Zeal in Lack

~

Received:

The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 203 (April / May 2005), edited by Marcella Durand ($5, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, New York, New York 10003)

Nicole Brossard on lies: “I recently asked myself why it is that we do not react more to the enormities of the lies surrounding us . . . Is it because without noticing we have become used to living among them as advertising, disinformation, dissimulation, half truths, fake news, and fake facts, or simply because it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between real and artificial, original and imitation, copy and fake?”

Ron Padgett interview’d by Edmund Berrigan. On biographical writing and memoirs, being a bootlegger’s kid, Leadbelly, writing political poetry, translating Cendrars, &c. “After a year and a half the FBI sent me 1,300 pages on my father, 99 percent of it blacked out with a magic marker. It looked like a Fluxus book, almost every word marked out! For example, one sentence began ‘Wayne Padgett’s mother is named—’ and the rest was deleted. In other words, they were withholding from me my own grandmother’s name! . . . A civil liberties lawyer told me I had grounds for an appeal, because the FBI had exercised ‘excessive zeal in the lack of disclosure.’ To my surprise, the FBI granted my appeal, and after another year the 1,300 pages came through again, this time with only 80 percent marked out. But the new 19 percent was illuminating, and this time they accidentally left in some things they were supposed to have deleted.”

Reviews: Macgregor Card on John Ashbery’s Where Shall I Wander (“Recitatives of Woolworth-era American argot ripple throughout”), Michael Gottlieb on Ted Greenwald’s Atelos-publish’d The Up and Up (“He is a tie, a reminder, a remnant and, a survivor of that long-gone wild, dangerous, unbound, frequently cruel and determinedly free world that boiled up—right here. . .”), Ange Mlinko on Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler (“There’s more ‘snappy dialogue’ recounted or invented here than in most novels, and a heightened intensity to it all . . .”), and others.

Select’d new books noted through ad copy or “books received” lists: John Olson’s Oxbow Kazoo (First Intensity), Harry Mathews’s My Life in the CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive), Jeni Olin’s Blue Collar Holiday, (Hanging Loose), and David Antin’s i never knew what time it was (U. of California Press).

~

So, heartless correspondents having intimated, nay, assured, Gerald L. Bruns is not doppelgänger to Gerald Burns, now deceased (1998), and me point’d (as usual) off th’intended “course” and off into unseen hinterlands in search of said Burns—it is now (period of numbskull burning questions) appropriate to ask: “What’s the name Jerome “Black Rider” McGann used (c’est à dire, publish’d “under”) in ’eighties forays into the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Circle X ranch? A creamsicle on a stick to the winner!

(Shouldn’t I “know” it? Is it because I banish’d the once-held knowledge of it out of the vague nausea I “develop’d” at the “sight” of McGann at Virginia—that “savage sideshow” parading around under a perpetual tan and a three hundred dollar hat!?) —Now, now, Mr. Latta, now, now.

~

The Materiality of Poetry notes:

Bruns’s placing of “sound poetry” into the “genre” of the limit-experience, seemingly a catchall genre for th’unprocessable experience, the one that overloads our cognitive circuit, in talking of:

. . . the contemporary practice of poetry as a performance art in its most theatrical and certainly most difficult form, namely sound poetry and varieties of acoustical art in which poetry ceases to be a genre distinction and becomes something like a limit-experience, an event that shuts down, or even breaks down, the cognitive mechanism or defense by which we process or filter our experiences.

Not unlike what “phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion” (In Excess (2001), The Crossing of the Visible (2004)) calls a “saturated phenomenon,” referring to “experiences in excess of the concepts that make our intuitions of phenomena intelligible as intentional objects or significations.” The brouhaha of the new is—largely—not knowing where to put the thing. (Off momentarily into a reverie of O’Hara describing Larry Rivers as a “demented telephone”—again, not knowing where to put the thing . . .)

Bruns’s parallel use of Levinas’s definition of ethics with William Carlos Williams’s notion of the poem as found, as a “practice of outside” (Blaser), “set down as heard,” “made of anything.” Levinas makes “one” an I largely because nothing’ll exempt “one” from responsibility (responsiveness and answerability) to others: “The word I means here I am [me voici], answering for everything and for everyone.” Bruns:

Imagine a poetry that, anarchically, just happens to a piece of language. This would mean that what poetry is cannot be settled in advance by principles, rules, traditions, or any sort of formal description . . .

Just as Levinasian ethics ceases to be a set of rules and prescripts. (Stein fits here well: “I am me because my little dog knows me” become “I am me because others count on me.”)

~

Rush’d, tortuous, inchoate, that. Inimical burgeoning of the sunny morn. Think I’ll read the Creeley tributes that are arriving. One single occasion of seeing him: at Albany a dozen years ago, a panel discussion, topic lost to the fogs and recumbencies of th’intervening. Sharing the stage with, among others, forgotten, Hayden Carruth. And it was Carruth who random’d through an assemblage of language-pieces, and then announced in a loud voice: “I’m an old man. I’m going to go find the can,” and lumber’d off. I recall none of the words Creeley spoke, rather indistinctly, I think. A tonsured look, groom’d is what I recall, and how it seem’d “unlike Creeley.”

~

To work.

In Lieu

~

Farewell, Creeley.

Just as I put a final touch to it, I see the news come up—died in Texas, pneumonia. So I open to the “Foreword” mention’d below, first sentence: “The comfortably adamant presence of things in this attractively various writing is a constant pleasure.” Mr. Robert Creeley wrote that, may it serve as epitaph.

~

Bruns’s The Material of Poetry notes:

To write under the sign of Hejinian’s lovely lines (out of Writing Is an Aid to Memory): “the sound for words makes me / the digressions is a tender essential”—pin it to my pineal appendage, vestigial third eye, seat of the soul.

~

At the distinct risk of entering kookdom, who is “the antiparatactic language poet Gerald Burns” (surely some goofery* in that phrase), author of “How to Nonread,” wherein he suggests that—as paraphrased and quoted by Gerald Bruns:

the trouble with poems of this sort [the example is a Clark Coolidge snippet—paragrammatical—out of The Maintains] is that “‘reading’ them means finding ways to make them interesting, to recover them from dullness.” [Why do I think immediately of some of Marjorie Perloff’s “close readings” of, say, Stein—rather superjacent (skew) flailings toward “sense”?] But of course “finding interesting ways to read” is the philosophical challenge of paragrammatical poetry, as Burns well knows.

“Paragrammatical”: footnoted, apparently originating with Kristeva, “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes”—“a text whose letters and phonemes form networks of signification independently of the grammatical forms of phrase structures, sentences and paragraphs.”

*The Gerald Burns hunt. I look’d with somewhat casual interest some years ago at the Dalkey Archive-publish’d Shorter Poems, and A Thing About Language, foreword’d by Creeley, part of the “Poetics of the New” series at Southern Illinois University Press. Is there anything to suggest Burns isn’t Burns? Does the Shorter Poems frontispiece photograph of “Burns” in a bowler hat, clown mask, and cane, with a decidedly silly toy dog in arms count? Do “author’s note” lines like:

Gerald Burns was an old-fashioned (Amenities of Book-Collecting) Johnsonian before he became a Stein scholar, and read prose at Harvard in order to write poetry. . . . Since 1969 he has been engaged in a XII-book long poem, The Myth of Accidence, of which the first eight sections have been published. . . .

count? I sense that either I enter a plausible kookdom with my (slight) suggestion, or’ll shortly, having trotted out the obvious (what “everybody else” knows), be mopping egg off my face.

~

New word, grace à Steve McCaffery: “fixist”—Bruns, in discussing what reading means: “Aristotelian exegesis seeks to fix meaning by working out the relation between parts and whole, text and context. Meaning just means belonging to a context . . .” And McCaffery (quoted out of “Poetics: A Statement,” in the second volume of Seven Pages Missing): “I have no steady poetics . . . no position or school that I defend, no fixist stance on art or anything else. I have a constant stream of feelings and ideas that constantly change, modify and carry into action as techniques for living.” (I must admit my Danger! Will Robinson! Dilletante! flag goeth up here . . .)

~

Pre-flarfist justification (as if any were needed) for flarfist work: the poet stuck inside language, language not erupting out of some interior reservoir, I like how Bruns puts it: “The poet . . . does not so much use language as interact with uses of it, playing these uses by ear in the literal sense that the poet’s position with respect to language is no longer simply that of the speaking subject but also, and perhaps mainly, that of one who listens.”

~

In lieu of writing a post I post’d a letter.
In lieu of writing a post I paste’d a debtor.
In lieu of writing a post I tot’d up ubiquity’s lot.
In lieu of writing a post I jammed a Woden nickel into Mount Gravity’s slot.
In lieu of writing a post I got busy hotwiring my Conelrad ear-buds.
In lieu of writing a post I made explicit my behavioral adversary.
In lieu of writing a post I visit’d Brazil’s southern-most big city.
In lieu of writing a post I drank a tawny port.
In lieu of writing a post I part’d the hair on my behind.
In lieu of writing a post I look’d hard and found nothing in my drawers.
In lieu of writing a post I turn’d a page in a climate of extroversion.
In lieu of writing a post I kibbitz’d with a “sign.”
In lieu of writing a post I ran like a greased pig amongst th’assembled assemblagists.
In lieu of writing a post I arranged several blank index cards in random order.
In lieu of writing a post I unwittingly support’d a post.
In lieu of writing a post I made for a deliberate liberty.
In lieu of writing a post I surrender’d my critical faculty.
In lieu of writing a post I track’d a worker’s reception.
In lieu of writing a post I saturated my practice with theory to th’extent that it rubbed off, though not “on” me.
In lieu of writing a post I prescribed an end, and continued writing “beyond” it.
In lieu of writing a post I loudly employ’d disciples of the thermodynamic frontier.
In lieu of writing a post I marry’d viability to a Judd.
In lieu of writing a post I sipped a camel “up” through a straw.
In lieu of writing a post I recapitulated my headstrong muster tactics, and took flight.
In lieu of writing a post I stole a sirloin and released it outside Petaluma.
In lieu of writing a post I sack’d out with fiery vivacious lunacy in the allegro shelter.
In lieu of writing a post I Joe’d.
In lieu of writing a post I huevos rancheros.
In lieu of writing a post “you know, the kind with logical closure?”
In lieu of writing a post I pooh-pooh’d the mechanisms of advertising.
In lieu of writing a post “sudden constraints of canonical thaw.”
In lieu of writing a post I broke into a song (clean’d it out).
In lieu of writing a post I got many ribbers too cross.

~

“drive, he sd”

—No, Leviathan

~

Brack diminuendo of dog-snore,
A pillow for a head.
Two is too many books
To try reading at one
Sitting, do I make myself
Clear? Shenanigans of a rut,
Why not try a prose
Poem? —I hate prose poems.

~

An uncharming lot of shuffling with th’accumulated papers, null set between the two antennae I hide with human ears, little cauliflowers, though one bigger ’n th’other, ah my Golden Gloves days. Nah, I fib, not a pugilist, not me. Oh story’d youth. The stogie’d lip, the flare of the blunderbuss. The first bussing blunders. The blinders I wore out staying straight. The straying, the hoof-trod pink pastures. The Blaue Reiter. The blah writer. Witless in the Hamptons. Toy trains and vibraphones (and a Feininger print zig-zagging the studio wall) . . .

~

Ah, the global collabs of youth. Tickle’d by the 1966 note of Joe Brainard to Ron Padgett in Paris:

I just want to know if you are still smoking Kents and if so if you would save the butts and send them to me. Or, as a matter of fact, as long as you are smoking any kind of filter cigarettes I’d like you to send them to me. I am on butts again and will be for some time. I am using them as a solid mass to surround a single object. Example: that teddy bear. But it is very slow. I smoke as much as I possible can already, but a day of smoking does not amount to much area-wise. I know it may seem silly since you are way over in Paris but, although I know lots of people who smoke, I don’t know anyone who would not consider it a pain in the ass, and that’s no fun. At any rate, since your butts will be different from mine do not bother to send just a few: wait until you have lots. . . .

—Kents? Why, Ron, why?

(There follows an attempt’d short catalogue of writers and cigarette brands (a new taxonomy!) with nigh-zero success (memory shot to hell by Marlboros).

A. R. Ammons smoked Winstons.

William Matthews smoked Marlboros.

Neither, however—if my gleanings don’t betray me—did it for art!

~

A few pages of the Bruns book. Noted the affable, nigh-giddy footnote regarding conceptual art, how:

. . . it is often said to be art that raises the question of what counts as art, as when Marcel Duchamp installs an ordinary object such as a snow shovel in his studio and declares it to be his latest composition. All by itself this is at most a dada gesture, but it poses a serious philosophical problem (perhaps the fundamental problem of modernism), because it lowers the threshold of what could count as art to degree zero, in which case logically nothing can be excluded from being art—a condition of nominalism that no one but an anarchist (like me) could be happy with.

Bruns proposes—in face of a poetry resistant to interpretation (“objective . . . as any act event of nature,” with th’extremest examples found in some “sound poetry”), what he calls “an anthropological approach to poetry”:

. . . in order to experience this (or any) poetry at all we have to integrate ourselves into the world or space in which the poetry is composed, become natives of this or that place, on the argument that what counts as poetry is internal to the social, historical, and cultural spaces in which it is written and read.

Is that akin to simply saying, poets read poetry (and thus it is and ever shall be), and so effecting a sidestep around notions of “the public” or “the common reader”?

~

Noted: “For Levinas, the proximity of other people is ethics. “The proximity of things,” he says, “is poetry.”

~

In talk of how most philosophers appear likely to assume that “what counts as literature is narrative” (thus avoiding poetry, or avoiding th’implications that, “in poetry language is not reducible to standard logical operations like telling a story”), Bruns’s sly cheekiness in making those philosophers all hang on the Nixon Republican Aristotle’s coat-tails warrant’d a chuckle:

Each of them is a good cloth-coat Aristotelian for whom literature is made of character and action and is to be read as a plotted picture of how things are or could be—a theory that preserves Aristotle’s view that diction or language, although in the service of narrative, is not essential to it.

~

Note to myself: Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson.

~

To work.

Stump & Maggots

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

The Great Dismal: A Swamp Memoir, by Bland Simpson (Henry Holt, 1993)

Call me a bimbo for books like this—a pleasing clutter of history, natural and human, about a place that’s swell’d big in my image system for years, not unlike the sand hills of Nebraska, the desert near Twenty-Nine Palms, or the Canadian prairies.

Much of the dark water that flows into the Great Dismal runs in from the west, from Cypress Swamp. There, where the Desert Road bridges it, I have heard the call of a hairy woodpecker in early February and seen the work of a pileated woodpecker on a tupelo gum stump in the water: gum chips like half dollars, all dug and pocked out by the pileated, lay about the base of the stump, and on a bright ice collar around it just above the water.
        Stopping there again on a balmy late April day, I saw poison ivy on the gum stump where resurrection fern had been growing before. A great blue heron flew through the tupelos, over and above the trash that protruded from the swampwaters now that spring had lowered their level. Here was a brown spaceheater, an old swing set, a faded red slide-up-the-slots drink box.

The Complete Poems, by Edwin Denby (Random House, 1986)

Differs not too terribly from the Collected publish’d in 1975 by Full Court Press (a copy “second-lining” somewhere in my double-rowed bookshelves, I know) but for th’addition of remarks by O’Hara, and by Lincoln Kirstein, and an introduction by Ron Padgett—and for a buck? Instant gratification, to re-read “The Shoulder”:

The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig.
It terrifies and it bores the observer, the shoulder.
The Greeks, who had slaves, were able to hitch back and rig
The shoulder, so the eye is flattered and feels bolder.

But that’s not the case in New York, where a roomer
Stands around day and night stupefied with his clothes on
The shoulder, hung from his neck (half orchid, half tumor)
Hangs publicly with a metabolism of its own.

After it has been observed a million times or more
A man hunches it against a pole, a jamb, a bench,
Parasite he takes no responsibility for.
He becomes used to it, like to the exhaust stench.

It takes the corrupt, ectoplasmic shape of a prayer
Or money, that connects with a government somewhere.

Which is sly enough in its turns and hooks, I could grapple with it daily—I’d think—without exhausting its pleasures. Damn’d if I can remember where I first read it, or why that weighs so particularly against the partial scales of my brain’s two pans. I think I found the business about Aaron and the “lost chord” the same day.

~

Finish’d the Schuyler letters, a world I’m reluctant to leave, though they do somewhat thin out in the late years—too many friends and correspondents available, at hand in New York. To fill the void, I’ll probably, first, breeze through What’s for Dinner?—a novel that is made up of about 99-44/100% Pure® conversation (‘it floats’) (Schuyler said something like: “I find if somebody says something, somebody usually says something else.”) Drifting off last night after a ham and asparagus dinner, I “mentally snort’d” over both “Deirdre [a dog, “a large and furtive basset”] wants her dribble cloth,” and “Norris [a man] was never so absorbed as not to leave a trickle of attention running.”

~

Received:

The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics, by Gerald L. Bruns (University of Georgia Press, 2005) With a CD of readings / performances by Steve McCaffery, John Cage, Christian Bök, Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos, Henri Chopin, and François Dufrêne.

A book that grew out of a series of lectures. Briefly, Bruns is trying to “justify three theses”:

The first is that poetry is made of language but is not a use of it—that is, poetry is made of words but not of what we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. The poetry I have in mind does not exclude these forms of usage—indeed, a poem may “exhibit” different kinds of meaning in self-conscious and even theatrical ways—but what the poem is, is not to be defined by these things. Poetry is language in excess of the functions of language (form doesn’t follow function but confounds it) . . .
        My second thesis contests the first by exceeding it. It is that poetry is not necessarily made of words but is rooted in, and in fact already fully formed by, sounds produced by the human voice (or voice and mouth), even when these sounds are modified electronically. What I’m aiming for here is a justification of sound poetry . . .
        My third thesis is that, notwithstanding the arguments that I try to present in defense of the materiality of poetry, its irreducibility to serviceable forms of discourse, poetry does not occupy a realm of its own. It is not a purely differentiated species confined to a merely aesthetic, neutral, or disengaged dimension of human culture. Rather, precisely in virtue of its materiality, poetry enjoys a special ontological relation with ordinary things of the world . . .

Bruns’s 1974 Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (re-released by Dalkey Archive) is one book on my imaginary short list of essential critical / poetics works (Antony Easthope’s 1983 Poetry as Discourse and Don Byrd’s 1994 Poetics of the Common Knowledge march alongside in the ranks, too, as well as—morning head’dness getting the best of me—several, uhm, other stragglers.)

~

Got through: “The razzle dazzle maggots” and all that. (Erm, I see I point'd there last year, too.)

~

To work.

Stinko Memory Bank

~

Bought:

The Factory of Facts, by Luc Sante (Pantheon, 1998)

Drop’d G. at Swing City (tap-dancing) and hoof’d it “out” the corner of that strip mall—passing a miniature indent’d marsh-hollow fed by parking lot runoff where I heard the chork and rough-burr of a red-wing’d blackbird (harbinge-ing spring)—and “into” an adjacent one, the hijack’d book truckers dump and emporium. Wherein I glanced at the sparse POETRY outlet table: same dust-raked bent copies of Stephen Sandy and Kimiko Hahn what’s been there ages. Sante:

In order to speak of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. The words don’t fit, because they are in English, and languages are not equivalent one to another. If I say, “I am a boy; I am lying in my bed; I am sitting in my room; I am lonely and afraid,” attributing the thoughts to my eight-year-old self, I am being literally correct but emotionally untrue. Even if I submit the thoughts to indirect citation and the past tense I am engaging in a sort of falsehood. I am playing ventriloquist, and that eight-year-old, now made of wood and with a hinged jaw, is sitting on my knee, mouthing the phrases I am fashioning for him.

And, typing that, I find myself splash’d with uncertainty—is that just portentous and obvious, a lethally-dismissible combo?

[Late addition. Oddly enough, this morning, skimming around haphazardly in Ammiel Alcalay’s from the warring factions, I find (in the wide-ranging conversation with Benjamin Hollander append’d to the work) a second way of seeing Sante’s “dilemma.” Alcalay:

. . . look at the remarkable work of Werner Sollors . . . particularly his Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (with Marc Shell), which introduces texts from Massachusett, Italian, Arabic, Lenape, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Navajo, Hebrew, Danish, Chinese, Greek, and other languages. For Sollors, these are all constituents of American literature. There are plenty of examples like this, even in canonized modernists. Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, or William Carlos Williams—all spoke other languages as children, as did Jack Kerouac, someone one doesn’t normally think of in this context. Not to mention the enormous presence of Spanish, the whole Nuyorican movement, different Chicano writers, Native American writers exposed to people retaining their own languages, Italian American writers who grew up with Italian, Asian American writers who grew up with other languages, more and more South Asian writers coming out of Urdu and Bengali, Arab American writers coming out of Arabic, and so on.
        The problem is that there is no lasting recognition; these things get viewed as curiosities, rather than as fundamental. A certain model has been set up, almost of sampling or dabbling, in which at this point we are presented more often than not with translations made by people who don’t even know the languages they are translating from, much less the social and historical contexts they purport to be transmitting. Yet these things are still called translations. Such productions take up cultural space and make it that much more difficult to transmit the real, in this case some sense and context of where a text might be placed socially and historically in the culture it comes from.

A long quotation, probably indicative (here, mostly) of me trying to sort something out. That childhood is “another country,” with its own language is one thing, obvious, maybe. That a childhood “in another country or language” (within these States’ boundary lines or not) is another, and less uncommon than the dominant culture-boom that gets drop’d ’ll admit. What is lethally-dismissible (or, dismissible only to our eventual and collective hazard) is the notion of one common “translatable” rut out of which we all paw forth. Might better change the metaphor, make that rut a furrow into which we pour our variegated germinal seeds.]

~

To look up: Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, and Christopher Sykes’s Four Studies in Temperament.

~

Schuyler’s humble sweetness, a kind of affection, with no grandstanding, for the things of the world, its facticity: “‘Lilac’ is one of the few words in English which comes directly from Persian, to us, smelling so sweetly.”

~

Yesterday, unsettled, vaguely grouch-pinch’d, restless. Not even th’usual random around the neighborhood with the C-dog managed a collapse of the dissatisfactory whatevers plonking me. (Though now, scribbling against knee-poised pad, period of one-hand’d ear scratch, the wild inconsolable falters, and I grow, my jowly toy, almost calm.) In the cellar: looking for a copy of a Ray DiPalma pamphlet publish’d by Zeitgeist (Michigan) circa 1969. And coming across a French Bertolt Brecht, Petit organon pour le théâtre, source of “l’effet de distanciation,” source of an unspooling of memory. The Paris of Les Halles just knock’d down—remaining skeletal ironworks glimpsed, and big hole, the trou. Around 1973. The Berliner Franz Moser, encounter’d at the Alliance Française next to the former domicile of Mesdames Stein and Toklas, and close by the rue d’Assas (law faculty) where thugs of the right-wing Groupe Union Défense (GUD)’ld corner longhairs to harass or worse, who barged—Franz did—into l’Arche booksellers on rue Bonaparte, bought the Brecht and thrust it into my hands. The Franz M. (smartass) who’d—practicing the j’ai peur de construction in class—smirk’d up “I have fear of the sun,” which caused me a fit of giggles. He want’d “to write.” The Franz M. who lived in a roach-rich chambre de bonne off the boulevard de Raspail. One afternoon I drop’d by and found him there with a German friend who—he explain’d—lack’d any identity papers, a military deserter who’d been dodging around Europe. He spoke little, gloom’d around in tiny briefs drinking Schnapps. Whilst Franz insist’d on reading, that is translating (into English) for me, something (a play?) by Sacher-Masoch. Or so, thirty-plus years later, I recall. I sat on the bed smoking black tobacco and wondering if I were “reading” the scene correctly, or if there weren’t something “fishy” about it all. One night—just before Franz had to return to Berlin—we got stinko in some joint in Pigalle. Or ran out of money and brought something to drink back to my own crummy quarters. Did we listen to the pirate radio (Radio Caroline?) off the boat in the North Sea? Eventually he wobbled off into the night. Memory provides itself its own Verfremdungseffekt, made of sampling, achronological overlays. Some years later, Franz M. sent me a copy of Lu Hsun’s selected works, publish’d in Peking, by the Foreign Languages Press. No note.

~

A sandhill crane in flight, neck outstretch’d and singular, in the gray-slogged dawn.

~

To work.

“I am a riddle, too . . .”

~

Received:

Book Forum (April / May 2005), edited by Eric Banks, et alia.

John Banville on Michel Houellebecq and H. P. Lovecraft, Gary Indiana on Emmanuel Carrère’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, (and others), James Gibbons on Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, (Timm’s Morenga is terrific, German colonials in Africa, in what is now Namibia, the book flood’d with documents, “the magical smack of facticity . . .”), Bruce Bawer on Guy Davenport (19270—2005)’s genius, select’d letters out of The Letters of Robert Lowell (coming to a nearby cineplex in June, with nuggets such as—to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, dated June 10, 1968—“Dear Jackie: I have been thinking of writing you a long letter, a letter of mourning, but also of apology, because I think I might have done something for Bobby that might have helped, a word of caution. Many times I tried, not by conscious intention but by instinct . . .” Anybody want to gently interject: “Um, Cal, it’s not about you.”), and Emilie Bickerton on Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters.

Casanova concentrates particularly on the struggles of writers to achieve even a degree of visibility within the “world republic of letters.” Globalization neutralizes the concept of “world literature,” making it seem as if the “literary world” worldwide, such as it is, is rapidly expanding and open to all. On the contrary, Casanova argues, “world literature” is a field (in the sense used by Pierre Bourdieu) based on “unequal trade,” functioning according to a “peculiar economy” in which literary value is a unit of exchange linking dominant centers (the literary capitals . . . Paris, London, New York, Frankfort, and Barcelona) with the peripheral countries they dominate. The latter are marginalized, or “démunis,” as a result of their lack of literary heritage and / or political independence. Transactions between them, then, are bound to be unequal at least in part because of the “gardiens littéraires” at the centers—the publishers, critics, judges of literary prize, and translators—who deal with the consecration and dissemination of works and evaluate them according to an often exclusive set of standards.

So, do the local squabbles mimick the big, or do the global mimick the picayune? No matter, just ’s long ’s “one” keeps snarling.

~

Schuyler’s humor: on moving end-of-summer off Great Spruce Head Island (Maine) back to Southampton with the Fairfield Porters (“six, plus Bruno [dog], who really needs a horse van of his own”): “. . . if we lash enough onto the roof of the car—yes, when we travel we are the pitiful family you glide by on the freeway, the one with the playpen and mattress on the roof and a tarpaulin dragging in the road behind. Then when we get to Southampton there is one very large, very light box which, when opened, discloses an old hat, some coat hangers, a hymnal wedged in sideways and some loose postage. The hat has been brought back to give to the Paulist Fathers, a kind of Catholic Salvation army. They, however, have no use for it.” Is it the “discloses” that makes that so delicious?

~

At the risk of sounding like Listing Man Jones of the silly ship Harbour (the S. S. Harbour’s “declench’d” now into the harbor), I’ll admit to some auto-chuckling over the morning’s Cheerios at the notion (flown down from what high pole?) of referring to something (or, ulp, someone) as being one’s “primary edible.” (At which point Listing M. Jones (and—admit it, you were thinking you were “at” the birthing of a (scrumptious) itemizing) topples completely “over.”)

~

Laugh autonomously.

~

Note to myself: Tino Gonzales’s “Modern Day Hobo.” I could listen to “Blues for Mary” without ceasing.

~

To work.

The Dangers of Close Reading

~

“A” comes off the bookshelf. I scoot’d through it without pause in 1996, in the big white house. Knew I’d get bogged down if I tarry’d “considerably.” Here, in the partita of 13: “What do you want to know / What do you want to do, / In a trice me the gist us . . .”

Rule of thumb: in a syntactical ball-up, look for a pun: Trismegistos. First name, Hermes. Meaning alchemickal slow grinder. Greek (meaning “thrice greatest” out of th’Egyptian aa aa, or “great great”) name applied to th’Egyptian god Thoth. Who (thank you, H.D.) is “scribe of the gods,

the inventor of writing, and the patron of all the arts dependent on writing . . . medicine, astronomy, magic.” (Thank you, Encycl. Britan.), Here, I’m assuredly sinking, you see the whys of th’overdrive approach—In a trice me the gist us: I get haul’d up (and tied up) “in an instant”—reading “thrice” for “trice,”

I unwind toodles of threesome mayhem, find suitable “corroboration” in the numerology (one, three, thirteen) in the whole temper of the “piece” (and of the Z-corpus) (Zukofsky, and Celia, and Paul) and in the subsequent lines: “She’ll have a son / And he honor, her heart desires / You let / / Her correct you, /

No one will hurt if / You can’t count zeros.” “Gist us.” Just us, and “gists and piths”—that Pound “thang”—somebody’s apt to be pith’d off if I simply park my Winnebago in the shade of my defeat, and sit a spell. As Joe Brainard says: “I like to start with nothing and just surprise myself.” And: “I’d hate to sit around and think all day.”

~

—Here, you put it together,
Miss Clytemnestra Jockstrap. Ain’t no
Way to parlay a prisoner-
Made boutonnière into a skivvy
Convention. Outside, in the wonderment,
A portable tub of marigolds
Nods its infamous rebuke—do
It up, tell it sklent.

~

In the social notes: “It was nice at the Whitney to have a distant glimpse of the tall young poets—you, Tom, Ted, Clark—above the heads of the art lovers, the long haired Watusis of American letters. Perhaps Larry Fagin should take Gro-Mor pills.” (Schuyler to Padgett, February 28, 1970).

~

The standard mess is too
Easy. Some disassembly required. Some-
Where between the boathouse and
The gazebo that dog stretch’d
Out to nuzzle a buzz
In grass poked through with
Dandelions. Leapt up howling. Thus:
My ‘playn and fynall confutacion.’

~

Updates:

David Perry writes to clarify “bottle conditioning,” which “entails leaving a bit of yeast in the just-bottled beer to allow an additional stage of fermentation.” And to note that he is merely “minding the shop” for Barretta Books, whose founder and proprietor is Marc Kuykendall. My apologies.

James Wagner, (“one of the dirty dozen dunces”) of The American Thinker’s latest imbecile screed, writes to point to a letter he post’d at Esther Press in reply. As he notes: “Am. Thinker says that it’s not about censorship yet somehow can’t publish letters to the editor?”

~

To work.

Stink, Stank, Stunk

~

In a letter purportedly responding to (poetic!) letters received by that inessential and mediocre cyber-rag, The American Thinker, Thomas Lifson, identify’d (with laughable completeness for one who’s just mock’d the timid “credentializing” of the letter-writers) as “the editor and publisher of The American Thinker,” writes:

Now there is nothing at all wrong with launching a letter-writing campaign. But a minimal level of cunning would suggest that you do so in way less obvious than a posting on your blog, especially if that blog is published under the same name as the first epistle sent to the target of the campaign. Apparently these poets are so dense that it never occurred to them that they could be googled. Conspiracies by their very nature are best hatched in private.

Which, if nothing more, reveals a kind of thinking I find bizarre: why, Mr. Thinker, would a letter-writing campaign require “cunning” and be “best hatched in private”? Isn’t it just possible that—in a free and open society, wherein the benefits of debate are allow’d, nay, encouraged!—one’d claim inalienably the right to open pronouncement, public consternation, and rabble-rousing. To do otherwise, I’d think, would be to assume the role of the stinker—pestiferous, closed in, stuck in the self-validating muck of secrecy, shifty-eyed, narrow skull’d, ready with the blindfold and the “prima facie tort.” I note, in your fever to score niggling points regarding th’identities and creds of the poet-correspondents, you neglect’d my sentence (it wouldn’t “fit” with your paltry “thesis”): “I need no credentials, nor would I stoop to cooperate in the supplying of such.” I appended it to the copy of the fine letter by Kent Johnson (also neglect’d) I sent, and, too, I post’d it publicly at Hotel Point. (Google it.)

Openly yours,

John “Th’Uncredential’d” Latta

“If you are making a list of enemies I am your enemy and must needs be put on that list, period. For I am the enemy of such lists.”

Read Yellow

~

My one allow’d beer’s drunk before I finish’d my country-mouse rustling, and no notion’s enter’d my cranial cavity—“no fly, no flea, no louse.” No bumptious doodah. So I rattle the chains, and the cabin boy pops up looking like a gopher.

What about a sixty-thousand word novel that is (merely) the finger-exercises of somebody trying to get a poem “launch’d”? All that rubbishy whatever, dog circling down into sleep, or dragging the dew-laps back and forth over the soccer field trying

to locate a followable smell. Isn’t that how anything begins. Y’ shoulda seen the truck what haul’d off all th’industry that got writ up afore the “Call me Ishmael” stirred a likeable splint in Melville’s eye. So we toss about erratic, finagling

something like a toehold. “The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds. There are either names of things which do not exist (for as there are things left unnamed through lack of observation, so likewise are there names

which result from fantastic suppositions and to which nothing in reality responds), or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities.” Like the kids named “Cormorant

Broomrack” and “Paraphernalia Grotto” in a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book? Aptly ask’d of “Francis Bacon,” no? A man named Nancy claims that “All ‘messages’ are exhausted, wherever they may seem to arise. Thus reemerges, more imperiously than ever,

the exigency of sense that is nothing other than existence insofar as it has no sense.” And other couching and ramping things, “And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff / As puts me from my faith.” Off. On. Off.

~

First sun in days burbles
Up liquid, and dives immediately
Into a bandwidth of cloudbank,
Orange succor like a Rodchenko
Copycat, un texte troué, I
Hate that kind of talk.
Under an otherworldly glare, what
I do is a hoot.

~

To work.

Hands in the Air!

~

Received:

Lateral Argument, by Kevin Davies (Barretta Books, 2003). Cover illustration by Tom McGrath.

Which arrived with the end “panel” of a Boulevard Brewing Co. Dry Stout six-pack, used as “stiffener” against the malign ravages of kook postal employees (“Since 1989 • Kansas City • Bottle Conditioned • ,” now what means that?) To read Kevin Davies is begin to see all language usage caught in the Swale of Irony, a low meadow’d depress aiming for the rad heights, the protuberant Swell of Sincerity, or Sublimity, or something. The form is there, and generally “correct”—but one gets a hell-hound feeling that that beatific and washcloth-scrub’d Sunday schoolboy up in the front row’s busy goosing the minister’s girl mid-recital, and that such goofery’ll likely rearrange the neural synapses of both, and for some lengthy period to come.

          It is not dancers who are difficult but dance itself
                    and exchange of brains on a stage of offal
          reminding you of something immediately forgotten
by Jim and his red-ant buddies down at the co-op.
                    The challenge is to stand up boldly
and say nothing, staring straight at the lips
of the microphone, refusing to move. And to repeat this
          action at every possible venue

                    until your mind’s as clear as a piece of rye toast.

Which lines, I belatedly note, linking, get quoted by Barretta Books, too. I love it. “Tonstant Weader fwowed up / ’s hands in jubilation.” Publish’d in an earlier (and un-printably .tif’d or something) version at the Alterran Poetry Assemblage. Available for $12 at David Perry’s Barretta Books.

~

What, I am asking myself, prompt’d the night-scrawl found in morning light: “Like going at it doggy-style in the sumptuous bedrooms of the gods, which turn out—‘closer inspection’ allow’d—behung with velvet Elvises.” As Schuyler writes in one of the letters: “Pandemoniumsville.”

The patience of that man—to read through all manner of (mostly) dull nineteenth century Americana, all for th’undeniable pleasure of uncovering a delectable or two like:

“Calling bear sign doughnuts,” interrupted Quince Forrest, “reminds me what . . .”
“Will you kindly hobble your lip,” said Officer.

Never under-estimate the extent of New York School “sources” in dud novelettes, kid’s books, and antique shop detritus. A raw sociology at work equal to that of flarf net-hauling and sorting, and more point’d. Raking resuscitable coals live and reddening out of the minor literature—conflagration by conflation.

(And, of the quotable—out of “Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy (first published in 1903)”—with the Schuyler preciosity to add mention of Adams’ “sinister expertness”: “In fact, what probably makes him good is that his literary equipment was just sufficient to his needs, & he didn’t try for the big one . . .” Ah, that overreaching, trying to dig a BIG HOLE with a tiny writerly tool—“one” sees it, too, hereabouts, and often . . .)

~

Oddly under-invigorating weekend (which is to say, plodding, chore-chock’d) though I found a Sunday afternoon recital (G. is studying violin, and perform’d Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Gavotte) immensely satisfying. Biked in Saturday with G. to the drabber and drabber Friends of the Library bookshop, turn’d down Markson’s Reader’s Block (which howsoever much I enjoy’d, ’s come to seem rather “repetitive in retrospect,” after reading Vanishing Point, and This Is Not a Novel, and Wittgenstein’s Mistress). Paw’d half-heartedly at Eugenio Montale’s The Second Life of Art, essays translated by Jonathan Galassi (I think J.’s got a copy). Linger’d briefly at the classics racks, thumbing several Thomas Hardy’s—I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles a few years back after thinking how terrific I’d found The Return of the Native, (Diggory Venn! going about here and there cover’d in red dye!) in high school. Verdict: I am no longer in high school. Still: an itch to give the Wessex puddle-duck another chance, just not right now.

~

Forty ways of naming mumbledy-
Peg, and one is chock-
And-taw. Thomas Hardy’s tromping
The lanes in an impermeable
And Wellingtons, debating a stricture
Within—is one’s home-scape
Resource or anchor? Tamps down
The persiflage of self-noise.

~

Back in the disco days
Of Oliver Wendell Holmes kung
Fu fighting with Leon Spinks,
High rollers plunking down millions.
And seamlessness a ghost grunt
Still to the general break-
Up, a shiny spheroid cover’d
With little hooks, an immunoglobulin.

~

Schuyler to Joe Brainard asking whether he’d acquire a drawing Schuyler’d seen antiquing: “a farmhouse and trees, it’s in pencil and looks as though a ruler had been used to get the lines of the house straight . . . it exists in some borderland between instinctive art and more conscious art, an area of which I am very fond.”

Relatedly, after seeing some enlargements Fairfield Porter’d made of Schuyler-snapped photographs:

There really isn’t anything to photography except point and snap (I’m not sure that’s true) but I often wondered how successful fashion photographers I’ve met could be such successes, since they’re such dopes. Now I see it isn’t a mysterious talent, it’s largely gall.
        On the other hand, perhaps there isn’t much more to poetry than point and snap.

Two ways of proceeding: “faking out” the ever-conscious “I am making art” bodyguard (“point and snap,” or, see list of intoxicants, &c. historically available for so doing). Or: the “constantly notifying” route (at the get-go constant insertion of art-apparatchik and –apparatus into the art). Is what attracts in Schuyler’s writing a healthy amateurism, another way of obviating the high dead earnest seriousness that is so often mistook for art?

~

To work.

My Batty

~

Poor John Clare’s getting chid
In publick again, ah, sunny
Buncombe that is greeny England.
—I ain’t done with that.
Easy enough to say ‘mytygateth
And easyth the ponsyshmentes’ when
A meadowlark burrs throaty beyond
Th’hedgerow, and the stationmaster rails.

~

Received:

effing magazine, No. 3, edited by Scott Pierce ($5, 703 W. 11th Street #2, Austin, Texas 78701) Cover photograph by Lucas Anderson.

Writings: Ken Rumble, Christopher Ryan, Susan Briante, Jim Behrle, Hoa Nguyen, James Wagner, Robin Powlesland, Denise Szymczak, Clayton Couch, kari edwards, Alli Warren, Brad Flis, Joseph Massey, Tony Tost, AnnMarie Eldon, Marcus Slease.

Art: Jessica Leigh & Scott Pierce, Spencer Selby, Angelica Paez, Donna Kuhn, Travis Catsull.

Francis Raven interviews Juliana Spahr.

(Spahr on “the relationship between lyric poetry and language poetry”: “I think their relationship is not going so well although they seemed to have stopped yelling at each other. But I don’t think they will be dating much soon.” Umm, thanks!)

~

Metaplasmic, by Anna Eyre (effing press, 2004)

A sample, out of a variously styled batch:

Loom

Crow finds
shiny ink
jet black spiders

delivers them
through chipped beak

disentangles
my throat
over
pour of rattle

tucked neat
beneath feather
in side coat
pocket.

How we hover
in our interweave
grace too bland with
nectar

drizzle spoon drops
like broken ambulance
breaks drip water
flames in my
stutters

Come shop keeper
I say
come gape at the
infinity spindle
bound in slick eight
legs.

~

Rabindra Sarobar, by William Hart (effing press, 2004)

Rabindra Sarobar, a note spells out, is a lake in a south Calcutta park, and is named after Rabindranath Tagore. Poems of the locale, mostly, view’d through the eyes of the visitor:

Guns of War

The old cannon battery
once stood arrogant upon
the Hooghly ghats, ready
to blow out of the river
any sneaky Portuguese
or Dutch frigate
crazy enough to try
a wild stab at the heart
of Mother England overseas.

After independence
the guns migrated here
to the peaceful shore
of Rabindra Sarobar
where muzzles now menace
oarsmen from the scull club
exercising their swift craft.
The concrete gun mounts
are used by the destitute
to beat laundry.
Sometimes a crow
descends to a black barrel
to rest.

~

Sidetrack’d after a doggish romp in the moon-hazardous night, a whitish glaze covering the sky. By a Howard Moss-edited book (in the cellar) call’d The Poet’s Story (1973). He quotes Gorky quoting Tolstoy’s critical dodge after reading Gorky’s Lower Depths: ”Most of what you say comes out of yourself and therefore you have no characters.” (Poor Moss’d missed, apparently, the news (1966) roaring up out of Baltimore where Frank O’Hara found the “stoops” unbearably hard.) Moss on poets:

. . . though they have learned to search for the truth, because that search has been directed toward themselves, their interest tends to be parochial or narcissistic or limited to the landscape and the psychology of the ego. That tendency must be overcome before a writer can produce poems of dramatic tension, a legitimate dramatic poem, or fiction.

Quaint, i’n’t it? What’s collect’d is a curious assemblage of fictional attempts by poets (no schoolmarming here—the gamut runs Bishop to Bogan to Rukeyser, Logan to Merrill to Wilbur, and scoops up O’Hara and Koch and Schuyler, too.) The latter the reason for the sidetrack. One begins to think of Schuyler without the diffidence one lends (unruly automatism, undeserved) the perceived “underdog.” See, say, the beginning here of one part (of sixty-three) of Schuyler’s “Life, Death and Other Dreams” (“First published in The Paris Review, Fall 1972.”):

30

They went to the Rainbow Room, and groveled at its wondrous décor. They had the whole dump to themselves and made the most of it. All around the twilight lay shattered into mauve, canary and blue tourmaline. No clouds troubled its repose as the day died into itself. They issued forth upon a balcony. They addressed the night.

“O Alva! Alva!”

“O flow! budding out in fragile glass”

“as though the living and the dead had fled, leaving phosphorescent shells.”

“O Steinmetz, Steinmetz, Steinmetz!”

“And waterfalls that change and charge the night with fatal ‘don’t chew on me’ wirings!”

“O monotony, peopled invisibly”

“Parks, offices and murderous squalor”

“Here and there lights go on . . .”

“and the unperceivable is seen . . .”

“in the rhythm of the swelling and subsiding sea . . .”

“no wave breaks”

”O Davy Davy Davy”

“O blue TV”

“and Waring blender, automated pencil sharpener, burglar alarm, electric toothbrush”

“O wattage”

“fluent and tappable”

“O phone”

. . .

And so forth, a batty Romanticism gone to twentieth-century mock-histrionickals. (More unruly automatism, unrehearsed. The mind—one would like to say—“minds,” just as time “times.” “Thinking hard” is an impossibility, it is hardly thinking.)

~

To work.

Pantry Bare

~

A fuzz’d out evening. Scholiast
Of the grit finitude, c’est
Moi. Doubt gluts the waterways
And the violet light nuzzles.
An over-heat’d mystery stake-
Out’s going down: some apple-
Cheek’d ha-ha mister’s in
The mimic hedges. And out.

~

Wherein I plunged out into the brainpan-emptying night—full up to the gilly-ticklers with G.’s elementary school “musicale” noises. It wudn’t Rapallo on a pre-war Sunday afternoon with Ezra and Olga, no it wudn’t. So, head stuff’d, a pantry bare sauf a “variety selection” of tins of the obscurer devil’d meats, the vacuum-seal’d can of twelve-year-old smoked oysters missing the solder’d-on churchkey that you moved here on the truck up out of Virginia, the dried (skim) milk, the Eagle brand canned milk (one used to call it “evaporated”), the Milk Duds probably aswarm with crumple-wing’d beasties in post-larval fury—

You keep thinking about that line James Schuyler “attributes” to “Red Wing”—“a Mdewakanton, Dakota Sioux chief born in the mid-1700’s who waved about a scarlet- swan’s wing dyed carmine, sign of one’s sign of one’s identity, a removal almost impossible to ‘soak up’”—as saying to Hamlin Garland, devoted American realist of the next century, with a beard, out of New Salem, Wisconsin—it (the line) “goes”: “You speak true, Hamlin Garland,” . . . “though to small purpose and with less effect,” capturing “adroitly” my “present.”

You think you’ll repeat it to somebody someday soon in a fit of unattributed exorbitance, “and then you do.” (Thank you, Tom Clark.)

~

Around eleven-thirty p.m. it strikes me as funny to say: “Let’s shop talk.”

~

Schuyler’s note on Franz Kline and “most American artists”: “Kline, in other words and like most American artists, whatever genre they work in, suffered from respect. He seems to have taken seriously the message that art is skill, a hard thing to master and possibly even a dreary thing. It is rather like a man who wants to chop down trees but first learns how to untruss a fowl and which way the port goes round.” Plus ça change . . . Recent grim instance out of Silliman’s “political autobiography” (though they—instances—are legion): “I had been a grunt during all those political events, far too focused at the time on learning about poetry to want to get diverted into the venal realm of full-time politics.”

~

Chortled audibly at Schuyler’s phrase, “mental hygiene.”

~

To work.

Lyric Juice

~

Schuyler notes: after seeing Paul Osborne’s comedy, Morning’s at Seven: “I always enjoy writing in which characters can only express their feelings in clichés, and there’s a lot of that.” See A Nest of Ninnies. And a picture of the young J. A. pre-departure: “running around town returning books and things and muttering, in amended Firbank, “such herds of wild books, such herds of wild books.”

On Shakespeare: “. . .my special love is As You Like It, it’s so artificial, it doesn’t make the faintest pretense that its existence was obliged, was called for. Bigger works of art always seem to threaten to help one in some way or other, and therefore the fact that they exist is a part of the Social Good; As You Like It is just there, like the one red poppy across the lawn, pure excess of delight.”

Letter (of September 20, 1959) to Donald Allen, sending the poems that’ll end up in The New American Poetry, with a report on “what I remember people [that is, “emergent” New York Schoolers] as actually reading.” Examples: “Auden: like the common cold”—though Schuyler adds faux-ominously: “if Auden doesn’t drop that word numinous pretty soon, I shall squawk.” And: “Pound, I wonder about. Like Gertrude Stein, he is an inspiring idea.” Though later he relents, and admits that a 1952 Living Theatre production of Stein’s Ladies Voices, “influenced me immediately and directly. To represent her by a work like Ladies Voices would be truer than to include almost anything of Eliot’s. I like Eliot but what Parson Weems was to other generations The Waste Land was to us; Pablum.” The interest in the letter lies in both the sense it conveys that “influence” (lineage) cannot be so simply ascertain’d as (some of) its current epigones believe (See where Schuyler points out that “Olson’s allegiance to Pound-Fenellosa can’t be generalized for others—unless you have room for all of Proust, The Golden Bowl, Don Juan . . . and Lady Murasaki”), and in the few (tentative) distinctions made (that Allen subsequently pushes toward codification in th’anthology itself). For the moment (any moment), all is flux (“Frank studied with Ciardi.”)

Curiously, about a year later (September 3, 1960) in a letter to Chester Kallman copy’d to Ashbery, Schuyler, in talking about the Harry Mathews-financed, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler-edited Locus Solus says: “. . . part of its unstated objective is a riposte at THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, which has so thoroughly misrepresented so many of us—not completely, but the implications of context are rather overwhelming.” Next sentence: “Anyway, for issue one we want a cheerful, serious, international, kind of Paris-New York edited contents . . .” Meaning: none of that west coast / Black Mountain / beat riff-raff? Aucune idée.

~

Received:

Red Juice, by Hoa Nguyen ($5, effing press, 703 W. 11th St., #2, Austin, Texas 78701) Cover by Josh Rios.

A handsome chapbook, staple-bound, with poppy-red endpapers and an unfussy, grace-inhabiting design. Twenty-one poems, and notes. Pregnancy, motherhood, birthing, and “the national tragedy.” Nguyen’s poems are notational and matter-of-fact balancing incremental one against the other:

Up Nursing

Up nursing           then make tea

The word war is far
                                        “Furry,”
says my boy                 about the cat

I think anthrax
                & small pox vax

Pour hot water on dried nettles
Filter more water for the kettle

Why try
to revive the lyric

The note accompanying reads: “Nettles are used as a liver and blood tonic and support the endocrine system, cleansing and nourishing the glands. It is high in minerals, especially iron and calcium, and many vitamins. To make an infusion, put a handful of dried nettles in a wide-mouth jar and add just-boiled filtered water. Cover and steep for 4 hours or overnight; strain and drink.”

What is terrific about the poem is how completely it meshes its sounds. There’s almost no syllable that goes un-echo’d—and the echoes “bring the war home” in a way that makes the final couplet completely justified: things are both too monstrous in the world to think one could ever again write lyric poetry (the famous Adorno injunct) and so monstrous that one can no longer do anything but. The gestures are impeccable: the slight sound-tempering of the vowel’d “r” moving “word” to “war” to “far” to “Fur-“ moves a far-off abstraction into the boy-realm of the “Furry” familiar. The deadly “anthrax” cunningly meets and contaminates the routine childhood vaccines in the form of “vax.” The “nettles” (a swing word, prick and remedy) declare proximity with “kettle.” All of it—the invasion of the familiar lyric (contain’d) territory of the home—gets re-enacted and summarized in th’uncontainable final couplet. Uncontainable because of its ambiguity: is it “Why bother to revive the lyric?” or is it “For these reasons one needs must revive the lyric.”

~

Scott Pierce must be an industry. He is doing plenty-plenty new chapbooks (I have two others he sent—Rabindra Sarobar, by William Hart, and Metaplasmic, by Anna Eyre—plus the most recent issue (#3) of effing magazine, all in the hopper). I learn’d recently that he’ll be putting out a Kent Johnson chapbook of anti-war pieces, call’d Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, Or: ‘Get the Hood Back On.’ Excellent.

~

Note to myself: Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms.

~

To work.

A Speedy Aperture

~

Yesterday’s protest-post against surveillance of American poets by creep right-wingers was put in toto into the hands of said creeps themselves. If you want to join in a general barrage against such intimidation tactics, send a letter to Campus Watch (at staff@campus-watch.org), and cc it to the editor of the American Thinker (at editor@americanthinker.com), source of th’original attack against Ammiel Alcalay.

~

Received:

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, by Lyn Hejinian (The Figures, 1991)

Two hundred and seventy “chapters,” each roughly sonnet-sized in fourteen (wildly variable in length) lines, arranged in eight “books,” with a one chapter / one sonnet coda. Dated December 18, 1989-February 18, 1991. Oxota (meaning “the hunt” in Russian) detailing Hejinian’s relationship with the country and some of the writers she’s encounter’d (and translated) there. Mid-book:

Chapter Ninety

Subjects separate into themselves and then come out again
Four padded apertures round a sour air
The canals cannot tower
Subjects (that is, all of us—and we speak for ourselves) have the thirst of our finitude and we hoard unsatiated elaborations why
Without the conclusion of all these voluptuous stammerings a word is dead
Such which is as much as
But the unguiding present patience is without prepare
So enormous changeless caused and causeless events come
Cold lines of wind tightly weaving between hot lines of light
The neighbor, smoking on the landing near the communal slosh bucket, watching the descent of an aluminum pot
The damp ego climate, our picaresque obsequiousness
A man on the roof points toward a gap in the tower at the corner of the inactive church
Optical reality and uncertainty around
Alyosha lay his shirt over the chicken


Chapter Ninety-One

Metaphor hides the paranoia of writing
The speechless jogs of the horse
But metaphor may be scaled to the loves of life
Its increments associate with the practice of impressions
So the yardstick notes how the forest might be pocked
Agricultural workers buzzing the bronze and this less social than mystical
Of course the logger is indifferent to the suffering of his echo
Overhead the crows turned day and night
Rejection of closure, slapping of wings
Every night at the end of the sofa stood the kitchen
The metonym reduces the monument
A monument has the effect of jiggling and then forcing the lock
Beyond the door was a trampled pot
Graffiti of the horse in the corridor

How the speed at which “one” keys in the lines becomes the optimum speed at which the lines should be read (I am slow at keyboarding. I experienced a similar sensation typesetting hot type on a jobstick at Ithaca House in my “youth.”) Speed measuring density, density indicative of (something like) th’indigestible materiality of the signifiers? What “happens” in the keyboarding is a “literal” “rewriting” of the Hejinian-made experience. (It’s always trotters to turn to William James when Hejinian’s nearby):

My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts . . .
        To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement.

Or “poetic arrangement.” Two things. One, a momentary sense that I approach Pierre Menard in my retyping / rewriting, closing in on th’experience by re-enacting it. Two, that Hejinian, more-so than Stein, is making of James’s sense of “pure experience” (“the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories”) something like a recipe for a poem capacious enough to “hold” (which is a making) that experience. One senses that Hejinian—unlike the collectioneurs B. Andrews and R. Silliman (of the interminable “tool’d”—in two senses—notebooks)—is capable of inserting herself into the flux (as part of the flux) as an un-joggable receiving / recording instrument. The work in Oxota ’s got none of the textural bump and cleverness of (routine, formulaic) pastiche, though it flashes and dazzles disparately enough.

~

Francis Bacon (circa 1949): “Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on the canvas.”

~

Reading the William Corbett-edited select’d letters of James Schuyler (titled Just the Thing), and noting how my estimation of Schuyler’s work continues to get boost’d. The delights of the letters: terrific reading notes, meticulous descriptions—often botanical, howl-happy “dishing” (I particularly liked how so-and-so made so-and-so “seem like weak tea in the mauvais gout department”—a perfectly offhand’d scratch such as a cat’d provide) and good-natured bitchery, a sense of pre-Sontag’d “camp,” casual reference to obscure cinema-stars (who’s Helen Twelvetrees? who’s Toby Wing?) A directness (and agile critical eye) to friends (here, in a letter to painter John Button):

There is a line you sometimes use in your drawing which is stunning because of its speed, but which does not always tell as much as it appears to; if it’s undesirable, it’s because it gives off a look of “finish,” and a work should not look more finished than it intrinsically is . . . A deeper trouble with the speedy kind of line I mean is that one important reason for making drawings, I imagine, is not to draw a likeness of what one sees but to find out what it is one sees.

Which “apply’d” to poems would make for a climate of less canned certitude, and earnest diatribe—a Jamesian space.

~

To work.

The Infra-Mingy

~

In solidarity against the puniness of tyrants—equal’d only by that of snitches—“we” post the under-scribed addition to the loudening rumble of anger and disbelief at the recent Campus Watch / American “Thinker” assault on Ammiel Alcalay and others. (Unbeknownst to us, Kent Johnson’d already pinned th’append’d “article” to the hem of th’ineffable Pantaloons, fine guise of the fine and redoubtable Jack Kimball when we offer’d to nail it boldly to the door of th’Hotel here in the public square. No problem. Any firefighter knows one stops a conflagration by lighting hundreds of bright backfires in its path. We’ll gather around and singing lustily the children’s songs of our pre-“Preemptive Self-Defence” youth!) As to our “own” letter and request: two things. One: Reasoning with half-wits incapable of reason is ’s futile ’s filling a sock with water, and the tossing of flaming epithets—though roundly “fun”—is mostly ineffectual (though it helps kindle up a good blaze). Two: To argue against some ga-ga purveyor of blind ideology (no matter what—as we says of skunks—the stripe) is—like masturbating—an awful lot of fun, and always “successful,” but risk-ridden by the possibility of one’s own self’s going blind. Better to “admit the truth unadorn’d and get it over with”—if you are making a list of enemies I am your enemy and must needs be put on that list, period. For I am the enemy of such lists. I need no credentials, nor would I stoop to cooperate in the supplying of such. Just as I would refuse to argue with your asinine claims and narrow preoccupations. All of you—Allyssa A. Lappen, Campus Watch, and all you mingy American “Thinker” bean-counters—ought to be ashamed of yourselves. The letter:

~

Dear Campus Watch,

I have recently read the diatribe on the poet and activist Ammiel Alcalay, published in the American Thinker on March 4.

I am not writing this letter to argue politics with you, for that would be silly, wouldn’t it? I am writing, rather, to ask that you add me to the list of American poets you are putting under surveillance. Allow me to briefly list some of my credentials, as I think you will agree I deserve to be given a file in the archives of your organization.

I was one of the poets published in Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War anthology. My poem, which was widely distributed before its anthology publication, including by the openly Marxist journal Monthly Review, is titled “Baghdad,” and it is loosely based on the children’s book Goodnight Moon.

Days went by . . . Then, the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison happened, and I published a poem titled “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, Or: Get the Hood Back On.” This poem may be of particular interest to you, since (in addition to the fact that it is accompanied by photographs and the music of Dean Martin) Ammiel Alcalay himself saw fit to send it abroad for possible translation into Arabic. I don’t know if it has been translated yet, but the English version is available here, where it has received thousands of visits since its appearance: http://www.blazevox.org/kent.htm

Further, this poem is now the title poem of a collection of mine that is soon to appear. This book will contain numerous pieces by me (not everyone would judge it poetry!), all of which have some relation to the war in Iraq. The cover of this book will be, I think, somewhat original: the infamous shot of the American soldier holding the leash which is clipped to the neck of the prone prisoner shall be surrounded by pictures of daffodils among which shall be little Cupids shooting their arrows inward, toward the picture.

But the most important thing I wanted to say about the forthcoming book is this: I intend to announce in the book that all author royalties from the sale of the collection are to be donated to Campus Watch. I wish to do this (and I hope you will accept the gesture) because I strongly believe your proto-fascist activities are an excellent stimulant to the defense of American values, like civil liberties and other stuff.

Also, I should tell you that I correspond with Joseph Safdie, one of the “leftist” poets mentioned in the American Thinker article! He and I almost co-edited a book of recipes and favorite dinner anecdotes by poets. Alas, this book idea fell through, though I now can’t quite remember why. But someone else should certainly do it, as it is a wonderful idea. Oh, and I should also say that in the 1980’s I worked as a literacy teacher in Nicaragua on two different occasions. This was when the Sandinista’s were in power. Though I’m more or less a social democrat now, I was really radical back then. From our village, we could hear the Contra mortars going off almost every night. Some of my friends died. Then I came back and founded the Milwaukee Central America Solidarity chapter, which went on to do all sorts of protest activities. One event we organized was called “Who’s Watching You in 1984?” and hundreds of people attended, including numerous FBI agents. Not to get too sentimental, but it was at this event that I met my future wife.

So, these would be some reasons you might wish to accept my request to be inducted into your files. I will be sure to send you a copy of the forthcoming book, which, again, shall go to support the activities of your organization.

Sincerely,

Kent Johnson

~

Phoenix.

District Notes 5

~

Ezra Pound, in “To Whistler, American”:

. . .
You had your searches, your uncertainties,
And this is good to know—for us, I mean,
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art.

You were not always sure . . .

Certainty that makes “one” kick against the pricks, and “one” sees it everywhere. Confidence, “boisterous and butch” (Schuyler) is one thing, dogma and smarmy indifference another. Middle ground: between timidity and alarm at one’s possible timidity and alarm (what if the Next Big Thing bump’d in the night and I heard it not?) and the earnest overweening certainty that is, finally, no more than Just Another Bump in the Night. Got it?

Whistler’s (1834-1903) adopting of musical terms (“nocturne,” “arrangement,” “diminuendo”) “to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest.” Relation to other attempts to deny objects the clinging shreds and shrapnels of the production-environment. Cf. New Criticism. (Note to self: Mr. Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock.’)

~

The Arabic script call’d Muhaqqaq—“strongly expressed, forcefully done.”

~

A Willem de Kooning “Woman” hung next to a Francis Bacon “Self-Portrait” (1958) in the Hirshhorn. Is what I call “seeing.”

~

A Robert Delaunay study for a painting of Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) in the Corcoran. Which I look hard at—trying to connect it to the impeccably-dressed man I saw sitting in a booth at some “Foire aux Livres” in the Grand Palais circa 1980-something. And walk’d by with my tongue lodged somewhere deep in my boot (which, one thinks in retrospect, ’s probably preferable to boot lodged deep in mouth—sure result of attempting to say, “Euh, M’sieur Soupault?”)

~

My mistrust of the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) exhibit’d at the Hirshhorn, a retrospect—predicated on the sheer variety of style, and of material. Great crusty slabs of basalt scoop’d out in places to “release” a severe and shiny interior—these I find moving as transformations (though not a “shapes,” the shape is rather incidental). And I like some largely wooden pieces. There are items in paper, aluminum, polish’d stone, stainless steel, wire, &c. Nothing, though, that is, no material obsesses, and all returns (periods) look desultory. Most exhibit a particular biomorphism in form that I associate with post-World War II art in general—most of the early works of th’American-based abstract-expressionists exhibit it. Elemental, Jungian, myth-soak’d, pods and diatoms—think Joan Miró, early Rothko, early Pollock, &c.

~

Strode through the Corcoran Frank Gehry exhibit, “Designs for Museums,” with what I intend’d ’s a “dismissive sneer” plant’d on my phyzz. The models themselves were a mess, look’d put together by someone who couldn’t manipulate a glue-stick. Crumple up an adequate sheet of paper, drop it into a scaled slot befitting the “site,” feed the wrinkle- and crease-created dimensions into a chunk of CATIA (Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) software with a “digitizing wand,” and what one gets ’ll look, uh, like a ball of wadded up paper.

~

Oh March, it’s March when
My self-absorption matches that
Of the great coastal cities
And if I call you
“Boisterous and Dutch,” a cabinet
Of curious grief-canisters, you’ll
Know it’s Jimmy Schuyler talking
Confusedly about the color green.

~

Edulcoration. Matching the colour-loss due to the watering-down of the snuck scotch with th’addition of pancake syrup. General waffling.

~

Bittern.

District Notes 4

~

Amadeo Modigliani (1884-1920) exhibit at the Phillips. One whole room fill’d with “caryatids”—pencil-sketched, or charcoal’d, or watercolor’d, brush laden. I think “columns of tenderness”—that grace one (rarely) sees in stone. Noted the mention of Modigliani’s exposure to Khmer work, presumably at the Trocadero Musée de l’Homme, it’s an element I’d’ve miss’d completely. Early patron Dr. Paul Alexandre:

When a figure haunted his mind, he would draw feverishly with unbelievable speed, never retouching, starting the same drawing ten times in an evening . . . until he obtained the contour he wanted.

And if only one could chart the language hubbub that emerges (crumpled, damaged, inchoate) as a poem with anything like the speed one can make a series of lines? Exercises need’d for getting it down ’s quick ’s possible. Of course, the difference (and point where I distrust Alexandre’s perception) is in the mysteriously haunting “figure.” Which likely only comes to exist in the drawing of it, the way a poem fills up and out with its writing.

~

The way Modigliani avoids the peculiar blank look of Greek busts—no pupils in th’eyes—by subtle differences in hue, by crosshatching one eye, by cock-eyeing one eye, by enlarging one eye.

~

Juxtaposed: a late Philip Guston (1913-1980) painted assemblage (the usual objects piled up, vaguely metallic, with seams and rivets) hung next to an oddball Arthur Dove (1880-1946, of Canandaigua, New York) “Cornell box” (though shallower) titled “Goin’ Fishin’” (1925)—of bamboo pole parts, denim shirt sleeve, buttons, and what resembles a hack’d off chunk of creosoted fencepost.

~

The story of Berthe Morisot’s greyhound named Laertes, provided by Stéphane Mallarmé. Dog, not name.

~

Egregious. “Nobody knows what that word means. It’s just a general intensifier.”

~

The one notebook solution. My reading notes hanging coat against coat on the same rack ’s my “museum notes.” Oculus interruptus. Jim Harrison—though I suspect th’observation’s less “territorial” (Midwestern) than “generational” (Harrison’s b. 1937)—on “self-improvement”:

As a Midwesterner I have always been quite the fool for self-improvement schemes, an impulse that becomes nearly liturgical in more isolated areas. In Horatio Alger young men were bent on “improving their lot.” You are either exercising yourself to a frazzle using the “dynamic tension” of Charles Atlas, improving your word power, saving your pennies in a big jar, making use of every minute, studying treasure maps, or reading biographies of men who made it “up from the depths.” This kind of inane bullshit later exfoliated into Vince Lombardi’s notion of toughness and the kind of rabid Americanism that was bent on punishing any form of dissent.

Wasn’t Jay Gatsby originally out of the Midwest, too? Remember?

I think of that kid Gatsby methodically printing a schedule
On the back flyleaf of a book called Hopalong Cassidy,

Resolve tendered as a post-
Literary act, what we do, done with reading.

For Descartes, what we do is set aside a few hours for practice
Of mathematical difficulties, inviolable havens.

For Gatsby, it’s dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling, study electricity,
Etc. and study needed inventions.

Well, no, of course you don’t. If I can’t find a copy of The Great Gatsby on my shelves, I’ll quote myself, see if I don’t! And wasn’t Descartes up out of the Miswest, maybe the Badger State?

~

The story of the “six-four and three hundred pounds” J. D. Reed drinking in Gloucester bars with Charles Olson, who “dwarfed him.” I admired Reed’s Sumac-publish’d Fat Back Odes, and then he wrote book reviews for Newsweek, I think, and then he vanish’d, I think.

~

In the room with the Claes Oldenburg “Soft Drainpipe—Red (Hot) Version” (1967) spread-eagled elephantine on the wall, the gutter on each side hanging testicularly down. Two “art matrons” talking:

—Claes Oldenburg.
—Oh my, that’s scary!
—(Inaudible, with snicker.) . . .
—And then there’s the color!
—(With finality. Enough nonsense.) It’s Jesus on the cross.

~

Bought (Bridge Street Books):

Muse & Drudge, by Harryette Mullen (Singing Horse Press, 1995)

Another one I read some years back and loved for its allusive ludic lubricity—not to put a too fine or final lucubration on it. (And thought Sleeping with the Dictionary a mite of a comedown, less “wholehearted,” more “studied.”) Who’d argue with relentless mastery like:

up from slobbery
hip hyperbole
the soles of black feet
beat down back streets

a Yankee porkchop
for your knife and fork
your fill of freedom
in Philmeyork

never trouble rupture
urban space fluctuates
gentrify the infrastructure
feel up vacant spades

no moors steady whores
studs warn no mares
blurred rubble slew of vowels
stutter war no more

Probably some kind of record for puns per square inch, high allusion acreage, and miniature faux-palindromicks (“slew of vowels”) throughout.

Sight, by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (Edge Books, 1999)

I suffer a similar radical discomfort trying to read Leslie Scalapino as I do (trying to read) Jorie Graham. Pas de musique. And all that tortuous (and torturous) stutter and stop and go (is that supposed to mimic thinking?) just about punches out my headlights, to put it acrobatically. Sample, random, decontextualized, popping open a book in a bookstore:

          — so that wakes disoriented anyway utterly relaxed — no one

          no breath in the thorax, and then a dead relative (that being recognized) — one begins to weep and laugh at the same time — as inner thorax not breathing — opening on the span of bridge —
          someone else — at a meeting — asphyxiating blue — is hugged by two jumping up as the cure to asphyxiating — not dreaming —
          in my deep sleep — so that I can’t resume a structure — out in the car going out but am casting for it — the thorax not breathing still, even in the prior sleep

Am “casting for it,” am hyperventilating, “get shorty,” I think. Here’s, however, Lyn Hejinian (the reason I bought the book) (the two writers alternate passages of varying lengths, each identify’d “(LS)” or “(LH)”)—a different, non-contiguous, passage:

          Experience (“it is flat”) can get dangerously thrown around (“what is the taste of this soup without salt?”) in theatrical situations (“I open my mouth; I puke!”). The result is only a semblance of emotion, without emotion’s intelligence.
          Emotion’s intelligence enables us to ‘go through life’ (the emotions progress), maneuvering between curses (the question of blessings we’ll set aside).
          “How is the weather?”
          “Open your umbrella!”

          Where materiality is concerned, the emotions are crucial to the response:
          “Has Nancy as much money as we two?”
          “No! It is very sad: she has less!”
          But as Saint Augustine points out, though “compassion is commendable it cannot be desirable” since to desire it is to desire the suffering which produces it.

Lovely. My immediate questions. What constraints were put in play, what ground-rules? (Scalapino and Hejinian each provide short—a page or so—prefaces.) Do the two writers begin to intermingle, “rub off,” influence one another? Is it more likely that I’ll come to find Scalapino finally readable, or that I’ll find Hejinian (whose work I’ve mostly enjoy’d previously) render’d to soap? Or, worse, that lather—mostly air—that soap “produces” in the frottage.

~

Received:

Notre Dame Review, No. 19, edited by John Matthias and William O’Rourke ($8, 840 Flanner Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556)

A massive issue titled “&Now, And Then”—with half read one way, flip it over—like the smash-jaunty pulp science fiction paperbacks (Ace Doubles?) of yesteryear?—read the other way. Turns out the “&Now” half—work coming largely out of a recent “festival of new writing” put together by Steve Tomasula—contains a number of “pointers?” or “ads?” for work that exists not in the journal, but online. One way the print journal and the online necessity work together. Entry here.

~

Rail.

District Notes 3

~

Graham Robb re: Rimbaud’s parents: “The marriage was doomed from the beginning: a wife who felt violently uncomfortable whenever her views were questioned, and a husband whose favourite spare-time activity was textual analysis.”

And quotes a snatch of Montaigne Rimbaud liked to toss about: “The poet, seated on the Muses’ tripod, furiously pours out all that comes into his mouth, like the gargoyle of a fountain, and there escape from him things of diverse colour, contrary substance, and interrupted flow.” Which makes Montaigne’s poet sound a little like a flarfist avant la lettre.

~

Jim Harrison on aging, how the flesh itself needs to refuse answer beyond what Yeats call’d “dissipation and despair”: “it is the ‘negative capability’ that is to be valued, the willingness to hold before the mind the thousands of questions flesh is heir to without forcing an answer more questionable than the question. This position for a writer can easily become a posture so that rather than a lifelong dance with the multifoliate questions, one is a geezer who continues to mutter a sequence of no’s that in themselves have become quite fashionable.” (A lot of that going around, lately.)

~

Rothko’s “No. 8” of 1949. Startled in reading some accompanying pedagogical spindrift: never did it occur to me to consider Rothko’s late images connect’d to doors, or portals, or thresholds, or windows. Only paint, and painting, and edge-areas, and color relations.

~

The Fauves sprang up—bright fungi soon gone—one hundred years ago. Nothing sadder than late André Derain paintings—mud dauber works.

~

Walk’d in the big-flake snow by Claes Oldenburg’s (and Coosje van Bruggen’s, according to the “literature”) big “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” (1999) in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. A technological dud: how long before nobody recall’s exactly what a typewriter eraser is, or how it is (was) used? Supposedly a giant “falling” eraser: “it has just alighted, the bristles of the brush turned upward in a graceful, dynamic gesture.”

Later, I see that unruly, stiff (think “Brylcreem’d”) hair-flop in a self-portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour, painter of the boyish Rimbaud turn’d revery-smirk’d at Verlaine’s composure in “Coin de Table” (1872), Fantin-Latour’s hair fanning up and out wild, and ’s brow is down, shading a cruel gaze. The painterly gaze is always cruel (paraphrasing somebody).

~

A new Andy Goldsworthy installation titled (“Roof”) protruding through the East Wing windows. Shallow dome structures of stack’d Virginia slate, a dozen or so, some interrupting others, circles cutting circles. Remind’d me of th’ancient stone dwellings (“Bories”) near Gordes, in Provence.

~

David Smith’s odd “Voltri VII” (1962). A wheel’d vehicle of sorts, with a row of semi-figural elements “standing” along the wagon-bed, or tongue (the two indistinguishable). Semi-figural: they could be human, bent, burden’d—though secretly I think of them as mégots (that word, as in “dix cigarettes font dix mégots et trois mégots font une cigarette.”), that is, stubbed out cigarette butts. As such, Brainardesque.

~

The other three books I grabbed at Bridge Street Books:

The External Combustion Engine, by Michael Ives (Futurepoem, 2005)

A dip into it convinced me—oddly animated abstract nouns. The following is, perhaps, not entirely “representative” (it is print’d columnarly, two justify’d margins and, as such, mimics the prose-poem look of most of the other pieces, only “skinnier”):

Précis of Historical Consciousness

how a pattern of (a.) violent
reciprocating ventures among enemies
giving way to (b.) dense rotarian
calms and (c.) back again, that is,
how, from (d.) continual interruptions,
to plot an (e.) uninterrupted trajectory
stands alone among (f.)
accomplishments as exemplary of (g.)
the totemistic headspace caught
boinking (h.) hot trophy wife of (i.)
imperialist justification, thus to
reinforce the (j.) argumentum ad
pabulum that (k.) sound government
“returns” to the “job” of (l.) “running
the country” a one would (m.) a
garbage disposal or (n.) sex toy, as if
to release the (o.) individual
consciousness to (p.) enjoy its attitude
toward history as a (q.) thing forever
passing into (r.) nothingness, since
whenever (s.) serious matters are
finally reduced to their (t.) non-serious
essence, and eunuchs are opening
splits of (u.) champagne and setting
out exotic cheeses, some (v.) buff
theory of time always rushes in to
announce that (w.) roving thugs have
(x.) defaced the herms, and
concluding with an (y.) accurate
explanation of (z.) herms

(As if that one who is attempting to write Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual” “on the uses of a new metal” had finally gotten it written (using th’alphabet, dummy, the only tool one’s “got” at one’s “disposal”), and turn’d it blithely in . . . ?)

~

Okay—period of time winning out over time—two more Bridge Street Books tomorrow. With mail out of Austin, Texas (effing press) and Great Barrington, Massachusetts (The Figures’s Hejinian). And th’usual sour snarls and suppressed belly-laughs into the sad soup I refuse to eat!

~

Dale “Possum” Smith’s stirred out of a hibernal slumber (with little ones accompanying) to post a fine roster of blogger Oscars (say it quick). Loud snort at the award to the lap-counting “Pool Boy” (them’s tepid and wishy-washy waters indeed) and, oh, aw-shucksy pride in th’Hotel’s mention.

~

One breed of Bloglander:

The ineffectual self-back-patter (auto-endorser) who is unendingly pleased with the “audacity” of “her” “daring” embrace of the New Orthodoxy (read your Barthes, citoyens), or who loves nothing more than to cavil against and smudge up some well-chew’d over straw-dog rep of the Old Orthodoxy (usually somebody “popular”—whatever that means for a writer in th’illiterate booboisie’d States). A breed of Bloglander who is ferret-attentive to the signals of the (likely mis-)perceived “leader” of the New. Indeed, ceases to function without such “elder-hinten.” Nominations anyone?

~

Pintail.