Tilt the Osmosis

~

My osmotic dependencies in full tilt tonight, pulling airs down out of the Zeitgeist. Too long spent looking at pictures of the Amalfi coast, or preparing a eucalyptus plaster for the boy’s

chest, who is suffering a spring cold. So I drum up the stories of my days, making a big thing of th’usual slump and derision that passes for time. Neighbor kids go rocketing a soccer ball around, punctuating the game

with grunts. One girl’s occasional yelp. Pawing like I do the docile backs of books, or letting them fall open (meaning of a leaf, decaying, lodg’d in a mushroom) I swerve into wonderment. Stella reporting how de Kooning claim’d “Flesh was the reason

why oil painting was invented.” Taking “down” a big book of Cage’s mesostics to stare into the deepest heart of tHeatre or excepT or gAmbit . . . Disfiguration makes reading susceptible to chance cohesions, bird entrails, tea

leaves, the way the string falls. Pound: “Knowledge is NOT culture. The domain of culture begins when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book.’ The Pound who translates Remy de Gourmont’s thievings

of Jean Henri Fabre’s (and others) entomological (and ornithological) observations with Poundian bluff and gusto: “The salacity of certain birds is well known, and one does not see that the absence of an exterior

penis diminishes their ardour, or attenuates the pleasure which they find in these succinct contacts.” Only (says Donald Davie): in French succinct means “brief” or “meagre.” O la. What I recall is

K. McC. one summer day in the ’seventies, repeating—“‘Yesterday I found a piece of wood.’ Isn’t that a terrific line? ‘Yesterday I found a piece of wood.’” And it is. Denton Welch sees a “black and glistening” coffin

carry’d on a pole by “chanting coolies”—and is reminded of “blood-pudding.” A.’s clothes that summer carry’d a permanent scent of dry’d sweat and vodka. Wittgenstein: “A good simile refreshes the intellect.”

~

Bernard Berenson: religious fervor, and th’ability to “communicate” awe without “representing” it.

~

The holy redbud blooming. One or two lilacs plant’d up close to house-warmth getting bud-blushes of color. Plethora

of bird-song in the tree-reaches. Azalias out. Is it in th’Hudson River towns one hears “When the serviceberry blooms, the striped bass run . . .”?

Maple leaves broadening, half-sized or bigger. Biking in, I wheel’d around a corner and got caught amidst a sparrow love-

chase: the following bird (presumably the male) hit the spokes of my front wheel and dropped, stunned.

And resumed. What is lust but everyday impossible avoidance? So endeth the book of April.

~

To work.

~

Fwee

~

Received:

Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso (Subpress, 2004)

Selections—of wildly varying “heft,” ranging from a single less-than-one-page poem to a fifteen-poem chunk occupying some twenty-seven pages—of poetry by B.J. Atwood-Fukuda, Jim Behrle, Carson Cistulli, Chris O. Cook, Del Ray Cross, Katie Degentesh, Tonya Foster, Alan Gilbert, Greta Goetz, Johannes Göransson, Tim Griffin, Cole Heinowitz, Jennifer Knox, Tanya Larkin, Amy Lingafelter, Jeni Olin, Michael Savitz, and Max Winter.

Each of the editors—in “separate, but equal” introductions to the volume—appears to recognize (or lament, it’s hard to say whether a feisty Realpolitik or a burgeoning nostalgia drives the attitude) what the result of the “first book” can be. Davis sees how the “government of poetryland . . . neutralize[s]” such upstarts as are here represent’d, how—“It brings them into the fold. It folds them into the batter. It batters them into unsolicited submission.” (Partly, of course, tongue in cheek, but still . . .) And Manguso rather wistfully admits that those in th’anthology are “all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books” and—upping the ante—are “not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”

Which makes one wonder, why the anthology at all? Which appears—through title and subtitle, and through the note that one of the contributors (Jennifer Knox) has (in interim between selection and printing) had a manuscript accept’d for publication by the lively Soft Skull Press—despite such misgivings, ready and willing to act as advocate for first books by any and all of the poets represent’d. Isn’t it better to maintain that illusory freedom, to keep clutch’d in one’s own hand all possibility, to write out all desire beholden’d to no publick known? Maybe it is. We do not do it. None of us.

Skimming thus uneasily through Free Radicals, with thoughts of glut and rush, the awful American hurry to become, I’m on the lookout for something essential, a proclivity and snare, something to singe and delight, probably high-verve, showy without fatuity, something without the least smidgen of the dutiful about it. Which sends a lot of these poems packing. Unfairly, no doubt about it. My saintly patience and perseverance, my goodwill and upright industry, t’hell with that. I want something to—how you say?—knock my socks out of the ballpark!

Which is what Jeni Olin’s poems do. And I’m thinking I’d rather’ve had a whole book of Jeni Olin poems, the Jeni Olin who can loop through a thirteen-line sentence that manages to reference “panties,” “fuchsia,” “pineal sunbeams,” “blackheads,” “deodorant cakes,” “foam core bird paintings” and “the klieg-lit kitchen” before hauling itself up short with a three-word rejoinder: “Wrist-slitting stuff.” Her pacing is a marvel. Much of it is relentless with “only” humor toss’d in to slow “one” down. That is, during the howl’d laughter some additional jokes go by so’s the whole thing doesn’t seem quite so clotted, and, on second reading, there they are, fresh. There’s a kind of unhygienic absolute fearlessness here that is only partly “felt out” as “content”—it goes like this (“Warner Bros. Newest Thriller Valentine”):

“Anything I do will be an abuse of somebody’s aesthetics.
I index moccasins on the web.
I used to translate Xenophon during the typhoons
But now I live in ‘far-off’ Chelsea where my god forsakes me
Several times a day. They say social anxiety can hurt careers
Though mostly I am suffering from intestinal complaint, ghetto-bred
Inertia. ‘From the dark bastions of the UN, a sick flush.’
I read it in the papers, the New York Times.
I fortify myself, douse my sushi with ‘liquid aminos’ spray,
Fly Lufthansa.”

Continual undercutting of the “serious” as category. Done by juxtaposing, done by enjambing and relenting. “Jeni Olin’s the one in charge of time here, ask her.” She’s also entirely capable of breathtaking metaphorical jumps (and freefalls). See “affections return tenacious / & slow like spanked kids or continental drift / All this & she is deaf.” See “I stand stalwart as lung-colored support hose / in a French sex & deather for readers under twelve . . .” See “Wherever you go there you are like Patti Smith’s shoulders / placed in this cold century with a virility that lacks self-esteem . . .” See “I am not a mature audience, possess the sexual mores / Of estrous chinchillas in the remote & humorless / Hinterlands of Jersey City . . .”

The poem (“Warner Bros.”) finishes like this—

“Skit night at Christine’s & everything seemed a waitress
In the throes of athletic lovemaking or centennial
Valkyrie slumbers with you, indecently pink
& tan like swatches of rarified turkey burger
& me shrinking beside you & you Nivea-slick skin
‘Really & truly I don’t care what you do with me.’
So I put on my little Lederhosen & started to walk.”

Sources? “It’s a New York thing.” Frank O’Hara, the Berrigans père et fils, James Schuyler. Derivative? Energy-clad invention cresting to such heights ceases to call out to the devils of derivation.

Who is Jeni Olin? (Some alchemickal presort in my brainpan spits out “Olatunji” in reply. Ekabo! Akwaaba!) According to the short biographical note in Free Radicals, she is “currently studying to be a nurse at NYU.” Which squib reeks of a Jeff Clark APR note regarding ex- or current status as “FBI agent” or some such nonesuch. Though, considering the academickal flocking of poets, one wonders if it mightn’t be a healthier move . . .

~

Fat Cheetah, the neighbor’s low-slung orange tiger is out hustling vittles when Charms and I step out into the canine night. So C. goes into her whimper-bob shuffle, inconsolable and adamant à la fois to give the fat boy the get-go. The heave-ho. “To run off the cat, that was the first heave.” I jabber a steady string of croon-idiocy—“You don’t want that, girl, that’s just a fat cat . . .”—and keep her moving, picturing fat cigar’d and bowler’d bosses of the anti-capitalist thirties in workers’ rag cartoonery.

~

First books, two things: one is how Tony Tost at “The Unquiet Grave” recently wonder’d aloud what’s going to happen to all the poets publishing first and second books in the (I want to say) “zillions” of first and second book prizes acrawl over the land today. Says Tost, what about eighth book prizes, or eighteenth? The other thing I think of is how Steve Evans puts it in the April 12, 2004 Publishers Weekly, in an interesting article by Michael Scharf titled “What Does It Cost to Do Poetry?” Evans says: “One book can mean a completely middle-class existence and a mortgage if it’s converted right.” And later, talking about the “meaning” of a book in the academic job market: “What schools want is for someone to have vouched for the value of your work. A dean, precisely, does not want to read your book of poetry before hiring you. A successfully valued book doesn’t need to be read by anybody. It’s a situation that leads to highly predictable results . . .” To which Scharf adds “as 1,500 new poets a year internalize what is expected of them.”

~

To work.

~

Clumsily

~

Raw notes. Reading Working Space: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1983-84, by Frank Stella (Harvard University Press, 1986).

Stella: “. . .the aim of art is to create space—space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live . . . the current prospects for abstraction seem terribly narrowed; its sense of space appears shallow and constricted.”

The temptation in reading art criticism is always to apply it, howsoever clumsily, to poetry. A tenuous ploy, of limit’d use. Part, however, of the aim of poetry is to “make time behave.” It is largely what the line is “for.”

Stella: “After 1500 the artist became critical of his relationship to the surfaces of architecture and sought to modify it, either by separation, making more use of individual portable panels and canvases, or by accommodation, creating a painted space that interacted in some meaningful, though often competitive, way with the structure.”

Poetry sorting itself out from the demands of music—is that one version of history? Always toward “the real language of men” it our “low and rustic life” or howsoever Wordsworth puts it. “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” With musicality diminish’d, inevitably slackening—so the struggle to pull out new stops, new musicks.

~

Note to myself: “Raw notes took seriously (key’d versus scrawl’d by my “sad hand of the diminish’d muscular wit”) cake up the simplistic and frost it with the ponderous. ’Twere better I’d eke out a summary from bird-scratch and -lime.”

~

Final little patch of Zukofsky. Cox ends with a passage from Bottom: On Shakespeare that, he says, comments on “from thence / sorrow were ever raz’d” (Pericles) which Zukofsky quotes at the tail-end of “A”-19. I found myself reading it over and over, with only the tiniest red mites of comprehension running up my stony visage. As such, I’ll record it here:

“The syllables of Pericles are brought together like notes. And if that intellective portion of mind that is music can make poetry and prose interchangeable, because there is a note always to come back to a second time—sung to the scale the ‘subjects’ of speech are so few and words only ring changes one on another, the differences perceived by their fictions are so slight music makes them few.”

Music is intellective due to memory?—no music without return, repetition? Saussurean echoes in words that “ring changes one on another,” but somehow I doubt it’s “intend’d.” Note to myself. Context. Check Texas Bottom, first volume, page 432.

~

Noted noctambulating: A calm’d wind, a coldening air, a Joyce-tempo’d catalog, a word’d horseshit unrecited, a difference unsummon’d, an unreckon’d recognition: Poetry elbows out room for its timekeeping—and makes a decorable (and undecorous) space for its saying. Poetry’s task is synthetic—thus so it is nothing to nobody, it carries itself aloft on the hot air of its consuming itself. No, poetry’s job is farming the other arts of the best talents, the bonus babes. Poetry’s scouts thieve music of tempo, architecture of spatial fixities, history of th’uncanny, science of its lack of compunction, philosophy of its “testy wrath,” dance of its fade and its way of muscling up to the bar to demand one “get a leg up.” Poetry is a doozy. (A “mash” form: Eleonora Duse, “a real daisy, a perfect doll,” a car built circa by Fred and August Duesenberg.) “Nobody know what poetry is, or whey it come fum.”

~

Stella on Leonardo’s rôle in breaking painting free of architecture (first heave in making “working space”): “the Mona Lisa comes in a tidy package, a marvelous, manageable rectangle. How wonderful it would be to see it in the Uffizi, where it . . . would be a new dawn, a glass house rising above the jagged Levittown of gold altar pieces . . . its simple rectilinearity would rest our eyes after their arduous tour around the crazy edges of early Italian painting.”

And: “the spatial experience of a painting should not seem to end at the framing edges or be boxed in by the picture plane. The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane is the burden that modern painting was born with.”

Two thoughts: “dissolving its own perimeter” would seem akin to “making language transparent”—materiality be damn’d. It seems odd to think of wrestling painting out of a rôle as architectural sidekick only to look to deny that a painting is a thing (generally box’d) make with paint.

~

Dumb adage: Thinking too hard = hardly thinking. Long minutes here with the most minuscule disjunctive rhumba going down in my cortex, a sort of semi-hemi-demi-version of muscular thought. I could lift it with a pin. Skewer it to a board. There now—barely moving.

~

Perfect “state”
For “beginning”
My “chores.”

~

Pastoral Deft

~

Received:

Pastorelles, by John Taggart (Flood Editions, 2004)

Another unbelievably well-design’d volume out of Flood Editions. The cover reproduces, in twenty tiny rectangles—all horizontals—sixteen rather pastoral photographs by Jennifer Taggart along with four solid color’d “blanks.” Photographs of tree trunks, rivers and bridges, huge circular machine’d hay bales, winter ice, old stone buildings, and—grace note of color—speckled orange daylilies, one close up, and one group of three held deftly in an outstretch’d hand. Fifteen number’d “pastorelles” thread through the selection—the other immediately noticeable motif is a number of pieces with starting points identifying writers, musicians, pre-Socratics (Marianne Moore’s “Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” “William Bronk,” “Henry David Thoreau / Sonny Rollins,” Georg Trackl, “Lorine Niedecker,” Thales the Milesian, Parmenides, “Irenaeus / Bishop of Lyon,” “Charles Wesley,” rhythm and blues singer James Carr, et al.) Bizarrely enough, one poem is apparently split in two: “Ideas for a Movie” begins page 84 and proceeds through seven sections, is interrupt’d by four poems (some with numerous sections) and “Ideas for a Movie Cont.” begins with section eight, page 99.

That pause and reprise mimics to a degree one aspect of Taggart’s musical approach. He probably uses repetition (with variation) more than any other contemporary American I can name. (Lisa Jarnot may come close.) As Taggart writes in “The Compulsion to Repeat”:

Gradually how gradually
one comes to understand the poets
as gradually as
the compulsion of one’s own compulsion the compulsion to repeat . . .”

A pulse, a blood, a tempo, a weave—the repetitive act seems to function both as solid music and as a way to admit variance, the whole big mess and all its littler niggles into the fabric of the poem.

In “Pattern” one makes out Stein (and “charming” Tristan Tzara):

“With strips beginning with strips of what could be said
what could be said to be charming
William Morris said material is simply charming
the strips are strips of material of one color one white color
package arrives in the mail stimulation for your senses
that’s what the note said
William Morris didn’t say that
package containing the note and a white dress
a white dress to be cut into with pointed metal scissors
and to be torn slowly and with the greatest possible consideration . . .”

On inspection I see that the cover photographs and the “pastorelles” do intertwine in a kind of mutual illustrative dance—the close-shot tree trunks caught in “Pastorelle 6” by “each trunk each small trunk woven a woven fiber / of exposed veins / . . . / venous fiber bark / of the Tatarian honeysuckle”, or the fabulous daylily in “Pastorelle 2” caught by:

“Full / open red daylily

reminder that the object is a song
for which the troubadours commended themselves to a life between
risk of holding back
risk of not holding back and the death of desire
which is the death of song . . .”

The temptation is fierce to continue quoting lines and more of Taggart’s Pastorelles. The activity of typing the words and their repeating, changing relations fills them to the quick, plumps them (as one would a pillow), and makes tangible their quiddity. My old typesetter’s itch probably. I’ll settle for one final “pastorelle” that seems to twist off out of the dance a little, and perfectly so. It is the via negativa song—how one’s best work works by subtraction:

Pastorelle 8

Young woman
Amish
green dress black apron translucent white prayer bonnet
strings of her bonnet trailing in the air

rollerskating down the road

by herself alone in the air and light of an ungloomy Sunday afternoon
herself and her skating shadow

the painter said
beauty is what we add to things

and I
chainsawing in the woods above the road
say what could be added
what other than give this roaring machine a rest.

~

Night note: thuggish local breezes out, throwing elbows, hip-checking the new greenery, glancing limbs against limbs. Rub-music, wood on wood, cable wire on tree-trunk, odd vibratory songs, stutter-y paeans. Reminding me of hot summer’s end insect trills. Haunt’d by Peter Riley’s note in new long poem Alstonefield: how impossible it is to get—anywhere in England—out of range of the noise of traffic, that slub and throb undercurrent. When and where did I last flee it? Probably not in the Blue Ridge mountains near Charlottesville? Possibly in the thinly-populated upper peninsula of Michigan, summer of 1987 . . .

~

Noted, in John Taggart’s Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 1994), Taggart’s remarks (he’s talking about the 1979 long poem “Peace on Earth” and how a density made of recurrence, length, and “a very deliberate cadence” led therein to a seeming closing down of possibility—for community, conversation, vision, &c.):

“To keep the voice open so that its attack could continue to be light through prolonged recurrence, particles of a distinct vocabulary are fed into a space already defined by the poem’s original language. The new vocabulary is like a foreign language. Moving throughout these contiguous vocabularies, the cadence produces cross-rhythms within itself, and the voice is reopened.”

There’s something of Sir Philip Sidney’s “peasing each sillable of eache word by just proportion, according to the dignitie of the suject” here, and of Marianne Moore (the poem about the “Carlisle Indian Industrial School” where Moore taught, just out of Bryn Mawr, is placed first in the collection). A care that comes of choosing (Sidney again) “verse” (the line) as one’s “fittest raiment” and attending to it.

Taggart, in the same essay (“The Poem as a Woven Scarf”): “The model ought not to be the ecstatically still saint, but the moved dancer. The dancer is encouraged to move by the gaps between the notes of music. The gaps are larger than the moments needed for the articulation of words. The dancer can move freely in the openness of the gaps. If there is no room to move, if there cannot be free response to the call, then it is hopeless to expect conversation. The gesture (embrace) toward community suffocates; vision turns into dogmatic dictation.”

And so to the figure of the title: “I am drawn to the poem as a woven scarf with many openings through which light enters. It could be spread out, enlarged to a scarf of migrating birds in the sky. Yet however dense the weave and however enlarged the area, the poem must contain a perceptible pattern of openings, composed silences, within itself. The response it not itself composed, as in a church service. Its possibility is invited.”

~

To work.

~

Gavotte

~

A sodden Sunday. Drizzle and chill. After yesterday’s sun and flourish. G. and I “batching” it—J. off to Boston. G. busy with a report about Emma Watson / Hermione Granger. Violin recital yesterday: G. all focus and flurry doing Gosser’s “Gavotte” and me proudly videotaping.

Bird upswing: a few possible warblers beginning to cruise th’upper reaches of the hardwoods, minuscule and unidentifiable without the binoculars. (Ask’d after the Gilfillan Rivers & Birds in Shaman Drum yesterday: no go.) A minor explosion of white-throated sparrows in the last couple days, first out my window in the yew bush, then whilst walking the C-girl. And just now: two scrabbling around th’unraked front yard. Those fine striped helmets topping off th’usual drabbish sparrow bodies.

~

The complexity of Kenneth Cox’s response to Zukofsky in Collected Studies in the Use of English is probably largely due to the fact that what is publish’d therein draws together short (though not perfunctory) strands issue’d by Cox at various points. As a result (it’s the case with the Zukofsky) it’s hard to identify the time and occasion of th’original writings. Cox does say (in a short “Preface”) that “Five of the writers dealt with having died during the period these studies were drafted [meaning Zukofsky, Bunting, MacDiarmid, Pound, and Niedecker], the work of each [is both] surveyed as a whole [and] accounts for the extended attention accorded [it].” The Zukofsky lists sources as “Maps 5 1973 rev. Scripsi 1984” at the end, with “Agenda 1988” following a section called “Relations with Pound” mid-course.

Early (presumably) Cox writes (regarding one of Zukofsky’s statements for Poetry—it’s difficult to ascertain which): “His composition of an intended manifesto proved extremely difficult, unacceptable to the others [Reznikoff, Rakosi, Oppen] and unconvincing to outsiders. He turned it into a statement of this own about poetry chiefly of interest for his inability to say what he thought.” Equally rough is Cox when it comes to the poems: “Underneath the various effect produced at surface level . . . the persistent note . . . in general is earnest effort of intention.” And later: “What is lacking is afflatus, the breath of life that sends a thrill down the spine and gets engraved in the memory. Assiduous industry and cautious calculation do not replace creative energy, they point up its absence.”

Which are fine points finely put—and we could push them off on any number of our burgeoning contemporaries happily—they don’t, however, apply to Zukofsky. See “Perch Less,” pick’d nearly at random out of the Complete Short Poetry:

“Perch less, bird
Fly on the
Leaves
Be heard
Spatter drops
So nothing is
But light
So light so well
Foolishness is joy.

Butt age, boy
Have it not tell
You, swift but
Is nothing so
Light it drops—
From such high
Slurred notes
Bow-hir dares bird:
So light so well
Foolishness is joy.”

Sonically “sound,” and over-“flown” with its own foolish joy.

A couple paragraphs later, Cox calls Zukofsky on “social significance,” calling it “a feature in which Zukofsky’s work is rather deficient.” And continues: “Attempts at translation which deny the diversity of languages do not advance understanding. There is indeed a stratosphere where points of contact between them can be visited for special purposes but not for regular habitation. The level of self-deception looks suspiciously high. In narrowness of view and oddity of habit the work is individual to the point of idiosyncrasy.” Which seems rather excessively harsh even if one is not terribly fond of the Catullus work, thinking it something akin to a “necessary experiment.”

Cox is no ideologue or stickler for consistency howsoever rudely it speak. At the end of a careful and finely-wrought redaction of “A”-19 and its way of using Mallarmé, and contributing (I think that’s the word I want) to Mallarmé, Cox says: “A-19 is a complex simple difficult moving shrewd and very beautiful work, rigorously conceived and brilliantly executed. Its complexity consists in the single apprehension of multiple concepts, its difficulty in its range, speed and volatility. Difficulty does not lie in its source of allusions, most of which are cited in the text. The writing is nude: nothing is ornamental, unrelated to theme.”

Which, of course, is one dream of writing. (Others have others.)

~

Bought:

Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal, by George Gaylord Simpson (Time-Life Books, 1965, originally 1934)

“It is a popular belief among those who dwell in cities, those who consider themselves as sophisticates and exponents of the complex life, that the inhabitants of the Great Open Spaces are simple people whose lives are not patterned or hedged about by conventions. When harassed by modern life, we sometimes sigh for the supposed directness and simplicity of the pioneer or the savage state of society.

“. . .this legend is laughable.”

~

Received:

Seneca Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1 (Spring 2004), edited by Deborah Tall ($7, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456)

Poems and “lyric essays” by Ander Monson, A. Van Jordan, Reza Baraheni, Katie Ford, Keith Cartwright, Rabindranath Tagore (translated by Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore), Katherine Soniat, Brian Teare, Reginald Shepherd, Barbara Johnston, Wang Wei (translated by Eleanor Goodman), Susan Lewis, Sandra Simonds, Lisa Lubasch, Susan Zielinski, Jane Satterfield, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Christine Perrin, Courtney Dodson, Stephanie Walkenshaw, Henry Israeli, Kymberly Taylor, Anne Gorrick, Stephen Kuusisto, Hugh Steinberg, Wendy S. Walters, and Thomas Bates.

~

G. comes in with a sowbug, and announces he need a jar with a lid, he’s got another pet, he’s naming it “Nature Two.” I think I’m hearing tiny green buds of irony in the voice—and I’m thinking about “The Birth of Irony”—a story by . . . who, who would write that? Top-heavy allegorical falling over into caricature and nuttiness—Donald Barthelme? I don’t know. The point is G. had once a sowbug he called “Nature.” For a few days a few years back. Along about the time we parents start’d thinking that boy could use a pet.

~

Solid night out, the kind that hoists day up in a rucksack with ease and motility, fluid in its grace. Sudden, coveting. G. and I earlier to Detroit Metro to fetch J. After circling the cement-slab course “laid out by the insane,” the lit tunnels, the tunnels with giant fans in the “ceilings,” never being allow’d to stop at the “Arrivals” curbside, “unless actively loading or unloading,”—or is it “charging or discharging”?—tension and weaponry in the air, a feature of the new Bush terrorist-spry nation, circling about five circuits, getting progressively meaner looks, killing a half hour. We finally decide to park in the “short-term” parking structure (laid out by the criminally insane) and make out tortuous way to the terminal. Where J. is nowhere found. Where the monitors say Boston flight is long in. Where the baggage carousel is occupy’d by other luggagers. We finally locate J. outside—the curbside area we’d cruised in vain. She’d got herself lost in terminals laid out . . . We find the Lumina again only by following a beard’d man who looks friendly enough—if slightly tetch’d—and is completely draped in light.

~

Try startin’ the day with Average White Band lyrics stormin’ you head:

“I’m taking care of business, woman can’t you see
I got to make it for you, got to make it for me
. . .
Oh I, got work to do, I’ve got work, baby
Got work to do . . .”

~

Orator

~

“When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts--the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race! Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy'd or Flourish! The Primeval State of Man, was Wisdom, Art, and Science.”

—Wm. Blake, Jerusalem

~

Leafing out everywhere. Tiny crinkle’d green paws of maples. Spikes that thrust’d skyward stop’d and broadening, palliate. Mitigating aspirations, or cloaking them over? “I confined myself to palliatives, the principal of which was laudanum.”

And the mock-magnolias aflowering, or getting prepared to do so. Holding out wan tapers to tweak the meniscus of sun. Light-storms horizonward. “Thus the meniscus shed a few faint beams after midnight.” In a week the magnolia petals’ll go shabby, litter the ground with “the Objects of one’s own diminishing.” So think I. Out with my little moon of a dog.

~

E. M. Forster, in Abinger Harvest (via McLuhan) on Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576, “Having cast his own horoscope and having predicted that he would live to the age of seventy-five, Cardano committed suicide . . .”), a man who, among other things, got himself in trouble with th’Inquisitional authority for casting, too, th’horoscope of Jesus Christ, and the new-fangled printing press: “The printing press, then only a century old, had been mistaken for an engine of immortality, and men hastened to commit to it deeds and passions for the benefit of future ages.”

Which is exactly the place of our new particular “engines” of light and byte? Frantic’ly we scrawl our names over and over. Diaphanous stone tablet of the screen. Spenser:

“One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde and made my paynes his prey.
Vayne man, sayd she, that does in vaine assay
A mortall thing so to immortalize . . .”

~

Alarming gaps in my literacy. Milton. Spenser. Or only barely scorch’d with a Bic: Blake. An old notebook says I was delving into naked Wm. last in the year 2000, a millennial fundament unsprung I suppose. (I suppose. I don’t “know” what I am “saying.”) Blake says: “Exuberance is Beauty,” and, of something, “Writ helter skelter like a hog upon a rope.”

Oddly enough, the notebook also uncovers a Coleridgean plaint I’m sure I’d intend’d to use as epigraph for Breeze: Here, belately, it is. (Write it in your copies. You do have copies, don’t you?)—

“Is the power extinct? No! No! As in a still Summer Noon, when the lulled Air at irregular intervals wakes up with a startled Hush-st, that seems to re-demand the silence which it breaks, or heaves a long profound Sigh in its Sleep, and an Aeolian Harp has been left in the chink of the not quite shut Casement—even so—how often!—scarce a week of my Life shuffles by, that does not at some moment feel the spur of the old genial impulse—even so do there fall on my inward Ear swells, and broken snatches of sweet Melody, reminding me that I still have within me which is both Harp and Breeze.”

~

Vale, camaradoes. And no more old notebooks.

~

Grit in Crop

~

Enjoying leafing through Gael Turnbull’s A Gathering of Poems 1950-1980 (Anvil Press, 1983). Got somebody to pull in out of storage (where the books are shelved by size) for me. I don’t think anybody check’d it out before. Look how fine and precise Turnbull is!

A Reflecting Telescope

Grit in a bird’s crop
(clenched, a sort of heart)
nourishes—and sand
(cliffs ground by breakers)
caresses wood (flowering
in undulations of grain)—
and diatoms of abrasive
(rotated under pressure)
hones glass
into a parabolic mirror
wherein spicules of light
may be coaxed from the dark
and resolved by an objective
into a moraine of stars,
each granule: a sun.

Th’interplay here betwixt grind and earth and abrasion and pressure—a rather “stationary” motion of sorts (“rotated”) underpins nearly every line. Against it, a kind of light (or flight) and clarity, an upwardness. Centripetal forces balanced against centrifugal. The pivot point’s the short line “hones glass”—whereat the vision swings heavenward (only to return to earth via “moraine” and “granule”). Note the prevalence of gr (and cr) sounds—“grit” back to “granule.” Undeniably tight comme poème, not an ounce of flab. And spicules is a discovery. Descending out of the Latin spica literally “head of grain” and source of the diminutive spiculum (“arrowhead”) and related variously to “spike,” and “spicy.” (So claimeth my friend Miriam Webster.)

~

Meaning is denote’d by (mere) Mention. Prose mentions, refusing Measure.
Meaning is convey’d by Use & Presentation. Measure is a “right Industry.”
Make a Granule a Sun, and One’s Work is done.

~

A couple of Blakean reminders (via McLuhan) for the technological morning:

“If Perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary:
If the Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.”

“The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralites
To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.”

“. . . The Reasoning Spectre
Stands between the Vegetative Man & his immortal Imagination.”

(All out of Jerusalem.)

~

The usual walk fail’d to dislodge my fatigue. Fell asleep reading Cox on Wyndham Lewis.

~

The Hat 5

~

Received:

The Hat, No. 5 (Winter 2003-2004), edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar ($7, c/o Edgar, 323 Degraw St. #2, Brooklyn, NY 11231)

Poems and prose by Robyn Art, David Baratier, Li Bloom, Edward Butscher, Garrett Caples, Macgregor Card, Michael Casey, Carson Cistulli, Jan Clausen, Jack Collom, Rob Cook, Dawn Corrigan, Connie Deanovich, Michael Farrell, Jack Foss, Ian Ganassi, David Golumbia, Ron Horning, Eileen Hennessy, Justin Jamail, René Jean Jensen (translated from the Danish by Martin Larsen), Bill Keckler, Richard Kenefic, Marc Kuykendall, Julie Lechevsky, Joel Lewis, Rachel Loden, Kimberly Lyons, Andrew Maxwell, K. Silem Mohammed, Cynthia Nelson, Jason Nelson, Alissa Quart, Lacy Schutz, Laura Sims, Chris Stroffolino, Rod Smith, Mark Statman, Erik Sweet, Elizabeth Treadwell, and John Yole.

I’m glad The Hat is back. I’d thought it a goner. Out here in the hinterlands it’s only occasionally (and with oceanic hardships and mountainous difficulties) that we get trustworthy word (of any sort) out of the metropolis . . . so, well, one can guess at the kind of enthusiasm that pokes up here at the news. Lots of new names here. Davis and Edgar generally put the work out there, unfussily, with ample space surrounding, and make no comment, obstruct it with no editorial apparatus, no scaffolding to prop up a viewpoint around one “reputation” or another. Alphabetickal presentation: —jus’ th’ pomes, ma’am. I like that. (I like the other extreme, too—the muss and muster of commentary overlording the poems, making “points,” claiming to tell “one” how to read.) Elegant simplicity hands off (the English butler) versus theme-park-like “experience” dining (the California waiter-chum) . . . (I don’t care for the middle way magazine, I’m sure, but the thought of the volubility a furtherance of the metaphor would require . . . well, they’d drum me out of the quiet Midwest, with a yap sheet long as my arm . . .)

What follows are pieces of the puzzle, mostly present’d (let us pray) without remark.

The lively tone-changes of “I make a mean salsa. / There is no incidence of tinnitus in my family . . . I know to lead with the wrist / grout the fissured counter to keep away the mites.” (Robyn Art)

“Operational love has spunked, we might / be in the wrong business. Sad little /
oboe in steel string company . . .” (Li Bloom)

“‘You are old . . . and a fuck-load uncannily so.’” (Garrett Caples)

“Lewder is edifice—xerox office, xerox el pit. Lumpen / u. s. d. a. batons.” And: “on a map o’ tar I dandyfied.” Two poems seemingly generated under constraints (anagrammatic? or homonymic?) that are not readily identifiable. (Macgregor Card)

“The parable started with a Spanish inventor stapled to an ad for make-up. It ended with the discovery of magnetite in the ear of a philosopher.” And: “He was made handsome by the light of the toll plaza.” (Carson Cistulli)

“smacking sound of yellow warbler
in the crabapple tree
fits”

And: “What safehouse and gorge fester up in this alleyoop of scratch reified? Who then circles as hamadryad?” (Jack Collom)

“rain doesn’t converse
my stone curse
passenger Todd Ward
please remain on board” (Dawn Corrigan)

“outside a yard in heavy action
a couple toads moving under orange leaves
loud blue jays pretending they’re bathing—troublemakers” (Connie Deanovich)

“Methane is not a contractile element . . .The smell of a little gland / In the neck of some lizards / / And Mortimer we hardly knew ye.” (Ian Ganassi)

“The earth article self leaf water ball you see / Comment to are term praising object night . . .” (David Golumbia)

“Here the prince of Troy entertained / Kaiser Wilhelm II, a man erratic and hard to approach / with innate politeness and a need for police intervention / to ward off attacks by flybitten horses in leafy shelter, / a discovery already anticipated the first time I set foot / on eastern soil in Egypt and confirmed in the balance / sheet of the following year, when shots rang out at Boghaz- / Keui with an objectivity ignored in obituaries by friends / who succumbed to the temptation of stating certain con- / nections strongly mingled with smiling irony and details.” (Ron Horning)

“You have a feeling you read those words
You have a feeling you know where it is
And that it’s going to work out fine
That the drought has ruined the duck-pond.”

And: “Even though not writing would be like
losing sight of Cassiopeia, I can’t depend on it.
My Talent is good but small like a button
And intermittent like quality radio.” (Justin Jamail)

(I suspect, no, I recommend everyone get aholt of Hat Cinq just to finish reading Justin Jamail’s poem call’d “In Envy of Prolific.”)

“What did it mean that the fridge was empty? And what did it mean, any transgression of emptiness indebts? I saw myself standing above an ocean one evening throwing homemade curses across it. And now of course the problem of beach cats appears: do you take them home with you in a pocket filled with sand?” (René Jean Jensen)

“As a generalist I do nothing well, / but I do lots of it.” (Richard Kenefic)

“‘Hanging out’: small-scale geniality
resulting from chump-change
salaries.” (Joel Lewis)

“Some ambitions are blonde and impetuous
Like searching Google’s endless manse
For a Richard Nixon snow globe
Letting desire overcome good sense . . .” (Rachel Loden)

“Why chronometer?
Boxy words oily as
A man’s suit absent of man . . .”

And: “the denizens of a poem
coming through a mist whack
a curtain completely uncertain
as to how wavelengths prevail.” (Kimberly Lyons) Who, notational, witty and heavenly “ear’d” as she suddenly seems, though not an unknown (to me), ranks a “discovery.” I’ll have to see what all more I can find by her.

“. . . some
negligent monster to see some girl and boy
punched silly in the marketplace, look
it’s so difficult to start from anything
like neglect, a burgled comfort, a cool mercy”

And: “A little guy with soot on his face,
a little guy, no, no roman nose,
a little guy, or ok, a soot nebbish.” (Andrew Maxwell)

“seeing you in motion in the edge scenery of laughter”
And: “there is that cute connecticutter, well-oiled and pure” (Cynthia Nelson)

“Any kinship diagram of the playground leads to my own obfuscation.” (Alissa Quart)

“camera-ready my ass

it’s nice not to be shot

There are no more indecent regional
feel-good op-ed chefs”

And: “America,
(soon to be a boiled pot of Brel)
your beauties tarnish
the reaggrevated mesalliant, so kind
so winning
so volubly pertinent, descends into a dolthood” (Rod Smith)

“. . .grand moment
having never let it go fresh rosebushes
and birds blooming the duck yard wheat
stood golden Nurse fancy not recognizing
that love him a sensible chat carrying
nobody about tucks her a word . . .” (Elizabeth Treadwell)

~

Is that an asinine way to proceed? Maybe. I’m sure anybody else’s copping of “what sticks up ready for the plucking” would result in a wholly different “look.” Call it a core sample. Call it an experiment in criticism. If I did it again tomorrow, a different “bunch” would out.

~

Drizzle at ten-thirty when I go out with Charms. And she lags behind “inconsolable, lost, wild” (Matthews) the whole way. Or in a “despondency a petulance of its own” (Latta)—as if the rain were my doing. Now, back, C. is looking spiky, a jackstraw dog. With her intelligent head poked under the draperies—Polonius behind the arras. Defiance in the cringe that accompanies the shudder that I done writ that afore. David Byrne-like tenor sings out in a voice just this side of tire-squeal: “Say something once, why say it again?”

~

Found the Lanark. Found the Yepez quote. Found a collection (Carcanet) of Donald Davie’s writings on Pound (gratuitously, unexpect’dly). Found no mail in the box. Lost no sleep over it.

~

Working myself into a minor manuscript-title morass.

~

Gouty Rexroth. Is what I remember thinking when my feet were hurting in the rain.

~

Haircut!

~

Received:

Samizdat, No. 10 (Winter 2004), edited by Robert Archambeau (895 Burton Avenue, Highland Park, IL 60035)

Editorial titled “For Lack of What Is Found There: Notes on John Peck on the Occasion of the Thomas McGrath Award”:

“Peck’s work offers . . . an attitude toward the past itself. This attitude, which contemporary American poetry does not have in abundance, could perhaps be best described as a reverence for the past that is unguided by the willful intellect. That is, Peck’s work is saturated by history and allusion, to the point of being unreadable unless one is (often strenuously) attentive to his erudite frames of reference.”

With an additional assessment of Peck’s work by Jere Odell: “Peck does not write what McGrath called ‘tactical poetry’—poetry for the moment, for the immediate struggle, but then neither does he write the poetry of the blind anti-political ether.” And, later: “. . . Peck’s singular voice may pass by in confusion. Most labels will not stick: A Vermont poet with expatriate style? A native internationalist? Pound with a soul? A misfit mystic with Jung and books? A pilgrim at home?

“Refreshingly, and all labels aside, Peck’s poetry sings with piercing clarity, vaulting over the mêlée of tribal marketability, confident in its aims and unabashedly driven to necessary complexity.” Which is excellently put, with verve, and honor, itself.

With a poem by John Peck titled “Double Sonnet in January on the Myth or Er.”

Also: poems by Michael Anania, John Kinsella, Stephen A. Allen, Joe Francis Doerr, Simone Muench, Kevin Ducey, John Matthias, and Robert Archambeau. A review of Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, edited by Jason Weiss. A short recollection of Hugh Kenner by David Kellogg. And an omnibus review / essay by Archambeau titled “Audit: The New Modernists.” Here are collected remarks on recent books by Jennifer Moxley (The Sense Record and Other Poems), Mark Salerno (Method), and Stephanie Strickland (V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una) along with notes on Mary Ann Caws’s enormous encyclopedia of documents (Manifesto: A Century of –Isms), Marjorie Perloff’s recent 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, a book by Welsh poet and critic David Annwn on some of those “working through the modernist matrix in Ireland” (Arcs Through: The Poetry of Randolph Healy, Billy Mills and Maurice Scully), the recent Alexei Kruchenykh selected put out by Green Integer titled Suicide Circus, and a new magazine call’d Dánta. One more: a Samizdat Editions-publish’d anthology edited by Jeffrey Roessner call’d The Possibility of Language: Seven New Poets. The seven: Joe Francis Doerr, Mike Barrett, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jere Odell, Mike Smith, Kymberly Taylor, and Archambeau himself. All, I think, somehow connect’d to Notre Dame, mostly as (former) students of John Matthias.

A willful hodge-podge, that. Blame the demands of the moment “and all that.” Blame th’essay itself, its positing, à la Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern) or Don Byrd (who, in th’excellent Poetics of the Common Knowledge, argues for some unfinish’d business in th’agora of the Modern), that modernism is not play’d out, that postmodernism—aberration, or interruption, or full-fledged bird of its own making (however one sees it)—“died” at the moment of “Bob Perelman’s renunciation” of it (—I’m so sorry, Bob, I hadn’t heard.) Archambeau’s piece is polemical in intent, breezy in style, and attempts that old ruse: if you can invent a name and make it stick, you’ll have pitch’d yourself (and namesakes) headlong toward eventual “establishment” (and, “one” might add, eventual ossification). See “New Brutalism,”—a joke of a joke, as far as I can see—“and yet,” there are those who’d “actually” take it seriously.

More hotz-potz here at Hotel Point. So. Out of the hotch-potch into the kaffee-klatsch: what exactly gets put out for the partaking at the New Modernist luncheon? Well, science (stripped of any “epistemological certainty”), the disjunctive, the elliptical, and the compress’d, history and temporal simultaneities, mathematics (complex numeric structures, variations, repetitions), old stand-by non-referentiality (combined with references to earlier avant-garde practices), polyglot internationalism, “a carnival of styles.”

Archambeau is, of course, only partly serious about th’Eden he sees in the offing. (He says: “Should either name or moment catch on, you’ll hear me sounding like Little Richard, claiming to have invented everything.”) But it’s an energetic gesture nevertheless, one “one” can only admire. It’s a refusal of the common tendencies, the received idea, the passed down pap, the “higher dictates.” Samizdat’s independence and verve, and the sense of même-combatism between poetic and scholarly industries, is relatively rare in these milieux. And shouldn’t be.

~

Clogged pastures of a sensualist numbskull—something like that. How I get when I hurry. How I get when I flee the work of sorting priorities and simply flood the neuro-soul with my mayhem. What I’m talking about is the crush-list of the New Modernists. Or my scuttlebutt on it. Enough to make “one” butt-scuttle right out the hotel door . . .

~

So I did. Into the night vapors, digging the stars. Coat of mail flung rattling at the heavens. One—westerly—impossibly conflagratae’d, planetoidal, and furious with light. I listen’d to the traffic hum thinking that I would hear a pattern-change if anything cataclysmic—electromagnetic or boffo—were going down. Or see a banzai-toy simulacrum spit fire. Nutso. Nutso I strode along. Somebody’s grillin’ meat prickle’d up my nose down along the lower end of Maywood. Coming around the corner the C-dog went a little postal in the shrubbery. Some low ghost. I drug her off. Sure enough, half a block later we turn’d back to look. Some skinny-rump’d F-Tom’s turning a sleek taunt-haunch at the C. —Where ya off ta so fast, fella . . .

~

Finally got to a little reading, late. Of use, Kenneth Cox on Gael Turnbull: “Indifference to style promotes . . . another and very remarkable practice, the use of rare words or words of abstruse meaning hardly assignable to any lexis because seldom encountered in any context. They are oddities, technical terms of little-known crafts, learned words coined for specific purposes or imposing words not perfectly comprehended. Turnbull would appear more fascinated by their appearance than interested in their application. At any rate he uses them as though strangeness of existence or difficulty of thought might best be conveyed by means of a word indeterminate in meaning or improperly understood. It is a device of ancient origin, traceable to the riddles and kennings of the northern skalds, characteristic of the literary tradition of Scotland (as in Urquhart and MacDiarmid), not unknown to Shakespeare and still to be heard in the popular English speech of today. In addition to incidental and arbitrary uses like subsumed, gallimaufry and alula the practice is elevated in some of Turnbull’s longer and most interesting poems to a principle of organization.”

~

A haircut Saturday, and a new hat today. New Hat tomorrow.

~

Green Zenith

~

Forsythia days. Yellow zenith moment before green creeps in.

Green creeps in.

~

“Hugh! Hugh Person!” Which is how my raddled memory had it that Nabokov’s Transparent Things commence’d. It doesn’t.

“Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person!” is how it goes. “Hugh” nowhere in initial evidence. I went in search of epigraph. Which (sentence) could begin a nutty children’s rhyme. A rhyme for nutty kids. “I went in search of Epigraph, / And epigraph I found . . .”

“Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us!” is—in lieu of lost Hugh!—being pressed into epigraphic service, even as we scribble our idiocies into the cyberdust of Sunday morning . . .

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

A Frolic of His Own, by William Gaddis (Scribner Paperback, 1995)

With the curious epigraph: “What you seek in vain for, half you life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.” Thoreau, to Emerson.

Sad-eyed Gaddis reading in Albany, circa 1995. Or late 1994. A wraith. A sturdy wraith. Still capable of boxing one’s ears, young upstart!

~

Bought:

Invisible Bride: Poems, by Tony Tost (Louisiana State University Press, 2004)

Thumbing through: noting the use of questions innocently put, with or without answers—

“If the sky is so wonderful why must it hold its summits behind barbed wire? How much music can that air take? How do you like my driving?”

Or: “War? There’s no doubt the public like to see victims, if only to patronize them with applause. Sleep? It is not difficult to sleep. The sea? A man in the ocean is awash in blue thoughts.”

Or: “Tony reads the questions:

Does an entire alphabet separate m and n?

Is there an alphabetical equivalent of fallen plums?

Does this mean nothing is ever really touching?”

And thinking of the contrapunto in payada—improvised Argentine gaucho-poetry debates in the pampas—“The famous mythical payador Santos Vega, so legend tells us, conquered the Devil in such a contest.” Of which surely I know little (not even to th’extent of reading Martín Fierro), though stumbled against a payada in a dark funk years back, and attempted one. “What does the moon eat? It eats light.” Is likely the only residue of that experiment. That and something about how little sleep the dead need. And: the lovely word payada.

Thinking too (relatedly) that Tost’s “Tony” persona in some places here seems a kind of Kaspar Hauser, (or big-head’d Georg Trackl, or William Blake sitting big-eyed and naked in the garden)—somehow endearingly “hayseed,” with a lovely wonderment nearly idiot-savantique, feral child doing th’Elemental Rag. One range: Cloud-watching, “a dog tied to a post,” discarding the onion found in the box of tomatoes, counting the steps one “takes,” or, “Like an assassin, kneeling in the flowers.” Another range (completely different, so’s not to leave “one” with th’impression Invisible Bride is “poesy”): “the Consumer Product Safety Commission,” “a Negro hung in chains on a tree,” “the beard of Joseph Stalin,” “Rick James and Neil Young,” an airport waitress named Agnes.

There is, too, evidence of enamorment in factoid, trivial wonders providing the poem’s textures (in lieu of “image”): how, for example, “the big cheese” comes about—(named after Thomas Jefferson’s 1,235 pound hunk . . .) I am reminded of Tost’s listing (in an interview briefly post’d at The Unquiet Grave—Tony’s “amnesia blog”) of Alexander Theroux’s terrific book called The Primary Colors. Wherein, one can also learn that “Vladimir Nabokov wrote ‘yellow blue vase’ on the board in one of his classes at Wellesley and told his students that it was almost ‘I love you’ in Russian: ya lyublyu vas.”

~

Tost’s editing, with Zach Schomburg, of Octopus, is proving exemplary, the two octopi betwixt them capable of digging a plethora of “crustaceans, mollusks, [and] small crabs” out of crevices everywhere. Of particular note: the Recovery Project (“a modest attempt . . . to swing some attention towards overlooked books of the last 30 or so years.”) Is here the place to mention some worthies for examination and resuscitation? Tim Reynolds, Stephen Shrader, Thomas Johnson, Marguerite Young?

~

Refreshing against the interminable hoo-ha surrounding “performance” and “sounding” to read Kenneth Cox’s remarks on Lorine Niedecker: “For her the verse existed on paper. Small differences of pitch and length, emphasis and enunciation, there indicated by visual means, could be picked up by the reading eye and transferred immediately to the inward ear, without need to render them aloud. On the contrary, in all but a few special cases, vocal realization neglects deforms or exaggerates the features of the verse. The delicacy and variety of Lorine’s versification are to be apperceived by careful silent reading from a good text.”

~

A poem of details and observations cut small. Call’d “Wittgenstein Ridge.”

~

Cox on Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Caledonian antisyzygy”: “Originally a learned joke of Gregory Smith’s (he thought it might have amused both Sir Thomas Urquhart and Sir Thomas Browne) Smith defined it as ‘the sudden jostling of constraries’ characteristic of Scottish literature. Recently George Elder Davie . . . rendered the word as ‘unyokeableness.’ The French language has a similar exprssion: une douche écossaise, [literally, a Scottish shower] hot and cold alternating unmixed, likewise praise and reproof etc.” Later, Cox calls it “the specific sense of jostling, unyokeable, unaccommodating nextness.”

Look out, New Sentence, “Caledonian antisyzygy”’s gonna git yo’ Mama. Or turn out to be yo’ Mama.

~

Walk with Carmen and G. through Dicken Woods, a ten-acre tract of scrub lately pull’d out from under the developer’s blade. Hot (the radio saying it may hit 87° F. before high winds blow in the thunderstorms). Native Michiganders in overdrive to shed the winter woolens. A small flock of cedar waxwings flitting through. And we pick’d up a deer trail, lots of tracks, splay’d in the soft mud, the C-dog right there “in the groove,” snuffling.

~

The crux of the “problem” of attempting a crossing of the Critical Divide that runs massive between supposed “schools”: (Cox on MacDiarmid): “[He] does more than disregard standards most readers will be accustomed to. He operates by virtue of qualities most critics pronounce defects. Since his achievement is evident and there is no sign of perversity it needs to be supposed the system of values is different. Certain features of the work are not then mistaken for failings the author would have avoided if he could but recognized as functions of the ideal he is striving to attain. Some roughness of expression may persist but banalities and audacities become difficult to tell apart.”

~

Bats twisting through the newly-reopen’d insect-courses at dusk.

~

Saw “Intermission” with J. Remind’d me of Altman of “Nashville” period. If one uses “Altman” and “period” together. And I have so little in my (recent) filmic files (to draw on). The fascination with American movies (and the United States in general) colors early Godard too: here one character with an interrupt’d litany of “as they say in the States” lines. Character is all here, and character based on “what one says”—that is, the writing, though I’m wondering how I can say that when large hunks of dialogue were lost (to me) because of accents, and what I did comprehend seem’d largely variations on “For fook’s sake, fook you, you fook,” etc. The plot itself largely propell’d “forward” by the MacGuffin (used several times) of one red-jacket’d boy on a bicycle pitching rocks at bus, car, etc. The fact that MacGuffin Red turns out completely without honor or human feeling (after all he’s little more than a schtick) when he tilts a car (with driver) (that he’s put into such precariousness) into a chasm (rather than rescue driver) seems, too, “American,” right as Raymond Chandler.

~

Another Cox assessment (descriptive) of MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve): “Values are quantitative: longwindedness for example becomes a merit (it may be renamed stamina) and excellence in general lies less in satisfying standards of workmanship, as in the crafts, than in breaking records and beating opponents, as in sport.”

Present’d without comment.

~

Treacle and Sorrel

~

Scratchpad Dump

~

To conclude, my advice is, that who desire to preserve themselves from this present Pest, do drink every morning either Sulphurated Wine, Strong Beer, or what Liquor they please, wherein hath been steeped a large quantity of Horse-Radish-root, with five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten drops of good Spirit of Salt; and no doubt they will finde a far better effect, then from a Galenical Electuary of London-Treacle and Wood-Sorrel.

No doubt.

~

Toward a revivify’d critical vocabulary: “The poetry of X——— Corroborates the Stomack and its ferment; enliveneth and invigorates the Archeus, the vital Spirit, being circulated with the blood into all parts: It mortifies malignant Atoms, enabling nature to profligate and expel the poison of the Y——— by sweat, cleansing away the morbifick matter by Expectoration and Urine.”

~

Notes on influence: “It is not dissonant to reason, that some salacious Seaman, whose sperm was tinged with some foul filthy disease, exercising venery with a nasty Leprous-like Putrilaginous Harlot, did in some short space after, lying with a wholesome woman, infect her; and so grafted upon her Issue that then unknown Plague we call the Scorbute, which in length of time did spread abroad and diffuse its Miasm, or infection, being at first fomented and quickned by Maritime unwholsome exhalations and fogs, and is now Rampant and grassant in all places in these parts remote from the Sea, extending its self like a Gangrene, sending out subtil Aporrhaea’s or effluvium’s into the Air, that contaminate those that take them in, either by the pores of the skin, or inspiration.”

~

“Here you see one that can swallow a Camell without coughing, and stand straining at a Gnat.”

~

Mawrdew Czgowchwz, the diva of the moment.
See James McCourt.

~

The Flung Up Casuist

~

The casuistry of “one’s own excellence.”

~

Flung down Thursday night’s, and that sense that all one’s done is without merit.

~

Scritch’d at the ms. some more. One angry little pile. A different angry little pile. Naming and naming again.

~

Finish’d a thing “about” George W. Bush call’d “Feckthief.”

~

Cruciverbiformularist Malady

~

Fiddle’d about with another piece for the manuscript. When I saw myself typing “Cruciverbiformularist, mot-mortist . . .” I thought maybe it’d be a good idea to quit. Gnarls and gnarls of gnarliness. Reading Robert Potts on J. H. Prynne: “The epigraph to the 1979 poem ‘Down Where Changed’ is ostensibly taken from Practical Crystal Gazing by C. Thorpe, and teasingly reads: ‘Anyone who takes up this book will, we expect, have done so because at the back of his mind he has a half-formed belief that there is something in it.’” Adds Potts: “I have always taken this as a disconcerting joke.”)

~

Big as a shed.

~

Whitman on “literary proportion”: “The big fellows are always the generous fellows: they recognize each other wherever they are. It’s the generosity that makes the big fellow. It will do for the little crowd to have all the bickerings, the mean jealousies, the quarrelling ambitions, the mean policies. And you know that’s the way to distinguish the little from the big. The thing we call smart, clean, skilful—that thing is not big. Those who regard literature as an exercise, a plaything, a joke, a display, are not big—they are small of the small. There’s nothing so riles me as this exhibition of professional acquirement. Literature is big only in one way—when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities—a furthering of the cause of the masses—a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers.” Friday, June 8, 1888. (To Horace Traubel.)

~

“Reveal’d to each other as bothers”? I’d rather he’d not got so blunt about the joke thing.

~

Probably enough there so we can all nod knowingly at our bigness, no? Me, I know I’m big. You big?

~

Stepping out into the warm night with el doggo. “Night délices” is what I think. And: Night délices, suivi de A Day of Delousing. And: Henry Miller, a line in one of the Tropics: “Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy.” Which, blunt-sprechen, dredges up Camus: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Direct statement. That black and white. And: a picture of Camus’s wrecked car near Sens, France. In garish black and white, as if photograph’d by Weegee.

Weegee. Délices. Back-pedaling I recall now that before “délices” I’d thought: “delicious warmth.” Lice. Licentious. Allowable. Lousy. Licit. Illicit. —Bus driver, here’s my stop here.

~

Cox, precise and deft: “the general rule that in art aim is not achieved by effort, for the obvious reason that effect is the effect of the effort and not of the aim.”

Eschew the florid.

Cox, on how literature works: “The experience of transformation is . . . brief total and imperious. It is no longer a question of suspending disbelief, whether willingly or unwillingly: willy-nilly the thing is ungainsayably there, though not of course true.”

Put out to sea.

Cox, on Joyce: “Growing up in a time when literary sensibility in general was entering a period of rapid decay he saw the life about him through different degradations of language.”

And the “rapid decay” today? Our Joycean collectors of the “degradations of language”—Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano.

Cox, on Finnegans Wake: “The state of mind it generally represents is more like that (not always due to alcohol) where remote references can be made with ease but simple messages get garbled, trivialities assume enormous proportions and everything appears at once inexpressibly significant and unaccountably comic.”

How that guy on Bourbon Street put it: “Y’all gonna ketch yo’ deaths a pleasure.”

~

A casualty of one’s own excellence.
A casualty of one’s own obsessions.
Does anybody read Henry Miller anymore?
Did anybody read Henry Miller, ever?
The writer whose obsessions match (by accident) those of the Zeitgeist: is (accidentally) consider’d “excellent” (or whatever monicker for excellence is toss’d up by that Zeitgeist.) See F. Scott Fitzgerald. See Pearl Buck. (Keeping the exempla “distant” waters down the discourse.)

~

Morning walk. An unidentifiable (unspot’d, up in a Norway spruce) bird calling repeatedly. Me thinking what words to put to the noise. “Unmusical,” “scissory,” “non-liquid,” “quick.” And noticing how all the short i’s in the words mimick the sound.

~

Off to the blood draw. Where, entering, I’m stunned by a man who “looks like” Ron Silliman. (I suspect some of you’ll think I’m mocking somebody here. Not so.) He’s big, with a carefully-comb’d beard and brush’d-back hair. Longer, the hair and beard. Glasses. He’s wearing hobnail’d biker’s boots, jeans, and a leather biker’s jacket with the sleeves torn off. Uncanny sense that if I mention’d Ron Silliman to him he’d know exactly who I meant. He’s call’d by the nurse. Alex. That’s the name. He’s bigger’n I thought—uncoiling out of the chair, probably six foot five or six. He's got a limp, and I’m thinking how he probably roll’d a bike crank’d up on white cross tablets and booze one night in the early ’seventies. He don’t look so mean, is what one voice is saying. On the back of the leathers is stitch’d, I think, “The Sacrificial Lambs.”

~

Truth is, I didn’t “get” the gang name. Too distracted. Distinct sense of something sacral writ there though. And a ferocity and a connection betwixt us. When I left my gauze bandage slip’d off—slow-blooming sense of a wet stickiness in the hollow of my elbow. Now a blood-stain’d ratty old shirt to go about the day “in.”

~

“Willy-nilly the thing is ungainsayably there.” I love that.

~

Pivot and Fabricate

~

Stray (and raw) Kenneth Cox notes:

Chaucer’s “Chaucerian” rhyme royal (ababbcc). That fourth line pivot position.

“The note of falsity and affectation women call ‘twee.’” Women? Or starlings?

“Stories being fabrications it is quite in order if they include no identifiable referent.”

Note to self: see Conrad’s 1914 Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.

Cox: “. . .the source of a phrase often quoted as though it summarized all he was trying to do: to make you see. The context makes it clear that see is used here in a primary sense . . . The idea is that it is by means of the evocation of extreme sensual phenomena that human beings can be brought to ‘see’ in the sense of ‘begin to appreciate the significance of’ or ‘finally recognise the reality of’. At ordinary level the idea that what you ‘have seen’ you can be said to ‘know’ is implied in the structure of some ancient Indo-European languages. In Polish the similarity of form between widzieć (‘see’) and wiedzić (‘know’) is still striking. In English the corresponding cognates are scattered (witness, to wit, a halfwit) but both senses continue to coexist in the colloquial uses of see, according as the verb is conjugated with can or with do.”

Memory of slowly buying all the Penguin Conrad’s in France circa 1980, even the windbag crummy ones like Chance and reading them that long cold February, boiling potatoes on the electric radiator. Absolutely “took” by Victory, and The Secret Agent.

“[An] originality [that] consists not in innovation but in renovating means . . . lately neglected.” Dropping the leverage boom of th’old methods down to revivify (or make apparent) new forces . . .

~

“The writing too is laboured and synthetic. Care is taken to make everything look a little different from the usual, in appearance for the sake of dignity or what is called ‘distinction’ of style but in effect towards the vague and the incoherent. Well-rounded sentences yield a somewhat uncertain sense. The vocabulary is rather high, with some recondite words and a number of similes and metaphors of the kind that tease the reader with comparisons just out of conceptual reach. They do not so much impart a meaning as challenge him to guess one.”

Wouldn’t “one” love to have the same said of “him”? “Just out of conceptual reach.” Out of Reach is a new book by . . . The lines above actually penned by Kenneth Cox, about R. C. Hutchinson, British novelist of the early twentieth c.

~

G. and I bicycle’d to work together today. The public schools closed. Today’s daycare solution. He’s busy on a spare ’chine.

~

Does Ron Silliman see himself as “Papa” to us all? I find it revealing that he pulls the plug on “the comments function” and expunges the record due to “three people calling one another names,” supposedly at “a level of personal invective I would not accept in my own children.” And's banned the three “perps.” Control, obfuscatory control, thy name is legion in the current empire mentality . . .

~

Au travail.

~

Deportment leading to deportation . . .

~

Kenneth Cox: “Self control, correct deportment and a certain pedantry of language betray the pedagogue, occasionally sardonic, never humorous.”

~

Out into the night with Carmen a little after ten. Wet snow. “Droppeth slop.” Me with no hat. I pull sweet cold air into my lungs, unable to pull down enough. Just a little more and I could release it all in a blast or sigh and completely relax.

~

Taxes terminated. Enfin. Procrastinator, sing me a song. —Shortly. Is the reply.

~

An era where the fiercest magazine’d be named not Blast but Sigh.

~

“Relations originally special become dynamic.” (Cox on Roy Fisher’s ridding a poetry of adjectives by making adjectives verbs.)

~

Graphism: “It consists in allowing the letters used in writing a word to suggest, if necessary by revision or rearrangement, another word not connected with it but apt to the writer’s purpose . . . misjudging its moment is followed by its omen undelivered.” Or “spectres of respect.”

~

“Prose improves the credibility of untruths.” Corollary to: poetry reveals image-relations. “While nothing actually prevents anything being said either in verse or in prose, very strange or very difficult things usually get said in verse.”

~

Next stop: Manuscript Junction.

~

To work.

~

Slide, Ambition, Slide

~

Days of sliding ambition. Ambition’s so “unsightly” in an era of empire anyhow. Putting one in league with. (Insert story of longhair at the “Speakers Corner” in Hyde Park in London circa 1974, a rousing call for “layabout-ism.”)

Ambition so far off the head-reaches of any true poetry. Leave it to the seas of industry. As Emerson admitted of Thoreau, that he “wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American Engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party.”

~

“Razzle-dazzle maggots” day of Easter come and gone. Vague thoughts of “what if Frank O’Hara’d lived?” Would he have turn’d into late-blooming Christian apologist, Auden-style? That possibility of turning against the “stance” of youth—result of perceived “threat” of youth’s “new stance.”

~

Reading Kenneth Cox on Creeley. My interest in Creeley’s always been negligible—thinking the pared-down diction and short lines turn out finally good for a rather limit’d number of effects (See also Raymond Carver.) Which may be why he’s so imitable (as opposed to, say, O’Hara, to use a nearby example, only some of whose battery of effects seem available). Under imitators Creeleyesque, see scads of late ’sixties and early ’seventies poets.

It’s a question of range, and likely is what separates major and minor artists.

Cox on Creeley’s poems, and avoiding “wrongs” (he’s talking mostly about language “evading a slide into what is merely expected,” which is honorable enough, but): “They prefer to stop short rather than go wrong.” And: “The tentativeness of definition seems to provide an assurance that the thing to be said, even if not yet formulated, has at least not (yet) suffered distortion. Silence leaves open the possibility of getting it said right, whereas saying it wrong would close the possibility: in spite of self-corrections what has been said cannot be unsaid.”

Which is smart, and smartly put (though what “it” is there to “get said” beyond “it”’s own saying of “it”?) What it lacks is the necessity for “wrongness”—that spiel and torrent that scoops up even “what is merely expected” and schusses it too down the irrefragable hill of its making . . .

Seeking “one” without ambition, with no sign of damnable timidity.

~

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida with G. Saturday afternoon:

“If you'd pooh-pooh this monarch's plan
Pooh-pooh it,
But when he says he'll hang a man,
He'll do it.”

~

Solitude Run

~

Scratchpad Dump

~

Hail! all-improving sacred solitude!
Thou best companion of the wise and good!
Why should vain man from thy blest presence run,
And all self-converse, with such caution, shun?
Can sensual pleasures so o’erwhelm the mind
As not to leave one trace of thought behind?
Alas! they can—and hence, that strange delight
In all that’s wicked, empty, vain and light.

~

“Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in this world, but only as a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy.”
—Norbert Wiener (I snitch’d it from Alan Sondheim.)

~

Bumpkin to Citt (in a dialogue by Roger L’Estrange):

We took what serv’d our Turn, and left out the Rest; and sometimes we were taken Tripping, and sometimes we Scap’d: But we never falsify’d any thing. There were some dogged Passages, indeed we durst not meddle with at all; but I can turn ye to any thing you have occasion for, with a wet-finger.

And a little later:

Why This is the very Part, that I was Made for; these Humours are to be put On, and Off; as a man would shift his Gloves; and you shall see me do’t as Easily too; but the Language must be got, I Phansy, by Conversing with Modern Authours.

And Citt’s reply:

Marginal Note: A Moving Metaphor.

Thou canst not but have heard of That Moving Metaphorof the late Reverend Mr. Fowler: “Lord Sowse us; (says he) Lord Dowse us, in the Powdering-Tubb of Affliction; that we may come forth Tripes worthy of thy Holy Table.”

Who can resist the Inundation of This Rhetorique?

~

Michael Frayn’s plan: “I’ll sit in a deck chair with a rug on my knees and a straw hat over my eyes and do nothing at all.”

~

Que moy mesmes

~

Nausea hounding me most of the afternoon. That huge clump of grapes? Psychosomatic backwash to the chance notice whilst skimming a book called Danse Macabre that “in 1444 . . . the relic of Christ’s foreskin was brought to Paris”? (I paw’d through the available Villon books here. This one carries the subtitle: François Villon: Poetry & Murder in Medieval France. And is written by Aubrey Burl, “whom” (in th’immortal words of James Tate) “I” “do” “not” “know.” Villon: Je congnois tout fors que moy mesmes. (‘I know everything except myself.’) Somehow all th’above needs must lead inexorably into the post-Steinian conclusion: “I am me because my little foreskin knows me.” Oh dear . . .

~

I can see I’m heading into a spate of unfocus’d reading (if not worse “weather”), skipping unmasterfully here and there. Do the books I don’t finish outnumber those I do? Probably not. Just that intention vastly overwhelms completion. Desire knocks out fulfillment, no contest. I think I read that the Poet’s House’d assembled over two thousand books of poetry publish’d in 2003. Is that possible? So: one’d have to read something like five or six “slim volumes of verse” a day just to keep up with what’s being publish’d now? Note to Jonathan Mayhew: faster!

~

Told myself I’d not fuss at the ’chine all evening, that I’d get to reading early, get to sleep early, ate cheddary. Here it is: tennish. I wrote a letter, browbeat some poems into fresh shipping-out uniforms, finish’d a ditty I’d begun (with the detritus of “How to Get There”) last night, proof’d a couple things, scratch’d my head and glimmer’d at lists trying to decide what magazines are what to me these days (a geological morass in constant shift molasses-seismic), skipped reading the newspaper, drank a beer, pick’d up G. at a friend’s and chatted desultorily with friend’s father, largely regarding dogs, ate mostly leftovers (Italian sausage, noodles, green beans, baguette) dinner with J. (G.’d eaten at friends), walk’d the C-dog once, collar’d the C-dog twice for maniacal barking, put together the sack lunches for tomorrow, scanned and tossed the minuscule mail, listen’d to canned Condy with commentary, drank two cups of coffee . . . Ed Shuddery.

~

Walk’d the C-dog twice.

~

Histrionicus bilious

~

I personally caned that homo histrionicus bilious ’at’s been hanging around here back into the hermit-hole (where he belongs). No more potshots. What gets the blood of the language roaring and oxygenated is “no good for community,” right? I got my doubts on that “score,” but I’ll keep ’em to myself. I certainly had some good laughs—and God knows any “stance” besides convulsive unstoppable giggling is clearly “insane.” If we don’t amuse ourselves, who will?

~

Cox: “Speech, not a passive reflex of the heard, limns and sculpts the real: sound and image are opposed no longer.”

Bunting: “Daphnis investigated / bubless Chloe / behind a boulder.”

Cox on Bunting’s deft appropriation of Villon’s veine,: “something between wit and daring partaking of the nature of cheek. Apart from an occasionally juvenile accent the language is assured, nimble, new.”

And Cox pointing at Bunting’s Old Norse origin’d “epigrammatic vehemence.”

The genius of beginning a poem “Brag, sweet tenor bull . . .” The way the vowels vary and descend. Reminding me of that early line in Nabokov’s Lolita: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Sweet. Tenor. Bull.

~

To work.

~

My Fling

~

In the “Ooooo, Girls, Lookit This!” Department

“Jimmy Barely’s changed the name of ‘The Crush List’ to ‘The Pigpile’ and I’m making my debut at number ten! With a pic, no less!” (Squeals and great flingings of lingerie.)

Jimmy, seriously. [That’s hard to say.] “Thongs”? I was kinda hopin’ for “love shackles.”

~

Shoe Leather

~

Received:

The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 199 (April / May 2004) “The Prose Issue,” edited by Marcella Durand ($5, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 131 East 10th Street, New York, NY 10003)

Harry Mathews is interview’d by Marcella Durand: “I do believe that you can be influenced by writers without reading them.” And Mathews reads out of a Robert Louis Stevenson essay called ‘A Humble Remonstrance,’ something he says he does “on every possible occasion”: “‘The novel, which is a work of art, exists not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, with is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.’” Mathews adds: “People can’t accept this; they want literature to be about something other than itself. And people will go on trying to prove that it is, until the last mad cow has come home.” Also: a terrific list of what Mathews’s reading’s consist’d of of late.

Reviews, and plenty. Some that caught me: Daniel Kane onJohn Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, Tony Towle on Jo Ann Wasserman’s The Escape, Caroline Crumpacker on Jean Frémon’s Distant Noise, Alan Bernheimer on Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, Laura Elrick on Kristin Prevallet’s Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects, Betsy Andrews on Gail Scott’s My Paris, Kristin Prevallet on Linh Dinh’s All Around What Empties Out, and Stephen Emerson on Merrill Gilfillan’s Rivers & Birds (First notice I’ve seen of this last one: publish’d by Johnson Books in 2003. Gilfillan’s a genius. As Emerson puts it, Gilfillan’s “Blue jays intone ‘consolingly,’ ‘a conversation of high vocabulary and enormous range, even intellectual content, from wheedle to lullaby, mutter to scuttlebutt, query to jeer.’”)

Poems by Pattie McCarthy and Harry Mathews.

Essay on “The Person in the World” by Renee Gladman (quoting, I note, Gail Scott, in Heroine).

~

Out into the singe’d night to do my monkey-shines under no moon—wha?—thinking maybe a Robert Musil low pressure system come in quick with clouds a-blotting (it is warming), or maybe th’apostolic Robert Duvall buck-and-wing’d it (moon) off under gospel cover . . . No, I “espy” it there—dull pulsating orange blob (Please don’t think “lava lamp”—oh darn, okay, think “lava lamp”—even a “thought against” is a “thought for”—that’s call’d the via negativa and can be used to “prove” God’s existence—you can see the limits of talking theology with me, right?) The “blob” is stuck between two rooftops, wedged in, slow on th’uptake, recalcitrant, sullen, big end of a fat cigar unpuff’d.

Some walks focus th’available—I start’d this one thinking about the carcass of a biggish poem I “intend” to dump (toss down) the Hotel’s shoot, deadweight carrion (is there a joke about carrion luggage?) for the pecking. I’m thinking like that, like a time-lapse film of a fox squirrel dragged to the road’s edge by a stranger’s hand, first the crows have at it, pulling long wet choicest morsels out to gulp down, then the maggots in a white ease of feasting, vermicular and wriggling, then down into the smaller workers bacterial, the pieces ever smaller, ever less defined: speed’d up, of course, it becomes: squirrel, in and out of dark shapes (crows), squirrel made “alive” by activity, almost seeming to jump and writhe in its reduction, pile of squirrel fur, and underneath, bones.

And some walks get “one” all diffuse and directionless: APB out for that ADD kid. Cigarette whiff on the night breeze, whazzat? ’T’s got me thimble-tongue’d and intemperate by the time I get to the neighbors house, and then the C-dog picks up on another scent—cat. She’s snuffling out the track, lah-di-dah, and I’m “espying” the cat (Frau Cheetah, ex-Nazi in spike’d heels and riding crop, teeth file’d to little points) standing on the porch, idling, a-thrum. I picture the C-dog in full snuff getting right to Frau Cheetah’s feet, too late, rolling up her big square head to examine what she’s found . . . Cartoon city.) I come back all thumbs and ingloriously racing thoughts and start’d hauling books off the shelf: Wier & Pouce, by Steve Katz, and Don Byrd’s Poetics of the Common Knowledge. I did eventually manage to rein myself in, and get busy with the Kenneth Cox.

~

Okay, here’s the poem (writ circa 1994, in Albany). I’ll try to keep a record of my savaging of it. What constitutes entrail, what the eye-socket peck’d clean resembles, that sort of thing. I “intend” to waste not a snitch or dribble, though I may one fine big innard to bait up a hook for the hauling in of the next poem . . . I suspect a few big phrases’ll go first—“the apt penetralia of the world succumb to number”—then individual verbs, then individual nouns, articles and prepositions most likely to figure amongst the “remains” (comparable to bone and fur?)

~

HOW TO GET THERE


In the blurriness of boyhood, the apt
Penetralia of the world succumb to number—
Two birds alighting a moment
Briefly stark on a clothesline hung against the wash of sky going off
Into the unaccountable beyond.

Or three shotgun shells, two green, one red, found in the sandy hollow
Kicked up by a tree’s uprooting itself in the fierce lash of a thunderstorm.
They glow like integers. They make a precise story
Where few stories manage to pierce the savage incoherence, the random big smear.

We lived back there in the middle of woods in Michigan, woods
Cut by logging roads, shacks, faint
Geometric traceries of the gone fracas

Of lumbering operations, mills, tin shanties, rusty winches, sawblades and straggly four-
Tree orchards gone to the gluttony of blackbirds, a kingdom
The master builders robbed and forsook,
Uneasy with wildness.

Summers a few returned to camp near Pickerel Lake, to pick over
The lesser, more seasonal, leavings—morels, blackberries, watercress—or to fish
The two-acre sinkhole lakes that punctured the hemlock thrall,

Looking for all the world like somebody poked a giant pencil
Straight down into the forest, leaving
Perfectly round holes that filled with water.

They were full of brook trout to be got with #2 Meps spinners.

I heard stories of a Captain Savitch or Savage.
I could not then sort voice into the tangible quicksilver
Matter of word, the slivers
That get in under the skin of memory, extractable
Singular wholes, or barbed
Like the porcupine quills the Brittany spaniels got muzzles full of,
Removable only with needlenose pliers and two men, one
To hold the whimpering liver-colored blotch of dog
Down—Sparky or Shanks or Heidi or Red.
Captain Savage did nothing without counting, a source
Of amusement and head-shaking disbelief to the grownups.

He took the smallest unit and sang the stuff of the world into bucket or creel—

Six hundred and twelve huckleberries
All off some scrawny bushes near Cornwell’s Mill—

Eighty-seven morels this morning in one hour and a quarter
Down the trail that skirts Tubb’s Creek—

Sixty-two fiddleheads right out back of my camp—
I fried thirty of them in butter, my wife ate eleven,
I got the rest.

Apt penetralia—how we measure out the world
With ten fingers, fingering it
To know what’s there and getting it down.

Four hundred and forty-one in the song—
What I cup in my hands I bring to my mouth
All for Captain Savage long dead and unaccounted for.

Sleepy numbers.

What it takes to get there.

~

Bah. Cox: “Art defines the hitherto undefined not by observing and reproducing measurable perceptions but by giving form and expression (two words for one thing) to identities and relations previously unformed / unexpressed.”

~

Bah. “I must beg the Reader to believe that I had no vanity to shew my self to the Publique in that Dresse: nor was I such a Sot, as to expect that what I fram'd to the Humour of the Vulgar, should much affect the Serious.”

~

Wash Up!

~

Cranky doodahs of the hacienda’d march. Trying to “stomach” this headache I’m having. The perpetual wash of pagings. Old hotel dysentery in phials. How long do the thunderings of rust kleptoparisiticals rage? Chrysopids falling into cruciforms in order to “slide” out of the orb weaver’s manse. How the “world” looks at this twenty-first century “moment.”

~

Adventure in the stacks: gazing into the pages of Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions and thinking: “Why do I find this so ponderous and wan?” There’s a whole “raft” of French writing I respond to just so: no grit, no crinkle, no smudge, no manic laughter or howling at the gods. Just words acting as if they’re afraid to soil their clothes. Sunday bests. The equivalent of those terribly interest’d looks one sees all stripes of academickals wearing when you know every one of ’em’d give bejesus a hayride to hell “and back” if they could only step back away from that fire-breather of an earnest colleague (or book, or whatever) and announce: “That’s a load of hooey.”

~

In the “We Advance by Grunts” Department:

Received:

“From: Jim Behrle [smallpotato@wazoo.com]
To: John Latta [coupdepoing@ditch.edu]
Subject: hey

In your case maybe it should be: “A weblog should be
as interesting as a teen fan zine.”

thanks, John.

—jimmy”

I could’ve wept. “—jimmy”: so apt, dapper and childlike! so baring of its devices! so ostranenie’d up side the head. I would only note that “interest in the material normally correlates with reading level attain’d.”

~

Good name for a critic’s pseudonym: Cy Gist. (Here lies . . .)

~

Big fat stunner of a moon smear’d on the sky when the C-dog and I go out. Investigating. Checking the boundaries. Off to meet the man. Wide ivory button at the throat of the night’s ample black cloak. A nip in the cold air, a tease of Pidgeon River camping, that damp clarity at raw-boned dawn. And what I’m thinking is: “Most of the village idiots on the backside of the Porcupine Mountains (the Porkies) where I grew up in the ’forties were named ‘Jimmy.’” And I’m thinking: “That’s a dumb thing to be thinking in the gravid dark.” I’m thinking that, and I’m thinking “Words are not ‘pleasant flowers’”—something Villon (no wuzzy imitable he) knew well. I’m thinking how I do like name-calling, how it plays to the groundlings amongst us (“Nous sommes tous les groundlings Américains . . .”) And I’m thinking: do dogs do that name-calling thing? Probably not. Probably the C-dog ain’t got no cosmopolitanlike big thoughts the big way I do so bigly on this night of the big moon. The C-dog probably thinking: “isn’t the sublime a contemplation of the fearful from a position of security? isn’t that what Kant says?”—pawing along in the namatode-laden earth, and “in our minds, mmm, I do have a mind, don’t I? we find a pre-eminence over nature even in its immeasurability, mmm, that’s one goddamn big tree, why do I feel so independent of nature?” Okay, okay. There probably are more interesting things to think about whilst noctambulating. Than the chortle and mash of name-exchange. I don’t (clearly) propose banning it (hell, I’d encourage it—we need lusty brawlers, poing-out-of-pockets roustabouts (gentility, there’s a cream-cover’d word)—it badgers the language itself into shape. Putting out the fire with gasoline . . . So endeth the night-walk.

~

Disorder, I wish may bee Imputed to my Designe, not Fortune.

The Notion of a Note or Mark, is clear by its Definition.

The Note of a Thing must be extra-essential of it self, because by it, and the Light from thence, we arrive to the Knowledg of the Essence.

Dig?

~

Enough savory sillinesses, camaradoes!

~

To the meeting!

~