I met Nathaniel Tarn at a conference in 1975 or 76. He had a long
list of accomplishments behind
him. Most important to me in the list were his activities as
publisher, introducer of new poets and poetry, and translator, as
well as poet under the Tarn name, and an equally impressive body
of anthropological work under the name Mendelssohn.
A problem for me was that as much as I appreciated some of his work with
Mayan texts and other meso-American sources, he at times seemed to
be riffling through these huge cultural and artistic zones too
quickly and perhaps superficially. On one hand, I found his edition
of Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu essential in part because it
was bilingual, and I used his translation as a crib as well as a
poem to read in translation. As such, it made one of the most important works
of the century immediately and easily accessible to me in its own language
at a time when I was trying to learn it. Sometimes I carried a volume
of Neruda or Lorca with me in the car so I could memorize passages as
I drove. On the other hand, this was a time when I was immersed in
meso-American studies, and I felt uncertain about a rhapsodic approach to
such works as his version of the Mayan Rabinal Achi.
The resolution came from a mid-length poem, The Beautiful
Contradictions. On one level this was a beautiful extension of Charles
Olson's "The Kingfishers," and on another a rhapsodic romp through an
exceedingly complex body of thought and culture. Understanding the function
of a rhapsodist seemed to be what I needed at the time. A rhapsode makes
endless digressions, and his art is based more on what we might consider
as melodic progression rather than single-minded focus. Tarn seemed
to approach poetry that sought to escape static referents - a practice
that was just coming into fashion at the time; but clearly Tarn was was not
trying to follow this fashion. Lyrics for the Bride of God, which had
just come out at the time of the conference, carried rhapsodic patterns
farther than his previous work. Contradictions moved fast;
Lyrics suggested that a rhapsode like Tarn might make a virtue
of haste, skimming across a very large field.
Our conversations at the conference were amiable enough. I had plenty
of books with me to hand out, and gave him several. I also
sketched some of the meso-American projects I had been working on.
As congenial as these conversations were, they didn't seem to have any
immediate projects attached to them and hence blended into the
general texture of the conference. As I look back on it now, this seemed
to be the beginning of a process that included several arcs. The
most important thing about the conversations was the correspondence
they initiated after the conference was over. As with many correspondences,
this one lead to a book.
The book was titled The Microcosm, a collection of shorter
poems. This seemed an interesting microcosm of Tarn's poetry in
itself. Virtually all of the major themes were there, though for
the most part stated more directly. The rhapsodic structure
persisted, but the pattern of movement away from whatever began each
poem didn't go too far, just hinted at the possibilities of restless
movement away from whatever strand of daily life set it off. The poems
thus suggested some of the shorter Homeric Hymns which simply presented
the opening of what could have been a longer poem; or one of the "preludes"
of Debussy or one of the other musical Impressionists. What might
those longer rhapsodies be - another Beautiful Contradictions
or Lyrics for the Bride of God? Perhaps. But not necessarily.
For the cover, I decided to use a portilano map - a type of map used
in the early Renaissance, marking out paths used in such navigation
techniques as dead reckoning. These gave lines to follow, but did
not anchor them to place the way later maps did using longitude and latitude
lines. I decided to use the net of these lines lifted out of their
graphic context for endpapers. I accomplished the separation by making
a huge bromide stat of the image and then applying white-out to
everything but the lines. This took considerably longer than I expected -
and used more white-out than I could have imagined. After shooting the
copy at great reduction, I hung the sheet with the white-out on it in
my hall along with performance scores, thinking that given enough
time most of the white-out would peel off, some taking parts of the
image with them.
Aside from the satisfaction of doing books, this one did another side
step approximately two decades later. I talked to Nathaniel about putting
work of his on the web. We decided against The Microcosm but
went with an old favorite of mine, "The Great Odor of Summer." Nathaniel's
partner Janet Rodney had begun sending me books of hers as partial exchange
for those I sent originally to Nathaniel and then to both of them. I
put several complete books of Janet's on-line with excerpts from others.
The process lead to webbing Alashka, a lengthy collaboration
between the two poets that had particular value to me for a number of
reasons. Looking at this book from the Tarn angle, the rhapsodic elements
of earlier books actually brook out of vocal modulation into literally a
second voice, something that it seemed to be trying to do in such
longer workings as Lyrics for the Bride of God. Janet's tight
lines both set up boundaries for Nathaniel's long bardic sweeps and
his rhapsodic process of what otherwise might be endless digression.
Perhaps because of Janet's participation, perhaps because of a more than
usually clearly defined telleos, this book strikes me as something of
a sequel or at least parallel or hommage to Neruda's Alturas -
I thought of Alashka as Alturas del Norte.
Perhaps a rhapsode has a tendency towards self-triangulation. Whether
that's the case or not, the process of moving from a small, self-contained
book to the publication of work by two poets and a collaboration
between them gave depth to all other lines of development. Perhaps
the early book acted something like a portilano for other
projects which could not have been predicted when I printed The
Microcosm.
