, every textbook is fraudulent unless it incorporates these works, and not as ornamentation, but as structure, as retaining walls to the whole. There is only one academic group I know of that has taken on the herculean task of promoting, translating, and studying these materials: The Longfellow Institute at Harvard (here). Named for the professor and poet who got Protestant Yankee New England to empathize with French Acadians (Evangeline) and Native Americans (Hiawatha), who translated European, often Catholic literature for an insular, Calvinist-minded public, The Longfellow Institute deals with all literature written within current United States borders, not in English. Their work is invaluable, and it's just started.

Charles A. Lowe

Why Gloucester?; for the marriage of art and social and political commitment or, I should say, seeing art and engagement in the matters of the city as the same thrust; for the novelists who are social workers and city administrators; for poets who are public school teachers, union negotiators, and ward-and-precinct men; and for Charles A. Lowe, whose Gloucester Daily Times photos are getting their second public viewing, here as a Cape Ann Museum exhibit, where the city-as-fulcrum, between the Victorian and the post-industrial, in one year pulled from a decade of tumult, loss, and expectation, is beginning to receive its proper due. Charles A. Lowe Photos: 1975, runs at the Cape Ann Museum until May 31, 2009; for further info, check out the C.A.M. website here.

His spleen is just short of billingsgate . . .

Edward Dahlberg (see Process: One) demonstrates the literary round-house kick to the face in the NYRB, responding to a pan of The Edward Dahlberg Reader; read him here.

Saint-Pol-Roux and the Apocalypse

In 1959 Anna Balakian published her extended study, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, rare and valuable for, among other things, her chapter on Saint-Pol-Roux. It was recently uploaded to Google Books. The Saint-Pol-Roux chapter starts on p 67 (here) beginning with this epigraph from Andre Breton, "Among the living he is the only authentic precursor to the modern movement."