Thresholds: Essays on the International Prague Poetry Scene 8073083507, 9788073083502

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thresholds ESSAYS ON THE INTERNATIONAL PRAGUE POETRY SCENE

edited by

DAVID VICHNAR

Prague 2011

Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com

Copyright © David Vichnar, 2011 Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors

Published 2011 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic

All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publication of this book has been supported by James H. Ottaway, Jr. and research grant MSM0021620824 “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education.

Cataloguing in Publication Data Thresholds: Essays on the International Prague Poetry Scene, edited by David Vichnar. – 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-350-2 1. Poetics. 2.Literary Theory. 3. Contemporary Poetry. I. Vichnar, David. II. Title

Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Cover, typeset & design © lazarus

CONTENTS David Vichnar INTRODUCTION: PRAHY PRAHY / THRESHOLDS OF TRANSLOCALITY & BEYOND

1

Ali Alizadeth THE POETICS OF UNPLACEMENT: DISAPPEARANCE OF SETTING IN THE POETRY OF LOUIS ARMAND

32

Jane Lewty IMPLIED OFFERINGS IN THIS UNIVERSE: THE POETRY OF LOUIS ARMAND

45

Vadim Erent REVOLUTIONS OF THE MINOR: KAFKA, TSVETAEVA, ARMAND

61

Jules Mann THE FARNSWORTH PROJECT

84

Louis Armand VINCENT FARNSWORTH & THE “RESISTANCE OF MEDIUM”

87

David Vichnar, Gwendolyn Albert & Vincent Farnsworth INTER-VIEW: “THRESHOLD” EXPERIENCES

100

Kateřina Piňosová THE ONE WHO SITS ON A HEDGE: THE POETRY OF LAURA CONWAY

116

David Vichnar & Laura Conway INTER-VIEW: MYTHMAKING AMONG EUROPEANS

132

Chris Crawford & Stephan Delbos STONES TO STEEPLES: AN ELECTRONIC CONVERSATION

136

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

155

INTRODUCTION

Prahy Prahy: Thresholds of Translocality & Beyond Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word: survivre, living on. Following the triumphal procession of an “on,” they trail more than one language behind them. – Jacques Derrida, “Living On/Borderlines”

The title of this essay collection is meant to – via a pun on the Czech práh, meaning “threshold,” the popular etymology of the name of Praha – evoke a certain state of affairs significant for, if not defining of, the poets examined here. By the same token, it is also meant to refer to the status of the collection as a whole, poised as it is in between its sister-publications, Louis Armand’s monumental The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, and Stephan Delbos’s comprehensive From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology.1 To speak of the “international Prague poetry scene” is to, indeed, deal with an in-between space: a space between languages, cultures, literary traditions – a space of trans-lation, of carrying-over, of metaphor. A space of boundaries, limits, borderlines: space of an opening and a closure, space of the threshold. With a tip of the hat to Henri Lefebvre, who famously observed that our space “remains qualified (and qualifying) beneath the sediments left behind by history, by accumulation, by quantification,” and emphasised that these qualities are much

1

The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, ed. Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010); From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology, ed. Stephan Delbos (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011).

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more “of space” rather than “in space,”2 Armand’s 58-page comprehensive survey of the past 20 years in the Prague Anglophone literary scene ends by stressing the primarily linguistic nature of constructing the Prague, or indeed any other, literary space: How such a space is imaginatively constituted in and by language is the question which is perhaps most pressing for any writer, and above all for the writer whose habitation is first and foremost that of a foreign space, over which no sovereign claim is possible [...] which is, of course, the space of language itself. Language, to paraphrase an often-evoked idea, establishes the realities for which history must seek explanation. [...] And it is the sense of living on a threshold – of performing in the gap between what history is able to measure and what its legislators seek to proscribe – that lends to this habitation its character of ostranenie – of strangeness and estrangement.3

1. The useful, however evident, reminder that springs from Delbos’s expansive collection, gathering 120 poems from 16 languages written between 1888 and 2010 and described as “the record of one city and the range of poetry it has inspired,”4 is that such construction of a “poetic space” takes place – in international poetic perception of any given place, and in the moved history of 20th-century Prague more than anywhere else – hand in hand with its “real-time” reconstructions in political history. All the more exceptional, in this case, yet equally significant for the future development of Prague poetry is already the earliest poem featuring the city as seen through foreign eyes: Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1912 “Zone,” which contains the memories of his 1902 visit to the city. In this poem, one can arguably see not only the direct forerunner to the strong attachment between Prague and Paris in the 1920s surrealist phase, but, more symbolically perhaps, already a foreboding to the frequent comparisons drawn between Prague and Paris with reference to Prague’s 1990s international scene. Echoing André Breton’s famous pronouncement of Prague being “the magical capital of Europe [...], incubat[ing] all the 2

3 4

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 230. Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 58. Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 6.

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delights of the past for the imagination,”5 Delbos describes Prague’s power to inspire as consisting in the fact that “the city’s rulers, inhabitants and visitors have changed drastically, while its physical nature has remained much the same. This modern city with ancient architecture affords a glimpse into time.”6 The political dimension of the poetic perception of Prague is brought home, in Delbos’s anthology, in the way the events of 1938/39, 1968/69, and 1989/90, each time caused a dramatic resurgence of poets’ interest in capturing Prague’s contemporaneity. One can, for instance, draw a parallel between John Berryman’s “Prague” poem about the 1938 Nazi annexation and Anthony Blake’s 1968 impressionist poems capturing the city’s mood weeks before the Warsaw pact invasion, recording conversations and anti-Soviet graffiti he witnessed. Robert Lowell’s 1968 letter to Elizabeth Bishop (following his anti-communist public engagement), in which he writes “Dear, I can’t write anything serious (after this) about [the] Czech hideous business, or about myself,”7 bears testimony to the extent to which this incident impacted upon American poetic sensibility. The Velvet Revolution in 1989 is the last and latest of the three historical milestones which has had implications for the political structure of Europe and the entire world and, among many other things, has also remarkably impacted upon Czech poetry. Delbos enumerates the three most marked changes in the post-1989 Czech poetry as follows: “a radical manipulation of setting, a tendency to make bold statements identifying the city, and marked compression.”8 Among the most revealing (for the purposes of the present collection) parts of the last section of Delbos’s anthology are the Beat poets: Allen Ginsberg, revisited Prague in 1991 (after his famous 1965 “Král Majáles” visit), followed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders and Gary Snyder. Ferlinghetti’s enthusiastic reception not only showed how deep-rooted within the Czech sensibility was its 1960s fondness for the Beat poets, but perhaps also revealed how very much current the Beat poetics was for the writers and poets of the newly reborn democracy. Most pertinently, what the 1989 Velvet revolution brought about 5

6 7 8

André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972) 255. Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 7. Qtd in Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 20. Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 23.

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was a re-occurrence of a phenomenon which had last flourished in Prague before the Nazi occupation with the so-called Prager Deutsche Schriftsteller – a self-substantial literary community inhabiting Prague, both in life and in literary output, through a language other than Czech: the Prague Anglophone scene. It is precisely from Ginsberg’s 1991 revisitation of Prague that Armand’s anthology takes its cue in its own retrospection over the past twenty years of Prague Anglophone writing. Before proceeding further with Armand’s informative account, there are three publications of note that deserve to be mentioned and examined, as it has been largely these three collections that had shaped the Anglo-Czech poetic interaction in Prague until 2010. 2. Armand’s three touchstone references in his thorough documentation of the period, Description of a Struggle, the special issue of the New Orleans Review entitled Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution, and Six Czech Poets, edited by Michael March, Richard Katrovas, and Alexandra Büchler, respectively, rank among the most influential primary literary documents to map the field, though none without its troubles.9 The editor of the first collection, Michael March (who had, in 1991, founded the Prague Writers’ Festival that this year has seen the successful completion of the second decade of its existence), opened his cryptically provocative “Preface” by positioning Eastern Europe, rather anachronistically, “in the wake” of Patočka and Marx, and openly avowed that for him, this region “has appeared as a lost continent for over forty years” (xvii), despite the fact that these forty years in this region had gestated no fewer than six Nobel Prize laureates, out of whom two poets, the Polish Czeslaw Milosz in 1980 and the Czechoslovak Jaroslav Seifert in 1984, were awarded in the course of the 1980s only. In a more informed and topical “Introduction – Writing from the Empire behind the Wall,” the Czech writer Ivan Klíma changed March’s metaphor of terra incognita into the common one of a space behind the wall: This anthology comes from a world habitually called Eastern Europe, though it would be more precise to call it the Soviet realm, the Empire of Stalinist tyranny, the Empire of great illusions, of

9

Description of a Struggle, ed. Michael March (London: Picador, 1994); New Orleans Review 26.1/2 (2000), ed. Richard Katrovas; Six Czech Poets, ed. Alexandra Büchler (Todmorden: Arc, 2007).

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broken dreams for a better world. For me, it is the Empire behind the Wall. Reagan called it the Evil Empire, which might make one conclude it was the Empire of a single, basic struggle. For in few other places did the struggle between impersonal power and the individual, between tyranny and the desire for a worthwhile life, assume such visible form as here, where fear became a daily companion, where tragedies were played out with bloodshed.10

Klíma, then, goes on the elaborate on this common metaphor and put it in the right perspective. Having recounted the story of the multiple police investigation following the completion of his novel, Jungle on Trial, which wound up being smuggled into Switzerland, Klíma displays a peculiar nostalgia for the clearly defined binary power relation current in the literary ethics of the time: “the bipolarity of a world divided between two superpowers reinforced the view” according to which writers “should reach under the surface of things, their picture of the world should embrace more than the vision of politics.”11 The rather simplified binary of depth vs. surface re-emerges toward the end of Klíma’s introduction: “Deep experiences do not make a great writer, but I am convinced that great literature seldom arises without it. Even pure fantasy needs to draw on real life, otherwise it is lifeless and forced. I have often thought that what this Empire deprived us of in terms of freedom, it returned to us in the form of experience.”12 Revisiting the “Czech Poetry of the Nineties” for the special issue of the New Orleans Review, the leading Czech literary theorist and critic Petr A. Bílek articulates a similar sense of nostalgia in view of the issues with which Czech literature was unexpectedly faced as it experienced its first teething of a democratic political and literary regime. Whereas, during the Communist period, poetry was very much context-bound and poets held personally responsible for its ideological and ethical content, and thus literature had “a prestigious position in Czech culture,” with Seifert’s 1984 Nobel Prize boosting the sale of poetry books “to fifty thousand copies in a single day,” the fall of this establishment “created a completely new situation for poets and poetry.”13 Following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, “almost two thousand private publishers emerged,” instead of “two 10 11 12 13

Klíma, “Writing from the Empire behind the Wall,” Description of a Struggle, xix. Klíma, “Writing from the Empire,” xx. Klíma, “Writing from the Empire,” xxiv. Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties: A Metamorphosis,” New Orleans Review, 20.

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periodicals covering all of contemporary literature” suddenly emerged “dozens of monthlies and quarterlies appearing and disappearing” and “the number of new people publishing poetry immensely increased” – this was, however, also accompanied with what Bílek explicitly sees as devaluation: But another change accompanied this one: no one cared anymore. Soon, almost all the big publishers stopped publishing poetry because no one was buying it. Under Communism, writers devoted to the regime had lived quite comfortably, but today there are only five or six writers who make a decent living from their books. None of them is a poet. Since 1993, except for books by a dozen big names, almost all Czech poetry has been self-published or produced by presses whose names appear only on one book.

More pertinently, the 1990s are also viewed by Bílek as a period of inherent anachronism: a time in which the voice of the present had to yield its place in the sun to many belated voices of the past – a time of “returns” and “discoveries”: “There is no common view any more. […] Poetry that dates as far back as the fifties is now being published for the first time.”14 This discontinuity, ultimately, gives rise to a twofold tendency in the poetry of the nineties: there is the “shock” felt by young Czech poets at “the sudden silence around them,” which somehow, in Bílek’s opinion, renders them “all the more ready to speak in new and radically different voices,” but also there is the older generation “coming to terms with the burdening legacy of what they wrote long ago,” and so “the impulse toward change” is always juxtaposed with “the impulse to stand still.”15 What is more, the new and radically different voices promised by Bílek are barely to be heard in the collection, as the polyphony of the “Czech voices ten years after the Velvet revolution” is composed of such matadors as Ivan Diviš, Viola Fischerová, Emil Juliš, Karel Šiktanc, Ivan M. Jirous, or Pavel Šrut, and the youngest proponents are Sylva Fischerová and Božena Správcová, both born in the 1960s already. Given this bizarre stasis in which Bílek, still in 2000, feels the post-1989 Czech poetry has stuck, it comes all the more as a disconcerting surprise that the whole collection makes no attempt at a crossover, at a dialogue, and is 14 15

Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 21. Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 23.

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sharply divided – here, the threshold separates – into two parts, that of English translations of Czech poetry, and of Anglophone poetry written in the Czech context (featuring, of the poets covered here, Gwendolyn Albert, Louis Armand, and Vincent Farnsworth). These two parts communicate so little that each is headed by its own introduction. The surprise is even deepened by the realisation how the other introduction, penned by Gwendolyn Albert and entitled “Allegiance to the Strange: Prague Expatriate Writing of the Nineties,” voices a similar, if also more personal and authentic, sentiment: the early-nineties literary scene of Prague was, even more so for expatriate poets, grouped together not so much by ethnicity, creed, aesthetic allegiance, or indeed nationality, but simply by the foreign space and time: “It is on this basis that people from all over the world have met and attempted to communicate with one another in post-1989 Prague.”16 This divisive treatment, then, comes full circle in Six Czech Poets and in the “strange case” that editor and translator Alexandra Büchler makes for the poetry of Miroslav Holub, a frequent contributor to British literary journals, described by Ted Hughes as “one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere.”17 In explaining rather facetiously Holub’s status of the most translated Czech poet of his generation, Büchler considers it a symptom of “the ready acceptance of cerebral poetry of linear thought, ‘universal’ ideas and easy-to-decipher allegories on the one hand, and of a reluctance to engage with poetry referring to an unfamiliar cultural and literary context on the other.”18 This reduction of Holub’s poetry to a production of easily-consumed ready-mades for the Western taste is particularly striking in the case of a poet who, an accomplished immunologist by profession, revolutionised the Czech poetic diction by inventively transplanting the workings of medical discourse and vocabulary into the very tissue of his poems. And becomes all the more suspicious when Büchler describes the contrasting value against which to measure Holub’s relative popularity: “What the English-language literary milieu finds attractive about Holub’s poetry is also what makes his work stand in contrast to a strong current in Czech poetry which is far more representative of what is close to the heart of

16 17 18

Albert, “Allegiance to the Strange: Prague Expatriate Writing,” 161. Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 4. Büchler, “Introduction,” Six Czech Poets, 10.

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contemporary Czech readers.”19 Thus, Holub is found guilty of committing the crime of selling himself out for a ready consumption by the Western public, only to be pitted against the rest of Czech poetry, which in turn caters poetry fast-food easily digestible for the Czech stomach! This current, for Büchler, is represented by Zbyněk Hejda and Viola Fischerová (again, both born in the 1930s already), as well as some of the younger poets (Kateřina Rudčenková, Petr Borkovec), and has its sources in “the poetry of turn-of-thecentury symbolism, surrealism and avant-garde movements.”20 What gets excluded from and disregarded in this perspective is the entire tradition of Czech phenomenological thought and the positivist slant of Czech realist fiction that have both formed lineages in their own right and influenced Holub and a number of Czech poets apart from him (most notably, Vladimír Holan). Armand, in reporting on this strange showcasing, is right to point out that treating Holub as an example of a failed attempt (on the poet’s part) at a transnational poetics and of vain effort (on the part of the Anglophone literary community) to accept and accommodate such an attempt, “masks, behind a facile ethnographic binary and an undeclared aesthetic ideology” (and Büchler has freely admitted that “[w]hat I was trying somehow to bring together in this collection were poets who have something in common”21), a set of “more fundamental issues that have continued to inform how the various cultural dialogues that make up the contemporary Prague scene are reported.” These fundamental issues are specified as follows: The apparent ideological rift between a broadly “western” poetics and the national sensitivities of some Czech translators and academics – as made clear in the case of Holub – has arguably less to do with poetics as such than with a certain “resentment” which applies equally within the sphere of specifically “Czechoslovak” and later “Czech” literature of that period, in which dividing lines are often perceptible in terms of personal politics and political histories – between émigrés and non-émigrés; dissidents and non-

19 20 21

Büchler, “Introduction,” 10. Büchler, “Introduction,” 11. Büchler, interviewed by the Czech Radio (January 2008), ‘Six Czech Poets: A first postrevolution anthology of contemporary Czech verse in English,’ www.radio.cz/en/section/books

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dissidents; anti-communists, socialists, anarchists, democrats, capitalists, monarchists; and also inter-generationally.22

By the end of the second decade of the new era, these three pioneering and useful, if also sketchy, impressionistic, and biased, accounts of the chaotic inception of the modern-era Czech literature and the Anglophone community within it, had been – despite their shortcomings pointed out above – by and large the authoritative documents from the Czech-English threshold. The most poignant irony, and a paradox to be encountered throughout the past 20 years, is that none of these three features a single mention of an anthology that preceded all three of them: the 1993 Bohemian Verses anthology of English-language writing from Prague, edited by Scott Rogers, including work by Jeffrey Young (co-founder of the Trafika magazine), James Ragan (long-term director of the summer writing programme at Charles University), David Freeling (founder of the Beef Stew poetry readings), Daniela Dražanová (Czech émigré writer, among the first contributors to the inaugural issue of Yazzyk), and Kevin Blahut (translator from German, co-founder of the Twisted Spoon Press). It comes as little surprise, then, that given the almost non-existent dialogue and interaction between the two symbiotic scenes, Bohemian Verses had remained the only anthology of its sort; this, however, only until 2010, when Louis Armand’s Král Majáles marked a milestone in documenting and revisiting the 20 years of Prague literary scene as shaped by its newly-acquired international scene, containing both poetry and prose excerpts by over 100 authors, Czech, British, American, Australian, brought together by one thing only – their long- or short-term sojourn in Prague, which somehow affected their writing. 3. In the beginning, of course, there is Prague as a mythological – or “magical,” as tradition and tourist T-shirts would have it – space attractive to foreign imagination, an attraction dating far back before 1989, as Heinz Politzer acutely observed: “[Prague’s] uncanny atmosphere had impressed observers as early and as independent of one another as the American Longfellow and the

22

Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 4-5.

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Northern German Wilhelm Raabe.”23 However, shows Armand, one indeed need not stop with 19th-century Romantics and trace this relationship of “fascination through imagination” further still all the way back to Anne of Bohemia, the patron of Anglo-Saxon poet Geoffrey Chaucer with whose “writings – on the model of Boccaccio – the long migration of a vernacular literary English is said to have begun, born – as it were – of translation.” The leap from Shakespeare’s imaginary “coasts of Bohemia” and the alchemists of his late romances, and the Rudolfine Prague of reallife alchemists John Dee and Edward Kelley, is “perhaps not [so] great,” nor would this comparison “appear entirely strange,” as the genealogies drawn by Armand are both relevant and intriguing to ponder: The metamorphoses of Prague following the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 in part revived, in part invented, a pan-European and cosmopolitan tradition that forty years of communism never quite succeeded in snuffing out. From the Utraquists to the Plastic People of the Universe – from Hus, via Masaryk, to Havel – from Arcimboldo, via Kafka and the surrealists, to Klíma – the idea of Prague persists as a type of Xanadu of cultural resistance in which a poetry of universal ideas, contrary to Auden’s glib pronouncements, might indeed make something happen.24

Already the first four years of democratic changes – before the “Velvet Divorce” of 1993, which, for some while, threatened Prague’s restoration as an international city by means of a surge of national revivalism – saw a rapidly growing international community and a reading public hungry for news from the “other sides.” Here is Armand’s lucid account of the years in fast-forward: In November 1990, five Americans from Santa Barbara founded Prague’s first English-language newspaper, Prognosis, which published bi-weekly (and for a brief period weekly) until its closure in March 1995. [...] Less than a year later, The Prague Post – a weekly newspaper with ambitions more orientated towards the status quo – was founded [...]. By 1993, two further papers where briefly in print – Prague News (half in German) and the Bohemia 23

24

Heinz Politzer, “Prague and the Origins of Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel,” Modern Language Quarterly 16.1 (1955): 49. Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,”The Return of Král Majáles, 11. Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 11.

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Daily Standard – representing the apogee of the early “left bank of the nineties” phenomenon. [...] In February of 1992, Howard Sidenberg – a former doctoral student in Russian politics at the University of California-Santa Barbara – founded Twisted Spoon Press out of a communal apartment in Smíchov. [...] Soon after Twisted Spoon published its inaugural titles, Prague’s first Englishlanguage literary journal appeared in print, in June 1992 [...] Deriving its name from a play upon the pan-Slavonic for “tongue” or “language,” Yazzyk was avowedly cross-cultural, publishing work both written in English and translated from Czech and Slovak. [...] Three months later saw the beginnings of the Beef Stew poetry readings. The first reading took place on the 13th of September at Rubín Theatre, in Malá Strana, and continued, two weeks later, at the original Ubiquity Club’s “Reggae Room.”25

In retrospect, the ten years of the weekly Beef Stew poetry readings (which came to an end in 2002) do seem to form the backbone of the Leviathan that was, and has been, the Prague Anglophone literary scene, as more than twenty of those writers active in Prague during the first decade after the revolution had embarked on noteworthy publishing careers, giving some substantiation to often-made parallels between the post-Velvet Prague scene development and the milieu of the rive gauche Paris of the 1920s and 30s. Most famously, this parallel was drawn in Alan Levy’s October 1991 editorial to the inaugural issue of The Prague Post: We are living in the Left Bank of the Nineties. For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others, a New Frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but somewhere within each of us here, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time. Future historians will chronicle our course – and I have reason to believe that they’re already here – but even they will need to know the nuts and bolts of what it was like and how it felt to live and be in liberated Prague in the last decade of the 20th century.26

This identification, however tempting and wide-spread, begs some qualifications. Some appeared merely two years after, in Bruce Sterling’s article for the Wired magazine: 25 26

Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 16-20. Alan Levy, Editorial, The Prague Post, 1 October, 1991.

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Prague is very much like Paris in the ‘20s, but it’s also very much unlike Paris in the ‘20s. One main reason is that there is no André Breton here. People do sit and write – stop by The Globe, the crowded émigré bookstore on Janovského 14 in north Prague, and you’ll see a full third of the cappuccino-sipping black-clad Praguelodyte customers scribbling busily in their notebooks. There are many American wannabe writers here – even better, they actually manage to publish sometimes – but there is not a Prague literary movement, no Prague literary-isms. [...] There isn’t a Prague technique, or a Prague approach, or a Prague literary philosophy that will set a doubting world afire. There are people here sincerely trying to find a voice, but as yet there is no voice. There may well be a new Hemingway here (as The Prague Post once declared there must be). But if Prague writers want to do a kind of writing that is really as new and powerful as Hemingway’s was in Hemingway’s time, then they will have to teach themselves.27

Be that as it may, it is the many self-taught Prague writers (Louis Armand, Vincent Farnsworth, Ken Nash, Donna Stonecipher, Lukáš Tomin, Anthony Tognazzini, to name but a few) who looked less to literary precursors than at the current socio-cultural threshold situation in which they found themselves, who stand as the crucial substantiation to, and a much-needed continuation of, what in 1993, in a retrospective glance at the first four years, Scott Rogers, editor of Bohemian Verses: An Anthology of Contemporary English Language Writing from Prague, termed “the new Czech renaissance”: Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the arts in the Czech Republic have flourished in a renewed atmosphere of freedom of expression. Prague has once again regained its former magnetic appeal as an international focal point for young artists, musicians, and writers, all of whom have come to this city to participate in the new Czech renaissance. Though the writers represented in Bohemian Verses differ in age, gender, motherland, and purpose, all for various lengths of time have called Prague home.28

Here, three genuinely Czech voices, both with considerable Anglophone exposure, can be called to bear witness to the “Czech 27 28

Bruce Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People,” Wired 3.01 (1993). Bohemian Verses: An Anthology of Contemporary English Language Writing from Prague, ed. Scott Rogers (Prague: Modrá Músa, 1993) xvi-xvii.

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renaissance” notion, however dubious and reserved. In 1994, Ivan Jirous remarked, in conversation with translator Alex Zucker and Armand, that “it was possible under the former regime for anyone to write poetry and go to prison for it, but this didn’t mean the poetry itself was of any worth, other than as a political provocation,”29 a perhaps more critical view on what Klíma and Bílek both seemed to idealise as oppression that for all its faults and crimes fostered writing of worth. In a recent interview conducted with Michal Ajvaz, one of the most prolific Czech novelists of the past twenty years, for the second issue of the VLAK magazine, Ajvaz shared the following impressionistic memory: Back in the 90s, I would spend plenty of time sitting around cafés, especially the Velryba (Whale) café – that’s where I would have met Doug Hajek and Tony Ozuna from the Yazzyk magazine, which also published a few translations of some of my short stories. Talks of the Prague Anglophone scene of the 90s bring to my mind the café hum, out of which emerge and into which disappear excerpts of English sentences…30

However, pressed for more specificity on his 1990s interaction with both the Czech and English-speaking literary community, Ajvaz, though one of the most outspokenly Pragocentric of contemporary writers, had little more to say on the subject: Naturally, the fact that I could buy books and literary magazines according to my taste meant an enormous change in life – it felt as if I’d returned from a long journey after twenty years’ time. That said, as far as my relation to literature is concerned, the formative years were the 60s, a period of the most important literary encounters when I became acquainted with most of my favourite writers: Kafka, Hölderlin, Gracq, Mandiargues, Breton, Michaux, Benn a many others. Those were the crucial literary revelations of my life, the 90s saw only a few of these…31

Looking back upon the “renaissance of the 1990s,” one of its most direct participants from among the Czech writers, Jáchym

29 30

31

Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 40. David Vichnar, “Novels one can get lost in,” interview with Michal Ajvaz, VLAK 2 (May 2011): 169. Vichnar, “Novels one can get lost in,” 169.

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Topol, voiced another revision of the Parisian analogy, again with an important qualification: What the international renaissance meant for me was mostly a series of wonderful binges, literary and other, with plenty of alcohol, weed and friends. Personally, I experienced the most important meeting and boozing with Alex Zucker, who rather inconspicuously became probably the most respected translator of Czech literature into English. I recall wanting to learn English from other friends, like Tomas Bridle or Farimah Daftari, but winding up teaching them Czech, instead. I also think this was the last period when the old “Hemingway/Miller/Kerouac” model of literature was in currency, that of living your literature first, then typing it down somewhere alone, hoping this activity would one day turn other people’s souls upside down... What I’m also reminded of while looking back at this wild era is the sentence of Czech-American writer Jan Novák, uttered sardonically after a common reading of U.S. and Czech poets at the Ženské domovy in Smíchov, sometime in the year 1992 – I think a new issue of Trafika had just come out then – contending that “they are still unaware of the huge difference between a writer who drinks and an alcoholic who writes.” For me, this period was a wonderful, continuous celebration, carnival, binge, while working for the literary-visual artistic Revolver Revue and the Respekt weekly. It is to my gladness and surprise that these magazines have survived till the present day, together with many of the participants of the international party of those years.32

Topol’s own work, particularly his 1994 epoch-embracing confessional novel Sestra, also deserves mention as a case in point of the troubled interaction between Czech writing and its Anglophone reception.33 Translated as City Sister Silver by the afore-mentioned Alex Zucker, the English publication in 2000 managed to win the attention and acclaim of international literary community. Caroline Kovtun writes about the Zucker translation in her review on Topol’s novel City Sister Silver: Zucker’s translation merits praise not only for attempting to convey Sestra in all its complexity but also for largely succeeding at it. He has managed to preserve the speed of the narrative and kept the 32 33

Jáchym Topol, letter to the author, April 2011. For the following account, I am grateful to Dana Soukupová’s graduate work on the translations of post-1989 Czech writers, which she kindly made available in her letter to the author, July 2010.

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translation faithful to the original’s eccentricity and modernity. In addition, Zucker provides valuable endnotes to the text, explaining the historical and linguistic references that Western eyes would otherwise not detect.34

However, the initial wave of positive reception toward ambitious experimental writing emerging from the heart of the Eastern European terra incognita, was immediately followed by unfavourable critical comparisons with various Anglo-American writers whom Topol’s work brought to the Anglophone sensibility, such as Anthony Burgess and Allen Ginsberg. Zucker himself aptly emphasised the absurdity of such unfruitful comparisons: One of the reviews negatively compared [Topol] to Ginsberg. […] Why should a Czech, writing in the 1990s, be reminiscent of Ginsberg? There are still people in the United States who believe that everything new must have something common with the Beat Generation. The only substantiation for his comparison with Anthony Burgess springs from the fact that Jáchym uses the expression “Bratři moji,” [O my brothers], which is a reminiscent of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.35

To come back to the issue of calling Prague “home” and to skip ahead toward the turn-of-the-millenium years of the late 90s and early 2000s, Armand points out how, as the 1990s receded from view and the communities it engendered disappeared or merged within less easily identifiable social networks and structures, “so too has the very conception of a contemporary Prague ‘scene’ become more difficult to reconcile with its fin-de-millénaire antecedents.” In this sense, it is understandable why no further anthologies appear after Bohemian Verses for the next seventeen years; to Armand’s mind, however tempting the Parisian analogies, the threshold space of the late 1990s Prague faced the “foreigners ‘at home’” with the necessity to experience and rethink it “differently from the post-Revolutionary romanticism that often confused the lived city with its mythological doppelgangers in Paris and elsewhere: imagined communities ranged in opposition, mutually evoked, invented and reinvented.”36 34

35

36

Caroline Kovtun, “City Sister Silver” (Central Europe Review Vol 3, No 4, January 2001): www.ce-review.org/01/4/books4_kovtun.html. Jan Čulík, “Vypisuju se z něčeho východoevropskýho” (Britské listy, 18 June): www.blisty.cz/2004/6/18/ art18585.html Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 30.

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3. The early 2000s, marked by increased socio-political tensions following the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, during which armoured vehicles appeared in the centre of Prague, largely around alongside concrete barricades manned by heavily armed militia – largely around the U.S. Embassy and the Radio Free Europe headquarters, were thus a period of searching, during which publicly visible activity was nowhere near its early90s heyday. Armand’s hindsight, however, cannot share the skepsis of many literary practitioners who proclaimed the Prague renaissance a historically closed period: “While it is generally recognised that the turn of the millennium represented a difficult time for the international scene in Prague, news of its demise had been greatly exaggerated.”37 And Armand should know. Just as the 2002 closure of Beef Stew gave rise to the 2003 birth of the monthly open-mic readings called Alchemy (hosted first by Laura Conway and then Ken Nash), the 2004 death of Alan Levy, marking the definitive end of an era, coincided with the foundation of the Prague International Poetry Festival. Founded by Armand in cooperation with Kratochvila (of the Shakespeare & Sons bookstore), the Festival brought together over forty poets from over ten countries (including writers from abroad such as Charles Bernstein, Cristina Cirstea, Trevor Joyce, Sándor Kányádi, Andrzej Soznovski, or Vít Kremlička, Martin Reiner, Jaroslav Rudiš, Šimon Šafránek as Czech poetry representatives, and indeed, Gwendolyn Albert, Louis Armand, Laura Conway and Vincent Farnsworth, from poets dealt with in the present volume). Describing the situation, Farnsworth revisited and redefined the threshold situation of the 90s: A recent death and a recent birth have made for a new reality in the creative scene of English-language poetry in Prague. The death was literal, that of Alan Levy [2 April, 2004], the local newspaperman who first called Prague the “Paris of the nineties.” The birth, metaphorical, was of the Prague International Poetry Festival, which has laid the groundwork of a new phase in expatriate poetry in the Czech Republic. Borrowing the term “deep poetics” from political scientist and poet Peter Dale Scott’s writings on the deepest machinations and impulses within world political crises, the death of Levy and the birth of the Poetry

37

Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 49.

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Festival coming closely together in time signal a shift in the strata of “deep poetics” in Prague.38

Or, still in the same article, reviewing Nancy Bishop’s satirical reappraisal of the ambitious post-revolutionary years, her 2004 film Rex-patriates (featuring a cameo of Alan Levy shortly before his demise), Farnsworth goes even further and buries the ParisPrague stereotypical coupling together with its author: If Levy’s passing marks the end of the (failed) Left Bank era, Rexpatriates is its cinematic epitaph. A farcical send-up of the expatriate in Prague stereotypes … the film takes its name from Levy’s phrase for Americans who spend time in Prague, experience reverse culture shock when they go back to the US, and then return to live in Prague as “re-expatriates.” By playing himself in a film that pokes fun at the expat art scene, Levy signalled that his prediction would no longer hold sway. In the Deep Poetics view, when he passed away this last April, Levy resolved the “Paris of the ‘90s” conundrum: he took it with him.39

However, this was no death without a re-birth. The years following the Prague International Poetry Festival saw a heightened activity on many fronts, first and foremost, on Armand’s part, both in terms of publishing – his own work with the international presses Salt, Textbase, or, most recently, Vagabond, as well as his editorial work with the Philosophy Faculty imprint, Litteraria Pragensia Books, culminating with the 2010 Král Majáles anthology – and in terms of event organisation. May 2008 saw the first edition the Evropský sen/European Dream poetry, music, and fine arts festival, co-hosted by Delbos and featuring simultaneous Czech, German and English translations of all texts read by Catherine Hales, Alistair Noon, Mathias Trexler, from Berlin, Josef Hrubý from Pilsen, and Chris Crawford and Lucien Zell, from Prague. Readings were accompanied by real-time projections of animated art, and live music from international performers. April 2009 saw the first edition of the week-long Micro-Festival Poetry Series, hosted by Armand, spread across four venues in Prague (Shakespeare & Sons, the Globe, Café Fra) and Brno 38

39

Vincent Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?” Poetry News (Summer, 2004): www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/poetrynews/pn2004/pinprague/. Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?” Qtd in Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 56.

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(Skleněná Louka), which featured a medley of Czech writers (Petr Borkovec, Martin Reiner, and Tomáš Míka), English-speaking writers in residence (Armand himself, Stephan Delbos, Vincent Farnsworth, and Justin Quinn), and visiting authors from Australia (Pam Brown, Michael Farrell, Philip Hammial, Jill Jones) and Ireland (Trevor Joyce and Maurice Scully). A selection of the poetry presented at the festival appeared in Vichnar’s translation in the Babylon magazine. Rakish Angel, edited by Delbos, the first in a series of poetry pamphlets devoted to new Prague writing, appeared in November 2009, containing work by Gil Fleischman, Jason Mashak, Sarah Borufka and Kateřina Rudčenková (translated by Chris Crawford). 2009 saw the appearance of Ajvaz’s The Other City, translated by Gerald Turner, followed in 2010 by The Golden Age, translated by Andrew Oakland, both with Dalkey Archive Press, both meeting with considerable international acclaim. By the end of 2009, a loose grouping of poets had begun to emerge, appearing regularly at the Alchemy reading series and, from February 2010, at Poezie Suterén – a nomadic weekly forum for poetic research and new writing in English and Czech, featuring Joshua Mensch, Chris Crawford, Louis Armand, Stephan Delbos, Sylva Fischerová, Jaromír Typlt and Anne Brechin. Fischerová read from her newly co-translated (with Stuart Friebert) poetry selection, The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, Typlt in cooperation with Vichnar – the translations would later on appear in the inaugural issue of VLAK magazine, a vast 300-page curatorial project, co-edited by Armand, Delbos, Vichnar, Eddie Berrigan, Carol Watts, and Clare Wallace, appearing simultaneously in Prague, London, and New York. The Typlt translations appeared with their visual component in the graphic art of Jan Měřička. The second edition of the Prague MicroFestival Poetry Series, in October 2010, followed in the footsteps of the venues of its previous edition, with some notable additions (such as Café Sladkovský in Vršovice or the Library of the AngloAmerican Institute in Malá Strana), and featured readings by visiting poets (Richard Tipping, Marcus Slease, Donna Stonecipher, Alistair Noon, Catherine Hales), new acquisitions among Anglophone locals (Holly Tavel) as well as Czech poets (Hana Androniková, Sylva Fischerová, Jakub Zahradník in cooperation with Vichnar). As this is written, the second issue of the VLAK magazine is in preparation, due to appear in May 2011, featuring translations of Ð18Ï

Ajvaz, Adam Borzič, Ondřej Buddeus, Jonáš Hájek, Pavel Novotný (all by Vichnar), Kamil Bouška (by Stephan Delbos) the concrete poetry by Michal Šanda, the visual work of young artist Lucie Skřivánková in the hope of furthering international awareness of a new-generation experimental writing taking place in the Czech Republic, but inherently in a dialogue with foreign literary traditions. VLAK 2 will be launched at the 3rd Prague Microfestival, hosted at the legendary Krásný ztráty bar by Armand and Vichnar in co-operation with the Psí víno magazine, run by Jan Těsnohlídek and Buddeus. This event will feature the readings of a wide array of poets, some well-established within the experimental traditions in the cultures of their origin (Keston Sutherland from the U.K., Carla Harryman and Barret Watten from the U.S., among others), some personally involved with the experience of “translocality,” of living outside of their native linguistic environments and literary establishments: Megan M. Garr and Jane Lewty from Amsterdam, Catherine Hales, Uli Freer, Alistair Noon, and Donna Stonecipher from Berlin, Karla Kelsey from Budapest, all hosted by Louis Armand, Laura Conway, and Stephan Delbos (for the Prague Anglophone community), with Czech poetry in translation undertaken specifically for the event, represented by Lenka Daňhelová, Sylva Fischerová, Dagmar Pokorná, Martin Skýpala, Josef Straka, and Jan Těsnohlídek. Vichnar’s book translation of Armand’s latest poetry collection, Letters from Ausland, specially revised to include many of his Prague-based poems excluded from the Australian edition of the original, will be launched at the Festival, under the title Pohlednice z Auslandu and with the Psí Víno Petr Štengl Publishing, marking the first book-length poetry translation of Armand’s work into Czech ever since his arrival in Prague seventeen years ago. Which brings us back to the concerns of this collection, aiming to complement Armand’s epoch-mapping work by evaluating the current threshold experience and perhaps divining things to come. The flurry of activity witnessed in Prague over the past few years, and in the foreseeable future, is also one of the topics covered in this collection’s interview between two of its major witnesses and agents: Chris Crawford and Stephan Delbos. Crawford, for his part, voices his reservations as regards the legitimacy of the “scene” grouping as follows:

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To give some perspective, I’d like to say that while it’s important that a city like Prague has a literary scene that nurtures and encourages the creation of poetry and of audiences for that poetry, the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the individual artists actually stay up in their lofts or wherever and do the work. That’s the kind of thing that’s a personal and solitary activity and makes the scene greater than the sum of its parts and, paradoxically, allows the individual poets to rise above any “scene” and become known on their own terms. And I may add, hard to do in a city with a nightlife and beer as good as Prague’s.

To Crawford’s mind, if there is to be a genuine Prague scene, it must combine the talents and assets of both the Czech- and the English-speaking groups: To summarise, my vision of a strong “Prague Literary Culture” would encapsulate commerce between the different generations of Prague writers, between the Czechs and the English native speakers, would feature an increase in translations from both Czech and English – these translations would appear in the city’s magazines and journals, and lastly I would like to see an increase in regular bilingual readings.

Delbos provides a telling comparison between the state of affairs merely four years ago, and where the Anglophone community stands now: When we had our first Karlák Summit, in August 2007, what was happening in Prague poetry? I think Alchemy had been on hiatus and was just coming back, I was starting work with The Prague Revue, and there were occasional scattered readings, most of which were organized by you and I. And now in 2010, we’ve got Alchemy in a new venue, Rakish Angel, GRASP, VLAK, The Majáles Anthology, the Prague poetry piece featured in the Clare Market Review, this very book we’re working on now, my Prague anthology in preparation, poets like Josh Mensch coming zapping out of the woodwork, other poets like Anne Brechin coming to town, the Poetry Micro-Fest returning with a second incarnation, Czech poets being translated and published in English, Englishlanguage poets being published in Czech in Psí Víno, and more. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.

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Delbos’s conclusion to his Anthology (itself a massive accomplishment of translational work) voices as much belief in the importance to translation in the cross-cultural dialogue to come: The wave of expatriates that hit Prague in the early 1990s has crested, and those who remain in the city have developer a second order observation of their own literary achievements as a community. One can only hope that further cooperation and translation between Czech and foreign poets will take place, and that poets from both cultures will benefit from their unique coexistence.40

These, and possibly many other, statements give credibility and substantiation to the conclusion of Armand’s Král Majáles introduction, in which the question of yet a “third” (following those of the early and mid-90s) renaissance in Prague’s international letters is broached: From a perspective of twenty years, the lure of periodisation, of identifying different groupings and tendencies, presents itself in ways that it did not in the past. The textual record, however, remains uneven and incomplete, rendering an historical view opaque at best, even when from time to time broad outlines appear to present themselves or defining traits seem to recur. It is of course no more possible to define such a thing as a Prague “poetics,” as it would be for any other geographical location. And yet, like communities of writers intimately identified with other cities around the world and at different times, it may be that a “Prague School” (or schools) exists.41

If there is one certainty that gestated over the year separating this from Armand’s introduction, it is that a continuation of the early 90s crossovers of the Prague thresholds is well under way, now represented by poetry reading series (Alchemy), festivals (MicroFestival Poetry Series), journalistic activity (VLAK, Psí víno, GRASP, Rakish Angel pamphlet series), and publication output (in 2011, Litteraria Pragensia Books alone is publishing Tund, the collection of short fiction by Garcia, Theremin, Farnsworth’s selected poems, and 1982-2010: The Collected poems of Conway). And that seldom over the past twenty years has there

40 41

Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 28. Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 58.

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been more sustained effort and eager willingness to step over the threshold than now. The threshold that, instead of separating and hampering, seems to unite and invite exploration. 4. It follows from the above that this collection finds itself, yet again, on a threshold – years after most of the flurries of activity of some of its protagonists (especially Albert, Conway and Farnsworth), and months before what is expected to be their important comeback (publication-wise) and a significant effort to, first, bring Prague back on the map of contemporary poetic theory and praxis, and second, to launch a systematic reflection of the cross-fertilisation between its domestic literary scene and its most vibrant minority literary platform (event-wise). The essays of this collection could be grouped into two halves: the first one, theoretically-exegetical, comprising three essays by Ali Alizadeh, Jane Lewty and Vadim Erent, dealing with the poetry of Louis Armand, and one by Armand himself on Vincent Farnsworth. Armand’s work has been widely published, anthologised and reflected in the Anglophone world, thus it makes good sense to take it as a case study for how poetry from the threshold or a translocal (more below) perspective can be written and examined. The second half, then, consists of two essays on poets Laura Conway and Vincent Farnsworth – engaging in both a direct critical treatment of the text (Kateřina Piňosová’s article is, then, relevant particularly in that it partly deals with material hitherto extant in manuscript form only) and affording a brief glimpse of the atmosphere and tenor of mid-90s Prague (Jules Mann) – and of three email conversations undertaken among some of the proponents of the poetic activities undertaken in post-1989 Prague, both the earliest (Conway, Albert and Farnsworth) and the latest (Crawford and Delbos). The essays and interviews collected here each aim to give one of the proponents of Prague literary scene their due, both in terms of theorising their work in original contexts, as well as evaluating their contributions to the scene, both past and present. Together, they provide some fresh insights into the concerns of an ongoing international discussion on the locus and locality in contemporary poetry written from outside the poets’ homelands, across the borders – what has come to be termed translocality. By way of conclusion to these introductory remarks, then, let me briefly outline the crucial arguments, stake out the crucial points of Ð22Ï

connection, and adumbrate the possible relevance of all this for our understanding of the present. For brevity sake, I shall base the discussion of the term upon two key sources – articles by two expatriate poets/magazine editors, the one an Englishman living in Berlin, the other an American woman living in Amsterdam: Alistair Noon of Bordercrossing Berlin and Megan M. Garr of Versal. For Noon, who first coined the term “translocality” in his article entitled “Translocal Underground: Anglophone Poetry and Globalization,”42 the need of this term springs from the fact that despite all the mobility that has entered into the lives of poets today, “there’s still a tendency to view the art first and foremost through a national gaze. In the phrase ‘one of our leading poets’ […] that ‘our’ refers, implicitly, to the nation.”43 Reasons for this explicit nationalism of the literary establishment are legion: from linguistic ones (translation as a delay in dissemination, major languages vs. minor languages) to financial aspects (most poetry and arts funding being organised around cultural institutes whose interest is to support writers and artists from their particular nation-states) to institutional underpinnings of literature as a part of pedagogy (the origins of national literature as a subject of study in schools). It is as a result of the joint influence of these processes that the category of the nation has partially eclipsed other possible ways of typologizing poetry: poetry written by those with or without a university education, poetry written by women and by men, and also, increasingly, poetry written by those for whom, whatever national identity they may feel, their daily experience is shaped by a place and a state whose national norm is not their own.44

Why “translocal,” then? Noon makes a convincing case for the usefulness of this originally anthropological notion for the situation of some poets writing and some poetry written today by excluding other labels commonly attached. For instance, the overused term “expat” is not exact because “it defines its subject negatively: you’re outside of your patria,” which is “only half the story: you’re also, to a greater or lesser extent, inside somewhere else.” 42

Alistair Noon, “Translocal Underground: Anglophone Poetry and Globalization,” Bordercrossing Berlin 3: 110-9. Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 110. Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 111.

43 44

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“Cosmopolitan,” on the other hand, entails a rootlessness which cannot be reconciled with “the felt reality of those who live abroad for a longer period of time.” “Intercultural poetry” might be useable, as long as “culture” clearly refers to “something whose borders are blurred and whose shape is constantly changing,” which is often not the case. Moreover, Noon voices a problem with the prefix “inter-” too: “can anybody really be ‘between’ cultures?”45 Now, a positive definition – translocality, in poetry, can be best defined by means of a series of the following common concerns shared by translocal poets in question: audience, reception, and publication. The first concern can be rephrased together with Noon as the basic question of literary communication: “Who am I writing for? What background knowledge do I expect my readers to have, what can I take for granted?” A poetry practitioner himself, Noon immediately illustrates this by a practical compositional problem every translocal poet inherently faces. As metonymy becomes more restricted together with complications posed by the poet’s own translocality for the reader’s capability of linking a foreign topographical name with its conceptual associations, a tension arises between “the idea of poetry as compressed language and the probable cultural knowledge of its probable audience.” The challenge faced by any poet to transform his/her local and particular knowledge or insight into a larger, more generalisable idea poses additional difficulty for a translocal poet: “to be able to name and use their local, everyday, physical experience, without exoticizing it.”46 As far as reception goes, Noon feels there being, in the British poetry scene at least, “some residual prejudices against and/or lack of sympathy for writing that comes from ‘foreign’ experience, at least if the poet is marked as being ‘one of us’” and quotes Philip Larkin’s extreme statement to the extent that “nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities.” Since reception goes hand in hand with publication, Noon notes that without a detailled quantitative study comparing the insider and outsider camps, nothing categorical can be said on the subject. One partial answer to these joint problems might be the internet, which “might not have turned out to be quite the democratic, levelling forum it was

45 46

Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 112. Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 114.

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once hyped up to be,” but it is for a fact that “web-based magazines tend to break through national barriers more frequently than print magazines do.” Still, Noon doesn’t fail to mention a telling detail: “The Eric Gregory Award, one route into publication for young British poets, stipulates ‘ordinary British residency’ as a condition, begging the question of what ‘ordinary’ might mean.”47 The situation described by Noon here is one very close to what Delbos in a conversation with Crawford refers to as an impossibility of being “a purely Prague-based poet”: Despite everything that’s happening here, one must realize – as I’ve recently been forced to – that, if you want to publish a book of poetry, there’s simply nowhere to publish it in Prague, or anywhere nearby. The closest publishers are really in the U.K. That automatically tends to negate the prospect of being a purely Prague-based poet; not only is there no real standard of publishing greatness in Prague, but there’s very little publishing of English books at all, and none really for contemporary poets.

Noon then goes on to talk about translocality, in its physical (involving the experience of exile, whether forced or self-willed, and including examples ranging from Ovid to Joyce), imaginative (producing poems so that more than one locality is involved, usually on the basis of an encounter with another text) and linguistic (making use of more than one linguistic variety in poetry) aspects – one need not follow his argument to understand that these often coincide, that they date back as far as Dante, if not further, and that, finally, translation ranks high in translocal literary activities: Translation is poetic translocality par excellence: linguistic in its method, imaginative in its transference of a new set of ideas, and physical in the likelihood that the translated texts will be read in a different geographical setting to that in which the source texts were produced.48

It is here that Noon’s argument, that is, at its least specific, is picked up and criticised by Megan Garr in her editorial to the seventh issue of the Versal editorial:

47

Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 116. Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 118.

48

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Up to now, most of the monologue I’ve seen about translocal literature is restricted to the relationship between author and his (yes, his) narrative text: observations of a street scene in Prague by a long-time foreign resident (the author) – the locality itself becoming protagonist to the poem. This either reduces the selfsufficiency of a piece alone on the page – i.e. it is the author’s biography that makes a piece translocal or not – or it limits it to narrative surveillance. Certainly not all poetry is traceable to a particular mise en scène, nor is all prose a story. The very pivot of translocality would indicate that there are many, many kinds of localities, and we need not focus solely on where our (or the author’s) feet are standing.

Instead of tying the concept of translocality to geography and the functioning of literary establishment, Garr proposes to open up the definition of the translocal to apply to the understanding of literary production and reception as a whole: What our relocated writers can offer us, if not manifestos and hundreds of poems about foreign street markets, is insight into the inner workings of the translocal line that can then be applied everywhere. How do they invite (or force) interdependence between a string of vocabularies from two (or more) languages within a single stanza? How is the distance of a line of poetry crossed in a translocal sensibility? How is this distance ever crossed? […] Why does any of this matter? Because on some basic level, I think most writers seek commune between their work and the reader on the other side of it – some measure of familiarity, understanding, anagnorisis. And after editing Versal for seven years and writing poetry outside of my homeland for nine, I’ve come to see the translocal line as bearer of the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time. […] This is why I don’t see translocality as necessarily connected to geography, and why I propose we open the definition (and discussion) up. 49

In the following editorial, Garr works out her broader conception. Her problem with interrogating the term translocality is two-fold. First, it still employs spatial imagery and conceptual framework: “these are words still defined with borders; they haven’t caught up to what’s really going on.” So in defining translocality, the definitions of many other things widen or even collapse. Second, translocality as sketched out by Noon, appears “not so much a 49

Megan M. Garr, editorial to Versal 7 (2009).

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way of reading text, but a way in which text itself occurs,” positing translocation as the principle of “any act of art” in that it entails “moving something from one place to another.” The escape, for Garr, is to rid the concept of as much geographical and cultural baggage as possible: The more geography and culture lose their grips on locality, the more the poles of discourse I’m used to holding become useless. And this is where translocality departs from dogmatic political, linguistic, or sociological artifices: it frustrates not only definition and literary explication but also the enclosures of manifesto and branding. We are all translocal, now. We can’t help but be. What is local and global in a given experience is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Who is left untouched by the world?50

In a nutshell, these seem to be the basic concerns of the ongoing debate that surrounds translocality today. 5. It is relevant, then, to consider some points raised by the essays in this collection: in particular, by Ali Alizadeh’s, Jane Lewty’s, Vadim Erent’s and Louis Armand’s articles. In the light of the Noon-Garr exchanged reported on above, it is particularly intriguing to view Alizadeh’s piece on Armand’s “poetics of unplacement,” especially since its author has previously attempted to view Armand’s work in its native – Australian – context. But here, Armand is ranked among “poets who do not possess an emotional/sentimental attachment to the environments in which they live,” and who “practice a poetics radically different to what is apparent in the work of the majority of modern and contemporary poets.” How, in view of the troubles which local naming presents to translocal poets identified by Noon, does one achieve such “poetics of unplacement”? Chiefly by means of a “transformation of the geographical signifier from a geological referent to a mental, metaphysical notion,” performing “a negation of a descriptive, picturesque (or unsightly) depiction of the poet’s surrounds.” Paradoxically, the Prague context is an important and ultimately beneficial for a development of such poetics, since “cultural milieus such as the amorphous and fungible communities of migrant, diaspora, peripatetic and expat artists” have existed in the Czech capital “since the end of the Cold War.” Drawing on the 50

Garr, editorial to Versal 8 (2010).

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work of philosopher Alan Badiou in his reading of Armand’s Land Partition, Alizadeh notes how this unplacement is accompanied by a refusal of, or at least a resistance toward, Romantic imagism of nature restoration: “Instead of attempting to resuscitate the land from the scene of its vanishing by resorting to mawkish, Romantic images (of natural, pre-industrial, primitive beauty, serenity, etc.) Armand ruptures the very tropes of such imagism to disclose nature as that which [...] possesses a singularity that no poetic, semantic or systemic human hegemony could ever obliterate.” In conclusion, Alizadeh charts out what in this context seems a viable strategy employed by Armand which escapes from the quandaries posed by translocal poetics: by refusing to verbally depict and represent place and the environment in his work, he has written poems that are entirely for a conceptualization of the environment as an unnamable, inestimable and therefore entirely singular being. As such, by refusing to speak about place, Armand’s poetry functions as the language by which place can come into being qua being, as an utterly non-human, unspeakable entity, not sequestered by the poet’s semantic, symbolic and metaphoric demands and compulsions, but open “to what it may become, to its possibility, to its invention.”

If, for Noon, the internet was a viable form or medium for translocal poetry, Jane Lewty’s close reading of the gist of Armand’s oeuvre shows that the internet and other communication channels themselves can become its theme or content: “Many poems inhabit a space where technological tropes are needed to enhance the central idea – topically, tonally, metaphorically. A poem will often replicate the uncertainties of communication devices, the chasm between transmitter and receiver that paradoxically opens up whenever a technology is considered.” Another aspect of language use to add to Noon’s list above would be the experimental one, where, as Lewty notes, linguistic economy conjures up a condensation or expansion of space, both real and imaginary: “In using compound words, elisions, erasures, mere scratches, cumulative, graphemic and synaethesic motifs, Land Partition shows the infinitesimal (that which is “encamped at the end of visibility”) and at the same time sweeps over vast aquatic reaches, miles of country and “barely

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tonal regions.” In Armand’s latest collection, this also occurs at the level of the title itself. Notes Lewty: If Prague is the present “otherstate,” then Australia is the place from where all is spoken: the outback, outcountry, a netherland, an underland. Its first syllable: “Aus” may be read as a pun – the translation into “from” in German – ”from the Fromland.” Its definitions and implications are many. Agent or instrument, cause or reason, removal, separation, starting point, something distinct from others.

One can look for alternatives within philosophical paradigms – a search undertaken by Vadim Erent’s essay, which approaches two Prague émigrés (Marina Tsvetaeva and Louis Armand) from the theoretical perspective developed from an engagement with Prague’s most famous “minor-language” writer: Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka. Again, the leading trope has to do with spatial transfer – detteritorialization, a movement within the major language toward what has been suppressed within it, toward its margins and thresholds where its grammatical and syntactical rules are undermined. Kafka, according to Deleuze and Guattari, performs this movement by “writing in his Prager Deutsch,” and deploying “a dialect of a major language already tainted by its limited, bureaucratic use within an imperial suburb,” and further more using “an impoverished, ‘paper’ German” further exacerbated “with inflections from both Kuchelböhmisch (a mixture of German and Czech) and what was pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch (a Yiddish-inflected German spoken by his parents).” Tsvetaeva and Armand, according to Erent, move along similar lines by exploring the limits of the sonic and visual potential of their language, respectively. If Tsvetaeva subjects “the Russian language to a Czechization, minoritizing and deterritorializing it to the sonic core,” then Armand exploits saturated graphic texture in his poetry whose effect is a high degree of optical disorientation: “The punctuating marks defy their standard function of organizing and clarifying linguistically generated meaning, reverting to their etymological logic of puncturing, pricking [...],” turning Armand’s poetic project into “an enduring experiment in purging poetry of phoneticism, hushing the sonic aspect of the signifier, disavowing the phone and valorizing the mark.” Armand’s latest collection also turns out a fertile ground for examining political/historical dimensions of his poetic experiment: Ð29Ï

Armand’s revisitation of Australia returns us to the issue of emigration, real deterritorialization and its linguistic manifestations. What does it mean to be born in the country founded as a penal colony whose Anglophone origin is the language of convicts, a convict language? Is the convict Cockney a minor Anglophone? Is it comparable to the minoritarian status of the Prague CzechJewish-German of Kafka?

Ultimately, for Erent, Armand’s deterritorialization goes further than that of Kafka and Tsvetaeva, for “Armand dislocates the very materiality of the signifier, creating an inter-invaginating imagetext, a sign language perpetually struggling to keep its word.” A last example of developing a poetics that eludes national denominations while not falling prey to geographical or cultural restrictions would be Farnsworth’s “deep poetics,” read by Armand’s own reading of Farnsworth’s “deep poetics” as “not an illusionism, and consequently not a mimēsis in any simplistic sense,” but rather as “the sensation, the ‘intonality,’ of language” which goes hand in hand with Farnsworth’s “strong resistance [...] to the seductions of national identity and the prescriptions of an ‘American’ poetics.” Farnsworth’s poetics, and to some extent the poetics of all other authors covered here, appears, in Armand’s original perspective, as an “undisclosed dynamism,” as the contrary to all that can be systematised, as that which includes what fits nowhere else: Poiēsis, in its fullest sense, is an undisclosed dynamism; counterpart of that entropic movement which is on the one hand called Literature and on the other Politics. It is the work of generative idiosyncrasy, iteration and permutation: it is the originary inassimilable element, the contrary of all that claims to be definitive or once-and-for-all, or what O’Hara called “downright forgery” [“Les Luths”]. It exceeds and contradicts the petty tyrannies of both the academies and the avant-gardes, as if (but of course only as if) it alone were the “conscience of our time”: not the voice of a moral rectitude society periodically avows belief in, but of everything at odds with a desire to impose-upon, like an imp of the perverse. It is the unruliness of the polis. It is the programme that succeeds only by failing…

A dynamism between Literature and Politics, two spheres separated by a threshold of poiēsis... If this collection might aspire Ð30Ï

to being a collective statement composed of personal testimonies on the state of past and present things poetic in the now-again international Prague, it also hopes to contribute to contemporary debates surrounding poetic production as against the categories of nationality vs. locality, opening up new thresholds across which to set out. David Vichnar Prague – Paris, April 2011

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ALI ALIZADEH

The Poetics of Unplacement: Disappearance of Setting in the Poetry of Louis Armand∗ NEITHER HERE NOR THERE? ANTI-LANDSCAPISM OF DISPLACED POETS Home, we are often told, is where the heart is. More specifically, as another idiom would have it, there is no place like home. Can it be said, therefore, that human emotions are commonly perceived to be primarily and most closely associated with unique physical locations? Simplistic and reductive as this question may appear, it addresses one of the key tenets of modern and contemporary poetry. A belief in an ineradicable, and highly sentimental, bond between a person’s subjectivity and singular, geographically specific loci is one of the key features of modern, post-modern and contemporary poetry. While it is commonly assumed that the height of poetic preoccupation with physical environment was reached in the 19th century Romanticism (e.g., via the poets’ commitment to eulogizing the Sublime Nature in the face of the rapacity of industrialization) actual settings and landscapes have remained pivotal to the developments of poetry ever since. In the case of the Modernist American poet Wallace Stevens, for example, “landscape, and along with it the thorny relationship between a perceiving human consciousness and a surrounding nonhuman world, is at the very centre of [his] work,” and Stevens “is not alone, moreover, among modern American poetic voices in his concern with issues of landscape and place.”1 ∗

1

Text references to Armand’s poetry throughout this essay will be: Land Partition (Melbourne: Textbase, 2001): LP. William Hogan, “Review of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.4 (Summer 2004): 129.

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Fundamental concerns with place are not limited to modern American poets. The work of the contemporary Irish poet Moya Cannon, for example, whilst contesting an “[i]dealized simplification of landscape” is, nevertheless, entirely dependent on the poet’s “knowing the depth and color of [the land’s] specificities, engaging and perhaps traversing the heights of the [Irish] boglands.”2 Similarly incisive linguistic engagements with actual topographic entities as well as manmade environments are to be found in almost all contemporary poetic milieus. The work of the emerging Aboriginal Australian poet Samuel Wagan Watson, for example, “invokes a space of local knowledge, of the land known in the blood, in the voices which refuse to be mere memory, merely of the past.”3 Wagan Watson’s post-colonial invocation of the visceral connections between a native people and their traditional land revokes the perception that a focus on place is an essentially European literary trope. As Jini Kim Watson has observed, for example, landscape is a crucial element in the work of widely different contemporary Singaporean poets: Edwin Thumboo refers to the natural as well as the industrialized scenery of Singapore in his poetry “to invoke the nation’s past,”4 while the late Arthur Yap’s poetry performs an “anthropomorphization of landscape.”5 However, although such a poetics of place is prominent in the work of so many modern and contemporary poetic voices, it is also clearly and crucially absent from the work of a small, albeit critical, number of fundamentally different, radical and influential poets. Place and landscape are not only denied significance in the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Aimé Césaire and a number of groundbreaking authors, but the linguistic references to setting and environment are significantly challenged and even negated in the work of these poets. We may discern what I shall term a poetics of unplacement in Rimbaud’s 1871 poem “Ce qu’on dit au poëte à propos de fleur” and Césaire’s celebrated 1939 long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, and by briefly considering the systematic and clearly deliberate subtractions of place form the 2

3

4

5

Christine Cusick, “‘Our Language was Tidal’: Moya Cannon’s Poetics of Place,” New Hibernia Review, 9.1 (Spring 2005): 73. Lyn McCredden, “The Locatedness of Poetry,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Special Issue: Australian Literature in a Global World (2009): 7. Jini Kim Watson, “The Way Ahead: The Politics and Poetics of Singapore’s Developmental Landscape,” Contemporary Literature 49.4 (Winter 2008) 699. Watson, “The Way Ahead,” 705.

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semantic fields within these poems, I shall propose that poets who do not possess an emotional/sentimental attachment to the environments in which they live, whom I shall refer to as displaced poets, practice a poetics radically different to what is apparent in the work of the majority of modern and contemporary poets. Rimbaud’s “Ce qu’on dit au poëte à propos de fleurs” was written during one of the teenaged poet’s nomadic movements between his native rural city of Charleville (now part of the commune of Charleville-Mézières in northeastern France) and Paris in 1871, possibly after the third time he ran away from home.6 As a striking aspect of its rebellious contempt for Paris’s politically conservative so-called Parnassian aesthete poets, Rimbaud’s poem, addressed to a hypothetical conservative poet, ridicules and critiques the abundance of motifs and representations of the exotic, natural world in the Parnassians’ work. In the sixth stanza of the poem’s fourth section, for example, he equates the aesthetes’ nature poetry with a laughable fantasy of primitive hunting, while immediately associating this fantasy with the reality of France’s predatory imperialist yearning for exotic colonies: Trouve, ô Chasseur, nous le voulons, Quelques garances parfumées Que la Nature en pantalons Fasse éclore! – pour nos Armée!7

The flora named in the second line of the quoted stanza (“garances parfumées” or aromatic madder, a type of herb) is radically different to, for example, Wordsworth’s daffodils. Rimbaud’s flowers are nothing but disposable, ontologically empty signifiers exploited by the landscape poets’ self-aggrandizing selfidentification (as White hunters, botanists and explorers) which, in turn, intoxicates and sexually arouses the soldiers of French armies conquering African and Asian territories. As Kristin Ross has observed, Rimbaud’s discourse in this poem, in line with the arguments put forward by theorists of the Paris Commune, finds the conservative poets “guilty of a kind of ‘landscapism’” and is

6

7

Oliver Bernard, “Life of Rimbaud,” Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1986) xvii. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1986) 162.

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therefore “quick to link Parnassian exoticism to an elitist artistic posture and its attendant racism.”8 Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal displays a similar dismissal of poetic landscapism. Although it is commonly assumed that this seminal Modernist text is, at its title perhaps suggests, about a particular place – in which the poet has, according to one commentator, “put [his native land] Martinique at the centre of the picture, to magnify it in order to take a closer look at its beauties and uglinesses”9 – it is significant to point out that, as the same commentator has also acknowledged, the poem was written in France, prior to the poet’s return to his Caribbean birthplace, at a time when in the poet’s mind “the reality of the island was taking the form of an impossible escape from and a necessary return to the native land.”10 This transformation of the geographical signifier from a geological referent to a mental, metaphysical notion exhibits a poetics that conveys a negation of a descriptive, picturesque (or unsightly) depiction of the poet’s surrounds. In the poem’s sixth stanza/paragraph, for example, it is not only the town, the subject of the passage, which is “flat” and “alienated from its flora and fauna;” the language of the prose-poetic passage itself, in its absolute refusal to linguistically portray the physical scenery by either accentuating its visual qualities or even naming its specific, characteristic plants and wildlife, is detached and dreary: At the brink of dawn, this flat town – staked out, tripped of its common-sense, inert, panting under the geometric burden of its forever renascent cross, unresigned to its fate, dumb, thwarted in every way, incapable of growing along the sap of this soil burdened, clipped, diminished, alienated from its flora and fauna.11

Although this passage could be read as a representation of an abject, colonized space, it significantly enacts the poet’s own conceptual “incapability” and “alienation” (“rupture” in the original French) from a poetic in which natural motifs such as “the sap of this soil” and “flora and fauna” can be represented as the 8

9

10 11

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008) 84. Mireille Rosello, “Introduction,” Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995) 16. Rosello, “Introduction,” 30. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995) 73.

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synecdoches of a geographical location. Césaire’s rejection of describing the land as anything other than a void misrepresented by an imposed European Master Signifier (the “forever renascent cross”) is not only a potent critique of colonialism; it is also a renunciation of landscapism, and a manifestation of a poetics in which the literary tendency to portray place has been negated. The similarities between Rimbaud’s and Césaire’s negative approaches to physical environment may be a result of the former’s direct influence on the latter (as seen in Césaire’s détournement of one of Rimbaud’s neologisms12) but perhaps a more compelling explanation can be found in the biographical fact of the two poets’ being displaced – that is, removed from their permanent homes – at the time of the composition of their work. Considering the radically innovative and avant-garde dimension of these poets’ works, Rimbaud’s acrid satire of nature poetry and Césaire’s inability / unwillingness to describe the natural environment of his native land seem consonant with what Raymond Williams has termed “radical estrangement,” a phenomenon observed in the work of the Modernist movements in early 20th century in which “the experience of rapidly mobile émigrés in the migrant quarters of their cities”13 provided the impetus for the iconoclastic stances and praxis of artists who revolutionized the arts. According to Williams, “the restlessly mobile émigré or exile” artists such as Picasso, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Brecht and Beckett, as a result of experiencing a foreigner’s sense of linguistic and cultural alienation and the other effects of social dislocation, produced “an intense, singular narrative of unsettlement [and] homelessness”14 which would in turn foment the momentum for the unsettling, disruptive and insubordinate raison d’être of Modernism. This chapter aims to investigate the consequences of such a radical estrangement, and its accompanying poetics, in two poems by the contemporary avant-gardist Australian poet, visual artist and intellectual Louis Armand who has been living and writing in Prague for the last 16 years. Without dwelling on the fact that Armand can be seen as a displaced, émigré poet due to his biographical details, I would like to discuss the startling treatment 12 13

14

Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, 104. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007) 35. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 34.

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of land and geology in his poetry in order to propose that cultural milieus such as the amorphous and fungible communities of migrant, diaspora, peripatetic and expat artists that have existed in the Czech capital since the end of the Cold War – which have perhaps drawn on previous formations of various groups of minority, displaced and/or exiled artists and intellectuals in the city during the course of the 20th century – are fertile grounds for the kind of disruptive, highly unconventional artistic experimentalism and innovation that characterized Modernism. And one key aspect of the work of such avant-garde, displaced poets’ project is, as can be seen in the chosen poems from Armand’s 2001 collection Land Partition, the vigorous negation of the poetics of place and landscapism. LOUIS ARMAND’S PARTITIONED LAND In his 1999 essay “Ground Zero Warholing,” in which he discusses the experimental work of his fellow expatriate Australian poet John Kinsella, Armand proposes that central to Kinsella’s poem “Syzygy” is the question of how land is represented (in the visual arts, in politics, in economics, in poetry: i.e. “the pastoral tradition”), and how in Australia this process has been, since colonization, one of conflict between a mechanical “translation” of land into “landscape” and a resistance to translation (an element of the inassimilable which enacts a deconstruction of the Western aesthetic, and so on).15

Such a methodical critique of the linguistic and political representations of land is central to a genre of contemporary poetry known as ecopoetry in which the “relationship with nature is not governed by the human author’s (Romantic) volition to transform and own [non-human] reality in some form of linguistic representation.”16Perhaps due to such an environmentalist ethos as well as the aforementioned themes of displacement and estrangement, Armand’s own collection of poems Land Partition – to use the terms of his analysis of Kinsella’s work – enacts a 15

16

Louis Armand, Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2008) 413. Ali Alizadeh and Penelope Pitt-Alizadeh, “Transgressive Lyric: Teaching Ecopoetry in a Transcultural Space,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14.2 (August 2009) 54.

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simulation of the conflict between a conceptual “‘translation’ of the land into ‘land-scape’” and an aesthetic, ontological “resistance” to this articulation. The poem “Field Composition” can be seen to simultaneously embody and unsettle precisely such a discursive transformation of the geological signified into the linguistic field of commerce, geology and agribusiness: FIELD COMPOSITION dividing the field into its constituent parts–the embankments of irrigation ditches squaring-off the horizontal curvature, mapping “libidinal flows” as index of returns, market growth or sustainability–a row of newly erected silos gleam in the mid-winter sunlight, like giant missives from some alien intelligence–strange heliotropes, urging upwards in effigie of outside investor trends–the quarterly prospectus hyping eco-consciousness as eradication of liability, sighting long term gain in selective reification, viz. rerum natura as proto-readymade & categorical, as imperative straining to make the point of economic impact well beyond the maximum yield [LP 85]

In spite of the putative difficulties of Armand’s poetry – described by one critic as an “intensely complex”17 writing which “requires a diligent reader”18– it is immediately obvious that this piece can be seen as an ecopoem in which the commercial and discursive exploitation of the land are vividly illustrated through, for example, the enjambment separating the poem’s third last line from its second last line which draws the reader’s attention to the usurpation of “eco” by “eco-nomic.” It is important, however, to stress that points such as this have not been communicated via homiletic, valorising depictions of nature, but initiated via the cancellation and dissolution of the very language of (inevitably 17

18

Bridie McCarthy, “Cosmopoetics: ‘Dimensions Unknown,’” Jacket 31: par.8, online, Internet, 24 Dec. 2009. Available: McCarthy, “Cosmopoetics,” par. 3.

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anthropocentric) nature writing. Armand’s poem does not resist the mistreatment of the natural world by celebrating a supposedly alternative and less pernicious relationship between humans and the environment, but it instead negates the poetic desire to linguistically represent and therefore possess landscapes and natural phenomena. To further explore the operation of this counter-poetics in “Field Composition,” I would like to draw on a theoretical framework based on the philosopher Alain Badiou’s reading of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. Premised on the philosopher’s radical concept of the event (as explicated in his 1988 magnum opus L’être et l’événtment), Badiou’s discussion of Mallarmé’s sonnet “Se purs ongles trés haut” proposes that the poem’s suggested, natural subject matter (the sunset) is not only about a vanishing (of the sun) but that the natural event of the sun’s vanishing (as an identifiable thing called sunset) has itself entirely vanished within the poem; that is, “so withdrawn as to be simply unnamable.”19 According to Badiou, Mallarmé has enacted this absolute disappearance of the scenic, natural referent through a set of “subtractive operations” within the poem, comprising: vanishing, whose value lies in marking; cancellation, which avers the undecidable and sustains the truth; foreclosure, which points to the unnamable, and fixes the uncrossable limit of a truth-process.20

According to this formulation, in Mallarmé’s poem the event of the setting of the sun experiences a “first vanishing term”21when it is not linguistically presented as itself (that is, as the word sunset) but is instead shown, in the sonnet’s first tercet, as a reflection in a mirror, resembling a nymph. The nymph, whose presence marks but does not reveal the event, is herself annulled in the first line of the last tercet (“défunte nue en le mirior”22) and in her place – that is, the place of the doubly vanished sun – a constellation appears in the night sky. This constellation signals “a possible nocturnal fidelity to the event” whilst also confirming the event as

19 20 21 22

Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008) 55. Badiou, Conditions, 57. Badiou, Conditions, 55. Stephané Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982) 48.

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unfathomable, limitless and unrepresentable.23 Therefore, none of these terms – neither the nymph nor the stars – indicate anything but a “radical lack”24 and this absolute, irretrievable eradication of the signifier indicates “that at the locus of the unnamable a singularity remains that no metaphor [e.g. the nymph] could ever sublate.”25 By applying the above reading to Louis Armand’s “Field Composition,” we may analyze the ways in which the Praguebased Australian’s poem proposes that, if treated as an unnamable, place also possesses a uniqueness no discourse could possibly eliminate; and, crucially, this infinite and undecidable uniqueness could only be brought into being in the absence of a poetics of place, as a consequence of the negation of poetic landscapism. The word “field” in the poem’s title and its first line does not at all name the natural entity, and immediately indicates the vanishing of the land, first via the jargon of agriculture and then via geometrical terminology: “dividing the field into its con- / stituent parts–the embankments of irrigation ditches / squaring-off the horizontal / curvature.” Under a palimpsest of increasingly obfuscating terms (from lexicons of land surveying, cartography, economics, etc.) the land is momentarily resurrected when the apparent entanglements of the poem’s language are interrupted by the rural imagery in the sixth line, as “a row of newly erected silos gleam / in the mid-winter sunlight.” This direct image, an obvious nod to landscape poetry, performs a function similar to that of the nymph in Mallarmé’s poem: it comes close to representing the natural, scenic reality (the sunset in Mallarmé’s case, the land in Armand’s) in a conventional poetic tradition (Symbolism in the former, pastoral poetry in the latter). Yet, as with Mallarmé’s poem, this vanishing is itself immediately cancelled, in this case via a simile which hints at something unfathomable, utterly mysterious and unnamable: –a row of newly erected silos gleam in the mid-winter sunlight, like giant missives from some alien intelligence–strange heliotropes 23 24 25

Badiou, Conditions, 55. Badiou Conditions,, 57. Badiou Conditions,, 58.

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The rural image’s cancellation by an indeed “strange” comparison to communication from outer space, and the breakdown of the flora’s name into two components that point to a physically that transcends the land (“helio,” the sun) as well as a rhetorical concept (“tropes), are lucid and cogent instances of Armand’s poetics of unplacement in action. Instead of attempting to resuscitate the land from the scene of its vanishing by resorting to mawkish, Romantic images (of natural, pre-industrial, primitive beauty, serenity, etc.) Armand ruptures the very tropes of such imagism to disclose nature as that which, to paraphrase Badiou, possesses a singularity that no poetic, semantic or systemic human hegemony could ever obliterate. To foreclose any chance of a return to nature poetry as a reaction against the land’s physical and conceptual depredations, the rest of Armand’s poem equates the (pseudo-) environmentalism of corporations with a manmade, literary artifice (“viz. rerum natura”), an overwrought Kantian axiom, and, ultimately, a ruse for increasing profits “beyond the maximum yield.” By negating these terms’ intention to signify the land, Armand presents the “radical lack” of a positivist concept of place in his poetics. His poem embodies a fundamental and committed absence of a perception of the environment. As another example of this crucial and programmatic disappearance of setting in Armand’s poetry, we may briefly consider “Biodegradable,” also from the 2001 collection Land Partition (a more recent version of this poem, as published in The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry in 2009, has a somewhat different typography26): BIODEGRADABLE arriving elsewhere, there are fundamental questions of locality, modularized space–the dividing line of separate hypotheses & the river charting a passage of illicit traffic, carnal (the bare “that it is” in the “nothing of the world”)–a bridge flares into view & recedes again into urban renewal, like time

26

Armand, “Biodegradable,” The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (Camberwell: Penguin, 2009) 386.

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suddenly focused on some inevitable, statistical average or cognitive sculpture arching out of bipolarity disorder in the barely initiated idea, a mere ornament of style–above the skyline the remote etymologies wink conspiratorially, faux blond in a fugitive midnight hustle: then just as soon it’s over again, the agitation passing to usedness, wastage–a damaged landform staggering upright & dissolving in brief nocturnal laughter [LP 58]

To discuss this poem under the rubric of Badiou’s ternary “subtractive operations,” we may first discern that the being of the place at which the poem’s speaker has arrived (here) vanishes under the “fundamental questions / of locality, modularized space.” Traces of the poem’s setting appear – “the river charting a passage;” “a bridge flares into view” – but these marks are immediately cancelled by psychogeographical motifs such as the “cognitive sculpture arching out of bipolarity / disorder.” To present the speaker’s whereabouts as a fundamentally and radically subtracted concept, however, the poem cannot end with statements of disorientation and disorder. It requires, as Badiou would have it, a “foreclosure” which indicates the poem’s setting as absolutely unnamable and infinite; and such a final annihilation of any possibility of place being named by the poet is precisely what is illustrated by the observation that “above the skyline remote etymologies wink / conspiratorially” and “a damaged landform stag- / gering upright & dissolving in brief nocturnal laughter.” The final dissolution of the concrete, topographical item in the poem’s last line is not due to its being “damaged” or “wasted,” but an effect of the poem’s trenchant and comprehensive anti-landscapism. CONCLUSION In the conclusion to his 1997 essay on the seminal avant-garde Australian poet Michael Dransfield, Armand writes what may be viewed as a statement towards a poetic manifesto of his own:

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the poet must stake everything against the world in order to be for the world – that poetry must assume the form, as Blake says, of an excess that constantly opens language to the experience of the possible, and whose ethics is not vested in the poet’s judgment but in the conditions of poetry. It may be that poetry makes nothing happen, if only for the reason that poetry is what happens – it is the language by which the world speaks to what it may become, to its possibility, to its invention.27

In the context of what this essay has tried to examine, it can be said that Armand’s proclivity to “stake everything against the world in order to be for the world” is effectively illustrated by the treatment of place in the above-discussed poems; that is, by refusing to verbally depict and represent place and the environment in his work, he has written poems that are entirely for a conceptualization of the environment as an unnamable, inestimable and therefore entirely singular being. As such, by refusing to speak about place, Armand’s poetry functions as the language by which place can come into being qua being, as an utterly non-human, unspeakable entity, not sequestered by the poet’s semantic, symbolic and metaphoric demands and compulsions, but open “to what it may become, to its possibility, to its invention.” As we have seen, such a poetics can be seen in the work of earlier radical, displaced poets such as Rimbaud and Césaire; but is Armand alone among contemporary poets (in an age dominated by geo-spacial issues to do with ecology, extreme natural phenomena, border conflicts and border security, expanding metropolises and their accompanying slums, etc.) in his obstinate rejection of a poetics of place and landscapism? Is he not an oddity in, for example, his native Australian literary milieu, a scene that has been identified as one almost solely preoccupied with rural and/or urban sceneries?28 As such, Armand’s poetics is more of a rarity than an absolute exception. In an Australian context, for example, his negating attitude towards landscape is shared by a small number of experimentalist poets such as the PolishAustralian Ania Walwicz who – perhaps due to the fact of herself being a displaced, migrant poet – displays a vivid exemplification of what I have been referring to as a poetics of unplacement. In 27 28

Armand, Solicitations, 404. David McCooey, “A Mighty Noise,” Australian Book Review 310 (April 2009): 14.

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her prose-poem “Australia,” for example, she not only finds her new country’s social as well as natural landscapes aesthetically unappealing, but she empathically refuses to look for, observe and describe any beauty in the land and its people: You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already.29

In a way, it can be said that Armand has also seen enough of lands, topographies and localities; but neither his – nor Walwicz’s – poetics should be mistaken for an expression of ennui or a kind of literary travel/home sickness. In view of the unwavering opposition to a poetics of place in his poems, it would be apt to say that this aspect of Armand’s work is an active and significant dimension of his entire poetic project. As to what extent, if any, this poetics of unplacement is shared by Armand’s fellow expat, Prague-based poets, this would be something that may be explored in critical work to come. For now, it should suffice to conclude that, according to at least one nomadic, contemporary poet, even if home continues to be where the heart is, home is not rigidly defined, limited and constrained by the poetic and conceptual confines of a set place.

29

Ania Walwicz, “Australia,” The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (Camberwell: Penguin, 2009) 334.

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JANE LEWTY

Implied Offerings in This Universe: The Poetry of Louis Armand Graphemic…salient – & monumental / dominating the horizon [“Land Partition: 8 Sections,” LP 27]∗

Reading across Louis Armand’s poetry is to hover over a landscape that shows “the cartography of remote sensing.” Dense with syntactic possibility, the poems nevertheless resist the abstractions that often accompany idea-generated work. Armand’s is a distinct, complex and magnificent poetics that elaborates upon the recent surge towards the lyrical-experimental, insofar that his early collections draw upon non-representational techniques: alinearity, rupture, erasure and so forth. These poems deploy a destabilized speaker/figure that renders a psychic life in abstract forms; later poems display an “outering” mode of lyricism that dramatizes an interaction with the immediate universe – whether that be a New York diner or a whole continent. This essay will refer to Land Partition (2001), Malice in Underland (2003), Picture Primitive (2006), the book-length prose-poem Menudo (2006), and Armand’s most recent collection, Letters from Ausland (2011), in order to underscore certain themes in what can only be called a topography of many dimensions. And paradoxes. Arrested in nightmare, the voice of Menudo is nevertheless alert and fully in control of its Beckettian stream-of-consciousness. In Malice in Underland, the poems gesture towards the contours of individual subjectivity, but are wrenched away to form a composite portrait of a falling world. The notion of an “alienated seeing” (PP 269) is ∗

Text references to Armand’s poetry and prose collections throughout this essay will be: Land Partition (Melbourne: Textbase, 2001): LP; Malice in Underland (Melbourne: Textbase 2003): MU; Menudo (New York: Antigen 2003): M; Picture Primitive (New York: Antigen 2006): PP (this collection denotes line numbers rather than poem titles); and Letters from Ausland (Sydney: Vagabond 2011): LA.

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perpetuated – the “remote and fugitive” (LP 22) poet’s eye detailing death, life-in-death, the corruption of bodies and matter, the existentialist reaction to human advancement, juxtaposition of event, visual space and audiospace, and – as will be shown in the final discussion of Letters in Ausland – the revelations of history. Read as isolated pieces, the poems have a unique authority. The volumes are separate selves, with their own carefully cultivated philosophies. However, it is possible to track certain emphases and patterns, all of which help to shape the wider intellectual network of Armand’s poetry. It must be emphasized that the present enquiry only provides a sample of the investigation that his work demands. TECHNOLOGY: “_________& WHAT IT MEANS TO BE TERMINAL” In the multiform dreamscape of Armand’s compositions, there are many screened encounters: blind alleyways, a “blanked-out silhouette from which no more / information is coming” (“Blue Square,” MA 53), “a petrified idea waiting at the end of sleep” (M 96), “anomalous forms / encamped at the edge of visibility” (“Anamorphosis,” LP 82). Many poems inhabit a space where technological tropes are needed to enhance the central idea – topically, tonally, metaphorically. A poem will often replicate the uncertainties of communication devices, the chasm between transmitter and receiver that paradoxically opens up whenever a technology is considered. Certain stanzas have a sensorimotor quality; the passage through a seemingly benign landscape is blocked by sound or the perception of sound and its contortions: winds nw to ne course n 20° e ltd in south 54° 57’ longd in greenwh. Reckg. 24°6’ the calculus of depth sounding recedes matra-like into far recesses – each time a different voice a different register unnerving even as it diminishes /

[PP 30-5]

And later, a side-note in the text: “^how many alter- / native rending renderings? [?]^” can exist in this “UNDER?GROUND OF SECRET PLAYBACK looped-in / circle of inanition: Greenwich meridian…” (PP 280-2). Here, “end” becomes a thing torn, delivered, restored, echoed, but plainly ceaseless. Playback is Ð46Ï

often horror. Reproduction can occur via a machine or as interiorized repetition: “when language loses / speed then it lags as the nights lag…” (“Split Screen with Static,” MU 24). In “A Cartography of Remote Sensing,” the voice is inhuman, like a set of antennae providing the imbrication of terrain and imagined journeying: “travelling / inland though the night, the issue involves more than traffic” (MU 31). A world where the “elemental particles / sibylline grammars / of the unspeakably mundane” (PP 365) is galvanized by way of the first step: “to set down, order, clarify. a tremor / felt only upon the inner ear” (“Quatro Centi,” MU 33) or “…electric switches radiating / from a single point like / a filial on a skyscraper… / the compendium that constitutes its centre [an ever- / inward movement watched over again on/rewind]” (PP 621-5). The poem titled “Xeno I-IX” depicts work by the artist Anne Truitt. Gradually, a “cosmic network of feint and counterfeint” is constructed though “noise, soundtrack” which makes itself felt in the painting (MU 52.) It can be observed that both Malice in Underland and Picture Primitive sustain this audiovisual motif. Ideas of playback, feedback, backtrack, acoustic striation, illocution, and aural alterities are investigated. Sound is both referential and explicit. Throughout Malice in Underland, the technologies of sound become topic and metaphor; they have their histories (“patty hearst on the / other side of the surveillance machine” (“Screen Test Portrait Nude,” MU 40) and their failures. Eerily, the “radio voices” under the pillowslip, the “twittering machine that broke,” the hum and whine of fuse boxes without voices, the “dud signal pattern, trans- / mitted along nerve strings” and even a slip of the tongue that “others/cannot tell whether or not to take it seriously.” The “tv amerikana resembling garbled transmissions” in “La Trompettiste” becomes “radio dogs / strange algorithims of / transmission of res- / piration… cathode tv screens flickering in / liquid unison” (“The Last Thursday of Zdeněk A,” MU 84). Not to mention the answering machine “that never ceases to malfunction: what is / it here for?” (“Positions in the Life World,” MU 15) There is often an inherent “suspicion of returns” whereby the process of tapelooping and throwback is described as a “sucker punch,” something that can annihilate. The ritual of hearing runs through the text of Picture Primitive, imprecise, misheard and threatening:

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…visual “acoustics” modulating / from radio waves signal code – to entertain the enigma of public life (decrying libido in the voice of the interrogated blonde) lips shaping the playback mechanism as dataveillance… [PP 208-11]

Safe, solid attributes of variables – data – is a “monstrous reiteration of cries” or “exegete codewording of an insomniac/presence” wanting to have its life told with fidelity, despite the …same pseudo-voice relating these “incidents” / fractions of some unformulatable quadratic equation – the tongue – stiffened algebra given in place of us (de vulgaris eloquentia)meaning flesh and blood that is life [PP 1283-8]

To “lose the self” is like a “telegraphic line cut out / from countless intervals/the morse’s unrelenting/hammer killing time…” (PP 577-80) Being scrutinized by nameless invisible authorities, by listeners, by one’s own “voices under the skin” turns the self into a half-person poised in a liminal space – a “lost permanence” (PP 896) – a ghost among footnotes, endnotes, voice units: “minimal details from which all else unfolds: the/body hollowed out like a spent shell & stuffed in a/box – where at the flick of a switch it learns again / the old game of dissemblance” (PP 377-80). In Armand’s poems, the constituents of the body appear in technology and vice versa – a crossover where surreality is blended with the very real notion that scientific devices are merely prostheses. Namely, a megaphone-like mouth, or the illusion of one’s “motor function irreduced to dialectico-histrionics” (PP 813). In Malice in Underland, flesh merges into a “seabed oscilloscope” uncomprehending of darkened shore figures whose “mute diatribe [..] is equally insensible to the meanings / we accord it” (“Soundings, La Parouse,” MU 75). As the hallucinatory ordeal of Menudo begins, a Cronenbergian scene is enacted: [a] prostrated body reanimates, gestures rewind, a faint white line descending the screen, bisects the image. He raises upright. Grimace. Laugh. Rictus. The lips tensing up exposing the teeth. A Ð48Ï

detonation in which the body is shot like a shell. Ejaculating itself. A mouth pressed up against the screen with spittle trailing from the corners. [M 14-5]

At the close of Picture Primitive the allegorical “spirit surrogate [bursts] its vacuum tube” with flesh hanging from its ruinous mouth. The dry cataracts of thunder and silence-that-sounds is figured as a universal loss of connection; “migratory neurons” (PP 1241) disperse and microphones move into the space like “jaded phaloi” breathing headlines over “damascened skins” (PP 1324-9). The unquantifiable sky is etched with the phrase: “TO PRODUCE A SINGLE NOTE AT DIFFERING FREQUENCIES” in response to the suggestion that “an utterance may be repeated any number of times/or not at all” (PP 1320-1). VISION GROTESQUE Much of the vivid quality of Armand’s work arises from the vivid portrayal of a “compendium landscape” (“Regularly, As the Seasons Advanced,” LP 46) where “strange machines gather / on the periphery… wind machines… fire machines,” the radio, the television, all types of “assemblage whose elements are co- / alesced through disposability, synthetic / & modulised as natural extension of / the aberrant idea” (“Morphological Forecast,” LP 43). In Land Partition, these uncanny devices, part of mans’ “dark psychology” often stand sentinel over land-masses, “sub- / cutaneous geometries” and the inclining turbulence of weather. Termed as alien, libidinal, “proto-readymade,” this multiform entity disrupts the ebb and flow of the natural world, creating a predawn where “a consciousness arches its claw” (“Entrance to the Sea Port of Desire,” LP 90). It is the labyrinth of urban life that best accommodates the machinic body with its decay and regeneration. Armand excels at portraying the majesty and squalor of our modern existence: “the greyblue bitumen of silver city hwy 79 / threading time zones crosshatched in / dusk-rendered enormity of reptile country” (PP 131-3); the “jump-cutting from interchange / ‘horn sound and bellow’ to nightroads… apparitions of distance / vertical & pinpoint luminous as conducting rods” (PP 625-9) amongst a “seraglio of gasoline vapours melting/over shiftless dunes” (PP Ð49Ï

1375-6). It is the recognizable details that linger in the reading of these poems – a dingy laundromat, crumbling stucco. Interior disquiet (the “baroque paraphernalia of / refurbished urinals” (“Valse,” MU 61), a “dim room lozenged” (“Serena,” MU 70) or the “centre of a grey membrane” filled with beige linen and unbreathable air) hides beneath a brutal exterior world: “euclid avenue. an all-night diner. a railroad / flat vibrating with silent motion” (“Split Screen with Static,” MU 23), shopping centres, subway stations, “the closed- / circuit… cameras bent upon simu/lating us out of existence” (“Quatro Centi,” MU 33). The final lines of “Mimo Provoz” tell of a conflagration that spreads along the margins of winter: “…a building on the opposite / side of the street is on fire. afterwards we watched/the dark passage of the dumb-waiter with growing alarm” (MU 49). The apocalypse – and its many derivations – is continually present. A pervasive disquiet stalks many of Armand’s poems. For example, in the unsettling “Euclid,” extinguished life-forms “[are] disposed in tiers like cans of soup / lunchmeat… walls appear to grow larger as they recede” (MU 39). In “Après le déluge” a skewed America wakes from or into a vile dreamscape, where “the black flag hangs from the national / theatre, now is the wake, eyes / which barely open, caked with grey / mud.” An unidentifiable, soulless “we” traverses a waste land where the “river has wound back the old / clock / like a watermill…elephant corpses…broken samovars bathtubs coal sacks” float in the “long sliver of bile” that emits from the library as books meld into the effluvia (“Après le deluge,” MU 81). Walls are “riddled with holes / where everyone can see / the cretinous brides in their blonde wigs & / artificial teeth, singing lullabies / to shut up the dead” (“Cranach: A Horoscope,” MA 66). The end of humanity also features in Land Partition, often stated as a portend, and even a self-engendered possibility: /in the middle of (nowhere) – totem figures, ossature half-buried in the scorched earth, a mute prostration (?) & the self anathemetised, like something pestilent on the fringe of inoculated memory. [“Land Partition: 8 Sections,” LP 29]

The true heart of darkness can be found in Menudo, a soliloquy / monologue erupting from the psyche of a delirious being, “an Ð50Ï

almost familiar figure, barely cohering & already coming apart” who nevertheless possesses the all-seeing eye, as in Alain RobbeGrillet’s La Jalousie. The territory is barbarous and sadistic, yet beautiful – a hallucinated Mexico that Armand portrays with an incomparable eloquence: a “danse macabre of mundane, trivial items, while elsewhere, under the ground their doubles are stirring.” And the dead, “how do they know they are not dreaming us? not reenacting us in the afterlife of dead gestures, dead words?... this is where your thinking has led to… someone else has been here before you. washing the blood from the hands, arms, neck, face” (M 3). Detailing a descent into madness and fugue, unfamiliar terrain, ritual and torture, Menudo sets out to refute the idea of its own searching, “of trying to recover. of following all the routes back. as though such a thing were possible.” Instead, “it will have always come back of its own accord despite the detail of enumeration.” What is presented to us is only a thing “in place” of the real event: “a captive piece of inertia. to stand in place of you… haunted by figures who are ever-patiently converging. menacing. pursuing through nightmares” (M 6-7). And if what lies ahead is a “a silence to be filled. a space to be invested with meaning” then what of this insistent horror “plucking the liver nightly from our sides”? (M 14). Whose dream are we in with its interminable analyses? “…a methodology of chance operations. to arrive at the fortuitous encounter with something ‘like’ the truth?” A place where “one kills oneself the way one dreams,” where one is “outside the situation of your body. & that is what it is. & that is what it is forever” (M 10-2). The speaker disposes of personal affects, wristwatch, notebook, and begins the quest, leaving no trace aside from a letter: “dear x, on the one hand i have a great desire, beside the scientific investigation of hallucinogenic substances, to research their use during ceremonial rituals” (M 67-8). The narration frequently shifts from first to third person; here “everything points to aversion. some underlying principle of the body inveigled in language” (M 29). It is indeed the body – its permutations, corruptions and perversions – that enforces the narrative. Effigies: a black christ. A white blood-spattered christ. a brown christ with a crown of hypodermic needles…cataleptic forms of smooth, hairless bodies, sexless. Tied & spread-eagled like mayan sacrifices. transpierced. eyelids sewn back & leering out of Ð51Ï

sleeplessness. Sutured mouths. Ears. Webbed fingers. grotesque mannequins animated on the ends of intestinal strings. [M 29]

The sky immolates itself like “an ember pressed up against the iris. The half of a face that immerses itself in fire… a string of blood & sinew trailing from a grill.” An altar is made of pelvic bones, the “purple and black and blue flesh” offered as sacrifice. In this domain, “what else can be done with death than to simulate it?” A naval is sliced, a body is “flayed, beheaded… fed to the lizards and dogs” (M 80-2). More viscerally experienced is the body in tortured confinement; the unnamed narrator veers between the “self seized as an object by others and the self abandoned as a blind, searching subjectivity” (M 99). The vision disperses to wander endless kafkaesque corridors, “cubicle-like rooms… oozing with heat… musty confessionals… sour mouths. anuses. putrid cocks… black curtains parting on the entanglement of imaginary limbs. their sulphurous, necrophile reek (M 103). Related images occur in single poems – “fingernailed walls where in mute succession un- / named internees have scratched out their / living” (PP 185-7); visions where quartzite is likened to “exposed spinal columns” (PP 121), shrunken heads are tied by string, emaciated figured expose their “scabbed / necks, penetrated hip-bones” (“The Funeral Oration,” MU 61) a mouth is “pulled sideways / full of pictorial blood (life’s unsweetened / pleasures)” (“R.S.V.P.,” MU 54), and a “raw head & bloody bones [are] dragged up like / fouled root from earth nothing could grow in” (“Sanctus,” MU 64). Armand is the master of unease, creating pictorial arrangements one would rather not consider – as exemplified in “Bucolic” where the set-scene is “clotted felt / of a carcass gnawed by foxes” – the dawning of a day “cut out with shears from the same / tooth-cloth; a maculated rag to / stuff a godless hole – blood sequins / threaded on a dressmaker’s needle adorn / the dry caretoid artery (“Bucolic,” MU 69). In Picture Primitive, the “carnivorous spirit” of the subconscious “dwells in each gesture of appeasement like / crude stitching in flesh barely covering muscle & / organ. bones open for marrow. charred / viscera in which prolific & devoured intermingle” (PP 80-4). The speaker of Menudo, finds himself “lying on his side. staring at the floor covered with dust & human hair. a plastic bag. old needles like Ð52Ï

maguey spines bloodied with his leper’s blood. the scabs of his bubas. a pyramid of excreta. base matter” (M 93). The speaker’s revelation is one he knows already: i see the prosthetic body moving off ahead of me. a doppelgänger pursuing an independent purpose. i realize i am paralysed & expect at any moment to discover myself in the act of committing something hideous. [M 106]

That hideousness is a “secret dictation” filling a blank space that could be filled again and again, in greater detail, more horror. It is a mind that can create the “sullen dissolution of entire continents” (M 96), qualify itself out of existence, relate the process of its workings in absentia: …i know that this is an illusion. what has happened has happened. there is nothing to be done. you try to keep moving. keeping to the periphery… & the further you go, the closer you seem to the point from which you started out. [M 99]

VERBIAGE OF THIS WORLD WHICH “COMES TO AN END.” Ideas of perambulation and dark geographies are continually replayed in Armand’s poetry. Land Partition (2001) is in itself divided into pieces “against a field sinister,” that is serial, able to be mapped, charted, scored out, endlessly repeated yet truncated. Its very methodology may be a process that “opens a trace without initiating anything…fragments detached from the curse of an exposition idiom” (“Two Studies for Terra Incognita,” LP 68), which is sometimes given a name – ”the mystery of telegraphic wires / (lesions that seem to imply the existence of a vein)” (“Untitled Serial Landscape,” LP 67) or maybe a “distillation of lightshift / wreckage….co-(l)apsing inwards the “white line of a cormorant / marking an incursion against the black sweep of an estuary” (“Two Studies,” LP 69). In using compound words, elisions, erasures, mere scratches, cumulative, graphemic and synaethesic motifs, Land Partition shows the infinitesimal (that which is “encamped at the end of visibility”) and at the same time sweeps over vast aquatic reaches, miles of country and “barely tonal regions” (“From the Life of Invertibrates,” LP 50). By Ð53Ï

charting the vast region of thought separating the micro-and macrostructure of systems, Land Partition endeavors to understand the composition of each as “formula / given over to the spaciousness of the other” on a Newtonian scale: matter as limit but also “gripped by a more inner/nature” (“Weather Patterns,” LP 49). In a compelling mode of expression – which prefigures the more lyrical nature of Armand’s later work – the collection seeks a discourse to render infinity that nevertheless requires tokens to mark its path – ”redoubled clouds & rain / falling… a piece of corrugated iron, uprooted” (“Untitled (Landscape with Emblems),” LP 88-9) told by an ever-present watcher / listener, reminiscent of Mr Tod in A Handful of Dust or the supine figure of Finnegans Wake. The last voice of Land Partition is “reduced to a nervous system, a carcass / brought in by the neck / ‘left / for crows to pick at’” (LP 88). Intentionally or not, we are reading into a waste land which corresponds to data energies: “slow codifiers of ruins” (“Notes on Incarceration: Geography,” LP 16). Or an – …endless series of anagrams: I=corrosive sublimate – chimerical? transmutation of base elements, seme of crude ore dark floe from the unconscious belies geostrata not yet raised to perception [“Erosion Mimics a Frame,” LP 70]

that nevertheless has familiar undertones; a place “where the map indicates water… has been dry / since before living memory” (“Land Partition: 8 Sections,” LP 23). Here is a “sense” of water “as though there were always a third person / to see for us unanswerable questions” (“Parallax,” LP 23). In Menudo, this absence, this misprision, is given the form of “a spectre that / collects and distributes the roles. the facts. the outcomes.” Amid the “bright amber light of electrical storms / flashing across the mountains [and] god raving in the wilderness” the speaker saysthis ritual was also using me, a lone figure among many others… & despite so many seeming calculations, nothing completes itself at the end, everything will be waiting. but the disclosure of this world, of this being, remains a dead letter. [M 32]

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But, as Armand points out elsewhere with wry humour, what cannot be said is in “the glancing sideways from the page / to the depthless outer margin you’ll never succeed / in crossing-out” (“Observation for the End of August,” MU 41). Armand has a gift for ending poems as individual entities. Each sub-section of Picture Primitive concludes with authority, whereas Malice in Underland presents a series of (topical) dead-ends expressed in lines of great beauty and simplicity. In particular, “Coucou Dubuffet” where a series of signs cannot be puzzled out, the final gesture being – “hurry up / nobody wants to solve you anymore” (MU 17). The concluding lines of “Lettre de Cachet” are where “the story took place. when? / then I found / it, it was swallowed up” (MU 35). It becomes frighteningly possible that the world and its hard facts, its demography, geography, happenings, headlines, all “read like an archaeological report – telling of the x you’ll never locate” (“Moving Averages,” MU 67). But, in truth, circularity and re-enactment override any final sense of closure. Every couplet – shaped with mastery of craft and tone – only serves to help the reader reach a semblance of finality. The feeling of “where and why” is irrelevant given that “it’s only a matter of time before it’s out of / range the gauge faltering” (PP 220-1). The question: is life too merely a form of repetition? echoes in Armand’s deliberate detours, in machines, ghosts, crypts, the accidental crowd, the fabric of things. Not to mention nearconclusions; the idea that any hour is “meant for nothing more, having struck root in us, stroked and shaped and misintended by it. The same repeated hour, the same deliberation” (“Something like the Weather,” LA 9). LETTERS FROM AUSLAND But the poem is only a way to dream without having to suffer – and it dreams us too, on the other side where time is forever advancing like a threat. Night stabs a thorn into the mind’s eye – we end where we began, riding the line until the words stop. The silent machines take us back out of the picture. A train’s windows flash past like cinema: Something groans. Something else gets born. [LA 11-12] Ð55Ï

Above, the conclusion to “Hugh Tolhurst, with Lines from a Poem,” a fitting example from Armand’s most recent collection, which both engages with the socio-political sphere and retains the experimental strategies of his earlier work. Divided into five sections, the dense prose-like pieces of Letters from Ausland convey a seamless line of thought, told by a grounded voice, one which is profoundly self-reflexive and elegant: The mind, the physical body, free to commit error, argue, go astray. Standing outside to see what’s inside: The mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects. [“The Start of the Bad Season,” LA 26]

Here is a book very much within, or of, its own time; many poems are focused on a single dedicatee as homage, subject, or enquiry. Poetry itself, “a world of circumstances joined to the universe by a tattered thread” (“Letters from Ausland,” LA 54), is perhaps an ironically endured state – ”A thing or a mind entering into the commonplace on / equal terms. You try to imagine the world as a / dog imagines it but cannot…” The question is how to create and re-create in its prosaic mystery, poetry “like a scarred lunch counter, timeless / under cracked eggs and broken eggshells. And still/ the difficulty of getting any simple idea or fact/ into terms simple enough for transmission” (“Sometimes, Apart in Sleep, by Chance,” LA 78). Poetry is the “minimal driftage of an ear’s / desolate murmuring, of rain stirring ashes into tarmac” (“Correspondences,” LA 89). As shown in Letters from Ausland, the sensual shiftings of the body – its memories, chance occurrences, visual impress – blend into an evocation of what it feels like to quantify life as an “anti-self who merely traverses and rates” (“Une femme à Claudel,” LA 40). Or rather one tries to – in a medium that rises to that task but sometimes falls short. Akin to the futility of blowing into a trumpet the wrong way it will be shown that all writing is correspondence, sent across every conceivable borderline with no hope of consensus idem. Every line is said to refuse closure. The low hum of a radio is as “inexplicable” as God or a cell dividing. Newspapers wetly flap against a wall. Again: …Time to light just one more cigarette before the signal pattern re-conquers the outposts and settlements Ð56Ï

or some other point we’re constantly referring back to but which remains blank. [“La guerre est finie,” LA 29]

The speaker of “Circus Days” who has painted a “life’s work index of first lines” makes an inventory of things backwards – would it be a good idea? The air is clotted and “[w]rit large” with signals, shards of history that happened among strange people but “the danger’s in conclusions” (LA 50-2). In “Forgetting Verlaine” – an admirable tribute to Donald Theall – the notion of erasing is exemplified as “awaiting the arrival at that senescent / plateau where everything peaceful has a troubled past” (LA 39). In a sense, this idea and its inversion is a prominent motif of Letters from Ausland. The fourth section, “Kino Pravda,” weaves history and event through art, politics, and case studies. “Boy with the Red Piano” announces itself – and what is to follow – in powerful truncated lines: “Morning birds on telephone wires talking in secret / brain language. Another 4th of May. Grew old and then. / Last night, listening at words for intimation of” (LA 61). What reads as a repeated intake of breath surely contains the unsaid, the unneeded. Small distances and far reaches are depicted like “streetlights, turned inwards, as if to see into the true state of things” (“Leden,” LA 62). A cityscape swarms with life, holds the memory of death: “the theatre where Petr Lebl hanged himself,” ghostly voices / vices in the greybrown river, behind weirs, “dilute” mirrors, failing walls; a shifting city “hobbled in its pressure suit of thresholds / within thresholds” (“On the Theory of Homocentric Spheres,” LA 70). The optical elision of the word “Plague” in “Botanical Typewriters” serves a myriad of images and interpretations: As Jan Hus never said: To know (is) to eat. Plague column, hunger wall, golem city – the picture falls into place and we’re not in it – took unawares, or the city, you see it and it disappears – it sits there biding yr time for you. [LA 69]

There are many still lives in still things – a folded letter, fruit in the dimming afternoon sun, a teacup, a pear tree, all shadowed by “some plan of action, long ago determined” hidden in “[p]arking lot vistas, seas of midnight enamel” all of which – foresuffering all – Ð57Ï

is the seer, all-positioned in the midst of tension – ” a man-statue on a rock out-waiting it,” his static eyes, “pressed to winter rain’s pale resuming weather” (“Böhmen liegt am Meer,” LA 68). Arrested, “[s]omewhere love is a silent, evasive poetry that we still dream about, but cannot write,” and Prague is a many-faceted place, “timed-out of a scorched end-century – mouth to darker mouth, speaking of life or afterlife” (“Kino Pravda,” LA 63). It is noteworthy that the last poem in the sequence centers on Robert Desnos, who often privileged the nonverbal liminal space / scape over coherence – a space where memory repeats, patrols itself: I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom among phantoms…1

Armand’s treatment of Prague in some way follows this pattern – one speaker somnabulistically navigates “a magic code landscape” (“V Elipse Spí Lev,” LA 64) while the ekphrastic “On Henrik Galeen’s Student of Prague” considers that “behind everything a simple yet remote promise hangs” (LA 67). If Prague is the present “otherstate,” then Australia is the place from where all is spoken: the outback, outcountry, a netherland, an underland. Its first syllable: “Aus” may be read as a pun – the translation into “from” in German – “from Ausland” implying “from the Fromland.” Its definitions and implications are many. Agent or instrument, cause or reason, removal, separation, starting point, something distinct from others. The poem “Biodegradable” announces that “[a]rriving elsewhere, there are questions of locality” (LA 28). That locus of control is both specific and multiform, as if the voice lends to itself the invisibility of the one addressed. It sends itself from a place of arrival, and therefore gives itself up in the act of sending. These poems are, of course, letters. Many have dedicatees, but do not explicitly speak to the individual. Armand’s writing enacts Derrida’s singular premise, and its units, insofar that if a locus exists then there must be a signal outwards. Then, there is the temporality of a past and an evasive 1

Robert Desnos, “I Have Dreamed of You so Much,” The Penguin Book of French Poetry 18801950 (London: Penguin Classics, 1994) 747.

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future, already and not yet or not quite, with as Armand writes, its “culverts and detours and motivations.” After all, “[e]verything that goes without saying / has been passed over in silence. It’s just another situation of the mind” (“La guerre est finie,” LA 29). One mindset is the Australian outback with its scrubby rural regions, waterholes, the back-of-beyond-land, sweeping expanse, arid air, tolerant and desert species of plant, timeless rhythm and breathing, slow, ancient. “Burial Pits (Maralinga)” echoes Menudo in its stark menace: “Shed skin hung up on door frames.” A metaphorical dog, a “ridiculous / post-historic beast in the desert” drags a chain made of rusty cans with “red dust/bleeding out of it” (LA 23). In “Bad Moon Rising, Northeast from Port-of-Bourke,” the landscape “is neither a labyrinth nor a mask; it’s only an image” reported and “factor[ed]” in by a speaker with a “cramped jawbone endlessly ruminating proofs.” The vista includes a flock of parrots, “barbiturate roadhouses, truckstops, the crossborder / nightrun from Mildura to Lightning Ridge.” Ghosts of an era / moment fade out “in moonrise / over the silent diggings’ ruined opalescence,” and, at the very last, we recall that the first sentence describes a “backtracking” towards a conclusion (LA 18). Conceivably, the magnificent “Drinking at the Vandenberg” moves in an epic and easeful way back to “pre-everything days when / knowledge was safely out of range.” Armand’s gift for the vibrant pictorial is once again on display, with the sarsparillacolored houses and “timber huts, dirt-floored / burlap-sack windows, cabbage tree roofs” rising up in a landscape. Elegiac and poignant, the poem is a candid portrait of Australia in its macroscopic sense, but rendered in penetrating detail – albeit (it is confessed) in “[a] succession of inertias, entropy.” The memory of a dead television, “[s]triking / rail workers, dockers, BLF. Cold Chisel, Bathurst riots”; the singing of “God Save the Queen under hot foreign skies”; how “Depression-era gabardine” is etched against shadows “in bamboo thickets […] ironbark / sleepers piled up beside the entrance to the wrecker’s yard.” And how, from the vantage point of middle-age (the ineluctable future) and a worldspan away, the “distance” is “never so far” as one imagined it “should’ve been” – there and now (LA 19). Echoes of Picture Primitive are in evidence, wherein the “mason-&-dixon line appear[s] inverted on the other side as optical / time-lag or aftereffect – to rectify a ‘wrong way of / seeing’” (PP 1270-3).

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The poems referenced in this essay are just a sampling of Armand’s formidable work, unrivalled in the sense that few contemporary poets dare to experiment with a different rubric from one collection to the next. At the same time, the dark wit of Armand’s poetic voice is consistent and recognizable: that of an exception academic mind formulating and reformulating a multivalent dialectic. On one level, politics, history, poetry as an act of witness. How, in the earlier collections of irreducible anxiety, re-enactment and nightmare, the self-as-observer hovers over a world of super-information, one that showcases its own destruction. How, in Letters from Ausland, that same sphere of market-driven forces is seen to affirm poetry’s ability to capture “pieces of time and circumstances” in the ear’s “minimal driftage.” The final piece, “Correspondences” talks of growing up into a “non-story”; asks, “How long can each of us outlive John Keats?” when we are “all perhaps the adopted point-of-view/of somebody” in a world of “unstable intelligence that cannot decide / what to do with us,” a planet which may well be “furniture beneath a sky painted with / static and feedback” (LA 88-91). Armand’s poems force us into the void, flinching. We are “hooked into the ear of things” – into his lines and their extra-sensory power. Moving from linguistic experiment to the lyrical quotidian, his work rescripts the ordinary and the strange, finding overwhelming questions in both.

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VADIM ERENT

Revolutions of the Minor: Kafka, Tsvetaeva, Armand∗ If we share Deleuze and Guattari’s conviction that “[t]here is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor”1 and if we accept their imperative of “becoming minor,” the question then becomes how to plug into this “minor” in order to strike something major, decisive and revolutionary? According to Deleuze and Guattari, the “minor” is charged with the function of deterritorialization: a minoritarian agent pollutes a majoritarian environment, injecting a dose of alien effluence into the refined reservoirs of a major literature. In their own words: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”2 For Deleuze and Guattari, ultimately Kafka stood out as the minoritarian paradigm par excellence: a Czech Jew zealously contaminating the German literary tradition. A minority within a minority, Kafka, writing in his Prager Deutsch (“a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses”)3 deployed a dialect of a major language already tainted by its limited, bureaucratic use within an imperial suburb, an impoverished, “paper” German which he further exacerbated with inflections from both Kuchelböhmisch (a mixture of German and Czech) and what was pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch (a Yiddish-inflected ∗

1

2 3

Text references to Armand’s poetry collections throughout this essay will be: Inexorable Weather (Todmorden: Arc, 2001): IW; Land Partition (Melbourne: Textbase, 2001): LP; Strange Attractors (Cambridge: Salt, 2003): SA; Malice in Underland (Melbourne: Textbase 2003): MU; Menudo (New York: Antigen 2003): M; Picture Primitive (New York: Antigen 2006): PP (this collection denotes line numbers rather than poem titles); Letters from Ausland (Sydney: Vagabond 2011): LA. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975) 26. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.

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German spoken by his parents).4 Rather than attempting to smooth out the linguistic ticks of his provincial, legalistic German, rather than working to rectify the deficiencies of his idiom, Kafka – on the contrary – gave full voice to a brazenly inferior German, in all its “withered vocabulary” and “incorrect syntax.”5 Even more, he exaggerated those idiosyncrasies, “marking a movement of language toward its extremes.”6 Deleuze and Guattari borrow the terms, “intensives or tensors,” to describe those tropological devices “that express the ‘internal tensions of a language.’” Additionally they use these terms to refer to “any linguistic tool that allows a move towards the limit of a notion or a surpassing of it:”7 the language of a minor literature particularly develops these tensors or these intensives… Wagenbach cites as the characteristics of this form of German the incorrect use of prepositions; the abuse of the pronominal; the employment of malleable verbs…; the multiplication and succession of adverbs; the use of pain-filled connotations; the importance of the accent as a tension internal to the word; and the distribution of consonants and vowels as part of an internal discordance. Wagenbach insists on this point: all these marks of the poverty of a language show up in Kafka but have been taken over by a creative utilization for the purposes of a new sobriety, a new expressivity, a new flexibility, a new intensity.8

The list of accumulated features (above) which together produce Kafka’s “poverty of a language” reads as a diagnosis of multiple speech defects, a dyslectic complex curdling into the utter stutter of a permanent parabasis, providing us with an itinerary of the material conditions for becoming minor, a program of deformation by which linguistic organs are disorganized, shapes shattered and eloquences deliquesced. “As long as there is form, there is still

4

5 6 7 8

Richard T. Gray et al., A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005) 147. Of course, even the “original,” “pure” Yiddish spoken by the pre-emancipated Prague Jewish minority was an “impure” amalgamation of Jewish-German-Hebrew so that even a Jewish journalist of Kafka’s era referred to it as “a deformed language, a freak that pathetically parodies healthy language.” Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin De Siècle (Berkeley: University of California, 2000) 85. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23.

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reterritorialization…,” write Deleuze and Guattari.9 One must disperse, defamiliarize, dehumanize oneself, one would have to – following Deleuze and Guattari following Kafka – become an ape, a beetle, a dog, a mouse, in any case, an animal,10 and “find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs…”11 Generating the minor is therefore an act of becoming foreign, “[t]o be a sort of stranger within [one’s] own language”12 with a foreign-turned tongue so that the native fluency is flummoxed in a leaden deluge of consonantal grind (“I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other…”13). In this regard, the “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.”14 Minor literature is a deterritorializing speech act and to perform it within a major language one must write “as a Czech Jew writes in German, or an Ouzbekian [sic] writes in Russian.”15 To do one’s mother tongue like an Uzbek does Russian or Czech Jew German, one must dig like a dog, burrowing like a rat, “finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert.”16 The desert of the third world, the patois of underdevelopment – these then are the base conditions of minor literature – but to advance a revolutionary literature, the desertification must spread, withering the bouquets of rhetoric, the patois must colonize comprehensibility. As Deleuze and Guattari frame it: How many people today live in a language that is not their own? … This is the problem of immigrants, … the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 6. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 7. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 13. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26. Franz Kafka, qtd in Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18.

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revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?17

The final question, of course, is rhetorical since it answers itself. To become a nomad, an immigrant, a gypsy in relation to one’s own language involves a literal displacement and dislocation, the status belonging to an alien, an illegal, a stateless refugee. Migration is the shortcut to deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari even designate migration as the “real deterritorialization,” while pointing out that Kafka’s father, “a Jew who leaves the country to settle in the city,” was “undoubtedly caught in a process of real deterritorialization…”18 This article tracks the work of two really deterritorialized, immigrant poets who have troubled their respective major tongues from afar, from within the foreign, “minor” environment of the Czech linguistic milieu. At first glance, there appears to be little in common between the Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva and the Australian poet and novelist Louis Armand beyond a shared Prague nexus and a linguistic texture filled with the deterritorializing thrust of the minor within the major as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Even within their mutual mechanics of dislocation, there are formal differences between the adaptations which Kafka’s minor German imposed on standard German and the disturbances respectively introduced into Russian and English by Tsvetaeva and Armand. Kafka’s relationship to standard German is minor by default, by being born a foreign agent into the belly of a mother-tongue, his parasitic patois digging into the great German tradition, not unlike the ghetto-derived African-American signifyin’ English. In both these latter cases, despite ghettoization, there is still a native contiguity with the majoritarian vernacular, a proximity, even intimacy, which contaminates from within. By contrast, the emigrant’s relation to the mother tongue operates by distance and separation. And this alienated language is not only “frozen” in a conservative usage, deprived – as it is – of the living-breathing colloquial mutations of common parlance but it also undergoes an immigrant localization to the extent that it becomes porous to its host language atmosphere and absorbs its 17 18

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 12.

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host’s characteristics, taking on grammatical tendencies, phraseologies, local word-concepts, etc. Spanglish is one example of such a sustained linguistic inter-invagination. In Russian, a common example would be the Brighton Beach-speak which Mayakovsky mocks in his devastating lyric lampoon, “American Russians:” the conversation of a Kaplan and a Petrov is peppered with translated appropriations as well as transliterated Americanisms, along with a few Odessa-Yiddishisms for good measure. The result is locally entertaining but insignificant. Marina Tsvetaeva and Louis Armand use the prosodic possibilities of migration in an altogether different and, as Deleuze and Guattari like to reiterate, “sober” register. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s demand for a revolutionary relationship to “one’s own language,” I will pinpoint some of the minoritarian traces lingering in the major languages of these poets, as remainders of the real deterritorialization of an immigration which generates currents of destabilization in two major literary traditions. The remnants of the Czech language within the Russian of Tsvetaeva and the English of Armand are not unlike the concrete traces of a yesterday in the texture of dream content; both are points of entrance, footholds for a broader analysis of psychic (dis)organization. In that regard, identifying the prosodic mechanisms that “tear” away elements of a minor language and force them into a major tradition of “great literature” (turning it minor in the process) will allow us to chart a new course through the highly disorienting, disarticulating and uncanny poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and Louis Armand. “What Kafka does in his room,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is to become animal and this is the essential object of the stories.”19 These metamorphoses allow the author “to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone…”20 In this regard, it may be worth mentioning that the name Kafka is a homonym of the Czech “Kavka” – a “Jackdaw,” the bird which served as a pictographic emblem for Hermann Kafka’s firm, clarifying for us Franz’s highly ironic suggestion that his father was “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice…”21 Becoming 19 20 21

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 35. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 13. Franz Kafka, “Letter to his Father,” The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 101.

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animal for Kafka was then a double imperative of owning up to the family name and escaping it, an obligation to spread his Kavka wings but also to take flight by crawling into a hole (entomologically savvy Nabokov suggests that Gregor the bug possessed wings under his hard segmented shell).22 Becoming animal was not articulated as explicitly by Tsvetaeva as it was by Kafka, perhaps because she took her animalism for granted, ubiquitously stressing the corporeality of her spirituality. By a coincidence though, in one of her early, typically romantic poems she does metamorphose into a Jackdaw, and this instance provides a productive point of comparison with Tsvetaeva’s later, mature Prague period: Суда поспешно не чини: Непрочен суд земной! И голубиной – не черни Галчонка – белизной.

Don’t rush to try: An earthly trial’s fragile! And don’t dove-white – Blacken – the jackdaw chick.

А впрочем – что ж, коли не лень! Но всех перелюбя, Быть может, я в тот черный день Очнусь – белей тебя! [1920]

Or else – go on, if you insist! But having loved them all, Perhaps, on that black day I’ll rise – more white than you!23

This is Tsvetaeva’s characteristic moralistic position, assumed throughout her oeuvre. The poem insists in the most ethical, categorically imperative terms on the spiritual necessity of what is conventionally immoral. It doesn’t take any special poetic sensitivity to vulgarity for a Russian ear to identify the verb “перелюбя” (pe-re-lju-BJA, “having loved,” a more literal translation is “having loved through”) as expressing a positively irreverent attitude towards “love,” especially in its perfective aspect (“having done the loving through”) and in the context of “them all” (“всех”) as a transparent euphemism for “всех 22 23

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Metamorphosis,” Lectures on Literature (London: Picador, 1980) 259. All translations from Russian are my own.

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переебя,” (pe-re-e-BJA, “having fucked through them all”). The psycho-somatic homonymity between “loving” and “fucking” is clearly intentional because the Russian language allows for the articulation of love without the fornicating association. In fact, Tsvetaeva had to resort to the elasticity of the Russian grammar to perform this link: the verb “to love” is “ljubit” and “to fuck” is “ebat” so it required the prefix “pere” and the perfective adverbial participle suffix ending “ja.” In any case, sexual necessity was Tsvetaeva’s explicit theme in her art and, indeed, in life. One of her most habitual expressions of this position can be gleaned from the “Epistle” of her “Phaedra” cycle (1923), written in Prague, in which she intones Phaedra’s excruciating, incestuous desire for Hippolytus: Slake my soul! (Cannot, without caressing lips, Slake our soul!) Cannot, clasping lips, But clasp Psyche, a fluttering guest of lips. . . Slake my soul: and thus, slake lips.

The missive is signed by Tsvetaeva in the guise of “your / Insatiable Phaedra.” Such spiritual and carnal insatiability is at once the cause and the effect of Tsvetaeva’s excess of lyrical intensities. The jackdaw poem manifests Tsvetaeva’s scandalous, Byronic romanticism as well as an uninhibited, confessional attitude – irreverent and exhibitionist – that is unique in the history of Russian poetry. On the other hand, beyond the indecent subject matter and the occasionally convoluted word order, Tsvetaeva’s poetics from this period are fairly uneventful. She reproduces conventional rhyme schemes and typically Russian mellifluous syllabics. Even such tropological antics as pe-re-liu-BIA/pe-re-e-BIA conform to the standard diapason of sonority from the Russian phonotype. We need only to note the steady alternation of consonants and vowels to appreciate the full bodied, unobstructed, poetic flow of Tsvetaeva’s production before her emigration to Prague. In this regard, we might gesture towards the Russian tradition’s general disposition to formal conservatism. Even Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s radical semantic breakthrough into trans-sense (заум/zaum) is comparatively conventional in their adherence to the standard sonic fabric of Russian; the transsensical “дыр бул щыл” (“dyr bul shchyl”) is an extreme semantic Ð67Ï

proposition expressed in entirely familiar sonic-phonic devices. We have to take Kruchenykh at his word when he boasts that “there is more national Russianness in this quintain, than in all of Pushkin,”24 even claiming that “the poem was written to underline the phonetic side of the Russian language. It is characteristic only for Russian.”25 STRČ PRST SKRZ KRK. (“Stick your finger through your throat,” Czech tongue-twister)

Tsvetaeva’s immigration to Czechoslovakia in 1922 marks a stylistic threshold in her poetics in terms of content, rhetoric, metrics and strophics. This difference is a well-documented development in Tsvetaeva scholarship and she herself insisted on it by entitling the collection of her poetry written in the wake of her emigration, After Russia, a chronotope which identifies the deracinated character of her mature work. In addition, where even Khlebnikov’s and Kruchenykh’s radical trans-sense holds fast to its linguistic Russian nationality, in her post-emigration poetics, Tsvetaeva subjected the Russian language to a Czechization, minoritizing and deterritorializing it to the sonic core. Although the Czech and the Russian languages share Church-Slavonic roots and a great number of common stems, this commonality only serves to set off their difference. In other words, the foreignness is not so absolute as to be incommensurate but just foreign enough to estrange, disambiguate, and de/compose into atonality the mellifluous fluency of literary Russian. What strikes the Russian ear submerged into a Czech speaking milieu is the comparative prevalence of the consonantal phone; at the extreme, Czech possesses a number of entirely vowelless constructions, some of which have evolved a vowel in Russian, for example: plť/plot (raft), prd/perdet’ (fart), prst/perst (finger), smrt/smert’(death), srp/serp (sickle), vlk/volk (woolf), vrch/verkh (top), čtvrt/chetvert’ (quarter). And even while the majority of Czech vocabulary involves vowels, there is a high frequency of consonantal clusters 24

25

А. Крученых и В. Хлебников, “Слово Как Таковое, О Художественных Произведениях” (A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov “Declaration of the Word as Such”), http://www.silverage.ru/poets/slovokaktak.html Нечаев Вячеслав, ”Вспоминая Крученых...” Минувшее: Исторический альманах 12 (1991): 383

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which are strange for a Russian ear and laborious for a Russian tongue – “zmrzlina,” “vrchmezi,” etc. Tsvetaeva’s sonic texture undergoes a marked transformation during her Prague period in the direction, I argue, of Czechization, obstruentization, assibilation, affricativization, general consonantalization and, ultimately, the deterritorialization of the Russian phonotype. In a nine poem cycle, “Trees” (1923), dedicated to “My Czech friend, Anna Antonovna Teskova,” Tsvetaeva begins by improvising with the word “sush’” (dryness) and continues to amass a discordant sibilating mash spreading through the entire cycle: shestvujshchij, zhivopleshchushchuju rtut,’ rushashchejsya, pleshchushchie, kupal’shchitsami, tishajshem, topochushchikh, roshch, veshchaja vest,’ veshchajshchij, mchashchikh, pyshushchikh; and this is just a fraction of assibilation in the poem. The result of such perpetual obstruentization is a truly labor intensive reading but also, paradoxically, an acceleration of the speech current. Dryness here is not just a metaphor but a procedure, a physical condensation of sonic matter. Tsvetaeva wrings out the fluidity from Russian poetry, solidifying it, crystallizing it and smashing it to bits: “терпеливо как щебень бьют” – ”patiently as gravel is struck.” Tsvetaeva’s Prague poetry is beginning to heat up and burn the Russian language with the friction of fricatives: “This is my heart with a magnetic spark – tearing the meter” (‘rvyot metr’). And in the poem, “Poet,” she says as much herself, “the comets’ path is:” Поэтов путь: жжя [zhzhya!], а не согревая, Рвя, а не взращивая – взрыв и взлом ... [rvja] [vzrashchivaja – vzryv i vzlom]

The poets path: burning not warming, Tearing, not husbanding – explosion and break-in

In the poem, “Ophelia – in Defense of the Queen,” where Ophelia tells Hamlet: “It’s not up to a virgin – to judge / Passion” and “Prince Hamlet! It’s none of your business / To judge febrile blood,” the poem ends on a consonant ridden, parched monosyllabic rhyme, vslast’ / strast’ (relish / passion), extending its desiccation to the entire syllabico-symbolic field of desire. Generally, Tsvetaeva’s poetry begins to fill up with words containing a high consonantal count. Often this requires Ð69Ï

uncommon grammatical devices, rare forms of pluralization, prefixes and suffixes, archaic usages of Russian harking back to Church-Slavonic, contextually unusual declensions: kratche, chustv, ust, vest,’ lzhej, snast,’ vetr, mstit, mchis,’ svist, skrip, vzglyd, dshcher, blud, vglub,’ esm.’ There are, of course, too many such constructions to list, but the overall texture is laborious and viscid, while rapid, irrepressible and uncanny in its familiarity in strangeness. Tsvetaeva plunged the Russian language into schismatic chasms articulating it to the edge of disarticulation: “вчувствовывается в кровь” [vchuvstvovyvaetsja v krov’] can be translated as something like “to keep sensing into blood,” the imperfective aspect prolonging it to infinity. The first word is nearly unpronounceable – note the barrage, or better yet, the barricading battery of the seven v’s, first obstructing the flow with extremely hard transitions of vch, then vst and then a tongue twister of vo-vy-va. The accent in vchuvstvovyvaetsya is on the first syllable; one has to continue to expire through the rest of the five syllables. In The Gift, Nabokov mentions that reading Pushkin expands the reader’s lungs and, with that vital image in mind, I would say that reading Tsvetaeva collapses them, dislocating one’s tongue in the process. Tsvetaeva is all about collapsing, condensing, generating energy, forcing tension, squeezing intensity out of language. What Brodsky says of her “Happy New Year” (“Novogodnee,” a long poem on the death of Rilke), applies to Tsvetaeva’s entire post-emigration production: what the reader “is not at all prepared for…, no matter how many times he may reread “Novogodnee” is the intensity of the monologue, the purely linguistic energy of this confession.”26 The texture of Tsvetaeva’s mature work is entirely paronomasiac: “Esm’ ya, i budu ya, I dobudu / Guby – kak dushu dobudet bog” – “I am, and I’ll be, and will get / Lips as God gets soul.” The archaisms tend to reflect Czechisms even to the extent of macaronic punning, for example, getting back to the “becoming animal” theme, in the “Poem of the End” (part 9), Tsvetaeva promises her lover, who is abandoning her, to tell him the secret of all women: I’m no more than an animal Wounded in the anima

Я не более чем животное, 

26

Joseph Brodsky, “Footnote to a Poem,” Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Ferrar Strauss Giroux, 1986) 199.

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(Wounded in the abdomen) (Wounded abdominally)

Кем‐то раненное в живот. 

Literally the text says “I’m no more than an animal wounded by someone in the gut.” But the Russian zhivot – stomach, gut, abdomen – in its archaic usage, has the same meaning as does the contemporary Czech život, life. So: wounded into life itself, wounded into the womb. In Tsvetaeva’s repertoire, a wound is a lingua-sexual organ, a labia, and what wounds it is its constitutional lack of fulfillment. In “The Poem of the Mount” she refers to herself as “рана сплошь,” “rana splosh’” (“a wound all through”) and in the poem, “Crevice” (“Rasshchelina” – note the tightness and friction created by the “s” – “shch” transition), she tells another lover “in me, you sleep [spish] as in a deep wound – this icy slash is tight!” In “Signs” (“Приметы”) Tsvetaeva writes, “I recognize love by pain / The whole body length” and “As if a field in me had been breached / For any lightning thunder,” “As if a burrow had been dug inside me / To the core, where it’s black,” “I recognize love by the slit [shcheli], / No! – by the trill / The whole body length.” This, then is the Tsvetaevan version of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal” and “becoming woman,” both of which require a “body without organs,” or in Slavoj Žižek’s rearrangement of Deleuze’s “BwO” – an “organ without body.”27 In Tsvetaeva’s canon, we might decide that the “organ without body” is reduced still further. The organ itself is a wound, becoming a “wound without organ,” a pure intensity of desire. The density of Tsvetaeva’s body-verse, already ripped asunder by her signature prosodic device, enjambment (out-jamming and out-jabbing both Mayakovsky and Pasternak), reaches a degree of compactness at which it begins to crack – manifesting dashes at every turn. Tsvetaeva’s punctuating dashes are as ubiquitous as Emily Dickenson’s and Brodsky has it that “Tsvetaeva, like no one else, indulged in the use of typographic means of expressing subordinate aspects of speech.”28 Brodsky goes on to identify the function of Tsvetaeva’s dash as something outside of any direct grammatical role, as a device by which she “crosses out a great

27

28

Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004). Brodsky, “Footnote to a Poem,” Less Than One: Selected Essays, 214-5.

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deal in Russian literature of the twentieth century.”29 Although the dash was present in Tsvetaeva’s writing from the beginning, in After Russia it proliferates, even penetrating discreet words, breaking them up. Placing dashes within single words, Tsvetaeva severs them, dismembers them into uncanny mutants, giving linguistic part-objects the status of full autonomous entities – ”wounds without organs”. Ne obshchupana, ne kuplena, Polykhaja i plja – sha,

Not probed-groped, not bought, Flaming and pran – cing, –

–

Six-winged, war – m-hearted, Between shams – prostrate! sheer presence, – Not asphyxiated by your carcasses, So – ul!

– Shestikrylaja, ra dushnaja, Mezhdu mnimymi – nits! – sushchaja, Ne zadushena vashimi tushami, Du – sha! (220)

With her mature poetry, Tsvetaeva thus strikes out/strikes at the unity of twentieth-century Russian poetry, placing the Russian language under the sign of erasure, dashing through its obligatory/superfluous grammatical constructions – lacerating the connective tissue of her language’s body. Á, Č, Ď, É, Ě, Í, Ň, Ó, Ř, Š, Ť, Ú, Ů, Ý, Ž PŘÍLIŠ ŽLUŤOUČKÝ KŮŇ ÚPĚL ĎÁBELSKÉ ÓDY. (Czech diacritic pangram)

The discussion of Tsvetaeva’s belligerent, insubordinate punctuation offers us a useful transition to the work of Louis Armand. Armand’s poetry takes off, in certain respects, where Tsvetaeva’s leaves off. Distinguished by its aggressive recourse to typographic concreteness, Armand’s prosodic texture exhibits an arsenal of punctuation marks, editing symbols (words struck through, variants offered), censoring devices (blotting out), calligramics, experimental spacing and layouts. This thorough29

Brodsky, “A Poet and Prose,” Less Than One: Selected Essays, 182.

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going insistence on the material axis of poetry moves us yet another step further towards a radically visual verse form, one which forgoes much of the sonic impact which Tsvetaeva preserved. Yet just as Tsvetaeva’s consonantal saturation displays echoes of the Czech phone, Armand’s graphic punctuating practice eerily reflects the dense diacritics of the Czech alphabet. Where the pronunciation of Czech speech creates an uncanny (strange but familiar), deterritorializing effect on the Russiancentered ear, the Czech diacritical alphabet creates an uncanny, deterritorializing impression on the English-centered eye. Deleuze and Guattari mention that speech generally deterritorializes the mouth, which is an organ of eating. By the same token, writing deterritorializes the eye, the organ of vision. Czech, like English, uses the Latin alphabet, but its copious supplementary diacritics defamiliarizes Czech (to outsiders) even beyond the standard incomprehensibility of a foreign language. One way we may begin to gain a point of access into Armand’s poetry is to consider how the complexity which inhabits the vertical axis of the Czech diacritical system is projected and duplicated within the horizontal axis of his strophe: … (a note scored into the margin the wrong way up > it is only through symbols that the real can be imagined)

In the margins, perpendicular to the above text, is the note: it is only through symbols that the real can be imagined is “imaginable”

[PP §XXI, 1000-4]

The real is inaccessible but, as an image in the symbolic register, it is nevertheless “imaginable.” The imaginary real, ocular as opposed to oral, is the paradigm of Armand’s symbolization. The accent shifts, in an intermedial move, from the conventional orality of poetic narration onto the visual field of notation. In the following example, Armand has “place names loom up” in a landscape so that the sonic substance of the name is presented as an optical phenomenon:

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place names loom up & disappear – apparitions : grain bins erupting in dull conflagration / slaughter yards stench of silage / diesel – the urine-coloured eyes of dead cattle leering from irrigation ditches / dried-up & fissured orifices of planting ^steeled against the seed-drill^ night under barbiturate cloud patterns – … [PP §XXVII, 1219-25]

These two examples (above) – more or less random ones – are from Armand’s book-length poem, Picture Primitive (2006), which is presented in the form of a unfinished manuscript complete with marginalia and marginal notations, blotted out passages, blank lines marked by dashes, underlining, text boxes and a panoply of punctuation marks, including carets and slashes and daggers and a slew of parentheses and brackets (square, curl / braces, angle / chevrons). The effect of such saturated graphic texture is a high degree of optical disorientation. The punctuating marks defy their standard function of organizing and clarifying linguistically generated meaning, reverting to their etymological logic of puncturing, pricking, much in the sense described by Roland Barthes (in relation to photography) of a punctum piercing the surface and studium of signification.30 In “jeu lugubre” from Strange Attractors, Armand plays on the association between punctuation and puncturing, evoking “the gill-like puncture marks / to describe both a verbal & organic form” (SA 46). Then, in the poem, “Discourse on Method,” from Inexorable Weather, he presents “dark eyes / punctuating / monotony” in a context which symbolizes the concrete topography of his poetry: the plain too is endless & white it seems though sometimes yellow or red broken at irregular intervals by the mallee & boreheads – dark eyes

30

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 57-9.

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punctuating monotony [IW 45]

This too is a landscape scene (a privileged topos in Armand’s repertoire), in which the optics of visual perception materialize and remain suspended in a difficult silence, the demanding hush generated by the emphasis on plasticity. Even the word “monotony,” although it stems from the phonic spheres of “tone” (a fundamental attribute of sound), is itself a metonymic derivation from the Greek tonos, “a stretching” (for example of a string); Armand’s monotony extends, stretching the scenery into a “seenery.” The sound that does intervene in the poem (“the slow, in- / sistent drone of / ‘tensile wires’”) intones its “Discourse on Method” “like something fanatical, / absurd” (IW 45). The examples I have offered (above) should begin to give us a feel for how Armand’s “envisioned” poetic texture exhibits an English infiltrated by Czech elements in a manner reminiscent of Tsvetaeva’s deterritorialized Russian at the very same time that it opposes Tsvetaeva’s enduring auditory sensibilities. Armand’s experiments in typesetting, formatting and layout drive us still further into the visual. Except for the opening sentence, Armand’s novel, Menudo, is entirely rendered in lowercase letters, without a single chapter or paragraph break. There ensues 141 pages of uninterrupted, unrelenting textuality, a tortured text of broken sentences: “a cracked membrane. dead skin. a toxic slough of discarded matter. language, used up, a dark viscous flow. wading through it. further and further. if only to reach the other side” (M 73). The “dark viscous flow” of language – this, in a nut-shell, reveals the paradoxical intermediality of Armand’s procedure – an amalgam of mutually exclusive, antipodal substances; for the phonic “flow” of speech in poetry, like music, is, in its sonic essence, a temporal phenomenon while notation is concrete, calligraphic, a “dark” mark on the page, spatial, plastic, and finally, atemporal – like painting and sculpture. This paradox is most evident in the oddball genre of the calligram, in which the text of a poem is molded into an image. Michel Foucault points out that “the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and

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to signify; to look and to read.”31 However, Foucault adds, the resolution of these oppositions is illusory. The gestalt (which every calligram seems at first to promise) between saying what it shows and showing what it says vanishes under scrutiny: For the text to shape itself,… the gaze must refrain from any possible reading… The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates… [T]he calligram never speaks and represents at the same moment. The very thing that is both seen and read is hushed in the vision, hidden in the reading…”32

Armand: 4. but let us return to this subject: the destruction of form – piet mondrian

[below the

fire the

escapes avenues are

concerto

a beginning

with piano

all the keys pressed

so

down

that each

is

31

32

note re

Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983) 21. Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, 24-5.

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leased anonymously...] [“Gravity’s Aspect,” §4, IW 38]

The last section of Armand’s four part cycle, “Gravity’s Aspect,” is a calligram. The epigraph to the poem is a quote from Piet Mondrian: “but let us return to this subject: the destruction of form.” The poem itself is shaped into a configuration reminiscent of Mondrian’s “Pier and Ocean” seascapes, especially the very earliest studies (1914) belonging to the series. Each line in Armand’s poem consists of a single crossed out word, which appears in different locations, creating an optical effect of swarming and shifting. Overall, the image forms an unstable oval text placed into square brackets, intimating the rectangle of a frame or a canvas. The dispersed spacing of the words challenges the reader’s trained inclination to proceed by the normative, linear organization of consecutive word order. The eye gets disoriented; it is difficult to determine which way to read, where to look, what word comes next. The fact that each word is crossed out further diminishes its legibility. Whereas Tsvetaeva’s obstructionism was focused on the phonic level of the signifier, Armand upsets the scopic regime of reading. The physical intricacy of interpreting Armand’s calligram complicates Foucault’s initially neat division of the calligram into two distinct media: image and word, the visible and the readable. In Armand’s homage to Mondrian, we can plainly see (by barely seeing) that the words of the text have not been liberated from the image even in the moment of successful reading; the graphism does not dissipate but perpetually intervenes into the text, the mark invades the word, maintaining a permanent, obscuring hold. The image is not “hidden in the reading;” rather, it permeates and deterritorializes it. On the other hand, the image, as Foucault so poetically puts it, does, in fact, hush the text: what is “read is hushed in the vision.” But if we persevere in working our interpretive way though Armand’s image, navigating its graphisms and viscous blanks so as to finally arrive at the semantics of the word, we learn that this poem (rather uncharacteristically for Armand) is precisely about sound. The words signify “a / concerto” of “the / avenues” (another nod at Mondrian one thinks, evoking his last completed Ð77Ï

painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43)). The “piano” concerto, lodged in this (un)readable text, consists of one massive discordant chord – all the keys pressed down simultaneously. And this chord, in the synchronicity of all the keys, is the opposite of the diachronic unraveling which constitutes musical and poetic compositions; instead it frames a paradigm of spatial organization defining the self-synchronicity of the image. Returning to the epigraph and its subject – ”the destruction of form” – we can ask: what “form” is subjected to destruction in a poem which is a calligram, and therefore a reconstruction (of Mondrian’s destruction) of form, a re-formation (of a de-formation)? Leaving aside the exegetical role of the calligram to offer an ekphrastic synesthesia, where painting is rendered as music (a kind of reverse-engineering in this case since the boogie-woogie concerto was already painted by Mondrian) – leaving that aside – I will suggest that Armand’s project has been an enduring experiment in purging poetry of phoneticism, hushing the sonic aspect of the signifier, disavowing the phone and valorizing the mark. Armand is a form-alist, properly not metaphorically. Armand’s references to painting and sculpture, photography, land and seascapes, to visuality (in general and in principal) are everywhere in his poetry: eye & no syllable jutting from a sunken fosse of skull syllable & no eye in the seneascence after dusk […] an estuary’s shadow graph forming in mute pre-dawn the surface (is) not enough (to contain everything visible) in the naked eye: further down a consciousness arches its claw [“Entrance to the Sea Port of Desire,” IW 42] Ð78Ï

the landscape marks only the incessance of procedure – the narrow band of a depthless field running out of contexts – shot-reverseshot in relentless pursuit hunted by the lens – [“Land Partition: 8 Sections,” §1. IW 11] the distant shores beyond the sign, graphemic in red sacrificial ochre, salient – & monumental, dominating the horizon [“Land Partition: 8 Sections,” §6. IW 13] … white spaces of thought condensing & coagulating inscribed in a closed figure …

[“Incessant Acts,” IW 18]

… reprocessing depth of field out of the filmic sequence (ambivalent to geo-political espacement?) – cubist landscape or nature morte: the unrelenting, paranoiac tableau [“Loci Memoriae,” IW 20] a snapshot, prague […] a city of eyes suspended in blank meditation

[“Camera Obscura,” IW 32]

There are, of course, many more examples. Inexorable Weather begins with “concrete primal naked forms” (“Utzon”) and continues with the scopic references throughout: “the city’s Polaroid gaze” (“Loci Memoriae”), “remote etymologies wink / conspiratorially” (“Biodegradable”), “a geometry of consonance” (“Gravity’s Aspect”), “photoselfportraiture” (“Erosion Mimics a Frame”). Even rhetorical figures are literalized as plastic shapes: “rhetorical figures silhouetted against / the liquid mineral sky” (“Untitled Abstract [Red, Black]”). Armand’s most common Ð79Ï

figure—strewn across his writing—is the character X. For example, “x marks literalization of distance” (“Erosion Mimics a Frame”), or “a train pulling away from the platform at x” (“Simplex Munditiis”), or “an archaeological report – telling of the x / you’ll never locate” (“Moving Averages,” Malice In Underland33). This figure—a cross—is a pure graphism, a sign designating at once a precise spot and an unknown entity, independent of its vocalization. The most utopian gesture in this direction occurs in “Gravity’s Aspect,” part 3: a black block is presented, a palimpsest of a text so dense that not even a peep emerges from it. 3.

fig. I. “choisir d’une masse incompréhensible un seul détail speculatif ...”

[“Gravity’s Aspect,” §3, IW 36]

33

Louis Armand, Malice in Underland (East Brunswick: Textbase, 2003).

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…a trompe-l’oeil in which all the elements are calculated to heighten the sense of impenetrability–though everything is “in the mind,” the illusion is concrete, the architecture solid [“anatomy lessons,” SA 68]

Muting, hushing, silencing the oral, Armand has shifted the load of signification from the acoustic vehicle of the voice to the graphic medium of the eye. The visual propensities of Armand’s work can be read in several ways. First of all, the silence disengages the poetic tradition from the sonority which romantically identifies the poet with singing birds. Armand’s practice quiets this convention within textuality, while clearing a space for its own performance. Yet a second aspect of Armand’s quietude is psycho-philosophical. What Žižek says of the Argentinean writer, Alejandra Pizarnik, also applies to Armand’s writing: The primordial fact is not Silence (waiting to be broken by the divine Word) but Noise, the confused murmur of the Real in which there is not yet any distinction between a figure and its background. The first creative act is therefore to create silence – it is not that silence is broken, but that silence itself breaks, interrupts, the continuous murmur of the Real, thus opening up a space in which words can be spoken. There is no speech proper without this background of silence...34

We have seen Armand performing this very silencing by imaging the il y a of the Real in the Symbolic order of writing. Žižek goes on to quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?”35 Armand’s poetry makes the same demand of listening with one’s eyes, of pure reading. Foreclosing the acoustic incantation of the signifier, Armand’s poetry operates on the level of the signified, as a sign-language. While the acoustic signifier perpetually shortcircuits its own auditory materiality (Tsvetaeva is the master of such short-circuiting: ne zhil – nezhil, don’t live – caress), mystifying, supplementing, sabotaging the referent, transcending it, the poetry of the signified is immanent to the referent. It is a poetry of a sign-thing, a matter of listening with one’s eyes: “the midnight boustrophedon / ploughing its tusk into uneven furrows / 34 35

Slavoj Žižek, “Burned by the Sun,” Lacan: The Silent Partners (London: Verso, 2006) 224. Qtd in Žižek, “Burned by the Sun,” 224.

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“paternalistically” chiding all who do not know / the collected works of enola gay” (“Picture Primitive”). The performative aspect of language is the promise that on the other side of the signifier, beyond its soundscape, is the signified which means. Holding language to its promise, the poetry of Louis Armand takes the word at its word. Armand’s latest book of poetry, Letters from Ausland36 begins, with the section Burning Section, by returning to his Australian origins, the “sunburnt country” as Dorothea Mackellar has called it, in all “[h]er beauty and her terror.” “It would be intriguing to see Australian culture” writes Pam Brown in her review of the book, “from the viewpoint of an Australian writer who has lived in Prague for over sixteen years and this collection of poems reflects that perspective.”37 At first glance, it seems that Armand, having quieted the space for his poetic vision in previous books, is beginning to let the auditory seep in: “The migraine purrs. Morning shouts in its familiar drawl. / A dry meniscus rings the eye, thickening over it, caul- / like. And how the dumb horrors laugh” (“Something like the Weather”). The purr, the drawl, the shout and the laugh—this is the unarticulated il y a of the sonic static, the white noise, the sound mass of the perpetually present primordial void. Containing that void is the visual paradigm of the symbolization of the Real, which remains Armand’s dominant element: “Open the text-mirror and / enter a room. Someone has vomited a mess of symbols on the floor.” And ending the same poem: “the message is all that matters - / the secret rendezvous, the indecipherable text” (“Melbourne, Night (Albert Tucker, 1974)”). Armand’s revisitation of Australia returns us to the issue of emigration, real deterritorialization and its linguistic manifestations. What does it mean to be born in the country founded as a penal colony whose Anglophone origin is the language of convicts, a convict language? Is the convict Cockney a minor Anglophone? Is it comparable to the minoritarian status of the Prague Czech-Jewish-German of Kafka? Deleuze and Guattari claim that “one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization” and they promise that “you haven’t seen

36 37

Louis Armand, Letters from Ausland (Sydney: Vagabond, 2011). Pam Brown, “Book Review; Louis Armand; Letters from Ausland” forthcoming in Southerly Journal of the English Association (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2011).

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anything yet…”38 Armand’s extreme gesture of deterritorialization moves beyond the radical dislocations performed on their respective languages by both Kafka and Tsvetaeva. For Armand dislocates the very materiality of the signifier, creating an interinvaginating imagetext, a sign language perpetually struggling to keep its word.

38

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 321.

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JULES MANN

The Farnsworth Project May 1997 in Prague. My month long sabbatical made possible by the generosity of friends affording me not just a place to stay but an insight into this breathtaking, often unintelligible, definitely surreal and sometimes melancholic city. My main guide, companion and translator was the poet, artist and musician Vincent Farnsworth, who had moved to the Czech Republic from the Bay Area in 1996, and was now based in Prague with his partner (Gwendolyn Albert, Editrix of Jejune: America Eats Its Young magazine which ran from 1993-2000). Vincent had recently applied for an ecumenical title in the spring of 1997, so was very nearly to become Reverend Feedback. He introduced me to a religious icon store on Ječná which I think was his eventual source of the white clerical collar; the title would allow him to perform weddings and to front his band with this new appellation. Jejune magazine was about to go to print, and what a joy it was to visit the kind of proper lead printing press one could only dream about in the States by the end of the 20th century. As we leaned over the massive type-setting machine Vincent negotiated with the printer about font choice, spacing, and – intrinsic to Jejune magazine’s flow of text – artwork. Every act is a creative one with Vincent; he is the most absorbed in the present tense of almost anyone I know. This gave the wanderings through the streets, parks, cafes, bookshops, ecumenical stores, paper supply shops, art galleries and bazaars an underlying hum of purpose. Anything could become part of an ongoing collection of phrases for his writing, sounds to experiment with for his music, or objects to enshrine for future creative material. During that month in 1997, Vincent and I talked incessantly about the fallacy of the much touted reputation of Prague as the Ð84Ï

Left Bank of the 90s. It wasn’t just talk – as a serious practitioner of poetry, music and art (and curator/editor fostering the work of other artists) long before moving to that part of the world, Vincent had the perspective of carrying on this work and he could only do so with a growing sense of irony about contributing to this “Left Bank” mirage. It was in his nature to ingest as much of what was going on around him culturally as possible, both in English and Czech. It was eye-opening to me to see how little others engaged in this way. With the exception of a few well-respected international literary journals based in Prague, the sense of Americans in particular claiming a cultural Mecca had deeply disturbing overtones of yet another form of easy colonialism. Though it never materialised in final form, for several months afterward Vincent, Gwen and I batted an article back and forth by fax – yes, those were the days – and post. In a letter dated June 1997 Vincent gave it the spicy title of “The Left Wank: Myth of an Ex-Pat Literary Scene in Prague.” It takes living outside the States first as an option, then a necessity – during the Bush years – and now as a preference, to understand the political criticism that Vincent expressed in our correspondence throughout the last decade. His close connection to the writing scene in New Orleans, via Andrei Codrescu and Dave Brinks, fuelled his/our fury at the handling of the flooding disaster there in 2005: “seeing all the things I sometimes said during diatribes about the USA come true. Can’t-do gov’t, third world country, collapsing infrastructure while resources go to war.” His perspective is more than theoretical, as he has experienced the residue from regions of conflict after spending a summer working in Kosovo, and gained insight into the difficulties of life in Ukraine after a visit there in 1997 (“the purgatory that forgot heaven” he called it in the poem “statuesque”). He has become increasingly more active in the anti-war movement and human rights over the years. In 1999, when Mánesův Most featured contemporary metal moiré sculptures, I marvelled at their beauty during a visit and Vincent became obsessed with them – he composed the bridge figure poems, and wrote in a letter to me “on the how of the meshiness, well you see all my life I have been pursued by the Moire Effect.” His chapbook with Lavender Ink, Immortal Whistleblower, was published in 2001 and there is something really very Vincent Ð85Ï

about the fact that a reference and link to it appears on iblower.com, (“one of the internet’s premier sites for information about blowers of all kinds. Whether you’re looking for leaf blowers or snow blowers, superchargers or turbochargers, you’ll find what you want on our site”). An idle search on the internet throws up Vincent Farnsworth as the inventor of a time-of-flight mass analyzer. “In one embodiment, the concurrent motions of the ions in the direction of the linear axis and along the equipotential field lines about the linear axis define a substantially helical ion trajectory.” A scientific doppelganger, no doubt, of our Vincent Farnsworth who writes in “poem with a ruler”: “ran with a ruler over my head to / measure the air.” More recently, Vincent is included in the internet magazine Big Bridge under the section titled “Old School Poets and Poetrics.” Gee that makes me feel old! Immediately, Andrei Codrescu reassures me by blogging “a little up the ocean, in Prague, Vincent Farnsworth makes the cacophony of the band rehearsal next door into a manual for gracefully ageing.” Vincent also writes scintillating reviews which are a true contribution to the genre. I found in the Prague Daily Monitor “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey,” reviewed by Vincent with a typical leading line “Part biography, part history-skim of UFO flicks and the Cold War, part technical geek-out and, ultimately, a love story, this tragicomic documentary delves into the lives around the Russian inventor of the first electronic instrument, still the only music-making device played without direct physical contact.” And, as anyone who knows his music knows, one of Vincent’s many sources of magical sound.

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LOUIS ARMAND

Vincent Farnsworth & the “Resistance of Medium” With only two small volumes to his name and occasional publications in magazines like Idiot Tooth, Exquisite Corpse, Mike & Dale’s that, even when they were in print, were often difficult to find, the reputation of Vincent Farnsworth has nevertheless spread widely among poets both in Prague (where he has lived these last fifteen years) and abroad, including notably Tom Clark, Pam Brown, Bill Berkson and Andrei Codrescu (the last once referring to Farnsworth as “the sage of Prague”). As his forthcoming volume of selected poems, Theremin (spanning a twenty-year period),1 attests, there’s good reason why Farnsworth’s reputation should have preceded him. Farnsworth first arrived in Prague with long-term partner Gwendolyn Hubka Albert in 1995 after living for a year in the South Bohemian town of Tábor. He and Albert had established a magazine two years previously in Oakland, California, called JEJUNE: america eats its young which appeared biannually and continued until 1999, becoming an important vehicle of the postrevolution “Prague Renaissance,” publishing a mix of writers like Alva Svoboda, William Talcott, Spencer Selby, Alexander Zaitchik, Jenny Smith, Theo Schwinke, Robert Bly, Jules Mann, Robert Bové, Eileen Myles, Lydia Lunch and Ed Mycue. As often focused on issues of civil rights as it was on new writing, JEJUNE published articles and interviews dealing with the rise in neofascism and the plight of the Czech Republic’s Roma community. Number 8, for example, carried an interview with Nazi-hunter Lubomír Zubák, about the cover-up over Lety concentration camp (a camp for the internment of Roma and other ethnic and political undesirables, exclusively operated by the Czech collaborationist 1

Vincent Farnsworth, Theremin: Selected Poems (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011).

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authorities throughout World War II),2 along with an interview with Petr Uhl, former dissident and (at that time) Czech Commissioner for Human Rights. JEJUNE was avowedly grungy in its aesthetic and outwardly anti-establishment in its political orientation. Tim Rogers, reviewing Jejune for the Prague Post, compared it to the mimeographed zines produced out of New York’s Lower East Side in the ‘70s – Ted Berrigan’s C, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You, and Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair.3 Farnsworth, the journal’s managing editor, divided his time with being a soundinstallation artist (founding the Pazvuky Noise Project with Ukrainian musicians Vitalii Sevcuk and Serge Dalek) and, beginning in the late ‘90s under the stage name Reverend Feedback, frontman for the cult band Blaq Mummy (“a little up the Ocean in Prague,” Codrescu wrote in a 2003 opinion piece, “Vincent Farnsworth makes the cacophony of the band-rehearsal next door into a manual for gracefully aging…”).4 Throughout the latter half of the 90s he also organised a string of reading series around Prague. Farnsworth’s first collection of poetry, Little Twirly Things, was published by Ed Mycue’s Norton Coker Press (San Francisco) in 1992. In the poet’s words, it attempted to map a concept of “deep poetics,” fusing “the contemporarily relevant and political with perennial truths.”5 In 2001 he published a second collection, Immortal Whistle Blower, with Bill Lavender’s lavender ink press in New Orleans. Both collections were short and gave little indication to outsiders of the scope of Farnsworth’s activities, either as poet, organiser and publicist of the Prague scene, as musician and sometimes screenwriter (Tesla Electric, for Czech director David Ondřiček, and Monster Movie), or as an underground curator (throughout the nineties, Farnsworth collaborated with locallybased artists like Karl Bielik and Igor Tschai, and was instrumental in setting up shows of artist’s work). Over the years Farnsworth has also been involved as a human rights activist and advocate for the Roma community in the Czech Republic and in Kosovo – his notion of “deep poetics” sometimes suggestive of a restatement

2 3 4 5

See Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak, Paul Polansky (Prague: GplusG, 1998). Tim Rogers, “Jejune: Angel Heir or Devil’s Advocate?” The Prague Post, 16 December, 1998. Andrei Codrescu, “The Penny Post,” Gambit Weekly, 29 July 2003: 13. Qtd in Bill Lavender and Dave Brinks (eds.), “Death Interrupted: A Colloquy of Words from New Orleans,” Big Bridge 14 (2006): www.bigbridge.org/BB14/.

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of the ideas of New York art critic Harold Rosenberg, defining poetry as a medium in which the poet acts. In a world ruled by cosmic terror, as Ortega y Gasset once put it, the question often arises as to the so-called “political” function of poetry. There is no doubt that in important respects Farnsworth considers poetry as a social act and as an act of engagement, not as glib pre-/post-millennial agitprop, but as engagement with the “medium itself”: to “realise” the metaphor, the res poetica, in a critical stance that always takes language, discourse, into account, upsetting the tendency to a status quo (poetic entropy). In conversation with Jim Carroll, Ted Berrigan once risked the claim that “there’s no such thing as a dilettante poet”6 (contrary to what currently passes as the norm in the US poetry industry and its various franchises / “male american poets with predictable fears” [“poem to look out”]). Like Berrigan, Farnsworth adopts a stance and employs a language that constantly evades expectations of easy resolution, recuperates the marginal and “unpoetic,” exhibits a “spare, reductive intensity” while disabling conventional sign systems founded upon a whole era’s somatic clichés. This is not “political” poetry in any straightforward sense, engaging high pathos, moral outrage, inspirational facetiousness or hectoring vigilantism. Farnsworth assumes in his poetry a stance that is always critical by virtue of riding the edge of a discourse that always threatens to collapse (has already collapsed) into the degree zero of farce. Again Ortega comes to mind: “to be a farce may be precisely the mission and virtue of art,”7 holding up a cracked mirror, so to speak, to History. Echoes also of what Tom Clark, referring to the work of John Wieners and Jim Carroll, called “the romance of damage.”8 Farnsworth: lies allowed; in love and war and unreasonable demands in fact if you pursue love you might get war, or

6

7 8

Ted Berrigan, “Discussion apropos ‘Songwriting and Poetry’ with Jim Carroll, On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living, ed. Joel Lewis (Jersey City: Talisman House, 1997) 106. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helen Weyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 47. Tom Clark, “The Romance of Damage,” The Poetry Beat (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1990) 133.

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if the fascists shoot tear gas we will cry (softly) anyways [“amerika’s top forty”]

While Farnsworth’s early poetry has its roots in the Bay Area scene of the late 1980s and owes a debt to the social vision (if not stylistics) of Lucille Clifton, there are difficulties in figuring Farnsworth as an “American” poet, even an expatriate-American poet. In 1996, Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal had wanted to include Farnsworth in their anthology American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, but like partner Gwendolyn Albert (also a poet) there’s a strong resistance in much of Farnsworth’s writing to the seductions of national identity and the prescriptions of an “American” poetics (the American Tree syndrome), especially in the post-Cold War environment of the nineties, defined as it was by successive US foreign policy misadventures. While equally not a “Central European” poet, Farnsworth’s radical urban-cosmopolitan stance (his work veering at times between the grotesqueries of Švankmajer and the techno-poetism of Karel Teige: the urban here signifying a zone, a nexus of cross-cultural encounters defined on a daily and personal basis, not a geography therefore but a kind of praxis) puts him in close company with Pierre Joris, the long-time proponent of a “nomadic poetics.” Like Joris, Farnsworth’s poetry – though in different ways – détournes the exclusionary/singular logic of the state-political as handed down from Plato to Stalin and a raft of lesser emissaries. The political, for Farnsworth, is always a dimension of the poetic, of poiēsis. Which is also to say, of a social praxis (the two terms are interdetermined: praxis here is always already a poiēsis, and vice versa). It is important, in any case, to recognise that a “social dimension” of poetry in no way corresponds, for Farnsworth, to a compliance with (or mere antithetical rejection of) social norms or expectations, or even the norms and expectations of social critique as established within the sphere of (specialised) political discourse or political activism. pigeons shit all over everything people curse in many languages yell guano bravo author the world becomes coated and hidden with words Ð90Ï

the terrible mistake of language the only thing worse is fluency [“dalek bird poem”]

Simply put, poetry as Farnsworth sees it affects a social dimension by virtue of what it is, not by what it obliges itself to become in service to any kind of formalised thought (“fluency”), even of “revolutionary” thought. Here one is reminded of that famous (and opportune) pronouncement of Trotsky, published in the August 1938 issue of Partisan Review: art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very existence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic essence has its laws – even when it serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only insofar as it remains faithful to itself.

Farnsworth’s preferred register (deflationary, ironic, trivial, “unpoetic”) in any case throws into doubt the conventional resources of so-called engaged poetics (endlessly anthologised in step with each latest catastrophe).9 …little bits of the bikini atoll finally come down to demand justice… [“particulate matter that my job is to arrange”] …war is a crime so i only bleed for peace…

[“spring”]

…i read a CIA psych warfare manual while listening to bootlegs… [“she wants me”]

But Farnsworth goes beyond the fraught position of an irony assumed as a “mode of understanding,” in the direction of that seemingly most non-political of poetics espoused by Frank O’Hara, in whom Sartre’s “austere personal morality” of the artist (“the chosen poverty, the refusal of early success, the constant state of dissatisfaction and that permanent revolution which he wages 9

Reminding us, if ever we needed reminding, that violence and caricature are complimentary attitudes.

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against others and against himself”)10 is transfigured into a diminutive and apparently off-handed “personism.” But this transfiguration is not a contradiction: the “permanent revolution” waged by the artist/poet is bound to fail (and this is perhaps the perennial truth of which Farnsworth speaks vis-à-vis his “deep poetics”). The task is not for poetry to legislate by decree, but, as it were, by example – to paraphrase Beckett: to fail, to fail better. (It is not for nothing that for many years Farnsworth’s work-inprogress was, precisely in this spirit, entitled Appointment to Fall.) And yet, note well, this poetic temperament is one that is in tension with the alienation of contemporary “mass culture,” not its product (no tragic view of history). I’ve seen Lux Interior come out in gold with a bottle down the front of his lamé and yanking the almost-empty accidentally pry out his dick saying Love Me, Love Me What else Jello Biafra, a nylon stocking stretched over his face bleating about the toast of Reaganism buttered with dead rock stars and the legendary stench of their bipartisan recording studios before a riot at the Democratic convention in San Francisco set off by the very plainclothes police he had just identified by their tie dye

10

[“twenty years of No Future”]

Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Artist and his Conscience,” Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: George Braziller, 1965) 215.

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While Farnsworth’s work doesn’t invite sentimental intervention it also exhibits impatience with many of the critical normativities of our times, in particular with those poetries which remain shut up in the old forms of conscientious “neo-avantgardism” and are, as Ortega complained a generation ago, exhausted and the worse for wear – above all in their hankering after a sense of moment. …political American poet stands up in the back call for hungerization of english literature a communitarian steps over a body mumbling family values and decline of morality… [“poem to look out of”]

The close affinity that exists between Farnsworth and writers like O’Hara, Berrigan, but also Clark and Brown, is in part reflected in their common rejection of the self-fetishising of an institutional “neo-avantgardism” (that herd of independent minds) that shares with the resurgence of Anglo-American lyric egoism an utter vapidity of purpose. There is a sense of writing against the altered and depleted meaning of the “social” and the “subjective” which characterises much of what passes for poetry today and represents, in essence, a static continuation of the mass-cultural kitsch-mentality decried by Greenberg and excoriated by Marcuse in his critique of “one-dimensional man” (Farnsworth: “but MTV is public television”). Kitsch, in Greenberg’s argument, “is all that is spurious in the life of our time.”11 And if we allow this statement to resonate as Greenberg intended, we can appreciate how the open engagement with kitsch by O’Hara, Berrigan and others, represented a political action – a type of re-expropriation and détournement (to “realise” dead metaphors) – which resonates equally in the work of Farnsworth where “emotions stretch between two people” like “rubber frying; on the stove” [“amerika’s top forty”]. Consider the following: a “loner” and a “loser,” fbi stakeout took him out. his own rod and home in the comedy. someday comes the photo with his smile, local page one hot mile of speculation, could’ve been healed with neurolinguistics, 11

Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) 9ff.

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dianetics, selected buddhist olios. a sanctioned and normal-common american way out: barricaded condo helicopter loudspeaker come to the door with a gun refuse to put it down. son, I’m calling to say when I get home I’m going to punish you.

[“downtrodden downloaded down”]

What comes out in Farnsworth’s performance of these texts, and which is evident throughout them, is a particular intonational quality which is at once idiosyncratic and flat. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is. Indeed, Farnsworth’s poetics is built upon a type of affective contradiction, between poetico-political engagement on the one hand, and the resources of boredom and entropy held up as a mirror to the great disillusionment stemming from the politics and poetics of the 1980s and only reinforced during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Farnsworth’s writing arrives at a point of symbiotic tension between Rosenbergian action and Greenbergian flatness, while at the same time eschewing the claims of either subjectivism or formal purity. It is as if Farnsworth had set out to demonstrate that a poetics which rejects “illusion of depth,” so to speak, respecting (in Greenberg’s terms) the “flatness” of language, is thereby able to surmount the limitations of a poetics preoccupied with the political signified. descending the here of the hole filling with the there of the sea as found in the oxford english dictionary [“not long (after creeley)”] 6. wrong way went the wrong way carrying the wrong sign and the natives are not friendly. they want to buy your hat for the high price of your head. maybe they’re only kidding. Ð94Ï

you didn’t ask to be here, but it’s rude to say so. hopefully they won’t notice that your same silhouette now means you’re leaving bringing your absurd tool to another uncomprehending land. [“Poems written to the temporary statues on Manes Bridge in Prague”]

“Deep poetics,” as Farnsworth has it, is not an illusionism, and consequently not a mimēsis in any simplistic sense. It is the sensation, the “intonality” of language-as-surface-effect and not of a secondary signified, that concerns us here: the resistance of medium. As in Cézanne, flatness exacerbates “depth,” becomes a critical-analytic action: flatness at high volume. this is light rays, rage against the t-shirt machine, a chuckle at the poison – corporate, governmental voluntary, human natural church sponsored, music videoed computer enhanced alternative for sale for free force-fed unavoidable [“twenty years of No Future”]

This is perhaps nowhere more evident in Farnsworth’s work than in his seventeen-part serial meditation (quoted in-part above) on the biomorphic installations of Lebanese artist Nadim Karam and Atelier Hephastis. Karam’s “Prague Project,” a homage to Kandinsky and Kafka comprising temporary large-scale sculptural installations on Prague’s Manes Bridge in 1997 (“in dialogue with the baroque sculptures on the historic Charles Bridge”) shares elements of Farnsworth’s concern with the tension between action and flatness.

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1. looking for fabled stability the youth of today are doomed Socrates said for they read too much… [“Poems written to the temporary statues on Manes Bridge in Prague”]

Karam’s figures, constructed from prefabricated interlocking mesh, are at once non-naturalistic and yet formally allusive, in the way Kandinsky himself spoke of as “literary” in the appeal of nonrepresentational art to fable.12 For Farnsworth, it is this fabulous aspect of the medium itself which is both most disturbing and most resistant, in that it evokes a social dimension of language which is not that of a communication. The flatness of Farnsworth’s text at times almost seems in itself to resist communication, yet without ever succumbing to the appeals of pure abstraction (“a rubberband man frying on the stove” [“amerika’s top forty”]). The “difficulty” of the work is similar to the difficulty of reconciling the fabulous and non-naturalistic elements of Karam’s biomorphic “figures,” mirrored in the difficulty of visually “locating” the sculptural object itself within or against (as in a picture surface) its environment. In the case of Karam’s “Prague Project,” there is the additional moiré-effect produced by the interlocking mesh construction, when perceived by a viewer in motion, for example. The whole work in a sense becomes an installation piece, not because it is physically situated within an existing locality (Manes Bridge), but because it acts as a type of matrix by means of which a perceptual environment is brought about – in an evanescent yet also incisive, generative and critical way. Existent situations are reconstituted, the banal gives rise to the fabulous, but by a surrealistic sleight-of-hand, but by a structural possibility realised through perceptual metamorphosis: just as in the social sphere, the tyranny of paradigms is most threatened by hitherto unrealised possibilities of seeing things otherwise.

12

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977) 49.

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2. formerly extinct combinations the amazing success of creatures once thought extinct to fill the room you’re sleeping in screech at you with a giant tongue as long as the mastodon of the body’s trunk would be out of the dodo bird alertness head signifies how despite the potshot attempts at eternal destruction taken by those already counting their wrinkles, forms of life, rows of eyes and even imagination spring up on the edges of the crater. [“Poems written to the temporary statues on Manes Bridge in Prague”]

Like Kandinsky and Miró, “form” (biomorphism) describes a clinamen, a swerve. In a nod to Rosenberg, we might say here that attitude becomes structure. And in the associational and permissive stance of Farnsworth’s language (as opposed to the formal rigour of a “pure abstraction”) we can see how the ironic, farcical and kitsch describes a “stricture,” since in each of these modes the work’s flatness achieves, or actualises, a heightened intensity (as it does, for example, in Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing”). 16. birdjoy joyous is the hummingbird on its visit to europe, prague, and sad is prague, europe, that does not know hummingbird. or it’s a new attempt at bat, again looking for table scrap, or the beginning of singing by flying mammals, or and vestigial wings by singing ones. [“Poems written to the temporary statues on Manes Bridge in Prague”] Ð97Ï

Like Rauschenberg, Farnsworth treats (narrative) discursiveness not as an element of illusionism, but as a textual surface-effect, its flatness corresponding to a resistance (e.g. of affect) which is the medium itself. As in Rauschenberg, we see that subjectivism is nothing more than a type of proscriptive grammar, whose conventional signs ultimately point nowhere than to stereotypes – emotional kitsch – which are already détourned. In other words, subjectivism is, of course, already a formalism. Like Rauschenberg’s “combine” paintings, Farnsworth’s poetry exposes the surface quality of affect, its arbitrary character, its narrative sleights-of-hand in the promise of interior lives (of its various fetish-objects and fetish-words). At the same time there’s a resistance to any reduction of poetry – by way of a countermovement – to a set of formal (so-called “abstract”) procedures which would seek in a sense to grammaticise poetry as a system – even as an anti-system – and thus re-inscribe the historical bracketing-off (or incarceration) of poetry as a catalogue of exceptions or deviations from the rule (i.e. of reason, communicability, the translucency of language “properly defined,” etc.). Poetry, of course, has always haunted the margins (and not only the margins) of the regularisable, even when its proponents have – at various times – sought to yoke it to one formalism or another, one task or another. The lesson of poetry, however, is that it is not a matter of choosing, as between one dogma or another, formalism or subjectivism, for the simple reason that poetry, poiēsis, is the subjective in language – not the voice of some transcendental ego or deus ex machina, or the Coca-Cola sentimentality for a sustaining “real” behind the veil of signsystem commodification (O’Hara’s “most dreary of practical exigencies”) – but the subjectivity of the medium itself… “Not just resemblance, but” as O’Hara says, with a gentle ironic stammer, “the magnetic otherness / that that that stands erect in the spirit’s glare / and waits for the joining of an opposite force’s breath.”13 If poetry names the subjective in language, it also – by virtue of this – names the mode par excellence of a “resistance” at the heart of the so-called political (for Farnsworth, poetics as social praxis is a praxis formed and articulated through the inner convulsions of a discourse in continuous re-evolution). Poiēsis, in 13

Frank O’Hara, “In Favour of One’s Time,” The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Random House, 1974).

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its fullest sense, is an undisclosed dynamism; counterpart of that entropic movement which is on the one hand called Literature and on the other Politics. It is the work of generative idiosyncrasy, iteration and permutation: it is the originary inassimilable element, the contrary of all that claims to be definitive or once-and-for-all, or what O’Hara called “downright forgery” [“Les Luths”]. It exceeds and contradicts the petty tyrannies of both the academies and the avant-gardes, as if (but of course only as if) it alone were the “conscience of our time”: not the voice of a moral rectitude society periodically avows belief in, but of everything at odds with a desire to impose-upon, like an imp of the perverse. It is the unruliness of the polis. It is the programme that succeeds only by failing… the microscopic orbiter he injected to fix his consciousness with a little psycho-surgery went bad, started strafing vehicles on neural highways and he had to poke into that blue vein something even smaller that will also have its own plan … so he programmed the NSA’s/NSC’s (nth degree) stratospheric broadcasting computer to randomly shuffle out words and it generated sonnets, erroneous theories and recipes for plaster of paris, the words immortal whistleblower forty thousand times [“they have arrived (to the music of Andrew Swartz)”]

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DAVID VICHNAR, GWENDOLYN ALBERT & VINCENT FARNSWORTH

Inter-View: “Threshold” Experiences I can’t imagine Prague without Gwen and Vincent. More than my failure to imagine, I’ll say that Prague was unimaginable before Gwen set her poetry & justice shop there, and Vincent began haunting Bohemia in his Nosferatu coat. Prague has a long way before being fully re-imaginable – first it has to bring back 350,000 Jews minimum, and to give full rights to the Roma – but thanks to generous and heart-warming work of poesy, music, and protest by Albert & Farnsworth, it stands a chance. – Andrei Codrescu, letter to editor, April 2010

DV: How has your life outside of your language, as it were, affected you as a poet? GA: Initially it was very productive. Not fully understanding the speech of the public space meant the language part of my brain was in limbo. The transition to a life outside of my native language also occurred at a point where there were a lot of experiences that I personally needed to process through poetry. In the very beginning, the English I did encounter was greatly valuable to me, whether it was through print, radio, or the speech of other people. Over time, as I became fluent in Czech, I began to understand every little thing around me and the limbo ended. Also, technically speaking, I was never truly outside English, as the relationships most valuable to me were with English speakers. VF: I would say it has been life with less of my language but not life outside it, since I spoke English just about everyday in Czechia and have not achieved fluency in your language. But still, just being surrounded at all times in public life by a different language, being shall we say partially immersed, did have a profound effect on me, made me ever more attentive to sound, to Ð100Ï

literal meanings and metaphoric ones, to the peculiarities of phrasings and the force of odd sayings, all making me wake up to what extent I was a pure product of America going crazy in Bohemia. How would you compare your experience of a Prague poet in the beginnings of your sojourn in Prague, and now, years later? GA: In 1994 I was writing poetry in a small town in South Bohemia, Tábor, and that experience remains one of my fondest memories. Vincent and I started a (Czech-language) poetry series including an open mic there and there was a lot of energy and participation, also a lot of amazement that we would organize such a thing without money being involved (great suspicion of our motives). The transition to Prague, which was basically an economic choice, inevitably meant meeting many more Englishlanguage poets, but there were only a handful who to my mind were interesting. We published them in Jejune. The very first time I ever came to Prague was 1988, and I returned in 1989 on a Fulbright and ended up participating in the Velvet Revolution as a translator, so when I returned in 1994 I was greatly focused on the contrast between my previous experience of the place and what it was becoming in the transition. When I first came to Prague it was the first European city that I had ever visited, and the shape of the streets, the age of the buildings, the green spaces, the river, were all just like diving into an ocean of aesthetic stimulation. Before that experience, I had not ever thought of myself as an “American” – if I had to think about it, and I was constantly forced to by the other foreign students with whom I was living (we were all housed together in a little enclave at a dormitory) – I probably identified myself as Northern Californian at the most. When I relocated to Prague in the mid-1990s, the “expat” scene was roaring and my identity as an “American” was pushed into my face even more by the fact that so many people from the U.S. were in Prague. In 1990s Prague, I think I spent about five years actively avoiding as much contact with “expats” as I could. One reason was a conscious effort to become fluent in Czech, but another reason was an outright antipathy that had to do with my own ambivalence about what it “meant” to be an American. That

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resolved itself after a while. The identities of “foreigner” and “Westerner” developed. VF: Let’s call it fifteen years later, and in my mind there’s a massive chasm of difference for me personally, poet or otherwise; my own individual changes coupled/mixed up with the changes in Prague/Bohemia during this time really make any comparison pretty difficult. Prague at night was a place with a couple yellow streetlights per block, black soot-colored buildings and my brain was also so murky that I just think of those old days as dark with gleamy bits shining on the cobblestones, but what those bits are remain unclear and shifting, maybe shiny wetness from fog or drizzle, maybe broken glass, maybe moldavite glowing through a fissure. Now that same street has the buildings painted like a wedding cake, and ground-floor stores that keep their lights on all night, it’s all lit up even if I’m not. I wrote more poetry in Prague in the first ten years and then it slackened off. Partly because what I needed to process via poetry had been processed, and also because I came to identify and want to avoid the egoism that comes from writing. In fact I didn’t write much for several years. So I really changed during my time in Prague and no longer self-identified as a poet, which before that I had done my whole life. I lost my identity in Prague, so to speak, which is a good thing. But now I feel that I can start again in poetry without being burdened by that submersion in egoism, because I now feel that inspiration and the poem is certainly exterior to me; I don’t take credit for them and I don’t see them as feathers in my cap. If my eyes can see the sun or the moon it’s not a tribute to my eyes, but a tribute to the sun, moon, and my ancestors who gave birth to me with functioning eyesight. So if I write a finished poem it’s a tribute to the world around me and to the constituted array of patterns that I have simply perceived. This ties in with your question because maybe life in Prague, its physical beauty, somewhat alienating and weird and sexualized human environment, devil-may-care social mores, liberating mass transit system, and cheap beer combined to affect me towards this vantage point. In other ways life in Prague in the 1990s and this century have been dispiriting, and maybe Czech was the wrong place to be, since in turning away from Stalinism, Czech society was herded Ð102Ï

into a consumerism and a semi-pseudo democracy like that found in the place I had left. So to see it grip this place, to see deadly pollution from the worker’s Communist factories being replaced by deadly pollution from private car congestion, for example – it didn’t reinforce my hopeful side. Neither did seeing the racism against the Roma here. A kind of overt, boastful, governmentsanctioned racism that existed in the USA from the 1930s to the 1950s, though it still exists in some parallel ways against Native Americans. The subtitle of the Král Majáles Anthology reads “Prague International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010” – are there, to your mind, any periods to be demarcated within those 20 years? Or if we speak of decades – the “golden 90s” as opposed to...? GA: I am really the wrong person to ask. I didn’t spend time in the English-language poetry scene the way others have. I think the accession to the EU in 2004 ended what was a very unique situation in which it was very easy for people from the Americas, for example, to meet people from the former Soviet Union in Prague. It is not as easy to be a foreigner from a non-EU country there now, for bureaucratic and economic reasons. VF: Not really. There’s a blurry line in there somewhere between when, from the outside, Prague was newly opened to the world and was exciting and slightly dangerous, and when later it became just another European destination as it is now, and when, from the inside, Praguers were interested/excited by the changes and new exposure to foreigners and when later they became indifferent. The concept of “renaissance” also deserves attention. Is there, in your opinion, anything in the expat writing in which a “re-birth” takes place of something that would otherwise remain dead? What did coming to Prague enable you to renew in yourself or in the background you came from? GA: My first visit to Prague was inspired by a fascination with life beyond the Iron Curtain and a desire to see for myself the economic and political system which we had been propagandized in the US to believe was the absolute inverse of “the West.” Secondarily, my ancestors on my maternal grandfather’s side had Ð103Ï

come to the US in the late 19th century from Bohemia, so there was a personal “heritage” pull there (although that has always been less of a conscious fascination to me). In 1989 when I “returned” on the Fulbright, I thought I was going to become a linguist. Instead the Velvet Revolution happened as part of the larger transformation of the entire world political order. I think people who did not live during the Cold War may never really understand how enormously mind-blowing the shift from bipolarity to multipolarity was for those of us who had been propagandized to believe in the Soviet Union as an implacable, solid, ultra-solid, “permanent” menace. What was “reborn” in me at that time was a fascination with minute-by-minute political reality and that fascination has not died to this day. When I “re-returned” in 1994, that fascination continued to be fed. VF: The publication of the Král Majáles Anthology is a definite piece in a corner of the mosaic of contemporary English language poetry. You would have to then discuss and attempt to quantify the state of poetry in the English-speaking world and whether it is living or dying to determine how important this is. On the one hand there’s the “The United States of Poetry,” which says it’s alive; on the other there’s “Flarf,” testifying to its death. For the effect on me personally, I think I answered this in the second question. My background entered into Prague like a frog entering a blender. I was born in the desert of Las Vegas, Nevada, on a military base, and grew up in California a few miles from the Mexican border and in sight of the ocean. I went to college and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before coming to Czechia, where I have now spent half of my adult life. The time in Prague with its gargoyles and curvy river with a bridge on it only for trains and pedestrians, St. Vitus and the television tower being the onetwo punch of the tall architecture, even the Dancing House – now I no longer feel so committed to any one place, and I can live anywhere with equanimity, at least for a while. How much interaction, in your personal experience, has there been between Prague Czech literary scene and the Anglophone community? There is the annual Prague Writers’ Festival, and then there is the monthly Alchemy, both largely, if not exclusively, attended by Anglophone audiences only. How much and what, in

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your experience, is happening outside of these institutionalised “encounters”? VF: I had very little interaction with the Czech literary establishment and limited interaction with the Anglophone one. The few Czech writers I know are not part of the establishment. The Prague Writers Festival is just as disconnected from English language writers living in Prague as it is from the Czech literary scene. Anyway I don’t have a lot of interest in hearing an author talk about writing, unless she has a strong political or sociological bent. I see DeLillo was there this year and his premise is that life in America is stressful and boring, so maybe I would be interested in hearing him spout off a little. Magor – Ivan Jirous – and me tussled during a reading by Andrei Codrescu that I curated in the 1990s. That was about it for my Czech literary establishment contact. I spoke to Fedor Gál and his son a bit, but given the unfortunate balkanization they are considered “the other” now, aren’t they, as Slovaks? I don’t really hang around writers. I don’t blame Czech writers for having no interest in the English language writers living around them, since by and large the Czech writers, even if they had a motivation or an interest wouldn’t have many ways to figure out which Anglophone was an Anglophony. What about other minority language groups, e.g. Prague German writers? Are Anglo-American expats alone in Prague, or do they feel there´s someone out there, together with or apart from them? GA: If you want you can meet someone speaking just about any language in Prague. I know there has definitely been a renaissance of Romanes-language literature. There was also a big scandal in the Czech literary world recently where some Czech male writer faked a novel by a Vietnamese female author, claiming it was the first Czech-language artistic output from a member of the country’s Vietnamese minority (which has been around there for 50 years or more now) and then he revealed himself. The other “foreigner” group that I personally interacted the most with were Russian-speakers from the former Soviet Union, and those people did and are still doing a lot of music and painting. There must be an art scene from the many refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus but I am less aware of that. Ð105Ï

VF: Well the minority group I saw most often were the Chinese and Vietnamese who ran some good grocery stores. The first friends I made in Czechia were the Russian-oriented Ukrainian artists in or connected to the band Elza, and I did get a sense that Russians and Russian-speakers (from the former Soviet republics) in Prague have their own things going there just as much as the English-speakers do. I felt more natural identification with some Russian/ Ukrainian artists than with most Czech ones, our backgrounds were similar, people with artistic tendencies to resist the evil empires we were from. The Czech world view is just so different from the American one in that way, with your ingrained premises about the smallness of your country, about how your language is spoken by so few, about the need to defend yourselves from larger forces all around while feeling trapped in a small place and needing to envy those all around. Now, let us speak about your own activist/artistic involvements. Gwen, could you provide a brief history of your civil society activity? GA: When Vincent and I were living in Tábor in 1996, I saw a news item in the local paper that President Havel was going to unveil a memorial to the Roma victims of the Holocaust in the town of Lety by Písek. A friend was kind enough to give me a ride there and I managed to witness that very first ceremony, which I then wrote a piece about for Robert Bové’s Grist Online. Through that piece, the poet Paul Polansky tracked Vincent and me down, and it was through Polansky that I met the Roma activist Lubomír Zubák, who now lives in Ireland, the Roma activist Čeněk Růžička, whose family perished at Lety, and Markus Pape, a German journalist and activist who has written the most definitive work on Lety to date, A Nikdo Vám Nebude Věřit (And No One Will Believe You...) – a book, by the way, that is long overdue for an English translation. Vincent and I and a few others tried and are still trying to help Mr Růžička get the industrial pig farm removed from the Lety concentration camp site. I don’t know how much help we have been, but we have done what we could to get the word out to the English-speaking world. And then began your involvement with the European Roma Rights Centre? Ð106Ï

GA: Yes, gradually at first, while Markus was working with them and helping them organize the litigation of the D. H. and Others v. Czech Republic case on the segregation of Roma children into schools for the intellectually disabled – the European Court for Human Rights found in 2007 that the Czech state had indeed violated their right to education. Polansky also asked us to come with him to Kosovo to teach English to Roma people in Serbian enclaves after the NATO intervention. I had never lived in a postconflict situation before and I learned quickly that while others might thrive in the lawlessness inherent in such places, it was not for me. That trip involved the start of work on another issue that has proven almost as resistant to change as the Lety pig farm, namely, the placement and abandonment of Roma, Ashkalija and Egyptian Internally Displaced Persons in lead-contaminated camps in northern Mitrovica. What about your activities in events on an international basis? GA: I have always been interested in human rights and social justice. In 2003 Vincent and I were part of starting American Voices Abroad to protest the impending Iraq war. Before that, when the IMF/World Bank meetings were held in Prague in 2000, I was considering joining the protests and I attended the international coalition organization meetings, which were pretty tense and full of a lot of distrust. At one of them a Czech lawyer let everyone know that there would be legal observers on hand to make sure the police behaved themselves, which would hopefully contribute to staving off any possible police overreaction, and I immediately offered my interpretation and translation services to that team of people. It was a way to contribute and be involved without directly risking attack or deportation (which sadly many of the international protesters in Prague did experience if they made it into the country. Some people were denied entry to the Czech Republic by police before they could even get on the train in Germany). Through that work I eventually became involved with the League of Human Rights and was elected their director in 2004 after working as a fundraiser and international liaison for them. I lobbied the key players in that organization very hard to get them to start working with the ERRC and other Czech NGOs on the issue of the forced and coerced sterilization of Roma women in the former Czechoslovakia and present-day Czech Ð107Ï

Republic – it had just come to light in Slovakia that such sterilizations were not just an unredressed part of the communist past but were ongoing, so I pushed for our lawyers at the League to investigate the issue in the Czech Republic as well. I left the League in 2006 but I am still working with the victims and with the ERRC on this issue, which has become part of the platform of the Open Society Institute’s Campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care (www.stoptortureinhealthcare.org). I spent most of 2010 researching the human rights situation of the Roma and Travellers throughout the Council of Europe (47 member states) for the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg – that research will be the basis for a report on that issue he should release mid-2011. Which gets us to the present day – what are you involved in now? GA: I volunteer with the Romea news organization on a daily basis as a translator and I have been or still am a board member with the following NGOs in the Czech Republic: Burma Center Prague, Persefona (an organization in Brno that assists victims of domestic violence and sexual assault), the Pramení arts organization, the Public Interest Lawyers Association (now called the Pro Bono Alliance), the European Network against Racism, Step by Step Czech Republic, and the Organization for Aid to Refugees. I was struck by the genesis of both your JEJUNE: america eats its young, a magazine you co-edited with Vincent, and your poetry, collected in Dogs and elsewhere. The former was first published by Oakland Press in California, then transplanted into the Czech Republic in mid-90s, Dogs was published in the U.S., but collected texts written during your first sojourn in Prague in the early 90s. Question that this begs is – how did this transplantation work, both in terms of its affects on your literary creation and publishing efforts? GA: I think the transplantation acted as a giant buffer or filter. People had to somehow find JEJUNE or it had to find them through the like-minded. They then had to take the time to send us work in the Czech Republic (we communicated by post only with people) and not everyone was going actually to do that. Then when we received the works, I think we valued them more Ð108Ï

because we were living outside of English and we also had more time to consider them because we didn’t spend time doing a lot of the things most people find themselves stuck with in the U.S., like driving a car for 40 % of your life. The magazine didn’t develop a following beyond a very small group of people, there wasn’t a lot of subscription activity, it was a labour of love on our part. Over time more European-related content and contributions got in there, and Vincent did one piece that attempts some Czech-English puns and other jokes that you would only get if you had lived in the ČR, it’s a fake art history piece, his inspiration was the often completely baffling translations he would be asked to proofread of similar works. For me personally, the best JEJUNE issue is the New Orleans – Prague issue, we found a lot of resonance with Dave Brinks and Bill Lavender there. Of your texts I’ve read, two poems stand out in terms of what this essay collection as a whole is trying to address: “(A) home (praha)” – here, Prague is put in brackets as, a) a precision of the vague notion “Home”; b) its alternative, one of its possible realisations, a hyponym, and is characterised as a space inhabited by the “passive, arrogant, polite people” – this is a strange blend of adjectives, what were your particular reasons for viewing the inhabitants of the city or the country thusly? GA: “(A) home (praha)” follows a previous poem called “home (oakland)” – each poem describes the sense of home I had in each place. “Passive, arrogant, polite” was definitely my experience of Praguers at that time, although not necessarily of “the Czechs” (and I think if I had written that 10 years later the “polite” descriptor would not have come to mind). I understand those who live in many a European capital usually get labelled by those outside the capital as “arrogant,” so I am probably not the first to observe this. The emphasis in that piece is on how everyone is focused on themselves while the environment deteriorates (“step from the crumbling buildings / in flawless clothing”). We took a sort of JEJUNE tour of the U.S. with a dear Czech friend at one point and her observation was that American houses were sort of a mess inside but the public spaces were well maintained, in contrast to what she saw in her home country. Of course these generalisations are just that.

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The other text on my mind is “Make Yourself Uncomfortable” – where the sense of “being lost” underneath the “rainy skies” again evokes what I suspect is your Prague experience, with its retrograde television culture and typical Czech passing of the buck (“that’s how it is / is not an argument / that’s how it was / also not”). What, based on this examination, do you/did you find the gravest maladies of the Czech soul (if one can indeed limit this to a particularly Czech phenomenon), what experiences did you base your diagnosis on, and what would the remedy be? GA: Actually “the television will not be revolutionized” is a joke, it is a reference to Gil Scott-Heron, who is an American musician and poet known for his spoken word piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which you should try to hear a recording of, because it is fantastic. I don’t know that what I am “diagnosing” is the Czech soul so much as the soul of the Global North at the end of a terrible century. If you want to talk just about the Czech experience, it is no wonder there are soul-maladies there, because every single generation during the 20th century lived through major societal upheaval and directly experienced the violent physical destruction of lives and of both the built and the natural environments: WWI, the First Republic, WWII, the communist putsch, the Warsaw Pact invasion, the Velvet Revolution ushering in the breakup of Czechoslovakia and gentrification/globalization. The remedy is to mourn and process the past and to keep the heart open so life can be enjoyed right now – really enjoyed and loved, which is not the same thing as being drunk or high all the time. One of the saddest conversations I ever had in my life was with a taxi driver in Prague who spontaneously told me that Christmas, for him and his family, was about exchanging receipts for the gifts they had already bought for themselves and the money changing hands. He knew there was something wrong with that, on a human level. He didn’t get what Christmas was for, he knew that. I’m not talking about religiosity, but about sharing love with people. You don’t do that with receipts – but that is not a “Czech” problem, it’s the problem of the “civilization” that is in place in a large part of the world today and furiously trying to encroach upon everywhere it has yet to reach.

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Vincent, apart from your collaboration with Gwen on most of the above, you have also been artistically involved with Andrei Codrescu, how did that happen and evolve? VF: In a nutshell, before I met Andrei Codrescu, I only knew about the legendary magazine he and Laura Rosenthal put out in the preinternet days, Exquisite Corpse. It was also scary to submit poems to because it included a section called the “body bag” listing all the poets who were rejected! But I eventually summoned the courage and submitted, when I lived in Tábor, and to my surprise it got accepted. This led to correspondence and meeting him when he came to Czechia in the 90s. I organized a reading or two for him in Prague, most notably in the old Jazz Club Železná along with another great New Orleans poet, Dave Brinks. This led me to an extended visit of New Orleans, where I considered moving to permanently, but eventually I went back to Prague. Besides that, I think our collaboration consisted of talking about poetry and participating in the group-poem writing technique that is in fact called “exquisite corpse.” Let’s talk about your poetry now and how it relates to what we’ve talked about so far. “Twenty Years of No Future” – though a poem of distinctly Anglo-American punk focus (Reaganism, KFJC, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, Rage Against the T-Shirt Machine), the “smudges / on the wall / from ashes / stolen off / the cremation” are juxtaposed with the image of “home taping samizdat / tamizdat.” This seems to me a direct parallel between the punk and the Czech underground as alternatives to their respective establishments that be, one that is not so often drawn outside of the music genre. To what extent did Blaq Mummy draw upon both? VF: Yes, a parallel was drawn, I have to admit. Blaq Mummy was inspired by the Czech underground in terms of bands like the Plastic People of the Universe. Before I came to Czechia I saw Pulnoc in concert in San Francisco. With our drummer Martin Rychta, we had a direct connection to the underground of pre1989 Prague, the musicians who dissented with long hair during the 1980s. But for me directly I am an American and I came from the punk zone, no-trend subculture of the USA, and from that radio station you mention, KFJC. So in terms of underground Ð111Ï

alternatives I was drawing more directly on Sun Ra, The Cramps, the poet Jim Carroll and his band, Magazine, The Pretenders, Husker Du, Pere Ubu, P.J. Harvey, Diamanda Galas and west coast stuff like the band X. But a lot of it was on the radio, like your fellow Central Europeans Einsturzende Neubauten. I saw Pulnoc in SF but I never saw Pere Ubu or The Pretenders until I came to Prague! Some of your U.S. poems published in RealPolitik (I´m thinking here of “the canyons of san diego” or of the “terrorist poem”) are very space- and place-specific, with most locales given precise geographical names (“Otay river,” “Oakland,” “Mission Valley”), which is a specificity that none of your Prague-written poems share (although there is the anthologized “First Snow in Tábor”). How is Prague “present” in your poems, if at all, and how do you feel about space-specific, localized poetry? VF: Sometimes you have to leave a place before you can write about it. So the very formal poems you cite were cases of that, me writing about the USA from the distance of Bohemia. You’re right, I didn’t get so specific about any Prague places. You see I don’t want to write place poems because something makes me rebel against that as a rigid form or a cliché, but then again I rebel against the definition of clichés or their devaluation. Which means if I go through a prolific phase again I am sure there will be some Prague place poems. If Prague does appear – as in one of your Big Bridge poems, “in the morning stretch,” where you do mention “treading prague sidewalk like a barrier reef / strangling bottle dragging it home...” – it is immediately exoticised through the barrier reef simile. In this poem, it becomes an almost incidental setting to a lyrical account of “saving a life” of a few half-drowned flies. How do you conceive of this connection between exoticism within the domestic, as most of Prague must have appeared back then, and of the fascination of your narrative poetry with the extra- within the ordinary? It seems your poetry shows these to be ill-conceived binaries... VF: The extraordinary is always within the ordinary, there is poetry in everyone’s life. Often in my life there are aspects of everyday Ð112Ï

circumstance that seem divine and fabulous. I did once attend a lecture by a supposedly reputable authority who said that the entire Prague valley glows with unknown radiation to the satellites taking images from space, and I think this must be connected to moldavite/vltavín. However I don’t think the barrier reef simile was an exoticization, it seems more a basic metaphor within a poem about the perils or pleasures of being a drinker. You’re right, I don’t think that particular tension, the exotic within the domestic, is a concern of mine, and it’s a problematic construct since the term “exotic” is fraught. Nothing’s very exotic to me, I’m from Las Vegas & California. Gwen and Vincent, let us now wind up with a couple of questions for both of you, on your relation to the context on which this book is focused. Name three (or more) Czech pre-1989 poets/novelists who you feel have influenced your work and elaborate on how/why. GA: Bohumil Hrabal, for his fabulous rush of language. Not Czech but Lithuanian / Polish poet Czesław Miłosz because he is the master. Eva Švankmajerová, whose surrealist novella Baradla Cave I translated, mainly because after translating that I am not afraid to translate anything. VF: Milan Kundera I guess counts as both pre- and post-, and I ate up all his novels as much as I could. Franz Kafka is maybe the most read Czech author, but that’s ironic of course since he’s now generally rejected by the Czech literary scene because he wrote in German. Definitely before I knew anything about Czechoslovakia I knew Kafka, and we took the term “Kafkaesque” into English. Mácha is a romantic touchstone and I participated in the annual informal reading at his statue on Petřín one year, reading a poem that riffed on Mácha and Žižka: when I die turn my love handles into candles and burn them for the cause of poetry and rock

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Name three (or more) Czech post-1989 poets/novelists who you feel have influenced your work and elaborate on how/why. GA: None so far but my aesthetic life has been greatly enriched by the Czech visual artist Petr Nikl, by the fantastic Teatr Novogo Fronta (Russian, Prague-based for a time), and by many, many musical artists, most recently we discovered the Roma band Parno Graszt. HOW SUPER! VF: Kateřina Piňosová influenced me. I had just begun to understand how surrealism is alive and well in the Czech art world when I met her and I saw how surrealism is not a bygone artistic phase but can be a way of understanding life. Kundera, as noted above, and Jáchym Topol has always been a presence. Magor Jirous was someone I identified with, as much as that’s possible, his attitude, his drinking. Again with Topol and Jirous, I know they are both pre- and post-, but I didn’t know about them till the 1990s. Have you had a particularly rewarding experience with collaborative projects between the two scenes, whether on paper or on stage? GA: I will never forget one of the readings we organized at the Jazz Club in Železná street in the Old Town, because Magor (Ivan Jirous) was there and in his cups, and there was a lot of punk spirit going on, and he continued to sort of heckle during the other readers after we got him offstage, and finally it was clear that some in the audience were starting to fear him, so Vincent went over and, to calm him down, sat in his lap, by which I mean, he sat on him as if he were a chair, and Magor instantly mellowed. VF: Well, on stage my main collaboration has been in music in the band BLAQ MUMMY, where I work with the poet Hana Langhansová, who started off singing in the band and now also contributes lyrics and helps write songs. Our bass player goes by the name Netopýr, which is Vampire Bat in English, and his real name is Vladimir Gartner. Finally, is there any, apart from the obvious linguistic one, particular characteristic that marks off the “expat” scene as a Ð114Ï

group, or should one speak of more or less independent individuals associated solely by means of their shared language? GA: Since so many people willingly hoisted themselves onto the “expat” meat hook you may as well use the term. VF: There are probably common experiences and motivation among the English language writers, but their work doesn’t show defining similarities as far as I know. I would have preferred it if we had similar concerns, I mean the US citizens, an awareness of our place in history, of the prison state the USA is becoming, of the military-corporate state it is, of its underlying nature as a borderline third-world country, where consumerism is stifling whatever soul exists, and how this was contrasted by and reflected in parallel aspects of Czech society. Although who can blame them/us, I often just wanna rock and have a good time, drink good wine and whiskey and spend time with my wife and try to forget about mountaintop removal and the massive war crime of the invasion of Iraq, about the USA being number one in prison population. I would be interested if you find any answer to this question, whether these writers as a group have anything in common at all.

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KATEŘINA PIŇOSOVÁ

The One Who Sits On a Hedge “The Great Dog opens her red eye, the river rises.” – Laura Conway

This is about a woman whose voice can let you experience the life of words swarming up into stories you would say you recognize somehow, but you can actually never explain why there is a certain familiarity in the songs-poems she unfolds before your eyes and ears, unless it is perhaps you or your ancestors or the ancestors of your ancestors she sings about. Her voice is strong enough to bellow in your ears and pulsate within your solar plexus. Yes, in the territory at the very centre of each person. Laura Conway finds the underground streams of energies that she traces back to their ancient sources. Thus she knows which tree the Minotaur’s red thread is tied to for Little Red Riding Hood to find her way through the labyrinth. IT ALL BEGAN IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY It was a dry state. It was a yellow house - the base all around of gray- and mustard-colored Arkansas stone overgrown by lilac bushes – you got drugged by the lilac – on summer nights snuck out and crouched – black as cast-iron – against those stones – waterstones - they sounded of a well – they sounded filled of water – it rung down and down – the trickle belling The yellow house was the last bit of green – and then the plains began – full open – flat and neat as a well-hung door – In this house you watched a man build a bookcase without any nails framed - with three wide shelves – When you sat with him watching - and asked: why no nails he said: you don’t need nails – and asked: how did you get here he told you: Shoe Leather Express. Ð116Ï

He’s probably dead now. He was old then. You don’t know how your mother made his acquaintance or why she asked him to – she was alone and made friends easy and often with odd fellows - she once invited a liquor salesman into the house because she was worried he’d get caught selling booze in a dry state – a photographer came once as well – and dressed you and your sisters up in white ruffled dresses and your brothers in littleman vests with clip-on ties - and stuck you five like dolls on a couch with your legs straight out and the soles of your shoes looming in the camera – It was a rent house. The family didn’t live there long. Then the family moved and took the bookcase with them. Night arches – in this sky the mouth the sex the red thread and the pillar – perseverate the body. Night frames – in this sky of false light worlds – rectangular – illuminates and cicatrices worlds. The first time you died you felt a warmth, a flood of goldenness as if you were glass the sun struck The second time you died the glass got stuck in your throat You moved around the corner. You moved to the white house with the blue porch. Your youngest brother was born there. Daddy was off selling toothbrushes and combs in Little Rock Memphis Oklahoma City. There was a pecan orchard in the backyard – beyond the pecans a bamboo patch – Down the block a vacant lot with a creek – you had two friends: a boy with a splayed inheritance of webbed fingers; a girl with a big, horribly swollen purple tongue from an illness no one ever explained – The afternoons : when you went down to the creek and caught tadpoles and put them in a dish and hunched over watching and waiting for them to pull legs from their sides – when the kindergarten teacher’s teenage daughter would call you and your sister into her garage and thrill you with her being a teenager and the radio playing “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and “Charlie Brown, what a clown…” – and pull down your pants and play with you and your sister’s private parts – when you and your sister went off to the rich part of town and industriously gathered armfuls of prize rose petals - enough to make an attar you had read could be made by squeezing the petals enough – when you and the big-tongued girl made tea parties with gumdrops and lukewarm water under the huge weeping willow on the front lawn Ð117Ï

– when your mother took you and the other four on long walks – to the Cowboy Museum and the reservations of the Five Tribes – as she was afraid and wouldn’t drive – and didn’t sleep very well when Daddy was away on road trips. The afternoons that informed you. The yellowjackets wove paper houses in the house joints. The wasps rose from the dry mud. The wind picked up all of a sudden and scared people and they came out of the houses and stood on their lawns yelling back and forth to each other about their roof holding – The red bird sang from the bamboo. The bees went crazy in the lilac blossoms. Upon the stone where sex writhes they smeared honey. How the old man across the street called the bees, captured them. When you sat with him watching and asked: how he said: It’s a trick made to look divine: shit on moss: the bees love it. How the old woman next door told you she “opened up” the state of Oklahoma. The porch of the new house was painted blue. When you scraped at the paint bubbles the heat made, they bled blue: it’s a good house, it survived the last big one. The blue got under your nails and you ate it. In the backyard were pecan trees – the four of you that could walk took bricks and smashed the nuts to get at the meat. Sometimes your older brother would get in a little fake car some relative must have given him - and pedal furiously up and down the driveway - but you can’t remember you or any of the others fighting with him for a turn. Beyond the pecans was the windbreak of bamboo. You hid here. Here was the fierce wind and the Chinese maiden and your greatgrandmother’s ghost. Here was the little girl in her red and green dress, before her murder years later by the dark man in the hansom cab on the Long Beach sandbar. Their invisibility made them truer than real. I know the geography of that place has a great deal to do with who I am but I can’t tell you how or why.1

1

Laura Conway, “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” The Return of Král Majáles, 243-5.

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WHERE THE STORIES COME FROM “I write because I have always felt compulsion, because I am most articulate within my world then.” (L.C.)

It can be the oddest smallest thing – a news story or something overheard that is the initial spark which serves as the base. Imagine iron filings, these small disparate things that gather together and over time become attracted to a magnet. Laura’s mind works similarly, as she puts it: How I write can sometimes seem like that, but takes a long time from the initial spark to when I know ok that’s it – it seems whole or “framed” now, so I will begin to shape or build it. “Geography” and “sounding” are important, too, in some way – I always know if the words, the section I’m working on, “sound” right, as if they were already there in my head, and I simply draw it out. Sounding – the way I hear, it is important both in writing and in then performing it. Geography and my life – having moved so often and to so many naturally overwhelming cityscapes, the Brooklyn and Levittown, the first little planned suburbia, then gorgeous natural places, The Great Plains, among legends of Cowboys and the hills of the Five Tribes with tornadoes and endless space. Then to Niagara Falls, this thundering, overwhelming force of water, staring into it, hearing them speak of “he went over the falls in a barrel” and thinking I wanted to emerge as I told my sister “bruised yet ecstatic...” and Canada and Mexico and Puerto Rico and places in the States as different as another country yet somehow always unstrange to me. Over many years my travels, even as a child, gave me access to the stories and myths of others, and, as my family was prone to in-house myth-making, we had a lot of pagan Irish gunrunners and illegal booze sellers with byzantine scaffolding running about and sailors, stowaways and several, as they called them, “illegal immigrants” in the family, so I enjoyed others mythmaking as well...but then also larger legends and myths. The Popol Vuh and The Book of The Dead, and The Aeneid by Virgil, and Gilgamesh, Canaanite creation myths and Navajo creation myths and the Old Testament - these all had a profound effect in the shaping of my personality. There are particular stories like Mahabharata and the Shiva cave in Kashmir or the Fish Mother from Lepenski Vir in former Yugoslavia that resonate within me, or Durga and Sarasvati and Kali – more benevolent aspects. They feel very close to me

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and it is the same attachment that I have to birds, especially swans – Sarasvati depicted as Swan. The “Poets” I love are really painters, Paul Klee and Goya, who move me as if they had some inner geography and language I react to instinctively.

THE ACTIVIST A rare experience of moving between many borders – “most artificial bridges” between countries, statelines, native reservations, between North and South East and West USA, moving to quite different places among many peoples – African American immigrants, native Americans, southerners and northerners, all had a profound impact on Laura and also how she sees the country: […] the “Americans,” the men and women, and watch these others watch myself among them. Some very narrow for having little experience with others or thinking each other exotic or threatening. I think that broader view of all kinds of Americans helped when I went beyond to other countries and is why I was involved from an early time/age with Civil Rights. I worked easily with black neighbourhoods in The South and poor white neighbourhoods... I worked for a basic decency and standard for all peoples, that is why I worked in Union organizing at different times. A lot of white boys and most in suits had forgotten John L Lewis push to organize the unorganized and in NYC and the southern States and even San Francisco, a lot of unions simply refused minority Hispanic or black workers or had their quotas and certainly did not make any big push to organize women, especially minority women. At first hand, I learned the larger civil rights - South Africa anti apartheid in the 1970s, tenant rights and grassroots organizing.

After coming to the Czech Republic in 1995, Laura conducted thorough research and field work from which emerged Report on the Status of Romani Education in the Czech Republic. It took 10 years for it to find its way to the European Court in the Hague. The judges agreed with the findings of her research. THE WORK Firstly, I would like to stress that the following text-collage does not include excerpts from all of Laura Conway’s work. Although I Ð120Ï

would have liked to have done so, it was impossible for me to have access to her complete work at the time of writing this text. If I were to state the main characteristic of Laura’s work in one sentence, I would spill out – it is her unceasing observation of the blood flow of the world; from moderate to abundant, to heavy, bloody rains and perhaps other kinds that I am not even aware of. She is sharp and honest, and her blood research is carefully evaluated by her fearsome voice. She knows very well what horror and fear are, for she sees the world unveiled. I think she carries an extremely heavy burden, like one of those that can never really rest and are out there, WATCHING everything, day and night, night and day. Like crows and owls. This is how she begins one of her texts: Hearing the dark rut, the first stars forming, the wind from Jutland: a clean tongue of wind after rain. The sudden light startles the mosquitoes. In the village it was like that. Air spawning water after the night rains. Thin lips intent on blood. And from the mouths of the girls, a warning song: Don’t cut the white birch in the forest The white birch in the forest is my body A book of blood in my lap. Opening this, a colophon of red: what is inscribed in a body.2

In her poetry, myths of the past seep through our thick air of the present to reveal the mysterious communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, so different in a modern man from his ancient ancestors, yet Laura belongs amongst those who comprehend the ancient mind. Therefore, she is able to narrate stories that combine it all – the blood line undisturbed, however, very often truly disturbing. You come from a long line of women who swim like fish Whose breasts and arms belong to the dark tangled sea. Who grew new fish in their bellies year after year.3

2 3

Conway, “The Well of Night,” Král Majáles, 251. Conway, “Bones.”

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The territories where Laura has lived are observed with a dedication that only a mind with deep insight can exercise. Laura gives us the geography of a woman’s brilliant mind and the story of the swimmer in the dark ocean. Each place she has lived in is portrayed through ancient as well as historical and current frames of time and events that blend totally and become palpable as if the people, the neighborhoods, the animals and the air were all being contemplated from within the reader’s or listener’s own memory. Here are a few excerpts taken from one of her earlier works: Book one: BREAKAGE […] The day began with us climbing down from the trees in Africa Bones hard as teeth taking the invisible language of the stars In the swamps Below the Columbia River Above the Hudson in the Cloisters of the Bronx Angel Trumpets fill the air Fragrant and poisonous […] They’re burning the wrong witch! among the radioactive isotopes where the road disappears driving Straight into the desert And the light burns the sky up And the earth shudders from the inside out There’s nothing left but us fish with a heart and a head and a gun Each element on earth has its own spectrum The same colors appear in space There’s the malignant blue house of the Southwest It’s simmering uranium lakes And farther out the frigid lavender twilight of Manhattan [...] MEMPHIS 1977 I flee into Ð122Ï

Egypt the night after death shatters the leader’s skull I follow the leader into the Land of Death I am no longer kind or decent standing on the banks of the Mississippi, the Major Aorta I will look I will not crouch in the lunchroom head between my knees” […] “Madam Curie is dead a long time alive with radioactivity Her teeth travel the world like an echo When she gets to her heart she bites down and the old men sail to France to play their horns Between-jobs music true and invisible enough to burn the players into another existence” NEW YORK 1985 […] There are panthers in the night sky Wolves in the soft arms of snow Lemmings close their windows on the delicate balance of nature Manhattan as Hungarian countryside Horns bleed brass Young girls cut off the heads of bears looking for princes4

It is Laura’s words that speak for themselves. No other descriptive writing or analysis can explain them better. Her words are simply moving like blood itself. They compose songs that need to be heard. Unveiled: Five.

4

Conway, Cities of Madam Curie (Cumberland: Zeitgeist, 1989).

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The women hung their dark braids by the bedsides. Slept like wind in the curve of a sail. The Polite Guard entered this village at night. With their Civil war. They did not remove their boots, they were not afraid someone would hear them. The women closed like four o’clocks to their sleeping men. And rose up the ghosts of their mothers, berating them: La Matanza! Nos abandonamos los recuerdos! All that held within. 41 kinds of trouble. This is a way. Of counting.5

SPECIAL COMMENT ON LAURA CONWAY’S THE MINISTRY OF STRANGE OBSESSIONS When reading “A Field Guide To Red,” I cannot help but think of continents spilling over into each other. The “Field Guide to Red” is part of a work entitled The Ministry of Strange Obsessions, based on an actual, but now defunct branch of Britain’s secret service M.I.5. The work has been in process and progress for 10 years. It is A Field Guide to the RED of war, myth, science, ritual, obsessions and events occurring within the transgression of time. Laura puts her readers into a trance during which their head nod slightly to the rhythm of stories that bear the excitement of discovery as well as a realization of the world’s true color; in moments of the highest tension, the readers are forced to put their head into their hands for they inevitably find themselves assaulted by the innumerable blood lettings of recent history, and specifically those that occurred in the former Yugoslavia. Sometimes the trance is disturbed by a curious intimacy between the mind of the story teller and that of the listener. Sometimes the readers/listeners realize that the secret of understanding myths (which dwell in the blood) is being revealed – and that is, in my view, the biggest treasure they receive. The following excerpts are taken from different parts of Laura’s The Ministry of Strange Obsessions, which consists of The Initial Interview and subsequent oral interviews between representatives of The Ministry (obsessors) and Ms. Scarlet who conducts the research into the field of RED. Then there are Internal Memos and the contents of the research itself, such as: Red Songs, Field Studies, Elemental Crib Notes, Properties of Red, Blood 5

Conway, My Mama Pinned a Rose On Me (Red Flower Ink, 1986).

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Addendums, Field Trips and Household Hints and many more other parts of the research. From “Using this Book”: RED is a territory of a chaotic universe. It is the most conspicuous and pervasive color in human experience yet its boundaries are not easy to define, as all but a sliver is invisible. This book is a guide to the most common forms and properties of RED; among them are the largest and oldest of living things, visible and invisible. […]”

From The Ministry of Strange Obsessions: Department 71753 Audio-Visual Archives Re: Tape Retrieval/Tape# 18.5.4/1 Application to conduct field work for A Field Guide to Red Introduction of Applicant (Ms. Scarlet) to General Council of The Ministry Ms. Scarlet, we have granted you 15 minutes in which to state your intentions…at this point you have…12 ¾ minutes remaining. Could we just have the definition? Of course, excuse me… Perseveration: The tendency of a set of ideas or feelings to stay on in the mind, e.g. a person is told to cut out all the letter A’s in some print; after a time he is told not to strike out the A’s but to strike out E’s: the perseveration of the first order causes mistakes. So also the perseveration of a tune of music “in one’s head,” and [in persons of disordered mind] meaningless repetition of a word or action. (Sound of raspberries, guffaws, banging gavel) The Ministry sees no difference between this and the term “obsession,” especially in regards the parenthetical disordered mind. We require further clarification. By all means. As The Ministry well knows obsession is a fixed idea which cannot be got out of the mind. My concern with RED is not singular nor fixed in the strict sense of obsession. Rather it tends towards a set of ideas or feelings, regarding a continuous expanding number of different arrangements of a certain number of things related to RED: some of which remain fixed i.e., I cannot get the equation: RED = Herschel’s warmest RED = Blood

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out of my head; however, this fixed idea does not stand alone; rather it continuously births further sets such as: Wine = Blood = Salt Salt = Sea = Her Shell (Herschel!) Herschel = Light = Fire Fire = Flour = Bread Bread = Body = Invisible Radiant Red Radiant Red = (infra x Doppler’s receding RED) = the Past The Past = Evolution = Creation/Destruction Creation/Destruction = (Blood + Salt) x (Sea + Fire) And so on and so forth. Thus in the vulgar equation: BLOOD (Salt + Sea + Wine) --------------------------------LIGHT or LIGHT (Fire + Bread + Evolution) ------------------------------------------BLOOD or RADIANT ENERGY (Fire + Body x The Past) -------------------------------------------------------WINE In each of these instances, RED, although not openly expressed, is the implicit function. These persevering “sets” of Red might be called simultaneous equations or more accurately – permutations.

From “A Field Trip to Red” #1: Lepenski Vir: an isolated gorge 100 km long Here the meandering Danube veers within the basin draws itself in Forceful fruitful a wondrous Leaping of fish On the shore of red limestone and porphyrite a finger draws itself out of the 6th millennium BCE: huge carved red-painted eggs red-smeared trapezoids remnants of enclosed red-smeared hearths And her: the red fish-woman, her bones of fishes You walk ruins searching for ruins Ten years after the siege Vukovar has not been rebuilt Ð126Ï

The Skaldic Tradition: Poetry associates with Blood associates whirls meanders: coming down river from Hungary A bone spatula bracelets of copper: evidence of “a marked intensification of spiritual life The curious absence of heavy fortifications and thrusting weapon sticks…” […] The earliest practices: salt the fish, the wound: of Vucedol where doves and coppersmiths awaited the return of Orion 5,000 years ago Blood associates with Salt: often common: refined for household use The small enameled kitchen pots dotting the Vukovar museum floor – I have the same style pots in my kitchen – are not part of the exhibition. They are placed there to catch the rain dripping from shellholes in the roof.

From “Field Studies” #3: RED: a degree of temperature at which the body radiates light BLOOD: Function: Waste, oxygen, hormones, are all carried by blood. transportation within the body, then, is one of the outstanding functions of the blood. [from] Elemental Crib Notes #1,#2 In the oldest stories a confusion between blood and salt: the taste of these: as if some great red fish rived long ago from the sea, deboned by the tongue. It was once believed blood is sea water infused with fire, the element of living heat. Blood blunts edges of knives. There is salt which preserves the dead, is accepted as substitute for blood. A covenant of salt cannot be broken. Ð127Ï

From Field studies #1: All around you an invisible Red far greater than the Red you can see

From “The Red & The Black” #1: The birds come with dreams The dreams come with the blood The blood comes with the moon Body moving out and beyond A blood boat leaking an ocean of blood A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow… Rising from the deep hollow place: from the right side blood bellows into the lungs from the left side blood flows out floods the whole body: O the little red light went off. Perhaps it is a lifetime of substitutions the wrong name rectified, wrong stories An emphasis on hands pulling swords from stone…

From “Interlude”: Month of ice I pack my father’s death pack it in A leaden box moving east of Prague A train just stopped: Stop without a station A human voice calling out its name approaching the least Refracted Ð128Ï

flat land wheat land of shades varying from crimson to bright brown & orange especially those seen in blood rubies human lips & fox’s hair: Out there over there Men scything Combing the fields Men gone red with the sun”

From “Blood Addendum” #2: Red has skills, an established geography The portal vein vs. the blood unstraightly to the heart A tape measure draped around the neck A mouth full of pins and blue chalk THUS blood is hemmed and harmed “What we have here is a phagocyte: a blood cell which destroys [EATS] foreign bodies…” the hands chalking it up: “Let ‘em go on killing each other, their whole history is nothing but blood…”

From Household Hints #1: To see Red: There is a tree at the center of the cold Northern earth upon which the earth revolves. Where the green and yellow lights splay in the moist electric air. If you are lucky, if the air is thin enough, once in your life you may see the red lights. If you see them, you know: Red is nature’s most beautiful color. This place is in all the old stories. And Dogs are chained to this tree, fearsome dogs who guard it with their lives.” “[…] There’s no sieve in my head which divides the explicit from the implicit.”6

A FEW MORE WORDS ABOUT THE FIELD GUIDE TO RED As I have mentioned before, The Ministry of Strange Obsessions is a work in progress. Laura has been writing and re-writing this mesmerizing text for more than 10 years, revealing in parts the story of her moving to the Czech Lands and staying on, despite 6

Conway, The Ministry of Strange Obsessions (2000).

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significant hardship, observing closely the confusion and terror of boiling blood within the bodies and minds of the diverse nations of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as well as investigating the situation of the Roma in the Czech Republic. In San Francisco, she was used to reading, agitating and singing in public for her voice to be heard, yet since her moving to the heart of Europe, her public activities became less frequent. I believe this was due to the fact that she was left to complete projects alone, or that certain projects turned into something different to that which Laura had originally envisaged. Thus Laura’s plenitude of energy and enthusiasm withdrew themselves from the public sphere into her solitary, highly powerful realm of poetry. It is my wish that Laura’s voice will be heard by many again and that The Ministry of Strange Obsessions finds a publisher, as it truly deserves to be out there. The Field Guide to Red has no comparison, it is the uniquely, powerful song of the one who sits on a hedge, touching the brain of the world with one hand and with the other, feeling its pulse. Built from the atoms of star deaths: our flesh, our bones, the iron that reddens our blood: as being the corpse of stars.

From “The Red & The Black” #3: Tonight there is clarity in the sky cleaned of stars. Suddenly nothing underfoot. I look down. Black ice shaped like a map of the world from the Age of Transition. Cracked on sorrow. Perhaps just cracked? A woman mops the stairs, smiles good evening. This is the difference between rent and pay. A slab of light across the courtyard – what I make of it: almost a god, inverted, desperate; almost a human… Rune thrown from the blue faux velvet bag, settling on the ground here: thurisaz the gateway the threshold: Cracking the spine: there is the White Book from Budapest: page after page of incidents, police reports, accounts of horrific brutality against the Roma. Sometimes there is a name there. Usually not. Usually an initial. To open the door: There is the White Book from Belgrade: page after page of incidents, police reports, eyewitness accounts, corroborated statements of massacre, mutilation, rape, gang rape…three countries…three countries with blood in the eye. Sometimes there is a name there. Usually not.”

From “Interlude cont’d” Ð130Ï

On an inexplicably warm March day D comes down the mud path through the old copper gates At the chipped table in the sun: red teeth, red tongues: Blood shimmers drowns bees Dogs throw themselves against the gates Through thigh high grass come men shouldering scythes we wade skirts boats filled with wild strawberries before the sough of the crescent razing our wake Weave laps of flowers into head wreaths Circling The sokol : falcon gone red with the sun shimmering green red pheasant startling even the cat the sudden violent moan high in the firs swallowing light Light gone inexplicably hard from the kitchen window the men struggle through hail bundling and hefting we knock the glass our hands call them in They come through the door red-faced eyeing our hips we Spilling strawberries, scrubbing What looks like blood from our skirts […] You were raised to believe this: You will – one day – be sung to death by the Banshee [Olr.: ben sidhe]: The Bloodless One of the dark mound. If you have been decent she will come gently, the song you hear will be filled with benevolence.

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DAVID VICHNAR & LAURA CONWAY

Inter-view: Mythmaking among Europeans DV: How, in retrospect, would you characterise your relations with the Anglophone Prague scene, or indeed with any other? You have always seemed to me a rather solitary figure, distrustful of groups or cliques of any sort. LC: I am actually not quite comfortable with being termed “Prague Anglophone writer” because I don’t really think that way about my writing or reasons I came here. I have very little contact with English American whatever writers or writing scene, and even when I first came here spent very little time among expats – they were younger and just out of college and usually went to Beefstew which didn’t interest me much. Also, what marks you off from the rest of the early 1990s newcomers to Prague is that you came here with already a noteworthy literary past as a writer, organiser, and publisher... I had been a publisher of small literary magazines and small press poetry in San Francisco with friend Bill Polak, who lives now in Cincinnatti, Ohio, and with friend Robyn Hunt who lives now in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I also founded and ran several Open Poetry reading series, over the years in San Francisco including “Forever” in the Hayes Poetry Series in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, the “Rose and Thistle Poetry Series” and “Peter's Pub Reading” in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, which was where a lot of the poets known as the “Babarians” first gathered and met and where I first met my good friend Bruce Isaacson who first read poetry there and later founded the influential Zeitgeist Press that has published scores of underground poets over the years. So I have always supported Ð132Ï

new poets young writers and an eclectic community where lots of activity thrives but I also was always involved with political issues and personal interests – history and politics of myth, archeology, jazz. You had also spent a considerable time working for community and social justice in the volunteering sphere. How did that experience impact upon your writing? I had spent several years in the Ozark Mountain area of Arkansas and in Memphis, Tennessee, working as a community organizer with lower income people, minority communities, tenant rights groups. I was writing at the time but it was the day to day door to door work in very poor communities, talking with people about their lives, their stories, their troubles that always triggered my voice, my own memories of being among my large Irish family and listening to my great grandmother tell of her life and her husband the gangster-asbestos worker and her twelve children, my great aunts and uncles and my grandmother. You see, it’s as if life has an arc a curvature just like the Earth. The internet scares me for that reason, because it completely eliminates the sense of wonder listening to a particular voice telling you their life their story tracing its arc. So, in those early years, you would base your writing upon personal daily encounters with the harsh reality of the underprivileged? Doing my community and social justice work gave me plenty of time to meet hardened farm gals and mountain women and old oil workers and guys who had had their heads bashed in trying to start a union in the south, or the old Afro-American guys who worked for New deal projects and could tell a tale or two. So, I was busy driving from Arkansas to Tennessee and Texas, etc., organizing in communities and I had also helped start a Women's Center and ran some arts projects and a newspaper for women in Fayetteville in the Ozarks pretty wild but there was a small feminist community in those hills even back then – and even a separatist women commune somewhere in the mountains there – a very cool scene and I could always get to Memphis for blues club. Ð133Ï

This was before you moved to San Francisco? This was all in the early to late 1970s. Then I moved to San Francisco and continued as an organizer in support of a Labor Union for the bankworkers who were overwhelmingly AfroAmerican Filipino or Hispanic gals with no union representaion by the mainstream old guard unions. I met a lot of wonderful poets and writers pretty early on and began publishing and doing poetry readings, and soon began publishing writers I would hear at the readings, etc. Why, then, did you move to Prague? I came to Prague for very specific reasons: I did not want to be in America anymore, I wanted to see America from the outside, and also to pursue certain political historical myths – mythmaking among Europeans. America has its own myths, and the myths others tell of it or asume about it, and so too Europe and particular nations. Eras of history tell themselves myths, sometimes flattering ones or ones that obscure the past or paint a tragic path to absolve/erase some responsibilty or national memory. There are the myths themselves, some incredibly wild and full of strange passions and bizarre circumstances, and then a history, a archeology, a reality I try to dig into, understand. “Re-member it Put it back together” – I wonder why this riddle, these words, this kolo or legend resonates here in Czechia… I’ve also looked at Slavic songs and legends and how they traveled, what they say and how they tell themselves. Your interest in Prague and Czech culture is then, more that of an ethnographer and documentarist, rather than an engaged writer. You did, however, manage to co-found (with Ken Nash), the Alchemy Poetry Series, which has continued to the present day. My involvement in any expat literary scene here was and remains minimal. Yes, I did help found Alchemy, and in fact did most of the booking for it and emceed it for about a year, and it was extremly popular and amazingly well-attended back then. There was some crossover, some local Czech writers but not anything substantial.

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Your involvement with Czech writers and artists was, thus, personal and private rather than public. It took the form of quite a few interesting artistic and translation collaborations… Mostly I keep to myself and do work with close friends who also happen to be artists or writers. I worked with my good friend Pavla Nikl on a poetry anthology for Mata Publishers here, a translation of Twenty Babarian Underground Poets that was finally published about six years back, and I have done adaptations and co-translations for “Meander Press/Blue Elephant Series” that includes art and literary works by Petr Nikl, Jiří Černický, Vráťa Brabenec and Václav Havel. Which Czech poets have you worked with? Kateřina Piňosová is the first name that springs to mind… I have old friendships with Czech poet Vít Kremlička and Róbert Gál and, yes, especially with Kateřina Piňosová. I did some poetry readings in Bratislava with Vít and Robert, and Kateřina and I have done an artwork / poetry collaboration and are working on another project I started and am ashamed to say she has worked on her part in it with more diligence than I have… And if, nonetheless, I would ask you about the English-speaking poetry scene in Prague and your personal contacts with it…? Then I’d name Roman Kratochvila the bookseller, Louis Armand the poet or the publisher Howard Sidenberg who has been involved in publishing both Eastern and Central European writers and some English speaking writers, and Alan Thomas who edited Optimism magazine here for a long time. These would be the only people that could be called part of a Prague literary scene Czech or English speaking with whom I have some relationship.

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CHRIS CRAWFORD & STEPHAN DELBOS

Stones to Steeples: An Electronic Conversation This conversation took place via email during the last week of August 2010 between Prague, Czech Republic, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. SD: Chris, I’ve noticed a tendency in your work to rely on sharp, simple language, which often seems to allow complex emotional concepts to be captured in sparse, surprising imagery. I’m thinking now, for example, of the “little bone dice” in “Cellar,” a great image which captures concepts of fate and chance, as well as darker concepts such as voodoo, death, and doom. Is this a conscious effort you make in the writing process - do you think concrete simplicity is the best or only way to capture abstract emotional complexity – or do these gestures and images come naturally, or subconsciously to you? CC: I think it’s a mixture of various factors. I wouldn’t be sure that there’s any one best way to deal with abstract or complex ideas and emotions, but I find myself naturally paring down language in order for me, myself, to more easily understand what it is that I’m getting at. With regards to sparser language coming naturally to me, I think you’ve picked out an interesting point in that I dislike, in my day to day life, anything I perceive as fakery or artifice. I’m far more attracted to Anglo- Saxon vocabulary than I am to vocabulary with French roots: I sweat rather than perspire. This has led to a harder-edged feel to my poems. Of course, there must be subtlety, strong metaphor and original imagery in a poem or it’s going to end up very one dimensional, so I find myself putting a lot of pressure on these small words and asking them to take the strain for me. There’s also the matter of living in the Czech Republic, as you know, the Czechs don’t often put a smile on Ð136Ï

things when they’re not in the mood. They’re not afraid to let you know exactly what they think without dressing it up in any way and that’s definitely rubbed off on me. Perhaps that’s just my excuse for being a grumpy bastard in the morning. You have lived in Prague for about as long as I have, Stephan, and we have been involved in translating some of the contemporary Czech poets into English, you perhaps a little bit more than myself. I’ve read your translations of Kateřina Rudčenková and Jaroslav Seifert. You are a Massachusetts man, I wonder how different a poet you would have been had you stayed in Massachusetts? What has been the effect of immersing yourself in another culture, learning its language, translating its poets? SD: Your question is apt, given that I just returned to Prague from a trip to Massachusetts, where I had a chance to see family I haven’t seen in years, and revisit some places which were very important to me growing up. My last day in my hometown, Plymouth – America’s hometown, as it says on the police cars – I walked through Burial Hill, an old Pilgrim graveyard where I used to go sledding as a kid. Plymouth is a very historical town, and people visit from all over the world. Many of those visitors go up to the graveyard to wander around, admire the view of the harbor and out to the Atlantic Ocean, and also to make rubbings of gravestones, some of which, like skeletons with angel wings, are marvelously gothic, dating back to 1620. I was thinking about that history as I walked along the overgrown paths of crumbling blacktop, but mostly I was thinking about my personal memories of that graveyard: sledding down the hill into traffic in the winter and almost being run over, or playing flashlight tag on summer nights. For me, these take precedence over the public history of the place. I think if I had stayed in Plymouth or in New England, I would have gone deeper into that intersection of the personal and the historic in a way I don’t feel I can in the Czech Republic, because this history isn’t mine. Of course, that intersection is very much Robert Lowell territory, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he also grew up in New England, one of the most historic regions of the U.S., where you can hardly take a step without tripping over some monument, some of which actually have his family’s name on them. Ð137Ï

Translating Czech poets has vastly expanded my conception of what a poem can be and do, and it has also expanded my understanding of the strategies poets use to respond to the urgencies of the present and the past. Living in Prague has awakened in me a certain sensibility; an awareness of the international poetic tradition. I found this awareness of tradition conspicuously lacking in poets I visited in New York City recently. My friends there seemed much more concerned about how their work is being received in the contemporary scene than in fostering a relationship with poets and poetries of the past. This seems to me like a significant mistake, and an invitation to obscurity. Certainly my efforts in translation have had an effect on my work. Translating Czech poetry has heightened my awareness of the power of imagery (hence my previous question to you about images), which is probably something I’ve latched onto in poems I’ve translating when seized by doubt about how to bring meter or rhyme into English. But other poets from non-English speaking countries have been huge influences as well, especially Adam Zagajewski, in Clare Cavanagh’s translation, whose work with imagery, emphatic statement and repetition I find especially resonant. We’ve given quite a few poetry readings together, both in Prague and Berlin. One thing that has by turns confounded me and sparked my admiration for your readings is your Scottish accent, which audiences, to a person, seem to love. I can think of only one of your poems which specifically references Scotland, “Prayer to Burns.” Does your accent influence your line breaks or your approach to language? How much do you think, when writing a poem, about how the poem will sound when read aloud? CC: Yes, we’ve had some great trips to Berlin to do readings (including a two-man après-performance game of football in an art gallery where you managed to thrash an antique lamp to the floor.) To answer your question, I think my accent influences my poetry in a fundamental and organic way. Of course, when I listen internally to the way the language flows in my head, the cadences, the rhythms, I hear my own spoken voice. I tend to rely very heavily on my ear, much more than on cold calculation of stresses and syllables in a line. I break my lines in certain places Ð138Ï

for a myriad of reasons, but my internal Scottish accent will play a part in all decisions made about, for example, a line break. A mutual friend of ours, the poet Eric Cummings, complains that my poetry verges on the prosaic at times. I asked him to read one of my poems aloud in a Scottish accent, and he did so, admitting when he’d finished that he could, after all, hear the music. Eric, of course, went on to become a legendary figure in Prague when he fell ninety feet from my old apartment roof and went through the hatchback window of an illegally parked car without breaking a single bone. He kept his beer in his hand the whole way down, too. Getting back to your question, I tend to keep music low-key in the poems, not wanting it to overpower the words themselves. The Scots are typically deadpan, with understated diction – I’ve spoken a little about artifice and the Scots, as a people, certainly tend not use “uppity” language and I think that also influences the way I write at the moment. I want to address what you said about Scotland making a single appearance in my work. I think Scotland will push through into the work with more frequency. I tend to mention geographical locations when they hold a key to immediate emotional concerns or thoughts that I’m dealing with, or more casually, when I’m at a specific location not particularly important for the poem but the poem “happens” to me there. Having lived outside the U.K. for so long, Scotland resides in a deeper level of my psyche but, without doubt, I will engage with and write about my relationship with my home country at some point. You have a very particular reading manner yourself: eyes closed, head tipped back, arms illustrating, almost conducting the flow of the poem that you’re reciting. It very much reminds me of a conductor or a jazz fan who’s living fully within the music to which he’s listening. You often employ line breaks which evoke a special rhythm – I’ve previously compared that rhythm to a tennis ball bouncing down the inside of a narrow chimney, I’m thinking specifically now of your poem “Tiny Miracles” with its lines “I saw stoplights blink like beating / hearts, but the bloodshot stare of a high school / drop out all-night gas station cashier shone / lonelier.” I’m also thinking of your long poem “Ten Bar Blues” which you wrote for your friend Walter Oller who died of cancer.

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I want to ask you, firstly, about the extent your poetry is influenced by jazz and the blues and secondly, the extent to which your performance is inspired by people like Jack Kerouac, who gave those wonderful readings backed up by jazz groups in smoky bars. SD: Music, especially jazz, has had a significant effect on my work, though less so in the past few years. I grew up playing guitar and dabbling with the trumpet, and eventually studied jazz theory pretty seriously. In college I worked as a music teacher, and played in a number of bands, including “Mantis Cadre,” a crazy acid jazz group founded by Walter Oller, who is the subject of “Ten Bar Blues.” When I came to Prague to study for a year in 2003, I still considered myself more of a musician than a writer, though I recently read my journals from that year, and it seems I was writing a great deal of poetry, most of it fifth rate. When I went back to Providence, Rhode Island to finish college, I found out that Walter had died. His death in part precipitated my slow transition away from music, though I continued to play in bands until I finished college. When I moved back to Prague I made a conscious choice not to get a band together. Instead I began to focus completely on poetry. But the concept of musicality in poetry is something I continue to be aware of. For a long time, my obsession with the music of language led me too far in the direction of sound. When I read the poems I wrote a few years ago, they seem far too alliterative, the language far too physical. I think I really had to internalize what I learned from music theory before I could really make good use of it in poetry. Certainly sound – alliteration especially – is a very effective tool for building tension in a poem, but it is only one, rather cloying tool for doing so. Part of internalizing what music taught me meant finding other tools for building and releasing tension. These days, jazz still plays a big role in my creative life, as it’s a style of music – and a style in general, thinking of photographs by people like Herman Leonard, who just died yesterday – I greatly admire. Actually, the writing project which will hopefully carry me through this long, gray, cold Prague winter, is a script for a play about a famous jazz musician whose identity I’ll keep to myself for now. As far as Kerouac and the Beats, they’re fine. Kerouac meant a great deal to me when I was growing up in Ð140Ï

Massachusetts and taking my first bus trips across country, but these days... he doesn’t really figure into my thinking about how to live as a writer. I don’t have any particular admiration for Ginsberg’s poetry. Having said that, however, I’ve recently purchased their Collected Letters and have been very impressed by the energy and insight they both had, even as very young men in New York City. Let’s try to steer this thing in a direction that might be more interesting for people in general, or people in Prague. We worked together a great deal in Prague for a period of years to help build a community for poetry. This past year has seen a flurry of activity surrounding Prague poetry, including the Rakish Angel series, the Král Majáles Anthology, and others. What are your feelings about the “Prague renaissance?” What has Prague meant to you, and how valuable do you think the writing and poetic activity in Prague really is? CC: Right, our work with the Karlák Summits, held each summer in the same “secret” location, where we plotted our plans for poetry while overindulging in beer, a lot of fun, I hope those will continue in the near future. Seriously, a lot of those ideas have come to fruition over the last 18 months or so. As you know, we spoke a lot about inclusion rather than exclusion of talented people and the building of bridges, a kind of “reaching out,” as you folks from the States say. We’ve seen more dialogue between the expat communities in Prague, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam, particularly between Prague and Berlin. We’ve also seen more translations of Czech poets being done by Prague expats and bridges being built between those two groups. The poetry scene in Prague has attracted lots of fresh blood in terms of poets who are active in the city and attendances at readings have swollen. I’m thinking of the Alchemy series of readings, which has become a sort of hub for poets, performers, theatre folk, actors and even journalists in Prague. Ken Nash has done a great job with that. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few poets who are doing some really interesting work and reading it at Alchemy, people like Josh Mensch, Gil Fleischman, Jason Mashak and Annie Brechin alongside the “older generation” of Louis Armand and Justin Quinn. Regarding publications, one that stemmed from a Karlák Summit, your own Rakish Angel booklet series has been a real Ð141Ï

success, giving the English speaking population of Prague real grass-roots access to the work the city’s poets are doing. There’s also VLAK magazine, the first edition of which looks extremely impressive, and The Prague Revue which should have another issue coming out at some point, so Prague is very well represented by journals and magazines. On the Czech side of things, I know Louis Armand has had his poems translated and published by Psí víno magazine recently; I had some Katka Rudčenková translations from the Czech come out in Envoi last month and five of my translations of the American poet Anthony Madrid into the Czech published in Psí víno September 2010. The big one this year has been the publication of the anthology The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, edited by Louis, which is a massive tome featuring all kinds of writings and photographs, a real historical documentation of a period, so I think things are looking healthy all round. To give some perspective, I’d like to say that while it’s important that a city like Prague has a literary scene that nurtures and encourages the creation of poetry and of audiences for that poetry, the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the individual artists actually stay up in their lofts or wherever and do the work. That’s the kind of thing that’s a personal and solitary activity and makes the scene greater than the sum of its parts and, paradoxically, allows the individual poets to rise above any “scene” and become known on their own terms. And I may add, hard to do in a city with a nightlife and beer as good as Prague’s. I’ve gone on a bit so I’ll answer you’re last question very briefly. Coming to Prague has meant everything to my poetic development, I’ve met some radiantly talented people, yourself for example and just as much as that: Prague is electric from its stones to its steeples. The city moves and inspires me every day. We are conducting this conversation through email since I am in Ho Chi Minh City and you are in Prague. Do you think we are losing the great tradition of poets as men of letters. What are your thoughts in this direction regarding the modern preference for email, telephone and text message communication? SD: Good question, and an appropriate one, as I’ve recently been reading The Collected Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Ð142Ï

Robert Lowell, and of course, the Ginsberg/Kerouac letters I mentioned previously. Let me try to respond from two directions, the first dealing primarily with letter writing, and the second with the concept of “the man of letters.” There is no doubt that letter writing is a dying activity. People simply aren’t writing letters as much as they used to, because, really, there is no need. With every publication of correspondence over the past few years, from James Wright’s collected letters to Lowell’s and Bishop’s, or Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s, and now more recently with Harvard University’s purchase of John Updike’s huge archives, we hear noise about how this or that book is going to be the last collection of correspondence, or in Updike’s case, that we’re never going to have this kind of fascinating paper trail again, where you can see the ideas of a writer develop over time through their drafts. None of this means that writers are communicating less, or that they are writing fewer drafts, but simply that they are conducting these activities over the internet and writing on computers, which tend to leave less physical evidence. People often joke that you’ll never see The Collected Emails of... whoever, and perhaps that’s true, but maybe not. After all, emails are stored indefinitely, so maybe our approach to archiving correspondence just requires a paradigm shift in the way we think about the lifespan of electronic communication. I do, however, think that the ease of electronic communication dulls the sense that each message you send to your friend, colleague, beloved, whomever – is vitally important and could take a long time to reach its destination, so you’d better put some thought into it. I think physically written communication fosters more depth at a basic level than email communication. This is not to say that depth isn’t possible over email, but to achieve that, you’ve really got to fight against the sense of ease and force yourself to dig into the correspondence and really think about what you’re saying as if something depended on it. Regarding technologies like Facebook, people don’t seem to realize or care that every message and dirty joke and picture posted there is in effect being published; it’s there for all to see. I remember my mother telling me once: “If you don’t want someone to know your secrets, don’t write them down.” No one seems to be heeding that advice these days. The other half of your question, whether we are losing the tradition of the “man of letters” – I’ve always taken the “letters” Ð143Ï

portion of that phrase to mean alphabet letters rather than epistles. In any case, I think there is a tendency, especially in the United States, to pigeonhole poets, and even for poets to pigeonhole themselves. We are living in the age of specialization. Many poets in the U.S. seem to have a very small circle of interest, that is, they more often than not teach poetry at university, publish the occasional book review and publish a collection of verse every few years. This has become the dominant model. The model I’ve always aspired to – and it seems more of a European model – is the man of letters, the writer, the public intellectual, not just the poet, but someone who engages will all forms of writing and someone concerned with current events. I’m less and less interested in hermetic verse and poetry or criticism concerned only with itself, while this style seems to be more and more pervasive. So in that sense, I do think the model of the writer as a man of letters is being lost, at the expense of literature and at the expense of writers themselves. This is why events such as the recent death of the great British critic Frank Kermode are being hailed as the end of the era. Kermode once wrote about the beginnings of his career in the 1950s, citing “a general belief, now weirdly archaic, that literary criticism was extremely important, possibly the most important humanistic discipline, not only in the universities but also in the civilized world more generally.” Unfortunately, that belief, and the wide-ranging critical intellects it produced, is dead. As a poet, do you feel that you have a mission or a message that other people should hear? What is the poet’s role these days? Do poets have more wisdom or knowledge about the world than other people, and do poets have a moral authority or a moral obligation to live and write as examples for other people? Or are they simply fools playing with words? CC: This is a difficult one. Do poets have more wisdom or inherent or gained knowledge than other people? I think good poets are people born with a natural predilection towards the search for insight. I think they have a natural talent for sifting out an inherent wisdom from say, a trip to the shop to buy a Mars bar or connecting the dots between apparently unconnected occurrences and phenomena. They also retain an ability to show these findings Ð144Ï

or communicate them in an interesting or moving way through the use of language. What I mean by this is that everybody is born with a certain disposition or talent and they can make the most of it or they can leave it unfulfilled. I used to work an engineer in the oil industry and although I enjoyed the physical aspect of the work on seismic boats and so on, it was clear that I had little interest in being an engineer. I lack the basic interest in the work, I am not a talented or a born engineer. Other examples I could use would be talented singers and musicians. Like poets, they need an ear, and that just can’t be taught, at least not to the point where the person will reach the highest levels of performance. So yes, I think poets are born and can do with that talent what they will and while I think most people can be taught to write competently, the magic will be missing from their work, the magic that makes it true poetry. Regarding the role of the poet in modern society, I think the role is superficially a little uncertain at the moment, but it is still the same role which poets have played throughout time: truthtellers. As we know, in a totalitarian or oppressive society poets are usually the first to get it in the neck which is funny haha and funny strange if you imagine the popular image of the harmless poet, bespectacled, skinny, quiet, uncool. But clearly many people don’t like this little guy going around saying it’s not like that, it’s like this. That’s dangerous, and I think people turn to poetry when they are looking for truths, something to stand on, something to give them strength and answers or even clues toward the types of questions they perhaps ought to be asking themselves. I think that also answers the question of the poet’s moral obligation. His or her obligation is simply to tell their own truths, to be true to themselves. It’s fantastic if those words and truths mean something to other people on a grander scale and enriches other lives – and perhaps that could be the definition of a great poet, but I don’t think it’s a moral obligation for the poet to be true to anyone other than themselves and the world around them. That’s the poet’s mission. Of course, what do I know now? I could reverse my position at any time. Some of the great old poets were never published in their lifetime or had moderate success. What are your thoughts regarding the differences between material success and acclaim for poetry and the act of writing poetry itself? Ð145Ï

SD: It’s funny when you look back at many of the American poets we now consider great, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens being two examples, neither of whom published books until they were well into their thirties: late starters by today’s standards. Especially for those poets who make their living as teachers, there is a great deal of pressure to produce books on a regular schedule. Young poets believe that they must publish their first book early, which, as we can see from older examples, is a misleading notion. Frank O’Hara would be another, slightly different example. Everyone knows the story that after he died Kenneth Koch and John Ashbury went to O’Hara’s apartment and found stray poems everywhere, even in his sock drawer. Everyone was amazed at the number of poems O’Hara had written and had never showed anyone. When his collected poems finally came out a few years later, everyone was surprised at the size of the book, and the size of O’Hara’s achievement. The collection won the National Book Award that year. So he was someone who wasn’t much concerned with fame, and certainly wasn’t precious about his own work. This seems like a very admirable example. Well, the bottom line is that there’s no real “material success” on any large scale for poets – that’s just not going to happen. As Jack Spicer said, echoing Dante, “Kid, don’t enter here.” Any success you may achieve in poetry is not going to repay you for the amount of time and energy and suffering you put into it. So, there is really no relation at all between success and acclaim and the act of writing poetry itself. Of course, we all want our work to be read, and read widely, but if that’s your guiding motivation for writing, then you’re sunk. This relates to what I said earlier about “men of letters.” When people categorize themselves specifically as poets they put a great deal of pressure on themselves and on their poetry, and often they begin to see their self worth through the lens of their poetry. If they aren’t successful poets they feel they aren’t successful people. I think it’s important for maintaining one’s sanity, as well as for one’s writing, to have specific projects, which hopefully go beyond the poem at hand. Of course, it is necessary to have fidelity to each and every poem, each and every line, but living poem to poem is dangerous; it puts you in a very precarious place. That’s why I’ve expanded my writing to include journalism, prose and playwriting, and editing as well, like my work with Rakish Angel. All supposed risks aside, living only for your own poetic Ð146Ï

output and believing you should be lauded for that is a selfish way to exist. CC: There have been many such occasions. One particular occasion was when you and I organized the Howl reading a couple of years back, I think in 2008. The whole thing reeked of magic, energy, duende, whatever you want to call it. I remember it for some very specific reasons. I recall this particular evening because of the musician friends who came to back the poets with instruments. I’m talking about people like the great Marc Cram (of Trunk Show, Chudáček and The Blue Valentines) on guitar and saxophone and Mayim Alpert on double bass. It was all pretty perfect, the balmy October evening, the setting, which was in the old Černá kočka cellar pub in Karlín, deep underground, smoky as hell, packed out with all sorts of disparate peoples. We gave everyone free shots of domácí meruňkovice (the home-made apricot schnapps) as they arrived, just to get them fired up... and then we performed. There is something about the stone cavern pubs in Prague that just feels right for poetry. If you recall, we weren’t sure who would turn up, lugged the musician’s amplifiers through the Prague metro, arrived dripping sweat and red-faced to an empty Černá kočka and wondered what the hell, you know, but it filled up and turned out to be some night. I wrote a spoken word poem “Living in a Ground Floor Flat” especially for the occasion, Marc backed me on Sax, Mayim on the double bass and you on the snare drum, I hadn’t been aware you were much of a musician until that point. I don’t know what else to say except: schnapps, smoky room, saxophone, a roster of poets, jazz musicians, Czech girls, Danish girls, poetry-talk becoming more and more heated, rising as the hour got later and the drinks flowed faster. We had to put hats and hoods on at the end and do a runner after people started smoking something that smelt like a particularly sap-filled pine forest and were asked to stop and didn’t: fumes were just billowing out of the back room by that point. A great night. A great night where we talked about everything under the poetic sun and I saw the creative potential of highly talented people in action, most of whom we knew personally. An eye-opener. Other memories I have are of persuading the poet James Ragan to get up on a table to recite some poetry at Globe cafe and then Ð147Ï

following suit myself, a little wonkily, or some of the Alchemy nights which turned out to be wild: big crowds, good readers and ending with those spiralling conversations about poets, poetic forms, poetic gossip, journals, what-have-you. It’s always fantastic to be in Prague, able to sit around a table with such diverse people such as the band members of Ocean vs. Daughter or Trunk Show or a journalist-critic like your colleague James Walling from The Prague Post or Elizabeth Gross or Josh Mensch or any number of creative people and chew the fat. I have to say though, the nights that most inspired me, were nights where you and I headed out for a “couple of beers and a chat” and ended up at four in the morning still rattling on. We didn’t have to change the record on those nights and were able to get down to the gist of our thoughts on poetry without feeling we were leaving anyone out of the conversation. I’d love to talk about the Evropský Sen music and poetry festival that you and Marika Ley (of Provokator magazine) organized and hosted, which was a mind-blowing couple of evenings sharing the stage with Berlin poets Cathy Hales and Alistair Noon among others, but I fear I’ve gone on long enough. What about you? I’d like to ask you the same question, knowing that there were so many of those types of nights, I’m sure you have your own memories and recollections. SD: Evropský Sen is certainly a highlight of recent Prague literary events, although it was already three years ago. Marika Ley, founder of Provokator magazine, and I organized it, when I was editing Provokator. Our idea was to create a multi-genre festival in which each performance was a multi-sensory experience. We combined music, art and poetry in English, German and Czech, bringing Catherine Hales, Alistair Noon and Matthais Traxler, along with the band The Trunk Show from Berlin. Both you and the Czech poet Petr Hrubý were the poets representing Prague. During each reading we had simultaneous translations in English, German and Czech, and we had some funky artists making funky art on overhead projectors, as you remember, and the festival took place over three nights, in Globe, Popocafépetl and Chapeau Rouge. I remember going to the train station to pick up Petr Hrubý, who is about 80, walks with a cane and speaks no English. I Ð148Ï

brought him over to Popocafépetl, this tiny little man amidst a crowd of sweaty youngsters. He sat on stage and gave a riveting reading – everyone in the audience was completely silent. Afterwards I took him in a cab to the southern suburbs of Prague where he was staying with his friend. He told me stories about hanging out with Pablo Neruda when he was in Prague, reading to a stadium full of people in Mexico, and causing trouble with the old guard of Prague poets like Seifert and Holan. It was a surreal experience. We made plans that I would translate one of his books, but somehow that never materialized… I remember deciding beforehand not to read at the festival and instead just mc’d and introduced the poets and bands with sideways comments and rabid hilarity – an experiment in performance art and poetic improvisation. Running on no sleep for three days, sweating and drinking several liters every night, having a blast, nearly collapsing at some points but always reviving to hop on stage and spit a few words: sweaty with genius. Remember how packed Chapeau Rouge was on the last night when you read? It must have been 90 degrees, and everyone was steaming. You were nervous because you’d decided to read last and everyone was drunk and rowdy by that point. I remember seeing you up there gripping the microphone like you were standing in a wind tunnel as you recited. “She would have curled like a leaf by your candle,” one of the lines I remember you reciting, and Aileen Loy from Trunk Show nearly sobbed. Legendary evening. What do you think the future holds for your poetry and Prague poetry? CC: If I could just say, I wasn’t very nervous at all, I was too welllubricated for that, hence my gripping the mic-stand tighter than I normally might have done. The crowd were excellent and I remember that being a night where the audience was more up for the poetry than the music, which doesn’t happen often. To answer your question: where do I see my poetry going and Prague poetry going? With the Prague poetry scene I think it’s essential that links between writers in the city are made and maintained, especially between the “generations.” I remember when I arrived in Prague in 2002, two guys who were doing a lot of things were Travis Jeppesen and Joshua Cohen and previous to Ð149Ï

that, writers like Donna Stonecipher and Laura Conway. Despite publishing a short story in their BLATT journal, I didn’t get to know Jeppesen and Cohen and have had no communications with Stonecipher or Conway at all. I think that kind of thing is a pity because people will do good work in Prague then perhaps leave the city or take less of an active role, losing contact with the writers who are playing a current active role in the city. The core group is always changing with people taking a step back or leaving for pastures new and when connections haven’t been made and maintained it becomes a lot more difficult to draw on the talent, energy and inspiration of the writers who came before and achieve continuity of thought and exchange of ideas. This is something we have discussed at the last couple of Karlák Summits and from that we have linked up with writers like Justin Quinn and Louis Armand which has been very productive. To have a strong Prague scene it is essential to increase the commerce between the expat scene and the Czech scene. Evropský Sen was a step in that direction as are your Rakish Angel booklets, our translation projects and Louis’ Král Majáles anthology but I’d like to see more writers get in on the act with their own projects. I know Justin Quinn has been translating Petr Borkovec for a while now and has been very successful with that but, case in point, I have only met Borkovec once, although I’ve been to his Café Fra many times. I’ve attended Czech readings there but there has never been a regular bilingual reading night at Fra featuring writers like Quinn, Borkovec, Katka Rudčenková, Armand, Gil Fleischman, Sylva Fischerová, Annie Brechin, Delbos, myself, Mensch, perhaps someone like Pavel Šrut, etc. I think the city is crying out for something along those lines. Alongside bilingual readings we need translations of Czech poets into English and English language poets into Czech and ideally those translations into English would appear in magazines like Rakish Angel, VLAK, The Prague Revue and translations into Czech would appear in Czech journals such as Tvar, Psí víno, HOST and Literární noviny. Once that sort of thing has been going for a while we may see presses like Howard Sidenberg’s Twisted Spoon and Charles University’s Litteraria Pragensia starting to regularly publish books by poets currently living and working in Prague rather than looking outside of the city for talent. As I write this, let me qualify that Ð150Ï

remark by saying I’m aware that Litteraria Pragensia are bringing out a couple of volumes written by Prague poets in the near future. To summarise, my vision of a strong “Prague Literary Culture” would encapsulate commerce between the different generations of Prague writers, between the Czechs and the English native speakers, would feature an increase in translations from both Czech and English – these translations would appear in the city’s magazines and journals, and lastly I would like to see an increase in regular bilingual readings. As for my own work, I hope it evolves in interesting ways, I want to keep learning and to find new and exciting ways to lay down on the page what I wish to lay down on the page. Currently I’ve noticed a tendency to lengthen my lines and not break them where I’d have broken them six months ago. I’m also allowing the harder-edged parts of my personality to enter the work which feels great, like I’m telling a different type of truth. I would also like to achieve a continuity of focus regarding form and subject matters important to me. I may well ask you the same questions: what’s the next step for the Prague poetry scene and where do you see your own work going? Clearly, at the moment, your own writing is intertwined with Prague as well as existing as a separate entity. Should you ever leave the city do you see yourself maintaining strong links with the community or would you regard your time in Prague as part of a learning curve and something that is firmly in the past? SD: When we had our first Karlák Summit, in August 2007, what was happening in Prague poetry? I think Alchemy had been on hiatus and was just coming back, I was starting work with The Prague Revue, and there were occasional scattered readings, most of which were organized by you and I. And now in 2010, we’ve got Alchemy in a new venue, Rakish Angel, GRASP, VLAK, the Majáles Anthology, the Prague poetry piece featured in the Clare Market Review, this very book we’re working on now, my Prague anthology in preparation, poets like Josh Mensch coming zapping out of the woodwork, other poets like Anne Brechin coming to town, the Prague Microfest returning with a second incarnation, Czech poets being translated and published in English, English-

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language poets being published in Czech in Psí Víno, and more. That’s nothing to shake a stick at. Now, this isn’t to say that our scheming and manic enthusiasm made all those things happen, but I do believe we set a standard for engagement with poetry in Prague and in a way acted as poetry ambassadors for a while as the older guard of Prague poets was raising children and otherwise engaged. We kept the waters boiling, so to speak. But during those dry seasons, I think I considered my poetry much more connected with – that is, I saw myself as “Prague poet” much more then than I do now. Now that things are really afoot here I’ve begun to focus on putting a book together and publishing my work in international journals, mostly in the U.S. Also, starting work as Culture Editor of The Prague Post and becoming more involved with journalism has opened up other opportunities and expanded my parameters of engagement. Despite everything that’s happening here, one must realize – as I’ve recently been forced to – that, if you want to publish a book of poetry, there’s simply nowhere to publish it in Prague, or anywhere nearby. The closest publishers are really in the U.K. That automatically tends to negate the prospect of being a purely Prague-based poet; not only is there no real standard of publishing greatness in Prague, but there’s very little publishing of English books at all, and none really for contemporary poets. Being part of a scene very much requires you to be physically present. It’s all well and good to keep in touch, but ultimately, history is made and momentum is gained almost exclusively by warm bodies in a room. So, if and when I do leave Prague – and I think I will eventually – I will certainly keep in touch with friends and fellow poets in the city, but I don’t think I’ll strive to keep being an active part of the community, as to do so would be to neglect whichever community I had moved to. When I leave Prague I will know that I have given a lot of energy and time to supporting Prague poetry, and that era of my life will have passed. The next step for Prague poetry – if people want to make things happen – is for more individuals to get involved beyond a once a month presence at Alchemy to read their own work and get a round of applause. And if they do decide to get involved, their efforts must be professional, not based on favoritism or selfpromotion, and not full of typos. Ð152Ï

It feels that some folks look on our efforts - organizing readings, translating into Czech and into English, Rakish Angel – with a fair amount of bewilderment. But there’s no secret how to make things happen; it’s simple effort. As Beowulf said: “Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.” This leads me to my next question for you, and a good place to wrap up this interview: You moved to Asia a few months back, at a moment when things were reaching something of a fever pitch in Prague poetry. Why did you leave? Do you feel that the move has cut you off from Prague? When are you coming back? CC: Right, that’s true, it was hard to leave just as things were becoming exciting. The truth is that I’d been planning this trip with Lenka for quite a while and it was time to go. I’d quit my job, Lenka had quit her job and was impatient to get travelling, I distinctly remember feeling a female-sized shoe connecting with my rear end so I speeded up the leaving process. At first I felt the timing wasn’t quite convenient but I’m not so sure of that now. As for a return date there is nothing concrete. We still want to get into the gist of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and back down again through Cambodia and the likes but I would love return sometime next year assuming all is well. I’ve been feeling really good in terms of my creative mood and have been able to widen my focus beyond Prague and of course distance from the whole excitement caused by the Prague thing “building” has helped me gain some perspective. I don’t feel that I’m cut off from Prague at all, I communicate with you on a regular basis, I’ve been reading your manuscript, I exchange regular emails with Josh Mensch, one or two with Annie Brechin, James Walling, Louis Armand and others so you see I’m probably as much in contact as I ever was – I’m still managing to keep my finger firmly on the Prague pulse. Which is not to say I wasn’t hurting (I was) at missing the Král Majáles launch and the launch of VLAK which, by the way, is a very handsome looking object. You and I laboured together in something of a poetic desert for three years or so and it’s been bittersweet looking on at what’s happening now just when I’m taking my sabbatical. Since Majáles was published there have been a few Prague and ex-Prague writers suddenly popping up from nowhere and staking claims for themselves and I found myself wondering where they had been Ð153Ï

hiding 2006-2010 and felt that we could have done with some help on the spadework during that time but on the other hand I’m very pleased to see them actively engaging again with Prague and adding their energy to proceedings. Now, if they’ll only come down and show us their work live at Alchemy, show us their wit and energy around the beertable or arrange a reading or two… Let’s get one thing clear though, my first glass of Plzeň will be on you, DuBois, I’ll even trudge down in the vague direction of your Prague 5 hellhole that you never want to leave – let’s say upstairs at Újezd…

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS GWEN ALBERT is a human rights activist and researcher, currently living in Middletown, Connecticut, USA with her husband, Vincent Farnsworth (aka Reverend Feedback). In 1989 she was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit Czechoslovakia, where she participated in the Velvet Revolution as a translator. Her first collection of poetry, Dogs, was published by Norton Coker in 1991. Other publications include Der Fährmann (1996) and Going in Circles (with Vincent Farnsworth; 2000). In 1993, while living in the Bay Area, she founded the magazine JEJUNE: america eats its young with Vincent Farnsworth, with whom she returned to the Czech Republic in 1994. In addition to her own writing, she has translated Eva Švankmajerová’s novella Baradla Cave (Twisted Spoon, 2000). She is currently an independent consultant to the Council of Europe, the European Roma Rights Center, and is a translator into English of material published by the ROMEA news server (http//:romea.cz/english/). She is also a student of Ayurveda and flamenco. ALI ALIZADEH holds a PhD from Deakin University, Melbourne, where he also teaches. His most recent books include collections of poetry Ashes in the Air (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2011) and Evental (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2011), and the creative memoir Iran: My Grandfather (Melbourne: Transit Lounge Publishing, 2010). He is reviews editor of Cordite and a co-editor of VLAK magazine. LOUIS ARMAND has lived in Prague since 1994. His work has been anthologised in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Calyx: 30 Australian Poets. He has published two volumes of prose fiction: The Garden (Salt, 2001) and Menudo (Antigen, 2006). His collections of poetry include Séances (Twisted Spoon, 1998), Inexorable Weather (Arc, 2001), Land Partition (Textbase, Ð155Ï

2001), Strange Attractors (Salt, 2003), Malice in Underland (Textbase, 2003), Picture Primitive (Antigen, 2006), and most recently, Letters from Ausland (Vagabond, 2011), which is due to appear in the Czech translation as Pohlednice z Auslandu in May 2011. He is founder of the Prague International Poetry Festival and Prague Microfestival (2005; 2009-). He co-edits VLAK magazine. LAURA CONWAY is a writer, editor and publisher who has lived in Prague since 1994. Her collections of poetry include To Knock Something Hard in the Dark (Bench, 1981), My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me (Red Flower Ink, 1986), The Cities of Madame Curie (Zeitgeist, 1989), The Ministry of Strange Obsessions (2000), and The Alphabet of Trees (with Kateřina Piňosová; Concordia, 2001). She edited Optimism Monthly from 1999-2000 and was the founder of Prague’s “Alchemy” reading series. In 2005 her work was anthologised in The New American Underground: Vol. 1. San Fransisco – Poets from Hell (edited by David Lerner, Julia Vinograd and Alan Allen). CHRISTOPHER CRAWFORD was born in Glasgow, Scotland and has lived in the Czech Republic since 2002. He co-hosted the Prague reading series Poezie a Provokace from 2006-2008. In the 2008 he participated in the Evropský Sen festival, Prague. His poems, fiction and translations have most recently appeared in Now Culture, Evergreen Review, RATTLE, The Cortland Review, Agenda, Envoi, Ekleksographia, and in Prague: The Prague Revue, Rakish Angel#1, BLATT, Provokator, Psí víno, The Return of Král Majáles and From a Terrace in Prague. He is currently travelling through Asia. STEPHAN DELBOS is a New England-born poet living in Prague, where he teaches at Charles University and Anglo-American University, and works as Culture Editor for the Prague Post. He currently edits the Rakish Angel poetry pamphlet series and coedits VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts, and was managing editor of The Prague Revue. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared in Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, Atlanta Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Return of Král Majáles. He is currently editing an Prague poetry anthology entitled From a Terrace in Prague (forthcoming with Litteraria Pragensia in 2011). Ð156Ï

VADIM ERENT is a photographer and translator. He graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in Postmodern Studies. His publications include translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, articles on Czech and Russian art, and a monograph on the artist, Oleg Tselkov. He is currently co-editing a book of essays on the Yugoslav filmmaker, Dušan Makavejev, for Litteraria Pragensia. VINCENT FARNSWORTH was born in rural Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and moved to the Czech Republic in 1994. With Gwendolyn Albert he founded the magazine Jejune: amerika eats its young in 1993. His poetry has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, RealPoetik, the Prague Literary Review, Room Temperature, and Big Bridge. His books include Little Twirly Things (Norton Coker, 1992) and Immortal Whistleblower (Lavender Ink, 2001). Farnsworth also performs as “Reverend Feedback” in the band Blaq Mummy. He has been active in anti-war and human rights activities in Central and Eastern Europe. Due to deaths in his family he has temporarily moved back to the USA. His selected poems, Theremin, will be published by Litteraria Pragensia in 2011. JANE LEWTY is assistant professor of English Literature and creative writing at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (2003) and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2009). Her poetry can be found in Versal, Word For/Word, Upstairs at Duroc, Moria, Dear Sir, Cricket Online Review, Volt, Blazevox, and others. She has also co-edited two essay collections: Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2009) and Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire from Litteraria Pragensia. She is currently an editor of VLAK magazine and lives in Amsterdam. JULES MANN has published several books and pamphlets, including TRIAD (with Karen Newcombe and Gini Savage, Norton Coker Press, 1997) and the chapbook Pluck (Slow Dancer Press, 1999) Her work has appeared in magazines throughout the U.K., the U.S. and in the Czech Republic. She is former director of the Poetry Society and currently runs a small publishing company, Chi Chi Press, devoted to poetry.

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KATEŘINA PIŇOSOVÁ, a painter, sculptor and poet, is a native of the Czech Republic. She has participated in many collective shows of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group whose member she has been since 1996. She has had solo exhibitions in Europe, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, anthologies and collections of poetry. A unique collaboration between Laura Conway (poetry) and Piňosová (drawings) was published as The Alphabet of Trees (Concordia, 2000). DAVID VICHNAR, born in the Czech Republic, is author of Joyce Against Theory (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010), co-editor of Hypermedia Joyce (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010) and editor of Hypermedia Joyce Studies magazine. He is currently a co-editor of VLAK magazine, for which he translates from Czech, French, and German. His poetry translations have also appeared in Babylon and Psí víno, his critical essays, interviews and reviews in VLAK, Vital Poetics, Big Bridge and Lungful! He currently lives in Paris.

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