Waiting for It

Why is apocalypse is so much more compelling than the future? People prepare for pig epidemics. Stock brokers stockpile food and ammunition. In a dream I am old, walking through the small coop grocery store, the one before the makeover into an upscale-looking food boutique. I see a young woman pushing a cart with two children. I approach them, begin to say their names and anticipate their smiles and kisses. And then I look again. This is not my family, just an image projected from long ago. I am old, my children grown, my wife old, too. The grocery store erodes under broken glass--the heavy drag of time marks its mottled features. The sun whitens the surface of the parking lot. When I wake up I am back in bed with my family. A spring morning. Pig flu announced on the radio. The children run naked, playing monsters. The world will end, or it ended, or it won’t. There will be loss and acquisition. Their bodies move between the possum haw and plumbego. My old man future self looks back at me down a long corridor. At the other end, I am playing in a yard near my mother’s gardenia bush. The three of us hardly recognize the other. The phone rings. The children run. And it rains.

Creeley Reviews

My books are boxed in storage for the time being, so it's not possible for me to go back to Creeley at the moment, but I found online these reviews of Life & Death (New Directions, 1998) by Tom Clark and Forrest Gander. This essay by Marjorie Perloff is worth a read, too. Personally, I like to enter Creeley's work and go with where he's at. Reading him writing in the 50s is quite different from the voice of the 80s or 90s. But I'm interested in attention, what it's given to and how it's given, and with poets who persist in this treacherous art throughout a long lifetime, I always find much to think about. Dorn, Baraka, Kyger, Whalen, Creeley--all read together with others of their generation help me as a poet to see my own motives more clearly. They expand my capacities to hear and feel the intonations of experience and political engagement. It's not either/or, but always *and*, an addition to the textures of experience as looped through language. I guess I'm just a little more process focused rather than being inclined toward product, though I like the sort of samurai attention to the art that develops over time in these projective figures. The prosody is honed down to a "natural" or inwardly paced movement. I'm often surprised by what holds their attention, and how it is so stressed. They make themselves available to the impersonal, and that somehow lets what they do become a significant achievement--going beyond themselves. And that's where I want to be--out. Or inside out, as the case may be.

Moving Way On

Well, I have a large article—about 50 pages—on Dorn’s late work I could chop up for blogosphere consumption. But I’m not sure it would contribute in any significant way to the conversations that are going on here and at the Poetry Foundation. At this point Aram Saroyan’s article has been instrumental in re-opening an old conversation about Dorn’s work, though I don’t feel like anything has advanced on that score. I tried to open up the context that surrounds the more objectionable side of Dorn’s writing here the other day, but that seems to have only pushed things farther down an old, well-trodden road. Eventually, it will take a queer reading of late Dorn to redirect the conversation away from a lot of over-educated, hyper-sensitive guys working out their public performances. A critical reading is necessary and it would be of value not only to us in poetry, but to queer and cultural studies, and other fields.

My own experience shows that there are communities of people willing to talk about late Dorn. I’ve presented papers and published articles for rhetoric and communications conferences as I strive to “professionalize” my vita. Typically, I find more genuine critique of the work with these other disciplinary tribes, which makes me wonder if the creative writing / literary world has the critical capacity or tools to really conduct a conversation on these issues. For more than a decade conversations similar to these here recently have erupted online. Someone shouts from the mountaintop: “Dorn’s a homophobe.” A voice shoots back: “bullshit, he’s not.” Others provide socio-cultural contexts for Dorn’s ideas. Someone shrieks, “so what?” Friends of Dorn write friend-of-Dorn responses, loyal to the memory of the man. Others situate Dorn among the fascist, anti-Semites of modernism. I come away from this feeling raw, exposed, and inadequate to the situation. There are people reading this blog who loved Ed—adore his memory—and I hate to allow any disgrace of that here. At the same time, the late work remains a significant contribution, and I’d like one day to see an actual discussion of it, and so, foolishly, I occasionally push it forward, suggesting ways it might be addressed. I have strong affinities with gay communities and writers, and their concerns regarding this mean a lot to me, too.

In December it will be 10 years since Ed passed away. Later this year I’ll bring some things out on this blog that I hope are productive and reflective on his work. For now, anyone so interested might check out Matthew Cooperman’s good essay on Dorn’s poetry and his relation to the public and the American West.

Dorn Notes II

A few days ago Aram Saroyan wrote an article for the Poetry Foundation that is critical of Dorn and Creeley’s late work, suggesting that both poets started off as great writers but that they “seem to have lost their way in midlife.” He goes on to look at a couple of early pieces by both poets as examples of what was great about their work, and he notes a decline in each after the later part of the 1960s: for Creeley the early poems possess “personal detail, the signature of a more-than-literary life” while for Dorn a kind of dancing melancholy, seems to [Saroyan] the signature of Dorn’s greatest work.”

Creeley’s writing from Pieces on, Saroyan argues, is “diluted” due to his labor as a tenured professor relying on technical mastery rather than lyric vulnerability while Dorn’s voice in his later writing “gradually turned into a hipster’s cutting, sarcastic instrument, often so elliptical as to be incomprehensible.” While Dorn “remained a searching and interesting poet,” continues Saroyan, “he no longer moved one as he had. Like virtually everybody who experienced the ’60s firsthand, Dorn experimented with drugs, and one can imagine that so finely tuned a verbal musician might have been more affected by them than others who had never made such music.”

Kent Johnson and others in the comments stream at the Poetry Foundation have responded by pointing out that a body of critical work on both poets contradicts these claims. While I’m not interested in rehearsing the various positions, I think Saroyan’s article points out, particularly in Dorn’s case, an important problem. Clearly, Saroyan has certain biases about the poems, about the quality of lyric vulnerability v. the later satiric and anti-poetic “hipster” persona Dorn created. Unlike some of the responses so far, I like that this problem has surfaced, and I appreciate Saroyan’s willingness to bring up in public a problem I’ve heard others in private more casually express. But I don’t want to defend Dorn’s later work so much as just talk about what I see happening in it and why, contra Saroyan, I think it’s important writing.

I love Dorn’s early poems, too: it’s difficult not to admire the extraordinary range and blend of the plain speech of the West with a musicality that erupts from the body of those poems. The sadness and keen perception in them remain profoundly moving. Early numbers from Hands Up! come to mind as perhaps the most perfectly pitched poems of that period unwinding from the Cold War Fifties West. “Sousa[’s]” “Great brass bell of austerity” and its “lost celebration I can’t / quite remember, / in which I volunteered as conqueror” settles close on the bones of the past. The spiritual composition of the people and place is revealed here and allowed to rest in irresolute disposition. “The desire to disintegrate the earth / is eccentric,” and yet, America is so disintegrated. The recognition of this complicity and despair gives the poem its own integrated achievement.

And just because I like it so much, here’s “The Air of June Sings,” which I won’t discuss so as not to dishonor it with such a vulgar disservice:

The Air of June Sings

Quietly and while at rest on the trim grass I have gazed,
admonished myself for having never been here
at the graveside and read the names of my Time Wanderers.
And now, the light noise of the children at play on the inscribed stone
jars my ear and they whisper and laugh covering their mouths. "My Darling"
my daughter reads, some of the markers
reflect such lightness to her reading eyes, yea, as I rove
among these polished and lime blocks I am moved to tears and I hear
the depth in "Darling, we love thee," and as in "Safe in Heaven."

I am going off to heaven and I won't see you anymore. I am
going back into the country and I won't be here anymore.I am
going to die in 1937. But where did you die my Wanderer?
You, under the grave grass, with the tin standard whereat
I look, and try to read the blurred ink. I cannot believe
you were slighted knowing what I do of cost and evil
yet tin is less than granite. Those who buried you should have known
a 6 inch square of sandstone, flush with the earth
is more proper for the gone than blurred and faded flags.

Than the blurred and faded flags I am walking with in the graveyard.
Across the road in the stawberry field two children are stealing
their supper fruit, abreast in the rows, in the fields of the overlord,
Miller is his authentic name, and I see that name represented here,
there is that social side of burial too, long residence,
and the weight of the established local dead. My eyes avoid
the largest stone, larger than the common large, Goodpole Matthews,
Pioneer, and that pioneer sticks in me like a wormed black cherry
in my throat, No Date, nothing but that zeal, that trekking
and Business, that presumption in a sacred place, where children
are buried, and where peace, as it is in the fields and the country
should reign. A wagon wheel is buried there. Lead me away

to the small quiet stones of the unpreposterous dead and leave
me my tears for Darling we love thee, for Budded on earth and blossomed
in heaven, where the fieldbirds sing in the fence rows,
and there is possibility, where there are not the loneliest of all.

Oh, the stones not yet cut.

*

But the later poems, of course, change dramatically, turning first satirical, hipster druggie elliptical. And then biting, epigrammatic, dogged in commitment to polis, place, people. Dorn welcomed the agonistic bickering of faction even as he challenged severe social limitations of identity politics erupting in the 80s and 90s. He changed as the times changed. Why rehearse the same old lyric gesture over and over? Who was listening? What did they hear? Amiri Baraka in Ed Dorn and the Western World (Austin, TX: Skanky Possum/Effing Press, 2008) observes the following:

The Way West as the great summation of Gun Slinger and the other trekking poems to find a heroic paradigm which could be studied, analyzed, turned forward and upside down, made mythological enough to say something about reality was just what it seemed. A searching. Searching for the real West. Searching for the real America. Searching for the real heroic engagement with the meaning of it all. Himself, ourselves included.

But there is no clearer delineator of the sum than Dorn. We all admire Robert Creeley for the precision of his line, the incisive twist of his verse, which some have even called Cubist. Dorn’s reviews of Creeley indicated that not only did Ed understand what Creeley was doing, and was much admired of it, as we all are. But he understood where Creeley had chosen to REMAIN. And so wound around and around near the end, satisfied with his rare music, eloquent locution and inverted use of world and word.

Why some silly man cannot use Dorn’s later work is that it is not only eloquent in word and skilled in construction, but that his meanings begin to be so clear to him that they become as quick as Billy the Kid’s response that he make his nephew a whistle, Billy draws and fires the exact hole in the exact reed to make the whistle. How can you hit the target without aiming the young boy asks, I’m always aiming says Billy the K.

So that Dorn who is aiming for years and years now can spin and plug a hole dead center in whatever target. It is the politics at question in the silly man’s mind that is squishy with the compromise of self satisfied mediocrity. We hold these truths to be self evident is a bulletin. The Bullet the Boston Tea Party.

The traditional lyric is the elevation of the singular I to the world as the attention of the world. It is the usual concern of young poets not yet able to see the connection of that I to the world. One of those links, of course, is study the other experience. For whom do you write Mao asks in Yenan Forum, what do you celebrate what do you put down, what do you love, what do you hate, the work carries all of this. Art Mao said is the ideological reflection of the world in the mind of the artist.

But there are artists for whom there is no world but themselves and whatever little inarticulate eating and shitting and sleeping and copulating have to say to them that is good, bad, perfect, execrable or whatever. There are also, again, (see my essay “why most poetry is boring, again,” in the Poetry Project Newsletter poets quite at home in what Dorn called “the very permissive asylum” the US has become. Certainly if they have tenure and tidy little bird cages in which they can make poo poo on a removable floor and have it published.

The moving out to investigate the real West the Westness of us, that is the real openness, newness, freshness, innovation of America the promise is to finally see that this promise has been the threatened future of this world of European invention and discovery, colonialism and capitalism and imperialism and always war and this Afro Asian Latino world of submission and imprisonment and defeat.

But it has been that tribe of Dorn’s that has also slipped outside the well advertised virtues of this hell and to include them in the torture must make Dorn then search outside the given, outside the relentlessly stated lie of American democracy to see that America and its place in the world for what they actually are.

That early lyricism always carried the sting of contrast to what surrounded it, in metaphor or in contemplative portraits of the subject. But as I moved more directly into political activism and away from the icy literary world, I grew impatient with a mere infatuation with language. That language that I still admired was to signify action, a move away from the given, the static, the dead.

The notable thing that happened in Dorn’s work of the late 60s was a turn away from an aesthetic view of the poem toward a more public and rhetorical use of it to engage pressing social issues. To judge the late poems next to the earlier simply doesn’t make sense because Dorn theorized his situation differently and adapted his poetic tool kit for new forms of cultural critique and cosmic illustration. Some, like Saroyan, may not like the later work as much, but it accomplishes what Dorn set out to do, and it would be difficult to imagine the 70s, 80s and 90s without his own specific commentary “taken from the air”. He doesn’t want to break hearts anymore. I don’t think he wanted to feel his own experience of American broken heartedness anymore, either. He claimed instead, “laughter could blow it to rags.” Insult could confront the identity factions. Wit would assault the good-natured zombies of American culture. Flam, Horse, Lil, I, Slinger---these all arrive on the scene to slapstick Dorn into another potential poet who refused the tender sadness in order to make available sudden and relieving statements of urgency that could heal Ophiochus-like. But it was a snake on Asclepius’ rod, and snakes, you know, can bite.

Dorn Notes

Thom Donovan and others bring up the ongoing issue of Dorn's perceived homophobia in the comments stream of a recent article at the Poetry Foundation by Aram Saroyan. I made the following notes in a piece I've been working on about this and other satirical aspects of Dorn's work from the 1980s. It attempts to provide a context for understanding Dorn's satirical work in Abhorrences....

Many of Dorn’s quasi-logical arguments about sexuality relate a lethal entity--in this case a disease--to broader administered powers of the medical industry and state. By taking the then recent cultural and medical phenomena of AIDS as subject of satire, he is able to reveal a moral and bureaucratic context in need of broader public reflection. Of course, it is risky to satirize a disease that at the time was afflicting specific communities who were identified as outsiders living beyond the realm of mainstream U. S. culture. These satiric poems, however, while courting outrage from a potential audience, aggressively expands reflection on the context of sexual identity within larger corporate and political systems.

For instance, what Dorn referes to as the “AID barons”--a medical industry composed of government, corporate, and health interests--forced an extension of bureaucratic language into individual practices of morality and sexuality, and so he ridiculed it in these poems, however troubling they may be.

His commitment to the rhetorical perspectives of individuals turned against other views that accepted power as the social construction of diverse agencies. One way he brings attention to social agency is to rhetorically flip social codes to broaden perspectives. In one of his most poignant satires, “Something we can all agree on,” Dorn offers the hypothetical comparison of AIDS to HELPS (Heritable Endemic Longrange Poverty Syndrome). The argument points out that people around the world are dying of the complex and numerous results of poverty, and that such socially constructed acronyms can be used as a strategy to keep certain groups of people in poverty. Indeed, an unwavering commitment to agonistic democratic practice is shown here, for Dorn remains consistent in his devotion to broader human problems beyond the view of particular factions. Often identified in the 1980s as a disease of predominantly gay men and intravenous drug users, Dorn ruthlessly used the growing research industry around HIV/AIDS to ridicule the class and ethnic selectivity motivating much of the research and application of new drugs and therapeutic methods. And today, of course, HIV/AIDS ravages African nations whose populations cannot afford treatment for the disease while western societies have watched the crisis diminish over the last two decades within their own borders.

And this footnote....

Dorn was a friend and correspondent with Harvey Bialy, a molecular biologist who edited Nature Biotechnology from 1984-1996. More recently Bialy was resident scholar of the Institute of Biotechnology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He studied epidemiology and genetics of antibiotic resistant enteric pathogens in Nigeria in the 1980s. Through Bialy’s research and work with Peter Deusberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, Bialy came to promote AIDS denialist theories. Duesberg likewise is notorious for a 1987 article in Cancer Research called “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.” His research on retroviruses led him to challenge scientific consensus that regards HIV as the cause of AIDS. An avid reader of Nature and other scientific journals, Dorn would have been familiar with both men’s work in the 1980s. In a 1990s interview with the Sunday Times (London) Bialy states: “We have taken sex and equated it with death, and into that mixture we have thrown money. What an ugly stew.” See Neville Hodgkinson, “AIDS: Can We Be Positive,” Sunday Times (London) 26 April 1992.

Complicating all of this, however, is the timing of the reception of Dorn's work. I remember talking about this with Eileen Myles once who pointed out that to her and others in NYC in the 80s who lost close friends to AIDS Dorn's satires seemed wacko and totally dislocated from their experiences. This gap in the intimacy of experience with HIV/AIDS and the critique of the gov/med/pharm industry is a big one....

Acknowledgments

Some years have passed since I last looked at the facsimile copy of the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads. I recall its elegant and austere physical presence though: lots of white space on the pages, text neatly centered above the page numbers, the words almost floating from the page to the eye. A title announces itself with little fuss, and, oddly, no author’s name appears. I think the name of the press and the year are printed—and that’s it regarding acknowledgments.

In the second edition, published in 1800 (or 1802?--my books are packed away for now), Wordsworth is credited as the author (though Coleridge wrote several pieces, too), and the famous Preface adds contextual density. These two different versions of Lyrical Ballads have always inspired my curiosity because of the tension that evolved in Wordsworth and Coleridge during those intervening years between the first and second editions. The anonymous 1798 version presents itself with raw freshness and separation: it makes a dramatic break with the past and announces a new vision in the work of anonymous authors. A reader that year (there were few), if they did not know the writers, would encounter a lovely and inviting book, and yet it was accompanied without the legitimizing apparatus of names, associations, or relationships beyond the poems therein.

By 1800, Wordsworth acts to legitimize the claims his poetry has made by providing a contextual statement that announces a new poetics. A very different book arrives, then, in readers’ hands. A name locates the writing with an individual, while the preface argues for a new methodology of a poetics that is rooted in the experience of that individual, and in his ability to relate it in words. By the time Wordsworth died in 1850, he was practically an institution of England.

I have been compelled by the young work of Coleridge and Wordsworth because of its radical sense of departure from convention toward the exploration of their appetites of knowledge and vision that accompany their radical invention in language. I like thinking of them through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, walking between Stowey and Alfoxden (if I have those details right), observing the landscape, getting caught in the rain, loafing in fields. The more staid and stately versions of themselves they aimed for later in life—once the terror of the French Revolution was at hand—is depressing. Wordsworth embraces the machinery of legitimation, stiffening his upper lip on his way to the Lake District while Coleridge gulps opium, abandons a family, ships out, only to return, weirdly institutionalized himself as the grand old patriarch of British letters, despite his kooky addiction and airs. And yet, something wild arises in his writing even late, and I like to think of his invisible presence in the early editions of Lyrical Ballads.

I bring this up because I posted a knee-jerk reaction recently to Jason Guriel’s post over at Harriet, the details of which are recorded in the comments section there. His words rubbed me the wrong way, I think, because of this tension between anonymity and legitimacy, and the contextual realization of the poem along that A-L axis. I like to think that poems should provide all a reader’s needs. They persuade us by their particular textures and concerns, and by poetry's ability to influence our belief and desires.

But I know this is bullshit, too. The first thing I do with a new book is read the blurbs, the name of the press, year and city of publication, author bio, and, of course, the acknowledgments page. This provides rhetorical texture and context that I can’t help but want. I do think that this apparatus serves a number of functions based on the needs for legitimacy and the ambitions of the author and publisher. I like the way some authors, however, contextualize their own sense of community rather than annotating their publication history in a long list of important presses, etc, and I find the awards aspect of things to interfere with this sense of community I’m talking about.

An example of a kind of acknowledgments page that I find particularly useful can be found in Rodrigo Toscano’s new book, Collapsible Poetics Theater. This was a National Poetry Series winning book from 2007, only recently published, but what I find compelling is, in addition to the usual list of magazines where individual poems appeared (Ecopoetics, Jubilat, Cross Cultural Poetics (XCP), etc), Toscano provides a list of names of people for whom “Collapsible Poetics Theater would not be possible,” including Tom Orange, John Beer, Leonard Schwartz, Kristin Prevallet, and probably one hundred others. Adding to this list, Toscano extends gratitude to his co-workers at the Labor Institute, adding yet anther contextual layer through which to read his book. While I think we could argue over how this influences the reading of his work, Toscano follows an impulse that he shares with Wordsworth—to want to help direct readers through his writing by outlining a community of writers and activists who share affinities with his project. And yet I wonder, too, what the experience of reading this book would be like without the apparatus that legitimizes, not Toscano’s career, but his ambition, concerns, and drives as a poet?

Anyway, I should acknowledge my thanks to Jason for bringing this up--so thanks!

[We Come to Love the Flowers and]

We come to love the flowers and

the trees.

Come new green.

Comes the lushness of the spring.

We will walk out to the spring.

Sing dumb songs

smiling now.

Cold water’s on our toes.

"Thrilly scab-picking"

From John Latta yesterday:

(If Silliman senses a kinship between Cole Swensen’s Le Nôtre-inspired garden-artifice assemblages and Conceptualist robotic sheen, it is likely the result of just that: post-human mess-shunning, archives made entirely of pixels, production values trumping the slut-underbelly of the wild empirical world. The French royalty at Versailles didn’t want to sully its hands either.) (The Flarf brigade, of course, tries to have it both ways simultaneously—dainty cyber-finger’d gleanings of “what it is not,” thrilly scab-picking at untouchables—making plain not only its limit’d processual means, but also its apparent moral bankruptcy.) More...

More From New York Crew

are new york crew really cooler than kenny goldsmith and nada gordon?

these kids based in LA drinking coffee at Intelligentsia

canadian cyber kids break into our blogs

not engaged enough to have readings art show bankruptcy

didn't take poetry lacking historical habitus

is this microspectacle more interesting than proceedural poems/ or flary pants that's just how they survive in academia

kids art school youth embrace your freedom

- Kat

"Flarf Fixie"

Get your "flarf fixie" from the New York Crew, y'all....

New Article at Jacket

John Tranter recently published a piece of mine in Jacket 37 that looks at poetry, satire, and publics. While much of it addresses work by Kent Johnson, I also discuss Poets Against War, PIPA (Poetry Is Public Art), and Adorno's claim about the impossibility of lyric poetry after Auschwitz.

A lot of the work I've done for my day job over the last couple of years has brought me into the realm of public sphere theory. Although I look at contemporary poets in my work, I don't "do" a lot of literary criticism, providing, instead, an approach informed by rhetorical studies. Maybe it will be of some interest to readers here. The argument I present is based on an understanding of "lyric" as practiced by Denise Levertov during the Vietnam War. Here's the introductory paragraph (the whole essay can be found here):

Many recall Theodor Adorno’s claim that, following the atrocities at Auschwitz, it had become impossible, in the West, to write lyric poetry. Of course, that has not stopped anyone from trying. But poets who desire to engage with issues of public relevance often have abandoned the lyric in favor of satire, social documentation, modernist assemblage, and other strategies of poetic engagement. Groups of activists like PIPA (Poetry Is Public Art), moreover, combine a skilful use of poetic language with social commentary that can be adapted to specific public environments, creating textual spaces that transform the area in which readers pass.

Uh, Wow

Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies

Final Bookslut Columns

This month's poetry column at Bookslut will be my last. This month I look at Tom Clark's selected, Light & Shade. Also see my March column for an article on the late great Lorenzo Thomas. Here's some of what I say:

Of the cities one might live in, Houston, with its bayous and highway congestion, in part offers an experience of modernity rivaled only by the more recent transformations of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Like those mirage cities of the Middle East, Houston, grounded in the extraction and management of energy systems, remains close to the fossil sources of North American ease. And like those Emirates, Houston has made the banal from the improbable. Glass skyscrapers rise above suburbs that now occupy the subdivided remains of sugar plantations. Nearby, Bay City refineries prepare crude for domestic consumption. Companies in the Bayport Industrial District contribute essential chemicals that go into the making of plastic bags, cleaning agents, and antifreeze. It is difficult to think of this, however, when walking along the magnolia-lined street of Sul Ross. In this neighborhood -- the Montrose -- the Menil hosts a significant collection of surrealist art, and near it, the Rothko Chapel broods obdurately beneath the oaks.

In Houston you live either “inside” or “outside” the “loop,” a reference to Interstate 610, an artery that separates downtown “island cities” from the outer portions of Bellaire, the Memorial Villages, and the suburbs beyond. The Third and Fifth Wards, located within, have given Houston much of its vitality through the blues scenes long established there. The city’s cultural or spiritual orientation, too, is turned toward the Gulf; it is more trans-Atlantic than southern, mid-western, or Latin American. Something about the dazzling contradictions and puzzling spatial dimensions must have appealed to Lorenzo. Perhaps something about the sky and air there recalled for him his family background in the West Indies and Panama. The Atlantic meets there the black prairie of North America. This geographic confluence meant something.

Lorenzo, when I asked him once whether he lived “inside” or “outside” the “loop,” only said, “Outer Space,” and we laughed. We talked about jazz, his small car hurling through space somewhere, that day, “inside.” At Brazos Bookstore, he pointed out new work on Texas jazz, along with Travois, a 1976 anthology of Texas poetry. Line drawings by Houston artist John Biggers accompany Lorenzo’s poem. One drawing shows a West African couple. A woman approaches a man, her body doubled, as if an aura moved a slight step ahead of the actual body. In the other image they embrace, kissing. Their forms darken and their features flatten. An aura of light penetrates the space where their faces meet. Lorenzo’s poem speaks into these images. “I want you to dance / GET IT,” he writes. “[D]o you get it? / I want you to dance / light as air / like the water.” The question brings a kind of brooding self-consciousness to the poem. “[D]o you get it?” There is an urge here, and in much of his other work, to expose, and then reject, what he feels in order to arrive at the truth of the poem. He thinks through it to discover what it means to live in a kind of powerless situation, and in the poem he makes the heart account for what it so deeply desires. [More...]