|
Number
287
April/May 2001
If Everything is
True:
The
Enterprise of
Temple
JOHN OLIVER
SIMON
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
LITTLE LORD SHIVA: The Berkeley Poems, 1968,
poems by Charles Potts, Glass Eye Books,
Northhampton, Massachusetts, 1999, 128 pages,
$15.00 paper.
LOST RIVER MOUNTAIN, poems by Charles Potts,
Blue Begonia Press, Yakima, Washington, 1999, 100
pages, $13.00 paper. NATURE LOVERS, poems by
Charles Potts, Pleasure Boat Studio, Bainbridge
Island, Washington, 2000, 64 pages, $10.00
paper.
JOURNEYMAN, poems by Stephen Thomas, Tsunami
Inc., Walla Walla, Washington, 1997, 128 pages,
$10.00 paper.
OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY, poems by
Teri Zipf, Tsunami Inc., Walla Walla, Washington,
1997, 72 pages, $10.00 paper.
THIS HOUSE, a book-length poem by Jim
Bodeen, Tsunami Inc., Walla Walla, Washington,
1999, 236 pages, $15.00 paper.
WITH MY HANDS FULL/CON MIS MANOS LLENAS:
Young Latino Writers in Yakima, edited by Jim
Bodeen, Blue Begonia Press, Yakima, Washington,
1999, 220 pages, $13.00 paper.
THE TEMPLE/EL TEMPLO, a quarterly magazine
edited by Charles Potts, Tsunami Inc., P.O. Box
100, Walla Walla, Washington 99362-0033, email
address: tsunami@wwics.com, single issue $5,
one-year subscription first class mail $20,
one-year subscription (ten copies standard mail)
for distribution $20.
One Rainy Sunday night in December, 1967, a
bearded twenty-four-year-old stranger with shining
eyes blew me away at the open reading series at
Shakespeare & Co. on Telegraph which I was
hosting along with Richard Krech, now three decades
later the lawyer for the KPFA defendants.
Charles Potts was on his way back from Central
America to Seattle, where he had been editing the
poetry magazine Litmus. Before that he came
out of Pocatello, a Mormon farm kid from the Big
Lost River Valley who fetched up in 1962 against
the teaching of Ed Dorn at Idaho State. Dorn
transformed the erstwhile teenage alcoholic and
high school basketball star into a poet.
"Meeting Edward Dorn for the first time was a
profound disappointment." Potts had snagged an A in
a short story class, but the prof had been
diagnosed with cancer, and the following poetry
semester Potts had been palmed off on Dorn. "I just
knew that I had to start over again psyching out a
different professor." Dorn chain-smoked in class
and let the students smoke, which was a plus in
those days. "He was forever running his hands
through his long blonde hair and looking
exasperatingly at us when he made a point. I liked
the fact that he got angry in class and raved at
times."
Charlie wrote a poem with the word fuck
in it, which he was too bashful to read; Dorn gave
him an A for it, and Potts soon became the
enfant terrible of the ISU poets. "Dorn
partied with the younger poets, sometimes all
night. He could out talk, out drink, out drug, was
more manic than, anybody around." What Dorn's
introduction to poetry did "was make me realize I
could write vernacular narrative in verse. Tell
stories in other words and skip all the he said,
she said, cut to the chase and stay there."
"Edward Dorn was never my favorite poet," Potts
clarifies. When he was Dorn's student, his
favorites were Creeley and Whalen. As he learned
more, Duncan and Thomas McGrath came to the center
of his attention. But it was Dorn who sent Potts
out into the world as a heat-seeking prophet on a
disgruntled mission. Charlie was carrying some
luminous poems that night at Shakespeare:
They're dancing in the market at Antigua
The ruins beneath the hand woven blouses
Brown nipples of the early
Flesh Age
Brown lips of the babies
Hungry grin
Chemical terror of not enough tortillas…
The incisively observant protagonist of "Para
Olga" passes a lyrical night with an eponymous
puta; negotiated seduction in Spanish leads
to a goodbye at dawn, "my word / The English / We
both knew what it meant / You said it," and the
encounter unhooks a manic didactic political riff
triumphantly typical of early Potts:
I left.
What little we have left
To prostitute
On the left
Is a staggering brown acreage
Out of the skin trade
...
Organ music.
Let the spirit
Lift up your clothes
And come dancing.
I accepted "Para Olga" on the spot for the third
issue of my little mag, Aldebaran Review, to
the notable displeasure ("it's not even poetry") of
my co-editor, Bob Parker, thereby provoking his
resignation. When I first met Parker, he was
married to the late African-American, and later,
lesbian poet Patricia (as she then signed herself)
Parker, but Pat soon left him, passed through a
brief flirtation with the Black Panther Party, and
added insult to injury by becoming the lover of his
bête noire, Charlie Potts. The lesbian
separatist contingent of our extremely ghettoized
poetry community has never been eager to hear about
Pat Parker's heterosexual past.
By February 1968, as third world students went
on strike at Cal, provoking mass arrests and
tear-gas in the South Campus streets, Charlie was
back in Berkeley full-time, sharing a pad on Fulton
Street with fellow Northwestemers such as Jan
Kepley who did visionary collages for the covers of
Litmus, his wife Edie who unobtrusively
slept once and once only with each of the male
poets on the scene, Vanish aka David Hiatt
who was eighteen years old and as elusive as his
handle, and Sunshine, a big dim blond kid who is
undoubtedly selling insurance in Billings
today.
Across that spring of 1968, as our generation,
from Paris to Prague, seemed to be birthing a
transformative future, a remarkable zoo of poets
began to congregate around the Fulton Street house.
These included Alta, my wife at the time and soon
to be a major feminist poet; John Thomson, who has
written music criticism for the East Bay
Express these many years under the handle of j.
poet; Joel Waldman, a warm, bristly bear; and
Harold Adler, who has lately curated "The Whole
World Is Watching," a historical exhibit on the
counter-culture, for the Judah Magnes Museum.
Krech, who had been editing the little mag
Avalanche, went in with me on the purchase
of a used A.B. Dick 360 offset press, which we
installed in the Boneyard, the grimy industrial
territory at Fifth and Delaware, now Fourth Street
boutiques, becoming job printers to the poetic
revolution.
We occasionally entertained crossover
heavyweights from the Meat Poetry movement like
Douglas Blazek and Hugh Fox, and Potts crashed once
at Charles Bukowski's house in L.A. and got a poem
out of it. D.r. Wagner, a refugee from Buffalo via
d.a. levy's poetry scene in Cleveland, weighed in
from Sacramento, along with a big old Okie named
Ben Hiatt. Our movement was obliviously male-heavy;
Alta and Pat Parker were the only women poets
included in Aldebaran Review 3. But friendly
older poets such as Al Young and Larry Eigner
published in our mags as well, as did Ron Silliman,
long before anyone whispered in his ear the word
'Language'.
But the bull goose poet of the Berkeley poetry
revolution of spring 1968 was Charles Potts. He
appears with a great grin on the faded yellow cover
of my last remaining copy of Aldebaran Review
3, his eyes fiercely burning out of their
bearded nimbus, at the podium, pointing one finger
in the air. In this gesture he imitates the
four-year-old child in his arms, my stepdaughter
Lorelei Bosserman, who is joyfully giving the bird
with her index finger to the poetry reading crowd
at the First COSMEP Conference in Berkeley in May,
1968.
COSMEP, the Conference Of Small Magazine Editors
and Publishers, was convened to organize the
simmering chaos of little-mag poet-editors who were
just beginning to sniff out the availability of
grants from the recently-established National
Endowment for the Arts. A manifesto which I
drafted, invoking the destructive forces of history
in order to divert moneys to the most alternative
possible presses, was self-servingly approved in a
stormy plenary session with few dissenting votes,
Charlie's one of them. But the readings, scheduled
by Potts and me, were to be a showcase for our
brilliant poetry movement.
Potts is up there at the podium to restore order
after a tumultuous presentation by Andy Clausen,
who stripped himself naked to read, his
gladiatorial twenty-one-year-old body draped only
in an American flag tie. The following month, when
Allen Ginsberg caught a glimpse of Clausen at the
Rolling Renaissance readings in San Francisco, he
thought he was seeing the young Neal Cassady. As
far as I know, and not for any lack of
propositioning, Allen didn't get laid by any of the
cute male poets in our movement. Back at COSMEP,
once the crowd calms down, Potts will read an
oracle for the next thousand years entitled
"Fu Hexagram 24 No Hangups," which
begins:
Charlie Potts is dead
And I wonder if I should
Be opening his mail
Just as though it had
Been addressed to me
From all his friends
as he solemnly announces that "my name is
Laffing Water." Alta, who was ready to let go of
all the patronymics inherited from the men of her
life, took him entirely seriously and would address
him as "Hey, Laffing Water," while on one occasion
a poetry functionary from academia referred to him
as Mr. Water. This transformation of identity gave
Charlie, like Archimedes, a stance from which to
shove at the sum of our predicament:
Though sometimes I feel trapped
With so many other
Ugly Americans
Locked in English
Long time---no see
The blind embrace the blind
The deaf the dumb
The dead the living
Let go of me
Potts blows through oral-performance
transitions, some more successful than others, into
a paroxysm that was probably the high point of our
entire evanescent movement. He lays the finger on
the wound, points the way, and heals with the
miraculous power of the self-evident:
How the genes know
what you all did
Greedy motherfuckers
I can be happy with nothing
Remember
Every step you take
Is in the right direction
And it's not recorded anywhere
If everything is true
This match will sparkle
The COSMEP extravaganza was nothing if not
poetry theatre, and Potts would later chronicle it
all in his excruciating memoir Valga Krusa.
The marathon reading was down to its twenty-third
poet, as Potts tells it:
The crowd had thinned down and Michael Upton was
on the stage reading, his lines falling on deaf
ears, when all of a sudden, some guy I later
learned was Tony Schonwald, threw down the books he
was holding, jumped to his feet, and began running
up onto the stage. Upon reaching the blackboard, he
began to scrawl, "your magazines, your poetry, are
all shit, except you Charlie Potts," which took
everyone by considerable surprise. Thinking myself
implicated in it, but unable to move because the
situation was still in a state of flux, for as Tony
got on with his gig, emboldened Paul
X[avier] went up and alongside on the
adjacent board, wrote, 'We are all shit.'
To which Alta then rose and added, "Silver
winged shit," all of this creating a brouhaha in
the audience. There seemed to be scant chance of
Upton continuing to read, but he did. Though Robert
Dawson, who was the next and last reader, began
squirting Upton with a water gun, walking back and
forth in front of the podium, Upton seemed to get a
lot of shit like that, I remembered the time he was
reading at Shakespeare on a warm spring night, the
usual crowd, when a dog walked nonchalantly in, sat
down in front of where he was reading, listened for
a few minutes, then puked a pile and trotted out.
Upton had every reason to be thinking, why me.
Instead he turned to Dawson and said, "If the
man talking about peace and waving the gun will sit
down and shut up, I will cover you with silver
winged shit," which brought down the house.
With, as Jack Spicer put it, no visible means of
support, Charlie took on his narrow shoulders the
whole 24/7 task of organizing, publishing and
hustling which enabled "the entire civilization
[to be] refuted at least / Once a month at
the poetry readings." As he understood this role,
it involved all the all night, outtalk, outdrink,
outdrug, out manic capacities he had learned from
Dorn, but Charlie was wearing thin. As the spring
of 1968 built towards planetary apocalypse, he
gradually forgot about sleeping and eating. He was
down to 140 pounds on his six foot three frame.
There were joyful interludes with Pat Parker.
"What is love / If not this juncture / Where
everything's warm and wet," Charlie wrote to Pat,
and she wrote back, "they haven't been told / no
boys / no girls / only energy / flashing back /
& forth." But this relationship was not a
stable platform. Just once, Charlie and Pat cruised
around North Oakland looking for a place to live
together:
A more likely looking couple not to rent to
would have been hard to conjure. Shaggy faced
hippy, and svelte black fox. They could see us
coming for miles. A frequent comment was, "it's
just been rent."
Alta and I, who were always happy to cook
Charlie a square meal when he dropped by our pad on
Grove Street, split for a summer pilgrimage with
Lorelei as far north as Vancouver. Charlie wrote a
"Total Eclipse of Ezra Pound" which he
characterized as "Canto 13 revised by one unlucky /
Idaho kid for the other." "And Kung said / 'You
old fool, come out of it, / Get up and do something
useful.'" [to quote Pound's "Canto
XIII"]
One afternoon Waldman gave him a ride to the
city to pick up boxes of paper for the next
Litmus, which was going to be the best ever.
They stopped off at San Francisco State. That
afternoon it became evident to Charlie, midway in
spacetime between Prague and Chicago, that the
final showdown was here and everywhere, but he
couldn't seem to make anybody understand how
immediately essential it was that he contact
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Eldridge Cleaver.
Ferlinghetti was a guy in a phone booth, and a
woman in the crowd was one of the New York poetry
bureaucrats we had confronted at COSMEP. Charlie
walked up and gave her a righteous kick in the ass.
Then he began hurling garbage cans. They took him
away in a squad car, and he soon found himself in
paper pajamas, in Highland Hospital, on
thorazine.
On the cover of Little Lord Shiva: The
Berkeley Poems, 1968, which I published
originally as a special issue of Aldebaran,
and which has been handsomely republished by Glass
Eye Books, Charlie's on the moon. It's the photo
from Dwinelle, sans child, grinning as photographed
by Apollo 9 from beyond the desolate lunar surface,
a gibbous earth above his shoulder, his finger
pointing up to infinity.
Despite our easy romanticization of poetic
madness, the terror and damage of Potts's
schizophrenic break were absolutely real, and the
subsequent thirty years can be read as a
reconstruction, using only the painstaking
materials of sanity, of the poetic authority and
community which Potts evoked in such magisterial
evanescence for a few moments in 1968. "There's no
necessary or organic relationship between poetry
and schizophrenia," Potts argues today, "any more
than there would be between poetry and asthma. They
are romantically linked in the American imagination
because that excuses the poetry tasters from
confronting the work. I suppose in retrospect my
'career' could get pigeonholed the same way, 'Oh,
another crazy poet, how predictable.'"
"It is possible to take the most normal
individual anywhere off the street and deprive them
of adequate nutrition and keep them from sleeping
and dreaming for a few days and drive them crazy.
On the other hand," Potts adds, "if our times
hadn't been so tight with psychic grief, I mean the
whole country was crazy and had been for years,
still is even if the powers that remain have
managed to disguise it beyond recognition, none of
what happened to me would have or might not have
happened."
Charlie slowly returned to his northwest roots,
publishing Litmus in Salt Lake City, and
settling down finally in Walla Walla, Washington,
putting together a couple of marriages, fathering
two daughters, buying and selling real estate, and
nearly getting elected to the city council on a
platform of radical sanity. Out of Walla Walla
comes his current publishing empire, Tsunami, Inc.,
and his magazine The Temple/El Templo, now
fifteen issues deep and eight thousand newsprint
copies wide.
The earliest among the poets Potts has promoted
is Charles Foster, born in 1922, a contemporary of
Ginsberg, Duncan and Ferlinghetti. Like Lew Welch,
Foster left the advertising game in order to write.
He was a regular, along with Stuart Perkoff, in the
Beat scene in Venice Beach, but had published
virtually nothing when he drank himself to death in
1967. Potts writes that "the pictures Foster leaves
with us do not occur elsewhere. [His] poems
are a periscope into a world hitherto
unrealized…I do not know of any American
poetry as usefully dense as Foster's." Charles
Foster raises a large, eloquent, didactic voice
from Eisenhower days, from the becalmed middle of
the American Century. This is "Public
Announcement":
all i know is, in that joy it is animal,
soul & liver & penis & ears, all
suddenly freed
from the dead old weight of the corpse
the corpse dead at the end, i think
of a 30,000 year long wave
when we couldn't find it and it was on our
backs
& it was all cowshit all ten tons of it on our
shoulders
that some evil and unknown great uncle had
secretly
willed us:
it is gone, that enormous bag
that incredible unearned misery, & now
we have nothing but lies to tell each other
or glad tidings or sighs
of relief till
some truth may be found
made up, out of our actual midst!
The plumb line nailed down at one end by the
improvisatory truth of Charles Foster reaches
across the decades to Sharon Doubiago, epic voyager
goddess driving our mythical coast from Alaska to
Peru, who, as Potts notes, hardly needs his
publication and promotion at this point to put her
across to a larger audience. Reviewing Hard
Country [recently reissued], he writes,
"Doubiago meets the test of the best prophetic
writing…by looking straight at her subjects
without flinching, for finding the exquisite detail
that elucidates the whole, and for feeling so
deeply about the subjects that they acquire the
power of song."
Prophecy, eloquent detail, useful density, and
song. Let's keep those criteria in mind while
visiting with five hitherto unknown poets that
Potts has been featuring in Temple: Stephen
Thomas, Teri Zipf, Jim Bodeen, Amalio
Madueño and Denis Mair.
Stephen Thomas entitles his book
Journeyman, and he identifies with the
humble medieval workingman on the cover,
sledgehammering a red-hot horseshoe into shape.
Born in 1950 in Auburn, Washington, Thomas "took
the commonest route of escape from the Catholic
working class" and studied for the priesthood and
went on to study medieval literature. "Again taking
a common route," he escaped academia by taking up
his father's trade of carpentry. He now helps run
The Poetry Circus spoken word festival in Seattle.
His poems are craftily hammered and nailed, forming
sturdy joists. I'm most excited about "The Sirens'
Song," which achieves an authentic Homeric accent
for our time. Here is Ulysses's perspective on his
wife:
Penelope is clear eyed, and she knows her
station.
Queens cannot just fuck and walk.
Anyone lays a queen, anyone, that is, who is her
equal,
doesn't want to be her equal but her lord.
That's how it is with property…
Speaking of another strong woman, Circe knows
this voyager through and through to the addicted
core:
Knowing me as well as she might, considering my
long,
bewitched sojourn there on her island,
she knew that I would have to hear what had
destroyed
my kind before.
She knew I would insist as children will on
having
what must harm me.
Stephen Thomas stays with the scene every slow
beat of the way through the strait between Scylla
and Charybdis, cadencing on iambic pentameter where
"sweet music came across the glass green sea / An
open candid air in harmony / One clear soprano and
a husky alto" and "the beach / was littered with
the putrid carcasses of seamen, as the banks of
spawning streams are littered with still salmon."
Bound to the mast, the poet wants it all, "the
shallows, the variety and the lies." The seamen
double up his bonds, the fetters cut his wrists,
and finally as they pull away, the singing dies
astern. Ulysses mouths the words "release me," but
in a marvellous six-line extended simile such as
our language has ahnost unlearned in the last
century, the mate shakes his head, like a mother
determined to teach the burned child a lesson.
"Then I began to learn about desire." Ulysses, at
the end, is entirely reduced to the human
condition:
Time moved in two contrary rhythms,
rapidly toward death, slowly on toward evening,
when at last the sundown broke the spell that
held my oarsmen to their clockwork task,
and they rose to untie me, but not to set me
free.
"The Sirens' Song" is a profoundly insightful
study of the heterosexual male presentation of our
most normal everyday social disease, obsessive
sexual fantasy and intrigue; it is also one of the
most workmanlike North American poems of the last
quarter of the twentieth century. Potts says he
likes poetry in which "the act of composing
transforms the poet as well." By the close of "The
Siren's Song," Ulysses, the poet and the reader
have been through an intimate tour of the hell that
Blake and Bosch knew as a garden of delights.
"I like depth and pertinence," Potts continues.
"I also like musicality. It's very refreshing to be
plain and direct if also musical. I'm not big on
cleverness. I adore humility, poets who put their
heart and experience in every line." A poet who
moves between impertinence and bedrock humility is
Teri Zipf, who arrives from a vector somewhere
between Dorianne Laux, Lyn Lifshin and Kim
Addonizio: sexy and sassy enough to be a famous
mainstream American woman poet, she's just a touch
too working-class to fit comfortably on the
visiting faculty of summer institutes.
In "90 Days Same as Cash" Teri Zipf refers to a
"five grand fellowship" which "will disappear / as
fast as the half-gallon of ice cream / I bought
last night," but her major premise is that "lying
on credit applications works," which will not get
you[r poetry] taught at Brown. Her upbeat
ending pounds the table in an enjambed and jazzy
Anglo-Saxon rhythm rife with the rickracking of the
actual language of our time, the poet as Bonnie, if
not Clyde:
…I own my home, at an attractive
mortgage rate. As I wait for the fax
to come back, I expect to be nervous
but it's not as if I'm robbing a bank
I just want some fucking credit
for what I've done, is a dishwasher
too much to ask? They deliver free,
they tell me, but installation costs me
forty bucks.
Does the reader need me to point out the
mutating near-rhymes, attractive/ fax/ back/
expect/ bank/ fucking/ bucks, the alliteration
of done / dishwater /deliver, in order to
perceive that this language is coherent with
musical craft? Teri Zipf sparkles and crackles with
a scrounger's rebellious moral energy, but she
comes to a deeper cadence in a cemetery poem, "The
Way the Blackbird's Song," recognizing her personal
burial place, sleeping in the earth with her rural
American ancestors and descendants:
I know I shall lie here with the Lambs and
Laidlaws,
my pioneering ended in the Blues. Perhaps
someday
the pattern will soothe me, or I'll find new
geometries
in the curve of earth. The way my children
break the smooth expanse of sky. The way
the blackbird's song defines the air.
If these Lambs and Laidlaws have a voice, it
would be that of the Spoon River Anthology.
Given the struggle between Province and Capital in
every poetics from here to Tierra del Fuego, Teri
Zipf resonates with an anti-metropolitan identity
that is close to the core of Templo. "The
famous New York poets conquered the great indoors,"
Potts comments, "Not much risk there."
The citizens of Jim Bodeen's rural democracy
have an accent which the Lambs and the Laidlaws
would be unlikely to recognize. Here's a
transcript:
You don't have any rhythm
at all, Bodeen.
Not fair, Eva Siddhartha Valdivia, Not fair.
Yo enseño a los que no tienen ritmo, a
bailar.
Oh, sí. Pero no. I'm way ahead of you,
Bodeen,
I've been teaching the men to dance for a long
time.
Try the mole. Es mole de mi mamá.
…Mole comes from the Aztecas, Bodeen,
Jim Bodeen is a santo. He has been
teaching English at Davis High School in the Yakima
Valley for thirty years, ever since he got back
from Med Evac in Vietnam, and by now his students,
who are way ahead of him, call themselves
Abrecaminos, openers of paths, and they have
a wonderful anthology of their poems and stories,
With My Hands Full/Con Mis manos Llenas, out
from Blue Begonia Press, which Bodeen operates in
such as may be his spare time, when he's not
teaching or sitting through curriculum meetings.
High school senior Angel Ayon achieves a prophetic
voice:
I see a dark cloud after rain fading in the
sky.
I see my people growing old under the porch
light.
I see a little boy crying alligator tears.
I do not see the thorn in the rose.
I do not see my feet.
I see these pencil marks on paper that leave me
naked
in the light for everyone to see.
I see the ink in my pen slowly getting used up.
I do not see what color socks you're wearing.
"You are a voice for those who don't have
voices."
Jim Bodeen's book-length poem, This
House, collages his life in the epic manner of
Doubiago's Hard Country. Bodeen writes every
morning before dawn to the music of Coltrane, and
he puts it all in, fighting the school board to
teach Como agua para chocolate in Spanish
and English, dreaming, gardening, playing
basketball, fixing up the spare room, his marriage,
by actual count five minutes alone with his wife,
crossing the river, bringing in saxophones, playing
with the dog, stitching connections that extend
from the poetry pole Bodeen erects in his garden to
the wooden fence around Isla Negra where the
Chilean people write missives to Pablo Neruda. It's
a book, a house, a life, that binds the two
Américas. Bodeen interrupts his verse, in
another language, to ask, "¿Qué es
el pasaporte para entrar en dos mundos? What's
the passport to enter into two worlds?" In Bodeen's
case, it's inclusion and integrity. It's
fascinating to see where a poem two hundred
twenty-eight pages long will take you, back beyond
the beginning to the book to first light:
I hear where this is going.
Back to the first vowel.
Back to the first consonant.
The barely perceptible comma
slicing light between the belly and the knife.
The cover of the most recent Templo,
along with the estimable metropolis-nervy L.A. poet
Suzanne Lummis looking naked in a beige top at the
wheel of her car, features the smiling face of
Amalio Madueño, a Yaqui Indian who is as
large as the whole western landscape. When Potts
publishes Madueño, it's as if his long-ago
"Para Olga" is translated back to him out of
something older than Spanish. Now the people of the
landscape for which the anglo kid dared to speak
are speaking back in an accent that got put through
a blender by Charles Foster as well as the jaunty
Juan Felipe Herrera. Here's a swatch of "Everyone
Is Part Yaqui" that goes so far as to echo
"Fu Hexagram 24 No Hangups":
I was fasting but had an iced horchata while
The rest chowed on tacos al carbon
Went to see where Chavez fought the priest
Where moonlight bloom agaves
Bowed under constellations
…
This is the time when we who make so much
Of being young must listen in amazement
Finding ourselves older and needing a talking
stick
More than requited love or goals achieved…
The glowing coals pulsating smelled of iron
Behind the blue percale muñecas
stand
In their nichos of dirt while the white
Lacework bier absorbed dumb looks
From those like me still unable to speak.
…
Nothing is false, we agreed, laughing,
When these things happen they take the darkness out
of time
Amalio Madueño speaks for the depth of
the American landscape with an authority I
associate with the greatest indigenous poets of
Latin America, those who write in a Native language
as well as Spanish, Elicura Chihuailaf, the
longko, or traditional chief, of Mapuche
poetry in southern Chile, and Humberto Ak'abal, who
writes his translucent aphorisms in Maya Ki'che,
both of whom have been published, in my
translation, in Temple. In "Four
Montañas," Madueño inhabits "the
mountain they call Azul," as the male body, from
within, becomes huge and hollow, "Atlas,
carnal, / Good work if you can get it," only
to explode like a volcanic caldera, and run
downhill in rivers:
I foam and yearn for release
From my endowments until my tongue
Drips with song and I say to myself, Oh Blackie
Remember, remember, the bear dreams to return
The silver trout sleep by your side.
Temple is deeply rooted in the specific
landscape of the mountainous American West, from
the Rockies to the ocean; but it is equally
committed to publishing poetry in translation,
especially from the cultures which rim our Pacific
to the west and south. There is good precedent for
this extravagance, in its original sense meaning
to wander afar. Pablo Neruda, whose poetry
is infinitely rooted in the rainy south of Chile,
spent seven years, from age twenty-two to
twenty-nine, serving as Chilean consul in places
like Batavia, Bangkok, Rangoon and Ceylon. The
massive impact of such isolation among profoundly
different cultures gave birth to Neruda's first
great book of poems, Residencia en la
tierra. I'd go so far as to say that alien
crucible made him the twentieth century's greatest
poet. Lorca's sojourn in New York was similarly
formative. It has been the western American poets,
notably Rexroth and Snyder, who have put us
seriously in touch with the elder cultures facing
our Pacific shore.
Denis Mair was studying in Beijing in the days
leading up to the Tiananmen Massacre. His daughter
Rebecca Mair was twelve at the time and now writes
about how she wandered during martial law to the
farmer's market, to listen:
for the gone whispers
of lamb-kabob
Ugyur song,
transient tongue,
spiced with such cumin
and gypsy tears,
to the urgent clanging
of bells and barrels,
the bartering and brawling,
chicken screams
and the vendors with the salty cries
Once
in the now-empty market
Denis Mair is now translating all the vigorous,
eloquent and plain-speaking Chinese poets he can
get his hands on for Temple. Zhou Lunyou
watches a candle burn out in Xichang Prison among
"the delicate fracturing" of arms. Yan Li plans a
robbery from the bank of language,
"star[ing] intently once again / At the
getaway map unfolded across / The body of mankind."
Zhai Yongming, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter,
brings a woman's perspective to the party ("Day or
night? It's all the same / The eye that hatches
oval stones, and the male and female body"). Chen
Minghua stands in line at the Metropolitan Museum
and eats hamburgers for every meal, and Meng Lang
is on the move through an entirely post-apocalyptic
landscape:
History exhibits its spine of a vertebrate
animal
It exhibits a mammalian face
It exhibits a whole field of disorder
Striding ahead, between the first and hundredth
step
The gas station I did not use has burned to
nothing
Looking back I see an empty room, full of air of
tension
Before taking another step, should I breathe out or
in?
Denis Mair has brought a flock of China-oriented
American poets to Templo, most of whom are
translators as well, and their writing shows the
impact of what they've learned. For instance,
Robert Masterton's snapshot of the girl condemned
for videos and prostitution on her "Long, Slow Ride
Through Town on the Way to the River to Get Her
Brains blown Out," who has just enough left under
the tilting dunce-cap to exclaim to herself, "Oh
look, a foreigner! A yanggweizi!" where the
italicized term is explained as foreign dead
demon/ghost.
As for Denis Mair himself, he goes on an outing
with co-workers to Long-Qing Gorge. On the hike up
he is insulted as a foreign devil by some
rock-throwing boys, but then, alone with frail,
epileptic Old Zhao, he climbs all the way to the
top, where "we sense the climb goes on, / layers of
immateriality above the rocks we scuttled over,"
and then they descend to where office-mates are
picnicking, "talk[ing] buzzingly, just like
breaktime at work," plotting career moves, until a
girl starts to throw some plastic bags off the
cliff, and sure enough the American poet's the one
with the ecological consciousness. It ain't easy
being the good guy from across the great water:
She stops her windup, and I take the bags from
her.
There was a nervous giggle from the
office-mates,
Young Shen said, "Learning from Denis."
…Everything must be human space for them,
They are molded by the weight of so much human
need.
As I interviewed Charles Potts by email for this
piece, I tried to get some colorful copy by
inviting him to attack the American mainstream, but
he demurred. "I have deliberately steered clear of
writing about the limitations of the poetry that I
find too limited to discuss for long," he allowed.
"There's more than enough to be positive about. The
American midstream, to put a loose loop around it,
seems bereft of consequence," Potts went on. "Too
many poems are timid and vague. You have to have
something to say before you get didactic, and the
right tone of voice to say it in. Corso is didactic
on occasion, but in the voice of a loud
clown.…As for poets who've already been
admitted to the canon who deserve to be there,
Sharon Olds certainly writes well and quite
differently from the poets she's often surrounded
by…"
"The essential nutrients for
Litmus/Temple," Charles Potts insists, "seem
to be: originality, informality, transformation,
i.e., the poem changes from beginning to end and
doesn't read like an essay or editorial." I want to
use this final comment as a hook to register a mild
objection to some of Potts's own recent poems in
Lost River Mountain and Nature Poems,
which on occasion do read like didactic editorials
or campaign speeches, the reflections of a
self-educated man who knows a lot more than the
reader and generally ends his sermon with a
quip.
This is the purpose of the poem as seen by
Pound, another unlucky Idaho kid, and thence Olson
and Dorn, a universal Chatauqua, emphatically to
mean. Occasionally, as in "Cutting Edge,"
Potts abandons himself to the poem, to all that he
doesn't know, and exits surfing through space.
Frequently, however, his message is very
prominently scripted. In "Dinner Beach Party," this
method works better than some other places:
When the Moslems arrived in Europe
With the zero they'd kipped from the Hindus
they were thanked for delivering nothing
And told at Tours in no uncertain terms
To get and stay the hell out of there.
"Service" is the word Potts finds now as he
looks back on his three and a half decades of
publishing. "To be of use. Useful to other people.
I've noticed from the beginning that I was part of
something bigger than me. I helped Drew Wagnon
mimeo and collate a couple of issues of Wild
Dog while it was still in Pocatello. In
Seattle, Edward Smith and Karen Waring, Jan Kepley
and others used to come by my two room apartment
and help me collate Litmus. We'd put the bed
in the middle of the room and put the pages on the
edge. I used Ben Hiatt's mimeo. I cut the stencils
for the last Seattle Litmus on the electric
typewriter in the back room at Steve Herrold's Id
Bookstore. Without the other people, poetry
wouldn't have a chance or reason to be."
Charles Potts gets an eight thousand press run
out of Temple by printing on the cheapest
newsprint, saddle-stapled. Temple won't
stand sideways on a shelf, like a perfectly-bound
mag. Its physical limpness demands display surface,
but it's not slick enough to complement the feng
shui of better bookstore decor. By last report the
only Bay Area bookstore carrying Temple was
Cody's. And this neglect may have to do as well
with a certain lack of famously fashionable poets
on the Temple masthead. Potts's understated
iconoclasm has not endeared him to the chairholders
of our established tendencies, whether Mainstream
or Postmodern, who might be likely to recommend his
enterprise to their students.
"I believe strongly," Potts writes, "that the
best of what I've published will eventually be
added to the canon when the current generations of
myopic academics are pushing up daisies." On the
largest scale, Charles Potts is engaged in offering
an alternative canon of American poetry for the
turn of the millennium. "The poets I publish," he
argues, "are making a new world for themselves."
Stephen Thomas, Teri Zipf, Jim Bodeen, Amalio
Madueño and Denis Mair and their ilk may not
be household names, but it says here that Potts is
serving up a helluva show as he promotes their work
in Temple.
John Oliver Simon is a contributing editor to
Poetry Flash. Caminante, his sequence
of poems of travel in Latin America, is forthcoming
from Creative Arts, fall 2001. Red Dragonfly Press
in Northfield, Minnesota has recently published
Velocities of the Possible, a fine
letterpress chapbook of his translations of the
great Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, for which Simon
has just been awarded an National Endowment
for the Arts Literature Fellowship in
translation.
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