liberty dont je suis issue

Priscilla Lane and Robert Cummings in Saboteur (1942)

"Stay with me. Wake up, Frank, Johnny, Jack, or whatever. Oh, Archibald, don't bow out on me now!" Comme dans les films, all those ladies qui frappent avec leurs jolies mains, peintes d'un rouge noir, sur film noir et blanc, forties ladies with their forties grammar, with their offres de jambon sandwiches and big glasses of milk, avec the uniform en blanc avec la ceinture noire saying things like "That's mighty kind of you, ma'am." and not holding his head up, but bent, en courbe, and not squarely as they should, comme appris, changing the tides of seas entire experience Held in what should be ces femmes et leurs mains qui frappent qui tapotent and hold you in their entire sea, ces femmes des années quarante, et les années de cet arbre généalogique de ces femmes des forties when on chantait "hey batter, batter, batter, swing" and "Joltin Joe DiMaggio we want you on our side," "how I love ya how I love ya, my dear old Sewanee," and of course: "somewhere over" americaines, dont je suis issue, these américaines, these ricaines, thowing back their heads, montrant leurs dents bien blanches, these carniverous ladies, candied, laquered red on the bout de leurs doigts, et leur performed liberty dont je suis issue, et que je perform oh I do and you encore ce rouge que l'on suppose, que l'on ne voit pas, et qui est noir sur l'écran, challenged like la peste au bout des doigts showing you your propre mort au bout de tes doigts bien visible, encroaching vanity, Paris vaut bien une analyse, the five shiny dying pieces of flesh au bout des doigts dont je suis issue, le visage de celui qui dort, le verre d'eau, les sels d'ammoniaque, des séries de doigts qui frappent comme pour donner le droit, enfin, le droit enfin de frapper ce con qui n'est plus. "Stella!" Ce con qui dort. Réveille-toi, idiot, avec tes six yeux si clairs, que je suppose si clairs, mais qui sont en noir et blanc. ...

An extract from "En Brume" by Jody Pou, a poem in the 1917 women: poetry: migration anthology edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. 

The poem begins and ends with Wittgenstein looking doubtfully at his hand, with a Dick and Jane early reader, and with Octavius Caesar accidentally breaking off Alexander the Great's nose. But this extract comes from the central span about the "femmes des forties", their sassiness, glamour, compromise and humiliation in a world where power resides elsewhere; performed liberty but also a "Hébé" à genoux. Somehow all the parts of the poem cohere, perhaps because of the reader's irresistible journey through this multilingual medium. The topic in question (we're mistaken into concluding) might be anything at all and we'd still be absorbed.

In "En brume" (in mist) the outlines are not quite as defined as this list of topics suggests. For example, though "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio" is definitely from the 1940s, the sideline taunt "Batter, batter, swing" can only be traced back to 1983. After all, a poem cannot be only historical, it's still a statement about now.

There are sideshows here too, multilingual crosscurrents (like seas/six yeux/seizures), creative misspellings, misgrammar, mispunctuation. Perhaps it's relevant to quote what Wittgenstein is made to say here: "Après tout, pourquoi le jeu de langage devrait-il reposer sur un savoir?" And yet the comparative definiteness of topic (compared, I mean, to a lot of other experimental writing) seems an important aspect of how "En brume" poses its questions. 

"Joltin' Joe Dimaggio" by Les Brown and his Orchestra (1941), Vocal Chorus by the sixteen-year-old Betty Bonney (she subsequently took the professional name Judy Johnson).

*

The Augustus passages play off the Emperor's own Res Gestae, that seminal plea for the merits of centralised power, especially in shirtsleeves.

... just a dude among the many, absolute monarch, mais "primus inter pares," I gave HS 240 to the plebs, to the plebs, I paid out public gift, cadeau, j'ai fait construire la curie, j'ai fait reconstruire des canaux des aqueducts, I rebuilt this road puis celle-là, trois fois j'ai donné, I gave, j'ai gave des spectacles de gladiator où 10,000 hommes se sont battus, I gave the people hunts of African beasts in the circus, à peu près 3500 were killed, morts, got rid of some statues of me, I am modest, ...

HS or more pedantically IIS  :  currency symbol for sestertii.

It's useful to know that four sestertii = one denarius, and that this was approximately the day wage of a common soldier in the time of Augustus.

*

Jody Pou (b. USA, lives in France) writes and performs multilingual texts, is also a singer and visual artist. 

This is great! Jody Pou and Emily Manzo, performing all of Anton Webern's compositions for voice and piano:

https://shskh.bandcamp.com/album/volume-4-a-webern-j-pou-e-manzo

Jody Pou's website:

https://jodypou.com/

Sign up for new writing on her newsletter:

https://jodypou.substack.com/

Gloria Grahame in Not as a Stranger (1955)

immesurable divisions?

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

When we poetry readers move between different poems, there's a kind of leakage across our readings, they're not insulated. I came from thinking about Sir John Davies' 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum, a philosophical account of the soul, and my questions about the distinctness of personal identity seemed to proceed uninterrupted into the dramatically modern turbulence of what I picked up next:  

Place :

                Is a

   dis-place-meant

                    in the means of

location

                A singlular

               locale [isn't/it?]

                                                    Are numbers of years spent

                                                    to account for :

               [opt out

               or into :]

                                         immesurable

                                                        divisions ?

That which is rent from one

In this movement

separrejeuvenation

a cultural-linguistic

                                                   promise

                                                   name     home

                                                   plane     schlept car

                                                   shipped to walk

                                                   stop

                                                                                      --and then

locate the "exile" in "reconciliation"

of frontiers and calculable numbers

of words available in each of her tongues

un-cross-stitched from what one was / is          

the average

trans-     

               stamp thumped on a block of papers

               declares her                        Hearing

                                                                          is in

                                           a quieter tone:       this

place of all echoes

                                           the palimpsestic

                                           singular

This is the beginning of the first of a group of five poems by Jennifer K. Dick in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). My thoughts still ran on Sir John Davies' soul: is it both single and singular, or does it only appear single by being singular ("singlular")? Or single by virtue of appearing to be only in one place; but are places meaningfully distinct from the soul's perspective? 

But tonight I read the poem more as about migration, about humans in different places. (Jennifer K. Dick was born in Iowa and lives in Mulhouse (France).)

But still, there's a questioning of singleness and demarcation that's deeply ingrained in this text. Words aren't just words, they are activated words. They are constantly being marked as quotations, italicized, capitalized, parenthesized, question-marked, energetically spaced across the line, creatively misspelled, multilingual, and conversing with each other by meaning (meant, means), rhyming (meant, spent, rent) or partial repetition (schlept, shipped; exile, reconcile). Stop jogging my elbow while I'm trying to read! That's what I imagine a traditional reader protesting (and I still have that traditional reader buried inside somewhere). This writing interrupts the flow, it asks us how the word reached us, about intention and control. It says that words conceal as well as reveal. That, after all, reality is outside the words, we might need to look past them and not just through them. 

The quotations are from a book by Erín Mouré, so Jennifer's poems are building on a practice that´s already inclined to multivocality and multilingualism. Like when we build two towers of bricks and then try to put one on top of the other. It courts a collapse of what separates one from another or inside from outside. Which is a recurrent image in her poems. As here in the fourth poem,  

the lost, regurgitated sandstorm

grit on windowless windowsill

a poem that considers ruined buildings and Alzheimers and "wherein our particulars vanish..". 

Or

Sure, you left the newspaper articles, fragments of
windows to be replaced, the beige sawdust coating the blackened
broken cement, the shattered café front.

from What holds the body, in a section that considers explosions as well as balancing on a tightrope (Sourced from here: http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25 ).

Some say that the first fundamental of primitive life was the cell wall. Only when there's separation can life exist, evolve, create. And that's how most of us think, most of the time. To write a poem you start with a new page or empty screen, you paint on a blank canvas, you make dinner when you've wiped down the sides, you begin to build a home by laying down a clean foundation. This is poetry that wonders what's at stake in these ideas of infection and apartheid, and whether we can think it differently. 

There's a good amount of Jennifer's poetry available online, and a good list on her website. Or rather, two lists:

Poems in English:
https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/poem.html

Poems in French: 

https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/fr-poemes.html

*

I'm currently reading the long extract from Enclosure here:

http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm

I'm not sure if it's part of ENCLOSURES (2007), or part of Lilith: a novel in fragments (2019), or neither. It's grounded on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus: echoes and reflections and eyes. Here are two extracts:

She is within her                       a repetition,                       a mirror, silvered-over

                             surfacing,                       mirage

leaden,                                     lead,                                     to be leading

                                               Some part or point of

voice bleeding                          over,                                     into paper

                             scratches                against,                     she scrapes

This is like a gasp

                             she says

                                                She wants to say

                                                                                            to be saying

----

A sleight for stored eyes        a staff to unsever her deprived by thankless Athens

In her mind's lyre            in the wind's mire opposed to the twilight of her trial        perceptive

Rail        immediate        redolent        mind her eye or vigilance kept contagion

if this were catching     she should advise he keep a sharp        look heed ahead out the

mischievous signs "o mine tie, thine..." tapered to, knotted        were she but one-sighed or

willowlike a cypress-Cyclops mounting with aramisapians—if time should prove to be

so sure as seeking with half a fly-on-the-wall      peek though the needle      spin

her waifish body suddenly perceived heavily-handed         as a camel's two-thump inability

to pass through eyeing the spire of the storm         screen-hurricane periphery

casting a sheep's, a glad, an open   

---

aramisapians -- transforming Arimaspians, a legendary one-eyed tribe of northern Scythia. 

*

Two poems by Jennifer K. Dick on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog. "Boundary" and "Timber Hitch" are from an in-progress project called Shelf Break that uses a lot of nautical terms. (Somewhat ironically for an Iowan, as she notes.)

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html

Here's section 2 of "Timber Hitch": 

median of misconceptions
misanthropic
mesopelagic tropical
amoebic dysentery
diatribe or troubled
waterways:
spindly motors,
mortar, cracks,
fissures, figments
glint atop the gangway
gate or plate
schlepped up on
deck the
chained the
hauled the
cratered cargo
hold
ruinporn ornamentation
a lapsus
“next to baroque mermaids”                                DA, 58
Neptune
narwhale
Nebuchadnezzar 

["DA, 58" references a quote from a translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.]

*

But now those mermaids and the troubled Mmms of that opening are drifting this post and me off to another kind of mermaid, another melting of separation, the half-shark half-human Girl of Lisa Samuels' Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). This current debate about definition and singleness has many aspects and many contributors.  

In the following extract Girl has found some books/barques.

Having decided, Girl moved there. She was clawed in time with barque masks. She collects herself for a while, herself several damp examples leaning on the pulpit by the end of the rented hall, and she would give them up next time she felt herself leaving town. But the hall was comforting, it was renewable and unlikely, her slapping feet from one end to the next. 

The hot wine drunk down her throat. To be alone and yet populated with exemplars was an aim she was learning to adopt alongside books with lists of names, one anchored to the next and the next, one heaving according to time, another according to license or locale, another simple alphabetic comforting. She had these by her strange eating, piece by piece, piled thin. The sniffing of the skins of the books taught her how to think and speak here. 

(Tender Girl, p. 46)

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa, Sw: Vitsippa). Throughout most of the British Isles (our only native Anemone). Throughout southern half of Sweden and more sporadically up to Jämtland. It also grows a long way up the Norwegian coast, about as far as Bodø. Anemone = windflower. Nemorosa = of the woods, shady places. 

The Swedish name Vitsippa means White Sippa. "Sippa" is a Swedish flower-name given to various attractive Anemone/Hepatica/Pulsatilla species in the Ranunculaceae, and also to the unrelated Dryas octopetala ("Fjällsippa") in the Rosaceae. The others are: 

Blåsippa (Blue Sippa): Hepatica or Liverleaf, Hepatica nobilis. Beloved early spring flower in most of Sweden. Not in British Isles except as garden escape. 

Gulsippa (Yellow Sippa): Yellow Anemone, Anemone ranunculoides. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles except as rare garden escape.

Tovsippa: (Tuft Sippa) Anemone sylvestris. Big white flowers, rare on Gotland and Öland. Not in British Isles.

Nipsippa: (River-erosion-sandbank Sippa) Pulsatilla patens. Rare in Gotland and Ångermanland. Not in British Isles. It occurs across Russia to Kamschatka and also in NW America (ssp. multifida).

Mosippa (Sand-heath Sippa): Pale Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vernalis. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles.

Fältsippa (Field Sippa): Pulsatilla pratensis. Rare in S. and E. Sweden to Uppland. Not in British Isles.

Backsippa (Hill Sippa): Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vulgaris. Uncommon from Skåne to Uppland, formerly more common. Uncommon in S. England, mostly Cotswolds/Chilterns.

Fjällsippa (Mountain Sippa): Mountain Avens, Dryas octopetala. Local in the fells, Jämtland and north. Very local in northern British Isles (e.g. the Burren, N. Wales, Scotland). 

after the scrutiny of years

Moving on in my slow read through women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, 2017, I've arrived at another poet I've never read before, Jane Lewty (JL grew up in Leeds and now lives in Baltimore or Amsterdam or both.)

Her contribution to the anthology is a suite of eight poems that for her are unusual: "It's the only time my poetry has had any kind of locus." That locus is the clubbing scene in Leeds in the early 1990s, the house/techno era (the first poem begins with a battery of housey names, later we hear Kariya's "Let Me Love You For Tonight", etc). The poem titles reflect the elaborate track titles of that time, recasting emotional communication as artefact: "Violence and Discord [Heavy Dub]", etc. The poems aren't always about the locus, except insofar as everything's about everything. They sort of swell out from it, go back, start again. In the interview linked below, she says of her writing: "There always has to be a sort of nebulous overarching idea, but the problem is that it gets bigger and bigger and bigger". You can see it happening as you read through these poems. (The poems are part of a project called Mistune. I don't know if they're available anywhere else except in the women: poetry: migration anthology -- but I'm guessing not.)

Dance music is lyrical even without lyrics, and these poems trail lyrical threads too. If some of the emotions come from song lyrics, others come from the young clubbers. The poems intercut those emotions with the crushing industrial electronic rhythms of the genre, with ecstasy highs, with the West Yorkshire terrain and its talk. And then it starts to be about remembering the unrecoverable, a place fixed in a time and a time fixed in a place. 

You need to encounter the full suite really, the poems are so intertwined, but here's a couple of extracts:

In ply over

ply slide and echo

listen to

a reply of mine. I

sleet across timbre

get closer to the unclear

source system, nonlinear

flickering. Us/I/whichever

years ago. Fretted

vacant, spoiling.

Just a little bit free.

And I miss you, I missed you like

cold weighing lightly and always.

When all sides slip

away is the too unbearable

to face. A feeling

of being so dispatched until

remade, retuned.

All of it, the

you an I an us am it

the warehouse days of glory

the final-cut body

the time it fell

on a deep-clad valley

a perforated valley

now an auricular space, a mass

so empty, very faint.

(from "Reflection [I.D.: Could Be Any Name]")

you should know hear me dub

mad hits fer yer

been around the world but still remember

like that friday night at Orion?

thought we'd work the strobe and keep it one beam

tenner for the best double dove pill ever

rum-ring corrided bench, age 14

legs turned up gathering for some effort rising in the awkward

sense and the shins

how they never moved nor did the spine

but then

running so hard

and you should know that only after the scrutiny of years

wuld would

I give you my hand very coldly

lean it against your bleak vandal face

I'd hoax you in the city square, hoax you

in the high park all the field

and you should know how at times I do

feel like flesh, a dim-discovered terrain

slowly

slowly in love with our own (my) curious forming, i.e. us we

mine art my (he)art

all selfsame if it were if it wore

I restore the varied sides trace them tune them

(from "I.D. Female Choir [Put Me To Life Here]")

City Square is a paved area north of Leeds railway station. 

[All images are stills from the Kaos Documentary filmed at Bradford University, 23 March 1991. The full vid is below.]

Jane Lewty has published two poetry books:

Bravura Cool (2013) and In One Form To Find Another (2017).

Poems in Blackbox Manifold 5 (2010):
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue5/JaneLewty.html

"Whosees" in Newfound Vol 4 No 3 (2013):
https://newfound.org/archives/volume-4/issue-3/poetry-jane-lewty

Interview by Marlo Starr (The Adroit Journal, 2019) with Jane Lewty and Dora Malech:

https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/20/must-we-fail-in-one-form-to-find-another-a-conversation-with-poets-jane-lewty-and-dora-malech/

*

the warehouse days of glory

That line stirred a memory from about a decade before the house/techno era that Jane Lewty launches her poems from. 

It must have been July 1981. I put an advert in the NME and Steve Elvidge contacted me, so I went down to Leeds one Saturday to see if we could form a band, me and Steve and his mate. We spent the day messing around and realizing our visions were too incompatible. In the evening it was time to lighten up, so we headed along to the Warehouse. Marc Almond was the DJ, and one of the peaks of that thronging, illuminated night was the extended version of a track he'd just cut himself, Tainted Love. I left Leeds the next morning, forgetting my songbook. Tainted Love shot up the charts. A few years later my pals went on to form Age of Chance; I was safely back in my daydreams. 

yellow barges in pushing away sense

. . .

to match an eyebrow

wilted flower code

assault upon language

both sides of a coin

yellow and black

false dilemma on an empty train

images faster than an eye

palm trees in a row of sorrow

no one speaks

of bark of sunlight

a man whimpers at the clouds

somewhere a young girl

plastic flowers in a pink bedroom

my back crooked from watching

yellow barges in pushing away sense

in a portable landscape

stars trapped in nets

dire thrown carelessly

diced food

dark web of buildings

in a summer heat of reason

split open like a moving variegated shadow

across a black canvas

are pink lines

weblike forest

yellowed lips of sense

against a moving

target of glitter trees

thoughts leftover

soundless atmosphere

slow move away from fading language

to which i pin my hope

great blur of reason

new versions of radiant forests

at the deaf of feeling

a hundred views of 富士山

outdated throng of tired listening

dissolve into grey pools of regret

yellow objects in my mind

not this heavy lifting of concrete

. . .

*

The distinctive features of the music slowly come into focus. For instance, the colour words. The nouns, which usually toll the end of the lines. The big abstract nouns: reason, language, sense, feeling, mind. (Is "mind" an abstract noun? . . .) . The emotional words. The metaphors. 

So it's poetry that is quite overt about its constructed nature. Yet it moves and means. 

*

dire thrown carelessly : Maybe that's meant to say "dice thrown carelessly". It suggests it anyway. 

富士山 = Mount Fuji

[Figuring out how I was going to reproduce this, I discovered that Google Translate has a handwriting option, so I didn't need to learn how to use a Japanese keyboard: with care and patience you can make a drawing of each character, retrieve a copy-and-paste-able Japanese character, and at the same time learn its approximate equivalent in English. 

Just for the record, the following characters show up later on in the extract:

川     river

森木林石水火雲霧     forest tree forest stone water fire cloud fog  ]

*

A modern landscape. There's hardly any human physical activity but there's plenty of movement. It's a "portable landscape"; sometimes the thing that appears to move is what stands still, and vice versa. So which is the moving target? 

Meanwhile, what to make of the recurrent hints of haikuesque tranquillity? The clouds, the canals, the wet trees. . .

A glimpsed tranquillity here in this modern poem, mocked by the ersatz flowers, and paradoxically co-existing with the un-haikuesque abstract nouns and metaphors: yet glimpsed all the same. 

But what is the meaning of tranquillity now? Is it merely too late for a human to act? 

And other things are here too. The barely contained emotions, they are spilling out. (It's not only the palm trees in that "row of sorrow".) And the exhaustion of "pushing away", "fading", "tired".

*

So my slow dawdle through the poetry anthology women: poetry: migration (2017) has in due course brought me to the poetry of the editor herself, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (born in Harvey, Illinois; she has lived in Japan since 1989). It's an extract from <<terrain grammar>>, a collection published by the same publisher (theenk Books) in 2018. (Her ninth collection, or thereabouts.)

The extract looks like a single flow of carefully considered quatrains (about three times longer than the bit I quoted).  Apparently it consists of several poems (and thus my sub-quotation might inadvertently cross a poem boundary). The blurring of poem boundaries is maintained throughout the collection, according to this helpful review by Brianna Vincent:

https://plumwoodmountain.com/brianna-vincent-reviews-terrain-grammar-by-jane-joritz-nakagawa/

Jacket of <<terrain grammar>> (theenk Books, 2018)

[Image source: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Terrain-Grammar-Paperback-9780988389199/351386092 .]

Not all of <<terrain grammar>> has the quatrain format. Here's a taster from another section, which appeared in Cordite Review:

and thus die toward/of a language. as it may [have been]. turning (in that
direction). whirling verb (of) personage.  not grasped (to). in

search of [nautical roughage like as]. to displace (to). at refuse (of)
historical bending past. expands breadth toward/beyond

urchin of noun objects. forgetting of it now. (a) breach of always.

http://cordite.org.au/poetry/theend/from-terrain-grammar/)

Some extracts from a wide-ranging and lucid interview conversation with Thomas Fink:

I see FLUX in large part as a book of characters trying to navigate difficult things (economic personal and sociopolitical uncertainty and trauma, untrustworthy organizations, natural disasters, etc.). Whereas FLUX is perhaps primarily about “the material world” Distant Landscapes is a more personal book about a character who is similar to me living in a forest versus the larger cityscapes and more numerous types you find in FLUX, both urbanscapes and mental landscapes which emphasize a kind of escape or wish to transcend the world. Both books dispensed with poem titles and are weavings of disparate elements that I try to make harmonize / cooperate with each other; there is a fair amount of formal and stylistic and tonal diversity etc. But Distant Landscapes is I think a quieter or more introspective and more nature-oriented book and is much more me or the me that was writing the book, a character very close to myself (my actual self v. a social self). After FLUX I wrote a chapbook titled wildblacklake and Distant Landscapes continued some of what I was experimenting with in that chapbook, a kind of minimalism that owes much to haikuesque poetics, much moreso than FLUX does.

          . . .

Yes, language including my own writing of course is imperfect, as far as trying to capture the world and one’s thoughts and feelings about it in words so that generates the next poem, or thought in language (sometimes gestures seem to work better or music, etc.) where one tries again but only succeeding at best partially:-), an ongoing process that needs to be repeated! As you said the alphabet (or other orthography) can’t help us “merge” with the natural world, a desire some of us including myself often has, or at least it doesn’t work for me that way. Especially for me as far as “thought” (v. “feeling”) poetry is closer to me, more “real” or “truth-full” than “linear” prose which tends to feel much more artificial and divorced from my actual “thinking”. But even so, there is some lack, a kind of grasping/gasping/gaping…gaps! The “music” of poetry is important because it helps make up for some of the lack, but the lack continues….

          . . .

It’s not a secret that I have an ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism often links together destruction of the environment with patriarchy, masculinities theory, racism, ableism, animal rights etc., as I do. If it matters I am also the survivor of physical assault. This does not make me special, there are many such women in the world. Rape occurs in numerous of my works, both the attempted rapes I experienced as well as the actual rapes of friends and acquaintances or rapes I have heard about in the news. Sex occurs because sex occurs. Environment appears because I care about it. Anything that takes a poet’s attention can be in a poem.

https://dichtungyammer.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/exchange-on-jane-joritz-nakagawas-recent-poetry/

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa in 2018

[Image source: https://isobarpress.com/authors/jane-joritz-nakagawa/ .]

Some other poems by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: 

"Buildings fall              (2003)

http://www.shampoopoetry.com/joritz-nakagawa/

Sonnet A                       (2008)

http://cordite.org.au/poetry/experience/sonnet-a/

Ode 8                            (2008)

http://cordite.org.au/poetry/experience/ode-8/

Dear Diary                    (2008)

http://cordite.org.au/poetry/experience/dear-diary/

methane dress               (2017)
http://cordite.org.au/poetry/confession/methane-dress/

<<terrain grammar>> was followed by the long poem Plan B Audio, published earlier this year (2020). It's about the author's experience of disability, life-threatening illness and radical surgery.

Here are some extracts:

https://aglimpseof.net/2017/10/14/the-uncontrollable-issue-jane-joritz-nakagawa/

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/poetry/from-plan-b-audio/

Here's a review by Ian Brinton in Tears in the Fence:

https://tearsinthefence.com/2020/06/15/plan-audio-b-by-jane-joritz-nakagawa-isobar-press/

Ivy Alvarez

Puya raimondii (Queen of the Andes)

hard sharp retrorse spines accelerate in number nearer the base

the animal (bird, cat) driven to die at its dense rosette

every recurved claw-thorn hooks in corpses difficult to retrieve

cadavers like kestrels, passerines, hawks, blackbirds

is the cat a legitimate pollinator or merely fertilizer?

dissolved nitrogen decomposed sustenance permitted approach

This is one of a group of three poems by Ivy Alvarez about plants that kill animals. I found them in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). [Ivy Alvarez: born in the Philippines, grew up in Tasmania, lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and (since 2014) in New Zealand.]

Puya raimondii is a plant of the high Andes and the world's largest bromeliad. It produces a large spherical bobble of spiky leaves, within which the corpses of birds are often found impaled (and sometimes other animals too, such as an unfortunate domestic cat in 1977). The thorns along the edges of the leaves all point inwards, so any struggling creature is inevitably sucked further in, like a spaceship into a black hole; researchers who vainly attempted to extricate the corpses found their own forearms in danger. It seems likely that the plant benefits from added nutrition as the corpses slowly decay. Despite its dangers the plant is frequented by birds. It grows in a landscape where nest sites and perches are in very short supply, and some other aspects of the plant's architecture are well adapted to satisfying these needs; but mistakes are fatal. [Information from the interesting 2011 paper by William E. Rees and Nicholas A. Roe: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237160959_Puya_raimondii_Pitcairnioidae_Bromeliaceae_and_birds_a_hypothesis_on_nutrient_relationships .]

Puya raimondii in flower in Ayacucho, Peru

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

The other poems are about the pitcher plants (Nepenthes) and the birdcatcher tree (Pisonia grandis); the latter is a tree of tropical oceanic coasts, much used by seabirds for nesting. Its sticky, thorny fruits are spread by becoming attached to the birds' feathers; too many fruits and the bird becomes unable to fly.


*

Ivy Alvarez has published several books that I long to immerse myself in. One is the violent verse novel Disturbance (2013), based on a factual and too-familiar kind of domestic tragedy. Another is The Everyday English Dictionary (2016). Here are some extracts from the letter X, taken from her website:




xanthic:

in the little white box

a cousin on a satin pillow

my question              ‘what’s jaundice?’

hangs                         an uncertain balloon




xanthous:

no raven-haired heroines

in fairytales





xerotes:

fruit bat                                sugar-seeker

tongue-tip dabber of sweetness

deliberate crumb-pincher of crystals

alchemist of dry habit           dissolving into moist reward



......


xyster:

it comes when I am unconscious

scraping music from my bones

a cricket’s song




Yes, it's a dictionary. But a journey too; I got a broader sense of it from Jennifer MacBain-Stephen's review for Agape Editions:

https://bloggingthenuminous.com/2017/12/19/blurring-the-edge-of-the-tiniest-things-a-review-of-ivy-alvarezs-the-everyday-english-dictionary/



But the Ivy Alvarez book I most want to read is her latest collection, which also has dictionary qualities. The poems in Diaspora: Volume L (2019) are arabesques that take off from common Filipino expressions. Here's one example, sourced from https://verityla.com/2018/06/29/poems-from-diaspora-ivy-alvarez/ :




*Lamang-kati


Asseveration is natural to me.
A machete, too — blackness
bonding to metal like rust.
I’ve seen blood on dirt.
It doesn’t hurt.


The first time I heard the words
dog’s breakfast, it made sense to me.
Things can get so messy
only a dog would eat it up.


The meat market’s wash and slurry,
my feet brown with storm water,
the aisles lined with heads, limbs:
a wedding I never knew.


Let’s not make a hash of love —
we don’t know how it ends,
what the shore looks like after hard rain,
the sea disgorging its contents.


*Filipino idiom meaning meat of butchered animals (literally, contents of low tide)





This volume (which covers the letter L) is theoretically just the first of 19, but I take that with a pinch of salt. IA circles round her wide, dark and tender domain but she strikes me as an artist, like Claude Debussy, who would rather grow pineapples in the bedroom than repeat herself.


Natalie Linh Bolderston has written an inspiring review of Diaspora: Volume L for Harana Poetry:

https://www.haranapoetry.com/iii19-review-diaspora-volume-l-ivy-

In the course of which she quotes some lines from"Lálabasán" [ability or intelligence, literally "something will come out"]  that I can't resist retweeting here:





to be told

I am an adjective

does not make me

that adjective

no matter how complimentary

or inflationary the adjective

Ivy Alvarez

[Image source: https://verityla.com/2018/06/29/poems-from-diaspora-ivy-alvarez/ .]

facts lock into the fictions we hang them by

My very slow reading of the anthology women:poetry:migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (2017) has brought me up against a poem I've read before, Hazel Smith's "Metaphorics", which had appeared in her 2016 collection Word Migrants. (HS: born in the UK, lives in Sydney)

Joy Wallace touches on "Metaphorics" in the course of her helpful survey (a "thematic reading") of the whole of Word Migrants :
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/word-migrants-hazel-smith/

She links "Metaphorics" with "a choice of metonym over metaphor"  in HS's own poetry and more generally in the world of experimental poetry, e.g. the Language school. (I'm not quite easy with this formulation, because there are plentiful metaphors in Word Migrants, both in "Metaphorics" and in other poems. I do sense that those metaphors often do have a vague air of being quoted, which I suppose puts a metatextual spotlight on them. But at the same time I don't feel that a metaphor ceases to operate as a metaphor when it's put in quotes. The poem shares the metaphor.)

 One of the sources in the first part of "Metaphorics" - ("I want to argue against metaphor -- against substituting one thing for another, to enrich or complicate our understanding") comes from a discussion of inclusive language, it refers to how some metaphoric language can smuggle in exclusionary ideas, for instance using "dark" to mean wicked, or using "blind" to mean ignorant.

"Metaphorics" is three poems constructed in a musical way. Here's some extracts (the end of 1, most of 2, and the beginning of 3).


Metaphorics (in three parts)


1. Metaphor (an internet cut and paste)

...

Use all metaphors, dead or alive, sparingly, otherwise you will make trouble for yourself. "Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside." During the treatment of violent individuals the authors noticed that physical assaults were often preceded by an onslaught of metaphors. There is no way to metaphorize the actual experience of losing any or all of your senses. The metaphors for talking about sex in the US all come from baseball, let's talk about pizza instead. Music as metaphor: a powerful tool in leadership development. It hurts the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef. You are welcome to your opinion of course. But these are metaphors and in the end are likely to be misleading.


2. The Unanswered Question

answers rarely fit with their questions

...


her ideal script was never the one she composed


she googles her CV, it no longer fits

it was years since he had died, the crime scene was yellowing

facts lock into the fictions we hang them by


3. Windfall (a polylogue)

I don't know whether I want to shake my life into bits or grip it like a handrail. The lightest wind can cause the ball to swerve. It's a crossing of bumps and abrasions, missed stations and barred gates. Every day I slip on the dropped peelings of somebody else's intent.

The grail they desire was never conceived, nor will the quest gestate. The black box is slowly liquidating, the ocean sucks in its own depths. I watched the news and didn't absorb the details, I surf by floating on my back. They suggested I write down my objectives, as if I knew what they were. If I knew, I wouldn't need to write them down I said.

There's no such thing as a goal, just whims; heresy defines the route. I'm an experimental poet she said, hoping cartographically that might fit. The moon outsmarts every poem about it, a compass pins words west and east. He's standing behind her, mapping what she writes, while a rhythm nods its unhinged head.

In poetry metaphor is everything; she wondered if she believed what she proposed. The rain saws the hapless day in half, the bark will keep the soil moist. Is it so new to them they won't understand or have they heard it all before? No self-help book ever worked it out. Her colleagues will never tell her what they really think. And the world wears indifference as its tell-all badge.

Ants in the sink in the morning, possums pounding on the roof. Being helpless is his strategy. The personal is like a violent toothache, while an earthquake on TV sidles by. You've never experienced genocide, she said, taking an unanswerable stance. Nobody noticed I was irate. There is a part of me that expects people to read my feelings, while the other me knows they can't.

...

Nearly all the sentences, in all three parts, are metaphorical. A sentence like "The moon outsmarts every poem about it" even uses a metaphorical construction to express the failure of moon poems that are (presumably) metaphorical.

In a way the poem sometimes noisily and sometimes quietly portrays the questionable nature of discourse in a highly discursive society. Spoken freedom isn't freedom, which (like the moon) can't be spoken. Language is more often a claim about action than an action.  Language is in a material context. Communication ("He's standing behind her") happens through more than language; it's act, mood, atmosphere, gesture, inferences of intent. Our true objectives, like the ideal script, are never what's written down. Language is a structure of fictions (upon which we hang facts), it is only an approximate fit.

While I'm thinking all this, the wind blows through the third part of the poem. A remembered wind that is also the real wind outside. It's difficult to control what happens in a poem.

Another brief note on Hazel Smith's Word Migrants:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-near-side-of-world.html

Mindful of kitchen sounds

Willow  tree with galls, Swindon, 14 January 2020.

Two poets in this fleeting post, both born in the same year as me (1958).

*

The clink-clanging of
knives and forks
against a susurrus
of sobs escaping
the steel faucet...

Me in this twilight hour
sipping red in cobalt...

Mindful of kitchen
sounds slowly seeping
into the woods from
whence appear a family
of deer I sometimes
spy from the
square window

And point out
to the delight
even now
Of grown children
And their father
familiar with the
madness of mothering

the Other

(from Fawzia Afzal-Khan, "M/Other")

Reading Fawzia Afzal-Khan's poems (in women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, 2017) takes me not to more poetry but to singing, theatre, academic writing, journalism. "My poetry -- like my scholarly and memoir writings, my teaching and other forms of art such as my singing -- sits astride, explores and emerges from the border crossings that make up my life." She was born in Lahore, lives and works in the USA.

History of Unforgetting: Fawzia Afzal-Khan (that's her singing, from about the 5-minute mark) with the Kathak dancer Parul Shah:



Mullahs and music in Morocco (2010):
https://tribune.com.pk/story/25868/mullahs-and-music-in-morocco/
How my daughter's interracial relationship opened my eyes (2017):
https://www.salon.com/2017/12/25/i-thought-i-was-open-minded-my-daughters-interracial-relationship-opened-my-eyes/
Journey to the house of stone: where past meets the present in the Levant (2017):
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/10/journey-to-the-house-of-stone-where-past-meets-the-present-in-the-levant/


*

Mir Mahfuz Ali's poem "A Lizard by my Hospital Bed" came up for discussion yesterday at my reading group. I've found the text online on Kim Moore's blog, so I'm feeling OK about requoting it in full.


A Lizard by My Hospital Bed

The mouth of silence trickles forward a bloodless lizard.
I take off my oxygen mask and allow

his cracked sound to crawl into my teenage head.
Like me he puffs for air.  I wheeze.  He pants.

He does not break his meditation as the hours pass,
my eyes still on him when he jumps on a thinking fly

with a fine open-air gesture.  An education by lizard:
focus, don’t rely on impulse.

Keep the foam clear so my voice doesn’t burst
through my trachea hole

like shrapnel in a pomegranate.
My eyes flick a question, city kerosene thuds

echoing in my head.  My friend says nothing.
Goes one step back, two steps forward.

How can I let him go?  I grab the fellow by his tail,
but he still escapes through the gap in my throat.


This poem (which refers to his injury after being shot in the throat by riot police during an anti-war protest in Bangladesh) comes from his only collection to date (Midnight, Dhaka (2014)). He was born in Dhaka and lives in the UK.

Mir Mahfuz Ali reading a poem about Salma:

Willow sprig with gall

These galls might be the work of the saw-fly Rabdophaga rosaria, which produces terminal rosette galls on willows. But they don't look quite like the images I've found online, so take this with a pinch of salt.

Gall of reduced leaves on willow

one string of blue smoke / burns like longing (Zhang Er)

Fire warms whom?
Whoever dares to seriously
receive this truest flame?

Only the ones who have left.

On the photograph
your grandparents smile.
Great grandfather does not smile,
in his torn felt hat, black cotton jacket
                  batting spilling out --

and your great-great-grandfather
has no photo from where
the ancient dead look at us.

Closely follow Elder Brother.

We take off our hats and bow
beneath our bundles of suspicion.

Mountain god, earth god,
Do we bow to all four directions?

Do we repeat one, repeat two, repeat three
hundreds thousands of
time's reincarnations?

Who presides here?

Who is pleased, and who is angry?
"The world belongs to you,"
Chairman Mao remarked.
So, it belongs to us?
Is life a kind of luxury
or a chewed-over crust?

Eyes are burning, body explodes
I can't see you. Where?

....

Can I now speak with you,
send you my regards
from among the living?

....

The message that would be
one sheet of paper
is too insignificant to be
mentioned in the field of late autumn
where one string of blue smoke
burns like longing
lingers only a few steps away
unsent
in the morning sun. Would it be
better to mail it home using
a non-standard address:
as one would send
a big gift package of
strawberries and chocolates and pears?

Will you be there to sign for it?

This is yet another place
that offers us no answers.

So what? Where else can we go
to escape from human desire?


(from Zhang Er's "Return on the Third Day", from First Mountain, trans. Joseph Donahue and Zhang Er (2018). The book arose from attending a traditional burial ceremony, in Shanxi province, for the poet's grandparents.)

Another extract from the anthology women: poetry: migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa  (2017).

Zhang Er was born in Beijing and moved to the USA in 1986 -- she lived for many years in New York, and now lives in Washington where she is an associate professor at Evergreen State College, Olympia. She has a PhD (Cornell University) in molecular pharmacology. She's a well-known and much-admired poet and my delighted discovery of her clearly astonishing work testifies to significant ignorance of both the Chinese and US poetry scenes.

 (She writes her poetry in Chinese, but many of her poems have been translated into English.)

*

Note for UK readers: "batting" = lining filler, of e.g cotton wool, synthetic fibre

*

... The poetics represented here fundamentally embrace the system of understanding underlined by the Chinese metaphysical concept of “Heaven and Human are one” — which denies separation of the subject and the object. True knowledge, in this respect, can’t be determined, given that mind and matter are the same, and observer and observed are one. Such knowledge is fluid and multi-directional in time and space.   ...

The difficulty of translation created by such writing is significant. Translators, who are often poets not unfamiliar with imagism or other post-Poundian multi-perspective writing strategies, are nevertheless perplexed by the seemingly arbitrary usage of personal pronouns in many Chinese poets’ work — as well as the fluid shifting of perspectives, the animation of things without any warning, and the tenseless transition of events defying a linear timeline, even when the poem is telling a story or following an obvious plot. If nature and human are one, the subjective and objective are one, mind is matter, and the conception of the world is not a human-centered activity, then the lack of “I” in many Chinese poets’ work becomes perfectly understandable. The absence of “I” is the manifestation of a presence everywhere, by every thing. Things have mind, or rather things ARE mind — or in Williams’ term, ideas are things. Animation is therefore unnecessary.

... Everything in a poem, I mean everything, is fluid: there is no fixed reference frame. ... Things tend to know themselves better than humans, who are simply other “things.” The prepositional words used to position them, to pin them down, in turn become meaningless or even misleading. Is pan-perspectival the best word to convey this lack of a human-centered epistemological view?

From Zhang Er's introductory note to the valuable How2 online anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women Poets:

https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_4_2006/current/translation/index.html

Also in the same anthology is her irresistible poem about a newborn, "Mother Event", which later appeared in So Translating Rivers and Cities (2007). Here's an extract:

*

he says—
“I saw the hair first, black     hair”
                                     “blood”
blood?
                   “screams” and “cries”
Cries? Screams?


~


let’s go home
OK
leave this place full of hands
                                              too bright too noisy
whether rain or heat
          we have a window, with shades
          bassinette   blankets                      turn off the light

~

it can cry	without tears
(like a bomb already set, but with an erratic timer)
hungry wet tired sleepy delighted	cry cry cry cry
(when lacking means of expression      it doesn’t smile)
dressing		cry
full diaper	cry	cry	cry
belly down	cry
held up against the chest
up and down	cry

~

when not crying
it (can) look at me
          those eyelids
Open the door
          let “me” in
eye of eyes
clarity of no distance hide me
is me! (is this mine!)

put this mirror down—can’t
little hands        little feet                 a little bonnie
tight fists
stinky
won’t open up

                       it rains
hualahuala                   water
a little spider
                slides down the hill



(from "Mother Event", trans. Bill Ransom and Zhang Er)


And here's a lovely 2012 conversation about "Mother Event" between Zhang Er, Bill Ransom and Leonard Schwartz (who is actually the dad in the poem).

https://jacket2.org/commentary/so-translating



*

Other online poems by Zhang Er:

"The Husband of a Younger Cousin on my Father's Side" trans. Steve Bradbury
https://jacket2.org/poems/poem-zhang-er
...where we were regaled with a “certified authentic” Ma Po Tofu that was absolutely drenched with salt. All the while he rattled on about the day’s fluctuations in the stock market index and was continually on the phone....

Four poems trans. Bob Holman and Zhang Er: "Let it be Distinguished. Let it be Pure", "Plastic Flowers in the Porthole", "Bridge under Construction", "Noodles".
http://levurelitteraire.com/zhang-er/
Alright then, how
should we treat life,
with all its transient needs?
Hunger, for example, sex
and (ta da!) marriage contract? Mountains rivers
all rush by- ... (from "Plastic Flowers in the Porthole")

On the train: two poems trans. Bob Holman and Zhang Er: "Fourth Brother", "In the Soft Sleeper Waiting Lounge".
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/two-poems3
                              Now
continue conversation
started two years ago: "There is no grassland any more,
desertification they say."
Wrote a few poems,
had a child,
now there's no grass left?
Rain beats down on yurt, a sheep of rain—
where's ruby-faced girl in long apple-
green skirt, gold-trimmed vest?
Second Uncle hasn't changed, only fatter, "Eat only vegetable dishes,
no more rice, still get fat!" (from "In the Soft Sleeper Waiting Lounge")

Three more poems from First Mountain, trans. Joseph Donahue and Zhang Er: "All Aboard", "Hou Ma Station Sketch", "Old Yard".
http://poeticsresearch.com/article/zhang-er-3-poems-trans-by-joseph-donahue/
The moment has arrived
for ID, ticket, fated seat in life, and
feelings that stream away.
What you’ve found does not fulfill you.
No hairstyle can fashionably
tangle over your eyes. (from "All Aboard")




*

Éireann Lorsung

Dickinson House visual

[Image source: http://ohbara.com/projects/portfolio/dickinson-house/  Dickinson House was a writer's residency that EL ran when she lived in Belgium.]

Out the window the snow begins as it has all week, off and on, and the four o'clock dimness sets in, but it is tolerable because of the snow and the little colored lights and the darkness of the neighboring house mirroring the lights from our windows, and in the distance I can hear the poets I love begin to talk about their lives (and other poets begin to scold them for talking about their lives) and their red shoes and their fear, and I wish the poets could come stay in this anonymous house far away, with all the people they love and the people they love, all the people I love and the ones they love, all of us here in the dim with the small lights and the houses next door empty of neighbors

From a poem by Éireann Lorsung. The poem has a very long title beginning When I say... If I gave the whole title you'd have forgotten about the extract I wished to highlight.

Here the poem plays a game about welcoming people in. It's not irrelevant that EL* did run a writer's residency for several years, so she really has had poets come to stay. And she's also a teacher, so I guess pretty comfortable with rooms full of people.

And yet in the poem this is complicated. As soon as the wish includes so many poets, and then widens out to embrace all the people they love and all the people she loves, well that welcome is getting bigger and bigger but it's also taking on fantastical and unreal proportions. It's a soap bubble that grows and grows and bursts.

And in the anonymous house, what then? A loneliness and emptiness, maybe. But it also seems tolerable, with the Christmas lights that someone arranged and the reflections of light in the darkened windows over the way: a resonance tranquillized by distance and time. After all it's rather nice that the neighbours have gone away. The fancied voices of beloved poets are also a reflection: the poets exist, but not in this place. So the passage expresses the consolations of solitude, it is a rich kind of emptiness, not the featureless type but the emptiness of something that can be imagined as full: an absence.

"in the distance I can hear the poets I love"  ... So for a second we imagine EL reading their poetry, but that's not clear, maybe they are only chatting -- "about their lives (and other poets begin to scold them for talking about their lives)". It isn't clear, and the unclarity is pointed. After all it's a small debate about good manners, if people should go on about their lives, and it's also a big debate about poetry, should poems be autobiographical.

The implication is that those two debates are connected with each other. And there's a difficult question emerging here, is loving poets central to why we want to read poetry (for we certainly do love our favourite poets), and if so is writing our own poem a persuasion to love us -- no, no, that sounds very bad, but .... Yet isn't love of a kind central to what art is for? How to express the worth of artistic endeavour if it isn't something to do with love?

I'm not talking about the rest of the poem but it certainly observes how love forms the architecture of our experience, the love of selected loved ones and of other people and all people and dead people, love and the absence of love. Love, and fear.

"and their red shoes and their fear". Hard to avoid the allusion to "The Red Shoes", Hans Christian Andersen's tale of compulsive restlessness, himself the most restless and fearful of travellers. But if it has an unacknowledged autobiographical element, it's also deeply anti-feminist in its fear of Karin's free spirit and her rebellion against staying small; in Andersen's own terms the red shoes probably means a career of prostitution or at least its moral equivalent. And yet (or rather, and so) it now strikes us as a potent feminist parable about the challenges of stepping forth as a woman with a public career, about being willing to be noticed, about the tribal judgments and attitudes that still haunt our world.

*

Weir, fishbed, river a straightened ellipsis after 1918

What red flowers were worked here in what hand
Wh at blue

We covered the stove with Delft tiles
We laid our bones across one another, to be found like that


from An archeology, a poem about inhabitation and migration, living and moving. Specifically Flanders during the 1940 occupation, but conceiving long vistas before and after. Conceiving rather than seeing: these lines are preoccupied with the unseen and with those frail signals to the future ("to be found") that so often don't get through or can't be interpreted.

*

Éireann Lorsung is another poet I've discovered via the anthology women: poetry: migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (2017). (At the time it was put together, EL was living in Belgium, though she's since moved back to the USA.)




Éireann Lorsung's web page introduction to herself and what she does:

http://ohbara.com/portfolio/

Charlotte Bhaskar's review of EL's Her book (2013):

https://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/08/28/evoking-the-physical-and-tangible-of-art-and-life-eireann-lorsungs-her-book/

2016 interview with EL by Taeler Kallmerten on the excellent Newfound site. It touches on both the poems I've written about, among many other things.

https://newfound.org/2016/02/07/west-illegitimately-an-interview-with-eireann-lorsung/


*

*This represents my latest, not especially happy, attempt to find a better way of referring to the author under discussion (once I've supplied their full name, obviously).

When we talk about dead authorities, using the bare surname is inevitable, sanctioned by tradition, and raises no hackles (though maybe it should). I've written hundreds of posts about "Shakespeare", "Scott", "Dickens", etc.

But I strongly dislike referring to contemporary writers in that way.  Partly because it always gives me a jar to see myself referred to as "Peverett". I haven't been called that since I was at junior school! Why are you infantilizing me and what I do? OK, I might play the fool now and then, but I assure you I'm all growed up! And talking about poetry is one of the most grown-up things any of us do, I'm putting my whole heart into this, my whole long life experience... So don't treat it like a school assignment...  Those are the thoughts that flash through my mind, whenever I'm Peverett-ed.

But besides that, I feel that I'm apt to write and think less honestly about the writers and their work and my own response to it if I adopt a naming convention that I'd never use to their face. (And every so often these were people I actually knew.)

So then I tried using the writer's first name, and sometimes that approach has felt totally right (for example, when writing about Tim Allen, a poet of my own generation with whom I've often had exchanges over the years).

But it's rather a different matter when e.g the writer's a woman who's much younger than me, someone I don't know at all. In that context throwing around someone's first name seems distinctly matey if not creepy. I don't take any credit for sensitivity in registering that unease. On the contrary, I think the embarrassment betrays susceptibilities within myself and other het males of my generation that are the reverse of admirable. But whatever, there's many times when the first-name thing doesn't feel appropriate, and I'm just not doing it.

So that's why I'm now trying the approach of using initials. It isn't very elegant, and its virtues are mainly negative e.g.  it is neither stuffy nor chummy. It isn't what people do in academic essays, and that seems to me a very good and important thing: academic conventions have long been a hindrance to the integrity of expressing what we really think and know and feel. And I do think initials are quite honest in this respect: that they probably are the form I'd choose if I was repeatedly referring to the same writer in a missive to a friend, for example.