Homemade Poems

sLorine niedecker

“communication is essential” s

Joanne kYGer: LeTTers To & From

“CommuniCation is essential”

letteRs to & FRom Joanne KYGeR

[Joanne kyger to michael rumaker]

monday yesdecember 9 [1957]

dear michael rumaker,

This is important what i have to tell you hold your arms around your knees and bury your eyes tight for 17 1/2 seconds it helps… since we all have glasses and are twenty-three i can tell you this, but not Jack spicer because He wouldn’t let me on the bus this morning.

michael yes is all right and all else for 17 1/2 seconds can be either important or unimportant whatever you decide to do but my god please water down your beer. it doesn’t help but it should. Jack spicer was locked in city Lights all night and couldn’t get out in the morning they told him it was all his fault and that made him even madder. i didn’t mind, i took the cable car instead and felt the curve around columbus to mason and remember that for fifty years no one had ever been inside, except Jack spicer.

God may love rosemary but does he love Jack spicer. and there are certain names we can’t say but when we know them we can say them. i talked to the taxi driver all the way home i told him everysinglething all one word thatwasimportant. everything that hadhappened all my life i told him everysinglething. He was aghast and talked about the fog outside and that it was cold. i didn’t stop i went on telling him

telling him everything starting from all that day and backwards as far as i could get until he made me leave the car. i think Jack spicer was the cab driver. He knows how to cry so that the tears well up and don’t run down your cheeks so that they shimmer and look sad but don’t mess your face. michael are you holding on tight please do or i shall and we all shall Yes shall and important shall, worry and send you peppermint sticks melted.

i would have gone too, thank god you didn’t let me or specht would have boycotted measure from the city and found us, all of us, stuck together under her blotter oh god what a mess. instead i have a bottle with a dark blue label in which i am saving each and every one of our tears. They are important.

Yes kids,

[handwritten] kids yes

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[Joanne kyger to michael rumaker] december 26, 1957

dear michael kids,

George Papermaster says i wonder who michael rumaker is. Which all goes to show. it is very important that we all communicate in some manner if you do not sally forth and have no desire to. That is. However, i may surprise you all and go into hiding. i have a secret life which no

one knows about, not even myself, and its mysteries not even George Papermaster or Jack spicer suspect at. it is also very important and necessary that we henceforth end all of our sentences in prepositions or verbs (in). To. Too. (circular constructing are tautological.) if we supposed there is meaning, cause and effect is necessary.What we must strive for before the Place closes at 2 a..m. sunday (familiarly saturday) is to discard meaning entirely from our lives of reckless sin (to, of.) cosmological, teleological and ontological argu-ments can at last leave as the constant topics of our daily conversations and we can discuss what is most dear to our hearts and to the point, devoid of any meaning whatsoever—‘fucing’ (inasmuchaswhich). Who now michael will you whisper in my ear about? now michael i want you to know that you have very large and beautiful lustrous eyes dropping with mournful emotion which you must use more to your advantage before there is to be more whis-pering in my ear, (into). i know that nemi has taught you to weep correctly (they brim without spilling) but i feel that they should fall more effectively upon your check and remain there poised and quivering. either myself or George Papermaster will be terribly happy to help you master this trick. it takes two mirrors. (become, remain continue)… Well, i wish i knew. How Bodhisattva meditates in hung rock. But, my dear, only gods can pray without meaning. i am quite sure that robert duncan had a tear that remained just below his left eye the entire reading last sunday. i kept looking at myself in its reflection hoping to see myself meditate without meaning. Whistper whisper whister whipsre pwhisper (was) miss kids devoid of meaning (on)

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[Joanne kyger to michael rumaker]

February 4, 1958

dear ol’ Boss man-roo:

kids you would just about commit if you knew how important. edward marshall’s poem is. i had a dream monday night: i was looking at the white muslin curtain in my bedroom and i fell asleep. When i awoke sheila was mad—like Pip’s friend in GreaT eX-

PecTaTion. mrs. Haversham—and had done awful things to the curtains. They were shredded in the most terrifying way—most of them missing—like some loose spider web, and fastened with the points of open safety pins to the ceiling and walls around the window. complete horror possessed me. after a moment i was walking with some friends and i was overwhelmed by a great thirst. i drank one glass of water after another urgently. Then i would start to resume my walking i would find i had to still quench my thirst and would be forced to drink and drink again.

david meltzer talks of death continuously. He asked nemi if she had never found it necessary to cover herself with the blood of a slain animal. When nemi was drawing Truman capote in his warn ginny fusty dusty hotel room he fell asleep. He is not fat and you would not notice him because he doesn’t wear high heeled shoes and a scarf a mile long floating behind him as nemi said he would. He is going to moscow because he has Frinds Theah. i believe that smartly sophis-ticated organized drinking will take place next sat however you will receive the essential communication. Love. kids.

John Wieners & Joanne kyger: Photo by Jerome mallmann, 1967

aFteRwaRd

“There is more political energy in friendship than in ideology” — edward dahlberg

i.each year of Lost & Found has been characterized by events that chart a particular mood or trajectory. as we began work on this series in Fall 2011, a student movement—at the Graduate center and the city University as a whole—took shape and grew rapidly. students, faculty and staff organized and demonstrated together against budget cuts, rising tuition, and a host of other issues. Their protests soon joined with those of nurses, transit workers and other union mem-bers and filled the streets with a sense of life and purpose that had long been absent, outside, in the public realm. Less than a week after the trashing of the library at Zuccotti square in lower manhattan, a number of our students were arrested. What stood out most then and in the months following was the evident sense of care and friendship amongst those involved. as students began taking greater charge of their education, themes that had been present in their work became more and more pronounced. Given that students participating in Lost & Found were themselves often drawn from textual scholar-ship to political activity (or vice versa), the boundaries between texts and events became more porous, even when a project did not seem overtly political. Two projects long in the making, John Harkey’s edition of Lorine niedecker’s Homemade Poems and anne donlon’s work on Langston Hughes, nancy cunard, and Louise Thompson during the spanish civil War, explore friendship and politics from very different perspec-tives. For niedecker, living in rural Wisconsin, correspondence with

other poets was a lifeline, and her act of creating homemade books as gifts was also a forceful statement about the kind of life she had chosen to live, and the perspective on the world that choice of life afforded. Harkey’s work included not just trips to the textual archive but to the archive of niedecker’s workaday life, on Black Hawk island in Wisconsin. For Hughes, cunard, and Thompson, the urgency of their political activity was sustained, as donlon writes, “by friendship and poetry.” Here the wall between the text and the world was even more dramatically breached through donlon’s discovery of a picture taken of Hughes in madrid in 1937; in pursuing the provenance of the photograph, another student, mariana soto, was led to a first-hand encounter with 94 year-old Julio mayo souza, master photographer and spanish civil War veteran, now living in mexico. The other projects create a prism of personal, poetic and political documentary, charting an intimate and intricate history that remains largely unwritten outside the very materials presented. michael ru-maker’s extraordinarily courageous and moving journey into the full embrace of his queer humanity is flawlessly documented by megan Paslawski’s edition of his Selected Letters, just as she and rumaker have found a certain bond across their fifty-year age difference. edward dorn’s complex relationship to his teacher and mentor charles olson is brilliantly interpreted by Lindsey Freer as she traces how dorn hones olson’s legacy to face the challenges of very new conditions in the world, all the while referring to friends who sustain this travail. seth stewart’s prodigious exploration of John Wieners brought him into a circle of friends of various ages directly involved in Wieners’ life and dedicated to sustaining his artistic and human legacy after his death. and as ana Bozicevic continues to lovingly trace the thought

of diane di Prima in one of her olson memorial Lectures, following her journey from Gloucester west in 1968 to form part of the “new Pleistocene,” Bozicevic finds di Prima’s words drifting from the text into her very dreams as she hears di Prima say: “We danced the dream, and then the dream exploded.” in all of these letters and documents, people appear and reappear, in critical or carefree times, with humor and the pathos of “pain and suffering,” the “formula,” as Wieners so unforgettably wrote, “all great art is made of.”

ii.

Part of the pedagogy underlying the Lost & Found Initiative has been to create or re-enact conditions of connectedness—between students, with the materials, and with those still living who are connected to the materials. This sets the stage for exploring the transmission of ideas and how they operate within the framework of friendship. if we ac-cept claims about friendship’s “political energy,” how might that relate to our organization of historical data, to our consideration of any given time writers share? in the fall seminar in which Lost & Found projects are incubated, we examined a group of writers all born in the same year, to see if they might, in very different ways, be responding to the conditions of a particular time. We chose 1934 as the birth year and looked at the work of amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, ray Bremser, Beverly dahlen, diane di Prima, Henry dumas, George economou, anselm Hollo, Hettie Jones, audre Lorde, John rechy, a.B. spell-man, George stanley, John Wieners, and, of course, Joanne kyger. a number of these writers were friends or had close and intimate rela-tionships. as we searched for descriptive terms, particularly in reading Baraka’s System of Dante’s Hell, di Prima’s Dinners and Nightmares, the stories of dumas and kyger’s first book, The Tapestry and the Web—feelings of submersion, the subterranean, and the underworld all

came up. Following an old schema of robert duncan’s, in which he traced the dates of various writers’ key developmental stages (nursing, standing, walking, and talking), we realized, as mariana soto pointed out in class, that the 1934 generation would have been walking and talking by the time of the spanish civil War. as these discussions took place, we were in the process of arrang-ing for kyger to come and visit the Graduate center for the launch of series iii. We began to think about a project with her that could be undertaken at fairly short notice. after perusing the list of cor-respondents in the Joanne kyger Papers finding aid at the University of california, san diego, we ordered some letters from the archive. The letter that immediately stood out for us, included in this selec-tion, was written to michael rumaker in 1959. after mentioning that, “Through the past months i have had dreams of war and destruc-tion,” kyger writes:

i fell into Hell for 6 hours, and the taste of what i had previously experienced for periods of moments or minutes, the horror of disassociation from the self, was now prolonged. . . i realized later how frightened i was of myself and how completely & ut-terly ignorant. ah well, it is most difficult. But it seems to be the problem that all of us face in our generation. and we either try to face it or we don’t, or we can’t. duncan shakes his head, sym-pathetically enough, but says ‘his time’ never had this problem, he can’t understand it . . .

This passage, tucked away in a letter between friends, very quickly opened a possible sight line onto complex questions of transmission with which we were grappling and what, in a poem, kyger has called, “the architecture of your lineage.”

as a poet embracing multiple lineages and traditions (“your teachers / like robert duncan for me gave me some glue for the heart / Beats which gave confidence / and competition / to the images of Perfection”), kyger’s work explores and inhab-its the process of memory forming in and of the present. “me is memory” she writes in “Visit to maya Land,” and again “now the memory is mine” in “day after Ted Berrigan’s memorial reading.” Her alertness to the ever-changing phenomena of both mind and things (air, light, animals, people, trees, thought) recalls duncan’s call to “break up orders, to loosen the bindings of my own conversions, for my art too constantly rationalizes itself, seeking to perpetuate itself as a conventional society. i am trying to keep alive our aware-ness of the dangers of my convictions.” For kyger there is a constant and ongoing recognition that relying on received perception and memory is never enough, that such ties must be loosened through observation, vigilance, awareness, and active thought. it would be hard to think of another writer of her generation who has so stead-fastly practiced this consciousness, almost as if her work provides an ever-present antidote—both playful and relentlessly focused—to the proliferation of both poetic and perceptual hot air, always bringing things and thought back into a phenomenal world that defies definition. coming into her lineage more directly when leaving the Uni-versity of santa Barbara to live in san Francisco’s north Beach in 1957, kyger found herself, as she describes in her introduction, at the confluence of an extraordinarily rich and vibrant scene. Like a kalei-doscope turning to reflect this or that quality of light or color, these letters provide a unique perspective on this key period. The velocity of nuclear warfare had recalibrated itself to target the living fiber of common civic life through “urban renewal,” as neighborhoods like

Bunker Hill in Los angeles fell to the wrecking ball. a person seeking the suppressed wisdom of the earth and the human spirit was turned into a “beatnik,” fodder for madison avenue ad-men, isolating and magnifying images that could be manipulated at will and turned into consumer categories. charlie Parker, Jack kerouac, and so many oth-ers not as well known were themselves consumed by this machinery. at the same time, with great political foresight and courage, robert duncan and his life partner Jess collins built a fortress of domesticity in which to practice a freedom that could be brought into a world only too prepared to deny it. as kyger recalls: “robert duncan was especially important to me when i was young as he presented the ‘religion’ of the household.” By the early 1960s, when the bulk of the letters included in this collection had been written, Joanne kyger, michael rumaker, John Wieners, and George stanley were all still in their 20s. The question of whether or not poets could create a new republic was still moot, not yet visible until olson’s filibuster that inspired some and angered oth-ers at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry conference, and Bob dylan’s choice, just two days later, to go electric at newport, with similar results. amidst literary gossip, there is striking tenderness woven into these letters, a sense of common cause, and an unswerving allegiance to the work of writing and what it might yield in a world largely gone mad and detached from sources of its own sustenance. Poet david meltzer writes: “History is not only written by the winners but also the survivors.” While certainly a survivor, to call Joanne kyger sim-ply that would surely be a misnomer because in her choice of ways to live and write she has flourished where many have failed. and to not call what is contained in these letters history would also surely be a misnomer, even if it means that we need, as kyger writes, to constantly remember:

that’s your life... in a past that keeps happening ahead of you

as the archive keeps getting rearranged, new facets come to light, par-ticularly as different selves are refracted through the prism of friend-ship. and just as importantly, “your life” exists in a phenomenal world whose passing moments constitute a living archive, where the borders between text and event no longer exist. Here, as kyger also writes:

the evening sky looks pretty clear that was a history just happened

lost & Found

LoST & FouND: The CuNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes origi-nal research, based on primary sources and related to figures central to or associated with the new american Poetry. Under the guidance of an extended scholarly community, the work is done by students in the english Program at the Graduate center of the city University of new York as well as by guest fellows, and supported by private donors, foundations, and the center for the Humanities. Lost & Found also initiates research, works with living writ-ers and their heirs, and organizes seminars and events that promote new, cooperative models of textual scholarship and publication. Tak-ing the new american rubric writ large, to include the affiliated and unaffiliated, the precursor and follower, our aim is to open the field of inquiry and include ancillary materials of importance to the writ-ers themselves. in focusing on extra-poetic work (correspondence, journals, transcriptions of lectures), Lost & Found illuminates unex-plored terrain of an essential chapter of 20th-century life. Utilizing personal and institutional archives located throughout the country, Lost & Found scholars seek to broaden the vision of our literary, cultural, and political history. in addition to the annual series, the Initiative has joined with select publishers for book length projects emerging from our research, to appear under the general title Lost & Found Elsewhere. Poised at the intersection of scholarly investigation, innovative pub-lishing, public programming, and the preservation of cultural heritage, each Lost & Found project emphasizes the importance of cooperative work and the relationship of archival materials to a living legacy. For more information, and to participate in our archival bulletin boards, visit us at: http://centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found.

The center for the Humanities

ammiel alcalay, General editor

aoibheann sweeneyexecutive director

ana BozicevicProgram manager

LosT & FoUnd eLseWHere (Forthcoming Projects)

Michael Rumaker’s Robert Duncan in San Francisco, with selected corre-spondence & interview. edited by ammiel alcalay & megan Paslawski. city Lights, Fall, 2012

Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast (costa Brava) edited & annotated by rowena kennedy-epstein. Feminist Press, 2013

series iV (Forthcoming Projects)

Edward Dorn’s Abilene, Abilene (edited by kyle Waugh)

David Henderson’s umbra Extensions (edited by Tonya Foster)

Selected Correspondence of Pauline Kael & Robert Duncan (edited by Bradley Lubin)

series i i i (spring, 2012)

1 Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (anne donlon, editor)

2 Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor)

3 John Wieners & Charles olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (michael seth stewart, editor)

4 Diane di Prima: Charles olson Memorial Lecture (ammiel alcalay and ana Bozicevic, editors)

5 Edward Dorn: The olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor)

6 Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (megan Paslawski, editor)

7 Letters to & from Joanne Kyger (ammiel alcalay and Joanne kyger, editors)

series i i (spring, 2011)

1 Selections from El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn 1962-1964

(margaret randall, visiting editor)

2 Diane di Prima: The Mysteries of Vision, Some Notes on H.D. (ana Bozicevic, editor)

3 Diane di Prima: R.D.’s H.D. (ammiel alcalay, editor)

4 Robert Duncan: Charles olson Memorial Lecture (ammiel alcalay, meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, megan Paslawski, kyle Waugh, and rachael Wilson, editors)

5 Jack Spicer’s Translation of Beowulf: Selections (Parts I & II) (david Hadbawnik & sean reynolds, guest editors)

6 Muriel Rukeyser: “Barcelona, 1936” & Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive (rowena kennedy-epstein, editor)

series i (Winter, 2009)

1 Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters, 1959-1960 (claudia moreno Pisano, editor)

2 The Kenneth Koch/Frank o’Hara Letters: Selections (Parts I & II) (Josh schneiderman, editor)

3 Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers (stefania Heim, editor)

4 Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections (Parts I & II) (Brian Unger, editor)

5 Robert Creeley: Contexts of Poetry, with selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals (ammiel alcalay, editor)

To order and for further information: http://centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found