three of many readers: CA Conrad, Julia Blumenreich, Eli Goldblatt (photos by Ron Silliman)
I feel activated and inspired after this Sunday’s memorable Gil Ott Tribute hosted by CA Conrad in Philadelphia. Conrad did a wonderful job putting together this generous, sincere event in honor of Gil Ott. He began the event by welcoming everyone and playing a recording of Gil reading and singing “The moon does not run on gasoline.” I read a little from my Chax Press book that received the first Gil Ott Award, then the tribute started immediately with commentary by Eli Goldblatt who was very close to Gil and who offered recollections about the history of their friendship. He read from some letters that Ott had written to him over the years, and an early didactic comment from these caught my attention: “it cannot be sold to an audience, but must be present in every language act.” Ott’s work had an extremely rich, multivalent surface at the same time as he valued activism and politics in life, which is an unexpected combination in literature. Usually writers take a purely functional approach to politics (having a “message” or “getting the word out”) with the corresponding heavy-handed pathos that accompanies that gesture, or else they are formalists and don’t deal directly with political content. Language Poetry was unusual because it adopted analogies for the interaction between form and politics in what language does (introducing a theoretical “third text,” the underlying assumptions of which need to be accepted to "get" the work), but Gil Ott seems to be ultimately of a slightly different mindset and a much more elusive, cantankerous, deterritorializing persuasion.
Eli Goldblatt also read from What It Is, a volume he edited with Ott. The introduction to this volume discusses the plight of “those of us with hidden disabilities” and Ott’s own struggle about identifying as a disabled person. By the time he had written this he had begun an “active self-identification” with otherness, an interest in the way that individual location could connect with social location. In that situation, “it is not surprising that disability pride should follow” other identity-based activist movements. Eli pointed out how Gil showed that “characteristics considered ‘weak’ are actually a source of individual and collective strength.’” I could tell already that this poet spoke my language, and I was regretting not having the opportunity to meet him while he was alive.
What else happened? Alicia Askenase and Joshua Schuster gave an alternating multi-voiced reading from Traffic with one of them taking the prose sections and the other the poem sections. Frank Sherlock read from one of Ott’s more didactic texts, the introduction to Public Domain which demonstrated a characteristic combination of prickliness and compassion: “Language is at once ambiguous and persuasive enough to offer itself as a tool both to advantage and oppression, and seen as medium, neutral. Complicity in this crime, as auditor/actors as much as speakers, contributes heartily to our public experience and behavior, as consumers, workers, citizens.” This beautiful, complicated, and in some ways self-contradictory piece of writing summarizes for me some essential themes in Gil Ott’s writing: he was a political poet who did not in his writing tell other people how to behave or how to be moral (though he may have had strong opinions about their writing). The picture I'm getting of him is this: on the level of “subject matter” that can be discerned in Ott’s work, he appears to have been spreading the word about revelations that language and politics are connected, that language can be co-opted, and at the same time that he loved acts of attention to language. But once he got partway into a sentence or an image, he seemed to feel the finality of such external forces impinging upon the writing, and he would often resolve the problem by disrupting the statement, the communicative function of language, or the scene being created. In this sense his struggle to articulate seems to have been at odds with traditional ways of "making sense" or "making a point." And yet his nouns referred to real things, often to political themes. Rather than pointing at the answer, he is pointing at ten different things at every moment and saying “look at this, look at that.”
If you were to pick up Gil Ott's work completely without context, an initial reading might indicate some kind of late modernist or poststructuralist formalism that has much in common with Silliman’s “trobar clus”, exploring territory not unlike Coolidge, but he appears to have approached this position from a different direction. Ott’s work is not concerned with some theory within literature in the usual interpretive or polemic sense. Rather, he is trying to write the political while avoiding being co-opted by the act of direct political statement, including interpretive statements such as this one I'm making now. He is actively trying to avoid the poisonous implications of pat phrases and their metaphorical/metaphysical baggage, and from this perspective the avoidance of cliché is an essential political gesture. It occurs to me that he would therefore probably not have appreciated the idea of me of me attempting exegeses of his poems, so I won’t pursue that line of thought further. But he would probably love to hear Linh Dinh engage in this activity, as Dinh did the night of the tribute in a manic, garrulous exposition of sections from Pact. His enthusiasm about Ott’s work was contagious, and he read several letters written to him when starting to write fiction which revealed how closely and carefully Ott paid attention to the workings of language. Dinh talked about Ott’s sentences as rooms that you can enter and look around in for a long time, pointing out that “you have to just slow down when you read Gil’s work, because there’s so much to take in.” Dinh also mentioned the recurrence in Ott’s correspondence of the word “alienation,” pointing out “it surprises me how few people there are living in this demilitarized zone.”
Conrad read from a piece by Harryette Mullen which described memories of Gil, and he also shared some of his own memories, pointing out that Gil was “anti-mentorship” (“and a great mentor” added Ron from the audience). Conrad talked about the context of the Philadelphia poetry scene, Gil’s scene, and the neighborhood around Robin’s bookstore when we were gathered at the event. This neighborhood had been nicknamed “the Zulli nation” after landlord Al Zulli, who loved artists and made sure they could live affordably, selling them real estate for $1 and things like that. This is the kind of context that truly helps you to better appreciate a writer’s work. Conrad reported a number of comments Gil made to him during his life, the most memorable of which was “Where do these things come from, you just think these things, you put ‘em on paper, it’s ridiculous...”
Ryan Eckes, who read from “Empathy,” reported another memorable quote: when he told Gil he was from northeast Philadelphia, the poet asked him “How does one get out of northeast Philadelphia?” a question with its own share of meta-connotations. Jenn McCreary read “The War” from The Yellow Floor, the effects of which seemed characteristically slippery like some kinds of collage but actually were created through close attention to the way syntax is fulfilled and play with the kinds of expectation that a reader has when a scene is created. This is the quality of Ott’s work that Linh Dinh referred to as “the logic of his sentences is often to turn the corner and suckerpunch the reader.”
Ron Silliman gave a powerful reading from The Whole Note, a book that Gil was writing when the poet was living south of Bolinas. Ron talked about how he first knew Gil when he was living on the west coast, but that was before Ott moved back to Philly after suffering kidney failure in his twenties. This work appears to show the influence of “the New Sentence” (I don't know the chronology of events here) while also displaying some aspects to the writing that are very much Ott’s own. This was one of the best readings I’ve heard Ron give: it had momentum and energy and a propulsive quality and close attention to the rhythms and syncopations in the language; it’s clearly work that he feels close to. Throughout this prose there is a lovely dialectic between acts of discovery in writing through syntax (manipulating participles and gerunds “Prominent stalk to yellow promise, ordered and notified.”) and what appears to be private ways of articulating experience, or even experience imagined through empathy: “Fastened by bones to the hillside, feeding cypress.” All of it beautifully chaotic and lyrical all at once, “Night, the sky with milk by dropper, not to locate you, but waste.” Chris McCreary also gave a wonderful reading and left a quote ringing in my ears that seemed to solidify some of my own ambient developing ideas about what poetry might do: “I will build a body of utterance that fooled me.”
This was a very full event. Next Bob Perelman discussed his interest in Gil’s way of breaking up words into pieces. Bob read “Or Not,” a fascinating poem from IfLife (from Roof Books) which employed fragments of words in a way that learned from this aspect of Gil’s work. Bob also read from the end of Traffic. I followed by reading Ott’s poem “Status” from Public Domain, a work which I described as the kind of poem you wish you could write. It had a jerkiness and slipperiness and syncopation to the lines that I identified with, though I don’t know how Gil would have sounded when he read it. Kristen Gallagher read from her vital Chax book of essays on Ott titled The Form of Our Uncertainty (you REALLY NEED to have this in your library if you haven’t got a copy yet, it’s INCREDIBLE). She also brought up Gil’s comments about the disability rights movement and his insistence that “as poets we need to think inclusively.” I felt particularly struck and challenged by his comment that "The difference between those who struggle and those who are comfortable is that the bitches, the coloreds, the cripples, the fags can never escape ridicule." Bracketing for a moment some of the dated terminology Ott was using when he made that comment, it's a fairly wise approach to identity politics. It's not so much that you adopt an identity politics as the fact that your identity gets politicized by others whether you like it or not. And that not being able to escape ridicule is often very much the reader's fault, the result of an act of "being read."
Gil’s widow Julia Blumenreich ended the evening with a moving talk about her husband and the work she had been writing since he died. She said she looked for him everywhere, and finally decided that he was “in the trees.” And then she remembered Gil’s advice to her to try working in a systematic way, so she did a good deal of research on different trees and started writing poems, and the writing ended up being about Gil. The result is the series “Elm Disease” which she read from that night, a long poem which related the tree’s inner body network to that of the human cardiovascular system.
I was really pleased to meet Eli Goldblatt who I knew at one remove through Charles Alexander but who seemed oddly familiar for the first time in person like an old friend. I was also pleased to see Dan Featherston and Rachel McCrystal from POG who are now living in Philly. This event for me was about getting back to what’s most essential and valuable about both poetry and community. It became clear from everyone’s comments that for Gil Ott being a writer really was about the work and not about self-promotion. His politics were based in his life and this in turn created complexities in the surface of his language. His extremely complicated poetics (did he have “a poetics”?) had something to do with waking people up politically while also insisting on the freedom to explore the workings of language in such a way that what he was writing could still end up strange to himself in some ways.
All these things make me more grateful to be part of the same root system as these people who so clearly loved Gil Ott, grateful to have received the first award named after Gil, and eager for further conversation about this great poet’s work and life.
There's another reading report by Ron here, and more comments by Conrad here. As Ron points out in his post, the sound files are available over at MiPoesias in three files here and here and here.
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