FLORULA LUDOVICIANA by MARTHE REED

What an intriguing project by Marthe Reed: her Dusie chapbook, Florula Ludoviciana, that's fortunately small enough to be included in SitWithMoi's "Books on Chairs." 

But, first, a note on the wonderful Dusie project founded and curated by Switzerland-based poet Susana Gardner.   I was fortunate enough to once participate in Dusie's chap project (THE SINGER AND OTHERS: Flamenco Hay(na)ku), and would encourage you to read this HOW2 article on Dusie; here's an excerpt:

On paper or on-line, the most important kind of space Dusie aims for is a space for poetry, the "of many by many for many" that is open to and for experiment. "As a woman and poet," Gardner says, "I had long wished to establish a space where poetry might thrive in a more open and conducive spirit, encouraging writers to take risks." She implies that there is often not enough space available in poetry journals for longer or more playful works, both in terms of physical page and stylistic constraints. While the average paper-based journal typically presents a small selection of poems or a few pages per issue by a given author, it is not unusual to find anything from a few poems to a dozen pages by any of the poets featured in a single issue of Dusie: the space is flexible and variable. Gardner takes on what she personally considers to be compelling work, from handfuls of in-progress or in-play poems, to extended chapbook features.

This is not to suggest that Dusie becomes a sort of catchall for work that has been filtered out of a poet or publisher's idea of publishable or polished work. Rather, it means that Dusie is to function as the arena we so often claim we want our work to exist in; a flexible, playful, risk-ridden space for actual experiment, "versus any ready-made poetic dogma," as Gardner puts it. She recognizes that what gets labeled as experimental is still prone to division and segregation within itself, that the "serial, long poems, hybrid and multi-genre works" she is obsessed with and intrigued by still get left out as the various other when they don't quite fit a given style.

  

Marthe Reed's Florula Ludoviciana is one of the experimental explorations coming out of Dusie this year. 

 It is also made out of judicious folding and cutting of a single piece of 8" x 11" paper to create sufficient "pages" to offer seven poems (just like moi NOVEL CHATELAINE). 

By coincidence (or synchronicity), I read Florula Ludoviciana shortly before reading another poetry collection, the fabulous 80 BEETLES by Mark Cunningham (there are three sample poems in the link). I couldn't help but notice how both Marthe and Mark offer poems with titles that would seem to set up some theme or narrative frame, but then the text of the poems segue (wonderfully) into something else.  In Mark's case, the often far-reaching segues unfold in the way of great prose poems (a form advantageous for suppleness and flexibility), and these are prose poems.  In comparing Marthe's approach to Mark's, I realized then that Marthe's poems are also about deftness and balance.  Because unlike Mark's poems, Marthe's poems, on one level, seem to want to be plausibly factual -- their constraint, thus, is not the capacity to go robustly wild (as Mark's poems) but to seem, at least initially, believable in an almost matter-of-fact way.

For example, we have the poem entitled Prunus Caroliniana which, according to Wikipedia, is "known as the Carolina Cherry Laurel, with syns. Cherry Laurel, Carolina Cherry, Laurelcherry or Wild Mock Orange, [and] is a flowering tree native to the Southeastern U.S., from North Carolina south to Florida and westward to eastern Texas."  Here is the poem:

Prunus caroliniana

a tree

and one foot

bending

small, white, yellow

taste of almonds

even when it freezes

On the face of it, one can read the text and not see any reason why the words are all "about" this Cherry Laurel.  But if one considers longer the last two lines -- "taste of almonds / even when it freezes" -- the poem's expanse widens (or can widen, depending on the reader) to narratively non-related matters.  Say, the aftertaste, both literal and metaphorical, of some complicated if not negative-in-some-way event.  I mean, have you ever found yourself in a situation where you participated in something that you ended up regretting or that ended up hurting you?  Your reactions to that event can remain or linger long after the matter has ended -- "it freezes," thus remains (instead of, say, evaporating).  And "taste of almonds," for me, evokes poison, which is to say, something negative.

This is another example, a poem titled after Amaranthus greggii.  Again according to Wikipedia, this is an annual flowering plant " native to Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico. The plant can grow up to 1 m (3 ft) in height. It is found in sand dunes and near sea beaches."  Here's the poem:

Amaranthus greggii

the real

differs from this

whitish

small

and small white

It may be that the amaranthus greggii offers parts that are white and small, but the wording of the poem makes it address the larger issues of reality -- the difficulty and complications of trying to fix reality, whether into words or recognition. If you think about it, "whitish," "small" and "small white" can mean entirely different things.  "Whitish" is not the same as "white." "Small" is not the same as "small white."  Yet all the words are applied to the same plant. Doesn't this hearken the same problems we might have with accurately defining matters of identity or authenticity, and then articulating them as such accurately?

What's interesting, too, about "Amaranthus greggii" is that it references a plant named after Josiah Gregg, an explorer and naturalist.  He collected many previously undescribed plants -- how much of what we know of those plants depend on Gregg's ability to identify "the real"?

Great poems often have the ability to inspire a reader to think.  Florula Ludoviciana might seem a modest project -- small in physical scale and short poems numbering only seven.  But its expanse is wide and makes for pleasing engagements.  Thanks, Marthe for writing it!  And Dusie for publishing it!

And now, it's time to "shelve" Marthe's 2 5/8" x 4 1/8" mini-book!  Well, why not on a lovely rocking bench with comfy rush seat, perfect for contemplation!

THE CARROT CHAIR

And I'm delighted to present another chair from the "Ebay 30" acquisition.  This is a wooden, painted chair featuring (inexplicably to me but why not?) a bunch of carrots flattened to be the chair's back:

And why am I delighted to present this chair?  Because, while larger than my targeted 1:6 scale, its scale allows me to include some larger (than 2" x 2") mini-books, specifically a group of David Larsen's poetry chapbooks:

When I first moved from New York City to the Bay Area more than a decade ago, the move allowed me to meet some of the innovative poets living in Northern California, including David Larsen.  I was delighted to be a recipient of some of his handmade chaps, and will be posting individually on his publications as I "shelve" them in the future.  For now, let us just welcome the chair whose scale allows us to include these David Larsen chaps!


[Prov.: "Ebay 30." Size: 11.5" height x 13.5" width x 5.25" depth]

A POET-PAINTER

is a favored breed by Moi.  And this reminds me that Moi's got chairs as not just chairs!  Here's a watercolor by Allen Bramhall that graces la casa:

I enjoy having this painting around and hope you, too, enjoy its image.  Last but not least, let this post be a reminder for Moi to point you to Allen's wonderful poetry which includes the magnificent two-volume DAYS POEM.  Allen also has an amazing and one of the most ambitious contemporary projects ongoing over at ANTIC VIEW with Jeff Harrison.  Check him out and enjoy!

"A WORD USED FOR CLARIFICATION IS FULL OF AMBIGUITY"

Dears, let’s recall innovative poet and engineer S.S. Prasad or “Mr. Chairssssssss…” or “Chairss” for short since, as he sagaciously notes, a millipede missing one leg is still a millipede (keep reading to understand!).  My first post about Chairss was quite popular, not to mention educational.  And now here’s his latest “Letter to Moi Us”:

Dear Eileen,

We stopped our conversation at gender in language in the last mail. I was thinking further about ‘cloud’ of meaning and ambiguity in words, and misnomers. The word ‘chair’ is called ‘nattrkali’ in Tamil: nal- four, kal- leg, the suffix ‘li’ rounding the reference to the object as the one with four legs. A noun that could have referred to anything with four legs, but precisely means a chair:  A word used for clarification is full of ambiguity.

Our chairs have grown in number, and we are having a conference at sit-with-moi.

I went upstairs to the canteen in my office, as I do every morning, and looked at the arrangement of chairs. They were as usual, inverted and placed upon tables for 4:  an arrangement of 4 chairs upside down on each table.  Workers were slowly getting them ready for business, taking them down and turning them up around the tables. You can imagine a flower with thousand petals blooming.

How do we deal with CHAIRS? They are too many, and ‘CHHHHHHHHHHHHH……..AIR’ becomes a cumbersome representation. We don’t want to count the number of legs of a millipede to declare it a millipede. A millipede with one leg minus is still called a millipede, isn’t it? Under no conditions will an octopus become a septapus.

Chairs: 

[Do click on image to enlarge.]

I’m typing down two poems by Arun Kolatkar to understand chairs and chirality better.

A LOW TEMPLE

A low temple keeps its gods in the dark.

You lend a matchbox to the priest.

One by one the gods come to light.

Amused bronze. Smiling stone. Unsurprised.

For a moment the length of a matchstick.

gesture after gesture revives and dies.

Stance after lost stance is found

and lost again.

Who was that, you ask.

The eight arm goddess, the priest replies.

A sceptic match coughs.

You can count.

But she has eighteen, you protest.

All the same she is still an eight arm goddess to the priest.

You come out in the sun and light a charminar.

Children play on the back of the twenty foot tortoise.

THE PATTERN

a checkerboard pattern

some old men must have drawn

yesterday

with a piece of chalk

on the back of the twenty foot

tortoise

smudges under the bare feet

and gets fainter all the time as

the children run

(Pages 17, 18 from ‘Jejuri’ by Arun Kolatkar, Pras Prakashan, Fifth edition, 2001)

Kolatkar intrigues me with his use of the plural form. He emphasizes that form by repetition of a grammatical rule: eight arm goddess, eighteen arm goddess, and twenty foot tortoise.

  

A key to the poem is the word, ‘charminar’.

charminar = char + minar ; ‘char’ meaning four in Hindi, and minar meaning minar in any language. The four minars don’t have anything to do with buildings but a brand of cigarette.

Notice how Kolatkar points to the transmission of language through generations (old men/ children).  The origin fades, and ambiguous marks of chalk remain on the floor to make meaning from.

So while Kolakar enjoys himself at Wayside Inn sitting on his chair, let me sit with vous.

Chairs

-chairss

**

Dear Chairss,

Thanks for writing, Senor Chairss.  I really like these poems you cite by Arun Kolatkar -- so thanks, too, for introducing (to Moi) this fine poet.  It's funny how, in the 11th line of the poem "A Low Temple," I first read "A sceptic match" as "Ascetic match"...

And your letter, too, reminds me how so many chairs exist that are not based on having a four-leg structure, even as I believe we conventionally think of chairs as having such four legs.  The great Finnish American designer Eero Saarinen of course railed against "the slum of legs," thus creating his famous "Pedestal Chair."

I'm also reminded of the Ryoan-ji zen garden in Kyoto to which I was introduced by another poet, Arthur Sze -- how, from all angles, one can never see all of its 15 stones (it is thought one must attain enlightenment to see the 15th stone).  One stone is always missing but its existence is never denied.

Well, of course your subject at hand is poetry -- "A word used for clarification is full of ambiguity."

Do keep writing us from India whenever you can.  It's lovely to pull up an e-chair with you and fortify the tea (hah).

Cheers,

Moi

Ryoan-ji

SELECTED BOOK COVERS by JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (do click on the link to enjoy Finnish) is a true Renaissance Man--a poet, an artist, a musician, among other roles ... and he's also been one of the contemporary poetry world's most innovative publishers, taking advantage early on of the possibilities of e-publishing.  As part of this role, he also came to be one of the most innovative book designers for cutting-edge poetry books.

I was privileged to be one of his authors through his xPress(ed) publishing forum which released my MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY. I mention this book so that I can draw attention to one of Jukka's early poetry book designs; if you click on the link title, you will see the vague portrayal of an old college photo which Jukka had presented with computer script.

Many poets would come to benefit from Jukka's design work, frequently using his images on their book covers.  You can see a sample at THIS LINK to another one of his publishing projects, Blue Lion Books  with (another poetry publishing innovator, Peter Ganick); several covers are presented at that link ... where you also can access one of my books, SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS  (more info HERE on SILENCES). Here is SILENCES' book cover

This is what I once wrote on Jukka's book cover:

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen designed the book cover through a program he wrote that generates a stochastic layout based on the letters of my name. After the layout phase, the program chooses one photograph from a big group of Jukka's photos, makes some manipulations, and then superimposes the manipulated fragment with the letter combination. Part of Jukka's poetics has to do with not allowing editing. Thus, after each (cover) image is generated, Jukka always destroys the original Postscript file.

The process reflects what Jukka calls one of his "basic" principles: "simply, if I use programs to generate works, I'm not allowed to edit them afterwards, otherwise I will make them manually."

Not only do I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the process, but I appreciate how it reflects the fragility of life and poetry. And how poetry, ultimately, cannot be pinned down. Thank you, Jukka!

 Anyway, that's all background to my next mini-book, whose impetus was the most recent flyer of San Francisco State University's Poetry Center Calendar of Events. On nice glossy paper, it highlighted an example from Jukka's work, which is part of a 21st century international visual poetry anthology being celebrated at the Poetry Center:

The Last VisPo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008 with editors Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis, and guests

Thursday MAR 14: 4:30 pm
@ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

Friday MAR 15: 7:00 pm
@ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell St., San Francisco
$10, $5 student/low income

Here's the flyer:

I lingered over the flyer, enjoying a reminder of Jukka's work, then cut it up in preparation for creating a mini-book:

I also noticed the light brown envelope in which the flyer arrived, noticing specifically the contrast between its plainness and Jukka's colorful work.  I liked the contrast, and determined to use it in the mini-book cover.

I cut up the colorful flyer into a series of "pages" for the mini-book which I sized at 2" x 2.75."

I cut up the envelope to begin fashioning a book cover:

And the result would look like this.  The title -- but of course! -- is SELECTED BOOK COVERS!  And because a colorful strip sort of divided the page, I decided to include my name as editor (besides, I like associating my name with Jukka's because it makes Moi seem much smarter...haha):

And so we begin. We open Jukka's book see French flaps on the cover (which I love) and the title page. Note that the latter says "Meritage Press" but then the publishing city is supposedly Espoo, Finland -- that was just my way of hearkening Jukka's former residence at the time he began publishing poets:

Here are the interiors featuring "book covers" which are actually spliced from the larger work presented on the flyer.  Perhaps my decision here to cut up the flyer into smaller, discrete works may have been nudged by an emailed conversation I was having at the time with another poet-visual artist, Ed Baker.  Ed was saying something about fragmenting images (which is part of an approach I later took to creating his mini-book  which will be in a future post):

The result is just all lovely, isn't it?  Interestingly, when you close the book to see the back cover, you see a white space at the top of the cover that was left-over from the mailing label.  Its location on the back cover is often where a book price is indicated. On that white space, I wrote "Free Poetry" as I believe both Jukka and I agree that Poetry should be Free -- free in its imaginings and free in terms of its accessibility.

And so, we come to the Decision Du Jour: where oh where shall we shelve Jukka's lovely and free visual poetry?  But, of course: on an "Art Chair" by Sally Davies:

There is plenty of information about Jukka-Pekka Kervinen in the internet.  If you wish to learn more about him, please do include reading this wonderful poetry collaboration he did with another stellar poet, Mark Young:

THE ORACULAR SONNETS

And if you are in San Francisco at the time, it'd be worth your while to attend one of the two celebrations of international visual poetry sponsored by SFSU's Poetry Center!

LOVING DETAIL by ELENI SIKELIANOS

Coffee House Press is a poetry treasure: one of today's most fabulous presses, it consistently "brews" wonderful work by contemporary poets.  This is one of their catalogs, which I saved because I suspected it could provide raw material for a mini-book or two:

Well, I finally had a chance to return to it.  Since I just received a review copy of Eleni Sikelianos' The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, my attention lingered on the catalogue's one-page write-up of Eleni's most recent offering  The write-up included a poem, "Comes to Me," which I thought is so fabulous I wanted to create a mini-book for it.  So, I did!  So, first, compare the one-page catalogue write-up below, with the result after I cut out areas that I used to create a mini-book (the second image is a xerox of the original page as I'm thinking of using the other side of the original page for a different mini-book "by" Bob Holman):

That's right.  From the little I cut out of the page, I created a mini-book entitled Loving Detail.  I spliced the two words out of the title and would come to paste it onto the front cover of the mini-book.  I thought the reference to "Detail" would be appropriate since the mini-book would contain only one of the many poems in The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead.  So here's the front cover to this 2" x 2" mini-book:

You would open it to see the following, which features not so much a set of eyes but a stare (the gaze?). The photograph was taken by Laird Hunt, novelist and Eleni's partner:

Then you can pull open the piece of folded paper to reveal the poem which I found so compelling:

Here's the text of the poem:

Comes to me

the future comes to me
with a horrifying screech
then it comes to me softly
like a weeping cloud
and it comes to me like
a fish, glass-eyed, flopping
and it comes to me erotically
meanly & sharp
it comes to me cashed out rolling
electronically

in my future life I was
a cowboy, killed
in a bar fight

a flamingo in the snow

Eleni has a sure hand with such leaping juxtapositions -- here, "electronically" to "cowboy" to "flamingo" -- that is one of the strengths of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead.  Narratively, the references may seem random and yet within her poems the details offer a surety in their presence.  I think that surety is because the poems present messages that need to be shared--and that the reader is drawn to try to understand--yet the narratives are not spoonfed; hence, the reader grabs onto any detail in an attempt to understand and/or inhabit the poem.  Here are two poems that exemplify what I'm trying to articulate about the charisma of Eleni's  newest book:

In the Airport

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skinn, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field.

and

Verb / Verbatim (Eva's first told dream)

What's mamma do
you're back, you came back from the snow

Did you been in the snow
   when I was dreaming about you?
      You carried the horses
         on your back, you held them
tight all the way from Denver, you carried
         the snow on your back

What's mamma do--
I'm sleeping and I'm dying

I suppose (some of) Eleni's poems can be considered "difficult" [to understand].  If they are, they nonetheless are not off-putting like other difficult poems.  She writes poems that, if not immediately graspable, are not ones with which to wrestle so much as to simply spend time.  Anyway, I highly recommend Eleni Sikelianos' The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead.  Turning now to a shard from it -- the mini-book Loving Detail -- after reading its lone poem, you might close the book and this is the back cover image -- it presents a photograph by Etienne-Jules Marey whose mystery, and detail, I find so aptly evocative:

If you don't know Eleni Sikelianos' writings, do look up her books (The Book of Jon is a particular favorite).  You can click on the link to Eleni's name for a start, but I'd also like to share the link to a review Susan Schultz (another stellar poet) once wrote on Eleni's works--this from Boston Review--as it reveals something about "collage poetics" which may be applicable to this poem or the larger book given the extensive "Notes" citing sources (but even if not applicable, it is, in any event, interesting...).

Now, where shall we "shelve" Eleni's ethereal mini-book?  Well, why not on one of my inventions (hah), a Richard Odom Stool:

MULTIPLES AND MULTIPLE READINGS!

Here is an image of one of the most popular miniature chairs about, Vitra's Planton Chairs:

Sadly, I don't have the chairs -- though would love to have them in my collection.  Until I can afford them, however, I am pleased to be more than soothed by Indian poet and engineer S.S. Prasad's visual poem:

Chairs

R
I
A
H
H
H
H
C

As a master of tiny, excuse Moi, nano-poems, Prasad is an apt commenter on this project!  Anyway, I appreciated his poem right away (for reasons detailed below).  But before I offered his reaction, I asked him what he was thinking of when he created the poem.  He replied:

 

I was thinking of the plural form of this noun. Plastic chairs, when not in use, are arranged one over the other to occupy less space, it so appears it is a single chair that sometimes one sits on without wanting to dismantle the pieces. The visual arrangement of one chair over the other to have a plurality of it, yet  shows a singular form- the plurality is constructed from bottom to top.

The representation is more compact in that it allows an embedding of adjective. How many chairs? The representation will differ depending on the number of chairs. Thus we can classify multiples not just as singular and plural, but with more granularity, and using a single word. Thus it's a number poem. Sanskrit offers three classifications: singular, dual or pairs, plural. Did English have it originally? I was trying to question it by the rearrangement.

The stacking of H is borrowed from Ana Maria Uribe.

Here Are some links on the Argentinian visual poet Uribe: http://www.afahc.ro/revista/Nr_1_2011/Articol_Antonio_nr1_2011.pdf and http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/12580/  And if you go to her http://vispo.com/uribe/, you can see a stacking element on the home page.

I replied back to Prasad:

As for what I think of your poem, it's interesting.  I read it and then thought about it for a couple of days.  But in my memory, the capitalized "H" you use was a small "h" in my memory.  And so I thought the poem brilliant because by stacking the h at the bottom of the line of letters, you were creating chairs -- indeed, multiple chairs -- through the shape of the "h".  Then I returned to the poem .. and saw that the image instead was "H".  Which is all actually a metaphor for how one reads a poem, isn't it? One reads a poem (subjectively) the way one wants to see the poem. That's the difference between a poem and a technical manual where one actually has to submit to the words being presented.  Hm. Maybe that's why I'm having a difficult time understanding the manual on my brand new dishwasher (haha).

And Prasad replied back:

...now it strikes me how you imagined the 'h' in the poem in small letters! I thought I saw that Uribe poem long back on  the IOWA review site: it was  a series of spirals/ladders using the alphabet 'H' which is mute in Spanish. It represented ascension, but the spirals eventually meant evolution. As far as I remember seeing them, they were in capitals. I landed at all other sites than the original, and here is what I found; you'll certainly like to read them. In the review essay, I find 'h' in small letters though. I think it has to do with how our eyes register things seen: the image is inverted on the retina and reinverts in the brain. So something similar must be going on biologically with small and caps!

http://www.afahc.ro/revista/Nr_1_2011/Articol_Antonio_nr1_2011.pdf


I'm tempted to argue against the dishwasher's technical manual not being poetry. I did notice a work of art in nokturno using some such manual, I'll argue this point with you separately :-)

But whilst I wait for my future discussion on technical manuals as poetry (actually, I'm quite open to the idea!), Prasad isn't done.  He noted in a postscript:

The 'H' in chairs helps avoid repetition as well as conjoins. It's a matrix transposition, as well as transposition of alphabets in the given word.

I'm delighted Prasad visited and stayed (sat!) for a while.  All this conversation, of course, makes me even hungrier to have a set of multiples in my chair collection.  But I'm still waiting for the humongous royalty checks from any one of my over twenty books (hah!), e.g. THIS, THIS, THIS and THIS! (Sorry to advertise but, yes, I need money for chairs!).

Meanwhile, you may come here for chairs ... in which case, yes, I invite you to sit and peruse the links on an innovative poet: Ana Maria Uribe.