"a few books that were formative for" me...

These are the poetry shelves at my apartment.
They are only partially organized and at present
all the poetry criticism lives in another bookcase.

It is not that often than anyone asks me what books of poetry were particularly formative for me (for my development as a poet, I assume, rather than my fashion sense or whatever). Sometimes this question is a toss-off, but when it is sincere it seems to me that one should try to give a solid answer to it. And as it has been some years now since I heard that question, I thought, why not both answer it and get a blog post out of it at the same time?

One of the first complicated things is deciding what counts. That is, I was asked about "books that were formative" - but I have to wonder if my questioner meant books of poetry, or whether any and all books counted. & what to do about The Four Horsemen who have surely been formative in many ways but not as book-based experiences. Anyway, the list below will exclude audio stuff (though maybe a list of that stuff will be added later.)

Anyway, here my list - not everything on here is currently *crucial* to my thinking about poetry, but everything surely had an impact in its time.

David Antin
SELECTED POEMS, and all the talk poems and so TALKING, TALKING AT THE BOUNDARIES, TUNING, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AVANT GARDE etc etc
…also worth finding are the pieces of David's from BOUNDARY2 as well as the book version of the magazine SOME/THING issues 1-3 and the 4th issue too if you can find them. I loaned my SELECTED POEMS to someone in the APG some years ago and never saw it again. Damn it. Also my various collections of talk poems are falling apart. I'd love to see some press do COLLECTED TALK POEMS someday. If it is not obvious, is was David's example - and my email exchange with him - that led me to improv (though don't let that be a black mark on his record). In the SELECTED the poem "definitions for mendy" has always been a huge favorite of mine.

Bruce Andrews
I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP (OR SOCIAL ROMANTICISM)
Bruce has many great books. Given how I have grown up within the APG it might make more sense *now* to cite his LOVE SONGS, as it would seem to have been influential. But that is a false positive as I discovered it only later when those things which would make it seem influential on the group were already well underway. Instead it is the book listed here which blew me away (and still does). Not an easy book to find these days, it needs a reprint.

John Ashbery
THREE POEMS, THE TENNIS COURT OATH
I understand why THE TENNIS COURT OATH has such a crucial place in literary history - at least if one is into language poetry. And it was important to me. But, though I had read SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR already, somehow it was THREE POEMS that really grabbed my attention and squeezed. Ashbery is probably always worth reading, but these two texts both suggest so many things beyond what they accomplish and yet what they accomplish is pretty amazing.

Steve Benson
BLUE BOOK
This is another great book that doesn't get talked about enough it seems to me. Benson's other books are worth a look too if you can find them. What I like about this one is the approach that SB takes to improvisation - so radically unlike what Antin does. It was helpful for me in many ways to think about where I might go, and though in my practice I tend more toward the unaided solo voice (thus more antinian) in my interest in disjunction and fragmentation and so forth much of what I produce is closer to Benson (or further toward the world of pound poetry than he).

Charles Bernstein
DARK CITY, THE SOPHIST, ROUGH TRADES
I read these three books in this order and all are fabulous. DARK CITY remains my favorite, especially for "Lives of the Toll Takers". But I have trouble separating these books from my reading of Charles' essays in CONTENT'S DREAM (and again, is there anything by Charles that is not worth reading and thinking about? I doubt it. I got ATTACK OF THE DIFFICULT POEMS for xmas). Probably a few ideas from CONTENT'S DREAM are still crucial aspects of my poetic thinking (re: Voice for instance).

Bertolt Brecht
POEMS 1913-1956
I just love this book. The "reader for those who live in cities" is incredible. The only poem that I have ever intended to memorize comes from this book

Once there was a child

That didn't like to wash.

They washed it and behold

It rubbed its face in ash.

The Kaiser came to call 

Up seven flights of stairs.

Mother looked for a towel 

To wipe its face and hair.

But the towel had been mislaid,

The whole visit was wrecked.

The Kaiser went away,

What could the child expect?

…Brecht's writings on theatre and some of his plays too have been important to me, for instance "Baal" which I read just after dropping out of high school.

John Cage
SILENCE
There are many books by Cage and a great variety of stuff to be found therein, but this one remains my favorite one. I bought it in German translation for someone as a gift but I don't know if she ever read it. (The 2 CD set "Indeterminacy" has also been a huge favorite for many years).

Clark Coolidge
SOUND AS THOUGHT, SOLUTION PASSAGE
Coolidge is often great. Maybe too consistently awesome, so much so that it's irritating for the rest of us. But these two collections form the base of my affection and inspiration for his work.

Ed Dorn
GUNSLINGER
Essential. Probably has an unrecognized role in my Johnny Minotaur  series.

Jessica Grim
LOCALE
I wonder how many readers will know this book. It was important to me as I encountered it early, just as I was beginning to get some sense of the poetic terrain and it gave me a view into a way of writing that I had not imagined. I still think its a solid read though I have not seen other book by Grim.

Lyn Hejinian
MY LIFE (any edition), WRTING AS AN AID TO MEMORY, THE CELL, THE COLD OF POETRY
Take you pick of these or anything. Lyn doesn't seem to write anything not worth dwelling within for however many hours it requires. MY LIFE was an inspiration for the decade in the making and still untitled APG Autobiography Project

Jackson Mac Low
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Still my favorite. The drama involved in Mac Low's leaving chance procedures aside is fascinating and had an impact on me that is hard to quantify, but I still favor the work he produced before he abandoned constraints.

Frank O'Hara
COLLECTED POEMS
This is screamingly obvious, get it and his plays and that other collection of stuff that was found after the collected came together.

Maureen Owen
UNTAPPED MAPS
This is another one that, like Grim's book above, hit me at just the right time. I reread it last year and it still stands up I think.

Leslie Scalapino
WAY
Other titles could have been chosen, but this one works very well for me and is the 1st book of hers I read.

Jack Spicer
COLLECTED BOOKS
Again, obvious if you know me (I think). & though this is the book that made me love Spicer, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT made me love him all over again and really, you need to read everything and the bio POET, BE LIKE GOD. (Be a good host and the Martians will love you)

Ron Silliman
TONER, XING, DEMO TO INK
These are first three titles I read by Silliman, nowadays one can buy the entire Alphabet in a massive tome. I plan to but have not yet gotten around to getting it.

Gertrude Stein
TENDER BUTTONS, STANZAS IN MEDITATION, etc
It is impossible to narrow down what from Stein had an impact, but these two books are the 1st two I bought (both in beautiful Sun & Moon editions) and it was upon these rocks that I was broken and reformed. Or something like that. LIFTING BELLY is also great. There is nothing "bad." my copy of LECTURES IN AMERICA is heavily underlined.

Hannah Weiner
SPOKE
I need more books by Weiner, sadly this is the only one that I own. What I like most about it is the sense of voices contending within her. That might be to fetishize her somewhat, I hope not. But that aspect of her writing really does grab me and I have tried to allow my own work to open itself to such things too.

Philip Whalen
ON BEAR'S HEAD
There is a newer selected poems, and I have that too, but somehow this collection is still my favorite. I got this in the first month that I'd decided to turn to poetry (to help me write better song lyrics) and so it comes along just after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in my personal idiosyncratic chronological development but unlike much else that I read in that 6 or 7 months when I was casting around in poetry, it has stuck with me.

Louis Zukofsky
"A", COMPLETE SHORT POETRY
Some of the later sections of "A" (especially where he is using Marx) and things like "80 Flowers" in the SHORT POETRY volume are all time favorites of mine. His essays have also been important to me in many ways.

… Ok, I have probably forgotten other crucial stuff, or maybe it was repressed (like, that in the 6-7 months of poetry reading I was pretty enthused with Charles Simic, then later lost almost all interest in him.) & what this list doesn't include really is the impact of a single essay by Harry Mathews on OULIPO, the book CONVERSATIONS WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP, the works of Arakawa and Gins in WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE: REVERSIBLE DESTINY (which Madeline sent me for free because I had loved "The Mechanism of Meaning" so much!), the plays and essays of Richard Foreman, the essays of Dick Higgins (which I often disagree with but nonetheless am influenced by), and what about anthologies? I should certainly mention the Douglas Messerli edited FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CENTURY (the poetry one not the drama one, though that is an interesting book as well) which served to introduce me to so many poets that I have learned since then to love. & what about books by Perloff or Altieri that shaped my thinking about matters poetic?



p.s. I couldn't fit all the labels I needed, dang it!

Russian Poet German Lukomnikov

German Lukomnikov in Moscow in 2009

TEXT CORRECTED

the fabulous discomfort and humor of this video gets me. also the weird retro look of it in spite of the obvious technical aspects, projection, etc. but that low contrast in black and white which feels like pre-color television somehow.

but what i want to attend to is the sound of this piece/recording.

there seems to be a cut (@ 1:37). & there are surely "parts" with edges more or less discernible. what i don't know is what it is called (is it "only sound" or is it somehow "Azor's Paw only sound") … hard for me to guess.

what really zaps me about this recording is the first section of wordless (and not even word-suggestive) vocal sounds and then the end. the first section has all these small vocalizations which in large part i would think could be used with words and not stand out all that much - well, maybe that crooning whine at 1:18 or the last thing before the cut this sort of yes/no feeling thing that becomes like the squeak of a spring - but many of the other sounds are not that unusual in spoken discourse, though we tend to ignore them when recounting what was said (we might call that retrospective semanticism and think of it as a bias). "here is an idea i can steal" i said to myself and i did (but will anyone be able to see where or how - the evidence is already out there). so that would be section one of this piece as i hear/parse it.

but then after the cut - in section two - things are more word-based for some time and don't have quite the same impact on me, though they begin to drift in looser and looser, more pitch-arc'd ways toward section three. in this section tho his utterances seem to echo hesitancies, uncertainties… at one point around 3 minutes this sing-songy repetition emerges - which again, i think that i at least do and suspect others do too; taking a word or phrase and chanting it somehow with however much or little melody. anyway...

… by 3:40 or so the transition seems to have been clear to a third section (this edge is much blurrier, or maybe it is a gradual build and not an edge at all). everything gets further from anything like conventional "word-space" and Lukominikov works with particles and the sounds between those of language and "mouth noises" and…

i'm always unhappy, i feel interrupted and annoyed when it ends. and yet, perhaps, relieved as well, as it takes a certain attention which i am not using when just sitting here, or having a conversation with someone, etc. and such attention is not endless, though here i feel more than able to give it.

there is also the twinned terms i opened with - humor and discomfort. the "how would i introduce this to so&so" thought experiment, where so&so is your great aunt lou or your assistant manager boss guy or whomever you picture as a tough sell for anything this self-consciously engaged in not playing the communication game while being nonetheless ludic, or maybe ruminative, or maybe something else (where ludic gets calls narcissism, and ruminative labelled pretentious and the whole non-communicative is just something that can't be fit into their universe). imagining playing that game with this video and whoever it is that i imagine gets at the discomfort somewhat. Lukomnikov seems quite comfortable with silences without a need to fill all the space tightly or to demonstrate a physical skill with language making (that is a bad way of saying this, but I am thinking of Christian Bök as a contrast, Bök clearly has amazing mouth-based chops aka skills, etc - as here in this performance at the Whitney, but let's get back to Lukomnikov

the text below the video as found on youtube
Герман Лукомников на фестивале "Лапа Азора only sound" 
  seems to say
Herman Lukomnikov at the "Azor's Paw only sound" ..but the G-translation of his name seems more common, though i did see "Guerman" to make it a bit more complex.

I got curious. There is no wikipedia page for him. There are some other videos of him reading, which I'll come back to below, but I was hoping for more info. Some googling got me a few bits.

1st I looked at this report sent to poet Maria Damon and housed at the EPC, with just a short mention of Lukomnikov, but it struck me as amusing. The author of this is Masha Zavialova, in the midst of her longer report on The Russian Poetry Festival Oct. 17-19, 1998, St. Petersburg she mentions Lukominokov;

Bonifatsii (German Lukomnikov) - a charming person and performance artist read some of his short and extremely witty (for us who live here) poems. One of them: "Why don't I fly?" (several times with different modulations of voice but very romantically) And suddenly in a matter-of-fact and slightly offended tone "Why don't I fly? I fly."

This made me more curious… and next I read this;

Potty About Poetry

25 August 2000

By Anna Arutunyan The Moscow Times

How can one characterize the poetry of German Lukomnikov, who attributes much of his poetry to his alter ego, Boniface? Similarities exist between Lukomnikov’s work and the kind of absurd children’s rhyme established by writers like Daniil Kharms and Kornei Chukovsky —poets who play with short stanzas and diminutive puns in their verse — but Lukomnikov, who often uses obscenities, is by no means a writer of children’s poems.

Lukomnikov (or Boniface) — Lukomnikov insists they are two different people — writes with an innocence and honesty that is so regularly masked among his contemporaries by cynicism and irony. He makes fun of his background and plays with words, but maintains an air of a barely discovered underground poet writing among friends in his attic.

But is there a name for the work of the virtual pair of Lukomnikov and Boniface, who write and illustrate their own works? Dirty limericks, perhaps, or childish farce? Or maybe it is something like those art-scene hooligans with a cult following, the Mitki, who create humorous illustrations with companion rhymes.

Associated with beer and hippies and enjoying a large following, the Mitki have managed to seep into the mainstream, but the same cannot be said of Lukomnikov, whose poetry is not only still marginal, but too varied to be characterized. His paintings can be childlike, with inscriptions of meaningless puns like "Kitayets kita yest" — which can mean either "the Chinaman is a whale" or "the Chinaman eats a whale" — which appears under a painting of an Asian-looking boy eating a fish.

Other works are earnest communications with an evidently strong lyrical background that reveal the vulnerability of a poet interacting with the world around him: "If only someone knew how I fear people! /How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me/ Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike/ As if in a sea of ugly swans (O kto by znal, kak ya boyus’ lyudei! / Kak diko mne vsemirnoye sosedstvo / Glazastykh chudishch. Ya vpadayu v detstvo, / Kak budto v more gadkikh lebedei.)

In this way, Lukomnikov hovers somewhere between poet, comedian and artist. The man who has characterized himself as a "poet, a human being of the male sex, and an inhabitant of Earth and the solar system," Lukomnikov plays out an exchange with his persistent alias, Boniface, on stage. If determining to what extent their poetry (and personalities) differ is of any interest to you, don’t pass up the opportunity to see their odd duet this week. 

German Lukomnikov reads his Poetry of the Season at 8 p.m. on Thursday at the Project O.G.I club, located at 8/12 Potapovsky Pereulok, Building 2 (enter through the courtyard). Metro Chistye Prudy. Tel. 927-5609. For more information, write ogi@mail.ru

i don't know enough about contemporary Russian poetry to say squat about this, though i do have a book by Daniil Kharms. i also like hearing about this group the Mitki discussed here and would be interested to know more of them, but back to the thread….

this gives me lots to think about. i cannot tell from watching or listening when Boniface is involved and when he isn't - so sadly, that whole intrigue will remain opaque, but this article generally charges up my curiosity. and this poem is surely one that would work for me;

If only someone knew how I fear people! 

How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me

Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike

As if in a sea of ugly swans

… but i should mention that i also dropped the original language text given for this poem in the article above into google translator as well and, being set to "detect language" is did not mark this as russian but Slovak and it could translate less than half of it. so is Lukomnikov not Russian at all?

There are several more videos on youtube. I'll leave their viewing up to you…

German Lukomnikov shows a younger Lukomnikov (1998) and while i am lost with the language, this one holds my attention quite well. i'll not go through why and how and so forth, but there is much humor and sound stuff here. enjoyable. also nice that he "flies" away at the end.

German Lukomnikov  rather more annoying video with noisy camera and crowd noise. Lukomnikov is doing some emphatic sound stuff at the end with what i assume are words and fragments tho.

POET GUERMAN LUKOMNIKOV is a small group setting and he is doing more sentency or phrasal stuff with odd slanted repetitions. lots of folks laugh.

Герман Лукомников в Булгаковском this is in the same venue as the previous one, and is yet more chanted and looping though using (i assume) phrases and sentences. again, a good bit of laughing.

Lukomnikov.divx  this too sounds more playfully semantic, rather than pushing hard toward sound. i'd love to hear from anyone who knows the language.

Velikiy Poet Lukomnikov is yet another venue with a big crowd (poetry standards) he is a bit hard to hear in spite of the amplification at moments and there are crowd noises and responses. Luko seems busy with these tightening and loosening patterns imposed on long string of text. big cheers at the end.

it seems that i also found his livejournal account where i stole that picture with the finger puppets. but scanning through it a bit i found some paintings as well...

Illustration of a poem (by German Lukomnikov) by Dmitry Shirokov (painter)

anyway, i like what i've found and hope to hear more of German Lukomnikov

Preliminary thoughts on the Combine Poem

In some posts about my improv practice from earlier in 2011: one on the emitter and another on sound poetry, I made certain suggestions which in retrospect seem to have pointed forward to the Combine though I had yet to imagine it myself. Looking back at those postings now I also see additional ideas that I might bring into the Combine going forward. But, that said, what served as the catalyst for the Combine was a note I made in a file called "poem ideas" which lives semi-perpetually on the desktop of my computer (while now and then being discarded or emerging again, with a new name).

Anyway, that note read simply; "repetition based thing i did a week or so back" underneath which I placed a short list of words

• piles
• trails
• feathers
• plangent
• antipodal
• huff
• forbear
• asymptotic 

… the moment a week or so before was not an APG meeting. I was thinking back to playing with words, aloud, scatting to a degree while home alone. It stayed on my mind and so I wrote the note later with this list as a record of the words that I generated. The first recording of anything in this mode is from the November 9, 2011 APG meeting & listed as "Stalactite improv" - these things, shall I just call them repeaters?

But, in any event before doing any of them again as solitary exercises (as emitters were intended initially) the idea of the Combine Poem came to me. Nothing grandly conceptual about it. & yes, in light of the current year's Poetry Resolution, the name is stolen from Rauschenberg (and that works for me in other ways too). So then a Combine Poem is what?

It can contain emitters and repeaters, could also embed what I might otherwise have called an "improv sonnet", various modalities of sound poetry might be included etc, in short - whatever. I imagined it as operating under a number of regimes or modes or procedures or tints and that I would shift between them as needed. Thus my need to work back through those earlier posts that I linked to above as both contain elaborate listings of other potential avenues which might funnel into the Combine.

So far there have been three of them.

Combine Poem No. 1 - Black radishes are just as white on the inside

Combine Poem No. 2 - Dissociative

Combine Poem No. 3 - Rip it open and eat the flesh

…which is my first ever video poem.

I'm interested in both a drift in the Combine where transitions between sub-routines are gradual and a total lack of drift, where they are cuts, abrupt, startling. But in either case I am still missing something with 1-3, as much as they are pointing generally in the direction I want to go for awhile. I think what they are missing is a lattice (as metadata) - which dims the improv aspect to a small degree, though I do not expect it will squash it totally.

Stay tuned to see if that last idea takes wings.

My Latest on Lacan...

This paper is primarily about Lacan's "Science and Truth" though it goes in other directions as well.

The text is PDF and can be downloaded at iFile, here.

Perhaps not the most tightly focused paper I have ever written, but I lost myself in it for a few days and that usually speaks of an engagement that will be of some import, if only for me.