Joseph Houlihan
An Encounter with Salamander: A Bestiary
I.
In 2017, Leonard Schwartz sent me a very kind note with a copy of his new collection of poems Salamander: A Bestiary a collaboration he had done with Simon Carr.
I had no claim to his consideration, besides having written a few reviews of his work for Entropy Magazine.
In Salamander, Schwartz wrote poems, and Carr designed woodcuts in a beautiful and wandering conversation. Here are five encounters with that text.
1.) Frog
“If we are like the frog/We may be in big trouble/ For one we spent/The whole summer/ Catching frogs/ And for another/ Well,/ You know the rest.”
In the introduction to the text, Schwartz describes catching frogs with his daughter in a transparent glass coffee pot.
“My daughter Cleo caught nine of them. I caught the other. There is a ravine up in Washington State's Capital Forest that is teeming with frogs. Now nine frogs sat in the pot, apparently dour of expression, as I anthropomorphized their countenances and circumstance. Sometimes they would all try to jump out at once, bumping their heads against the soft plastic top of the coffee pot.”
We know the rest. And Schwartz has always been a poet of eco poetics. And this work, much like his meandering treatise on peace and the Middle East, The New Babel, seeks to see, as James Schuyler said, “things as they are, too fierce and not too much.”
Because our bodies are an inevtiable melange, with obscure and anthropomorphized bodies, (As Levinas asks: Does a fly have a face?)
I've often heard the glass jar described as a metaphor for order and rule. With the story going something like this, “We walk into the field and catch fireflies in a ball jar. We punch holes in the lid, and the fireflies alight. But after a few days, we take the lid off, and the fireflies no longer seek to escape. The jar is their new reality.”
2.) Cupid's Deer
“Also I shot a deer the other day/ With a cross-bow, for getting/ Too close to my wife's garden.”
I shot a deer. I shot a moose. I think of James Thurber's “Unicorn in the Garden,” where the killing of an imaginary unicorn marks a symbolic violence.
Across the midwest, more and more deer wander from the parkways into the back gardens of suburban America to eat our plants. I heard about proposals to allow us to bow hunt them in places like Detroit and Gary. And also, I’ve heard that rednecks will drive into the deer and accelerate, to knock them dead, and throw them in their truck beds. It all sounds very dramatic, with red mist settling over the snow, or pools of dark blood in the gutter, hunting dogs wailing out the passengers side windows.
3.) Snow Monkey II
“Figures on a stage/ that lead miniature lives, zoo creatures/ in the action of language.”
The Lincoln Park Zoo is especially depressing, with the one armed monkey, swinging in a slow indictment. This too, a zone of Baudrillard's carceral reality, war zones, the zoo and Afghanistan, hiding a degraded ecological imagination, our broken down wildness hidden by imagined wilderness.
4.) Elk
“Sadly, the ocean has faded from our view/ Of late./ Right up to the horizon all we see/ Has the solidity/ of elk.”
“The elks, on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find it is only a water hole. What they're looking for is an 'elk-a-hole.'” “Beyond the Alps are more alps, and the Lord alps those that alps themselves.” Groucho Marx.
5.) Bee Hive
“Leaving out of Laguardia? Nah, Newark./ In the city each window houses an/ Active bee hive.”
I've been told to plant Bee Balm, to make our little friends happy again. My father, loving his Paw Paws, walks around the yard with tiny paint brushes.
There's a scene in Steve Barron's beautiful and rhapsodic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(1990), when a startled tourist in the back of a taxi cab asks, “What was that?” To which the driver replies, “Looked like sort of a big turtle in a trenchcoat. You leaving from Laguardia, right?”
I work in the public library, and we receive telephone questions from all over the country. Last week, one woman called and asked, “What color are turtles? Are they green or are they brown? I'm making a greeting card.” A quick Google search confirmed my suspicion: some are green and some are brown, and some are both green and brown.
In My Dinner with Andre (1981) Andre Gregory describes his paratheatre experiments in the Polish forest, sometimes called a beehive, “Well, a beehive is that at 8:00pm a hundred strangers come into a room...and whatever happens is a beehive.”
Andre Gregory shows up again in Henry Jaglom's beautiful and rhapsodic Always... But Not Forever (1985) dropping wisdom about encountering the other, “If you can only accept the fact that you will never know another person, then that not knowing, that acceptance, can be like the bridge between you, the one thing that you can know for sure.”
II.
I first encountered Leonard Schwartz through his terrific radio program Cross Cultural Poetics hosted on the Pennsound Archive. Since 2003, he has produced generous and incisive interviews with poets, scholars, and artists about their current engagement. Speaking in a conversational voice, he invites guests to read and share ideas about the state of poetics and life. From these many hours of thinking aloud, I've learned incredible things about the performance of poetry, and ways this mode of inquiry heals as it cuts.
Some of the guests are famous, Amiri Baraka, Fanny Howe, and many other's less so. All told, its a kind of cipher for serious multi form investigations by thinking adults. The projects he describes are expansive and diverse. Heide Hatry makes cenotaphs in ash, Nathaniel Mackey writes letters to the Angel of Dust, Keith Waldrop translates Baudelaire, Jerome Rothenberg talks Klezmer and Shamanism, and Anne Waldman is in Iovis. It's witty and smart. You learn that Erica Hunt worked in social service, M. NourbeSe Philip works as a lawyer, and Albert Mobilio loves basketball.
And as such, it's one of the great living archives of the contemporary experimental poetic project. And more than this, Schwartz explicitly makes room for conversation across difference as a means of expanding the American language, and countering the language of war.
Through this project, Schwartz returns to several central themes. He identifies the Sufi tradition that privileges conversation as the highest rung of spiritual engagement, above meditation and prayer. And he often returns to the political, Keat's and negative capability, Buber and the possibility of encounter.
From these broad conceptual foundations, Schwartz steers his guests through tangled ideas and enthusiasms. And one of the most resonating sensations from listening to hours of this program comes in Schwartz's essential wit and grace. In conversation with Timothy Morton, Schwartz joked, “I may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you, I actually am an idiot.” Schwartz has married a gentle tone, with a generous mind. He incapsulates what Ron Padgett identified in Bill Berkson: probity. Schwartz has dedicated the many years of his practice towards expanding the American language to a language of peace and ecological coherence through conversations across difference. It's a privilege to join this conversation.
In 2017, Leonard Schwartz sent me a very kind note with a copy of his new collection of poems Salamander: A Bestiary a collaboration he had done with Simon Carr.
I had no claim to his consideration, besides having written a few reviews of his work for Entropy Magazine.
In Salamander, Schwartz wrote poems, and Carr designed woodcuts in a beautiful and wandering conversation. Here are five encounters with that text.
1.) Frog
“If we are like the frog/We may be in big trouble/ For one we spent/The whole summer/ Catching frogs/ And for another/ Well,/ You know the rest.”
In the introduction to the text, Schwartz describes catching frogs with his daughter in a transparent glass coffee pot.
“My daughter Cleo caught nine of them. I caught the other. There is a ravine up in Washington State's Capital Forest that is teeming with frogs. Now nine frogs sat in the pot, apparently dour of expression, as I anthropomorphized their countenances and circumstance. Sometimes they would all try to jump out at once, bumping their heads against the soft plastic top of the coffee pot.”
We know the rest. And Schwartz has always been a poet of eco poetics. And this work, much like his meandering treatise on peace and the Middle East, The New Babel, seeks to see, as James Schuyler said, “things as they are, too fierce and not too much.”
Because our bodies are an inevtiable melange, with obscure and anthropomorphized bodies, (As Levinas asks: Does a fly have a face?)
I've often heard the glass jar described as a metaphor for order and rule. With the story going something like this, “We walk into the field and catch fireflies in a ball jar. We punch holes in the lid, and the fireflies alight. But after a few days, we take the lid off, and the fireflies no longer seek to escape. The jar is their new reality.”
2.) Cupid's Deer
“Also I shot a deer the other day/ With a cross-bow, for getting/ Too close to my wife's garden.”
I shot a deer. I shot a moose. I think of James Thurber's “Unicorn in the Garden,” where the killing of an imaginary unicorn marks a symbolic violence.
Across the midwest, more and more deer wander from the parkways into the back gardens of suburban America to eat our plants. I heard about proposals to allow us to bow hunt them in places like Detroit and Gary. And also, I’ve heard that rednecks will drive into the deer and accelerate, to knock them dead, and throw them in their truck beds. It all sounds very dramatic, with red mist settling over the snow, or pools of dark blood in the gutter, hunting dogs wailing out the passengers side windows.
3.) Snow Monkey II
“Figures on a stage/ that lead miniature lives, zoo creatures/ in the action of language.”
The Lincoln Park Zoo is especially depressing, with the one armed monkey, swinging in a slow indictment. This too, a zone of Baudrillard's carceral reality, war zones, the zoo and Afghanistan, hiding a degraded ecological imagination, our broken down wildness hidden by imagined wilderness.
4.) Elk
“Sadly, the ocean has faded from our view/ Of late./ Right up to the horizon all we see/ Has the solidity/ of elk.”
“The elks, on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find it is only a water hole. What they're looking for is an 'elk-a-hole.'” “Beyond the Alps are more alps, and the Lord alps those that alps themselves.” Groucho Marx.
5.) Bee Hive
“Leaving out of Laguardia? Nah, Newark./ In the city each window houses an/ Active bee hive.”
I've been told to plant Bee Balm, to make our little friends happy again. My father, loving his Paw Paws, walks around the yard with tiny paint brushes.
There's a scene in Steve Barron's beautiful and rhapsodic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(1990), when a startled tourist in the back of a taxi cab asks, “What was that?” To which the driver replies, “Looked like sort of a big turtle in a trenchcoat. You leaving from Laguardia, right?”
I work in the public library, and we receive telephone questions from all over the country. Last week, one woman called and asked, “What color are turtles? Are they green or are they brown? I'm making a greeting card.” A quick Google search confirmed my suspicion: some are green and some are brown, and some are both green and brown.
In My Dinner with Andre (1981) Andre Gregory describes his paratheatre experiments in the Polish forest, sometimes called a beehive, “Well, a beehive is that at 8:00pm a hundred strangers come into a room...and whatever happens is a beehive.”
Andre Gregory shows up again in Henry Jaglom's beautiful and rhapsodic Always... But Not Forever (1985) dropping wisdom about encountering the other, “If you can only accept the fact that you will never know another person, then that not knowing, that acceptance, can be like the bridge between you, the one thing that you can know for sure.”
II.
I first encountered Leonard Schwartz through his terrific radio program Cross Cultural Poetics hosted on the Pennsound Archive. Since 2003, he has produced generous and incisive interviews with poets, scholars, and artists about their current engagement. Speaking in a conversational voice, he invites guests to read and share ideas about the state of poetics and life. From these many hours of thinking aloud, I've learned incredible things about the performance of poetry, and ways this mode of inquiry heals as it cuts.
Some of the guests are famous, Amiri Baraka, Fanny Howe, and many other's less so. All told, its a kind of cipher for serious multi form investigations by thinking adults. The projects he describes are expansive and diverse. Heide Hatry makes cenotaphs in ash, Nathaniel Mackey writes letters to the Angel of Dust, Keith Waldrop translates Baudelaire, Jerome Rothenberg talks Klezmer and Shamanism, and Anne Waldman is in Iovis. It's witty and smart. You learn that Erica Hunt worked in social service, M. NourbeSe Philip works as a lawyer, and Albert Mobilio loves basketball.
And as such, it's one of the great living archives of the contemporary experimental poetic project. And more than this, Schwartz explicitly makes room for conversation across difference as a means of expanding the American language, and countering the language of war.
Through this project, Schwartz returns to several central themes. He identifies the Sufi tradition that privileges conversation as the highest rung of spiritual engagement, above meditation and prayer. And he often returns to the political, Keat's and negative capability, Buber and the possibility of encounter.
From these broad conceptual foundations, Schwartz steers his guests through tangled ideas and enthusiasms. And one of the most resonating sensations from listening to hours of this program comes in Schwartz's essential wit and grace. In conversation with Timothy Morton, Schwartz joked, “I may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you, I actually am an idiot.” Schwartz has married a gentle tone, with a generous mind. He incapsulates what Ron Padgett identified in Bill Berkson: probity. Schwartz has dedicated the many years of his practice towards expanding the American language to a language of peace and ecological coherence through conversations across difference. It's a privilege to join this conversation.