THE MYSTERY DANCE OF POETS

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Robert Polito read his poetry this past Thursday at a fundraiser for the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to his poetry, Polito’s biography of Jim Thompson, author of The Killer Inside Me, is a book that should be on every poet’s bookshelf, right alongside Keith Richards’s Life. Come to think of it, “Midnight Rambler” would make for skittery mood music to accompany Thompson’s classic portrait of a serial killer, which possesses every bit of palpable intensity that could be asked for in a prose poem.

Back in the mid-1980s, I found myself not too happy with most of what was taking place in American poetry. The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets seemed in particular to exemplify a mediocrity that was difficult to stomach. I turned to mystery writers to help resolve my yearning for writing of genuine quality. It’s probably unfair to ask a poet to produce at least one book that is as intricate and subtle as a good mystery, but I know that Suzanne Lummis, who was also in attendance at Polito’s reading, would agree with me in wanting poets to strive for such a register of accomplishment. She would also probably agree with me that Polito’s Hollywood and God is an example of how such an equivalent is possible. Charles Webb has often commented that he wanted to make poetry as popular as rock and roll. I would settle for it being as sturdily supple as the mystery books I’ve listed below, many of which I read when I was in despair of mainstream poetry ever waking up.

My list is not meant to constitute my assessment of the best mysteries ever written. I have left out specific titles by writers such as Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and P.D. James because I assume some minimal familiarity with the mystery genre. If you should settle for no more than these exemplary writers, however, then you will miss out on work that has not only been admired by poets, but was written by poets. Dorothy Hughes, for instance, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets before she started writing mysteries. At the very least, you owe it to yourself to pick up at least one book by each author I’ve listed.

I’ll concede that there are more than a few poets for whom this reading list will not prove particularly fruitful. On the other hand, I suspect that many poets could use a break from the bland cafeteria-style buffet menu (“Poetry Daily”) of much contemporary poetry. How often do you read a poem in which the dialogue between characters is as pungent as that found in K.C. Constantine’s novels?

In urging younger poets especially to dig back into the recent past of this genre, I also want to remind them of a poet whose work has had a substantial influence on many poets born between 1940 and 1960: Weldon Kees (cf. Christopher Buckley’s Aspects of Robinson). Poems such as “The Last Testimony of James Apthorp” and “Crime Club” deserve a place in any comprehensive anthology of twentieth century poets, and I find it puzzling that his reputation among younger poets seems to have sagged. As much as I am interested in avant-garde and post-avant writing, I wonder if the apparent immediacy of those writing practices has led younger writers to feel that they can skimp on their apprenticeship. Of all forms of fiction that I would recommend to younger poets as a way to solidify one’s knowledge of fundamental templates for narrative surprise, the mystery genre remains one of the most felicitous allies at a poet’s beck and call. It’s worth remembering that one can hardly be post-narrative if narrative itself has not been thoroughly absorbed.

Dorothy Hughes (1904 – 1993)

In a Lonely Place. (1947)

John Franklin Bardin (1916-1981)

The Deadly Pecheron. (1946).

Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. (1948).

Jane Langton (1922 –         )

Dark Nantucket Noon. (1975)

Natural Enemy. (1982)

Emily Dickinson Is Dead.. (1984)

Murder at the Gardner.  (1988)

Paula Gosling (1939 –       )

Loser’s Blues. (Pan, 1981).

A Running Duck. (1974; Pan, 1979).

Winner of the John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of the year.

Stuart Kaminsky. (1934-2009)

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. (1934-2009) (1977; Penguin, 1979).

The Howard Hughes Affair. (1979; Hamlyn Paperback, 1981).

Down for the Count.. (St. Martin’s, 1985).

A Cold Red Sunrise. (1988).

K.C. Constantine (1934 –         ).

Sunshine Enemies. (Mysterious Press, 1990).

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself. Godine. 1973.

Upon Some Midnights Clear. (Godine, 1985; Penguin, 1987).

The Rocksburg Railroad Murders; The Blank Page  (Godine Double Detective, 1982).

Michael Dibden (21 March 1947 – 30 March 2007)

Ratking (1988)

Vendetta (1990).

Dirty Tricks (1991)

The Tryst (1989).

Joseph Hansen (1923 – 2004)

Fadeout (1970)

The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (1978)

Early Graves (1987)

A Country of Old Men (1991)

The Complete Brandstetter: Twelve Novels (No Exit Press, 2007)

DICK FRANCIS (1920 – 2010).

High Stakes. 1975.

Proof. 1984.

Bolt. 1986.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

King of Infinite Space. Tyler Dilts.

Bogmail. Patrick McGinley.

This Way Out. Sheila Radley. (Penguin, 1989).

(In Radley’s book, an undated receipt from SCENE OF THE CRIME: 18.95 and 3.95 and 4.50. Seven percent tax. Total: 29.31.)

Double Negative  – David Carkeet

The Whistle Blower.  John Hale. (1984; Collier paperback, 1988)

Hunter in the Dark. Estelle Thompson. (1978; Walker paperback, 1984).

A Murder or Three. Laurie Mantell.

The Hands of Innocence. Jeffrey Ashford. (1965; 1966; Walker & Co. paperback, 1984).

Tip on a Dead Crab. William Murray (1926 – 2005). (Penguin, 1984).

The Schoolmaster. W.J. Burley. (Walker, 1977).

March Violets. Philip Kerr. (Penguin, 1989).

Cast for Death. Margaret Yorke. (Hutchinson, 1976).

(Author’s Note: I should like to thank the Marquess of Tavistock for his help and advice, and for consenting to appear in these pages.)

A Question of Inheritance. Joseph Bell (Walker, 1981; Walker paperback, 1983).

Code Name Hangman. Paul Geddes. (1977; Penguin 1979).

The Killing of Katie Steelstock. Michael Gilbert. (Penguin, 1980).

Malice Domestic. Mollie Hardwick. (Hutchinson, 1986).

Words for Murder Perhaps. Edward Candy. (Doubleday, 1971; Ballantine paperback, 1985).

Spend Game. Jonathan Gash. (1980; Penguin, 1982).

The Riddle of Samson. Andrew Garve. (Harper & Row. 1954)

Chapter 1; First sentence: “The day I crossed to Scilly the islanders had just learned that for the first time in their history they were going to have to pay income tax.”

Murder through the Looking Glass. (AKA Murder in Moscow). Andrew Garve. (Harper & Row. 1951).

RUTH RENDELL.

One Across, Two Down. (1971).

To Fear a Painted Devil. (1965)

A Demon in My View (1977).

The Lake of Darkness. (1980, 1981).

Patricia Wentworth (1978 – 1961).

The Traveller Returns. (1948).

Pilgrim’s Rest. Patricia 1948.

Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis) (1904-1972).

The Worm of Death. Nicholas Blake. (Harper & Row, 1961).

A Question of Proof. Nicholas Blake. (Harper& Row, 1935).

“A deep wedge of depression is moving quickly down from  Iceland. There will be local soul-storms tomorrow.” (107).

Minute for Murder. (Harper & Row, 1947).

Head of a Traveler. (Harper & Row. 1949).

The Corpse in the Snowman.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

PEEPING MOT (A Maxwell; Apogee Press)

In the late Spring and summer of 2011, I began work on translating Rene Char’s Leaves of Hypnos. Here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Ron Silliman the day that he posted Tim Hetherington’s Diary (Saturday, April 23, 2011). Given the current events in Syria, I’d recommend that anyone who has not seen that video find it on their search engines immediately.

“I’m about one-fourth of the way through translating Rene Char’s Feuillets D’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos). My French is rudimentary, to say the least, but it’s sufficient to be very dissatisfied with the version edited and mainly translated by Jackson Matthews (Random House, 1956). Cid Corman’s translation (Grossman, 1973) is vastly superior to Jackson’s, but it feels like a radio reporter’s transmission of field notes that have first been vetted by the station’s general manager. I don’t mean that Corman’s version seems censored in some way, but that he intermittently constrains himself, like an actor who feels unworthy of representing the hero, from testing the intellectual and emotional boundaries of Char’s concise syntax. I’ve known and admired Char’s poetry for a long time, and from my first encounter have wanted to make his work better known. I wonder how many of our contemporaries have actually read Char, and so I’m working on this translation as a way of urging others to read him. I myself have certainly benefited from this process: the thematic nodes in Char’s prose poem journal are very subtle at times, and only by working on a translation have they become audible.”

I only finished about a third of Char’s journal of his time in the Resistance during World War II, and perhaps I will never find the time to do so.  Having engaged, however partially, in a close reading of Char’s writing has continued to be a greater resource than I anticipated as I continue to meet younger poets in Los Angeles. Most recently, A Maxwell gave me a copy of Peeping Mot, in which Char’s presence is minor but nevertheless contributes grace notes to a book that focuses on the process and value of raising an infant son. Seeing Char quoted in this book immediately made me want to read it so as to understand the precise integration of Char into Maxwell’s themes.

It turns out that Peeping Mot is a hybrid assemblage of short poems, epigrams and diary-like meditations on the relationship of language to social power. The book is 83 pages long (the pages themselves are unnumbered); it opens with four untitled, numbered propositions, followed by epigrams with titles and the first dated entry, 7.25.10. All this occurs in the first eight pages, and the book unfolds along alternations of these pressure points for slightly over six months.

Many books that might fall into the classification of post-modern make little effort to stabilize themselves in an easily apprehensible manner. Maxwell has made use of a familiar process of “tagging” in order to register the “key” (akin to music) of a given passage. Of the dozen terms that serve as a “key,” the two most frequent are “Life X” (39 entries) and “Suspended Judgments” (42 entries). Judgments get suspended because the problems (another “key”) are immured within complicated contexts. The challenge is to extract the problem and resolve it, without isolating its solution from the causes and sources of its original contradictions.

The primary axis of destabilization in Peeping Mot is the presence of a very young child in a family. I read somewhere if you find the exact center of a play by Shakespeare you’ll encounter a line that contains the key to the play’s major thematic impetus. Almost exactly at the mid-point of Peeping Mot, Maxwell ponders “The problem of the black swan tool,” a term that is a conflation of a mechanism used in a rescue operation (“swan tool”) and the paradigm of the “black swan,” the exception that disrupts normative expectations. In Maxwell’s formulation, the writing of a poem is the primary activity of the poet, but becoming a poet involves the crucial awareness that “the vector of poetry is away from publication.” On a page tagged with the key: Discovery, Maxwell observes, “The poem as black swan tool attempts to engineer an exception, an egress from ‘the literature’ – from the literary economy or marketplace – yet simultaneously also attempts to breaks into the vehicle of literary history, or the conceit of a bounded discipline and its progress.”

The double function of a poem in this construction manages to keep its balance in Peeping Mot largely because Maxwell is able to juxtapose the obligations of child-raising with its peculiar, but ineluctable outcomes:

“If one can never concede the defeat of one’s own knowledge, one can never be a humorist.

If one can never be a humorist, one can never be perfect.”

KEY: Epigrams

One’s knowledge will be defeated, in part, because that is what the love of the child demands: not the imposition of the strictly delineated, but the bestowal of reassurance that an autonomous means of looking at the world is possible.

7.10.10

He’s delighted, and we want that.

He fails to describe the world in the canonical way, and we want that.

Such even prospects.

In accepting such a leveling, Maxwell affirms his comradeship with Char: “To understand Char’s sense of acquiescence, one must understand what he chose to sentinel: the sovereignty of the child.” Near the beginning of the book, on 7.27.10, Maxwell records a conversation with his young child that addresses how the child exercises that sovereignty:

What’s that?

— Deeh.

What’s this thing?

— Deeh.

In the youngest vocabularies, the sound at the root is a response to the prompt.

What does this token go when the agreed-upon words crowd it out?

PEEPING MOT is one of the places to look for the poem of where it goes.

Hear Bill Mohr in conversation with Santa Monica Review editor Andrew Tonkovich on KPFK’s literary arts program Bibliocracy

[audio:https://billmohrpoet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/kpfk_120425_200050bibliocracy1.mp3|titles=Bill Mohr on Bibliocracy]

 
Tonight at 8 on KPFK:  BILL MOHR, Part II.  I’m back tonight through the magic of radio with the second half of my conversation with Bill Mohr, author of Hold-Outs:  The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1945-1992. It’s an essential story of our cultural history, with surprising and provocative and, yes, poetic insights into a period often overlooked, underestimated, misunderstood, with urgent themes about place, politics and the people who contributed to what poet-printer-editor Mohr argues has been an essential and influential epoch.  In tonight’s episode, Bill Mohr talks to me about, among other moments in the story, the creation and enduring influence of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, an institution which shaped much of the scene along with other important community cultural arts organizations, as well as the emergence of some important players — writers who came out of this community.  Before researching and publishing Hold-Outs, Bill Mohr developed a CV as long as your arm:  as publisher, editor, workshop leader, booster of other poets, and published writer himself.  Which is to say that he himself figures both in the living and in the telling of the story of the Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992.  If you missed the first part of his reading and our conversation, please have a listen at the station archives.  Bill Mohr is an associate professor of English at Cal State Long Beach.  His own writing has appeared widely, including in Antioch Review, Chicago Review, ZYZZYVA and is collected in three volumes:  Hidden Proofs, Vehemence and Bittersweet.  He was the editor at Momentum Press for fourteen years, and published two groundbreaking anthologies of LA poets:  The Streets Inside (1978) and Poetry Loves Poetry (1985).  Thanks for listening.  This show available as a free download from the KPFK station archives under “Shows,” “Bibliocracy.”