Bern Porter. now it can be—why did it fail before? Fredrik Averin, Mark
Melnicove, eds. Portland, OR: Idea of the Book, 2023 https://
Working off finds began for me in Sacramento, 1974, unaware of founds by Porter and others. I had just left my novice, experimental stage yet to have a creditable grasp on American poetics, let alone our avant-garde poetics. Years later here on the Central Coast of California I was visited by Porter because of my support of his book, Found Poems, and his founds published in my magazine Kaldron. Dick Higgins, one of his publishers, later visited me, during which Bern was a topic of conversation.
Porter entered my seeing. I came across knotted string and wire walking along railroad tracks and sidewalks in Sacramento after moving from Salt Lake City. Cracks in concrete sidewalks also caught my eye to sketch in a small spiral notebook pocketed initially for lexical poem lines and notes. Before moving I had begun typing the first rune volume from studies of keltic knots in The Book of Kells. The studies continued for a few years. I unraveled curvilinear knots rendering an x-y grid expression for typing. The new found abstract curvilinear knots began a parallel series, lost alfabet found. By mid 1975 there were 27 pages rendered and typed. I thought it a small compete series, numerically fitting, 3 cubed. I seem inclined to work in series. To examine and then express in multiples.Moving to southern coastal San Luis Obispo County and walking its beaches provided me with an unending variety of found forms. Eventually sketching was replaced by photographing.
I was raised to be a technocrat, like Porter in fact. This allows me to move easily in scientific textual and visual literature and thus my long support of Bern’s borderblur works. Having dropped out of university answering the call of the muse, I also had to teach myself on my own terms about the world of art and see anew. Instead of the way of postmodern linguistic theories many university-trained (and trammelled) poets accepted, I jumped into mythology, psychology, Asian and traditional ways, and worked with local Chumash protecting sacred sights.
Finding Found Poems by Bern Porter published by Higgins was for many of us a seeing/sea/change experience. For me, his founds, their arrangements and rearrangements, have always brought an inexplicable positive jolt, beyond wordings. Perhaps this is explained by his learning-time in Japan, honing a knowing for the condensed haiku form that attuned his eye. Then there is his detailed work as a physicist. His prolific editing eye guiding a muscular scissoring-mind totalled many volumes. From six of these, Averin and Melnicove culled this current collection of over 220 of Porter’s works, themed around self help.
The frame of his ready-mades and founds are born out of Dada and collage. Unlike Dada’s inherent slap in the face anti-artiness and later Neo dada offshoots informed by nihilistic tendencies streaming out of postmodernism,
Bern presented a open, lyrical and pleasing to the eye placement and
selected groupings. How much of this comes out of his interactions with Kenneth Patchen in the mid to later 1940s is a question for those accessing the Porter archives. He published Patchen, Henry Miller and others and thus deep in the American Avant-garde, or in Bob Grumman’s usage, "otherstream".
Bern Porter’s work is not without controversy. Even his friends and supporters point up his tendency to lift copyrighted materials and make other appropriations without credit. Additionally problematic, are the improbables in Bern’s autobiography. This of course is extra-problematic; it queries how attribution and provenance can hold a poetry and its maker too tightly to the presiding officiousness of the day, and its rulings. Is this poetry held removed from the story of its creator to stand on its own regardless, or erased due to a lack, in an ideological “pureness”? At the moment, both notions of rightness exist side by side, fighting for their own dominance eventually to be eclipsed by yet another school of criticism in years coming. If censored then what about thief-blackmailer-gun runner-slaver Rimbaud?
With that said, while ethically flawed, these founds, perhaps “readies-to-be-made waiting the Porter net,” simultaneously move this particular reader / viewer audibly and inaudibly. These pieces enter the eye, stir deep within, then arise as another way to look and reset undoing old patterns, although they themselves are now old. Many trigger joyful smirks. Many are ahaas! — a positive vibration shimmering around the higher mindfulness of this inspired life project.
karl kempton
Oceano, Ca December 2023
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