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by David Rosenberg
A.
During the summer of '71 or '72, I sublet the artist's loft and apartment of David Bolduc on Toronto's lower Yonge Street, sharing it with my ex-Island cat Harry, for I was recently separated. I spent many evenings down the block at 'the Colonial,' having cheap fish on the balcony of the great jazz club of the day. A block or so in the other direction were the tiny studios of 'General Idea, 'the art coop I had begun hanging around, fishing for a collaborative project. I worked days at the Coach House, mostly underwritten by a summer grant for creative projects.One Friday in August I got an urgent call from Bolduc; he had to come in from his country place that weekend to work in his loft. I moved from the loft area where I'd made my pallet, into the apartment area where Bolduc and his family usually slept, while David took over the loft. Amicable enough for us, it was a nightmare for Harry and David's dog. David had to come through the apartment to walk the dog, and these encounters sent fur flying. The rest of the time, Harry lived in terror and the dog in agitation, for each was occupying the other's home space.
I hadn't felt so isolated in a long time, but it was that weekend I wrote The Necessity of Poetry, which would become the title poem of this book in 1973. It's amazing what isolation can do for creativity, but it has to be an enforced isolation, so that there is no thought of loneliness eating at the edges. Decades would pass before I would learn that isolation is nature's condition for the evolution of species.
B.
'She knows how to finish a plant, how to open nostrils, a mouth, a vulva, how to create a setting for an eyeball; she thinks suddenly of the sea shell when she has to unfold the pavilion of an ear.'
- Paul Valery, 'Home et la Coquille'The Necessity of Poetry, my title poem, derives from a classic essay (1923) by Paul Valery. Once again, twenty-five years later, I am reading another, 'Sea Shells' (1932), which describes 'making' - from a stone to a poem - as the operative trope for knowing anything. Now I would add 'unmaking,' echoing what I believed in '73: a defense of poetry is worthless without a return to origins in the natural world. While I regarded old ways of reading nature as weak, I had no idea yet of any new way - except to start by 'unreading.'
Each work in The Necessity of Poetry is composed as if it was a found artifact, naturally - and necessarily - made. In other words, the privilege of authorship must blur the boundaries beyond human-centered making, beyond culture, and the way I knew to get to this 'unmaking' was through explorations of collage and collaboration and a further blurring: of genres, those conventions of human making.
The psychoanalytic parallel - the adult must be unmade into the child - suggests the reversal more clearly. And still further: the human ape must be unmade into the ecosystem it evolved away from and lost. This is the recent understanding of frontier ecology. Beyond a reversal of the human image, it is an extension of what 'home' might mean. In this book, your author grew increasingly displaced - from his cultural 'homes' down to his St.Mark's Place apartment in New York.
However, once you stop to ask of an artifact 'Who made it?' the creating moment has passed and the composition must now include its commentary. Not asking this of a stone or an alligator leaves us free to consider them accidents - or part of an unfinished and unknown picture. Not asking this of our own species, what becomes the answer to 'Who made me?' Our cultures, including poetry, repress the accident and answer, 'me' - 'I' made it. Accidents remain the surprise of the nonhuman. And now, for the first time we are beginning to have a non-religious, non-metaphysical vision of our own accidental existence, made possible by explorations in frontier ecology. I call this postmodern surprise of the nonhuman, 'ecological mind.' Nevertheless, in 1971 I did understand the principle of accidents happening 'so fast I didn't see it.' Today, the same can be said for new species, such as Homo sapiens when it evolved, and that changes everything. I may have intuited that in The Necessity of Poetry, because I composed these pieces as if my hands were behind my back.
C.
It came down to speed. Not merely speed, the drug; not the rush of heroin or rock; and not a fast life and loose women. No. It was the creating of art with no hands, unmaking convention so fast that a piece seemed willed into existence and the work seemed finished before it started. Balanchine did it with ballet, with blurring speed. Too fast to catch in the blink of an eye - even in a photograph. It was left to Andy Warhol to remove the hands literally, letting the camera or silkscreen press speak for itself.In the same way, remove the hand of the creator and you unmake the species. Without our hands we are no longer Homo sapiens. What then? Frontier ecology explains: we're on the road to evolving, where what counts is the crossing of a border ('not clarity but the sense of shift' wrote Michael Ondaatje), exploring the niche in which new life can come into existence. Here is the ultimate 'getting lost,' where it is isolation that provides the inspiration of evolution.
The potential to evolve, to become more at home with unknown mutations of oneself - it all starts with a strange art, one which creates a model of the space in which evolving can take place. Instead of the crafted art, what remains precious is the collaboration between artist and artifact (whose hand is it?) as he or she unmakes it, returns to us its full potential. Is there anything more challenging than to imagine ourselves before Homo sapiens came into existence, when we were an earlier form of Homo - and, unlike the conventional trope from embryology, we were a perfectly completed thing? Our prehistory is so long that to read it we must put aside our hands, including the hand that holds the book or tablet. Whatever we 'make' today (including our own feces, as Freud astutely pointed out) is probably less significant than our ultimate origin and destination: the creative ecosystem which made us.
So how do I approach this ultimate 'home?' Back before this concept of ecological mind, we were already preparing for it. Whatever genre the work took, whatever visual or mental form, it was the process of blurring that form which allowed for the creation of a larger concept of space. I began calling my poems 'works,' to embrace what is now the 'memory' of a poem instead of a 'poem.' Poetry or prose was no longer the issue, but rather a meaningful preparation to write. The Necessity of Poetry was the first book in which I felt that various genres could be united in a way that unmade the term 'poetry' - while leaving the necessity of it clear.
This was hardly a triumphant art; there was a poignance to losing the object, the poem. Having only the memory was lonely. It was like seeing a picture of the house you grew up in when you are living in other people's houses. Yet the aim is to remake the lost object, to make it more than it was: to retain its poignance in a reaching out for new forms of collaboration.
Meanwhile, a couple weeks after Bolduc returned to his cottage in '71 or '72, a serious bolt from the blue: a telegram from the U.S. Attorney General: 'All matters pertaining to the charges against David Rosenberg have been annulled...' I could go 'home.'
D.
'...After having engulfed a person, life goes on,
Without even a ripple at the vanishing point,
And from that life that person's excluded,
As will, as knowledge, as any other thing
Except a memory, growing dim...'
- from Empire of Skin by Tom Clark (Black Sparrow, '97)Empire of Skin is Tom Clark's 232-page documentary-in-poetry of the prehistory of British Columbia and Vancouver. I recently visited Tom in Berkeley, where I got my copy of what he called 'the otter book.' Driven to near-extinction, the reader holds onto the loss of the otters more than the men who came to the Western shore of not-yet-Canada for the 'soft gold rush' of skins. Meanwhile, the indigenous men and women - those who came in pursuit of wooly mammoth or whale many millenia earlier - are also done in by the white man's subconscious mind and its projection, an unfathomably brutalizing 'system of exchange.'
The Indians (nearly decimated too) are just a bit closer to the sea otters in spirit, those who 'slept on kelp beds/ back-floating.' But only the sea otters can represent the innocence that we continue to brutalize. The otters are at home in the natural world as we can never be anymore; at least, not in our Homo sapiens incarnation. The otters, in fact, are all that we have of innocence to contrast with George Vancouver - and ourselves.
Clark's new book, which transforms old journals, shows how new poems can be created not only out of memories but a specific memory of loss. It reminded me of how the specter of loss rose up from the depths and took over the last five poems in The Necessity of Poetry, as if I had turned from age 29 into 60. Now I can see that the preceding pieces were also governed by loss. Although I thought of myself as 'remaking' Valery's essay in the title poem, my poem also acknowledged the loss of that great essay (and the poetry it defended) because it can now only be read as a dead (or domesticated) classic. Such a gesture of admission that the past is deeply lost connects it to human prehistory, which until now has seemed beyond admission.
Call the 'necessity' of poetry its evolutionary drive, and the poetry itself a remade memory of loss. Turning toward the future, the 'prehistory' of our lives and poems today will become equally lost and remakable when we evolve out of Homo sapiens into Homo x - a vision of evolving very soon to become unsuppressed.
E.
Sam Hunter lectured in Miami this year on landscape painting. In person, Hunter represented exactly what I felt about his 1972 monograph on Larry Rivers: a dry, New York Jewish wit tethered to mediocre writing. A brain that outran his hand. But Hunter didn't like landscape painting or having been saddled with that topic, so he unmade the subject, often hilariously. There were slides of Pollacks and Rothkos and Franz Klines, referred to as 'New York landscape painting.' Hunter was blurring the genre as outrageously as any painter, and his performance spoke more eloquently than his text, which he read in a monotone.In 1973, I chose to unmake Hunter's text in my poem 'Rivers,' and I tried to restore the performance of Larry Rivers the action painter. Twenty-five years later, I was watching Professor Hunter as he swatted the glass of water off the lectern, spilling it onto his shoes. He reached down and with his bare hand wiped off the shoes, all the while continuing to declaim the text that went with the current slide, which by this time had turned into Jasper Johns.
This performance took me back. From Toronto, I had arrived onto the St. Mark's poetry scene in New York, where performance was key: the author was often hidden behind his or her poem, a parental observer of the poem's 'acting out' an innocence that is lost, and therefore poignant.
F.
A prophetic book for me was George Bowering's Geneve, published at Coach House, summer of '71. Based on the Tarot, the cover unfolded into a poster displaying the photographed cards fanned out in order.In his seminal work on photography, Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes described the photograph as a madness, a stopping of time - a domestication of it, into images. A few artists might remake those images into the madness of which they come, while poet Bowering remade them by a form of collaboration. He turned the cards themselves into real-time photos in which the author is also there, his hand at the margin outside the picture, at one point handling a hockey stick.
Bowering revealed the dominance of marginal cultures within the mainstream by merging Tarot with hockey, and turning it - and by extension, all popular culture - into our universal myth of life and death. 'I ask for no more/than two minutes/for one chance to score/a power play goal...then fall forever to the ice.' This performance of Bowering's was so prima-donnaish that it made the madness of stopping time - the photo-like cards - poignant.
Poignance was the closest thing to innocence we had left. While the influence of Geneve in Canada extended to Frank Davey's Arcana (1973) and others, I had gone in search of poignance to New York, where some poets were already deep into performance. In fact, a week after I arrived, I attended a John Coltrane concert on Second Avenue that included a reading by the equally-speeding Ted Berrigan in striped pants and purple glasses.
Can this be true? Is memory to be trusted? Probably it was two separate events at the Fillmore, but they might as well have been the same because I found Ted in collaboration with any other art in which performance could be elaborately critiqued. Both Coltrane and Berrigan critiqued the limitations of performance - of the socially-constructed self - by blurring past that self, lightning-fast. But first - and suggesting a collaboration between life and art - Frank O'Hara had raised poetry to a new level of reaching out. And this poignant longing for camaraderie (no matter if living or dead) could only be represented by the trope of collaboration. The observing artist behind the performing one rendered the scene of writing itself poignant for being so desperately lost.
G.
Describing American phenomena, it's good to remember how Canada retained some room for itself to harbor marginality, a kind of underground to the American desperation. Even before I left Toronto, I knew I would not fit in again in the States. I was confused, of course, but I tolerated confusion like a Canadian. The Necessity of Poetry was a life raft, in which I could develop a critical sense of collaboration to the point that the next step became obvious: translation, collaboration with absent, dead, and even unknown writers - such as the ancient biblical ones, where the issues of authorship and marginality were crucial.Even now, in my recent translation of Kabbalah, the issue of prophecy raises all the others I have described. Prophecy is turned toward the future because it expects an end to time. The most prophetic work I translated - The Zohar - is so certain of it that it demands its reader become initiated as a collaborator, acquiring extensive years of marginal study in myths and texts. At that point of accepting the future's judgment, the reader, like the author, can shed all taboo and enter the book sexually naked. For the book has become a poem outside of time, in which all borders, all genres can be blurred and remade.
Not having a vision of the future, in The Necessity of Poetry I could only insist on its necessity. I didn't know how to see through poetry to a natural world outside. But I have learned a way from frontier ecology. It allows us to see ourselves as the work of the creative ecosystem in which 'we were preparing to evolve' - because that ecosystem created a space for us, opening a niche. In that way, we ourselves are poetic artifacts.
Each work in this book explored a new source by working it into a potential niche: Hunter's monograph on Rivers; the artist Claes Oldenburg's journal; an interview with Matisse for 'Joe Brainard'; music in 'December 9' and 'Miss Smith'; a documented poetry reading in 'Frank Lima'; a personal interview conducted at the Coach House in 'Vito Acconci'; poets' letters to me in England in 'Brightlingsea Sounds Good'; Picabia and a Malanga letter in 'Passing By...'; Cocteau and a Clark letter in 'May 24'; a Larry Rivers conversation in 'Sept. 28 Thursday,'and Valery's essay for the title poem.
But one day in '73, after I'd read my first psalm translations at St. Mark's Church, Allen Ginsberg came up eager to talk. He didn't want to know anything about The Necessity of Poetry, which I had just given him, nor the psalms. Instead, he had a blunt question for me: 'Do you believe in God?' 'No, but --' I answered, and before I could qualify it Allen was saying, 'Then there's no necessity in your translations, they're just art.'
Allen's necessity was up - up and out through the meditative, Buddhist hole in his head. There was no 'sideways' to discover except through reincarnation. He was right to the extent that my collaborations with archaic poets (as I thought of the psalms then, following The Necessity of Poetry) were still limited by the context of culture. I was stimulated by his buttonholing to go deeper into the sources, toward something like the prehistoric, aboriginal spiritual world I would unearth in The Book of David - more than twenty years later.
I let go of the words 'translate' and 'transform' for the word 'evolve' - used not in its decadent form as a cheap metaphor, but in its strict sense as a necessity greater than any human or cultural one. I have gone back to native peoples in The Book of David, and that is also a way of circling back to Canada, where indigenous history is becoming every day more compelling, among the wild vestiges of land that remain.
There is another way of considering Canada in a form of reversal: it is closer to a poignant margin. I'm reminded of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band, and the poem in The Necessity of Poetry in which I used 'basement' as a metaphor for Canada:
[excerpt]
it's not hard slipping thru/ our photograph/ our social hero
lighting up the line picture/ smoke in the air/ O my Toronto!
basement of Europe/ America chills the air of/ not my head
- from 'Passing By An Open Field'To go beneath the mainstream - to 'go underground' - Dylan and some Canadian cohorts had to record themselves in the basement of 'Big Pink,' which connected in fact and in their minds to the underground railroad. It could not happen in a big studio or a big university or publishing house (elaborated further in Greil Marcus's 'Invisible Republic,' 1997) anymore than the Bible could have been written in a dominant culture like Egypt, and later, Rome. What was needed was a poignant place like the Solomonic court culture in 10th century (B.C.) Jerusalem first sketched in The Book of J. Here was a whole culture of writers in a small enclave caught between the giants of Egypt and Mesopotamia, concentrating on their own little canon, based upon genre-bending writers like 'J' and 'S'. A Canadian canon of genre-benders on the margin (beginning with bpNichol) might look similar as it makes the marginal and 'outside' new again, much like Solomonic Jerusalem's writing of the early Bible. Suddenly, it is the opening of new territory and sources that matters.
H.
The writers I asked to be artists in this book suggest the marginality of the writer as he or she blurs into the artist. The poet Kenward Elmslie's drawing of his companion, Joe Brainard, on a cocktail napkin, unmakes the Brainard aesthetic of drawing as daily life. Rudy Burckhardt's document of Larry Rivers unmakes Rivers's life back into art, going from his mother (and model) Bertie to his collaborator (and model) Frank O'Hara - with artist/companion Jane Freilicher observing. In poet Anne Waldman's collage of memory as bodily function, she collaborates with I Remember as it unmakes the vanity of memory. Memory in this poem takes me back to Canada as a purity of space (of niche), within and without - because, in the end, I must open the snowy window without hands.Consider Ron Padgett's photo of a new-wave intellectual beauty in Paris (his wife, Patty) as it unmakes the camera's distance. I recall Ron's words when he gave me this print: 'I thought she was going to bite the photographer's head off, namely mine.' In other words, the viewer of the photo is implicated in the picture - as if it were us who broke the subject's heart. 'Miss Smith' of the poem could be any woman's alias, besides being Bessie Smith backed by Fletcher Henderson as she re-invented the blues.
The photo series illustrating 'Passing By...' shows me blurring from author into photographer, which I pursued further in Toronto, including works published in the Coach House photography magazine, 'Image Nation.' I didn't become a visual artist so much as a poet without hands, documenting a 'ghost' parade I bumped into on Bloor Street. As if the product of a marginal culture passing into extinction, nobody could tell me what was going on or to whom the 'queen' mannequin belonged. The poem with which the photos collaborate, 'Passing By...', unmakes the Black Mountain trope of an 'open field' into a literal field--and here, an open street.
In fact, I was returning from lunch that day with Victor Coleman (who edited all of my Coach House books). Victor was anxious to get back to work; I was too slow for him, but my lagging allowed me to spot the scene. And when we met up later at the Coach House, where we were both working, Victor asked, 'Get any work done?' I took the question sympathetically: it unmade the trope of 'work' to its barest, poignant necessity of 'passing the time.'
The remaining poems in the book, 'May 24' and 'September 28,'explore how making anything more artful of work would be madness, and that it would be more ecologically minded to 'unmake' it. To create a space for poetry, first.
Appropriately, these two poems were written in other poets' apartments: 'May 24' while living on the top floor of Kenward Elmslie's house (the '104 Greenwich Avenue' quoted in 'Brightlingsea Sounds Good'); 'September 28' (with Diana Molinari and Larry Rivers as co-protagonists) in Anne Waldman's, while she pursued 'disembodied poetics' in Colorado.
I.
I have come to 'I', I as experienced in relation to other species. Imagine the warmth I felt toward a fly upon waking from a nightmare. In the nightmare I was lost and about to die, trapped by forces I could not control. Because I had not even the cultural illusion of domination, these forces were alien to me, alien as death. The fly, on the other hand, was a fellow in life. He, or she, was shaped by the same forces as me, forces that I sense are parental and not alien: sexuality, for instance, a body with eyes, and appendages for mobility, a desire to eat and mate - and to explore. This fly was exploring me, in its way, as I was exploring it for signs of my being at home, here, in the world, and not in alien death.How to speak to each other? In poetry. In the necessity to unmake an 'I' and then to restore it, by collaborating with a lost or 'dead' text. We ourselves are that dead text, made alive even under the exploring feet of a miraculously-constructed and innocent fly. Marginal though it only seems to be, it allows us the poignance of poetic communication.
Canada is no innocent and of course not another species. But it allowed me an enforced isolation in which to learn that our culture-bound genres have become too canny, too contented and inbred, having lost hope of communication with the world outside us. This loss is poignant because it goes unnoticed; instead, all the domesticated genres of old go on as if nothing had happened to 'humanity.' And as if the reaching out to new forms of collaboration and the advent of ecological mind were merely an outlying region of unknown ecosystems that can be ignored. Like Canada itself, this territory can be thought of as marginal to the American cultural engine. I used to think that Canada had given me time, but I realize now that it was also the gift of space: to range across conventional borders and to find not only poetry poignantly lost but Homo sapiens (and myself) as well.