Of Earthquake and Poetry

Ifind myself reassured--and more than slightly amazed--by the vitality and sheer abundance of poetry in a civilization that has spurned much of its literary heritage in favor of “novelization,” “docudrama” and other aberrations and debasements. To be sure, poetry survives only because of the passion and vision of its makers and readers, who sometimes appear to be roughly equal in number. Aside from the poetry that sometimes finds its way into the popular culture in the form of song lyrics--Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album is a good example--virtually all contemporary poetry is utterly non-commercial and wholly outside the ordinary practices of the publishing industry. And yet poetry does not merely survive; it thrives in the fertile underground of literary magazines, poetry readings and small presses.

One such refuge is Temblor, a handsome, book-size journal of contemporary poetry, edited and published by Leland Hickman (4624 Cahuenga Blvd., No. 307, North Hollywood 91602: $7.50 per copy; two-issue subscription (postpaid), $16; four-issue subscription, $30). Now in its third year of publication, Temblor is genuinely impressive in the scope of its ambitions--and its success in realizing those ambitions.

Each issue of Temblor offers a thoughtful selection of contemporary poetry in all its richness and diversity, including the work of poets who still cherish clarity and lyrical beauty; latter-day angry young men (and women) whose verse is an opportunity for psychoanalytical pyrotechnics, and self-absorbed souls whose words are so tightly encoded that we can never really penetrate their intended meanings.

Among the poets whose work has appeared in the first four issues of Temblor are figures of established reputation, both local and national (Clayton Eshleman, Holly Prado, Paul Vangelisti, Rachel Blau DuPlessis), foreign poets in translation (Minoru Yoshioka, Tomas Guido Lavalle, Michel Deguy), and a roster of new poets that includes many challenging and intriguing writers and few undoubtedly gifted ones.

The reading of modern poetry, as Temblor demonstrates, can be a trying experience. I puzzled over Steve McCaffery’s “Ba-Lue Bolivar B-Lues Are” in Issue No. 4 of Temblor--the poetry consists of page after page of justified text, lacking paragraphs or punctuation, and rendered in some dreamy, vaguely neo-Chaucerian dialect that defied my efforts to decipher it: “Constreint for pensihede to bed whan that was joyned amyd be kalendes of and derk hir bemys within my bed. . . .”

In the same issue, Susan Howe’s “Heliopathy” consists of apparently random assortments of words (and a few non-words) that have been literally scattered across the page: “Anly which he has alt corrector. that I. crestende.” How, I wondered, does one proofread such work? (Of course, Hickman is the right man for the job--he is a poet, editor and publisher who supports himself as a commercial typesetter.)

Of course, Temblor would be less absorbing--and less faithful to the practice of poetry in our times--if these ragged edges had been excluded. Still, the hundred or so poets who have contributed to the first four issues of Temblor are innovators who mostly manage to remain coherent while exploring the complexities of language, thought and perception that represent the purest values of poetry.

Above all, the best of these poets manage to make themselves understood in ways that open our eyes, touch our hearts, move us to insight and even revelation. As Eshleman writes in an untitled poem in Issue No. 1 of Temblor: “I so much want no meaning as part of / composition, / I’ve stayed with imagination in darkness / to watch it swerve / against unrelenting fall, / even as abyss / seeks its own meaning, so do I fall into the need of meaning.”