Faversham Creek, May

objectivism's children

At a Friday night one-off, Shearsman launched three books. Michael Heller’s Beckmann Variations, Elaine Randell’s Faulty Mothering and Robert Vas Dias’ Still · Life. It was a superb reading from all three poets of work that was meditative, precise and witty with that sharpness of form that characterises what I’d see as the Objectivist diaspora. These poets, all very different nonetheless had in common an attitude at variance with the poetic often encountered in writing schools. The ‘teaching poetries’ these days tend to be variations on new formalism on the one hand, or language poetry on the other. These poetries (at least their lowest-common denominator variants) share a reliance on method that lends itself to educative practice. Method is an unquestioned constant for those at the conservative end of the spectrum; it’s a device to hold content in its place and a signal that one is to be taken seriously. For those of Langpo disposition method is especially useful as a set of artificial rules to detach the poem from the tendency towards humanistic discourse or ‘plain speech’. Poets like Ron Silliman often enough claim Oppen, Niedecker, and Zukofsky at least for their own purposes. But the kind of chiselled, glyph-centred work the Objectivists produced (though Zukofsky’s Catullus may have hinted at this disposition) seems to me a long way from ‘the new sentence’. The poets who read on Friday are still around to broadcast their work. Others of the same ilk no longer here to remind us of the fact (Paul Blackburn for example) risk neglect in a world of ‘teaching poetries’.

deft fx

After broiling under the outdoor heaters at Ciao Bella it was good to get a cool dose of works in progress at The Lamb next door. The featured poets were Nat Raha, Lucy Harvest Clarke and Anna Ticehurst. Nat Raha did one bracket with a Telecaster and an impressive array of effects pedals navigated with ease as she performed a series of Sapphic texts. Her other life, as musician, can be sampled at http://www.myspace.com/thesleepwells and at http://www.myspace.com/helloloveless

pontiac

Tenant Wood, May

the risk society

authentic, local, essential