Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten was born in Berkeley, California and attended MIT and the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1960s. Here he met fellow poets Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman and he subsequently decided to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he received an MFA in English (Program of Creative Writing) in 1972.

He edited This, one of the central publications of the Language school of poetry from 1971-82, and co-edited Poetics Journal with Lyn Hejinian. Apart from his numerous poetic publications he also works extensively as a critic, editor, and publisher. He is a Professor of English at Wayne State University, Detroit.

From my own point of view, Watten is one of those people whose theoretical work simply is mesmerizing. Doing my little bit of research for this post I found myself wanting to read every little article and blog post he has ever written… I highly recommend having a look through his blog, Jacket2 contributions, and his readings on PennSound.

Links:
http://barrettwatten.net/ (Watten’s blog)
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Watten.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Watten
http://jacket2.org/commentary/barrett-watten (several posts by Watten on Jacket2)

My below poem took its inspiration from Watten’s “Statistics” which is included in the anthology. I found myself seriously struggling to create an adequate response to his work, so this one is merely a first attempt. It uses language about the concept of “statistical significance” as well as quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

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significant / white
“we prefix so significant and infidel a word” when the null hypothesis specifies the undesired. the abandoned. the past. the value of a parameter measured in abstraction is all. “a most significant event befell the most insignificant”. the data are yet beyond the curve. a bell to be called statistically at a given confidence. γ = 1 – α. “no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity.” (which here might well be knowledge or maybe clarity) the computed confidence for that parameter fails to contain. the whiteness on the edge below. (the corner of my eye - faded marginalia). the value specified by the null hypothesis (as to say the status quo). we pose the question. we ask for details. “a significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated” we gather evidence beyond the borders of the known. it remains as a matter of good scientific practice: “they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness”. a level is chosen. “a remarkable and most significant one” (here: mere interpretation?). set to 0.05 (5%). in any experiment or observation involving a sample, a book, a paper, a sheet - there is always the possibility slipping into whiteness. “this one is very happy and significant”. an observed effect would have occurred due to error alone. (question unanswered) “pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders” if the p-value p < 0.05. the first inference “it seems a significant provision of nature” - an investigator may conclude the observed actually reflects upon the surface of the purest. “whiteness has been even made significant of gladness”. yet “second: it is a little significant”. investigators may then report that the result points between lines i.e. “his life, as they significantly call it, untouched”. thereby confirming the null hypothesis. abandoned by clarity: “every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light” is white.

Tom Clark

image: Moritz Nähr [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Born in 1941 in Chicago, Tom Clark attended John Carroll University and the University of Michigan before going to England on a Fulbright scholarship. In addition to earning an MA at Cambridge University he spent some time hitchhiking across the country together with Allen Ginsberg.

Over the years Clark has published more than 30 collections of poetry. He is particularly famous for his sport-related poetry but also frequently addressed the state of contemporary America. As a poet mainly associated with the off-handed, witty poetry style of the New York School, Clark also established himself as a leading opponent of the language movement.

The poet Billy Collins wrote of Clark’s work: “Tom Clark, the lyric imp of American poetry, has delivered many decades’ worth of goofy, melancholic, cosmic, playful, and wiggy poems. I can never get enough of this wise guy leaning on the literary jukebox, this charmer who refuses to part with his lovesick teenage heart.”

In addition to his work as a poet Clark also published a number of novels and biographies of people such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Olson.

The recipient of awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, Clark has been an instructor in poetics at the New College of California since 1988. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Links:
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/ (Tom Clark’s blog with poetry and essays)
http://jacketmagazine.com/bio/clark-t.shtml (his author page at Jacket Magazine)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/tom-clark
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/tom-clark


My poem below took their inspiration from Clark’s “You” poem series. They also draw in parts on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous philosophical work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

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You (XVI)
1.    Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
2.    Cups of tea on your sofa in the early morning sun.
3.    Your arms.
4.    And lips and perfect cock.
5.    Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
6.    With the curtains drawn.
7.    Long walks along the canal, through the park, towards a slice of cake and coffee.
8.    What is thinkable is also possible.
9.    Books piled up.
10.    Thoughts kissing, begetting others.
11.    It will mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable.
12.    Not without hesitation.
13.    Yet eventually.
14.    Operations can vanish.
15.    Logic must take care of itself.

Charles North

Born in Brooklyn, New York, poet and writer Charles North grew up in New York City and earned degrees from Tufts University and Columbia University before attending Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at The New School. The Poetry Project in New York City was central to North’s development as a poet.  He went to numerous readings, published in Project magazines, and befriended other poets of his generation, including two who would become close colleagues, Tony Towle and Paul Violi.

Since his first collection Lineups (1970), he has published nine books of poems, as well as collaborative books with Towle and with the artist Trevor Winkfield.

Publisher’s Weekly noted that

“North’s work constantly greets us with the deft presence of a mind devilishly enamored of improbable form and substantial ideation … there is a pervasive wistfulness and lyric rush that pervades even the most artificial of forms, as if blueprint ink was running from the draughtsman’s tears”

Hoover says of North’s work: It is “reminiscent of the metaphysical poetry of Andrew Marvell, [and] is often gently humorous, moving with ease from high to low levels of rhetoric.”

In addition to his work as a writer, North edited the poet/painter anthology Broadway with James Schuyler in 1979, and ran the Swollen Magpie Press with Paul Violi from 1976-1982. Among his awards are two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships and four Fund for Poetry awards.  In 2008 he was awarded an Individual Artist’s Grant by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Links:
http://www.charlesnorth.net/Home.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-north
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/North.php


The below poem was inspired by North’s “A Note To Tony Towle (After WS)” which uses a similar structure.


~ - ~

Not to

One must have swallowed three decades of game show hosts
Not to feel empty on a Monday morning
One must have squealed each curl of pubic hair
Not to feel lonely on a Friday night
One must have scratched the stickers off the back of each IKEA fish stick,
have sucked the straw of six generations of iPhone battery leaks
One must have hugged every new soft minty sanitary towel
Not to feel
Not to feel

One must have held on to 6,000 air miles of pina coladas
Not to feel dizzy with frustration every day
One must have leaned on the heavy metal rods of eternal porn film wisdom
Not to feel the rising of the bile in your throat
One must have kissed the sweet lips of neo-liberal consensus
Have licked along the voluptuous curves of hedge fund gluttony
One must have touched the private parts of 20 years of everyone’s Google search history
Not to feel
Not to feel

Amy Gerstler

Amy Gerstler was born in San Diego and received her BA in psychology from Pitzer College in 1978. She subsequently moved to Los Angeles and received her MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College in 2000.

Known for its wit and complexity, Amy Gerstler's poetry often deals with themes such as redemption, suffering, and survival and – as critic Sarah Gorham puts in in 1991 – “strip[s] down all basic assumptions about beauty and truth and holiness, and begin[s] a struggle for redemption from the gutter”. In a review of her 2009 collection Dearest Creature, the Los Angeles Times called Gerstler "one of the best poets in the nation." 

She has published more than a dozen poetry collections, two works of fiction, and various articles, reviews, and collaborations with visual artists. In 1991 Gerstler won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection Bitter Angel.

She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine and lives in Los Angeles.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/amy-gerstler
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/amy-gerstler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Gerstler

My below poem is inspired by Gerstler’s “BZZZZZZZZ” and uses some of the first phrases of her poem while also incorporating parts of the text for an online “love compatibility” horoscope.

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Horoscope

There’s a certain philosopher I’ve fallen in love with. His hands are weighty. His breath smells long, silent and deep. His thoughts are neither captives nor violent lovers. They’re capricious. Like stubborn cats they hide quietly in the darkest corners, and leap fiercely from beyond the shade. He thinks only of improving the future of the world and humanity, and builds pillars of books for the fates to rest. I watch him discussing the tides with the ancient muses, his eyes reflected in their perfect white spheres. I follow him through the cellar door of his airy chamber. Up a tower of a thousand steps I often chase him, gathering hand-written notes I can never read. But when I reach the room he is never home, having gone to find an answer. Yet I stay and bent down to collect the pages: my story scattered about the floor in beautiful circles like autumn leaves around a curious tree.

Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach was born in New York City in 1942. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University before moving to London for a period of time to teach and work as an editor. She returned to the US in 1974 and - as the Poetry Foundation puts it – “immersed herself in the art world, working as an art consultant and an assistant director to various art galleries”. She has published nine poetry collections as well as one book of essays (The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2005)).

John Ashbery to who’s work her poetry has often been compared, said about Lauterbach’s writings: “Ann Lauterbach’s poetry goes straight to the elastic, infinite core of time.”

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. For over 15 years, she has taught at Bard College and co-directed the Writing Division of the MFA program. She lives in Germantown, New York.

Links:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/lauterbach/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ann-lauterbach
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ann-lauterbach
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lauterbach.php

My below poem is inspired by Lauterbach’s “Platonic Subject” – while her poem reflects on Platonic Realism I decided to address the question whether we have free will.

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Being Determined

Waiting for the bubbles to rise in the hot water as I make my cup of tea.
My decision just another bubble, following the pull of nature’s law.
My steaming cup - entailed by the precise state of the universe
at a given time t0 together with all the laws of nature:
sperm, ovum, a zygote cell growing, lizards slithering across wet, sandy soil,
bubbles rising, steam gathering heavy on the inside of the lid.
At a given time, as expected, I watch it. Being determined.
Caught in a bubble or free to drift, defy the tale -

Seasonal Break

There has been an awful lot going on recently with a number of readings and travel etc. which made me feel like I am not able to keep up with the fast work pace of this project. In light of these events and the upcoming holiday season I have therefore decided to take a few weeks break from "After Gertrude" and will continue with the final 30 poets in the new year. It has been an amazing journey so far and I am looking forward to getting back into it after this little break. See you in 2016!

Gary Snyder

Beat poet, member of the San Francisco Renaissance, spiritual poet, political poet, eco poet - Gary Snyder fits all these categories and none.

As one of the six poets who read at the historic Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955 which helped launch the Beat movement, he is often associated with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, yet as Hoover notes in the anthology: “unlike many of the Beats, […] he rarely deals in urban subjects.” Instead Snyder’s writing is far more diverse as he is equally interested in the politics of ecology, performance, and non-western cultures.

Snyder has authored numerous volumes of poetry, including Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award and Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

He was the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gary-snyder
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/gary-snyder
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/snyder.htm
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/iain-sinclair/the-man-in-the-clearing  - London Review of Books feature including podcast
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/16/featuresreviews.guardianreview19 - Guardian profile

My below poem took its inspiration from Snyder’s “As for Poets”.

~ - ~

The Space Poet

The Space Poet has grown old and frail
on his wait for the Space Age.
His Space Hands are shaky and thin
in his giant, white Space Gloves.
He cannot even push the right Space Buttons
anymore to navigate the Space Ship on its course
or write about what he saw in Space
all that he saw in Space

from a distance

when it was too close
for us.