mary ellen solt (1920-2007)

elegy for the astronauts #4 (1964)



geranium, from flowers in concrete (1966)



dogwood, second movement (1966, from artpool.hu)


from prentice-hall author biographies:

Mary Ellen Solt was born in Gilmore City, Iowa, and spent much her life in the Midwest. Her poetry and essays were heavily influenced, however, by her international travels. Moreover, Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: a World View established her as a powerful influence on the genre of concrete poetry around the world.

Her international travels would produce more than poetry. A university professor on teaching exchange in 1977–1978, Mary Ellen Solt spent time living in Warsaw, Poland, with her daughter Susan. She was instrumental in establishing the American Studies Center at Warsaw University. Back in the United States, she served as the first director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University, established in 1977.

Married for nearly forty-seven years to historian Leo Solt, she is the mother of two daughters, Catherine and Susan. In her retirement, Mrs. Solt moved with her daughter Susan to California. She continues contributing to education and the arts by serving as a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts. She remains a Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

Some other works by Mary Ellen Solt:

* Creator of Poor Old Tired Horse—a volume of poetry
* Editor of Dear Ez: Letters from William Carlos Williams to Ezra Pound
* Poems Marriage, Rain Down, Moonshot Sonnet

east european mytho-folk surrealism

picked this up at the half price books in north olmstead ohio last week. born the same year as jackson mac low, vasko popa is the great serbian surrealist. he tends to write short poems arranged into short cycles. his palette is colored with myth and the idiom of folkore (riddles, games, etc.) and allegory, all adding up to something quite different from the revolution and amour of french high surrealism. it's much closer to lorca i find. some of popa's animal cycles are a bit too totemistic for me, preferring as i do the more ludic, aggressive and philosophical cycles.

the cycle Games, for example, reads very much like a dick higgins or yoko ono piece from the fluxus days. i even imagine my nephews (ages 9 and 6) having some fun with these:

Before the Game

Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are no cuckoo's eggs

Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump high high high
On top of yourself

Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss

Who doesn't break into pieces
Who remains whole gets up whole
Plays

here's another from the same sequence, far more wicked and telling of la condition humaine, and very much echoes something from a 1978 robert duncan naropa lecture i transcribed a while back, "I mean there’s not a living form that isn’t working away day and night to demolish the earth it lives on -- chew chew, chomp chomp, scrabble scrabble, dig holes in it, the whole thing, uh -- in this fabric, where are you gonna put yourself?"

Race

Some bite from the others
A leg an arm or whatever

Take it between their teeth
Run out as fast as they can
Cover it up with earth

The others scatter everywhere
Sniff look sniff look
Dig up the whole earth

If they are lucky and find an arm
Or leg or whatever
It's their turn to bite

The game continues at a lively pace

As long as there are arms
As long as there are legs
As long as there is anything

these are anonymous translations from a nice little 32-page PDF (132K) of translations done mostly by anne pennington, while charles simic did the selection from the oberlin press book above: apparently the two collaborated on a 1997 anvil press edition of the collected. (now out of print?) this PDF tho is noteworthy to me for the inclusion of the little box sequence, along with another, far within us, not included in the simic selection.

here's one i can't resist including, from the little box cycle:

The Tenants Of The Little Box

Throw into the little box
A stone
You'll take out a bird

Throw in your shadow
You'll take out the shirt of happiness

Throw in your father's root
You'll take out the axle of the universe

The little box works for you

Throw into the little box
A mouse
You'll take out a quaking hill

Throw in your head
You'll take out two

The little box works for you

here's a few from one of my favorites, the cycle give me back my rags

Give me back my rags

My raglets of pure dream
Of silken smiles
Striped premonition
And my lace-like sinews

My raglets of polka-dot hope
Of filigreed lust
Calico glances
And the skin off my face

Give me back my rags
I’m asking you nicely

(Simic)

later in the sequence things get a bit more aggressive and insistant:

Get out of my walled infinity
Of the star circle round my heart
Of my mouthful of sun

Get out of the comic sea of my blood
Of my flow of my ebb
Get out of my stranded silence

Get out I said get out

Get out of my living abyss
Of the bare father-tree within me

Get out how long must I cry get out

Get out of my bursting head
Get out just get out

(Pennington)

definitely one of my favorite opening lines of recent memory. read the whole sequence in simic's rendering online at the exile quarterly.

follow the oil law

with the increasing (albeit belated) realization that this president's "surge" strategy is not likely to succeed, it becomes increasingly important to monitor progress on iraqi oil law.

this is one of the so-called benchmarks for progress that would enable u.s. troops to begin leaving iraq, and thus the ongoing status of the debate over iraqi oil can serve as a useful index less to iraqi than to real (as opposed to stated) u.s. intent and design.

one story that went unreported in the mainstream media last week was the nearly-averted strike by the largest of iraq's largest oil workers' union. seems they have a legitimate concern that these oil law benchmarks run the very real risk of making too much of their oil revenue open to foreigners.

david bacon has a good piece at truthout about this. and kenneth anderson at opednews goes further. follow his links, especially to the piece in american lawyer by daphne eviatar about the DC lawyer who's purportedly advising the iraqis on how to manage their oil interest. eviatar includes this choice tidbit of background info:

Under Saddam Hussein, foreign investment was strictly limited, as it is in most major Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. Under the new law, the Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of only about 17 of Iraq’s approximately 80 known oil fields.

be certain tho that, when this president's surge is declared the failure that it inevitably will be in september, it will be the iraqi people who will take the blame for not meeting their benchmarks.

a return to form

...or perhaps a somewhat new form: updates on random topics. otherwise heuriskein as we've come to know it will probably be put into indefinite retirement until i find an appropriate means and manner of keeping people abreast of nashville developments.

* * *

i love the drive between cleveland ohio and london ontario: you can make the whole run in under five hours but the time goes by really quickly because no leg of the trip takes longer than 90 minutes. (cleveland-toledo, 90 minutes; toledo to detroit; 60 minutes; detroit to port huron, 60 minutes; sarnia to london, 60 minutes.) flat farmland punctuated by urban rustbelt. best also to go through the border at sarnia-port huron rather than windsor-detroit so as to use/buy less gas in canada. the 402 is one of the flatest and most desolate highways around. (the photo in the wikipedia entry looks positively lush by comparison). good trip for listening to whole box sets.

* * *

renewed affection for all things london ontario.

freud's bit in civilization and its discontents about how "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -- that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances... it can once more be brought to light" -- from which he lauchnes his epic simile comparing the mind to the city of rome with all the buildings that ever stood in it over time all copresent in space -- is never more apt. i'm convinced that through neuroplasticity space hardwires itself not just into our thought process but our physiology as well, proprioceptors or whathaveyou. wandering throught downtown london upon my arrival -- on a weekday summer night it was bound to be a bit barren, but it's fallen on hard times all the same -- heading north on wellington the words "scot's corner" came to mind for the first time in probably twelve years. ten seconds later i turned west onto dundas street and there before me sat one of my favorite old haunts, the scot's corner.

* * *

the range of ontario regional brews otherwise unavailable in the u.s. has grown considerably since i lived there. this is a product line that even the brickskellar in d.c. (which boasts of the largest bottled beer list in the city) is hopelessly clueless about.

go ahead, yanks: visit the beer store (ontario's province-wide retailer) and do a brand search. you will be dumbfounded by the amount and range of beer you've never heard of let alone tasted.

all i could bring back with me was a sleeman's sampler pack. sleeman is the premier regional brewer in the province (located in guelph), running a full line of its own products as well as picking up some other brews (like the upper canada line) from indie brewers that did not survive the consolidations of the late 1990s and early 2000s led by the biggies. sleeman makes a light, premium light, lager, "clear," IPA, dark, porter, and the three that come in the sampler pack: cream ale, honey brown, original draft. the cream ale is very clean, the honey brown nice and malty.

brick breweries of waterloo has managed to avoid selling out to the majors while simultaneously buying up a number of smaller regional brewers and yet still maintaining those product lines. red baron is their lager, and their waterloo dark was always a personal favorite, and the red cap ale was a popular brand in the 1950s that they resurrected. they also do the british-style conners best bitter and formosa springs line of cold-filtered draft products.

other great brews you are unlikely to encounter in the states: wellington brewery in guelph makes an excellent range of british-style ales (arkell best bitter, country ale, special pale ale, iron duke strong, imperial stout); creemore springs (not quite two hours north of ontario) makes a lager, pils and ur bock; and from out-of-province, keith's makes an IPA and amber ale from halifax, while big rock is the calgary microbrewer to beat with their pale and traditional ales along with a grasshopper wheat and warthog cream ale.

* * *

undying affection for pere ubu. could not quite listen to all 5 CDs in the datapanik in the year zero box as i would've liked, and still finding my way through new picnic time and songs of the bailing man (which i've only just heard for the first time recently), but i do think dub housing is far and away the masterpiece. musings from the post-industrial sublime.

* * *

do want to recommend the charlie parker pershing club recordings from chicago in 1950, formerly available only an an obscure 1976 LP release from the zim label of jericho ny (pictured below) but now reissued thanks to the good folks at definitive/disconforme (one of those fine spanish budget-priced reissue labels). the quality of the recordings is lousy and the rest of the band (chicago pick-up band featuring von freeman on tenor) is largely irrelevant sadly. but bird soars. makes me wanna get the benedettis and all the other live dates just for those solos...