Stint

~

Grid 25 X 4 (Insouciant Humbug)



Sour at Coxcomb Sneer.

Fey blue mayhem engine.

Subtle rain besmirch’d horehound.

Loud lewd picnicking stint.

Such acerb yellow’d vittles.

Prompt bandy-legged rural entelechy.

That slovenly skittish cloudlet!

Tansy-lit plonk-scrounge.

Necessary essay-opprobrium contrariety.

Err, filch blini, skedaddle.

Toy curt noun: cup.

Vellum auk-apple offal.

Pssst of smoky nightjar.

Abundant vernal linen girth.

Scorn Cineplex caryatid-abs.

Sincere quarry-spent veery.

Tar-rancid nylon pommels.

Sere zygotic quid-fumigant.

Chum akimbo vetch-seizure.

Rhomboid egging-loft joint.

Ensconce vichyssoise detritus, albeit.

Discern cotyledon-resin imprimatur.

Perfervid dormer-measles lipid.

Whelk-burin nail phlogiston.

Parallelogram, doe.

~

Um. Somehow I lost two words or something. The artist gives not a fig for it, nor the king. As usual, the thing tails off, the “experiment” goes to tedium, the “experimenter” snoozes, horn-swoggle’d by entirety and all its bouffant claims. Islamabad! Hickory! Whodunit!

~~~

Scoot’d off leaving Henry Adams in a tiny cloud of 13th century dust. Pick’d up Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s She Loves Me, a quick sexy romp (with history), a kind of replacement therapy after the sexless Bostonian. (At one point in the Education Adams casts himself as a kind of “American insect.” Such relentless and, I think, mostly unfeign’d inferiority. Yoohoo! Franz!) Though Adams’s good at guff and counter-guff:

He recounts how the battle of V------ had not “penetrated [S------’s] thick cortex of received ideas.”

Mocks S------’s “bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even more than common by the [poet’s] epidemic of egotism.”

Of one adversary, says: “His humor was glow, like iron at dull heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.”

And observes: “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.”

~

Esterházy book-jacket writing: “the exhilarating hilarity of our own confusion” (Quartet Books). Sly wave of redounding redundancy. Milton call’d marriage an “exhilarating cup of solace.”

“Temperat hilaritie” (Skeyne, in The Pest), “ideal hilarity” (what wine furnishes not, according to Johnson, according to Boswell), “coarse and vulgar hilarity” (Thackeray, and De Quincy), and “The incomparable hilarity of the dusky cotton-pickers,” (in American Missionary, apparently a magazine).

~

Vain, silly. Cold is lying full-length on the hinterlandic midwest.

~

Jordan Davis is grappling with a table
Of contents.

~

On a minuscule fuchsia Post-it: “Swinburne” in execrable hand. Me, thinking I probably’ve never read a word of Swinburne. According to Adams, a plangently destabilizing talker. (My words.) (Archie Ammons often let out (with mock alarm) a slow “My word . . .”)

~

Tired, I am, of the namers and proscribers of “What Certaine Poems every man and woman of Estate or none should find, and a Mulct upon such as did Detractare Poeticae.” (Said with Shirley Temple pout, and flounce-curl.)

Pinch Fiercer

~

Resignation on Monday


Not to myself: “Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread.”

~

“Inured to the Gusts of Popularity” (bitter Laughs all around).

~

Pinch off the Dispute: it’ll bud out all the Fiercer for it.

~

That same Rhetorickal Twittle-tattle; it spins out so much Time in tedious Circumstances.

~

Who is it, so Prepossest with Personal Animosities, Particular Piques of Personal Animosity, and so, oftener, the Bane of any Publick Design?

~

Cavelling about Niceties, and Nothings.

~

To run through the whole Body of Human Frailties, would be too Tedious.

~

Narcoleptickal

~

A lost weekend. Not like the Ray Milland film, or the Charles Jackson novel. (How I used to love those: Don Burnham, writer, pawning the typewriter, hiding the bottles of bourbon on himself.) What’s that line in the novel? “The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.” The “good brother” by the name of Bim.

Lost, rather, to errantry, chores. Perfunctory dog-walkings, with G., who lately is eager to accompany me, “to talk about stuff.” Too cold. And up too early. Monday, and I nod, narcoleptickal bobble-head.

~

Sour at Coxcomb Sneer.

~

Fey blue mayhem engine.

~

Subtle rain besmirch’d horehound.

~

Lewd loud picnicking stint.
Bewilder’d

bug.

~

Constructivisms that begin to expose (nothing but) artifice. And I want to rub some lanolin of a burry “natural” voice into them. As G. likes to repeat: “Nowt me. nowt ’ermione. Yeoou.” (Something Ron Weasley says.)

~

To work citizens.

~

The File

~

Note to myself: "The Old Worthies kept their Garments undefiled."

Curt Mayhem, P. I.

~

One Hundred Words for Small Potatoes


At Coxcomb Sneer. Subtle sour horehound. Necessary essay seizure. Such yellow’d vittles. Acerb, albeit akimbo. Loft-skittish chum. Egging nail imprimatur. Rain besmirch’d veery. Auk-apple offal. Vellum joint detritus. Pssst of nightjar. That slovenly cloudlet? Sincere smoky vichyssoise. Rancid nylon pommels. Cineplex abs contrariety. Tansy-lit phlogiston. Rhomboid whelk-burin. Prompt bandy-legged entelechy. Opprobrium-spent quarry. Tar dormer-caryatid. Err, filch, skedaddle. Rural plonk-scrounge. Sere zygotic resin. Perfervid blini parallelogram. Vernal toy cotyledon. Curt noun: cup. Discern doe-measles lipid. Vetch-ensconce fumigant. Loud quid-scorn. Abundant linen girth. Lewd picnicking stint. Bewilder’d blue bug. Fey mayhem engine.

~~~

Alphabetical sort, third character. (I’m a New Technologist, now.) Purveyors of Fey Mayhem, back off!

~

33

~

One Hundred Words in Thirty-three Lines


Abundant linen girth.

~

Bewilder’d blue bug.

~

Fey mayhem engine.

~

Vernal toy cotyledon.

~

Auk-apple offal.

~

Rural plonk-scrounge.

~

Rain besmirch’d veery.

~

Necessary essay seizure.

~

Cineplex abs contrariety.

~

Subtle sour horehound.

~

Opprobrium-spent quarry.

~

Lewd picnicking stint.

~

Such yellow’d vittles.

~

Prompt bandy-legged entelechy.

~

Loud quid-scorn.

~

Tansy-lit phlogiston.

~

Sincere smoky vichyssoise.

~

That slovenly cloudlet?

~

Curt noun: cup.

~

Vellum joint detritus.

~

Loft-skittish chum.

~

Err, filch, skedaddle.

~

Rhomboid whelk-burin.

~

At Coxcomb Sneer.

~

Sere zygotic resin.

~

Pssst of nightjar.

~

Acerb, albeit akimbo.

~

Rancid nylon pommels.

~

Tar dormer-caryatid.

~

Egging nail imprimatur.

~

Vetch-ensconce fumigant.

~

Perfervid blini parallelogram.

~

Discern doe-measles lipid.

~~~

Present’d in order made. Omissions are not accruable. Ogotemmeli.

~

I ain’t sure I like the jittery diligence required to gum these pointillist things together here at work. Cut and paste. Or is it just how the meat-curl’d spongiformity I call my brain today reacts to the stop and startishness of it all? It (it tells me) would prefer to race along on some more regular syntactical pathways, a footfall away (always) from knowing where its going is, well, going. (Though, admittedly, it admits (it tells me) that a mis-step and tumble can provide excitement, a blonde, like that.) So we hoof away. Foofwa. (An Alan Sondheim word.)

~~~

Def Scholiae


I am
A rapturist.

If critical
Measure need

Be took,
Place my

Work at
A distance

Equal to
The width

Of that
Smile lighting

Up that
There reader’s

‘Firkinge Physiognomy.’
No conjecture

Disallow’d regarding
Other (and

More private)
‘Fleshly Appendicies.’

~

Toy Fumigiste!

~

Prose Poem in Fifty Sentences

Yellow’d vetch. Vernal cotyledon. Toy vittles. That whelk. Tar burin. Such tansy. Subtle horehound. Spent quarry. Sour opprobrium. Smoky phlogiston. Slovenly cloudlet. Skittish blini. Sincere vichyssoise. Sere offal. Rural nylon. Rhomboid parallelogram. Rancid pommels. Rain veery. Quid-scorn. Pssst! Skedaddle. Prompt entelechy. Plonk-scrounge. Picnicking stint. Perfervid fumigant. Of err. Nightjar imprimatur. Necessary essay. Loud measles. Loft nail. Lipid seizure. Lewd vellum. Joint detritus. Filch lit. Fey mayhem. Engine egging. Doe-ensconce. Discern resin. Curt noun. Coxcomb cup. Cineplex abs. Chum, akimbo. Blue bug. Bewilder’d sneer. Besmirch’d contrariety. Bandy-legged dormer. Auk-apple. At girth. Albeit zygotic. Acerb caryatid. Abundant linen.

~

Prose poem. Who’s got brow enough to deny it? (Strains of Dylan:

“We’re sitting here stranded
Though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.
And Louise holds a handful of rain temptin’ you to defy it.”)

Next: work in units of three. Which’ll mean: some dis-assembly, some dissembling, and a leftover.

At what point is th’introduction of other vocabulary a necessity? At what point is inconsistency of line length a necessity?

There are no necessities in art.
There are no necessities in art.
Art is all desire.
Art is all desire knows.
Art’s desire knows no necessity.
Art’s desire’s to know no necessity.
Insufficiency’s part in art is call’d desire.

~

Next.

~

Vapeuriste!

~

What about a series of arrangements of identical elements? Oh water, ô vapeur! Every force evolves a form. What I begin with is a pointillist’s palette. One hundred terms, hues. One hundred terms hewn out of what? Sound: curt, sight: bandy-legged, “meaning?”: err.

Last night I watch’d the full moon ease up big out of a cloudbank to the northeast. What eases up big and round? Thought of a William Matthews line “about” airplane champagne, sluggish bubbles drifting up the size of peas. Some amphibious metaphor—snake swallowing egg, turtle poking nose up through the algae—seem’d possible, and impossibly wrong. Again, this morning, walking el doggo, moon now to the northwest, and sinking, big ivory-hilt’d knife into the flesh of snow-cloud . . . I demur, I witness, I cannot name.

~~~

On Shanna Compton’s recent blog-study of poet-labels, brand-label-poets, &c. What kind of poet am I? Ask’d, I think, sincerely. Is it now incumbent and expect’d to declare one’s affinities, to name one’s particular poison and stick to it? Is that the upshot of a hyper-awareness on social formations? Henry Adams (in, with small rearrangements, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity):

“Poetry is a fairly large field where no one need jostle his neighbour, and no one need shut himself up in a corner; but, if one insists on taking a corner of preference, one might offer some excuse for choosing a point of transition . . .”

[For “Poetry” read “Art”; for “a point of transition” choose “the Gothic Transition,” the period of Romanesque (round’d, squat, restrain’d, weighty) French architecture going to Gothic (point’d, soaring, light).]

Meaning: work the borders, the hedgerows, the shores, estuaries and marshes, treelines. There where things edge and peter out. The liveliest spots, the naturalist knows, are found where ecosystems collide, overlap. New Sentence disjunctives in service of a series of narrative vignettes. Lyric outbursts toss’d against a rigorously pattern’d grid. Refuse to decide between banker and anarchist (Adams).

~~~

One Hundred Words in Fifty Lines


Picnicking stint.

~

Blue bug.

~

Filch lit.

~

Such tansy.

~

Abundant linen.

~

Toy vittles.

~

Lewd vellum.

~

Auk-apple.

~

Bandy-legged dormer.

~

That whelk.

~

Rural nylon.

~

Skittish blini.

~

At girth.

~

Chum, akimbo.

~

Sincere vichyssoise.

~

Cineplex abs.

~

Yellow’d vetch.

~

Fey mayhem.

~

Smoky phlogiston.

~

Besmirch’d contrariety.

~

Engine egging.

~

Plonk-scrounge.

~

Slovenly cloudlet.

~

Coxcomb cup.

~

Tar burin.

~

Spent quarry.

~

Bewilder’d sneer.

~

Subtle horehound.

~

Prompt entelechy.

~

Nightjar imprimatur.

~

Sour opprobrium.

~

Curt noun.

~

Albeit, zygotic.

~

Necessary essay.

~

Joint detritus.

~

Discern resin.

~

Rain veery.

~

Quid-scorn.

~

Vernal cotyledon.

~

—Pssst! —Skedaddle!

~

Perfervid fumigant.

~

Loud measles.

~

Acerb caryatid.

~

Rhomboid parallelogram.

~

Loft nail.

~

Doe-ensconce.

~

Sere offal.

~

Lipid seizure.

~

Rancid pommels.

~

Of err.

~~~

Quarried

One Hundred Words

Abs. Abundant. Acerb. Akimbo. Albeit. Apple. At. Auk. Bandy-legged. Besmirch’d. Bewilder’d. Blini. Blue. Bug. Burin. Caryatid. Chum. Cineplex. Cloudlet. Contrariety. Cotyledon. Coxcomb. Cup. Curt. Detritus. Discern. Doe. Dormer. Egging. Engine. Ensconce. Entelechy. Err. Essay. Fey. Filch. Fumigant. Girth. Horehound. Imprimatur. Joint. Lewd. Linen. Lipid. Lit. Loft. Loud. Mayhem. Measles. Nail. Necessary. Nightjar. Noun. Nylon. Of. Offal. Opprobrium. Parallelogram. Perfervid. Phlogiston. Picnicking. Plonk. Pommels. Prompt. Pssst! Quarry. Quid. Rain. Rancid. Resin. Rhomboid. Rural. Scorn. Scrounge. Seizure. Sere. Sincere. Skedaddle. Skittish. Slovenly. Smoky. Sneer. Sour. Spent. Stint. Subtle. Such. Tansy. Tar. That. Toy. Veery. Vellum. Vernal. Vetch. Vichyssoise. Vittles. Whelk. Yellow’d. Zygotic.

~

Writ differently. To study. Who remembers the Aram Saroyan poem, something like:

A man stands
On his head.

Then he sits down.

All different.

~

Publish'd in a high school literary magazine I edited, along with a Richard Brautigan story about burying an elephant. Both purportedly by, I think, Ken Burns's older brother? A few years later I came across one in Revenge of the Lawn, the other in some Saroyan book. Damn is what I thought. We publish'd them under the name Dharma Jhudi, I think. I could look it up. Overtones, circa 1970.

Scrounger

One Hundred Words


Chum.

~

Mayhem.

~

Scrounge.

~

Cineplex.

~

Entelechy.

~

Scorn.

~

Dormer.

~

Vichyssoise.

~

Of.

~

Albeit.

~

Parallelogram.

~

Doe.

~

Stint.

~

Vetch.

~

Akimbo.

~

Girth.

~

Ensconce.

~

Contrariety.

~

Vittles.

~

Such.

~

Rain.

~

Yellow’d.

~

Err.

~

Acerb.

~

Cotyledon.

~

Caryatid.

~

Slovenly.

~

Abundant.

~

Lipid.

~

Coxcomb.

~

Skittish.

~

Vernal.

~

That.

~

Lewd.

~

Sneer.

~

Rural.

~

Measles.

~

Linen.

~

Veery.

~

Apple.

~

Besmirch’d.

~

Nylon.

~

Quarry.

~

Fey.

~

Rhomboid.

~

Lit.

~

Pommels.

~

Fumigant.

~

At.

~

Sincere.

~

Loud.

~

Resin.

~

Smoky.

~

Bewilder’d.

~

Spent.

~

Auk.

~

Bandy-legged.

~

Imprimatur.

~

Subtle.

~

Loft.

~

Blue.

~

Prompt.

~

Engine.

~

Toy.

~

Rancid.

~

Abs.

~

Picnicking.

~

Discern.

~

Curt.

~

Essay.

~

Cloudlet.

~

Phlogiston.

~

Blini.

~

Bug.

~

Filch.

~

Perfervid.

~

Sour.

~

Necessary.

~

Plonk.

~

Quid.

~

Vellum.

~

Tar.

~

Skedaddle.

~

Egging.

~

Whelk.

~

Nightjar.

~

Horehound.

~

Zygotic.

~

Tansy.

~

Offal.

~

Sere.

~

Noun.

~

Burin.

~

Detritus.

~

Pssst!

~

Joint.

~

Seizure.

~

Opprobrium.

~

Nail.

~

Cup.


~~~

Writ whilst waiting for a palpable something to lodge up in the meaty folds of my brain-flab. Like a bullet. Like one hundred bullets.

Called Back

~

“The clamorous puppy might bethink himself of better language. . . especially addressing to an Eminent Person.”

Ecrasez l’anti-infinitude.

Signed, A Restive Horse with a Galled Back.

~

Drop, Visit

~

Too distract’d today. Loss of “connectivity” at home. The University of Michigan, relentlessly discarding old technologies, turn’d Telnet out to pasture.

~

Socks on Parade

Being an occasional batch of poems by inveterate Escholiers de la Tranquillité, or E.T.’s as the French say. “Euh, Tay.” Et bien, oui, c’est sûr. Charles Baudelaire, who tamed Edgar Allan Poe for the wild American masses, did the translation, or so Robert Duncan let drop during our final visit. Robert terribly put out by that Spielberg item: “the nerve of that incompetent shyster, that penny-ante panty-waist” is what I think I heard him say. Hearsay is always so completely fumigatory, just the way ignorance is a kind of theft.

I’d planned to slip in a Charles Wright number here, but realized that wouldn’t wash. After all, I’d seen Charles that day walk briskly up to the see-through door at West Range, Allan Poe’s room preserved, complete with lumpy (soiled) sackcloth mattress and copper washstand. Charles knock’d softly, mumbled a word or two and marched hurriedly off. Clearly not one of the Quiet Boys.

Who was it? Nixon? who used to evoke the Silent Majority for aid and abetment? I knew that quietudinous thing’d got a familiar (and familiarly greasy) ring.

~

Cut the Grass

The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful,
wonderful: I’m surprised half the time:
ground up fine, I puff if a pebble stirs:

I’m nervous: my morality’s intricate: if
a squash blossom dies, I feel withered as a stained
zucchini and blame my nature: and

when grassblades flop to the little red-ant
queens burring around trying to get aloft, I blame
my not keeping the grass short, stubble

firm: well, I learn a lot of useless stuff, meant
to be ignored: like when the sun sinking in the
west glares a plane invisible, I think how much

revelation concealment necessitates: and then I
think of the ocean, multiple to a blinding
oneness and realize that only total expression

expresses hiding: I’ll have to say everything
to take on the roundness and withdrawal of the deep dark:
less than total is a bucketful of radiant toys.

~

City at Night

The blueblack plumes of the fountain
parched my yearning, and a tuft of cellophane
clings fondly to my foot like a diadem.
Down that street an uproar is dwindling,
a small word had been magnified and was
once again shrinking back to its reasonable size,
and Joe Blow drifts down to the riverbank
searching for relics, a man of sorrows.
Then a new turmoil infects another flock;
it’s a good corner on which to sell balm.
A seer bobs along, oblivious or beguiled.
I look for my reflection in a window:
Good night Joe, Good night Joe, Good night.

~

Forms of Forts

Hay Fort

A labyrinth. A pencil shaft of light
wherever four bales couldn’t squarely meet.
The twine tight, lifting as abrading.

A twinge, the prickly collar rubbing,
a scratching rash along the forearm.
The heaviness of the hay in the hot dark.

So earnestly, we set
to building for ourselves.
That there should be something
where before there was nothing.

Then the fervent hours
of catching and pretending,
the dreaming hours of strings
and lucky stones.

If you touch one of your hands
with another, the one that touches
will seem alive, the other like
an object to be awakened.

When winter ended,
the doors were rolled back and the broad day
flooded the loft.
And then we could see, in the swath

Of sunlight, the stray clover bud,
or jewelweed, or fireweed,
or evening primrose,
or robin’s plantain,

Thistle or chicory,
even once great mullein—
the leaf that’s called
velvet dock.

Whatever had been in the mower’s path
was bound and pressed into the hay.

You cannot know both hands at once;
you must choose between the living and the dead.

A labyrinth broken open from above
or worn away at its foundations.

That there might be something when there is nothing
and the source of light confused with holiness.


Snow Fort

Come in, come here, come into
this place that’s been made for us,
that was packed and braced for us
against the collapsing rain.
Come in, it’s a cavern in the white
heart of the sea. Come in
where the silence is like breathing
moonlight, where a faint taste
of iodine will lie on your lips
and you’ll never be cold again.
In every part of space, there is another part of space.
When this is gone, it will not disappear.

~

The Responsibility of Parentage

Being being a mattress-striped whore—

If you should go there, the if-then relation
Fold like a babe in your arums.
The head is neither vacant nor spurious
But an ocean and battle of butterflies

And fecund of churches and holy wars.

Old drunk ejaculated cities.
His eyes were universes,
Eye winks, our annihilation in sightless dark,

Though the unreality of experience makes no ascertainable difference
To the strings of the harp.

Our steel tenement is as a moth fickle, as moments not fixed,
Yea, as harbor waters three blocks from its yellow painted door,
Stare of the eyeball glazed or wink
As where a sailor walks to meet his girl

And perishes again into an imperishable existence.

If you should go there, then you should find it,
The if-then relation, an ocean depending as self,
And if-then oily sea gulls woefully emergent

In the copulation of man with space.

~

A. R. Ammons, James Tate, Susan Stewart, Marguerite Young, in that order.

—Is they is or is they ain’t?


~

Strategic?

Tactical?

Ain’t them fightin’ words?

Oy, the militaristic misadventures of that language-lad. The prostitutes in San Francisco used to have an union called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). I propose a union of Big River writers called PISS-POOR (Put It Somewhere Simple, Patronizing Old Oppositional Rhetoricker).

~

Hic.

The Compleat Complaints

I see in Ron Silliman’s writing today a defense of label-slinging. I haven’t had a minute to read it. Maybe I’ll have more to say. Some of my Silliman complaints (written over the weekend) interlard’d below.

~

Henry Adams call’d his wife “Clover.” He himself was denounced once by a senator for being a “begonia.” Early in the Education he writes that he “grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a vegetable.”

Reading: The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, and loving its prose stylings. And Adams’s sense of the Adamses invariable and unflagging battles with “State Street,” that is, the ravening meretricious materialist instincts of America, the “Kommerz-Staedt.” Hence: Adams’s sense of being born in the wrong century:

“Suppose he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel—would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and the rest, in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street, and ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank?”

He, of course, being Adams, the whole autobiography being deftly put into third person. What is it exactly that makes me think of Flaubert in reading the Education? Is it th’encyclopaediackal, great catalogue-making tendency (see Bouvard and Pe/cuchet), or the corner of the eye caught—like Emma Bovary’s—always looking at the new?

The stylings (as if one were talking about, who, Henry Mancini? Chet Montgomery? “Buffalo wings and radicchio salad follow’d by the musical stylings of Lisa Jarnot?” On the track of something and near losing it, or near finding it, isn’t that what the blogger’s wettest dream should be all about? Loss and recovery in the processual goo? Not a can of canned hauteur in socks, deliver’d up as daily mash?)

We were talking about Henry Adams’s prose style (tout court).

In Berlin, for schooling, aged nineteen: “Apparently Adams, in his rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously logical education.” Rigidly goes up against viciously just as logic gets swatted down as an ideal. Just a page before Adams had recognized: “All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.” Gripped by the idea of force. The State’s ideal of a perfectly polarized and motionless populace.

Out-Nabokoving Nabokov (whose alphabet, like Rimbaud’s vowels, is famously color’d, unchangingly so): “Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a spelling-book—the taste of A-B, AB suddenly revived on the boy’s tongue sixty years afterwards.” Every word a curry. A gallimaufry. What does X taste like? And R?

Adams: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds . . .”

Erratum: for “Politics,” read “Poetics,”

~

I see Dale Smith’s recent (December 24, 2003) imprecation, or snarl, or resolution, or dare:

“Stop reading Ron Silliman’s blog!”

I read Silliman regularly, with impatience and some anger some days, with disappointment and fatigue other days. I sometimes begin to suspect Silliman writes it “for the numbers” as much as anything. Numbers of “readers,” numbers of “hits,” numbers of “posts.” The fact is—in spite of a recent denial (regarding some other matter)—Silliman is a “size queen” (as he, rather coyly I thought, put it). It is part of the whole legacy of the heroic Modernists to which he still tips a hat: write more, write longer, make it bigger. It’s where Silliman starts (with Pound, mostly) and where, it seems, he still lingers. In what part of “The Alphabet” is that line about a desire for another letter after Z?

I don’t plan to stop reading anything, but in the interest of conversation and additional perspectives, I’ll add a few notes on what disturbs me about Silliman and/or the blog:

Notes:

Silliman’s categorical imperative: desire / need to slot each and every writer into an apparently impermeable sock (in the case of the Scholars of Quietude) or an apparently impermeable syntactical fix (in the case of the After-Advance, also known as the Mop-Up Crew). Categorizing is almost invariably a way to control a welter of data, to reduce a smeary contiguousness to a Benday-dotted regularity reproducible as a photograph suitable for any family newspaper. Key word: control.

Categories also serve to limit one’s available reactions to a manageable few, or two. Cf. Henry Adams on polarizing the populace in service to the State. A world codify’d into an “us” and a “them” is world wherein movement stops and a status quo reigns. A world comfortable enough for all those except the inquisitive. To be blunt: “Us versus them” is boosterism, useful mostly to those unwilling or unable to make finer distinctions. For what it allows is heedless dismissal of a whole range of writing, exactly what Silliman is fond of accusing the “mainstream” (can we call it the Big River?) of: benign neglect. As a kid I know is apt to say in moments of disbelief: “What kind of story is that?”

Silliman’s “unworldedness”: an awkward formulation at best. What I’m thinking about are two not unrelated things. First, how little of the “world” goes into Silliman’s blog-writing: what we generally get are critical set-pieces, denuded of the wraps of a life tuck’d in amongst other lives. There’s rarely any sense of a person moving about in the world (particularly when compared with Silliman’s poetry, which, even at its least proprioceptive, is full of seeing, witnessing, a rarely sardonic intelligence noting the goings-on, doing a take on, and taking off from the ongoing world-foibles . . . ) Second, relatedly, there’s little sense of a processual, questioning intelligence in the blog-writing: at its worst a seeping pedantry bubbles its black oil up and slicks down all hint of struggle or doubt; other times it’s Certainty that makes nary a curtain call, but delivers her lines like a parcel, a wrapped-in-foil and tied-with-twine perfect parcel of Peruvian flake. My favorite: Silliman’s toss-off about the “great line break debates” of the ’sixties. I think he indicated these were simply beyond comprehension for anyone who was not there. Apparently, the question of the line—was therein solved. I was fourteen in 1968 and probably missed the news.

Silliman’s terms (of interest, of endearment, “reader agrees to submit to the terms underscored below”): I got no interest in a rehash of the Scalapino brouhaha, though it seem’d rather unconvincing the way Silliman shrugged it off, all the whilst wholly ignoring Tom Beckett’s letter and charge. Silliman has regularly included (in blog-entries) rather mild disagreements to things he’s written, but seems to’ve dodged the bigger ones. What such a tactic does, of course, is give the appearance of engagement, community-mindedness, and openness. See several letters surrounding Bill Lavender’s anthology of southern experimentalists, see, more recently Curtis Faville’s quarrels about the Dydo Stein book. What Silliman wants (and mostly gets) is the ability to control the terms of the debate.

A recent example: why, in what is ostensibly a review of the new “collected” Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman (Viking, 2003), after some desultory (and largely patronizing, see how quickly he gets to Pound) gestures towards Moore’s poetry (he can’t really decide if she’s a “major modernist” or “one of the finest examples of the School of Quietude”) does Silliman prefer to veer off into Grace Schulman’s career (“deeply connected with the School of Quietude at its quietist”) and imply that the book is part of “a long tradition of conservative, conformist editing,” the upshot being, of course, that eventually one of “us” will have to do up a “My Marianne Moore” to rescue the (poor, beleaguer’d doesn’t know its own name) work. Silliman’s evidence: Schulman’s admitting that her editing process had a human side: “In the end, I chose what I loved best by a method I can only describe as ‘conscientious inconsistency.’” And, of course, it is entirely fitting that Silliman, Mr. Categorical Imperative, should cringe and shoot at any sign of lack of consistency (for in its lack lies the place—devilish, ‘tis—where categories perish).

Who was it, Robert Francis, the skinniest man in Amherst, Massachusetts, who wrote something like Potshots for Poetry? I’m glad Silliman’s there as a target; I jes’ wisht he waren’t so big.

~

Yaaah, booo. Even one’s own yaaah, booo’s grow the flaccid hair of tedium, no?

~

Snow sifting down, wet. The weather authorities say eight to twelve inches by midnight. I tend to deride such speculation. Only a couple inches out there now, sevenish, Sunday evening.

Fissiparous Poppy

~

Received:

Green Mountains Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, edited by Neil Shepard (Johnson State College, Johnson, VT 05656) Poetry by Mark Doty, Eamon Grennan, Mark Yakich, and others.

Neil Shepard asked me for poems for a “Comedy in Contemporary American Poetry” issue a couple years ago. I finally sent him some, and he answer’d that he liked them well enough, but didn’t think they were funny. I continue to find that reply funny.

Mark Doty’s joining the fissiparous hordes. “The Pink Poppy” is divided into seven parts. One begins with the line: “Poor Arden’s hiding under my desk,” which I glimpsed as “Poor Auden’s hiding under my desk.” I continue to find that . . . funny.

One of Doty’s parts:

Theories of Beauty

1. Hook that pulls us out of time

2. or a lure to catch us in it

3. Rupture in the boundary
caused by delight, recognition of what
we aren’t, then suddenly are?

3. Longing solidified

4. Flaunts some flaw
—evanescence, radical pink—
and owns that quality
so firmly it triumphs

5. Rilke: You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness . . .

7. The moment budded out of us?

Three questions: First (in German intellectual peevishness and snarl), why the infatuation of Amerikans with that second-rate turdt, Rilke? Second, is “flaunting some flaw . . . so firmly it triumphs” the same as “failing . . . as no other dare fail” (cf. Beckett on van Velde)? Third, isn’t it proper to admit that lately a lot of foolish and perverse gobbledygook goes down for no other reason than to, what, “look quirkily fragmentary and fraught”? I mean, above, 1,2,3,3,4,5,7? What’s up with that shit? This is not an isolated example.

A Mark Yakich poem:

Before vodka arrived on the scene

& ruined almost everything, there was

a perfect little confusion of the dim

hours. There was a contentment with

the short dictionary, the panty

dresses, the leaves of the great books

yellowing. There were fairly young

people swimming along the whited-out

horizons. There were unflattened

soufflés perched at each place setting.

There were fleshy winters, gaudy

Falls, bumped off springs, and summers

Of sponged down bodies. Now,

The only thing we can be certain of

Is that it’s been raining, on and off,

Forever. Or as far as we can tell.

oo

In the cringe department: “delightful over-the-topness” in the Ann
Arbor News.

oo

New Years’s Eve and Orion’s out high-fiving th’assemble’d, saying: “I ain’t cuttin’ up, not tonight!” It’s a mystery to me where my New Year’s Eves’ve gone. I can only account for a handful.

1973. La Plagne. Ski resort in the French Alps. Dashing around kissing French ski-boys at the stroke of midnight. Hitch’d up there in a boat-sized baby blue Buick, skidding around the switchbacks, some crazy American. G. G. and I meeting Martine K., whose father, a doctor in Mulhouse, had a condominium there. He’s the one who, when he learn’d I planned to hitchhike around France, said: “Vagabondage, that’s for the followers of Jesus.”

1979 or so. Paris. Le Palace with Robert, performance by Clifton Chenier. Bourbon in a flask, and black-leather’d duck-tail’d French boys stage-dancing as if C. C. were Chuck Berry. After, accompanying the band back to hotel (Robert’s knack, a charmer’s, for shuckin’ up to the famous, being a New Orleans native help’d). The washboard player with a French girl on each arm. Robert and the saxophone player talking about ham radios. Me cadging drinks, “abstract’d from the all.”

1989 or so. Charlottesville. What was that “African dancing” I work’d myself into a frenzy about, slamming against the futon-cover’d floor, gone hoarse with shouting? Bill and Terry’s in Belmont, John Casey wide-eyed at the ambiance, adding wide eyes to the ambiance.

Early nineties. City Island, The Bronx. J. and I at her parents’ house, waken’d by a call from her brother. Disorientation and guesswork on the fold-out couch.

2003. Watch’d a Gene Kelly / Frank Sinatra vehicle: Take Me Out to the Ball Game. “You’re pretty poetic for a shortstop.” Walk’d Carmenita. Finished the Auster novel just after a tiny barrage of fireworks went off, courtesy the Bulgarian neighbors.

~

Stray Notes

A home-grown frown. A moue askew, a full-blown frown.

oo

Title Swap

Recently made available:

“The Night of the Day in Question”

oo

Fleeting ambition to write critical pieces under the name of Pony Riddlecups. Or Widdlecups.

—Pony Widdlecups’s in her cups, she is.
—Ain’t it so.

oo

The basso continuo of my writing: the slapstick elegiac? Attention and its spawn? Orthographickals and lilt? Simple word study? Saddled by an emotional catch in the throat? Inventory and moue?

oo

Drove with J. and G. down to the Toledo Art Museum. Strongest in glass, whose thrills I know not. Nevertheless, a fine exhibit of 100 years of American photography. One terrific Robert Frank, three French boys in near-motion around a horse. The four figures line out horizontally and movement and low light make a gauze covering, a blur of tension.

In a handful of separate rooms: paintings and prints collect’d under the rubric “East Coast, West Coast.” Being tired of, as I put it elsewhere, the “platitudes of the bi-coastals,” particularly regarding the rest of the country (or, the gods forefend, the world), I had to overcome a certain wariness. Turn’d out (I didn’t read the fine print) to focus mostly on the (mostly) New York abstract-expressionists and the California (mostly) figurists. Though Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series is strongly represent’d by a 1970 piece called Ocean Park No. 32.

Noted a de Kooning, “Lily Pond (1959),” with Monet colors and fiercely big brush-strokes seemingly whipped on in a frenzy. Such is rushing light on water. Noted, too, a Kitaj titled “Notes Toward a Definition of Nobody—a Reverie (1961)” with a scatter of images, most prominently a figure in black high-tops. Apparently drawing on a German legend of Nobody. Kitaj, on the “literariness” he brings to painting: “Some books have pictures and some pictures have books.”

West Coast: Michael McClure’s unreadable strings of spit and growl illustrated by sculptor Robert Graham pen and ink drawings of big-aureoled women.

East Coast: Frank O’Hara’s efflorescent hand scribing “Poem” in lyric cursive next a Franz Kline black blockiness, hard-edged and etch’d tight:

I will always love you
though I never loved you

a boy smelling faintly of heather
staring up at your window

the passion that enlightens
and stills and cultivates, gone

while I sought your face
to be familiar in the blueness

or to follow your sharp whistle
around a corner into my light

that was love growing fainter
each time you failed to appear

I spent my whole self searching
love which I thought was you

it was mine so briefly
and I never knew it, or you went

I thought it was outside disappearing
but it is disappearing in my heart

like snow blown in a window
to be gone from the world

I will always love you

What perfect balance to reside in two commas, how they toss something out for our inspection:

the passion that enlightens
and stills and cultivates, gone

and

it was mine so briefly
and I never knew it, or you went

I’d throw in my lot with the New Yorkers in a Michigan minute, I suppose, if forced to choose. Lately thinking about Stacy Szymaszek’s Gam project, training the opticks—the whaler’s brass telescope—on the Great Lakes region, counting the flukes and spumes. And so plot a city of disparates? (Bound to be read by some city-slickers as “desperates,” that is, desperate to get to one of two coastal metropolises?) Not me.

I am return’d here (Ann Arbor) to the state of my birth. I shot squalling into sentience in Ypsilanti, a dozen or so miles to the east. And’ve lived in (relatively) few places (I keep hearing Frank Sinatra: “and lieu, I had a few, lieu, too few to mention”—or make it “too fieu . . .”) in fifty years. An inchoate trajectory (repressing departures and returns): Willow Run, Michigan; Vanderbilt, Michigan; Gaylord, Michigan; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Ithaca, New York; Paris, France; London (actually Wimbledon), England; Charlottesville, Virginia; North Garden, Virginia; Albany, New York. Three countries. Three states. Ten lieu.

Somewhere I decided that it didn’t matter where I lived, that place determined little of what I did: that is, that I did the same things no matter where I lived. Too, I recall terrible longings for “an American field” at points, living in Paris. And the field I pictured: a couple miles outside of Ann Arbor, abandon’d farmland just beginning to show first stage forest reclamation growth, buckthorn and hawthorn invading out the hedgerows.

Much of bird identification consists of knowing what one would expect to see in a locale: that is learn’d by living there. Is it a hazard (a provincialism) of, say, the San Franciscan, that he cannot see beyond a purview that keeps him telling himself: “Ain’t nothing but migrants in the provinces”? Aye, ‘tis. ’Faut rue such hazards.

oo

An afternoon with G. at the natural history museum, the one with the black panthers out front. Or lions. In 1966 and 1967 I would go there and look at the dusty birds taxidermy’d into adequate poses in the glass display cases. I thought vaguely that nobody except me ever enter’d through the wrought iron doors. Now it booms with kid-mischief cheer, or howling petulance of the bored, or the patient-stridency of the sure parent, full of honorable heaps of misinformation. G. likes the dioramas, and is righteous to defend recent history against the transgressions of the eonists. Considering a fossil found in Connecticut, dating 175,000,000 years back, he’s quick to check: “That wasn’t Connecticut then, was it?” Given the measurable changes in the Connecticut “masses,” erm, it, might, well, ‘ve, been . . .

Noted on a placard next a brain-shaped rock: “CONCRETION OF IMITATIVE FORM.”

Need to find: People of the Three Fires, about Michigan Native-Americans.

oo

A Mark Twain sentence (Tom Sawyer): “The artist erected a man in the front yard, that resembled a derrick.”

Another: “Tom drew an hourglass with a full moon and straw limbs to it and armed the spreading fingers with a portentous fan.”

oo

G. gives me three pieces of paper, stapled together.

The first reads:

collecting poems

using sources/getting books and selecting poems
using your own poems
selecting

Select many/then narrow down to 4

The second reads:

common questions collectors ask

How many pages should my book be? 26-38
how should my book be bound? it depends, staples, glue, tape
Do I have a deadline? 25 feb.
Should I draw, get somone else to or not have drawings? Totally up to
yOU!!!!

The third:

write a list of sources

—————————————————
———————————————-
——————————————- 2 suggestions A bad case of the giggles
——————————————- The new kid on the block
——————————————-

book for kids or adults/ can be both
Introduction by ———————— the author

Written-in above the suggestions: Breeze and
Rubbing Torsos

Crossed out: 2 (replaced with 4)

Taped to the page: getting sources (angled, near top) and
only 3 poems can be by the collector (near bottom)

Written, with arrow pointing to final blank: your name

G., my man! Future anthology warrior! I salute you!

oo

Reading Paul Auster’s Oracle Night after a short exchange with Tom Beckett about the title. Beckett’d included it in a list of somehow essential books and I thought he’d meant a book of the same title by Michael Benedikt. And wrote a presumptuous correction in which I even posit’d a notion of how he’d (Beckett) come to such a mix-up, remembering Benedikt’s curt, vaguely surreal dialogues and likening them to what I recall’d of Auster’s New York Trilogy, which I read, desultorily, mid-eighties. Truth is, the only line I unabashedly recall is: “My real name is Mr. Sad.” And that only because I’d insert’d it into a long poem call’d “My Heart and All That,” along with Silliman’s “Haul ass, kitten,” Highsmith’s “it was merely a piece of aesthetic luck,” and Nabokov’s “A book lives longer than a girl.” My bad, Tom.

Auster: “For comic relief, I took up smoking again.”

“Narrative ballast.”

A footnote in Oracle Night quotes Samuel “the other Beckett” Beckett’s remark (in dialogue with Georges Duthuit) about Bram van Velde: “van Velde is . . . the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world.”

Why do I immediately think of Lawrence Welk saying “Wunnerful!”

oo

A late afternoon nap and a walk. Half-moon pasted up against a clear blue sky: dusk after a hard-blowing cold day.

“You say that it’s over baby,
You say that it’s over now,
But still you hang around, now come on,
Won’t you move over.”

Pearl.

The ditties of the under-being that surface in the rhythms of motion. I knew a woman in Paris, a pianist, who claim’d she couldn’t walk without music in her head. Not just any music. I didn’t understand the mechanicks of the thing, certain intervals, scales ascending, or descending, an incomprehensible whatnot. What I loved was how she admitted that the Rolling Stones “Miss You” fit the requirements for walking perfectly.

oo

Robert Motherwell’s love of the color of the Gauloises cigarette pack, the “Caporal.” At the museum in Toledo, a smallish print with a torn blue wrapper collage’d to it. Next to it a large print of what I think were Motherwell’s three favor’d stones—for lithography—at some renown’d print shop. The largest was Gauloises blue, or nearly. So lately I’ve been measuring all blues against that shade. Is the 30 mg. Paxil tablet close to Gauloises blue? Is the sky at nine o’clock this morning, looking east a few degrees about tree level, brightness temper’d down by the snowclouds ravening the west?

Too poor in Paris to afford “blonde” cigarettes, I smoked Gauloises “bout filtre”—the filters nothing more, it seem’d, that tightly roll’d up tissue paper. My teeth, crooked, got black, and with unwash’d lank hair and wire-rimmed glasses, I fancy’d myself a German intellectual, an exile, a brilliant misfit. Too many Fassbinder movies. Or Herzog, or Wim Wenders. Crazy Klaus Kinski claiming he lick’d prostitutes’ pudenda (a prudent word). Sturm und Drang in my scarred room above the Corsican anarchist’s restaurant. Herzog standing in the Amazon being interview’d during the filming of Aguirre: “At night the birds don’t sing. They scream and cry in agony!”

oo

Notes move in eddies and currents, tumble over one another, merge, turn off into a tiny pool, reappear further downstream where the scenery’s stopped including conifers, gone to deciduous renegades amongst the junkyards and railyards and city parks with mallards and domestic crossbreeds, mottled and few. I forget some things, the desire for some flags, or new amatory demands blow up blotting all beyond. Shiny mylar balloons helium’d off into the winter trees, slack garbage, but bright. Intention of a few days reprieve off the daily to and fro shuffle: to catch up, to tie up loose ends, to get down to brass tacks. If I seem an insubstantial wayfarer, the way is lit by what’s becoming, or leaving. No grief in motion. A long lazy diffuse black contrail of crows homing is my tagline.

~

A couple of weeks back I went off looking for Alfred Starr Hamilton poems in Epoch, remembering Baxter Hathaway saying something like “Oh, Hewitt decided Starr Hamilton was the great neglect’d American genius and tried to convince everybody within earshot of it,” detecting a strange combination of disdain and admiration in his voice. Which is probably right: admire the quixotic youth, disdain the idea of genius.

Starr Hamilton’s first publish’d poem appeared in Epoch in the Fall 1962 issue (Vol. XII, No. 3), next to poems and stories by Howard Ant, Paul Blackburn, Hollis Summers, Ronald Perry, and Stephen (sic) Katz. No sign of the anthology wars here, both “camps” present and accounted for.

(I admit it: I am growing suspicious of claims of a grand historical division demarcated and authenticated by the Allen / Hall, Pack, Simpson gatherings. In an age seemingly crammed with poets and those poetic offspring Mr. Jealousy and Mrs. Spite, in a country whose anthem should echo Felix Pappalardi and Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen”—”you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be getting mine,” I suspect there’s interest in some quarters in maintaining (and abetting) the story-aura of a grand division: it makes it easier for one to slot oneself into a grand tradition of raw denial and outsiderhood, and a concomitant heroic struggle. E—as we abused longhairs used to say—nuff.)

Here’s the Starr Hamilton poem:

Crabapples

Why didn’t you know of a hurt?
Words
hurt
If
I
never spoke
to you

about a hard apple
that can have been gobbled
and gobbled some more and

about a rooster

that clutched at the truth’s breast
that can have clawed and clawed
at the good earth
that can never have been yourself

who never hurt
who never knew

of an idiot poet of your own hard kind and breeding
who ate dyspepsia for bread

“Alfred Starr Hamilton writes from Monclair, New Jersey” is all the contributor’s note admits. Which fits my memory of what was said of him a dozen years later: he lived there in an SRO hotel, sending out huge batches of poems. And probably drinking: there are the kinds of syntactical skitterings here that I associate, too, with Spicer—”can have been gobbled.” And a messy nonchalance and quickness that I associate with alcoholism.

In the subsequent issue of Epoch, seven Starr Hamilton poems, label’d an “event” by the editors, with the note that “we think [he] is one of our important discoveries in recent years.”

And Back

Back to back
And back to the factory
And back

And figures and facts
And back to the bank
And back

And back of a pencil
On the back
Of a little yellow postcard

That measures you and I and Jack
and Jill of our ups and downs

And back
Of our grave travels

Which seem’d first Stein, then less so, and uncovers a connection between factory and fact hitherto unnoted and likewise grave and travels. It is partly in the atomizing of words, visually and aurally, that I see a measure of alcoholism. “A noise / Annoys.”

*

Liquid’ll

That’s a pint of red daisies
That has been sent to your florist
That he has become your drunkard

*

Tampa, Florida

To sting a centipede around
A pineapple bend, on a peach—truth is
Studies on the breast—abysmally

A picture of a tramp is being excruciated
Betwixt a splintered parked bent bench

And truthfully
And in Africa
A pink pigmy
Sits stupidly on a bamboo spear
In the hark wide open jungle

Which is Le douanier Rousseau’s Africa, Starr Hamilton as American naïf.

It seems that Geof Hewitt—editor, too, of Quickly Aging Here, an odd Cornell-heavy anthology of the early ’seventies—was Starr Hamilton’s champion champion. He had, briefly, a magazine called Kumquat and a little research shows he publish’d (in Montclair, N.J.) a Starr Hamilton broadside “set and printed by hand” titled “Officers Shoes,” and a chapbook titled Sphinx, both in the ’sixties. Hewitt also wrote the introduction to the Jargon Society’s Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton that Jonathan Williams publish’d in 1970. Other publishers: Greg Kuzma’s Best Cellar Press did something called The Big Parade and Blue Moon something called War and Peace. And, in 1985, Crawlspace (Belvidere, Illinois) did a small thing title’d An orange drink at Nedick’s.

~

Arguably, the greatest artists ceaselessly reinvent themselves. Dylan’s a good example. Chameleonic with a will and a vengeance. I drug home two fat bound volumes of Epoch and cannot desist. One more glimpse of a writer in previous invention: “to be ambushed / alive is not a simple choice.” Kathleen Fraser, 1962.

West Side Spinster

The dawn is smoky with pigeons,
and boys, like slender sticks,
paw the waking air, poking holes
in October. Mornings ago
it was I who mounted those wild stairs
they stride, tossing twigs to the corners
of my room—still warm from their carrying.
I bear them no grudge; to be ambushed
alive is not a simple choice.

I remember a tire-swing hoisted high
on a winding rope; and the tang, when first I was pushed
to taste the open sky with legs outthrust;
and the lightning-bugs snuffed by the muffling glass
near my bed; and the float of country leaves to the crust
of love, and their solemn burn. All I know is
we burned those leaves in the dark.
And their smell still sticks
to my pockets. And their smoke still clings.

Now I am city born. On October mornings
the neighboring resthome pastes its bulging dames
against my eyes. I can hear their torn slippers flopping
close behind as I enter the earth with a vision
of wrinkles, reminded how the day swings down
from a sallow sky to drink me up.

~

Received:

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Lydia Davis (Viking, 2003)

Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Knopf, 2003)

Epigraph: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Which reminds me both of hearing Isabel Allende talk about magical realism in South America as being mostly “realist” not gussied up with any magic (she read odd newspaper clippings to illustrate, something about villagers somewhere selling shit, or buying shit, or looking for a golden shit)—and—of O’Hara’s line about Lowell’s confessionalisms being used to excuse a lot of bad behavior (and here, as usual, it’s likely I’ve misremember’d both the quotation and the principles.

Selected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (Penguin, 1999)

Circa 1979. Borges reading at the Beaubourg. Roger Caillois reading translations. Except: Borges never said a word. He sat on stage with a kind of embarrass’d dignity, head atilt, and presumably listen’d whilst French literary pomp (unctuous, royal, veering to the tasteless) went down for him. And was led off like a prize heifer at the end.

The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 2003), edited by Peter Stitt. Paintings by Haitian Armand Fleurimond, introduced by Elizabeth Spires, an essay by Albert Goldbarth (“Roman Erotic Poetry”), a story (“The Real Eleanor Rigby”) by Alice Fulton, poems by Debora Greger, Patricia Goedicke, John Latta.

I like to see what Albert Goldbarth is up and puttering about about, wordier than mating habits of the mongoose monographs, whatever. Logorrhoea’s been known to grab me threateningly by the collar, too. He arrived at Cornell about 1974 or so and upset the local pecking order considerably. Mostly because he was a wisecracker, mouth-swift (mocking my name with some line about the Church of Latta-Day Saints), and full of himself. Hotshot: new Doubleday book deplorably titled Jan. 31 under belt. And we exquisite undergraduates loved so to plague poor Albert. We’d call him up pretending to be Donald Justice. We’d ask pointedly stupid questions of him. We’d steal apartment-lobby philodendrons and Marimekko hangings after after-reading parties at Goldbarth’s. He left after a year. I thing it’d been a visiting appointment anyhow. Though I think he’d not fared much better with some others—MFAs, faculty—around either. Tell you what, Albert. Here’s a poem “to rectify my snottinesses.” Here’s “Intercourse in Bad Weather”:

Words in transit warp with the cold.
Your voice sieved through the receiver’s
seven holes hits my ear as a newspaper photo
reassembles your face for my ear: there’s more
of you lost in-between the dots than rides them.
A smile hooks like a horse-shoe

on a telephone pole, its spat word speeding
onward through the wire, or a nuance uses
itself up mid-way to my house in shooting
juice through a bird: some hobo lifting his supper
from a snowbank pries your tongue
from its beak. And here I’m guessing your cunt,

eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ass are each which
of the phone’s seven holes; or trying to translate
the ancient language of misinterpretation.
Better to open the door, step over the newspaper
that’s my bottom stoop, and follow the wire
back through those neighborhoods words are bruised

and bloodied in. To go’s no breeze; when I dialed
the weather lady, her taped voice sad flow snurries
by late. It’s a cold trudge through that.

Mmm. Never read that before. Struck by the prevalence of metaphor, a shape-shifting world which, one could argue, is apt to the “situation”: undefined loss of a woman, more misunderstandings via the telephone, blame the weather, hell, blame the weather “lady” (that is, it’s not the weather at all). Also struck by the inaccuracy of the metaphors—to say the (seven) holes in the telephone receiver “sieve” the voice, to say a smile (why a smile? I thought we had a p. o.’d woman here) “hooks like a horse-shoe” after having “spat” a word (“the smile spat back”?), to say those same sieve / receiver holes represent bodily orifices: ain’t that a stretch, Al? Suspend’d my disbelief on a balloon what took of like a rocket. There’s a way to do this—James Tate used to succeed regularly at it, things becoming a succession of other things, Chris Stroffolino runs a similar program by often enough—but Goldbarth’s here’s the limp manifestation of the récherché.

Is the concatenation of the hobo’s snowbank, the prying of tongue from beak, and the proximity of “cunt” a sign misogynist alarms should ring forth? I don’t know, though I suspect so. The poem reminds me of another, one I wrote. Title: “Ithaca,” same era. I can say with near-certainty it was written in 1972.

Our animal sensibilities have grown
hard through fear and ceaseless myopia.
On the telephone, your voice is acrid
like a lizard stiffened by formaldehyde.
Your words smell of science. As if,
stretched and pinned to beeswax,
you had become weak-bladdered,
corpulent, and morose.
You cannot talk now. I become conscious
of the noise of the splitting of your skin.
Like the even humming of a long wire
that sags under the weight of lies and ice
along a hard-packed road out of here.

Presented without comment? Or what’s that little torture-device midsection, the language of biology, sure, how one does dissections, but . . . Is the poetry of the time rife with such stuff? Sure is.

~

Ping’d, Twerp

~

What does it mean, pinged?

~

The C-dog and I
under the cockeyed umbrella
barking at the rain.

~

I like that word, twerpy.

~

Whatever happen’d to Howard Ant?

~

Abeyance: same root as yawn.

~

Dylan line running in (ruining) my head: “Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.”

~

It’s partly that I am empty-head’d. It’s partly that I like to put different and various things next to each other. Argument by selection and placement. That’s all imagism is. That’s all the New Sentence is. That’s all renga is.

~

Davenport: “a grammar of images . . . rather than a grammar of logical sequence.”


~

Davenport: “The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they figure. The ellipse, which we feel to be the absence of predication, is the invisible line of attraction between particle and particle.”

~

For Pound, the image. For Silliman, the sentence. For Davenport, the prose cube.

~

For Basho, a history of images. Basho: “Tu Fu wrote:

The whole country devastated
only mountains and rivers remain.
In springtime, at the ruined castle,
the grass is always green.

We sat a while, our hats for a seat, seeing it all through tears.

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams.”

Sam Hamill adds a note:

“Basho’s poem is also inspired in part by a poem of Saigyo’s, written at the gravesite of the poet Fujiwara Sanekata who died in exile in 998:

He left us nothing
but his own eternal name—
just that final stroke.
On his poor grave on the moor,
one sees only pampas grass.”

In The Essential Basho, Matsuo Basho, translated from the Japanese by Sam Hamill (Shambhala, 1999).

~

Walt Whitman throws off the coarse green blanket, yawns, stretches, smiles big.

~

Placement, overlay, nudge, reminder, series. What makes a tradition.

~

Gazzera

~

Received (Order'd through Peter Riley Books, 27 Sturton Street, Cambridge, CB1 2QG, U.K.):

Wittgenstein's Devil: Selected Writing 1978-1998, by Alan Halsey (Stride, 2000)

Lives of the Poets: A Preliminary Count, by Alan Halsey & Martin Corless-Smith (Ispress, 2002)

A Robin Hood Book, by Alan Halsey (West House Books, 1996)

Magpie Words: Selected Poems 1970-2000, by Richard Caddel (West House Books, 2002)


~

Received:

Distant Noise, by Jean Frémon, translated from the French by Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky, and Cole Swensen, cover by Louise Bourgeois (Avec Books, 2003)

Cris d'approbation.

~

Crise d'appropriation

T. writing me, warning that appropriating and "scattering" odd tags of Shakespearean et al. lingo may defeat the reader, trumping (and removing) any serious attention that that reader builds in reading.

My obsession is with orthography. And diction. And mix. That lingo follows me home nights. Probably I done overdone that particular schtick. I have a "history" of overdoing.

~

Weekend of torpor mitigated by bouts of seasonal guilt. Mad little horrified dashes out into the Kommerz-Staedt (which is everywhere) and back with guilt-lacerated booty. The wrong articles for the wrong people. Walks with Carmen through the profusely-lit neighborhood: kleig light icicles, huge inflated Santa Claus dolls blocking sidewalks, sticking out tall, impeccably-shined black boots to trip th'unwary, giant lightbulb-construct'd reindeer hoo-hawing in the shrubbery, and one petulant nasally canned voice singing endless winter-wonderland refrains out of the convulsive manic-rocking of a miniature hobby-horse.

~

What would an expressionist writing look like: an Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, Blue Rider expressionism?

~

At Borders the strike continues. Few picket, cold. Last week someone paint'd Blood Money and Slaughters Diversity on the sidewalks in the front of the entrance: using it as a handy excuse, management broke off negotiations for a couple days.

~

Tangles of a dream of meeting J. She play'd a tape of high-pitch'd chanting call'd badade, pronounced with long a's. Also nova badade. Jump to a sort of cafeteria, mostly Chinese sitting in rows, listening to "performances," doors guarded. I decide to try to exit and am able to do so, heroicks not possible here, I'm completely ignored, J. is in the "audience" watching. Jump to me riding a bicycle against traffic. Jump to a jukebox, labels pointing to Indian music, reading Dufek's Badade, Derlinsky's Nova Badade.

~

Hell, I don't know.

~

Not Dufek, not Derlinsky. Place-holders for a name I miss'd. Forgot.

~

Sitting in the car in a crowded parking lot with G. yesterday. He want'd to hear more of the sitar and drums music on the radio.

~

Saudade?

~

Thumb Pump

~

Skid-skittering in by bicycle, odd hibernal insect. Thinking how I whack'd a snowbank a few years back: thumb hanging down like a pump handle.

~

Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to G. "[Applausive titters.]" is how Mark Twain puts it. Just like that. In the middle of the superintendent talking some old condescension rag in Sunday School.

~

And reading the Victor Brombert memoir. To myself.

~

The picture of Bruce Andrews reading Newsweek troubles my sleep.

Iced for the Age

~

Scratched out some gobbledegook about the Poetics tempest and think I'll ice in down for storage for now. Hierarchickal squabbling is tiresome. Is it my escapist self that yawns and shrugs so at the meagrest argument? Or is it this particular argument? I'd be the first to admit I find Silliman's public writing of late tremendously irritating, and I'm all too willing to make sport and derision of that fact. In the current hubbub, the Bear's put up a bewilder'd sort of physiognomy, point'd a paw at His Rumpledness, and spoke: "Gosh, Leslie, what's got your panties in a wad? Couldn't be me . . ." And then proceeds by bizarre innuendo to associate Scalapino with Joe McCarthy for not naming names. Standard way to deflect the heat. All heck? --My neck.

~

"To be attached to the life of words means to take possession or repossession of sounds and signs that are charged with echoes, reminiscences, unexpected alliances, surprising betrayals, yet also carry at their core a permanence that promises an eventual return home."

Victor Brombert, in Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth (W. W. Norton, 2002)

Bullying

~

Dirty laundry.

~

Ron Silliman's getting some upsides-the-heads on the Poetics list. Leslie Scalapino and Tom Beckett. My tuppence: insecurity only builds a (temporarily) floatable boat. Come here and get your comeuppence. Bully.

~

Odd hush there. At Poetics. Is it seasonal or waiting for the bear to notice its tormentors and begin to growl?

~

Reasons humbly
offer'd why

the name
of Ron

Silliman should
be left

out of
the Act

of Oblivion:

~

Being (a little) idiotic. A little idiot.

~

Sunspots. Crankiness.

~

He's the man, with the plan, he got five dollah in 'is hand, he's Mistra . . .

Clubbingly Deft

~

Trop.

Inarticulatable.

My mouf's fool.

~

A sloppy day out. Scrambling with stuff to complete by mid-week next. Probably ought to say I'd amend my assessment of the Colson Whitehead. I liked the tiny psychological portraits of New Yorkers clubbing, deft, recognizable types.

~

How tired today of Eugenio and Leander, of noble views of God. How tired of the slow pac'd caravan of . . . and the poor Chaldean with the naked eye.

~

Belly full of Indian food: naan, goat curry, spice'd tea.

~

A mystery: distinct memory of reading an article in the New York Times Magazine, I think, about Richard Howard doing a new translation of A la recherche du temps perdu. Maybe ten or fifteen years back. Wha happen'd?

Dawdling with the new Lydia Davis thing. All one can do with Proust is dawdle.

~

Angry little hybrid of a virus snatch'd out the guts of the machine and waved triumphantly aloft. Arthropoda or annelid?

~

Quite a pretty story it is, by Peter Grievous.

~

A book called The association, &c.

~

Mairead Byrne is writing.