Across the North Pacific
by Charles Potts
$15.00
Slough Press
ISBN - 0-941720-99-3
Across the North Pacific
Potts has fallen up in the sky and fallen down again, gathering info from all quadrants, where we are, where we've been, and he has determined with heisenburgian guesstimation how fast we're spinning, the torque, the immense speed of manifest destiny across the north pacific, pointing to the north pacific as customer's last stand, where, before so very long, a spanish speaking president of the u s empire will capitulate to the chairman of the maoist dynasty, this event explained by linguistic geography and our continual need to find new markets, a search leading to globalization and the oligarchic plutocracy controlling moneyed minorities with a democratic facade, language being our doing and undoing, our doing being a society that is a linguistic echo, our undoing being our greed and need to protect this consumer imperialism by invoking the right of might.
Richard Denner
Potts quotes Kenneth Rexroth: "Any bright young man or woman can be taught to be arty, but great works of art are nobly disheveled." Across the North Pacific is nobly disheveled: part book of poetry, part philosophical and scholarly treatise, and part prophecy and prophetic railing, the "history of the future" of the North Pacific Ocean Triangle, which is where future struggle for global hegemony will take place. Potts is a serious intellect who rejects boxes or containers. Since he came riding out of Idaho in the early 60s, he has been relentlessly pursuing a vision and an aesthetic.
Barbara La Morticella, KBOO Portland, Oregon
Across the North Pacific takes establishing intellectual underpinnings to an extreme. Like an academic prose work, this poetry collection ends with a bibliography of works informing the position of the author; it lists seventy or so titles, including Toynbee's multivolume A Study of History. And it begins (in a section called Warmups) with introductory prose pieces which set up arguments and parameters very much like a historical study or political polemic. Here are some of the theses stated outright in these "warmups": the final syntactical position in a language posits the largest emphasis, which leads English speaking societies to be static -- their subject-verb-object syntax predicts their obsessions with objects, things, wealth; the Japanese, with their subject-object-verb syntax which emphasizes the process, the verb, are therefore dynamic -- they key, for example, not on what is manufactured but on refining the manufacturing: "the questions that might save English speaking civilization can't even be asked in English:" "history is best learned as a branch of epistemology." Well, I can not even begin to list all of the interlocking theses; this is a review, not a study. The prose setup for the poetry here operates much more directly than Eliot's notes to The Waste Land; those were afterthoughts, a way to show off and take up some blank pages. Without the prose up front here, these poems would be like kites on the ground, of some interest as image but not in motion, not dynamic.
A collection of poetry with bibliography and with ambitious historicist generalizations as prolog! What is this?! Potts answers: "A prosimetrum examination of the relationship between language and behavior," an "original work in linguistic geography," "a history of the future."
It is also a self referencing jesture, a process. "I used to plan on waiting about ten years before I wrote this to give me a more leisurely run at some of the currently missing components." The reader is made privy to Potts' assignments to himself in relation to the work, such items as: "I will check SVO-SOV dynamic of a dozen languages. . . . I may have SOV material for Komantcia in Sven Lilejblad's work on Shoshoni." etc. In other words, he writes the work by figuring out how to write it, in public. "To epistemologize in the infinitive form contains the verb how." [He "Japanesalizes" in this resonant sentence; its relationship to the ideas and tactics in the book could be the subject of an essay on its own, and yes of course he "knows" "how" is not a verb.] Once the generalizations are in place systematic argument ends. The poems are arranged in sections dealing with the United States, Japan, and China. The theme of language is pursued throughout and from time to time throughout the work civilizations with their differences are telescoped together and shown as unconsciously subject to nature. In haphazard and surprisingly varied ways, the poems illustrate, illuminate and expand Potts' propositions. While the arguments seem to exist for the poems as much as the poems for the arguments, the poems seem items left over from the process of writing than as the object of the activity. But it is reading them as carefully as they deserve that pulls the reader into the process.
There are so many ways to react to this stuff. Potts himself observes that the book "may initially baffle, irritate, and confuse." "This stuff is bullshit!" will be a reaction of some fairly sharp readers I'm sure. But look: [speaking of World War Two and before]
Japanese can claim with a straight face
To have been victimized by their own Kwantung army
Even though those people speaking a
Subject Verb Object language like Zhongguo Hua or English
Aren't buying it.
("The Closing Sea")
Do we not see around us in the United States today preposterous positions acted on as constants, as if we were helpless? Do we not take the status of medicine as a business as if this were natural? Do we not seem to treat it as natural that a layer of profit is inserted into our insuring of each others health, a kind of tax on sickness paid not to the sheriff of Nottingham but to private "insurance" companies. Is it not clear we live in an ensemplastic Enronomics where the methods of the rich stealing from the poor, from the middle class and each other, become apparent only after they have been used long enough they become so brazen it's time to invent new ones anyway? Don't we act in the United States as if the profitability of business is the only thing worth protecting? These are not Potts' observations, they are mine, but is there any better explanation of behavior like this than saying our language through its patterns and momentums leave us helpless? I have put off discussion of individual poems because whichever poems I pull out cannot be typical of the collection. But I must exhibit some of them as teasers. How about 1968? It opens with a classic Potts maneuver:
There were two watershed years in the twentieth century:
1929 when speculators leaped from tall buildings
To meet the concrete consequence of their fantasies as
The roaring of the twenties simmered down into the great depression whine;
1968 when the country and the empire clashed for good.
I have a photograph from the 1940s when I was born
Of my brother Don, our dog Skip and . . .
That move from a somewhat didactic observation to personal narrative mode is used frequently by Potts, and very effectively. He goes on to lay his life (in family context) across twentieth century America, skipping back and forth across his life from childhood to the present day.
Many years ago I heaped river stones beneath the rain gutter
So during storms a man made waterfall would splash off the rocks
To remind me of the sound nature used to make . . . .
The poem ends with remarkable intimacy.
What to do when all apparent choices lead nowhere?
Body out with feelings and straight talk song
In as many tones as a warbler can get to.
Discover how things are.
Don't be mislead by religious fantasy
Economic exploitation
Government manipulation
Druggy fuzzing of the edges
Parental disapproval
Lack of funding or
Failure of nerve.
Make friends
Cement alliances
Listen to your body
Hear the music
Sing the songs
O wild one, you are it.
At the last line we move from what has been his program, his tactics "when all apparent choices lead nowhere," to his approval of how he has born up to the forces of history: "O wild one, you are it." Allowing the reader in on his self approval gives a jolt of intimacy. The enjoyment of an individual's power before macro-forces that seem to trap us is one of the great values of Potts' work.
I should illustrate the sporadic didactic lectures, addressing societies and economics quite abstractly, in a manner that many I expect will claim is not poetry at all. After a listing of Pacific beaches in the Americas and Asia, comes these lines in "The Northwest Passage:"
This be two arcs of the northern semi-circle of the ring of fire,
Drawn together by their compound interest in the Hawaiian Islands
And other atolls, coral reefs and volcanic upthrusts as will support
An air base, a harbor, an army barracks, an American Indian Ira Hayes
Helping his Marine Corps Comrades raise Old Glory on Iwo Jima under fire.
The American claim to the Pacific Ocean economy
Will be under fire as long as they assert it.
The ukulele boogie of Waikiki
Was drowned out by Kamikaze pilots singing Tora! Tora! Tora!
On their way to a molten lava meltdown
On a pineapple plantation,
Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! burning bright on the bottom of Pearl Harbor Bay.
Is it poetry? The lines above clearly are. Closer to pure exposition in free verse, these lines from "The Closing Sea."
For 14 generations Tokugawa and his primarily literal progeny
Ruled Japan from Tokyo, the Eastern Capitol, or Edo
By keeping every Daimyo's wife and children
Under house arrest in Edo while
The Daimyos were required to spend
Half of each year on their Daimyo
And half in Tokyo with their families.
The possibilities of revolt were scant under these circumstances,
I quote the above only because there are a number of such sections of free verse in ANP which resemble plain prose, academic prose even. Is it poetry? I don't care much. The material contributes to a context out of which a complex poetic gesture is made and is therefore in the gravitational pull of poetry. It is certainly effective writing toward expression which assumes the risks and the freedoms associated with poetry. What more do we want?
There is a wonderful section of weather poems. But I turn now to one of the treatments of language as a power over consciousness, "The Ethics of Generalization, Deletion and Distortion" with a caption under the title: "a law firm of linguistic relativity." A few lines in, we find:
If Chomsky-like you try to stay ahead of the trinity
You make up in thoroughness what you lose in timeliness,
You actually fall behind time and
The world goes on without you speechless.
I can take you through it one thread at a time
Until it's as tightly woven as an
Isfahan carpet,
The knots close together and
Cleverly out of sight
On the bottom of the carpet
Facing the floor . . .
The conceptual music of this poem expands dramatically to the end. I want to show one short poem in full, in part because I simply love it. There is nothing else like it in ANP yet it acts upon the total context, and reacts to the total context, the way the rich complexity, as a historicist gesture, of Ira Hayes at Iwo Jima does.
The Sea Hawk
The sea hawk perched on the concrete wave breaker
At the edge of Hakata Bay rightly regards me with suspicion
I cannot alleviate.
This is in Japan but the Hawk's suspicion is not because Potts' appearance is foreign to Japan, but simply because he is a man, foreign to nature. The very perch of the hawk, "a concrete wave breaker," is itself a tiny act in man's war with nature. Considering the expansionist spirit, especially of Japanese and American interests, as China sits poised to grow from the center out, suggesting the certain continuation of human hostilities and a higher and higher demand on the resources of nature, with the daily affairs of man subject to economies addicted to exponential growth-- the poet can not assure the hawk that we will not degrade nature till the hawk can't live. He cannot alleviate the suspicion.
I love this book. Yet if there hadn't been so much wonderful basketball on television this month I might never have given this volume the energy and time needed to warm up to it. I had read it through once thinking it strange but pretty good. I kept picking up the book during commercials and it pulled me in, this very ambitious book and remarkable gesture.
Janice Faye Fiering
as reviewed on www.timegarden.com