Hoa Nguyen: Living Room

I live with this photograph of Amiri Baraka taken by Pat A. Robinson at Woodland Pattern in 2003.

Here you see Baraka reading his poems published in issue 6 of Skanky Possum, a tiny magazine that I founded and edited with Dale Smith in Austin Texas, our home of fourteen years. The Frank O’Hara paper-doll-like figure standing next to him is a two sided cut-out based on the Alex Katz portrait (handiwork of a poet in the O’Hara workshop in celebration of what would have been O’Hara’s 90th birthday). I love how O’Hara looks like he is listening to his friend Baraka read his poems.

I feel like this image captures something of my life and practice as a poet and teacher: how to really live with poets and their poetry—and how to learn from them. In the Fall of 2015, with a group of 35 poets (a portion present in my current home of Toronto and the rest attending virtually), I read and wrote through S. O. S, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka. This year, a group of 50 poets are reading and writing their way with me through Frank O’Hara’s Collected poems.

*********

Poems don’t live in isolation. They live with the reader. In the Baraka workshop last fall, we read his poems together aloud. We read the poems and practiced poems after them, inspired by them, drawing upon similar writing strategies as his. His consciousness about race in the United States and his exposure and questioning of systems of oppression steeped into our poems. We listened to Sun Ra and wrote. Sometimes we listened to blues and wrote. Once we danced to Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” and then wrote about childhood memories.

I think of poetry as having three terms: the poet, the poem, and the reader. Here Frank O’Hara would want me to say that poetry puts the poem between two people “Lucky Pierre style”.  But I also think it’s a relationship of constellating orders. Reading O’Hara sent me to Petrach and Joseph Cornell. I played a recording of Rachmaninoff and we wrote. O’Hara also admired composer Schoenberg so I read this from a letter written by Schoenberg in 1909:

My music must be short.

Lean! In two notes, not built, but “expressed”.

And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.

That is not how [one] feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion!

[One] has many feelings,

thousands at a time,

and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up.

Each goes its own way.

This multi-colored, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations,

a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves;

I must have this in my music.

and thought about how O’Hara might have applied it to his understanding about writing poems and how it also could be part of my makings.

*********

Joanne Kyger is a poet that I have studied deeply and in my workshop format. I’m always learning something from her poems—how poems can be visually interesting, rich in moods and movements, by turns political, pointed, intimate, humorous, ordinary, and profound. In her Collected she writes:

You know    when you write    poetry    you find

 the architecture    of your lineage    your teachers

I think of this phrase often—how to find (or make) the architecture of your lineage. For me, it means deep engagement with poetry and attention to the constellations of influences and community: communications between poets living and dead. Or as Kyger writes elsewhere:

I know it’s a detective story of passions,

dinners, blood stuff around which the history of our lives

crank.

Kyger is pictured here with John Wieners circa 1967.

I mean, that’s her photograph on the wall behind Wiener’s profile. This poem by Wieners is an homage to Kyger, a poem called “I Hope It Goes On”.

Places, poetry, and friendships: I want to invite a place for this as a way in—outside of institutions—so that poetry may continue (“I hope it goes on”).

Part of this might mean creating a virtual or literal hearth around which to gather. I teach out of the home I share with Dale and our two sons. I teach out of the living room. My writing desk is in the living room. I’ve hosted countless poetry readings in living rooms.  I am writing this right now in my living room. Which makes me think about how poetry can be a living room, one based on connectivity, relationships—a room you can walk around in, share company, and make more art.

*********

In the spring edition of the workshop (I lead three a year) we will be reading and writing through Supplication, by John Wieners. This selection of poems includes the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems (which Frank O’Hara admired and mentions by name in his poem “Les Luths”).

One of the aspects that I bring into the workshops is the importance of tiny or small press publishing, those sites of production organized by individuals bound by friendships and affinities, ones not tied to universities or corporations. For the Wieners workshop, one such small press I recommend is Bootstrap Books run by poets Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher. When Fenner heard I was teaching Supplications, the press generously sent me (the almost out of print) limited edition of A New Book from Rome.

One of the three previously unpublished photographs of John Wieners tucked into this edition as ephemera is the one of him with Kyger, mirror-like, behind him on the wall:

The edition is gorgeous, thoughtfully framed and edited, and a treasure.

I tend to keep a rotating number of independent journals and publications like this one on my living room coffee table to create another kind of hearth of nourishment, to show and share the depth and abundance that is produced by tiny and small presses in North America.

For the Wiener’s workshop, our suggested texts include Stars Seen in Person, Selected Journals of John Wieners, from City Lights Books, edited by Seth Stewart. (In addition to its publishing ventures, well-known City Lights is also a bookstore in San Francisco, famous for carrying titles from smaller, independent publishers.) Another recommended edition, also edited by Stewart, is The Selected Correspondence of John Wieners and Charles Olson, for The Lost & Found Series. This fantastic initiative from the CUNY Poetics program “publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers” in staple bound editions that are bundled and sold in sets that resonate with linkages. I love how this series rhymes with my own considerations about engaging with poetries—how to add historical depth and interest to the study of poetry by offering resonating constellations of connection.