On Roving the CUNY Chapbook Festival

by

Robert Mueller

“Due to formatting problems the text is not how it appears in print”

Talk of the chapbook brings to mind the arch flattery by which the ancient poets defend what they like.  Suppose they choose to write in shorter forms.  They might try the eclogue, or some other suitable form.  Whatever their liking, to take to these hills they will accept attention given, but they must duck onerous demands on their resources:  “Though you are so wonderful, my patron, please do not ask me to write an epic poem.  My wings, poor things, cannot encompass the weight, and besides, smaller poems can be good, too, good to please and good for the soul.”

Being smaller, an eclogue is like a selection.  It is something picked out in fact, as its name tells us, picked out perhaps from a greater whole.  Or like flower, like what is there, like expressly waiting perhaps, like some quality to be plucked, as Horace might say, from out of the stream of daytime.

So for a few days during the Chapbook Festival on March 2-5, 2011 at the City University of New York it was chapbooks that were the number.  In one of the panels they were touted for their charm, being smaller, and likened in expressiveness, being select and precious and more to the mind of a dear object.  Thus, with idyllic features all its own, the chapbook can still and can truly flourish.  To this end, it has its lesser expense to thank, a luxury that leaves more allowance for odd likenesses.  And with not too much expected of it, the chapbook may puff and strut its happy small frills, which may be of almost any kind.  Playful graphics, bright and frequent colors, intended or accidental egg-drops in the printing, pre-designed quirks of physical construction — they all carry a point, or not.  Also peculiar bindings, or anything else that comes out in the wash, will accentuate the need not to stress outlay, not to say it all or even close to all.

Yet the experience of being among, of living and breathing among, chapbooks for a day is more truly like the eclogue for another reason.  The stray reader, the casual reader, the reader on permanent holiday, saunters amidst books at their stands in the space outside the auditorium, and she or he may even pick them up, without too much fear, strolling along outside, and may even pick one out.  A reader with that endowment is in and out, into it and outside of all the other central, imposing calamities.  With the outside reader in tow, the chapbook affords a happy patronage.  It is us that it celebrates, as soon as we have it in our hands.  Inducing something like a neighborly pleasure in the taking of it, it is us that it understands, and scarcely passes nigh the feel of what a full-length volume might be.  The poetry book, on the other hand, big and pretty counterpart to ancient epic, all gussied up from much official pressing, much official press-releasing, all weighed down in concerns about the national sales count, all but buries the swift delights known only to the light-footed reader.

So naturally it is expected that you pick one up and pick one out, for its idiosyncratic features.  Stephen Motika’s offering, for example, came in an envelope masquerading as a dossier masquerading as a picture-frame; in short, a plain, oddly plain, though exceedingly well-identified, though impeccably well-labelled, dossier.  Selecting it for the handsome print design on its beautiful, expensive-looking leaves of paper (the expense to be rendered bearable it would seem because of the fewer numbers of pages and replicas), you casually find that this loose insertion called In the Madrones (SONA BOOKS, 2011) is itself a selection from a longer work.  And that is peaches!  For then it is truly an eclogue, existentially an eclogue like those of Virgil in size and scope.  Moreover, it sports an idyllic character, surprisingly, that many a reader may sometimes think is getting harder and harder to come by.

Eclogues, these smaller, precious ancient forms, generally have as their burden idealized aspects of country life, and with them the moral advantage of escape from any number of civilizing conflicts.  Their subjects are peaceful, if only in appearance.  They include forests, shepherds, a few cows, sometimes references to farming, certainly an unlucky assortment of pining lovers, and many another outdoor, another outside factor.  Thus an idyllic passage in Motika’s selection might look like:

this getaway

her pilgrimage

little  [a frame]  tucked in the woods

surviving                                                                                                                                                      redwoods arching

driven woods of

ferns & ferns above

darker canyon

ages, ringing

Just as the opening sheet of In the Madrones records a description of the habitat of a special variety of tree, a description dated to 1908, so the drama that begins here, and that is taken from other times and other communications and mainly from those provided in the writings of Norman O. Brown, is placed in the woods.  In a precisely Californian setting in and around Santa Cruz, we greet the forests that are themselves the backdrop and local color for found referencings, found words, found and borrowed, reordered and reconstituted texts, for found languages and expressions, and for the distance and place and form, on the page, made beautiful and made telling.

Ok.  So the forest generates.  So the forest germinates feelings about space and place.  So context gravitates toward, among other extant possibilities, the Latin of “silva” (plural “silvae”), the Latin word for forest or woods.  So then perceive the shape of the following words.  Hear the expressions fronting a landscape of richly-textured and smoothed and faintly mottled sheet, this poetic and sandy phase and elegance that embraces the whole, exquisitely balanced landscaped page:

home thought though at home

oracular tree

tree of dreams

the silva

I ask her the simplest

question.

a through z

a sun belt, a hawk red to white,

having this to say

 

avoids real uncertainty

 

[Note: The “z” in italics has an exaggeratedly italicized appearance in the chapbook.]

It is picking of settings, surely providential in the taking.  The earlier passage (unless the sheets get commingled) with woods and a human figure, with moral dilemma and a human action, can be put together, mostly by attending to the phrase “ages, ringing,” with the Latin “silva” of the later passage, and thereupon to echo, for adventurous ear so inclined, the echoing line of the ancient eclogue by Virgil, the last of his eclogues, Eclogue X: “non canimus surdis, respondent omnia silvae.”  It is not of any slight consequence that this line of Virgil’s comes down to us in English in a gailier glorious instance, plentifully pastoral in its own right, the (lightly varied) refrain from Spenser’s Epithalamion: “that all the woods may answer and their echoes ring.”

But why Virgil’s Eclogue X?  Here the reader is invited to go out on a limb by the poet’s own dipping into etymological word-play.  As conundrum and as recherché effect, Motika samples on such analysis in the term “de-lirium,” with its hinted broader range of significance that pretty much opens all the windows:

for books not found

Thinking drives furrows in the ground of being.

De-lirium: out of the furrow.

Only where there is a furrow is there any point in going straight.

failings

along edges, falling lines

disassociative                                                                                                                              an ideal

This is about half of one of the landscaped sheets, and the next page ends with the line, a de-lirium: out of the furrow, and contains some more of these particular references to pastoral topics, so that the gathering collocation of phrases invites a fair amount of inquiry and interpretation; but what is immediately clear is that themes resting on qualities of living and on wayward instabilities cut their way into this interesting and virtuous etymology from the Latin word “lira.”  Actually “lira” refers to the bank formed on the side of the indentation when the furrow is created.  This is no problem because Stephen Motika, or his source, aptly posits from this deriving the neuter singular noun formation for a concept of transgressing, for going or falling over the edge in a direction that strays from the straight and forward progress.  It turns out, however, that there is another word, “lirium,” in fact a “v.l.” or variant of “lilium,” the Latin word for “lily.”  Moreover, the Oxford Latin Dictionary copies the OED in providing citations for these words, and “lilium,” as luck would have it, but more than luck, is noted as occurring in the line, “florentis ferulas et grandia lilia quassans” from, once again, Virgil’s Eclogue X.  The subject of this action, waving or shaking large and imposing lily-plants along with flowering wands, is “Silvanus,” a god, obviously, of the “silva” or forest.

Thus a false etymology sleeps into action; and a playful reader, delighting in straying or precocious source-hunting, makes the connection between Stephen Motika’s excerpt, from a longer piece which he indicates bears the title “Blueprints for Desert Museum,” and Virgil’s excerpt, or “eclogue.”  Just as Virgil for the moment honors Silvanus, a god with a specific range of powers, so Motika cherishes the localized spirit of a language-play leaning toward the personal, intimate extensions of meaning.  Not unlike what Motika meditates, Virgil at once creates a shorter poem, picked out from infinite possibilities, and the final poem in a sequence containing these selections.  Motika’s package, if selected, could ably represent the chapbook, while Virgil’s eclogue is the duty-bound representative from his day and age of the shorter poem in free opposition to the world’s prizing of the longer poem and its bigger bounce and forum.

The experience, and the selection, thus hint at the pastoral.  There is more to it, much more, but for a day the task becomes simpler.  Reading for pleasure looks like reading without complications, where books are topoi under foliage, are safe zones, are strewn straws and milky sassafras; like walking for chapbooks, like slender purposeful thinking hats — but more than enough has been said on this and other topics, for which it is hoped apologies will be accepted.

fin

When God Came Back I Became Alone

James DiGiovanna

 

When God returned to earth He came in a private plane, with a small retinue of security agents, who were gentle, and hard to get to know.

And yet everyone recognized Him and threw garlands at Him and bowed down. He was modest, and said No, no, really, no, and they stopped, and He shook some hands and kissed a baby, which became The Baby That He Kissed, and you know her from her TV show where she helps couples with love and partnership.

Some of us wondered where He had been, but He said Let’s not talk about the past, let’s talk about the present, and the future. Like how great is this country? And have you noticed that some money is taxed twice, and can we fix that? We can.

And I wondered, Can He see everything that we’re doing? And He answered me, and said, Yes, but it’s cool. And I wasn’t sure if it was cool or not.

His followers didn’t ask any questions, they just praised him. And they were surprised when He didn’t make Himself king, but instead He declared His candidacy, because He said He respected the process.

Of course He won, though not by as much as you would have thought. Early polling had Him at 100%, as did middle and late polling, but the actual vote was 51% God, 48% former senator Terry Stevens of Idaho, who got a lot of traction on his I’m One Of You campaign. Some suspected vote fraud, as Steven’s large holdings in Freemont Voting Machines becoming a minor post-election issue, but God said Ok, the votes are in, the American people have chosen, can we not make a big issue about it?

His first acts in office were minor. He eliminated the estate tax for holdings of less than 250,000 dollars, and graduated it for higher sums. He did away with unnecessary soy bean subsidies. He tapped a rock on the White House lawn and a dancing fountain arose, and it was lit with colored lights, and you can still go to see it today.

And I reported this story, and as I wrote it God stood over my shoulder, and he said That’s a nice metaphor. I like that, I really do. And I said Thanks, but I didn’t mean it, and He knew that.

International relations became strained, mostly because other countries were jealous, and some demanded equal rule by deity, and some just laughed, ha ha, because they were atheists and thought that God’s comment at the U.N., I may be God but I’m not gonna tell Secretary General B’shawe how to shave! was very funny.

Many thought God’s changes upon the earth and our land would be more extreme, and it was His followers who first started to grumble, because the rest of the people were too impressed by 18% year-to-year growth. And in the press conference I said Isn’t at least some of this growth due to the policies of your predecessor? And He said I knew you were gonna say that! And I felt zinged.

And we wanted universal health care, which He said He was working on, but the followers wanted universal judgment and the burning of the unrighteous in fires of purification and the establishment of the City of God for the saved. And he said The City of God is your town, America, if you make an effort!

But they demanded more, and his popularity with his base faltered, and his approval rating was only 70%, which, I wrote, was a typical affect of the end of the honeymoon period in newly elected presidents, and God appeared to me and He said you mean effect, not affect, and I said Yeah, that’s what I meant.

And He signed a law allowing victims to testify anonymously in cases of violent or sexual crime, which some said was unconstitutional but the Supreme Court said Far be it from us to judge God wrong!

And crime rates did drop nationwide, and we were thankful, and God said Hey, you know what? That’s My job. So thank you, America, for hiring Me.

And the universal health care bill was making progress in committee, and this was seen as a good sign, and our gun rights were not an issue, and God went golfing with the president of Russia, and He got a hole in one.

But at last a cry come out too loud for Him to ignore, and it said We do not need a balanced legislative agenda, we do not need a simplified tax code, we need a sign from You that our beliefs matter, and that we matter, and that we are the blessed jewel of Your creation to which You bequeath the small fraction of Your glory that is salvation.

And God thought about it, and He said Ok. I can see that. I can see where you’re coming from.

And he went into seclusion for 40 minutes, which is known as the time of the Great Darkness, and then he returned after a commercial break, and he said Ok, I have an idea.

And that was when we received our beautiful costumes, our capes and masks and many colored insignia. And we received our powers. And He said Blessed are the poor in spirit, for you shall have eye-beams. Blessed are the mourners, for you shall have stretchy power. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for you shall have flight and either intangibility or spider-senses, but not both, as that would unbalance the whole thing and who could stop you? And blessed are the meek, for you shall have super-intelligence and robots.

And others were also blessed and arrayed in their new clothes. And I asked Him, can I have something a little different? And He said, Sure, what did you have in mind? And I said, I would like the power to hide from You.

And He said, Wow, that’s an interesting one, because I’m omniscient. But sure, you can hide from God.

And while the others played with God in the great gardens that He founded in all places, and while they threw a ball to Him and He tossed it high and they soared in the air to catch it, I stood alone to the side and I watched, and I recorded their playing, and this made me very very happy.

 

A Memoir of Creativity, Piri Halasz’s new book, unites art theory, politics, journalism & memoir into a fluid whole. Its point of departure is a theory about abstract painting that defies the dictionary.  Halasz argues that instead of being non-representational, abstract painting can be seen as a new, “multireferential” form of representation, and tells how she arrived at this theory from varied personal and professional experiences…..read more