immanent occasions

Tanslation and impossibility

2012-01-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

We were discussing issues of national security and one of mycolleagues made a remark, encapsulating his perception of my biases: Wellmandoes not believe in borders at all as far as I can tell. The remark seemed trueenough at the time and has haunted me since, so I am taking this opportunity todiscuss the origin of my bias, as far as I understand it. I was an Americanteenager in Germany, indirectly attached to the occupying forces followingWorld War II. It was the year the Berlin Wall was constructed. On my trainrides to my American High School operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, Ispoke with German girls and Czech girls, some refugees, on their way to a privateacademy in Stuttgart. My school, I have recently discovered, was also the highschool attended by Newt Gingrich. My point: I have often positioned myself, ifmy adolescent memories are useful for argument, on the edge or boundary betweencultures. I feel alienated by the ideologies espoused by many Americans. I feltmisplaced or unwelcome in the homes of these young women when I showed up attheir doors, invited by the daughter but an uninvited guest in their parents’eyes. Still, no longer an adolescent, I have come to feel comfortable andempowered by my ability to occupy intercultural or liminal spaces. Living inGermany I was challenged to relearn my French pronunciation because theQuebecois variety that I had learned in rural Maine was not deemed acceptable.I had the privilege of learning some rudimentary Russian but I had to speakGerman on the streets and on the trains. Streets and trains, figures ofpassage, sites of liminality, my readings are condition by the anthropology ofVictor Turner and Michael Taussig. Insecure in my command of languages, Inevertheless have come tofeel empowered by my ability to observe andparticipate in the lives of those around me.

At some point in my life, it may once more have been whileliving in Germany, during the period of my military service, the ideacrystalized for me that I wanted to know more about poetry than any of mypeers. My models in this were Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ezra Pound. I had amoderate command of French and German, I could read Latin, and chose as an areaof academic study, Old English. I loved the orality of the various medievallanguages that I could read. I had in fact become multilingual with respect topoetry and song. This was my passion and remains my passion and is the basisfor my work in translation. Development of the poet’s ear is crucial for actsof translation. Today, I read and translate so as to improve my ear, and I readand translate so as to compose my poetry which often takes the form ofintercultural collages, bits borrowed from one language entering another. Eachof these bits has to meet the test of translatability as described by WalterBenjamin. In some fashion it must offer a window on its world, a depth ofresonance with meaning and emotion unique to the parent language and approximated,often badly, by the host language. A poem of mine will use images from Andalucíaand be framed in an English or Germanic stress syllable pattern. A poem that Iam translating from Spanish will take the form of a hymn such as those of Hölderlin.More important still are sympathies rooted in images and a search for thecultural value of these sympathies and their poetic embodiments. Since mychildhood, my imaginary, in the Lacanian sense, my word-hoard or imageinventory, has been intercultural. My books have explored the culturallandscapes of those parts of the world in which I have lived. Recently in myunbounded enthusiasms I have had to confront the impossibility of translation.In my heart the difficulties are indeed linguistic far more than experientialand aligning these two spheres, language and experience, has through anencounter with the impossibility of translation, improved my ability to writeand to see when I read.

As a guide to the necessary impossibility oftranslation, I will offer several theses derived from the writings of WalterBenjamin and Jacques Derrida. I have chosen two classic texts with which I feelall students of translation need to be familiar.

Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dessemination. Tr.Barbara Johnson. Chicago University of Chicago P. 63-171. Originally El pharmakon de Plato 1968.

Benjamin, Walter. The Translator’s Task,Tr. Steven Rendall, Erudit:TTR. Volume 10, numéro 2, 2e semestre1997, p. 151-165.

See the linked presentation for more on these texts.

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2012-01-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

Saloua Raouda Choucair

My friend Nelida will be glad that I have discovered the artof Saloua Raouda Choucair, now 95, bedridden and pale, according to thereviewer, Kelen Wilson Goldie (ArtForum Jan. 2012). A retrospective atthe Beirut Exhibition Center contains the exquisite Poem in Nine Verses, 1966-68, aluminum 11 3/8 x 8 5/8 x 2 3/4.” Goldie also cites Adonis’ conceptthat “language is the material presence of thought itself.”

Madre or Queen of the Mountain

2011-12-12T07:13:00.001-08:00

The subject is emergent identity under postcolonial conditions. The island is Cuba.

Madre or the Queen of the Mountain

Donald Wellman 12/7/2011

Written on the flyleaf of Louis Zukofsky’s All, signaling a change in my scholarlyitinerary as it has swerved from Bach to bolero and salsa in a desire tointegrate and synthesize disparate inquiries into cultural hybridity, I find this note: “mi gente” means“my people,” “asere” is “brother,” “bro.” What forms of cultural identification are in play here, if any? Does “asere” signify an elective affinitythat might distinguish postmodernist insecurities from modernistideologies? From the Yoruba language,“asere,” according to the raperos, Los Orishas, signifies cubanidad. There was a time when a nation, a people, associated itsoppressed subjectivity with the grip of colonial exploitation. The postcolonialpoet, instead, writes for a possible people, an emergent people—it is “a peopleyet to be born for whom the poets must write,” an expression that originateswith a young Martinican surrealist, Suzanne Césaire. A future people, anemergent nation. Ethnicity, with respect to an emergent nation, is fluid;“asere” is archaic and postmodern. Does it also evoke consumeristidentifications, rock-star rebel and Billboard’s Hot 100, Jim Morrison’s dreamsof tribal exceptionalism, promoted byRCA and Elektra, or Daddy Yankee with his successful line of bling. LosOrishas proclaim: “asi soy yo, recordarás mi voz (ya Orishas, asere) / de calle, de calle soy yo” (A lo Cubano, “Eltriunfo”). Yotuel, oneof the Orishas, has said, "We make music, not just beats with samples ontop. We talk about social issues, the reality on the streets.” He distinguishesthe music of Los Orishas from the obsession with money and women that arestereotypical attributes of rock or reggaeton success. Forgive my rant.

Both modernism and postmodernism haveimplied a recovery of archaic sources, materials that survive as livingpresences, organelles attached to the surfaces of popular culture. Resemblingand influencing my thinking, Nancy Morejón identifies Nicolas Guillén as a postmodernpoet in advance of the critical designation. His rejection of high modernistabstraction together with his embrace of popular culture in his poemas son signals for her the culturalsynthesis most important to cubanidad.A rejection of high modernist aesthetic tenets (those that value form overcontent or substance) is likewise crucial for the visual artist Ana Mendieta. Ilay the beginning of this story at the doorstep of the North American poetCharles Olson, the first to use the term “postmodern” in precisely this senseof combining the archaic and the contemporary (in “The Present is Prolog,”1952: 207). Such instances of archaic recovery by means of participatory orperformative actions distinguish themselves from modernist cultural appropriations,like Picasso’s use of African masks in Desmoisellesd’Avignon. Put it another way, before I am charged with atavism,postmodernity is often a matter of feeling at home with cultural differences?Lovely thought! [With respect to identity and immigration, by way of contrastto cited examples, both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (this essaybegins on the flyleaf of the Zukofsky 100 Program at Columbia University, Sept.17-19, 2004, where I introduce Peter Quatermain to the assembled poets and scholars)are typically modern in their generally ambiguous feelings towards culturalattributes associated with their respective roots and in their desire forassimilation.[1] Thisparenthesis, a bridge to multiple projects in the study of cultural hybridity,will also serve as a footnote to my “Witness for Elsie.”]

I will attempt to model receptivityto cultural difference as it can be heard in some examples of Cuban music. Inthe contemporary versions of “La Negra Tomasa” that I have found, the malevocalist invariably slips from the impersonal “la” to the possessive, “minegra,” with reference to the identity of the black woman who prepares hiscoffee. Is this usage reflective only of endearment? Curiously “La NegraTomasa” in the D. J. Kane video of that title is portrayed by a very lightskinned mulata. Only in the version of the lyric performed by Compay Segundo doI hear consistent reference to "1a negra," giving the character morescope or independence, but possibly objectifying her differently. CompaySegundo uses phrasing that refers to significantly African aspects of Cubanidentity, calling Tomasa "Mandinga" and describing with fervor herdistinctly Afro-Cuban cuisine. Compay Segundo is the peer or age-mate ofNicolás Guillén, the poet most associated with emerging mestizo cultural identity in Cuba. With respect to these artists, negritude has become fluid rather thanthe property of a genotype.

Similar to Compay Segundo, Celia Cruz uses the term “lanegra” to describe how the black woman of sonand salsa walks, “la negra tienetimbao / no camina de lao” (“the negress has timbao / she doesn’t swerve whenshe walks”). “Timbao” is the beat kept in an alternating and highly regularpattern as quinto and conga drums speak to one another. The “letras” or lyricshere are self-reflexive and congruent with the poetics of identity in theirmodernist phase (consumerist or market capital phases), that is, reflexivityobjectifies individual behavior instead of referencing social constructions.“La negra” walks with seductive grace! Person and stereotype, chaste sexuality,a baroque and conservative fantasy! For all that and for all the commercialsuccess that has gone with her performances, Celia Cruz projects an inescapableconnectedness to African roots. She has denied practicing Santería, but in “Cantoa Yemaya” (“Song to the Mother Goddess”), she addresses the value of thegoddess’s love or caridad, prayingfor the well-being of her friends and family. Her usage of Yoruba, like that ofLos Orishas, signifies Afro-Cubanidentity. Guillén implied something similar in his famous lines, “Yoruba soy,lloro en Yoruba / lukumi /Como soy un Yoruba de Cuba (I am Yoruba, I cry inYoruba / Lukumi / As I am a Yoruba of Cuba) (“Son numero 6, Yoruba soy ….” Unlike Guillén though,the expression of Yoruba identity for the Orishas and for Celia Cruz, as wellas for Bobi Céspedes, is a function of an exile that refuses to accept theenforced distance between the cosmopolitan site of emigration and the homeland.Emigrant experience is an inescapable aspect of Cuban identity in the currentpost-nationalist phase of global capitalism. Emigrant status needs also to bedistinguished from exile of the sort that Raymond Williams, associates with theelitism of the modernist artist. “Emigrant,” not “exile” is the appropriateterm to use when discussing the economic and political social facts that affectcontemporary Cubans in Miami or Madrid.[2]Unlike the return of the exile, or the desire for assimilation that drives theimmigrant, the expression of emigrant desire may always be tinged withnostalgia, a possibly melancholic cubanidador negritude that is also a socialfact of emergent hybrid cultural forms. Return to the homeland, if it is evenpossible, will inevitably be to a place that never was, to a homeland that nowhas no place for you. “Madre,” you were both mother and father to me from thecradle, in suffering, “en esta puñetera jodida vida” that is the economicreality of Cuba, sings Yotuel Romero of the Orishas, underlining one facet ofthe title of this paper.

Among cultural critics of consumeristcubanidad, Gema R. Guevara offers atrenchant critique of the reinvention of Cuba by exiles like Gloria Estefan.Estefan’s Mi tierra uses traditionalmusical forms like guajiro, guaguanco and rumba to describe a utopia that neverexisted but which is promised to come to the exiles on the day of their return,that is, after the overthrow of Castro. The nostalgic assumption is that theRevolution has put no real distance between the Cubans of Miami and those of LaHabana. Guevara’s analysis concludes, “Estefan’s popularity and the mainstreamrecognition allow Americans to congratulate themselves on their appreciation ofdiversity as her music furthers the political imaginary of her own communitythrough ostensibly nonpolitical cultural celebrations of cubanidad. (43). Guevaraalso deconstructs Celia Cruz’s utopian message with respect to the imaginedreturn. Her nostalgia, writes Guevara, empties traditional forms of theirmeaning potential and establishes an impossible identification rooted inlonging rather than history. Nostalgia of this order depends on the envy of afuture self which for John Berger is the driving engine of world capitalism.

A dialectical tension proposes itselfbetween the muñecas that represents an imagined reality, tinged with nostalgiaor utopian fantasies, and the muñecas that are ritual objects participating inthe identity formation of an emergent culture. The figure of the mother in theperson of the Queen of the Mountain described by the anthropologist MichaelTaussig and the ritual objects constructed by Ana Mendieta imply the presenceof continuing and continuously renewed forms of identity. Dolls used for ritualpurposes, like the funereal muñecas usedin colonial Mexico and Colombia serve a range of liminal purposes. These usesstand outside modernist aesthetic categories and have a share in the complexcalculus of identity under what we now understand as postmodern conditions,conditions that have an integral if not parasitic relation to the archaic. In aform of anthropophagy, the postmodern feeds on the archaic.

Do the retablos and funereal formscreated by Ana Mendieta represent nostalgia or do they achieve a corporalrecovery of lost sacred strength? The bond between earth mother and herdaughters is foundational for cultural identity. That relation is inscribed inthe form of the Indian princess, the doll in Simon Bolivar’s raised hand.

Is she also muse to the poet or do madre and muñeca embody masculinistconstructs? Vera Kutzinski in Sugar’sSecrets has critiqued the homosocial biases underlying the construction of mestizaje in Nicolás Guillén and otherCuban poets. Commenting on the male-to-male bonding in “Balada de los dosabuelos,” she writes: Guillén’s are indeed “man-makingwords” ([her] emphasis). Nowhere in this masculinist paradigm are women,especially non-white women, acknowledged as participants in and possibleproducers of the very culture that inscribes its identity through them (168).It’s generally the case that masculinist constructs of femininity have markedthe modern period in ways that have limited female productive and creativepotential, marginalizing or fragmenting her. Lucía Extebarria and Sonia Núñezgo so far as to argue that under modern era disciplinary regimes women mustquestion how they inhabit their bodies much as their mothers questioned theplace of woman in society. “Las mujeres de mi edad nos estamos cuestionandocual es nuestro lugar en nuestro propio cuerpo tal como nuestras madres sepreguntaban cuál era su lugar en la sociedad” (412). This observation resonates with AnaMendieta’s address to physical insecurities, like violence against women, realtiessharply contrasting with her mother’s secure social standing as a Professor OfChemistry. Opposition to sexual violence motivated many of Mendieta’s works inIowa City, including those in which she smeared her body with blood or stoodnaked with a decapitated white chicken, as in a Santería offering. Is there afemale figure more real than nostalgia or fetishism permits? My thoughtinterrogates both the “Queen of the Mountain” as she is presented in MichaelTaussig’s study, The Magic of the State,and the bodies evoked by Ana Mendieta’s performances.

The “mala mujer” of Octavio Paz’s Mexico, “La flaca” ofJarabe de Palo’s song of that title, “Coral negro de la Habana / tremendísimamulata … / que sin palabras habla” exemplifies the woman, attractive in herlack of presence, consuming her life force in drink although, enchantingly, shedances all night and sleeps all day. She is drained of her magic and invitesabuse. La Lupe, by contrast, displays agressive force in “LaGrand Tirana.” OctavioPaz describes the Mexican woman as “An instrument, sometimes of masculinedesire, sometimes of the ends assigned to her by morality, society and law”(35). He goes on to fetishize the “aggressivity” of the “mala mujer,”acknowledging the attraction of the exception, indeed celebrating the exception.The construction of gender in Paz’s essay is masculinist. In Paz’s Mexico, asVera Kutzinski has argued with respect to the mulata of Cuba, woman is excludedfrom the culture that she symbolizes. Additionally, in discussing mulataidentity we often occlude African and Native American identities, singing“azúcar” with Celia Cruz, as if nostalgic for the economy of canefield andfactory.

Paz speaks of a Mexican independence forged at the expense ofindigenous and catholic traditional values, a rejection of the colonial past,and “a necessary matricide” (126). To the contrary, she lives. The archaicmother (victim of genocide) can today be found among indigenous populations ofMexico (Maria Sabina) and among Afro-Cubans. Mendieta associated such mothertotems with the homeland from which she had been forcibly separated as a childand which she could visit only rarely as an adult. In the streambed and claywalls of the Jaruco, she made performative siluetas subject to erasure byweather and tide. Her tie is through her African nana who practiced Santeria.Likewise, Nancy Morejón addresses the reality of slavery in her poetry. Warpingtime, the experience of embroidering the hem of the master’s gown and bearinghis nameless child becomes a possible experience for a Mendieta or a Morejón.Morejón, evokes both the middle-crossing and the experience of being sold in“Mujer negra.” In remembered language she finds the link to healing presence.“Acaso no he olvidado ni mi costa perdida, ni mi lengua ancestral” (200). Evoking the possibilities of healingpresences, Mendieta fuses art and ritual in the performance and image of theimmobile body on the ground surrounded by flames. The image captures andacknowledges irrecoverable ash, irrecoverable wholeness, after the trauma ofseparation. Like a fallen swallow, “la golondrina,” Morejón mourns the suddendeath of Mendieta, mid-career (“Ana” 112-117). A yearning backwards shapes ourfuture. That is why the curandera surrounds the body “lying within a portal”that is also “a death-space” under theimages of the Queen of the Mountain and the Indian, the African and theLiberator (among other figures) with candles and other offerings (Taussig 39).

The Queen of the Mountain represents a necessary hybridity,in her personal composition and in the distinctions among the entities thatsurround her. She is for Taussig the embodiment of the state, “an impossiblebeing, holding dissimilar things together, bringing the back-then andover-there slap up against the here-and-now, hovering between estrangement andfamiliarization” (8). She is a mother and a Virgin, in relation to theLiberator, she is his daughter. For instance, in her discussion of Pedro JoséFigueroa’s painting (above), SimónBolivar, Liberator and Father of the Nation, (1809), Dawn Ades notes thatthe figure of the Republic stands in relation to the ‘father’ as a ‘daughter.’She continues, “However, she also—unlike many personifications of America whichshow her as naked or lightly draped—is dressed as, and wears the pearls andjewels of a European, and her features are at most mestizo; her gesture isclearly derived from Christian iconography, and she presents something of theaspect of a virgin or saint” (17). She is, as Michael Taussig might say “aliteralization of the mystique of sovereignty” (18). The Spirit Queen is,according to one of Taussig’s sources, “not an Indian but a mestiza, hybrid child of an Indian womanand a conquistador (sixteenthcentury) and that she had had to seek refuge in the mountain until saved by theLiberator (born in the late eighteenth century) who sent el Negro Filipe to care for her” (31). Taussig concludes his studyof the ritual and mimetic properties of the sacralized political state byindicating that Figueroa’s painting both “anticipates her future coming” and“anticipates her intimate and magical connection with the Liberator …reinstigating the eternal return involved in the violent making and breaking ofstately being across the female form” (191). This mestiza coming into beingbinds the archaic and the postmodern.

A future coming into being, false nostalgias aside, iscrucial for an art and poetry of healing and recuperation. That is thecontinuing relevance of Suzanne Césaire’s phrase concerning the artist of theunborn. It is the meaning for me of Ana Mendieta’s personal odyssey. Whatfollows as an addendum is a glimpse only of Ana Mendieta as mother/daughter,archaic and archetypal embodiment of the land.

Addendum

Ana Mendieta’s face pressed against the glass suggests theunformed qualities of Francis Bacon’s folded and compressed works, specificallyimages from the Glass on Body.University of Iowa, 1972. Her high voltage expressionism is a hallmark of herpostmodernism. In the works of this period, as Charles Merewether writes,“Mendieta began to explore issues concerning social taboo and transgression,focusing on the subject of sacrifice and crime around the body of a woman”(89). Works of this sort, like the untitled performance in which she holds abeheaded chicken as she stands against a white wall (1972) resonates with bothsocial injustice and a politicized Santería.

Concerning her relation to the sacred, she might be thoughtof as hovering or shuttling between subjective and objective perspectives, asperformer and simultaneously as document maker with respect to the photographicrecord of her performances. Donald Kuspit in “Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body”writes “Mandieta wants to reconsecratethe body, that is, restore the sense of it as a miracle, and with that,restore, the value lost by its reduction to a kind of machine—itsmodernization, as it were. … Mendieta’s mystical body stands in opposition tothe body as conceived by science” (39). Different perspectives may have morecomplimentariness than Kuspit suggests. The sacred body, like the camera is aninstrument. It is of use, after a fashion. It is surely not the narcissisticbody promoted by Revlon and Cover Girl. That point can be easily taken from thefaces pressed against glass, as well as the use of masculine hair, of feathersor blood in other performances from her student years in Iowa. In one case,Mendieta describes how it pleased her that the ceiba or silk cottonwood, used inone of her performances, came to serve as a ritual site for Santeros in theMiami area. She recalled, “The last time I saw the tree, the people had addedcoconuts, chicken wing, all kinds of offerings. … they put a figure of SantaBarbara underneath it, cut an opening in what would be the face and stuck ashell in the mouth. They have really activated the image and claimed it astheir own” (qtd Rauch and Sura). Family servants, including her African nannyhad introduced her to Santeria as a child. Changó, owner of the bata drum andSanta Barbara are the same, syncretically, in Santería, his thunder andlightning associated with divine justice. A bisexual figure, Catholic Saintwith masculine characteristics. Mendieta with beard. Aggressive projection: mala mujer fused with sacred,transgendered powers. Visiting Cuba in the 1980s, she came to understand thesacred use of art and ritual for purposes of healing, both personal andcollective. She carved her Rupestrian sculptures into the embankments of theJaruco.

These images with the properties of sacred fertility figuresare simultaneously in dialog with both the environmentally based sculptures ofartists like Robert Smithson and with sacred sources of being, fusing archaicand postmodern in a language of use for healing and revitalizing the strangeand abstract, cold and alienating forms of high modern visual discourse.Meriwether remarks, regarding her engagement with otherness, “removing her workinto the landscape” freed her to separate the body from the self and tochallenge both the identification of woman with nature and the ways in which,as a representation of “otherness,” she is all too often excluded from the categoriesidentified with constitutive power (107). Her work is both about recuperationand the impossibility of recuperation—one reason for its primary existence asoutline or ash, vegetation that will die or mud that water will erode.

Concerning her art, Mendieta wrote, “I have been carrying outa dialog between the landscape and the female body (based on my ownsilhouette). I believe that this has been a direct result of my having beentorn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by thefeeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way Ireestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to thematernal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth …I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really thereactivation of primal beliefs … [in] an omnipresent female force, theafter-image of being encompassed within the womb, is a manifestation of mythirst for being.” (51).

Paragraphs in Pursuit of aConclusion

In the context of an argument as to the relation between thefeminine and its figuration, in which she cites differences between Derrida,Irigary, and Kristeva, Judith Butler addresses a variety of cosmogonicrepresentations stemming from the notion of the ‘chora’ or ‘receptacle’ inPlato’s Timaeus. She writes, “Thisnaming of what cannot be named is itself a penetration into this receptaclewhich is at once a violent erasure, one which establishes it as an impossibleyet necessary site for all further inscriptions” (44). Erasure, like forclusion(or psychic foreclosure), is primary trauma, primary to identity formation, aconcept found in Slavoj Zisek’s work (cf Butler 190) as well as in JeanFrancois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “thejews.” Butler discusses foreclosure in relation to female castration andthe imaginary phallus, her purpose being to empower female performativity bydeconstructing gender. I am attributing to Ana Mendieta’s Rupestriansculptures, with their ambiguous forms, both phallic and maternal, a direct andpractical action that inscribes a powerful performativity of the sort thatButler theorizes as “performative power” (224 f).

To continue my discussion of names and naming, at thepostcolonial level, now: for Derek Walcott, history “folds over a fishline(305),” an image of foreclosure, erasing memory “and the foam foreclosed.” Inresponse to postcolonial political dislocations, he fears that personalidentity may have “melted into a mirror.” Homi Bhabha cites this poem, “Names,”as most representative of the cultural politics of “temporal disjunction.” Hewrites, “at issue in the discourse of minorities is the creation of agencythrough incommensurable (not simply multiple) positions” (231). Clearly,Walcott’s poetics are deeply hybrid, locating meaning in incommensurablejuxtapositions: “A sea-eagle screamsfrom the rock, / and my race began like the osprey / with that cry, / thatterrible vowel, / that I!” (306) The Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” haunts that scream,“gifre ond graedig /gielleth anfloga” (l. 62). Walcott, like the voyager,associates the seabird with the soul in this peregrination per amor dei. Equally he finds meaning in theperformance of ordinary acts of naming: “moubain:the hogplum, / cerise: the wildcherry” (307). These acts of naming are events of the sort theorized by RoyWagner under the heading of “symbols that stand for themselves,” collapsing“the tension and contrast between symbol and symbolized” (43). Events inpursuit of an originary moment haunt new world poetics, its continualincompleteness, dissolving into uncertain futures (not my thesis but JoséMartí’s), never Europe’s Elsewhere, butin fact a world like that of Cien años desoledad, still so new that many things lack names: “El mundo era tanreciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre” (83). Events become names inrecycled gestures of pointing fingers or inscriptions in the mud or clay wallsof Old Man’s Creek or Jaruco, spiritual quests, fusing attraction andrepulsion, instances of “cultural integration,” according to Lucy Lippard (qtdGuy Brett 202), forms of emergent subjectivity that can best be understood asfluid, tinged with melancholy perhs, but not wrapped in nativist sureties anddread of mingling multiple sources.

[1] SeeCharles Bernstein, “Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second-Wave ModernistPoetry and Lyrics,” American LiteraryHistory 2008 20(1-2):346-368. “In "Poem Beginning ‘The,’" LouisZukofsky (bornin 1904) writes of the temptation to assimilate intothe Englishliterary tradition. "Assimilation is nothard," he tells hismother, but the burden of the poem is toregister both the difficultyof resisting assimilation and theunexpected and irreparablecosts of not resisting” (348).

[2] Notethat the second album released by Los Orishas carries the title Emigrante, produced in Barcelona itcontinues the exploration of cubanidad butthis time at a self-reflexive distance.

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Field poetics and the practice of autoethnography

2011-12-05T12:48:00.000-08:00

I have developed my thoughts about autoethnography as an aspect of understanding my own methods and habits as a poet. Here I will attempt to read this practice into or against the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. These poets have been my guides as I have attempted to open this terrain, a terrain that implicates the self as an agent among others and as an object in the field of the poem. Both Olson and Creeley write with a demonstrable interest in ethnography. Neither practices, consciously, what I here call autoethnography.

During his stay in the Yucatan, Olson learned to respond to the cultural differences and deep similarities between self and other. He wrote that the Mayan sensibility may have declined from what it once was, but that its profound human-ness was also evident in how the Mayans carried their bodies. Creeley wrote in a similar fashion about his meeting with a Lacandon Indian in Chiapas. A lesson about the self in action is crystallized. We are neither as open physically nor as alert and quick as the native subject, the “other” of the imagination. Does such a feeling register only a moment of exoticism or nostalgia for a lost capacity? Problems of transference infiltrate possibilities of truly knowing the other. An embrace of this set of problems torques the process of autoethnography as I understand it. Autoethnographic poetry is an investigation into the nature of self or ego as a phenomenon that arises in the interactions between the one and the many, the body and the polis, the moment of apprehension formed by the in-swirling of cosmic and historical forces. These fault lines, fractures really, score the surface of the text.

Seen or felt, the self is a product of interactions, a product of the field of shifting and counterposed physical and communal forces. The self is always partial. An aspect without substance, an ego, only this; but there may be more, spirit for example. Uncountable elements. The practice of ethnographical poetics can be understood as the process of mapping the field of action in which the self becomes aware, uniquely or differently, of its own existence.

On certain sunny days, with a chop of whitecaps, blowing in from the WSW, I ask, does the self exist apart from the text? does it exist as an object apart from the text? Is it only a presence that arises in discourse? What about the endless arguments that divide my mind when I cannot sleep or the fears that grip me when I wake?

I am revising here what I have written before. I am integrating new material in a process that is accumulative, accretive. At some point I will start to cut back as the field begins to define itself. I will cease editorializing, and I will accept what I have been given by the languages that I use (this assertion is a nod to the important work of Robin Blaser). My conversation is with a ghost of myself and with Omar Pérez. Yesterday Omar and I sat on a terrace overlooking the Malecón in Havana. Omar can be trenchant, a line from one of his poems reads, “Lo que no embarra no goza.” His poem traces the connection between slime and pleasure, shit and joy. What are the forces that lead me to this garden with its vista? To continue this theme means I will have to reach a long way back through the contingencies of my life. That would be narrative of a different sort than what I mean by autoethnography, although many useful conjunctures might emerge, each a possible impetus to poetic analysis. For Omar poetry is an exact science.

When I was a boy on Cranberry Island, at the age of eleven or twelve, we had no plumbing in our house. The winter winds were ghost-ridden, carrying the voices of tortured sirens. To relieve my bowels I had to thread my way through the chambers of an ancient barn to an outhouse behind the animal stalls. Is it thus that unless you dirty yourself there is no pleasure? How I came to these words is a result of poetic analysis, inflected with autoethnography. The process of how I came to Cuba, making a connection in Montreal, is not so very relevant to any of this, nothing in that string of contingencies is more than a chronology. Autoethnography begins with an identification of break points and elisions.

Poetry understood in this way is a process of instantiations, the becoming of fields traversed by multiple vectors, or as Giles Deleuze would put it “lines of flight.” But there are knots and vortices, monads, where threads tangle or overlap. Maximus, Charles Olson, John Stevens and Enyalion each has a relation with Fenris the wolf. Creeley’s poetry often seems to be largely about echoes.

Neither Olson nor Creeley use autoethnography as a method consciously employed, as many academics have now come to do in the disciplines of anthropology and composition studies. In anthropological terms, an autoethnography is an account of the writer’s experience as if the writer, himself or herself, were the object of ethnographic scrutiny, both self and other, a means of addressing the participant-observer dialectic that has framed ethnography since Bronislaw Malinowski’s early efforts. The liberty to undertake autoethnography as a form of anthropology is generally ascribed to the influence of Clifford Geertz. In The Interpretation of Culture, Geertz asserts that “what we call our data are really our constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to" (9). Thus the act of interpretation becomes the subject of reflection, perhaps more so than the data itself and our understanding of culture becomes a semiotic construct. As a result data in the form of clinical observations has been shoved into an unstable range, one not secured scientifically for purposes of analysis. The gain is that now the biases influencing interpretation become available for inquiry. For instance, in his essay “Deep Play,” we learn who Geertz is, we get a glimmer of how the Balinese see him; nonetheless his data on the Balinese cock fight is presented in the form of analyzing the amount of money wagered in different circumstances. Despite this seeming objectivity, Geertz feels obliged to compare the energy of the cockfight to the drama of Shakespeare’s Lear. The reading of his observations is finally subjective and rooted in western notions of self-destructive willfulness. It is because of hovering instability with respect to data and its interpretation that I have used the word “transfer” in my definition of autoethnography above.

In her critique of the practice of autoethnography as a method of composition and a model for teaching writing, Mary M. Reda asks,

Can we utilize memory in an autoethnographic project in the same way we use observation, interviews, and material records in an ethnography? Memory is a self-selecting process, creating patterns through elision, emphasis, forgetfulness. Such transformations radically alter the "data." We read the writer's retrospective reconstructions … . patterns of memory. History gives these constructions a teleological imperative: to explain the present though the past. There is no alternate source against which to "test" the hypotheses presented as inarguable.

Contrary to the self-justifying endgame just described, I am arguing that the embedding an autoethnographic data within a field poetics, frees the text from slavery to such teleological constructs. It transforms time into space to intone the usual Olsonic mantra. As archaeologist, Olson sifts among the contents of his texts to disinter those figures like Maximus, Stevens, Merry, Enyalion and Tyr who are figures in the poet’s psychodrama as it relates to the son’s obsession with his father’s death, an event that implicated the son in multiple ways that echo throughout Maximus, perhaps as the spine that unifies the epic.[1] Much hinges on the refusal of the son to lend to his father a suitcase that perhaps symbolized for Olson his own stature in the world (Clark 28). He had acquired the suitcase for his European travels as the youthful winner of a national oratory prize. Symbolically, Charles’ ego seems to have been invested in this bag. Among multiple variations, it becomes “a box upon the sea” (M 373), the image that closes Maximus II. Karl had requested to borrow the suitcase for his trip to a convention of postal workers (and that trip to was a matter of some pride, the father’s hoping to set the record straight as to how his supervisors had hounded him in the last years of his postal career), but Charles refused and Karl died soon thereafter, at 53, “too young,” of a stroke, before he could attend the convention in Cleveland, the father blaming the son it seems for his refusal of the loan and the son feeling guilt over how his action was implicated in his father’s death. This is the subject of Olson’s essay, “The Post Office.” Of all this, Olson wrote:

It was to be a big thing and when he was leaving he waked me to ask if I would let him take my suitcase which was bigger and newer than his . I had a use for it that coming weekend which seemed important to me, and I refused. He went away sore, and the curious thing is, that though my mother and I drove the hundred miles to the hospital the moment we heard he was sick and though I was with him much of the time until he died. I do not remember that he ever addressed me or seemed to notice I was there. He pinched my mother’s nose and said something unintelligible from the twist of his mouth but it is only now that I realize at no time did he admit a notice of me. Or do I exaggerate and punish myself anew for the guilt of my refusal of the suitcase. (CP 235)

“The Post Office” was written in 1948, fourteen years after the death of Karl Olson. At age 52, Olson reflects on “The Postal Union of the Son with the Father” (M 390). (Date Dec. 62.) And the theme is present in the remarkable Stevens song, where the Stevens (Gloucester’s first Maximus), Olson’s father and the King, Tyr and the Fenris, constellate into a figure of the son cannibalizing the father’s body (M 399, Jan. 1964). The pages of Maximus III, beginning with the line “I have been an ability—a machine” (1966) were written thirty one years after the death of the father, Olson’s mourning for the loss of his wife Betty in a tragic car accident, displaced upon memories of the father, sexual insecurity preoccupying the son’s address to loss. Here again are lines implicating the son in the father’s tragedy and the remarkable visual poem dedicated to “My Beloved Father” (M 499). The typography suggests both a rose and a penis as I have argued elsewhere.[2] I cite these texts now to prepare you for the entrance of melancholia into the fields of Maximus.[3] I am claiming that these archaeologies of mourning and implicit guilt are a form of autoethnography. The differences and overtones among the contents of an autoethnography constitute a deep reading or embodiment of obsessions and other formative impulses, as if the different times indicated by chronology or mythic allusion, occupied one time or composite field.

Olson combines both the anthropology of the other and personal forms of ethnography as he explores the meaning of his “tribe” or “world” (M 209), is “Human Universe.” His description in that essay of the unselfconscious ways in which the Mayans carried their bodies, like his description of the toddler Kate, “She wears her own face / as we do not (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 - A pastoral Letter,” M 92) represents his formulation of an ego-ideal that is narcissistic necessarily but not damaging to the child as it can be for the adult: this is Freud’s opinion when he distinguishes a “primary and normal narcissism” from adult regressions to the narcissistic stage, regressions possibly to an oral and cannibalistic stage (CPW. 14: 73 ff). I move rapidly to the conclusion that the role of narcissism in mourning and melancholy is decisive with respect to Olson’s ability to love and his ability to write.

Is it only by accident that Avicenna writes that melancholics “imagine themselves made kings or wolves” among other obsessions, including and obsession with coitus, when these images or practices are so central to the last pages of Maximus? Consider the appearance of Fenris, after Tyre who is a figure for Olson himself, has put his hand in the mouth of the wolf:

Stevens

went away across Cut Bridge

my father

lost his

life the son

of the King of the Sea walked

away from the filthy wolf

eating the dropped body, the

scavenger (M 403).

I have elsewhere written that Olson suffers from melancholia.[4] It seems to be a disease endemic to New Englanders, Hawthorne and Creeley, as well as Olson. For Freud, melancholia is distinguished from mourning because the libidinal investments have been internalized. In mourning, grief reconciles the subject to loss. That would be the way in which one deals with the loss of the father, and perhaps this is largely true of how both Creeley and Olson experiences loss. In melancholia however the object of loss has become internalized, it is no longer precisely identifiable. Freud writes of it as a shadow upon the soul (CPW 14: 249). It may be that for Olson this shadow has the multiform appearances so often invoked when the subject of the father enters the poem.

For Creeley in turn the object of loss has become language itself, words. The obsession with words is an internalized mourning for the father that he only knew from the accounts of others. In the poem, “The Doctor” from Memory Garden (1986), images of the father, whom Creeley lost at the age of 4, are vague, a smell of cigarettes. The words that pertain to the father are those of his sister and his mother, words that lack any realty other than echoes, “Nothing said / to me, no words more // than echoies, a /smell I remember (CP 2: 275). Words that are empty signifiers, shadows of unspoken trauma. In his brief Autobiography, Creeley is very trenchant about the facts of his life. The tenor of melancholy is better perceived in his poetry. In “Friends,” a poem from Pieces, he writes “I listen. I had / an ego once upon / a time – I do still, / for you listen to me” CP 1: 411). Identity is bound up with those semiotic structures identified by Geertz and others. In “Alex’s Art” from the volume Echoes, he concludes the poem by asking, “Can you see me?” The suggestion is that art like memory always takes as its subject the past, “As each so-called moment, each plunge and painful recovery / of breath echoes its precedent, its own so-called raison d’être (CP 2: 430-31). In Windows, the volume immediately before Echoes, Creeley writes of the limits of expression, evoking a profound loneliness and desolation. More cruelly some might have called this self-absorption diffidence. In the poem “Wall” we find the lines, “You can push as hard as you want / on this outside side. // It stays limited / to a single face” (CP 2:351). And in a poem entitled “Echoes” from Windows, addressed to William Bronk he writes, “Was it always you as one, and them as one, / and one another was us, we thought a protestant, a complex // determination of this loneliness of human spaces” (CP 2: 360). We cannot trace this melancholy to the loss of a father as with Olson, although we cannot discount the trauma associated with loss of the father and the loss of the poet’s own eye from an automobile accident for which it could be felt he father was guilty.” Creeley doesn’t dwell there as Olson does. But his poetry is a record of multiple conversations with wives and lovers and other poets and artists for whom loss and the difficulties of communication are central.

Charles Altieri has written that in the “conative” style of Creeley’s art, “The poetry dramatizes the affects involved in finding words that do not falsify the energies making direct description an inadequate rendering of the poets world“ (41). Altieri prefers the conative to the notational sequences, described as seemingly endless series of observations, because meaning is coming to be in the moment of conative language. In one such moment, the poem finds a song that echoes the immediate presence of sunlight on a landscapes described as “miles of spaced echo.”Language finds its form: “Sing me a song / makes beat specific, / takes the sharp air, / echoes this silence”(CP 2: 389-90). I hope to have briefly indicated Altieri’s reading of “My New Mexico,” the first poem in the volume Echoes (1994). For me, moments such as these seem carefully balanced resolutions. But the notational is also the stuff of autoethnography. It is the sorting among echoes and flickers of light at the edge of consciousness is preliminary to a poetry of resolutions and coherences.

In his Autobiography, to close now, Creeley writes “I have no reifying memories that tell me this is where I was then and there. They are far more echoes … .It is the pleasure and authority of writing that it invents a life to live … (in Clark, 122).

CONCLUSION: Autoethnography is not about identifying or analyzing the self as an internally generated psychological construct, for instance, about an individuation that would separate the domain of the Self from that of the Ego in Jungian terms. It is about recording and classifying cultural data that form a terrain and mark the passage of a self through or over that terrain. It is about the data that impinge upon an individual’s life experience and different ways of constructing that data. When viewed poetically, these constructions have a depth, a coherence of their own, are a matrix, but are not in any sense the self. It is impossible for a self to identify itself. It can account for patterns in its lived experience. As such the self can be a citizen with known properties. The private self at the public wall as Olson put it.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1992.

Altieri, Charles. “What Does Echoes Echo” in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work. Ed. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery. U Iowa P, 2009: 36-49.

Bové, Paul. Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays. Duke, 1995.

Brodkey, Linda. "Writing on the Bias." College English. 56:5 (Sept. 1994): 527-547.

- - - --. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Butterick, George. A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1980.

Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. NY: Norton, 1991.

Clark, Tom. Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place including “Autobiography” 122-144.. NY: New Directions, 1993.

Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1982 (abbreviated as CP 1).

- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005. Berkeley: U Cal P, 2006 (abbreviated as CP 2).

- - - - -. Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973.

Dressman, Mark. "Catholic Boy: An Account of Parochial School Literacy." Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Linda Brodkey (ed.) Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996. 275-283.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. v. 14: 237-258. London: Hogarth Press 1957

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997 (Abbreviated CP).

- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson. Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997.

- - - - -. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: U Cal P. 1983 (abbreviated as M).

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession. New York: MLA, 1991.33-40.

Reda, Mary M.. “Autoethnography as Research Methodology” in Academic Exchange Quarterly (Spring 2007).

Redden, Jennifer. The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva. Cary: Oxford U P, 2002.

[1] Following his discussion of the line “When a man’s coffin is the sea,” (where he discusses the inseparability of death and creation), Paul Bové writes, “Perhaps it is paradoxical, even nonsensical to say that the texts of Olson and the world of texts takes real unity from the ego. In theory Olson passionately denounces the ego. An early essay, “This is Yeats Speaking,” a defense of Pound in 1946, reviles the language of false self-esteem: crowing over, bragging about a triumph over mere personal incoherence. (160) Paul Bové. Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays

[2] “Olson and Subjectivity: 'Projective Verse' and The Uncertainties of Sex.” Olson Now: Documents. Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo. Dec. 8, 2005. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/. A revised version appears in Olson's Prose, Gary Grieve-Carlson editor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, 47-61.

[3] In Stanzas, Giorgio Agamben argues: Nevertheless, an ancient tradition associated the exercise of

poetry, philosophy, and the arts with the most wretched of all humors. “Why is it,” asks one of the most extravagant of the Aristotelian problemata, “that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from the black bile?” (13)

[4] "Olson and Melancholy," Worcester Review (Fall 2010).

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Elegy for Ted

2011-11-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Julie with whom I had botanized the heath
of my North Atlantic island, lost
in the marshes of Minnesota. A virgin love
I thought we had. Now Ted
with whom discovered samphire,
glasswort, true hellebore,
with whom fished oysters from the cove,
always smelled of sweet tobacco
caught in his beard. His eyes.
shone with trobar clus it seemed. Turnings
of the melodic phrase. Swum
bare-chested in raw, icy water
On Kansas Road kept bees. From
scraps of trash fish made
bouillabaisse. Wolf, dog,
bones and eyes

The Impossibility of Translation

2011-03-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

I have been in Spain for the last week. Pleased to have been invited to share thoughts on the art of translation and to read some of my poems at the University of Valencia.

A careful reading of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of the Translator" has suggested to me that all poetry needs to be approached as language that holds within it a certain degree of translatability.

Here is the url for one of the presentations related to this subject:

"The Impossibility of Translation, Benjamin and Derrida." Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació, Universitat de Valencia. Mar. 9.

http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/The%20Impossibility%20of%20Translation.pptx.

2011-01-19T19:25:00.001-08:00

Querying myself, I ask what do I mean by “autoethnography? First, here is what I mean by “ethnography” with respect to the work of Charles Olson. During his stay in the Yucatan, Olson practiced a kind of ethnography that recorded cultural differences and deep similarities between self and other. In his view, necessarily partial, the Mayan sensibility may have declined from what it once was, but it also remained evident in how the Mayans’ carried their bodies. A problematic lesson about the self in action is crystallized. Such lessons are often the result of ethnographic inquiry. Problems of transference infiltrate possibilities of truly knowing the other. This set of problems is what I mean by autoethnography. It seems to me that all of Maximus is an investigation into the nature of self or ego as a phenomenon that arises in the interactions between the one and the many, the body and the city, the moment of apprehension formed by the in-swirling of cosmic and historical forces.

2011-01-07T14:24:00.000-08:00

In the most bastardly vein of possible pleading, I cry, hear me. I am sliding towards termination, cremation, immortality—nothing exceptional there. But I seem to have been able to write poetry, very different poetry from what I was able to write 20 years ago, to my sense. One book this fall, A North Atlantic Wall, I read as a soul-journey to somewhere beyond physical restraints. In 2009, there was Prolog Pages, three works in one cover, composed by an observer who sought to be unnoticed as he travelled in the underbelly of globalized predation. I will read from both at the Zinc Bar on Feb. 18.

2010-12-22T18:19:00.001-08:00

With a view toward participation in Modernist Studies Association 13 in Buffalo, I am seeking signs of interest in any of the following: a panel, a round table of a seminar on the topic of Charles Olson and Ethnography. I am willing to organize or lead, to co-lead, or to defer leadership. It might be best for some one other than myself to serve as the chair of a seminar. In particular I would like to explore autoethnographic writing as theorized by anthropologists like Ruth Behar and to construct a reading of “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” in that context. And of course, of more general relevance, connections between Olson’s work and cultural anthropology in are familiar to many colleagues. The theme of MSA 13 is “Structures of Innovation.” It would seem a almost necessary to have several Olson related events at the conference.

2010-11-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

Sea turtles copulate
Box kites fly over head,
each on a long thread

Since talking on Olson in Worcester, I have been to Rochester where I developed a poetics of transcription, based on an analysis of Olson's reading of Walter H. Rich's "The Gulf of Maine" and Fannie Hardy Eckstrom's "Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans." I also read in the Centennial Celebration in Gloucester. Now I am happy to say that my "A North Atlantic Wall" has been released by Dos Madres.

http://www.dosmadres.com/dos-madres-books/a-north-atlantic-wall-by-donald-wellman/

2010-02-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

In March I will be talking at the Charles Olson Centenial in Worcester. My topic is Olson and Autobiography. Preparing for that, I just reread my "Prose on Uxmal." The text first appeared in Absent Magazine, Issue 2. I reproduce the text here with slight modifications.

Donald Wellman
August 13, 2006, revised Feb. 1, 2010.

From profound sources I have been led to believe that there is a resonance between aesthetic integrity and morality. Machines without souls or randomized constructions without the handprints of a creator haunt the modernistic landscape. Circumstantial evidence in support of coherence underwrites this credo, prizing alienation, morbidly, dispensing panaceas. Thrones de los Cantares! Hateful bigotry! The case of Ezra Pound argues against transcendent order. But at least he held to a pre¬lapsarian faith in the power of goddesses. Nostalgia that produces fascism!

Lacking palpable metaphysical certainties, assume that serendipity generates coherences. The desire arises to subscribe to an epistemological poetics as do Charles Olson or Robert Creeley. Envisagement as discovery. Reading, in an active sense, constructs a world, becomes accountable for the facts and mechanics of seeing, embraces the apparatus, eye or pen. The glyph as fact of observation compelled Olson’s imagination when he explored Mayan culture. He observed the freedom with which teeth are displayed when smiling. So, for instance, “It is so very beautiful how animals human eyes are when the flesh is not worn so close it chokes” (“Human Universe” 57). He also remarks on a persistent deadness after 400 years of colonialism. “They are fucking unhappy. ... those sons of bitches, those ‘scholars’ –how they’ve cut that story out, to make the Mayan palatable to their fucking selves, foundations, & tourists” (“The Mayan Letters” 79-80). Quick to perceive the commodif¬ication of culture and yet clued to the solidity of forms cut in limestone. Wave patterns that mime scales, mouths that are flutes. “The fish is speech. Or see / what, cut / in stone / starts. ...” (“The Mayan Letters” 101). It is here that I find my poetics, adding also the knowledge that identity shifts as discourse (always an outside) warps the frame of local experience.

As prime function the Mayan calendar maps space, so Olson posits. The illiterate shaman addresses her book: Maria Sabina enacts a knowledge rooted in observation. Herman Melville is an architect of systems where evil attains its full, obsessional force. Susan Howe works gloss against gloss in “Melville’s Marginalia.” The Cantos too are fundamentally gloss, observations and notes, emendations, a diseased mind editing the cultural dictionary. Praise Leibniz, Voltaire and Webster (Thrones CIV 763). Seeing is all the weapon allowed in these negotiations. Reduce the cosmos to a vocabulary of squiggles, vortices, and zigzags. Adolfo Best-Maugard taught this method to hundreds of thousands of Mexican school children in the 1920s. In this manner, the Mexican muralists aspired to build a national consciousness.

One evening in July, seeking to understand the meaning of Mexico as a magical elsewhere for Beat authors like Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg, I was lead to translate Octavio Paz’s “En Uxmal.” I also re-read relevant correspondence between Creeley and Olson on Mayan archeology. “En Uxmal” inscribes an archaic non-linear coherence, a property that Latin American magical realism shares with Beat, anti-modernist social values. According to Daniel Belgad, both the Beats and Paz envisage Mexico as “the potential site of an alternative modernity” (31). Belgad addresses a synchronicity shared by these poets. He distinguishes between representations of Mexico as liminal or magical and the harsh facts of Mexican cultural history, a debate that is central to the rough feelings that arose when David Alfaro Siquieros accused Diego Rivera of indulging in “bourgeois mysticism” (see my poem Tepotzotlán” in the Oaxaca collection or the selection from that volume on line at There.

Presumptions about the sacred and profound mark Paz’s response more deeply than do physical facts; nonetheless, it is true, as Paz asserts, that in the “unblinking light ... the columns dance without moving” The second story friezes, balanced upon undecorated receding walls, create a perception of movement. Multiple figures of Chac weave over a ground of stonework patterned in imitation of reed mats and woven thatch. Reflecting an invasive influence, out of kilter with the rest, on the west side of the quadrangle, a superimposed cornice, heavily encrusted with twin serpent figures of Quetzalcoatl, Xul (or Mexican) style, submerges the clean-lines of the Puuc vocabulary. My poem cites both quotidian and magical realities. Not positioning myself in flight from consumerist or late-capitalist cultural facts, vision becomes enmeshed by past and present aspects of an unfolding reality. Facets in an overlay, not in polar opposition, perceptions constitutive of where we are.

On the architecture at Uxmal Olson writes “... the famous Uxmal, is altogether otherwise than you’d gather, from the literature I have seen the two famous buildings, for example (the Governor’s Palace and the Nun House), brilliant architecture & engineering as they may be, are aesthetically dead ...the Maya had become state lovers ....” (Olson/Creeley Correspondence, Vol. 5, 1932). For Octavio Paz, in contrast, Uxmal is a living and transparent temple, not the heavy thing that Olson finds it to be. My visit to Uxmal, the subject of a poem in my Diario mexicano, reads the mythology of the serpent against the physical form of the Nuns’ quadrangle when the walls are illuminated, emblazoning the commodified spectacle that Olson feared. For me the imbrication of the sacred and the physical is not in the stone. It is in the perception. Olson hunts back into archaic time on the track of vestigial knowledge. Paz is stunned by experiential transparency. Bryant Knox writes that Uxmal is the model for the central quadrangle at Simon Fraser in Burnaby, British Columbia, designed by Arthur Erickson (35). The visual experience of that structure may be alienating, as Knox suggests. But not viscerally so. To sit briefly in the cells at Uxmal where the women were fattened and pleasured before their sacrifice is to perceive a frightening, but sacred reality. Forms of death and bloodshed as horrible as those that cause us to blench when looking at the corpses produced by modern terrorism, insurgency, counter-insurgency, car bombs and missile strikes. At Uxmal my morality and humanism seeks to justify matters more primal than I can comprehend. Quotidian news footage, even that from Lebanon today, is sanitized, commoditized, necessarily. Memories too horrible for words produce emaciated , drained, terrified beings. Do ruined temples hold curative instruction?

Both my “Uxmal” and my translation of Paz’s “En Uxmal” follow. Honoring the complex realities of indigenous experience, my moral desire is to resist the subjective longing for an elsewhere. Engaging the spiritual space that is alien to me, the poem “Valladolid” maps aspects of Mayan history as it affects contemporary identity.

Selected Works Cited

• Belgad, Daniel. “The Transnational Counterculture.” Reconstructing the Beats. Ed. Jennie Skerl. NY: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004: 27-40.
• Knox, Bryant. “Following Charles Olson in the Yucatan.” Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 36/37 (Sept 200).

Octavio Paz Donald Wellman, trans.
EN UXMAL
1
LA PIEDRA DE LOS DÍAS
El sol es tiempo;
el tiempo, sol de piedra;
la piedra, sangre.
2
MEDIODÍA
La luz no parpadea,
el tiempo se vacía de minutos,
se ha detenido un pájaro en el aire.
3
MÁS TARDE
Se despeña la luz,
despiertan las columnas
y, sin moverse, bailan.
4
PLENO SOL
La hora es transparente:
vemos, si es invisible el pájaro,
el color de su canto.
5
RELIEVES
La lluvia, pie danzante y largo pelo,
el tobillo mordido por el rayo,
desciende acompañada de tambores:
abre los ojos el maíz, y crece.
6
SERPIENTE LABRADA SOBRE UN MURO
El muro al sol respira, vibra, ondula,
trozo de cielo vivo y tatuado:
el hombre bebe sol, es agua, es tierra.
Y sobre tanta vida la serpiente
que lleva una cabeza entre las fauces:
los dioses beben sangre, comen
hombres. IN UXMAL

1
THE STONE OF THE DAYS

Sun is time;
time, sun of rock;
stone, blood.

2
MID-DAY

Light unblinking,
time emptied of minutes,
a bird has been stopped in the air.

3
LATER

Light emissions,
the columns awaken
and, without moving, dance.

4
FULL SUN

Time is transparent:
if the bird is invisible, we see
the color of its song.

5
RELIEFS

The rain, dancing foot and long hair,
the ankle bitten by the sunbeam,
descends with drums:
the corn opens its eyes and grows.

6
SERPENT CARVED ON A WALL

The wall breathes with sun, hums,
undulates,
bit of sky, alive and tattooed:
man drinks the sun, is water, is earth.
And on all this the serpent lives
who carries a head in its jaws:
the gods drink blood, eat men.

Donald Wellman
Uxmal

Two times to Uxmal, its dovecote and macaw’s roost,
impossibly recursive. On the first return, unexpected confidence
in my abilities to navigate: jarring topes in the road.
Identity papers, passport and the required
foleta de migración turística,
mislaid, not where I expected to find them
on my return to my room,
compromised self, panic at the old year’s end.
No magical purpose at work here or in the recovery.
Near noon, I had been splayed on a high platform
for a sun god’s inspection,
exposed post-operative on offer.
On the lawn of the palace, jewel box
of ancient authority, children played at jaguar
and diviner. From my perch I examined
the bedrooms where girls feted before sacrifice.
Fields and shrub forests in the distance,
remarkably green toward the north coast.
Do they burn the earth to destroy the thorn bushes,
potentilla fruticosa, morning glory, red darts from a fennel
where I had wandered into uncharted ruins?
Descending the ninety-nine stairs,
a small incautious boy tottered
on the brink of a well. I called out, “¡Cuidado!”
Happily, he did not fall. I acquired a guidebook to Mayan ruins
with reprints of drawings by Catherwood
and daguerreotypes by Charnay. Also a puppet,
with an arm long sleeve, wearing
typical yucateca costume. And a jipi.
No great awakening in these details,
only that my tourism seemed almost joyous,
setting aside, for reasons of conscience, my status:
consumer without identity in an impoverished land.
At night, on the second return, error led me into Muná,
known for workshops that specialize in reproductions.
Museum security had recovered my papers
from the floor of a stall where I had urinated,
dislodging the passport from a waistband
when extracting bills. With my papers restored,
I was able to view the sound and light show,
son et lumière, turning to my left (so often I take
the long way around), assuming that on this night,
naturally, I might be one of only a few there,
gingerly stepping over grates
that house flood lights, then turning, about face,
to find myself on the opposite side of the quadrangle
from the crowded stands on the north wall, “Chac, Chac”
stereo prayers to end the drought.
Quetzalcoatl, his form wound among the Puuc friezes,
illuminated blue, then green. How can I explain
that the serpent god has female aspects? Venus, Lucero?
On this night, I had intended to meet my scorpion woman,
my Shango, Santa Barbara. Endless New Year’s Eve
dawning on a desolate balcony overlooking
an empty plaza, supping on cream of cilantro soup,
desiccated poc-chuk, the white carriages waiting to transport
lovers to balls in mansions on Avenida Montejo.

Excerpts from Diario mexicano on line at XCP: Streetnotes.

2010-01-26T19:33:00.000-08:00

In a recent post on his Nomadics blog, Pierre Joris pointed out some issues of mistranslation affecting the core meanings of Aimé Césaire's "Earthquake" as translated by Paul Muldoon and presented in the New Yorker as a gesture of sympathy to the tragic plight of Haiti today. In response, I wrote, "The complexities of communist or any political temblors in the Caribbean require exactitudes of expression from both poet and tranlator." I have been sensitive to this problem of exactness in my efforts with translation of some works by the Haitian poet René Depestre. The issues requiring sensitivity include the different ways of negotiating both the Kreyol and the French languages and the role of activism of the sort that is represenetd by the "successes" or "failures" of La Casa de las Americas. There is disappointment and anger and beauty and redemption in Depestre's text. I hope I have got some of it. I put this out here because of Haiti's complexities. Like poetry, she breaks my heart. Any suggestions for tweaking the translation will be appreciated.

ADIEU A LA REVOLUTION FAREWLL TO THE REVOLUTION

J’ai cessé d’être un poète noire
sur le qui-vive à la porte
de la Maison des Amériques
j’ai quitté le foyer deux fois natal :
mes rêves en morceaux tiennent dans un mouchoir.

Je regarde dans les yeux mes jours
élargir un nouveau ciel du poète en moi,
je fais mes adieux à tout ce qui est mort
sur pieds dans ma vie,
je mets à morts la foi et l’espérance
qui ont failli truquer mon art de vivre.

Je voyage désormais
à la belle étoile
des mots d’Alexander Dumas père.
Mon voyage est un enfant du pardon.
S’étant trompé de chemin de croix
mon cheval innocent s’éloigne
comme un voilier remis à neuf
pour l’aventure océane.

Ma tête grise a poussé
dans les hauteurs des mots
en pleine forme
qui firent la pluie et le beau temps
au jardin de la jeune madame Colette :
vive le dieu émerveillé d’une langue française
aussi ronde en chaire et en soleil qui courbe
au lit de la femme en l’état de poésie.

Vive les petits matins maternels de la
langue française!
ils me font des signes de frères
tout en haut des mots
bien créoles d’Aimé Césaire !
vive la prose à monsieur André Gide !
j’ai sa fraîche aurore à la gorge
j’ai des mots frais du français-de-France
je m’imagine fraîcheur du soir
taillée dans la saison des îles
pour couvrir le parcours saharien du siècle.

Au fond du panier d’années d’exil
où mûrissent mes travaux et mes jours
—très loin du désert cubain qui pipait
les dés du fond de mon âme—
voici un sang et un horizon d’homme libre
criblés de rivières et de rêves en crue,
voici la charrue des mots à donner en vrac
à la bonne et fraîche illumination d’autrui,
en prose et en poésie, voici la pirogue
qu’il faut pour descendre en chantant
les tout derniers rapides du XXe siècle I have stopped being a black poet
on guard at the door
of la Casa de las Américas
I have abandoned the hearth twice my home:
my dreams in fragments, caught in
a handkerchief.

I look into my eyes as my days
open a new horizon for the poet in me,
I make my farewells to all that is dead
standing firm in my life,
I condemn the faith and the hope
that betrayed my way of living.

From now on I travel
toward the beautiful star
of words by Alexander Dumas père.
My voyage is a child of remorse.
Having been deceived at the crossroad
my innocent horse stretches out
like a sailboat newly fitted
to venture on the ocean.

My gray head has scaled
the heights of the well-made
words
that bring the rain and sunny weather
to the garden of the young Madame Colette:
Long live the wonder-struck god of a French
so sleek in his flesh and in the sun that falls on the bed of a woman in a state of poetry.

Long live the maternal early mornings of the
French language!
they gesture to me with brotherly signs,
above all the well-made creole
of Aimé Césaire!
Long live the prose of Monsieur André Gide!
I sense its morning fragrance in my throat.
I sense the fresh words of the French of France
I imagine the fragrance of evening
cut in the season of the islands
to cover the Saharan tracks of the century.

At the bottom of the basket of the years of exile
where my works and days ripen
—far from the Cuban dessert that loaded
the dice in the depths of my soul—
here is a lineage and an horizon of the free man
flooded by rivers and raw reveries,
here is the plow of words to break the sod
for the good and fresh illumination of others,
in prose and in poetry, here is the pirogue
that is needed for descending in song
the very last rapids of the 20th century.

René Depestre tr. Donald Wellman

.

Supplemental notes to a field poetics:

2010-01-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

Supplemental notes to a field poetics:

NOTE ONE (additional constructs of relevance to ethnopoetics): In his essay “Spatial Practices” from Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford reconstructs the notion of “field” and “fieldwork” in anthropology. “Field” is customarily taken both to be the space of anthropological field work, as well as the word “field” being in several senses synonymous with the discipline of anthropology. Further, in anthropology, understood as a discipline, “fieldwork,” in some sense, is constitutive of the significant difference that distinguishes anthropology from near cognate disciplines: cultural studies, travel writing, poetics can each be thought of as fields with a laminar relation to anthropology (and to each other). Clifford writes, concerning an urban neighborhood (an example of a field or space of fieldwork), “an urban neighborhood, for example, may be laid out physically according to a street plan. But it is not a space until it is practiced by people’s active occupation, their movements through and around it. In this perspective, there is nothing given about a “field.” It must be worked, turned into a discrete social space, by embodied practices of interactive travel” (54). The notion of a filed as a set of “embodied practices” that underlies this passage seems cognate with that of an “embodied poetics” like that of Charles Olson. Poetically conceived, the field described here is one of “action” like Pound’s vortex whose shape is dependent on energy in-flow. That field can be mapped to a grid like the Cartesian grid of a neighborhood or it can be mapped to a Riemann calculus of non-Euclidian geometry. The anthropological field in this reading, like the poetic field functions as an energy construct, clued to the actions of embodied participants, and governed by perception.

Clifford’s thought seems fully available to the poet in this instance of metonymic concretion: “Today, in many locations, indigenous people, ethnographers, and tourists all wear T-shirts and shorts” (76). A collapse of boundaries and fields, suggesting that differently tuned perceptions is the key to a poetics.

NOTE TWO: Articulating some ambiguities that have affected the concept of the “paradigm,” in his The Signature of All things, Giorgio Agamben writes of how it is that a paradigm can be understood as both an “exemplar” and an “exemplum.” Concerning paradigms, “[it] is impossible to clearly separate an example’s paradigmatic character – it’s standing for all cases – from the fact that it is once case among others. As in a magnetic field, we are dealing not with extensive and scalable magnitudes but with vectorial intensities” (20). The paradigm seems to offer an embodied knowledge that for Agamben is to be distinguished from both inductive and deductive logic. The paradigm is always an instance of what it is. It is metonymic in function not metaphoric. Metaphor depends on a cross calculation between definable categories. The paradigm, like the field, is a law and an instance shaped by embodied energies.

See my "Field Poetics (a compleat history of de-individualizing practices)." EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts (Fall 2009).

2009-04-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

It was a month ago that I planned to revise my essay Expression (and the transhistorical baroque). I have now done so. My desire is to engage expressivity by modelling a poetics on the emergence of baroque or neo-baroque aspects of some modern and contemporary painting. This essay might well be read in conjunction with my e-book of poetry, Baroque Threads, available at Mudlark.

Postmodern Baroque

2009-03-13T20:18:00.001-07:00

One signature of the baroque is the folding together of perspectives. The points of view available in Las Meninas, unlike the planes of a cubist composition, suggest that the different positions available to the viewer correspond, embody alignments of corresponding positions. With Picasso, the mirror is broken, only on the canvas do points of view collide. The cubist composition does not place you before it. It is complete in itself “has a life of its own” independent of the various perspectives that might be brought to it. The coldness of its detachment resonates inversely with the unlocatedness or homelessness of the modern consciousness. The image displays no concern with the viewer’s confusions. In the postmodern world, certainty is fixed with respect to geosynchronous orbit, but also haunted by legend or myth, vestige of lost immanence.

It was a month ago that I planned to revise my essay Expression (and the transhistorical baroque). I have now done so.

Consider the marble quarry in Clarksburg,
how bits of Africa collide in a mélange
of continental plates.
Abutments and clefts of great depth.
Our host fabricates books “On Sex.”
His wife glazes salmon with honey,
Follow the shunted waterways
to a collision
with a Chinese fighter jet
Huang Yong Ping’s Neapolitan mastiff
pisses America on the wall.
Buddha upon Taishan
fishes in the maw of that Gonwandan trench.
Crucified Christ for bait (Beuys).
On a scrim within a compact jewel case,
a platoon of black children, hardly nine or ten years old,
crowds a corner of the desolate parade ground,
hardly wanting to come forward.
Hampton Institute 1900 (Carrie Mae Weems).
On the mountain road to Florida
unremitting curves, vistas
that swallow the onlooker whole.

Revival

2009-02-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

I began this blog partially for the sake of argument with an exclusively constructivist poetics. At least occaionally transcendental realities abrupt on social realities. This often seems uncommonly clear to me in the visual arts as well as in my experience of latin and spanish cultures. My theoretical bias lies with what I have read and understood of Deleuze, Olson, and Spinoza. I am not a philosopher.

I hope to share my work in cultural studies with other poets and artists. Using the blog I will be editing and revising my proses and short squibs in order to create an archive of work that would otherwise be lost. The method is an extension of my practice of drawing on notebooks where I record ephemeral observations, searching for the resonances that become poetry. I am tending my garden in advance of the growing season in order to see if any of the material has roots or value.

The first entry to the archive that finds itself under the window of this proccess is an essay largely influenced by my reading of Michael Taussig and by my enthusiasm for the works of Ana Mendieta. The engagement began on the flyleaf of the LZ 100 program in NYC, in 2004. Several of the people that I spoke with there had personal recollections of Mendieta, both troubling and fascinating. The title is "Madre"

Fantasies

2007-03-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

Read this as a gloss on orientalism:

Michael Taussig. In Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Michael Taussig describes the “two great narrative forces” that have shaped the anthropology of America. “These narrational configurations are centered on the Indian, on the one hand, and on the Negro, on the other, which owe much, of course, to the needs and fantasies of the European imagination as transplanted in America” (33-34).

Bolivar and the Allegory of America

2007-03-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

In my essay, "Madre of Queen of the Mountain," I discuss different understandings of the relation between community and its representations. The theme of "imagined communities" emerges as a focal point in my reading of the various New World literatures with which I am familiar.

In Pedro José Figueroa,'s portrait, Simon Bolivar, Liberator and Father of the Nation, 1819, the doll or muñeca held by Bolivar represents the fertile, healing and natural qualities of the Americas that are often associated with indigenous peoples. Qualities lost under modernism and the spread of capitalism, qualities that cause nostalgic dreams. Bolivar is the liberator, the founding father of a new regime. What is the source and motive of betrayal, a theme so common in the history of the western hemisphere? How does African heritage figure into this mix? These questions arise when considering the mix of peoples and loyalties that constitute the "new world" -- not only its promise of multiculturalism, but the inescapable history of genocide, enslavement, and environmental degradation.

In order to understand "community" and history, I ask what is the signifigance of Reveron's identification with native peoples? What can be made of a similar identification with indigenous Americans in "Our America" by José Martí. Martí writes:

“American intelligence is an indigenous plumage. Is it not evident that America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed the Indian? And until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself will not begin to walk well. [AAA,” 337, qtd. Retamar 20]

The desire to animate the muñeca may be ritualistic, speak to a felt alternative, a crucial aspect of emergent identity. Can we not also ask, "When does she speak for herself?"

Third Instance Armando Reverón

2007-03-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

In his essay for the exhibition catalog, Armando Reverón, February 11–April 16, 2007, John Elderfeld remarks on the “optical dissolve,” due to intense tropical light that is caught in the landscape and figure studies made by Reverón . Reverón himself remarked, that intense light “disloves colors and ... all colors, after all, become white” (qtd. Elderfeld 27). The theme of an invented America emerges in Reverón’s painting, his casteleto at Macuto becoming an aboriginal scene, mixing the primitive and the priestly. Paintings set in the casteleto retreat featured human children and life-size puppets or effigies (muñecas), visitors and Reverón’s mestizo wife, Juanita, in tableaux reflecting a mythical turn toward indigeneity while also bearing stylistic traits uncannily postmodern (using the weave of the canvas backing of a painting as an element in the composition. Visit the on-line exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/reveron/

The ideas presented here were developed into the talk, Emergent Identies, given in Long Beach, California in 2007.

First notice

2007-03-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

My life began at 50 or was it 60. I began this blog in order to share ideas with other poets of similar interests. I travel on the second-class bus. I write about what I see and about the conversations I have in the mountains of Mexico or Spain. I will be teaching a version of my New World Literature course soon: Garcia Marques, Césaire, Chamoiseau.