Language Lessons: The Poetry of BobBrownby Douglas Messerli on January 3, 2015

In his 1974 anthology Revolution of the World: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry1914–1945, Jerome Rothenberg introduced American poet Bob Brown to those of us of a certaingeneration, hinting at the wealth of visual poems the man had created and describing his writing,based mostly on the poet’s 1916 collection, My Marjonary (announced for publication by my ownGreen Integer press), as bearing close kinship with the later New York School writers.

What a marvelous surprise and wealth of information we have now suddenly been provided byCraig Saper, with the facsimile publications of three little known Bob Brown collections, words,Gems: A Censored Anthology, and The Readies, that not only take Brown beyondRothenberg’s purview, but provides the innovative poet with an entire series of genres not only farahead of their time, but still quite original today.

Words, at first reading, might appear simply to extend the kind of poetic experimentation that

Brown was working on in My Marjonary. If one simply leafs through this facsimile edition — theoriginal published by Nancy Cunard’s important Hours Press, in 1931 — the poems appear tohave a great deal in common, given their witty word play, and off-the-cuff observations, to thesemi-confessional observations of Frank O’Hara and even Ted Berrigan. A poem like “ThePassion Play at Royat,” for example, might even have been written in a prose version byGertrude Stein as she wandered through a small French village with her dog Basket, observingthe other such animals on her way:

There is no great gulf between theLove life of theDogs in the village street of Royat andOther dogs or even human beings

Although the slightly more prudish Stein probably would not made the beast-human connection,and certainly would not have observed, as Brown does later in the poem:

They bark and bite, snarl and scratchPurr and piddle, play ceaselessly atFornicopulationEven as talkie actors in gilt ritzy rooms.

Certainly the last two lines are pure Brownisms, representing as they do his love of lively wordcombinations (fornication and copulation) and his immediate reference to popular culture. I don’tremember a single occasion when Stein described her and Alice sneaking out to the movingpictures.

Like Stein and even Pound, however, Brown is an unapologetic, pure-bred Amur-i-can, employingcolloquialisms whenever he got the chance, even while discussing God’s creation:

It’s all right GodI understand you’re an altruistPlus GodI know you had a high purpose &All that GodIn breathing your sensenSemen-scented breathInto clay pigeons Chinks BraziesYanks Frogs Turks and LimeysIt’s a great little old world you made GodBut now I’m ready for another eyefulMars Heaven Hell &/orWhat have you got Gott

So Brown sets up a sort of fallen angel situation, quickly moving on, more like E. E. Cummingsthan any other American writer, to a kind of visual word-play that can be read down or across.

If I I would onlyO ODarling SitO O

Were marooned on a Dry-eyed in its centerLittle old Scanning of the seasEye of an islette For youDear Dear

Who else could write a love poem, depending upon which way you chose to read his columns,that simultaneously sings a song of his imaginary love while wailing out the loneliness of the poor,marooned darling with her cries of “O O” and “dear dear”?

Even more excitingly this poem, titled “La Vie Americaine” begins with a purely visual elementthat combines time, daily meals, and money, with golf, the talkies, and “tail-chasing,” presumablyof a young girl such as his later marooned darling?

What is even more amazing about this page of poetry, however, is the little black smudge thatappears at the left side at the very bottom of that page. The smudge, in fact, is one of many suchpoems produced microscopically in the volume so that the reader, if he desires to peruse it, musttake up a magnifying glass. I have long had one laying upon my desk, given to me my someone, Ipresume, who thought, as I aged, it might become necessary. Thankfully, my tired old eyes wererestored with what optometrists describe as “second sight,” a condition in which I suddenly foundmyself, after years of resisting bi-focal glasses, able to read very fine print despite the fact that atdistances everything remains a blur! But even my magnifying glass was insufficient to read thesetiny offerings; fortunately my companion Howard brought out a sharper set of magnifying glassesthrough which he could better make out the visual images in old-fashioned photographic slides—once a necessary tool for any art curator.

The micro-poem on this page, for example, reads:

I, whom am GodWear lavender pajamas andPurr poetryShould I whom am GodDirty my ear on the groundStriving to catch theIdiotic waltzing lilt ofRhyming red-eye dervishTwirling white pink poet miceIn union suits?

Thus Brown creates a kind of blasphemous commentary about the God he addresses in the otherpart of the poem, explaining his aversion to the kind of literary conceits usually used in poemsaddressed to the “All Mighty,” a commentary continued in the last stanza of the 16 pt. size poem:

Fancy in poetryNow that aeroplanesAnchor to starsIs a trifle old-fashioned

In this case, at least, the micro text comments on the larger poetic effort. In other cases, such asin “To a Wild Montana Mare” (once more, a poem that can be plumbed by reading down its twocolumns or across), however, the situation is reversed, as the poet ponders the nude LadyGodiva in the larger poem, and merely uses the micro-poem to suggest how little he was movedby Romantic icons such as the Sphinx and Mona Lisa.

Accordingly, the smaller, hidden texts, are not necessarily more outspoken or radical in eithertheir subject or their linguistic usage. And often the “parallel” poems seem to have littlerelationship to one another, even if the reader is somewhat encouraged to try to discern links

between the two.

While we might expect the micro-poems to represent something created to escape the hands ofthe censors such as Robert Hooke’s Micrographia — an issue of much more importance inBrown’s anthology of poems from 1931 titled Gems — for Brown the nearly unreadable texts, asSaper argues, play the role of something more like “squibs,” small jokes and commentary, muchlike the mistakes from other publications one used to find at the bottom of the columns of TheNew Yorker, a genre in which the poet had had success early in his writing career.

Moreover, the varying sizes of these texts, in their alteration of focus, point to Brown’s continuedinterest in a “writing machine,” in which one would be able to adjust the size and speed of textswhile reading them.

Finally, the micro-texts suggest, as Saper implies in his useful introduction, other popular genressuch as the spy story, with its constant references to hidden texts and disappearing ink, or ofmainstreams forms of concise writing styles such as stock-quotes, the fine print on food labels,etc., all of which call attention to themselves by their near-impossibility to decipher by theuninitiated reader. Certainly, for Brown, his experiment in variable type through his own poeticsshares a great deal with Duchamp, a figure who greatly influenced him, and who, himself, asSaper reminds us, “tried to sell his optical art-toys like a street vendor in front of his prestigious artexhibits.”

In Gems: A Censored Anthology, Brown more thoroughly explores the issue of censorship,beginning with a spirited and, at times, quite hilarious send-up of entire modern history ofcensored or culturally frowned-upon texts. Like boot-legged liquor, he argues, the more a text isdeemed to be unfit for certain readers the more its value to rare book dealers and, particularly,the young entrepreneurial men and women who bring back texts from overseas and publish, inspecial editions, what is deemed “obscene” writing. These individuals, whom he jokingly refers toas “book-leggers,” can make a good profit if they know where to look, particularly in a time whencensors are so busy blocking out passages in great works of art such as James Joyce’s Ulysses,Djuna Barnes’ Ryder, and the writings of Havelock Ellis (several others are mentioned).

Outlining the major forms of censorship from time immemorial, Brown’s introduction alone isworth reading the book; and given the continuation of such censorship of books in school librariesand on university reading lists even today, Gems is a book worthy of our attentions. Along withNorman Douglas’ wonderfully obscene collection of Some Limericks, originally published in 1928and reissued in the 1960s by Grove Press, Gems demonstrates the poetic liveliness of manypopular forms, which revitalize language and pull the poetic away from the whimsical old maidsand professorial fuddy-duddies who struggle to deaden poetry and language itself.

As if to match Douglas, Brown proposes a much more radical alternative. Taking absolutely primand proper poems from Shakespeare to the Victorians, many of the works written particularly forchildren and young adults, the poet applies to select works the large black censor’s stamp, usedparticularly in wartime to delete sensitive correspondence and to prohibit then-contemporaryreaders from being sullied by obscene passages. Of course, by using the same tools of thecensor to excise words from Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Shelley, for example, he forcesthe reader to fill in the missing words, often with alternatives that truly are obscene andblasphemous. At left I reproduce Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” a poetic rendering that I inviteany reader to scan without a blush if not a series of outright guffaws—all of his own imagination!

Certainly there is something dilettantish aboutthese poetic renderings, and after a few pages of reading such works, the joke grows thin. Ifnothing else, however, Brown has certainly proven his point about the censor’s ink, and throughhis use of these utterly boring, mostly Victorian works—the selection itself serving as a satire ofanthologists like Francis Turner Palgrave, whose The Golden Treasury, was long perceived as anuplifting compendium of morally “worthy” poetry—has simultaneously satirized the poetry thatused language in the ways he most opposed. Certainly there is not a better example of themanipulation of “found poetry” in existence. And once again, Brown has made good use ofpopular genres in order to create radical experiments.

Perhaps his most radical experimentation had less to do with the actual texts used as with howthat language was presented and disseminated. Through the late 1920s and the 1930s Brownargued, quite seriously — although many interpreted it as another comic enterprise — for a newReading Machine, a kind of forerunner of a fiche machine that would run microscopic textsthrough a viewer which could be sped-up, slowed-down, and enlarged to various degrees. ForBrown this machine would make it possible to produce an entire work on the head of a pin, or, ashe expressed it in a poem in words: “In the reading-machine future / Say by 1950 / All magnumopuses / Will be etched on the / Heads of pins / Not retched into / Three volume classics / By pinheads.”

With the intention of showing off his machine, Brown also edited a collection of works by variouswriters, some rather traditional, others experimental, and many now unheard-of contributors,which he described as “the readies” for his machine. The anthology itself, except for contributionsby Stein and a few others, seems not so very interesting. But then, Brown was presenting himself

as an anthologist, but simply selected texts that might demonstrate the flexibility of his invention.

The ideas behind his reading machine are fascinating, in part because Brown saw his reader notonly as a kind of futurist machine that is not today so very different from the Kindle and othercomputer-based operations, but argued for a new kind of language to accompany it. Saper andothers have, somewhat convincingly, suggested that the kind of combined linguist-wists (my owncombine from twists of linguistic expressions) parallel the kind of computer-based languages wesee today in Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail expressions.

Frankly, I think Brown-talk — what Stein hinted as being a kind of “Bobbed Browning,” or, playinghis game once more, I’ll describe as “Bobs-ledding,” was far more complex and interesting thattoday’s twitter talk. In The Readies, published by his own Roving Eye Press in 1930, posits newcombinations of words such as “Verbunions” (Verb, into verbosity plus “I know my onions”),Shellshallow (an echo of the Yankee shell game played with a dried pea and three walnut shells),and “Springish sappy” (Bliss Carmen’s “Make Me Over,” Mother Nature, when the sap begins tostir. Doubtless the author’s undying tribute to the greatest of Canada Dry poets).

But the creation new words, for Brown, were clearly not enough. As he suggests in his lastchapter, “A Story To Be Read on the Reading Machine,” it is the combination of these newly-minted words, without all the everyday fillers such as “the,” “of,” “and,” “to,” “a,” “in”, “it,” “I,” etc.and most forms of punctuation, which he replaced primarily by the dash, that truly matters. Fourlines will have to do as a sample of his verbal-ized (“verbally energized”) writing:

Bermuda-barmaid-season-Harry-could-play-M’s—Spring-Song-flawlessly-without-music-before-him—but-continued-turning-sheets-effectively-Harry—stood-up-tall-popular-tree-other-three-sat-down—

The editor of these three volumes has set up a site to show off a version Brown’s ReadingMachine. I couldn’t quite get it to work on any of the selected texts, but I was able to get thesense of its ongoing motion through a tutorial of the machine. Although one can alternate thespeed, stop it, or even go back, the text itself, however, moves forward, unfortunately at its owninterminable pace, stealing from the reader easy the possibility of or accidental (but sometimesfortuitous) opportunity of repeating, interrupting, or even skipping over passages. The endlessscroll from left to right almost scolds the reader from jumping ahead, in and about a text,intentionally slowing down and quickly moving forward again. If this can, in fact, be accomplishedon Brown’s machine, I remember using the fiche — a machine I tackled for several years whileworking of my Djuna Barnes bibliography — trying to tame it from its mad rush forward andleaping moves backward, attempting to adjust its distorting lens into a position betweenmicroscopic and giantized. Frankly I would miss all those simple American conjunctions andpronouns, the repetition of so clearly defines American syntax, as opposed to Brown’s hobbled-together word combines.

But no one can deny Brown his rapacious hunger for words or dismiss his endless attempts — ashe expresses it in the very first lines of his 1931 collection — to “operate” on words:

Operating on words — gilding and gelding themIn a rather special laboratory equipped withMicro and with scope — I anesthetizePompous, prolix, sesquipedalian, Johnsonian

Inflations like InfundibuliformOnly to discover by giving them a swiftPoke in the bladder they instantly inspissateAnd whortle down the loud-writing funnel.

Like a madly inspired doctor, Brown prods, pushes, and cuts his words into and out of meaninguntil — I swear — he might even awake T. S. Eliot’s etherized patient. If there was, most often,something slightly clumsy about Brown’s insistent linguistic embracements, he seldom shied fromhis commitment, determining to never abandon his love of words, even if he had to create his“Superb swirling compositions / On my back where even I / Cannot see my masterpieces”(“Lament of an Etcher”).

We can only forgive Saper if he somewhat overstates the greatness of Brown’s poeticachievements, while profusely thanking him for sharing these significant, nearly-forgottencontributions. Knowing Brown makes American poetry profoundly more interesting.

Bob Brown, words (Paris: Hours Press, 1931); new facsimile edition published 2014, with anIntroduction by Craig Saper.

Bob Brown, editor and author, Gems: A Censored Anthology (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France: RovingEye Press, 1931); new facsimile edition published 2014, with an Introduction by Craig Saper.

Bob Brown, The Readies (Bad Ems, France: Roving Eye Press, 1930); new facsimile editionpublished 2014, with an Introduction by Craig Saper.

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