If Frank O’Hara were alive, chances are he’d be published at Wave Books, founded in Seattle four years ago by Charles Wright, former director of the Dia.
Wave
specializes in poetry that can be mistaken for conversation but cannot
be entered by a conversationalist. Wave poetry isn’t as consumer
surreal as John Ashbery, as lyrical as Charles Wright (no relation to the publisher), as war-haunted as Charles Simic or as romantically charged as Olga Broumas.
Wave
poets are not in love with bars and do not want to be fish leaping in a
river. They do not believe alcoholism will make them better poets. (See
John Berryman and the Booze Talking.)
With the exception of Franck Andre Jamme,
who turns the recognizable into the indecipherable and forces an
admiration for clumped lettering, Wave poets are not islands. The
celebrate (or at least endure) entangling alliances. They burrow. They
grip down on a person, place or thing and take it for an interior ride.
Many
are unreliable narrators. They mock their own pleasures and confess to
crimes committed by others. They are serious and/or comic, occasionally honest but seldom sincere. They care about art without saying its name.
Sex is graphic but fails to enthrall over the long haul. Even when
reporting from the middle of a forest, they tend to be urban.
Unlike Rita Dove,
they can’t dance, but they refuse to cry a river about it. They are
adults: Their childhoods interest them less than their children’s
childhoods. They crack wise about their political concerns, which are
seen aslant. None is likely to proceed, as Denise Levertov did, from a gnawed-on
dead squirrel in wet grass to urgent, anti-war narratives.
If your house is on fire, their poems will not serve as alarm. They are not the antenna of the race, agreeing, with Auden, that it sounds like a job for the secret police.
Even if they are beautiful, Wave poets will not make note of it. They do not admire their arms, face,
shoulders, flanks and buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades.
They are not preening in their bodies or rotting in their heads and
could be the least self-absorbed group of poets on the planet. What
else? They are not dainty, not depressed, do not aspire to verbal
architecture and care less about line breaks than Robert Creeley did.
August 14-16, Wave takes over the Henry Art Gallery with film screenings and readings both big and small in the Henry auditorium and the James Turrell Skyspace.
There are only 150 tickets. Those who want to go need to reserve their places soon.
Samples from three in the lineup:
Joshua Beckman, also Wave Editor, from Take It:
Dear Angry Mob,
Oak Wood Trail is closed to you. We
feel it unnecessary to defend our position,
for we have always thought of ourselves
(and rightly, I venture) as a haven for
those seeking a quiet and solitary contemplation. We are truly sorry
for the inconvenience.Signed,
Ranger Lil
Also Beckman, from Take It:
I feel now like I am saying sorry for something, when
what I am saying here is that the unknowing spirit is
greater than the knowing spirit, that no matter what
emboldened structure descends to stand before you
in its plan and fullness, you do not know what it is.
One more fragment from Take It:
…Financially
I’m made of music. Spiritually, I’m all full of cookies.
Dara Wier (most inspired by Roethke), from Our Master Plan:
Celeste goes waltzing with bears.
Natalie shops for milk glass on pedestals
modeled after the hooves of baby goats.
Mr. Holdrogen whips in and out of his tuxedo
faster than a pileated woodpecker
can count without a calculator.
Maggie Nelson, from Bluets:
148.
The Tuareg wear flowing robes so bright and rich with blue that over
time the dye has seeped into their skin, literally blueing it. They are
desert nomads who were famously unwilling to be converted to Islam:
thus their name. Some American Christians have been bothered by this
idea of a blue people abandoned by God living in the Sahara, herding
camels, traveling by night, and navigating by the stars. In Virginia,
in 2002, for example, a group of Southern Baptists organized a day of
prayers exclusively for the Tuareg, “so that they will know God loves
them.”
Besides Beckman, Wier and Nelson, participating poets are Mary Ruefle, Dorothea Lasky, Noelle Kocot and Rachel Zucker.
P.S. The structure of this post is a homage to Charles Wright’s The New Poem:
It will not resemble the sea.
It will not have dirt on its thick hands.
It will not be part of the weather.
It will not reveal its name.
It will not have dreams you can count on.
It will not be photogenic.
It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.
This is a wave of self-indulgent, esoteric
poetry that will make a small splash and wash up
flat on the shores of obscurity.