Names for 428 Writers' Group

Danny Prill (406) 868 9350
Chris Hollewijn (406) 579 3576 dutchy7914@yahoo.com
Kacie Shober " 587 1647 bkshober@msn.com
Mandy Hansen mkhansen@montana.edu

Also: Sunflower Writers' Workshop is sometimes run by Dean Williamson at 556 8442

Letter to Harrison

Jim,

Though you’re not already dead, you look it more and more every time you grimace for a New York Times reporter or take a pass on the wine and cheese then take some after all. I wanted to ask you about Nature, but you were busy burning your tongue on a microwaved hot dog. I wanted to ask you about immortality but wound up bumming a cigarette. I wanted to ask you about women, but you turned to watch a girl ride by on a bicycle. I wanted to ask you about death, but my voice was lost in the March wind where you were walking to disguise your tears. I wanted to ask you about love, but you were waist deep in a river and trying to keep your balance. I wanted to ask you about fame, but you were out by the corral petting a puppy. I wanted to ask you about art, but you had fallen asleep.

Though you’re not already dead, your sockets are emptying one by one so that even the actresses feel compelled to use a felt tip when addressing their love letters to you. Are you still camped out under the roots of that old growth stump, or did the bear finally get its way? Are you still teaching Nicholson how to act, or will he have to draw the chalk outlines around his own victims? Do you still fire warning shots at sand hill cranes headed toward Los Angeles, or are you saving your shells for the Last Best Meal?

I hope the weather in Michigan turns to the weather in Montana, and the weather in Montana turns to the weather in Arizona as the season allows. Don’t die without writing.

Yours,
Greg

Neo-Post-Naturalists

In Gary Snyder’s book, Danger on the Peaks, the deconstruction of Nature with a capitol N may be nigh complete. Airports, McDonald’s, Denny’s and Motel 6 are not separate from the birds and bees. They may be an ironic inclusion, but they are included, not in something called Nature but in the poet’s total experience. This isn’t new to Snyder who, after all, did engaging bio-regional portraits of New York and Los Angeles. Neither was it new to William Stafford who called himself, his car, a dead doe and an unborn fawn “our group.” Post-Humanist, Post-Colonialist, Post-Structuralist—things get Poster every day out here in the hyperspace of no-nature, or is it now Post-hyperspace?

When we dispense with the Confessional’s guilt, suddenly the barriers start to fall. Robert Lowell’s skunk loses its ironic simplicity. Lowell’s in hell; the skunk’s eating sour cream. And? Sylvia Plath’s daddy’s big toe looks like a seal. And? I’m afraid those tired old Wordsworthians can kiss the still sad music of humanity goodbye—just ask the grizzly trying to rub her radio collar off on a tree.

BUT there’s always Mary Oliver. She still manages to trudge “away from it all” and send the doe into a state of shock when she smells her faun where Mary’s been petting it. And Mary still comes up short in trying to find the right words for greeting a swan. I mean, what if Ronald McDonald were to run out of the woods behind her squeezing an Aflac duck? Would the swan know the difference? Science says the DNA’s pretty much the same.

A human writing a Nature poem is about as credible—and likely, as a WASP extolling the morality of Post-Colonial literature—to get tenure, promotion or a raise. I guess eventually that means we’re all in this together—and what’s wrong with that? It’s only natural.

Radiant Beyond Rescue: Sandra Alcosser's Gorgeous Poetry

Recently, in describing works by poets like Lucie Brock-Broido, reviewers use the word gorgeous. That may be an influence of Keats or at least an extension of the more recent Georgian poets like Walter de la Mare, whose lavish lines dripped with jewels, spices and haunted silences.

I'll contend that Sandra Alcosser's lines were carrying the contemporary fire of gorgeousness back in the early 1980s--not just in the sense of lush imagery and exotic cadences, but also in the sense of the profound and overbearing--the loading of the senses to the point of illness that Poe strove to create in his synesthetic short fiction. In "Skiing by Moonlight," Alcosser writes, "Why will a person freezing to death/Inch into the false warmth of the moon? Eros is the wound./ White will go to shadblow. White will go to orchid bloom./Except by nature--as a woman, I will be ungovernable."

Orchids, shadblow, snowpeas, swamps, moss, worms, palmetto bugs, ducks, the aurora borealis (heaven's beast), and ultimately the Glory Monster iris chase us and suffocate us in the Nature that governs Alcosser's otherwise ungovernable feminine. There is something thick, evil, beautiful, jilted and redemptive in the gratuitous sensory quagmires of Alcosser's poems. Sometimes I leave off reading them with the mild fever akin to love-sickness.

As the poet says of a boy who floated downriver on a punky plaque of ice:

Imagine careening slick water,
over peamouths and shiners
on a punky boat of ice, like orbiting
the planet on a tempered glass

windshield, one crash
and all would shatter, not shatter exactly,
but fracture full spectrum, like life
as we know it--radiant beyond rescue.

Michael Earl Craig's Poetry

In the spring '72 issue of The Seventies, Robert Bly told us that there are two types of surreal poetry: leaping poetry and hopping poetry--lines that leap in disparate associations from the emotional psyche to haunt and disturb the readers by challenging rational thought and the dominant culture; and lines that have a sense of play, wit and fun in their associations but don't jump very far and aren't very committed to "the inner world" of the Other. In all of his Neo-Lutheran gravity, Bly comes down sqarely on the side of socially defiant(Spanish-speaking) leapers and poo-pooes the French hoppers and American counterparts like John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the St. Mark's or New York School--and, by extension, James Tate and Michael Earl Craig.

What I like about Michael Earl Craig's poetry in "Yes Master" is that, frankly, he doesn't give a flying fuck. When he says "yes, master" in his poetry, he could easily be mouthing off to the somber, indignant unconsious of Bly and his Spanish leapers--as well as his own. He doesn't mind letting us know that he's not rationally in control of his poetry, so if it's witty, sardonic, and hops, well, what the hell is HE supposed to do about it, write in accordance with some doctor's prescribed form of the unconscious? "It's as if the nurse has adjusted my cheeks/with the cotton balls, has turned/in her chair to shop at Nordstroms,/and my open eyes begin to ice over like bird baths."

The act of writing poetry is so selfconscious that only an idiot would pretend that he/she's the oracle of his/her uninterrupted libido. I mean "What is the word/for when a nun rolls a boulder/away from the mouth of a cave or tomb?" What if, when you pick up cashews, you "roll/them over and over,/examining their little/spines, searching for eyes/and assholes/and so on"? Are you supposed to pretend it's not happening because it doesn't seem profound? Craig sums it up well, "I'll just have to keep typing/toward you, who are unhappy/with my driving. Understanding/that when a lover is undoubtedly dead,/her shoes will fall off."

Pamela Gemin's "What's Going On"

Pamela Gemin's poem, "What's Going On" (see link below) is a wild ride through both Detroit and a plethora of influences on contemporary poetry. Like many other poems written these days, the language has decided that Eliot was full of crap when he saw the present as a squalid wasteland cut off from a glorious past. Gemin's poem knows that the wasteland is all we've got for our poetry, whether we learn to live with it or not.

The same might be said for W.C. Williams' poetry, but fresh typewritten imagery was so new to him that he put his poems down like polished gems. Gemin's poem rides through the present of "nineteen seventy-something," blase about history, allusion, form, etc. yet slightly aware of them all. Like Plath and Larkin, the poem is aware that parents "fuck you up," but it's too wrapped up in its own present to dwell on it.

All we know as readers is that we're driving through Detroit with a bunch of teen-age girls in someone's Mustang to see someone's sister's new baby, that someone has a big stuffed dog, and that the car is full of big stuffed hungover heads. The readers also get their heads stuffed with "what's going on" in the car to the point that they participate in the hangover. We get wild specific questions about whose parents are doing what, culminating in a puzzling "Take this and eat" communion blurred into baby spiders hatching out in a vacuum cleaner bag and someone's mother saying why don't you girls get your hair out of your faces and hold your heads up.

It doesn't do this poem justice to try to figure out its significance on a first reading. Only after you let it drag you along for the ride do the poem's occasional rhymes start resonating with Marvin Gaye's music and the joy of being alive in the squalid present of Detroit in the nineteen seventies--in spite of bitter cabbage rolls and someone's father knocking someone's mother down the stairs. The cult of poetry about abuse, victimization and recovery in confessional poetry takes a back seat to a big stuffed bear, a Mustang full of gabby, hung-over girls, and a new baby.

Reading Billy Collins

Reading Billy Collins is like reading T.S. Eliot except the allusions are in your head or in front of you instead of in books. A poet reading Billy Collins is like an auto mechanic reading Richard Brautigan. It’s hard to get mad at Billy Collins, but when you do, your anger is probably already in one of his poems. If Billy Collins is a Confessional poet, I wonder what he’s confessing? That he is in love with clichés and has to tease them into original language? That he’s irritated by established poets and poety and every word he writes is like a pin in a voodoo doll of Wordsworth, Dickenson, Pound, Williams, Plath, Roethke, etc. Some poets make me want to write poems, but Billy Collins makes me want to draw cartoons because the poem has already been written. Billy Collins drinks a cup of tea like Robert Frost searches for a rhyme. If Billy Collins had written the Lord’s Prayer, it might go something like this: Father, you’re in the ground, but I still remember your name, your future is still mine in how I look and act, and you still bring home the bacon, if only metaphorically. Because you forgave me, I forgive people. You didn’t let me fall into your bad habits, so I remain lucky. I really appreciate that, and so will my kids and their kids and so on. Thanks.