Amiri Baraka
Re: Port
from Xcp  no. 1

Hilton Obenzinger
Writing (In) the Past
from Xcp  no. 2

Elaine Equi
Blue Notes
from Xcp no. 3

Amiri Baraka
 

         Re: Port

Ahab went crazy
chasing his self
and the self his self was
who worked him his employer self
and butcher self, the imperialist navigator
hunting the biggest white  thing in literature!
He got crazier nad crazier raising his spear
to the devil by reflection, imagining evil
an evil vector and imp of Satan, himself. And he knew that
was really him, and so he chased his white tale through
the lie, but then that's later, when early no one could
stand his psychopathic stare, the anglo-saxon dueling scar
cut by Moby Dick, dig, across human emptiness. And he was
alone because he wanted to be and thought he was, after all
he was both master of this ship and master of his fate.
And so he swore upon the devil, and set off with the drunken
laughter of Dis, the crazy howl of co lore yet he set himself
up like the thing itself, like the colorless satan fish, for
which he was to sacrifice his life. Ignorant savages under
the control of even more ignorant savages. Ahab, al;one, who
was the King, where Ishmael went when Sarah had him driven
out, from where Hagar stayed. He cried, "Is there no help for
the widow's son?"
 But see he rode there all the time. The little black
spot on the destination card. The tiny but shiny black nigger
on the great white way. You a pip, others wd say. Gladys,
however, had three pips with her. She took them out so the
white folks would'n get 'em.
 In the torrent of madness the ship carried and drew into
itself from the belly of the stinking evil that must balance
the world. Triple Six, out the ditch, dicht is a thing, dig
is what sing, dig is like on to understand, but their dick
is a policeman, Tracy, a white Indian living in the comic
strip. This washing throwing even beneath the waves the prow
would lunge, and shudderr, and you held whatever you could, so
you wouldn't be hurt, or even, God forbid, tossed overboard!
 But that isn't what happened to Pip, sharp black heaven and
hell of symbol-everything. Suddenly, was thrown into the
screaming torrent, above the dick where invisible forces
clawed at the staggering crew, then Pip felt himself ( and I
too, as if a sweep of jet hell had heaved him and he flew and
tumbled over board and dropped without thought except the
evil he knew this was and why he could not prevent it, who
has been the doer of this, in bubbles and choking swift
lashing downess. Wet without wetness, rushing without speed.
Till he crashed at the very bottom of the sea, even way below
the whales. And there he dug God's foot.
 And when he returned he was a singer and a poet, and
drummer of dreams and curious harmonies of lilting wondrous
melodies. He talked in tongues he explained, almost without
speaking, it was his hands and shoulders and the bottomless
huge black eyes that sent the response to almost everything.
 And they became close, I know, it hurts you the way the
shit works, sometimes. But they were never friend. Ahab and
Pip. It's just that they were so weird they could only be
around each other. Ahab, mad. Pip, on the other hand, just
needed a job and was hip, until he tried to save Ahab's life,
got enbtangled in the Rope, got choked and drowned, while the
White Devil drug Ahab away, screaming. I aint seen neither
him since.

        JA  ZZ
        7/96 New Ark

Elain Equi
 
 

BLUE NOTES
 

1. The sort of day where everyone, even the cashier, seems close to tears.
 

2.  ... in the sugar cookie of the spotlight.
 

3. The poem -- a place to hide things under the guise of revelation.
 

4. Just as I used to fantasize about the secret life of objects, so poetry became a way to fantasize about the secret life of words.
 

5. My childhood: a clumsiness so sturdy no one could knock it down.
 

6. The truth about Modernism: feels like everyone is still at Finnegan's Wake.
 

7. I can imagine a Gulliver tied down by perfume -- flowers instead of ropes.
 

8. Tabloid thinking is the triumph of democracy: revenge on anyone who thought they were better than us.
 

9. Jars make whatever you put in them shine. Wallace Stevens knew the pleasures of jars. Jars display whereas boxes conceal and bury. The ultimate box is a coffin.
 

10. We forget that being a good listener also means listening to ourselves.
 

11. I want to read, but I'm too tired. My words keep slipping off the eyes on the page.
 

12. The voice I'd most like to hear right now -- money's!
 

13. Shorn of spirit.
 
 

14. Caught a whiff of lightning right before bed.
 

15. On the persistence of hierarchies: "... the spirits of less important folk also went to the abode of the blessed, but did not cut much of a figure there; while commoners had no souls at all, or souls made of such poor and attenuated stuff that they perished with the body,"  (C.E. Vulliamy)
 

16. Like bells ringing in a silent movie.
 

17.     ASH WEDNESDAY

    Squeezing through
    the darkest part --

    even words
    get left behind.

    Ashes
    softer than skin.
 

18. The earth is finite. But the world keeps getting bigger. Too big for just this planet to hold us in its spinning glance.
 

19. The smell of gingerbread in the hallway, and from behind a neighbor's door, the cackling of a cartoon witch.
 

20. Separation Anxiety: phantom pain in the phantom limb of the therapist.
 

21. Erotic Flashbacks: The windshield wiper swoosh of the pendulum in the movie The Pit and the Pendulum as it sweeps across the protagonist's stomach. The laser beam inching its way toward Sean Connery's crotch in Goldfinger. Both men tied down -- helpless against technology, whether it be barbaric or state of the art.
 

22. Only music can convey walking and flying at the same time: the bass on the ground, the flute in the air.
 
 
 
 
 

23. An inherited trait: asking for directions and promptly forgetting them.
 

24. "Their minds are always busy -- always decorating." (my mother on our relatives)
 

25. Looking at before-and-after pictures of people in heaven.
 

26. Finding the necessary blank spaces to wander and grow in.
 

27. "I" in my own hands.
 
 

BIO:  Elaine Equi is the author of many collections of poetry including Surface Tension and Decoy, both from Coffee House Press. She also has a new chapbook, Friendship With Things, available from The Figures.

Obenzinger

Writing (In) the Past

 Travel some miles out of Minneapolis or San Francisco and you reach countryside, and if that countryside is rural enough you might consider yourself in the boondocks, and if you had to live there with some reluctance you might even consider yourself to be "stuck in the boondocks."  The word boondocks, usually filled with a deprecating sense of urban sophisticate versus hayseed naïf, is securely a part of American language, entering "the pure products of America" at the very end of the last century through the impure vehicle of colonial violence.  Boondocks is a corruption of the Tagalog word bondoc, which means mountain, and the bondoc was where the "bolomen," the Filipino independence fighters resisting the U.S. occupation after the defeat of Spain nearly a hundred years ago, would hide in a ferocious guerrilla war that lasted in some areas decades; and "boondocks," its meaning transformed from a zone of terror spoken by frightened Buffalo Soldiers and other American infantrymen to an area of rural isolation and idiocy spoken by disparaging city slickers, circulates through our language cut off from the anchor of its origins, infiltrating slangy talk with the ghosts of massacres through a kind of linguistic chemistry that turns fear and pain and death and colonial appropriation into something else altogether.

 Imaginative writers, fictionalists and poets, are not etymologists, at least not in the scientific or academic sense, and yet we activate and are activated by an acute sense of the history of words as well as the words of history.  Through language, pasts invariably occupy presents, the pains, delights, violence, individual pulsations of lifetimes drifting in and out of casual conversations.  Poets are still the hidden, unacknowledged legislators of that past, conductors of currents that often surge through life without consciousness of their presence.  My somewhat coy title alludes to some of the multiple effects of the relationship between writing and history, between remembrance and memory, that the self-conscious effort to recall, reiterate, reincarnate the past involves, and this talk is an evocative meditation on these multiple effects, particularly as drawn from my own direct experience of writing in the past.  My use of "we" may seem presumptuous, perhaps, since there are so many positions, experiences, commitments, but I will assume a common bond of democratic engagement similar to that which allows the shared perceptions of cultural studies and poetics will inform this discussion.

 We write the past, we create what is no longer living memory and make it current; we write in the past, already in the past, writing in the moment that instantly becomes a future gone; and we write in the past, in the sense of filling in blanks, of including what was never considered worthy of remembrance or of imagining and rearranging items, a bricolage of historical debris, often attempting to revise or reinvent or restore what has been distorted or forgotten or never even remembered in the first place, even if that "past" is the moment generally known as "now."  These three senses of "Writing in the Past" are activated any time a poet or imaginative writer or particularly attuned scholar decides to engage in accounting for the present.

 The past is, of course, "another country," and in a conference devoted to cross-cultural poetics, the discussion of the past -- of what is remembered and what (often violently) is not, of imagined communities seeking mythic sources, of mythic sources debunked and harsh realities decentered, of a whole myriad of effects -- further complicates the criss-crossing of all cultural encounters.  There are communities in which poets and storytellers keep memory and identity alive through the generally understood or assumed imperatives of that culture, but the general experience of American life and of American writing is otherwise.  Those of us old enough to have lived through a time sufficiently gone know the feeling of unrecognizability and alienation and rootlessness which most of us experience when we are aware of even what we alone have witnessed.  For example, those who were active in the cultural and political rebellions of the sixties and seventies not only feel that so much of the program of the time -- civil rights, for example, or the critique of American empire that has led me to remember "boondocks" in the first place -- is today being eroded, but even the account, even the story, the feeling, the sense of that time is constantly under assault by powerful forces attempting to reverse those changes or render them ineffectual through unrelenting trivilization and commodification: hippie beads, afros, platform shoes, memoirs of recantation but not of politics; no actual sense of movements generating meanings, no sense of the vast, great awakening to the absurdities of power that involved millions.  "Anyone who remembers the sixties wasn't there," Robin Williams jokes -- and it's a joke we can enjoy -- but as a result of the assumption of forgetfulness the official memory is now created by those who have other designs than the appreciation of psychedelic delights.  It is a sickening, hollow sense of being ripped off, of having one's own history stolen right before your eyes, and it is a feeling repeated again and again, particularly since speaking of pasts inherently means refraction through the structures of power.  Poets, generally, are not in power, and the winners write history, while the losers can only remember, if they can.  In this regard there is a difference between "history" and "memory," for history is sanctioned, public, is a structure to organize feelings, while "memory" is made unofficial, private, a feeling which may organize structures but only imperceptibly -- until "memory" becomes a material force and "history" acknowledges its source.

 There is, as E.P. Thomson and others have identified, the "arrogance of history," an arrogance that not only makes selections of worth from positions of power, but often makes those selections through the corresponding rendering of so much of the past as invisible, as "memory."  I spoke and read poems from New York on Fire before a literacy workshop at a settlement house in Harlem composed mostly of Latino and African-American women, and when I spoke of that arrogance or condescension of history they understood immediately because it is a condescension and invisiblization they perceive in daily life.  At that very moment, at this very moment, so much occurs in the lives of people, all the people -- there is simply the arrogance of being able to look back upon a moment from the present and try to extract slices of key actions, cross-sections, when so very much occurs -- and even with that overwhelming totality kept in mind, there is the immensity of that fragment which does get selected as "history" and that immensity which gets forgotten.  How many people were/are working at this moment washing dishes in kitchens, pressing pants in laundries, changing diapers, and these acts constitute the complexity of the moment that others identify perhaps with one significant act -- the President signs a bill, a Princess dies in a car wreck, etc. -- but they are also what constitutes the historical past -- and who decides why they are not "History"?  Those women of that workshop knew they were part of that swirl which was history -- and they would be given voice if they as writers themselves, or through the medium of imaginative rendering of writers who knew their moment, would challenge the immensity of condescension, would "make" history simply by the knowledge of who they were.  Within the last 20 or 30 years developments within history as a scholarly discipline have also moved in the direction of seeking what has previously been ignored, such as the history of private lives, all the questions of what constitutes the knowable, the construction and elisions of the archive, the search for the voices of the subaltern, even when those submerged voices were never heard in the first place, or the rendering of those who previously had been invisible as visible, as actors with agency and subjectivity, at the same time that "the linguistic turn" has made the language of historical discourse itself a realm of scholarship.

 If the past is, indeed, "another country, a foreign country" then questions of the semiotics of tourism must intrude, the dynamics of tourist and anti-tourist, the transformation of a site or a citation into a "sight" in the visual sense available for reification and commodification with the possibility not only of involving "use value" but also of "misuse value."  Those of the present -- that always superior advanced country -- can look upon those of the past -- that backward, underdeveloped region in dire need of our presence in order to lift itself out of obscurity.  It was not always like this, of course: the roles were reversed with the past as a "Golden Age."  But today, indeed, history is becoming more and more touristic: those "authentic" Indian villages, those Civil War reenactments, that lived-in colonial Jamestown, the possibilities of reconstruction by Disney, the constant privatization of public spaces yanked from contestation.  Can the present travel to other histories without condescension?  In the dialectic between tourist and anti-tourist can there be a meta-tourist of this other country or simply a traveler that does not aggrandize?

 I will draw from my own experiences of these questions, particularly in regard to poetics and history involved in writing two books, New York on Fire and Cannibal Eliot and The Lost Histories of San Francisco.  I was hired to write a history of the New York Fire Department on behalf of the firefighters' union, a commercial history, a hack job which puffed up the reputation of the heroic firefighter, and I dutifully went to work.  The hack job went belly up when the company who hired me bankrupted at the same time the president of the union lost his election, even though the book had been written.  But I knew something else would emerge almost immediately, even before the commercial job was scraped.  I met with the Fire Commissioner, who directed me to archives and key people, and at the end of our meeting he leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, "Psst, come here."  I leaned towards him, and he looked side to side to check if we would be overheard.  "You know, Dalmatians?"  "You mean the fireman's mascot, the spotted dog?" I answered, a little perplexed.  "Yeah.  I'll tell you something: keep it to yourself: Dalmatians are the stupidest dogs around."  At that moment I knew something was up, that the history of fires in New York and the whole mythos of fire and fighting fire contained more than it seemed -- and as I delved into the archives and literature of firefighters and New York's social history, as I uncovered more and more, I knew I would write an entirely different book than the one demanded by my commercial clients.

 For example: Fire escapes were invented because Irish workers died in horrible tenement fires -- one in particular, the Elm Street fire --  and if the northern industrialists wanted those workers to remain passive if not allies during the crisis leading up to the Civil War they had to be given concessions, one of them being the possibility of surviving a fire by fleeing down metal steps.  Such a politicized provenance for the invention of what today we take for granted -- such a thing is worth poems.  Reading first-hand accounts, memoirs, official reports, I tried to reconstruct the voices of those times.  I had to imagine what was left out, and I had to spend months at a time hanging from the ledge of the Triangle Shirtwaist company or some other horrendous disaster imagining, revisioning, inviting ghosts to appear as the words made their way to the page, voices of victims and heroes, but also of the evil, violent, perverse who also require embodiment.  There is the uncomfortable exchange between narrative and the past that documentary or "non-fiction" or collective (and uncollected) memory provokes: how much do I make up?  (Historians are more and more wrestling with the same question.  A historian at Stanford who had all the data around the center of an event but nothing in the center itself asked me if he could simply fictionalize what he otherwise knew to be true, even if speculative, without the necessary two, documented witnesses.  Of course, he was asking the wrong person, that is if he wanted the stamp of the official discipline, since I see no problem with imagination.)  In fact, the creation of history always involves the literary imagination, and I knew that in my own book as much as I found someone else's voice I was finding my own, even my own voice of evil.  It is problematic -- the sense of distortion, even if so-called poetic license -- but I felt I was being transformed, even led by the spirit of people long gone.  This is not an oral tradition, as Simon Ortiz and other Native American poets can call upon, but one that must become oral by sizing up strange documents and searching for the voices behind reportage or beaurocratic obfuscation or private utterance.

 In Cannibal Eliot, a book that revolves around invented documents -- memoirs, diaries, reports, interviews -- of participants in San Francisco's history, particularly its history of mass psychosis and violence, I would be moved by small footnotes in Hubert Howe Bancroft's histories of California.  The first murder in what would become San Francisco was a hideous rape and murder of two infants during a fandango during the Mexican period.  A soldier was accused, but the case was so politicized, became so entwined with other issues, that the execution was continually delayed -- and even then there were doubts -- and when the new governor sent from Mexico City eventually carried out the sentence, was it the execution or the fact that he was "black," either of African or full-blood Indian background, the final cause for the revolt which ensued?  I found the court records in Spanish, as well as the unpublished memoirs of the dons, the Californios, and I felt ghosts to such a degree reading them that I ended up writing the account of the one surviving child as a ghost story, one which involved evil and uncertainty and racial politics all too familiar to America today.  I frightened myself writing it.  But now this murder rendered as a strange tale, much more than a footnote, has become a part of San Francisco's history, so much so that tour guides have written to me how they use the ghost story that I have evoked as part of their spiels.  A legend thrives where one did not exist before -- although, with some irony, once again, almost inevitably, the past enters the touristic economy.

 In such ways poems about history enter history, can be confirmed by history, so long as they reverberate with what is known.  It so happens, for example, that the Happy Land Social Club fire took place on exactly the same day as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire -- both disasters involving immigrants and locked doors and scores of deaths.  I read excerpts of New York on Fire in response to the "Happy Land" fire on WBAI radio and took phone calls for an hour and a half.  People from the neighborhood called up to explain about what had made the boyfriend of the ticket taker at the dance return with a molotov cocktail, and why the dancehall security people were at fault for not taking his threat seriously.  I read a poem on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, then read a poem about the Bronx burning in the eighties, a monologue of the only landlord that was arrested and convicted for torching his own building.  Employing the research of housing activists, the poem explains the intricate, Byzantine details of codes and interest rates which actually made it profitable to allow a building to decay and even burn down.  I received a call from a former building inspector from the Bronx who confirmed all that the poem elaborated in the strange language of financial shenanigans.  A poem's truth confirmed by a building inspector over the radio -- it was an astonishing moment -- and while I do not consider that poem among the best in the book, it held deep resonance, a truth content, that went beyond any designs I might have intended.

 Such moves to criss-cross boundaries of genres and expertise and actualities have come under considerable attack, more within historical circles than within poetry and probably less among poetry circles, first because poetry itself is one of those practices, widespread and constant though it may be, which is continually marginalized within American culture; and second, because poetry has utterly different understandings and standards for the notion of "fact."  Many reading Cannibal Eliot in particular were very unnerved because they could not tell what was "true" and what was invented -- "what a wonderful parody of Ambrose Bierce!" but it IS Ambrose Bierce -- and yet such uncertainty should always be a part of what is projected as "history,"  and our interpretations, those parts of narrative that we emphasize, are all subject to revision.

 Consider this as a piece of history and poetry:

 As cruel as a Turk: Whence came
 That Proverb old as the Crusades?
 From Anglo-Saxons.  Who are they?
 ...
 The Anglo-Saxons -- lacking grace
 To win the love of any race;
 Hated by myriads dispossessed
 Of rights -- the Indians East and West,
 These pirates of the sphere! grave looters --
 Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters,
 Who in the name of Christ and Trade
 (Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!)
 Deflower the world's last sylvan glade.  (4.9.112-125)
 

An example of "new formalism," perhaps?   Or perhaps such a passage would be characterized by many as simply an outburst of race rage or "political correctness" (an insidious term which veils more than it reveals)?  The fact that this passage is by Herman Melville, from his long and virtually still unread poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and is spoken in the voice of an embittered part-Cherokee Confederate veteran employed as a mercenary for the sultan in Ottoman Palestine -- an improbable but by no means impossible occurrence in history: Confederate and Union veterans were in fact hired by General William Tecumseh Sherman for the Khedive of Egypt, for example -- the fact that these lines are by Melville might give some readers pause.  The historian C. Vann Woodward termed Clarel "the blackest commentary on the future of his country ever written by an American in the nineteenth century," although, even here, a poem by such an acclaimed, canonized, and very Anglo-Saxon writer is barely read -- and rarely employed within anyone's notion of history.  Would William Carlos Williams' Patterson or Reznikoff's Testimony figure in history courses?  The work of Paul Metcalf?  Nazim Hikmet?  Ernesto Cardenal?  Adrienne Rich?  Eduardo Galleano? Perhaps -- but probably not.  This is one obvious barrier imposed by the crossing (or attempted crossing) of institutional lines -- the institution of poetry and fiction or creative imagination in general with that of academic history.  This is a barrier we are used to, breached from time to time in classrooms by famous, social novels: notably, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath.  More difficult are the barriers imposed by the even more problematic institutions of publishing and bookselling, and I want to touch upon them briefly.

 When New York on Fire first appeared I gained a deeper appreciation of such barriers -- and I was astonished by my own naiveté.  The book's reception was marked by the marketing limitations of bookstores due to the confusions of genres, heightened further by the fact that the book was profusely illustrated.  The book was hailed by the Village Voice: "Poetry or not, this is great history," and an excellent essay in The Hungry Mind Review regarded it at length as an example of architectural history, barely mentioning the fact that it was poetry.  The book was listed in San Francisco's poetry bookstore Small Press Traffic's newsletter, but it was listed under the heading of "non-fiction" -- a curious and not altogether negative category for any book of poems, but one which placed this particular book outside of the accepted boundaries of verse.  Some bookstores carried it in the history section; others under fiction; some under poetry; while Barnes and Nobles in New York placed it alongside guidebooks for tourists.  The New York Public Library ordered it for the Young People's shelves in all the branches, while the single largest distributor of the book was a mail-order catalog directed to a list of over 25,000 "fire buffs," those people fascinated with all things pertaining to fires and firefighters.  The Bay Area Book Reviewers Association did select it as a finalist for its award for poetry, so the book was ultimately recognized as a citizen of the nation of poems.  But the problem posed by multiplicity and cross-over was driven home by the book's unplaceability.  The book may have sold ten times the amount of the usual small press book of poems, but it still did not reach the breadth of readers it may have been able to because shelves did not allow more than one slot -- and the placement on one shelf and one shelf only makes multiplicity of any sort especially difficult.  As an experimental poem, it was not of a certain type of experimentation recognized as such; it was not on the surface difficult, and while it was narrative -- and entertained the notion of the structures of narrative as tropes of poetry -- it was not official history.  Books do cross-over successfully: I think of Spiegelman's graphic Nazi genocide narrative Maus as a prime example, but categories on bookshelves are becoming more and not less intransigent.  Reification is not simply a kind of lockjaw of the brain, but a process carried out in material realms: have you ever wondered why there is one category in book stores called "Poetry" while another is called "Literature?"   In the Borders Bookstore in Palo Alto there is even a section called "Popular Poetry" alongside the regular (unpopular?) poetry section.

 I would like to end these meditations with a call to arms, but I suspect the best tactic is simply to persist and trust to the power of language and the irrevocable unraveling of human contradictions to free up minds as well as bookshelves, no doubt a very romantic gesture.  Writing in the Past means creating the Present, insisting upon the validity of the imagination now, no matter what the publishing or academic definitions demand.  Artists create because they have to and certainly not as a career choice; oppositional art can exist outside of commodity relations.  We will find ways to pass around our handwritten scrawls, if we have to.  Writing in the Past is almost a religious calling, an insistence that voices can be and will be heard, that memory will not be forgotten.  With the rise of computers we have perhaps never heard so much about the amazing capacities of memory -- all the RAM and speed of retrieval, etc. etc. -- but the fact is, paradoxically, we are forgetting more and more.  Think of all the Web Pages and email.  Where do they go when they are used up?  How are they archived?  Does someone keep a record of each day's internet?  Tim Lenoir, history of science professor at Stanford, tries to maintain an on-line history of Silicon Valley, but the rate of expansion is always faster than he can keep up with.  At the same time the more the machines remember, the more people push delete.  It is one reason, at least, that I trust that books and speech will remain low tech constants of life wielded by people who can wrest contingent truths from the clutter of bullshit.   Perhaps 1898 will be remembered, and someone will recall the "bondoc."  Or will the passage of one small anniversary escape us, filled with Teddy Roosevelt's "Charge!" up San Juan Hill on cable TV?  Will the poem of the Buffalo Soldier emerge?  Will the poem of the Buffalo Soldier who switched sides, who fought with the Filipino insurgents, emerge?  Will we re-fashion the ancestors of Minneapolis or New York or San Francisco or any other place in this country and know the ground upon which we stand?
 

Biographic note:
Hilton Obenzinger's recent books include Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco (Mercury House) and New York on Fire (Real Comet).  He has recently completed a novel of the 1968 student revolt Busy Dying and is working on a long poem on time and memory First Things First.  He teaches at Stanford University.