Noticing 2: Jack Sharpless and 'Working Stiffs'

                                                      (photo by Jonathan Williams, c. 1978)

 

 

Jack Sharpless is a poet little mentioned or read though he wrote four perfect books and was at work upon a fifth when he died of AIDS at the age of 38.  Unpublished during his life, the first four were given to the world by Jonathan Greene’s Gnomon Press in 1989 (the year after the poet’s death) as Presences of Mind: The Collected Books of Jack Sharpless, edited & introduced by his friend and advocate Ronald Johnson with afterwords by Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams, and exuberant blurbs from Creeley and Duncan.*  The “collected books” consist of quantum, twenty-four carefully oracled definitions (“each poem defines a word”--GD); Inroads, a superbly graceful accounting of Elizabeth I’s last twelve hours on earth written from inside her head; A Soldier in the Clouds, “Variations on a Parish Hymn Recurring in Dreams and Nightmares of Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw”; and The Fall of the X Dynasty, works snatched from “an imaginary Chinese dynasty (X is X here, not 10) which appear to be translations but are not” (Johnson).  Each a little boke, as Williams writes in his afterword.  (One must remember that a revolution took place in only 27 pages in Pound’s Cathay, a book Johnson brings up in relation to the X Dynasty.)  Each book is finished as a Poussin and unpredictable as a poem by Williams (W.C.).  Four excerpts from the four books, given in reverse order of how they appear in the Collected, for a taste:

The Tyrant

150,000

young soldiers’

sweet bodies

lined the roads

to Llasa and

the outer steppes,

yet he sat,

drinking it up

with the old boys,

unembarrassed.

*

&

a sea

otter’s

handsome

surefire

dives

through

mirrors

of

flesh

&

eons

The

older

one

grows

the

more

one

lives

inside

of

others

*

12:30

Bothwell

turned

her out

into the

streets

of Edinburgh

screaming

Hang

&

crucify

The

crowd

thunder

volleyed

Burn

the

Whore

*

song

UTTER
PRAISE

**

In 2014, the Song Cave--publisher of a number of permanent books**--gave us the unfinished fifth, Working Stiffs, again introduced by Johnson.***  Here the Jack of Diamonds, as Johnson nicknamed him, turns to a new metric--more spontaneous, more involved with speech than anything he’d written before--and works it well, rolling out the narrative quick, appropriate to--fitting perfectly--the tale, based as it is in the lower-vulgar (not a slight--I’m thinking of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia): scenes of bar-talk, gay-sex pick-ups, film noir dinginess, workingman’s gripes.  His rhythms give--better put: invent (“to find”)--grace to every line.  The first of the two poems in the book, “Palooka”, has the bar-met Joe skip to and fro, telling his life to the interested listener (I give a good portion here so the flow, rhein, can be felt):

I’d follow a line

of cocaine

wherever it strayed!

I lived in England,

France, Spain,

Singapore, LA,

Nebraska, Georgia,

Maine and Florida all

in one year or two.

Can’t remember anymore

the differences between.

A real army brat,

dragged from school

to school, hither

the fuck yon

around the planet.

The instructors in

the French schools would say:

Pulley-vous your ass,

and I’d spit back:

Fuck your own asses!

They hadn’t the faintest

where I was coming from,

nor where they were at.

*

My wife is Russian,

from over there; --I

tell you, they come here

and go all goofy on

religion and morality.

She really hates

my hanging around bars like this.

*

But, what was I to do,

sit home in front of

the tv and eat the Bible?

I just couldn’t

stomach that.

Afterall, Jack,

we all get horny.

**

On the inside flap-cover of the book the two poems in this chapbook are said to be ‘the only known examples of the “big gay book” that Sharpless was writing toward the end of his life.’  Hearing the rhythm, certain poems of Jonathan Williams**** came to mind, especially those found in Get Hot or Get Out and his other homoerotic verse (I mean as distinct from some of his other work--Mahler, the various Samuel Palmer poems, the elegies for Olson and others).  Williams’ rhythms are different, but both can be read beside one another and a kin-mind emerge.  Williams can be bawdy or majestic, as can Sharpless (Inroads a kind of Mahler).  Both had an interest in passionate speech--Williams wandering all over America and England seeking out in a kind of field-recording (I think of Lomax or Child) whatever might best be planted in the fields of Elysium; Sharpless waiting tables, taking drink and speech in bars (“He listened, he listened,” Johnson writes)--and Sharpless may have taken this interest as far as Williams if he’d lived to be 79, as Williams did.  

Another, also under-read and not-much mentioned, queer wild-man amphetamine Boston poet Stephen Jonas comes to mind as kin of Sharpless.  His Exercises for Ear is an absolute classic.†  His ear for speech, rooted in jazz and with a concern for exact, generative notation, is ostensibly far afield from Sharpless’, but the spirit’s grown up from the same root (EP: “We have one sap and one root”).  Here’s “CXVII” from Ear:

once i saw Bird so high

       that he came wingin’

over from the apple

w/ a busted foot & a gig

      to make at roll-a-way

he came in on the chorus

      from a wheelshair &

       just made the bridge

on one wheel

                           oh.  man the hippies

at mass.  & columbus

                          were moderately

shook!

Where Sharpless keeps a narrative in his speech-rhythms, Jonas is more concerned with the isolated spark of passionate utterance, registered with a rapidity found almost nowhere else in the language.  (Amiri Baraka, who was Jonas’ friend, may be the exception.)

I mention these as company.  Other poets come to mind, for speech or theme or both: Joel Oppenheimer; the lusty queer poems one can find in Thomas Meyer’s work; CAConrad’s possessed detonations; Jeffery Beam’s electric pan-amative “mustard seeds” (as Meyer’s called them); Spicer, whose Blaser-edited Collected Books echoes in the Presences title.  Others.  James Broughton.  Gerritt Lansing.  

**

This all to say: read the Work.  Sharpless should be read--Catullus’ corpus is not much larger, Sappho’s smaller though a superior melodist‡--, studied, delighted in.  The world is filled with read unreadable dross; Sharpless is a poet who never managed to write anything but exquisite charms: besasa out of Kirke's isle.


*

Two poems to leave off on: from The Fall of the X Dynasty, and the closing lines of the second poem in Working Stiffs (called “Graveyard Shift”):

The Recluse

What have I besides poetry?

Bed, table, lamp, some books.

A dozen years of scratching

does not relieve the itch.

*

I will look directly

into death’s unmoved,

onmoving grin,

but will I see you

again, or remember

all of your names?

_____________________________

* Creeley: “These intent, elegant verses are instance of an accurate and feeling mind.  We wander so abysmally in a maze of arguments and opinion that I hope we can still hear such compact wit and good will.  Jack Sharpless is a pleasure we had best accommodate while we still can.  His is the world that matters.”  Duncan: “Jack Sharpless restores my faith in the new generation.  He’s by far the best of them all.”

** A few titles as a hint to the keen minds in the cave (to be found here: http://www.the-song-cave.com/): Alfred Starr Hamilton’s A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind; Thomas Meyer’s Essay Stanzas; Nate Klug’s Rude Woods; Fanny Howe’s The Lamb.  I don’t think there’s a miss in the whole catalogue thus far.  Gems.  

*** Some of these poems were first published in the Chicago Review (Vol.45, No.1, 1999).

**** To listen to some of them, vide: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-Jonathan.php.

† Can be found in his Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1994), edited by Joseph Torra.  The subtitle of the poem is: being a Primer for the Beginner in the American Idiom.  

‡ And both of those poets--Catullus, Sappho--registered passionate speech in indelible fashion.  

Noticing: The Book of the Green Man

 

 

 

A beautifully-done new edition of Ronald Johnson’s classic--EP: “A classic is classic . . . because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”--book-length poem, The Book of the Green Man, has just been put out by UK-based publisher Uniformbooks, with a fine afterword by poet & scholar Ross Hair (author of Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, a pioneering study of the poet’s work).*  There is nothing in this edition, whether in design or setting, that does not lend itself to immediate commendation.  A pleasure to have in-hand.  

 

 This is a poem so fine it moved Harold Bloom, craggy rejector of many beautiful things (he has even tossed out much of Whitman as bad poetry), to write a fan letter to the poet (“I don’t know that I’ve ever written a fan letter before this…”).  Johnson’s former lover / poet-partner / conspirator-in-conjuration Jonathan Williams found it so wonderful he chose to quote its closing lines--”ecstatic reverie”--in a memoir of the poet.**  It is perhaps the poet’s “most accessible” work, renovating one of the most permanent of the tradition’s forms, the seasonal poem.  As such it fits perfectly alongside Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender***, Vergil’s Georgics, Thomson’s Seasons, Bunting’s Briggflatts (published one year before Green Man), and a hundred others.  And as with Spenser, one of Bunting’s favorite poets, the given-form allows a wild invention.  (The same can be said of Pound’s Propertius, a poem which functions in relation to The Cantos as the Green Man does to ARK, though in the Homage it is the given original Pound works from.)  The formal innovations of Pound, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan, and others--quotation, the luminous detail, the derived and variegated montage, rhymes of all kind--come to play with the visionary company of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients; Blake, Stubbs, and Grigson; the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, the poems of her brother; the naturalist investigations of Francis Kilvert, Gilbert White, and Thoreau (among others); the works of Edith Sitwell (I think of Rustic Elegies here, having a copy in my room, a book of many splendors); etc.  Johnson, as in all of his work, steals mercury from wherever it lies best.  The reader is in familiar territory but with a strange weather all about.  (Oz is nearing here.)

 

I won’t write of the poem’s compositional background--it has been well written of in several places, including briefly on the Uniformbooks site****, as well as in essays in the Joel Bettridge and Eric Selinger edited collection Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (essential reading alongside Hair’s Collage Poetry), and elsewhere--but to say Johnson lived and walked for a time in the land from which he wrote his poem, much as John Alec Baker did to write his astonishing prose masterpiece The Peregrine (a book to set with Thoreau on the highest shelf) or Peter O’Leary his Whitmanian extravaganza Phosphorescence of Thought.  In all three--Johnson, Baker, O’Leary (a disciple of Johnson’s)--the work comes from a generative practice focusing consciousness to meet the imaginal, be it by bird-watching, translation, quotation (an eclogue--selection: is it the wren I hear?--of reading), or search for all things “most rich, most glittering, most strange” (a poem-title in the “Autumn” section Johnson took from a Time magazine article—a quote from Gustave Moreau).  Johnson’s poem reads as “lived” as anything by Villon yet with the additional quality of feeling that one may walk headlong into a lost Méliès or Spenserian garden.†

 

I cannot tell you how much I wish this book were in every hand in the world.  No more “uglier to the airport"‡—Attention! bring in Arcady. The sight, sound, and intellection found in this book may be enough.  

 

____________________________________

* Hair’s book can be found here: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/ronald-johnson's-modernist-collage-poetry-ross-hair/?k=9780230108691&loc=us.  (Expensive there.  I found it through interlibrary loan.)  

** Can be read in full here: http://jargonbooks.com/rjobit.html.

*** Johnson and Spenser both delight in the strange-bodied apparition of the archaic: “Of Certaine White Nights Wherein the / Darkes Doe Seem to Gette Up / & Walk & How Wee Saw Divers Wonders in Bothe / Earthe & Element” (“Autumn”, third part); the epigraph to the whole book: “Then cam four grett wodyn / with four grett clubes all in grene // & skwybes / borning . . .”.  

**** http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/thebookofthegreenman.php?x=43&y=6.  I refrain from quoting from the book here as it’s well represented on that page.  

† Vide the notebook pages Johnson kept of his walks: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-gm-nb.htm.

‡ Title of a great Guy Davenport essay taken from Zukofsky.