“No one can
put a style on me. I’ve learned from many people. I change all
the time. I experiment to keep up with what is going on, to hear what
everybody else is doing. I even keep a little ahead of them, like a
mirror that shows what will happen next.”—Mary Lou
Williams, jazz pianist and composer.
When I received my copy of Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space,
Selected Poems of Kitasono Katue (Translated by John Solt, Edited
by Karl Young and John Solt, Introduction by Karl Young), shortly
after Bastille Day, 2007, I didn’t know anything about Kitasono
Katue or his work. It no longer surprises me that there are rich veins
of important work out there that I don’t know anything
about. When I was first recognizing in myself the joys that working
with words brings to me I had the naïve idea that poetry was an
attractive subset of literature to pursue because it was small enough
that in a lifetime of immersion a person could reasonably expect to
become familiar with all of the work worth reading. I stopped thinking
that the year I discovered the world outside mainstream poetry
publishing.
The moment I realized that there was more work out there worth reading
than I could possibly take in in one lifetime I realized the
efficiency savings of finding reference points whose sensibilities
aligned with my own. If there was a person, or a school of thought, or
a swath of praxis that I could trust as a secondary source, as a
content aggregater, it could save me a lot of time locating the things
that I wanted to be learning. If I used that time saved locating for
learning, I’d be learning ahead. This is not to say these secondary
sources were trusted over original sources, or even trusted without
question, only that a board of readers committed to the same set of
editorial guidelines can work through a lot more unsolicited
manuscripts than a single editor can.
Somewhere I no longer recall I read the suggestion that a person
would do well to read poetry by as many poets as possible, while at
the same time reading everything ever written by one single poet. The
idea being that the former would give one the sense of the breadth of
what poetry was capable of, and the latter would give one the sense of
the depth of what one poet could do. I decided to start with the
breadth, since I didn’t have a particular passion for any single
poet that I felt would sustain me through reading everything
they’d written. I figured in the process of reading widely,
I’d find one who interested me enough to want to read
everything. Of course, I forgot the whole plan formulation during the
course of a decade of reading, writing, and just generally living. It
wasn’t until I was waist deep in what turned out to be a sea of
one person’s work that I realized I’d long since found the
one poet I wanted to learn in depth.
One unexpected change which resulted from this shift in my focus
was that my reading become less of a happy-go-lucky bounce from this
to that to the other and more of a series of expeditions down lines of
influence or out spirals of confluence and back again. In one of the
earliest of those expeditions I came in contact with Karl Young, and
he has proved to be, for me, what the Indie record label Anti Records
is for my friend Jim Warner. Aside from being a talented poet, Jim is
a music superfreak. Jim said of Anti Records that, at this point, he
just buys everything they release. As far as he’s concerned
they’re batting 1.000 and that has freed him up from the need to
look into whether or not he’ll like any given release. This is
how recommendations from Karl Young are for me. If he thinks I should
read it, he’s been right every single time so far. This book is
no exception.
Enough preamble, here are my first impressions of Kitasono Katue,
and of Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space.
I’ve been through this book three times now. Once when I
first got it, once a couple weeks after that, and once more in
preparation for writing this. The first time through the book I
wasn’t really all that impressed. It was a quick, surface read,
and I thought, “Meh, not seeing much that’s new in
this.” The second time through I looked at the dates on the
poems, and remembered the first time I watched Citizen Kane. I
was about 15, and Citizen Kane was always on the top of all kinds of
Best Movies of All Time lists, so I figured I better watch it. So many
cliches, I thought. The film is just riddled with rip-offs of things
I’ve seen in all sorts of other movies. It took me years of
movie watching to finally realize that Citizen Kane couldn’t
possibly have been ripping off all the movies that were made after
it. I confused my experiential chronology with the reality of when the
films were actually made. Kitasono was finished with Concrete before
the famed international movement began—before even Kenneth
Patchen— he was rupturing the relationship between signifier and
signified and breaking out of the linearity of language before
postmodernism had been spanked into taking its first breath, and he
was writing Fluxus event scores 30 years before the term (in both
prose and poem form).
It’s funny what makes it into the canon and what
doesn’t. I don’t mean funny as in haha, I mean funny as in
something smells funny. This is not the first time I’ve noticed
a bias against artists whose output won’t sit still long enough
to be pinned to the display tray. It seems possible to re-invent
oneself, to stop doing what one did and start doing something new, and
not get kicked off the island, but it seems a lot more difficult to do
several-many things well at once, or to be devoted to no style but
inventiveness and exploration. You can be inventive, or exploratory,
but then you need to stop when you get somewhere interesting and keep
performing your one-trick-pony act until you die. You’re not
supposed to walk out into fields declared barren and throw the rubies
and emeralds and sapphires you find over your shoulder while shouting
out “too small!” The canon doesn’t like that. Even if you
do correspond with Pound, and are published by Creeley to the
adulation of Olson, Williams, Patchen, Rexroth, and Laughlin.
“What is
important is method.”—Kitasono Katue
In his richly re-readable introduction Karl Young says:
After White Album, Kitasono kept a complete coincidence
between pattern and book. He did not issue books of diverse poems
at intervals when opportunities presented themselves, but used each
book as a framework for a new pattern. We could thus see each book
as a basic unit of composition. In the two books
following White Album, we can see Kitasono clearly and
purposefully moving into specific patterns and shifting away from
others between one book and the next.
and this theme of patterns and the working through of patterns
repeats itself throughout the introduction in Young’s words,
Kitasono’s words, and the words of others.
Two examples of this come to mind, one on the micro level, and one
on the macro level, both involving the graph which graces the cover of
the book, the “no” graph, which is “a weak and
general possessive, a particle that could be translated
‘of’ or as the apostrophe s.”
In the poem “Monotonous Solid” Kitasono relentlessly
worries the skin off of the peanut of meaning where later, less deft,
poets would proudly pound meaning into a skin-flecked crunchy style
butter. The stanza that acts as the pivot point of the poem reads
“imagination’s / face’s / curved line’s / dark
/ jaw’s / hard loneliness” and performs a slow spin there
at the point after the cast has landed and before the reeling-in has
begun.
Kitasono is quoted saying:
I have published as many as twenty books since then, but all the
“patterns” of my poetry are in White Album. In
that sense, White Album is an unfinished volume of many
patterns gathered in a jumble...When I get in a slump, I always
take out White Album and, like a hunter stalking prey, my
eyes wander in the jungle of words where I discover a forgotten
pattern, sweep away the dust, and extend it in a new way.
The almost purely chronological (with the exception of the Plastic
Poems near the end of the book being grouped together) organization of
the book means that the reader gets to watch Kitasono’s use of
the “no” graph throughout his entire published career. He
works it through variation after variation, and elaborates patterns
with a meticulous thoroughness that approaches (but never gets bogged
down in) permutational precision.
After reading “Collection of White Poems,” 1927, I
wrote a series of notes to myself. The first was a reference to Paul
Dutton’s Mouth Pieces series of sound poems. When I
listen to those pieces it feels like Dutton has described the
circumference of the furthest limits of the sounds possible for the
human mouth to make. “Collection of White Poems” has no
verbs, but the richness and variety of its constructions are such that
it goes unnoticed through multiple readings. The second note was a
shorthand reference to one of my pet theories about Net Art/Web
Art. Much of it seems to lack the depth I want art to possess, and my
theory is that it’s because the bells and whistles and levers
and buttons that are available for the artist to exploit are so
numerous to begin with and are so quick to be upgraded that it’s
all a serious practitioner can do to demonstrate familiarity with the
tools—there’s no time for mastery. I see a method
demonstrated, and I want to watch it be extended and elaborated upon
and explored through a series that would comprise a body of work, not
just a single piece. “Collection of White Poems,” like
many of the pieces in this collection, simultaneously postulates and
exhausts its methods.
These are hard poems, but they reward the effort they ask. Kitasono
is clearly doing something with these poems, even the most difficult
of them reveal an intentionality that coaxes the reader to continue. I
never once felt that beating-my-head-against-a-meaningless-wall
feeling I get from a lot of postmodern poetry. In Magic and
Showmanship, A Handbook for Conjurers, Henning Nelms says:
Interest depends entirely on meaning. The degree of interest that
spectators take in any performance is in direct proportion to its
meaning for them. The more meaning you can pack into a presentation,
the more interest it will excite. An illusion creates interest because
the conjurer gives it meaning by proposing to demonstrate some
remarkable power. A typical trick has no meaning beyond the fact that
it presents a puzzle and challenges the audience to find a solution.
Many people find puzzles dull. Even the enthusiast is bored by some
types of puzzles. Conjuring puzzles are not likely to fascinate anyone
who is not a conjuring-puzzles addict.
Even when Kitasono is most clearly engaging in the (almost
mechanical) separation of referrer from referent the reader never
feels abandoned by the poet, his presence is there in the method, in
the patterns, and in this way even when the surface of meaning begins
to shift and spin there is still a hand-hold in meta-meaning to stand
against vertigo.
The book itself is well-designed (clean, simple), well-built
(glossy cover, perfect-bound), and looks like a book you’d find
on the shelves of any bookstore with only a couple of
exceptions. There’s no ISBN, bar code, or price printed
anywhere, and the page numbers are in the lower right corner of every
page, even the left-hand pages, an unusual convention. A couple of
typos leapt out at me, but, beyond lamenting the fact that I find
typos in books at a far higher frequency since the advent of digital
typesetting in general, even (perhaps especially) in mass market
books, I can’t get too worked up over it.
Karl Young’s introduction, at 26 pages, does an impressive
job of contextualizing Kitasono’s efforts. In the same way that
I can’t read Eco without a dictionary under my left hand,
whenever I read one of Karl’s introductions, I keep a pen and
paper handy for jotting down notes to myself on pathways I know I need
to peek or plunge down later.
The additional “Notes on the Introduction, Editing, and
Organization of this Book” was also something I found value in,
and appreciated. Translation presents a vast set of problems which is
multiplied when translating poetry, and multiplied again when
translating into a different writing system, and multiplied yet again
when that writing is visually innovative. An understanding of how this
complex of compromises was approached by the editors helped me, as a
reader, to remain aware the process, and to, at times, get a better
sense of the poem as it was intended by the author, particularly the
visual poems.
“I will
create poetry through the viewfinder of my camera, out of pieces of
paper scraps, boards, glasses, etc. This is the birth of new
poetry.”—Kitasono Katue
The Plastic Poems are photographs of composed arrangements of
objects, most but not all include some element of text, though that
element may, at times, be serving a design role rather than a lexical
role (meaning, the content of the text is less significant than the
fact of the text). The finished piece is the photograph itself, not
the objects photographed. There is a fragility or precariousness to
many of the compositional elements: string, wire, hand torn paper,
crumpled paper, roundish solids on flat surfaces, loose letters. They
are all without title, so readers must orient themselves, and accept
that multiple readings are possible.
The presentation of the Plastic Poems as a single group,
exceptional to the otherwise chronological progression of the
selections, makes sense, but without the benefit of dates,
there’s no way for the reader to know how these poems fit within
the whole of Kitasono’s work. Were they produced throughout his
career? Did they begin or end at any significant point? Are the
Plastic Poems we are shown ordered in any fashion? Was he making
Plastic Poems alongside other visual poems, and/or other lexical
poems? We are told in the additional “Notes on the
Introduction”:
Kitasono titled few of his Plastic Poems. Sometimes he assigned
them numbers, but even these became confusing because Kitasono was
not consistent, and some writers have referred to page numbers of
different editions. We present the Plastics without title or
reference to editions.
But this is not enough for the reader to be able to properly
contextualize them, and they are such an important component to a
complete understanding of Kitasono’s work that the absence of
this information is felt as a loss.
Notes by the editors appear in several places, were never
intrusive, and often sparked my interest to seek more information on
my own. The note regarding “Kappa” leaps to mind. My
reading of these poems would have been completely different (and
completely wrong) without the explanatory note. The note was detailed
enough to make me want to learn more about Kappa for my own knowledge,
not just to inform my reading of a few poems. Throughout my readings
of the book I consistently felt that I was being walked through an
exhibit with a friend at my side who had a passion for the work, and
never like I’d been pushed out in traffic to see if I got
hit.
I particularly liked the poems that showed me the work as it was
published. I recognize that it’s not always possible to present
books of translation with every original side-by-side with the
translation, but, as a poet with a strong appreciation for the visual
aspects of the art, I always want to see the original layout.
Eyes closed, fingers on the keyboard, the parts of this book that
still pulse with interest in my mind are the Plastic Poems, every one
of them; “Electrical Enunciation,” for having appeared in
1925; “Human Dismantlement Poems,” for making me wonder if
bpNichol knew them when he wrote his “Selected Organs”;
the excerpt from “Magic” which is a halfone reproduction
of two pages of type; the poem “Monotonous Space”; the
line from the poem “Black Church” which reads “white
sand / for / a / red glass // was / only / itself”; the post-war
poems of Black Fire; and the four diagrammatics.
I will close by saying that I will be seeking out more of the work
of Kitasono Katue as a result of my reading this collection. I know of
no higher praise for a book of selected poems.
