Douglas Messerli; Stay
Series No.: 218
ISBN: 978-1-55713-447-9, Pages: 102
Over the years, Messerli has developed a kind of collage technique wherein he “writes through,” as he describes it, the poetry of others. His poems are neither imitations of others’ works, nor invocations of their art, but might be described as a kind of “assisted reading” and a personal associative response.
What happens in this “writing through” pieces is that my own poetry, highly disjunctive and following its own associative course, interweaves word pairings and bits of lines from others, weaving and unweaving their originals, creating, like Odysseus’ Penelope, through a bit a chicanery, an attempt to delay a parting and to keep by me the deep relationships I have with these artists.
Perhaps only in Stay, ultimately a command to keep death at bay, did Messerli truly realize just how important his readings of other poets were to sustaining his own life. His poems pay homage to, among others, Cole Swensen, Inger Christensen, David Bromige, Djuna Barnes, David Kinloch, Hugo Claus, Reina María Rodriguez, Meredith Quartermain, Dennis Phillips, Louis Zukofsky, Carlos Drumond de Andrade, Sarah Law, Can Xue, Christopher Middelton, Joe Ross, Adriano Spatola, John Wieners, Michael Lentz, Paul Vangelisti, Clarence Major, Arseny Tarkovsky, Bernadette Mayer, Rosmarie Waldrop, Standard Schaefer, Jack Spicer, Martin Nakell, Thérèse Bachand, Susan Howe, Ted Greenwald, and Néstor Perlongher.
In addition to writing poetry, Messerli has published 11 volumes of his My Year cultural memoirs, and edited numerous volumes for his Green Integer press. He was named an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.