Notes from an Open Channel Spring 2026

Notes from an Open Channel

         In light of historical/generational signifiers such as how the military industrial complex opened up channels of work force as women shifted from the domestic to the public sectors did capital free markets necessarily mean “equitable certainty”?   With assimilation the working woman strove for integration with the mainstream even if it meant accommodation of patriarchal and/or hierarchical values.   “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist” wrote Samuel Beckett as though one expected life to bring not just subjects for writing, but for many women this also meant elaborate dust structures held together by a scaffolding of dog hair, dried bits of pasta glued to the floor by their sauces.     For example, there seemed to exist a binary split between assimilation and anarchy in the poetic work of a generation of American female poets who rejected going through the correct channels as in committees or even communities of poetic practice.   Clearly following Diane DiPrima’s example vis-a-vis her essay “By any Means Necessary” is very inspiring, particularly since the erasure of agency usually associated with “getting your work out there” is counteracted by self determination and community outreach.   Having a direct sense of one’s audience is as important as the solitary practice of writing poetry.    I also like DiPrima’s epigrammatic sentence,   “The requirements of our life is the form of our art”.   Diane is talking about how a poet should take advantage of the situation, the requirements of her life, to do whatever possible, to get her writing in the world.    A writer who has a lot of responsibilities and financial debt may not have as much time for writing and starting magazines with other writers, but what Diane is suggesting is let your art fit the possibilities in your life.    Collaborate with others. I’d add, if you want to be a poet, do what you can so that your living requirements don’t overtake the possibility of writing.  It is hard to classify the quanta of one’s experience as a poet living in the city.  This is further illustrated by following quote from Frank O’Hara:

          “One must live in a way; we must channel, there is not time or space, one must hurry, one must avoid impediments, snares, detours; one must not be stifled in a closed social or artistic railway station, waiting for the train; I’ve a long way to go, and I’m already late.”

      For many artists and writer of the 1950s anchoring generalizations and intricate aesthetic structures of the New Criticism no longer sufficed to describe the urban world in which they lived   

            In response to this sense of “contingency” New York City poets such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery discarded complex symbols interpreting life in favor of actual reenactments of imaginative energies devoted to particular life situations.

            I would argue that the hermeneutics of the genuine conversation has its place in poetry.    Accordingly, “the limits/of the social” can coexist with one’s “viewing technology” in context to each other.  This is why they both frame understanding of the poetic text.  The theory of the poem provides a kind of intellectual armor while in the practice of writing the poem is rooted in a shift that emphasizes waking thoughts and everyday information seeking.  In order to attain a state of mind with no predetermined purpose, my poetry adopts a more common-sense approach to writing poetry.   This is in many ways the application of a colloquial order of things to using every day speech which can be also socially reenforced as far as how we attribute meaning to various situations and persons.     

                       Several years ago a fellow writer and friend named Andrew and I attended a writer’s anonymous group in central New Jersey.   After the meeting we would usually have dinner together and discuss our projects and aims in life.   During one such dinner conversation, Andrew mentioned to me that he had had an idea called sonnet 81/2, but had not yet been able to write it.    This idea for sonnet 8 1/2 took hold in my imagination and several years later (and after many attempts) I came to write the sonnet 8 1/2 that was published by the Chicago Review On line Edition in the fall of 2022.     In writing sonnet 8 1/2 I felt like I was  “channeling” a historical person named Marcello Mastroianni, a famous and debonaire Italian actor of Fellini’s new Italian Cinema much like the way Yeats or Madame Blavatsky had “channeled” their spiritual automatic writing.    I am using “channeling” in scare quotes.   What I really mean is that I was performing a complex exegesis of a historical film called 8 1/2 and paying homage to Shakespeare’s sonnets.   The success of this experiment resulted in a fascinating interplay between between mission vs. omission, and a humorous portrayal of an actor playing a director at odds with his environment and social set.   These two sonnets make up a patchwork of temporality even though there are gaps in the seams of the historical record.  

        I owe the thematic material at the outset of the first sonnet to the late critic Joan Acocella’s well known article "Blocked" in which she references Paul Valéry’s famous hiatus from poetry among other poets and writers who have suffered from “writer’s block” at some point in their writing lives including S.T. Coleridge who wrote in a diary at some point, “So completely has a whole year passed with scarcely the fruits of a month—O Sorrow and Shame…I have done nothing.”  To this list one might add Baudelaire’s ill fated stay in Brussels, Belgium where he hoped to reestablish his career, but failed to do so before his untimely death.   Sometimes at 5 a.m. I can hear James Joyce chuckling to himself as he continued to work on Finnegan’s Wake, a novel that took him 17 years to write, and in which at times he also developed periods of writer’s block.   

                The final lines of  sonnet were derived from a procedure produced in grad school at Temple University in which certain stanzas were generated by using a procedure invented by Jackson MacLow known as the diastic.   What it requires is that I choose a “key phrase”.  For the purpose of this procedure I chose the title of an early poem from my first year of grad school called “Chat and Chew”, which was the name of a restaurant chain in Manhattan in the early 2000s.   The first word of my experiment will be the first word in the text where the first letter is “c”.  The second word will be the next word in your text where the second letter is “h”.  The third word will be the next word in text where the third letter is “a”, etc.   The diastic than falls into endless loop of the last two stanzas.  The nonsensical nature of it makes me listen to it more carefully.  

             I hear “endangered candles share queer.”  I can imagine that snow endangers (lit) candles, but somehow in the world of this poem, fire and water have found a way to share the space.  I’m also amused by Chagall and Cher sharing the same stanza.  The silly repetition of chatting and chewing communicates a lot-isn’t chatting and chewing how we spend our days in a way?  I’m reminded of Eliot’s “in the room the women come and go/talking of Michelangelo. “   Finally there is the Volta or turn in line 10 upon which hinges the world of literary and self referentiality as they bleed together in a subconscious state before sleep and turning off the lights.   

            A few summers ago my friend Lorraine Lupo asked if I enjoyed the poetry of Allen Ginsberg after sending me a postcard of a famous picture of the poet.   I think I went through a few periods where I read him quite extensively.   I became interested in a concept important to his work which he called the “Eyeball Kick” (eg.  Hydrogen jukebox”) similar to what Pound maintained about images as “planes in relation” or what Alfred North Whitehead would term “presentational immediacy” in his much celebrated philosophical work Process and Reality.   Over the past couple of summers I’ve been studying up on the sonnet form esp. Edwin Denby’s sonnet sequences, Clark Coolidge’s sonnets as well as those by Bernadette Mayer et al. 

             Just as an aside I wonder whether Larry Fagin’s association with Clark Coolidge could be seen as originating two equally diverse poetic traditions the former rooted in the minimalistic/metaphysical? paintings of Robert Ryman and while the later perhaps in the more gestural paintings of George Schneeman. Perhaps one could even go so far as to say that while Coolidge has penetrated more deeply within a narrower LANGUAGE Poetry context, while Larry’s influence can be felt more widely as an editor and poet of The New York School umbrella.

        Even before I contacted the late Kevin Killian for the reading at Alley Cat books it seemed as though he ( Kevin) had already learned of my association with Larry Fagin, as I presume Larry’s West coast LANGUAGE poet affiliate Alan Bernheimer told him because in his email response Kevin wrote, “ I am glad to hear that you were part of the Larry Faginkreis, that valoric cult of which I have heard so much here in San Francisco.”   The Kreis ( circle) referenced here was the Stefan George Kreis around the turn of the 20th century Germany, which was in many ways the model for the San Francisco Renaissance poets Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan.   The only distinction I would draw is that Larry was more of Pataphysician, the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”.

            I remember a lunch I had with my mom nearby the Prado in Madrid—a delicious tapas of fried egg plants drizzled with honey dipped in humus.  Now I thought I sort of finally “got” the opening lines to John Ashbery’s Leaving the Atocha Station:

   “ The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing 

darkness/and  pulling us out of there experience it/he

meanwhile…And the fried bats they sell there/dropping from 

sticks…”

              The poem “Leaving the Atocha Station”, which as per Richard Howard reaches a “pitch of distraction”, was written after Ashbery’s first trip to Spain with Frank O”Hara.  Of “Leaving the Atocha Station” Ashbery states in an interview published in the Michigan Quarterly, “my poems aren’t usually about my experiences because I don’t find my experiences very interesting as a rule.  When they are about them, they are so in a very oblique and marginal way… but it strikes me that the dislocated incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement  of the poem are probably like the experiences you get from a train pulling out of a station of no particular importance….”

                 Interesting to think about the idea that a search for a core is itself a core meaning.     A feeling that everything is slipping away or being reimagined or what the reclusive and eccentric Joyce scholar Joyce Jon Kidd termed “an infinite loop of revision”. 

               If Heidegger is right that the “light of the public darkens everything” then the problem was not how to relate to the public but how to conceive of it as a kind of “chorus” in the Greek sense of the word.   By its very nature the chorus is impartial sort of commenting on certain actions of the persona of the poem without actually being beholden to them.    Or to paraphrase the poet Toby Altman “our task is to surrender to the archive”, yet if the archive is itself a kind of chorus wouldn’t that entail its being subsumed by historicity or the effects of late capitalism.                

           Rather than seeking new experiences to write about, my current work seems to be centered on the experience of what the 20th century philosopher Jacques Derrida called improvisation.   Yet to paraphrase Derrida it is not easy.  It’s the most difficult thing to do.  Even when one improvises on the page or before an audience, one always seems to mimic a totalization of autobiography.        

Never underestimate the moment when someone—a friend/first reader/editor etc, explains your life and poetic work to you.   Something you thought was inexplicable suddenly tossed up in the air and occasionally takes flight.  Occasionally, as in this poem by Emily Dickinson a poetic vehicle achieves escape velocity, leaving its tenor behind entirely “it scatters like the Birds—/Condenses like a Flock—/Like Juggler’s Figures situates/Upon a baseless Arc.”