POETRY BEGINNINGS
A strange planet onto itself, rich in polymaths, Portland, Oregon is home to one James Yeary: independent publisher, charismatic thinker, poetic collaborator, challenger of aesthetic boundaries, and master of the Hemingway daiquiri, a star amongst stars.
“Poetics is such a funny thing,” James says when asked how long he has been engaged with poetry. “All writers write to an un-seductive drive or demon. Writers of every stripe are like that, like [other] artists and musicians.” His very earliest memories involve the creation of charming poem-like projects, including free-styling poems at age seven. These days, his poetics demand a generous space for critical thinking—it’s a space where questions are central. How do we address writing within the world? How does writing address the world? Why do we do it? What good is in it? Such ruminations are part of James’ daily life, a life intimately and complexly woven with the many bright and obscure faces of poetics.
Questioning has a personal element for James. While he understands that questions afflict every writer, his plunge into poetics became irrevocable, in part, because of the intimacy he feels that questioning presents. James gleans reward through tackling these troubling ideas and confrontation; he allows himself to be open to philosophical affronts of poets like Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, poets who paradoxically appear to invalidate the very work of the poet. Bernstein himself is credited with the quote: “Poetry devalues the very paper it is written on.” While the cost of paper may be rising, that’s still not saying much for poetry.
Issues of form are among the confrontational concepts that James works with regularly. Form is an endlessly complex and intriguing theme in poetics, and one that James engages with passionately and with great focus. And it’s not just in the act of contemplation, but through the art of making his poems. Just track down his swiftly growing and changing oeuvre, and discover an object lesson in making and breaking poetry’s rules.
James is not without answers, however—he finds them, plenty of them, and the good ones he not only keeps, but puts into practice. The gift economy is a perfect example. It’s something vital to James’ practice as a creative individual, as well as a window into who he is. The gift economy is a type of economy where spiritual exchange trumps the monetary, prioritizing the sharing of work and creating of community over profit. This, and similar notions, allow James to keep poetry close.
“There’s poetry that’s made just to be sold, but that’s not what we’re talking about,” says James, regarding the gift economy.
At this point, for James, the gift economy is a given.
One way that James engages in the gift economy with poetry is through his own small publishing press c_L, a name cut right out of [poet] Jackson Mac Low. The first poet on c_L was Phoebe Wayne, published in 2010. Since c_L, James started his monthly poetry newsletter. With a rotating title, James compassionately refers to this publication as “the newsletter,” hosting the work of poets as broadly recognized as Alice Notley as well as local talents like Sam Lohmann and David Abel. James also released an intriguing anonymous issue of the newsletter, where writers were asked to submit pieces without the author’s name attached to the work. The work was published anonymously, the names undisclosed, even to their publisher.
James is not one to say no to an enticing collaborative endeavor, either. He is forever undertaking new projects. Recently, Portland antiquarian bookseller, teacher, and contributor to various poetic projects, Charles Seluzicki, asked James to join in on a new publishing experiment, Editions Plane. Their series is a nod to Gertrude Stein’s Plain Editions. The project is inspired by the Mimeograph Revolution of the 60s and 70s, wherein the invention of the mimeograph made small-run, independent publishing much more feasible. James and Charles work together to solicit and print new experimental poetry for distribution in runs of 75, at minimal expense. Each publication is a short manuscript or excerpt by a single author, a printed space to honor that writer’s work. The Editions Plane library so far includes James’ “Third Spectral Cannon” and Mark Johnson’s “Penniless Greenery.”
COLORING LANGUAGE
James’ recently completed poetic title is a conscientious work, an investigation in contemporary language and form, comprised of 184 pages composed of 14 sections, the majority of which are titled “Spectral Cannon,” preceded by their number in the sequence. Ron Silliman’s idea that a sentence written in red carries different meaning than the same in black was a key to the project. And so James’ work started with many colored-pens. “The idea was to take ten sentences and assign each one a different color, thereby making each color associate with a particular quality of the sentence it is bearing,” James says. “Then, the colors shift one position, and the sentences are all rewritten, changed in whatever way necessary, to be captured by their new color.”
Two years in the making, the composition follows his initial plan for 14 Spectral Cannons, each comprised of 14 stanzas, with titles alluding to James Tenney’s musical piece, Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow. For this reason, James kept in mind musical arcs while writing his cannons. Each of these poetical cannons plays with, and modifies, what came previously. All the while, each cannon is still functions as its own stand-alone piece. “Later on...” James explains, “I bring back the color system, tweak the chronologies, etc. There are also peaks and valleys of repetition, both within individual Cannons and spanning all of them.”
The colors are demanding, a potentially jarring constraint for readers, despite any familiarity with classic forms such as rhyme or meter. That said, the cannons are worth the effort they demand. The coloration loudly emphasizes the separateness and relationships between lines, sentences, phrases and cannons. The work takes advantage of fragmentation, a technique that calls attention to form itself, which morphs throughout the work. James refers to it as a staggered simultaneous chronology.
While the work regularly speaks of the contemporary world, sometimes through open gestures and abstractions in language, it maintains an intimacy with the reader through specificity: the presentation of quotidian objects and experiences. With these tools, James delivers a wise and comprehensive mediation on postmodern existence, as explored through language.
This is the museum of the future
This is the future of the museum
What will come next if the sign continues spinning
That would be the one exception
Talk of the trumpets call
Lacking any sense of identity
they are its very signature
He is a bad bad bad bad person
and he lives at the end of my street
It’s also treat for any linguaphile:
you will wake up in the middle of the night
with a piece of broken language
and then:
Keep this distance
Nico says words make a prison for letters
but the keyboard is a house of letters
and:
If poetry is improved by context, the book should be relentless. You can just eyeball it. A book that contains pictures of its own pages.
This month, the 10th Cannon is to be published by Jim McCrary, and some Cannons presently available at Portland’s Division Leap and Mother Foucault’s bookshops.
NORTHWEST POET/CENTRAL PIVOT
Portland community means a lot to James, and his gratitude is evident as he talks with glowing respect about the people he knows who are intent on sharing work. He calls the community a bohemian environment, where artists often work terrible jobs and struggle in ways they don’t love so that they can put the other hours into their art. He is appreciative of Portland as a place where individuals are driven to make work and champion the work of others.
James is also a contributor of text in a regular zine series “my day”, alongside the visual art of Nate Orton, who publishes the series through Abandoned Bike Press. The two collaborate on this “geopoetic” excursion, walking extensive parts of Portland and its surrounding environments—places that a great many residents of the city-proper would prefer to leave unexplored—recording each excursion through words and drawings, and occasionally, sound. These textural collages speak to the beauty of this slice of the Pacific Northwest, while subtly commenting about its curious foibles, as well as the pervading social and economic struggles. Referring to the chapbook poem my day walking east 252 to Mt. Tabor, James had this to say: ”everything I’ve done comes from that ‘my day’.”
James’ contribution to the public world of poetry in Portland is well-rounded, as exemplified in his membership in the 13 Hats creative collective and in the decade-old Spare Room collective, which hosts an outstanding reading series and other poetic events, including a recent free and open to the public marathon reading of Mina Loy as well as from William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, hosted at the kitchen at Yale Union Contemporary (YU). James became a member of the Spare Room curation team in 2009, a solid crew of six Portland poets. The purpose, says James, is 90% to allow writers visiting Portland to have a place and an audience. Spare Room is a host for the underdog with few exceptions. The other 10% is reserved for special literary events. Spare Room differentiates itself through its devotion to hosting challenging new work, hoping to represent, in James’ words, “the best shit out there.”
James doesn’t balk at the question of writing practice. He says, “a lot of writers (not poets necessarily) say they get up and write for three hours. I don’t do that. Language... always takes me by surprise.” That said, he does sometimes write in the morning, and regularly seeks out particular spaces for writing, as with the “my day” series. For all his comprehensive participation in the poetics community, as well as his consistent creative output, James is amongst the most active and devoted writers I’ve encountered, demonstrating that three-hours-in-the-morning is a nonessential ritual.
A related part of his poetic philosophy, James believes vehemently in everyday language. “The language I really like to capture,” he says, “[is] language of description. I look at something and I look at the way I’m looking at it.” While unsure where this influence originates, phenomenology deeply colors his poetic palate. “It’s as much about experiencing as about things.” He utilizes collage-like means to weave poems, looking to include both sides of the sentence, what’s in it as well as what it’s made of. Sound in writing is also a chief concern—this and the both-sides perspective evidenced in James’ Spectral Cannons. For example, James has interest in the space between soft and hard vowels. Reading Louis Zukovsky was pivotal because initially “it didn’t make sense but I like the way it sounded.” There is a lot to learn from what is not immediately understood in poetry, if we are excited to engage with it, give to it, and see what it can give us back. It’s an exchange beyond the monetary: the best and only possible way for poetry to be.
James’ recommended Portland writers: see the locals table at Portland’s fantastic poetry/ephemera-rich bookstore: Division Leap at 911 SW 9th in downtown Portland, OR.
Meet James—and taste his avant-garde craft cocktails—and the 9 other poets and artists that comprise the 13 Hats Collective this March at Portland’s 12 x 16 Gallery.
Friday, March 1, 5-9pm Opening Reception
Sunday, March 3, 2-5pm Artists’ Reception
Saturday, March 16, 7pm Reading/performance
12 x 16 Gallery
8235 SE 13th Ave, No. 5
(Sellwood) Portland, OR
http://13hats.org/news-and-events/13hats-at-12x16.php/
