At Dashanzi

798, also called the Dashanzi Art District, is Beijing’s premier art community. Since it formed in the early 2000s, a number of Western art dealers and corporate entities have set up shop here, and a few of its first tenants, including Ai Wei Wei, have become a powerful force in the art world.   

My visit to 798 in February 2013 confirmed this description. Walls and light posts are plastered with exhibition billboards and fliers. Weird public art proliferates.  For example, in the first three courtyards closest to the entrance, there is: a resin statue of a scorpion, an airplane wing embedded upright in the ground (its engine looking much like an unblinking camera eye) and a 7 foot tall cement man bound in rope, BDSM style. Spray paint stencils and graffiti coat the exteriors of buildings, buses, and signs.  Street sellers hock potatoes and fur pelts as fashionable visitors wander in and out of galleries and cafes, snapping photos.  In short, the site bears all the tell-tale semiotics of frenzied artistic and commercial production consistent with international art communities like SOHO and Chelsea.

Still,798’s current role—part art-zone, part shopping center—is relatively new.  East German architects originally constructed the site as an electronics factory in the 1950s, and until its insolvency in the 1970s, 798 was a paragon of the state-run worker commune. Outside of the storefront facades and the self-consciously asymmetrical, iceberg-shaped gallery at the center of the district (whose presence seems as new as it does out of place), most of the architecture in 798 looks original, and it’s easy to imagine the site as it was 50 years ago.

East Germans in Beijing: Building Factory 718

The Danshanzi Art District in northwest Beijing, architecturally speaking, is a modest endeavor (perhaps unsurprising for a factory). The site is a rectangular compound arranged on a grid. It is composed of thick, horizontal buildings made of plain red brick. It has unadorned walls dotted here and there with a few windows, arranged in uniform blocks.  The avenues are wide and open. The public squares feel tiny and intimate.  Pipes and vents of all colors and ages reach between buildings, supported by metal gantries.  Some poke up from the ground, releasing steam into the street. In a lot of ways, this is a pretty unassuming space, one that follows its own iterations of style in an absolutely unconscious way. Even today, with its contemporary art veneer, it still looks more like a place where you make or build things rather than sell them.

The district is a favorite subject of contemporary articles on urbanization and gentrification because of its shift from an industrial production space to a creative development area, an unusual occurrence in China. The story of 798’s construction, operation, decay, and revival parallels a broader story of changes in the modern urban and cultural landscape of Beijing.

 

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798 is a smaller subunit of a much larger factory complex called 718. It was one of a number of projects initiated by the Communist government after their victory over the Nationalists and their subsequent consolidation of power in Beijing. It’s part of a Mao Zedongs’s incredibly ambitious proposal to industrialize China, after two decades of civil war and nearly two centuries of political and economic decline.

Mao envisioned a future China that outgunned Britain in steel production and a new modern capital whose sky would be populated with a “forest of smokestacks.”  The journalist Jianying Zha notes (somewhat sarcastically) that when Mao came to Beijing, there were only 15 architects there, and less than 5 of them knew how to construct a three-story building.

It was the Soviet Union, initially, that made the realization of Mao’s urban plans possible. Though they may have spitefully destroyed their coal-mining factories in Manchuria in 1946 to keep them out of Chinese Communist hands, by 1950, they’ve changed their mind. By 1951, there are 156 Soviet projects in the works, in Beijing and across the country.

Factory 718 would become project number 157, initiated by Premier Zhou Enlai.  He requests an additional factory to produce electronic components specifically for the People’s Liberation Army. The Soviets lack the necessary expertise, but they arrange a meeting with their electronics supplier, the head of the East German government, who agrees enthusiastically to work on the project. Between 1954-1964, a total of 300 East German experts traveled to the site to cooperate with Chinese construction workers and engineers, as thousands of tons of materials made their way from Germany to Beijing by way of the trans-Siberian railroad. At its completion in 1957, the “North China Wireless Appliances Friendship Factory” covered 500,000 square meters and had 7 separate operating units.

The East German and Chinese construction groups, with minimal interference from their Soviet overseers, made an excellent team. Both countries understood the necessity of making much out of little; both were in the process of rebuilding and were eager to reboot (or in China’s case, establish) their industrial sector through any means necessary; both worried greatly about the ability to withstand foreign attacks.

The East Germans built 798 with all of these things in mind, and it’s apparent in certain aspects of the architecture. While the Soviet leadership initially disliked the undecorated, sparse German design and demand something more “historical” (whatever that means—most likely something that bears more obviously the mark of Soviet domination through kitschy entablature), the Germans refused; records of their conversations with Soviet and Chinese leadership, luckily, show the detailed case the East Germans made for the particular components of their design.

Consider, for example, the oddly Romanesque-looking arch supports, with their massive interior buttresses, that line the inside of some of the larger factory spaces. (It is an odd effect—the buildings look like they’re leaning backward and resting on their haunches.) Why this odd design? Presumably, because it’s much stronger than walls simply built perpendicular to the ground and topped with a triangular prism of a roof  (the Germans repeatedly insist that they’ve designed the factory this way to ensure that it will survive an air raid—something they certainly know a little bit about.)

Consider also the humble type no. 500 red bricks used in every warehouse and wall.  This particular type of brick was not available in China, but the East Germans insisted that without it, they could not guarantee the integrity of the design in the event of an 8-magnitude earthquake. To solve this problem, the Germans built factories to make them.  (Factories producing factories in an infinitely recursive fashion—this is the ultimate modernist dream.)  They then proceeded, according to a former factory worker, to test the psi of every single one. When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the neighboring province of Tangshan a few months before Mao’s death in 1976, one can only assume the German team felt particularly validated.

Reform Follows Function: Ideology and Urban Policy

In the creation of a new Beijing, both construction and destruction were necessary. When Mao moved to transform Beijing into a socialist masterpiece, a “proletariat-peasant metropolis,” his makeover was brutal. The hútòngs, distinctive alleys with dense, infinite recursions of space, were destroyed en mass, as were the city walls and gates; hundreds of teahouses, temples, and residential courthouses (sìhéyuàn) were also systematically bulldozed. Why was this? Jiaying Zha suggests that, from an entirely aesthetic and symbolic perspective, Beijing couldn’t function as the capital of communist nation in its existing state; she calls the city walls, for example, symbols of the “feudalism and claustrophobia” that Mao was trying so desperately to purge from the city.  They were too much of a reminder of the old ways, of rigid imperial hierarchies, of out-of-touch emperors and stale customs, of decadence and decline and luxury. The city needed to change because Chinese people needed to change too, in the way that they thought about one another and the way they lived together.

Architecture and urban planning worked in an advisory capacity here, attempting to engineer social behavior from the top down. There is no better example of this (at least, that still remains intact from this period) than the state-run factories, 718 in particular. Like many other Soviet-built factories of the time, 718 was intended to be an entirely self-contained entity; each unit included residential, commercial, and work-spaces for its respective denizens. This is in contrast to the previous division of space in old Beijing, in which living and commercial quarters were kept distinctly separate.  In communist Beijing, the basic of unit of cultural, spatial and social organization was no longer the neighborhood, but the factory.

This is why 718 is more than just a factory. It is supposed to be a site for both work and play, for sleeping and eating, for new communal identities to form and thrive.  While the compound has a distinctly utilitarian vibe, its form seems patently aware that its function is not only mechanical, but human too.

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At first, it’s hard to identify just what about the complex (outside of great care put into its construction) makes it seem so livable, so pleasing to look at and walk around in. The original site didn’t have much in the way of decorative effects, save the red Cultural Revolution slogans added to the interior walls in the late 60s.  Maybe it’s because the East German design, while sparse and practical, is also incredibly livable, human-sized, and intimate. Rather than trying to overwhelm you with the grand authority of the state (perhaps the goal of Tiananmen Square, a former imperial garden) 798 is trying to amuse and comfort you, to be the proverbial Matissian armchair for the worker at the end of a long and tired day.

Perhaps the best illustration of the designer’s ambition to create a space that is both beautiful and functional (both human and machine, and in that way an ideal “machine for living”) is the silhouette of the factory roof in the main square, often described as “saw-toothed.” These buildings, in addition to a few others within the compound, are capped by a series of what look like sawed-off barrel vaults.   The red brick portion of the roof completes about 60 degrees of a circle before it terminates in a slab of paneled glass. From the inside, this forms a gigantic hall, a long wedge-shaped prism that now functions as a gallery space, but was formerly the main factory floor. From the outside, the structures make a scalloped pattern that chunks up the skyline in a pleasing, whimsical way.

This feature is a particularly creative solution to a relatively banal problem. The factory spaces required lots of natural light; the north-facing skylights filter in angled sunlight, bright enough to illuminate a space, not so direct as to overwhelm. It’s hard to imagine, though, that the Germans designed these skylights, which look so much like open-mouthed sea bass, without a hint of humor or pleasure in architectural oddity merely for its own sake.

While all this discussion of form-follows function, the elevation of the worker, and the creation of livable machines might sound familiar, it’s worth pointing out that this structure wasn’t actually designed by the Bauhaus (the progressive German architectural school terminated by the Nazis in 1933). In terms of materials and style, there are few comparisons to be made here.  Architects like Mise Van der Rohe were famous for working with volume, and not mass; Van der Rohe defined the quintessential Bauhaus-inspired building as a glass skin hung on a steel frame, plastered with stucco on the inside—glorious and white, radiant and lifted. 798, by contrast, is horizontal and heavy. Its red brick masonry is the definition of mass and not volume. Where contemporary Bauhaus was cinematically stark, Dashanzi is stolidly plain.

Still, one gets the idea that Walter Gropius’ ghost implicitly approves of the project. The structure absolutely fulfills and realizes Gropius’ greatest vision for the Bauhaus (somewhat ironically, outside of a Western European context)—that its architecture would operate in service of a great class transformation. For a time, 798 oversaw such a transition in China.

The Socialist Utopia that was

798 was a total space built by a total state, meant to fulfill completely the requirements of a life. Into this comprehensive environment, then, the most privileged of China’s factory workers and engineers went.

In its first iteration, 798 seems to have been a success, from both a social and economic standpoint. For nearly two decades, 798 served as the model of a centrally-planned, government run, self-contained industrial center.  Workers had furnished housing available at 1/30 the price of their wages; their children enjoyed free public education, and their families had access to some of the best medical and dental care in the country.  Grainy black and whites from the 60s show happy workers congregating for group exercise and nurses petting the heads of babies at 798’s daycare center. In 798, recreation also played an important role.  The site boasted basketball, volleyball, and soccer teams, literary clubs, swimming pools, a stadium, a theater, a library with books in both Chinese and German, and an orchestra that played revolutionary hymns and Western music.  I even saw an image of one man doing an Evil Knievel on a German motorbike.

What was propaganda and what was reality? From an outside perspective it’s hard to judge. 798 was in many ways the ideal exception to the general rule of reorganizational failure and poverty in Communist China. Part of why 798 received such generous resources and became a flagship of model factory life was because it produced some of the most valuable (and top-secret) products in the country.  When a U.S. U2 plane was shot down in China in 1962, it was workers at 798 that reverse-engineered electrical components found on board (like an insulator) and began producing them for the PLA and for the North Korean military.  (Though this is a bit speculative, some writers suggest that 798 was also where the components of China’s first nuclear bomb were created.)

If indeed 798 was ever the socialist utopia it promised to be, it did not last. While workers at 798, due to the selective and important nature of their trade, were shielded and isolated from many of the effects of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and in particular the Great Famine, a radical shift in economic policy under the reformist and moderate leadership of Deng Xiaoping would knock the factory from its privileged state position. Like many state-run enterprises, 798 (and its larger encompassing unit, 718) was essentially insolvent by the mid 90s; over 2/3rds of the work force had been laid off and only one of the original 7 factories, factory 750, was still operational.

Unsustainable as it was, though, 798 was for the Maoist regime a cultural ziggurat; it did not represent the de facto reality of what the country was or necessary would be, but echoed its highest ideals and aspirations. Perhaps Factory 798 was in some ways a huge performance piece, a “culture zoo” that displayed the ideal version of a Communist system, and that became less and less viable as the country struggled with internal divisions, poverty, and the heinous outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. It was, as so many great artworks are, an exercise in articulating not what a society is, but the way in which it sees itself.

Mao is not the only 20^st century world leader to find in modern architecture the promise of social reform on a massive scale. Like many other contemporary modern leaders in Western countries, Mao absolutely believed in the transformative power of spatial planning; unlike modern leaders in the west, he had the state power behind him to compel people to realize his vision, in which material reality, social organization, and national ambition merged into one harmonious society, pointedly directed at the future.

798: Factory and Art

How did 798 shift from its previous life as a model socialist electronics factory to its present iteration, an arts and culture center that garners increasing international attention? There are, of course, many unromantic and incredibly practical reasons for this transition, having to do with such boring and obvious things as real estate markets. Jen Currier and Rene Dekker both note, with a touch of irony, that the same market reforms that consigned factory 718 to obscurity, emptying it of its workers and devaluing its property, are what allowed artists to develop it at relatively low costs into an aesthetic enclave in Beijing.  The low per-square foot cost to rent was key. Also important: high availability of light, massive high-roofed spaces that function dually well as studios and exhibition spaces, and the orientation of the district far away from the city center and (at least initially) reasonably far away from the watchful eye of Chinese sensors.

Still, convenience aside, it’s clear from reading descriptions from some of the artists and culture workers who were instrumental in the repurposing of the site that there’s more to it than that. Berenice Angremy (2006) of Thinking Hands, an architectural conservation group in Beijing, summarizes it in this way:

“It was very obvious that this area could be where contemporary culture could develop. It contained an architectural testimony to an industrial past that was absolutely very precious, and that’s why we wanted to have an art district here.”

In China, a generation of artists born in the 30s and 40s worked in the factories alongside their parents and peers; they remember the transition from a state-centered economy to Deng Xiaoping’s socialist market system. They witnessed the end of a shared vision of classless prosperity and a culture that glorified the worker. Small, wonder then, that this same generation of artists continues to be preoccupied with factories as culturally resonant spaces and aesthetic objects. There are several 798 artists, including Sui Jianguo, Huang Rui and Xu Yong, who have worked part of their lives in a factory (Huang at a shoe leather factory, Xu at a needle factory).

Sui Jianguo in particular has an interesting history.  He was the head of the sculpture department when, in 1995, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing moved from Wangfujing to another electronic component factory nearby.  Two of his sculptures are here at 798. The first is a three-tiered red mesh cage with dinosaurs inside, probably from his “Made in China” series. The second one is the Diskobolus. The copy I see tucked away in a back courtyard, acting as a doorstop shows a thinly-smiling Chinese in a business suit winding up to pitch a discus; Sui’s most famous version of the piece, however, currently on exhibition at the British museum, is a stony-faced Greek, nearly a perfect copy of Myron’s ancient sculpture, wearing the iconic Mao suit.

Lately, Sui has been making copies of the suit itself, signifying (by his own admission) that “the Chinese people have not yet taken it off. “

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798 may not longer be the center of experimental avant-garde art and culture in Beijing (that title may go to the districts of Caochangdi and Songzhuang); it may fast become a commercial center for aesthetic commerce and speculation, a hub for the international art community in Beijing, and drive out local talent (indeed it may already have, as climbing rent prices have meant that few artists can afford to have residences there). Still, at the moment it serves a dual purpose, allowing Chinese artists and denizens of Beijing to communicate with a complicated past—part industrial, part idealistic. There’s a historical resonance here that is different from the Forbidden City, so neatly sanitized and so clearly a feature of a distant and far removed era. 798 preserves a past-present, a history still on the heels on contemporary China that haunts the memories of its citizens. It stubbornly carries into the affluent present memories of building industrial Beijing, of the construction of state ideologies and their equally rapid dismantling.

CANARY

I held my canary out for you when you said your canary felt a little droopy.

Your canary was a ruby drop in my frosty glass of canary.

The canary between us grew for many days.

I wanted to fight the canary, but you held me back.

The officer shot the unarmed canary on a canary I used to walk down every day.

When you touched the canary underneath my knee, a balloon filled with canary in an eastern corner.

The sound of unmarked canaries overhead frightened the rural hospital.

The president has never commented publicly on the controversial canary program.

Can you remember where that canary was that we tried so many years ago?

Oh, that canary feels so good—just like that.

The canaries carry electricity to our houses in even smaller canaries.

When the activists passed out yellow canaries I took one and read it.

A canary is born every 8 seconds.

I log onto the large canary to check how my canary is faring.

When I go to the supermarket, I check the codes on the canaries to make sure they are not genetically modified canaries.

Many canaries suffer.

She pressed a thumb into my muscle and all the canary was released into me.

When I went outside I saw the sky. It was filled with canary.

You held the canary up to my face. You vibrated the canary at a new frequency.

You said the best time for canaries was 11:30 am.

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Emily Skillings is a dancer poet poet dancer.  Recent poetry can be found in No Dear, Bone Bouquet, Lingerpost, Stonecutter, La Fovea and Maggy. Skillings dances with Saifan Shmerer, the A.O. Movement Collective and The Commons Choir (Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik). She lives in Brooklyn, where she is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and event series. She is a co-curator of the Brooklyn reading series HOT TEXTS with Krystal Languell. On July 25, 2013, she and her collaborator Lillie De will perform their dance theater piece (being fluid and knowing what to fill) at Dixon Place.

EVERYONE LIKE HER

I just had a little of your chocolate
and now I’m wild with desire
for more chocolate
it goes right to the discomfort
sweetens it I think.

The moon’s on
a short white leash
and what happens
to everyone
happens to you.

You’re gonna die too.

I’ll make you a tape
to play
when you say my name
slowly
like I’m stupid
like dogs are stupid
like the homeless are stupid
you’re always calling
everyone stupid.
And you are kind of
a lunk
big medium
mind.
I’ve been tuning you out
since I was a sperm
That’s why I can’t listen well
all your talk
you made it vulgar
to speak
talking in your sleep
when the fear cartoons play
talk when you wake up
talk
talk
hate is real
it’s an actual thing
and I really do
I hate you.

_______________________________________________
Leopoldine Core was born and raised in Manhattan. Her poems and fiction have appeared in Open City, The Literarian, Drunken Boat, Sadie Magazine, Big Lucks, iO, Harp & Altar, The Brooklyn Rail, Agriculture Reader, No, Dear and others. She is a 2012 Fellow at The Center for Fiction and at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her chapbook Young Friend is forthcoming from Perfect Lovers Press.

Gregory Orr is famous and has won major awards. John Smith is a retired high school teacher from New Jersey who is a poet, well respected locally but unknown otherwise. Orr has blurbs from such luminaries as Albert Goldbarth, Ilya Kaminsky, and Naomi Shihab Nyef. John has blurbs from poets who have won grants and are well thought of, but not exactly headliners. I was asked to review Orr. I chose to review Smith. So why am I putting them together?

First, both inhabit the same generational orbit: Nam, eastern spirituality mixed with a dose of overcoming the dark spots through mindfulness, meditation, a sometimes didactic sense of wisdom that would not be out of place at a weekend retreat on Rumi. They do not draw their powers from decorative displays of language, and tend to have some of the traits inherent to the deep imagists, to Bly and James Wright and Galway Kinnell, but Orr is more sparse, less likely to let his lines breathe in an expansive form of pontification. Smith is more likely to experiment—even with shaped poems. He does not have a reputation to live up to and can be less confined in the competing poem of his name. Orr is confined to Orr. To his credit, he is trying to break free and I see this book as being the awkward manifestation of a voice change. But to the poems:

The River Inside the River: Gregory Orr

The River Inside the River is divided into three parts, the first being a sequence of meditative poems on Adam and Eve in the garden,(and, to an extent on exile as a form of growth and the superiority of becoming over mere being). The second part is a meditation on the “city of poetry” (sort of Orr’s gloss on the Kingdom of God, and Williams’ the city as poem) and the third section is a sort of culmination of the two previous sections. The title of the book should be a tip off that mystification and simplicity, the simplicity of mystification, and the mystification of simplicity are going to be a huge factor. Forget reading previous Orr. If we judge this book by itself, there is much in it that is part of the didactic-self-empowering- pocket wisdom market. Someone who fell in love with Gibran or with the messages in Rumi, or with the spiritual transports over nature in Mary Oliver might not be at all troubled by this book, except that Orr—the part of Orr that is a good poet—knows better. Inside his comfort zone (and this is definitely a comfort zone poetics for intelligent white middle class baby boomers who want to congratulate themselves on their evolved selves) there lurks a book-saving sense of affliction. This would make those who traffic in spiritual uplift fault the book. For me it is the one thing that saves The River Inside the River from bombast and the self-help section of the supermarket.

Orr’s comfort zones never succeed in being wholly comfortable. They fall apart. There is a shrillness, a shrike among the wild geese as to who is impaling the butterflies to a thorn. This is not negativity. This is the real truth teller in Orr. There is also a false “truth” teller who is a more artful version of Kung Fu .The real truth teller broaches trouble that cannot be tied up in a neat spiritual bow of epiphany and put out with the recyclables. Poets who traffic in either positive or negative energies are not often worth reading: rather, Orr, at his best, offers the sort of trouble Stephen Dunn, another wise poet, suggests we should always keep on our road to being too pleased with ourselves. But before I get to that saving grace let me quote a little from a poem in each section and tell you why it annoys the bejesus out of me:.

From the first section:

With their embrace
They chose
Each other
Which is
to choose death.

This is bad Gibran and it is faux mystical. Adam and Eve now inhabit a “choice” culture” but this choice that is death will, by the laws of yuppie epiphany, be superior to eternal life because after all, becoming is always better than being; and, in addition to choice, our culture is a sort of whore for endless flux– Faust’s striving, but with a dose of eastern equivocation to keep it from being ferocious. I’m giving these lines too much credit here. What really annoys me are the enjambments which cause a sort of stage whispery feeling, an unnecessary pause between “they chose,” and “each other”. This is language reduced to summing up, language which seeks to have no flourish except in the spaces, the caesuras of the white space which, for me, happens to often in such poetry to be effective any longer. This contrivance gives everything a falsely hollowed hush. Written out as a sentence, one can see it as a fairly plain statement:

With their embrace they chose each other which is to choose death.

I understand that, according to Harold Bloom, this is a new spiritual age in which wisdom literature is waging a comeback, but where’s the rhetorical majesty, the eloquence, the form rather than the mere information of wisdom? How do we keep a poetics of spirituality from being a fucking fortune cookie on steroids?

Anyway, that’s in section one. In section two, there is more memoir-like narrative, more Wordsworthian prelude and confession about Orr’s catastrophic origins (he accidentally shot his brother and killed him as a child). Here, one might expect the poet to fully be conscious of his era: on how we are hung up on self because we no longer really have any confidence in it. We lust for serenity because we are detached from our violence by drones, and video games, and the fact that there are always immigrants, poor whites and blacks to fight our police actions while we buy new yoga mats. Occasionally someone shoots up a school and we never tie it to ourselves. How could it be us? Unlike our parents, we don’t scream or shout. We are protected by our violence, our casual viciousness by the cult of the cool, the mellow, the politically correct the suburban disaffection. When all that fails, we go camping, and re-connect to the earth. How nice.

I have admired much of Orr’s work in the past, and I expect him to get at that fly in the soup not to spoil the soup, but to make it honest. All soups, even the soup of eternal truth contain a certain percentage of insect parts. Here, in the second section, he writes:

In the middle of my life
in the middle of the city,
I got lost.

Thanks, Mr. Divine comedy. What he says in this poem is: “you can’t count on any guides. You have to risk discoveries you can’t predict. Otherwise, you’re only half alive”.

OK…risk, choice, self, uncertainty, these are the basic wisdom tropes of the baby boomer .Generation. Generation X answers them with a sort of knowing nihilism. Generation Y embraces a sort of sociopathic code of bon homie (one of the traits of true sociopaths is a kind of easy, breezy charm and a sense of nothing personal, dude). Of course, I’m nut shelling generations, and I don’t think any of this is wholly accurate, but neither are these too easily uttered forms of wisdom. Right after this poem, Orr has a beautiful section, more ecstatic, less self consciously wise, and more surrendered to a high level of lyricism (and the image of the white flag brings that home)::

White flag
of the city–

No ensign
of surrender.

I love this. This little and perfect moment is too rare. This is cryptic and lyrical and resists the sound of the fortune cookie. As a kid, we would add “in bed” to all fortune cookie statements. Let’s apply this to my previous quotes from Orr:

In the middle of my life
in the middle of the city,
I got lost (in bed)

With their embrace
they chose
each other
which is
to choose death… (in bed)

.

I am not trying to trash Gregory Orr. I think he has written a superb body of work, and has influenced two generations of poets for the better, but this is a comforting of the already too comfortable. It has none of the ferocity, and embattled engagement with the spirit found in the best mystical and devotional traditions. The River Inside the River, while well-crafted and engaging in parts, does not have the wicked sense of humor one finds in the great midrash poems of the late and ought to be better known Enid Dame (her book Lilith and Her Demons is decidedly not preachy, though it is wonderfully wise). I am pissed off because, for a culture that says “it’s complicated” about everything (thereby dismissing all further discussion) the comfort zones of easy wisdom poetry seem as simplistic as self-help books, and the hypertrophy of telling our truths seems to have precluded the eloquence and decorative might with which we tell them. But this stuff sells, and I would not be shocked if this won some major awards. Here’s my problem with the intentional lack of eloquence: “Death be not proud, nor honor long,” has the weight of rhetorical eloquence behind it. My grandmother saying: “never marry a short man; they’re a bag full of cats,” has imagination and colorful speech behind it. If she changes that to: “It might be a mistake to marry a short man with many insecurities,” then is this really the same message? Does it have the same flavor, or sinew, or the sheer joy of the figurative behind it? Hell no. It is neutral and devoid of figures and decoration, and this might be my biggest qualm with this sort of spiritual schtick: not that its truths are too easy, but that their utterance has no spice and is as bland as a fortune cookie.

From the last section:

The beloved came,
then vanished.
Nothing beautiful stays.

Tell me why stating the obvious in incremental bits of information with the drum rolls of white space, and the caesuras of conjunctions and parataxis, makes such statements poetry? Nothing gold can stay has the glamor and eloquence of invention: nothing beautiful stays is mere statement. This third section is the best in the book because in it, Orr is most unsure of his epiphanies, and his summing up manages not to be a cozy summing up, but there is still much of this nutshelling wisdom and it creates a strange effect, the effect of a haiku master who thinks himself profound. The poems seem brief and spare, yet long winded and preachy; they seem too close to the Dali Lama’s ghostwritten self- help books, and the self-esteem movement, and forms of 12 step. If these spiritual traditions do not find themselves a meter making ground in some language tested by full aesthetic rigor and doubt beyond the obvious , then to what art do they aspire? If they aspire to the artless, they are certainly getting there.

Putting these qualms aside (and I am willing to admit that it may just be my discomfort with aphorism and my own generations love affair with its self-satisfied “seeking’) there are moments in The River Inside the River where Orr’s gentle and sad humor and his sincerity and simplicity win out. He can be wry and self-effacing, like Stephen Dunn. He can be dark when it is necessary. He can, in his love poems, give up the wise man for the ecstatic. At such moments his language seems neither derivative nor simplistic. If he did not believe his own mottos too readily, or if he arrived at them honestly (writing toward the truths, rather than the poems being excuses for the truths) I might feel better about being told “nothing lasts.” It might not bother me to be clobbered over the head with truisms along the lines “of change is the only constant”. (Orr never literally says this, but it’s one of themes of the book). I don’t mind when Whitman expounds the obvious to me. Whitman has the whole of the biblical and oratorical tradition behind him. Orr’s imaging tradition eschewed rhetoric and literary conceits over a hundred years ago– before Orr was born. It is stripped of eloquence and literary devices and often comes off as mere statement or image. If I had not read Rilke, and, yes Gibran when I was 12, and if I did not have the sonorities of the King James Bible and an entire literature of proverbs, koans, Emerson, and, on the more equivocal side, Jabez and Celan and Kafka, I might be more well-disposed to these poems. But, to me, (and I will probably get called bad names for this) the overall effect of Orr’s book is to send us back to those greater works and to anger me that the devotional poem in terms of contemporary poetics is perilously close to new age positive thinking. Telling people how to live and be at peace is a multi-billion dollar industry. Do poets have to do it?

Finally, to be fair to Orr, I grew up loving MR Cogito and the far from always wise predicaments of Paul Zimmer’s poems. I believe Orr’s tradition rules out slight-of- hand verbal tricks as being somehow phony and dishonest. Also, Orr is not a poet of rhythms. He believes in flat out telling as a test of sincerity, I take my cue from the imaginary philosopher Carlos Stir: “you can’t fake sincerity; it’s already fake.” What saves this book is the young child still at the scene of the shooting, the one who has not “learned” and for whom becoming is the only hope of escape from being. When Orr comes anywhere near this sort of “unknowing” he is a wonderful poet. Otherwise, he’s a guru, and I shoot paper clips at gurus from my desk (when they aren’t looking).

 

Even That Indigo by John Smith

John Smith has long been a poet whose work I was glad to see in some of the local New Jersey magazines, or here and there in an anthology or two. He is a narrative poet. He is far more likely to stick to the particulars of a moment and let them imply a truth or realization rather than springing a truth on you. He is less a wisdom poet in the way of Rilke and more appreciative of the minute and the perfectly observed detail in the way of Robert Francis (though he does not have Francis’ sense of form). Like Orr, he is in his sixties. Like Orr, he has some of the tendencies toward epiphany, meditative nature lyric, sex as mystery, and a touch of the new age peculiar to baby boomers. His book is not a high concept of interconnected poems. It is a collection held together by recurrent interests: his past, his family, the experience of Nam, the possibilities of finding peace within the small detailed encounters with nature. Consider his meeting up with a possum in the poem, Stumbling Around In The Light:

Something wasn’t right.
I could tell by the way it wobbled
across the lawn, midafternoon.

Fat head the cat knew it too
and kept back, pretending to lick a paw
each time the Possum stumbled.

The uncertainty is fearful uncertainty. The detail of the cat “pretending” to lick its paw is a perfect projection of the speaker’s own diffidence onto the cat. The poem moves from fearful uncertainty to conjecture (kids might come. Perhaps the speaker can kill the possum with a shovel) to a gentle and empathetic realization that, perhaps (an important word) the Possum is no more close to dying or dangerous than the speaker (the wonderful thing here is that the speaker had just considered bashing in the possum’s skull with a shovel). Stumbling Around in The Light has the close detail, and particularity, I admire in reading Carolyn Kizer’s great poem about her encounter with a bat, or

her great blue heron poem. It is working out from observation to epiphany, but the epiphany is not certain; it could be erased in the next moment. Rather than stating that everything is tentative and transient, Smith puts us in the place of the tentative and the transient.

In speaking of minor and major poets, one can either mean lesser or greater in terms of craft or make a distinction between a poet who lives for each individual poem and a poet who must be read and judged at his full scope. Smith is a minor poet in the best sense. Orr is a major poet who has some of the faults of the major: he has given up keenness for scope, and when he is not at his best, the scope is distorted for want of clarity and the keenly observed. Smith does not have to imitate Smith as Orr has to compete with Orr, and so he can screw around with different palettes, dabble at being present in different ways. John Smith is not a competing poem with John Smith’s poetry. There are thin lined, and long lined poems in Even That Indigo. There are poems that undulate and alternate between short and long lines. Smith does not have a “look.” He is not branded. The least arbitrary aspect of Smith’s line is that he either writes stichic (no stanza breaks) in the narrative style of Bishop and Levine, or he writes in stanzas of varying lengths (what Milton called Aleostrophic stanzas), and so his poems do not have a spatial identity– a fixed look. He does try a shaped poem (no title) which refers to a painting of geese by Escher. It’s not bad except it is somewhat gimmicky (I am growing cranky in my old age and have a hard time not finding almost all shaped poems gimmicky), but it is still a decent poem. This brings me to the flaws if any of this book:

Smith isn’t taking many risks beyond the well-wrought and well-crafted poem. While in depth, the poems do not go outside safe water, and stay clear from any risky currents. The crafted detail, the economical observation that implies rather than states is easier to pull off than a grand statement or a series of “wisdom” poems. For when the grand gesture fails and the mystic moments are all clichés of shadow and dark and stone and ash, then nothing is worse—nothing more worthy of contempt; but when these grand gestures are pulled off, when the mystification and rhapsody work (as with the best of Whitman, as with Neruda), then I gladly trade in my Robert Francis’ Cedar Waxwings for Whitman’s Sixth part of Song of Myself (though I may miss the waxwings). Smith’s poems in Even That Indigo are from a school closer to Waxwings than Song of Myself. It is a poetics that does not trust any major claims, that believes God is in the well wrought details. In most of his poems, Smith is a splendid successor to a long and honorable tradition of truly observing nature, an unsentimental narrative poet: Not as florid as Dickey, not as controlled and thereby heartbreaking as Bishop, not as intensely singular in his seeing as Schuyler, not as wounded or in need of embracing the wound as Orr, but with his own virtues of humility, intelligence, and singular wonder. The final poem in the book, Cicada, might give an indication as to why I would recommend Even That Indigo over Orr’s latest work (though not over Orr). I do not think Smith the greater poet, but, at this point, he does not have the weight of his oeuvre to contend with, and is thus at greater liberty to play. In this final poem in the book, Smith is saying essentially the same thing as Orr, making the same case for the eternal within the transient, for intensity, for becoming rather than being, for the joy and passion of becoming. But I believe Smith earns the epiphany. I leave you with the poem:

Even if we could live forever,
what if we still grew old and gray
as the dusk? What if we shrank
into the top soil of the night
and woke whining for the sun
with voices so shrill and small
only termites could hear them?

I’d rather crawl from the earth blindfolded
and drag my grimy shell up the side
of the whitest tree I can find,
rather scream like a match head on fire
than smolder and never die.
I would split open my spine
just to fly for one season.

The open sound of French

Even the sound of French is open
And the children find me very interesting to look at
It is as if I am a TV show or supper
All my pretty babies who paint the winter chests
With red and gold and green

It was on the afternoon
In the small wooden town
That I was so mired in my act of jealousy
I did not pay attention
To the beauty of the dark church in front of me

And now you ask me
To meet you in a park after dark
Well it is too late too late
I am already flying

__________________________________________________________
DOROTHEA LASKY is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: THUNDERBIRD (Wave Books, 2012), AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010). She is also the author of five chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Laurel Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Fashion Institute of Technology, The New England Institute of Art, Heath Elementary School, and Munroe Center for the Arts. Currently, she lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

I live in a nation that has three year olds becoming life time members of the NRA, and anti-bullying seminars that force a draconian language of the politically correct so technical and nit-picky as to be a form of bullying in its own right. Guns to the right of me! Jargon to the left of me! All volley and hold the thunder (after all, thunder may be perceived as a semiotic indicator of male patriarchy). I look at my daughter and say: “I’m so sorry, but I wanted you to exist.

Into this vale of tears, I have introduced a magician giant who lifts the vale and give me moments of clarity and peace–he’s the friendly giant of old poems I can return to, the Giant who goes “presto!” and behind the vale of NRA nut jobs, and academic jargon spouters, there appears my mother’s favorite Robert Louis Stevenson, my favorite poems by Theodore Roethke, a couple of poets whose names will never be on the lips of microbrew swilling grad students: Walter De Lamare, Robert Francis, May Swenson, JV Cunningham, Kenneth Patchen, Carolyn Kizer. Sometimes I return to them by picking up the books, and sometimes by the faulty yet passionate vehicle of memory: I remember lines or whole poems, or the time of day and the quality of light when I first read the poems. A jet plane scratches its autograph across a blue Saturday afternoon spent down by the railroad tracks, reading where no one would bother me. I forget current poets then (I don’t always like poets. They sometimes wear capes and sweep into rooms and piss me off). I forget that I became a poet and remember that I am a reader of poems–not a poet. To be a reader of poems is still a lovely thing–a better thing. There is little ego involved in it compared to being a poet. It makes me forget the borderline sociopathy of English department brag fests–kudos to Henry, hype for Margie, and blah, blah, blah. Some working class anger in me denies the idea of “major poet.” I don’t believe in them. I believe in major poems.

Long before Centos became a fad, long before I knew what a Cento was, I was dicing and splicing in my mind as I walked to school or rode my bike, or drove my first car. I used to play like this:

Winter uses all the blues there are,
yet the wet sides of stones can not console her
She runs out of the sea, shaking her long green hair,
runs from the bleached valleys under the rose
this maimed darling,this skitterry pigeon.

It would be a paratactic (one short line after the other) recall of lines or mish-mash from poets I had been reading. In this case, A poem “Winter uses all the Blues there are” by Francis, a paraphrase, of Elegy for Jane, a splicing of Joyce’s I hear An Army with Olson’s The Lonely and Isolate Satyrs.” It’s what I did for pleasure or distraction, or the pleasures of distraction.

I never wanted to express myself in a poem; Fuck the self. Of all the things I know, the self is most fraudulent. I wanted to express the light on bricks at dusk, a certain ghost presence on a wintry day, the eyes of someone peering at me over a broken down fence, characters I made up, most of all–the haunting veracity of presence: what it is that is there in the world, but you do not know exactly–that haunted and haunting energy we might call the felt-life.

I’ve failed miserably to accomplish any of these goals. Whatever MFA programs teach poets to be, I pretty much don’t get. I blame myself–not the MFA programs. I am pretty stupid. All I ever had to go on was the faulty ardor of someone who liked the soundings and whisperings of things. Poetry now seems military to me. “Careers” are plotted out. Magazines march out their contests and fees and winners. Awards are given to the usual suspects. Most poets aren’t poets–they’re A students, a whole different species of excellence. They achieve. Whenever I hear the ghastly shriekings of “Achievement,” I recall Auden’s concept of “Achieving your corpse.” That puts it in perspective.

Today, when I woke up, I wanted to see a construction site. I wanted to pick up a clod of turned over dirt and throw it at the ghost of my own childhood–whack my ten year old self in the back of the head with a dirt bomb–the way my big brother used to do. I wanted to look at the crane and bulldozers sleeping in the early morning frost, glistening with their bright reds and yellows. I didn’t wanted to be young again. I never wanted to be young. I desired the power of a shape shifter. I wanted to be the milkweed pods on the verge of the site, and the point of merging where the crane’s neck met the sky–but all of it as consciousness, dizzy and reeling with consciousness. I wanted neither return nor recompence, but the presence of a thing made out of words.” It’s a strange courage/you give me ancient star/ shine alone in the sunrise/ toward which you lend no part.” I wanted that. Three year olds are being taught to shoot guns and confuse them with manhood. On the other side of the absurdity, words like globalization and transdisciplinary studies, are wrenching the arms off poetry. The poets have meetings and win awards, and sail passed their lesser brothers and sisters like Williams’ yachts. Who will sit with me at the table of our sins and breathe his word? What poetry will be found in the ears when I die? Who will make me forget how much I fear for my child who is asleep in the kitchen as I write. On flows the river/ A hundred miles or more/ other little children/ shall bring my boat ashore. I sure as hell hope so.