Greg Bem is the publisher of Carbonation Press and the new anthology Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election. He got an email from someone asking him why the parenthesis before the word “again” was not closed. He said: “ask Paul.” Here was my response:
“…Student: Olson also used a lot of open parentheses. One parenthesis.
AG: Yeah, That’s a really weird one, because it’s confusing, But it’s just like the mind…
Student: Yeah
AG: …because you begin a divagation, and you never do finish it. You just go back to your subject. You might break off with a dot. He also says the typewriter, because it has even spacing – it’s not like somebody’s handwriting – so it standardizes the eccentricity of individual writing. In other words, you can still be eccentric, arrange your poem on the page equivalent to your breath,( like a painter), or equivalent to your mind, (like one half of the parentheses started but never closed), but, at the same time, it provides a standardized form of those arrangements…”
I love Ginsberg’s comment that “it’s just like the mind.” That notion is consistent with what I have gleaned from my Olson studies in that poetry should be more like life, more like how the mind works, to close the distance between the energy that inspires a poem and the energy experienced by the reader. The notion that a sidebar has started and continues is consistent with my hope that this book is only a first salvo in response to DT 2.0 and there is more to be said by the included poets and everyone else who can go deeper than the name calling DT and his ilk employ, so the open parenthesis could allude to this notion.
I am reminded of a line from Olson’s epic The Maximus Poems, “Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 15:”
He sd, “You go all around the subject.” And I sd, “I didn’t know it was a sub
ject.”
I read this as “You were expecting (demanding) the linear.” I am responding with a different logic chain. It is the dominant strain in North American poetry today, addled by the demands of capitalism, to stick to the subject. To have “subject-lock” as some call it. It’s limiting (closed) and one can train themselves to grasp for something with a little more depth.
It is a different logic chain that we need to apply in this D.T. 2.0 era. We hope to model that Tuesday, February 4, 2025 at 7pm, as several contributors to Winter in America (Again read from the book at Seattle University’s Sinegal 110. Our thanks to Jason Wirth and the Seattle U. Department of Philosophy for hosting.
