More recycling of old material:

Here are some introductions I wrote for writers who read at the Segue Double Happiness series when I was curating. Writers introduced: Ben Friedlander, Cole Heinowitz, Michael Gottlieb, Kim Lyons, Kevin Davies, Jack Kimball, and Pat Reed.

Benjamin Friedlander

Benjamin Friedlander is the author, most recently, of A Knot Is Not a Tangle. With Donald Allen he edited The Collected Prose of Charles Olson. Two books are forthcoming: The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes: Poems 1984-1994, from Subpress Collective; and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism, from the University of Alabama Press. He teaches at the University of Maine.

An anonymous source close to him told me recently, “Ben has an edgy relationship to nature. Once, trying to memorize the name of the bird-of-paradise flower, he kept calling it ‘impending doom’.” Quelle slippage! There is indeed an edginess – a comic edginess – to Ben’s sensibility. It appears in his work as sardonicism, particularly in A Knot is Not a Tangle, some of whose rhyme-laced verses aim to shock with their mordant – and ultimately critical – vulgarity. But Ben is never merely sardonic. He’s also a writer of great conscience, perceptiveness, curiousity, erudition, and sentiment. He lopes heroically from the lofty to the goofy to the arcane to the banal to the lovely as only a feeling thinker who carries in his head a vast library of obscure poetry books, philosophies, and great records can. Please welcome my friend of twenty years…

Cole Heinowitz

When a bull first comes into the arena out of the toril, or bull pen gate, the matador greets it with a series of maneuvers, or passes, with a large cape; these passes are usually verónicas, the basic cape maneuver.

The amount of applause she receives is based on her proximity to the horns of the bull, her tranquillity in the face of danger, and her grace in swinging the cape in front of an infuriated animal weighing more than 1000 lbs.

As with every maneuver in the ring, the emphasis is on the ability to increase but control the personal danger, maintaining the balance between suicide and mere survival. In other words, the real contest is not between the matador and an animal; it is the matador’s internal struggle.

The kill, properly done by aiming straight over the bull’s horns and plunging the sword between its withers into the aorta region, requires discipline, training, and raw courage; for this reason it is known as the “moment of truth.”

Cole Heinowitz matadors language. Like a matador, she is provocative, theatrical, highly skilled, and fiercely erotic. Her multi-genre debut, Daily Chimera, published when she was nineteen, is an extraordinary weaving of viscera and intellect, full of mucous, pubic hair, brassy assertions — “The habitual is a cowardly spindle.” – and dramaturgic inventiveness to equal Carla Harryman’s. Today, hot off the xerox machine, we have Stunning in Muscle Hospital, a Detour Press chapbook, her too-long-awaited first collection of poems since 1995. Brace yourself for the moment of truth. Afficianados, prepare to toss roses from the balconies…

Michael Gottlieb

Back in the rigorous, turbulent 80s, Michael Gottlieb was one of our most radical disjunctionists. Paratactic to the max, his early books, Local Color/ Eidetic Denier and 96 Tears, did not invite close reading – tho some people tried it, with generous application of the parsimony principle. They are, however, as much in their accompanying graphic images as in the writing itself, imbued with the urban and urbane sensibility Michael displays throughout his oeuvre. They are also hothouses for what have emerged as his most pronounced fortés: 1) brilliant two-word collocations, some of which stand on their own as gemlike lines, and 2) the device of arbitrary precision. What more apt title could there be than 96 Tears, the prime popular example of that device? Michael’s more recent books, The River Road and Gorgeous Plunge, with its somehow endearing moodiness, are more authorially voiced , with a deliberate sense of pacing. The lines no longer accrue pell-mell but become judiciously — and deliciously — discrete, leaving pauses for the impact of their deadpan wit, or rueful disillusionment, to sink in. His most recent book, Careering Obloquy is available literally from today.

Mitch Highfill

Right now the sky’s hot, dark, and rumbling oppressive. Sweaty prickling and hair’s frizzing all directions. Wind chime jangling, I’ve got to write Mitch’s introduction. In this menacing weather. How can I do him justice? Big wind knocks Bullwinkle lunchbox off the sill. Nemo jumps up to see what’s the matter. Cats have less fear than curiosity. Same with Mitch. He wants to know, seems to know at least a little about, everything. Mitch is all about capaciousness – in intellect, in generosity, in warmth and righteous conviction, and in myriad enthusiasms. His writing too. He has the distinction of being confessional (as in his beautiful Situations book, TURN) and procedural (as in his Detour chapbook, the hardboiled Blue Dahlia) at once. His confessionalism nothing like the Iowans. More like, I’d say, Whalen. He’s earthy. He craves authenticity, and creates it in his presence, his conversation (he’s garrulous to a virtue — as he writes “Friends avoid me on big news days”), and his poems. His work says best what needs to be said about his work. Sirens outside – an accident? The huge elms shake in wind, blow my sharkskin curtains. Mitch works for a bank, and the signatures on his e-mails always read, “This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information. ” This intrigues me. His office used to be next to the WTC. He made a habit of writing in Liberty Plaza, next to the fountain. But not – thankfully — that day. Here’s a quote from one of his unpublished works, section 20 of a long sequence poem. Note the fountains in it:

squaring circles in the hub-bub

of sound checks and fountains

splash of overgrown mums

and delicate pansies. I thought

to myself, I said “self – why

not grind my opinions down

to a fine puce dust, why not

just attend to perception alone,

why not just gargle the lymph

of French philosophers then

spit gleefully in the fountain,

tune up that zither and emote

vociferously…

Huge flash, then thunder. Many car alarms go off. The cats’ ears radar around. Tires swooshing, dogs barking. Please welcome… Mitch Highfill.

Kim Lyons

In Kim Lyons’ beautiful poems, “moody small domains”, even the adjectives seem like nouns. Listen: “Hell is red, smeary, entered through a green crack.” “The page was bronze, but weightless, in your eye.”

When I read them I notice an excitement akin to the feeling I have when (I admit with some chagrin) shopping. But not the acquisitive kind of shopping born of greed or necessity. Rather, the flaneur’s kind – moving rapt, randomly, among objects. Like going into curio shops in strange neighborhoods and finding – with surprise and delight!… cold rosewood plates, isolated tinsel, a funny old bedroom lamp of brown paper and green ceramic horses, or bamboo stalks the color of a diorama of bamboo stalks.

Gerhard Richter, asked what his paintings were about, replied, “light”. Jordan Davis has made the same observation about Kim’s very optical poems, in which “the eye. a box of fluids, conveys a channel.” But conceptually, there’s much more to them than just retinal observation. There’s the attentive revelation of how poems come to be: “Come forward out of the shadows, disconnected piece. Become a peach that does not adhere, resists fugitive hours.” There are plays of stillness and movement, sensitive enjambment, the skillful isolation of phrases. There’s a balance of cosmic awe and the goofily quotidian. The abstract and concrete take pleasure in each other: “the reversal of momentum has the ragged shape of real daffodils”.

Kevin Davies

“The words (says Kevin Davies, author of the much-acclaimed Pause Button and Comp.) , on hundreds of scraps of paper, get accumulated over a given period, during which I am in the midst, as are we all, of various situations… Most of the “notes” are either assertions or shields. A few are silos. One or two might be reedy exhalations with vegetal imagery. I take it all personally, even the bureacratese and excerpts from how-to manuals. Or especially those… the struggle then, usually in the week before the reading, is to force the liveliest and most contrary piglets to arrange themselves serially within the container. I ask them to please try to be interesting.”

They are not merely interesting. I remember the first time I saw Kevin read, just a couple of years ago at the Church. I was sitting in one of the back rows with Mitch and Drew and Gary. Kevin was reading in his inimitably focused, almost pedagogic style, checking off the obdurate piglets as he read them. And… you know, I don’t think I ever understood exactly what Breton meant when he said that beauty should be convulsive. I’ve had a seizure, and it wasn’t at all beautiful. But Mitch and Drew and Gary and I, by the middle of Kevin’s reading, were completely convulsed, with laughter, that is, and wiping tears from our eyes. We couldn’t help it. Kevin’s work is a relentless procession of punch lines and the unpredictable insights of a very very conscious person fighting hard not to get caught in the undertow of alienation. So there’s pathos in his sharp humor. We were laughing so uncontrollably that Kevin looked at us severely and said SHUSH, which of course made us laugh even more. The amazing thing is, although we were being totally, though not willfully, disruptive, we didn’t break his composure. Only some arcane practice could have cultivated that. He really is a consummate artist, public, interpretive, and situated — an acrobatic code-switcher — the ventriloquist of a thousand voices.

Jack Kimball

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence, and Jack Kimball is the author of Man Ship, Witness Protection, Frosted, and Quite Vacation. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. He is also the editor of the invaluable East Village Poetry Web magazine and the new, gorgeously eclectic and exciting Faux Press. The tea-room (the Sukiya) does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage – a straw hut, as we call it. I saw you crossing Banal. As though a mistake meant whatever you do, like troubadors. The original ideographs for Sukiya mean the Abode of Fancy: Bambi, Flower, Coke, Puffkin Dinos. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tearoom, and the term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Vacancy (craft of cloves) or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical (a paper boat of loose proportions) . It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It locks onto my thought – it’s always just one … and then the thought will shed its skin right there – and inject its own dream instructions deep down inside my Utopian outfit. It is an abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. This is because we disambiguate, and remain creatures before undercounts, “bumps” in the void with no potential to unwind away from the kingdom of experience. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the Imperfect, purposely leaving some thing unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete. The warm radiate pulses,/ your darting/ tightened of… what? Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. You’re sensing an avian / dammed up stolid-to-rapturous, something/ enriched awaiting Eve’s brain. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself. That temperature all over us like sea ponies. Let’s fragile.

Pat Reed

I don’t know if it’s because of 9-11, El Niño, the drought, global warming, or countless everpresent environmental toxins, but I’ve noticed that a lot of New Yorkers have lately been beset, even more than usual, with respiratory difficulties. Gary and I, for the first time in our lives, have had to start using inhalers. So when Pat asked me what I wanted her to bring from California, I told her, I don’t know – something aromatherapeutic – maybe some sagebrush to scatter around? And lo and behold, when she got here last night, she pulled a plastic bag out of her suitcase, filled with rosemary, lavender, nasturtiums, lemon blossoms, and even a sprig of redwood. Suddenly my breath liked inhabiting the world and my body again. This is how I feel about Pat’s poems too. They are fragrant with sound, breath, perception and unmediated love of nature. She’s kind of like the Opal Whitely among us, collecting bits of lichen and pretty shells and thistles and putting them on her dashboard to counteract all the steel and plastic and fumes that surround. I remember asking her long ago why she writes poetry, and she told me about growing up in Los Angeles — obsessed with the ocean, the only thing, she said, “that wasn’t paved” and there was so much endless horizon, so much placelessness, she felt like she needed to create limits, which come to us in the form of her delicate, super-melopoeic writing. Author of More Awesome, Qualm Lore, Kismet, Tangle Blue, Container of Stars, and We Want to See Your Tears Falling Down, which is about her experiences teaching Vietnamese refugees, Pat writes the most reverently attuned nature poetry of anyone I know. She’ll make you want to climb mountains, surf, camp out in the desert, or at the very least, breathe.