Manroot

Love 8 (no crumbs)

Manroot, which ran 1969-1981, edited by Paul Mariah and Richard Tagett, was very but not exclusively gay, West Coast, avant-garde and post-Modernist in a particular sense—that is, it’s not exactly what I’d mean by “postmodern” but is more specifically avant-garde poetry after Modernism, inspired in large part by Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, with also a lot of Jack Spicer, sometimes Allen Ginsberg or a bit of Gary Snyder, along with Lorca and French poets like Rene Char, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, as well as Cocteau, Prevert, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, and a whole special issue (the last one) of Jean Genet in translation. So unlike some other gay poetry journals that seem to have just been running whatever they could get their hands on, this expresses a definite poetic sensibility… for better or worse.

Mariah had, as Trump once said, an amazing life (which you can read about here)—three years of prison for a gay affair with a student, early involvement with the pioneering Bay Area gay rights group Society for Individual Rights (I always wondered if there was some BDSM thing happening with the acronym SIR…) and its magazine VECTOR, an apprenticeship with the gay avant-garde poet Robert Duncan, founding Manroot—a genuinely respectable literary mag, let me emphasize—and, of course, dying of AIDS. As for his poetry…

Now, ‘Mama-ism’ is funny but I’m worried he means it! His translations of Char (fellow homo, I think) aren’t even so-bad-it’s-funny but just so bad:

But there is a lot of intentional humor!

She’s having fun, she’s getting hard, I’ll let her cook.

Richard Tagett, the co-editor, dreams apparently of being Robert Creeley—and here I must admit I’m both totally ignorant of American post-war avant-garde poetry, such that I wouldn’t know my field from my objective from my Black Mountain from my New York, except that most of it seems like crap to poor Frenchified and basically conservative me. So I’ll let Tagett make his case for Creeley first:

Now that all looks awful to me—but what do I know? Maybe in gay hands something decently crooked can be made of this straight timber. Here’s Tagett trying to do a Creeley himself:

Anyone who invokes the I Ching or writes “yr” gets blasted into space immediately, once I’m Queen Bitch of the Universe.

Tagett also brought to readers attention “Sebastian Hua,” ie Ching-Hsiang Hua:

Now this seems (but idk) like he must actually be Gao Shangqin, pen name of Gao Xinjiang, who was then editor of Dragons Poetry Quarterly (of the Race of Dragons Poetry Society, founded 1971), which was apparently the journal of a group of radical ‘nativist’ poets in Taiwan who criticized wholesale Westernization and sought to represent and critique local realities and Chinese culture in a mode that had passed through modernism—so in that sense I suppose, a mission not dissimilar to what these American gay poets were trying to do: getting over the Modernist project of trying taking on, through shows of Eliotic/Poundian erudition, all of old Europe’s crap, and instead appropriate what was still seemed vital in the techniques that the Moderns had opened up to address gay realities and enact a gay sensibility.

Although neither of these visions seems to align with translating Suddenly Last Summer into Chinese! Anyway, readers who read Chinese do please go figure out what’s going on here—and see if “Sebastian” (!) wrote better poems in the original than Tagett and co-translator Patrick Yuen-Suen Yang (the only other evidence for this person I find is a 1969 MA thesis on “Tang Dynasty Literary Forms” at something called the Monterrey Institute of Foreign Studies) offered in English:

and/or approximated!

Well, whether the poems were working or not, part of what was great about Manroot was that it put gay poets in dialogue with each other. For example, here’s Mariah’s mentor hailing newly/increasingly-out Thom Gunn:

Now I should note that I cannot stand Duncan’s maximalist vatic nonsense, of which there was of course a fair amount in Manroot:

Like, ok, it’s in principle great to summon Marlowe and join hands with Gunn, but the latter is actually nice to read (“carnal weight” … “solar bees”—into space you go!!).

Speaking of Duncan, who again I have to admire for his courage in being an early out gay man, even if his poetry gives me a headache, here’s Samuel Biagetti fumbling around some points about the state of gays today in Soros-funded Compact via Duncan’s critical 1944 essay on ‘the homo in society’.

When I emailed Biagetti—who cites me approvingly at a couple of junctures—to express on the one hand my agreement with his echoing my call for a reappreciation of gay male particularity, but also my regret that he was airing gay laundry under the editorial supervision of a couple of Christian nuts, and to say:

I think you are regrettably hard on the conventional gay male figure of contemporary culture, whom you seem to align with the sort of ambient homophobic caricature circulating on both the conservative right and woke left—that of an entitled white male consumer-enjoyer who combines the pursuit of selfish pleasure with annoyingly provocative demands for cultural and political esteem. I suppose such people exist, but don’t they largely exist in our own heads, and aren’t we also them some of the time? Aren’t there things about gay culture as it that we like and participate in, even when they are corny or politically imperfect or whatever?

He was, I guess in retrospect unsurprisingly, too displeased for any productive conversation to ensue. I am not (who is?) my own best ambassador or public relations man—oh well! I suppose I should have known that anyone who actually likes Duncan as a poet is not someone I’m going to see eye-to-eye with… that all said, Duncan could doodle with the best of them:

And ok, to end, one poet the Manroot guys appreciated who I actually do like (although I’m just starting to read him—I fell in love after reading this a few weeks ago):

Now Spicer had some retarded theories about being a cosmic radio receiving messages from wherever, but Philip K Dick thought Jesus was beaming him shit from a space laser and Merrill was getting word from Auden via teacup on the Ouija board so it just goes to show having a theory and/or being crazy won’t stop the good ones.

You may disagree, Duncan-lover that you possibly are, but I think these are, as it were, cunt! and Jonathan Williams (whose An Ear in Bartram’s Tree is also good fun) does too:

On that note, some parting cocks: