Primitive
Press is a funny name for a publishing venture that would print a book such
as Kristin
Prevallet’s Lead,
Glass and Poppy (LGP). The one-time co-editor of Apex of the M
& author of the notorious “Why
Poetry Criticism Sucks” is very possibly the least primitive poet around
these days. In the ten years since I first became aware of her work – seeing it
literally for the first time in the O•blēk
12 New Coast anthology – Prevallet has produced a substantial body of work, to
date gathered mostly in a series of small chapbooks. Lead, Glass and Poppy is one such volume. Emulation
Etudes, from Phylum Press, is another. Why there isn’t a large volume
from Wesleyan or Penguin or FSG is the real mystery here.
LGP signals its complexity instantly when the text starts on the
left-hand page – something publishers do only when they absolutely must, less
they be taken for rank amateurs at design &
production. There is, thus, an absolute necessity – the same holds true for Wanders, the Nomados Press production of a
collaborative series co-authored by Robin Blaser (always on the left hand page)
& Meredith Quartermain (always on the right). With LGP, it is because the poetic text on the left-hand page is
commented upon, sometimes obliquely, by more prosoid journalistic comments that
run down the right. These aren’t footnotes – in fact, the commentary to the
right itself has endnotes (numbered, in contrast with the asterisked title line
on the title page), providing sources. In short, the poetic text – the
theoretical center of this work – is functionally surrounded by at least two
layers of commentary, not unlike the Larry
Eigner poem situated in his correspondence to Raddle Moon in what I called a palimpsest of meta-thinking the
other day.
Poetic
metacommentary of this sort has been around at the least since Eliot footnoted The Waste Land – I suspect you could
trace the contextual impulse back at least to Lyrical Ballads if you tried. Eliot it was instantly parodied by
Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem beginning ‘The’,” although one suspects, looking at LZ’s subsequent career, that his parody was mixed with a
serious dose of envy that somebody had gotten to this idea first. Pound’s use
of polyvocality & Olson’s extensions thereof can be seen as parallel
impulses – it turns up even in such places as Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, in which the
footnotes present a detailed history of a period of American poetry, or in Fred
Jameson’s Marxism and Form, which has
only one footnote & that about footnotes.
This is the dark
underbelly of ”first thought, best thought” – sort of “first thought, myriad
second thoughts” – a wool-gathering web of digressions lies at the heart of
such classic tales as Tristram
Shandy or The Saragossa
Manuscript & Prevallet indulges a little in the verticality of the
impulse herself, using endnotes to reference sources that might as easily have
been incorporated into the running comments along the right hand column.
Which, of
course, raises the question why? One
interpretation – the one I’m drawn to – is that the texts on the right, which
also look like a poem, merely in a different font & with the numbers of the
footnotes as a curious ornament at the end of every stanza, can likewise be
read as a mode of journalistic poetry. In fact, I tend to read the poem on the
left as a single eight page poem, while the commentary on the right – in a
different font – comes across to me as a series of ten shorter poems. This
would also explain why the left-sided text is biased to the right margin right
up until the final page/stanza, which is printed centered on a page with no
facing commentary.
Here, to give a
flavor of the text, is the left-hand page 9, which
also just happens to be in the exact center of the book, so that actual staples
poke through between it & the comments to the right:
The spine in the
book is a crease in time
and we’re lowly waverers
between the cracks
of what might seem to be
unreachable but true
(because
printed)
for certain, and spreading
through the tracks buried over
where have you been
when needing you stuck
here where the dawn
and the day that meets it
can’t get it on enough to say:
“Here is a house.
There is another’s
home.
At the corner is an
arsenal.
Pick this one up
and explode, here.”
A number of the
right-hand commentaries refer to the Order of the Solar Temple cult, 74 of whose members
committed group suicide in Canada, France & Switzerland, as does the text
facing the one above, which appears on page 10:
France-2 television
broadcast what it
said was
a taped telephone
conversation
between two
disciples shortly before they
died in
a program which
says the sun is half-way
through its life.
“But
in any case it’s been organized,
we’re going to
Jupiter.”
“So
Venus is out? I think we’ll first
go to Venus.”
“We’ll
see. I don’t give a damn.
The
main thing is to go where we have to go.”8
Footnote 8,
located on an unnumbered page to the chapbook’s rear, merely sites “Untitled,
Reuters,
This is a
deliberately unsettling, de-centered performance, executed superbly.* There is
a somber wit at work that sees the connection between the perpetually
self-deconstructing text – a crease in time, literally at the point of the
book’s spine – to the delusional belief of cult members that they can hitch a
ride on the next comet out of here if they but “drop the body” at the right
moment. The text on the right, if we can talk about it as a complete poem, is
extraordinarily sad, regardless of the ridiculousness of the surreptitiously
taped conversation. As a work in its own right, its bleakness is unrelieved.
Set into the larger ensemble that is LGP,
however, it is contained, framed rather as one detail amid the slow-motion
holocaust that is contemporary life.
Which is why,
ultimately, so much depends on the final page, a left-sided text now centered,
in the tone of a rhetorical response to all that has come before:
Rise up holy, in
corsets arched
to the sun-struck heavens
This curious
invocation leads into a long & complex image that slides finally into what
can be read – at least on one level – as a final admonition
to stay
still
for awhile longer.
It’s a complex
& ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at the end of a complex & at
least equally ambi-/multi- valent
text.
LGP is contextualized even further in that the elements
mentioned in the title – lead, glass, and poppy, a curious trio – are those
used by Anselm Kiefer in his Angel of History sculpture** at the National
Gallery in Washington, as well as in several other of his pieces from that same
period. Beyond the footnoted title, Prevallet brings neither the sculpture nor
the sculpture fully into play in the piece & barely references Kiefer’s
source, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses
on the Philosophy of History.” Rather, they seem to sit peripherally around
the text, rather than either illuminating or being illuminated by it. In this
sense, they’re only one step closer than the image on the cover of the
chapbook, a medieval study of the motion of sunspots, or the frontispiece
image, a giant sphere hovering over
Emulation Etudes is ostensibly a simpler book, just four
poems, each written to some degree “in the manner of” a master – Dodie Bellamy;
my mother
dead, carried
out of the house wrapped
in a sheet
in “Rises (after
propped
atop a building.
With its windows
covered,
the birds cannot wake up.
Kristin
Prevallet is one poet unafraid to look at the dark side. One result, the main
one for me, is that all her poetry provokes me, makes me think, leaves me
wandering lost in contemplation, reassessing her world & mine, not so
terribly unlike Jennifer Moxley. In that sense, these aren’t “likeable” or
“fun” poems – they’re trying to go so very much further than that – which I
suspect means that Prevallet’s audience is one that will be built up over time
by individuals who make an effort. If poetry is, as
Thursday, May 22, 2003
A version of Kristin
Prevallet’s Lead,
Glass and Poppy (LGP) which I reviewed here on 12 May, can be
found in Scratch Sides,
Prevallet’s book from Skanky Possum. There is a four year difference
between the two books – that’s a sign of just how high my stacks of unread
material have gotten – and the differences between the two editions warrant
examining.
As before, LGP contains two
parallel texts divided by a vertical – in the Primitive Press edition, that
vertical was created by the chapbook’s spine, here the two texts appear on the
same page with a vertical bar. On the left, the text is more writerly &
carries a ragged left linebreak. On the right, the text speaks to source
materials and consciously appropriates the discursive features of journalism.
(A third variant appears in the excerpt of LGP on
the EPC website – the two texts without the intermediate vertical bar.) The use
of end notes for the right-hand text in the Primitive Press version does not
appear in the Skanky version, which trades them in for a general note about
sources.
Two other
differences are more important. The first is the elimination of stanza
demarcations in the left-hand text in the Skanky LGP. Thus the later version promotes a one-page one-stanza
approach, even though the “journalism” texts on the right break into stanzas
when multiple elements of fact come into play.
Most
significantly, the endings are radically different. Here is the left hand text
of the later (or Skanky) version:
The clearing is
variously inscribed
with official words
not quite innocent of all
that has been cut out.
Where the planes
themselves
in time will rot
back into the sea
irreversibly, a story
that repeats itself over and over
now more than ever
as the globe shrinks closer and closer
to Eros, you
burn me
straight through to the wars
over the rumors
of wars
where a fire means
there is always an other side
that has died for one reason
or another.
The right-hand
text is as follows:
There
seems to be
a significant
chance
that within the
next
1.14
million years,
an asteroid named
433
Eros
could hit Earth,
with dire results
for the human
race and most
other species.
The sole difference
between the two versions of the right-hand text is an end-note number. But the
left-hand text has been substantively revised. In the earlier (or Primitive) version, it consisted of a three-stanza section
on the page facing the right-hand text, plus
one other entire page with a text that was centered. Here is the left-hand
page of the Primitive version of LPG:
In the clearing we are all variously forged
with official words
not quite innocent of all
that has been broken
where the planes themselves
in time will rot back into to the
sea
of irreversibility, that story
that repeats itself over and
over
now more than ever as the globe
shrinks
close and closer although the wars
over the
rumor of wars are always the battles
left for other continents to die
over.
Thus over four
years, we see a number of substitutions:
forged → inscribed
broken → cut out
of irreversibility → irreversibly
although → straight through to
There are some
subtle, but critical alterations of linebreaks as well, most notably where
the wars over the
rumors of wars . . .
has now become
the wars
over the rumors
of wars
The lineage of
the Primitive LGP places the greatest
emphasis on rumors, whereas the
Skanky LGP emphasizes wars.
The ending of
the two left-hand sections vary even more. The Primitive version:
wars are always the battles
left for other continents to die
over.
The Skanky
version:
where a fire means
there is always an other side
that has died for one reason
or another.
This is, I
think, a revision of quality more than of content – the generalization of the
earlier LGP has become a more
specific & concrete image, a partial attempt in the poem to confront the
problem of the anonymous murder of invisible Others.
But what are we
to make the deletion of the entire final page of the Primitive version. It read
Rise up holy, in
corsets arched
to the sun-struck heavens
bring news of pillage
as once a woman
naked among the ashes
(or
that of her child)
did bend in half
and was broken before
the eyes of a mob
frenzied and rushed
away to the center
cannot hold but promises
at least to stay still
for awhile longer.
Presented in the
same font as the “writerly” left-hand stanzas, this page thematically & graphically
brings about a type of closure. As I wrote in this blog on the 12th,
this passage is “a complex & ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at
the end of a complex & at least equally ambi-/multi-
valent text.”
Its absence
altogether from the Skanky version leaves us with a far more somber &
pessimistic poem. Further, I read its absence as the origin of sorts for the
italicized insertion that pops up in the Skanky text’s last left-hand side:
to Eros, you
burn me
Each version
entails some engagement with the flesh – the Primitive version of the woman
“naked among the ashes,” the Skanky one through a direct interjection to Eros –
albeit one glance at the right-hand page forces us to remember that this is also (at the very least) a reference to
impending collision with asteroid Eros 433.
The stillness
which is associated with promise in
the Primitive version might be read as part of what appears in that final
concrete image of the Skanky edition, where it is associated now not with any respite
or absence of conflict, but rather with the smoldering ruins of death. Given
the timing of the two editions, one might characterize the Skanky Possum
version as the post-911 version. One might read the difference between the two
versions as political. If so, the former poses the possibility of the personal
as a respite against the social. The latter, as I read it, counters the social
with the sensual, but finds relief in neither. It is indeed the more
pessimistic text.
In theory, of
course, the later text is typically considered the “corrected” or final
version. But as readers of The Prelude will
know, it is the earlier published edition that sometimes survives as the one
cherished by generations hence. Personally, I don’t think that one has to – or necessarily
even ought to – choose one over the
other. Rather, these twin texts position one of our most interesting poets at
two different moments in history & that in itself is a more valuable
service than playing eeny-meeny-miny-mo
with these extraordinary works.