APOSTROPHE BOOKS

Paul Foster Johnson @ the Apostrophe table

The Poet Reading

The Poet Signing Books

Standing Room Only!

Below is from my introduction to Paul Foster Johnson for his reading and book launch party at Proteus Gowanus over the weekend . . . a wonderfully successful event!

In describing the work of John Asbhery, critic Paul Zweig writes the following:

“Every poem creates a mood of density and discretion, which is almost magical. And yet one never knows quite what the poems are about. His fine elaboration of images and arguments forms a concealing net, a sort of camouflage that works not much by covering over as by fascinating, so that one forgets to pursue one’s hunger for logic amid the glories of pure language” (107).

I think something similar can be said of Paul Foster Johnson’s work but with an important caveat. And that is, what Zweig describes here about Asbhery, really speaks to only one of Paul Foster Johnson’s registers. There are poems in this collection that are delightfully elusive and seduce us into believing meaning is forthcoming, but, in the end it never arrives. Like Asbhery, there is a kind of comic-tragic erosion of signification in many of Paul’s poems. It’s like having the rug pulled out from under you, but miraculously you never fall – you just float above the surface as though levitating, magically, on some supernatural syntax. But then there is another register that demands we search for a logical, perhaps even Romanticized order. These poems have an “aboutness” that demand explanation and meaning. They’re musical and lyrical, while at the same time they destabilize notions of identity and selfhood. So, these are Paul’s contrasting sensibilities—highly indeterminate language that seems to decay and then re-distribute through multiple refrains of “dislogic” versus poetic discourse that tends toward something quotidian, Romanticized, profound. These paradigms compete throughout the poems and effectively illuminate different modalities of consciousness and different possibilities of meaning by opening up the field of signification. It’s often difficult to determine—when inside of a Paul Foster Johnson poem—whether he is making sense, as uncertain as it may be, or dismantling it. In Paul’s poetry meaning exists between words, not through or in them. His words “unwork” themselves, by pulling meaning apart and by loosening the semantic surface. Referents and signifiers are not merely undefined, but they challenge definition itself, as phrases, lines and words reconfigure in varying, almost liminal permutations, thus placing the reader into new linguistic thresholds. For example, in “R13. Written Into the Bestiary.” He writes,

All larking

had been a mistake

When you were born

the wolves outside

their footfalls never neutral

abducted the plush symbols

there to greet you

Leaving you sungazing

in pine sap and ambient noise

Things in themselves

wavering in the grove

A beginning indentured you here

on the inmost beaches

surrounded by ventifacts smooth

out of the cannibals’ poems

These enjambed lines force us to disregard linearity and follow language, like the footfalls of the wolves, to some kind of neutral alterity – something outside consciousness, where we abduct our own symbols from seemingly ineffable fragments. So, yes, the poems are deeply philosophical and, as we say at Apostrophe, pataphysical. But, the poems are also beautiful and often very funny. In some poems, it’s as if clusters of words stumble upon and then trip over other clusters of words, and, then, somehow act surprised, perplexed, as if saying,“what are you doing here?! you’re language too? let’s see if we can’t undo some of this meaning, some of this convention and make everything seem otherwise.” Really, you’ll see what I mean. Take for instance this passage from the opening poem of the book, “Rhythmicon”:

Imagine the melody is a landscape you roam through,

it says—this will help you to play it better. Run

through the passage backwards—you will find

it more elastic and never exhausting itself

in a style that asphyxiates the subject. The technique

of visualization produces in this case not one apple

but bins of them, and the rain does not stop

and its pounding historizes the long march

So, this is essentially the introduction, though I did open with some passages from an essay “On Poetry” by the Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich, which I pulled from shelves of the Reanimation Library just before the reading. Some wonderful stuff about the poetic line being stuffed like a sausage! Anyway, Paul organized the event himself with the help of friends, so thanks to all for such great work, including Andrew at the Reanimation Library and Sasha at Proteus Gowanus. Stay tuned for more readings by Paul and our other writers…..

Zinc Talk/Reading Series @ the Zinc Bar in Manhattan

82 West 3rd, two doors west of Thompson Street
NYC.

November and December 2008

Sundays at 7:00

11/9, Lynn Behrendt, Patricia  Spears Jones and Thomas Devaney

11/16 Robbie Dewhurst, Brenda Iijima, Paul Foster Johnson

11/23: Bob Hershon, Sharon Mesmer and Susie Timmons

12/7 A HUGE LUNGFULL PARTY

12/14 Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover

12/21 Ron Silliman and Joel Lewis.

$5 donation goes to the poets
Your hosts Joe Elliot, Kimberly Lyons and Douglas Rothschild

For more information about the Zinc Reading Series:

http://lungfull.org/zinc/

Subway: ACEBDV to west 4th street.
NR to spring. 1/9 to Houston.
F to Broadway Lafayette.

Refrains/Unworkings is Paul Foster Johnson’s first book of poetry. Juxtaposing Romantic ideology against a postmodern disregard for “found” or “authentic” meaning, where “everybody’s ontological investigation/ is guided by anticipated findings,” these poems explore the social space of sound and rhythm and rhetoric. These are love poems, too, paeans so private and so simultaneously public, they evoke a contemporary return to Hart Crane’s White Buildings. Yet, the speaker here resists the totalities of lyric history and their familiar arguments of selfhood: Romantic Man of Taste, revenant noisemaker of the New York School, vatic observer of the Republic, gay poet. Every new utterance is already old—already within limiting quotation marks. Johnson’s clever answer to the problem is a complex recapitulation and revision of lines, phrases, sounds, and images, where even entire movements of a poem are “refrained” but re-contextualized in later poems. Nowhere is this more evocative than in the bookends of Refains/Unworkings. In the first poem, “Rhythmicon,” there is only the voice “without anchor,” a “birdsong of institutional being,” a voice wherein art is without purpose even while the urban bourgeoisie search for new theories of art. In the last poem, “Art of the Cities,” the same sentences of “Rhythmicon” form new lines within the context of polis and socius— post-9/11 New York City— where new construction ultimately leads to monumentally empty glass buildings and memorials to grief, perseverance, and failure.

Paul Foster Johnson is an editor at Litmus Press. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the chapbook Quadriga (gong press, 2006). From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The book is NOW AVAILABLE through SPD.

At first we thought about calling the press “Comma” and decided to use the mechanical mark, exclusively, (rather than the word “comma”) in all of our early design ideas. I suppose, initially, the idea was to emphasize the material aspects of the poem (via the Objectivists maybe? Perhaps Williams’ “machine made of words” ticking in our ears?). Anyway, a publishing house in the U.K. beat us to the punch: http://www.commapress.co.uk/. This, however, turned-out to be rather fortuitous, as “apostrophe” is the nom parfait for our press.

Distinguishing the apostrophe mark from the comma presented some difficulties, so we abandoned this notion of using the mark, exclusively, and have since tried some different typography intended to evoke the idea of “apostrophe” in its many incarnations. At any rate, I suppose we were particularly interested in the dialogue between the material/physical aspects of the text and its manifestation on the page – and ultimately in the mind. And, further, how this interaction or conversation occurs. For both of us, poetry and poetics have always been deeply philosophical endeavors, and the intersection of philosophical thought with aesthetics, art and representation, as well as the role of culture in all of this, is something we were interested in exploring, especially via poetic discourse. . .

The word “apostrophe” is incredibly multilayered. Perhaps its most obvious use is as a sign or mechanical mark that indicates the omission of a letter or letters, as in “weren’t.” And, similarly, its use to indicate the genitive or possessive case, as in “John’s book.” Or, again, as a superscript to designate plurals of abbreviations and symbols, as in the “6’s.”

More interesting perhaps is its use in figurative and rhetorical language as defined by the OED here:

“A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address. (As explained by Quintilian, apostrophe was directed to a person present; modern use has extended it to the absent or dead (who are for the nonce supposed to be present); but it is by no means confined to these, as sometimes erroneously stated.)”

The notion of an address to an imaginary person (or personified image) parallels the relationship between the writer and reader implicit in the production of any text, whether the writer actually imagines an audience or not. Also, implicit here is the idea of digression – a pause, a stop, an aside. It is in this space where poetry often finds its voice, where the imagination accepts the uncertainties of language and of human experience.

The word itself is derived from Latin (apostrophus) and Greek (apostrophos/prosoidia), and involves the idea of “turning away” or “turning aside,” as well as simply an indication of “loss” or “omission.” So, it is here, in loss, in turning way from intention or purpose where the material or noumenal interacts with the phenomenal, as Kant would put it; or, where the sign enacts its meaning; i.e. the mark as an indication of loss, a moment of pause, a digression in meaning.

And, imbedded in the word “apostrophe” is of course, “strophe.” Strophe is also multilayered. Most obvious, perhaps, is the unit in poetry similar to the stanza, except that it more often refers to a section in a poem that does not follow a regularly repeated pattern, whether rhythmic or rhyming; i.e. a stanza in free verse. As with “apostrophe,” the word is partly derived from the Greek (strophe), or “to turn,” as well as the Indo-European (streb). In classical Greek drama, a strophe indicates the first movement of the chorus while turning from one side of the orchestra to another; i.e. a physical movement (bodies and heads turning) accompanied with a turn in song. It also refers to the first division in a Pindaric ode.

Finally, there is yet one other interesting definition worth noting, again from the OED:

“The aggregation of protoplasm and chlorophyll-grains on the cell-walls adjacent to other cells, as opposed to epistrophe when they collect on the free cell-walls. . . Apostrophe takes place under unfavourable external conditions.”

Although the use of “apostrophe” as a rhetorical and figurative device seems to predate this use in biology, it’s still a kind of fascinating use of the word. Maybe it would be interesting to consider this cellular activity as a metaphor for language? Perhaps there’s a theory brewing akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic process of concepts and ideas?

Although we will continue to maintain our website, www.apostrophebooks.org, this new blog will be the place to find out about our authors, books and happenings. We will use this space to create a new interactive community of writers, readers, critics and scholars interested in the work we publish. This means several features like a discussion board where you can interact with the editors and poets, links to book reviews, an editors recommend list, comments and analysis about our books from readers and critics, and an ongoing discussion about contemporary poetry.