Summer

The poet Callie Gardner passed away in early July. Callie was author of the book-length naturally it is not., a series of four letters published by the 87 Press a couple of years ago, each one corresponding to one of the seasons. Committed to the kind of work that can be done in a long poem, in this book they construct a kind of essay in verse whose formal structures--a digressive but focused articulation of unfolding argument--shares something with elements of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, particularly Lyn Hejinian, something with Ashbery's longer poems, but is always shot through with a particular and distinctive relation to language, a wry and sardonic yet loving sense of humour, and an urgent concern with how to move through 'nature' and the weather, social constructs whose mythic mismanagement hurtles us toward destruction. For me, some of the sections that resonate most are the pastoral observations of flora and fauna written "from my summerisles"--even as the introduction makes clear that comforting reifications of 'nature' are the sequence's prime target of critique. There's a grace and a beauty of observation, an incisiveness that is a form of clear-eyed attentiveness and love. 

Callie was also author of numerous magazine publications— a scholar of the work of Roland Barthes, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and others—and a devoted and selfless champion of small press publishing, with Zarf magazine and Zarf editions. Given the labour of editing and of maintaining a regular publication schedule amidst precarious labour on the edges of the academy, and elsewhere, that so many poets in the scene have to perform, it's hard for print magazines to be sustained in the UK small press scene—they tend to last sporadically and then fade out. But Callie produced 15 issues of Zarf between 2015 and 2020, ending as the pandemic hit, each one with an editorial that offered a poetics in miniature. Here's the editorial from January 2020 (also pictured at the top of the post):

many people have commented on a noted poet's statement last year that 'poems are rarely on the side of power', but we find ourselves somewhere w[h]ere we must know that the reverse is true. it's a rare poem, in fact, that can not only imagine a world that grows differently from its very roots, but speaks as thought it is already in existence. if you let it, poetry can be the resilient technology of love & liberation, but it's not inherently good. so we should be vigilant about what the world is asking our poems to be and do, and be and do the opposite. if they ask you to be simple, be difficult; if they tell you to be articulate, do not bend nor explain; if they want you only as a soothing voice for the evening, screech shatteringly into the still morning.

Others are far more qualified to talk about this, but to me it seemed that Callie’s work as editor and as poet always manifested this great generosity and dedication: they offered incisive readings of the systems we live under and have to live through, academic and others, but they also exemplified the power of kindness, of taking poetry seriously and taking the communities that develop around it seriously, of maintaining this total commitment to alternative ways of being and organising and living. A recent series of commentaries on contemporary poetry--Nat Raha, Eric Hunt, Rennee Gladman, Tom Betteridge, and others--sought to find a form of writing that would be adequate to the works themselves, neither academic nor sloppily journalistic, but immanent and urgent as Callie felt those works to be. Constructed, like naturally, it is not., as a series of letters, the dialogic nature of these pieces--relaxed, focused, concerned with the mechanics of reading and the inner workings of a poem on the inner workings of its readers, manifest a gentle and exemplary seriousness about reading the work of often obscure contemporary poets in these communities that some of us find ourselves in--communities subject to dispersion, fragmentation and precarity, that have become all the more dispersed during the past year-plus of pandemic. They're models for how we might do criticism, for how we might read, for how we might conceive poetry in our lives. It's the kind of writing that gives you the strength to keep going, writing, reading: a gift.

Callie’s loss, far too young, is that latest blow in what's been an exceptionally grim couple of years. The world needs more people like this, not less, and they will be much missed.

(News for July)

Recently I participated (online) in the Milosz Festival, Krakow, discussing UK poetry and politics in a conversation with Harry Josephine Giles and Luke Roberts at the kind invitation of Marta Koronkiewicz and Paweł Kaczmarski (who host the discussion). The discussion can be viewed here (you'll have to sign up first).

'Occupied Territory and Abolitionist Freeze Frames', an essay on Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, is in the new issue of Senses of Cinema.

And again in Bush Mama – outside the prison per se, but in the carceral circuits that surround it – Dorothy fights back. Gerima’s response to being stopped and searched while filming was to include the footage in his film. Someone was filming. Someone witnessed and documented. This is the beginning of community, of resisting the occupying army. For Gerima, following the theorisations of Fernando Solanas and other Third Cinema pioneers, the film camera was a weapon, a tool in the struggle. But unlike a gun, a film does not run out of ammunition. The camera witnesses and records, but also transforms reality. Cinema itself is, in essence, the projection of still images to create the illusion of movement. A frozen image can be made to move. The cell awaits smashing. Bush Mama’s final freeze frame awaits reactivation.

New from Materials, Alli Warren's Another Round: Selected Poems. This is Warren's first UK publication and is available here. Here's the official write-up:

Dear Comrades

don’t get it twisted

This Selected Poems, Alli Warren’s first UK collection, presents work from her first three full-length books: Here Come The Warm Jets (2013), I Love It Though (2017), and Little Hill (2020). Shot through with clear-sighted hope, yet intensely attentive to the specific cruelties of our present epoch, Warren asks “who is permitted unhindered breath”. This work aims to “study the past to denaturalize the present”, to reverse the mirrored and self-perpetuating notions of nature and culture, human and animal. Warren knows that poetry can’t sing from beyond mediation, but insists that poetry can acknowledge mediation’s more mendacious disguises and bring them out into the open. Carried through by a prosody alternately razor-sharp and capaciously crowded, in lines and sentences harshly yet lovingly aware of the “possible future in the tender measure”, poet-as-ventriloquist throws multiple voices to see what’s revealed under poetry’s light. With glamour and imagination and biting humour in abundance, Warren seeks to walk to the end of the world-system, “the terror of the totally plausible future” at once post-apocalyptic and utopian—“When I said I was going / to the bar I meant / no death, no death”. Such work may “begin from economic fact”, but it’s where you go from there that matters. Operating within the flows and constraints of racialised capitalism—a space of horror, shared with monsters—Warren’s poetry also throws up multiple pleasures, guilty and otherwise, and glimmers of collective possibility, of possible futures we can sometimes glimpse and live within. This is poetry written from community, poetic and otherwise, living and dead and otherwise: from Oakland, El Cerrito, San Francisco; from the meadow, from the street, in a car; marching to shut down the port, walking to breathe in a charged air everyday and Orphic, “buoyant” and “forked”. These poems give us the measures, the strength, the breath to propel ourselves through the circumscribed day. 

ALLI WARREN is the author of Here Come The Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013), I Love It Though (Nighboat, 2017), Little Hill (City Lights, 2020), and numerous chapbooks. She edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, and co-edited the Poetic Labor Project. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.

Finally, I have some copies of 'Umbra magazine (1963-1974) An Introduction and Bibliography', the fifteenth pamphlet from the University of Buffalo's Among the Neighbors bibliography series. The 40 page pamphlet consists of a timeline and a short essay, along with a bibliography of the five issues of Umbra magazine. If you'd like one, just leave a comment below this post with your email address.

100 Films

When the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant lockdown measures reached the UK back in March, I somehow got the idea into my head that I'd watch one hundred films and give each one a short (one paragraph) write-up, generally focusing on a particular representative image or scene from the film. One hundred seemed both sufficiently large and sufficiently arbitrary a figure, a structure for meandering viewing, a way to focus attention, with the process as something that both mirrored and staved off the thought that this situation wouldn't end any time soon. Now that we've come to the other end of the year, one hundred films have been written up. I've been posting them periodically on a dedicated Tumblr site, but have now added them as a page to this site--you can see them by clicking the link on the sidebar, though they look more elegant on Tumblr. 

Includes films by: Bergman, Burnett, Clark, Clouzot, Collins, Demy, Dovzhenko, Duras, Gerima, Gunn, Hondo, Kramer, Mambéty, Poole, Rocha, Maldoror, Pasolini, Sembène, Resnais, Varda, Von Praunheim, Wakamatsu, Woodberry, Yoshida, etc etc.

Image from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's Byker series, seen in Edinburgh back in February.

Urban Guerrilla Planning in the United States: As Above, So Below (1973)

Larry Clark's second feature, Passing Through, is one of the most acclaimed of the films to emerge from the 'LA Rebellion' moment connected to the UCLA Film Programme in the 1970s, though, like many of these films, it's still extremely hard to track down. Currently available on YouTube, however, is his first film, As Above, So Below. Produced by pioneering arts administrator Vantile Whitfield's Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), an organisation founded in 1964 to help train inner city-youth in the arts, the film is a product of local organisations, interdisciplinary in their reach and collaborative in their ethos. Jazz will be utterly central to Passing Through, and in some ways, the forms of improvised cooperation within the sphere of improvisational music serve as one model here, and the film is saturated with the often improvised music of Horace Tapscott's group (recall, after all, that Larry Clark was nephew of jazz pianist Sonny Clark, and that, the previous year, he'd served as Director of Photographer on Mel Stewart's outstanding Wattstax). Around an hour in length, the film's credit sequences depicts a lone gunman on what look like military manouevres in a snow-covered forest. The film goes on to depict the recruitment of this gunman, Jita-Hadi (Nathaniel Taylor, who also stars in Passing Through) an ex-Marine, who's participated in US imperial meddling in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, by an urban guerrilla group: a network of militants who operate in small groups yet who now constitute a linked, nationwide uprising. It's never quite clear in what precisely their activities consist: the activities of the militants are rendered as a series of training exercises rather than in detail (an encounter with murderous armed police at the end of the film might be read as its 'climax', though the film's narrative logic refuses anything like a three-act structure). But detailed plot isn't the point--it's the idea of armed resistance, and the dedication, quiet determination and efficiency necessary to accompany this that are at stake. The depiction of militancy echoes Ivan Dixon/Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which had been quietly buried by its Hollywood distributors earlier that decade (the two films were screened together at UCLA), and Jules Dassin's Uptight, but the film is, in general, looser, rougher and less linear in its texture, as befits Clark's role in the LA Rebellion and the influence of Third Cinema. While most of the film depicts recognisable locations and interactions in a broadly realist fashion, surrealism is a factor, as in the sudden appearance of Jazz Age dancers outside a contemporary cafe in an incongruous fantasy sequence that insistently reminds us of its nature as mediated fantasy, or a lengthy shot, early in the film, of a blank grey sky accompanied by the sounds of machine gun fire and police sirens.

















Sound is also key: much of the film is set to the ubiquitous sounds of the Horace Tapscott group, driving scenes with rhythmic propulsion or offsetting them with bursts of free improvisation (with the great Arthur Blythe's alto very much in the mix). And much of the information, texture and atmosphere of the film comes from the equally ubiquitous radio transmissions that play as both diegetic and non-diegetic texture. The soundtrack is not as wildly multi-layered as fellow LA Rebellion director Haile Gerima's soundtrack to Bush Mama (Gerima appears in a cameo here), in whose opening sequences a barrage of sound, from jazz to the sounds of police helicopters to non-synchronous conversation to an audio collage of the questions of invasive welfare office workers, is poised between the psychological and the 'realist', suggesting a traumatic breakdown between inner and outer that aims at sensory overload, not to overwhelm through spectacle, but as a dialectical quality of form that encourages active spectatorship and aids thought. Clark's use of radios in As Above instead imparts a kind of documentary quality, an argument or thesis absorbed as part of the sonic texture of everyday life--in itself a political argument about the respective stakes of mass media and revolutionary counter-transmissions, perhaps inspired by radio in Vietnam (Radio Hanoi and 'Hanoi Hannah') or Cuba (where the exiled militant Robert F. Williams broadcast Radio Free Dixie). Sound makes historical connections without having to put clunky speeches in the mouths of characters: thus, out first glimpse of the film's hero is as a young boy in 1945, as the radio announces the release of Japanese Americans from detention camps, a still too little-known aspect of US history and one that's echoed later in the film as the radio announces similar measures for African Americans, along with curfews and psychiatric torture/'therapy', reminiscent of the racialised brutality of the mental health apparatus made infamous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). (The radio reports draw on HUAC reports on Black militancy from the late 1960s--ironically enough, Clark recalls that one of his professors at UCLA wanted to report him to HUAC on the basis of this film, never mind that HUAC had by then disbanded.)




Mid-way through the film, dialogue and narrative scenes are intercut with a lengthy sequence in a church prayer meeting; reminiscent of a similar sermon that occurs at the end of Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess and of the more dream-like church sequence intercut in Gerima's Bush Mama. Most obviously, the sequence reinforces the film's critique of the Black Church as mental opioid: one of the most eager participants is Kim (Gail Peters), the owner of the cafe whose endorsements of her Saviour, combined with the rambling secular odes of the customer who praises 'the white man', form a chorus of reaction, seen as two sides of the same coin; and there's a satirical dig as a church elder asks for donations, from one to one hundred dollars--no entry to the church without a wallet. At the same time, the visceral power of the sequence and its non-alignment with the main narrative renders it with a 'documentary' energy that leaps beyond the bounds of plot. In that sense, one might be reminded of Glauber Rocha's first feature, Barravento, in which the depiction of cadomble practices, religious ritual and social rituals of song and dance achieves an audiovisual immediacy existing in unresolvable tension with the didactic, anti-mystical speeches that condemn such practices as tools of backwardness and fatalism. (See Robert Stam's nuanced reading of Rocha's film here.) The placement of these sequences in Clark's film is somewhere between didactic formal argument and an aesthetic quality that doesn't so much contradict the film's unflinching advocacy of militancy as place them in dialectical tension. Here, as throughout, the film crackles with a desire to expose, highlight and further social contradiction as part of a process of revolutionary change.
 

And this dialectical quality is present, too, in the apparently incongruous occultist/Hermetic reference in the film's title (later appropriated for a truly diabolical horror film set in the Paris catacombs). This is a film of doubles--many of the characters we initially encounter turn out to be secret members of the armed cell, an Ellisonian disguise by which a perpetually-coughing junkie is actually a militant leader, something that reads as actuality in the film's plot, but that the film also suggests is a potentiality outside the film's universe. This is most apparent as a key scene replays in a kind of coda after--but really serving as--the 'completion' of the film's principal narrative strand. Early in the film, Jita-Hadi enters the cafe where he will meet Bee (Lyvonne Walder) who, unbeknownst to him, is one of the leaders of the guerrilla cell: their subsequent intimate encounter is one of the final stages, or tests, in his recruitment into the group. When they meet, she describes their encounter in terms of deja-vu, the uncanny feeling that what's happening in the moment is the replaying of a previous encounter. At the time, it's just a chat-up line, complete with talk about dreams coming true (or, in terms that sound closer to psychoanalysis, travelling to the farthest recesses of one's dreams). But sure enough, Jita-Hadi's entry into the cafe is repeated at the end of the film. At the film's climax, the customer in the cafe earlier seen praising 'the white man' seeks to inform on the armed cell, for which he's shot by cops, who in turn are shot by Kim (Gail Peters), the proselytising Christian owner of the cafe who turns out to be another  of the militants. As we cut from Tapscott's eerie inside-piano work to the entry of the full band in affirmative unison melody, the film cuts back to an earlier shot of Jit-Hadi driving a car and to his entry into the cafe. Passing the resurrected neighbour on his way in, over the soundtrack, we hear Bee's words of the initial encounter replayed over the soundtrack: "Hey brother, do you believe in foreknowledge? You know, deja-vu--it's like a birth to a new life, and you go on and on to other, still higher planes of life..." Thence the film cuts to the scene with which it began, the lone militant on manouevres in a snow-covered forest; except this time, we see him joined in conversation with a comrade, before the fade to black. What initially were a set of social encounters characterised by alienation or isolation--the lone militant, the reactionary conversations in the cafe, the wary glances of strangers--are now revealed to be potential nodes of solidarity. There are a number of ways we can red this: the revolutionary potentiality by which dreams coming true--travelling the furthest recesses of the dream--does not mean the dreams of the Church service, of the attainment of luxury goods, of the goodness of the 'white man', or what Henry Threadgill sardonically calls 'refined poverty', but the dream of a transformed society. The film does not, then, reveal a mystical secret, though there may be parallels between the underground guerrilla cell and the mystical or religious cult, a revealed knowledge into which one must be initiated for purposes of evading religious authority or state power, but the possibility of self-emancipation by any means necessary.