for Felix D’Arienzo and Gerri Czachowski
“1976”
After his reading I asked Peter Schjeldahl for a
poem
for our one-page magazine folded in an envelope.
“I haven’t written a poem in two years. You don’t know?”
Later that night Peter found himself talking to “Verse”
as if thinking over my plan to bypass everything but poetry through
new Xerox technology.
“Your business is pleasure,”
Peter found himself telling
“the Art of Verse”
in the poem
he mailed me early the next morning.
That afternoon, I mailed the world two
or three hundred copies—the world was smaller then—folding,
addressing,
stuffing, stamping, and sealing “Dear Art of Verse” exactly
as he typed it. The next day one person after another called
him, each thinking he sent the poem
only to them. Amazed
he asked me over,
showed up at my art show,
and The Poetry Mailing List
still thrills him, a little
before he announced
he had
terminal cancer.
I feel he’s okay.
Time can’t be real.
September 22, 2022
In April 1977, I wander into the Andy Warhol Factory building’s elevator.
I get off at maybe the third floor and there’s Andy. I saw him before, in Heiner Friedrich’s Wooster Street gallery, where Warhol projected a shrewd art-world-guy aura wearing perfectly fitting blue jeans with a beautiful black belt, but now he pumps out his coolly enthusiastic big- baby character. I show him my one-page poetry magazine, The Poetry Mailing List, and boy, did he love it! My single-poet journal makes his eyes pop.
After all, in the mid-seventies, clean cheap Xeroxing was new. I saw it as a vehicle for making something that was nothing but poetry. I conceived a total focus on poetry. I thought Jasper Johns had done something like that with painting. With Flag (1954-1955) he eliminated the abstraction of both explicit and implied representation by making his painting nothing but sign. This paradoxically freed him to make his painting nothing but painting by jettisoning any hint of copying nature.
I similarly wanted to eliminate all the distraction surrounding poetry and bypass the sentinels of publication by simply mailing poetry. I thought of all poetry, however, as visual and verbal hybrids. Sometimes, in the PML, poems were part of an art piece, but even when they were not, I thought of them as visual art in three ways. First, if there were no accompanying images, I thought of the poem as presenting an implicitly iconoclastic reality. Second, every issue was contextualized by a small PML logo and issue number. Third, since this was well before personal computers, a poet’s individual way of typing and/or writing seemed beautifully authentic. John Cage, for example, made a point of wanting to know exactly how to type his mesostic poem:
JOHN CAGE’S SPECIAL OFFER
“Would you like a drink?”
the great 20th century
master John Cage asked.
“Very much,” I overstated,
amazed to be sitting
in his basement studio.
After his Town Hall concert,
I asked Cage for a short poem
for my one-page poetry journal.
“Call me,” said Cage.
When I phoned, he asked,
“Can you come get it now?”
Knowing I would Xerox cheap,
clean copies,
then a revelation—
he asked how
I wanted his poem on the page.
I stood above him
as he typed.
His large flush left margin
thrilled both of us.
Afterward he asked,
“Would you like my special tea?”
“Yes.”
He floated to his kitchen area
to bring me a tall thin cylindrical
mug without a handle
though I liked
strong, sweet Indian
chai with a kick,
Cage’s tea
was the opposite
and that was the point.
“It levels you. Some people,”
he continued,
“like caffeine. They like the bump
it gives you.” Cage paused
and said,
“I don’t like that bump.”
“Sometimes I like the bump,”
I told him, “but I love your tea’s flat,
bitter aftertaste.”
Cage beamed and said,
My new diet is wonderful.
I’m feeling better all the time.
When I die
I’ll be in perfect health.”
In addition to Cage, David Shapiro, Kathy Acker, Ann Lauterbach, David Lehman, Charles Bernstein, Rudy Burkhardt, Beth Anderson, Michael Goldberg, Robert Ashley, Jonathan Williams, Joel Oppenheimer, Lucio Pozzi, Linda Francis, Peter Schjeldahl, and others contributed. The success of the Poetry Mailing List was guaranteed early on when I ran into John Cage for the first time at Town Hall. When I asked him out of nowhere for a poem, he told me to call him. When I call he tells me to come right over. Appointments are such a drag.
My co-editor, Kenneth Deifik, and I bent our ‘one-page to maximize focus” ethos and put out multi-page David Shapiro and Kathy Acker issues, in addition to a Jimmy Carter inauguration issue. We got Council for Coordinating Literary Magazine grants. Poets and Writers featured a story about The Poetry Mailing List by, if memory serves, Nelson Richardson, who interviewed me at the Poets and Writers offices. They published the article with my headshot (see above), which I had made when they asked for a photo. Subscribers sent checks from all over the country. A couple of them said they heard about it on NPR though I didn’t. The new subscribers added to our address base of the Poetry Project mailing list and suggestions in the art and other worlds from sculptor John Newman and others.
As much as I believed in the mechanism of The Poetry Mailing List, I also saw it as a way to meet people. I therefore didn’t mind it when people I admired didn’t contribute their work. Warhol wouldn’t contribute but he asked me whom I could interview. “John Ashbery,” I said, elating him. Although Interview editor Bob Colacello killed the story in favor of a Ricky Ricardo, Jr. and Dino Martin interview, in retrospect hanging out with John was what mattered. (For more about the interview see https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/10/stephen-paul-miller-remembers-john-ashbery-.html and https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/75143-for-poets-there-s-no-such-thing-as-bad-press.html.) I can’t thank Chapter One enough for asking me to write about The Poetry Mailing List. If corporations are people, they should all be the PML. The very process of incorporating as a non-profit organization was exhilarating. The lawyer who contributed his services through the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Felix D’Arienzo, became interested in the poetry he was incorporating. A patent attorney with engineering and law degrees, he was fascinated by my observation that there was poetry in the precision of his technical language designed to prove the unique nature of intellectual property. Out of nowhere, he becomes a lifelong poet. He writes amazing poems in pure patent lawyer language [copyrighting / copywriting] his feelings. As I say introducing him for a June 1978 Ear Inn series reading, “Felix D’Arienzo portends something sturdy and new by simply being himself.”
I Google Felix for this article. He’s posted new poems! They’re a little more sentimental than I remember, but as Delmore Schwartz asked, why should we abhor the sentimental in art but seek it in life? In one poem, Felix stops Time in the street, and Time tells him, ‘Within each point of space, there is all time.” And he’s posted a poem I wrote about him in 1977, “You’re Missing Felix”! And my introduction for his reading!
But wait! I’m startled to find out that Felix has recently died.
When I Googled Felix, I thought I had been rude a few years ago when we got together because I forgot to ask how his legal secretary in the seventies, Gerri, was doing. I realize from her post that Felix, or “Fee” as Gerri called him, unexpectedly died. In her short paragraph post, she says, “Felix introduced me to some wonderfully talented artists such as composer Dan Berlinghoff and poet Stephen Paul Miller.” That Gerri Czachowski should seemingly so clearly remember me after a brief professional relationship some forty-five years ago blows my mind. I wouldn’t trade it for any other professional honor.
Although I no longer run it, The Poetry Mailing List, Inc., as Marsh Hawk Press, Inc., is publishing more poetry than ever; it will outlive me. I see streaks of it in everything I do. In the eighties, for instance, poet Laurie Perricci desperately asked me where she could be published. I heard John Cage telling me to come right over when I told her to come over with ten or twenty friends. I flashed on a new take on Richard Kostelanetz’s Assembling, which boxed loose pages of individual contributions, and various Poetry Project magazines that were put together by volunteers at collating events. Why not add a Marxist twist to that kind of assemblage and have the poets do the hard labor of assembling? This would give the workers all the cultural capital. Every month dozens of poets would come over with their 200 or so copies. Kenneth Deifik came up with the name The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side. I sweated such details as a contributor’s page, cardboard stock covers, the art on them, and how to bind them. Ron Kolm brought a stapler strong enough to bind all our work, until I bought one. He also brought copies to The St. Mark’s Bookstore. Then The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side collating moved to bars and restaurants where the collators took turns reading.
It’s hard to believe, but as far as I know that was the first time a regular journal in which so many poets and artists in the process of being published did the assembling. It seems, however, commonplace now.
Coming from one collating party after midnight, I showed the latest issue with a young Meher Baba on the cover to Allen Ginsberg in the Kiev restaurant. He immediately got the Marxist angle. His face lit up. I asked him to write a poem for it on the spot. His friend scoffed at the idea and tried to protect Allen from me, but he told his friend, with whom he seemed to have been editing or doing some other work, to relax.
The notion of doing the “hard work” of The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side inspired him. After writing nonstop for a couple of minutes or so, he told me to use the page he gave me however I wanted and send him a copy (which I delivered to him at his weekly Brooklyn College class). Together with “America,” “Kaddish,” and “White Shroud,” it’s on my Mount Rushmore of Allen poems:
HARD WORK
After midnite, Second Avenue horseradish Beef
at Kiev’s wood tables—
The Kasha Mushrooms tastes good
as Byelorussia usta when my momma
ran away from Cossacks 1905
Did the 5 year plan work? How bad Stalin?
Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A
Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red?
No I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo
translucent as an onion ring in
the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev
Restaurant after a hard day’s work
Allen Ginsberg
February 17, 1986, 12:35 A.M.
(See https://dreaminginthedeepsouth.tumblr.com/post/698725171562954752/allen-with-quentin-crisp-at-the-kiev-restaurant.)
At the next monthly collating party, a poet objected to Ginsberg not collating with us. The guy had a point. I should have at least asked Allen to come over.
After a few years, I left America on a Fulbright. When I returned there were many groups using my Marxist model throughout the country. Most of them never heard of The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side. So it goes.
I’ve always felt bad about dropping the ball on The Poetry Mailing List. Doing all that collating, address labeling, folding, and sealing was something I had fun with, but it was nothing to take lightly. A full-time job without any remunerative end in sight, it made graduate school seem practical. On the way to the first day of class I ran into Kathy Acker, whom I met through the PML, in Washington Square Park. She was unreservedly excited for me to be getting a Ph.D. and kept saying how cool it was. Kathy had the sweet superpower of making me never look back. And Kathy was right. School is cool. Every critical idea that got me things like tenure was like the PML in that academicians and professionals didn’t get my ideas until they worked. I still don’t get the List, but I know it’s still with me. It’s an uncontrollable force, a form of Marxist fun.
When I was a teenager, I was taken by William Blake saying no imaginative act could be lost. I think Walter Benjamin explains why. “Nothing that has ever happened” wrote Benjamin, “should be regarded as lost” because we are the change (however imperfect) the past is banking on. We feel this in our bones, much as we ask the future to redeem us. And yet, past, present, and future redeem one another through “the stand-alone now”—something like what Felix was getting at when he intuited his death.
According to Benjamin, there is no “distinguishing between major and minor events” because we only know them through this independent “now”—The Poetry Mailing List of all we know. Every star part of an acausal constellation, everything is poetry without borders.
Somebody might do The Poetry Mailing List again, but, even if they don’t, my experience with Peter Schjeldahl is a gift that keeps giving. As I tell in this piece’s poetic epigraph, the surprise of poetry smacked him in the face. His poem is probably why we called it The Poetry Mailing List. It’s certainly the name’s payoff. The piece he sent me, unavailable anywhere else now, is the best description of the poetic process I’ve ever read:
DEAR ART OF VERSE
I haven’t checked in with you, Verse, in some time.
We’ve been estranged far about two years,
though I don’t flatter myself that you’ve noticed.
You don’t need me to love you, though actually,
to my surprise,
I find I do—having got over for the moment hating you
for not serving me as I once thought you would,
as I pathetically almost felt you ought to.
Your business is pleasure.
My ambition has been—what? Meaning?
Well, I’m still far from cured of that grim yearning
to be useful and clear and well-paid,
but I promise to quit belaboring you with it.
Prose will do for my civil tasks
for which my early devotion to you, Verse, made me limber.
(What was frustrating was finding that your relation to Prose
is a one-way street.)
And so I return to you, sweet science of line-lengths
and line-breaks, laughably called “free,”
though you enslave even your masters, chaste modern instrument
so hard to handle, let alone play—
maybe a half-dozen poets in America right now
seem to know which end to blow into,
and except in two or three self-forgetful flights
I have not been one of them.
You do not lead to will or passion, you are pitiless
in exposing the proud mind, the tendentious heart,
not do you thrill to words like “tendentious”
though you make no fuss, suffering fools in silence.
Your business is pleasure, you are always elsewhere
when anything else is occurring.
When pleasure rules the roost
and the poet observes your strictures,
then the elsewhere is suddenly here
and the heart breaks neatly. And that
is absolutely all there is to it, a simplicity
that has often driven me crazy with rage
and now makes me want to weep with despair.
But only you can make me weep that way, shame me with weeping
as when I can’t get through “The Idea of Order at Key West” aloud
without choking, and feeling like an idiot.
The great poems all are based on dumb ideas
To which great minds submit themselves as offerings, burnt
by the blowtorch of pleasure to a fine ash.
You are murder on the nerves, Verse,
with your ecstasies giving a promontory
on the most terrible boredom,
the boredom of the marvelous, unlivable life.
Surely, I think, humans are not born to be so transfixed
by angelic apparitions, by what cannot be gotten,
and then I am tempted to believe with the Marxists
that you yourself, Verse, in your present form,
your office of substitute religion, cannot but be implicated
in our hideously dreary condition, and that History,
the mass human story, is the only ticket
to get us off the dime of a despicable languor, the modern swoon.
(Whether any of this follows only prose can tell.)
But I do not believe that, not here in mid-penance,
for I find that without you I have nothing but anger,
and disdaining you will not keep one person from starving.
Finally your consolation will not be the pleasure
with which you sear us to the core, but the pain that comes after,
the pain of knowing life as a crushing potential.
In this way you gratify life,
which we might otherwise suppose we actually possess
and be doubly fallen. So I’m trying to stop squirming
and to take my joy and terror straight, like a man
who knows what it is to be a poet,
though he may lack endurance for that fierce vocation.
Peter Schjeldahl
November, 1976
Like Benjamin, Peter sees the need for a different kind of Marxist history.
I just think of William Blake, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Schjeldahl. O Boy!
Stephen Paul Miller is the author of eight books of poetry including the forthcoming Dating Buddha (Marsh Hawk Press); the title poem of that book will appear in Best American Poetry 2023. His critical books include The Seventies Now (Duke UP) and the forthcoming The Other New Deal: 1938-1945. Miller was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and he is a Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City.