W I T Z

A Journal of Contemporary Poetics


Volume II, Number one                                   FALL 1993




EXPLICATIONS

By Nick Piombino


*The Return To Prose*

This poem describes the poet's feelings about the poems of a
close friend. Beginning with an evocation of sounds of
streams and rivers which can be heard but not seen, the poet
declares that the friend now" refuses to dirty his hands even in
flowing water." A flower which flits by in a "blur of yellow
and green" becomes the starting place of a melancholy description
of the passing nature of all things, even friendships. But ("as
it were") the poems created by the two are "preciously
connected." Yet even these disappear, when the matter is examined
closely, in the "many faces of time." Perhaps in the following
several lines the poet is being ironic when he writes that only
on the page death and life are "interchangeable."  "Flickering
lights," "momentary villages,""muffled sounds" are all ways of
depicting momentary pleasures. In the final passages, the poet
recalls the earliest verses of his friend. These were
"primitive," "vast," "undifferentiated," yet their "echoed
darkness" is what is now best remembered-paralleling the vast
blankness of "futureless time" when neither poet will "live in
uttered words" but will have joined the "inexplicable silence" of
death.


*Failure To Exist*

The poet's implication here is that it is probably no longer
possible to create a poem. This is made clear in the opening
passage which depicts the impossibility of describing the most
beautiful and touching aspects of what it means to feel. Speaking
of an "ironic sun" and a "black hole of comprehension" the poem
here dwells on a series of infinite parallels, digressions and
reflections. "Passion evaporates into transparent calm" is a line
which may refer to the exaltation implied in a poet's silence.
"This isn't real--it feels too good" may be ironic or sincere.
"Hatred follows hard on joy" may signal the poet's despair
towards anything that can be said too directly. "Mostly movie
stills," "false memories," "tiny sights" all refer to the
frustrating aspects of communication via images. "Life has been
replaced by words, only silence moves me." Here the poet
encounters chaos in the heart of the most meaningful aspects of
private satisfactions.


*Autumn Thoughts*

Autumn is the season closest to a state of mourning. Describing
in great detail the "smells," "wetnesses," and the "encroaching
cold and dark of winter" the poet is here attempting to set the
scene for a comparison with a state of resigned acceptance of
life's "mirrored states." It is unclear in what follows whether
or not the "bassoons and oboes" refer to real or imagined music,
but it is clear that "thought, which is a kind of music" is as
"unceasing and unchangeable" as the seasons.


*Promises*

In this enigmatic poem, the scene shifts from the external
landscape to the internal world of memories. The sea is evoked as
a paradoxically moving yet static storehouse of movement of
"living things" and their "living reflections." But soon it is
unclear if a sea is being described or the universe, the reality
of one mind or "the universe of shadows." Light and dark become,
alternatively, a man and a woman, the sky and the sea,
electricity and its conducting mediums, Joy and disappointment. It
is true something promised to exist ("the promise of a poem") but
we are unsure if it has actually come to exist. Several themes
of previous poems are here alluded to, along with the rather
maudlin observation that "no one who knows a poet well sees her
as a genius." This is reminiscent of the line in "Narcissus": "I
am a friend of a poet who lives alone." At the end of the poem
the word "promise" is evoked in its other meanings--something
expected about a person. This is a reference to "real"
expectations of a poet in terms of "substance"--which "murders
not only the intent of poets but their promise."


*Passages*

Although at the outset, "Passages" seems to refer to trials or
difficult lessons, it soon becomes clear that it is mainly the
poetic process which is being evoked, specifically in the form of
"passages" which can be separated from the specific poem as
wholes in themselves. This is seen as a paradox, in that a poem
itself is one thing, but the passages themselves constitute not
only parts of a whole but one whole. The poem is then conceived
as a series of "ages" very similar to the developmental
sequence, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood,
adulthood, old age, death.  The poet then draws a few quick
comparisons. Like the lives of most human beings, the poem allows
its life to overtake it in a series of dumbfounded surprises. An
analogy to this might be catechresis in which the mistakes
themselves are incorporated into the pattern being woven. Like
the poet, the poem "never really had a childhood, adolescence was
a war, young adulthood shallow and evasive, adulthood a series of
late lessons, and old age a harvest of regrets." The obvious
point, which "must be made" is that what could a poem be but a
"reflection of ourselves." Yet this "harsh shadow" is  not our
"real reflection" but a "painted darkness" of human doubt. The
poet then conceives the ending of "Passages" as a round. "A new
generation of poets" will emerge, which will "recover" (in both the
sense of cover over again and regain) the old powers.  Because of
this, the poem's ending, like death, counters "unknowing with
silence and empty space."


*Unread*

The poet notices it is no longer possible to read. Even a few
minutes of looking at words and even briefly considering their
meanings produces a prolonged revery. A recent bout of this
allowed the poet to "think for hours" "idly circling familiar
thoughts" like a child on a "merry-go round." In any case,
reading itself invariably leads back to the original motivation-
this is "the categorical avoidance," perhaps. The poet then
observes with chagrin that even Beauty itself is not a
consolation for unread poems which are "unseen shadows" the
inevitable and "undemanding shelter" of "meager and unfed
thoughts." But just as a "room is rarely noticed and almost never
the foundation" the poem is the "rock of ages, the ground from
which we spring." Yet it is one in which "the singing's not in
the voice but in the deep breaths arising from the song."


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NARRATIVE AS POETIC SPACE

By Stephen-Paul Martin


I guess you could say she felt she could tell me anything. How
else could you explain her complete lack of hesitation in
announcing, on our first date, that a month before she'd had a
UFO experience? It's not the kind of thing you just blurt out to
someone you barely know, even if you came of age in the sixties,
and you were caught up in the idea that it's best to wear your
private life on your sleeve and not worry if people don't like
it.

Anyway, she said she'd been unable to sleep one night and had
gone up on the roof to get some fresh air. After maybe ten
minutes, she was starting to feel more relaxed, ready to go back
to bed, when she noticed what she thought was an airplane
approaching. As it came closer, hovering, she decided instead
that it must have been a helicopter. But the odd thing was that
although it was fairly close, she couldn't hear any noise, no
sound of whirling blades or grinding engines.

It came closer, soon seeming to be little more than a small cone
of pale green light, spinning and softly humming. She began to
feel dizzy, faintly nauseous. The next thing she knew, it was two
hours later, the sun was coming up, and she was on her back,
waking up on the roof, her mouth filled with words that might
have been parts of a jigsaw puzzle, scrambled remains of a dream
like urban garbage washing up on a beach.

At the time, she'd simply dismissed the event and plunged back
into her daily routine. It only occurred to her later, having
read Whitley Strieber's _Communion_, that what she'd assumed was a
dream--something about being strapped down in a small metallic
room and undergoing an abusive medical examination--might well
have really happened. Soon she became convinced she'd been
abducted. Following Strieber's example, she'd gone to a
hypnotist, hoping she could fully recollect an event that was now
only faintly visible, repressed either because it was too
horrifying to remember or because the aliens had induced a state
of amnesia. The hypnotist had seemed a bit strange at first,
obsessed with language, constantly revising everything he said,
making simple ideas seem incomprehensible. Her initial reaction
had been that she wanted to leave and forget the whole thing. But
soon she began to enjoy his verbal contortions, casting herself
adrift in his words, and the session went quite well. Her
memories traveled in several directions at once, each direction
constantly revising all the others, until she arrived at what
must have been their source, or at least their provisional
source. The cone of pale green light had become a sequence of
geometric shapes, a rhythmic progression of greens and blues and
reds, a pattern that seemed to imply that the way she'd always
described herself--the 'I' she'd built her identity on--was
little more than a stage with painted backdrops, crude lighting
effects, and an audience filing out onto a street of restaurants
and apartment buildings, traffic lights and taxi cabs, a pattern
of shapes and motions whose primary function was improvisation, a
means of making sure that her physical senses had a location, and
apparently only for less than a minute, replaced by a labyrinth
of microcircuitry, a door getting smashed, a shabby collection of
furniture forcibly seized, a folded page of dots left
unconnected, a mirror left in the basement of an abandoned
luncheonette, a cypress tree replacing the savage wind it's
normally swayed by, the word 'normally' on a blackboard getting
erased, a lecture on class and race, a rhythm of transformation
made of geometric shapes in the dark--and at the end of a
corridor, a group of words on a folded page:

As yet, a photograph sidled upward unwrap
of ten, term teal greek, tend tone mind
to implant requisites.
Ducal use inquiry,bequest.
Otherwise fragrance (frequent) dentist cool
prospectively adjure impossible.

The hypnotist looked at these words in deep distress. Since they
were clearly in English, and since individual phrases bordered on
making sense, he felt forced to confront a pair of possibilities
whose implications greatly displeased him. The first of these was
that the aliens weren't aliens at all, but people who lived on
the earth, concealed in other dimensions, virtual zones that gave
them secret access to the deep structures of spoken and written
English. The second possibility was that the aliens had been able
to monitor the human use of language from their own planet, using
various devices that human science could only dream about,
machines that over the years had become a language of their own,
a four dimensional syntax making space fold up like a paper swan,
making time fold up like a road map stuffed in a glove
compartment.

He dismissed the first option because it was too similar to the
theories of a well-known ufologist, Jacques Vallee, who proposed
that UFOs weren't really from other planets, but instead were the
holographic projections of people in other dimensions. The
hypnotist didn't so much disagree with Vallee as dislike him
personally, for reasons better left in the dark. He dismissed the
second option because it implied a contradiction: Why would a
race of people capable of monitoring English thousands of light
years away not be capable of using it in a comprehensible
manner?

This question surprised me. I couldn't see how such an apparently
brilliant man could have ignored the obvious possibility that the
message had not been generated to make the kind of sense he was
looking for. Indeed, it might have been developed as a kind of
game, a puzzle based on Jacques Lacan's ideas about language and
identity, a sequence of rhythms and motions, verbal sounds
interacting, windows becoming elastic, words like microscopic
rooms where huge unfocused eyes look in, all designed to set the
stage for future visitations, leaving a space to be filled by
subsequent UFO penetrations .

When I mentioned these ideas, she told me she'd already come to
more or less the same conclusion, and had said so during the
session. She'd expected an enthusiastic response from the
hypnotist, especially since he'd mentioned Lacan in several of
his digressions, talking about linguistic event horizons, gaps in
the verbal sequence, coded instructions making windows disappear
into windows.

Unfortunately, the hypnotist was horrified, offended that she'd
even offered an interpretation, pretending that it was
meaningless, not worth his attention, claiming that he could work
with her only if she agreed not to speak without permission. But
she'd seen through his dismissive postures quickly, telling him
that she thought his attitudes were paternalistic, patriarchal,
phallocentric, arguing with him without permission for ninety
minutes, a savage debate which ended when he tried in vain to
seduce her.

I told her I thought the hypnotist's behavior had been totally
unprofessional, that he sounded like a lot of other professionals
I'd heard about and worked with. I was just about to go off on a
tedious digression about the emptiness of all professions, about
the dubious rituals of legitimation all professions depend on.
But I held my tongue, focusing instead on a group of scrambled
ideas that made the hypnotist look like a badly polluted beach,
like a map in a glove compartment.

Had he been a character in a work of fiction, I might have been
tempted to say that he represented mainstream culture, which is,
after all, both hypnotic and seductive, to say nothing of being
intrusive and abusive. But while such an interpretation might
have been consistent with his sexist assumption that she was
there to seduce him, it would have been a reduction of the
multi-layered possibilities suggested by any well-made symbol,
and would have obscured the fact that on his most basic level the
hypnotist, as a character in a fiction, was nothing more than a
sign, a set of dark marks on a white page, a mere trace or
outline representing a so called person, but opening also toward
a huge network of concentric possibilities, including in its arc
a broken revolving door in Boston, a Siamese fighting fish
assaulting a mirror, a group of mountain gorillas attacking a
tank in northern Kenya, an essay on poetics getting ridiculed in
a warehouse, a governor getting photographed in high-class Dallas
whorehouse, a time machine becoming a pocket watch, a frozen
witness, a frozen witness repeating himself, a frozen witness
reading a page of symbols trapped in flat white space, a page now
heating up and repeating itself, animating itself as if the words
had somewhere else to go, as if each word were quickly changing
itself to become the next word, the otherwise of as yet, upward
sliding toward unwrap, inquiry changing into bequest, a ducal
adjuration .

I looked at the message closely, fragrance becoming frequent, the
end of this word emerging in the next, becoming dentist, echoing
back to tend becoming tone becoming mind, as if it were some sort
of serial composition, as if it could implant requisites
prospectively, cool as teal, as if the graph in photograph were
the reek in greek, not impossible, yet not really possible
either, of plus ten becoming often.

Suddenly it was no longer disturbing to me that she'd felt she
could tell me anything. I still wasn't sure what to make of the
hypno tist's offensive behavior, but it no longer seemed
important. What did seem important was that I didn't want to make
any general or theoretical statement about the message, nothing
that might reveal something about the nature of the people or
beings who'd sent it, if indeed scent was the right word. It even
occurred to me that the dimension they lived in had come into
being only in response to the reading of the message, that they
themselves existed because of the reading, that they might be the
words themselves in coded form, and that their existence was
constantly being altered by the attention I was giving them, and
perhaps also by the attention they were giving me .

This final thought made it clear that any invasion they might
have been planning had already been a success. Simply by reading
that folded message, I'd made them parts of what I was telling
myself about myself, what I was telling myself about the world I
perceived, and what I was telling myself about the way I chose to
perceive it, as if that choice were no longer mine, as if it
never had been. I might have found this transformation intrusive
or even abusive. But, as it often turns out, there was no time to
think, no time to feel, only time to move on to what the moment
was becoming, moving into the words the moment called for.

When we got back to her apartment, she tried to seduce me, and
would have succeeded except that I didn't have any condoms. I
felt like a fool at first, made stupid excuses. But she told me
it didn't make any difference because the whole thing had been
contrived, conceived as deliberate artifice. The UFO, the
hypnotist, the message, and even the form and content of my
responses to them, had simply been parts of her latest
performance piece, the documentation of which would soon appear
in one of two prestigious downtown magazines--with my permission
of course.


Note: for more information, see Peter Ganick's _untitled_
(Generator Press, 1989).

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----------------------------------------------------
READING AND REVIEWS
----------------------------------------------------

_LINEN MINUS_ BY SUSAN GEVIRTZ, AVENUE B

Reviewed by Susan Smith Nash


If language can dismember the psyche, then the act of
dismemberment must be a violent, dramatic one. In Susan Gevirtz's
new collection, _Linen Minus_, the rupture of language and psyche
is accompanied by Dionysian ecstasy which often astonishes with
its fearless shattering of forms and expectations. For example,
in "Romansch: the stations of cannonization," Gevirlz underscores
and problematizes relationships between the body, text, and
intention:

nothing of the soft tissue holy intentions davor davor left "the
seduction of having oneself dismembered alive for others" (12)


This poem, which deals with issues of marginalization and
linguistics, refers to Romansch, a language spoken in only a
small part of Switzerland. Of course, to talk about Romansch's
"stations of cannonization" makes a nice play, with "cannon"
giving rise to associations of violent disruption, and "canon"
refering to a literary canon, or a state of being (sainthood)
which can only be achieved after death. Further, "cannon"
echoes the word "canton." which is how the Swiss designate their
provinces. Thus Gevirtz makes an interesting comment on the
nature of language by suggesting that we are seduced by the
spectacle of watching something die, even if that something
happens to be the symbol-system (their language) of a people and
not the individual bodies that comprise that group.

If language can die, then how do we understand when and why the
collapse began? Gevirtz suggests that language and its linguistic
structures can be used in and against itself ("ln which / second
language / shall we stop / to forget them?" (13) she writes in
"Romansch"). What happens then is a poetics that eulogizes what
once existed -- where, when, and how -- and analyzes the texture
of newly-imposed nothingness which fills up the "orchestrate
silence of a house." _Linen Minus_ reminds one of George Bataille's
_Tears of Eros_ or Michel Foucault's _Sun/eillir et Punir_, where
vivisection of the body is necessary in order to divine a way to
achieve self-transcendence. How does one achieve self overcoming,
or manage to override the symbols of authority that lodge
themselves in the consciousness and act as a refraining force on
creativity and adaptability? How does one proceed, once the
panopticon devised by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century and
scrutinized by Foucault has been firmly established in the middle
of one's waking thoughts? Sadly, Foucault and Bataille both
experimented with methods that resulted in physical trauma--
their attempts to transcend either discipline-and-punish
authority structures or culturally constructed eroticized
thanatos aesthetics led to their death, scandalized their
achievements, and in an ironic triumph of the systems they sought
to escape. In _Linen Minus_, Gevirtz takes the body itself as a
point of departure. For convenience, one could construct a
Nietzschean-based system of oppositions, where an Apollonian
aesthetic incorporates system-building, and thereby privileges
notions of order and logic. The Apollonian aesthetic opposes a
Dionysian one of system-rupturing, which is characterized by
chaos, blood, and abandon. Gevirtz takes the Apollonian and the
Dionysian and creates an exercise in thought which revolves
around the problem of representing change and transformation. If
we continue the dialectical structure, then Gevirtz's exercise in
thought becomes one of positioning destructive chaos versus
cultural constructs: "...restoration of that first... her passage
through ... graspings and droppings ... coming back...
paper-scattered lamplit circle .. as the centre ..." (19)
(quotation marks and ellipses Gevirtz's)

Gevirtz places self-creation at the center of the poetics. In
"Caldera," using a nature-based paradigm of representation allows
one to posit that a volcano could represent context,"The climate
of their country / spilled contents of a broken jar / carnival of
lights above the sea / In a meltimi they rim an / island (55)"
writes Gevirtz. If the caldera constitutes the milieu of the
poetic process, it forms the constraints upon what Lloyd Bitzer
would have as the "rhetorical situation." Thus, it is the
environment, or the context that forces rhetorical strategies to
come to the surface, and begin their reifying and rigidifying
tasks. How does the reader detect the context's effect upon the
reading? How does the milieu work its almost imperceptible
effects on the reader's strategies for seeing and interpreting
form? Gervirtz posits relationships of text that call into
question the notion that there is a neat cause-and-effect
solution for this issue. Instead, degree to which the cotext
affects the reader has a lot to do with scales of perception.
Gevirtz questions how the scales work: "background detected /
relics of infancy / subatomic scale" (55). Also, what do you
exclude or rule out? "imperfect origin  vacuum genesis / as we
crawl back into / longevity out of which came // the first
equation" (56). The scales of perception revolve around naming
and identity issues as well. In _Linen Minus_ this concern is
constructed so that the reader becomes as engaged as Gevirtz in
examining identity (or lack of identity). Does nebulous identity
have an impact on meaning? If these issues are not resolvable,
they are at least provocative, and in considering them, the
reader can begin to develop more strategies for reading.

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_HER ANGEL_ BY KAREN KELLEY, SINGING HORSE PRESS

Reviewed by Dan Featherston

While reading Karen Kelley's first collection of poems, _Her Angel_
(Singing Horse Press), a maxim from poet Peter Redgrove kept
coming to mind: 'Depression is withheld knowledge.'  The crux of
Redgrove's statement-- that withheld knowledge, particularly
self-knowledge, manifests physically--seemed to present itself
as a point of departure in _Her Angel_, whereby a kind of
self-combustion of bodily pressure (withheld knowledge) turns
itself out into the corpus of the text.

_Her Angel_ is a dialogue between body and psyche, oscillating
unabashedly from wry, self-reflexive humor and idiomatic phrases
(akin to troubadour and Blues narratives along the contours of
the sexual landscape) to a dense, organic use of imagery in which
the text moves as a body moves, articulating subtleties and
layerings--a masterful use of "no ideas but in things."

Despite the book's massive psychological excavating, Kelley
avoids locking herself into a confessional strain by tentacling
out with equal insight into the social, political and sexual
contexts in which she writes.  Her poetry is a braid of her angel
and the warped lenses of billboards: "a mirror all
over...tethered to this stake."

In the first section, _The Boston Poems_, Kelley's poetry moves
cautiously, ambulating around the fringes of the book's more
engaging centers; it's as if she's revved the engine but idles
here through a series of pieces that lend little insight other
than to contextualize and better understand from what distances
the later poems have traveled: "I was not even sure what I hoped
to gain--perhaps a certain shallowness that / would make me
restless. A concern for surface was inherent, though not yet /
articulated."

By the end of _The Boston Poems_, Kelley has migrated toward
herself as her "primary resource," as it were, shifting away from
"him," or rather through him via herself: "suddenly I realized:
he's mirroring me.

The second section, also _Her Angel_, is five meditations, or
encounters with her angel, from its "siege on her bedpost night
after night" to a "seduction by vi- / sions, secret visions
gaining substance at these heights, turning into what / she swims
in, what she cannot face."

Her angel, like Rimbaud's bridegroom in hell, is a muse of a
darker nature than what "angel" implies--a kind of wild (er)ness
of the imagination whose "hide is a mirror, a portion of space
with / indefinite boundaries."  This is not a tour through hell
behind Roman robes, but a descent inaugurated by a symbolic death
in the hands of her angel who has "cut off all of her limbs and
thrown them in the / water, and lighted a fire beneath the kettle
and boiled them."

The result of this imaginative assimilation is "The Red Snake We
Woke," a long poem that twists forward into unconscious and
preconscious territories, as well as through a series of sexual
encounters in which the others' identities constantly shed and
merge through historical, archetypal and personal masks. Kelley's
observations in this piece, while patently surreal, remain in
full control of the so-called 'objective' world, unlike a sur
realism in which the thing-itself is lost or glossed over by
hyperboles and abstractions:

My mother makes the characteristic cry of a submissive animal/
invoking heaven. / Poisonous./ She makes me think of the
bursting forth / of large groups of fins, gills, cartilaginous
skeletons swimming together / in shallow waters, turbulence in
the atmosphere causing the sparkling / of lustrous white
scales, a boiling like the winging of birds' bodies
unlocking trails of smoke as they turn / in a threatening
sky.

The final section, _Virtual Realities_, is a set of ten dream like
narratives studded with boldface print where the 'voice' seems to
rise along the poem's funhouse-circuit, its mobius strip where
"You / come around the corner, carrying a large suitcase. You
look like the / space for a ship between two piers by moonlight,
then like a MILK- / PAIL, then again a port and again a bucket."

These poems possess a cinematic-splice feel and a theatrical
quality, as if one is seated before a montage of burlesque images
in which characters shed personae in a kind of satire on the
plasticity of human fantasy.  For example, in "Deconstructing
the Queen," the 'you' to whom each poem is addressed ('Anywoman'?
'Anyreader'?) undergoes a series of metamorphoses that seems to
parallel historical (as well as parody academic) changes of the
'queen'/anywoman, until she is merely a catatonic arrangement of
"FACE POWDER, COFFEE, AND CREAM / CAKES." Reading _Her Angel_, one
follows Kelley through a sort !of ritual-dance: from a hesitancy,
or withholding, into a poetry that is in-bodied.  In a culture
where the exploration and knowledge of one's own body (and,
therefore, psyche) is taboo, Kelley's angel is a herald of a bold
and ancient sort, slipping past that other angel at psyche's gate
and momentarily reclaiming the body.  One wonders where her angel
will lead her next.

        #     #     #     #

_STRONG PLACE_ BY TIM DLUGOS, AMETHYST PRESS

Reviewed by Kevin Killian

After the publication of _Entre Nous_ (1981), Tim Dlugos was unable
to find a publisher for the poems in this collection, written
between 1981-5. Since they're in every way superior to the
earlier work, it's hard to see just why _Strong Place_ was
systematically rejected by a round of printers. Maybe because
Dlugos was a Republican? But probably because he was gay. I
understand, for example, that of dozens of young poets invited to
the recent conference at Buffalo, "Writing from the New Coast,"
only one identifies herself as queer. Could that really be so?
Dlugos died two years ago today, and I remember his obituary in
the Chronicle, the reprint from _The New York Times_, a slice of
text that seemed to elude his personality more cleverly even than
most of them do.

When I met Tim Dlugos, I was in grad school. He, Michael Lally,
Eileen Myles and Jane DeLynn came to our campus in a bunch, a
glamorous, drunk bunch, redolent of Manhattan high life,
sophisticated, vivid, strongly colored. Tim was pretty absent.
Sarcastic. "Prick," I mumbled. Much later I realized it was
because both of us were drunk at the time. Strong drink's a
screen behind which all kinds of intimate interchanges tip and
bow, figures from a minuet. A year later I read with him myself I
still have the gala poster from this event, somewhere in my
files "GAY' written all over it in glitter, as though it were a
word freshly coined, sassy and neologistic. Here Tim opened up,
warm, helpful, enthusiastic, mordant: he was my man. When he came
to San Francisco in 1990 to partake in the OutWrite Conference,
and to read at the "Compact" event at Southern Exposure, I hadn't
seen him in years, not since he got sober. Guess I should have
realized this would be his last reading here in California (but I
hoped not) but wrong. Guess AIDS is too powerful, though it won't
always be we hope. The poems in Strong Place gain from the
dramatic unity of their conception: the localized, benign
Brooklyn neighborhood where they were written, and the 12-step
precepts, often mocked and sometimes dulsome, actually worked in
this case, sharpened Tim's writing like a whetstone on a blade.
The happy frivolity ("Gilligan's Island") of his earlier work
became the somber vitality of the new. This is "Not Stravinsky":

Dark-eyed boy in tight designer jeans and sneakers on your way
from basketball practice at Bishop Somebody High, I

don't know what you're playing on your Walkman but it probably is
not Stravinsky.


Within this discourse an overload of irony awaits, deadly,
threatening as radium. These are the nineties now, when we're all
going to learn the value of sincerity, so inevitably Dlugos' work
shows its age, wobbles a bit. David Trinidad's introduction to
_Strong Place_, though unnecessarily formalist, is sharp, clear and
fierce, like the translucent prose of Willa Cather.and never less
than moving. His argument, like mine, is a skein of memories. But
what about this? Unlike many contemporary poets who
fashionably strive to obscure narrative, or to not make sense,
Tim never abandoned his story. 'I risk playing the fool,' he says
in "The Morning," 'because this is a world I am creating,/ not
"text" or "slice of life," and old contexts/ don't hold."' I only
wonder if these lines really mean what David takes them to mean?
Perhaps they only intend to mean what he takes them to mean? I'll
take the other tack and say that Strong Place is a text I hope
finds its way into your hands. It's not easy to forget a writing
of such verve, dexterity and ambition. Even its few failures
partake of community, where you think, I know what he wanted--and
I want it too. Please note, this book may be a little hard to
locate, because its publisher has AIDS now. His health has caused
him to abandon his business affairs.

Thus a bitterness, mine, occludes this healthy lovely air, that
we call cultural critique.

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END OF WITZ 2.1
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W I T Z


WITZ is a journal of critical writing edited by Christopher
Reiner (creiner@crl.com).  It is published three times a
year.

The contents of this issue are copyright (c) 1993 by WITZ.

Copyright reverts to authors after publication.
Reproduction of this magazine for NONPROFIT purposes is
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