Steve Halle (Palatine, Illinois, USA): from Map of the Hydrogen World: Fishing Near the Power Plant, Waukegan, Illinois

the blue-black lake slick with oil, and rainbowed
by gasoline, burps up a carp for a fisherman
under the façade of the old power plant.

at first the fish flops and fights, hanging from the line.
the fisherman heaves the carp up and leaves
it on concrete breakwall. a sign says carp are rough fish.

the carp stops moving his mouth.

his brown scales rust dull red; his false eye mirrors
the glassy calm of the blue-black lake
slick with oil, and rainbowed by gasoline.

© Steve Halle 2008

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pa, USA): from Something Solid: The Nineties: Season in Hell: White Candle

Once, if we remembered rightly, our life was
a feast at which all hearts opened & all wines
flowed. Now, we found ourselves reduced, as
the unmade bed in room 510 became a symbol
of disorder in our brains, separately & together.
This was our last stand, to & for each other— to
prove, beyond reasonable doubt, what forever
could mean to a boy & girl, partitioned first from
each other like Romeo & Juliet themselves, now
free from our clans to not accept our respective
conditions. Sleeplessly, we fucked living hell
out of each other, with desperate, animal
intensity, man & wife welded together in white
candle wax, singed into perpetual melt, resolved

into loose fluid. The web around you, Jennifer—
schemes, starvation—if they never knew the woman you
became there & then, in a hotel bed in State College,
amid summer throngs— you & I knowing would have
to be good enough (me taking twenty-five years to see
it), our bodies burning in Elysian fields. O witches, O
misery, O hatred, we entrusted nothing to you at all,
even as guns were lined up for our excoriation. Walled
in on all sides, you left it to me to demonstrate your
wifeliness to the world. I am not merely pleased to
do so— the white candle of our non-immolation
stands in a state of perfect & perfectly lit equilibrium
in the corn-fields behind what used to be your
trailer, the perfect image of our marriage, war—

© Adam Fieled 2022

Waxing Hot, a poetics dialogue: Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Philadelphia, USA), Adam Fieled (Philadelphia, USA)

Adam Fieled: Hand in hand with the intellectual rigor of your poems is a deep sense of suffering, an awareness of futility and fragility. One might see in your work a “poetics of suffering.” Just as the Buddha said “all life is suffering,” do you feel that, in some sense, all poetry must be “suffering” (or “a suffering”) too?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: One of the fascinating things about having Drafts read is hearing about what they see in the poems. (Hearing what they see.) People’s responses construct a multi-faceted polyhedron for me. It is also fascinating to hear what words people choose to talk about their feelings for this poem and for poetry in general. You have chosen several very freighted words to open this exchange, including using the term of the Buddha. So I have taken a deep breath, and looked at your words (“deep”; “suffering”; “futility”; “fragility”; “the Buddha”), and have re- engaged my sense of the poems.
I would say that suffering and fragility (your words) are close to feelings I have about some of the themes of the work, but this is combined with a resilience, resistance, and even a rather inflected joy and awe. “Futility” is your word. I think there is a lot of futility in life, even, in some moods, in all of it, but I couldn’t myself get involved in the 20 year long construction of a poem thinking to communicate sheer futility. The tragic sense of life, the sense of sublimity and rage, is different from futility, after all. Another of the words you use is “must be” what poetry “must be.” Poetry, to be worth something, evokes many, many feelings in readers: structural feelings of pleasure and dastardliness, feelings of being overwhelmed by the force of language, a sense of leaping forward into a world and being contained in relation to the large world by the smaller world made in and by the poem. There is a lot of pleasure in the artfulness of art, even if some of the feelings evoked by a work are overwhelmingly difficult and sad and hard to manage. Hence I don’t think that all poetry must be “suffering.” I can’t wrap myself around that generalization.
AF: Your work shows a clear and ever-present awareness of post-structuralist theory and practice. Yet you also freely incorporate standard devices like rhyme and alliteration. Are you comfortable with the dynamic tension between “hallowed” tradition and new-fangled theory? Do you find it stimulating?
RBD: Another observation about being interviewed by email to join the first observation. Since I don’t know you particularly well, it’s not yet clear what you mean by the terms in which you are invested. If you were to say even a little about what you mean by post-structuralist theory and practice, we could make sure that we are the same page. When I went to college and graduate school (Columbia), there was “no” theory; this means we were almost totally into an unquestioned paradigm formed by the New Criticism. I have by the way never given up my formal sense of the artwork learned under that rubric; it’s just not a pure formalist or purely aesthetic sense that’s ever at stake for me. Only as I exited from my formal education did theory emerge as a set of discussable positions, what I like to call theorizing practices. Or, say this another way: the political rupture of the late 1960s was also an intellectual rupture. This has meant, to me, that I am most engaged with the loop between theory and praxis coming out of feminism and gender thinking.
It’s been, therefore, a thrilling time to become self-educated in what people call theory, which I have always taken as a thinking through. I could thereupon tell you what positions and works have been interesting to me, but they all would fall in the in-between formed by a kind of spiritual yearning and a materialist base. This would first be positions taken up by and in feminist thinking including the theorizing of Virginia Woolf, plus key works of French feminism (Irigaray, Cixous) and also Spivak and Braidotti, all positions dealing with gender in culture; then positions taken up by echt post-structuralists, most emphatically Barthes, but also Blanchot— these are hard for me to sum up except as being a gloss on spiritual investments and ideological analysis at the same time; and third, the positions of the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin and Adorno, plus one very important Marxist pragmatist: Raymond Williams.
The feature of theory that fascinates me, and that I’ve tried to deal with a bit, is that only some of that evocative list of thinkers ever directly and assiduously treats the poem, poetry, the poetic text. (Obviously, the poet-critics are different in that!) However, I see no contradiction between this set of positions and any poetic tactics I might choose to use! Any rhetorics, formal tactics, choices I make, desires to sound inside language, tripping and torquing tradition are my informed choice. Of course it appears to some that using rhyme links you to tradition, but it could allow you to trump tradition, answer back, and so on. No formal “device” (or choice) has absolute content but situational, historically contingent meanings that get created and recreated inside a specific work.
AF: At one point in Drafts, a speaker says, “If I am not who you say I am, you are not who you think you are.” This cuts to the core of the political element in Drafts— the construction of identity through various “namings”, of the self and others. How does the construction of identity (as woman, poet, “speaker”, etc.) play into your poetics? Is the poem, or does the poem become, part of the poet’s “identity-construct”?
RBD: I sincerely think and hope that speaker was Ralph Ellison. It’s one of the citations in Drafts unchecked (or one of the unchecked citations). I cited it for the magnificent dialectics. (It’s in “Draft 48: Being Astonished” my poem concerning a whole generation of female experimental poets and all the different subject positions they might be imagined to have and to take up.) My identity? There are a lot of parameters to identity (class, race, gender, religious culture, job category, national location, social usefulness). I try to forget them all when I write. That doesn’t mean I am not engaging them, or engaging with them. I just try to work into them and beyond them at the same time. I know this is a paradox. That’s the paradox of writing. Of course the poem, a task and struggle as large as Drafts, becomes part of who I am now.
AF: Sense of place in Drafts seems to me multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, “numerous.” Is the voyage “inside times and inside pronouns” one with destination other than “a speaking” or “a writing”? Can you carry elements of this voyage into “dailiness” or is there an evanescence to it?
RBD: If I understand the question, you are asking does the poem—with its ethics and sense of being— affect my daily life. The answer is— sometimes. I think the poem comes from everything I am, and has also changed what I am.
AF: You devote a substantial amount of space in Drafts to a dialectical exploration of Adorno’s famed quote that (to paraphrase) to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Do you believe that statements of this sort, i.e. deliberately provocative statements, are a healthy part of cultural conversation, or merely a nuisance, or can they be both?
RBD: Your question refers to a poem called “Draft 52: Midrash” in the most recent book of Drafts, Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered, Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). The poems in this book are all dedicated to specific people, and constitute a personal pledge of engagement with the issues of historical tragedy and spiritual questioning that the poems as a whole set forth. However, “Draft 52: Midrash” is deliberately un-dedicated. This is a commentary on the Holocaust and on the genocidal, killing fields, and mass murder tasks that nazi-fascism has taken up, no matter where it is active.
One of the notable poems in that book, “Draft 52: Midrash,” makes an endless, unresolved gloss on Adorno’s sententia, After Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric, taking his statement as an important ethical talisman. (His statement comes in an essay called “Cultural Criticism and Society”; it appeared in Prisms.) I truly thought his comment was beyond what would normally be seen as provocative in a cultural conversation (to use your words) and came from an emotional and political space far, far beyond anything that could be called nuisance. There are always some people who mouth off about poetry and what poetry should or should not do, and articulate orders for poets but Adorno is far beyond being one of those people. His statement comes from the most wrenching revulsion, grief and human anguish. Therefore, because it was so absolutist, I respected it as such. However, because it was so absolutist (plus annihilating, as morally wrong or uncivilized, my desire to write poetry), I felt it had to be discussed. Not answered, discussed.
It is very important to me that this poem is called “midrash”. This word evokes a textual strategy from Hebrew interpretive practices. Midrash originally meant a continuous and generations-long commentary on sacred texts by those— males, in Orthodox tradition— invested with appropriate spiritual authority and learning. In writing this particular midrash on Adorno, I am taking a secular text, in the post-Holocaust context, examining it as a woman untrained in any philosophical tradition of argument, but someone who is invested in the notion of thinking in poetry. The gesture is therefore filled with critique.
Actually, Drafts as a whole project alludes to— but secularizes— this genre of serious commentary, spiritual investment, and continuous gloss. By the title Drafts, I am signaling that these poems are open to transformation, part of ongoing processes of construction, self-commentary, and reconstruction. This is similar to the collective processes of midrash. And, while some in individual Drafts can be very funny and witty, the whole project has thematic and emotional investments centering on loss, struggle, and hope, on the unsayable and “anguage,” the language of anguish.
conducted by e-mail, late 2005-early 2006

Chris McCabe (London, UK): "Existential Clubbing"

Five fingered bars strobe white prisms from brick
Inversion of God’s Ministry. Bouncers are ministers.
Frisks you in a soul-search. Finds an in-pocket novel,
original Penguin Classic. Considers refusing you entry,
presumes you’re no trouble. Drunken bookish one.
You put your soul in the cloakroom, the ticket says 72.
There are only seven other people you can see.
They are so young your face reflects in their eyelids.
The only offer at the bar is being served.
The lager scrapes the outside of the barrel.
The dancefloor is a pelt of purple, un-refuseable.
It is so long since you last danced the baton of the rhythm
remains two seconds ahead of you. Someone faceless
suggests you are not a student you think quick, say you have
more letters after your name than in it. The dancefloor has
doubled in size. The DJ tells you he has lent all of his albums
to a friend. You have no friends you think he blames you
for the dancefloor being empty. Your spit is mote-dust.
The pulse in your temples is the after-audio of a chant
of a ritual. You start to dream in pink wafers. You take
your coat it refuses to talk back. Outside is cold. The
club is called Secrets. You have never heard of the place.

© Chris McCabe 2009

Miscellaneous E Hits

The Flourish and the Fall by Keith Nunes on AOP.

Two (relatively) new sites: Scud and Ink Pantry.

Funtime Press begins the process of spreading its wings, taking to the air.

From Something Solid: a 2024 palimpsest moves Tobi aside for Abby

Remembering Lyn Hejinian

There's what's in the Cabinet, then what the Cabinet's in

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from PICC (A Poet in Center City) #39

“Ingres and David,” Tobi shouted in my ear, as I held onto her waist and we grinded on the dancefloor, upstairs at the Khyber. “Still them, huh?” “Of course. I still don’t care what they say at PAFA, and I don’t care what Trish says either.” Tiny Tob— another brain complicated enough, like John’s, to make your head spin, when up close and personal finally became a reality. She’d moved, as a painter, into a charmed space in which her kaleidoscope eyes fashioned, from street-life among the heavy dykes in Center City, a thematic compromise with the stern formality of the French Neo-Classicists. She managed to work me in as a little fun, on the side. Not that, standing on stage with The Bats, who were playing cat and mouse with the East Coast media at the time, her cherubic face didn’t lead most Philadelphians to think she was just another rock girl. John loved her, too. The neighborhood where Tob had a flat and The Bats had a co-op house in the environs, South Street past Broad, into the mid-to-high Teens (Tob was on 16th), had become a dynasty situation for them. Not a neighborhood with a specific name, adjunct to center-of-the-center, but when lines formed to see them at Tritone, right in the heart of it, John and I knew our place as art geeks in comparison. Tob was a cheater! Once in a while, we got called in by The Bats heavy brass to do roadie duty. “By the way,” I thought fair to mention to her, “I couldn’t find those maracas at 8th Street Music at all. I don’t think they have them.” Tobi made a moue but also giggled, “Don’t ask me, ask Liz.” The song and the grind were about to end, but I knew Tobi would eventually be dispatched up to Logan Square for a few nights, and she was. John and I got paid back for our consummate skill lugging gear around with what amounted to, each time, about a joint worth of dope each. Fair. With us, Liz was happy to fire up the Bukka White and subject us to a rigmarole, two heavy dykes and two pretty bis, that had to do with demonstrating the right kind of devotion, so that The Bats at the Highwire Gallery could feel comfortable that they were not demeaning themselves there. It was useless at the house to talk to anyone but Liz. She’d look at you and make her appraisal for the evening: “Oh, it’s you guys. Alright, you both wait here and I’ll come back and show you where the gear is.” Liz, with the red, lank mop, fulfilled her quotient of the redhead’s notorious bloody-mindedness: “These two amps, set by the door for now. Don’t touch the instruments ‘til they’re packed the right way. The keyboard, Tob is going to do for herself tonight.” Might I say, with some embarrassment, that the portion of the dope we then received went right into our lungs. So that, gear lugged to a station wagon which only had to drive a yet-crucial few blocks, we all wound up at Tritone, to watch Tob and Liz go into Mick-and-Keith mode and leave John and I in the dust again. All in good fun. But the last thing I asked Tob on the Khyber upstairs dancefloor was to the point: “Are you gonna try to show this time?” Tob’s eyes rolled up to the not particularly lofty ceiling, as the song began to fade and I relaxed my grasp on her waist. She collected herself, and said “Yeah. But I have to wait for all the other stuff to settle down. And no one’s gonna rush me, either.” I told John what she said, and he laughed all over again. This time, he wouldn’t tell me why. The inscrutable bisexual brain: it is what it is. 
 Adam Fieled © 2023

Andrew Duncan (Nottingham, UK): "The Metallic Autumn"

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
Season of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
Pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

© Andrew Duncan 2001

Valeria Melchioretto (London, UK): "Grandmother's Cataracts"

for Oxfam

Her eyes stop her from seeing the world for what it had always been I
long before the cataracts became an issue. It is hard to say what exactly

she is looking forward to. So many fanciful visions rest at the base
of her eye sockets and words go rancid in the abyss of her throat.

If she had saved the left over umbilical cord of her many children, she
could now weave herself a shawl for cold winter nights when she talks

to her dead husband who as usual doesn’t reply. Nothing must be wasted
or else everything is for nothing. No babies thrown out with the bath water

no matter how cheap life must be. She thought of her children as the future,
now she hardly sees them. The cataracts are not to blame but her children’s

future is abroad. Every so often the kind neighbors call her over to answer
short long-distance calls. The phone wire has replaced the umbilical cord.

Those wide cheekbones have faced the indispensable as it lurked daily.
Solid corners of her face on which she hangs a sad smile to dry her tears.

Now that the house is empty she wonders how long the future will take
as time is nothing but short spells of rain, long spells of rain and restlessness.

(Orig. published in Poets for a Better Future, ed. Todd Swift, Oxfam, 2004)

John Siddique (Wigan, UK): "Tree of the World"

On nights when the sounds of the children
we should have had wake me. I sit in the yellow
of the bulb, and place my hands upon the horizon,
spin on the axis mundi which connects us,
even though at times we have no desire
to be connected. The stones on the moor,

touched by so many over the centuries,
so much so they have memories, will tell the stories
of all our confessions. If one will just stand,
and lay one’s hands and listen at the centre.

The carvings of spirals and swastikas,
concentric rings and bloodlines, added to
over millennia, will fade in eternities face.
Each year a wipe of a cloth over rough stone,
soon they’ll be polished and faceless,
soon they will be sand on the wind.

I will wait for you there, where the symbols
lose their meanings, where our attempts
at holding on are less than nothings, but still the axis,
nameless and unspeakable, is true, never out of sight.


© John Siddique 2005