An
Anecdoted Topography Of The California Poem
The
California Poem
Eleni
Sikelianos
Coffee
House Press
1-56689-162-0
1.
This poem is
autobiographical, imaginary, quasi-learned,
quasi-teenage-bullshitter’s companion, beatnik biologist’s bedroom field guide,
trailer park trailer trash epiphany, exorcism, & extension, Baudelairian
cowboy catalogue, poetical Gray’s Anatomy, tiger tail Tristram Candy, inflated
egotistical balloon popping, stakes-raising, quasi-everything, blah blah
doctorial glam-thesis, American appendix, roman candle & endnote, exegesis
resisting, anti-pantheon pantheon-joining, 190-page holiday companion,
entrance, warning, welcome, exit plan, & travel guide.
2.
From the back cover: “A native of California, Eleni blah blah blah book about blah
blah blah California blah very good blah remarkable blah female blah book blah
blah blurb blah blah blah.” But like a burger I will rise
3.
& then I start reading The California Poem and: “The flame of materials” /
amaze
4.
It spills insects & pills over its front and then throws
off its shirt and then embarrassed thinks better of it & spends some time
in the dirt looking for where it landed & instead finds more &
different bugs, rocks, junk, cowboys, needles, things & goes back into town
& does something teenage& trashy to prove that it’s not what everybody
thought it was in the mountains. over the
anomalous orbit of Pluto / tipped at 17 degrees to the solar plane And then goes back. & then goes back.
5.
Thoreau moved from culture to nature. as if space were / a
readable object The
California Poem starts with nature, encounters culture. & licks it.
6.
California is all surface – and so everything is here, now,
available, immediately. With soft
foots & mean teeth / bite I mean / bite Holyfield’s ear / twice Served in super-size, bite-sized,
disposable, organic gobs of California, the poem, the state. eg. to state: the State: a state [of being]: & to be in a State. According to my lights / as I
circle & touch upon this state or that / uncouth gringos are lounging in the shade
7.
California in the lights of the trees …
California with
my eyes …
California /
stitched up twice …
California /
& its industrial wastelands …
The dental
imprint of California
Jack Kerouac would speak
through the medium of Eleni.
8.
This is, I mean, an easy, as in enjoyable, book to
read. a
dictionary arranged not alphabetically but from heaven to earth
9.
>>The sublime …. But?
<<The Sublime But>>
10. California
[When I write ‘California’ in this text I mean both the State and the Poem ] = Cornucopia. Everything IS interconnected, utopian,
included, mulched, special, banal, singing, intoxicated, purged, bleached,
immaculate, broken, shaved, washed, sweating: & I remember all the Republic
of California Flags hanging in the fogs. Where Blake / stuck his finger into the bloody deer and all
you ghosts who could give a fuck / about aesthetics, that strictly human
endeavor
11. As good as
J.H. Fabre, The Life of Spiders. 1912. The
pleasure of natures. Or the
opposite.
12. everything
belongs in California, / the ‘sodium squalls,’ tomatoes / of injustice A man in San Francisco – on
Valencia St – said to me -- as I bought a shitty 3 gear bicycle off him for $30
– “SON, you know why everybody in California is so fuckin’ weird? It’s because they arrived on the east
coast and were driven out of every town they tried to settle in until they got
here. And then they couldn’t go no
further.”
13. So it goes
so far out that when you have got that far out you find that actually you have
got to where you came in.
14. But here in
this State, Eleni Sikelianos [ ‘Eleni Sikelianos’ in this text = the poem]
is made by California and what making she does comes out of this
pot. a child
making up a child’s songs, / singing to the Pebbles & Peerless Lachrymara
15. As the poem
goes, possums wander across the set.
& that possum – as a stranger to California [we learn herein] with
its pouch and its inducted nativity works as a metaphor for the writer herself. Curious. Wandering under timber framed houses, becoming familiar with
the grubs and the candy wrapping, either putting things in or taking them
out. Stealing from everybody
because everything is necessarily hers.
Crossing highways. Being
among all the earths but not of it.
Eating donuts & bugs.
Hiding & obscuring or revealing what?
16. Herself?
California? Whatever. Eleni. Escaped. Alien. Courier. Shoplifter.
Shopgirl. Showgirl. Shopper.
17. The poem is
the pouch. But is it a case of
putting in or taking out? the
researches of Eleni, of melatonin patches
18. Or: this is
and at any time can be turned over by the fault lines that run up and down
it. & so the strata that the
surface necessarily covers can & does break through too. Or be submerged. Will the writer be raised up or
swallowed? over the /
veering / Earth.
19. The most
enjoyable blah read
of 2005. The most enjoyable.
20. What
evidence – thus far – do you have that I have even read the damn book anyway?
21. Sikelianos,
it is reported sprawling,
self-seeking-as-in-seeking-of-self, sentimental, sub-atomic, stripped,
straight, stoned, stratospheric, sad, stung, shining, speeding, slouching,
solitary, sensuous, shipwrecked, scientific, swinging, spidergirl, shaggy-dog,
striated, psychic, submarine, sublime signees & signets / a
sideskip, a skid, a
22. Here now,
available, consumable, pointless in the past and if only of the future
unattainable, & therefore NOW.
And now = eternity in California & eternity = NOW. & if everything is in nature &
nature is perfect then everything that happens is natural & everything that
happens is perfect.
23. California
is too large & it breaks. But
– and here the epic is dispensed with – the California Poem [to q. Whitman]
does contradict itself / AND contains multitudes -- and how could it not? The truth
of Georgia is not to be found here in sushi dinners
24. Without
contraries there’s no progression.
William Blake. – If,
however, language expresses only the universal, then I cannot say what only I
mean. Hegel / Encyclopedia. hometowns
invaded by Huguenots, Reaganites / Daughters of the Did you wait for our
languages to disappear?
25. In California – is the natural
world more present than almost anywhere else? SF fogs, earthquake news every day, surf, the eternal desert
just at back, the fires. &
what sits on it is therefore so superficial & so profound – because – this
is all there is. Meditating
on daily objects – / to find any aura & possible
26. Her line
breaks. As miraculous / effortless
/ glorious as [on-a-high-wire]-Schuyler.
HER LINE BREAKS.
27. The artist’s
function is quite clear; he must open up a work shop and take in the world for
repair, as it comes to him, in pieces.
Ponge The god of
imaginable objects / made me
28. Lisa Jarnot
once in a lecture said something like ‘I inhabit the space between Bob Dylan
& Gertrude Stein’. When I
think of Eleni Sikelianos I think Captain Beefheart, Lorine Niedecker, Jaques
Cousteau, Jack London, Eartha Kitt.
29. & what
California does to The California Poem is – As Paris did in Sikelianos’ exquisite
poems of the mid 1990’s – take the poet out of the body and into the
world. And this capacity for
tasting it, being coloured by it, being it almost before being self, is – in
its glorious transcendence of self – where Sikelianos’ most original &
eternal & exciting writing happens extends & is extended. for the moon / malls made a language /
“to eat up / available reality”
30. we /
opulent stars / as suggested / by
Virgil are Barney
Hoskyns’ Waiting For The Sun, Laird Hunt’s Indiana, Indiana, Brenda Coultas’
Bowerie Poems, Helter Skelter, William Least Heat Moon’s Prairy Earth,
Christopher Dewdney’s Spring Trances In The Control Emerald Night, Pet Sounds, Clark
Coolidge’s A Geology, The Big Sleep. The California Poem made me find & want these landscapes.
31. A good book
because: The
crystalline style / will rise and write: / “not an animal gives a hip-/ hop,
the moon & all in it is perfect
& broken.
32. Chamise,
Scrub Oak, hard tack, wild lilac, Bear Brush & Quinine, manzanita,
Sugarbush Thus names
of frogs, trees, beetles, etc birds. Showing not saying, etc. The hope that
at least a few are made up.
‘Poetry is really loving the name of anything. Gertrude Stein.
33. Lost
animals, lost languages, lost tribes, lost childhood, lost innocence. This is a sad book. But of this ye sing? And the beauty of parking garages
illuminated / in the night
34. Reading The
California Poem reminds me of reading Paradise Lost in school and having it in
the ear & staring out of the window as far as I could into summer. I too / moving viewer / in the
indeterminate land, an always moving / horizon at my front / or at my back
35. I can call
myself / a Californian because / I was there in the state of the Sisters / of
Perpetual Indulgence &
though the lists of endangered & extinct are listed & the extinguished
customs are named, there is no – because of the expanded self [?] –
finger. By naming them they are
here. And by the very dialogue
with the transitory nature of everything in California – they are no different
from the cars, the movie stars, the fleeting, the absolute….& thus already
gone. I have said this before?
36. Americans
like to keep the sound going – Americans from the west. Alice Notley.
37. and
tectibranchs and bryoza, down to the Mexican sea (‘Nothing could ever again help us to fulfillment,
except / Our own solitary course over the sleepless landscape’ – Rilke: Elegy
[for Marina Tsveteaeva])
38. Dipping my
toes in the Pacific off the edge of –
/ Tell, what lurks at the boundaries Or it is as if somebody has stuck a huge finger onto
the spinning globe and the whole of California – as if in a car without
seatbelts – has all -- from
pre-history to now – in the land of the neophyte beasts, rats in the palms hit the fan
that is The California Poem. Up to
now nobody has been able to tell it.
39. Our long
hours / in dormant crooks in cool canyons lazily drumming along the pipelined
coast / We’ve roamed these When I read the woody, seedy, parts, of the poem, I
want to be sitting in a car and eating fast food. When I am climbing hills with the teenage Eleni & I
tire, I want to fall under the sea or read some philosophy. When I am sitting with the turtles, I
soon want something more … trashy or profound. & Sikelianos [because she is restless, because she is
somehow unsatisfied[?] or interested]
but there is the dirt bike parade provides it.
40. How it is
for the author too. “because I
think the lake / is better than me” & this
is another instance.
41. The
California Poem is too interesting to be an epic. For this work, the authorial ego is too absurd, the form
[that is an epic] too restrictive. In general - An author’s ambition to
write an epic automatically damns it. Look,
42. A thought
wavy and loose / showed me / the endings of matter, things / beyond / hope The California Poem is an
exciting, restless read because the investigating that goes on [anthropology,
archaeology, sociology, identity, mechanics, astrology, puberty, poetry,
gender, etc.] is done by an amateur who doesn’t know exactly where she is
being pulled but who looks at everything with the same capacity for ecstasy
& boredom that I bring to the book & the world. What will happen next? The author allows you to not know. & that’s unusual for any kind of
reading [particularly poetry] experience.
Ie. The rejection of closure through content as well as form.
43. ________________________________________________________________________________________________
44. & so
this poem is?
45. Autobiographical,
imaginary, quasi-learned, quasi-teenage-bullshitter’s companion, beatnik
biologist’s bedroom field guide, trailer park trailer trash exorcism, epiphany,
& extension, Baudelairian cowboy catalogue, poetical Gray’s Anatomy, tiger
tail Tristram Candy, inflated egotistical balloon popping, stakes-raising,
quasi-everything, blah blah doctorial glam-thesis, American appendix, Jungian
journal, roman candle & endnote, exegesis resisting, anti-pantheon
pantheon-joining, 190-page holiday companion, entrance, warning, welcome, exit
plan, hipster litany & travel guide.
46. And what
this book makes you want to do [and Bernadette Mayer says as much] besides
being excited about reading and writing - is to be in your poems or for
you to be here in this one go and write your own.
47. Go and
write your own.
48. Hand
me the black / prison
phone Tell them / all chola girls
to be set free