Phrenology

~

Received:

Bird Dog, No. 5, edited by Sarah Mangold ($6, 1535 32nd Ave., Apt. C, Seattle, Washington 98122)

Poetry by David Pavelich, Dana Ward, Kristin Palm, Camille Guthrie, Stacy Szymaszek, Steve Timm, Julie Kizershot, Bob Harrison, Noah Eli Gordon & Sarah Veglahn, Donna Stonecipher, John Latta, Brenda Iijima, Brigitte Byrd, Michael Leddy, Mark Tardi, Corey Mead, and Heidi Peppermint.

Art by Karen Ganz. Cover art by Maggie Mangold.

Tipped-in color xerograph’d art and illustrations! One gets th’immediate impression that Sarah Mangold’s Bird Dog is something she (and her confederates) love doing. And Karen Ganz’s paintings are terrific. Images of “old 1920’s cartoons . . . ‘the company man’” gracing “messy,” “broken-up,” “fragment’d,” canvases to good effect. A little Basquiatesque, though more “complete,” more “finish’d,” “slower.” Ganz says: “My approach to painting . . . has been influenced by early films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton that I arrived at by way of Twyla Tharp and Samuel Beckett.”

What stands out: Brigitte Byrd and Stacy Szymaszek. Byrd is a native of France, with three prose-poems with titles “Georgian Permutation with Water,” “Babushka with Plum Blossoms,” and “Comparative Obscurity.” Here’s the last:

A dark day it is and it is in bed. An empty house is often a full heart when colors have left the rooms. This is what you get when the only brightness is a yellow shade. There is no one to let her in. I might be wrong. It is not uncommon that both breasts feel different. Silver is the color of water in the rain on the roofs. The only time a branch falls in my path is when the wind blows. I used to think. If there is estrangement what is the difference between speaking to the dead and speaking to the living . When there is a song there is reassurance is there not. If I cannot have you. There is the news of a hurricane and she grabs her umbrella. We cannot operate on nothing.

~

Ambiguity in the narrative (what story is being told? several plausible ones seem to get foreground’d and fade and return—a round), ambiguity in the parts (“We cannot operate on nothing.”)

Stacy Szymaszek’s new book Some Mariners (Etherdome, 2004) just arrived today in the mail. That I’m going to delay saying anything about for now—, too many teeming irreducibles in th’atmosphere—and the notebooks—(well, the scribble-sheets, I am not terribly methodickal)—for any but the most promiscuous bout with clarity . . .

Szymaszek’s poem (“untitled”) in Bird Dog covers four pages, amount of text (perhaps number of words—or word-clusters—is more appropriate, the poem is present’d as an array, a field of fragments . . .) generally diminishing from a “full” first page to a marked paucity. The effect is a shearing-down of rhythm more than anything else, as the first page’s clusters present themselves mostly by fours (to a line) or threes.
Hard to reproduce for an HTML dunderhead like myself (I’ll indicate white space with virgules (/):

I am ready / to eat / / impossible / without a mouth
/ / blot out / / tag / metal chafed
mummy / paddle / je m’ap / elaborate / two jaw
/ bones / mummy loveth bandage length / stop
/ / pulling / no one is new / croc
/ can’t prevent movement / / when I wish
to chew / food shapes / / vase of unguents / obj
/ bit of color / for natural / pry ear / colony
/ of matri / / / shut it / letters out of
order / / now the other won / soldier on / oiler
/ / / till I spell / / j j j / id
/ masc / plenty of canines / tune in / thought of
. . .

Two immediate thoughts: one is that my reproduction is nefarious, ugly, and loathsome, and robs the poem of all its fine aeration and shapliness. Two is how compelling / satisfying it is to copy such fragments, like a typesetter’s dream of a ready-to-assemble piecemeal world—j j j.

I find myself most “attract’d” to the partial words: “je m’ap”—allowing one to see “map” and its relation to naming, appellation; “croc” (as in “alligator”? as in “pottery”?) Tiny sounds get amplified in th’array, tiny syllables, isolated, throw long shadows. On subsequent pages, local vertical configurations assert themselves:

me on pillow
hold

a dupe

snow

is one such moment. Another is:

when I was
a boon

At the end of the poem, there is a small stack of clusters:

storage locker
EUSTACE

of schema

radically indent’d, and center’d to itself, then, a left margin:

Eustace


chosen

for
closure

~

I won’t pretend that I could do anything more than an existentialist mime clown’s explication de texte here and, plainly, that’s not what the poem is asking of anyone. It’s relation to the “world” is partial, local, provisional, it is surface (material) and variably “representational.” Basquiatesque. “Basquiatesque.”

~

My “system” of early evening writing broke down lately, now I find myself lunging toward a week “in Chi-town” (need to see a man about . . . a violin, a tax bracket, and a distillery . . .) and ensconced in a mad scrabble of notes and other detritus I’d just as leave “finish off” without further “ado.” Somebody ought to take those “marks” away from an ironist like “me.”

~

Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism: the final scuffle.

A remark Janet Holmes spoke into her Humanophone, suggesting the book “reinforces [her] belief that male poets are very often pack animals, carefully delineating their territories and eagerly pointing out the unforgiveable differences among their aesthetics (which activities Friedlander satirizes, but also participates in).” And I think of Emily Dickinson, her startlingly acid tongue, mocking: “You speak of Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.” And: “I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.” Or “All men say ‘What’ to me, but I thought it a fashion.”

Part of it is thrill at one’s abilities, that headiness that accompanies a well-turn’d sass-spout. Think of the Ted Berrigan poem that ends with mock- and not-mock thrill in equal measure, something like, after doing this, and this, and this, you sit down, “and write this, because you can.” (I used to have an Alternative Press broadside of the poem tack’d to a bookcase in Ithaca, New York—it is certainly in one box or another of my “effects,” and I used to know it nearly “by heart”—Google, I think, makes one’s helplessness before one’s own “personal” retrieval system all the more frustrating . . .***) Think of the mock-bravado (immiscible with the true-) of Dickinson’s: “I suppose the pride that stops the breath, in the core of woods, is not of ourself.” Même combat?

And part of it is tussle, and flyting, and who can throw the golden-urine stream the farthest, no doubt about it.

Er, prompter’s insistent and stagey voice: “The matter at hand!”

Er, some lines, wherein Friedlander runs a little San Francisco lit-history through the Poe-nerator. And as “player” in that scene (though one, in a good joke, about whose “personal appearance,” “there is nothing very observable”), he’s got the wit and grace to include himself. From “The Literati of San Francisco”: “I learn that Mr. F. is not without talent; but the fate of his magazines [Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K” and Dark Ages Clasp the Daisy Root, both with Andrew Schelling] should indicate to him the necessity of applying himself to study. No spectacle can be more pitiable than that a of a man without the commonest school education busying himself in attempts to instruct humankind on topics of polite literature.” In subsequent sketches: Douglas Messerli comes off as petty and vindictive; Barrett Watten gets repeatedly referred to as “General Watten”; Steve Benson gets a scolding (though not to the degree the “experimental” tadpoles of S.F. do) for having “imagination if he would only condescend to employ it, which he will not, or would not until lately—the word compounders and quibble concoctors of Frogpondium having inoculated him with a preference for Imagination’s half sister, the Cinderella, Experiment.” Also: some finely-honed axioms surface out of the Poe-puddle stirred by Friedlander’s stick: “in adopting the cant of nonsense, the cant of vagueness soon follows.” Too: Friedlander uses the impeccable rhetoric of Poe well, and gives pertly, if rather backhandedly, Lyn Hejinian her due acclaim: “Ms. Hejinian has erred, too, through her own excessive ambition. She judges the capacities of language by the heart and intellect of Ms. Hejinian, but there are not more than one or two dozen Ms. Hejinians on the whole face of the earth.”

~

Blogland red danger light trigger’d here, where Friedlander speaks of a possible “deficiency” in Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K”: “attributed in part to the exceeding brevity of its articles—brevity that degenerated into mere paragraphism, precluding dissertation or argument, and thus all permanent effect.”

Is th’undertow of blog-publish’d “reviews” and comments terminal extemporaneousness? Would it be better—assuming it were possible—to set my stolen minutes aside to cobble together arguments made of steel? Are such monuments necessary, or trustworthy, or honorable? Better a gabble of the half-baked going off they heyds? Off they heyds.

~

In the “personal particulars” (On Silliman: “Neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended; the latter would puzzle phrenology.”) department, my fave detail would have to be how Michael Palmer is known for “how neatly ironed he [keeps] the crease in his denim trousers.” The only time I met Michael Palmer, in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was having post-reading drinks in a room with Charles Wright, another notorious Levi’s-ironer. What I found unsussable was how Palmer put up with Jack Spicer-the-slovenly, whom he apparently gaggled and fringed with in the pre-Langpo dark ages.

~

All good fun indeed. And “instructive.” Of the twenty-two “Literati of San Francisco” portray’d, I’ve encounter’d three: Grenier, Mackey, and Palmer.

~

One question “stages its proposition” immediately on turning away from the Poe inflect’d pieces and tackling the Jean Wahl-template’d “A Short History of Language Poetry, by ‘Hecuba Whimsey.’” That is, is such dovetailing chicanery suitable only for farce, for the kind of ribbing that salutes one’s indebtedness to predecessors through multiplying number and effect? That is, can a lesser, and more “abstract” and idea-bound writer like Wahl be made to do similar work with as happy a result? Which is where I find myself now. It is a piece less coarse, finer in its distinctions, able to delineate different approaches to language and representation amongst its principles Creeley (Hegel), Coolidge (Kierkegaard), Silliman (Jaspers), Watten and Hejinian (Heidegger ) and Bernstein (Sartre). Whether the distinction-making is “due” to a cordial fit between Wahl’s text and Friedlander’s “texting” of lived / witness’d particulars, or whether, I should say, Friedlander’s “texting” exact’d some violence on the Wahl (I’m thinking something like being “shoehorn’d in”), I’m not likely to know (and probably doesn’t matter for the “success” of the experiment. That is, I’m not likely to seek out the Wahl original the way I was moved to hunt up the Poe.

~

***Ah, here it is. In In the Early Morning Rain (Cape Goliard / Grossman, 1970). Title’d “Peace.” I love this poem. A large part of its pleasure is in the restraint of its diction, with not-completely-smug Eliotic echoes, and the goofy (though not always wholly obvious) rhymes. (The lines should be true “step-down” lines, ach.)

PEACE

What to do

when the days’ heavy heart

having risen, late

in the already darkening East

& prepared at any moment, to sink

into the West

surprises suddenly,

& settles, for a time,

at a lovely place

where mellow light spreads

evenly

from face to face?

The days’ usual aggressive

contrary beat

now softly dropped

into a regular pace

the head riding gently its personal place

where pistons feel like legs

on feelings met like lace.

Why,

take a walk, then,

across this town. It’s a pleasure

to meet one certain person you’ve been counting on

to take your measure

who will smile, & love you, sweetly, at your leisure.

And if

she turns your head around

like any other man,

go home

and make yourself a sandwich

of toasted bread, & ham

with butter

lots of it

& have a diet cola,

& sit down

& write this,

because you can.

—Ted Berrigan

~

See you in a week or so . . .

~

Out

~

Knacker’d.

~

Kablooey.

~

Runt’d in the fundament.

~

Out of “it.”

~

Morning shoot across the Diag and down the gunshot hill to the hospital. For the blood-draw. Morning milling of M.D.s. The visible self-satisfactions of the wiener class. I heard one use “on board” indicative of agreement.

—I talk’d to So-and-so and he’s on board now.

~

Kaput.

~

Cold-cock’d.

~

Skimming Sasha Frere-Jones’s piece on “Singles” in the latest New Yorker. Whilst shoveling down the raisin bran. Delight’d with: “This is not necessarily weather you need to keep track of, if it even exists.” I don’t know squat about current pop. I read Frere-Jones’s S/FJ (and Franklin Bruno’s Konvolut M, also “largely” focus’d on music) for the quality of the sentences. Sign’d: The Sentence-Seeker.

~

Capsiz’d.

~

Gor-blimey’d.

~

Knot’d. “Go get knot’d.”

~

A fudge beyond the sentence is the factoid. Set like a jewel in the gray slurry of print. Julian Barnes, writing about an auction of British cookbook author Elizabeth David’s “kitchen remnants,” drops in a rubific nugget: “Francis Wheen, the biographer of Karl Marx, spent £220 of his capital on three cheesegraters, two paperbacks, and a nutmeg grater—the last item still containing a talismanically half-used nutmeg.”

~

Fetch’d up.

~

Call’d back.

~

In the final pickle.

~

In a finical hap of effort elsewhere, anywhere.

~

Sack’d.

~

Black Dust

~

Received:

Buffalo Yoga, by Charles Wright (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004)

William Logan, who ineptly slam’d Buffalo Yoga (amongst others) recently in The New Criterion, provides blurbage here from another New Criterion review (of A Short History of the Shadow): “[Wright] finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places.” The book seems to’ve been released in tandem with Jeff Clark’s Music and Suicide, with similar black dust jackets, (Wright’s carries a Rothko panel; Clark’s an abstract rush of subway and fluorescence. Clark’s author photograph is “studiedly sexy” and imposing; Wright’s is quizzical, nearly “loopy” . . .) And Wright gets black paper cover’d boards, whereas Clark makes do with (something I’ve never seen) completely raw, uncover’d boards—one supposes it has something to do with being the latest “unclassifiable classic in underground American writing.” (Obviously, such choices don’t get made casually at a place the size of FSG; they have everything to do with “image,” that staple of marketing.) Would it be instructive to read sample pages of each? Would it help calibrate our instruments for future assessments of crossover wunderkinden like Clark? Would it mark extreme points on any meaningful continuum?

Here’s a page of Wright (the beginning of “Buffalo Yoga Coda II”—a little less than half of the poem, the second of three codas to a longer poem call’d “Buffalo Yoga”):

If, as Kafka says, the hunting dogs,

At play in the stone courtyard,

Will catch the hare no matter,

regardless of how it may be flying

Already now through the dark forest,

Then it must stay itself with just these trees,

and their bright passage,

Those marks and punctuations before the sentence ends,

Before, in short, and black as a bible,

the period closes in.

If, on the other hand, the hunting dogs,

now at play

In the stone courtyard,

Never arrive, the story becomes less classical.

And the hare, however fast,

will always be slow enough

To outlast the ending, which presupposes the source

Of story and story line,

Which cannot be doubted, and so the period snaps in place.

And thus one parable becomes another, the sun,

As it must, continues its chords and variations,

The waters lisp in the speckled woods,

The deer put their tentative feet,

one forward, one back,

On the dead pine needles and dead grass,

Then turn like Nijinsky out of the sunlight and up the hill.


When Tolstoy met Chekhov, Chekhov says,

they spoke of immortality, what else.

~

And Jeff Clark (a page randomly grab’d out of “Shiva Hive,” a poem that runs about fourteen pages in length—this comes a few pages before the end):

You once told me you would write down for me the story of the man who looked into a mirror and didn’t see himself.

Once again, forgive my delay in replying—I’ve been burdened with the indexing of Newton’s Principia. (The laws of falling bodies seem to describe a tragedy—though not everything that falls experiences impact. Think of orbiting, tracing out a trance.) I’m hardly in a position to write the story you requested.

Still, if we remember the mirror is a resistant medium, our faces, along with our thoughts, will travel much more slowly toward their images. “Recognition,” a dark drapery sinking through the mirror’s water, will settle gradually upon our eyes. The mask of recognition is donned for the (always awkward, always premature) encounter with our mirror-self.

It’s the same with words: to delay the arrival of a word’s meaning, say it over and over and over again until its true identity appears, wrested free of language. The same experiment can be conducted with the gaze, trained steadily upon one’s mirror-image. After a while only the eyes remain alive behind the mask. If the spell is prolonged, only a laminated pattern or pool of light pulses through the eternal instant.

No doubt these are obvious and primitive means of misrecognition—I only mention them to point out how easily the membrane is transpierced that separates us from the unnameable. But the unnameable is also the uninhabitable—and so, huddled here in our temporary homes, we keep its hiding-places (a book, a mirror) for future reference.

~

Which puts me in the mind of lines out of Wright’s “Words Are the Diminution of All Things,” glimpsed in thumbing: “The word remember touches my hand, / But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzard bank and wheel / Against the occluded sky. / All of the little names sink down, / weighted with what is invisible, / But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.”

Clark: “Alas, the world is constantly revising and erasing its propositions. At the mercy of these tides, we long for the unauthored . . .”

Ridiculous to continue pretending the two converse except at points. Clark’s constant succumbing to cum vignettes, groin “pulls,” sex eddas, Madame X crave-songs, and the like (all admirable enough) versus Wright’s “Chinese” lack of sex, or even other people beyond those who populate various static tableaux— whether literary, painterly, or reminiscent. Is there overlap along the lines of something like “salvation” (defined howsoever one may) in a landscape, urban-phantasmagorical or rural—Italian or Blue Ridge’d—and gospel-hung? I don’t know.

~

As to the slumgullion of my critical remarks: I could, one supposes, often be accused of allowing a critical writing to out that is only a species of letting saying say whatever it is bounden and beholden to say (rather than, say, dressing an orderly row of ideas up—as if they were farmer’s sons off to the Saturday night dance!—in “go to town” finery and brogans. Writing criticism that slides forth as any writing must: word-volitionals askance and prickly. “By ear,” sd the one who tower’d twenty-two inches over the spratkin John Keats. Such is exactly what interests me “most” about Ben Friedlander’s Simulcast: the template provides a constraint that disallows a writing of criticism that is mere exercise in getting one’s notions into the proper “togs.”

~

Talent without technique’s
No more than
A manner’d sally.

Technique without talent’s
No less than
A “dirty” mania.

~

Thinking my usual dark anti-Ron Hegemony thoughts whilst biking in under a sky absent of all flocculence, my brainpan, one supposes, “heavily infest’d with nymphs”: What’s up, I klaxon’d, with the Monday onslaught of e-mails from “Ron” tout court? Is that a bid for alignment with the category of “Greats of the Single Name”? Should one think “Ron” as in “Jess,” the undersung genius collagist, or “Ron” as in “Dion,” the minor indefatigable rock-moppet?

~

Too much
my “platter”
make me
a goofball.

~

“Work, and work, your fingers to th . . .”

~

Kibosh

~

Summer’s putting
The kibosh

To regularity
Of writing.

~

Some air is pudding—
The guy batch

Triggers hilarity
Off wry things.

~

Summary sputtering—
Thick broth

Tore garrulity
Off rind dings.

~

“Idiotic using this code.”

~

Note to self: read up about “inaugural methodickals retaliating to commencement of new literary formations”: to wit, the New Breed. Cf., “He ain’t too hip / about that New Breed thing.” Resignedly sigh out publick “Oh papa!”’s and shake a dismal head. “He’s doing the Jerk.”

~

Rainout after three innings. Game stopped after catcher caught the second of two rain-slick bats in the shoulder. We were all drench’d by then. Home to onslaught of fatigue.

Read, though, another parcel of Simulcast, largely completing hugely rambunctious and—odd maybe to say so—mightily informative third experiment, “The Literati of San Francisco.” Notes soon.

~

Question (for all New Breeders): Is Curtis Faville remora to Ron Silliman’s Caribbean reef shark? Now, I think Faville’s got plenty of interest to say, and says it generally with more pizzazz and flamboyance that the Silliman shark himself. I suspect, too, that in the used-and-rare book world he has encounter’d and “study’d” a wider range of materiel than Silliman, whose “range” often strikes me as circumscribed by affiliations political, poetical, and otherwise. So, it baffles me why Faville doesn’t strike out into th’ocean un- (so to put it) attached. If we study the zoological tracts, we learn that “Remora remora is a short, thick-set sucking fish.” The following, perhaps, will clarify the relationship:

The remora is not considered to be a parasite, despite its being attached to the host. Instead it is considered to have a commensal relationship with its host, since it does not hurt the host and is just “along for the ride.” It has been suggested that the relationship is symbiotic since the remora can obtain its food acting as a cleaner fish and removing parasites from the host, thus benefitting both. It is not known whether sharks tolerate the remora's presence or are just unable to catch them, but no remora’s ever been found in a shark’s stomach.

~

Au travail, mes rentiers!

~

Funk Applause

~

Sunday night a goblet moon pouring ink, Navy blue, into the black. Fatigue comes up on little bat claws, climbing up out of the broken flowerpots, nuzzling into the caves and considerations of our mutual hazardous physiognomies, our funks and applauses, our hugely mawkish incontinence,—to tell a tale that itself hangs upside down, a retinue, a list, a torpor, and a squat. Lincoln: “I never net a man so capable of using the most words to express the least thing.”

How’d it go? The usual. Housecleaning, lawn mowing, putting the bicycle tire flat to “right.” Two evenings out late. A Blandings turtle in a pond with green frogs plucking the one-string bass, washboarding up a percussive onslaught, and falling silent.

~

Summer: putting the kibosh on regularity of the writing?

~

A lather of verbiage to one end only. A “morning” phrase.

~

Married thirteen years ago today, by one D. D. Hudson, in a courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, retiring with no lack of alacrity and a small band of friends to Le Snail for eats immediately after.

~

Received:

The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Essays, by Harry Mathews (Dalkey Archive, 2003)

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, (University of California Press, 1974).

~

Tiniest laugh-nugget of some lazy reading last night, sleepy: Julian Barnes in Something to Declare: Essays on Fance and French Culture.

“Central for me in the development of the modern sensibility is the figure of Gustave Flaubert. “I wish he’d shut up about Flaubert,” Kingsley Amis, with pop-eyed truculence, once complained to a friend of mine. Fat chance: Flaubert, the writer’s writer par excellence, the saint and martyr of literature, the perfector of realism, the creator of the modern novel with Madame Bovary, and then , a quarter of a century later, the assistant creator of the modernist novel with Bouvard et Pécuchet.”

~

I did spend a half-hour or so in the public library (G. reading something call’d Junkyard Dog) breezing through that hefty new Anne Waldman Coffee House “select’d” titled, awkwardly, I’d warrant, In the Room of Never Grieve. I found it astounding that Ron Silliman would dispatch with the poetry therein with a nod at a fifteen line lyric (whilst giving huzzah to Waldman’s various social positionings—though with the odd disclaimer “that all these divisions into schools is (sic) so much hoo-hah on the part of compulsive mapmakers”—, along with her general energy and incredible prolificity.) What strikes me about the book is how copiously it offers up “Anne Waldman” as image. Full of photographs dating “back” in some cases, I’d think, before the markoff date of the New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003 of the subtitle. It remind’d me of the picture of Carolyn Forché that graces the cover of The Country Between Us, her “El Salvador book.” The wind-blown demoiselle of the bee-stung lips as anti-imperialist. Marketing tactics—Harper and Row’s or Coffee House’s—apparently subsume all “progressions,” literary, artistic, or ideological.

~

Au travail, ’toys!

~

Box

~

Verse Magazine Announcement

The following just popped into my "box":

Dear John Latta,

FYI, Verse magazine now has a blog at versemag.blogspot.com

In lieu of its web site, which has been dead for a while and which I'd need to buy new software to bring online / update, I've set up the blog for news and excerpts from issues of the magazine. Eventually, I hope to include a lot of reviews on the blog and maybe even have a "reviews annex" there.

Best,

Brian Henry

~

Drench

~

So drench’d me the rains that, home, my slicker zipper stuck. Supper of leftovers with G. and a “clearing at sundown” ramble with Carmen through the neighborhood, G. pedaling lazily alongside. Desultory sort of the day’s accumulation of mail: I don’t recognize myself in any of the pics in the “Gifts for Dad” flyer. “Radio controlled atomic digital weather station. Indoor /outdoor temp, date & time transmitted daily from the atomic clock in Ft. Collins, CO. Not available in Alaska.” Who built an oeuvre out of such data—and did it affably, with something like “a tender humor for human foibles”—(rather than recklessly and meanly, Mr. Malaprop-Misanthrope)—was A. R. Ammons. (Though he wasn’t above pettiness—it seem’d recognition itself made him ornery.)

~

. . .
I tell you you are a walking calamity
And when you sit down there is hardly less activity
The alarm clock breaks out raging its held cry
and the oven in the kitchen sets itself for broil
I mean the gas-jet in the incinerator bloops on
and frankly the mechanisms in my legs—I hope you
never find out—jerk:
Oh, beauty, beauty is so disturbingly nice.
(“Guitar Recitativos”)

Just because I stumbled against it, disturbingly.

~

Snooz’d. And J. return’d with a story of meeting a ninety-year-old painter, former New Yorker, a woman only yea-high, who paints into the wee hours of morning in a big empty house in Ypsilanti. Fay Kleinman. Here’s what little I find:

Fay Kleinman’s “Zayde” series . . . About 40 years ago, Kleinman, now 92, uncovered a box of drawings of country scenes in the Catskills her Russian immigrant father had sketched on brown bags for his young granddaughter.

Kleinman, an accomplished oil painter who now lives in Ypsilanti, has been creating her own interpretations of her father's sketches during the decades since: Still painting, she has three or four to go. One corner of the gallery holds several of these luminous Paul Klee-like works, alongside the father's drawings.

~

Out of my snooze and back into the Friedlander. Reading the review of Charles Bernstein’s Dark City, titled “Blockage, Breakdown, Baffle,” based on a Poe review of the Complete Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, I may—post-snoozedom—have been too ratiocinatedly busy with my own accidental juxtapositionings—but, much of Bernstein’s quoted patter remind’d me of Ammons. See:

“So sway the / swivels, corpusculate the / dilatations. / For I’ve / learned that relations / are a small / twig in the blizzard / of projections / & expectations.” (Bernstein)

“Streams divided (around a boulder-cluster or / barge) heal right back together: // gravity’s bed takes it all one way, the same / water the substance of distant, subsequent / occasions:” (Ammons)

See:

“Enter the / Digitalizing oscilloscope with 20 / GHz bandwidth, 10 ps resolution & / Floating-point primitives upwardly / Compatible with target-embedded / Resident assemblers & wet-wet / Compilers.” (Bernstein)

“I want precision reel blades
I want a console-styled dashboard
I want an easy spintype recoil starter
I want combination bevel and spur gears, 14
gauge stamped steel housing and
washable foam element air cleaner
I want a pivoting front axle and extrawide turf ties
I want an inch of foam rubber inside a vinyl
covering . . .” (Ammons)

Poe / Friedlander says of the Bernstein: “Its tone of cheerful derision is well sustained throughout. There is, as well, an occasional quaint grace of self-derision . . .” I suspect it is in the tender slicings of “tone” (to say nothing of intent) that difference lies—“cheerful derision” is not exactly “affable sympathy,”—but I’d think the kinship of these two warrants further investigation.

~

Is it the placing in the book, or the meanness of the prey? I rather hurried through Friedlander / Poe’s throttling of poor Lew Daly (of apex of the M), a species of, oh, mashing a hapless (and mostly harmless) scuttling cockroach with ordnance of exceeding size, oh, say, a sledgehammer. The prey warranteth not th’expenditure.

~

Note to myself: locate the Waldrop book— Against language? Dissatisfaction with language as theme and as impulse towards experiments in twentieth century poetry (The Hague, Mouton, 1971).

~

Boss is talking about avoiding encephalopathies, spongiform or otherwise. Hey, I’m for that!

~

Still left with a notion of something oceanic unsung here, or maybe a series of tidal pools, more optically feasible, if less terrible, or swift, of all-embracing. Huh.

~

Work, for the lambencies shrivel.

~

The Lankiest

~

Baseball. G. the lankiest of catchers. A win, 24-18, against the “arty-smarty” scholars of two private schools—one named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, one named for Rudolf Steiner.

~

“Hotel Point channels Friedlander channeling Poe,” kindly noted by Steve Evans at Third Factory. Which word, “channeling,” I cannot read without recalling a document so titled that the Selective Service “produced” at some point in the early post-WWII years, probably part of its justification for a “peacetime” draft. By the time I saw a copy of it, circa 1969 or 1970, through a loose group of anti-draft activists who’d want’d to make draft counseling available in the Ann Arbor high schools, I think it’d been “decommission’d” or whatever it is that war-making bureaucracies do with ancient “position papers.” The memorable phrase therein was “the club of induction” and how it could be held over the heads of young men in order to (mostly by means of a coercive set of deferments) “channel” individuals into studies and jobs “in the national interest.” And channel it did. I knew a terrific poet at Cornell, Anselm Parlatore, some few years older than me, who most reluctantly enter’d into medical school rather than pursue graduate studies in English, or honorably “work an odd job and write,” or skip off to Canada. One example.

Side note to what is mostly pure side note: after the high school administration inform’d the anti-draft activists that regular high school counselors could provide whatever answers and advice would be needed to students with questions about the draft, I went in as a “test case” to see what Mr. E—, whose name I’ve forgotten, a genial nitwit, sort of bubbly with good humor, almost chop-licking with good humor, no matter. I said, “Mr. E—, I’m worried about the draft.” And Mr. E—, the old goof, laugh’d a wettish laugh: “John, I don’t think you have to worry about becoming cannon fodder.”

~

Who’s Harriet Martineau? The H. M. who wrote: “Thus I arrived,—after long years,—at the same point of ease or resignation about my ‘quietudinous’ mettle as my ‘post-avant’ cred, and felt that (to use a broad expression uttered by somebody) it was better to take the chance of being damned for adhering to the former than be always quacking one’s self as pure partisan of the latter.” She, H. M. apparently also publish’d fiction under the unlikely monicker of Hattie Hammer.

~

Work, for Thoth dogs an ape.

~

Yellow Dog

~

Beer pull’d out cold. Yellow dog heap’d at my feet. “Post avant be damned.”
(Paraphrasing Williams, talking of Vers libre.)

~

Epigram for an unwritten collection call’d Hush Street, companion to th’unpublish’d Rue Hazard:

“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.” —Coleridge

~

Addendum to yesterday’s notes on ambition: “forth came Ambition, Crawling like a toad.” —Blake

~

Fireflies out, with minuscule lantern-lit cargoes. “Sticky.” Carmen, the thrown bolt of her “exploding” after a rabbit, and coming up short, yanking leash and leash-arm taut. Putter about the sleeping house. G. asleep in the big bed and “periwinkle blue” paint drying on the walls in the room where he usually sleeps.

~

Here’s how Friedlander (in Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism) finesses Poe, with little nudges—no agon, no hurry, no apparent “guilt” at th’untouch’d perfect “blocks” of text. Making it sing anew.

Poe:

While the epic mania—while the idea that, to merit in poetry, prolixity is indispensable— has, for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind by mere dint of its own absurdity—we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of The Didactic. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

Friedlander:

While the epic mania—the notion that, to merit in Poetry, prolixity is indispensable— has, for some years past, been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity—we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our Poetical literature than all other enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of Language As Such. It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate fact of all Poetry is its Language. Every poem, it is said, should “foreground” this fact; and by this “foreground” is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. As computers talk in movies, so too our most up-to-date poets—with flashing lights and robotic drone foregrounding nothing but the silliness of all Didacticism. Americans, especially, have patronized this sham; and “New Coasters,” very especially, have developed it in full. Opacity has become something of a first principle in the scribbling of verse—a solipsism unbound. We have taken it into our heads that to write simply for the sake of sharing out thoughts, and to acknowledge this to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force—but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into another’s face—the true opacity—we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely poetic, more intrinsic to Language, than this very sharing—this sharing per se—this sharing for sharing’s sake—which suffers opacity but seeks clarity—seeks, that is, the welcome of a reader.*

*Our most opaque poets—the most solipsistic—are those who bark loudest for “Radical Transparency.” The transparency of their theory lies in its motive—their desire to make a big splash—while the radicality is mere dogmatism. No true poet could adhere to their principles, and no true reader would take pleasure from the result, if any poet should so adhere.

~

Ah, to damn the Language boys with good old Didacticism. Barthes’s third term: the “teacherly” text? The paragraph roots itself (in the rewriting) finally in something like “love”—and becomes almost tender, and moving. The asterisk’d footnote is, I suspect, a re-do of something out of Poe’s “Marginalia,” though I haven’t discover’d it.

~

I suspect the most damning remark for the present moment might well be this: “Opacity has become something of a first principle in the scribbling of verse.”

~

To work, (for the mighty are slumming).

~

Orthographickals

~

Blow-out of bicycle “tyre” (thinking how orthography is materiality) near Allmendinger Park. Hoof’d it home in the post-thunderstorm light, the beat down humidity pushing itself back up off the asphalt for another go-around. Good hand on the “saddle,” th’other “measuring” the slippage of the minor walk-velocity breeze.

~

G.’s first game, against the Hawks. A drubbing, though mostly well-play’d. G.’s fielding a species of insouciant avoidance, never too obvious. I recall being told I, too, lack’d some necessary “competitorial” ingredient. —Humph.

~

Novelist Robert Stone in the current New Yorker (June 14 & 21, 2004) on “where his head was at” whilst, circa 1964, Ken Kesey and pals were preparing the 1939 International Harvester school bus (destination tag: “FURTHUR”) for the drive across the country to the World’s Fair in New York: “I was at a strange point in my life. I had gone to the hospital for the treatment of what, in the days before CAT scans, was thought to be a brain tumor. The doctors, after shaving my head and pumping air into my cranium, playing my head like a calliope with their monstrous instruments, had decided that there was no tumor. Or, rather, there was a condition called pseudo-tumor, something that happens sometimes. I was conscious during the operation, on some kind of skull-deadener, so I remember snatches of medical conversation. ‘When you cut, cut away from the brain,’ one of the surgeons suggested.”

~

In Gaylord, Michigan, 1964 found me ten years old, also with a shaved head. My father’s home-barbershop version of not wanting me to look like “those backwards boys,” meaning the tight white Levi’d motorcyclist brothers with the ducktails who lived down the street. In my grade, Jimmy Hercules went to the World’s Fair in New York. The same Jimmy Hercules who’d gone to Disneyland. The same Jimmy Hercules who had taps on his shoes, and already a permanent smirk of entitlement on his handsome “mug.” I hated Jimmy Hercules with all my shorn-head’d might.

~

Ambition’s always catch’d in my craw, cached in the crow I eat (ever willing to put anything in my mouth for a laugh). Ambition ground down in the pullet’s grit-stuff’d gizzard, rash étouffé of bafflement and refusal. Something indigestible about ambition. A green cud darkening with enzyme’d-up saliva, mouth’d again and again, forced back down into el estómago numero quatro like Sam the Sham hasty-basting the Pharaohnickal Ruminant Urge. (Sentence kablooey, I know. “Something,” as Robert Stone says, “that happens sometimes.” So sentence me.) The digestif that’d cut the morass of my “lack ambitional” (“a going round, a compass, f. amb- + -itus going, going round to canvass for votes: “any puft vp greedy humour of honour or preferment.” See individual entries “Language poetries,” “post-avant,” and “Silliman, Ron.”) would likely soar tyrannically to spiel and geyser rage, to squirt forth mannlich the way any old vieux marc’ll grapple with any old stomach to cut a half-dollar sized hole in it, a bull’s eye in a target Lack, so forget it. Forget ambition. Dylan:

I've got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don't live here—
Honey, I gotta think you're really weird.

~

After all: “It will not do in a civilized land to run amuck like a Zapatista.” (Friedlander)

~

Had to Laugh Department: One of the “alt.fan.madonna” re-writes sent (as a “thinly anonymous” posting to “Newsgroups: alt.fan.silliman”) circa 1995 to the Poetics List as part of the “Anti-Hegemony Project” (present’d in Friedlander’s terrific Simulcast):

“I love Silliman, but I cringe whenever I hear that he is preparing another pronouncement, especially one where some sort of historical perspective is required. He’s so smirky! And he loves to throw in some stupid fact to make himself sound like a big expert, even though his comments are totally superficial. I simply can’t bring myself to read any of his essays (except some of the one-pagers, which are more like poems) He is way too self-conscious as a critic; it’s as if he knows the whole world is holding its breath, waiting to see if he can successfully deliver a simple opinion without patting himself on the back.”

~

To work, (for the plight is sung).

~

Junk Leg

~

What did G. say when I (sorting junk, G.’s junk in a junk drawer) toss’d him a small leg?
—That’s the leg of Chipper Jones.

~

Lyrical interference (para uso cotidiano) of The Delphonics: “La la la la la la la la la means I love you.”

~

I as “technical effect.” (Friedlander). I like that.
As I do the Gogolian “untrustworthy critic.”

~

William Carlos Williams to Kenneth Burke (January 26, 1921): “Criticism must originate in the environment that it is intended for.”

Which would (maybe) tie some of Magee’s concerns in Emancipating Pragmatism to Friedlander’s in Simulcast. Friedlander’s appropriation of Poe’s various and sour critical reviews for a series of writings “on” language writing (and writers) originates not in the environment of Poe, but in that of Kathy Acker, and early (musical) stirrings of “sampling.” Curiously, however, Friedlander’s call for a reading “between the given text and the hidden text beneath it”—that is, the Poe original—a “hidden text” “whose origins have exaggerated legibility,” would seem to ask that a reader of the Simulcast pieces read the original “plagiarized” Poe texts in tandem with them.

~

Clobber’d by a nine-year-old baserunner (with helmet) in the practice scrimmage yesterday: mal à la tête.

~

Off to sit in th’auditorium to read whilst G. rehearses tap-dancing for the show immediately to follow. ’Course it’s dark in th’auditorium, too dark to read, so I sit stretch’d out pretending I’m James Dean in the planetarium, or Carl Sagan, or Françoise Sagan, or somebody . . . Rare to just sit there, and it makes me edgy.

~

Of course, doing nothing means thinking, a kind of catatonia. The big-butt’d catatonia (whomp) of thinking. Some blues thing blocking my way: Caledonia (whomp), Caledonia (whomp), what makes your big head so round? Big butt so grand?

That’s one version of how my walk with the C-girl commenc’d. By the end of it the breezes sough’d the treezes. Sough’d? It’s so perfect: as in cough, as in dough, as in through—air brushing the brow of the feverish tree.

The East Jesus Blues Band. Was that local, circa 1971? James Hejna, who went on to study molecular biology and write poems about gamin calling out “Baksheesh, baksheesh.” Brother of “East Jesus” David?

Checking my pupils for any sign of uneven dilatedness. Wasn’t it Nietzsche who suggest’d we all suffer equally from dilatednesss? Here comes the boss. At least he is tardy. Names in Friedlander:

“Halliday Dresser” is clearly a fraudulent piece of drop’d in gaffawry, no? A right-sounding fake needs be “off” a touch, like “slightly” sour milk. Once the idea of pseudo- hetero- “nyms” (Think of Clouseau saying it . . .) gets “in” me (like a lengthily

monstrous tapeworm nommé “Benji”), there’s no telling whom I could suspect next. Please rewrite the following in terms appropriate to the contemporary scene: “Bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau:

he gave a whole new meaning to “being full of oneself” . . . along with his manic sidekick, Kato (who was always springing impromptu karate attacks upon Clouseau . . . to the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus, who

was actually driven insane in one of the movies by Clouseau's inane actions and colossal stupidity. Misterjaw played by Arte Johnson. Additional cacophony of “voices” by Rich Little.”

~

Topical Overkill Department:

Immersive reading:
confronting grief at a book's end.

I’m sure there’s something in the self-help section of any one of the ubiquitous chain bookselling units of this, our fair majestic nation. Or, as G. and I like to mock-histrionick “at” one another in moments of earnest fatuity: “O woe!” and “O woe!” And again (together): “O woe!”

~

To work (for the sight is bung’d).

~

Newly

~

Uncover’d a newly catalog’d library copy of Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism, and read the first few pages with alacrity and high excitement, sitting in the Lumina in the rain whilst G. did tap-dancing. I understand Jordan Davis’s enthusiasm: it’s genial, swift, and accurate in style. No chance so far to measure “affection” or “severity” vis-à-vis the principals, but I’d bet th’assessment’ll hold.

A couple of things noted: mostly because they threw me back on the inchoate disaster of yesterday’s “argument.” First, a distinction between the Poundian sincerity of “a man standing by his word” (a critical “stance” privileging content, interpretation, evaluation, &c.) and a sort of “top down criticism” (“style over substance”) put into play here. Which Friedlander characterizes as “an inversion that in effect ceded control of my writing to the writing itself.” (Like poetry.) And I recognize the feeling of abandonment of the critical markers, the tiny (though rigorous) sets of conventions that Friedlander attempts to reject (and likely succeeds) by means of several strategies (the “experiments” of the title)—most favor’d being the use of the “form” of Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism as a mold / template into which to pour an “actual history of language writing,” attempting all the while to follow the form(er)’s arguments (“and even wording.”) But: my fretting (here, and yesterday) is due to a recent preoccupation with the limits to that ceding of writerly “control.” Even when that little voice is sitting on “one’s” wrist claiming to be, say, “Europe,” there is an activated, ongoing contextual constraint, one “made” by all that’s preceded that writing.

Which would seem to stymie one completely, though writing continues and changes (no wager placed on the teleological possibilities in th’observation). A tiny stab at clarification, using Friedlander’s method. Here’s a sentence he wrote (he’s discussing Borges’s “Pierre Menard” text and how readers shape meaning out of the raw material provided, and how “this act is usually constrained by such factual considerations as chronology and context”):

“We read only what we imagine it possible to read, adhering to a fixed order of reality even when reading the most fantastic of texts.”

Which I could use as template for th’following:

“One writes only what one’s contextual burden allows as possible to write, stuck in a mysteriously changing contextual order, a reality made of previous texts, even when attempting to write the most outlandish of texts.”

~

Suffering an indelible failure to communicate.

~

A spectator is chomping at a rope. Two days, now three, of drizzle. Out in th’yellow dog slicker to plod the wet alleys, dismal as a vision of Arlen Specter. Behind closed doors voices implore the Pistons to ferocity and tempo, feverish for a simulacrum’d communitas, the holy “we,” wholly pixellated and replaceable. “Pixellate me, pixellate me,” the mummers cry. A strange dog trails behind, the water everywhere keeping the scent low, inconspicuous. Looks frowsy, an unkempt bowser, brother to Sirius Black. Carmen continues, keeping her own council. I suspect it’s Novalis she’s maundering discontent’dly about tonight. Back, I scrub her dry, mop up, pitch the towel down the shoot. Whatever happen’d to Mel Fowler? Woodcut illustrator of several Kayak books.

~

Read brutally late. Friedlander makes a page-turner out of the details of a personal history of lit-crit trajectory. Unsentimental education. How’d I never meet the guy in the five years I hid out in Albany, early nineties? Hid. Out. With blinders.

~

To work.
To coffee “later” with Mr. Flowers That Glide.

—Mr. Flowers That Glide, meet Mr. Scowler That Hides.

~

Proviso, Nutty

~

Imporvirshment of infratricies. Bump in sluice mo.

~

Honorific of the itch, who
Dicks around buggy today? Who
Manages to o’erleap th’undertow of
Permissibility context (there’s nothing more
Unforgiving than context) provides today?
Provides? Nutty. Nutty proviso of
The wretch engobment. Salamanca’d dirt.

~

Soporific of the rich who
Stick around. Muggy today. Who
Bandages the solo plea asunder’d now?
Permeability sans text and nothing
Fungibly “reckonable” pervades the day
Parades. Not I. Not I.
The red engine gobbler’s girth.

~

Thinking about one kind of robotic assumption made: “I is free to write anything I does please,” or (in one of its myriad variants), “To thine own (thin) self be twoo.” A contagion and an impossibility. Thinking of Williams’s “fooling-around” crossroads book, Spring and All.

How it
Don’t
Go too far.
’Cause it
Ain’t
Possible
To go too
Far.

~

O hob and backsmirch! O sentible frag. O rundial mutt and corse over. Meliasticon of the impoverish’d polisher. Better turf, get a better smurf. I does not amuse me minions to experiment so. It is no experiment to experiment so.

~

Import’d dervishment of infra-thrices. Bumps in sluice mode.

~

Meagre rakish sustenances of the dribbly night. Out under the scratchable rabblement of the cloud-flush’d night. Dutiful Hennigan is my name-o. Brandish the computer as rabid decontextualizer.

Regard:

Meagre rakysh swwstenances owf the drybbly nyght. Owwwt wwnder the scratchable rabblement owf the clowwwd-flwwsh’d nyght. Dwwtyfwwl Hennygan ys my name-ow. Brandysh the cowmpwwter as rabyd decowntextwwalyzer.

A Sondheimizer! A machinery!

And thrilling it is. ’Cept: a new context rushes in wherever the “meagre rakish swwstenances” of art dareth to tread. And soon as “one” can say “Dwwtyfwwl Hennygan,” “someone” is shrugging listlessly and scratching they rabblement: “Why that’s just more Sondheimiz’d malarkey, “nothing” “new” “there.” (Truth is, I “like” Alan Sondheim’s pieces, find that omnivorous innocence—even when it’s “faux”-omnivorous innocence—mostly endearing. What I’m probing here is the mechanism of its de- and re- contextualization.) It’s not for nothing that the “rooter’s” meaning for “art” is “context-breaker.” And, you do “root” for Art, don’t you? Art is “one’s” route to “out” of a “contextualization” one’d seem’d root’d in . . .

~

Soft rabblement of cloud-laundry—rag and tatter aftermath of the tornado warning’d “front” that, mid-afternoon, sent the library populace lackadaisical-ing down into the sub-floor stacks. I took along Homo Aestheticus Luc Ferry and busy’d at its pages, though I did have a “G. Gordon Liddy” moment of wanting to lash myself to a tall tree on a high hill, holding cigarette lighters to all my underarms, one in every hand. The “all clear” cometh too qwwyck . . .

~

Morning. Why do th’underplug’d “fashionable noises” seem more “authentic” and “variable” than the Procrustean awkwardness “with which” I began the entry?

“semiotic frou-frou” “too bland solipsisms of ornery empire”

“originary in the soup of havoc” “becalm’d butter-slugs”

“mojo wonking with th’industry heavies” “energizer buns”

“still spotless threesome rug”

All note’d in that brief impasse between orange juice and coffee.

~

There is something solace-offering about this:

Honorific of the itch, who
Dicks around buggy today? Who
Manages to o’erleap th’undertow of
Permissibility context (there’s nothing more
Unforgiving than context) provides today?
Provides? Nutty. Nutty proviso of
The wretch engobment. Salamanca’d dirt.

~

I gotta go. Fix my head.

~

Loathe

~

William Logan’s (presumably) paid gig of being the irascibly loathsome loather of American poetry (and, in all likelihood, anglophiliac irredentist—Oh for a tiny Larkinville to bring a little reserve to these wild shores!) is mostly laughable: good prescriptive reading for the rhetorically bereft, but little more. Stay at a style too long and you get charged with self-caricature—as Logan charges Charles Wright, one could easily charge Logan. Proper response is a snort, refusal of engagement. (In spite of which, engagement persists . . .)

Given the ga-ga incoherencies of Logan—the reductio ad absurdum of O’Hara’s glorious bounty to one more trotting out of the “I-do-this, I-do-that” line, say, or the way Logan so determinedly deprecates Wright with ‘Southerner = hick’ nudge and innuendo: there’s the supposed “crooked country grin” and demotic speech; there’s the likening of Wright to “Mammy Yokum, puffing on a corncob”; there’s the reference to “cornbread platitudes”; and there’s the strange and entirely inappropriate (to Wright) image-eruption of “a man who makes brilliant origami out of Playboy centerfolds.” (The image’d seem more apt for 1985’s “most beloved poet in Britain” and one begins to picture Logan flailing away, all epithet and froth, until even he’s unsure what nasty remark attaches where . . .)

(Mrrr, I had not th’intention of detailing Logan’s idiocies so.) Having done thus, though, allow me to mention a curiosity. Once Logan (begrudgingly) settles for Larkin as the offensive piece’s one (somewhat tarnish’d) “golden boy,” he provides only vague histories and muddled superlatives. And (with nothing quoted), little consideration of the work itself. (He does list a baker’s dozen titles of “Larkin’s best poems” and makes a claim for “dozens scarcely less fine” (British accent de rigueur there, matey!) We should, I sighingly suppose, know such classics as “MCMXIV” and “Talking in Bed” by heart. So, for th’edification of us who don’t, sample some “best” Larkin bon mots:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

(“The Trees”) (A decidedly Audenesque limp into the barely accurate: “buds” “spread”?)

—But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M 1 café;
Their kids are screaming for more—
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)!

(“Going, Going”) (“Spectacled grins”: that’s metonymy! Makes me want to “look up” “unspoilt dales” “on” the “Business Page.” It is drab and “modern” and musically limp.)

I cannot continue.

~

It all reminds me of A. R. Ammons’s remark after a reading by, who? Jon Stallworthy? More likely a Britisher that Stallworthy “brought” to Cornell. Ammons: “British poets’ve always seem’d like ‘geldings’ to me . . .” Laconic, precise, and right.

~

Given the ga-ga incoherencies of Logan . . . it’s interesting to see Ron Silliman use Logan’s review to bat Simon Armitage (and some silly slew of Armitage-select’d offspring) about the head. He does, however, seemingly lose the critical grip (in, I’d wager, reckless ambition to mark up another score against that old Gipper and bête noire the “School of Quietude” (the quotation marks are deliberate, c’est à dire,I don’t think any such school exists) in claiming “he [Logan] does an excellent job of demonstrating just why it makes sense to call such a poetics reactionary.” Wha? Where’s that? Logan’s now enlist’d in Silliman’s imaginary cause célèbre? Pouka! It’s as if une salade de crudités were suddenly a “crud salad”!

~

Interesting, too, that Silliman should apparently (uncritically) accept Logan’s portrayal of Wright’s poems—“bundles of lines ‘loose as kindling.’” To me, Silliman and Wright seem kinfolk: each rather openly pursuing th’inheritance of the Poundian legacy. And isn’t Silliman’s oeuvre, too, a similar “bundle of lines”? I don’t say “mere,” or imply it—it seems an entirely honorable way to proceed. (Perhaps the only way to proceed: skimming a little chapbook by Roger Snell this morning, I liked “Wholeness is / botch . . .”) And no opprobrium in “loose as kindling”—“one”’d want a poem to be lattice’d, spark-worthy, aerate’d, and ever-ready to flare up (“metaphysically” or “objectivistedly”), no?

~

Out into the hot night to trouble these notions. And troubled they remain.

~

Charles Wright: “Nothing’s undoing among the self-stung unfolding of things.”

William Carlos Williams: “A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent . . .”

~

Morning note: “One rhetorical strategy to obliviate the bruisers: be as “French” as possible. Bof!

~

Bureau des Rêves: Watching from an elevated crosswalk as the black rolling ball—sometimes star-shaped, or with points, like a mediaeval mace—of a tornado “took out” several squares of the urban “net.”

Tiny voice within: “He’ll stop at nothing! He’s literature-fyin’ our dreams!”

Me: “Man, it’s all literature-fyin’ ebrywhere. Il n’y a pas hors . . . They ain’t no other horse!”

~

Fined for “failing to make himself available to the media.”

~

Big (Carolina) wren-clatter in the back-greenery.

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Two downies (woodpeckers) in a dying ash, downing emerald borers.

~

Rhet. Strat.: Wow the dismissives with sentence architecture.

~

Petering out tunefully: “Don’t let me / be loathsome / tonight.”

~

Cutback Adept

~

Ice cream social at th’elementary school. Where I find myself standing uselessly, optics agog at peers. A slice of pizza costs three tickets, a cup of ice cream costs four tickets, a five-minute bounce (with four other kids) in the inflated enclosure call’d the “moonwalk” costs two tickets. That’s the game I “man” for a spell. With J. Who’s adept at chatter. G. dashes about, returning for more tickets, or to show off a won T-shirt. Great expenditures of energy in public education spent on fund-raising (th’administrator’s job now that of “spurring parents on” to help raise money, all under the guise of “community-building”), the result of governmental funding cutbacks all down the line, and the resulting habitual, chronic shortfalls . . .

~

“One book opens another.” Is how Gerrit Lansing ends a brief notice of John Clarke’s From Feathers to Iron. Which occurs with alarming frequency, prematurely. I note it here to remind myself not to clean my own readerly clock with something hefty and unaffordable before I’ve had a moment to adjust my Emersonian-Ellisonian headgear. Which is where regret wells up like an oratorio to say, when a single word’d suffice, “one” lined “one’s” nesty tablature with downy over-imbecilities. So “one” did. So “do” “I.”

~

One ordinary stitch the cloak-
Seamstress made in th’unbecomingest future
Sack’d up our discrepant desires.

~

Out into the fawning hot night we go—C-dog and I. How is it the heat amplifies the common drapery of noise that falls heavy around us? Semis skirling up they tachometers hitting highway night speeds west. My own scuff and drag and the jangle of the Carmen-leash. Under the buzz of a streetlight big head peonies bust open they whiteness, broad as a cackle, wide as a gaffe. There’s a pleasant gulf between the eye’s delight in mess and flourish and the ear’s perennial dart and focus. The way it tracks its musicks—temporal creature in an economy of overlap and ply. The sigh’s sign, slack embouchure and cannonade. If a door starts with a soft pluhh to open, it is lens and filament to the soundscape, a mufflerless Toyota humors but th’eye, and subsides.

’Cept the C-dog’s scoot’d into the underbrush and come out hiding something in the back of her throat. ’Cept I don’t know it, I only suspect it. Indoors, she’s guilt-wrackedly gumming it in lieu of diggin’ her treats, an impossibility out with predecentials. My dopey good humour pounces dogward, opens her black-lipped jaws and, and, fingers th’awfullest thing out her deep craw. It looks like Miss Watson’s Jim’s hair-ball, what he uses for oracle-izing, what “had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox,” if you believe Mr. H. Finn. If not: “Praise then the interruption of our composure” (Rob’t Duncan). It could “of” been a chicken breast, could “of” been a Kotex, could “of” been a sponge . . .

~

And off I went to read Ellison’s Invisible Man.

~

Work, (for the blighter’s coming.)

~

The Honour of Art

~

Though I know little of Gerrit Lansing (I must've missed th'indefatigable Dale Smith's remarks here at Possum Pouch), the following statement, uncovered in A February Sheaf: Selected Writings, Verse and Prose ($15, Pressed Wafer, 2003), a handy-sized compendium of widely-differing pieces, with a fine Jane Freilicher winterscape (Snow Day, 2001) gracing the cover, strikes me as particularly apt in our present “age” of boundary-demarcation, turf-defense, and pathological propriety. Too, I like what Lansing notes in Prelude, quoting Nicholas Breton: “the honour of Art is gotten by Exercise . . .”

Here’s the piece in its (near)-entirety. I know neither th’occasion nor the date of its composition:

La p(l)age poetique

nations of poetry on the beach
scanning “horizons endlessly” . . .
awaiting . . .

Poetics will be planetary or not at all (hommage à André Breton): its data and resource unrestricted by any “tradition.” The word of sin was always Restriction, and, in the bondage-scene of verse, was always, at its best, high play (game of Decorum, the keeping, the conventions apt to some local time-crystal).

The dead hand, or confusion of times, was ever to take the living rules of one historical moment and try to fasten them down on another time. Pseudomorphosis. The restricted notion of “form” never furthers. “Form-content opposition” is not an idea fruitful to explore . . .

The gravelled ways of those poets involved in practicing what they already know (for example, Auden, J. Merrill, Larkin [today, one could extend the list to include “members” of any number of more recent “social formations,” unconvincingly rehashing for a tired public the correctness and ineffability of practices practiced now for nearly thirty years—JL]) are less informative of song than the bewildered hike of a Khlebnikov. Dusky Whitman says, “At its best, poetic lore is like what may be heard of conversation in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs.”

The space that opens out in a planetary poetics is not imperial-universal. Making the soul is always particular, in whatever tongue. Even parochial—the historic you inhabit is also the formant (manifesting the unheard etheric formative forces) and the isness of “the mere objectiveness of things” (Stevens) includes the language in which you wreathe it . . .

That figurative beach or page is a head, for launching or welcoming down the grand insolite poems to come.

~

“Isness” includes the language: naming talks the world into being. Which is not too removed from Kenneth Burke’s pragmatist “process” wherein it is recognized “that one discovers ‘reality’ in accordance with one’s terminology.” Which is out of Michael Magee’s Emancipating Pragmatism. I am reading it slowly, deliberately. The necessity of exploring Burke’s writings’s never been made so plain. And Ralph Ellison’s.

~

Received:

Xantippe, Number 2, 2004, edited by Kristen Hanlon ($10, P.O. Box 20997, Oakland, California 94620-0997)

Poetry: Killarney Clary, Miranda Field, Joseph Lease, Julie Carr, Claudia Keelan, John Latta, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Carmen Gimenez-Rosello, Carol Snow, Laura Mullen, Donna de la Perriere, Jennifer Scappettone, Laynie Browne, Denise Newman, Geoffrey Nutter, Ange Mlinko, Tom Thompson, Elizabeth Robinson, Molly Lou Freeman, and Chris Stroffolino.

Reviews of Columbarium, by Susan Stewart (Amy Shroeder), The Frequencies, by Noah Eli Gordon (Glen C. Silva), X: Poems, by James Galvin (Lary Kleeman), Granted, by Mary Szybist (Denise Nico Leto), and Some Values of Landscape and Weather, by Peter Gizzi (John Isles).

Odd coming to a head here of a minor phenomenon I’ve noticed lately, that of several poems lined up unabashedly under the same “recycled” title without nary a numbering to distinguish each and any . . . I think I first noticed it in Joyelle McSweeney’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” series, though I’m sure “one” could point to other prior unabashednesses. (All the poems titled “Poem” by Frank O’Hara doesn’t count: he just didn’t want any confusion in the matter . . .) Here, we see seven poems by Joseph Lease, each carrying the title “Self Portrait as the Downhill Slide,” two by Miranda Field, each call’d “Animal / Mineral Fable,” and two again by Tom Thompson call’d “Mode et Accessoires Femmes.”

~

Of note: Ange Mlinko’s “Color Deepening in Autumn Sweat,” (in the florid tradition of young O’Hara or ageless Elmslie?) ending—

Certain ratty violets
Festooned in a ronde macabre, a lab
Where the budgie’s “Cranach, Cranach!” can’t be prised
From my recurrent beefs occlude

My view of the sweet
Hypoglaecemic across the street.

~

Of note: Carol Snow’s notational, marginaliack’d and subtextualized (there’s another thing that’s “going around”—notes to the poems, either Spicereanly providing a richochet text (the way the mind “bounces” between the two texts, see “Homage to Creeley / Explanatory Notes” in The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether), or Dickinsonly providing alternate words, lines, etc., an unsettled “hyper” text, or providing resonant sources, forcing the poem to cough up its lineage in public . . .) poems “from Karesansui.” One call’d “Notwithstanding”—

Amor fati / The love of fate”—but uh-oh—will never know whether it would have been better to—missing—
so when the artist extends his thumb before the subject: what’s that about?—what (could have) happened?—still missing—happened

1) George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”

~

Of note: Killarney Clary’s selection of untitled prose poems: narrative hints, stories without markers—

We follow a trail of blood and broken glass where pronounced grain in the wooden floor might train any flow, born with a tendency to laugh, born smart, born at least. For a thing to happen takes two other things, and they trade within a tick. Absolute and unknowable, the complex of laws drones above our hearing. For a thing to endure, to affect. . . . It’s protein in blood that makes it stain. So, signed. So, said.

~

A morning where
Perfectly good sunlight
Looks “rather shabby.”

Life is unremarkable
Enough, no need
To lift it

With an ordinary
Plinth, minion to
Our monuments everywhere.

~

To wordk.

~

Granny and Pot

~

Letter to Jim Behrle (Posted at the Request of Kent Johnson)

Jim,

I've got to admit that the post on me today was funny. The picture of the granny very clever, too. Really. Ouch and ouch. I think some of it is quite innacurate and unfair, of course, but still nicely done, all in all, in best and famous Behrlesque.

The truth, though, is that I was genuinely confused intitially on the Harvard Square thing: Combined with confused info someone gave me when you first invited Forrest and me, I thought the series was in some way associated with Harvard. I corrected that mistake with my college's publicity department later, but it was overlooked. Anyway, so for what it's worth on that—I wasn't trying to insult the Wordsworth reading series!

And seriously. If you go over the posts on that Pound exchange, I don't think you will find anything over the top in the three or four things I said. I did remark on your "ad hominem" comments, which are certainly contained in a number of the personal posts you later bombarded Tony Tost's comment box with. You have to admit that, right? So if my questioning of your position there is what has precipitated your revision of my "stanza," I think it is a bit, well, unprovoked. Still, it's a nice bit of parody, I will admit. And I am pleased to see that the poem in question is provoking such a wide mix of responses. Time might sort them out, to some extent, I suppose.

Kent

~

Riddles in a Hurricane

~

Thinking a spell of dyspepsia and crabbiness’s about to descend. Headstrong riddling at the self-same doors of mayhem and fate. Thinking there ain’t a thing a man can do when the blossoms crash down and th’earthworms rise up. Thinking like a great sphinx moth puttering around a hurricane lamp.

~

Kerouac: “the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it’s the laugh of a maniac. Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, “Be ye lamps unto thyselves”—last words—“work out thy salvation with diligence,” heck of a thing to have to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery. Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.”

~

Ever more conscious of the Blogland Boys’ Pissing Contests hereabouts. Maybe it’d be better to write it all in a little notebook, rather than out here under the golden glare. That goes for you, too.

~

Ever more conscious of how obsessive the scritches become, the need to afflict the area with something. And how the hours slip into th’assigned seating in the big recessional auditorium of the years. How did Curtis Faville put it? “I can be pretty certain I’ll never read large portions of the Bible, or Byron, etc.” And maybe that’s a difference between being, say, fifty and, say, thirty. Recognition that the devouring tiger’s beginning (gently) to toss “one” up in the air in a game that’ll end by getting mighty rough.

~

Finish’d Vanity of Duluoz sitting in the car in the late afternoon sun, whilst G. did tap-dance rehearsals. Jack’s Book intervened: I’m always disappoint’d in oral biographies. A crude oil. Delicious tentative wet vac / dry mop moment of book-betwixtness, before th’angels and rubberneckers muddy it all up with apelike tread. (I got lost getting out of that funhouse, Ambrose.)

~

Spent some moments with a book with Jim Dine-drawn tin snips on the cover.

~

Or the B side of the Favillean remark: the Nabokovian obsession with the afterlife of memory. Where goeth (at death) the “memorial” existence of, say, those Tloothian delectables encounter’d moments ago, and “stored” “now” in “me”? Like: “The doorknob was a mistake.” Or: “Hodge, alive and kickable.” One shall never read everything one “ought.” What one doth read—that precise fugitive recombinant—what becomes of it?

~

Morning lalling:

Hearthshorn ear bubbers.
Plank of th’inhospitable.
Small viable impertinencies of the lost radio score.
Oatmeal whooser in th’elision ship.
A finality of one.
A relational sway.
A relational swag.

~

Such language (essentially musical) is available—pooling and roiling—just under the beetle-brow’d threshold of sense 24/7. The “trick” is to fish out the “sensical” bits—the ones that “seemingly” display a momentary “connection” to the “world.”

~

I confess: I’d an inordinate fondness for the ironickal placement of quotational markers in my “youth,” “too.”

~

The C-dog comes up to put muzzle to knee as I spoon Cheerios mouthward. She’s a tender corrosive to my inane patter. I meant to say “corrective.” She’s a warm shame-bringer to my vain hucksterism. Her gooes and felicities overflow to mock and roast my ratiocinate inconvictions.

~

Did cut the first pages of Michael Magee’s Emancipating pragmatism: Emerson, jazz, and experimental writing before the Letheans drubbed me down in our daily practice for the big forever.

~

To the daily slog.

~

The Georgia Woods

~

Mud-lather on my brogans. (First thought: “Mud on my Oxfords.” Second thought: is “Oxfords” a local usage? Third thought: Mud on my brogains. “Brogayns” or “broguynes (long a or long i sounded)? I’m thinking Carla Thomas with Otis Redding. “Tramp.”

~

—You know what, Otis?
—What?
—You're country.
—That's all right.
—You straight from the Georgia woods.
—That's good.
—You know what? You wear overalls, and big old brogan shoes, and you need a haircut, tramp.

~

Edcheddreck. I am wild with inspecific industry. That’s the way I get “between projects.” Baseball practice with G. in the rain is source of mud. Source of above is the persistent rattle of isolato’d sound-pebbles in my brainpan. Prainban.

~

Dragging back my present allotment of library books: I’d got ensconced in my own bufflehead’d good intentions. Clearing space. Remember (with chagrin) that moment when reading straight through Blake seem’d suddenly possible. Bilious regrets overpower’d by new inklings of intent.

~

Tiny battle within ensues: to read all the “read Pound or not” comments in The Unquiet Grave, or to spend that hour or so reading, say, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. I like a ferocious tussle ’s much ’s next man, but I got a low tolerance for the trivial. And here: well, Tony Tost ain’t trivial, and Ezra Pound ain’t trivial, but they be one o’ they perps—he be triviality poisonified.

~

To the barricades?

~

Fantomas Hordes

~

I draw a blank: —

~

Fantomas of the minimalist hordes. Who woke to an alarming vapidity. Decrudescence. Retrenchment.One thing I’ll say: dispersing my up-burgeoning library’s my first priority. “Books,” he roar’d, “begone!”

~

Lit . . . ? Hunh?

~

Honk if you like honking. Is what I say.
Honk if you’re a honky.

~

Line of low-flying honkers shunting up raggedly north the whole one-block stretch of Westfield.
I can see that.

~

Where is it written? That line about the “muzzy indelibles.”

~

Wrote Flaubert: “Les chefs-d’oeuvres sont bêtes . . .” (“Masterpieces are stupid: they have placid faces like the very products of nature, like big animals and mountains.”)

So quoteth “The Man Without Content.”

~

Rounding the doctor’s house (big, brick, ivy-coat’d) on the corner: “American” flags stuck in the ground at the outreaches of the property. Territorial markers: flags akin to canine urine-squirts.

~

Two bugs ass to ass in copulatory regimen alight on my wrist so I watch th’antics for a while. How do they effecuate that arrangement, satisfying as it must be once accomplish’d?

~

To work, my dullard.

~

Fingering Fence

~

Bought (Bridge Street Books):

Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, by Lisa Robertson (Clear Cut Press, 2003)

Rivers and Birds, by Merrill Gilfillan (Johnson Books, 2003)

Debbie: An Epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997, 2003)

Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains by Merrill Gilfillan (University of Nebraska Press, 1988, 2003)

Happily, by Lyn Hejinian (The Post-Apollo Press, 2000)

~

A run and a dodge at everything. So eager was I to finish shunting “A Poetics” into the wicket with a click to finalize May. That I broke my weekend rule and harried it forth via the “home office.” And today (Monday) slept away a half day of bafflement and emptiness. (Though I did, in the morning, join the “home improvement millions” at the local Home Depot, fingering fence boards. It’s important to do as do the hoi polloi on national holidays, and on particularly grim ones “at that.”) The take-down thought of whatever wrestling match I am here engaged in: “I don’t do home improvement.” Get your transitory ya-ya’s out.

~

Which “tone” is enamoring “onto” no “one.” About the books: what’s the drinker’s lament (and who utter’d it)? Something like: “my only regret is that the smallest thirst of an afternoon led me to the drinking of the whole bottle.” Gone now. Done in, almost certainly, by some blitz of yesteryear. Nine million brain-cells marching (singing!) in unison over the precipice of a Beam Green bottle-lip.

What I meant about the books: how I “set out” to acquire the first two, and “toss’d in” the rest. I am mad for the Gilfillan prose style. Dig:

“One becalmed, speculative winter I arranged with a friend to receive the little feeder birds that regularly struck the panes of his large French doors. Each time he heard the unpleasant ponk from the next room he retrieved the body, ascertained that it was over, and moved it immediately to the freezer. After three weeks he presented me with a paper bag containing, as I recall, two tree sparrows and two juncos, which I thawed, plucked and cleaned one Sunday morning, with a thought to Emile Zola subsisting during a lean spell in Paris on sparrows he trapped on his window ledge. I rubbed the two-inch things with butter and put a tiny sprig of parsley in each cavity—poked it in with my little finger—roasted them in a hot oven for ten or twelve minutes, and had a tiny experimental lunch.”

~

G. spent the weekend violining with teachers drawn off two overlapping locally-based groups: the Phoenix Ensemble and the Cavani String Quartet. Saturday night a “faculty” concert: what thrill’d me was a piece called “Resurrection del Angel” by Astor Piazzolla, arranged by cellist Derek Snyder. Later I learn’d that Snyder and associates’ve been doing a lot of Piazzolla for strings. Also Brubeck, with Brubeck’s blessing and collusion. The other piece that caught my fancy: “Quartet in F Major” by Dvorák, “vivace ma non troppo,” which, I’d gamble, was written after the American visit, so reminiscent of cowboy fiddle noises part of it seem’d. (I’ll stop before it becomes more apparent how little I know about music, particularly “classical” music . . . )

~

Other: vacuum’d, mow’d the lawn, scootch’d around the roof on my butt to empty the gutters of leaf-rot and swamp-smell water. Twigs. Lots of rain lately. It overflows and ends up sliding around in the cellar. “Home improvement” frontiers creeping ever closer.

~

Out into the night still in not-night “guise”—light-vestiges loitering on heaven’s porch. And a lopsided moon. Moon dropp’d on its head whilst still a lad. Thrum of appliances a back-beat. Reading (before the C-dog waltz and foray just now) the John Tipton interview: struck by’s affability, humility (“I don’t feel any more neglected than any other poet”), poise, humor (“Have you seen my hair lately?”), and phrase-making (“templates for the kinds of distress I want to employ”). I go into some overdrive sentence-making mode when I walk at night: and lose most of the words to the air. As it should be. “Man waren’t brought here to earth jest to make sentences!” Something amusing tonight (got lost) having to do with th’anatomical automaton, the sexual champ. Champing at the bit. Then Carmen-girl pounced on a buzzily clamoring wad of insect life and fright’d off my sentence-collection. That and the neighbors hallooing in the dark.

~

To work.

~