Secret Histories by Craig Watson (Burning Deck)

A recent book which really caught me off guard was Craig Watson's Secret Histories. I should know by now to expect the unexpected from Burning Deck's stellar press. Probably no press has been as consistently important to the American avant-garde for the past several decades. This is the press that largely introduced Mei-mei Berssenbrugge to American literature; that moved the "Jarnot phenomenon" rapidly up the lit pike; that wed contemporary French avant-garde writing to American avant-garde writing and then sent both on a honeymoon that's lasted several decades now.

En bref, we are talking cultural tsunami.

And yet the books still have that handmade look and feel. Amazing. People are going to cry one hundred years from now. Holding these things. There's definitely gonna be some heartbreaking going on.

Watson's book is a work of cultural and social criticism. That's a definite. But the good news is that it also happens to be extremely good (and often great) poetry. The closest book in sensibility to this that I can think of would probably be that strange Wittgensteinian assemblage of apothegms, theorems, and philosophical bons mots: Culture and Value.

It shares with that work an aerial reconnaisance type of feel. Both works are fast works, fleet works. This is because the writer is an experienced cultural reader. The poet knows the shorthand. The poet knows when three innocent (misdirecting) words really mean someone is going to die. It is an aerial perspective, as I said. This work flies rapidly over the American (and global) ideascape and finds much to lament, much to curse and much which mortifies:

"This is the person who is not a person.
  This is the world that is not a body.

   Halt and be cognized.
    Origin means entitlement.

    The goal of power is to destroy.
     Of course, innnocence is just the bait."


That's from the second section of the book, titled "Pre-science." This book is actually a quartet of medium length--mostly serial--poems. That poem I just quoted above if read sloppily could be interpreted as a political (i.e. social) poem only. It is that, doubtless, but there is a subtler critique there of the interpersonal that comes out of the negative capability inherent in the poet's framing.

The poet I keep finding my mind coming back to in reading this book is Blake.

There is a real Blakean terror here that is finding the essential and primal imagery not just to criticize, but prophesy.

This is weird, but real. Poems can still prophesy. Odd. The poems are incendiary with truth sometimes:

"Human stream, human clot.
  No form uncontained.

   A house is not a bone.
      More like a lie in unison.

         Let a thousand blanks bloom.
          Beggars can't be democrats."

Methinks the "house" there is probably a bicameral one, but also the other social collusions which wear that name as well. That's the beauty of his Watson's negative capability again.

I mean, what do you do if you find our your (ideological) Mother, your country, is a monster?

I guess you enter into a monstrous dialogue. These poems are a monstrous dialogue. Do I even need to specify that I mean that in a complimentary way?

"Steppe Work" is the first section of the book, and it is a collection of apothegms. Many of them strike me as being etched; that is, you can taste the acid there still laying down the line.

"2. War makes culture
[empire begins at defense]
your money [and] your life"

or

"56. the romance of nations
only exists in confession
one to denounce
one to execute"

or

"70. build bridges fix roads pardon the condemned
still the poor are born naked [stupid with magic]"


or

"77. west [safe]
east [safe]
even mortality
[wasteful delight]


Section Four of the book (the closing section) is "Loose Canons," a suite of thirteen poems in twelve lines each. These were less satisfying to me than the serial poems that compose the rest of the book, but they are of a piece with the book and make similar fiery trackings on cultural (shared) space:

"Today wrote door on the door
then locked every door which
made another door necessary."

Dark humor like that is pretty endemic in this quartet in poetry.

The poet knows how to rebuke: "Are we civilians or are we men?" (Those lines are from "Mammal Jinx.)

"Survival is the barbarous act:
Nothing left to chance or
The devil the devil doesn't know."

Smells like governance to me.

Now, the section I have saved to discuss last is the third section, "Last Man Standing" which is subtitled "A Shepherd's Calendar." This serial poem is cast in the form of a calendar in poetry and it is the most stunning thing in the book. Stunning in the way a big hammer comes down in a slaughterhouse at the poor bovine meat-bearer. Stunning in the way Blake doesn't mind beating you about the head with angel bones....

He starts with a darkly hilarious and extremely memorable epigraph by Keith Waldrop:

"I'm the one who's
running out

and then

time's
on its own."

You have to love a poem that greets you like this (when you haven't been before!):

"hello mutant
welcome back"


He knows his audience. He knows who you are. If you aren't the mutant he is adressing, what the hell are you doing here? This is poetry.

"Welcome back." It never changes, does it? Not really. The War. It's as though you were just thrown into a stone cell by some dog-faced government minion, and the poet--who has been sitting in that cell about forever--looks up and speaks those words so knowingly, so smart ass.

The poem is the cell.

Cells are under investigation. Worldwide.

And it just goes uphill from there...


"the distance between
seeing and thinking
is everything else

what we hated
was expression."


I can't begin to start typing quotes as I will never stop. It's one brilliant scintillation after another...

"generation to generation
the problem remains

who is dead
and who isn't."

These are Blakean lines. This is a Blakean poem. There is force and terror and there are angels everywhere, fleeing. Those lines I just typed...those pretty much say everything you need to say about culture, and say it with infinite compression. That's a hat off, hell head off, moment there.

There are many very powerful Dead. And there are billions of impotent Living.

I hope this book was issued in a livre d'artiste edition, as it really deserves to exist as a separate entity. I think it sort of has the status of instant poetry classic...or does to my mind, for sure.

All those lines are just from "January." I could cull many, many more from that month alone.

Do you get the impression I really think you should pick up this book? Think so?

This is spooky:

"dawn in the crematorium window
appearance fashions its own order

let's fight fire with fire
nature deserves to fail."

Those are lines from "February."

How Blakean it is...here lines from "April":

"semen written on the tree of babel:
does image imply meaning"

And the poet is fluent in time, frighteningly so, as he even stops in at the pre-human stage of the game to leave a little burning pyre:

in geologic time
epistemology means
a sum of none

will trade food
for sleep
mind for matter.

Are those lines about abdication, cultural victory over the individual?

And there is the hearbreaking moment when the poet says this:

"shouldn't we be free by now"

This line is all by itself on the page, floating free, unattached to any other line.

He doesn't even put the question mark there. It's a noticeable weird sort of take on aporia. The inflection is what's left out, what would render it a question...but it's more than a statement. The words sort of turn to stones. Discrete. Units.

This poet is one of the darkest I've read lately (perhaps because he is possibly the most relevant right here with this book--these are dark days) but he is also hilarious:

"note to next world
abundance
obvious mistake."

Nature and her prodigal little purse. Indeed.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a dark new Crucible.

It can be ordered from Small Press Distribution (1-800-869-7553 or online at www.spdbooks.org). In England, distribution is handled by the fine press Spectacular Diseases c/o Paul Green, 83b
London Rd., Peterborough, Cambs, PE2 9BS.)