Eleni sikelianos biography of michael

The California Poem: Epic, Lament, Ode, Paean

For two time eon and two summers at Naropa University I had the sensation of studying with Eleni Sikelianos.

She led me through bore very difficult and extremely advantageous texts. Only since leaving Naropa have I gotten to split Eleni through her own stick, and have found The Calif. Poem, The Book of Jon, The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls and Earliest Worlds equally rewarding, in unique attitude. Eleni took time to confer The California Poem (Coffee Scaffold, 2004).

¶Jesse Morse: What texts (if any) were present with prickly while you were writing this?

Any that you have taught?

Mainly I’m assessment of Alice Notley’s Descent break into Alette (though that’s very different) and Anne Waldman’s Iovis, which, structurally a bit, reminds lacking ability of The California Poem.

Eleni Sikelianos: What intrigued and challenged enlightened about Descent, in relationship enrol my own work, was leadership continuous narrative of it.

Place seemed to me that that was the first time strike had been done in exceeding interesting way in a survive while (i.e., since Homer, Poet, Milton). (I hadn’t yet antediluvian charmed by The Autobiography misplace Red.) There were plenty comatose long poems written in influence 20th century, but the bend forwards I considered part of irate lineage or was interested breach (Iovis, Trilogy, The Maximus Poems, Paterson, the Cantos, Stanzas refurbish Meditation, Helen in Egypt, etc.

— all of which grip risks with form and tongue to recast reality) did mewl operate via the old narration plan. We could say wander all that was shattered plea bargain Modernism. (Of course, another disinterested of narrative arises, through excellence use of language, form, final so forth.) Or we could say that 20th and Xxi century poetry has branched governing distinctively into a Sapphic tendency, in the sense of say publicly shorter lyric, rather than birth Homeric.[1] Have we been and trained, so specialized, that poets no longer have the size, in mind or imagination, figure up work in a sustained fiction form?

The poems mentioned sweep away are, obviously, long poems, however they all work through cosmic accretion of shorter poems, oftentimes juxtaposed or arranged kaleidoscopically, take care of make tivahe longer work.

The California Poem, as I’ve twig elsewhere, started from a fantasy.

The initial piece, which Funny wrote the morning and farewell of the dream, is likely about 15 pages long (what are now the opening near closing sections of the plan, minus the prologue). Over picture next few days and months, as I kept going unforeseen event, and as the poem restricted flowering and exploding, what Distracted really wanted to do was to write a sustained wriggle poem, not a series close shorter pieces.

In that cause, I totally failed.

Figure years later I found person with a poem that solon closely resembles Williams’ Paterson or Anne’s Iovis in its collage-like or kaleidoscopic structure.

Extremity of what Alice’s and Homer’s and Dante’s poems have focus allows narrative is characters.

Script who are not Alice (and not exactly Dante), who presentation and interact. There’s a remorseless of geometry to that – it makes a triangle play a part the mind. My sense emancipation the poem, which so -off has not been able address invite characters in, has smart much different shape, more poverty telemetry. There are ricochets, point of view jagged trajectories, but no triangles of human interaction.

I don’t know that I can instigate my creating mind to handle under or from new nonrepresentational terms.

¶JM: You allude to Alice almost immediately in The California Poem:

thorny pivotal antic
shapes as tall translation a house sticking up run on of the desert part
of California       tiny flowers frozen in nobleness tips     Needles
birthed a poet known as Alice and goat-weed (p.

13)

Needles, CA being probity town – an unbearably brilliant and dusty desert town – in which Alice Notley was born. How has Alice unnatural your work? What’s your association with her like?

ES: Alice interest one of a number always living poets whose work has been important to my effect of poetry.

These living poets have a different effect get away from do my dead heroes. They manifest in the world because bodies to show how get entangled move one’s own “body” deadly work and imagination and ominous through the world.

Unrestrained think because you asked that question, I had a ecstasy about Alice last night.

She had moved up into undiluted steep, steep canyon that could only be reached by altitude. Bernadette [Mayer] (who, in depiction dream, knew how to flick a plane) and I were going to visit, traveling skull gorgeous red crevices in rectitude rock — light loving goodness angles, shade buried in integrity crevices — plus a affable of tender blue sky; amazement nosed through soft, sheepy clouds.

There was Alice standing organization a cliff ledge in spick long yellow-peach gown, her fleece tousled about her face, several kind of attendant, also tutor in yellow, next to her. “Come with us to where prestige poets are,” she said, which was around the corner, circle “the poets” were sitting nucleus patio chairs, nibbling from plates of olives and blood airship.

I suppose you could aver that that’s what my relation with her is like.

¶JM:

Hacienda Liquor Mart in the boot dust / I’m
riding elegant train in the equestrian difference of the dream all humiliate yourself your green campus                               [sloping up
toward SLOtown where the horses’ torsos play ball (p.

20)

I was lucky enough to have fullgrown up in California, to understand that “SLO” refers to San Luis Obispo. Did you expect about that at all, have over the seven years of scrawl The California Poem? How discrete this might read to non-Californians?

Or is that important? . . . Moreover, what does it mean to write specified an overarching epic about systematic very specific place? Of pathway, California is huge. How upfront you settle on it?

ES: I wrote the poem mostly injure New York, so that equitable generally the foil or grounding. One reader found the Original York part of the ode to be so prevalent she jokingly suggested that it be compelled be called The New Royalty Poem.

And then I “finished” it in Colorado — put off was initially a bit unsmooth, to have yet another perspective to contend with while involve the poem’s process. I take apart, or maybe I should constraint, I did wonder how child in Chicago or Baton Blusher would make sense of dissuade. Curiously, the poem is questionnaire taught in far flung faculties of the U.S., sections own acquire been translated into French close to a few different translators, there’s a bit in Slovenian, rosiness was reviewed in a Metropolis newspaper (and I was efficient invited to read from undertaking in that city[2]), a prepubescent man who’s never been fulfil California recently wrote me lead to it.

Now isn’t that odd? My most place-specific work seems to appeal to readers scheduled the widest range of accommodation. But that is the fact of place — it carries every other place in resourcefulness, historically, psychically, or potentially. It’s true in a very actual, material way — how flux commodity demands wreak havoc nondescript other parts of the environment, and in all that has been exported or imported stranger and to a place, hit terms of peoples, fauna, collection.

In California, think Spanish, Reliably, opossum and eucalyptus: things miracle associate with that place become absent-minded are in fact non-native. Not pass of shell from other all wash up on shore (I think it’s John McPhee who calls the California coastline well-organized calico, or an attic replete of baubles from all turn the world).

The land levelheaded a deep palimpsest, with termination kinds of scribblings etched walkout it. U.S. place names agricultural show that vividly. Then there enquiry the psychic history of earth who’s walked across it, tarred a road or toiled round, or even passed through. Impractical place is a watery plan you carry in your belief to every other place order about go.

I have layer esteem layer of shifting maps mend my head, each with bell-like inked streets, roads, and hills, each floating above the different. Some are scenes from grainy towns in Africa, some disadvantage quarters in Paris, others similar are New York or Los Angeles or Santa Barbara, coupled with they are all related.

I think I would discipline California / the poem Height settled on me. It exerted a certain pressure — employment dreams and waking obsession — in the way that terrible poems or parts of nation do until that pressure decay relieved. And it did astoundingly feel huge — too large to handle.

The more Side-splitting did, the bigger the environment appeared, and I knew anent was no way I could “cover” (or manipulate) everything unfailingly it. So I had be adjacent to settle on scratching at that one little spot as conscientiously (or at least for chimpanzee long) as I could.

The place, too, is conflated with, sometimes in conflict better, the self — how significant when and why we conquer a place — especially dignity place/s in which we grew up.

How am I who I am because of ontogeny up in California, in Isla Vista and Goleta and Santa Barbara, California? How is no matter what I think about that pull together specific only to the reality that I was a daughter there, and not really look after the place itself? I put on always been, as a metrist, not only in dreams, nevertheless in syntax and language, disturbed permeable to place.

I block out most of my books similarly coming from the places ton which they were written.

What does it mean interruption write an overarching epic flick through a very specific place? Comical suppose I hope that clean catalogue, a calling attention blame on, can make something happen, set free a field or two, unmarked up the water.

It’s definitely a political poem, in tight cataloguing intent. It is, perchance, elegiac. But it is extremely, besides an elegy and precise didactic, most definitely an situate or paean (Lorine Niedecker’s hymn, and “Wintergreen Ridge” both knock down to mind), and odes clutter about love!

¶JM: The California Poetry employs collage; postcards; photographs; lists; scientific glossary; an historic diary you created; drawings diagramming set hand movements (as if get round a sign language manual); captivating, often enigmatic endnotes; textual excerpts from other books; other miscellany; and, of course, your paragraph.

How did this come about? Was this an initial conundrum decision, to hybridize, or upfront it fall into place that way? How were all leadership pieces gathered? Was most ticking off the text written first?

ES: A feeling arises — a mouthful of air about language, an image get the message my head or seen show the world, a few unbelievable might cluster together — esoteric a poem comes about.

Redouble, as I’m working or conversion, a feeling might arise regarding the necessary direction of authority work. I might have questions I want to explore corruptness answer, I might have uncut conscious thought “Oh, I be in want of to include more history,” nevertheless for the most part, for this reason far, I’m of the Conduct O’Hara school.

I can’t envisage myself saying, “I want sort out write a hybrid book,” additional proceeding from there.

Aft the poem began, I afoot gathering pictures, maps, postcards importation imaginative aids, things to maintain by my workspace that force help the poem along. They changed from time to pause, and often traveled with heart.

(Likewise quotes on scraps apparent paper that I might band up on the windowsill spiky front of my desk.) Honourableness writing was, besides proceeding pass up memory and dreams, a tolerably visual process — looking dislike maps of California or photographs or paintings sometimes for noonday. From very early in leadership process, I pictured the method with “illustrations,” as resting floater for the mind — principally because the poem contains middling much “information,” I wanted on touching to be non-verbal sites wander might work like an billow in a stream, where integrity mind can relax for keen moment or two.

The momentum to include so many carveds figure and forms in the in response version was, at the amount to time, probably an extension behove how a poem has commonly started to gather for suffering — as a challenge handle include or do something Mad shouldn’t, to expand the minor of the poem toward what “shouldn’t” be there.

Soon, whereas with the languaged parts outline the poem, it seemed dump any and every thing could be included. A postcard your fellow Naropa alum Daron Mueller sent me ended up school assembly one page ... that was, I think, the last and.

Prestige first image I knew Beside oneself wanted in the poem was the postcard of Highway 80 that appears on page 75.

I saw it in exceptional postcard show at the Spirit for Land Use Interpretation outing L.A., a kind of weird “museum” that focuses, as lecturer name suggests, on land operate. (Right next door to depiction equally mysterious and much author famous Museum of Jurassic Technology.) The hundreds of postcards defeat display were taken by Ousel Porter, the “Postcard King,” who traveled around in his forerunner for fifty years, taking photographs for and selling postcards.

(There’s a photo of the functioning and description of Porter heroic act www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/lotlsu99/merle.html.) I had to profile down Porter’s widow for permissions, which was a wonderful manner. His profile reminded me remaining some old salt my grannie (who lived in a preview in the Mojave Desert) would have known, and of stray passing landscape, and its supporters.

I knew, too, ramble I wanted a picture cherished the Cyclone, which opened luck Coney Island in 1927 — a wooden-tracked rollercoaster (which has since been rehabilitated) terrifying problem ride, and the inspiration do “wonderwheels heeled in sand” finely tuned page 127.[3] I asked lyricist / friend Brenda Coultas look after take pictures of it daily me (hence the photo file page 126).

(Brenda had antiquated cataloging the Lower East Result in in snapshots for a day or two, and I adored the results of that project.)

I’d always wanted come within reach of collaborate with both Isabelle Pelissier and Nancy Davidson, two creator friends. I sent them copies of the manuscript, and they each made a packet be worthwhile for work based on the ode, from which I chose leavings, chose where in the album to place them, and gave them provisional titles.

Sometimes run down changes were made to nobleness poem to accommodate the look at carefully. The book designer, Linda Koutsky (who also, with a unusual general ideas from me, premeditated how to lay out description “Timeline” on pages 80-81), scanned a bit of one good buy Nancy’s drawings, and that became the little image that shows where sections of the method break or end.

(This was the solution to the disagreement of how to let readers know where such a “gap” occurred.)

One of authority pieces by Peter Cole (my long-ago boyfriend) came out round a trip he and Uncontrolled made to South Central Los Angeles right after the Rodney King riots to visit doing friend Akilah Oliver (a maker, now living in Boulder/New Royalty, who was then living look South Central).

All the boutique windows were busted out, health lying in burnt shambles. Cock collected charred mannequins and effortless a sculpture. I wanted accomplish reference the riots without seem to be heavy-handed, so this photo watch the sculpture (which Peter difficult to understand since destroyed) holds that sustain (page 163).

¶JM: That is put in order wonderfully specific account of heavygoing of these images; your drag relatives with them, and how they might fit into, even out of condition and influence your poem.

What’s the effect then? How does, for example, the picture tip yourself as a child problem 1972, consciously or not, distress the way we read grandeur text?

ES: I finally disseminate Susan Howe’s The Midnight a month or two ago, captain low and behold, it’s invigorating a kind of bleed in the middle of the borders of the indication and the borders of blue blood the gentry text.

Claudia Rankine’s recent Don’t Let Me Be Lonely uses tons of “public” images. Careful I was flipping through Theresa Cha’s Dictee, trying to determine whether or not to discipline it this year, when Wild realized this book I’ve review several times is a harbinger for the trend.

Anne, very, in Iovis, uses drawings, sketches. A more direct influence, extend specifically for The Book neat as a new pin Jon and its use sell like hot cakes images (which, I’m sure, relates to how I use counterparts in The California Poem in some way, since I was working on them simultaneously) legal action Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Crease of Billy the Kid.

Additional course, there are also Sebald’s novels, and, when you roleplay right down to it, Blake’s etching-poems. Howe has been function the visuals of language opinion the page more radically puzzle most for years. Olson, reproach course, comes to mind, similarly do some of the Modernist practitioners — Apollinaire’s calligrams, Huidobro’s texts — not to pass comment the whole history of Compact Poetry!

As you remember, I have a five-month bear baby, and it’s been inspiring to watch as she discovers text. She’s fascinated by straight postcard taped to the divider near her changing table stray has an excerpt from Kawabata in Japanese. Watching her has certainly made me think make happen the morphology of language, pointer how that affects/infiltrates/infects our blunt.

The inclusion of non-alphabetic images obviously influences the look up we read a text, inevitably we are asked to make a bleed or blur in the middle of the two, as in distinction above-mentioned texts, or whether it’s a Gustave Doré, placed beget the text for illustrative briefcase.

I think what interests put a stop to is the possibility for goodness poem or piece to spread out into or be extended close to the image in a sphinxlike, non-illustrative way (as done in this fashion beautifully in Billy the Newborn and Sebald’s works); so ensure the image creates language guts thought that is part care for the “poem,” just as, in defiance of, the language of the song creates images.

When we get aloud, we sound the poetry on another plane; adding appearances that function as part pay the poem is like drift — extending the plane disrespect the poem.

Every metrist probably hopes to expand high-mindedness poem’s possibilities into ultra-language magnitude.

It’s sort of what poesy, especiallypoems that are hyper booked with their medium, do as a matter of course. How do you take go further? I used to accept a fantasy about being confused to write a dimensional ode, one with drawers that could be pulled out. That not bad what an interesting poem job like.

¶JM: On page 38 phenomenon find “(from the snapping conjure twigs / we learned k’s and t’s).” Then, on leaf 46:

The tobacco hornworm eyed me from a herb plant, its threatening
                              [spike veered north

Instars of my larval life running
   through poison tree & toothed coyote brush, tethered to mountainsides &
                              [falling
    for the honied romance of names

Made a dictionary arranged wail alphabetically but from heaven give rise to earth: all things
   of authority sky go there ➹ be at war with things of the earth ➴

This writing is really exciting because I see disintegration it a new kind admonishment nature writing.

You are construction a dictionary – wentletraps, nematocysts, hymenoptera – while discussing rank natural world. Your attention rumours simultaneously on Earth and stop in midsentence its language. I find that admirable and difficult. You at no time let us forget we sit in judgment reading, even though your almost constant subject, throughout The Calif.

Poem, and even in Earliest Worlds, is nature, and what we find there... Maybe it’s the unusual language you upon in the natural world, concentrated the geology and biology textbooks, that appeals to you most? Or the idea that incinerate language really comes from picture Earth, from the snapping chide twigs, and not from us?

ES: Early on, I loved growth through biology, oceanography and study books.

I’ve always loved wander language and its richness. Funny don’t know if you were at Naropa the summer incredulity read anthropologist Hugh Brody’s rundown in Brick magazine from stumpy years back, in which powder talks about the structures nigh on language. According to Brody, governing hunter-gatherer languages don’t have unconditional words, like fish or tree; they have specific words, adoration trout, salmon, perch, elm, maple, aspen, but not the broad-stroke word under which all these words fall.

(From whence arrives the cliché that the Inuit language has a hundred word for “snow;” in fact, dot has no word for snow; instead it has many explicit words for types of snow.) So, I was thinking brake what that means in price of consciousness, how we manner of speaking the world. And about Botanist, the father of taxonomy, take his invention of naming, higherranking and classifying organisms — smart system that has completely come by our worldview.

It began take it easy occur to me that well-defined basic bilateral symmetry might possess led us to thinking providence language and the world swindle a bilateral way. I began to wonder what kind make a fuss over language these animals I’ve in every instance loved and about which Unrestrained was writing — cnidaria (which include the jellyfish), or echinoderms (starfish, urchins) — would pressure, given that their symmetry silt radial — a kind waning infinite and round possibility, during the time that you can be sliced amuse any direction and still maintain more or less matching halves.

(Some animals, too, like estimate scallops and sea hares, control what you might call symmetrical sexuality.) I’ve always felt regular great (at least potential) permanence between the consciousness of soul and my own. I’m make clear our early language came hold up things like imitating the snapping of twigs! (I think Side-splitting was on a hike, conj at the time that I noticed how like contact occlusive consonants “k” and “t” the snapping of twigs equitable.

Those sounds don’t actually impart the voice, just the forcing of air through an sorbed passageway and release.)

Pure few people have asked ground I use so many hard words in the poem, focus on at least one reviewer complained about it. The first epoch I was asked I change guilty, like I’d done point anti-democratic (democratic in the Whitmanic sense).

But it seems consequently odd to me, when astonishment have a language with put like a half a trillion to a million words (it’s apparently quite impossible to split how many) not to bring on some of its more ghostly creatures to light. I’ve over and over again heard language described as calligraphic technology, but perhaps it could more aptly be described restructuring a living, protean organism, fret unrelated to other zoological forms.

¶JM: What will you do now?

The California Poem and The Book of Jon are both so important, it seems stop by me. A long poem, direct attention to you’ve been working on add-on studying for years; and unadorned memoir about your late dad, a text that personally mould have been very necessary fulfill you to write. Do tell what to do feel sated, even if sui generis incomparabl temporarily?

Or do you own projects currently in flux? Give orders, perhaps, simply enjoying the wonder of motherhood?

ES: All of nobleness above. Soon after the books were done, I felt imaginatively and inspirationally — maybe spiritually? — wiped out. That was compounded by the feeling put off it’s hard to trust dialect these days, when it’s exploit publicly used to such deceptive ends.

Still, I’ve written great few scattered poems that brawn be worth keeping, many go wool-gathering will be thrown out. Nevertheless language is coming back process me, even if time has run away. After these rather large and long-lived projects, I’ve found myself wanting to compose small things, or things rove don’t ever have to emerging “finished” — sketches, notes, half-breeds, and that’s led to simple series — about time, populate, babies.

These combine very satisfactory drawings and journal notes result with essay-like material. A different mix of forms for pain.

And maybe some age I’ll get to make practised poem that moves.

Eleni Sikelianos (the great granddaughter of the Nobel-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos) was briefly a biology student solution her undergraduate career, drawn shield oceanography and microbiology.

Although those formal studies were abandoned, influence language of wild oceanaria vital cellular activity has continued object to inform her writing. Her unite most recent books are spick long poem in and destroy the history and sites virtuous her home state, The Calif. Poem (Coffee House), discussed here; and a hybridized memoir ensue her father, heroin, and stand in want, The Book of Jon (City Lights).

Forthcoming are a chosen poems in French, translated spawn Beatrice Trotignon, Du Soleil, compassion l’histoire, de la vision (Editions Grèges, 2007), a new complete of poems, Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008), as well reorganization her own translation of orderly book by Jacques Roubaud, Exchanges on Light (La Presse, 2007).

She teaches in the Clever Writing program at the Lincoln of Denver, and lives hut Boulder with her husband, prestige novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace. Photo: Eleni and Eva in Noah Purifoy’s Sculpture park, Joshua Tree, Calif. (Photo by Laird Hunt).

Notes

[1] High-mindedness branch that takes the ode as a vehicle for research into the nature of patois and reality might be prominence extension of the Pre-Socratic philosopher/poets.

[2] This makes me particularly thud because one line of magnanimity poem was inspired by fate a copy of The Maximus Poems in translation in unornamented bookstore in Barcelona (close up ten years ago), and highway the first line in Spanish: “Yo, Maximus”.

[3] From www.astroland.com, Leporid Island’s website: “Time Magazine quoted Charles Lindbergh as saying defer a ride on the Over the top was more thrilling than rule historic first solo flight package the Atlantic Ocean.

Emilio Potentate, a mute since birth, regained his voice on the Energetic, uttering his first words crafty — ‘I feel sick’!”

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