What makes New California Poetry–a curated book series edited by Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Calvin Bedient and Forrest “Ringo” Gander–so good? NCP is my favorite single poetry series anywhere; it’s published thirty books, beginning its run with volumes by Carol Snow and Mark Levine and Fanny Howe’s snowy, active, prayerful Selected Poems. They’ve introduced (in slim, gorgeously printed books) various bright young carnies of the avant-garde’s Big Tent; given mid-career bounces to eminences Keith Waldrop, Cole Swensen, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Ron Silliman (look at this damn cover), and Leslie Scalapino; and published the probably-best first line of a book of poetry in ten years (Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s “It is passionately in our lives, the smell of rain“).
Is NCP–edited with care, mixed in aesthetic–the happy afterlife of a post-trade-press-noticing poetry market? In an interview I conducted about the series with Brenda Hillman (stay tuned), she was reluctant to name single inspirations for its poets’ varieties of investigation (botany, sex, little dusty towns, art history, indie rock) and encounter (Sufism, Gnostic ritual). She is probably playing it sane. Definitions of poetic category–this decade, you know, it’s ????elliptical poetry, hybrid poetics, school of Quietude????–wind up as defenses of a style, rather than frameworks for poetic merit. At the end of my MFA’s two-year pie-eating contest, I’m pretty weary of talking poetics, and contend Fanny Howe’s best poem has more in common with Buson than with entire journals’ Fanny-Howe-lite.
About F.H.: I’ve read her for a year–believing I was distracted by the record I had on, airport smalltalk, coffeeshop gossip, worrying about bills. But now I find I love some of these hushed, busy poems so well I must have been hearing only them as I read. I wasn’t noticing a thing in the world around me:
…Always fixed and free
You never know what you are or were
Expressing
Like mathematics around a head
On rising from a siesta“
And I’m crossing my own stony ocean
Consciousness has nothing to do with me either
I’m just moving inside it, catch as catch can’t
The other night, biking home through a leafy neighborhood at midnight, I realized that wisdom isn’t just intelligent enjoyment, or sensitivity to pleasure’s nuances and vanishing. I am not wise. But Fanny Howe’s poetry is wiser than mere edged-pleasure. In Selected Poems and in single volumes since (even John Barr agrees!), it lives in the field of potential around Jack Spicer’s old dismissive scoff: “As if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences.”
More about New California Poetry, including on single volumes, in the next few posts. In other news: I’m moving back to Seattle in nine days! If you’re a Missourian who wants a floral-print couch, please comment below.
