Off!

~

For Wallis and Fortuna

The modus operandi of one whole slew of the semaphorists I hang with
Is to waggle violently our flag-savvy arms, as if to excoriate
The shredding mists into a witness’d departure. Of irrepressibly less interest

Is the scuppernong blush wines we like to pour out, compounding
The general hubbub with appetites sauvages, or merely pickled.
That is how we do it out here in the greeny pluglands.

~

Juniper Blue

The shellac-hard days of high-dollar oils, of watercolorist’s mufti and glues—
All that’s just a metaphor, something to bind order to itself with, a palliative
Against steerage, that lonely outpost where the radio’s mostly

On the blink and the vegetables costly. The mastermind’s name is Dick, the
Mastermind’s name is always Dick. Interloper and liar, nails like claws
Leaving drag-marks in the sand. Mudpuppy, cave-dog, face like a poach’d egg.

~

One Steamboat, Two Steamboat

In the hostelry grubbing Baco-bits in a panic, three mouths fed by an impartial
Hand. Writ of indifference versus writhe of interferon-manacle’d in-
Patient. The red sun stuck like a knob to the big drawer of the sky. Oh yeah.

Quite the rhetoricist I am when the slurry parade is done. No? All the purchase
A man can get on something won’t be enough to hang on to “for dear life.”
Cached in my book: thousands of similar pages, repulsive and astute.

~

Finding a form. Long periods of scavenge and relapse. Twiddling thumbs, trying on the Thunderbird wings. And then, abruptly: a sailing vessel comes up out of the water, made of water, contributory to a tradition. Or a condition.

This morning—plenty-plenty snow, and the C-dog restless and puling. Pacing to G.’s room, back. Ya whiney weimaraner! So: up, walk’d, shovel’d, shower’d, hoof’d it in, turning my whole body around every so often, on the outlook for a bus. Due to my hood. Which disallow’d a normal turning. Without hindering me opticks! Luck dog turnabout: a neighbor recognized my ploddingness and “gave me a lift.” About six or eight inches out there, and accumulating.

~

To work and off!

Spigot

~

“Doze’d bussing”       “home, nose”       “tilt’d into the Riding book.”      
“What”       “about Le république”       “mondiale des lettres?”      
“Increments of the clock”       “of my days”       “comes up a little,”       “winding down.”      
“A sudden enjambment”       “of all my senses by”       “the regulatory system.”      
“Left me without”       “a leg to stand on.”       “Signed, Sarah Bernhardt.”

~

Ya bum.

~

Misfit reticulations of the heinous sort.
Double-bruises bruit’d about.
Singular militancy in the shower-shack.
Jamming the apothecary.
Newton Arvin.
The belittlement of major minors.
Songs to take a saw to.
Down by the millpond in the greeny o’s.
Seventeen settlers, one dog.
Calcinated hosiery.
A rip in the rapture.
Dorn: “rhapped” for “made rhapsodickal.”
Revving: a journal of poetry and other gunk.
Sopped.
A shoulder holster for a human leg.
Abdominal sheathing—a big bite.
“When a decoction of meat is effectually screened from ordinary air, and supplied solely with calcined air, putrefaction never sets in.”
Meat of a sanderling.
“A bumf-hunt is a paper-chase.”
Those are the Ministry of Mimes’s piles.
A long poetickal bumph-rush for bragging rights.
Cistern Lucy.
Cistern Harold.
My chum Spud.
“After inhaling the No-doz, I stepped out into the plain. A horn, recurved, flatten’d, nodose, beckon’d.”
My fast-acting alertness.
Oh for a swote ribible dynning yn the dell.
That’s it, Gleeman!
The sump and morass of my ceasing.
Some kind of manufactory stiff, he.
Fathomable Frenchies!
J. Barnett Palmprint to you, too.
Thinking how he’d explain “of what purpoos he mighte make to her his entree.”
Saddlebag Sanctum.
Sorry, bud, that’s myn informacioun.
L’pool.
Bucephalus, meaning “Oxhead.”
Insufflated horsing around.
Body weight: 105 lbs.
Sure . . . “and we get of yone pelf, ye man tak trauell and mak ws sum supple.”
A pottle of supple.
Out of me typical uppers, by cheef.

~

To work.

Zone’d Comfort

~

Received:

Hotel Imperium, by Rachel Loden (University of Georgia Press, 1999)

~

One of Rachel Loden’s poems in The Poker reads, in its entirety:

The USNS COMFORT Sails to the Gulf

Huge red crosses on the whitewashed hull:
http://www.comfort.navy.mil/welcome.html

An astonishing rewriting of Pound’s famous imagist piece “In a Station of the Metro”—

The apparition           of these faces           in the crowd
Petals           on a wet, black           bough.

—though that thought’s not th’immediate one. The first response is a kind of terror combined with exhilaration, a fugue-plunge at the bland banality of something like “clickable comfort,” a sharp uptake of air at the brilliance of the juxtaposition. There’s a perfect bathos there: churning into the Persian Gulf is a huge floating Uniform Resource Locator, ready to rescue the great unwash’d body politic, the soldiery, the grunts on the ground in Baghdad, in Mosul, in Basra and Fallujah, as if they, each soldier were no more than the momentary blink of a cursor launching itself into virtual end, or virtual relief. Somehow I’m remind’d of Slim Pickens as Major Stanley “King” Kong riding the atomic Fat Boy down in Dr. Strangelove. The visual slant-rhyme (hull, html) and reckless tidiness of the piece only adds to its slow-bloom bigness, as does, too, the fact of its appearance in print. To make that second line an actual link would undercut it—it must remain an ineffectual hieroglyph on the page, just as it is an insipid and meaningless code affixed to the side of the “hospital ship.”

~

Noted:

In the clubby and negligible hobbyist’s pages—it’s become mostly a magazine for prize-hounds, I think—of Poets & Writers (January / February 2005 issue), a piece by Clayton Eshleman titled “What Brought You Here Will Take You Hence: A Poetic Apprenticeship in Kyoto.” In Japan with Cid Corman:

In our 19th-century Japanese house, I sat on a tatami, cross-legged, the typewriter on a low table before me. I would sit there for hours, staring at a single line, not knowing how to move beyond it into something that seemed to be my own. Squatting in the benjo one morning, I realized that I was in the position of Tlatzeotl-Ixcuina, the Aztec goddess of filth and childbirth, in a nephrite carving with a tiny god-infant projecting from between her thighs. I, too, wanted to give birth, but all that seemed to come out of me was shit.

In The Nation (January 3, 2005 issue), a review by Stephen Burt of Complete Poems: Basil Bunting, edited by Richard Caddel (New Directions, 2003):

Bunting’s compact oeuvre has an astonishing scope, not only within his longer poems but in his translations from Persian and Latin, and in the short poems he called “odes”; these range widely in form (singsong couplets, dense trimeters, long-lined free verse), in kind (erotic lyric, sarcastic rebuke, scenic meditation) and in mood (angry, regretful, devoted, exited, resolved). Clunky early on, the short poems got better and better; the best date from after “Briggflatts.”

~

To work.

Clowning Post

~

Received / Bought (Including a roundup of items—well, one, the Graves—overlook’d in hebetude, lost in desuetude, or panned with attitude, added late for completeness. I’ll “get” to th’others . . .):

The Spoon River Poetry Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (Summer / Fall 2004). Guest Editor: Gabriel Gudding ($10, 4240 English Department, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, 61790-4240)

Writings by Jonathan Mayhew, Luis Miguel Aguilar (translated by Kathleen Snodgrass), Joe Amato, Anny Ballardini, Gastón Baquero (translated by Mark Weiss), Douglas Barbour, Barbara Barg, James Bertolino, Daniel Borzutzky, Anita Boyle, Brigitte Byrd, James Cervantes, Jennifer Chapis, Kris Christensen, Ewa Chruściel, Brian Clements, Brenda Coultas, Joel Craig, Catherine Daly, Alan DeNiro, Gerald England, Juan Carlos Flores (translated by Kristin Dykstra), Georges Godeau (translated by Kathleen McGookey), Janet Goldberg, Arielle Greenberg, Matthew Guenette, Tim Hunt, Max Jacob (translated by Mark Weiss), Kent Johnson, Doug Jones, Pierre Joris, Jeffrey Jullich, Jennifer L. Knox, John Latta, Rachel Loden, Haki R. Madhubuti, Michael Magee, Joyelle McSweeney, K. Silem Mohammad, Bill Morgan, Sheila E. Murphy, Brooke Nelson, Daniel Nester, the anonymous “Lament of the Hag,” translated by John O’Leary, Karl Parker, Jack Pendarvis, Jennifer M. Pierson, Anthony Robinson, Mary Ruefle, Helen Ruggieri, Standard Schaefer, Alan Sondheim, Chuck Stebelton, Chris Stroffolino, Tony Tost, David Trinidad, Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew, Mark Weiss, W. Aaron Wilson, Joel Barraquiel Tan, Julie Cipolla, Judith E. Johnson.

Interview with Haki R. Madhubuti.

One is—I hate to say it—remind’d of the undifferentiated slaughter that accompanies regime change, or, better, the kind of belly-ache one gets at the Smörgaåsbord, or at the Brännvinsbord. Too many “samples.” Is that the hazard of the Guest Editorship? That altogether admirable desire to present a fine big variety leading to a regrettable hotch-potch and cacophony? Something frenetic in the predominant one-poem-per-author arrangement, no chance to sit a spell with any particular duck. “Shucks, you got another one like that?”

~

Good-bye to All That, Revised, with a Prologue and an Epilogue, by Robert Graves (Doubleday Anchor, 1957)

Pick’d up before my “current unrest” with Laura Riding, as if in anticipation. Here’s Graves as deconstructionist precursor:

I found it difficult to write my theses, The Illogical Element in English Poetry, in the required academic style, and decided to make it an ordinary book. I rewrote it, in all, nine times; and did not like the final result. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry, the latent associations of the words used—the obvious prose sense being often in direct opposition to the latent content. The book’s weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet’s supra-logical thought processes and the sub-logical process of the common psychopath.

I published a volume of poems every year from 1920 to 1925; after . . . 1921, I made no attempt to please the ordinary reading public, and did not even flatter myself that I was conferring benefits on posterity; I had no reason to suppose that posterity would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I never wrote unless a poem pressed to be written. Though assuming a reader of intelligence and sensibility . . . I no longer identified him with any particular group of readers or (taking courage from Hardy), with critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural design to indicate the size of a building. The greater strictness in writing . . . laid me open to accusations of trying to get publicity and increase my sales by a willful clowning modernism.

Written in 1927, at age thirty-three. Not th’autobiographical ruminate run-off of an aging “man of letters” at all (as one might guess reading the quoted paragraphs), but mostly a report on one’s doings in World War I, and at Oxford after.

~

A general and fastidious call is hereby announced: for examples of individuals of the “current crop” that “one” could accuse of “trying to get publicity and increase . . . sales by a willful clowning post-modernism”?

~

Dreaming of the day when Pessoa’s poems’ll grace the lips of schoolchildren, the way Yeats’s musickal englobatures—in the feral squeal of Mick Jagger—used ta!

The day when Fernando Pessoa’ll meet Hugh Person.

~

Kevin Davies sent me the whole of “Excerpts from an Ongoing Narrative of Some Length”—I run into epistemological trouble and hubbub whenever I think too hard about wholes and parts—and—also—ask’d me about “late Dorn.” Which sent me (back) to the recent Chicago Review “American Heretic” Dorn issue (which I’d barely look’d at, such be the sludge in my constant-filling bucket of reading material, where things tend to bob and dive with random unsustainable intensities (as I do). And sent me looking for post-Hello La Jolla items, rather unsuccessfully. One point: that Kevin Davies ’ld be thinking hard about Dorn skews my perception (somewhat grandly) of both Davies’s and Dorn’s work. It’s not a connection I’d be capable of making all by myself—not without a pointer. Two point: reading Dorn through Davies is to see the comic fury of Dorn afresh (“Scrumptious meals, it says, / prepared completely from scratch. / But who wants to eat scratch?”), and to note the accuracy of Dorn’s ear for th’American lingo frank (“Shaving lotion fresh / we nonstop into Houston . . . A lot of bystanders, craning / their necks, had “Serves Him Right” / in their dodgy eyes, high twitch profile / all round Houston International / said to be the most thieve-ridden / airport in the universe.”) Reading Davies through Dorn is to see the epic thrust behind the notational style, that ambitious reach and aim to catalog all the side-effects, all the residuals, all the post-merger mayhem and nutso brouhaha, (and under-spoken dangers to the polis) of late capitalism’s consolidation of means and effects, and betrayals of public trust.

Dorn (out of “Chemo du Jour: The Impeachment on Decadron”):

. . . as the drip is connected to the pump I see W. J. Clinton
full humping St. Monicka panting in the pantry
I see D.C. people walking like negative ghosts
past the Casa Blanca,
I see public petty ire as a bomb
in the garbage scow, sanctuary to an aborted
human baby, neo-natal trash from this trash social
structure, the product of the policy of Billy & Hilly,
this fetal thing wrapped like pisces in a copy
of the Washington Post, the voice of Babylon,
they wish, but instead nothing but
another methane burner
in a swamp of overpaid busybodies.

Davies (out of “Karnal Bunt,” in Comp.):

Once a year, a halter, pumps, stockings with garter, tight red skirt, a little
     mascara, all alone with the light from another room, phoning everyone
     you know and hanging up after one ring, this is mandatory if you want to
     continue in the program, call it a required rereading course, it’s not a soft
     option like Intentional Dehydration or Reciting Shelley’s End-Rhymes
     Upwards While Sneezing or Leaving Fudge for the Letter Carrier or
     Replacing All Your Condiments with Pictures of Where You Figure They
     Come From or Voicing Vocational Doubts to War-Memorial Retaining
     Walls Where Spivs Loiter in Towns the Train Stopped Stopping At. For
     extra credit dangle pee-wee forms of former demons off the tip of
     extended foot resting on whatever object stands in for what you call an
     ottoman before flicking them off into unlit linoleum abyss.

                             Political, a science.

~

Of note: Keith Tuma in the essay “Late Dorn” (Chicago Review) mentions a remark Dorn made (“Email is MEmail”) “in a preface written at the height of the poetry community’s infatuation with email and related technologies.” Tuma continues:

Imagine what he would have made of the more recent blog phenomenon . . . where a verbose older poet whose poetry I sometimes admire and whose opinions I occasionally share is perfecting literary criticism as self-congratulatory autoblography.

Who was it point’d out that Tuma, in the earliest days of the Poetics List, went under guise of self-styled enfant terrible and Bad Boy?

~

Weekend of the C-dog chomping down a mouthful of de-icer, necessitating emergency vet visit and overnight. She’s okay. The knucklehead what left the bag of pseudo-salt there? He’s a crumb.

~

Morning brings the “miscellaneous bumph” and duff of how “I just can’t get behind that “post-avant” nomenclature. I mean I don’t identify with that shit. Post-avant? Like “after the advance”? Isn’t that where the cleaning crew comes in? The dust-off after the dust-up? I know we got a service-industry economy now, but c’mon! I ain’t no chief of no Mop-up Ops!”

~

Noted: a new biography of Riding—A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson, by Elizabeth Friedmann, out shortly.

~

To work.

The Lush Customary

~

Pfui.

Is what my seasonal command prompt says for today. I am no Kinch, no “fearful Jesuit.” I am th’headless reprobate, making a path between waves.

~

Hart Crane call’d her Laura Riding Roughshod. She call’d herself, pseudonymously, Lilith Outcome. Malcolm Cowley call’d Crane the Roaring Boy. She wrote, in French, “Mortjoy est certainement un garçon heureux!” and translated it “Surely is Mortjoy of the luckiest.” In an “Explanation” preceding the piece (titled “The Life of the Dead”), Riding wrote:

The text of this highly artificial poem was first written in French, in order that the English might benefit from the limitations which French puts upon the poetic seriousness of words . . . French is not ‘my’ language. I have used it here with approximate correctness, but my object was not to produce a finished literary exercise in French: the French text is merely the critically intermediary between the pictures and the English. The English text is therefore not so much a translation from the French as a piece of writing in English which contains in itself its improvised French model—as a safeguard against inappropriate poetic seriousness. The phrase ‘poetic prose,’ which is generally applied in a flattering sense to a degenerate form of prose-writing, may be correctly applied here because the poetic dishabille of the text is willful—a conscious relaxation of poetic energy, not a stylistic orgy in prose. Indeed, all French writing in poetic form is, strictly speaking, poetic prose . . .

Source of th’Ashbery experiment in The Double Dream of Spring, that thing call’d “French Poems” that ends “dent et sang”? That appear’d originally in an old Tel Quel? Against Riding’s Shangrila’d and lush verbosity, Ashbery’s precision:

I wrote the group of poems called “French Poems” in French and translated them myself into English, with the idea of avoiding customary word-patterns and associations.

~

The Ur-grinch, c’est moi. And Kipling: “It’s woe to bend the stubborn back / Above the grinching quern.”

~

Phooey.

To, uh, work . . .

My Dollish Smile

~

On a tear. Wanting to locate and read Joseph Kosuth’s art writings, and that new Rothko dug-out-of-a-file-cabinet thing, and Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense. The latter because Hugh Kenner seem’d to’ve thought highly of it. In lieu of any of that, I ravage the pages of Stevens’s letters, domesticated, flat—where’s the razzmatazz, or, alternately, the high suasions of th’aphoristickal? Suasions is an Ammons word, the way regatta is Ashberyesque.

~

In Nineteen Twenty-Seven

In nineteen twenty-seven, in the spring
And opening summer, dull imagination
Stretched the dollish smile of people.
Behind plate-glass the slant deceptive
Of footwear and bright foreign affairs
Dispelled from consciousness those bunions
By which feet limp and nations farce—
O crippled government of leather—
And for a season (night-flies dust the evening)
Deformed necessity had a greening.

~

Lovely. And ruin’d directly after by exposition and connective: “Then, where was I, of this time and my own / A double ripeness and perplexity?” Being roughly the first fourteenth of a poem by Laura Riding, out of the 1938 Collected Poems that hubby-in-the-offing Schuyler Jackson in an unsigned review in Time top-list’d in a roundup of recent poetry. (William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems got rank’d third. To a correspondent who ask’d about Riding, Williams (“Inimitable Bill”) report’d: “all I know of her is that, personally, she is a prize bitch . . .” So goes the prize nature of American letters.)

~

William Carlos “Indomitable Bill” Williams.

~

One way of putting the problem: too many yammering adaptables perfeckly willing and able to ventriloquize whatever “the age” (or the period style) demands. So saith Mr. Florilege Crankypants. Always demanding to know the difference between an alliance and a dalliance. (My brave friends call me “Little Legal Flower.”)

~

The Laura Riding who bombard’d Lillian Gish with letters for four years, only stopping once she got a reply. (Now how is it allowable to utter such biographic tidbits without the merest hint of explanation . . .)

The Laura Riding who defined poetry once as “self-perpetuating language, recited to still the anger at injustice.” (Immediate image of that hands-covering-the-ears white-noise-generating stance—“blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”) Rather than such avoidance behaviour, mayhaps the quiet castle of American letters needs “language—self-perpetuating, or self-conflagrating—, recited to stoke the fires of anger at injustice.”

The Laura Riding who goes by the name of Tamar Spinet in Glorious to View, a novel by fellow Cornellian Sylvia Bernstein. Apparently unpublish’d, Cornell University Manuscripts & Archives lists: “Typed manuscript of GLORIOUS TO VIEW, a novel about Cornell University and Ithaca, New York in the 1920’s, written by Sylvia Bernstein Seaman in collaboration with Frances Wexler Schwartz, 366 pages.”

The Laura Riding who, of her “unauthoritative treatment of the life of Voltaire,” writes:

I offer no other sources than the tireless gossip of an old wind and certain unaccountable revelations of the strange caprices of what-may-always-be-possible . . . My facts cannot be challenged, for I have none; nor can my fancy be questioned, since it is proved by its own deviations wherever it goes.

Precisely. Kent Johnson, whose extend’d metaphor making ability is such that—seeing him caught by Fancy’s minions—one’d think him in the midst of a fit, epileptickal or worse, couldn’t have said it better.

~

I had to smother a giggle at John Crowe Ransom’s admitting: “I know the dangers of cerebration in poetry. The best poetry, for me, is the most perilous.” (If you don’t know much about John Crowe Ransom, just drop “Barrett Watten” in . . . Guaran-damn-teed to provoke a snort.)

~

What ho! To work!

Gimme Cap

~

Bussing through the snow-shackled hinterlands, reading the story of Allan Tate writing a long, encouraging letter to Laura Riding telling her that she was the poet to save America from the Edna St. Vincent Millays—now why should that make me think immediately of Ron Silliman? (Of course, Tate’s undue combativeness might’ve been excused on the basis of a late-lingering juvenilia—he was a raw youth of twenty-four . . .)

~

I keep thinking about Kevin Davies’s pieces in The Poker No. 5 with the title “from Excerpts from an Ongoing Narrative of Some Length, and how, beyond the collapsible jokiness of the title, there is a sense of a world possibly replete, a fullness. That is, in seeming spite of the nutty premise—excerpts, wildly numbered à la Spring and All-era Williams (71, 49, 59, 86, 98, 31, 83, 58, 8 is the sequence here)—there is a three-dimensionality present (that I find lacking in ostensibly similar New Sentence’d endeavors of the earlier generation . . .)

Two things I notice. One is that there are plenty of tiny speech acts coming through the static of Davies’s work: ”Not / / an epiphenomenon, I don’t want / to hear you / say that again, understood?” Or: “I can’t lift this book, not even a page of it.” Which is mighty different—recklessly intimate in intent—from th’essentially visual (and far more distant) doings of—here, randomly select’d: “The bottom of the page is only a dotted line across the screen. A flock of starlings high over the valley. These are not facts. She stood naked by the window smoking a cigarette, looking down at the scene at Broadway and Columbus, while her boyfriend behind her slowly pulled on blue trunks and an orange shirt.” (Paradise, Ron Silliman) Something inert in the endless enumerations—what’s Emerson’s line? “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all—”? As if the “I HATE SPEECH” balloon’d carry’d off all the hum and slurry, all the squawk and grunt of th’iterating tongue. Something there is that is lacking: no “he do the police in diff’rent voices,” no sound’d woofs, whoops, and warbles of the whole “gwunt-gwubby weal.”

The second thing I notice: the delicious carelessness of Davies’s embrace: “Don’t want to hear / anything that might imply / that this dragnet is acceptable / / intellectually, emotionally, pedagogically” Davies’s desire, it seems, is always to skitter out and away—there’s something of the outlandish distant taunt, a willful unacceptability that makes itself known through a willingness to accept anything and everything that dragnet hauls up and plunks down. He’s more nonchalant, funnier, and “bigger” in’s welcomes than the “leading langpo lights.” Affable, all-encompassing. Here’s “31”:

I began to cut away my unneeded giblets and to tear up my copy of the contract.
           It didn’t matter, it was as they say
by this point academic, meaning of no effect, irrelevant, tenurable.
The assistant manager puts a soda on the table in front of me and says drink.
When it comes time to measure cocks however they are yes missing!
and a general hunt is ordered, dogs and horses, great leaping over hedges.
Disaffected German mercenaries form the bulk of the forward troops.
Our job: to dig out the root system of the alien life form.
From this came calculus and all its modern wonders, explanatory and productive.
           Standing above it
the water seemed negligible, but dive we did.
           Now, in the hot weather of midwinter,
we look in the cupboard to get us a bone. Thirty-seven squared
minus thirty-seven squared minus one.
Glassine envelopes on the sidewalk each morning.
Within a range of possible responses, everything is permitted to honk.
A stylized, hypnotic performance of the data is all we ever
                           were, right?

As Frank O’Hara, another great includer put it (echo’d here): “Everything / suddenly honks.” Is Davies admitting to a diminution of expectations, a recognition of a lessening of the high-cultural aura and mix in that variation (“everything is permitted to honk”)—I’m thinking of Ange Mlinko’s nostalgia for the (perhaps) headier ’fifties—? I think not. Or, I think th’irrepressible tone holds the cake: a sort of “So what” writ large over the “stylized, hypnotic performance of the data” we’re stuck with—epigones and Johnny-come-lately’s alike—we make our own fun.

~

A local bank robber’s nom de heist is becoming “The Sysco Kid.” Apparently due to the gimme cap he sports.

~

To work.

In Extremis

~

Of note: In the 27 December 2004 issue of The Nation, John Palattella reviews the huge (646 pages) Mary Ann Caws-edited Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: “The problem is that the anthology only has general dimensions. Caws has sacrificed selectivity for comprehensiveness.” Comparing it to Paul Auster’s 1982 Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, Palattella writes: “Reading Auster’s anthology is like stumbling into a large, long-running block party where some poets cluster in the middle of the street while others mingle near the curb. Reading Caws’s book is like wandering through a vast trade fair.”

~

Thinking of Mary Ann Caws recalls hitchhiking with G. G. in late December, 1973, Nice to la station de ski at La Plagne, winding up through snowy Gap (capital of the département Hautes-Alpes, founded by Augustus circa 14 B.C.) Standing comickally with thumbs poised, intoning in high serious at the head-shaking and driven drivers: “Indefatigable American youth!”

~

A limit’d writing night, chores, concerns, &c. Finally propped myself late into a bustle of pillows and skimmed a little of Deborah Baker’s biography of Laura Riding, call’d In Extremis. Baker acknowledging the difficulty of writing about Riding, the dangers of condemning her to “myth, megalomania, or marginality”: “one of the ironies that any biography of Laura Riding must, at some level, explain—to judge Riding in the terms Laura Jackson proposed, is ultimately to denounce and silence her.”

~

The kind of thing I’m more apt to jot down, insouciant schoolboy at heart: Allen Tate writing to Hart Crane about a planned sortie north: “It is no mere reification of desire this time . . . I am coming to New York. And I have no qualms about saying that the prospect fills me with an enthusiasm best described, perhaps, as somewhat pubic.”

~

To work.

Doze and Relinquish

~

Odd, difficult weekend. Things go awry. Two nights running I dozed off in th’entanglements of Laura Riding’s words about letters in The Poker No. 5. Which is not to condemn the Riding style—it is feisty and smart, punchy and aphoristic. Skimming the piece Thursday turn’d out enough to send me scooting into the stacks

to find Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs, a thing I recall Don Byrd marveling aloud about, and marveling that one should find a copy in the library in Albany, New York. Thinking it come: my “period of intensive Riding study.” Didn’t locate it. Found, however, a Carcanet-publish’d reprint of two books that Riding and Robert Graves

wrote together, each book, pointedly, “a word-by-word collaboration”—A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). And, pausing, pouring over The Poker essay, I think: it’s Frank O’Hara that I’m remind’d of here. “To write is to exercise authority; and with the least exacting form of writing—letters nearly

write themselves—and within the narrowest field of activity anyone wishes to choose to rule over, ordinary people have not a leg to stand on as authority-wielders . . . what better justification can writing have, from the point of view of ordinary people (and readers are always ordinary people), than that it proves that everyone is as intellectually legless, or human ,

as everyone else?” Or: “I make little distinction here between the writing and reading of letters because their social character (their mingledness) destroys all the niceties of authorship.” (Neatly availing itself avant la lettre of all the graces of “theory” and the “writerly text” without, quand même, all the ugly histrionickal exertions and deep-

knee bends, and all with that lovely “mingledness.”) Or: “Sex must come in somewhat everywhere . . . No authority is evoked, no judgement challenged or courted; it is all in fun, or at lest it is all by way of argument—earnest as far as it goes, but not interested in refutation. Authority is only death’s inhuman voice; but argument is the music of immortality,

that part of a man that stays immortally behind when he dies—his letters, his little language.” What I see is a similar mercurially sardonic slippage, the ease of wielding language allows one the freedom to wield it howsoever, sharply, funnily, ever-bemused at the possibility of one’s own savagery. Undercutting the solemn, hoisting in all earnestness

the frivolous. Th’important thing to keep it all in play. Riding, concluding, unwilling, even there, to settle into a single identifiable “manner”—still that tongue ferociously seeking the shade-flickery cave-ambiance of the cheek: “Life in the long, long run is letters—charming, odious, perdurable mortality. I recommend them to humanity as the very best next-best-thing to the too-good best.”

~

Out into a patter, the morning’s skiff of snow turn’d to mud, black. Half a block later: swirls and galactickal spirals under the streetlights, sizeable snowflakes grazing the eyelashes. Right at th’haggard catalpa, and down the shadowy block of Maywood. Another inflatable: a rooftop snowman with a top hat is swaying—mirthfully, a Falstaff in a scarf—and occasionally rocketing sideways in a blast. Another right—approaching th’hated Republicans, flag whipping out erect, snow shooting horizontal arrows at us—Carmen-the-dog and me—and I’m thinking of “my optick-hoodlets dropping shut for the gauntlet-run” and saying it, trying it out in the air. Skankin’ up a phraseology with a Chas. Dicken fervor. Seriality: my walk around the block. Nightly. Sliding up the home stretch, dog-learnedly slow. Is Laura Riding really like Frank O’Hara? I don’t know. How’s Hemingway’s Jake Barnes put it? “Wouldn’t it be nice to think so.”

~

To work.

Distill, Culm

~

Thursday nights as distillate and culminate of the week. The Poker arrives in its manila wrapper and its motto—“Half with loathing, half with a strange love”—is perfect, unpardonably right. I grouse off in the Lumina, drop the boy off,

and head to the Mallets Creek branch library to detoxify, shed the gloaming Grundeffekt (I mean whatever it is that makes that skeletal rictus-grin out of my mouth) of the sour day, and pour over its contents. First up: Nathaniel

Tarn, in a letter: exhibiting a mite of that elder-malaise called youth-envy. It comes out as “just you wait, buster” couch’d in a lackadaisical and folksy faux-wisdom: “Something which he [Steve Evans, accused by Tarn

of having “the leisure to read nothing else than an incalculable number of new poetry books a day”] will probably encounter as he grows older: it is almost impossible, past a certain point in life, to go on reading every younger poet who crops up

as opposed to poets of one’s own generation that one is committed to follow.” And, being one nearing term of old-angst myself (toppled into my second half-century, though still “upright”), I’d point out that—truth is—”one’s own generation” fails

one (or one fails it). And unless one’s got peculiar age-allegiances (the kind of thing schools—of all sorts—teach), one soonest mended learns to brook no natural or automatic comfort by it. That is, one’s coevals go dull, or drop out, or drop

dead, or begin copping hazardous attitudes, or one’s admiration sags for a thousand reasons, half due to oneself, half to th’other, half to “the age.” All that’s needed is a look into a literary journal of one’s “thunderous in pulchritude” youth. Here: Oink!

Number five, 1972, edited by Paul Hoover and Jim Leonard out of Chicago. And bingo! Where’s Jim Leonard? Where’s Dean Faulwell? Or, all that’s needed is a short investigation into one’s own shifting enthusiasms—how one’s excitement for, say,

James Tate, in “cloudy, comickal” youth, went in “earnest-earnest” thirties to grudging respect for James Tate for “sticking to’s guns” in defiance of the worn-out modality of th’American surreal, and thence (“sunshiny, stoickal” now) to genuine irritability with

James Tate for the domesticated, slack, humdrum, and mightily apolitic late ditties. The names keep changing, all that’s required is a modicum of curiosity, a willingness to say “welcome,” to say “scram.” So endeth the reading of the first letter in The Poker.

~

The Poker No. 5, edited by Daniel Bouchard ($10, 2 issues for $18, 3 issues for $24, P.O. Box 390408, Cambridge, MA 02139)

Poetry: Rachel Loden, Chris McCreary, John Ashbery, Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Marcella Durand, Drew Gardner, Michael Carr, Fanny Howe, and previously unpublished poems by Jack Spicer (introduced by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian).

An interview with Robin Blaser (conducted by John Sakkis).

An essay by Laura Riding (“Letters are the most anarchic activity tolerated as ungovernable in civilised experience . . . An unopened letter in the hand is a game with accident.”) (introduced by Logan Esdale).

Reviews of Around Sea, by Brenda Iijima, and Born Two, by Allison Cobb (by Tim Peterson).

Letters by Nathaniel Tarn and Kent Johnson in response to Steve Evans’s “Field Notes” in The Poker No. 4.

~

Fatigued, out of energy. Out in the great syndicated lackluster of night, “the big—everybody’s new prefer’d Spicer line—without,” Il Grande Senza in the Italian film version, starring Roberto Benigni as the young “naughty” Jack.

A noir in primary colors, high-toned secular junk music by Donald “The Junkman” Knaack on the soundtrack. In the windy night a man hangs off a ladder with clots of Christmas lights—icicles—dangling lit around him. Who puts up lights in the dark?

Down the block th’inflatable Mickey Mouse in Santa duds clings mightily to a giant candy cane. Judging by the crocodilian sex-addict idiot-grin, Mickey must think he’s grab’d ’s own enormous prong. The wind makes the thing buck against its guy lines.

The C-dog and I dawdle by—in good air out beyond the books. That encumbrance one whilst offering th’undeniable solace of grease the thinking slides by. That slide inevitably by, adamant and implacable as Laura (Riding) Jackson herself. More Poker notes to come.

~

To work.

The Point Whereat

~

“The sacred ibis may be extinct, one of many reports / I hear but can’t confirm. My chatter is meant to distract / you from my ignorance . . .” is how one Beth Anderson poem (titled “A Rare Creature”) begins in Overboard (Burning Deck, 2004).

A large format thing, oddly wide—the better to parcel out the long lines Anderson stretches out seemingly effortlessly, with tensile abandon, like pushing a measuring tape out of its coil-container, knowing exactly the point whereat it will buckle, dip, and

bend.

The photo of a double-hinged jaw and a person beside it to demonstrate size

can be found on postcards in any store near moving water. I have never caught
a fish. Within the flood, debris floats, is suspended, and has sunk to rest on what is
normally a surface. You may fall overboard but will remain, unavoidably, yourself.

The ending of “Suspense.” Syllables per line: twenty-one, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-three. The two additional syllables in the final line (along with the sudden bunch’d vocables of “unavoidably”) giving extraordinary weight to the final isolated

“yourself.” Meaning (along with such choice’d depositional emphases as, for example, “to rest on what is”): these are attentively lineated works, not stanza’d-out, ragged-right margin’d prose. A tendency to make boxes, a leaning toward three- or four-line stanzas, a

predilection to seriality (a raft of sonnets named for cities and towns—“Cleveland,” “Juneau,” “Marshfield”—and both “A Locked Room,” and “Hazard” made of number’d identically-shaped pieces.) Who is Beth Anderson? Little clue in the epigraphs—

one by Alice Fulton (partially: “the arrow / resembles the bird it will fly into”), one by mystery writer John Dickinson Carr (wholly: “It must be assumed that somebody is telling the truth—else there is no legitimate mystery, and, in fact, no story at all.”)

The drifts of story here exhibit the dodgy specificity of dream-states, and precisely echoing unlocatables. Here’s “Victoria”:

Our weekdays folded into one temporal unit, costing us our
ordered lives. A price more than fair for respite from knocks
and rings and clinging to poles like carousel riders. You’ll
never be a person who hates to walk, and I’ll always near fatigue
before your step slows, but still we seem to need ourselves in
these incongruent forms. A blue bowl shows off yellow apples,
unripe greengage plums, the main intersection of town.
Please save me from cabbage roses with other versions of
domestic bliss. No longer will we decide where to stay based
on chances to participate in pastoral tableaux. Down the street
walnut trees grow and their ink stains the sidewalks with
an imprecise course of hopscotch. I’d hoped for artifacts but
found instead this tournament. We’ll walk in the squares,
speak in shorthand, make rain with how much time we take.

There’s imprecision, something skew’d amidst the tangibles—

that “blue bowl” showing off “the main intersection of town. The constantly shifting point of view keeps “one” safe against the terrible longueurs and ennuis of the dream-recitatif, which is mark’d less by oddball juxtapose than by relentlessness of pov.

Anderson’s “Hazard”—I note, without sussing the rules of engagement—apparently welcomes th’aleatory aboard Overboard. Twenty poems of twenty lines, with lines (partially, changedly) repeated throughout. Chance City Breakdown. A whole

manuscript in this homeboy’s drawer’s titled Rue Hazard—as in Chance Street, as in a regretful sorry reluctance to engage, a lament for fortune. There is more to say, there is constantly more to say. Anderson: “I consider and approach you / with an eye to appraisal, then panic when you flop the last three cards at once.”

~

An electronic peep in th’early morning notify’d me that Jackson Mac Low is dead. Rushing in to temper the loss: memories of reading—circa 1971—“Stanzas for Iris Lezak” pieces in Sumac, and, later—early ’nineties—of performing, under Don Byrd’s tutelage, voiced simultaneities for group brouhahas out of Representative Works: 1938-1985. “The aleatory surge settles out broad, wide waters dappled with light.” Or I think of Kurt “The basis of poetry is not the word but the letter” Schwitters—and something I found in Hans Richter’s book Dada: Art and Anti-Art, and used for epigraph in Rubbing Torsos:

There is no such thing as chance. A door may happen to fall shut, but this is not by chance. It is a conscious experience of the door, the door, the door, the door.

On 4 March 1990, in Buffalo, New York, Jackson Mac Low wrote “intuitively and spontaneously”:

Universal ligature incessant jam
nature janissary beeper         rental close bind
space vanity                itself Murgatroyd
champion pencil trigonometry

Out of Twenties. “Edited protracted improvisation,” is how Mac Low term’d it, “accurate, though awkward.” Awkward. Curious. Accuracy. Th’only requirement of perspective is a fix’d point of view.

~

To work.

The Line

~

Early sun-down and a snarly black westwards, high wind. I hoof it to the Lumina and arrive home to a street without light. Power outage. G. and J. grinning around a candle-stuck table, trying to find workable flashlights, and batteries.

Th’impulse dying out. The roar of the behoover hushing. Toodaloo a French leftover: toute à l’heure. Said in the stray-cat prose of th’American idiom: “Meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader,

for the problem of Twenty-first Century poetry is the problem of the poetic line.” Meaning th’end sweep of avoidance represent’d by the New Sentence is just that: side out and rotate. I mean to make a dint by trying the feasibles.

A misfit morning of identical mis-distinctions: a notation is a sufficient summation. Careening nigh into sister of old friend: the pizzazz and refulgence of unfetter’d delight. McLuhan:

“For the low definition imagery of the tactile mode compels the viewer into an active participant role.” Everywhere th’insistence on man’s mental “activity” whilst meanwhile he grows a tummy as big as a tub through physical sloth.

History of increasing number of fragments. The alphabet’s singularity is in its fragmenting speech into utterable repeatable units. Think of Eadweard Muybridge’s “chronophotographic work at Leland Stanford’s farms in 1872”

“a series of thirty cameras at twelve-inch intervals, releasing their shutter electromagnetically as soon as the moving object passed before the plate . . . Each picture showed the object in an isolated phase as arrested by each camera.”

So “X” arrests a phonetic noise, and is a recombinant. Piecework. The alphabet a technology akin to th’assembly line. The alphabet making capitalism—the endless shuffling of goods as a way of managing desire—possible.

Separation and reduction of functions. McLuhan points to a passage in King Lear as “a kind of medieval sermon-exemplum . . . of the new Renaissance life of action.” “Shakespeare explains minutely that the very

principle of action is the splitting up of social operations and of the private sense life into specialized segments.” Edgar trying to convince the blind’d Gloucester that they stand at th’edge of a cliff (IV,vi)—

note the layering and segmentation of the abyss itself, a way to “fix the gaze,” a thing endless in its possibility and reach:

Come on, sir; here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers sampire—dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumb’red idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

So the alphabet—meaningless sign attach’d to meaningless sound. A technology of low tactility. Though sign-semantic not entirely absents itself in the human universe. Visual

poetry’s predicated on pushing up those daisies. Think of Ron Padgett’s “the 2 f’s / in giraffe / are like / 2 / giraffes / running through / the word giraffe.” It hoicks the rarely-hoick’d heart.

~

To work.

Compliance in Honey

~

Them that tarries is lost. Scrambling after a bung’d-up weekend (chores, nonsense, chores) to adequate my preponderables (if you know what I mean). Ninety per cent. of what I “say” is hooey, the rest of it is pure honey. I loves to carry on thus. Whence in my youth I sought excellence and the fearsome strictures of “truth,” solitary and embastion’d. Now: scripture, the compliant rigmarole of hardy vocables crying “Eheu! Eheu!” in stirring wind. Tongue to lenses for clarity kind of stuff.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin, 2000)

For my ongoing Melville investigation:

In his sea chest, Chase found an assortment of useful items: a jackknife, a whetstone, three small fish books, a cake of soap, a suit of clothes, a pencil, and ten sheets of paper. As first mate, Chase had been responsible for keeping the Essex’s log, and using the pencil and paper he now attempted to start “a sort of sea journal”—despite the horrendous conditions. “It was with much difficulty . . . that I could keep any sort of record,” Chase remembered, “owing to the incessant rocking and unsteadiness of the boat and the continual dashing of spray of the sea over us.”

Sort of like some days here at th’Hotel. The regular bust-up and douse of neuron-wavelets misting the scope. Not too different.

Bonus: a daily pass / permis de circulation quotidian stamp’d PAID AUG 16 2001 to the Red Bay National Historic Site / Lieu historique national de Red Bay, a Canadian park. I love the odd bookmark.

~

La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century, by Hilary Spurling (Harper Collins, 2001)

Nearly banging into a too ubiquitous blurbese (maybe I do it anyhow), I want to say: “Richard Holmes’s preferred biographer,” though where that comes up--aucune idée. Spurling’s written a book about one of Frank O’Hara’s faves, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and is, I think, at work on a second volume about Matisse. Spurling’s “little history” of con artist and society dame Thérèse Humbert:

Tears, helplessness, a poignant projection of herself as victim were always her trump cards. “I am pursued by villains [Ze suis poursuivi par les mécants],” had been her habitual refrain as a wide-eyed girl in Toulouse, trying out the lisp that nobody could resist.

~

The Outermost Dream: Literary Sketches, by William Maxwell (Graywolf, 1997)

Who writes about, among others, the Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), diarist and curate to a Richard Lister Venables, whom I know “of” only through reading Ronald Johnson. One listless library morning I did go to fetch the diary and determine what the fuss’s about—I found them wan and wanting. Though this—“This dream within a dream [of Mr. Venables doing battle with the Holy Ghost] excited me to such a state of fury that in the outer dream I determined to murder Mr. Venables. Accordingly I lay in wait for him with a pickaxe on the Vicarage lawn at Clyro, hewed an immense and hideous hole through his head, and kicked his face till it was so horribly mutilated, crushed and disfigured as to be past recognition.” Ah, the burdens of religious faith . . .

~

And somewhere along the way of the Boston journey: a copy of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, translated with an introduction by Jackson Mathews (Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1973, 1989).

Teste in chains.
           I know so many things, surmise so many connections, that I no longer talk. Nor even think, knowing already as the idea dawns that a whole system is coming into play, that enormous labor is required, that I shall not go as far as I know I ought to go.

Recurrent and oft-thwart’d obsession: study Valéry. One of the writers I’m convinced I will wonder why I wait’d so long before reading thoroughly.

~

Rainy-weight’d morning, slopping by foot several blocks after nudging the Lumina into a sardine-sized space. After dropping the boy G. at’s safety post. No umbrellas in that drawer. No umbrellas in that drawer. No umbrellas . . . New habit: falling asleep with the lights burning. The Gutenberg Galaxy sprawl’d out in the muss of blankets. Can “one” (a Westerner “one”) remark any difference between an eighteenth century hokku and a twelfth century tanka?

Just one mosquito raises a fuss all day near my pillow

Calls of a clapper rail far into the night—moss-grown gate closed to all but the moon

~

To work.

Plumb'd

~

A “no possum, no sop, no taters” kind of morning. Waiting for the plumber is a sap in tatters.

~

Thinking how I’d like to hire a tattoo artist to print all of “For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson” on my body:

no there is no precedent of history no history nobody came before
nobody will ever come before and nobody ever was that man

you will not die not knowing this is true this year

~

Minimalism’s thin cabbagey soup. Olfactory feints. Faint obfuscatory.

~

With G. Saturday to see The Gondoliers. Gilbert and Sullivan.

~

After ye saw thymage of our lady that held a cote & a shirte / & said this cote & this shirt haue kept the fro fallyng in to the pytte / for thou hast defouled my hous & mocked it / That is to saye that ye haue ben in the chirch in gretter loue of another / than of hym / They were the folisshe regardes & the folisshe plaisires yt ye toke hym / for whom ye emprised & toke the Iourneye: & also the vois said to you ye haue fouled & mocked his haus yt is his chirch.

So goeth the fourteenth century knight Geoffroy de la Tour Landry 1483. Print’d by Caxton (“the booke / whiche the knyght of the Toure made to the enseygnement and techyng of his doughters translated oute of Frenssh in to our maternall Englysshe tongue by me William Caxton / whiche book was ended & fynysshed the fyrst day of Iuyn / the yere of oure lord MCCCClxxxiij And enprynted at westmynstre the last day of Ianyuer the fyrst yere of the regne of kynge Rychard the thyrd.”)

All in th’heydays of floppy orthography. The malleable word. And Caxton, after that spate of translating, a fine June morn, what did he do? Hike to the city’s edge? Go toss down a few and gab? Th’effable past.

~

McLuhan uses Shakespeare’s (King Lear) line about “the most precious square of sense” to claim “the need for a ratio and interplay among the senses as the very constitution of rationality.” The breaking of which square meaning “the isolation of one sense from another by separate-intensities with the ensuing irrationally and clash among wits and persons and functions.” Seeing the poem versus hearing the poem. Which’s appear’d ever the constant struggle—aurality and speech hastening in to revivify the moribund verse (see Beats, Olson’s “breath,” &c.) against the backdrop of thudding ’fifties onus-mongers (the New Critical writ). Do the language boys next nudge “one” into “I HATE SPEECH” out of anything more than a cyclical slackening manifest? They don’t. As if “with seeing the line grows thick” or “with hearing is no clear demarcation”—the work of ages in the balance.

~

Inchoate as a weasel.

~

To lunch.

Prologue

~

What does Marshall McLuhan mean here?

Joyce . . . accepted the grotesque as a mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field. Such, indeed, is symbolism by definition—a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order.

If parataxis indicates a placement “side by side,” without coordinating or subordinating connectives—whence the ratio?

~

I bicycle home, jump in the Lumina, scoop up G. and lumber him off to tap. I end up bibliothèqu’ing it, drooping my long physiognomy Dali-style over a batter’d copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, a book I’ve tuck’d into (like a meal) before. Intent now to go through it—though I’m apparently in that bimonthly err phase of beginning a new book every two pauses or so. And McLuhan cannily suggests in a note, after indicating that the book is done up in “a mosaic or field approach” because “a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history,” that: “the reader may find the end of the book, “The Galaxy Reconfigured,” the best prologue.” So that’s where I begin.

~

I like the mosaic of Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, R. Buckminster Fuller, Guy Davenport. Others slip in and out to mess it up, kaleidoscopically. Wyndham Lewis in Toronto. Robert Lax of Olean, New York and Thomas Merton of Monk’s Pond. Jonathan Williams. Amazed by how long some connects connect. Or how early.

~

I patch together broken lines made up under a broken moon. Dog walk, fecal gobs claw’d into a see-through bag. Ratio: dog and I under a broken moon. Lines about chicken paprikash, or a Danish girl in Florence, circa 1975, feast of St. John’s Head-on-a-Platter. The Duomo, Campanile, and Baptistry: the several ratios.

~

McLuhan’s argument goes thus. Blake:

If Perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary.

McLuhan:

Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies.

What is desire is interplay, tactility, synaesthesia: to give one’s own eye to the boob tube is to see everything as if it exist’d to be televised. Blake: “they became what they beheld.” McLuhan claims Ruskin’s writing on the Gothic grotesque offers “the best way of ending the regime of Renaissance perspective and single vision or realism” and that Ruskin’s statement of the matter wins him “the serious interest of Rimbaud and Proust”:

A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.

Funny how the sources of that “contemporary” notion of “empowering” the reader / beholder goes back and back. Though constantly reintroduced as new model. “Renovate, not innovate.” “Look to the grandees of the old roosts.” I like the Ruskin of th’illumination:

I am striving to introduce Gothic architecture into daily domestic use; and to revive the art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting in books, or on vellum, which has ridiculously been confused with it; but of making writing, simple writing, beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of perfect colour, blue, purple, scarlet, white, and gold, and in that chord of colour, permitting the continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque imagination . . .

McLuhan:

The technique of vision in the Illuminations or “painted slides” (as Rimbaud called them, in English, on his title page) is exactly as Ruskin delineates the grotesque.

What I think of is Robert Grenier’s color’d felt pen scrawls, though, too, of the half-toned screens of words in things like Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic—that “witty jazz,” and simultaneity of sense-event. Think, too, of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes :
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles . . .

~

McLuhan:

Just before revolutions the image of the immediate past is stark and firm, perhaps because it is the only area of sense interplay free from obsessional identification with new technological form.

Written circa 1962. I stop to look endlessly at that. My sense is that th’immediate past is no longer ever “stark and firm.” And is no longer ever likely to be. Perpetual technological revolution. Change is constant, all-enticing and never innocent—it is the bass note and under-hum, now, incorrigibly. And the ga-ga way “one” encourages that, welcomes that is severance song enough to wallop my hermit-yearning, and send me skedaddle. Post-avant! By Gott! A gazillion component’d future of fragment’d sense-strangulation and lockdown that one’s being blown ass-backwards to land on the ash-heap of, a machine’d world of box’d motility and canned perception, and one wants to hurry that along? By some dint of naming (and so seeking) a Progress? Criminy, man. Call me pre-avant. There’s a past, undeniable and under-investigated, out there, waiting.

~

fak yea. i woll cull yea.
fak yea. i woll cull yea.

Says Alan Sondheim.

~

Contrails lit red
Above a cloud color’d “slumber-blue.”
Knife wounds
Whitening up to scars.
A tiny crosshatch of starlings
Black up the power line,twee-ing
Contestedly.

~

To work.

Get a Line, Get a Pole

~

Goofing around with an excellent book, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, compiled, translated, and with an introduction by Makoto Ueda (Stanford University Press, 1991).

In Mino Province I went to see fishermen manipulating a number of cormorants in the Nagara River.

Basho Roman: omoshirote | yagate | kanashiki | ubune | kana

Basho Homophonicus: Th’uomo, she wrote, yacht-y, can dashiki Ubu, can’t he?

Ueda the Literalist: exciting | presently | sad | cormorant-boat | kana

A Leaf: Every syllable here’s done a million Noh plays, and every Japanese poet knows it.

A Stone: The cormorants fly off the boat and return, fly off the boat and return.

A Wave: Virginia Woolf! Virginia Woolf!

A Cloud: The cormorant dives for and swallows a fish, and tosses it into a bucket.

Another Cloud: The cormorant swallows a fish and tosses it up into a bucket.

A Cormorant: Ralph! Ralph!

Ueda Poeticus:

so exciting
and, after a while, so sad—
cormorant fishing

A Poet:

Torque it over,
Culture pivot dud. Is what says Bob,
Cormorant fishing.

Another Poet:

Incroyable! Brillat-Savarin! What a craw!
It’s so meaningless to eat
After cormorant fishing.

~

Nah.

~

To work.

Aimless, Wild

~

Behind I am in noting the scoop’d up mark’d downs of the Boston used book market, and elsewhere, and other print’d matters rec’d.

~

Bought (Harvard Book Store):

He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, by Caroline Knox (Verse Press, 2004)

Freddy as Sweeney

A man holding egad a bumbershoot
walks along a boundary, the Imaginot Line.
Gentlemen, a bunfight this ack emma at the beanery.
This is Friederichsschmerz, O Flintstone
(head in hands, missing at the Somme).

I say out loud the facts I know
about T. S. Eliot as I do every year
to the class, I mean the redoubtable
hero Sweeney. Freddy recommends
this etymology to Dr. Puffkin, who resides
at Puffkin-le-Willowes, with his wife of a thousand years.

I mention’d He Paves . . . before. I think Caroline Knox writes like an idiot savant. Something fearless and preternatural in the word-sling, no stops or filters, child-like. Though she’s obviously read her history, and widely.

~

Writing Is an Aid to Memory, by Lyn Hejinian (Sun & Moon, 1996)

With Adolf Wölfli cover!

again in time I come to think maybe
                   nostalgia is unworldly bating
               many an error of mercy of the moment
                               the long wanderings of logic over the
                               thinker
         durations linger in different places
         durations whose power as much as who love
                   not of one
afraid about the smoke of jokes
             I but find-out
           dollar color the aunts would grass
         cloudless electricity even dishes anything
. . .

I find some of Writing . . . a little shopworn—pretense ages faster than anything else—and some of it heart-pliable still, and some of it—“dollar color the aunts would grass”—luxuriantly Stein’d. The “Preface” is succinct, and essential: “I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me. Memory cannot, though the future return, and proffer raw confusions.”

~

Literature and the Gods, by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks (Knopf, 2001)

“As Proust would one day write to Reynaldo Hahn, it is not true that in Mallarmé images disappear. No, they are “still images of things, since we would never be able to imagine anything else, only that they are reflected, as it were, in a smooth dark mirror of black marble.” And that “black marble” is the mind. In Mallarmé the material of poetry is brought back, with unprecedented and as yet unrepeated determination, to mental experience. Shut away in an invisible templum, the word evokes, one after another, simulacra, mutations, events, all of which issue and disperse in the sealed chamber of the mind, where the primordial crucible burns.”

~

A ratty wind-slapped morn. Sleet clinging to the western verticals, slapped up there overnight. Bussed in. Crows aimless and buffet’d in the grey skies, wings suddenly lacking coordination, veer and drop. Crossing to the Diag a stopped SUV starts up, the short-hair behind the wheel oblivious, and nearly plows into me. I jump, thump the fenders, “Fuck you.” Wild man in a headband, bulk’d up by a down vest. He travels, snickering, no doubt. Finish’d the Kleinzahler. Weakest piece one call’d “Eros & Poetry”—the kind of cross-cultural pastiche that Eliot Weinberger does so terrifically. The title piece—about Kleinzahler’s gay, fist-fighting, gambling, suicidal brother—a knockout. Edging into Joel Porte’s Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed with the distinct sense that I got too many tire irons in the fire. G. is joining me here after a half-day of school.

~

To work.