New Books and Events

little scratch pad is launching new orbital craft in the coming weeks:

Jonathan Skinner. With Naked Foot. 36pp. $7. Limited Edition of 200.

Overherd at the River's Hip: 15 Buffalo Poets. 40pp. $7. Edition of 200.


Send a check or well concealed cash plus $1 postage to:

little scratch pad press
82 Livingston St. Apt. 2
Buffalo, NY 14213

Poetry and Small Press events are coming up as well:

"Naked Kitchen Yoga" Celebrating Buffalo Small Press at Rust Belt Books, March 6.

The Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. March 21.
The awesomest in the land! Go to their website: http://www. buffalosmallpress. org/

Also pending is "Endocrinology": a Poetry/Performance Open Mike at Sugar City in Allentown hosted by our very own Little Scratchy and the Gang--look for flyers and posts soon!

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Georg Trakl and Mitchell Parry

Mitchell Parry. Imperfect Penance. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2008. 107 pp.

This is a multi-faceted book of poems that, taken together, form a subtext to the works and life of Austrian poet and dramatist Georg Trakl (1887-1914); a writer who, beyond his consummate skill as tone and color poet in the vein of poets maudit like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautréamont—the late romantic/symbolist/early modernist precursors to our current idea of an avant-garde—also typifies a dramatic and tragic Viennese aesthete’s life history: he was a drug addict, held an incestuous love for his sister, and then fell victim during the first few weeks of World War I at the young age of 24. As Parry indicates in his notes, there is as yet no full biography of Trakl’s life that has been translated into English. As a result, Imperfect Penance is, for the time being, his biography.

…Of sorts.

And what sorts are these! Large blocks of prose recreating imaginary scenes in Trakl’s life, poems responding to signature examples of Trakl’s work, a chronological progression throughout the tripartite structure of Parry’s sequence, and a kind of biographical and descriptive re-framing of Trakl’s style that proposes an evocative “real event” providing the causes and contributing influences for Trakl’s work.

There are critical differences between Trakl’s poems and Parry’s, namely, the distance from Trakl’s emphasis on dream and delirium to the kind of cool heat of description in Parry’s writing. Parry’s poems are not late romantic/symbolist poetry: he clearly takes part in the documentary rage that defines our era, and there is no avoiding the contemporary pattern of softening (broadening, diluting) previous condensations of imagery and tropes, expanding the symbolist’s minimal color and tone palette into today’s accuracy of denotations (as in the naming of birds, the particularities of place-names, and other clearly referenced historical moments). One aspect of literary historiography specific to this project is the vividly recounting of “events” as we have had so often in television and cinema’s dramatic recreations of celebrity life. Viewing Parry’s work historically, we should recognize the present impulse to move away from or, in a way, efface the transcending spaces of literature in order to incorporate them into our obsessive currency of fact.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is Parry’s handling of Trakl’s poem “Rondel”. A rondel is a poetic form that mirrors the first two lines of the poem in succeeding lines, creating an arresting effect of difference in repetition:

Verflossen ist das Gold der Tage,
Des Abends braun und blaue Farben:
Des Hirten sanfte Flöten starben
Des Abends blau und braune Farben
Verflossen ist das Gold der Tage.

Here is my poor translation:

Long gone is the gold of days,
evening’s colors brown and blue:
the soft flutes of shepherds are dying,
evening’s colors blue and brown,
long gone is the gold of days.

With the shift towards biography, and its overlay of purposes, Parry writes:

Past is the gold of day.
The crocus folds its purple hands:
a young girl tucks her hair beneath her scarf.
The crocus folds its purple hands.
Past is the gold of day.

Which is evocative, certainly. There is, perhaps, more honesty in seeing the evocation of a pastoral moment in Trakl’s poem as so much melancholy regret at the covering up of a young woman’s hair. Yet, why not a line like “the purple folds its crocus hands”? In my opinion, what is missing most from Parry’s book is the full recognition of how biographically important Trakl’s sense of color really is. Here are three lines from Trakl’s “Rest and Silence” from the Daniel Simko translation: “A pale man/ Lives in blue crystal, his cheek leaning on stars,/ Or else he bows his head in purple sleep”. “Rest and Silence” is also the title of Parry’s initial text in Part One of Imperfect Penance.

What emerged for me as I read Parry’s book was a clear sense that this work exemplifies North American poetics, shows us what has taken place in our “New American” poetry up through to the end of the 20^th century: a mistrust of poetry’s own mythology: that desire for an art that imputes significant sensuous reality to its poetic vocabulary, its composition of imagery, beyond all contextual framing that would rivet it to a unique time/place/subject position. So much poetry of our moment can only ironically permit the auditoria of the classical or romantic, in the feeling that all reference to the Western imaginary is an implication of its ideological failures, as if these tropes were the secret source-springs from which centuries of blind destructiveness were unstoppered. If so, then we can understand the “slight return” of Viennese Voodoo Chile Georg Trakl as pure trope—biographically, and poetically. To write a book that undergirds that mythology with the tempering modality of current historiographic and biographical conventions is to give penance not to the sequence of ideas resulting in the suicidal catastrophy of Europe in WW1, but to the fact that the delirium and dream of this specifically male poetic imaginary needs better acknowledgment. That it needs better recognition and melioration than our post-pop cultural exaggeration of surfaces. Parry’s flawed penance points to the composition of a purely fictive space in which fantasy and melancholy can be indulged in unflinchingly. The extreme stylization of Trakl’s erotics (as in the works of Egon Schiele, among many others—Fauvists, Die Brücke, Blaue Reiter, etc.) weds sexual transgression to sepulcral decay. That this was the symbolist’s fullest artistic fabrication and result was also seen as the extreme failure to provide a better mimesis that so convinced poets like Ezra Pound and Tristan Tzara that new aesthetic grounds would be necessary. If Trakl, or Parry, mean for us to see their works as ironic or melopoetic, than I think I have misread them all along.

Which leads me to think about the idea of Parry’s project in poetic biography. Whether or not Georg and Grete were physical lovers, what was pertinent to Trakl’s aesthetic was the tension between a prohibition, whose violation ensured a consequent damnation of the soul, and the resulting heightening of sensuousness of a primary kinship relation turned into an erotic longing. Symbolism, as reflection of a spectrum of fantasy recoiling from the approaching flattening out of the artist’s conjuring powers as a result of photography, cinema, and industrial production (to wit: the suburbanization of the world in its unceasing regularization of landscapes under corporate design homogeneity), was able to invoke a kind of depth psychology in which impotence could be leveraged into mythic prowess.What Trakl gained from his close reading and absorption of Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Baudelaire was a consistent body of works that held close to its twilight/bright-lit nexus of themes and images. What we can say of Trakl is almost never said of contemporary poets: that he was a master of color. His poetry gains as much from the aesthetic of his contemporary painters as it does from the melancholy of its poets-maudit with their self-tragic histrionics. Trakl is in some way a better guide to Freudian psychology than Freud himself, because there is no attempt made to give over the contents of his obsessions to a yearning for normality that would extinguish its operability, its continuation. Trakl, above most others who follow him in characteristic American ways (such as Plath, Berryman, and to some extent Robert Lowell), has no interest in becoming normal, and instead revels in the purely negative components of his perceived (and, what may be his reason for survival as a literary figure, realized) damnation.

What Parry’s book suggests, in its title, is that, in terms of a Western “conscience”, there has been no complete resolution of the particularities of the fin-de-siecle, the decadents, and the relation of the artist’s to an alienated, criminal’s mind. I still wonder how, though, a homage to a Viennese poet of one hundred years previous is appropriate to today’s poetry audience? Is it that we can only now appreciate the ways that appropriated works are moving into the foreground among younger writers, especially for a generation that seems ready to accept (and celebrate) that no critically new (e.g. “foundational”) literary tropes are emerging in our culture? We seem, instead, to realize that our advances in understanding have more to do with the scale, scope, and speed of transforming our already-accomplished knowledge than with the ability for any single artist to crystallize and generate new paradigms. But the recourse to a failed biography of a rather grim modernist poet may also tell us more about our current acceptance of the loss of that impulse. Meaning: we’re not yet happy about it, and are perhaps again curious as to why so many writers of these distant generations were so invested in projects we now feel have completed themselves, even if we squeeze them of any remaining relevance they may have through our deft manipulations of reproduction and technological ability to remix.

Trakl’s poems, when read in succession, are a lot like Monet’s haystacks: the “object” of the paintings doesn’t change to any great extent, while all the means of understanding it, as a reflection of a changing and changeable light, do. Trakl’s poetry is faceted, and repetitive of singular moments comprised of a moral, visual terrain that will not change, whereas Parry’s book comprises a sequential narrative of the subject’s life, reflected in a kind of mimic voicing. Parry conveys a desire for realism that we may not be interested in acknowledging as the real pleasure we get from reading the book. And, as to the extent that Trakl’s work is relatively obscure for most North American readers can only increase the chances that Parry’s book will find an audience. I would not compare Parry’s efforts to the vivid and nostalgic Merchant and Ivory films of the 1980s and 1990s. It would serve us better to appreciate the degree to which Parry is able to express his own fantasy life (a world of 1990s and 2000s urban metropoles) under the guise of biography and stylistic metaphor.

Parry’s book is important simply because it is not a work of autobiography, as so many other extended lyric meditations are. There is all the latent voyeuristic pleasure of looking into a vanished, lurid, riotous bohemian world way over there on the other side of the century, with all of its famous personages of the scene: Wittgenstein, Kraus, Kokoshka, Freud, etc. It is also important because poetic biographies are very rare (I can think of only two other’s that strive for factual information in the same way: John Brown’s Body by Stephen Benet, and Edward Sanders’ Chekov). That puts Imperfect Penance in a category with few other works of poetry, and makes it a valuable, interesting, and uncommon book.

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No mind for the gaps

Bus fare has gone up 25¢.

The days when I walk to work
fall into the trough
between paychecks.

I walk, not to revive
a lost art, but out of necessity.

Winter was easier with a car,
distances and commuting time
truncated and buffeted
by music or radio as I sped
daily to Amherst for poetics
and to teach essay form,
research, drama and literature.

In the diagnostic manuals
and textbooks I read
while studying for a college major
in psychology, poverty
is a symptom of mental illness.

When you are poor,
you can’t even afford emotions.
Illness can’t be afforded either.
Having a psychological problem
is a luxury good.

Paranoia takes quanta
of information and creates
narratives to complete
otherwise missing information.
The new narrative contains events
that contradict the wishes, hopes,
desires and fantasies of the paranoiac.
The imagined narrative is then acted on
as if it really occurred.

Paranoia is a lust for knowledge
taken to extremes, coupled
with a negative self-perception.
The emotional, cognitive result
of this combination of narratives
supplying harmful information
to the gaps in one’s knowledge
(gaps which are the real fabric
of sensation and consciousness)
is mistrust: of self, other, past and future.

Luckily, we are told, life is not composed
of narratives but of chemicals and hormones.
Research in this month’s Nature magazine
states that oxytocin is the love hormone.

I wonder how many people taking Ecstasy
helped the researchers learn this,
and also how many destroyed
smaller mammals were autopsied
to find these possible new pills
that will help people love one another.

The research also says that the nesting
and trust hormone is called vasopressin.

The New York Times doesn’t simply
report this news, but makes the
recommendation that, while
it might be good to take these hormones
to physically encourage love
between partners, it would be
better to create an antidote to them
to prevent cheating, and cool people off.

The New York Times also says that people
might put these drugs in other people’s drinks.

Thus encouraging readers’ paranoia about love,
about which enough of us
are confused already.

Exuberance and naivete must be cultivated.
“Go thou hence,” the old sage says, “and
Fill all your gaps with sunshine and flowers.”

Bus fare has gone up 25¢.

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3 unsupported definitions of postmodernism

the anomaly becomes functional

the anomaly becomes commodity

gestural art equipped with apparatus


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having less capacity for deep analysis of the current war in Palestine, outside of what must be ineffectual but true sorrow & a good amount of disgust, I will defer to Philip Metres, who encouraged Ron Silliman to give his thoughts, and linked to Jon Stewart and to Avraham Burg. From this I have decided to read Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, in order to season my negative dialectics with a bit of negative theology.


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NuYears Poem

it hot iw uz some body

(quatrain for the polytechnical guild poets)

Complicated rules based on musicological theory dictated
purchase and retirement of emissions offsets
to encompass a variety of strategies
overtaken by pervasive real-time.

Miles To Go

Biking The U.S. of Awesomeness
The mass email correspondence of cross-country cyclists Meryl Estes, Nicole Grohoski, Caitlin Prentice and Jonathan Stuart-Moore, illustrated by Charles Mahal. New York: Graphic Union Press, 2008. 55 pp.

O, open road, (almost) endless and winding.

Here is the bicycle bell (mini-clarion) of a new generation, out to discover the U.S. of Awesomeness unburdened by cars, gasoline, or that gritty taste kicked up by long miles of high speed driving. This book is a pleasant, present, joyous record of the travels of four young bicyclists who, in the summer of 2005, pedaled their way from Maine to Oregon. It was planned as a project for a Geography course at Middlebury College in Vermont that spring, and then carried out and documented nearly every week for the 100s of people who received their emails. As a travel narrative, it is full of simple pleasures and perplexing frustrations met with wit and humor that speak of a kind of Thoreauean deliberateness. Not exactly a philosophical meditation, it is instead a collectively-authored account (written in the third-person singular) comprising the landmarks, landscapes, and local flavors encountered on the road. The path itself is traced by illustrator Mahal across a large map that spans the final five pages of the book.

As a document, it provides lots of factual detail: a "bikers' index" lists the amount of peanut butter eaten; the cyclists' regimen of diet and daily progress; the aid and comfort given by strangers who unexpectedly encounter the voyagers along the way; and praise for the community of family, friends and supporters.

While this account of a +4000-mile trek is rather brief--so brief as to leave a desire to know more--the combined array of illustrations, introduction, excerpts from the original "guidebook", emails from the relieved and celebratory cyclists' parents and the index provide a diversity of ways to read through what is truly a one-of-a-kind, and awesome, expedition.

Some Poems

Julie Perini. Videos to Be Constructed in Your Head. (Buffalo, 2007) 8 pp. A small book , 5.5"X4", picked up at Squeaky Wheel or Hallwalls last summer. A brief homage to Yoko Ono's 1962 Tokyo exhibition Paintings to Be Constructed in Your Head. 6 brief instructions or prompts for the imagination: #1 "This is a video unlike anything/you have seen before." #2 "This is a video to be read out loud/so go back and read this out loud./Try not to feel shy or awkward about it." and #3 "this is a short video. " If the early 1960s were an age of conceptual, Fluxus art, ours is an age of repetitions.


Rikki Ducornet, illustrated by T. Motley. Clean. (an excerpt from The One Marvelous Thing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). A small, 5.5"X2", 12-page "freebie" booklet done after the style of Jack Chick's proselytizing, fear-inducing pamphlets. Drives the notion of "cleanliness" to absurd heights: "And Jesus says: 'Do you smell good and are you the color of roast veal?' And the old folks answer 'O yes, Lord, we are clean and Our thoughts are like white sauce and our blood is like water and we are ready, O sweet Jesus." Funny and gross, quite a combo.

d.a. levy. "What can I say?" (poem one-fold excerpt from RANDOM SIGHTINGS WITH NO ONE AROUND, Kirpan Press, 2007). 4 pp. 6"X4". This poem is subtitled "for r.j.s May 10, 1967/imprisoned for making a moral decision to help other young people even if it meant endangering himself". levy's friend was hounded, censored, jailed, etc., in Cleveland, OH. It takes the attitude of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and crafts an angry portrait of a loss of identity amidst a culture of fear and suspicion.

this poem is wired
they are listening
they are in the audience
they are in the poem
they are in the words
they are waiting for something obscene
for something un-american
for something about drugs

they dont know
i am as frightened as
they are


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