A Room in Rome

~

A turn unhinder’d is what
Signals it, a riotous gravitas
Insuperable. To condone, say, officially,
The undoings and unravellings of
Reason’s clerical mischief, that’s what
I’d like to see here.
Off under the burdock’s elephantine
Leaves, a snail is shooting
Forth one “eye,” then th’other.

~

A veritable nigh-backwash of receivables, and noted:

118 Westerly Terrace, by Susan Howe (Belladonna, 2005) ($4, 458 Lincoln Place, Suite 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11238)

“In 1934 Wallace Stevens bought the house at 118 Westerly Terrace in Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived until his death in 1955.”

In that piecemeal guesswork reading-style one inhabits (rather joyfully) in th’approach to Howe’s works (pages torn or crumpled collaged together, with all the gaps and overlays and obfuscs that entails), “one” makes out fragments of what seems a biographical sketch of Stevens (“Europe but never went there.”), repetition of “a robe painted with tinsel stars,” and what looks like a detailing of marginalia (Stevens’s?) in a book about Samuel Johnson:

138 Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any [illegible]
Growl. Tom Davis described it drolly enough: he laughs like a rhino[illegible]
259 he has bracketed section on Chatterton beginning on 238 ending
J said of C: This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful
how the whelp has written such things.

Amongst what the agate-sized type over-splays and interrupts: “worlds together on the pag[illegible]” in pica. Th’effect is not unlike that of a Charles Ives piece, “Trio for Violin Violoncello, and Piano,” with its scherzo titled “TSIAJ”—“This scherzo is a joke.” Introduced and play’d by pianist Sarah Bob Saturday night, who made a convincing analogy of walking down a hall of music practice rooms, overhearing impetuous distillates and bribes of Americana song’d amidst the bold uproar, and the troubling intimacy and elegy of the passingly overheard. (Sense now of th’uproar become rote? Lacking th’unholy courage and blast of one’s forebears?)

~

First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant, by Lisa Robertson (Belladonna, 2005) ($4, 458 Lincoln Place, Suite 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11238)

Part of an opening note:

If we could slow down our needy swerve, offer it—for the instant of hunger—a frame or a dais that includes all that’s unknowable about the earth, it might show us something new about how to resist what is traditionally felt as causation’s law. What precisely is required in the moment? I want to study the refreshing flora within resistance. I want to relax also. I want health and resistance to tarry in synaesthesia. I want to move on. Thus I am thrown headlong into transcendent things.

And a few “headlong” lines:

And then to take hold of semblance and call it
Nothing as dirt is zapped through
With habit and lacking a better verb I promote
This inauthenticity and the earth is a tipping dish
Where chance wears its messed up items
Entirely apart from intention.

~

Lola, by Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna, 2005) ($4, 458 Lincoln Place, Suite 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11238)

The chapbook Hejinian read out of in late March. What trigger’d me to send a few bucks to Belladonna. I recall Hejinian saying she’d had the task of “writing a circus.”

The dog on its leash knows the secret of freedom.
This is promising, says Lola.
Fanfare and ridiculous light.
Chapter One.

Is how it begins. Chapters volley for attention, no more than three. Three-ring’d circus. And how it ends:

Chapter One

        A novelist is no more a scientist than a snake charmer is a herpetologist or a tightrope walker is an engineer or a cook is a chemist or a voting booth is a sanctuary or a confession is an autobiography or the folding of the nomad’s hammock is a surrender of territory.
        A goldfish is no more a guard dog than a divorcée’s guilt is a balancing rod in the hands of the tightrope walker making his or her way from the Arctic to Antarctica or vice versa.
        Go, little pebble, go shoe, go accountants in trances, go missionaries distributing rice to saxophone players on tour in the Sierras, go naked.

~

Befallen I, by Erín Moure (Belladonna, 2005) ($4, 458 Lincoln Place, Suite 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11238)

Part of O Cadoiro, a work in progress. “The raisonnement of my canción’s / ever been lacking.” Strange orthography and seeming translations—Portuguese nuns pining in the New World (hints of), archival love songs in a dead language. A seeming note (signal’d by sans serif) on the final page:

The record of how a language actually breathed in its human (now vanished) correlates

« tout le sens »

venant toujours d’ailleurs




“at my own grief. 7 that of my heart”

That (false) sense that everything always arrives out of “elsewhere”—is that the realm of the “befallen”? A piece:

What is an archive? (Grief.) What is a book? (Trespass.)
A book’s where breath’s seal is broken, breaks. The anatomic
structure of a body is not allowed to occur (but must) . . . .

O que é espectral no concioneiro é o soplo. Ce soufflé, a
respiración non pas entre mais dans les mots. “Cela parle, un
fantôme.”


Eq~talhatarda becomes “e quant’ alá tarda”
                                          “e quant’ el tarda”
                                          “e quanta lh atarda”


Visually, she sent herself into apopléxica, desléxica, until
‘do’ and ‘go’ looked identical to her.



[1184] #1236
Pae Caluo

Who’d a thunk of the “lex” buried in “apoplexy”? (It’s not “there” the way the “lex” in “dyslexy” is there.) “Sum ar dissoluit suddantlye Be Cattarue or be Poplesye.” says a Lyndesay in th’O.E.D.

~

I wrote perpetologist. I wrote
Titrope. Saxophone I misspell’d: saxopone.
My walker got writ waker.
Rome for more: a common
Switcheroo’d insufficiency, though room
For more’d be something else.
So goes the daily malleability
Report, a day, if anything
Is, is malleable, correct, spelt.

~

To work.

Slant Vibes

~

Received:

Bookforum, Vol. 12, Issue 2, (June / July / Aug / Sept 2005), edited by Eric Banks, &c. ($3.95, 350 Seventh Ave., New York, New York 10001)

Fiction Editor Albert Mobilio’s pull’d together twenty or so writers—Don DeLillo, Joanna Scott, Lydia Davis, Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, and Jay Cantor amongst them—to squib on Pynchon’s influence thirty-some years after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow. Too, Gerald Howard writes about the reception of the book, winner (with I. B. Singer’s Crown of Feathers) of the National Book Award in 1974:

At the award ceremony, to the audience’s perplexity, the professional bafflegab artist Professor Irwin Corey accepted the award for, or maybe as, Pynchon, and launched into a semicoherent leg-pulling speech that began, “However . . . accept this financial stipulation—ah, stipend in behalf of, uh, Richard Python for the great contribution and to quote from some of the missiles which he has contributed. . . .”

Robert Polito on Harry Mathews’s My Life in CIA:

The rounds and inversions . . . suggest a shell game. There is little that is impossible inside these pages and lots that is readily verified, but still those peas are somewhere else every time you life the walnut. As he loops along his delirious spirals of facts, names, dates, and places, Mathews pauses for snapshots of French intellectuals and celebrities, from Philippe Sollers, to Jacques Brel, and manages fresh, astute takes on 1968 Paris.

Adam Kirsch on James Laughlin’s Byways, a sort of verse memoir “assembled . . . out of a mass of published and unpublished fragments composed between 1983 and Laughlin’s death in 1997.”

A short note by Harvey Pekar on Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, by Giorgio Manganelli (translated by Henry Martin). Manganelli a member in good standing of Gruppo ’63 (with Calvino and Eco, and Gianfranco Baruchello), died 1990. A few of the “novels”—“(each originally composed on one sheet of paper)” and each “united by an “ouroboric,” or circular, notion of time—in terms of both immortal existence and the narrower scope of individual human life,” according to Pekar, appear’d lately in the Zukofsky Chicago Review.

~

Vibe’d out whilst the boy tap-danced away, back to Alice Notley’s Coming After. A useful definition: “To posture you have to sound like someone else, a known role. Unless one says that the role of poet is a posture, but that would be stupid, like saying that it’s affected for you to use feet for walking.” Think a moment how bracing, committed, rare and uncompromising that is: just to say “that’s stupid.”

~

One (acknowledged) reason for formal constraints: tapping in to what’s gone before, a way of “getting” knowledge, whilst not making it too evident how little one knows. So Notley compares the late Berrigan (Alternative Press postcard-generated) sequence published as A Certain Slant of Sunlight to th’early The Sonnets:

A Certain Slant works by creating singular structures; as a sequence it is held together by what might be called its knowingness (the author of The Sonnets didn’t know very much, in a way—he was only in his late twenties—and the book’s knowledge flows from its strict formalism as if tapped from an unconscious which isn’t quite the author’s).

Notley mentions a third sequence, titled Easter Monday, which’s never been publish’d in its intend’d form (though most of the individual poems’ve appear’d.)

~

Too, unpublished, the transcript of an (apparently legendary) performance / talk / statement deliver’d by Berrigan at a St. Mark’s tribute to the late Philip Guston. Limit’d to five minutes, Berrigan purport’dly reject’d the proposed “tidy package of tribute” (Guston being, notably, “large” in approach (to art, to life) and philosophy). Notley:

So he rambled on and on as if a helpless speedfreak until the audience got mad at him and began booing, at which time he turned his presentation into a “statement” about excess, greatness, proportion, and how long it might take for an abstract expressionist to get to the point . . . He made a mess and he cleaned it up, deliberately. There are people who attended who still don’t believe he did it deliberately; his performance that evening is still a scandal, the transcript of the evening which he hired someone to type from the tape is still unpublished.

Archivally point’d journals? I’d like to read that.

~

Notley, concerning Berrigan (and swiping, I suspect, at some of the props and claptrap of the more theoretical), points to the dash, “transparence,” “brevity,”—say, “the ability to negotiate quick dense changes” of the postcard pieces in A Certain Slant, and writes:

These poems suggest a direction in poetry that has yet to be picked up: we’ve all been too obsessed with being “important.” But importance isn’t necessarily where you think it is; it’s really generated by circumstance and is in the flesh and spirit of the poems, not in a presentation of “importance.” These are important poems.

A little hard to move directly and immediately—in Coming After—then, to Notley’s (generous, detail’d, and mostly convincing) appreciation of Anne Waldman’s epic-length Iovis, a thing that’s undoubt’dly “placeable” in a category of “importance” present’d. Notley:

. . . what is happening to Waldman [riffing off O’Hara’s low-sass, faux-naïf, “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems.”] is experienced by her as mythic as well as quotidian, and she identifies with many more personages, real and imaginary, than herself in the course of this investigation, passing among an array of cultures and vantages.

(Which, latter, likely provides a need’d ballast against the self-mythmaking.)

~

On the “form . . . acknowledged as the ‘great’ one of our (at least American) century” (and how I love that little nudge toward the provincial of “at least American”)—see The Cantos, The Maximus Poems, Paterson, that is, “the modernist male form”:

The form, it must be acknowledged, is still wonderfully serviceable, a collaged entity which seems able to manage any juxtaposition of material, sound, and tone, and which is welcoming to most kinds of novelty of line and layout. All of that is also the form’s weakness: it tempts endless heterogeneity and in its fragmentation makes little room for whatever unity there is in actual existence. I myself think there is quite a bit of unity in actual existence, and also that an epic by definition is a presentation of unity to whatever culture the epic serves.

Makes “little room for”, or imposes it [“a” unity] on the materials collect’d under its rubric?

~

Fine ponderables to haul in a sack of its own belonging off into the weekend with?

~

To work.

Eureka!

~

Received:

Eureka Slough, by Joseph Massey (effing press, 2005) ($5, 703 W. 11th Street #2, Austin, Texas 78701) Cover illustration and design by Wendy Heldmann.

If I’m recalling rightly the smallish poems in Massey’s Minima St., then these (presumably) newer poems are getting (incrementally) bigger. And Massey’s diction’s getting wilier—specificity making for a clean precision of image and a more sonically complex music, both. Here’s—not counting the nine-part’d series titled “What’s” that ends the chapbook—the biggest poem offer’d:

Front Yard

Dragonfly’s green thorax
glints mid-flight
against next-door’s fence posts’
flaked white paint

          and lands on the sidewalk
in shadow slung
from a spray of nasturtiums
coiled up the side of the porch
          —snail-pocked, flecked
with sun-blanched trash.

          You pluck a few, rinse them
under the garden hose,
slip them past your lips.

That pile-up of accent’d syllables culminant with “next-door’s fence posts’ / flaked white paint” makes for a hovering that holds that dragonfly perfectly still, releasing it only to land. After a somewhat easier couple of lines (the “little words,” added prepositions, letting off the tension) the final lines of the second stanza echo those of the first, signal that one is looking, hard: “snail-pocked, flecked.” Which hard ck noise is last heard in “pluck”—and the whole scene softens, first with “few,” next with “rinse,” and one is feeding, “slip” rearranging “lips.” What one is eating: flowers, though no big deal is made of that. That would put the poem into a different “spell,” a rather precious, sticky (sentiment-goo’d) one at that. (It is possible, too, to gather fresh green nasturtium seeds and “pickle” them in salt and vinegar: capers.)

(Incidentally, in Ron Silliman’s note about Eureka Slough of a few weeks back, I see he placard’d effing press with “ineffability.” And here I thought the word “effing” a simple abbreviate politesse in direct lineage with Mailer’s fugging Naked and the Dead, Ed Sanders’s Fugs, and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. I also “get” echoes of some forest or “woods” in Shakespeare-affiche’d England, though I suspect that’s my own skin of sack talking.)

(Incidentally, in Ron Silliman’s note about Eureka Slough of a few weeks back, I got undeniably buzz’d here: “The joke in that piece above lies precisely in our recognition of how that final word mimics the sound of insect wings.” Eunhh? What kind off insect goes “blur”? “Blur-blur, went the little bee. Blur-blur-blur, answer’d the fat gnat.” The only bug I know that goes blur-blur is the busy blurbist.)

My irremediable capers aside, Eureka Slough’s a terrific chapbook, snugly writ and design’d, and tidily built. Scott Pierce at effing press’s got chapbooks by Tony Tost and Aaron McCollough in the works, and another issue of that effing magazine, too.

~

The kind of thing I love: “And my idea of the tree had something to do with that too, it was always a tree to be panted on a grave, like a cypress, a tree that grows out of your entrails.” —Gianfranco Baruchello

~

The other kind of (impossible) thing I love (and l’Hôtel Point—Serge Gainsbourg and Marcel Duchamp, propriétaires—offers it up in simulacrum, replica of an uncontainable youth): “eau et gaz à tous les étages.”

And the problem, suddenly, was that I’d been trying to be eau et gaz for all my life, that was the kind of game I was trying to play, that was the way I read the lesson I learned from Duchamp, it was a way of liberating yourself from just about everything, and it’s a very dangerous lesson to learn, the idea was to be always and totally available, even more than schizophrenic. The idea of living in a state where the mind has just simply exploded, scattered itself everywhere, and the psyche, the animus, the capacity for feeling is exploded and vaporized too, the idea of belonging to everybody, the idea then too of needing a conatiner. I found myself deciding that I’d had enough of that . . . —Gianfranco Baruchello

~

For all of you to whom I “owe” things:

Since I am becoming chronically remiss in responding to all the epistolary courtesies of my friends for so long a time past as to be (or to have been) long since disparaged—I make no more excuses in detail, beyond the passing recognition of that imperfection, its millionth confirmation, as it were, with the added addled protest that I am still, as always, your friend, and that silence is not more mysterious, in this instance, that (at least) cordial. Further, I have at present a little Spanish port in my noddle. —Hart Crane to Yvor Winters (1928)

~

To work.

Larf, Larf, ’S Art!

~

Received:

Radi os, by Ronald Johnson, with an Afterword by Guy Davenport (Flood Editions, 2005) Designed by Jeff Clark of Quemadura. Cover: details of William Blake’s Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve.

                                    love shall outdo
                            death, and dying



                                                    assume
    Man’s nature,


                            fruition
                            from utter loss, and








                                under thee,



                          in the sky appear

                                                    from all winds


                            such a peal



        The World shall burn




                   to compass all

~

       multitude
               from numbers without number,
                               uttering

The eternal
                                                       ground

       crown


                                   Tree of Life,





                                       inwreathed with






           song



                                       of all being,
Fountain of



Dark with excessive bright




                                               , without cloud

                                      behold:

That’s an approximation (two pages) of a wildly “splay’d” text: Johnson’s “etching” of the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost. Johnson:

It is the book Blake gave me (as Milton entered Blake’s left foot—the first foot, that is, to exit Eden), his eyes wide open through my hand. To etch is “to cut away,” and each page, as in Blake’s concept of a book, is a single picture.

First publish’d by Sand Dollar Books in 1977. Johnson traces its origins to “hearing Lucas Foss’ Baroque Variations” and subsequently “tampering” (my word) with “an 1892 edition of Paradise Lost I picked off a Seattle bookshop shelf the day after.” And he notes Foss’s instructions for Variation I: “Groups of instruments play the Larghetto but keep submerging into inaudibility (rather than pausing) . . . The inaudible moments leave holes in Handel’s music (I composed the holes).”

Davenport’s “Afterword” is breath-takingly astute and wide-ranging (even for Davenport). One prefer’d moment: how Johnson, impeccable eye for detail and for relation (echo, rhyme), described Davenport’s lawn in Kentucky as “all Klimt with violets.” Davenport gets the gist of how writers write out of writing, in glad coterie with the dead:

Blake also rewrote Paradise Lost, once as the unfinished epic called Vala or A Dream of Nine Nights or The Book of Moonlight, and once as his poem Milton. Blake was correcting and amplifying Milton; he was opening him up, as he said. Some day someone will explain why the Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewrite the Odyssey. And then we will have a clearer understanding of why Ronald Johnson returned, as a signal act of the postmodernist period (The Age of Olson the books will get around to naming it), to Milton.

Study notes. Date of Foss’s composition of “Baroque Variations.” Date (1970?) and availability of Tom Phillips’s A Humument. Other examples of leaving out: Cage. References to Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett whiting out comics speech bubbles and writing in new words. Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? Robert Rauschenberg’s erasing of a Willem de Kooning drawing. Norman McLaren’s direct treatment of film, scratching out, daubing in. Burroughs / Gysin cut-ups. Stripped down theatre, stylized (non-existent) props? Gordon Matta-Clarke cutting a huge hole directly through a house.

A kind of associational burn, and a negligible list. I’d think a “study” of the period’d pry up tons more exemplars. I recall—circa 1979—working through the pages of something like The Motorboat Club on Holiday, a rather brittle (likely British) kid’s book of the ’forties I’d think: meticulously crossing out anything that didn’t add to what I gather’d was a core story of (humorous) semi-pornography that “lay” underneath (or within). Full page illustrations, Glen Baxter-style. All just to “think aloud” how Johnson’s method was (and no longer is?) “in the air.”

The other booster of Johnson: Jonathan Williams, whose own work in some lights’d be took for Johnson’s, so clearly did they share exchangeables. See Williams’s epigraph by Samuel Palmer (1828), one of The Ancients who crowd’d around the dying Blake:

Nature swells from herring to leviathan, from the hodmandod to the elephant, so, divine Art piles mountains on her hills, and continents upon those mountains.

Out of Jubilant Thicket. Attached to one of the poems in “Mahler” titled “Symphony No. 8, in E-flat Minor.”

Writing out of a querulous hunger.

~

Und so weiter. To bed to read of Gianfranco Baruchello’s “unease” about “land art.” How Agricola Cornelia’s sugar beet production’s a way of “calling its bluff and highlighting its confusions and its lack of any real understanding of the world we live in.”

The disturbing thing about land art is that it’s so completely aesthetic, and all on such a terribly wrong scale. Anything that big should have other kinds of meanings altogether. Anything that enormous doesn’t make sense any more if it’s entirely without awareness of the social realities inside of which and all around which it operates.

And thinking (aloud, he’s talking to Henry Martin) through issues of use value versus exchange value at Agricola Cornelia. How the how (“meditation on the modes of an activity”) of what he’s done at the farm is “a difficult thing to talk about; the discourse slips away into almost entirely intangible subtleties.” Intangibles caught by Baruchello’s speech, and put done in the book How to Imagine, which becomes the useful thing (after produce) of Baruchello’s art:

I’ve been involved with Agricola Cornelia for eight years now, and that means eight years of trying to figure it out, eight years of notes and attempts at writing texts—there’s a whole packing case of the stuff by now—and every time I do it, all I end up with is a kind of fledgling poem in prose. That’s its limit and that’s also its saving grace. What’s the point of poetry after all? There’s a poem I remember by Sandro Penna where he talks about taking a piss. He says something about ‘liberating the body in a bright white bowl of porcelain’ and as far as that goes it could just as well be the subject of a report by some policeman who’d observed Sandro Penna intent on liberating his body while looking for a pick-up in a public toilet, and so what’s the difference between this policeman’s report and Sandro Penna’s poem? The difference is that it was Sandro Penna who wrote it. So instead of taking a piss and then writing about it, I’m growing potatoes and writing and talking about it.

~

To work.

Dog, Makeshift

~

One finds few and (mostly) restrain’d hints (pointers to the conflict) regarding the early language poetry / New York School animosities in Alice Notley’s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. What one sees is an attention to conversation, speech, that (I’d like to think) lends some credence to what I see’s the seesaw of “American” verse. Teeter goes up for writing, totter for speech. The grammatological langsters done went up against the idiomatickal New Yorkers. Notley, in talking about Joanne Kyger, notes that she “is an exact contemporary of Ted Berrigan (both born November 1934), another celebrated conversationalist.” My (foolish, hardly idle) questions: What’s the relationship between brilliant speech and a speechify’d poetics? Is a “writ” poetics accommodated (enhanced?) by quash’d (mostly silent) vocal habits? What is voice if not a recognizable “print” of diction, rhythm—one “finds” it only by constructing a body (of work) around it? (First corollary: any solitary piece precludes voice, two’re need’d to tango (or quarrel). Second corollary: voice is a misnomer, depending not on a speechifying poetics—a predominantly “writ” poetry like, oh, Hart Crane’s or John Crowe Ransom’s—it, too, “clothes” (discloses) an identifiable voice.)

~

“That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” (“So how should I resume?”) Notley:

Being known as a glorious and fascinating talker can obscure the value of your work . . . Kyger’s influence on my own practice . . . has been considerable; she’s one of the women who’s shown me how to speak as myself . . . rather than suiting the requirements of established intellectuality.

And a proper nudge for the academy: “idiomatic truth can’t get born there.” Which strikes me as brilliant. After noting how Kyger’s absent Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, Notley goes straight to the fraught imbalance in any art—how the jockeying loudmouths and flailers’ll inevitably win (the short-lived) day. As for Kyger—“she’s stayed away from the centers of Poetry’s meager power; to wield power would be counter to the logic and even the technique of her poetry, would be for her a spiritually poor choice. But not calling attention to herself, she isn’t always included.” Out of the particular, Notley draws the skein of the general: “each poet’s poetry is, or should be, its own world; you cross borders, you get to know it, you read it being there, not bringing a lot of baggage from outside it, and it works. Poetry’s supposed to be lived in, not assessed.”

~

Funny it is to spy on the mind’s assignations and rendezvous—I watch’d mine set off with a kind of jaunty confidence to locate the Frank O’Hara line that goes “I hate it that he’s dead.” My particular mind, oblivious to its own naïveté, was dearly convinced that Ron Padgett, in the terrific poem “Dog,” riff’d (knowingly or not) off that line. Oh dear. Here’s the Padgett poem (out of the Godine New & Selected Poems):

Dog

The New York streets look nude and stupid
With Ted and Edwin no longer here
To light them up with their particularity
Of loving them and with intelligence
In some large sense of the word:
New York’s lost some of its rough charm
And there’s just no getting around it
By pretending the rest of us can somehow make up for it
Or that future generations will. I hear
A dog barking in the street and it’s drizzling
At 6 A. M. and there’s nothing warm
Or lovable or necessary about it, it’s just
Some dog barking in some street somewhere.
I hate that dog.

Notley, who quotes the poem in her fine essay on Padgett, notes that it’s “written in a sort of ‘generic’ New York School style that Padgett has access to but uses sparingly and to specific purpose.” Which is (perhaps) what sent me sniffing off along th’O’Hara trail. Or the “hate”—an emotion O’Hara’s plugs without qualms? (Think of the masterly elegy “For James Dean,” addressing the gods: “Welcome me, if you will, / as the ambassador of a hatred / who knows its cause / and does not envy you your whim / of ending him.” Think of “Hate is only one of many responses . . .” Think of the early and utterly fierce poem “Hatred.”) So I wait, watching my mind do its coy dips and pirouettes, slower and slower . . .

Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP

As if that sax
were made of bone wrenched from his wrist
he urged through it dank music
of his breath. When he blew ballads
you knew one use of force:
withholding it.
This was a river of muscles.
Old dimes oily from handling,
eggs scrambled just right in a diner
after eight gigs in nine nights,
a New Yorker profile, a new Leica
for the fun of having one.
Gasps and twitches.
It’s like having the breath
knocked out of me
and wearing the lost air for a leash.
I snuffle home.
I hate it that he’s dead.

                     —William Matthews

And how it (that “mind”) got there, I’ll never exactly know. Early Matthews, out of Ruining the New Road (1970), and urban in its charms, (and not accidentally—I’d think—reminiscent of “The Day Lady Died,” that “breath / knocked out of me”), and with the same savage (half-savage) emotional shift in the final line. That’s what the mind (looking for something to hitch to) did for some hours . . . if you’re looking for a report on the mind.

~

Usual Intemperate Blast Department: That School of Q. thing La Silliman keeps a-yammering about (by begorrah, hardly a veritably “quiet” day doth pass without it nodding up its besmirch’d face, behind which smirks La Silliman)—it puts me unrenegadedly in the mind of Ronald Reagan, it doth. Laissez-moi expliquer: remember how the brilliantine’d one, the Great Communicator, used to refer to that ragtag band of thugs that were the contras in Nicaragua as “Freedom Fighters”? Blatant attempt to sway the populace by means of lingo-control. Every government does it, even, apparently, a loud government of one.

~

The Baruchello & Martin How to Imagine stories (chronicles) Acricola Cornelia, Baruchello’s farm south of Rome. A sort of Spicerean lemon, or Duchampesque chessboard:

. . . the paintings are only a by-product. Agricola Cornelia is like that package of newspapers that I hung up five years ago in a tree. I don’t know what it is at all, it’s simply something that I had to do. The idea with Agricola Cornelia was to deal directly with the essence of an experience independently of the paintings. The paintings are something that I use to call attention to things, so why not be interested in the things themselves?

Question: what would a poem that is “only a by-product” look like? One supposes that a poem’s the by-product of a mind’s trajectory, and points “back” to that. Which seems negligible compared to a farm.

~

“This other image is a drawing of an angiosperm, which is a non-existent parasite, a potato parasite that didn’t exist before, and you can see how it has take the form of a woman, it’s called phanerogama angiosperma, this horrible technical name, and it’s there with these rotten pears near the outline of the compost heap. The idea of inventing a parasite seemed to be an explorable possibility since there’s nothing really scientific about Agricola Cornelia, and at times its distance from reality is such that inventing a parasite seemed an entirely reasonable and logical thing to do.” —Gianfranco Baruchello

~

To work.

Mouthpiece

~

How quickly “one” gets pegged—by a variety of forces—into what, for some, amounts to a constricting, a cutting off of available directions. Note: in 1998, less than thirty years after her first book, Alice Notley, sees the need to announce (“The Poetics of Disobedience”):

For a long time I’ve seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well.

First on the list: “poetic factions.” She continues:

For a long time—well in fact since the beginning, since I learned how to be a poet inside the more rebellious wing of poetry; though learning itself meant a kind of disobedience, so like most words, the Dis word, the Dis form, cannot be worshipped either—and that would be an obedience anyway.

Warnings partout-partout: make not a fetish of a “way.” Commit and re-commit to the folly of a youth that’ll put anything in its mouth. A youth-mouth’d poetics. Note, too: Notley’s are exactly the forces that Romain Gary so stunningly and swiftly rebel’d against in France (as fractious and covetous a literary “place” as that of contemporary “American” poetry) by becoming—for several novels, unbeknownst—under the pleasantly skew’d nom de cache-cache Émile Ajar. One way to dodge the presumptuous labeling one’s “past practices” allow.

~

I look’d back at the “Disobedience” essay after encountering Notley’s fine adamant argument against “predetermined terminology”—that oft-engaged in imperious slotting that is a functional dismissal. For while it may be impossible to read anything without aligning it against something one’s read prior to it, the bully’s default way of immediate and irremediable categorization is nothing but a diminishment, and serves no good. To repeat Notley’s remark in the “Preface” to Coming After: Essays on Poetry: “Any contemporary poem or poet deserves to be approached without preconception, If it’s of now, who know what it is?”

~

For Notley, that lack of preconception is a way of including others, is a character trait, a kind of “moral force” she identifies with Frank O’Hara. That trait, united with “charm,” she makes “the hallmark of the New York School.” Put with blunt precision:

You don’t try to say something without being worth knowing, and you aren’t worth knowing unless you come off it so the person who wants to know you can be present too.

One way, obviously, to “come off it” (a terrific way to say it), is through humor, the gently self-deprecating kind, that disallows the kind of earnest “Master”-y one sees paraded about hereabouts.

~

Did I ever read anywhere before that “O’Hara’s final set of poems” were “meant tentatively to be published under the title The End of the Far West or the New York Amsterdam Set”? Notley’s remarks on these late O’Hara pieces jar me—not least because I’d apparently never seriously consider’d O’Hara’s “periods,” it’d all come to seem a mighty blast, mightily variegated, but without meaningful sequence or division. Notley, after noting how the late poems seem “an attempt to write at a different speed, possibly in order to write at all, since they appear at a time of significant slowdown”:

The End of the Far West is written under the obvious influence of Williams’s variable foot, and also under the influence of television and its deadly flat diction. A new kind of voice is speaking, that of the poet becoming, and at the same time commenting on and changing, the story or issue on the screen. This voice is both satirical and mysterious; it anonymous and communal (in the bad sense) in its exploitation of verbal mediocrity, and works somewhat more through deadpan presentation and juxtaposition than through intricate linguistic closework.

Later, Notley notes the poems’ “negativity of outlook and their seeming voiding of what is now called authorial presence”:

It’s not as if he’s taking a stand against authorial presence, or is incapacitated in relation to it; it’s more as if he would deny it to the world on the grounds of the world’s incapacity to receive it. A sterile machinespeak is becoming much more suitable for everyone.

So, as ever the best criticism insists one does, “one” does go back to the texts. Only to note one that begins, “Just start writing / it’s plenty powerful yet so lightweight” before getting into some (undoubtedly TV) nonsense about “a Norwegian cargo vessel in this vicinity.” Or to note one that ends:

                                            So stop thinking about how
badly you’re hurt . . . Stop coddling yourself. You can
do something about all this and I’m here to help
you do it! I’ll start by getting your clothes off . . .

What the . . .
                       THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!
                                                                                                        Forget
we ever met.

A lack of authorial presence writ big.

~

Notley on th’effects of reading by “lineage” and “affiliations” (in an essay on Joanne Kyger): “No poet is those things, and the poetry’s the thing, as we all know; furthermore, such labeling by association is frequently detrimental to women poets. Poetry movements are generally manmade; women seen in the light of such movement always appear secondary.” And in astute remarks on a tiny untitled Kyger poem, Notley points to a distinct “literary moment” (one’d be apt to mark it “th’arrival of the label-mongers”):

. . . the arrival of Language Poetry . . . is caught and both accepted and gently repudiated as personal practice:

                                        The electric clock
from the 30’s childhood belongs to me. I am the I
of this writing which indeed I like to do.

Clear (mocking in the context) Steinian hum to the final half-line. To which poem Notley responds: “Note how in less than three lines she has managed to say she is of her own time, to identify her time, to conjure up an actual clock in a room, to comment on the nature of her favored first-person singular, and to suggest that she is surpassingly content with the way she write and not about to change for a fashion.” Bravo, Kyger. Bravo, Notley. Pointing toward a literary history way more nuanced than certain manhandlers of the expungibles’d have it.

~

What is the (somewhat legendary) French verb meaning “to thieve time at work in order to pursue one’s own personal, even if unarticulated, ends.”

~

Weekend of celebratory outbursts—one eightieth birthday, one day of birth. The green earth is greener. Dabbled at the landscape (some call it mowing), walk’d little, read a paltry, rode a palfrey (some call it a bike)—the sun flex’d easy in its skin, or the rain hurry’d down. What I’ve been reading (or rereading) when I’m too tired to read more of whatever it is I am reading: two books, Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact and How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art and Agriculture, both by Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin.

~

“Here around Rome, they have an expression for a bad piece of land, they call it land for chick peas, and that’s also a way of referring to the ground in a cemetery.” —Gianfranco Baruchello

~

To work.

Homem Velho

~

Where’d I see Tom Beckett’s voucher that Ron Silliman admits to the use of “strategic overstatement” in critical writing? As if that explain’d it. Sort of like the guy who’s constantly getting off a stream of fuckin’ this, and fuckin’ thats. Where’s he going to go to find an expletive when it’s needed? Or an intensifier in all that hysteria? Strategy must needs be based on a sense of measure, is rarely heroic. Clamors not constantly, and is occasion’d.

~

Ange Mlinko posit’d recently the big difficulty: to say anything the better the work is. And Ashbery the Inestimable on Jasper Johns’s work (circa 1966), how it: “seems to defy critical analysis, and this is precisely a sign of its power—it can’t be explained in any other terms than its own, and is therefore necessary.” Idea cropping up that some work renders me speechless, “aghast”: akin to Ashbery’s report that Johns admits that some critical writing—even if it says nothing “about” it—“made things lively around the work.” Ravening spirits, ghostly demarcations.

~

“Too often the post-avants of today fall prey to the built-in curbs to the mind and the imagination which a post-avant style imposes. For many young poets, these limitations actually seem to constitute an attraction. They have chosen an academic stance, one feels, because of a deep-rooted disinclination to experiment fully, to take risks, to believe that there can be other means or values than the glaringly pre-approved ones.”

~

To make one’s indifference scandalous.

~

The point of certitude being mouth-watering negligence.

~

Ushering in the era of do-nothingism.

~

Amber filigree, with bugs embedd’d.

~

Dd’d.

~

A voluptuary of affect’s lack.

~

Subtlety, à quoi sert?

~

Whatness is the use.

~

A gratifying delirium of letters. “French letters.”

~

“What do you say about somebody who could keep a box under his bed full of pages and pages of phonetic puns like LMAP, or LHIEOPI, or MOAGBZDDSOSLARNU. LHOOQ was really the most innocent one of the lot.” —Gianfranco Baruchello

~

To work.

Is it Ur?

~

If materiality’s gain’d by making the language itself visible, do the material tics lead to mannerist predictabilities. Is “plain speech” a materialist tic? Equal to baroque gussyings-up? Perhaps the “baseline” changes: Hemingway’s pared-down prose is a hard-edged material after the redoubtable verbiage and slush it reject’d. Against a period-style of “plain speech” gone to invisibility, the knottily writ (and present’d) prose sentences of, say, Hejinian remark language as a thing in itself. (More “material” for the speech versus writing replacement cycle “crowd,” who is me.)

~

Endless the pleasures of Ashbery’s prose, and sly. Look how—after reading a part of the long poem “Europe”—he echoes a Poundian Ur-story in gentle mockery and hommage:

I was inspired to write the poem after passing through a Paris Métro station called Europe, on a moving train. Somehow the sight of those ceramic letters set in a tile wall, with hordes of subway passengers passing by, made me realize for the first time that I was—Eureka!—in Europe.

Compared to Pound’s “Petals on a wet, black bough” transport, deliciously “invent’d-sounding” itself, particularly in the detail of Concorde’s being the crucial station: “I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face and then another beautiful face.” Apt that Ashbery sees “letters” to Pound’s “faces.”

~

An Ashberyism: “which is as it should be.”

~

And just when (past few books) you could be thinking Ashbery’s repeating himself (and you’re either loving that obsessional un-stylish “stick-to-it-iveness” or hating that ever-deepening and inevitable “rut”), he calls you on the whole notion of repetition, and with a Kennedy-esque prod (“Ask not . . .”) dares you be as cuckoo as he:

SONNET: MORE OF SAME

Try to avoid the pattern that has been avoided,
the avoidance pattern. It’s not as easy as it looks:
The herringbone is floating eagerly up
from the herring to become parquet. Or whatever suits it.
New fractals clamor to be identical
to their sisters. Half of them succeed. The others
go on to be Provençal floral prints some sleepy but ingenious
weaver created halfway through the eighteenth century,
and they never came to life until now.

It’s like practicing a scale: at once different and never the same.
Ask not why we do these things. Ask why we find them meaningful.
Ask the cuckoo transfixed in mid-flight
between the pagoda and the hermit’s rococo cave. He may tell you.

Out of Where Shall I Wander. Oh to be both “different” and “never the same” à la fois! Which is, of course, an indication (practice run, “practicing a scale”) of how one could be both.

~

“It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is the easier it is to talk about it. At least, I’d like to think so.”

~

To work.

Herring Heap’d

~

Stray Ashbery (Selected Prose) notes. Reason enough to read Locus Solus: to encounter the Roussel-invent’d fluid “resurrectine,” which “if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important moment of its life.”

Artaud pointing to Surrealism’s “inattention to the object.” Is metaphor itself found’d on a vacillant attention? Attending (to) two objects?

How Ashbery, deflecting, pulls a long scarf straight-demeanor’dly out of one sleeve, only to find “Lectures in America”-era Gertrude Stein attach’d to the end of it:

The underlying thrust of all these questions is something like: “Please explain your poetry to me.” Now it may be true that composers and painters and cineastes are also asked to explain their work, but if so their task is lightened somewhat by the fact that there is something there to explain. With a poem there is nothing, or there should be nothing if the poet has done his job successfully, and that is because the act of writing the poem was an explanation of something that had occurred to the poet, and demanded to be put into words which in turn formed a poem. To explain an explanation is a much more difficult, and in the end perhaps a hopeless task because it’s doomed to redundancy. Yet I’m fully aware that I’ll have to go on making repeated stabs at it for as long as I’ll be asked to speak in public, and that this impossible feat is also a necessary one if only because people expect it, and it is normal and proper to give people what they expect.

Red-herring fill’d talk accepting the Robert Frost Medal (Poetry Society of America) at the National Arts Club (1995). (For Ashbery’s view of the red herring, see the 1967 review of Borges’s A Personal Anthology:

Borges’s prologue also contains what I believe to be another red herring. He writes: “Croce held that art is expression; to this exigency, or to a deformation of this exigency, we owe the worst literature of our time . . . Sometimes I, too, sought expression. I know now that my gods grant me no more than allusion or mention.”

Ashbery goes on to note “elsewhere Borges is revealed as a master of ‘expression,’ which he defines as the ability to ‘reproduce a mental process with precision.’” Which, herring heap’d on herring, avoids the Crocean meaning of “expression” and animates the Ashberyesque.) (For an earlier stubbornness regarding explanation, see Kenneth Koch on “Europe”: “Since many people find it very hard to read, could you give them any suggestions for making it less so.” Ashbery: “No.”)

~

Back out of the Canadian flatlands, the black muck onion fields of Ontario, out of Point Pelee, where the warblers yesterday were sparse, and did not fall “with all good velocity celerickal” out of the Heavens into our mightily open’d arms. Exemplar: no common yellowthroat seen. Though, unaccountably (meaning—God’s nefarious tease-work be blamed), this morning out early with el doggo I heard th’yellowthroat’s unmistakable song, that Steinian riff: “Which? Ida. Which? Ida. Which!?”

~

Walk’d the treadmill. Heart of a boy.

~

One swift (and essential) note on materiality, John Ashbery writing about a painting by Jane Freilicher (View over Mecox (Yellow Wall)): “The pigment that stands in for water is as much an object of delectation as the water itself. It has to be humored, nudged, helped along to awareness of its materiality even if that means forgetting subject matter for a moment.” Try substituting “word” for “pigment.” Not in “non-representational” gumbo, or syntactical mush is materiality of the signifier found—it is found in the delectability of words themselves, thrust suddenly forward into the limelight’s crepitant hiss and glare.

~

To work.

The Hat Corps

~

Received:

The Hat, No. 6, edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar ($12 / issue, or $20 / two issues. 323 Degraw Street, #2, Brooklyn, New York 11231)

Okay: sense of something extruding here: that under the hat is clump’d a retinue, a crowd, a mayhem—truth is, I don’t know what to call it, not exactly a “generation” (too serious, inaccurate), not exactly a “school” (too many delinquents, too many roustabouts, too democratic a cut). If I tag a couple lines for each, what’s that? A Medusa snake-guided head? And th’upshot? One obvervation, just one: against the programmaticks of the Language writers, the brave sassy nonchalance of Frank O’Hara “wins out” even for those who’re writing a defiantly (loud, direct) political poem.

Work by Kostas Anagnopoulos—

Invitations to be snubbed and guided,
Like any contradiction, to the parapet, and over
At least the bachelor buttons have found their friends
And there’s a hint of mint in the air.

Anselm Berrigan—

                I’d like to be
ocean-shaped and crashing
at my edges, vicious and open.
Become an outpost of irrational
compassion instead

Li Bloom—

In Japanese mountain villages, giant hornets
are eaten as sashimi metafictional truth?

Jenny Browne—

Lately I’ve been listening to Springsteen sing “Stolen Car,” memorizing that part about the guy really hoping he gets caught so he doesn’t disappear entirely.

Franklin Bruno—

They’ve rolled a calendar-printed blotter page into a cone
and blown the numerals past my face, the very stuff
of time. If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working.

Garrett Caples—

      have
to behave
like the

boneless
boy

of the assiniboine
indian lesbian
legend

else my kingdom for
portuguese modernism

Meghan Cleary—

                    cleanliness
in the form of harmony or
music speaking austere melodies &
exoneration from the pulsing in her thighs.

Joshua Clover—

The sun tutoyers me! Adrift beyond heroic realism
In the postmodern sublime where every window can lie
Like a priest, adrift in the utopia for bourgeois kittens

CA Conrad—

she won’t
drive down
Bush Street
because of the
president not
the genitalia

Del Ray Cross—

When I look up to where the sky is the rain washes my eyes out
and it’s like my shoes are still untied at Macy’s and I’m reading
poems on t-shirts while you swiftly shift from rack to rack.

Tim Davis—

Day laborers and insane saviors
share orange malt on the filling station lawn
the bloated heads of Ella and Aretha
one of whom’s sister wrote a song called “Ain’t No Way”

Connie Deanovich & Rachel Loden—

          giving up is never quick
Especially in a month as fractious as October
When ripping leaves off artichokes is too much fun
To pass up for something prim like “destiny”

Katie Degentesh—

It had to have been a .303 because Frank’s head just fucking
Exploded. He was big, but skinny; you could see his ribs
As he crossed the goal line, I mean, that soldier sitting
Out in the heat

Joseph Donahue—

Shoot, blue lizard, up the wall
of a festival tent. A classmate dies
in flames at the World Trade Center,
then reveals a secret room in the ruins
for writing down dreams.

Mary Donnelly—

        that dirty rotten coat of unintention.
Hopeless snags on a nylon dress.
Cigarette burns from a car that’s airbag free.

Amy Edgar (a cartoon)—

“This is not even close to being a reasonable facsimile of ME.”

Robert Elstein—

The greatest sleeve of all is the half.
The greatest hills of all are the Black.
The greatest tease of all is to saturate.
The greatest lipid of all is fat.

Sasha Frere-Jones—

I know. I cannot do anything about the grapes. There were many before you, but I can’t give you any names. I was plenty half-settled when you got up in the bunk and started ooching. The fuck.

Benjamin Friedlander—

Black Smoke

The Etna
is still undecided.

Michael Friedman—

Lately he had been like putty in her hands.

Joanna Fuhrman—

        the mere idea of an idea unshackled a galaxy’s lacquered-dipped doppelgänger,
softened a ballooning yen for manifest maximalist fleece. No longer would any
of us have that urge to call our pain a “burn.”

Eric Gamalinda—

No one knows that something is about to come amiss,
a pixel will disappear from the screen. The baker is already
filling the alleys with the telltale scent of rising dough.
Someone is singing a ballad in Catalan, a language invisible
to the naked eye.

Drew Gardner—

The “three branches of government” system of democratic America is a relatively recent phenomenon. She knew he was getting closer because on the horizon she could see leeches.

Peter Gizzi—

I mistake many things in dusk
like seeing liberty everywhere today,
smallish unacknowledged moments
of door holding, tossing coins
into a worn paper cup, smiling.
To rediscover our neighborhood
one wrapper and bum at a time.

Loren Goodman—

Neither Dionysus nor Aphrodite
Had noses; though they were not
Real people—merely gods
Who roamed the earth, occasionally
Interfering in human affairs

Nada Gordon—

Say to the one who provokes you:
“It’s the time to disco!” Mobells,
harebells, lillibelles. Jews
as elective infants.

Henry Gould—

& Gong Xian         abandoned the field         and the fugue of war
(a change of ancient dynasties         Ming for Shang)
trailing retreat         transmuting each desire
(only flickers         of black horsehair)

Mark Halliday—

each stroke must constitute a making of meaning—if not,
we are in the pickle of ache. That pickle is sourly dill

and yet it was I who one night at the Encore Café wrote
“Fern Pearls”—but where is it now?

Joy Katz—

For sills whoring shells,
for sills announcing my important self to the air,
for sills, shadow-caterers, witness to drones,
protectorates, lips of my house;
for the luxury of empty sills,
clean-timbered and cumbent!

Ishmael Klein—

Brother, I’ve been so weary as to not even go for the kopeks in my pocket.
Missed the bus twice that way.
A sight in uriny trousers.

Jennifer L. Knox—

              “This one goes out to Don, a total
Tool who I temped for in ’89:
Data-mother-fucking-entry this.
Who’s got ‘inappropriate footwear’ now?
The inappropriate footwear’s on the other
Foot today, you hick”

Justin Lacour—

You were always stating the obvious,
crying “Skullduggery!”
when the monastery’s yard sale
proves to be a red herring.

Tanya Larkin—

I am not the baby on its belly laughing
to itself (its first private joke, the joke itself

a stroke of blue) or two colors collapsing
in two, not a paperback soaking in rain,

o to be read by rain the rain turning
your pages with its fat greasy finger

David Lehman—

Let me not overrate palaces,
queens, rich sycophants, tense
undertakers veering west.
Xanax yawns Zululand.

Rachel Loden—

Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol
and was wrong about most everything

except her boredom. That was real.
Valerie, let’s cut up verbiage and not
men.

Lisa Lubasch—

as the telling is rolled—off the course—which contains the pronoun—and the asterisk—for reasons guessed but seldom noted—the path of safety lies with such distraction—half-practicing itself

Kimberly Lyons—

I storm my aloneness
with vocables.
Behind my aloneness
are implacable violet
curtains.

Sarah Manguso—

I wanted to waste eight lines on every line
with a hey and a ho and good god-damn—
mouth-kissing all your friends is a good way
to let dissipate a pretty good procreative impulse.

Jonathan Mayhew—

What were “complacencies” anyway?
(None for me.)
What was a “peignoir”?

Raymond McDaniel—

I day this summer all defy
I kite song stutter dumb a cheap suitcase
A Hoyle deck tommy gun

Corey Mead—

“There are more ways
than one of being
eaten by time”

against which his only defense
was an inhuman

grammar

James Meetze—

Where we come together with paste, a starling among Romanesque colonnades and a girl with her tiny girl-hand held aloft as if to say I am your perch.

Elizabeth Merrick—

Pinks are starting to smear the tree limbs, you can smell exhaust fumes mixed in with the clean, et air, and you are walking with Josette Hoopes, whose mean streak has dominated the life of every girl in your grade since you were tiny.

Mario Milosevic—

Here is a rock.
Fist-sized and hard
like a curled up animal.

Ange Mlinko—

It’s woodsy.
Ain’t edelweiss, ain’t fom Urugray. Didn’t originate in Fiji.
Whence the papaya? Whither the capybara?
A spongiform innocence wonders.
The adult doldrum’s just a phylum of
radially symmetrical
invertebrate animals
living in the skull
which may be vented toward the radiantly placental clouds, plum silver, or
fleshy earlobes.

K. Silem Mohammad—

Louis is telling David about the daguerreotype
that was taken of Claudia
mannerist cylinders rendered in cyanotype blue
          shifted to include chiefly non-sailors
a mirror transfixed by its own form
captures the image that it reflects
          I have gone speechless
erect in the center of the table

Michael Morse—

I trust initial states, my mental Delaware:
As parting snows will downy up the dirt beds,
impatient daffodils debut their taxi silks.

Ryan Murphy—

Tomorrow wall stoic
At the city gates a head on a stick
Soot-streaked smeared a little with rain

Maggie Nelson—

                      Inside the barn
the boys build bongs out of
copper piping, electrical tape, and

jars.

Daniel Nester—

instead of interviewing the true athlete the animal we’re
stuck with the helium-sounding self-congratulatory
jockey a freak of nature

Jeni Olin—

I’ve got a brain like soaked coral.
I’ve got a tongue like a baby’s penis.
I’m Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense—I’m dead but I don’t know it.
My pen, my Eskimo blood spilled cheekily over “good & dear people. . . .”
I managed to write this by myself.
When I say “Oh get me away I’m dying,” I meant I wanted
a cigarette and a problem child on a peony-filled evening.
In the dry heat of photocopy fans,
making Easter cards with the, uh, terminally ill,
You hold the retinal scanner to my heart.
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
as flames rose to her roman nose and her hearing aid began to melt”
and in the darkened underpass I gave
blood and now my French in shaky.

Alissa Quart—

              There are no
guns on boats between Canada
and U.S. Maybe that’s why Canadian
intellectuals adopt children more than
in New York. We adopt “positions.”
A biological Canadian and non-biological
father snorts at us Americans: “Local angst!”

Jessy Randall—

The empty library
stutters awake, words
falling out of their paper beds,
alarms of exclamation points
ringing from every corner.

Kit Robinson—

I take spontaneous bop prosody to be self-
evident. In that sense, this writing is not
about but is itself a kind of music, with
semantics for harmony, the scales and changes
of our collective dictionary, and for rhythm,
syntax.

Richard Roundy—

I’ll meet you at the abutments
where the business of life still goes on, barely.

Kaia Sand—

if sunrise blues
a ‘historic
sadness,’ that big
bore I veer
toward—

Michael Scharf—

If every exchange is negotiated with the presumption of bad faith,
the only possible way to come away with even a piece of what you
want is to propose basic terms which you have no intention of fulfilling,
while feeling around for what givens on the other side can be seized

Michael Schiavo—

It was obvious, once we heard the hubcaps clang,
Heard you rushing through the underbrush,
That the bonfire was still burning near the bay,
That boats still coasted out of sorts in the dark.

Roger Sedarat —

The ants are to analogies as cutlet
is to rhetoric. The exponential burden of laboring
bits of ground meat on tiny red bodies
thus makes a text worth eating.

Prageeta Sharma—

When can I expect the cloud to encase all of it, moving toward
its own recognizable base, did it lead me? Did I follow that rumble?

Rod Smith—

experts are bedded and sassy, half-quilt loonberries
pumped with
a string o’ guck, more half-needle than half Carnegie, built
libelous twin bullshit hugging republican cocks
all aligned, all impaired, all exact

Rod Smith & Marianne Shaneen—

Handy logo porn fussball sms handy logo hamster hintergrundbild is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its Being this being is concerned about its very Being.

Gary Sullivan—

I’m not trying to say
the penny *caused* the
puking & diarrhea
but that we probably want
to reexamine this whole
penny = good luck bull-
shit.

Tom Thompson—

The police inhabit their work so tenderly! Like dolls built to simulate laughter. Like bells, they watch the space between themselves, its milky white.

Aaron Tieger—

        Jeff
doesn’t sit out here
since a team of white
spacesuits hosed off
“a strange green substance.”

Anthony Tognazzini—

For a long time we stood unbearably still, until one of us found the courage to scratch a message with the pencil.

Tony Tost—

Clean contentment in that I have never feared for my life. A retrieval system for that? As one joins Homer & Whitman roaring in the pines one makes a decision on value. Notes the man: “this sentence did not exist an hour ago but an exactly similar one did.” A century of certain ground.

Tony Towle—

And how does the Michelin Man punish this impiety?
Does he seize the blasphemer and lock him in his trunk?
No, he gazes at him sorrowfully, in quiet pity,
So resilient is his compassion.

Melissa Tremblay—

I’m blocked up here
It’s not my fault that the boss put the heater in my hand
Blind people are backing me up with swords

Tristan Tzara (translated by Nick Moudry)—

a blue light which holds us flat on the ceiling
it’s like always my friend
like a hell’s gate label stuck on a medicine bottle

Catherine Wagner—

Pow! plow! fading purple pomme
Glasses pushed askew by the pillow
One two three four five six seven eight nine 10 there was nothing else
This writing is not a lazy or easy activity Wags

G. C. Waldrep—

There are only two human figures in all of America
and I have already seen them. Everything else is socks and recognizance,
flutter and mood. A color wheel comes in handy.
Mazarine, for instance, can be a shade of deep blue or (less commonly)
of reddish-blue. It can refer to Cardinal Mazarin, prime minister of France (1643-61)
or to a forcemeat entrée consisting of finely-ground and highly-seasoned
pork, fish, or poultry. It can be a serving dish
or a Bible

Dana Ward—

We wanted the names removed from the book, so they could be written in books we could love.

Alli Warren—

My legs cross surfaces
a submarine, a fundraising fishfry,
a blue rental car tacking its way
across the current

Elizabeth Willis—

Gorky to Hartigan: the street is for sale.

Terence Winch—

Love conspires against formality.
The dust of information gravitates
around the obligation to move clouds.

Jonah Winter—

      says things
in the style of the great warrior,
Henny Youngman.

Max Winter—

the speakers are being connected

For a succession
of oom-pah’s and sighs

John Yohe —

a wooden fence post falls with rusty nails
the cows look up the wind begins to shift

Denée Dubeau Zah—

Now you I like.
You belong in a beaker,
decorative, sterile.
It keeps me from crushing you.

Magdalena Zurawski—

and when I looked up I could see the plastic of the radio face. And once I could see the plastic of the radio face I could hear. I could hear that no one was talking or one person was talking. And the one person that was talking said “Let’s stop here.” And when I heard the person say “let’s stop here” I could look up from the sentence I was reading and when I saw that I was reading I could see the words that I had been reading.

Which is, one thinks, another way of doing a “core sample”—attempting (a tempting) randomness (that never “comes off”), always, in the selecting (exceedingly few, I note, where I had the devil’s nose of a near-seizure to “come up” with any lines selectable, my voracious omnivore democratic gullet guard’d (unduly?) by my fastidiousness, what I like to call “taste”).

Phew. That’s a big and terrific issue. “The white one.” As to my corps / core: consider it a cento with all th’intersticial constituent tissues intact—meaning names of th’authorities to whom to report compleyntes.

~

Wrote a note to myself in the pitch’d blackness of 3 a.m. and fail’d (thus) to note that faulty pen. The result: claw marks, scuttle lines, the flailing cilia and flagella of pre-Linnaean invertebrates, with only one whole legibility: the word “underwrites.” Major morning interpretive “gestures” indicate that what I’d prodded myself to note (here) is: tomorrow I am off to Point Pelee, where—on a tongue of land that laps at th’Erie waters—one’s able to witness the warblers collapse out of the celestial heights, and consider how geology underwrites zoology.

~

To work.

Big Boss Man

~

One of the “Adagia” in Stevens’s Opus Posthumous: “Hermit of poetry.” Another: “One reads poetry with one’s nerves.” Publish’d 1957. Surely a source of O’Hara’s “You just go on your nerve.” Written 3 September 1959. Though I remain suspicious of that “surely.”

~

If it’s Thursday, mention the Lumina. Mention the starling ratcheting up they ornery little voice-boxes in the scrubby wastes adjacenting the mini-mall. Mention the run-off pond fill’d with cattails, and bust’d up shopping carts. Mention the mention in Ashbery’s Selected Prose of the “thirty-one versions of a Baudelairian sonnet” by British poet Nicolas Moore, titled Spleen, available at UBU, and mention how reading that’s akin to seeing in some codger’s memoirs the name of a village in the Pyrenées one’d stay’d in in one’s unbadger’d youth!

~

Ashbery (circa 1983) on dog-packs of poets versus the loner el lobo (he’s talking about th’Homerickal Robert Fitzgerald, and F. T. Prince):

The fault of both poets is that they cannot be attached to any group; therefore, their excellence confuses people. Fitzgerald’s voice is lost in America where the loyalty-oath mentality has infiltrated even poetry, where you cannot see the poet for the disciples.

~

So’s not to forget, a lovely word embedded in a value’d strategic reminder: to achieve “a delicate but consistent disparity between the sense of the words and the sprachgitter, or feeling of the language.

~

Ashbery on Michael Palmer:

Equally strong in him is the tradition of the American Objectivists—Resnikoff, Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, Zukofsky—yet he approaches their program of “no ideas but in things” with not a little help from Surrealism. This sounds bizarre at first—surely the leanness of Objectivism is at opposite poles from the high-strung and full-blown conceits of the Surrealists—until we remember that Objectivism has its eldritch side—Williams’s Kora in Hell for one instance—while Surrealism is not just Breton’s rodomontades but also Éluard’s jagged, lightning-bolt lines as well.

Eldritch? See Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid (1513): “Vgsum to heir was hir wyld elriche screik,” or “Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850): “Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream . . .” Of origin obscure. “Unnatural, frightful, hideous, strange.” Vgsum? Ugsome it is to hear the earnest nattering of some cohorts . . . (Some days I think I am in love with words!)

To the point: Ashbery’s willingness to see th’inevitable cross-pollinations that “make” a writer. Refusal of single-campism. Seeing how the dissimilar fit fits.

In the same piece (introducing Palmer and James Tate reading at the New York Historical Society, 11 April 1991), Ashbery says:

Tate is in fact one of the two poets whose work I read when I have trouble writing, the other being Hölderlin.

Coffee snorting out nose in astonishment at one, that pairing, and two, the bizarrerie of Ashbery’s “trouble writing.” Who’d a thunk it?

~

The sayings of the Dogen: “That doggone dog!”

~

To work.

’Sokay

~

El doggo flop’d on the bed, J. out and about, G. monkeying with a newsletter, stretching titles big, or slanty, or shadowy. Post-repast slack-hand’dness, that’s it. Feeling a little like a chump about yadda-yadda-ing the solid Mr. Stevens. Maybe th’impulse crops up at the cold instigation of that particular poem, its avow’d set-piecedness. For who’d refuse to admire a man capable of so unconstrainedly writing “Under the eglantine / The fretful concubine / Said, ‘Phooey! Phoo!’ / She whispered, ‘Pfui!’” What’s that line (Ashbery on O’Hara) that’s stuck to me (“that kind of love is terrible”) all through the years? “Amusing himself, another highly suspect activity.” Anyone willing to cavort amongst th’earnestines. ’Sokay by me. Even if there’s that annoying thing where he asserts things like “The deer and the dachshund are one.” Cain’t no way get behind them apples. Or the effusions of similar apples, maybe. What I like is a little thing out of Opus Posthumous, with no date, no particular note, no identifying squib. Canny the way the processual world imposes itself, drops its seemingly whole self at our feet. The way we, of necessity, make our own dominions out of the continuum. Lying dog world:

JULY MOUNTAIN

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry—
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain
Vermont throws itself together.

~

Kenward Elmslie: “The figure in the carport.” (Out of Ashbery’s Selected Prose.) Is it Wallace Stevens who gets ask’d if he aligns himself with Henry James or Walt Whitman and more or less dismisses both?

~

So, did Guy Davenport call Louis Zukofsky a “poet’s poet’s poet” prior to John Ashbery’s calling Elizabeth Bishop a “writer’s writer’s writer”? Or vice-versa? That’s the kind of “fact” that needs establishing in the morning. Ashbery’s writing (about Bishop) circa 1976. Of somewhat more interest is the rhetorical clumping Ashbery engages in in remarking Bishop’s broad appeal:

. . . this is the first thing that strikes me about Miss Bishop’s unique position among American poets . . . That is, the extraordinarily intense loyalty her work inspires in writers of every sort—from poets like myself, sometimes considered a harebrained, homegrown surrealist who poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism, and from a whole generation of young experimental poets to experimenters of a different sort and perhaps of a steadier eye, such as Robert Duncan and James Tate, and to poet-critics of undeniable authority like Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell.

(I’m also struck by the number of references to Surrealism in Ashbery’s prose in general—there’s a tendency to forget (today) how undeniably available, demanding, and “work’d” that vein is. And not “work’d out.”)

Elizabeth Bishop, quoted by Ashbery (that knack for th’ore in the slag):

. . . reading Darwin one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels that strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eye fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown, What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

That trance of transcription, that beholden’dness to dictation. Tiniest Europe is speaking into my snail-shaped ear alone.

~

Received:

Carve, Issue 5, edited by Aaron Tieger ($5, 221 W. Lincoln #2, Ithaca, New York 14850)

Poems by Stacy Szymaszek, Jordan Davis, Guillermo Juan Parra, Cheryl Clark, and Ric Caddel

Essay by William Corbett: “Ric Caddel’s Tunes”

Corbett quotes Basil Bunting’s credo: “You don’t set out to make a poem of your experiences. You set out to make a shape. A shape of sounds.”

Cheryl Clark, unbeknownst to me, delivers:

BOSTON

New England’s wit:

bit of whip-

lash in your face,

good cold snap

of ocean.

~

Bird Dog,Issue 6, edited by Sarah Mangold ($6, 1535 32nd Ave., Apt. C, Seattle, Washington 98122)

Poems by Justin Lacour, Kate Colby, Elizabeth Robinson, Laura Walker, Brian Lucas, Edward Smallfield, Jane Sprague, Paul Foster Johnson, James Grinwis, Deborah Wood, Sasha Watson, Alan DeNiro, Julia Bloch, Nico Vassilakis, Rodney Koeneke, Derek White, Sheila E. Murphy, Jeffrey Jullich, Mary Kasimor, Matthew Jewell, Kate Greenstreet, Scott Bentley, Chris Pusateri, Christian Peet, Sarah Rosenthal, Alan Semerdjian, kari edwards, and Bethany Wright

Art by Richard Hutter: “Opiate,” “Quince Grove,” and “Tergiver” (Collage, acrylic, and charcoal on birch panel, various sizes)

Review by Michael Leong of Lev Rubinstein’s Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky

~

Chugged—bicycling—up the hill after the “blood work” stop at th’hospital. Just after th’old observatory a red-tail hawk cross’d my path, fanned out its tail feathers braking, and land’d, eye-level, in a box elder. I stopped, tilting one-legged on the bike, and admired its fierce intent. “A serious character.”

~

To work.

Alaskaphrenia

~

Received:

Alaskaphrenia, by Christine Hume (A Green Rose Book, New Issues, 2004)

A little song keeps running around my head, that Blind Blake “Diddy-wah-diddy” thing: “I wish somebody ’d tell me what ‘Alaskaphrenia’ means?” Which is interrupt’d by “One must have a mind of winter . . .” and which, yadda yadda yadda (you should have it down “cold” by now), flying through the Stevensesque details, arrives at the glare-surround white-out struck by the brinkmanship of beholding “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Alaskaphrenia as Alaska-mindedness, and all the cold, snow, fog, loneliness, frontier violence, improvised ways of getting by, bluster and swoon, blindness and weather that gets offer’d ungovernably up. And Alaskaphrenia, an ungovernable book, seemingly epic in its intent, dashing headlong through forms and vocabularies, rarely willing to pause, trusting the reader to catch up at the next outpost.

It starts out backwards, reviewing where it’s (purportedly) been, with a mustering of “Comprehension Questions”—a schoolmarm’s last bout with civilization, before “lighting out for the territory,” that old American dream?

Where does the girl hide her great distances?

. . .

How do the men abandon ship?

. . .

Does the stormy girl’s beauty suggest something about the captain?

Why do his arrows ricochet wildly just before the target?

. . .

Why do the men take the tusk and shank inside?

. . .

Is anything more grotesque than the face of human ecstasy?

Return’d to now, after reading the book, the questions seem—oddly enough—to function as stable elements, possibilities with expect’d (desired) answers. The effect—for (this) one reader—is to impose a narrative on the pieces that follow. Hence the sense of last outpost. For the next piece begins, “I’m not right. I’m interfered with / and bent as light,” and ends:

I’ve outened the word
to show you real barrenness;
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.

The metamorphoses that erupt out of that “want”—“One winter hunger weirds your mind-wires”—are astonishing, unfetter’d mixes of nineteenth century explorer talk, folktale lingo, scat blues patter. Witness these lines out of “Hume’s Suicide of the External World”:

their music confused him into affection

for a dynamite belt and Zero pond

   time tranced and put him on ship

a black-voiced bird recognizing his torture

signed his full name on the slanting shore

he weathered genital waves to quit having a curse

   then a blue man crawled out from under a horse

whose rusted bit hushed his greedy depictions

his haunches were meat, signed Nitid Piss

and no dragoman staggered out of Candyland looking for him

he had never mouthed something so dead sweet

I’m at something of a loss to account for antecedents to Hume’s work: there’s a generous reworking of surrealism’s mandates, though with a kind of syntactical imploding and care-announcing placement and weight that shears the notion of “automatism” off the list. The epic drive (and the high-cheekiness in the fashioning of it—see “I was cracked up to be what I was”) reminds me a little of some of Lisa Robertson’s writing. Something about the New World bigness and will’d untidiness of parts of Alaskaphrenia recall the O’Hara of, say, “In Memory of My Feelings” (think of the passage that goes “And now it is the serpent’s turn. / I am not quite you, but almost the opposite of visionary. / You are coiled around the central figure, / the heart / that bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love / and the scrutiny of all things is syllogistic” or O’Hara’s initial claim that “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent / and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. / He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.”) The post-Romantic refusal, on Hume’s part, to make the self into a paysage moralisé—the Alaskaphrenickal I becoming you, becoming he, &c., splay’d out and divvy’d up, and shuck’d off—maybe it’s that that recalls O’Hara. And some individual pieces of Alaskaphrenia point here or there (the masque-like “Dialogue Among Unincorporated Towns Concerning Alaska’s Resources” tilts me momentarily toward Martin Corless-Smith’s muttering landscapes in Of Piscator—sixteenth century borrowings.) The “Dialogue” is funny, too—I’ll brusquely insert a chunk here—the humor in Hume’s work shouldn’t go unremark’d:

Curry: No one stops by anymore.

Noorvik: You and your tiny, sneezing ambitions. Remember the days of freebooting fur-traders? Before the Office of Indian Affairs? Before the drama of daredevils and schooled pilots. Have you been rural to the pipeline that long? When they open you up, you’ll turn to dust. You’ll be a hidden world begging to be absorbed by the light of the open ocean.

Flat: Atavistic alarmist. I am the transfer point for the ocean, and the cold that contains me, preserves me.

Chignik: You’re salmonella under the Governor’s tongue. You awe at yourself as if you were a Cruise Line. Better to be an isomorphic isthmus or fata morgana looming its ice walls, stained pink by algae’s pigment, along the horizon home.

Other formal gestures, hats try’d on for size (for fun!): fine catalogues (see “Sampler City” and “Dos and Don’ts About Fur”), a piece subtitled “A 12-Second Miracle Play by Thomas Merton” (one “part” goes: “A carton of Pepsi cans break and roll under the paratrooper’s feet: A volcano to which they say squat”), a seventeenth century lingo’d (“where fogge is a terryble animal / hung from the Coast / and Day is but pulse / sucked from river ironne”) “Log Written by an Unknown Hand in the Margin.” I’m tempt’d to claim that Hume is attempting (and succeeding at) a kind of “pure poetry” (as in “pure painting”) depiction somewhat incidental to the pleasure (and terror!) of aligning words (colors, paints) one next to another. A fascination and a spell.

C. D. Wright (in Cooling Time) quoting Miles Davis (in a Down Beat interview): “Endings just drag me.” Hume provides all the apparatus of an ending to Alaskaphrenia within a separately named “Appendix: all matters of fact beyond boundless doubt oceans and theologies of cold”—a point approach’d with the kind of anticipatory relief of one coming down out of the “cold.” Alas and thank goodness, no. No relief. What appears explanatory isn’t, the one who seems a willing guide is a sprightly tease. The first document, “Brochure,” begins: “traipse to outerports / ice-loud and steal / a mule to sing so / sink in switchback / wonders scored . . .” The “Diagram Explanatory of Lucency” provides number’d points of lunacy: “2. The sky grows fifteen feet a year, but you are fieldless and in a huff. You could be dangerous in the weather-cracks, where you interpret intent. Called ‘parasite’ ice because it’s creepy to touch . . .” And (a favorite) “What Became of the Company You’ve Kept, According to One Who Left” provides a nutty mop-up of the “where are they now” variety, for “characters” purportedly encounter’d in th’Alaskaphrenic wildness:

. . .

Surveyor: grows a tail to help get his body down a mountain that night

Full moon: left wandering the fiend field and laughs her head off

Silence: tinkers with phlogiston inhalants until the town gets fucked up

Deathcunt: ingests a giant cedar and inspires fear on the aits among the jilted

. . .

Incipient Doxy: forks her thumb in an industrial accident

One succumbs willingly—if fearfully, remember the old New Orleans greeting, “Y’all ’ll catch yo’ deaths of pleasure!”—to the delights and wonders of Alaskaphrenia. As someone says in “Translation Key to Exercises and Dialogues II: “Keep mute, I am going to read you your story.”

~

To work.

Binoculars in Fist

~

Received (The University of Michigan Press):

Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter, edited by Ted Leigh. Introduction by David Lehman with additional notes by Justin Spring. (University of Michigan Press, 2005)

Out of a letter of 6 August 1971 to Ron Padgett:

A poem that one likes is not necessarily one that is easy to make a picture for: but that is in itself interesting, it brings up the whole question of poems plus pictures, about which I may have too literal a mind. When I have tried to and gone through with pictures for John Ashbery, what was called to my mind was an association, which might be no one else’s association. So what? And with John’s poems, for me the question is, if I think of a picture for it, would this picture relate to the poem as a whole or only to one small part? I am as it were translating again, just as I do when I make a litho from a watercolor.

Porter illustrated some Ashbery poems for John Bernard Myers’s Poets of the New York School, (1969). Occasional need to remind myself that Porter’s brother is Eliot, the photographer.

~

Coming After: Essays on Poetry, by Alice Notley. (Poets on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 2005)

Notley’s book is divided into two sections: “Poets” and “Topics.” In the first: O’Hara, Kyger, Padgett, Anselm Hollo, Elmslie, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan (review of A Certain Slant of Sunlight), Lorenzo Thomas, Douglas Oliver, and Steve Carey. The title in the second: “American Poetic Music at the Moment,” “Voice,” “Thinking and Poetry,” “Women and Poetry,” and “The ‘Feminine’ Epic.” Notley, in the “Preface”:

These essays, reviews, talks were written during a ten-year period and, though often commissioned, to one of three purposes: to discuss a poet whose work hadn’t been discussed much; to take up topics which seemed neglected or badly discussed; to explain what I was up to, since no one else seemed to be writing about me (a circumstance that is probably changing). I wanted to be clear, and not consciously innovative in language: I had done that before in discussing poetry and probably will do so again, but I didn’t want to make, as much as to serve. However, I did want to invent a viewpoint in each instance according to what was required, that is, to see what was there without a predetermined terminology or logic getting in the way. Any contemporary poem or poet deserves to be approached without preconception. If it’s of now, who knows what it is?

Which is refreshingly direct, nuanced, and sensible, and should put to shame the categorical despisers amongst us. Too, worth noting, is Notley’s pointing to the neglect of some “second-generation New York School figures, and certain poets connected to them . . . partly because they tended to disdain criticism as a form, thereby not creating a way of talking about their works (as others were doing) . . . [and] sometimes simply because they were humble or distracted . . .”

~

The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, by Annie Finch. (Poets on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 2005)

Out of Finch’s note “The Ghost of Meter Revisited,” originally prefacing the paperback edition of that book:

Prosody is at best a contentious field, and even straightforward metrical poems may be open to multiple scansions. When the poem in question is in free verse and there is no metrical context as a guide, scansion becomes yet more subjective . . . The idea of the metrical code rests less on agreement about the scansion of individual instances as on the overall recurrence of metrical patterns that carry related connotations.
      The metrical code differs from other aesthetic-based approaches in that it is fundamentally descriptive, not evaluative. Its aim, like that of historical-based criticism, is to understand the poem in a wider context of social and literary forces.

Thinking aloud: if metrical patterns carry “connotations,” isn’t one forced to forego the claim to the merely descriptive? Connotation puts a relation into play: a word, an explicit “thing,” an implicit “thing.” If a metrical pattern is doing that, it is making meaning, an evaluative thing. Finch’s book is, I note, dedicated to WOM-PO, the Discussion of Women’s Poetry listserv. A first?

~

On Louise Glück: Change What You See, edited by Joanne Feit Diehl. (Under Discussion, University of Michigan Press, 2005)

A varied collection, with short pieces (introductions to readings) by Frank Bidart and Wayne Koestenbaum, longer assessments of Glück’s work (at several stages, from Firstborn and The House on Marshland to Vita Nova) by Linda Gregerson, Bonnie Costello, Alan Williamson, Stephen Burt, Paul Breslin, Sandra M. Gilbert, James Longenbach, and Stephen Yenser, a short interview with editor Diehl (“The problem of the interview form is that candor looks like grandiosity and demurral looks like idiocy.” —Louise Glück) and a shorter afterword on “The Restorative Power of Art” by Glück herself. Stephen Burt:

Almost every one of Glück’s best poems gives a new meaning and a new incarnation to some . . . device of successive closure. To love her forms, in particular, is to love endings.
      Glück’s attraction to summaries, conclusions, decisions makes up apart of her depressive style—one might even say of “depressive style” generally. In an important poem from The Wild Iris . . . Glück classifies herself matter-of-factly as a “depressive” who makes the characteristic “error of depressives,” identifying with wholes rather than parts . . . Glück’s recent insistence that she is “drawn to the unfinished, to sentences that falter,” and “dislike[s] poems that feel too complete” seems less descriptive than aspirational.

Which—admittedly dipped into—teeters on an odd “psychology of form” one’d like to think simplistic, which’ll compel this reader “back” into the book, and which may go a way towards explaining th’animosity against Glück in certain “opera aperta” quarters.

~

Reading Ashbery’s Selected Prose. Not unlike Marianne Moore, whose work he admired (and who begins to “place” in my thinking as “most radical Modernist,” the one whose precise and canny direction seems forsworn by today’s practioners?), Ashbery’s an inveterate collector of oddities—of th’American vernacular, of th’oddball artist (musician, writer, &c.), of the most fraught remarks. Just in the “space” of a few dozen pages, I collect’d several.

Ashbery says Marianne Moore says: “There is something attractive about a mind that moves in a straight line.” (He also, I seem to recall, likens her to Mary Poppins.)

Ashbery says Théodore de Banville says that poetry is “That magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds . . . that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.”

Ashbery says he “hates to repeat Henry James’s corny advice to a writer, ‘Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost,’” though he (Ashbery) does so, twice, on two occasions.

Ashbery says for Henri Michaux Surrealism was “la grande permission—the big permission.” And adds: “The big permission is, I think, as good a definition as any of poetry, of the kind that interests me at any rate.” (See Robert Duncan.)

Ashbery says that Auden once said “poems are written not by intellectuals but by ‘the man who like to hang around words, trying to figure out what they mean.’”

Ashbery says that Sherwood Anderson once said that Gertrude Stein had “foregone the privilege of ‘wearing the bays of the great poets to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working, money saving words, and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half-forgotten city.’” (See Zukofsky’s “little words.”)

Ashbery says The New York Review of Books characterized New York School poetry as “the Instant Mix, alchemic spontaneity, mud into mosaics, a form as popular right now with the New York avant garde as Sara Teasdale’s posies must have been in her day.”

Ashbery says (in an unpublish’d review of Berrigan’s The Sonnets): “Like so much recent art, it renders criticism obsolete, except insofar as the critic feels called upon to express approval or disapproval. There are no apologies to be made for ugly lines and no prizes to be handed out for good ones: that would be like smashing your window or pinning a blue ribbon on it because you like or dislike the view.”

Ashbery says Gertrude Stein says: “Real thinking is conceptions aiming again and again always getting fuller, that is the difference between creative thinking and theorizing.” (See narrow “theoretical” category-mongering.)

~

Walk’d with the C-dog out to the ponds and woods behind the high school, binoculars in fist. Orioles, yellow warblers, goldfinches, nothing of note. Good to plod the springy earth and sniff at the air. Warblers beginning to skimp through.

~

To work.