On the Genesis of January 2008

When my friend the poet Landis Everson killed himself near the end of 2007, I travelled to California to attend the scattering of his ashes on Mt. Tamalpais just before the new year. Sixty years earlier, Landis had been close friends with the Berkeley poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, with whom he had shared his poems until the group broke up and he stopped writing in the early 60s. I had contacted Landis in the fall of 2003, while researching a history of the Berkeley poets for Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, and Landis and I had struck up a friendship that he said led to his returning to poetry again after a silence of 43 years. Landis began writing extraordinary poems that he said he was writing for me, and I began placing them in literary periodicals, including The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Jacket Magazine and The Poker.

For the Fulcrum feature, I tracked down obscure and forgotten literary periodicals and interviewed many friends and members of the Berkeley-San Francisco circle — Robin Blaser, Mary Fabilli, Ariel Parkinson, Catherine Mulholland, Gerald Ackerman, Ebbe Borregaard, Dick Stone, Lew Ellingham, Joanne Kyger, Fran Herndon — and wrote what Ron Silliman later called “the best history of the Berkeley scene in the 1940s & early ’50s that I’ve ever seen.” Landis and I shared our poems with each other as we wrote them, and I was often surprised by the appearance of a new poem or set of poems in my email box; many seemed to have the quality of oracles received from beyond the realm of the living, and there was sometimes the feeling that Landis’s dead friends Spicer and Duncan were speaking through him from beyond the grave. Sometimes his poems were about a girl I was dating, trying to persuade her to get with me; I think I was supposed to show them to her. I had Landis’s poems out at nearly 50 literary magazines (there were only two rejections); between that, my own poems, and my two dissertations, Landis said I was like Howard Hughes, with his 28 airplanes in the air.

Landis came out to Boston to visit me when the Berkeley issue of Fulcrum (#3) came out, and we travelled by bus to New York City and Amherst to give readings with Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, John Hennessy, Glyn Maxwell and others. (In New York Landis showed me the apartment where he had lived next door to Katherine Hepburn when John Ashbery had been an admirer of his poetry back in ’51.) When I reunited Landis with his friend Dick Stone, a student of Landis’s at Deep Springs who he hadn’t seen in 50 years, they got lost and didn’t come home until four in the morning (they had told me they were going to an art museum). Not long afterwards, I submitted a manuscript of Landis’s poems — new and old — to the Poetry Foundation, and it won their first Emily Dickinson Award, for a poet over 50 who had never published a book of poems, and was published by Graywolf Press as Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). Landis and I travelled to Chicago for the Awards Ceremony, and not long after that to San Francisco, where we appeared in Kevin Killian’s production of Jack Spicer’s play Young Goodman Brown and Landis gave his first poetry reading in the Bay Area in 50 years. It was on a second trip to Boston — in the spring of 2006 to give a reading with Bill Berkson (with whom Landis had appeared in Locus Solus in the 60s) at Harvard — that Landis had the stroke that stopped the miraculous poetry as abruptly as it had begun.

In Berkeley, after the ash scattering, Steve Dickison let me use his apartment (he went underground in San Francisco) and I roamed around Berkeley communing with the flowers and trees, and thinking about Landis and his dead friends. I took a bus to San Luis Obispo and saw where Landis had been living when we had passed so many hours on the phone together, night after night, day after day, for four years. In SLO I stayed on a remote mountaintop with a friend of Landis’s, the poet Roy Kahn Johnston, grappling with my loss in the peace of an unpopulated silence. Time seemed to stop, and I existed in a place where I could perceive all of its attributes and cloaks of identity and action replaying themselves over and over again as if penetrating through and beyond the surface of appearance. As if the atomic elements of which all things temporal are made up had convened or reconvened in one final and original, all-penetrating destination, some wafer thin headline on which all phases of life were simultaneously imposed.

I emerged from these contemplations with a sense of profound spiritual refreshment, and returned to Boston, where I had but a few months to complete my PhD dissertation, a critical edition of the poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman.

But I found that I was unable to work on the dissertation. I was disturbed by Landis’s suicide, I was troubled by my looming deadline, and I had fallen in love and could think only of my desire to be in New York City, where I visited to give two readings. At night I couldn’t sleep, and I began writing poems — one after another — to deal with my grief, and out of a sense that there wasn’t anything else to do. This was in January, 2008.

Writing from midnight until four or five in the morning, I would write between three and five poems a night, pouring out my feelings of grief and longing in whatever form they came to me. I began to realize that I was imposing no limits at all on what I was writing — and was startled at the diversity of forms and range of feelings that were emerging in the poems; I was touching on areas of expression I had never dreamed of touching on in a poem. Each poem seemed to push to some new frontier of form and feeling — so personal (and strange) that I couldn’t imagine I could ever publish such writing, though it seemed to me profoundly right what I was doing. As my long poem grew, I began to notice with a sense of exhilaration that I felt myself to be in complete control of my medium, and able to extend the form of my poem in any direction I wished. I also began to notice that the thing was taking on an overall shape — one that was rich and complex, and wove together many disparate and related threads and themes in recurrent motifs and a unity of form. When I finished the poem three months later — when the poetry stopped coming after 135 poems — I put the whole thing away, thinking it was too strange for anyone to ever consider publishing.

Almost two years later, my friend the poet (and Fulcrum editor) Stephen Sturgeon told me that he had got around to reading the enormous file that I had sent him when I had just finished writing the poems. I was shocked when he said that it was one of the best books of poems he had ever read. Reading them over myself, I was startled to see how much better they were than I had remembered them; indeed, I hardly seemed to remember them at all — it was as if I were seeing them for the first time. I showed them to the (wonderful, if undeservedly little known) St. Paul poet Joe Green (his great poems can be found in most issues of Fulcrum). He told me that it was the best poetry he had ever read, and he told me that he meant it. It seemed to me unfathomable that I had written the poems and then forgotten all about them.

Kevin Murphy of Dark Sky Books had contacted me to ask if I had a book of poems that he could publish. Yes, I said, I did. And now, thanks to Kevin Murphy and Dark Sky Books, the poems are published in a book, exactly as I wrote them, and have a life of their own.

Poems from January 2008:

1)

Though he arrived his presence is not felt
inside the sleeping town before ice melt
and the docks steam with new activity
under the protection of the sea
Only in memory his thoughts revive
the promise when his friend was still alive
and like a chrysalis all forms abstain
from commentary turning into rain
He is the one whose name will echo through
provincial palaces of well to do
consignatories of a new regard
like kisses melting into radiant art

2)

Ice kindled tree to life in passive fog.
The shadows settled on the wires log
too absent early. Then he heard eavesdrop
the marching others hush and the wind stop.
Behind was only no one then he had
rented wrongly regulated flat.
Fat chance a father, earwig flowing
like a cape over him owing
nothing. When announced to him as Kris
regarded other nowhere near the roof
saying to him, this is how it is,
I hope this will be brotherly enough.
Chimney fallows. Blast black in the knit
changes. Rectangularly repeat.

* Read more about January 2008 here.

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Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. His poems have been widely published in international periodicals, including Fulcrum, Verse, Harvard Review, Jacket, Agenda, Stand, Boston Review, Salt, and The Wolf. His poetry collections include Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), and two chapbooks, The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics (Cannibal Books, 2008) and Johanna Poems (Cy Gist Press, 2007). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010), Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006, winner of the first Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation), and a forthcoming edition of the poems and critical prose of John Crowe Ransom. He lives in Boston, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.