More Torture - Alex Smith Has to Go !!

Once again, the 49ers have lost as a result of poor performance at the quarterback position.

Last week, I remonstrated Singletary and the media for falling prey to its own sentimental tendency to believe that the 49ers 2005 1st round "Cinderella" draft pick would finally blossom into the star everyone once hoped he would become. Today, Smith had his usual ups and downs, eventually throwing three interceptions--each at a key point in the contest--and generally failing to take advantage of this great opportunity to roll over a weak opponent with a weak pass defense. You'd have thought this should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for him, but he ended up throwing the game away, after a gutsy, courageous game by the defense. Take away those three interceptions--and a needless fumble he made as well--and the 49ers probably win this one by two touchdowns. That moaning you heard by the faithful in the stands at Candlestick Park, after the 3rd interception, was the agonized recognition that Smith just doesn't have it, and never will.  

Once again, my prognostications have been proven true. This week the 49ers lost to a Tennessee Titans team, previously 1-6 in the current season, which was near the bottom in nearly every offensive and defensive category--notably, last in pass defense in the whole league. The 49ers, under Singletary, have one of the best defenses going, particularly against the run, as they had shown the previous week against Indianapolis, which has one of the best offenses of all time. 

Singletary's overall philosophy--the character of the team he envisions as a winner--is a physical squad, tough, determined, strong. On offense, this translates into a run-emphasis strategy, using the forward pass just to keep the line-backers "honest". In Gore, he has one of the game's premier rushers. He began the year choosing Hill as his quarterback, who pretty much fulfills the Singletary approach: Ball control, good preparation, a minimum of mistakes, few turnovers, conservative passing game, level-headed "smart" management. 

Smith was chosen by Nolan, Singletary's predecessor, on the strength of his potential to be a great open-field passer--perhaps along the lines of Drew Brees. Smith's performance in his first year was predictably mediocre--after all, few rookie NFL quarterbacks have great first years. In his second season, he showed little improvement, however. He sustained a serious shoulder injury, and quarreled with Nolan, and ended up having three surgeries. 

This year, after one game in which the 49ers defense allowed three touchdowns in the 1st half against the Houston Texans, Singletary suddenly, impulsively, decided to give Smith a chance to salvage something of the day, putting him in after half-time. Predictably, with the pressure off and the Texans unprepared for Smith's open passing style, he shone, leading the team to a narrow comeback loss, 21-24, bringing stars into the eyes of hopeful fans and coaches. Nevertheless, there were disturbingly familiar signs of his former difficulties: A lack of focus, occasional errant, risky passes, poor clock management, and a sense of isolation from his team-mates, and the action occurring around him.

A good deal of his shortcomings have been excused as sophomore jinx, the frequent changes in offensive game plans (and coordinators), and a nagging lack of confidence. But these excuses belie the major problems with his performance. Great, even good, NFL quarterbacks can still thrive, even on unsettled teams. The best ones, like Peyton Manning or Ben Roethlisberger, have a dominating presence and command over situations and game plans--you can feel their effect on the flow of play.  

Smith is not known as a running quarterback; in other words, he's a pure passer, and that's the one dimension in which he must succeed. He's not known, either, for his ability to improvise, either by calling "audibles," or by salvaging broken plays with third or fourth options. But as a passer, Smith has a number of weaknesses. First, he tends to telescope his passes, looking continuously at one receiver as the play unfolds, letting the defensive backs know precisely whom he's going to throw to. Second, he seems unable to check off options, picking an alternative receiver. Third, he seems unable to "see" downfield. This quality of vision is a primary ability all great quarterbacks have--the innate instinct to distinguish flashes of movement and openings as they develop quickly across the breadth of his field of vision. Quarterbacks who lack this skill typically build up high interception totals, because, despite a strong or accurate throwing arm, they're at the mercy of canny defensive backs who can see what's coming, and can hone in on an arriving ball. In addition, Smith tends to throw "desperation" passes--either too hard, or a little too high and wide (the result of pressing or throwing scared--under pressure). 

All this frustration is especially painful for 49ers fans, given the great history of quarterbacks the franchise has enjoyed over the years: Frankie Albert, Y.A. Tittle, John Brodie, Steve Spurrier, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Jeff Garcia. Between 1981 and 2002, the 49ers overall record was 240-105, with 5 Super Bowl wins and countless play-off appearances. 

Alex Smith is a loser. He has flashes of brilliance, which one would expect of any 1st round pick All American, but he lacks the skills to succeed in the National Football League. Smith is probably a great guy, gregarious, dedicated, courageous--would probably make a great husband, father, executive, probably even fun to have a beer to two with. But as an NFL quarterback, he's a bust. Nothing to be ashamed of--hundreds of great college quarterbacks, once destined for NFL stardom, have fallen into obscurity. And as far as money is concerned, he's fixed for life, or should be, given the millions he's already been paid. 

But Smith is a dead end as a starting quarterback. The 49ers would do well to reinstall Hill, take their lumps against the tough teams, and shoot for 8 or 9 wins this year. That's eminently doable, given their weak schedule.

__________

Addendum: The Monday Morning Quarterback: SF Chronicle sportswriters this morning castigated the 49ers for the poor showing against the Titans, but stopped short of blaming it all on Smith, despite throwing three interceptions, and fumbling twice. Two of the interceptions came on tipped balls, but tips that occur at the reception point are usually the fault of the QB, either because the ball is thrown so hard or high that the receiver can't get a purchase on it, or because the defensive back is too close (because the QB has "telegraphed" his pass before-hand, tipping off the defensive back, or because coverage was too tight on that receiver). In either case, the receiver is usually not at fault, except to the degree that he may not have adequately faked or outrun his coverage. Giving Smith a get-out-of-jail-free card now is really counterproductive; the best the team can hope is that Singletary returns to his original plan and re-install Hill as QB. Doing that might enable the team to break even this year. Sticking relentlessly with Smith will only make the decision to get rid of him eventually harder. Smith isn't the 49ers Quarterback of the future, he's just a place-holder until we get a "real" leader at QB.              

Stalag 17 - Holden's Career Performance & More

It shouldn't be difficult for movie audiences today to appreciate William Holden's charm and manly force on the screen. After all, Tom Hanks, whose career has come to resemble Holden's not just in the kind of parts he's taken (and in what order), possesses essentially the same kinds of actor-character traits, which may be proof that the older Hollywood action-drama movie-formula--featuring a capable but reluctant average Joe as the heavy--when carefully done--can still appeal to mass audiences. That's what occurred to me when I saw Saving Private Ryan [1998] while visiting Victoria, BC in 1998.  

    

Stalag 17 [1953],  a classic prison-camp movie (a sub-genre of the prison movie of the 1930's and 1940's), combines elements of escape, loyalty and betrayal, situation comedy, and wartime distress, into a tightly knit, fast-paced series of set-piece scenes, each perfectly shot and realized.  

 

Aside from Holden, who plays the part of J.J. Sefton, the camp's cynical hustler, the man who--like Morgan Freeman's "Red" Redding in The Shawnshank Redemption [1994]--can "get anything a man might need on the inside"--the film also features Peter Graves (in what is surely his best cinematic role, aside from the cameo in Night of the Hunter [1955]) as the German spy posing as one of the prisoners (slyly serving as "security" for the compound), with Harvey Lembeck and Robert Strauss ("animal") doing a comic duo routine the equal of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello; Otto Preminger (the erstwhile actor and well-known director [Laura, River of No Return, The Man With the Golden Arm, Bonjour Tristesse, Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advice and Consent, In Harm's Way] as the German camp commandant; Gil Stratton as Sefton's [Holden's] errand boy, who does the voice-over narrative in the film; and Sig Ruman as the fat, boisterous, effusive compound guard who is Graves/Price's contact. 

     

The film's axis revolves around the question of loyalty. Attempts by the prioners to stage escapes are repeatedly sabotaged, but how this happens continues to befuddle the prisoners, until Sefton--who has heretofore inspired only disgust and suspicion for his apparent collaboration with the German guards (trading for goods and privileges) by the other prisoners, and has received a beating from them for it--discovers Price's little trick by hiding inside during inspection (messages contained in a bishop piece from the chessboard in the bunkhouse) and exposes him, elevating Sefton overnight into an unsuspected hero. 

The contrast between Sefton's cigar-chewing cynicism, and the cardboard gallantry of Lt. Dunbar (an Ivy League commissioned prig), a new arrival at the camp who has information crucial to the Allied cause and hence needs to be freed a/s/a/p, is made graphically apparent in their joint escape attempt. The similarity between this role, and that which Holden played in The Bridge On the River Kwai, is obvious: In each case, an American soldier more interested in his own plight, is discovered capable--when the chips are down and there's no way out--of heroism and selfless courage, against his natural inclination. This "reluctant warrior" concept is central to the myth of the American soldier profile, so often repeated in movies and literature. In a capitalist society, self-interest and hustle are admirable traits, but in a military situation, requiring obedience and loyalty to the group, these traits become ambiguous. 

We're charmed by the gregarious, hard-boiled sardonic grifter, but, like the hooker with a heart of gold, he proves to have deeper resources of cunning and loyalty than we suspected. This is traditionally contrasted to the stereotyped fascist soldier, an automaton of conformity and submission, who either has no guile--or, if he does, only as a predatory drive--or who would never dream of questioning authority or thinking on his own. This is frequently presented in support of the concept of the superiority of a free-thinking, "civilian" army, as opposed to a professional warrior class.    

 

The film teeters uncertainly between comedy and tragedy, as prisoners are killed or captured, while the "inmates" put on skits and pursue hijinks to relieve boredom and the grinding routine of camp life. The story, originally conceived as a stage drama, functions essentially as a theatrical adaptation, since there's no real "action" other than a couple of escape scenes. The dialogue and quaintness of the rag-tag "bomber crew" cast, and Billy Wilder's masterful, economical direction (note he also co-wrote the script, as he did Sunset Boulevard [1950], another of Holden's notable early successes), produce a black and white film of noble proportions, memorable both for its cinematic simplicity, its jovial wit, and its subtle undercurrent of circulating menace and danger. It's among a handful of great WWII movies, which, despite having no battle action at all, presents complex ideas about loyalty, heroism, betrayal, loss and longing, and the durability of the American "common man" under conditions of privation and stress.   

 

William Holden's career, which began under the studio system in the late 1930's, was defined by a string of roles, beginning with Golden Boy [1939] and Our Town [1940], but didn't really take off until Sunset Boulevard [1950], continuing with Born Yesterday [1950], Stalag 17 [1953], Sabrina [1954], The Bridges at Toko-Ri [1954], Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing [1955], The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957], The Key [1958], The World of Suzie Wong [1960], before beginning to decline after The Wild Bunch [1969]. During that stretch, Holden proved himself capable of both dramatic and comedic parts, always the personification of a dignified, attractive, charming American male, not effete and slick like Cary Grant, or gruff and wooden like John Wayne, but voluble and gregarious, solidly middle-class, confident and secure in his skin, positive in outlook. It's a type that largely died out in the 1960's, along with the studio system. Tom Hanks is the inheritor of that role-type today.    

Capacity & Limitation - Failure as a Creative Act

                                                     T.S. Eliot in his youth

 

                                                    Ezra Pound in his youth

 

One way of thinking about successful form in the Modernist Era is as a measure of the degree of failure by the writer to achieve what he/she may have originally envisioned. There is no better example of this than Eliot's The Waste Land. A careful analysis of the history of the poem's composition, and the "editing" which Ezra Pound did of it, with Eliot's blessing, reveals that its form underwent drastic revision over the period of its unfolding. Like others of his generation, Eliot emulated (imitated) the styles of a number of English poets, including Pope, Milton, Gray, Dante, Spenser, the Elizabethan Dramatists, etc. Much of the material which was eventually excised from The Waste Land (or as Eliot had once thought to title it He Do the Police in Different Voices), by Pound, or Eliot himself, consists of satiric colloquial ballad-style jingles, some scatological. 

Based on what Eliot published, critics have traditionally interpreted the poem's fragmentary structure as a deliberate attempt to summarize the modern age as a picturesque literary ruin, a sort of archeological site, decayed in time. The poem's separate parts are thus specimens of speech, unfinished sequences of longer works, dramatic remnants, sections of music or ceremony, etc.

Eliot's biggest difficulty as a poet was in conceiving of a form which would both express and transcend his skills as a writer. In his case, those skills lay in the realm of traditional verse composition. But one could hardly foist off an updated version of The Rape of the Lock, or Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, without seeming altogether antediluvian. Eliot realized that the presentation of his satiric versions of older styles of verse could throw his talent into sharp relief, if it could be seen against a background (or context) of a quasi-dramatic comedy. 

Pound had set upon the trick of expressing, for instance, among other things, sardonic irony (Villon) or pastoral erotic naivete (Cavalcanti), by employing "antique" mannerisms and forms. This awareness of the quality of burlesque inherent in adapting traditional patterns, either as updated rehearsals, or as amusing pastiche, is crucial to an understanding of the poem that Eliot and Pound jointly framed. 

Eliot's earlier verse--Prufrock and Other Observations & Poems (1920)--is a series of dramatic voice monologues. It's clear that Eliot feels most comfortable speaking through this technique, which allows him to employ traditional verse forms while mimicking the emotion and attitudes of other (earlier) times and conditions (Victorian, Medieval Britain, etc.), while distancing himself from the implication of direct personal utterance. This distancing is the key justification for his work; as Eliot's career progresses, he will play titillating games with the fictional alter-ego of his writerly persona ("Mr Eliot"--the mincing old prig of clerical cut). 

It is clear from the shape of Eliot's career between about 1910 and 1922 that the appropriation of his poetic skill to a dramatic framework is the primary determining factor in the construction of his reputation as an innovative Modernist writer. In the Thirties, this tendency would ultimately lead to experiments in verse drama. It will be seen, though, in retrospect, that it was his limitation as a poet that led him away from the sort of formal experiments that Pound, Moore, Stevens, and Williams would try. Eliot had no epic to write, because his talent as a writer was confined to the performance of closed forms. He would have been incapable--if indeed such an idea had ever occurred to him--of writing poems of a kind such as The Cantos, Moore's "Marriage," Williams's Paterson, or Stevens's "Sunday Morning," because formal innovation at that level was outside his interest and abilities.

 

None of this means that the value of Eliot's work is any the less, as a consequence of the fact that he would have been incapable of the kind of formal innovation which his contemporaries essayed. His ability would have been remarkable in any time, though perhaps better adapted to 14th Century Tuscany, or 18th Century London. In the case of both Pound and Eliot, there is an open rejection of the artistic conditions of the modern age, in preference to earlier models of civilized refinement. In Eliot's case, this meant writing poetry of a kind more suitable to another time and place, but offered up as stale routines against the backdrop of modern decadence and chaos. But Eliot's writing doesn't infer chaos and decadence--that's just the critical frame through which it is presented.

 

What strikes me is that one of the cornerstones of Modernist "innovation" is actually a patchwork mending of the disorganized fragments of a frustrated verse caricaturist into a loose scaffolding of "movements." Eliot was never an innovative writer, and as a critic, his tastes were almost wholly anti-Modern. How odd that he should continue to be viewed as one of the great Modernists, when his talents lay in an imagined past. Eliot's failure as a Modernist was salvaged by a device that was essentially a conceptual framing--and it was, to the degree that we can verify, partly accidental and largely the doing of another man (Pound).             

Skip-Reading as a Creative Act

One of my peculiar habits is reading texts out of order. Lots of people who read mysteries will read the last chapter first, to relieve the curiosity and suspense of wondering what the ultimate revelation of the plot is. This is the riddle of detective fiction. The detection genre, which Sherlock Holmes more or less invented. Scientific deduction, etc.  

In high school, in journalism class, we were taught to make each paragraph of an article a sequential, stand-alone unit. That way, if the editor wanted to cut your story, he could simply lop off paragraphs, starting at the end, perhaps keeping the last paragraph or two to save the conclusion. (It also meant writing generally in shorter paragraph lengths.) Amazingly, if written correctly, a news article can actually be cut without the reader really knowing that this has occurred. It's a trick of the news business, not much known by the public.

As a voracious reader of many disciplines, I've had to limit my coverage of most of the work I sample. I rarely read a novel end-to-end, and prefer shorter works--poems, essays, short stories--because I can skip around, sample taste, and derive vivid impressions of style, drift, form, without having to invest hours and hours, or days and weeks, methodically and laboriously devouring long works. Few long books (texts) justify such laborious expenditures of time.

Reading my first experimental fiction and poetry in the late 1960's, I realized that some writers (John Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath comes immediately to mind) were constructing work out of quotation, lifting sentences or paragraphs or phrases directly from source-material and using them as specimens--not as quotations, but as literal parts of the argument or dramatic sequence in a poem or story. This resulted in the poly-contextuality which is such a common device used these days in metafiction or post-Modern poetry. You can quote, silently, or manipulate source material, and call it original, new, integral text. 

I began to meditate about chance methods of composition in the early 1970's. I had read a lot about Duchamp; and the idea of arranging pre-existing textual matter into new form was intriguing to me. I came up with a number of schemes, e.g., taking the last five words of the third line from the top page of each recto of a novel, and stringing them together to create a new sequence. The result would be a tiny sample (or fraction) of the whole work. 

Other people had tried this. Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson had tried skip-quotation, or whiting out, Burroughs had cut up text lines and rearranged them in various orders, there were Cage & Rauschenberg, Mac Low, suggesting collaged text. Treating the text as a "thing"--instead of a syntactic sequence of built argument or narrative--was not a new idea. Larry Eigner had been writing poems since the early 1950's made out of the "parts" of perceptual nodes or fragments, presented as organized disjunction. And Clark Coolidge had already explored a synthetic syntax at the level of the word (which he would in due course expand to include the phrase, and the sentence). But the idea of making a sequence of statements, or phrases, derived from disparate sources or "places" in the head, or in the world, was still waiting to be explored. 

I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but Barry Watten had written "Factors Influencing the Weather," Tom Raworth was working on what would become Ace [1977], Bruce Andrews and Ray DiPalma had been playing with non-narrative poetic constructions. 

The idea occurred to me that I might make a poem from the sentence fragments of books I was then reading on architecture, literary criticism, and music. Such a poem, I thought, would have no narrative or argument, but would consist of a sequence of phrases of varying kinds, disparate and discrete, which might express some gratuitous relationship to each other (but only of an accidental kind). I would be free to alter phrases, and to add others which popped into my head or which I thought showed more wit or interest, but there would be sufficient separation between the lines that there would be no confusion about their possible attraction--that was for the reader to deduce (creatively), i.e., there was no "correct" or single "interpretation" to apply to the poem as a whole. The result was "Rotterdam" a poem of 142 lines (which I included in my collected earlier poems Stanzas For an Evening Out [L Publications, 1977]). (I elaborated on this form in three other poems: "Sonar," "Star Root" and "A & S.")  Each of these works bears a fair resemblance to "list"-making as a technique, but what's listed is clearly poly-contextual, with no hidden narrative or rational agenda aside from the form. Here is the poem in full:

 

 

        Rotterdam

happening meant to

incline and reflect

of an interval to oblige

band of gilded without the consolation

in alternate windows

of very great merriment possibly

it can be they're tall

with pleading or cause shed

for the nuisance of polite as shown

in a collision

forbearance with an appeal

towards a suitable exodus

and the neck of land was

plain cut in counting

lames him hot

succor like sugar

chinese junk shake a leg

known akin and bowed to

the dilapidation of utter edge of outer egging

to the curl of their negligence

repressing as open to ironing

folder in resume

the difference between simmering

scare me with a wave

plan of acute bogus

and the moaning of the blocked

really with a definite demand

by implication known as a joint

splice to rest

pushed bother nodding

to sully the movement

why do they spread

and apply forfeit

springing up shut powerfully

 

in a pillow slip

to be returned to ought

nearly aching in retrenching

elongation to fraternal

cry they must make cake

convinced and joined to the care of

flexibly zeal

when fed through

cracked about the vellum

not a powder of the poker

blight that is perverted

agate inlaid and a double of the endorsement

feasibly upon the prevailing

smoking habit

dumped fresh

mournful as most rain is

brushed with a glance

feet and the tides

with doubt plaited as a cooling

weather loved in truly rusted channel

of their biting it

hurled above without a thought

blooming altitude

is a kind of neatness in the blend nutriment

crease in realignment

the appointing of lots

having fathomed should next be named

whither in bestowed rushed

tethered to the elastic

reliable fast plain

the claim of their reveling

to hover let it down

tamed by the resonance

masses making no preferred

in liking to rely

form in the care weights

reversing the loops

cordial imbibed

the rightly loving angel

restlessly whaling

every once in a while which is mode

to meddle in the advice

from a neglect of chosen

simply to go about

divulging the progression

for the consumption of repercussion

restored to the calendar

soap that she might sing

for the fun of the new color

parallel to the waist

mix of white and egg

soothing of the ushered within

is a mirror and the quinces

outlined a valve

circular pianos

favorite spoon

with dreams that whet

shutters made of wood and lead

just faintly on account of the curfew

hour when the ship was owned

held in rapt jagged

pieces of the establishment

partly divided the reward

raincoat for a cut-out

up the daily bust of bread

emerging as the foundation

clarity of bowsprit

the immense coincidence

with a little dear trust

pedigree from a prefix

to collapse an inhibition

replacing ahead of time

the recklessness of not being mistaken

for the flowers out loud

beneath a row of pails

motion to arrest

so that is why dots

when at her floor a shawl

couple of the age

the habit of calling us here

whelped to pass muster

spanning the Atlantic

stored in airtight

how the pair breathes

in a white ovoid

surface rubbed to pine

relief when the old

patting a beseech bed

exploits to the notion of pondering

whether they can pay

carpeted the adjoining

flimsy annex

context of vacates

mended with jails

rapid widening of the river

in a burst does displace

believed to be calm region

heartily lain they were trimmed

grown with a wish pull

provision for large open

established an early gain

as the forest jumped

to break the glass extinguisher

tug of what for

catapult to the difficulty

with fringes soluble

they may be following

clearing out the clutter

                 ***    

What occurs to me now, reading the poem, is that the statements seem to fall into groups or classes. Some refer to something outside the poem which is not clear/evident, others are self-contained units that can stand alone. But how do these statements cohere into a meaningful whole? In terms of length or duration, none is composed of fewer than two words, nor more than nine--most are four or five words in length. None forms a complete "sentence" requiring punctuation; there are no commas, colons or semi-colons, periods or question marks. Many seem to be bridges or connectives, part of a longer statement of which the specimen phrase is an incomplete part (fragment). They show contrasting levels of interest and specificity: "the recklessness of not being mistaken" is of a different order than "circular pianos." The refreshment of attention occurs at the level of the individual line, hence the line break is a splice of focus, a momentary frame which enables each line to be distinguished from all the others.  

The poem's title didn't really clue the reader into any aspect of the poem's meaning. Rotterdam, the big Dutch seaport city, has literally nothing to do with anything "in" the poem. Its only possible meaning for me would have been that it was a measureless mosaic, something so big and unmanageable that it couldn't possibly be contained.         

 

I remember Stan Brakhage presenting a series of experimental short films at Pacific Film Archive in the mid-1970's. Two of the films used "flashing" colors or "subliminal images" between partial narrative sequences. This technique struck me as a variation on how poems, only heard orally, were perceived by the listener--a totally different impression than the way poems are experienced (read) on the page (as when a musical piece is played from printed text). Reading a text allowed the mind to dwell, if even for a millisecond, on the discreteness of the specific word, phrase, or line, whereas in listening, the mind was forced to experience the sequence non-stop, irrevocably, like riding fast on a motorcycle, unable to pause long enough on any one feeling or image to "digest" it before being obliged to address the next thing.

I got to thinking again recently how short phrases of varying lengths, experienced as irrevocable, stand-alone units, could function in a poem that did have an underlying subtext to which all the phrases might have a tangential relationship, an unconscious "pull," a poem which still didn't, in the traditional sense, function as a poem "about" something, but was in a very abstract way still referenced by the initial "subject." Virgil Thomson, during the 1920's, inspired by Gertrude Stein's concept of the verbal "portrait, " set about creating a series of short musical portraits, equally abstract and non-referential (as those of Stein). (One imagines going to "sit" for one of Virgil's portraits ! "Please move your head a little bit to the left.  Good.  Now hold that pose!")

So, I thought recently, why not make a long meditation, a la Stein, in which one's "deep image" projector was allowed to run unfettered by concerns about sequence, meaning, or form, but which nevertheless would be "inspired" or "condensed" by a vague notion of a series of impressions about a place. The poem I've been working on, "Africa," is the result. I don't know where it's going, ultimately, or if it works, but I like some of the things it makes me feel when I read it back to myself. A lot of it is about irrationality, crazy, wrong-headed connections. I freely admit that, but I feel bound to explore those areas in my mind.   

 

You could call this "skip-reading" through the unconscious, riding the image generator vehicle as it careens through dreamland. Except the references and odd hybrid nodes are all in my mind, not in any exterior "reality" or text. Here is the unfinished text of the poem--

 

Africa

                                             After Herb Ritts

Africa is every color, all of them poisonous.

Genes are blind.

Spectral monkies.

Black is blonde.

Zebras run backwards.

Bodies in convulsion.

Milk and blood.

Water comes from animals.

Cut the head off, the body lives on.

Diagonal stripes, horizontal bees.

Ash is shit.

Green dies back.

Water buffalo slobber.

Intuitive and counter-intuitive are one.

Wring it out.

Pain is ecstasy.

The light is swollen.

Ants. Locusts. Mosquitoes.

Flakes of light stick to your arms.

Tan is orange.

Angels have no genitals.

The brain is an implant.

Walking 100 miles.

Snow evaporates from the mountain.

The logic of cannibalism.

Hanging upsidedown.

Darkness drained of fluid.

Spiders are cross-eyed.

Plato in his tree.

Grass is a symphony.

Trajectory of epaulettes.

Naked bone.

Money into sand.

Our shadows evaporate.

Two and a third.

Jumping back and jumping in.

Water is mud made of clay.

Fissure.

Dried blood.

Seed pods.

Living stump.

Unbalanced loads.

Black rain.

Dung beetle.

The aimlessness of jackals.

Glycerin puddles.

Milk and blood.

Flash flood.

Breeding and grinning.

Swarms.

Bats marinated in piss.

Mud is dung and blood mixed with ash.

Death as a shrinking circle.

Cup of hallucinations.

Salt.

Haunches.

Crinkling lakes.

Red grit.

Slime.

Flashing grin.

Water is thinned blood. 

Venom is milk.

Sunset.

Powder.

Fluke.

Eclipse in ellipsis. 

Lisp. 

Lips burn white.

Rashes.

Dwarf grass.

Elephant grass.

Flat feet.

Hose attached to wild dog.

Red and green dye.

Red and green ants.

Eye water.

Rubber guts.

Dreams cut off circulation.

Squeak of leather on leather.

Beetle snaps.

Crouching.

Crouching and fleeing.

The futility of lying.

Sunset burns.

A rash and a blight.

Shimmering screens of organ failure.

Cheetah is a thorn song.

Flakes of fool’s gold make your teeth rot.

Hang nails.

Rainbow sarong.

Volcanic glass.

Black ash.

Blue ash.

Brown ash.

Orange.

Green.

Red.

Triple dikes.

Leaking fissure.

Scoured hill.

Time lapse.

The mineral fact.

Groping for a nub.

Dried mud and rainy ash.

Black cool-aid.

Acid flowers.

Skin cracks.

Face-mask for a sandstorm.

Orange fever at sunset.

Aimlessly wandering.

Aimlessly killing.

Flat echoes.

Gnarl.

Fractal cities.

Plucked.

Doodle bug.

Scrotum wrinkle.

Eye-slit.

Ankle bell.

Nose-ring.

Boomerang boomerang.

Fever dream.

Maggot swarm.

Stinger.

Sac.

Blood thorn.

Semen & glycerin & blood.

Urine & ash.

Yellow clay.

Skin crackles.

Sun virus.

Bleak light.

Buzzing before detonation.

Powder blue.

Powder yellow.

          ***

The poem seems to be about disquieting images and irrational deductions from my unconscious. But on the other hand, I feel no requirement or duty to be "accurate" or PC or "smart" about any of it. The poem doesn't need an "excuse" for its irrationality. The unconscious isn't ruled by morality or ethics--that's partly what makes it so interesting, so independent. The moral relativism of free association (of "automatic writing" or "automatic thinking" ?) is one of the real strengths--the salvation, if you will--of a lot of Modern and post-Modern art and literature.          

The Discrete Delicacy of David Gitin

Back in the 1960's, there was a lot of interesting new poetry being written. Hah. Is that an understatement or a joke? A lot of little publishers, little magazines, underground stuff kept popping up. The mimeo revolution. 

One early voice that was immediately recognizable and exciting during that time was David Gitin's. It was immediately apparent that he must have known Eigner's work, maybe Anselm Hollo's, the Objectivists, Chinese traditions, probably Zukofsky's lyrics, and Creeley without a doubt. 

 

I never met Gitin, but I felt I knew him right away from the formality of his verse, the counterculture subject-matter. A quick, light wit, charming, sharp-edged, ingenious. 

 

Gitin's first book, Guitar Against the Wall [San Francisco: Panjandrum Press, 1972], arrived at just the moment in my own writing life that I was attempting to cobble together a living space that would permit me to pursue poetry more or less full-time (an attempt that would prove to be unsuccessful, as it turned out). David's work seemed, on one level, to be about the ways in which one might go about reconciling the different contexts of life, work, perception, art, music and American culture. In that sense, I felt a kinship with his work, not only because we probably shared many of the same likes, but because his condition bore some apparent resemblances to my own, at that moment. He seemed to be juggling the same hot potatoes, the same slippery plates--though with more success, I deduced, than I would.

  

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973--which considered books published in the previous year--was Maxine Kumin's Up Country: Poems of New England [New York: Harper & Row, Publishers]. Finalists for the award have been announced since 1980, so I have no idea who else was nominated in that year, but I think we can be fairly confident that Gitin's collection could not have been nominated, given the literary power-structure of that time; though in retrospect, there are few poets' first books that could compete with it in terms of promise, and precocious fulfillment.   

   

Gitin's book contains 52 pages of verse; in terms of length, and depth, it's a full-scale collection. Stylistically, it's arrived. There is no hesitancy, no obvious apprentice work: This is the work of an individual voice, original in manner and approach.

 

Its primary technical innovation, if one chooses to call it that, is in its enjambment of phrases, coupled with surprising shifts at line-breaks and stanzas. Impressionistic short-hand. Take, for example, the second poem in the book:

 

 

YER BLUES

 

words

bound of dread

end, the record

 

turns over

birth not

right for me

 

        world

I did not, do

not know

 

 

For those who may be too young to know, "jukeboxes" once functioned by literally playing records. When you put your nickel into the machine at your booth and punched up your selection, the old "45's" would be unslotted by an automated "record changer" and would flop down on the turn-table, then the tone arm would descend onto the spinning surface and play your selection. The "record//turns over" seems to be an evocation of the sense of a selected musical number, mechanical and inexorable, but suddenly, without any kind of transition (except the line break), the subject becomes birth, perhaps not the poet's literal birth, but at least a sense of misapprehension, of the "world/I did not, do/not know." Words "bound of dread/end" may contain the seeds of our mortality. Or is death the flipside of birth, of life? Is this painful solo blare the elegy of birth and death? The tight cohesion of phrases, the hard, uncompromising turns demonstrate a complete command of form, in the same manner that William Carlos Williams would have done, not a word, not a space wasted. 

  

More often, Gitin's manner is delicate, the lines unfurling like fine filaments or traceries of impression, fastidious, subtle, pirouetting with delight and tease.

 

 

                         CARPENTER

  

                    the plane

scrapes along the grain

 

                             the hold

                      where the nail was

        she laughs

      deep Irish gutturals  fearing

                         the attention I give

 

               to the porch  not unlike

                                   a second home

 

                           formless

                                     stir

 

                    the nails between her lips

                                      readied

                                                     for a crosspiece   

 

 

A poetry without explanatory bridges, in which event and impression occur seamlessly, with a kind of simultaneity which the balanced, floating stanza'd groupings perfectly weigh. This is a poet in complete command, but whose language is primarily metaphorical and symbolic ("the nails between her lips/readied/for a crosspiece" speaks worlds, the sexual, constructivist, conflicting archetypes, hovering in the moment like a wire mobile in the breeze).

 

This is a poetry, too, whose delicious effects occur at minute levels:

  

  

                  PILLOW

  

        what's this tomahawk

doing in my linen closet?

                      *

  The Hardy Boys

               night light

                      *

  snowflake

                Sayonara   

 

 

As the symbolic talismans of childhood, such tiny, vivid snapshots capture perfectly the fragmented vestiges of a specific life, while cashing in on their generic Pop Art associations.

 

 

                      ICON

 

 

          ram

 

shack

 

          le cow

  

  

                        hawk

                                    King

                                dom

 

                                         come 

 

 

Splitting up (deconstructing) these rhetorical flourishes allows Gitin to display these syllabic fragments as iconic deities, "ram," "shack" and "hawk/King" function separately as phomenic entities which acquire almost a separate material density, a formality that renders such signifieds into a realm of pure opacity. It's a series of dualities:  ram/shack, le/cow (an amusing turn as "le" the definite pronoun (the) in French), hawk/King, dom/come--roughly a four syllable iambic line. Perhaps a prayer, "kingdom come" from the third line of the Lord's Prayer, which every kid of my generation, it seemed, learned. A pastoral, no less! The poem has a peculiarly American quality, call it rustic gothic, in the tradition of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, raising the forlorn "ramshackle" cliche to heroic proportions simply through syllabic enunciation/annunciation. Ordinary entities elevated to the level of icons.    

In terms of poetics, Gitin travels light--

 

 

              THE BLESSING

waters runs gold with black silt

volcanic

                     the yellow moon

pops between stars no matter the road

sixty cents buys ice

to keep the chicken for tomorrow

 

 

--the quickness, here, eliding gold/black, driving along a road at night under a yellow moon, carrying food in a cooler--language as the vehicle which conveys us along a route we discover as we go, punctuated with pungent detail that carries a necessary weight as well ("chicken for tomorrow")--the imaginative qualities of actual things. Poems are like temporary camps--we set up quickly, get our bearings, then move on. 

 

Reviews like this only can give you a taste of what there is. Gitin's poems are like rich Tapas, savory tidbits of indelible experience netted out of the sheer air. There is poetry you should read because it improves your mind, or because it teaches you lessons in life. Then there's poetry like this, which is as evanescent and fun as cotton candy. We need both kinds. Guitar Against the Wall is an important book, both for what it isn't (mild imitation), as well as for what it is (lovely original lyric voice).