Li-Young Lee
Boa Editions ($12.95)

by M. L. Schuldt

“Our bodies look solid, but they aren't. We're like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but there's no thingness to them.” Such is the metaphysical preoccupation of Li-Young Lee's long-awaited third volume of poetry, Book of My Nights—a collection of 35 lyrical nocturnes which mark a shift in the poet's work towards a more hermetic mode. Where Rose and The City in Which I Love You confront childhood memories and the generational anxieties attendant to them, Lee surrenders much of his familial obsessing for a transfiguring kind of introspection.

As the title portends, Lee endures sleeplessness to contemplate the self's urge for total presence. And as with the two volumes that precede it, Lee arrives at his revelations through a pliant, twining syntax and an archetypal diction. Nights, those "black intervals," become a kind of threshold, a fugitive and elusive place where Lee interrogates himself as in the poem "From Another Room": "Who lay down at evening / and woke at night / a stranger to himself?" In "Degrees of Blue" the poem yawns open into a dream-like setting: "At the place in the story // where a knock at the hull wakes the dreamer / and he opens his eyes to find the rowers gone, / the boat tied to an empty dock, // the boy looks up from his book…" Indeed, the stillness and quiet and repetition of "night" fill Book of My Nights with provocative instants of self-transcendence.

In terms of its metaphorical strength, "Praise Them," (perhaps the finest piece of writing in the collection overall), expands through terse phrasings:

The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.

Here, the birds become auguries of a new, visionary perspective at work in Lee's poetry. He continues his Romantic projections:

See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We're the nervous ones.

Like Charles Wright and Wallace Stevens, Lee internalizes his landscape, conjoins imagination's immanence with the external world of God's eminence:

If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?

The Chinese painter and writer of the 6th century, Hsieh Ho, observed that a painting should enact a spiritual movement of its own—the painter's meditation becoming the viewer's meditation. In the aforementioned poems, as well as "One Heart," "The Sleepless," and "Little Father" Lee's spiritual flights are wholly felt by the reader.

Unfortunately for the majority of poems in Book of My Nights, Lee's strength seems also to be his weakness. So smooth and polished are the surfaces, so ephemeral and fleeting the impressions, so reliant, poem to poem, on abstractions that, taken as a whole, the collection suffers. Indeed, a good portion of this third volume seems overwrought and monotonous, and as such slides from any sort of memorable grasping. For example in the poem "Buried Heart," Lee writes:

The hyacinth emerges headlong dying,
one of the colors of ongoing
and good-bye,

its odor my very body's smokeless burning,

its voice
night's own dark lap.

Above ground, the crown of flowers tells the wish
brooding earth stitched inside the bulb.

In another kingdom, it was the wick
the lamp cradled, strands
assembled in rapt slumber.

Here, while the sounds are certainly wonderful, the metaphorical language seems graceful to the point of forgetfulness, airy, and overly elaborate; in short, unconvincing, without the linguistic or syntactical kinks that would jolt us from what otherwise too often reads as pure artifice.

In contrast, take for instance the poem "Eating Together" from Lee's first and best book, Rose:

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Gerald Stern has praised this first collection's simplicity, how it "consists in finding the language that releases—even awakens—feelings, and that the poem as art object is best served by addressing those very feelings, that is, the language of those feelings." Stern has never been more right. Lee's great contribution to contemporary poetry has been his gift for revivifying the senses, his infusion of simple pleasures and simple speech into a poetic climate where the vogue seems to be to commodify language. Indeed, no poet in only two books would be as commended by peers and embraced by anthologists if he wasn't a master of balancing the grace of his artifice with the holiness of his experiences. And even if Book of My Nights reads less successfully than its predecessors, such shortcomings, nevertheless, remind us of the poetry past and the poetry still to be written.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Click here to buy this book at Amazon.com

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

Geoffrey G. O'Brien
University of California Press ($16.95)

by Steve Healey

A cloud of anonymity shrouds The Guns and Flags Project, the first book of poems by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Granted, there's a pretty slick author photo on the inside flap, but even here he tucks sheepishly into his own shadows, letting the cloud looming on his shoulder take the focal point. Below that photo you'll find a bio that offers nothing but a few journal acknowledgements. On the back cover you'll find, shockingly, not a single blurb from the literary elite (although the editors of the impressive New California Poetry series—Cal Bedient, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman—may constitute a less obvious Holy Trinity of official sanctioning). Finally, the entire cover design conveys an austere remove with its understated arrangement of line and muted color (think: Ralph Lauren meets Mark Rothko).

More importantly, of course, is what you'll find in the poems, and here too, a stark, impersonal tone prevails, as in titles from "The Premiere of Reappearance" to "Winter Rose." In fact, the typical O'Brien poem sort of avoids point of view altogether, almost never clinging to the easy intimacies of you or I, usually flowing seamlessly through a series of indefinite vantages. Point of view becomes movement itself, allowing all things macro and micro their democratic right to be seen and heard, at least for a moment. There is a speaker here—indeed, this book's magic is how it turns so much variety and blur into a singular, convincing voice—it's just that he seems to have no qualities, or just not the specific, personal-ad litany of faux-individualism we expect from the modern consumer self (e.g. "I like Pepsi and Britney's bellybutton").

You might guess that The Guns and Flags Project favors a distilled, elemental language—the lexical primary colors (including frequent references to primary colors themselves), like this sampling of key words from a poem called "Thoughts of a Judge": clouds, days, fell, leaves, space, ideas, teeth, glass, dying, calmly, country, be. O'Brien gives himself a limited palette: simple nouns, few extravagant qualifiers, and the most transparent verbs, the favorite being be. Add to this lack a lack of peppy rhetorical devices, and it's a wonder these poems can move at all. But move they do, hugely and thickly as slow tornadoes emerging from the unconscious. The only way to survive is to surrender to the spiraling swirl, to be it, and O'Brien encourages this with absurdly long sentences brimming with comma splices and other run-on fun. This pace builds momentum in mostly longish poems that spill over two or more pages, and even a one pager like "Constantly So Near" gives a smaller-scale taste of that paradoxically simple and complex flavor. Notice how quickly the I is abandoned for the not-I:

I thought the thinking of going to sleep
thrown on like a coverlet of flame

which urges the body beneath it
to a sultry kind of ownerlessness

in which the famous obedience of limbs
submits like the non-public aspect of flame

to being only the yellow ash
of some almost glimpsed but yielded thing

in a space not quite lashed by experience
but still lent to the losing of it

or a just-missed train whose passage hangs
about the station in a great veil of dust

refusing to speak of any children
only looming now fast now slow as windows

or the holes in the lace of the new mourners
while the tracks are not rising up to meet it.

The dust an ash the passage a form of flame
or just being alone over the hours

descending so blithely where they appoint you
governor of irregular black buildings.

By line three the speaker becomes a generic body who surrenders to "ownerlessness," a loss of personal control guiding him on a strange tour of himself as "yellow ash," then as "a just-missed train," and finally, morphed into the second person, as "governor of irregular black buildings." Like most poems in The Guns and Flags Project, this one can be read as a song of despair about a self suffocating in a world that worships the material and entices us to purchase so many false selves. So that final line resonates with our political impotence, the futility of so-called individual freedom.

But there's a redemptive and joyful strain running through O'Brien's poems, this perhaps even more foregrounded than that encroaching darkness. The speaker in "Constantly So Near" is also travelling a mystical path, learning how to be humble, grateful, awestruck, receptive to what is real in the face of buzzing desire. Life happens not in personal satisfaction, this poem suggests, but in transformation through metaphor—not in attachment, but in the mysterious fluidity between the I and not-I. Mostly what I hear in "governor of irregular black buildings" is the playful possibility of an alternative politics whereby choice is an imaginative act with reverence for the unknown and the strange.

If O'Brien's poems have a sameness of diction and rhythm that verges on monotonous and impersonal, it's the same sameness of heartbeat and breath, prayer and meditation. It's a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Click here to buy this book at Amazon.com

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

by Ryder W. Miller

[Note: a version of this paper was presented at the John Steinbeck's Americas Centennial Conference at Hofstra University in March 2002.]

Mexico City
February 19, 1944
To Annie Laurie Williams, by Telegram

PLEASE CONVEY THE FOLLOWING TO 20TH CENTURY FOX IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT MY SCRIPT FOR THE PICTURE LIFE BOAT WAS DISTORTED IN PRODUCTION SO THAT ITS LINE AND INTENTION HAS BEEN CHANGED AND BECAUSE THE PICTURE SEEMS TO ME TO BE DANGEROUS TO THE AMERICAN WAR EFFORT I REQUEST MY NAME BE REMOVED FROM ANY CONNECTION WITH ANY SHOWING OF THIS FILM.

Though receiving an Academy Award nomination in 1944 for best original story for Lifeboat, Steinbeck was never madder at any of his screen adaptations. Alfred Hitchcock and John Steinbeck were a strange choice for collaboration. Hitchcock, the auteur and master of suspense. Steinbeck, the proletarian and realist. Whereas Steinbeck's characters worried if they had food enough to eat, Hitchcock's characters debated about which restaurant to eat at, with one of the considerations being how to avoid being poisoned.

Steinbeck's unpublished manuscript for Lifeboat, which you need to make an appointment to read at one of the few Steinbeck research centers in the country, at first glance isn't extremely different than what Hitchcock created on the screen, but it is different enough. Donald Spoto, in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, recounts what Hitchcock and company did to Steinbeck's work:

The difficulties of realizing a script for Lifeboat were considerable. John Steinbeck, who thought that Hitchcock's obsession with a single set inhibited the drama, left the project after sketching a few scenes and a prose summary. MacKinlay Kantor was then brought in, but Hitchcock was disappointed with him and asked Macgowan to let him go. Finally Jo Swerling, who had crafted several scripts for other directors, worked on the screenplay until mid-July; but just before shooting began that month, Hitchcock, working alone at home, rewrote all the dialogue himself. He then asked Ben Hecht to read the script and to make some suggestions about the final scenes, as Hecht had done for Foreign Correspondents.

Robert E. Morseberger wrote in Film Quarterly that the result was "an uneven conglomeration of Hitchcock suspense, Steinbeck philosophy, and Swerling situation and dialogue." Among other things like racism and snobbery, Steinbeck "objected to the way in which Swerling had removed his gritty realism and replaced it with slick and implausible details."

Lifeboat tells the grim tale of survivors from a bombed Allied freighter trying to survive at sea while World War II rages. On board the lifeboat in the movie are a reporter, a union worker from Chicago, a millionaire, a seaman, a British radio operator, a nurse, a Negro steward, and an English woman with her dead baby. In many ways they are a microcosm of humanity, and when they pick up an enemy from the German submarine that bombed them, the group has to decide what to do with him. Lifeboat is about survival, but it is also a study of how society reacts when the enemy has become vulnerable. For some unnamed reason, union worker Albert Shienkowitz wants to throw the German overboard immediately. Others are mistakenly more trustworthy. In the movie the German becomes the pilot, and even helps by performing an operation to save one of the passengers. But he has secret plans, and when he is found out the others in the lifeboat get rid of him. Though factitious, humanity has bonded to protect themselves on the unpredictable ocean.

Steinbeck could write a story about survival at sea. Hitchcock could direct a film with an enemy aboard the lifeboat. Both men show their mastery in revealing the nuances of society despite the harsh conditions—there are rivalries, romances, and relationships—but they are each the victim of their own situation. Hitchcock, who had seen his native England heavily air bombed by Germans, directed a film without a cry for the end of the war, as in Steinbeck's story; instead it was a stronger justification for the war effort. Steinbeck may have been more sympathetic because he was farther away from the war in America, he was German-Irish, and he generally had a better opinion of people than Hitchcock. Lifeboat was written before Steinbeck went on to cover the war as a reporter in Europe.

So Steinbeck wrote a different Lifeboat. He used a narrator to tell his anti-war story; the action is also less restricted to what was occurring on the boat, something which Hitchcock was particularly interested in exploring. In Steinbeck's novella the outer world is as important as the human drama on the boat:

The dawn comes sneaking up in a fog at sea. First everything is black and then it's like a little white colored been mixed in like pouring cream in coffee. First you can't see anything and then before you know it you can pick out a few little outlines and then gradually the darkness thins out against the light so you can see things.

Porpoises swim by in Steinbeck's work. The survivors are impressed by the night sky. And like always, Steinbeck shows his concern for working people (who in this case were shuffled out into the war). Steinbeck wrote about how people could be pushed to violence, but in the unpublished novella the reporter is a possessive Congresswoman and also a victim of the anger of the crew. Ironically, the perpetrator is the man chosen to captain the ship, an industrialist who forgot to tie down the food which is lost overboard.

Steinbeck's Lifeboat, though mainly about the war, also falls into the popular tradition of stories about survival at sea, and could find a welcome spot on the book shelf next to Steinbeck's other ocean-related works: Cup of Gold, The Log of the Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, The Pearl, and The Winter of Our Discontent. Steinbeck wrote social commentary, comedies and philosophical treatise about the sea and its neighbors, and with Lifeboat he adds an adventure story. In fact, if Steinbeck's novella were to appear in book form it might remind people of Steinbeck's ocean writing, which is generally either overlooked or considered mostly humorous by editors of ocean-writing anthologies.

A.C. Spectorsky in The Book of the Sea (1954), for example, points out that "Those familiar with his marine descriptions in such books as The Sea of Cortez may, in their delight with the ribald humor of Cannery Row, have slipped by its brief opening section on the character of a tidal pool, the finest piece of writing on a marine subject which Steinbeck has ever done." In American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology (2000), editor Peter Neill also focuses on Steinbeck's "keen-eyed, funny, and casually philosophical narrative, from which the excerpt below is taken." And most collections of ocean writing do not even represent him. Nature Writing anthologizer John A. Murray does not include Steinbeck in either The Seacoast Reader or A Thousand Leagues of Blue: The Sierra Club Book of the Pacific: A Literary Voyage. Nor is Steinbeck anthologized in either The Oxford Book of the Sea, edited by Jonathan Raban or The Oxford Book of Sea Stories, edited by Tony Tanner. Ditto The Norton Book of The Sea, edited by John O. Coote. Sections of Lifeboat, though not Steinbeck's other ocean writing, could be but is not included in Rough Water: Stories of Survival from the Sea, edited by Clint Willis.

In any event, Lifeboat is certainly not "funny," "casual" or "ribald." Steinbeck in many ways took a different stand on the ocean. It should not be forgotten that he wrote at a time when science was becoming more prominent, and he was part of the forces that help shape the beginnings of modern environmentalism. Unlike Ernest Hemingway, who was a fisherman and hunter, Steinbeck the fisherman was also a budding marine conservationist. Joel W. Hedgepeth, in "John Steinbeck: Late Blooming Environmentalist" concludes that Steinbeck's most sophisticated thinking about the environment was in his later works, especially America and Americans. Warren French, in "How Green Was John Steinbeck?" wrote that "Steinbeck was wise to avoid commitments; his problems began when he made them. If in this context one asks, 'How "green" was John Steinbeck?' the answer is 'not very, and a good thing, too.'" But as French also points out, "Steinbeck's writings demonstrate that one's head is not always where one's heart is." His heart was with the sea. It was a lifelong interest. Steinbeck wrote in an article for Popular Science that "The Sea... offered us immense opportunities, not only to feed the hungry and to provide scarce minerals, but also to learn about our as-yet-unexplored planet and ourselves." Thus it is also worthwhile to ask: How "blue," in the sense of caring about the ocean, was John Steinbeck?

In nonfiction, Steinbeck complained directly about the harm that was occurring to the environment in such books as The Log of the Sea of Cortez, Travels with Charley and America and Americans. But the warning is also in his fiction; those who harm or exploit the sea pay the price in Steinbeck's work, a pattern which can be gleaned from the storylines and settings. For the buccaneer Henry Morgan in Cup of Gold, the ocean was a waste of time. As John Ditsky writes in "Cannery Row: Passageway in the Heart": "Steinbeck was showing the futility of Henry Morgan's piracies, a life-course that followed leaving behind a true ideal in a pursuit of an illusive and false one."

Doc, like the sea creatures he studies, is also under the microscope in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Much of the community in the latter is destitute because the ocean, after the demise of the fishery stocks, has failed to provide. Strangely, Doc, the worldly humanitarian and marine scientist, isn't trying to find a solution—he is too busy drinking, fornicating, and performing other civic duties. Mack and the Boys, the members of society that the Cannery Row community can no longer support, represent the community's anger towards him. Doc may be the non-teleological hero (as Susan Shillinglaw has observed), but he is hardly what French and others are looking for in Steinbeck's fiction—a "model and inspiration for an ecologically oriented political agenda"—and he pays the price in a number of ways.

The family in The Pearl lose their child because robbers try to steal the valuable "Pearl of the World" from them. "For centuries men had dived down and torn the oysters from the beds and ripped them open…But the pearls were accidents, and the finding of one was luck, a little pat on the back by God or the gods or both." Maybe Kino should have settled for the lower price, which was more money than he had ever seen, as his brother and wife suggest, for something that was "ripped" and "torn" from the sea.

The residents of Bay Town, similar to the residents of Cannery Row, never really recover from the loss of the whaling industry in The Winter of Our Discontent. The Hawleys are left to flounder in the aftermath when whaling oil ceases to be a commodity: "There was a time when a few towns like New Baytown furnished the whale oil that lighted the Western World. Student lamps of Oxford and Cambridge drew fuel from this American outpost. And then petroleum, rock oil gushed out in Pennsylvania and cheap kerosene, called coal oil, took the place of whale oil and retired most of the sea hunters. Sickness or the despair fell on New Baytown-perhaps an attitude from which it did not recover." The ocean in Steinbeck's fiction, like the real ocean, can be hurt or superseded. It can stop providing, and whole communities which exploited it in the past can suffer as the result.

Steinbeck is probably not very known for his ocean writing because it appears in his less-famous and less-critically acclaimed books. The Log of the Sea of Cortez was sneered at on the East Coast. Cannery Row was written to entertain the troops and Sweet Thursday was a follow up in a similar vein. The latter two are considered by Millichap to be part of Steinbeck's literary decline, which produced works that were palatable for the uncritical masses, designed for adaptation to the big screen. These works fall low on the list of the Steinbeck books that should be read, behind the photographic and realistic early works of the 1930's (The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men), East of Eden, and in this light, the exception: The Pearl. For those who were not appreciative of Steinbeck, or for those who think we need only be responsible for only the most famous books of even the great writers, Steinbeck's ocean writing fell among, in a word, his "Steinblechhh." But in a different light, rather than being considered failures, one can view his later works as satisfying the desires of other markets, even if the critics didn't approve. Californians and marine scientists are fond of his ocean writing to this day.

But did Steinbeck ever satisfy those who wanted an exciting adventure or a riveting tale about survival at sea? In "Flight" he did. The Grapes of Wrath is sort of an adventure. Cup of Gold is fun if not exciting, and Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday are light entertainment about those funny people who live by the ocean. The Pearl and The Winter of Our Discontent, though they explore our relationship with the ocean and remind that it may cease to provide, are really moral tales. The Log of the Sea of Cortez offers humor, science, and food for thought for the philosophers. Thus Steinbeck's published ocean writing has given us wonder, humor, moral responsibility, exploration, enlightenment, and a warning. The novella Lifeboat rounds out Steinbeck's ocean works with an argument against the stupidity of war set amidst an exciting tale about the sea—which, as Steinbeck had to learn personally, doesn't always provide.

Bibliography:

Beegel, Susan F., Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., eds. Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Benson, Jackson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.

Coote, John O. The Norton Book of the Sea. New York: Norton, 1989.

Day, A. Grove, and Carl Stroven. Best South Sea Stories. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing of Honolulu, 1964.

Ditsky, John. "Cannery Row: Passageway in the Heart." The Steinbeck Newsletter, Spring 1999, p. 5-8.

French, Warren. "How Green Was John Steinbeck?" In Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., [Missing page numbers]. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Hedgpeth, Joel W. "John Steinbeck: Late-Blooming Environmentalist." In Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., [Missing page numbers]. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Hemingway, Ernest. Hemingway on Fishing, Edited by Nick Lyons. New York: Lyons Press, 2000.

Millichap, Joseph R. Steinbeck and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983.

Morseberger, Robert E. "Adrift in Steinbeck's Lifeboat," Film Quarterly 4 (1976): [missing page numbers].

Morseberger, Robert E., ed. John Steinbeck: Zapata. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Murray, John A. (editor). A Thousand Leagues of Blues: The Sierra Club Book Of The Pacific: A Literary Voyage. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1993.

Murray, John A., ed. A Thousand Leagues of Blues: The Sierra Club Book Of The Pacific: A Literary Voyage. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1993.

Neill, Peter, ed. American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology. New York: The Library of America, 2000.

Raban, the Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jonathan, ed. The Oxford Book of

Shillinglaw, Susan. Introduction to Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Spectorsky, A.C. The Book of the Sea. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1954.

Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine, 1983.

Steinbeck, John. A Life in Letters, eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1975.

---. Once There Was a War. New York: Viking, 1958.

---. Cup of Gold. New York: Penguin, 1929.

---. Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row. New York: Penguin, 1978.

---. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Penguin, 1977.

---. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947.

---. Sweet Thursday. New York: Viking, 1954.

---. The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking, 1961.

Tanner, Tony, ed. The Oxford Book of Sea Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Willis, Clint, ed. Rough Water: Stories of Survival from the Sea. New York: Adrenaline, 1999.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

by Jon Carlson

Jane Bowles was an American author of surpassing qualities, although her modest oeuvre remains well outside the consciousness of the general reading public, particularly in the United States. Best known for her novel Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943, she also wrote a number of notable short stories, including "Guatemalan Idyll," "A Stick of Green Candy," and "Tea on the Mountain," as well as the play In the Summer House. These were reissued in the collection entitled My Sister's Hand in Mine, which included a laudatory introduction by Truman Capote, who cited her "... subtlest comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness." Other luminaries have praised her writings: Tennessee Williams called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters," and John Ashbery found her to be "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language."

Her work was, in Williams's words, "the heart of her life." And Jane's life—animated and exotic, even quixotic—reached and resonated well beyond perceived limits imposed by borders and conventions. Not incidentally, it presaged by a generation the struggle of Western women towards a less-fettered psychology.

With her humor, linguistic abilities (she was fluent in several languages), skill at mimicry and genuine bonhomie, she and husband Paul Bowles were indispensable invitees on the guest lists of the New York art cognoscenti during the 1940s. After the Bowleses moved to Tangier, they found themselves the cynosure of the city's international community throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As Gore Vidal wrote: "Although unknown to the general public, the Bowleses were famous among those who were famous; and in some mysterious way the art-grandees wanted, if not the admiration of the Bowleses (seldom bestowed), their tolerance."

Despite Jane Bowles's relative obscurity, the unique aesthetic sensibility she brought to her life and work has continued to attract a small but steadfast following.

Jane Bowles moved from New York to Tangier in 1948, where she lived with Paul. After a prolonged illness that began with her first stroke in 1957, she was admitted to a hospital in central Málaga in 1967 and was sent the following year to the city's Clínica de Reposa de Los Angeles. She made a brief return to Tangier, then came back to the clinic in 1969, where she remained until her death on 4 May, 1973.

The day after she died she was buried in San Miguel Cemetery in an earthen plot identified only by a wooden shingle.

During the 1980s and 1990s, concern arose in Málaga that the graveyard where Jane Bowles and others were buried was going to be converted to a freeway. Families in Spain must prepay fees in order to obtain a long-term lease for the burial plot or niche of the deceased; otherwise, the remains eventually are removed, and reinterred in a new, common grave. Paul Bowles, living in Tangier, had paid for a lease on Jane's burial plot only for a period of ten years. He was not enamored with the elaborate rituals and memorials associated with religious institutions. Neither his background nor temperament disposed him to believe in a supreme being or a hereafter. And he did not favor a marker for her grave. From Millicent Dillon's You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles:

"But, Paul, a lot of people will want to come to her grave," Virginia [Sorensen Waugh] protested gently.

"That's nonsense," he insisted coldly. "The marker would be a symbol that someone is there. But she was never there. Only the body is there. We have not progressed from savagery," he added. Then, in a strange transition he told an amusing and terrifying story of a man who drank a cocktail into which had been mixed the ashes of a corpse.

So it was not surprising he failed to maintain her gravesite beyond the initial ten-year period. Perhaps another reason for Paul's indifference was the issue of Jane's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism (which permitted her burial in a Catholic cemetery). Whether Jane was compos mentis at the time is subject to dispute. Though Paul had consented to the conversion, he remained convinced that it was done under the nuns' duress.

Unless someone was willing to fund a grave for Jane, her remains eventually would be consigned to a common burial site, thereafter untraceable.

It happened that a year ago I was traveling to Málaga during the city's August feria in order to attend the bullfights. The trip presented an opportunity to see if the uncertainty surrounding the disposition of her remains had been resolved and in what manner.

Before I left for Spain, I knew Jane Bowles was buried in San Miguel Cemetery. Previous visitors, however, didn't perhaps share this advantage. In his book, The Tangier Diaries, 1962-1979, John Hopkins described the difficulty ascertaining which cemetery Bowles was interred in when he and Joe McPhillips, both good friends of Jane's, went to pay homage a year after her death. In Málaga they had called the Clínica de Reposa, and a sister directed them to San Rafael Cemetery. They searched there in vain before deciding to make their way over to San Miguel. Others over the years have experienced the same problem, but nevertheless took the trouble to find the gravesite of this writer, whose spirit has maintained a strange hold on her admirers' subconscious. I thought of the beginning of Millicent Dillon's biography of Jane Bowles, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, wherein she related how she dreamed of Jane's grave ("The stone that marked it was white under an intense sun in an unclouded sky.") prior to her first trip to Tangier. And in Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles, Cherie Nutting recounted how she "... didn't want to meet Paul without first paying tribute to Jane." When she finally managed to find Jane's grave, "A wind blew out of nowhere—the earth trembled—my head began to swim, and in 'another kind of silence' Jane talked to me and I felt her power."

Locating San Miguel is not terribly complicated, but it required about twenty-five minutes when I made the trek on foot. From the Alcazaba, a Moorish fortress situated in the older part of the city, I headed up Alcazabilla, a street that runs alongside the grounds surrounding the Alcazaba until it joins Victoria, then continued north to the Plaza de la Victoria. At the Plaza, I veered left over to Calle Cristo de la Epidemia and went north up to the Plaza de Olletas, which is next to a busy gasoline station. I then turned left onto Alameda de Capuchinos and continued walking for four blocks until the Alameda Patronimo. I proceeded to the Plaza del Patronimo, which leads directly into San Miguel Cemetery.

Adjacent to the cemetery entrance was a small office with an assistant. When I asked him for directions to Bowles's gravesite, he asked me for her date of death, which I provided. He pulled one of the ledgers from the wall and flipped through a few pages before arriving at the one that confirmed her name (misspelled as "Bonles") and grave number, 453-F. To find its exact whereabouts, he suggested I speak with one of the matrons tending the cemetery chapel.

Past the front gate the chapel lay about 200 meters directly ahead, a pleasant walk amidst the cypress, juniper and orange trees flanked by simple graves marked with headstones, impressive stone tombs and mausoleums. Above-ground sepulchres, known as nichos, appeared as a wall of concrete squares, each a burial niche containing someone's remains.

Looking for help, I spotted a priest and asked if I might speak with him. When I inquired about the location of Jane Bowles's grave he appeared incredulous. "¡Jane Bowles! ¡Soy gran admirador de Jane Bowles!" His name was Padre José. Equally surprised, I introduced myself, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries he led me along the front side of the chapel to a padlocked door, which he unlocked and entered.

We were in a large rectangular room that served as his living quarters. At one end there was a simple writing desk; at the other, a variety of relics was clustered. A prayer stand and chair were located in the middle of the room. A bed hugged the wall on the side directly across from the entrance, and next to the bed was a long cloth-covered table that served as Padre José's personal shrine to Jane Bowles. A votive candle had been placed in front of two photos and a piece of paper taped to the wall directly above the table. The sheet to the left contained the birth and death dates of the Bowleses, printed by hand. In the middle was a xeroxed photo of Jane's face along with strands of her hair encased in plastic. To the right was another xeroxed photo of the Bowleses together.

"How beautiful was Jane!" exclaimed Padre José, gazing at the photos. "¡Mira!" he said, and brought forth the Spanish translation of Millicent Dillon's biography. He went to the rear of the book, smiled and nodded his head as he pointed to the partial inclusion of Paul Bowles's poem "Next to Nothing." And he told me how much he enjoyed Jane's Two Serious Ladies and Plain Pleasures, a collection of her stories.

I spent a few more minutes examining the shrine and snapping photos when Padre José suggested we visit Jane Bowles's grave. Unaware of whether she had been reburied, I didn't know what to expect. We walked out past the front of the chapel, which he entered briefly to glance at those kneeling in prayer, then turned onto a cobblestone path and headed towards the front of the cemetery. Near the end of the path he stopped and pointed to an edifice about four-feet high, constructed from small stones and cement, atop of which a smooth stone slab was mounted. It read:

Malaga A

Jane Bowles 1917-1973

At the base of the tomb stood two candles astride an empty vase filled with wilted flowers. On the tomb's front was a small, greenish tile with a phrase etched in a scrawling hand:

Hommage
A Serious Lady

In the lower right hand corner were the letter and number identifying the tomb.

I took a few photos of Padre José praying next to the tomb.

Padre José said that Jane's new grave, established through the efforts of the municipality of Málaga and the Association of Friends of San Miguel Cemetery, had been unveiled mid-October, 1999. Afterwards, he added secretively, "But in the evening she moves all over the cemetery, and I am here to watch over her."

I bid good-bye to Padre José, as I needed to return to my hotel prior to the evening's bullfight. Before I left he said, "Come back during your stay in Málaga and I will take you to Jane's old grave."

I returned to San Miguel two days later. Padre José spotted me walking towards Bowles's tomb, waved and disappeared. A few minutes later, he struggled towards me in his brown sackcloth, breathing heavily in the heat, carrying fresh flowers and a watering can. After arranging the flowers and lighting the candles, he stepped aside so that I could take photos. But I motioned him back over to the tomb, and he stood next to it, solemnly, as I took a picture. I suggested another, and this time he dropped to his knees and immediately began to pray.

Soon thereafter, the padre led me to the edge of the main cemetery where we came upon a small portal covered by rusted wire fencing. He pushed it aside and we lowered ourselves onto a cement path and wended our way around and down the sinuous route until we approached a spot shaded by cypresses. When we came up to it, the padre spread his arms wide to indicate where Bowles's plot had lain.

"Only a small wooden cross and a piece of wood with a number marked her grave," the padre said.

And that scant designation had made it difficult for visitors to locate. For Hopkins and McPhillips in 1974 there wasn't even a cross, and they finally needed one of the gardeners to lead them to the site. Hopkins's description: "...Jane Bowles's unmarked grave ... had become the refuse dump of broken flower pots and dead stalks cast aside by the assiduous ladies in black." What Dillion found in 1977 was far different than the white stone she had dreamed of: " ... an unmarked space ... was covered with rubble, old flowers from other graves, broken glass, pieces of plastic and paper."

Returning uphill, Padre José smiled and pointed to where he would be buried when he died. He revealed that he was the one who carried Bowles's remains to their permanent resting place. "Cráneo muy grande," he uttered softly, and showed me how he had cradled her skull in his arms. The rest of her bones were in fragments and carried in a box, which the padre said were entombed with a white shirt or chemise, black dress and black shoes.

I realized then how the padre had acquired the snippets of Jane's hair for his shrine.

Much later I reread an entry in a Paul Bowles journal from the late '80s: "[Alice B.] Toklas openly embraced the Roman Catholic faith in her late years. Is this regression?"

The journey of Jane Bowles's remains within San Miguel Cemetery was marked by improbability. Yet given the unorthodox lives of the Bowleses, this should not be entirely unexpected in death. Perhaps it was not surprising to learn that when Paul Bowles died, scarcely a month after Jane's grave was unveiled, his body remained on a grounded Royal Air Maroc plane for a day while a strike was being resolved. A full account of the byzantine events leading to Jane's final interment shall be reserved for another time. For now, it is enough that, owing to the good offices of Málaga and the Association of Friends of San Miguel Cemetery, Jane Bowles's remains are forever secure-even if her spirit occasionally is squired around the grounds by the estimable Padre José.

Select Bibliography

Bowles, Paul. Days: Tangier Journal: 1987-1989. New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1991.

Capote, Truman. Introduction to My Sister's Hand in Mine, by Jane Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Dillon, Millicent. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Hopkins, John. The Tangier Diaries, 1962-1979. San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 1998.

---. A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

---. "Keeper of the Flame." The New Yorker January 27, 1997 27-28.

Nutting, Cherie, and Paul Bowles. Yesterday's Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2000.

Skerl, Jennie. "Sallies into the Outside World: A Literary History of Jane Bowles." A Tawdry Place of Salvation, edited by Jennie Skerl, [Missing page numbers]. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

Vidal, Gore. Introduction to Collected Stories 1939-1976, by Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979.

Williams, Tennessee. Introduction to Feminine Wiles by Jane Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

photographs © 2001 Jon Carlson

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

Andrew Schelling is a poet, translator, and essayist. At Naropa University, where he served as Chair of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from 1993-1996, he teaches poetry, Sanskrit, and wilderness writing. His most recent book of poems, Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry (Talisman, 2001) brings writings from six earlier books together with previously unpublished work . Other titles include Old Growth: Poems & Notebooks 1986-1994, The India Book: Essays and Translations from Indian Asia, The Road to Ocosingo, and The Cane Groves of Narmada River. Schelling received the Academy of American Poets award for translation in 1992, and in 1996 and 2001 he received Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry grants. Next year La Alameda Press will publish Wild Form, Savage Grammar, a collection of essays on ecology, poetry, Asian studies, and small press publishing.

Shin Yu Pai: How did your interest in translating Indian literature come about?

Andrew Schelling: I grew up close to Concord, Massachusetts. As a child I circumambulated Walden Pond hundreds of times, visited the Thoreau cabin site, and tossed pilgrim stones on the heap started by Bronson Alcott. I developed a deep but unschooled excitement around the Transcendentalist presence in New England's conifer forests and ancient granite outcroppings. You could say I breathed the air of Thoreau and Emerson, who had turned with profound excitement to India's literature. Did you know that at one time Thoreau owned the largest collection of Sanskrit books in this country?

Though official USA government concern with India was pretty muted until India set off a nuclear bomb a few years ago, the counterculture of the 60s—the backdrop to my early life—brought a large and confounding array of things Indic to America. Yoga, incense, paisley patterns, animal-headed goddesses, exquisite music and complex philosophies. Why did India catch on so splendidly outside official culture? There must be a hidden truth in the mistake those 15th-century Europeans made—when their ships bumped up on this continent and they thought they'd gotten to India. That the indigenous people are still called Indians fascinates me. Only in the mind of art does it make sense I suppose.

But I got interested in yoga early on. I heard Ravi Shankar on his 1965 tour to America, and a copy of the Upanishads I found browsing a used bookshop took my breath away. I decided to fulfill my language requirement in college by studying Sanskrit. This was at the University of Rochester in 1971. The Sanskrit class, taught by a lovely Indian gentleman, got cancelled after my first semester. I only discovered years later the reason: federal interest shifted from India to China as the hot spot in Asia. Henry Kissinger made his secret trip to China that year, and American foreign policy changed its focus. The Nixon White House decided China was where it was at, a market of a billion people for Coca-Cola and American grain. So the Indic programs lost financial support. All my friends who were studying Chinese, however, got their ways paid the whole way: trips to Beijing and Taipei, graduate school stipends, jobs in East Asia, offers from the CIA. India mostly held on in America in the subterranean or alternative mind. Which is a place I like to dwell.

I first got resolute about Sanskrit in order to dig deeply into Buddhist and Hindu writings. By the time I studied the language in earnest at Berkeley—1978 to '79—I was already writing poetry. Then almost by accident I happened on a splendid poetry tradition, virtually unknown in the West, lying dormant in the massive old anthologies of Sanskrit. Of the planet's classical traditions India's had been astonishingly neglected. So I set up camp, and now it's been twenty years crouched over banana leaf texts.

SP: Where do you find your source texts? Are they readily available?

AS: Finding the books is always hard. The Rocky Mountain Front Range has no library with even minimal holdings. At Naropa we're slowly building at least a reference library for Sanskrit and Tibetan, but good poetry material is all but unavailable. Generally I travel to Berkeley when I need to do research. A few book dealers in India have been enormously helpful, and they can now ship books air express so I don't need to wait four months for the cargo boat to arrive.

SP: How much of ancient Indian literature remains untranslated?

AS: Most of it has never been translated. There is also quite a bit that has been lost or destroyed over the centuries. Everyone hopes more will emerge, but who knows where it will be found. Do you know a team of Japanese scholars just discovered a Sanskrit copy of the Vimalakirti Sutra in Tibet? I think scholars have a pretty good idea of the best surviving poetry and drama, so some of it has been translated. But translation got off to a rough start. Certain key works got translated into very poor Victorian verse and prose in the 19th century by the British. These colonists frequently could not disguise their disdain for the material. But there is much, much more—I'm talking about the range of Indian literature, not just high art poetry—a stunning amount of mythological material, philosophy, religious poetry, gnomic literature, weird Tantric texts, Buddhist sutras, and so on. This material occurs in many languages, covering several major linguistic families. Not to mention the tribal languages. India is the cradle of storytelling, as Kipling knew, and that impulse continues today.

SP: Is the predominant mood/tone/rasa that you prefer to work in the erotic mode? What are the texts that you are most drawn to translating?

AS: First I want to make a distinction between verse and poetry. Old Indian literature almost all occurred in verse since writing was never widespread. India developed a sophisticated oral culture with sophisticated techniques for conserving important material. Verse is one of the foremost of those techniques—hammer it into shloka form (a prevalent thirty-two syllable pattern). Mathematics, philosophy, medicine—all are likely to appear in verse. Poetry—high art poetry I guess you could call it—is something else, and uses innumerable techniques other than verse structure. I'm drawn to terms like the controversial Sanskrit sandhya-bhasha, "twilight speech." There's a comparable term used for Kabir's work, ulatbamshi, "upside down speech." The implication is that poetic language works in complex, a-logical ways. It's hidden in shadows, it's night-time language, it's speech inverted, it uses sound and sense in unpredictable ways. There's nothing new in this—think of Paul Celan, or Robert Johnson. Emily Dickinson said "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Every culture knows that poetic language is ordinary speech heightened, polished, slanted, crafted, inverted.

India's classical poetry (kavya), which probably derived from an early ritual theater, worked explicitly with rasas, or emotional flavors. John Cage called them the permanent emotions. The erotic (sringara) was considered the most important in India. A poet had to work with all eight or nine rasas, which include humor, pathos, fear, astonishment, and so on. But the tradition took the erotic as paramount.

SP: In the essay "Manuscript Fragments and Eco-Guardians: Translating Sanskrit Poetry" you speak of handbooks which ancient poets referred to. These texts covered rules of grammar, metrics, and even natural history. Do you have access to any of these handbooks, and do you consult any texts as supplemental sources when translating?

AS: The poetics handbooks, or grammars (I call them grimoires) were abundant. Don't think of them as grammars like we think of the word today. They were handbooks for poetic training. Some were yoga texts, regarding poetry as a spiritual discipline. A few are quite famous. I have copies of some of the better known Sanskrit ones, ranging from simple accounts of how a poet should organize his or her day around writing and lovemaking, to massive speculative works that are in fact metaphysical treatises. There are hair-splitting compilations of rules, how one applies figures of speech, metrical patterns, and so forth. Luckily most are written by poets or formidable Tantric philosophers so they remain pretty interesting. Some of their verses are themselves compelling poetry.

One inadvertent gift of certain handbooks is they contain excellent poems lost elsewhere. You know how so much Sappho survived only in the Greek grammar books? Just a half a line, or an odd word somebody cited as an example of brilliant usage. It's similar in India. The 11th-century Jain scholar Hemachandra compiled a book in which he recorded weird vocabulary that had entered Sanskrit from indigenous sources. He saved a number of fine poems from oblivion by citing them in his grammar.

SP: In your preface to "Isha Upanishad," from The India Book (1993), you comment on the process of translating these sacred texts, the contrariness of these verses—"their wild and archaic method of thinking in-verse, founded on sharp metrical changes and a fresh and savage grammar." Your forthcoming book, Wild Form, Savage Grammar references back to your work with Sanskrit language. How has the practice of translating Indian texts informed your practice as a writer?

AS: Henry David Thoreau in his essay "Walking" notes an old Spanish term, grammatica parda. He translates it as tawny grammar, and almost single-handedly tries to invent a wilderness ethos lying in language. He would have been the first American to articulate how language—poetry in particular—is akin not just to culture and civilization, but to wild nature and wilderness. So savage grammar is a notion I took from him. It's the call of the wild you hear in fresh, innovative uses of language. Of grammar.

Forget grammar as the rigid rules of a legal code. Forget grammar as something drilled into children in school. Think of grammar as "grimoire," that old word that signifies a collection of spells and incantations, songs for love, songs for liberation, songs of animal fertility and the fecund soil. The more I study ecology, and the closer I look into languages, the more parallels I see. Grammar would be the ecology of language.

At this point in history we know how imperiled the biosphere is, with all its diverse ecologies. We know that species who have traveled along with us humans for millions of years on the great journey are being snuffed out at an unprecedented rate. How do we stop this? Well, humans need to learn the grammars of the various eco-zones, watersheds, and bioregions.

This stuff—it's now called natural history—makes a surprisingly sensible appearance in the old grammars of India. Guidelines for poetic composition include identifying particular eco-systems with the flora and faun they hold, the weather patterns, the geography and so on. In other words, the belief was that to write poetry you had to know the basics of ecology.

SP: Are there many other translators working on Sanskrit poetry?

AS: Weirdly, almost nobody is seriously working with it. A few scholars have done important work and provided good translations. Barbara Miller, who taught at Barnard, was one of the important few. Her translations, especially of Bhartrihari and Jayadeva, have been heartening and instructive for me. No accomplished American poets however—or even European except the French writer René Daumal-have taken up Sanskrit and its related vernaculars. Compare this with the dozens of fine poets who have devoted generous years to Chinese and Japanese studies, from Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth to Gary Snyder, Cid Corman, Jane Hirshfield, Arthur Sze, David Hinton, and younger writers including yourself.

You couldn't imagine American poetry at this point in time without the examples of East Asia. The influence of Imagism, the sage voice of personal experience that characterizes T'ang Dynasty poets like Tu Fu and Li Po, the notion of a poetry stripped of rhetorical embellishments. And of course the prevalent popularity of haiku which has spawned clubs throughout North America. By contrast how much has American poetry learnt from India's old traditions? There remains something deliciously archaic and underground about its influence. All I have tried to do is bring a candle into the shadows. I'd say my fellow workers are really not the scholars but the singers—who carry the vernacular traditions of Mirabai, Surdas, Kabir, and Tagore into the music hall.

SP: Which projects are nearest to your heart? Does translation come first to you as a writer or do you spend equal time on your own prose and poetry?

AS: I think of my work as having three specific forms: poetry, essays, translations. The poetry comes out of notebooks I'm incessantly keeping. Essays and translations are generally site-specific projects. With poetry I never quite know what's going to happen, when or how it's going to begin, what the ultimate shape will look like. Sometimes essays occur that way too. But translation is a deliberately conceived project. Ron Padgett has an amusing take on translation in one of his essays—he says it's like doing homework. Well, that's a bit stodgy since there's so much I find unpredictable in the task, but he's hit on an element of truth—the methodical nature of it. It may make a difference how old the work is, and how distant the culture. I feel I need to create in the imagination an entire civilization in order to translate from ancient India.

But don't you need to create a whole civilization in order to write a contemporary poem?

SP: I have been thinking about the concept of time in your writing, timelessness, and also of a concept you commented upon in your essay about Sanskrit poetry as an almanac. It becomes very interesting to me that you should lift so much of your writing directly out of the notebook, or journal form, which I think of as having a documentary sort of quality in terms of time, the way everything unfolds in real time.

AS: I do most of my writing into a journal, and like to keep the final work close to that form. There's a rough intimacy you get from keeping the poem close to the moment and place of its birth. You get to keep the roots on, a bit of the dirt too. Things happen in real time as you say—everything can enter. Daily observations, items from the news, meditations on love or poetry, things the children say. I think of the journal as the great open form. The way Basho and other Japanese writers sculpted it into a balance of prose and verse is my model—things enter into relation with each other because of the interdependence of things. Today's account of fighting in Afghanistan, listening to Arundhati Roy on the BBC, helping my daughter prepare for her school play Alice in Wonderland, paying the electricity bill, and working to protect the Arkansas River watershed. They are all connected—they better be!—otherwise we'll collapse into schizophrenia. Buddhists call the interconnection and necessary involvement of things with each other pratitya-samutpada: the co-arising and interconnectedness of critters, inanimate objects, thought forms, and so on. It's really an ecological vision.

SP: Your poems often take a precise, short verse form, zooming in on one aspect of a narrative. What was the experience of writing the longer, sustained poem "Claw Moraine" like?

AS: My temperament seems to be to work in short forms, and then to link them together when I want to create a larger work or get a wider scope. I cut my teeth on poetry in California in the 70s and 80s. One possibility on the innovative writing scene, which people were looking at closely, was the serial poem. Not just the Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer set who kind of figured out the notion. George Oppen was there—a craggy presence—and he would notoriously piece together short poems into rugged philosophic sequences. There were also the marvelous wacky notebook cut-up-and-paste-into-elegant-shape excursions by Phil Whalen. And I always had the example of the beloved Sanskrit poets who'd been dead and gone for a thousand years. Those folk worked similarly—short poems which could get strung together to create a series of multiple dimensions and textures, and which defied conventional narrative structure.

"Claw Moraine" came out of notebooks kept on a trip into the Solu-Khumbu district of Nepal's Himalayan outback in 1986. It was my first sustained sequence poem, and I worked it up when I got back to Berkeley. It is comprised of twenty-five brief poems strung together as a mala or necklace. The poems were meant to be tough and unyielding, like the high altitude terrain where I wrote them. Now, I write all my poetry by stealing bits and pieces of things at hand, and fitting the fragments into distinct shapes. Since there is no one so good to steal from as oneself, this means I need to fill up notebooks to plunder. And notebook entries are notoriously fragmented—maybe unfettered and full of chance encounters with the outside world would be a better way to say it. Closer to life than art.

Notebooks are sharpest, most vivid and most intriguing when kept on the hoof. I cannot imagine a life of writing poetry that confines me to a desk indoors. I need my faculties working—my legs, my eyes, my lungs. These days I don't get much chance to "wander the dusty countries" like India or Nepal, so I've turned to local eco-zones and watersheds of the Southern Rocky Mountains as sites where I can dig into the writing. At this point the natural history journal is a salient model, or even the mountaineer's logbook. Joanne Kyger has taught me a great deal in this regard.

The other form that intrigues me is haibun—the Japanese form (also famously derived from notebook jottings) which balances a terse observational prose with short haiku-like lyric. These get arranged so they resonate in curious ways, not unlike the serial poem. Sei Shonagon, the 11th-century Japanese lady famous for her Pillow Book, is my favorite. What an eye she had for natural history and human behavior! She could name and describe hundreds of botanical species, then pin her companions with an anthropologist's eye. In Japan school children still use her writing as a model of clean, vigorous style.

SP: Your personal interests seem to tend towards a preference for ancient literature and literary forms. In Tea Shack Interior, there are translations of ancient Sanskrit poetry, an entire section devoted to haibun, and a lovely poem, "Little Songs of Love and Wine," versions from the Anacreontea, a classical Greek text. So much of this work concerns itself with ancient themes—love, eros, death—themes that never lose their relevance. At the same time you teach at one of the most non-traditional writing programs in America, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. How do contemporary poetics inform your own sensibilities and practice as a poet?

What are your general literary interests?

AS: "All times are contemporaneous in the mind." Ezra Pound wrote that. As a poet you imagine all writers are your contemporaries. So you're right: the ancient themes and archaic writers stay near my heart. Translating old verse keeps their words and minds vivid—"the snake-like movements of syntax. "

At the Kerouac School the curriculum consciously folds the past into the present and the present into the past. How can we live without all the generations behind and ahead? Ethnopoetics, mythopoetics, accounts of the mysterious poetry schools Sappho or Phillip Marlowe founded, International approaches to poetry—these things make our school distinct. Right now we are setting in place a translation focus for students. It all feels right up to date.

My own interests in poetry go in many directions. I came into poetry in the Bay Area scene of the 80s, and knew (and also published or was published by) many of the Language poets. Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Bob Grenier, Leslie Scalapino were local figures I saw a lot of, as well as a clutch of younger writers: Ben Friedlander with whom I edited samizdat poetry journals from 1984-1993, Pat Reed, David Levi Strauss, Norma Cole.

More recently my comrades at the Kerouac School have been the most influential. I see them daily, especially Anne Waldman who I lived with for eleven years, and Anselm Hollo. Other close influences are Lorine Niedecker for her peerless bioregional eye. Susan Howe, Robert Duncan, Cecilia Vicuna. I could make endless lists, and include the example of students who have been through the Kerouac School. My deepest interests continue to run toward the literatures of old Asia (since I've taken the time to study the languages), and to anything that holds promise for eco-poetics or bioregional studies.

One last figure I should mention. I've been hoping to write a book on Jaime de Angulo ever since I dropped out of Berkeley in 1979. No professor would sponsor a thesis I wanted to write on de Angulo. He was an anarchist Spanish anthropologist who'd come to North America early in the 20th century. He made himself into a crack linguist, working on Native American languages that were threatened with extinction. He hung out with D.H. Lawrence, translated for Carl Jung, was pals with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robinson Jeffers and Henry Miller. Near the end of his life he enjoyed a crackling correspondence with Ezra Pound. Pound championed his work and helped get him published.

In the Bay Area, before his death in 1949, he taught Jack Spicer linguistics and employed Robert Duncan as his secretary. His writings are very wild-game American, and much underrated. But in Northern California he's something of a legendary figure. His best known work, Indian Tales, has been continuously in print in a bowdlerized edition. The real edition is a series of broadcasts he did for KPFA radio in 1949, full of anthropological lore, vanished languages, California Indian songs used for hunting, gambling, and puberty rites. Jaime homesteaded at Big Sur before the bohemians got there, built his house, raised horses, hunted his meat, drank crazily, and recorded dozens of Indian languages under the patronage of Franz Boas. For a hobby he would do things like learn Chinese and translate the Tao Te Ching. I keep in mind his hard living and practical skills—that he could homestead a house as well as write splendidly, or go into the field, make friends, and write up languages that had never been recorded. His example is a good balance to the sort of writers so common today, who come out of graduate schools and write very smart but rather cloistered poetry.

SP: Knowing more about your general literary interests sheds some light on the poem "Riparian" which appears in Tea Shack Interior. It is an interesting departure from your usual style of writing—of course I would attribute that to it being a collaboratively written piece.

AS: "Riparian" was a collaboration with Anne Waldman. We passed a notebook back and forth sitting alongside the St. Vrain River. We stole some ideas from Basho, and considered some of the unattractive trophy-home subdivisions in a once lovely Colorado canyon. The idea here was to get something of the American landscape. But I also like that notion of the almanac—the way the old Sanskrit anthologies were put together: watching the seasons go round. There's a similar strain that runs through European poetry: poems of the seasons. You get it in haiku as well. These are very real concerns, like people discussing the weather when they meet. We are a species that developed for millions of years as gatherers and hunters, more recently as agricultural folk. Talking about the weather, or what's happening with the forests and rivers, must be hard-wired into our genetic system. We just sit and watch the river flow...

SP: You have had an abiding interest in and commitment to small press publishing, having co-edited magazines such as Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K" and Dark Ages Clasp the Daisy Root. Several of your books have been brought forward by independent publishers like Pleasure Boat Studios and Rodent Press. What are your thoughts on web-based publishing, and do you think of e-publishers as contributing to the demise of small presses?

AS: Right now I'm teaching a class at Naropa on small press publishing. I introduce it by asking what is the small press and what makes it small. Here are a few facts. There exist close to 50,000 publishing outfits in this country. More than ninety percent of book sales in the USA however belong to thirty publishers, most owned by multinational media conglomerates and based in mid-town Manhattan. These thirty publishers are the Big Press. What makes them big? Only the money they command. They produce a limited range of very predictable titles.

Outside of that circumscribed space there is and has been for decades a profusion of little publishers—little if you gauge their influence in dollars only. These are prolific, un-policed, unpredictable. They are funny, scary, serious, vegetative, full of piss and vinegar, fueled by optimism, conviction, controversy. They are not a thing—certainly not a thing called "the small press." They are everything outside the painfully narrow marketing practices of the media conglomerates.

In literary practice the small press is the writers themselves. I know hardly any accomplished writer who has not at one time edited or published a magazine, a journal, or been involved with a book publishing enterprise. Or at least created a broadside, a piece of mail art, a greeting card. Or organized a reading series (the oral small press), or circulated a tape or CD of somebody's work. Here's how easy it is. For seven or eight years Anne Waldman and I have put together winter solstice greeting cards. We write a poem or a group of poems. Then we find a respected letterpress printer. We design a card or little book, buy the paper, thread or ink or envelopes or whatever is necessary for production. And we pay the printer for his or her labor. We mail these things out instead of Christmas cards to a list of about 250 people. These are elegant hand-made objects, the best of the small press if I might say so. And—instructively—it costs us less than if we bought Hallmark cards. This includes paying the printer.

There's always a crew of energetic young writers at The Kerouac School creating a magazine or a publishing cooperative, or working late hours on the hand presses in the Harry Smith Print Shop.

So from where I stand I don't see a demise of the small press. If there exists some kind of problem or crisis I'd look to one cause—and it isn't e-publishing. It is the disappearance of independent, community-based bookstores in this country. Independent bookshops are not disappearing by accident—they are going under because of deliberate predatory business practices conducted by chain bookstores. The chains, in collusion with the corporate publishing houses, are limiting the flow of information to a very narrow trickle. Until our economic situation changes—or someone figures a way around the increasing monopolization of publishing—e-publishing may be one way people with alternative ideas get to exchange them. Meanwhile groups of young writers continue to form collectives and cooperatives, send things through the mail, and make and swap books and chapbooks and poems.

The advances in technology actually have spurred the small press. Today almost anyone with a home computer can design lovely books. And with much less of the labor it used to take when we worked with typewriters and glue sticks and scissors, bottles of whiteout and so forth.

Old China had the image of Zen poet Han Shan who laughed like crazy and wrote his poems on pieces of tree bark, scattering them through the mountains. North America has poets who laugh like crazy in front of their obsolete hand presses or state-of-the-art desktop modules, and scatter their poems through the postal system.

SP: To me, some of the strongest works in Tea Shack Interior are the poems that evoke the power and beauty of nature. In "Cheyenne Still Life" you write, "It is in general the unexplored that attracts us...yet poets and musicians paw over worn mythologies, and neglect the grand ecology theater. Consider the butcher bird—(four hours more 'til we hit Green River)—who impales grasshopper or frog on a spear of barbed wire, and returns several months later to eat his stash. O Composition in white and blue. O Cubist Prairie!" Birds appear again in "Haibun (Western Tanager)" where they are compared to "vernacular. " There's also the Thoreau quote that starts off your collection of essay A Handful of Seeds that talks about the naming of things. These pieces speak of the beauty and history contained within nature, and of your awareness of the natural world

AS: It was the Eco-activist Aldo Leopold who used that phrase about poets pawing over worn mythologies. Isn't this one of the crises of American consciousness? From the outset the settlers here in North America felt at a disadvantage in terms of history and culture. Trying to take up the mythological systems of Europe, or Asia, or Africa, feels gallingly disloyal to the actuality of this continent as living space. North America doesn't have those old gods. They are starting to look like unattractive, worn-out baggage. What North America does have is open space, and lots of it: Wildlands, extensive unpopulated desert zones, wildlife, vast rivers and their tributaries with extensive riparian communities, National Forests, mountain ranges, BLM grazing lands. There's been a tumultuous history of conservation, some of it in line with Native American views of the sanctity of specific landscapes. Gertrude Stein opens The Geographic History of the United States saying, "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is."

It's that space where "nobody" is—no human beings but plenty of other somebodies—that provides an immediate, visceral mythology. Even in the popular mind. Think of sports mascots—for decades they were named after local (vernacular) critters: bears, orioles, blue jays, wildcats, 'gators, bison, wolverines. If you want a true American mythology you have two choices: natural history or Walt Disney. I can have fun with Walt Disney up to a point—but this is where I break from a lot of postmodernism. I just can't get with the sheer exploitation and imperialism for too long. Even making fun of it is to succumb to its sorcery. Natural history seems more real. It's been around longer, it's got good science to back it. Ernest Fenollosa, in the essay on Chinese characters that Ezra Pound edited, says poetry agrees with science not logic. Give me science—not the logic of the free market.

The other, more serious perspective of course, is that environmental degradation and ecological collapse are desperate at this point. Air, water, soil, plants, animals, people, are all polluted-threatened, endangered, blinking out. "Extinction is forever." Think what the current war in Afghanistan is doing to those rugged-looking but enormously fragile high-altitude mountain and river eco-systems at the moment. The only way to turn things around, to protect biodiversity, conserve key species habitat, and also provide humans with dignity and safety, is to know how the natural orders work. What protects them, what damages them? Poetry can provide something here—a vivid engagement with the grand ecology theater. This coupled to the instinct, or the vision—the oldest vision—as Blake put it, "Everything that lives is Holy."

Click here to buy Tea Shack Interior at Amazon.com

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002