Entanglement

~

Received:

Entanglement, by Allen Fisher (The Gig, 2004)
Cover by Allen Fisher, four panels (5-8) of allotment days. ($22 US, 109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, Ontario, M2N 2B1 Canada)

Nate Dorward, who put Entanglement together—edited and typeset—must be a one-man dynamo. I received the book as part of renewal promotion offer’d by the Chicago Review, rather skeptically ticking the Fisher box, knowing little of the work, though convinced, on the basis of a few copies of The Gig, that Dorward is—as Pound’d say—“a serious character.” My skepticism last’d only for the period I took thumbing—that havoc of th’optics trying to see through the “eye-fringes,” words back-glancing and skittering off. Hitting Fisher’s “Introduction” steady’d my thumb-hand immensely, sound’d my corporal mind. Thus:

One of the more engagement problems encountered in any urban catchment can be an unavoidable decoherence due to the coupling between the quantum system and what if the environment. Experimental praxis can address this problem through a poetics of crowd-out and this what is it has partly been achieved in the poetry of Gravity as a consequence of shape, using a necessary critique of modernist coherence, and its precedents in roaring and the enlightenment. If Entanglement achieves indistinguishability, it is because several methods have been used to guarantee overlap in spatio-temporal imperfect fits. Some of the starts, books in Entanglement, such as Fish Jet, are complete in themselves and were published as complete entities. Other books lack this obviousness.

(Rather not unlike a card out of Charles Bernstein’s goofy deck, though more subtly (enactingly) play’d.)

What’s here in Entanglement—in nearly 300 pages—(scouting around in the front matter), is, then, “the second extended collection” of poems in the above-mention’d long sequence, the first (simultaneous) collection of which were publish’d (also in 2004) by Salt under the title Gravity. Noted, too, is th’omission of “associated pieces from Ideas on the culture dreamed of (Spanner, 1982) for reasons of space.” Available, though, here. All adding up to a fine example of how “indistinguishability” + “obviousness” = “spatio-temporal imperfect fits.” Precisely. Roaring modernism shuts down inevitably in a “fit” of overdetermination unfinish’d. Just two more unbeatable sentences out of that “Introduction”:

Critique of any ‘you’ concept, implicit in critique of the individuated self, any entity fixed to a garden fence left to rot there with the slugged geraniums, can lead to a heap of worn tyres, better for a worm compost or the edges of a boat lap than for use on the road. On the evidence of chronology there is an assurance that Spenser could not have read Nietzsche.

Implicit, too, that—damn the chronological aspect—even if Pound were to return for a day he could not (immediately) read Fisher: see “the traps of any participant’s consciousness radicalise the aesthetic tools in the process of their use.”

How is it that what appears first forbidding becomes so oddly comforting, almost intimate? Some core samples, for—in part—the variety of dictions, th’occasions of technique. Here’s a section out of “Ring Shout”:

He downloads Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
as a therapy, shifting each narrowed text
Presentational immediacy arises
from the integration of a strain-feeling
and a physical purpose

We are both in pain
perhaps reasons are complexly different
Both ranges of reasons are human
She is very beautiful the way
she considers
I hardly ever weep now
It takes fifty years to make a man

When so much you have loved torn from you
and you expect to remain the same.

Domestic freight (moving) intercut with what I associate with “corporate noise” (most often issuing out of “personnel” wings)—that “Presentational immediacy . . .” business. Directly opposite “page-wise” are the lines:

by a river she bends over a torn epiphytic lichen
resting on the heavy, close textured loamy soil
of a marl partly concealed by an orchard of perry pears
in an April rain shadow the puzzle posed related to
the presence of Lobaria pulmonaria away from limestone . . .

New register. “Ring Shout” is accompany’d (as many of the pieces herein are) by a page and a half of “Notes and Resources”—tuck’d all together at the end of the book. It comes to me how much I love such apparatus, the lists of books, the pointing off at the detritus (compost) out of which these spears poked up. (I recall tracking down the Rev. Francis Kilvert diaries precisely because Ronald Johnson’d quoted something therein.) For “Ring Shout,” items include Epicurus, Alfred North Whitehead, Zola, Blake, Benjamin, and Malraux, and books on lichens, Chernobyl, biochemical oscillations, and millenarianism. And a note identifying Lobaria pulmonaria as “the tree lung wort.”

Another core sample, a tiny (ineffable) section of “Mummer’s Strut”:

The line between sense and non-sense
Wider than both the areas it divides

Resisting th’impulse to impose that on Fisher’s work, though it is clear, I think, that he sees borderlines rich, fecund with possibility. Hedgerow. Beach. Treeline. Suburb.

One more (though I should also mention the Zukofskyan fivers that make up “Fish Jet”). A sample:

What I, in it, grieved
Strive to get out cavity
Variant arrangements of human life
I am grieved to want
And give you reasons many
Give more than one reason
To draw a thing moving
Draw that which cannot sit.

One (I was saying) more, out of “Pulling Up and Quasi Queen”:

Thought image, a kind of narration, gets detected
at a distance measured downstream from an exegesis
there thoughts traverse a cell sheet of resonant analytical light
and the understanding that results a kind of fluorescence
detected in a surf gush by a change-coupled device
listed as comprehension.

Thoughts in a thermal park of the process
showed up in a red-mauve field
where a screen test of the mind
proposed itself as an activity that involved self-expression,
self-actualisation and self-knowledge
to say that mind is all reality or that mistake is mind
is thus to shower gel the most awkward feature of reality

One of the pleasures here, certainly, is the gentle enactment—inserting that verb “to shower gel” into a wash “about” how the mind “functions.” (Since Dylan’s been hovering nearby—I was trying to “use” the line about “when gravity fails / And negativity won’t pull you through”—to no avail—I’ll say—Dylan’s epigone’s line—how the mind “sees what it wants to see / And disregards the rest.”)

There is, in a “poetics of crowd-out,” a terrible lot more to Entanglement than I know, (my “obviousness”) or can hint at here. Suffice it to say my skepticism’s unwarrant’d, my reading cut out.

~

Note: Nate Dorward enclosed a “gentle reminder” regarding The Gig’s “forthcoming book of criticism on women’s experimental poetry in Canada”—including Peter O’Leary and Susan Schultz on Lissa Wolsak, Gerald Bruns on Karen Mac Cormack, Peter Larkin on Lisa Robertson. First I’d heard of it—$19 US in advance of publication. Judging by th’unstoppable reach and richness of so much recent Canadian writing, I’m planning to plunk down my greenbacks, and you too?

~

To work.

Saline

~

Received:

Saline, by Kimberly Lyons (Instance Press, 2005) Cover image by Brenda Iijima. Cover design by Anna Moschovakis and Brenda Iijima. ($10, SPD, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, California 94710)

There’s something primary here. Boldly color’d (“a sudden / canary yellow leaf”), with an emphatic precise certainty (“Dial a red telephone and meow / to a cow”) interspersed with other diffuse energies (“Peripheral snaps, like a fly swatter / with no sweat / fits of sound without shape”) all undersung (or underslung, cupped up and support’d) by a big attentiveness to the word. A rapid windy (exemplary) catalog here: “Remember thunderstorm / a word / that implicates the future,” or “inflaming solitude with the / inflamed word solitude,” or “words grow inward,” or “the overturned alphabet / oblong, stationary, held in reserve,” or “letters jump around the black void / of the sentence / as though sense were only one possibility / in this world,” or “The black dog who comes to the door. / Is the strangest olden word.” Or “A thesis / of how thunder emits / fluid, earth spatters graves, / ink condenses into language,” and “The silence of a figure / entering a forest ‘at the midpoint / of their life’ / Going into the words like that.” “The word corvette or dart or pepto bismol also elicits the memory of that smell.”

Or here, ending “It’s a Possibility” with the speed of an O’Hara:

The conductor’s capabilities
thrifty as lilacs in late April
as evanescent and fluorescent
a pond of purple witchcraft
safely rowing is that possible
the denizens of a poem
coming through the mist whack
a curtain completely uncertain as
to how wavelengths prevail.

Which swiftly and accurately enacts that Keatsian talent to summon up a whack incertitude and let ’er rip. (I associate it a little with Lyons’s lines in “Soap”: “ ‘Just looking around’ I say to myself. / I imagine the words / are looking for me also.”)

There’s a childlike, easy (graceful) alternating between intense focus and happy aimlessness, a knot-up and release rhythm to Lyons’s poems. Happy to meander (wend) in diffuse acceptance, just as willing to pause in “decisive hesitations.” It is a human cadence, mete with human energies—though it is, too, precisely what is lost to the nine-to-five world, to our (unwilling) compliance to inhuman structures. Hence, most visible in kids. Not to suggest there is no hint of anomie, no kvetch, no refusal here: see the way “obligations / look over my shoulder / like flies” all one’s best intentions “my light, deflected,” and even a slim volume of poetry (or the joys of scribbling in notebooks) won’t help anybody now:

I hate this Sunday consciousness

got hysterical, couldn’t find
Lunch Poems, worn thin, wafer of a book.

It’s that kind of intensity
generalized, smeared over everything
even this notebook is too
fat & demanding . . .

Here’s a Kimberly Lyons poem:

First Book

At the crossroads,
you would expect cross hairs,
jumbled branches and day old roses
pressed against a cemetery fence.
I see “Apollo’s Agent” like a joke,
ugly billboards in the rain.
Who doesn’t hear Robert Johnson
at this place
near King’s Highway.
Old Dutch mercantile
and native tribes.
“Accident’s casualties.”
“we sell gold and silver.”
“Violations removed.”
Three graces came
as though binding her to their
protections, not the reverse.
Divine features ground
down by too much fate.
Moonlight, which persists
like scissors.
Their four visages
have completely turned to an inwardness
more than any singular thought.
When I saw their clasped arms
and unreadable futurity,
I felt the crossroads
emanate from
our decisive hesitations.

Crossing the Manhattan Bridge
jagged extremities in every direction,
come upon Lucretious:

and such like bodies ever wandering
from the vast deepe, supplies to natures bring
But there’s no center to which all things tend
And thus doth this first Booke abruptly end.

Which couplet may function as justification and desideratum of Lyons’s poetics. Just as (the story goes) Robert Johnson made a pact with the devil (to play guitar so gorgeously) Lyons adopts the strategy of the misfit angel, willful and canny by turns, dishing the Romantic ditties (in a hiss: “Moonlight . . . persists like scissors”) and getting by (humorously) with insouciance and a sort of wise naïveté. In the title (prose) poem: “Like perpendicular shadows, people grab one another suddenly in affection. . . . People drive around doing errands. What’s an errand? It’s hard to define, it goes on all winter afternoon.”

Saline sports a completely stunning cover. Plangent green wash with an array of sizable cubicoids looking (I like to think) like salt crystals blown up into high color (reds and blues) under electron microscopy. Or I think of skirting the Salton Sea in southern California: not the terrain itself—all brown’d out, the fail’d hotels, resorts still saturated with a forgivable near-preen of color.

Instance Press is currently edited by Beth Anderson, Elizabeth Robinson, and Stacy Szymaszek. It’s done earlier books by Craig Watson (True News), Keith Waldrop (Haunt), and Beth Anderson (The Habitable World). Without knowing the specifics, the press seems to’ve changed hands, or is functioning in a kind of roving editorship manner—I associate Instance originally with Leonard Brink and Jono Schneider. No matter, it’s doing splendidly just now.

~

To work.

Two Bones and a Pick

~

Home in rain. Walk’d the dog in rain. Patch’d the bicycle tire that’d skidded my ass down the morning street. (Leapt on (the borrow’d) J.’s bike to ride to work, dorkily low-riding it, knees up around earlobes with every peddle. Though (secretly) I enjoy being a Kafkaesque spectacle, a giant insectlike creature with haunt’d eyes and a bad haircut.)

Genius is all haunt’d eyes and bad haircuts: see Wittgenstein, see Beckett, see Marguerite Young. You don’t think the dapperly-coiff’d Thomas Wolfe’s a genius, do ya stupor man? John Ashbery (whose haircuts’ve gone slightly better of late) wrote, back in the god-awful hair days: “We have seen the city; it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.”

~

Temporarily mislaid my taedium vitae?

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In a piece in The Guardian, Ashbery says: “I’ve also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, ‘there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major’ and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I’d like to do myself. I’d like to write like Tennyson, but make it new.” (I suspect somebody’s leg’s getting tugged a smooch by the end there, however straight and sensible th’earlier claim. We could use a little more such perspective out of the current crop of soon-to-be elders, in lieu of the rabid sophomoricks we, uh, currently “get.”)

~

Temporarily disobey’d my caveat emptor? (Meaning: to stop the sword-rattling, as that cave is obviously empty.)

~

Caught a tiny portion of an NPR interview with Warren MacKenzie, maker of what he calls “everyday pots.” Notable: how he stopped bothering to sign (or stamp) the pieces after noticing that invariably people were selecting (collecting) the pots with clear (not glaze-marred or -illegible) stamps. Rather than “looking” at the pot. Ah, branding . . . anonymity and heteronymity beckon.

Here’s MacKenzie out of th’excellent Smithsonian Archives of American Art. On how the “backwards glance” (or the sidelong glance off into—here—anthropology) revivifies:

Our main inspiration I think came from the Field Museum of Natural History because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind. And so we could see very simple, primitive, hand-built pottery from Babylonia and ancient Egypt and so forth, Greece. We could see the most sophisticated things that came out of the Orient—Japan, Korea and China—some few pieces of European porcelain, majolica [tin glazed earthenware], and that sort of thing, but they had a marvelous collection.
      And the other thing about it which inspired us was that in a group of pots you wouldn’t see a single example of this kind of pot. You would perhaps see a case with 20 different examples. So you realize that these pots could be repeated again and again and each time there would be minor variations in them.
      In looking at these pots at the Field Museum, Alix [MacKenzie’s wife] and I both came to a conclusion individually but also collectively that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life, and we began to think—I mean, whether it was ancient Greece or Africa or Europe or wherever, the pots that people had used in their homes were the ones that excited us. And so we thought, if those are the kinds of pots from every culture that interest us, why would we think that it should be any different in mid-North America 20th century? And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.

~

Love that elocution and intensifier “high.” High modernism. High dudgeon. High seas. So I see two goldfinches bouncing “over the bounding main” of the higher sky (singing as they go). Or so I see two robins (with, curiously enough, two onlooker-robins in the surrounding yew shrubs) in a flighty wrassle-hold, and think: “two robins in high copulation,” “two robins in high rut.” Two perfect mantric fivers to allow the day out of its night-sack.

~

To work.

Snatch It Back and Hold It

~

—I love it when Ron Silliman talks about intellectual dishonesty.
—Oh yeah, it’s so . . .
—Dirty’d!
—Always!
—Already!

~

A curious schism adulterated:

One of the typical weaknesses of penny-ante avant-garde sentiment, lulled by illusions, is that it resents its own attachment (read: communitas) as an infected wound, that it bears a childish love for its debility, that it adores overestimating itself in the domain of letters, and more precisely in that of poetry, a subject on which it nonetheless has few grounds for congratulating itself . . . Old-fashion’d despite oversized claims to the contrary, backwards in its unpalatable insistence on the new, petit-bourgeois (finally) in its aspirations, the alleged avant-er suffers from a social inferiority complex . . . One ascends up out of the provinciality of the bland self-justifying new (“new for new’s sake”) and finds one’s intelligence is a dog that wags its tail in front of strangers, with all the baseness of a slave to an idea, all the snotty self-consciousness of a child. One gives proof, in demeaning oneself so, that one is exactly what one denies being: nonvalue incarnate, and old before one’s time.

And:

The vaunt’d member of the School (“happy schools’re all alike”) is afraid of pretension, has a phobia about pretension, especially the pretension of written or spoken words (outside of “Schoolcraft”). Whence that famous reading style—as if strangulation were about to occur any second, or instanter. The secret is just this: the School-er believes that words are pretentious. One chokes and smothers each word as much as one can, so it will become inoffensive, good-natured, de-natured, ambivalent, “plain-style,” dumb . . . The rather general (national) return to simplicity (“dumbing down”) that has made itself a trademark in Schoolish letters, finds poetically-inclined young men and women here marvelously well prepared, and is already taking effect . . . The Schoolish today I would readily call virtuosos of simplicity, and I could cite almost all of them.

Okay, time’s up. Bastard-fiddling with remarks quoted in Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters: Miroslav Krleža on Croat writers, Henri Michaux on Belgiums. If the distinguishing terms are wholly interchangeable, the arguments for distinct differences falter.

~

To work.

Don’t Pick Me for Your Fool

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“Ostentatiously thinky”? Skim’d the David Orr “column” (poetry, apparently, is now relegated to the ranks of th’other irregularly column’d featurette’d hobbyist-fodder—beekeeping, gardening, philately, &c.) whilst spooning down my milk-sodden’d roll’d oats and couldn’t, indeed, determine the difference betwixt, however “ostentatious” and “unthinky” the quotable Milkdud present’d. Several “thoughts”: why’s the Book Review need so implacably turn to someone a “non-poet” if—as Orr writes—the “world of American poetry” be so “cloistered”? Nonsensickal as putting up with a tool and die mechanic’s monthly reports on th’orchidaceous varietals? Orr’s incapable of seeing how Jorie Graham’s writing—“she’s tried out about 15 different styles”—is one long chase after some ill-perceived ever-shifting “fashion.” Which is to say: Graham got “thinky,” I suspect, trying to ride the wake of the truly “thinky”: Lyn Hejinian and other motorboaters of similar cut. One other thing, reading the Times-manufactured visuals: the title “Jorie Graham, Superstar” and the inky portrait of Graham, complete with bee-stung lips, Fabio hair, and a kind of wash-bruise shading that “speaks” of course to alcohol abuse and / or a ham-fist’d hubby, making of the “package” named Jorie Graham just another dismissible, that year’s model. See the same in any Hollywoodish rag. Which may be the case—only “one” ought stick to honorable ways of “saying” it.

~

Out of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters:

Translation therefore stands revealed as an ambiguous enterprise as well: on the one hand, it is a means of obtaining official entry to the republic of letters; and, on the other, it is a way of systematically imposing the categories of the center upon works from the periphery, even of unilaterally deciding the meaning of such works. In this sense the notion of universality is one of the most diabolical inventions of the center, for in denying the antagonistic and hierarchical structure of the world, and proclaiming the equality of all the citizens of the republic of letters, the monopolists of universality command others to submit to their law. Universality is what they—and they alone—declare to be acceptable and accessible to all.

Which, though Casanova’s talking about a “center” that’s a high abstract and exult’d “world literary space” of accumulated cultural capital (call it “Paris,” call it “New York”), is pertinent, too, to the untidy literary space of contemporary American poetry. Beware the centers, I say, beware the self-appoint’d consecrators, beware the dubbing proffer’d. That ambition to cast those surrounding one (or not) in the likes of oneself, or cast oneself as natural inheritor of some lean upcoming particulars—surefire sign of a “space” trying to wrassle itself into centrality: beware.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

England in the Age of Hogarth, by Derek Jarrett (Paladin, 1976)

For th’illustrations, and for th’orthography wild:

In 1796 Anne Hughes heard that the villagers were convinced that there was a ghost in a disused cottage called Gun’s Cott. Her husband and the other men made brave noises about going to investigate but they never went—‘All men bee just babies att harte’, commented Anne—so that in the end she and two other women plucked up their courage and banged on the door of Gun’s Cott:

      My legges didde shake muche and my teethe didde rattel wythe fere. Noe anser cummen, Mistriess Livvy didde saye toe oppen thee dore, wyche Mistress Prue didde, I feelinge verrier skeert theratt. Noeboddie sayinge nay, wee all inside, ande, la there naute toe ere, itt bein onlie a pore gipsie boddie there for sheltere, and hys wiffe who was lyinge sicke on sum rubbbishie sacks in a corner.

The MacGuffin, by Stanley Elkin (Penguin, 1992)

Here he looked fine, jim-dandy. It was recognizable cloth on the diners in the lunch house, too, only theirs didn’t lie on them as it did on the successful young men Druff had seen in the store, like well-kept hair on their well-kept heads. Here he, the pols and dependents dressed in a sort of dim apparatchik mode, one size fits all. No cuffs on their crushed linen, and even the color of their fabrics, no matter how expensive, a vaguely unfashionable shade of grime.

A divining rod, a split in the globe, a winnowing out of those writers clearly and unoffendingly “in love” with words and sentences, by the savory pipeful, and those just trotting them around joyless and behoof’d! Elkin’s quite emphatick’ly the former, (here) with a character named Druff!

To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, by Henry Petroski (Vintage, 1992)

Petroski writes more (and better) ’n most writers. The man who wrote about pencil manufactory, and bridges, and books, and “useful things.”

Which innovation leads to a successful design and which to a failure is not completely predictable.

Yup.

The Life of John Berryman, by John Haffenden (Ark Paperbacks, 1983)

On writing the Stephen Crane biography:

. . . the difficulty of labour seemed excruciating. ‘I abhor this series,’ he wrote. ‘It consists of Columbia professors and their mutual ass-licking, unnecessary (Krutch’s and Mark’s) or stupid (Neff’s) books, ritual praise.’ . . .
      He dogged the book for the next two weeks, drinking and smoking excessively—

At least I have all the help science can give. My psychiatrist after more than a year got me into condition to make this effort. Eileen puts out morning & night, for me to take, vitamins & anti-spasmodic. I take dexedrine morning & afternoon; martinis before dinner; nembutal & sherry after midnight, to sleep. . . . Good God.

—until, on 21 February, he had completed the first draft.

I recall Ammons’s story about sitting up all night with a drunk and weeping Berryman, th’upshot and result being Ammons had no use whatsoever for the man or the poetry, though I never did figure out exactly why, nor whether I learn’d more about Ammons or Berryman out of the recital.

The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters, by Wendy Lesser (Pantheon, 1999)

“Narcissistic” (she admits) baby-boomer (1952), Lesser fossicks the OED to come up with new words coincident with her own arrival:

In 1952, Ernest Hemingway was the first to weigh in with rubberiness, Mary McCarthy provided apolitical, Norman Mailer came up with porno (natch), the film critic Stanley Kauffmann originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as “a resonant noise as of a tennis racket striking a ball” and categorizes, with hilarious understatement as “rare”). In general, 1952 was a good year for onomatopoeia: in addition to the Betjeman noise, it gave us boing, clonk, whomp, and thunk (this last only in the sense of “a sound of an impact, either dull or plangent”; in its earlier non-onomatopoetic sense, as the past tense or noun form of the think, it had already been used by James Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake).

~

Unseasonal snow dogs th’April forsythia
And Jimmy Schuyler says “lovelyly”:
“It’s snowing on the unpedimented
Lions,” a flowery honorific. Dog
And I tromp th’neighborhood, greet
The lesbian out shoveling: —Y’oughta
Refuse that shit. Conspiratorial grin,
Snowcatches in her blonde mustache.

~

The snow, off the shrubberies now, looks to’ve muss’d the false magnolias. No more the classic uprightedness—a droopiness and sag’s took, rather “fetching.”

~

Forgot my lunch. My woeful cheese sandwich and applette (I can never remember, is it “Fiji” or “Fuji”? No matter, it’s probably agro-manufactured in an empty warehouse in Bayonne. “Bayonne, New Jersey, that is.”) In anticipation of no lunch my body says: “I’m hungry.”

~

Note: Hotel Hotel, (barely) in the works, is my new jumping off spot. Cyber-imbecile that I am, I’ll probably occasionally note it here. Simpler than making a permanent link-commitment. I need’d something “elsewhere,” “impermanent,” and “sleek,” meaning not too cumbersome to update and vary. So. Consider it “experimental.”

~

To work.

Voodoo Boogie

~

Received:

The New Review of Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, edited by Paul Vangelisti, with Douglas Messerli (Fiction), Dennis Phillips and Martha Ronk (Poetry), Standard Schaefer (Nonfiction), and Guy Bennett (Translation) ($12.95, Otis College of Art & Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, California 90045)

Poetry by Jaime Saenz (tr. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson), Diane Ward, Ralph Angel, Brent Hendricks, Aaron McCollough, David Levi Strauss, Cutis Bonney, John Latta, and Cole Swenson.

Thirteen Quebecois Poets, edited by Nicole Brossard and Jean-Éric Riopel.
(Martine Audet tr. Paul Vangelisti, Claude Beausoleil tr. Eleni Sikelianos, Jacques Brault tr. Eleni Sikelianos, Nicole Brossard tr. Guy Bennett, Carle Coppens tr. Norma Cole, Normand de Bellefeuille tr. Cole Swenson, Denise Desautels tr. Guy Bennett, Jean-Marc Desgent tr. Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, Kim Doré tr. Guy Bennett, Paul-Marie Lapointe tr. Guy Bennett, Hélène Monette tr. Cole Swenson, André Roy tr. Paul Vangelisti, Elise Turcotte tr. Adrienne Rich.)

Fiction by Stacey Levine, R. M. Berry, Jorge Miralles (tr. Kristin Dykstra and Henrry Lezama), Bruce Henricksen, Sarah Porter, and Chris Kerr.

Essays by Luis H. Antezana J. (tr. Ayelet Amittay) on Saenz’s “The Night,” Douglas Messerli on proms and reunions, Jill Magi on Dickinson, Scalapino and Vicuña, Douglas Messerli on ’fifties kids Holden Caulfield, Dolores “Lolita” Haze, and th’eponymous “boy on the bench” of James Purdy’s novel Malcolm,, Martha Ronk on “Narration and Its Undoing,” and Gabriel Gudding on solipsistic poetries in the wake of th’outburst ofw Creative Writing programs.

Leonard Schwartz in conversation with Richard Foreman. (Here, on “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe”)

The way that I work, for many years now, is I just write a couple of pages now and then of just dialogue with no indication of who is speaking. At a certain point, I look through many, many pages, and say: Oh, here is an interesting page. If I combine it with this page, if I combine it with that page, I collage a play. So this play was collaged out of material that I had, a few pages of which seemed to be talking about an emperor, and that seemed a little abstract. Then, all of a sudden, I said: Oh this material sort of relates to George Bush.
. . .

LS: . . . it still is experimental formalism that is the closest to a revolutionary articulation. When poetry or theatre for that matter gets turned into a bullhorn or a slogan, just like the object we’re critiquing, then we’ve lost.

RF: Exactly, and that’s why it was so tricky doing this play. I kept wanting to say: I don’t like what Bush is doing. But you have to be careful that you don’t fall into a kind of pornography of fact. It’s interesting because I dealt with the same problem maybe twenty years ago before there was such leniency in the arts and even on T.V. about treating sexual matters. I did a play called, “Pain(t),”and it was full of a lot of nudity and sort of pornographic stuff, and I wanted to see if there was a way to make art that stayed art and didn’t tumble into just being interested in all the sexual imagery, and it was some of the same problems in doing the play about Bush.

And reviews: Allison Schuette-Hoffman on contemporary Vietnamese fiction, Guy Bennett on Maram al-Massri, Ken Rumble on Juliana Spahr, Douglas Messerli on Inger Christensen, Douglas Messerli on Charles Bernstein, Randy Roark on Michael Rothenberg, Rheana Rafferty on Joy Williams, and Amy Allara on Bill Lavender.

~

Finish’d the Bruns. On the perennial fences:

What sorts of words are allowed into a poem? In the eighteenth century the circle inscribed for poetical words was fairly small. Even Gerard Manley Hopkins thought that words like “duck” and “potato” could not be admitted into a poem.

And, just to rip a copy for the bystanders who keep craning necks and scratching pates about history:

The history of poetry is a history of the reconceptualization of poetry—and of language as well. If poetry has a purpose, it is to keep history—and not just its own—from coming to an end.

Jiggle, jiggle. “My word!” as Archie Ammons used to say. That’s the noise of the toilet still “running.” I’ll be the first to admit I don’t “get” what “the end of history” could possibly “mean.” If poesy is the perennial plunger that keeps it “clear” and “running,” all to the good, though I suspect “one’s” gets more’n th’usual ’proximate whiff of something like “dandify’d hogwash” picking “one’s” way between the cow-mountains on that road.

~

Moaner’s Bench: I nearly swallow’d my own shiny marbles, or split my seemly seaminess, when I noted, in a book unclamourously title’d Entretiens de Francis Ponge avec Phlippe Sollers (1970, the interviews dating to 1966), that Sollers refer’d to Ponge’s hearty avoidance of the “ronron poétique.” Meaning the sort of low-level continuous (monotonous) noise of poetic production and consecration. Hoy! Help me Rhonda. Papa Doo Run Run. (There’s a major mojo parcel of fun just waiting to be had with that ”ronron poétique” thing, I swear it on a stack of hummables. Or mumbles. Not me, though. Never.)

~

To work.

Sitting Down Thinking

~

Scuttlebutt Corner: Plotz’d and flub-slumgullion’d we be by continuing calls for an anthology of the Spice Girls Circle. Weren’t they sort of “media-made”—not unlike the Monkees, and the Plasmatics? O Wendy O! Drinking buddies a backup band do not necessarily make. As Anthony Burgess reported elsewhere: “Say, an anthology of small potatoes . . .” Question: is Michael Palmer consider’d a Spice Girl?

~

Finish’d the lesser Schuyler novel. Short, seemingly interminable, though the nod to th’emerging pot-savvy in middle-class “culture” is rather funny. Then, got a temp-besottedness to read all the New York School novels out of my system rather quickly by browsing about through Edwin Denby’s Horizon-publish’d Mrs. W.’s Last Sandwich, cover a Nancy Drew-ish ink by Joe Brainard. The first sentence—I recall—had the word “roadster” prominently bringing up the rear.

~

Bruns’s The Material of Poetry raw-notes (words and things, words as things):

The boundaries that separate words from one another (and, indeed, from things) are not logical or even determinate, so perhaps we should not think of meaning as ideal objects, either. As Ponge says, meanings are weights that time attaches to a word, which is irreducible to a concept or any sort of metal entity . . . Only at the level of their materiality do words connect with things

And quotes Ponge: “O infinite resources of the thickness of things, brought out by the infinite resources of the semantical thickness of words.” A phrase I love: “l’épaisser sémantique de mots!” Robert Duncan, at this juncture, comes striding into my household, violently waving ’s hands, talking a mile a minute:

My aunt’s name—Fay or fairy—had to do with illusions or enchantments, bewilderings of the mind in which we saw another world behind or under things, and at the same time with the enchanters themselves, the folk who lived under the Hill. Fate, faith, feign, and fair, we find, following the winding associations of fay, fey, and fairy, in the O.E.D., are related. From many roots, words gathered into one stem of meaning, confused into a collective suggestion. There is fay, too, from fe an, meaning to join, to fix. In the United States of the nineteenth century it meant the fit of a garment: “Your coat fays well,” the O.E.D. gives us. The casting of the image is high fairy, phanopoeia; but the image itself, as Pound conceived it to be—a nexus, “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” he wrote in A Stray Document, “which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth. . .” —the image itself is fay: an apparition and a joining in one.

Out of The H. D. Book. The thickness thickens in time.

Bruns: “Ponge is certainly an anomaly. One need only recall Mallarmé’s famous line: ‘to create is to conceive an object it its fleeting moment, in its absence’—as if an object were a note of music. ‘Destruction,’ Mallarmé said, ‘was my Beatrice.’” (Note to self: history turns itself about three times like a hound and settles itself where? Why, poised straight (posed) exactly astraddle the plinth of the fat word-object, no?)

Zukofsky: “Poems are only acts upon particulars.”

And: “In sincerity, shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of . . . completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.”

Bruns: “‘Sincerity’ in Zukofsky’s usage does not mean speaking from the heart; it means (counterintuitively, perhaps) careful attention to the things of the world and a kind of selflessness and straightforwardness with respect to them—for example, not turning them into metaphors or stand-ins for one’s own experiences.”

Mrrr. It’s that criminy festooning of the metaphorickal act that “bugs” me. One must needs—mustn’t one—distinguish between that kind of Heathcliff bravado of making one’s inner weather a bellwether for th’ongoing outer weather, or vice versa—that kind of thing just makes one look ‘Self’d and encumbre’d.’—and th’announcing of seen, fraught linkages and relations between and among objects, including word-objects. It’s wholly apparent that any word “worth its salt” is “always already” (I hate those two words) a little metaphorick’d canister in itself—why not fuse it to some others for a bigger bang!

~

Adíos, my big white baseball.

~

To work.

Don’t Touch My Head

~

To the “Captious and wrangling reader”—as Bunyon writes somewhere in a whole series of notes to a whole series of (variable, explicit) readers—though between the two of you (readers) I know neither to wrangle (much). Explaining to somebody recently how everything I write gushes (seeps) into the miasma known as Blogland—the back half of my brain-function start’d a separate conversation with itself. About the distinct possibility that (mayhaps) “one” ought belly up closer to the bar (hiding the vitals) or stop wildly brandishing one’s dealt deck. Mmmf? I don’t, honestly, know. Mark Scroggins (who’s proving a dandy Kultur-Industrie addition, increasing the readables (non-fury- or dyspepsia-inducing readables) by something like twenty per cent) recently suggests that Thoreau’s Journals were—for Thoreau—raid-worthy sketchpads for subsequent distillations (books, essays), rather that adequate viaducts of themselves, sui generis sewerage spalling off self-function and becoming a thing immiscible? Oh, you know what I mean. Which, I think, is only apparent in th’early journals. By the end: the botanical processual-processional alone makes of the journals an ycleptick’d thing. (Oh, you, etc.)

~

Subito one object objects to
The cumbrous shadow-word that
Dogs it, and elbows out
A rare felicity by spieling.
An elastic icon lies at
Its feet, or it tumbles
Trebly into itself, key’d to
A subject peg-leggedly absenting.

~

The thing is, trouvere que je soys, I found the “thing” in a folder of work circa 1999. Back when—G. only four and requiring naps—I’d manage a scribble or two each weekend after a splendid lunch. Before G. trundle’d in smelling of Napland and climb’d up into Lapland to demand I do typographickal magicks—letters suddenly BOLD, &c. No “claims” made for the piece—though I did rather unwillingly scratch at the doors to my coincidence center, wonderingly. Maybe I’ll fuss with it some, make something of it.

~

SEPTEMBER TENTH


1

The meridian cooks
The heart’s fatal
Constituency of wonder—

All a kind
Of measure of
What the stockade

Of memory banish’d,
Riled up arcana
Of the real.

Please know that
I cannot put
Any of it

Down spine up
Like a book
And so displace

Whatever memory, conversant,
May once’ve said,
Constituting something, something

Like the real.
All of you
Is dead today:

G———, R———, another
G———, you rigs
And derricks of

The oily alphabet,
You cigarettes made
Of not so

Stoic marble, salt
And pepper color
Columns of ash.


2

What tries the patience of the many is the fiery nonchalance of the few, one hemisphere of a brain hazarding an essay, sussing out the hid irregularities of a blazing shiny sun, ineffable poseur, lame mobile to a science of perception that admits the onlooker’s propensity to make a whole man out of these pieces of Greek statuary we pin to a position by means of iron rods. These words are the stickpins of our consent
                                              to a dream of unity—partial to the partial itself, they recollect the tranquil summaries of summer’s dead, they zip together a world broken at its equator, they lie there like the darned heart, hammering wildly, innocent, and mildly skeptical
                                                          like a heart in a zoo!

~

And one other “thing”—stumble’d by—in honest research for a variant spelling—a tiny portion of a “word list” publish’d by an “outfit” call’d Government Security. org.

clunky
clunnk
cluons
clupea
cluser
clusia
clusif
clusky
clutch
cluter
clutha
clymer
clynch
. . .
ninnns
ninnoo
ninnpc
ninnqi
ninnsr
ninode
ninons
ninten
ninths
ninvot
niobbs
niobes
niobic
niobid
nioctl
niojda
niords
nioreh
nipmuc
. . .

Which, seeing Scroggins post for today, makes me wonder about star-alignments, and long to shout out: “Yoohoo, Mr. Melnick!” Who, undoubtedly, wrote th’above for the securidadistas. And that, twenty-five years before it was “needed.” So art goeth.

~

To work.

Copy Copy

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

Private Parties, by Jonathan Penner (Avon / Bard, 1985)

There’s an excellent possibility that I got Penner confused, though with whom? Aucune idée. Even looking for a suitably dorky paragraph makes me ill-at-ease. (He used “dorky.”) “So Duane had left New Rochelle and hitchhiked to Sandra’s and Otis’s house in Mamaroneck.” Yeuh. Thumbing it closely I think of guy named Larry Monroe, a disk jockey for WABX in Detroit circa 1967. Early FM rock. Low budget. All the ad copy read aloud, and casually. All for head shops, poster shops, record stores. Monroe did a late-night stunt of reviewing the new album releases the station’d received. A minute of chordal bombast or insipid lyric follow’d the the the sound of a hammer smashing the record to smithereens. (Sound effect (glass breakage) here.)

The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers (Harper Perennial, 1992)

Somewhere in the late ’eighties I read the Powers book with the August Sander photograph title (Three Farmers . . .) because a lawyer friend’d call’d it “systemic” and I thought I’d try to figure that one out. Pursuit of th’inexplicable by the nonplussed. Somewhere in the early ’nineties Don Byrd, I notice’d, led some Albany honors students through The Gold Bug Variations and I keep thinking I ought to toss off the vanity of the first-unimpress’d and jump in again. Here’s a core sample (a sentence every sixty pages, the last completed on the page—as good a measure as any):

I lay in the metal-cold sheets aware of every pore, unable to keep from remembering.

The only antidote to what ubiquitous radio announcers call the aches and pains of today’s modern living is hair of the dog: research alone will cure a world sick on the aftereffects of discovery.

A thorough search of the journals turns up references to her as coauthor on those Illinois publications Ressler already read before hitting campus.

“Handy English coincidence.”

Life as exchange of mail.

“Passwords are trivial,” I said, kissing him good night.

Photo cavalcades to performing hand surgery.

The world we would know, the living, interlocked world, is a lot more complex than any market.

They take him at once, gang-rape him.

On the pillow next to him, there moved a second, soft, blond angelic head.

The admonition made me snort in pain.

“The sole work by which I hope to be remembered.”

End of core sample. (Note for samples subsequent: enlarge core area (bore circumference) to two sentences, or, enlarge frequency of sample retrieval (number of crosscuts) to every thirty pages.)

~

Mop-up ops: finish reading Schuyler’s What’s for Dinner? finish reading (and note-taking of) Bruns’s Material of Poetry, finish reading Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, abandon (for now) the Graham Robb Rimbaud biography, proceed with all due alacrity into the new Nathaniel Mackey Paracritical Hinge, “in tandem” with the stall’d reading of Atet, A.D. Or: (backstage door to slip out through should the “crowds” convene “inconveniently” (“Sometimes I think I’m a little ‘in love’ with language.”) begin the urbane and rarely-Kafkaesque Roberto Calasso’s K.

~

Algal bloom: the rapid excessive growth of algae, generally caused by high nutrient levels and favorable conditions. Blooms can result in deoxygenation of the water mass when large masses of algae die and decompose, leading to the death of aquatic plants and animals. Algal blooms are not a new phenomenon—Captain Cook recorded an algal bloom during a voyage in 1770.

Intellectual bloom: the uncontroll’d overflow of a blighter’s imaginary, generally caused by high ambition combined with narrowness of vision (the blinder’d or blinker’d lot). Blooms can result in mass tawdriness, dead-idea build-up, a top-down chokehold on th’economy of ideas. Intellectual blooms ain’t new: Robert Grenier famously record’d one in an 1970 outburst: “I HATE SPEECH.”

~

So it often haps: on the way to mocking myself and my pile of unfinish’d books, my pretenses to intellectual “industry,” I swerve off to mock a certain chief rep of “dead idea build-up”—here, through one of ’s marker boys, commissar-adjutant numero uno to “the” master narrative of an “origin.”

~

David Lehman on A. R. Ammons’s colon-use:

The use of colons where periods would be expected—in book-length poems such as Sphere and Garbage—is a crucial element of Ammons’s versification. Unlike the comma, semicolon, ellipsis, or period, the colon looks two ways: it works somewhat like an equal sign, suggesting that what precedes the mark and what follows it are part of a continuum. In “Composition as Explanation” Gertrude Stein had declared that modernity required a “continuous present” and perhaps no one heeded the injunction as brilliantly as Ammons, whose colons continually postpone closure and create the illusion of perpetual motion until an arbitrary end (the end of a tape, for example) is reached.

Now, ain’t there some circles (clubs) in the world, wherein that kind of thing’d be took for the beautiful provocation that it is? What is it call’d—brand infringement? Lineage-thievery. Lineage—like salt, like water, like cigarettes—is a free commodity, unbrokerage’d by any “club.”

~

Terry Eagleton in “The New Statesman” on Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, on th’apparent position of literature under late capitalism:

. . . writing frees itself from its former political dependency and makes its strike for freedom. This is known as modernism. You can tell that a district of the republic of letters has made it when its poetry and fiction are regarded as entirely useless. It is the culturally well-heeled, in short, who can afford to forget about the internecine struggles for authority and recognition that mark the literary republic as a whole, and that “dominated” nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America can scarcely avoid. For Old Europe, literature becomes pure, free, timeless and universal.

~

To work.

Applaudable Enigmas

~

A fine weekend of bedazzling warmth and sunlight provid’d backdrop to delivery out into the rare social unconstraint, sitting in good company porch-bound and free, plucking out songs to African peanut soups, Sephardic breads, and a daughter soon-to-be-grace’d Shakespeareanly. Assez, beauté, ralentissez.

~

To work.

The Fundamentalists

~

A thought-experiment, Casanova-boost’d, Simulcast-style. What if one were to argue that:

Of late, in these States, th’availing (two, major) poetries’ve been defined into gel-status, which is to say sealed off from each other behind poetic definitional boundaries like so many monads that contain the principle of their own causality. Fortify’d by endless righteous commentaries (a busy two-way street), the character of each poetry is fixed in terms of a series of traits declared to be peculiar to it. Moreover, now that each poetry’s staked out its claims, its literary history gets composed and taught in such a way that it becomes closed completely on itself, having near nothing in common (or so it is supposed) with other poetries. Each poetic tradition henceforth believes itself the fundament, incomparable and incommensurate with any other. As P. Q. Reegan notes: “Only those poets who display the putative characteristics are recognized as authentically ‘post-avant,’ a category whose definition strictly relies upon the examples provided in the literature written by just those poets.” So the poetical “schools” are mostly concerned to equip themselves with an identity, and endlessly to reproduce their own norms in a sort of closed circuit, declaring themselves authentic, necessary and sufficient within the available literary space.

Close quote, close mind. End of experiment, end of thinking. Back to your corners.

~

A robin in a shabby maple, not tippy-top, though topped up enough, and slurring its burr-edged vocables—“cheerio, cheerio”—and then that slight wincing sound that somehow reminds me of a reed being split with a pocketknife, or a razor. Thinking, walking the C-dog, of how rarely the moon, stars, catalpa, the standing pale tapers of the false magnolia about to bloom (messily), shedding its pretense of containment and poise—all that—how rarely it “gets in” these scribbles of late. As if the brainpan grew tarnish’d with mere looking. Niedecker: “Summer— / I don’t hum / the least of my / resistance, / I give it a fly.” (Impulsive haul of the Collected Works off the bookshelf, out of the “Favorite” Sunlit Road Calendar (that’s not the title). How rarely a made thing (made of words, made in Wisconsin, made in late August torpor, ease mid-Depression (1935)—I’m guessing, the calendar itself and the page of the calendar being so dated—) arrives—like the robin—so seemingly adequate. Enough to merely note.) (Though a compulsion to note the echo and subsume (consume) under layers of commentary—sound propulsions, ambiguity of “fly” &c.—is not far off, and gaining, and I flee—)

~

Something to hunt up: Victor-Lévy Beaulieu quotes a Kerouac line (out of Visions of Gerard, circa 1963): “None of it is even there, it’s a mind-movie.” What’s the relation between it and Philip Whalen’s famous assessment and decree that he was making: “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines—“continuous” within a certain time-limit, say a few hours of total attention and pleasure”?

~

To work.

Frank O’Hara Reading

~

A friend just sent me here (mp3) or here (Real Audio). Off The Voice of the Poet: Frank O’Hara:

“To the Film Industry in Crisis” by Frank O’Hara was recorded May 11, 1957 in New York City. The poem was read by Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher. The music was arranged by John Gruen. Permission courtesy of Maureen Granville-Smith, executor, Frank O’Hara estate. The recording was part of Evergreen Review Presents: Poems to Music and Laughter. A tape recording with music supplied by John Gruen, on drums, and player piano (music chosen by John Gruen), engineered by John Button. [Information from: Frank O’Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography by Alexander Smith, Jr.]

A Summons

~

Okay, quickly: the story of Vincent Voiture, courtesy of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters. Voiture (meaning “car”) got charged with defending to the French Academy (sclerotic defenders of the language) the use of the conjunction car (meaning “because” or “for”) in lieu of the Academy’s preference for pour ce que. Which Voiture did—in a “noble” style:

At a time when fortune stages tragic dramas in all parts of Europe, I see nothing so worthy of pity as when I see that one is prepared to hunt down and bring to trial a word that has so usefully served this monarchy and that, in all the troubles of the kingdom, has always shown itself to be good French . . . I do not know for what reason they try to take away from car what belongs to it in order to give this to pour ce que, nor why they wish to say with three words what they can say with three letters . . .

All (slightly) amusing, though my fancy doth turn most to the pre-Wordsworthian François de Malherbe (1555-1628), he who, as Casanova writes: “sought to invent an ‘oral prose’” and “carried out a literary revolution by rejecting . . . two traditions: on the one hand, the worldly and precious poetry of the courtiers and the verse of the learned men and the neo-Latin poets . . . and, on the other hand, the practice of the the Pléiade’s descendants, who freely used many dialect words, employed a convoluted syntax, and practiced esotericism.” What Malherbe want’d to codify and affirm: speech. In an (apparently) famous line, he refer’d to the “hay-pitchers at the Port-au-Foin,” implying that here, amongst the (“humble and rustic,” rural, recall how the rude-boys “speak a plainer and more emphatic language”) speech of men, one finds the truest French.

Okay. A bigger bag of wind than I’d anticipated. Back to my fancy: it doth turn around the splendid alternance (and altercation) betwixt the writ and the spoke. I’d deign wager that all literary spats (all the beautiful changes) teeter on the balance of the speech versus writing. (Obvious bag of wind.) (Pages of examples.) It’s a torsional movement: when the writing slips off into the nether worlds of “nobody talks like that” (prime example: ici, maintenant ’cept as I’m just funnin’ you), somebody comes to loosen that screw, make it untidy, long, rollicking, &c. See Ginsberg in the manner’d ’fifties. See Hemingway trying to wriggle out fum under the corpulent (bloat’d, syntactickally “block’d”) Mr. Henry James, See Mssrs. Whitman, Twain, and Williams. And when, per contre the screw goes loose (the teeter totters), somebody’s sure to make a “major statement” like “I HATE SPEECH” and hand the Williams-slacken’d “official verse culture” its pink slip, and the subsequent graphical bizarreries’ll torque the tongue, smither th’eyen only. Olson’s breath takes a dive. The conversational erupts only in puns, though most puns depend not on the ear, they seer the (sere) eye. (Burnt. Not a dry one in th’house.) “Play-dough’s / republic.”

~

So where are “we” now? “(This is getting good, isn’t it?)” Caught, tout probablement, in a continuum (one cannot be elsewhere) and leaking into it our (very) selves. The out-front (“like Africa” “on its way”) post-Language beaters are likely those (like Kevin Davies, I think, and “nearly go to sleep with quandariness” trying to recall the lines I recently saw in someone’s “sig-file”—something about “getting into the ‘isn’t Kevin great’ industry at the ground floor” —Buck Downs . . . Simply terrif.)—that is, those who are letting the spoken poke into the poetic fabric. The bringing-up-the-rear are likely those who’re mopping up (and out) all traces of the spoken, jimmying together new-looking machines of cast-off grammatologies, New Sentence roadsters for the masses. That’s how the screw is set “for now,” “and everyone and I stopped breathing” (See “a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”)

~

Peter Culley, whose net-prowling and writings make “Mosses from an Old Manse” (recently turn’d two!) an essential stop along th’highway, writes to tell me that Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, author of Monsieur Melville, “also wrote a wonderful book on Kerouac (essai poulet).” Which is translated by Sheila Fischman and publish’d by Coach House (1975): Jack Kerouac: a chicken-essay. (I think “chicken scratch” saxophone style, accordion throwing up (or down) a backbeat, without more ’n a dropped stitch of knowing what in the whole cloth of things I’m talking about.) Something to investigate.

~

Read, in the Casanova book:

Modernity’s connection with fashion is a sign of its inherent instability. It is also inevitably an occasion of rivalry and competition: because the modern by definition is always new, and therefore open to challenge, the only way in literary space to be truly modern is to contest the present as outmoded—to appeal to a still more present present, as yet unknown, which thus becomes the newest certified present. The success of newcomers to literary space and time in breaking into the ranks of the established moderns, and earning for themselves the right to take part in debates over the definition of the latest modernity, therefore depends to some extent on their familiarity with the most recent innovations in form and technique.

Humph. I think Picasso and Africa, Modigliani and Khmer statuary, Davenport and Greece, &c.—somebody’ll supply the millions. The new as a raiding / recycling of th’old. Fashion is not made of the fabric of the sky (attention, second whole cloth metaphor is on the very lips of the morning . . .)

~

Note to myself: João Guimarães Rosa.

~

Summum Bonum, or, Some Boners

A Non Ens cannot be
Known, because it cannot be
Impressed: it hath no Figure.
We say It or That
Quiddam is a Non Ens,
Not because we know that
Quiddam which we speak of,
To be a Non ens,

For a quiddam and a
Non Ens are Contradictories, but because
We conceive that quiddam not
To be like to another
Quiddam, which we had expected
It should have been like
To, and therefore we say,
It or That quiddam is

A non ens, so that
A non ens in that
Signification is only a difference
Of one being from another.
‘The bird hop’d into my
Hand, cock’d its tiny head.’
In this sense, we say
One thing is not another.

~

To work.

Th’analyst lists listlessly . . .

~

As a member in good standing of the sterling conglomerate of market analysts (an huge and unremarkable body in these States, most conditioned to “lives of quiet desperation”—as Thoreau’d say), Ron Silliman is likely to know (and cherish) the dictum of the repeater: “Say it enough and they’ll come to think it’s so.” Nothing else could explain the relentlessness of Silliman’s (insufferable) campaign to insert the (useless, historically govern’d) term “School of Quietude” into current poetic patois. The “approach”—if one’d call it that—is simple: keep repeatin’ like an onion eater, and Silliman’s done just that—in knickerbockers! Hence, “Motormouth.” Evidence, howsoever slim, of either the proposed “dominance,” or the “sameness” of the Quietudinous “wares” is thusfar unforthcoming. I suspect that most “school assignments” are the result less of questions of style and manner (that is to say, questions of writing), and more the result of accidents of circumstance and temperament. One could use A. R. Ammons for an example. A man who—in Berkeley briefly after WWII, could well’ve register’d in the San Francisco annals, and been subsequently identify’d not as member of the Quiet brotherhood (as Silliman’d have it). Ammons, however, intensely shy, private, self-deprecating, uncertain, didn’t stay in San Francisco. Loner, he gets lump’d into the shit pile. Ammons:

Shit List; or, Omnium-Gatherum of Diversity into Unity

You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:
gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout

shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,

horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit

(dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit, gannet

shit (wholesome guano), fly shit (periodic), cockatoo
shit, dog shit (past catalog or assimilation),
cricket shit, elk (high plains) shit, and

tiny scribbled little shrew shit, whale shit (what
a sight, deep assumption), mandrill shit (blazing
blast off), weasel shit (wiles' waste), gazelle shit,

magpie shit (total protein), tiger shit (too acid
to contemplate), moral eel and manta ray shit, eerie
shark shit, earthworm shit (a soilure), crab shit,

wolf shit upon the germicidal ice, snake shit, giraffe
shit that accelerates, secretary bird shit, turtle
shit suspension invites, remora shit slightly in

advance of the shark shit, hornet shit (difficult to
assess), camel shit that slaps the ghastly dry
siliceous, frog shit, beetle shit, bat shit (the

marmoreal), contemptible cat shit, penguin shit,
hermit crab shit, prairie hen shit, cougar shit, eagle
shit (high totem stuff), buffalo shit (hardly less

lofty), otter shit, beaver shit (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw shit, alligator shit (that floats the Nile

along), louse shit, macaque, koala, and coati shit,
antelope shit, chuck-will's-widow shit, alpaca shit
(very high stuff), gooney bird shit, chigger shit, bull

shit (the classic), caribou shit, rasbora, python, and
razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, lacewing
fly larva shit, chipmunk shit, other-worldly wallaby

shit, gopher shit (or broke), platypus shit, aardvark
shit, spider shit, kangaroo and peccary shit, guanaco
shit, dolphin shit, aphid shit, baboon shit (that leopards

induce), albatross shit, red-headed woodpecker (nine
inches long) shit, tern shit, hedgehog shit, panda shit,
seahorse shit, and the shit of the wasteful gallinule.

How, exactly, does that poem stack up next to, oh, say, “The Ten Greatest Books of the Year, 1968,” by Ted Berrigan:

The Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams
Selected Writings Charles Olson
Chicago Review One Dollar
Alkahest
New American Writing No. 1
THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The Pocket Aristotle
After Dinner We take A Drive Into The Night by Tony Towle
Love Poems (Tentative Title) by Frank O’Hara
The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land by Ralph Connors
Cosmic Consciousness by Dr. Richard Bucke
Meditations On The Signs of The Zodiac by John Jocelyn

In Public In Private by Edwin Denby

The World Number 1     Cover by Dan Clark
The World Number 2     Cover by Robert McMillan
The World Number 3     Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 4     Cover by Donna Dennis
The World Number 5     Cover by Jack Boyce
The World Number 6     Cover by Fielding Dawson
The World Number 7     Cover by Bill Beckman
The World Number 8     Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 9     Cover by Joe Brainard
The World Number 10     Cover by Larry Fagin
The World Number 11     Cover by Tom Clark
The World Number 12     Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 13     Cover by Donna Dennis
The World Number 14     Cover by Joe Brainard

Two teases, no? Berrigan revels in community (a small community), Ammons does a sort of Scientific American readers (another small community) dub number.

~

Unfinish’d, remind me to tell you about Vincent Voiture’s car. Une vraie histoire.

~

Grudgingly, timed-out, to work.

Correction

~

Erm, just look who’s the careless reader now! It’s Mr. Latta! So enamour’d be he of calling Mr. Silliman a twit (that rustle of short-i insect noises awhirr in ’s head), he didn’t read none too careful and sees now that Mr. Silliman call’d none “twit”—it were the finer man Mr. Shakespeare (who is, one supposes, allow’d). Sorry, Ron Silliman. The remainder remains.

Aimless, Aimless, Zonk

~

Received:

Verse, Vol. 21, Nos. 1-3, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki. “The Second Decade” issue. ($20, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602)

A white brick of an issue. Randomly sampling (a sort of “sortes Versiclianes”):

Dear Neruda—he’s a langoustine of a man,
a violet maiden in multicolored fleece,
both hands paralyzed from swatting political lice.
Neruda! A swiller of a gale, a snood disguised as a church,
rutabaga in cleats, something found on the beach which,
as you fondle it, urinates in your heart.

(Clayton Eshleman, out of “The Magical Sadness of Omar Caceres.” Whitmanesqueries leav’ned with Benjamin Péret, and Antonin Artaud.)

How about:

A ghoulish girl dating a dentist
An idiot in a closet
A Moorish magician in her kitchen
A sorrowful soldier with a morose clothier
A dilettantish senior washing strictures
A socialite on routine imbroglio
A bicyclist hoarding hornets
A toddler pocketing the till

(Charles Bernstein, out of “In Particular.” Gumming up the waterworks with a clever list, a poem predicated on, & illustrative of, an Idea.)

How about:

After hovering, after spying like an insect on the screen door, he asks if perhaps there’s a place for him at the table. He knows the answer, but likes to hear them say it. Their lungs and then their chest and finally their mouths fill with all the things they’d like to tell him. There was a war, they admit although that’s not what they want to say.

(Dionisio D. Martínez, out of “The Prodigal Son Jumps Bail.” Prose poem, the midge of Kafka hovering nearby.)

And:

Is the female anatomically in need of a child as a life preserver, a hand, a hand up? And now, and now do you want harder the family you fear in fear of all those answers?

Could you put fear there as having to do with the price of milk, as having to do with prudence? To your health. Cheers. Or against the aging body unused, which way does punishment go?

“Let us not negotiate out of fear . . .” butbutbut . . . Then the wind touched the opened subject until Liv finding herself in light winds, squalls, was without a place to put her ladder.

(Claudia Rankine, out of “A short narrative of breasts and wombs in service of Plot entitled.” Which cuts and splices and stretches out the “how do I live my life?” story, with the feminist slant of “having a womb within.”)

~

A spectacularly insufficient way to approach Verse’s second decade, hamstrung by Time. Increasingly thinking that the diddles here obstruct the doodles elsewhere. Merz-struktur or not, one mustn’t come to the table so determinedly, under a compulsion. No. In glee, furry glee, and camaraderie! And giddy, not to say smarmy, self-satisfaction! And with a skint corpuscular racing in the very blood! So: if I prefer to squander myself of a night on “booklearning”—Lord knows, it’s need’d!—“one” shouldn’t allus expect a drudge report come morning, right?

—I am so glad we’ve come to this understanding!

—Oh, dear heart, me too!

~

Note to Ron “Motormouth” Silliman. It’s “wits,” twit, not “twits”:

University-bred one and all, these five men—John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, George Peele and Robert Greene—were proud of their breeding . . . always ready to take arms against the unwarranted assumption, as it seemed to them, of certain dramatists who lacked this university training, and to confuse them by the sallies of their wit. One and all, they demonstrated their right to the title bestowed upon them—“university wits.”

Isn’t th’association of, say, A. R. Ammons, Charles Wright, James Tate, and, oh, Charles Simic, just to select a random bunch of highly disparate backgrounds, influences, and styles—under th’absurd monicker “Brahmin” just about four bites short of a whole sandwich? And to suffer th’inclusion (supposedly) of “Brahmins” like Creeley, and Susan & Fanny Howe into the “ranks” of the post-avant a needless muddying of opaque waters? Untenable nonsense, and shrill. What’s all the aimless grutching about? Go read something.

~

To work.

Dim, Dimmer, Dimmest

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

Trial Impressions, by Harry Mathews (Burning Deck, 1977)

A Queneauvian exercices de style that runs riffs and variations on a morsel out of John Dowland’s Second Booke of Ayres:

Deare, if you change, Ile never chuse againe,
Sweete, if you shrinke, Ile never think of love,
Fayre, if you faile, Ile judge all beauty vaine,
Wise, if too weake, my wits Ile never prove.
      Dear, sweete, fayre, wise, change shrinke nor be not weake,
      And on my faith, my faith shall never breake.

Earth with her flowers shall sooner heavn adorn,
Heaven her bright stars through earths dim globe shall move,
Fire heate shall lose and frosts of flames be borne,
Ayre made to shine as blacke as hell shall prove:
      Earth, heaven, fire, ayre, the world transformed shall view,
      E’re I prove false to faith, or strange to you.

Mathews’s “Up to Date” version of the first stanza:

If you break our breakfast date, I’ll go begging in Bangkok;
If you start stalling, I’ll stop everything;
If you phone that freak, I’ll fall down Everest;
If you take that trip, please tow away my truck.
      A date, a freak, a trip—I implore you to be careful.
      I don’t claim to be reasonable, I just can’t stop.

Or, in another key completely, style “Wang Way” (second stanza):

first   earth   flower   fills   sky
sky   star   lights   earth   dark
fire   bears   cold   ice   flame
grave   dark   light   fills   earth
change   earth   heaven   fire   air
then   false   being   love   being

~

Monsieur Melville, by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, translated by Ray Chamberlain (Coach House Press, 1984) In three volumes: I. On the Eve of Moby-Dick, II. When Moby-Dick Blows, III. After Moby-Dick or The Reign of Poetry.

Lit on haphazardly. Not knowing Beaulieu. In fifth grade, a teacher named Beaulieu with a sour sweat smell—he dissect’d a cow’s heart and taught us French by means of a comic strip version of Les Misérables he got somebody to send him out of some distant metropolis for us northern Michigan savages. Mon Idée is the name of a town southwest of Lille, in France. Chock full of illustrations, maps, cuts, and other visual detritus, à la early Barthelme, Donald, he whom Thomas Pynchon made me go back and read. Three sample blocks out of Monsieur Melville (one per volume):

I.
Upon Melville’s death, a well-known journalist wrote in the New York Times: ‘This week a man of advanced age died and was buried in this city, a man so little known, even by name, to present generations that a single newspaper printed his obituary, and the notice contained a mere three or four lines.’ Nothing more—a mean fate. Which should give you some notion of what I am attempting in this book—a book that is really writing itself, heading I don’t know where down the labyrinth of my questioning with the patient slowness that is mine now that I’m temporarily free of my characters and staying in Father’s house.

II.
For the moment, I continue with my parenthesis and this part of me that is a publisher. My thoughts turn to the situation of American literature in the 1840s and I silently note that it resembled at every point the situation in which the literature of my own country remained until very recently, Québécois writers awaiting recognition not from Montréal but from Paris as they dreamed rather ridiculously of writing in a language which, though resembling our own, could hardly say who we were. This confusion left us out in the cold as far as national literatures went: by using a language which didn’t suit us, we condemned our literature to the status of a marginal one. We were alienated politically, and none the less so culturally, since we could only offer the least part of ourselves. One hundred years later we were still living what Melville had gone through, chasing the myth of ourselves and imagining we had found it in a literature that almost completely ignored our special, North American point of view.

Which is precisely one of the (myriad) concerns of Casanova’s magisterial The World Republic of Letters. One could ask why a world-beater of a Québécois (a language with the status of a vernacular today, akin to, say, French’s relation to Latin during the Renaissance —perhaps) novel’s unlikely and get the clang of the workings of “world literary space” in reply:

. . . literature enjoys a relative autonomy when the accumulation of a literary heritage—which is to say the international recognition that attaches to writers who are designated by critics in the center as “great” writers—enabled national literary cultures to escape the hold of national politics.

The Québécois being stitch’d in a double-bound bag—a caught up minority in Canada’s English-speaking majority. Centers and margins and margins of margins. Casanova:

The irremediable and violent discontinuity between the metropolitan literary world and its suburban outskirts is perceptible only to writers on the periphery, who, having to struggle in very tangible ways in order simply to find “the gateway to the present” (as Octavio Paz put it) , and then to gain admission to its central precincts, are more clearsighted that others about the nature and the form of the literary balance of power. Despite these obstacles, which are never acknowledged—so great is the power of denial that accompanies the extraordinary belief in literature—they nonetheless manage to invent their own freedom as artists. It is by no means a paradox, then, that authors living today on the edges of the literary world, who long ago learned to confront the laws and forces that sustain the unequal structure of this world and who are keenly aware that they must be recognized in their respective centers in order to have any chance of surviving as writers, should be the most sensitive to the newest aesthetic inventions of international literature . . . .

Yeah, us marginals get keenly (nay, puckishly) alert! Not so the city-slicker whose eye-lids fall dully and duly on the static assumption and reassurance that here he is, astraddle the very center of modernity, and with a handsome clout in ’s hand! That’s how that goes. And that’s how the rude (shabbily construct’d) overlaps and alignments occur, and get (even more rudely) noted. Back to Monsieur Melville:

III.
I would like never to have begun this book; it exhausts me because I have never had much patience nor sense of continuity, always jumping from one lamentation to the next, always despicably in a hurry, unable to pace myself, to work inside a daily routine like a builder of poems-puzzles who spends most of his day staring off in space enjoying the pleasures of the text.
        While I am on that side of things, while I am only oppression, this furious oppression I have to get out of, quickly, any way I can: I have become this aged man that Melville is and I don’t know how I might resolve my contradictions. I believed I would learn the answer during my reading of Melville, reading that I have kept at assiduously for almost five years, to such an extent that I no longer know whom I represent, what part of me my reading calls into question.

Proof of the notion that an affable obsession’ll carry a writer a long way. Seemingly part biography, part literary criticism, part autobiography, all fiction. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot comes up in the fo’c’s’le’s Rolodex.

~

Friday off with G. to Lansing. For those who excell’d at “state capital” identifications in elementary school: that’s the locale of Michigan’s. (Though it’s a shame it didn’t get stuck up in Calumet, in the UP, which, late in the nineteenth century boast’d a big population (mining, copper and iron) and a terrific red Lake Superior sandstone opera house (still existing) where Sarah Bernhardt play’d the boards. We—G. and I—and forty-odd other fourth-graders—look’d in on the R. E. Olds museum (REO Speedwagon, &c.), the capital building (th’usual gaudy mercantile trimmings—elk standing on hind legs “gracing” the chandeliers), and the Michigan history museum (tent- and shack-dwellers in boomtown Flint when the car factories start’d up and the population increased nigh ten-fold in a matter of years). Back by bus wherein I fell into an open-gob’d snooze, much to G.’s discomfiture. (I’d managed to read some early Stein on the way, punctuated by kid-gabble).

~

Note to myself: Sherman Paul’s Olson’s Push

~

To a Gilbert & Sullivan thing call’d Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride Sunday afternoon. A Wildean poet type is Bunthorne, complete with lily, long curls, ample girth. After whom “twenty love-sick maidens” a-swooning go etc. Aestheticism turns a trick or two. Prefer’d line: “. . . the truly happy always seem to have so much on their minds. The truly happy never seem quite well.” Gilbert’s lyrics equal Ashbery’s for the odd medicinal ingredient and the dandy vernacular catch-phrase: one lyric’s “amorous colocynth” being “a strong purgative made from the pulp of a kind of cucumber,” another’s “jolly utter” being “a popular bit of semi-meaningless jargon actually affected by the mindless followers of the aesthetes.” (—Uh, mightn’t “torque” be a good example? occurs to my brain’s saucy pan.)

~

Of Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters: did I say Bourdieuvian and big? I meant Bourdieuvian, Braudelian, and big.

~

How easily, I think, I could slip “out” of th’Hotel, off into the night. Dimmer switch.

~

To work.

Sans terre

~

—Missed Dorothy’s ruby slippers, is
What he is shouting, the
Dog is barking loudly at
The two wiener dogs the
Homosexual couple walk by, going
Saunteringly slow, as if earth
Were not for us, nor
Us for earth. See Thoreau.

~

A conversationalist, a terrific con-
Versationalist, is what gets said
In circles where the social
Magnum of plonk is pass’d
And th’individual skanky boozer is
Suspect, just the way one
Is in church. Another me’s
Out shepherding mists, mumbling low.

~

David Perry sent me a .pdf of a piece call’d New Years, originally publish’d by Noah Eli Gordon’s Braincase Press. Print’d out, it’s seventeen pages of prose—tidy paragraphs ranging in length: one sentence (“I swivel and peck a key.”) to twenty-five or so in a block. Here’s a sample:

The wrongs done to language, no matter how funny, have analogs here on the ground. They’d always been there, in favor for a while, later relegated to shadows, and finally, darkness. My peers insisted on placing animals, drawn or otherwise imagined, in sordid and violent situations. I gave up my resistance, pretending not to have, and began to write stories instead of reports, (in the manner of the day). Soon enough, I joined them using new words in sentences. Benefactor. Furlough. Poignant. Adversary. Garble. My benefactor held me under too long and I almost choked in the chlorinated pool. The soldier never returned from furlough. The poignant scent of pomander balls combined with the sight of poinsettias, set off alarms in her head signaling the coming of the annual dull hurt drill among family. The idea of turning back is to meet yourself as adversary, then to overcome or be overcome. But what if it’s someone else instead of you? Wind in the dry branches garbles our talk on the trail.

Though it borrows some of the New Sentence sentence to sentence jump-cut construction, Perry’s work here is not the paratactic wheel-spinning of the language-mimickers, not staticky (in two senses) non-narrative tranches de vie. There is a trajectory to follow—a tiny history of imperfectability that dogs every life—and several threads to wind in (and get wound up in) just that. There’s a kind of recognizable emotional truth that’s apparent: that (sometimes brutal, often confusing) process of figuring out something like “how to live one’s life” (it includes, as subset, “what about my origins, that family burden?”) Stickpins (markers, slash cuts) along the way: “Knee-biting Brooklyn.” “Memory repair.” “I was poor and poverty has a way of sharpening desire.” “I found a new identity today—I’m a mule.” “How I ended up in a Kum & Go buying a Slurpee at 4 a.m. remains a mystery for the ages.” “I don’t understand we’re at war.”

And tending to the writing, charting the processual thrills and spills. At one point, and providing evidence of the kind of sardonic humor throughout, a buzz-cut on Ginsberg: “First and only thought.”

Unavoidable in a piece title’d New Years “Tangible time is us.” The only means of making one “tangible” is by the stories one tells about oneself: so the list of words (“Benefactor,” etc.), so the “garble” at th’encountering of oneself, one’s “adversary.” (“Head tilted back, mouth open, the boy’s asleep in the back of the car rolling forward. He’s a reflection of the sun. His dreams started big then ran away small. The tires popped right off the toy, and that’s how he felt: effective contact with the imaginary road—actual parquet living room floor—gone, thoroughly beyond any control but that of a little boy . . .” is how the longest paragraph begins.) There’s an ease to the precision in New Years, in its willingness to drop and resume, and its straight up awareness as an artefactual version (meaning turn—as in “star turn”) and its (often noir-ish) humor: excellent.

One isolated group exchanges raspberries at bedtime. Bronx cheers. And we are going to war, so come along and stop complaining. In fact, everybody’s happy to go: just look at us, right in the middle of my roman à clef. Mannerism means a forgotten why, other than doing likewise. Me and Richard Jefferson. We pronounce the “f” in “clef.”

~

Plunged into Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (Harvard University Press, 2004) after it bobbled up to surface out of cataloging. Bourdieuvian and big. (How’s that for nosh, my huggums . . .)

~

To work.

Nosh Nothing

~

What good is a collection
Of moments scissor’d out of
The raw hurly-burly of
Sheer indisposable ongoingness, that crass
Attenuated noise unscissorably shorn, is
But one of the things
I’d like to know: there’s
An equal number of others.

~

O mechanicals of freesia! O
Glabrous pinpoints! O palliative!
The clarity of ubiquitous school-
Stunned imponderables blows up a
Malarkey of sorts. I get
Off here. I churn past ‘greatness’—
All my things belong right
Here, in my snatch-basket.

~

Dumbism, I am all thumbs
Without you. My candleberry weeps
Prithee-prithee rings all over
The settee. I meant to
Say pretty, as in ‘pretty
Damn good dirty rice.’ I
Think most days I just
Get suck’d into a book.

~

I’m all for keeping a
Satchel of good words around,
For use. Something to bug
Off of, up into the
Day’s splinter-drift, with the
Neurals going like gang-busters.
It’s my duty to say
It like that, and begin.

~

Possible hangnail shipwreck chief petty
Officer, is one way of
Seeing it—how the disaster
Start’d small. And who’d gripe
About a minion’s minor mopery
When the sun-shafts bedazzled?
A plank made for walking,
And now it’s smithereens-city.

~

Inside the little glove’s a
Little hand, and clunch’d unsudd
Th luttle hund us uh—
Cut out th schtupped stuff,
Buster. Is public writing necessarily
A call for deft-templates, brochures
Of copperplate loveses and losses?
Helmut th’Unhelmet’d at th’helm, sir!

~

Did it in a tarpaper’d
Shack, did it under th’egg-
Yoke sun, did it prodded
By a man with a
Gun. Got down on knees
In a patch of yeller,
Unzipped my pencil case for
Another feller. Thunder of plunder.

~

Of the mademoiselle’s kundalini stickpin
Little is known, it’s a
Topic stopper like Henry James
And iceberg lettuce. What’s the
Primo return investitures like that’ll
Get? That’s not what love’s
Asking for, vermilion-sided flycatchers
And bouquets done in scrunchies!

~

We snigger’d at the resemblances
And haul’d it home in
The trunk, cardigan’d against the
October weather. Fires lit trees
In Vermont. An ambulance toodled.
In the spirit yards outside
Memphis, rigs of whiskey got
Tabulated, and license plates unscrew’d.

~

—Man name of Rusty used
To balk at gin, said
It made’s pee turn blue.
That in Virginia where a
Nam vet broke my rib
Like a plank, bare-hand’d.
Kudzu climb’d up inside the
Subaru’s engine-cage, strongarm’d it.

~

Reticent: I can’t talk now.
Bird: Fulvous is the sepulcher.
Man: Charm’d by th’ease of
Th’unswept earth, I dally with
Grievous mirth. Mirth: O putz!
Grief: I knew a man.
Man: A death-noise prised
Up, reticent for a name.

~

Nothing is to be excluded.
‘Smthng’ is to me occluded.
Bathing is to be unsuit’d.
Noshing is to be tout’d.
Shushing is to be brutish.
Mouthing is to be denuded.
Muddling is to see shark’dly.
Puddling is to sea sally.

~

Bruns’s remark, in The Material of Poetry, that “Sound poetry has nothing of the monumentality and solemnity of the Grand Œuvre” reminds me of the David Wojahn complaint in a letter concerning “Ambition and Greatness” in Poetry. Wojahn gets himself tangled up in the middle ground between damning “the triumphalism of the modernists” (it “seems a bit silly now, and the climate of Modernism made for a fair number of monstrosities”), and pooh-poohing the “standard-issue New York School doodle” (with its lack of what Wojahn calls “an abiding sense of the poet’s civic responsibilities.”) The problem here is that by linking “greatness and ambition” to—as Wojahn does, with the “mightily” striving Robert Lowell as Exhibit A—“scrupulous, merciless self-appraisal” and “an astonishing understanding of tradition” along with the civic sense advanced above, Wojahn calls for a gravitas and “responsible” diminishment of the single most essential ingredient of poetry: excess, overflow.

Which is, delightfully, since it is Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)” that Wojahn carps about—exactly what that poem makes dizzily tangible: “everything is tossing, hurrying on up / this country / has everything but politesse,” and “it was also windy / last night we went to a movie and came out, / Ionesco is greater / than Beckett, Vincent said, that's what I think, blueberry blintzes / and Khrushchev was probably being carped at / in Washington, no politesse, and “joy seems to be inexorable / I am foolish enough always to find it in wind.” Bruns’s remarks on sound poetry apply: “Inevitably it causes people to laugh . . . Irrepressibility is a condition of both sound poetry and laughter as against . . . controlled conditions . . . sound is inherently comic precisely because of its resistance to repression or containment, its ability to penetrate walls and to invade us like sprites. Excess defines the ontology of sound, which is perhaps why poetry exploits it.”

Wojahn’s “responsibility” argument is akin to that (argue’d by one Siegmund Levarie) for “orderly sound” in music (and present’d by Bruns in a footnote): “For while we remain defenseless before the power of any sound, the controlled presentation of orderly tones in a good composition obviates the primeval threat.”

~

Noted: terrific AWP “coverage” gets dissolved by the hard glare of cyber-light before I can point to it. Boo.

~

To work.

’Zounds

~

Putter’d about putting supper together—G. and J. off “orchestrally”—and decided it’d be a good moment to listen to the CD accompanying Bruns’s The Material of Poetry. Play’d the first six pieces: Steve McCaffery’s “Shamrock” (underwater blub-blubs, glug-glugs, strangle-snores), McCaffery’s “First Random Chance Poem” (the emergent repeat’d name “Julian Dowager” and tonal moaning combine for dirge and requiem), John Cage’s “Williams Mix” (to me, the most dated sounding of the bunch—radio dial, tape splice jump cut, old magnetic reel to reel going backwards noises, “I bury Paul”—though perhaps only due to wide imitation), McCaffery’s “Mr. White in Panama” (short—2:17—and apparently meld’d indistinguishably to some more prominent memory-hump) Christian Bök doing Kurt Schwitters’s “Der Ursonate,” and Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos’s “Phoneme Dance for / from John Cage.”

Somewhere in the middle of the Bök-voicings (I tend to differ with Bruns’s allowing the label “sound poetry” the latitude of multitracking, amplification-distortion, electronic-collage, etc.—rather narrow-mindedly, I’d want to limit it to human-mouth-(body?)-noises . . .) I start’d thinking—partly the result of having look’d at Schwitters’s score—that what it was, was (scored) white scat.* Not Albert Murray’s (I riff’d in my brain-chamber) “blue devils of nada,” but Hugo Ball & Cie.’s “slim pixies of Dada.” And, as if to underline my theory, what I heard Bök “saying” sound’d like: “Ofay! Ofay! Ofay! Ofay!” (pause—rhythm break—diggy diggy diggy) “Conciliatory ofay! Conciliatory ofay! Conciliatory ofay!” (Which is a large part of the fun of nonsense syllabary-jumbles—the inevitable emergent “sense,” the recognizable semantic clusters arriving (largely) out of identifiably familiar “tonal ranges”—the sort of thing that allows one to “follow” conversations in a foreign language.)

*Think, par contre, of Ella Fitzgerald’s fine enunciatory, that “solid fluidity” in her scat-singing—improvisational, warm, untether’d. If Schwitters’s piece is dated 1922-1932, is it possible he’s responding to Cab “Hi-De-Ho” Calloway, or Louis Armstrong? Implausible common root? Encyclopaedia Britannica sayeth: “Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was made popular by trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong from 1927 on . . . Earlier, as an accompanist to singers, notably the blues singer Bessie Smith, Armstrong played riffs that took on vocalization qualities. His scat reversed the process.”

Bruns: “To my mind sound poetry constitutes the most difficult and imponderable form of art in our culture. (It is without question the most underresearched form of modernist or contemporary art.)”

Levinas on th’overloaded “scandal” of sound (or why I think Christian Bök’s calling me “ofay”):

In sound, and in the consciousness termed hearing, there is in fact a break with the self-complete world of vision. In its entirety, sound is a ringing, clanging scandal. Whereas, in vision, form is wedded to content in such a way as to appease it, in sound the perceptible quality overflows so that form can no longer contain its content. A real rent is produced in the world through which the world that is here prolongs a dimension that cannot be converted into vision.

(Quoted by Bruns.) Who adds: “Sound bleeds the self.”

~

Late habit of going off to slumberland with What’s for Dinner? propped open on my breastplate, collecting gleamy nuggets out of the Schuyler word-hoard. Only to re-awaken to splay’d book, midnight oil lamp a-yellowing the windblown curtains, Schuyler crouch’d Fuselian on the bedclothes, chomping word-bits in’s teeth.

Yesterday’s: “snitified” and “Yetch!” The second a “sound-word” noise a character makes.

Too: “Bryan made a sound usually rendered as ‘humph.’”

~

To work.