Outright

~

Appalled is what I am by the outright nose-thumbing in the vague direction of “fiction.” Particularly in a “wing” of the written arts and sciences that seemingly pines for a dissolution of genre. The world ain’t paratactic, it ain’t pointillist, it ain’t a matter of amassing a series of discrete particulars and lining ’em up in the penny arcade, ducks all in a row. Sequences persist, and language can be made to mimick the way one thing occurs as a result of another thing. And, to indicate the extent to which the first thing changes. Which is narrative, which is character. I like what Alice Notley says (quoted in Rasula’s Syncopations): “What a service to poetry it might be to steal story away from the novel & give it back to rhythm & sound, give it back to the line.”

~

If Marjorie Perloff is sidling toward an argument against narrative by means of her conclusion in Wittgenstein’s Ladder that ”Description . . . replaces explanation,” the lost term in the argument may be “relation.” According to Rasula,

Perloff derives the term [description] from Wittgenstein himself: “We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place.” Wittgenstein’s preference for description is explicitly grounded in aesthetics: “Aesthetics is descriptive. What it does is to draw one’s attention to certain features, to place things side by side so as to exhibit these features.”

Wherein note must be made, that it is the arraying of “things” that throws up th’aesthetic scrim for our attention. That is, meaning occurs in relation (as Ronald Johnson says: “Ratio is all.”) Whether it’s fitting to argue that putting relation into play leads inexorably to narrative feints, I do not know. I do know it is difficult to read a series of descriptive items without beginning to assemble story-like elements. Ronald Johnson again: “Linkings, inklings, / around the stem & branching of the nervetree— / shudder and shutterings, sensings. / / SENSE sings. / “A world where chaos and cosmos are interlaced and superimposed, / where anything may happen, / but nothing happens twice.” / / —perceive! perceive! Reality is ‘make’ believe.”

~

An experiment. Two selections, four contiguous sentences each:

The city made a yellow amoeboid splash on the road map of the state. Sleep was choppy, unproductive. My car was getting keyed. Lots of hastened engravery on the side panels, the trunk.

And:

The sound of a foghorn, but no sight of fog. They went into Safeway just to get into the cool conditioned air. Two boys ask the old man what he’s doing with a net and a bucket. He throws the empty beer bottle out into the bay.

Is it immediately evident which is thieved out of “fiction,” which out of “poetry”? Aren’t sentences omnivores, willing to graze in whatever pastureland they be put? More importantly, shouldn’t “one” be voracious, rather than delimiting, if one is engaged in a study of sentences and what sentences do? Isn’t one more likely to find specimens of note in locales where a species thrives? If “one” is looking for sentences, aren’t novels—based on some simple population theory—probably the place to look? Look to James Joyce, with’s investigations of stylistic tics in a whole slew of “minor” genres within “fiction.”
~

Shrill, likely. It’s the self-satisfy’d dismissal, or the obsequious “guilty pleasure” confessional tone of admission (“Spent the weekend reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Lazy Lover. What a relief! What tripe! Today working diligently through “A”.”) It’s that moral superiority thing (“nothing to learn there”) that sends me—pickaxe in teeth—cramponing up the friggin’ wall. Writers ain’t “specialists,” and “one’s” got to do more’n cover the lousy waterfront. Try:

Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired the sheath-like contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barbershops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell.

Or try:

Most memorable for the bridegroom Debs and the bride Kate had been the cordiality paid to them in Washington, D.C., by the Robert Ingersolls, something that would be long remembered and not tarnished by the atavistic terrors soon to tear the fabric of the democracy of these United States when it would become apparent to some of its critics that the true anarchists were not the huddled masses but the czars of iron and steel and other merchandise who, as Debs would put it, were russianizing American life.

They’s sentences out there.

~

There’s a terrific chapter about Clayton Eshleman (“Notes on Clayton Eshleman”) in Jed Rasula’s Syncopations. Most of it publish’d in 1987 (though exactly where I do not know—for context, the book needs a list of where its pieces originated). One thing I learn’d was how in the ’seventies Eshleman wrote and publish’d poems under the name Horrah Pornoff, apparently not-so-identifiably Eshlemanian works even to the cognescenti, though Rasula, at least, suspect’d th’authorship. As Rasula says, the poems “have a character apart and make a convincing case for Eshleman as a partial author of heteronymy.” I like Rasula’s identification of Eshleman: “Imagine Blake’s image of Nebuchadnezzar as a portrait of Eshleman; those pelt drips off his flank are adhesive tentacles. Having carried so much of other people’s writing on his back (as translator), some of it stuck and has come off in chunks.” And noting how, in Eshleman’s poems: “all forms of life are raffishly prolific and uncontainable . . . Anything organic, if given a suitably grotesque space—a tunnel, an intestine, a cave—blurts out indelicate promptings . . .” Think of Eshleman as King Lear brooding on the copulatory / excretory world: “The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive . . . / The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to ’t / With a more riotous appetite. / Down from the waist they are Centaurs, / Though women all above . . . / There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit, / Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!” Too, Rasula, in commenting on the multiplying notes to poems in Eshleman’s recent books, remarks rightly how the text is “a worksite,” a research center, not a performance space where the gladiatorial poetic ego struts.” Such remarks turn me toward the work—a difficult body, surely—with renewal. What more can criticism do?

~

Identifying the prose, in order: I Looked Alive, by Gary Lutz (out of a story call’d “Chaise Lozenge”), Paradise, by Ron Silliman, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov, and Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by Marguerite Young.

~

To work.

Thin

~

The Heights, continued

A serpent
Reach’d up
And clove
To th’ivory
Egg of
The moon,
A ludic
Occluding occur’d,
Cur’s work,
A salivating
To devour.
A raggedy
Scrawl of
Honkers—miserably
Writ V—
Power’d a
Line emphatic
Into that
Single high
Means of
Seeing.
         The notion
Of ‘Worldly
Goods,’ th’operable
Manufactory of
Thing and
Another, thing
Disposably obliging
Thing to
Move along,
To end
Its rubbishy
Days heap’d
Up, piled
High, useless
And without
Merest hint
Of that
Criminal excess
Of production
Words and
Man are
Known for,
‘That’s disgusting.’
If you
Think ‘group
Formation’ is
Anything besides
A marketing
Ploy, you
Ain’t been
Reading Henry
Ford. History
Is bunk-
Ing down
With whomsoever’ll
Get name’d
‘Product of
The year’
And pull
You, bootstrap,
Along with
He. Or
She. Be
Certain not
To mistake
The commune
For th’assembly
Line, purveyor
Of modestly
Cheaper goods,
Modestly made.
Like dimity,
‘A kind
Of course
Linzie-wolzie,’
Rugged cotton,
Rig of
Th’rugged individualist,
Double-thread’d
For breeches,
And strong.
Dimity is
An admissible
Wearable, and
Likely a
Woman’s name
Somewhere near
Sioux Falls,
South Dakota,
In ‘waste
Acreage’ where
Some government
Body or
Other’s probably
Staked down
The outer
Reaches of
A grid,
Something to
Measure the
Numerous ways
We humans,
Group’d, got
For wrecking
The Ball
Of Earth
We inhabit.
Th’appellation of
Of that
Woman is
A kind
Of fabric,
A “stuff,”
Come unmenacingly,
That is
To say,
Without pejorate
Intent, out
Of French,
“The” French
“Étoffe,” meaning
material, fabric,
A made
(Fabricated) thing.
In sleep
The words
Pile up—
Reprobate, impoverish’d—
Scatter-drafts
Of heaven—
To make
A hellish
Array, inconstant
And inconsistent,
A jism-y
Stew of
Plausible unused.
To meliorate
The smug.
Fixity. To
Obfusk the
Brilliant. To
Smarm richly
The rich.
I do
Like what
Friedrich Schlegel
Says here:
‘Wit is
Absolute social
Feeling, or
Fragmentary genius.’
He finishes
The one-
Two punchiness
Immediately, (on
The heels)
With: ‘One
Should drill
The holes
Where the
Board is
Thickest.’ Oh
And where’s
The ‘one’
Hinting that
The mistake
Most critics
Make is
Akin to
The flaw
Mozart’s music
Is so
Often accused
Of: ‘an
Occasionally excessive
Use of
The wind
Instruments.’ Oh
I could
Quote lines
And aphorisms
By Schlegel
All day.

~

To work.

Ruckus

~

Maybe it’s sheer fatigue that makes us into raiders. Unable to sustain a line of argumentation, skittering about like skinks, blue-tail’d, high-tailing it after whatever song drops its clanging bronze coins out of the sky the moment the wind drops. And drop it doth. And pounce we dooth.

I read a book for the way it allows a trajectory—any—arc, or beeline, or the broken-field run of a rabbit start’d—to etch itself into my mind-nodes. Dot to dot, or stringing out, arrowing off—thought’s a fine corrosive, an acid bath. If, puddling up, it cuts too deep the brain-slick surface:

th’argument’ll get mired in a tarry complexity. Inkpot, rubber brayer, laid paper, points of register. Press the paper itself into the eaten-out gaps. The word “yeti,” I read, is bastard of the Sherpa yeh teh, meaning “that thing.” So the unspeakable inhabits th’ordinary, the neutral,

the vague, and makes a proper home. The word’s “body” changing, just the way mine does, though remaining me, “so furry and familiar,” “so fleshly and exuberant.” Rasula: “Eurocentric history . . . hierarchically disposes humans from top to bottom and center to periphery,

distinguishing those empowered to speak from those bereft of speech. Ironically, canonical figures are certifiably mute by virtue of having spoken ‘for us all.’ They can no longer speak for (or defend) themselves, as the force of their signification is redirected toward a central chronicle, a supreme fiction.”

A raider is inadmissible. Reader / raider. He who thieves th’available simply because it is available, not because it “is right,” or “is necessary to th’argument.” Michel de Certeau: “Heteronomy is at the same time the stimulus and what is inadmissible. It is a wound in rationalism.” A raider dandles

Irretrievable bits in that hole. What pours out of that hole is vicissitude and attribute, the twittering mournful sparrow that is Isis, the hovering hawk that is Isis. When I get near the mythological my hands itch, my tongue, like a mah jongg tile, the west wind, takes to clattering against my teeth. A ruckus.

Schlegel, who is an aphorism himself, says: “It is a sublime taste always to like things better when they’ve been raised to the second power. For example, copies of imitations, critiques of reviews, addenda to additions, commentaries on notes. This taste is very characteristic of us Germans

whenever it’s a matter of making something longer; and of the French when it promotes brevity and vacuity.” Hunh? Where I be? One “plunges” out into the fever-wrapped parcel of night, el doggo tether’d to fist—and the word-panick begins. Something about “rid-runt giganticism”

of the canon-mongers, something about “the mitochondrial hordes, the minuscule blades,” something about the preferable babble of the builder-uppers, le facteur Cheval, Simon Rodia, Antonio Gaudi, “Merz” Schwitters, “Collector” Proust, “The Collective” Joyce, &c., the unstoppable

adders-on, the architect-writers—for there is no architect who makes big and whittles down. Versus the pristine, clean, stripped, sheer. And Bof! dog-walkers partout, partout, partout. And dog yak ensuing, even the gimpy moon joining in. So that:

Rasula’s (Paul Mann’s) idea of an hermetic avant-garde, an undisclosed avant-garde seem’d, emerging, to answer my call. A practice defiantly not on its way to the market, not on its way to shout out like a fishwife in the public square (Goo’bye, Blogland . . .),

a completely lay-about practice, and wholly un-recuperable. Who needs estrangement more than myself from myself? And I don’t, thank god, always know what I am doing. So let’s do our alchemickal tricks hid and skip the labeling-compulsion—borrowing Rasula for a moment—

“the diagnostic task of the labeling impulse has long served as a preemptive strike,” which neatly brings to light the George W. Bush side of one of the “major” “post-avant” “critical” “enterprises” “of” “our” “time.” Note to myself: find Allen Weiss’s Shattered Forms:

Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism: “an insidious tactic of cultural appropriation is to give what is most free and most subversive the highest value in order to neutralize its practical efficacy.” What about impracticality as a virtue? A poem I allow nobody to read. A poem that is, literally, unreadable.

There is, of course, that story—and I think it’s Tim Reynolds story—of the man who lived for a year about a gas station in Xenia, Ohio. A writer, living a poor writerly life. And he had no money for a ribbon for the typewriter. Persist’d in writing poems on that typewriter. Poems press’d into paper, leaving no trace.

~

To work.

Mass Bashfulness

~

Fragments of the Noctambulist Mr. G. (Rasula Mix)

Deeply in love with the masses, and also with anonymity, Mr. G. pushes originality to the point of bashfulness.

The ratifier of the walk’s th’occlusion of the step.

*

“Charles Baudelaire, never out of underwear.”

*

A seed-pearl of moon is imbedd’d in th’horizon-bound claddage.

*

A jangly planner.

*

Embattled indifference and where it’s gotten me.

*

If I think of Edward Dahlberg, I think of priapic moaning. Or cynical snorting.

*

Why I ought to read more Adorno: because he calls art “the imago of the unexchangeable,” what “makes us believe there are things in the world that are not for exchange. On behalf of the unexchangeable, art must awaken a critical consciousness toward the world of exchangeable things.”

*

Never pay a buck again. Is a note I tack’d up at eighteen.

*

Refusing to “assume the subject position”—meaning not making meaning just another object lesson, object that makes “one” a subject. Refusing of the commodities “one” attempts to dispose amongst “one.” Which “one” is which?

*

Refusing to become the tool of other tools. Against the them. Thoreau.

*

Rasula: “Publication is simply one part of a much larger social process, which is the segregation of access to significant symbols.”

*

To reject the stinking gadgetry-mongering that “passes” for culture. To nurture a fine Luddite scorn for “progress,” that which—in a mere generation—’s meant: more work required just to get by, more meaningless toys offer’d up as palliative to “need,” more false choices, market flurries, see the little piggies run . . .

*

“So let us not with wants and pressures make ourselves the efficient Causes of what we compleyn of, but by being stubborn, stiff-neck'd, unquiet, and disobedient, instead out-do the Ungratefull in murmuring with Quails in our Mouths; not in the Deserts of Arabia, but in a more plentifull Land, that which is said to flow with milk and honey.”

*

What we do: “shed bloud, shed innocent bloud, make no end of shedding innocent bloud, let bloud touch bloud: oh cruell Tigers.”

*

Becoming a subject means “Never having to say I wish again.” In Donald Meyer’s brilliant summary (in The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology, from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts, quoted by Rasula): “The wish for plenty was not the wish to have one’s wishes fulfilled; it was the wish not to have to wish wishes of one’s own at all.”

*

Rasula on the precedence of “numeracy” over “literacy”—counting, arranging, ordering, labeling, sampling—“Numeracy is the ability to relish and manipulate number symbols discursively.” (Commonly witness’d here in Blogland—where a fully flung-down discourse, running up and down the length of a subject—with acumen and discrimination—is rare . . .)

*

Rasula: Desiring “to seek alliance with any practice of writing that refuses to treat binary elements or dual possibilities as injunctions to choose.” (See th’oceans of words simply indulging in an opposition: “post-avant nyah nyah” against “School of Quietude bah bah bah.”) “To abide with both elements of a seemingly incompatible equation is to enact a poetics.”

*

And a call (Rasula) “to regain an essential incoherence of modernism, to reappraise it in light of its fragility, its fugitive testimonials, and its carnally jubilant incantations.” A carnivalesque. Make the murkily posit’d and shabbily maintain’d demarcation of binaries anywhere an indulgence, a see-through reactionary putsch, and crude.

*

Rasula: “What else is citation but a controlled frenzy of gratitude at finding something worth recycling?” Against which—mid-giggle—my “sober” side says “It’s all “worth recycling.” A matter of use?

*

Is it all “worth recycling”? On the plangency and querulousness of . . .

*

To work.

Stuff’d Duck

~

First G. gets a foot caught in the tangled bed-sheets because he’s jumping around on the bed whilst taunting the dog with the stuff’d duck he’s about the toss and tips forward like a ten pin, and smacks head, scrapes arm. He’s okay, just a scary couple of minutes whilst he’s howling louder than I’ve ever heard. We bike off anyhow a couple hours later—resilience, thy name is Kid. And get caught in a gentle downpour coming back—just a sprinkle going. Which G. likes, getting wet. Later I putter about with the vacuum, booming a Buddy Guy thing, newish, I dragged out the library, that inimitable and particular ringing sound—bell-like—he torques out of the guitar. Unapologetic moan lyrics: “I got to try you girl.”

~

Rasula in Syncopations: “Normally, half the words we use are not chosen freely, but rather comply with the structural (statistically regulative) requirements of the language. For messages to persist in the midst of noise, it is necessary to encode the message with redundancy.” In a discussion of how Clark Coolidge works to “abet” the noise of writing, rather than “exorcise” it. And making th’astute observation (smack the gueule, write it down): that Coolidge’s lineage is through Kerouac more’n anybody. So do I read it all differently now? Yep.

~

Rasula: “That [Bruce] Andrews, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and others are rigorously committed to the linguistic inspection of the American state, its polis both vernacular and doctrinal, marginalizes them on ideological grounds; and the brand of ‘experimentalism’ marks them as even further removed from the mainstream expectation of accessibility (or noise free ‘communication,’ . . .) In other words, an ideology of the simple, the transparent, the heartfelt, precludes recognition of those values as themselves ideologically infused.” Which, to me, ’s got a whiff of datedness coming off it (can’t find a date-stamp, though some of the pieces collect’d here go back to late-’eighties Sulfur’s)—whether it’s the “rigorously committed,” or the “marginalizes,” or the white-male clumping of th’exemplars, or the refusal to admit that ideological linguistic steeping is pervasive and inescapable, the “difficult” not except’d. Do the poems of these three continue to commandeer attention as “critique”? (I’d say no, “one” cannot critique out of a position of power, though “one” can, like a satrap, remain faithful to the oppositional trappings of one’s youth, and, against all evidence, claim “acanonicity.”) Is the predominant mainstream expectation of accessibility? Or’s there been a wide-ranging folding-in of “experimentalist” ingredients and techniques (the grounds ideology pervades is changeable—which is to say: to write now as, say, Bruce Andrews wrote in 1980 does not “mean” the same thing as it did in 1980, even if one is Bruce Andrews)?

~

Rasula, quoting two principles of Jacques Attali (Noise: The Political Economy of Music): “First, that noise is violence: it disturbs.” “Second, that music is a channelization of noise, and therefore a simulacrum of the sacrifice. It is thus a sublimation, an exacerbation of the imaginary, at the same time as the creation of social order and political integration.” And: “The game of music thus resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it.” In quick succession (and not necessarily in the list’d order) I thought of: “the language poets,” “George W. Bush and’s lying lackeys,” “John Cage,” “OuLiPo,” “Charles Wright.” Random noise, random words, random violence. Of course Cage gave himself problems. Which he subsequently attempt’d to solve.

~

Rasula: “there is always an order of literature content with the notion that it ‘contributes’ something to society, that it’s a cultural ‘activity,’ and the poets who aspire to this kind of social service distrust noise. It’s no accident that they emphasize the ‘music’ of verse, for they know the purpose of music is to banish noise. But there are others whose sense construed as senseless, makes a noise in which the joy has yet to be savored.”

All claims for poetry regarding its “serviceability,” its amelioration of man and betterment of woman, its ability to “promote change,” its use for edification moral, personal, other—obfuscatory, hogwash, es stupido, idiot ca-ca rot of blind rotters. It is a completely useless activity, it amounts to nothing. It is a bauble in the hands of auto-slobbery nutters, a waste, and a game.

~

Rasula claims for the language poets “the characteristic activity of the Enlightenment: critical inquiry . . . an extension of scientific investigation” and asks that one “consider an image from that legacy: Robert Hooke’s illustration of the microscopic view of a period from Micrographia (1665).” Rasula’s point is that, for Hooke, th’enlargement of the period [see here, Figure 2, “Printed Dot,”] represented “a radical challenge to the semantic stability it was presumed to serve.”

Rather than incarnating a Euclidean value, it seemed to Hooke a “smutty daubing” or “a great splatch of London dirt.” [It rather resembles, I think, the moon in the 1902 Georges Méliès movie, Le Voyage dans la lune, a little more rugged, a little “darker” just before the rocket pierces the eye?] Hooke looks into the microscope at the hitherto stable realm of grammatical order, only to find it teeming with microbial animation. Just as Hooke, confronted with his “splatch,” wonders what a period really is, we might say that modern poetry has been defamiliarized as if under a microscope, leaving readers wondering what poetry is.

Which, by golly, must be what Ron Silliman’s talking about with that coy remark about what doings go down in the vicinity of the period in the New Sentence: how it “figures precisely the role of the Other, the non-rational, the dark side.” How the “blank space between punctuation & the next capital is the X-file of language & we have just begun to scratch at its surface.” Microbial animation, yes indeed. The work looks less like “critical inquiry” mayhaps, and more like mystification, more like Voodoo Lit. Look close, there’s a night-riot going on! There’s a pricking at the very eye itself!

~

Sunday leaf-raking. And chores. And the Carmenissima sicketh. Vomits and runs out to immediately nibble the tops off the chives. Which probably caused th’episode to begin with. Or so—I hate to say it—th’evidence suggesteth.

“Return not, now,
with the Dog, to thine own vomit, nor
like the washed Sow, to wallow again in
the mire of thy former sins and uncleanness;
lest being intangled and overcome . . .”

So goeth another Sunday, and writing.

~

To work.

Fangs

~

Just to note: three new John Latta poems up at Verse: “Gap,” “Loud,” and “Kudos and Xyster,” all out of a new manuscript call’d Some Alphabets. That last one’s for Donald “Fangs” Rumsfeld.

Gloam Stretch

~

Hunker’d into the slouch-seat of spaceship Lumina “in the gloamng” whilst G. did tap. I listen’d to the streetlights buzz up pale orange to white, orange being noisier, the way things always start noisy (to get heard) and settle into an ambient hum. I read about Charles Bernstein’s “Dysraphism,” the seam’d unseemly universe, the way literature talks back at literature, “sassy,” all in the Rasula, sort of weary’d by the stretch of connectives, and fell to a beastly snoring, head atilt, mouth agape, oh careless loves.

~

What if influence—like the plague in the English Renaissanc’d brainpan—befoul’d the air, or fell down sudden as sight, felling one in a heap? That’s why we talk about taste, which ravens and is inscrutable, merely because it varies, caught up in its miniature enzymatic upheavals and getting faulty instruction “by means of” that overlord, the nose. Sight is always whole, and fatal, a binary, a grab, an execution. Taste nutters in, noncommittally, and changeable.

~

David Antin defining poetry as “uninterruptible discourse”: “it is not the habit of poetry to be open to interruption.” Which goes (at least) back to Edgar Allan Poe’s formulation of poetry as a species of rational artifice “read at a sitting.” In what interview does John Ashbery admit that he welcomes (in the course of composition, that activity being akin to a hare’s being hound’d by a kennel’s worth of beagles—looping back, hiding out, hunkering down, shivering it out, skinting into a thicket—not exactly the same thing as “poetry” is the making of it, but—) interruption, the telephone’s tinny blaat, and indicates that it merely enters the poem? A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year is a whole text of interruptions, and reports back-winding the whole spool of adding-machine paper out of the typewriter (ah, typewriters!) so’s not to leave it recklessly endanger’d by a likely house fire whilst Ammons goes off to visit the in-laws.

~

Nothing’s complete without interruption. Whatever else is, requires it. Which is, intentionally, as ignobly Stevensesque as I can make it, rider of the feral steed, me. In an age of fissures, is a duly interrupt’d and interruptible poetry needed? A discourse accommodating the discourse-pock’d nature of the age?

~

Writing the Johnston notes yesterday: a few words (tentative, notational) before dinner, a few after helping G. with homework (median, mean, mode), a few after reading a mystery or two to G., a tiny glut before the C-dog begins her imploring restless pacing. Walking usually tosses up a useable phrase or two, or connects a line to some outlying district (I think yesterday Auden shambled up that way, house-slipper’d Wystan punch’d my sternum with a nicotine-bronze’d finger and said: “A cloudless night like this / Can set the spirit soaring: / After a tiring day . . .”). Something gets achieved by the prescience of the dark, a prurient entropy grabs at the synapse-centers, and I scribble legible shit immediately “after” whilst sitting in the “reading rocker,” doggo curling down to sleep.

~

Writing to keep the tool of writing well-oil’d—not to any particular semantic end (what comes about anyway, in interlude, by accident, unstoppable meaning.) Th’intent is not to make a floatable boat, rather, to keep the waterways clean, pitchfork out the blue-green toxicity of algal bloom, keep the saw-blade sharp. Rasula: “Striving to be understood is a momentary aspiration . . . the interlocutors are themselves transitory features of an ongoing pulsation of the word. We here for a moment, “live” wires, and the language throbs through us. We are in language. “Language writes us, old hat.”

~

Or, what of a poetry of interruption, that which, made of ruptures, a rapturous commingling, interrupts. Something there is that does not love the control-mongering stance of that “uninterruptible discourse.” A poetry not acting as the “chatter in the channel,” what keeps the system open: a poetry acting as “parasite,” the mickey-mocker, the noise, the fly in the ointment (the black-fly in the blew ointment of northern sky), the ghost in the deus ex machina clockwork armature, tipping th’ideologue sprawling onto the stage, the no pasarans! The poem that acts as a deft buckthorn in the eye of the sysadmin. The poem that taunts the ongoing demagoguery of the daily language-assault, and does not stoop to mere mimickry. Where is the poem that torches the loudmouth, brute America, simply and quietly incinerates and punctures the noise that extends th’official noise? A thrift-sale saw-blade verbally flung. A wooden shoe jammed in the language loom. What’s that poem look like?

~

To work.

Ghost Restraint

~

Aversions, by Devin Johnston (Omnidawn, 2004)

A note provided by Devin Johnston, author of Aversions (and of th’earlier and excellent Telepathy (Paper Bark, 2001) says: “Romans performed rites of aversion in the month of February. According to Jane Ellen Harrison in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, these rituals involved not the invocation of heavenly spirits but the placation of ghosts.” And the book is seemingly almost ritually construct’d—beginning with “Ghost,” and moving through “Aversion,” “Dead,” “February,” “The Roman World,” and so on, with “Another Version” coming near the end. Toward the middle come three “free translations”—after Archilochos, Horace, and Catullus. Other possible hovering spirits: Dante, “Slinger,” Stan Brakhage, and th’Australian poet Robert Adamson.

Classical restraint and clarity, precise diction, the rhythms of the early English sonneteers (and occasional fearless rhyme), metaphysical topoi, a willingness to work small combined with a desire to broach large concerns, a pared-down near-severity leaven’d by an haruspex’d lexicon (words summon’d out th’entrails of the language, astonishingly exact): “vetch,” “scutter,” Daewoo,” “mouflon,” “drupes.” Poems like Johnston’s remind one of masonry-work, that pleasant clang and whinge of trowel-play, slathering up the mortar, slapping in the brick (satisfying, muffled, wet), catching the ooze and curl of excess—next. No apparent excess, and a built thing solid and graceful as a serpentine wall. Here’s “Dead,” surely a brash enough title:

Some find it dangerous
to analyze the dead:

they shut a collie in
the cote, then find him gone—

or else, the blackest plum
proves bitter on the tongue;

an unequated remnant
lodges in the head.

When venturing abroad,
they tilt each name and date

against their silhouettes,
and looking up, take aim:

the landscape loses depth,
collapsing near and far

as plumbing groans when taps
are turned, emitting air.

The bed is hard, the room
is cold, and some have found

the dead, though well-attuned,
are slow to understand.

A rather common metrical choice for Johnston, the iambic trimeter line (apparently a “Greek” meter, often used in drama for speech), handled with impure deference, as is just. Something Audenesque in a couplet like “an unequated remnant / lodges in the head.” (Think “The clockwork spectacle is / Impressive in a slightly boring / Eighteenth-century way.”) Everywhere, a particle-level attention to sonic choices: look to the softly plosive “p’s” in “depth” and “collapsing” in an “ordinary”-seeming couplet like “the landscape loses depth, / collapsing near and far.” There’s a breezy laconicism here, understatement and (rather deceptive) nonchalance, beginning with “Some.” Truth is, mess with the dead, and the (equally laconic) dead (alert enough) won’t “get it.” And’ll make the landscape go kablooey, make the dog run off. A warning of the need for aversion.

Here’s “Influence”:

Smoke gets into everything:
bitter honey,

autumn’s distillation, bears
an aftertaste

of cats
and muscatel.

When privet
dominates, hives

disperse in sparks
through private darkness,

filling cells
with evidence of elsewhere:

spores of cockle,
rush, and dock;

contraband,
perfume, and punk.

Even you (asleep
and breathing deeply)

open from the core
to all that you are not.

Couplets ensconce and shelter semi-internal rhymes, slants and echoes, Johnston’s is an unstoppable and subtle ear. A tiny list: “cats and the scat and cat in “muscatel,” “cells” and the else of “elsewhere,” “privet” and “hives.”

“Influence” (the word out of / related to flow, fluid, fluency, fleuve, river) is, here, both wave (“smoke,” “bitter honey”) and particle (“sparks,” “spores”). It insinuates itself into one, surrounds one as stink (“perfume”), it plants its seeds (I’ll skip trying to tease out if the resultant plants—“rush, and dock”—be pernicious weed, or not. Certainly the burdock, with its burrs, is pernicious enough). Influence as invasive species to our (“open to the core”) ready and willing receptacles of “self.”

~

Got curious, walking the dog, about the source and treatment of the “free translations,” and, returning, rummaged about to uncover Guy Davenport’s 7 Greeks. Johnston identifies the Archilochos (titled “One”) as “Fragment 11.” Sure enough, here’s Davenport’s “11” of 287 fragments he provides:

Like Odysseus under the ram
You have clung under your lovers
And under your love of lust,
Seeing nothing else for this mist,
Dark of heart, dark of mind.

Here’s Johnston’s “One”:

Like Odysseus under the ram
you cling beneath your lovers—
seeking to pass for them
by pressing close, supine.

Amongst the tangled curls,
who could tell one from the other?
Not I, who wade against the waves
with darkened eye and darkened mind.

Is such a pairing instructive? Maybe. Johnston makes the midriff bulge, and, more importantly, introduces the “I,” putting the tensions of amorous jealousy and competition to the center of the poem, where Davenport’s fragment exposes only a single insatiate. Johnston’s “supine,” that sense of offering “up” the body, a way of hiding (by joining) (“pass”-ing) is key, and is exactly position’d so. Whereas the “dark” of Davenport’s lover seems the result of being lust-addled, Johnston’s, plodding “against” the waves, that is, out, presumably, into the sea, deeper, becomes a kingly character in a black fury, or in a suicidal rage.

It’s a damnably good book. “Boötes blocked by clouds.”

~ ~ ~

What if influence fell on one like a heap, and fell’d one? Disgruntlement at the morning’s offal of chores and interruptions. Read late last night in the Rasula, and scribbled some few words. My tasks call, my teeth clench, the air is warming and affable, the seasonal drift towards wintry contentment proceeds. Domani.

~

To work.

Pinworm

~

Forestall’d morning coffee whilst I biked to th’hospital for draws of about thirty little vials of blood—a “battery” of tests—post-physical, and no caloric ingest for twelve hours previous: surely a mouthful to say—I’ve regain’d my post, here, with coffee, alert as a pinworm amongst dogs. I love to carry on like that.

~

Reading Rasula: “In the first issue of Sulfur (1981), Eliot Weinberger remarked, ‘One effect of the poetry pandemic has surely been the elimination of exogamous reading. It has become so hectic in one’s own longhouse that one rarely has the time or stamina for visits to other clans. Twenty years ago, in the ardent days of the anthology battles, even diehard Beat or Black Mountain partisans could, at the least, recognize the insignia of the opposing troops.’ The warning about parochialism in one’s reading and associations is perennially relevant, though it should not be taken to imply, as alternative, some vacuous universalism.”

Which is to suggest that every “age” senses an excess. Rasula suggests, too, that “there’s a value in overcoming one’s own presumptions, particularly presumptions of familiarity with what goes on across the way, in the enemy’s camp, the neighbor’s backyard, the other guy’s poem.” It is precisely there that I find Silliman’s “School of Quietude” lumping so obnoxious. There’s little demonstration that he investigates with any credibility the things he dismisses.Making huge more or less indiscriminate splits in th’available material is precisely how institutions operate—which is to say Silliman’s actions exactly resemble those of an institution. Rasula: “Distinguishing mainstream from avant-garde has some utility, of course; but its utility is limited to institutions. If such a distinction applies to particular works, those works are sadly no more than byproducts of the institutions to which they adhere.”

~

On Silliman’s “surfeit of good writing by younger poets”: surfeit implying “intemperate, immoderate, a superfluity”? Implying the “disgust arising from excess,” “nausea, satiety”? Thackeray: “He was half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins.”

~

Predictable response.

~

What does it mean to “stay current with all that is changing” in one’s reading? What does it mean t “keep up,” to “absorb so much of what’s new”? Is there a tiny “Ballad of a Thin Man” insecurity going on here?

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
. . .
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Reading as a means of control. “Don’t look back.” To which Satchel Paige add’d: “Something might be gaining on you.” Isn’t reading the thing without social constraint? The most free and freewheeling thing? The way the doors of one book empty one into another, or several others, in uncontrol’d and uncontrollable succession? To make it a need or a duty, or tack on a programmatic hindrance like “coverage”? Fishy.

~

The Heights, continued

Drinking water
For, golly,
Twelve hours,
And nothing
Except it.
The dog
Sighs big,
The boy
Mutters letters
Aloud, spelling
It out,
Whatever word
He’s stuck
With, something
To do
With secret
Agency between
States, that
Shit, it
Comes down
The pike
And pikers
Just out
Of college
Get suck’d
Off into
‘Intelligence opportunities.’
End up
Garrot’d in
Gabarone, or
Slightly angst-
Rid in
Berlin. So
Saith the
Kerygmatic brow-
Beaters of
Th’obsessionalist word.
So saith
The didacts
To th’autodidacts,
Who sneer.
So saith
The skaters
Over ponds
Peripheral to
The convent
Where nuns
Bespeak th’idiocy
Of speech
By remaining
Silent, in
Savage witness
To th’awful
Witlessness of
Wordy codger-
Mongers like
Ourselves—
                     Unheard
Of, unread
In Babylon:
As mastiffs
Which lie
In shambles,
Have commonly
‘Bloudy mouthes,
So doe
The mouthes
Run over
With fiery
Plethorickal rhetorickes.’
Gunk in
The combat
Zone.

~

To work.

Found

~

Received:

The Lichtenberg Figures, by Ben Lerner (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) (Winner of the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award)

Puttering in the kitchen, wrapping up sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunches, putting some potpies in the oven, listening loud to Bob Dylan’s 1975 “Blood on the Tracks.” My “Dylan period” occur’d prior to th’album—roughly coinciding with my scuffling high school years, 1968-1971 or so—so I tend to think of “Blood on the Tracks” as “newer Dylan.” And I’m thinking that part of Dylan’s brilliance lies in how willing he is to toss down any old thing into the lyric at hand. Here’s a couple of verses of “Meet Me in the Morning,” standard blues cough-up about meeting at “56th and Wabasha” so’s “we could be in Kansas / By time the snow begins to thaw.” Wabasha strikes me as nonsensical mischief with Wabash:

Little rooster crowin’, there must be something on his mind
Little rooster crowin’, there must be something on his mind
Well, I feel just like that rooster
Honey, ya treat me so unkind.

The birds are flyin’ low babe, honey I feel so exposed
Well, the birds are flyin’ low babe, honey I feel so exposed
Well now, I ain’t got any matches
And the station doors are closed.
. . .

Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship
Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship
Ain’t that just like my heart, babe
When you kissed my lips?

The lines’ll not withstand any explicating wont to delineate more’n a situation (as in nearly every blues song, it’s “scene” is something like how two individuals invariably “go at it”—howsoever that may be understood . . .) The lines are also fearless, rabbling, “any old thing,” near-aggressively “dumb,” a kind of dare to any expectation of tidiness or th’appropriate. (See ship / lips, see the diction wobble of “I feel so exposed” and “I ain’t got any matches.”)

I write all that because that’s th’immediate luggage I carry entering Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. Which, I find, is a run of loose sonnets (the other major form—besides the blues—wherein “two individuals invariably ‘go at it’—). One immediate question—which Lichtenberg figures here?—seems to get answer’d by a look at the back cover (“The book takes its title from the fernlike patterns that sometimes appear (and quickly fade) in the aftermath of a lightning strike.”) Dashing “my cruel esperaunce” that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the oddball aphorist, (See the recent Gert Hoffmann novel, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl. Sample aphorisms: “A worry-meter, mensura curarum. My face is one.” And “There are many people who won’t listen until their ears are cut off.”) ’d find a way into the poems (he does get a mention in C. D. Wright’s blurb though).

Lerner’s writing is antic, florid, wild. It doesn’t care whence it comes. It splashes, erupts, thieves (how does the old Airplane song go?— “steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide and deal”) There’s a smattering of the “dangerous, dirty, violent, and young” here, too. It’s audacious in its diction, and references, and moves—completely inhospitable to notions of tidiness, or manners. If there are hints of preciosity (often a pejorative shorthand for an unabash’d love of words) in lines like (in a poem for fellow Kansan Ronald Johnson) “The sun spalls the sluiceway into shards” or “The rabbi downs a hin of wine,” there is, too, flat-out stupid-talk (“The Internet is the future. And my woman rejects the Internet.”), tastelessly overblown matter-of-fact prose (“I send my professor thirty dollar’s worth of fusiform compound umbels / after her only child is shot and killed.”), and repetition and variation used (knowingly) to excellent effect:

Will these failures grow precious through repetition
and, although we cannot hope to be forgiven,
will these failures grow precious through repetition?

And the truth is, history tells us—as much as it tells us anything—it is repeat’d “failure,” stubborn, willful, brute “failure,” that seems to “advance” the art.

Here’s a couple of poems:

Resembling a mobile but having no mobile parts,
my instrument for measuring potential differences (in volts)
is like a songbird in a Persian poem. I have absolutely no

idea what I’m saying. I know only
that I have a certain sympathy
for the rhetoric of risk and mystery. Think of my body

as a local institution. Think of my body
as a monocoque. Think of my body
as the ponderous surgeons of Wichita

ready their nibs. When the first starlings began to cough up blood,
the night applied its cataplasm. The moon issued its scrip
to the Austrian dead. An expert described your son

as incapable of some really important shit.
Your son described his name in the air with a spliff.

There’s a near-constant marvel (and humor) to the fact that the same word can mean two things (or more)—“mobile” and “mobile,” “described” and “described.” The tone—not smug, not faux-innocent, adaptable to the occasion, ranging and wheeling—is satisfying, “trustworthy,” agreeable. Another:

I place a terminal raceme of fragrant, funnel-shaped perianths
beside the mile marker where Orlando flipped his Honda.
I fuck his girlfriend and induce epistaxis in his homeboy.

You asked me to explain the peculiar power of continental literary criticism,
to clarify what I mean by “theory” in the sentence
“To clarify what I mean by theory in the sentence.”

The impossibility of referring to the interruption immanent in the referential chain.
Snowfall in North Topeka.
The impossibility of not referring to the immanent interruption.
Real persons, living or dead, resembled coincidentally.

Orlando imbued my body with erotic significance
by beating it with a pistol. Nothing is as metaphysical
as the claim to break from metaphysics. At a party in his honor,
we throw our hands in the air. We wave them like we just don’t care.

Some threads (and characters) loop through the book: the César Vallejo of Trilce, (“Vallejo, aka Eschleman, aka Lerner”), a violence-soak’d man named Orlando Duran (“I beat Orlando Duran with a ratchet”), a near-suicide (“I forestall a suicide” and “suicide, beneath this corrigendum of a sky”), a number of poems “for Benjamin” (there is a sense of autobiographical interlude throughout, often reminding me of the kind of brilliant shorthand noises Jeff Clark made (“Introduced to a breast: daunted.”) in “Some Information About Twenty-Three Years of Existence” in The Little Door Slides Back), and something like “poetry, its place” (“All readers of poetry sicken me.” And “So I paid Ben Lerner to write you this poem / in language that was easy to understand.”)

It is a terrific book, rollicking and genial, and spooky (believable humorous rancor and threat is both rare and spooky, and there’s an undertow of that here, too). I’m not prepared to ascertain its origins or the all the numerous effects of its final accumulation—that’ll require more (pleasurable) study, but with the publication of The Lichtenberg Figures Lerner looks poised and bodacious, on the brink of a furtherance, thug-tough dreams and “continental theory” and all.

“Goatsuckers spar in the linden.”

~

Reading. The dog.

Lost in Juarez

~

Growl. The additions made in the squinty morning to a squib about Ben Lerner’s tremendous new book, The Lichtenberg Figures, apparently didn’t make the leap into the transport bucket I bring these things to work in (it’s a snazzy system—waders and hooded mackinaw, a skiff and a scowl, a char wrapped in woolens . . .) So: rather than fuss with reconstructing, I’ll wait and try to retrieve it later.

~

Some littler notes: In the dog-walk autotelic muttery dark, it occur’d to me: I see the streets less and less. I climb up into the fernlike overlays of my dirt-fascicle’d spraint-brain and there I sit, hoo-hah-ing. Last year I recall noting a regular floribund of yellow leaves, yellow slicker, yellow rain. Now it’s like, uh, I just noticed I, uh, forgot to change my shirt, must be distract’d.

~

It’s like that.

~

The use of “pointless rhetorical violence” here is rhetorickal sleight-of-hand, victim-culture-speak. They just words. Ain’t no point in deletion, Maisie.

~

Finish’d Greenblatt’s highly-readable Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Rather disappoint’d—as the paucity of notes here regarding it probably attests—that it didn’t jumpstart any particular thinking. It did make yearn for a ruckus of Shakespeare reading. Which is likely what it’s “supposed” to do. Or what I’m “supposed” to do.

Before going back to Proust, I think, having crack’d it briefly last night, I’ll read Jed Rasula’s Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry. I found Rasula a clear-sight’d and -thinking polemicist, particularly in The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990.

~

A Dump

To the right and true interpreting of a Poem, a speciall helpe is, to consider attentiuely, and finde out the proper scope and ayme of The Author in propounding it: and not too curiously presse other things, lest in stead of milke wee presse out blood.

~

L. saith, that running to the Poem, and studying its Scripts, will make men beggers. It runnes at randome, and walkes by any rule but the Word; that is an intolerable yoke. It heares many gravid hospitable things, but sauours none. It least busies itselfe in the knowledge of its owne happinesse, as most vnseasonable, vnprofitable, impossible.

~

Straite-neckt vessels are long a filling.

~ ~ ~

Ben Lerner: “Goatsuckers spar in the linden.”

~

To work.

Rattler Roundup

~

Of note: Poppycock. Silliman’s use of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “strategic opacity.” Or better put: “acting dumb as a post to gain some imaginary tactical advantage.” Big self-righteous outcry. Which begins by trying to claim that Kent Johnson took the “85” words he present’d to New Poetry “out of context”—that is, out of the “just under 10,000 words on the topic of Robert Duncan and The H. D. Book” Silliman’s post’d of late. (I love Count Silliman’s propensity to count everything—hard scientific proof of something, surely.)

Opacity: In fact the post in question is a hodge-podge, bullet’d like a newsletter, travel notes of Silliman’s recent nostalgia-gutted trip back to Berkeley. Additional “context” (same post):

Using the police car as a stage (with a sort of padded lean-to attached proscenium to protect the vehicle itself) was a nice touch at the FSM rally.

(Talk about history repeating itself as farce—“to protect the fucking vehicle”? “A nice touch”? My word!) And (same post, exactly following the 85 words under indictment):

Honoraria, especially in the academy, have been more or less stagnant now for at least 40 years, meaning that the actual payment for readings is—in constant currency—only a fraction of what it once was.

Additional topics: Alfred Molina as Doc Ock, th’audience as fickle multitude or solidarity’d dirty dozen, the need to digitize the San Francisco State Poetry Center archives, the Red Sox, English department idiocies. The general thrust and tenor of the remarks, though—and the backwash to much of Silliman’s 10,000 Duncan words: aging, how “one” ages, warnings to youth-about-to-age. The context-stripping charge is wholly unfounded. The Duncan writing is not the center of the post, nor is it the center of the lines queried at New Poetry.

If Kent Johnson’s “oh-so-innocent-nature” is trademark and device, consider Silliman’s own characteristic way of proceeding by “lumping-pell-mell-together-to-damn” a heterogeneous crowd (see th’ongoing School of Quietude nonsense). It is a method that disposes difference, and nuance, and the hard work of making any meaningful distinctions, quickly under a single rubrick, a label that then gets soak’d in innuendo, slight’d, ignored, and generally batted about in a game of critical laziness and Know-Nothingism.

Opacity: So impatient is Silliman to refute attack that rather than read and delineate any disagreements, he packs up a whole kettle of fish (bag o’ rattlers) and proceeds by brickbat, innuendo and rhetorickal slight. So mention of Paul Lake’s predictable and asinine belch “Po-mo gibberish?” becomes part of a strategy to ignore what I wrote. Watch the moves here:

At the far end of the commentary scale from Lake’s two-word rhetorical question—at least superficially—Perpetrator number one (Lake)’s question is rhetorical (no answer required, he’s just musing aloud). The opposing piece of work on the “commentary scale” (or in the gunny sack, for Silliman’s pairing of Lake and me is a ploy to tie all the rattlesnakes he sees together in the rock-weight’d bag of’s doubtful prose) is me, the guy without the word count. Note the “superficially” and its placement just before perpetrator number two’s name.

—is John Latta’s attempt to deconstruct the quotation in the manner of Roland Barthes S/Z.—Note the contemptuous and belittling “attempt.” Note the link regarding S/Z (for presumably my edification—though the precise Mr. Silliman comes up with the bizarre “lexeme”—a unit of linguistic analysis—for Barthes’s more “readerly” “lexia”—a unit of reading.)

Unlike Barthes, who uses segmentation into lexemes as a strategic device that allows him to bring in a vast range of secondary material, Latta’s comments range no further than the bullet point immediately prior to the two cited by Johnson.—Wrong. I situate (“location, location, location”) the damned quotation: I want’d to see / recall what preceded it mostly in an attempt to make sense of the imprecise hash concerning Duncan’s (lack of) response to the New Sentence and why it could be of importance beyond that of the possibly hurt pride of the quickly-aging sycophant who was forcefully peddling it. Here’s slippery ground for Silliman (one rattler poking out the bag): a quick look at what I did write, and the comments I did make show that the “range” is considerable. Easier to claim “lack of context” and dismiss.

Most of what Latta has to say suggests that I use figures of speech that are, in one way or another, pompous. (I would prefer the characterization precise, but, hey, that’s just me.)—Not concern’d with pomposity. The connection between “precision” and “pomposity” is lost to me. Grandiloquence and grandstanding in lieu of making careful distinctions can certainly be seen as pompous, but that’s not my major concern in my 10,000 words on Silliman over the last year or so. He deigns to “respond” to a series of substantial notes and queries and observations with a single smarmy snicker about “X-files”?

Strategic opacity and the ladling-up of gooey psychology: Another prefer’d means of avoiding the opposition (or merely the argument). By saying “what X writes says more about X than anything about me.” See the positing of the “anxiety” New Poetics list types apparently experienced regarding a Sillimaniac comma. See the insinuations that those same individuals were “using my paragraph rather like a Rorschach test.” Or see the dumb Quixote remark at the end: as if critical commentary that tilts at the shabbily listless windmills of a critical project that barely stirs even under repeat’d gusts of hot air (“300,000 words per year! Why, if we laid ’em all end to end . . . they’d reach out and grab a speech act by the throat and throttle it!”) Oh, um, that “young Quixote’s fancy”—I was saying, any commentary contra the Silliman “project” is certain to be label’d as jejeune, inchoate, quixotic, hopeless, delusional, etc. Combined, the lingo is Silliman’s way of saying “You, other is the unhealthy one. Confusion and distortion lie elsewhere. I am the norm (and I lie here).”

Next rattler in the bag is Jim Behrle. Whose often clever cut-ups and trenchant graphics, whilst successfully puncturing Silliman’s bag of afflatus, rarely offer any kind of sustain’d textual critique (nor do they “need” to). Behrle’s brilliant scowling admonitory “Obey” Silliman (of last August!) gets popped into the snake-sack as more “rowdy boy” work. Silliman dismisses it along with all else as mere “inchoate social material.” Diminish and demean: that’s the S-method. Or: make all critical material equal, and equally dismissible, with th’upshot that “one need not answer,” which is to say, one need not engage in the social / critical sphere made by the poem.

One more thing: It’s interesting that Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast gets brought up, in particular “the alt.fan.silliman parody that the Anti-Hegemony Project ran on the Poetics List nearly a decade ago.” Silliman claims “it reads as quite dated.” I read Friedlander’s book with high glee and interest, and a kind of reassurance—that my “more recent” perception of Silliman’s persona and modus operandi—its noxiousness—had not gone entirely unnoticed. If it’s old hat (“nearly a decade ago”) to Silliman (and dismissible as a generational flux “simply the next generation” which disregards the fact that my age lies somewhere between Friedlander’s and Silliman’s, as does, I think, Kent Johnson’s) maybe its recurrence should be read more as a measure of its accuracy. Maybe, Ron, it’s “Time to look inside!”

~

Of little note: The Little Pedant apparently thought he’d got th’okay—having read the poppycock (fr. pappy-caca, bastard Fr. for father-figure shit) of the Big Pedant—to go into what he considers “attack mode”—a terribly sorry misnomer indeed. Laughable. It’s a wonder that a sycophantic tagalong like him is able to haul himself out of bed mornings without th’example of one of the Big Boys. He asks “Why he writes “add’d” or “hint’d”—? Because he is a poet. Because he likes the “look” of it. Because he likes to expose the radickal signify’d. Because an orthography that’s everywhere “stable” is a recent and unnecessary and dull encumbrance. Because he reconnoiters and proofs early English texts and’s brain-musculature’s got spraint (now thar be a variant!) by apostrophes. Because whatever’s “correct” is the default mode of the timid, the insignificant and the pedantickally spank’d.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

Northern Mists, by Carl O. Sauer (Turtle Island Foundation, 1973)

One of big Charles O.’s men. Seafaring north and west in the Middle Ages. Opposing the “tenebrous sea” of antiquity. “Atlantic Europe acquired increasing and largely shared familiarity with a wide reach of sea to the west, its seasons, winds, currents, and life.”

Art and Culture: Critical Essays, by Clement Greenberg (Beacon Press, 1965 pbk., 1961)

“Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture . . . Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times . . .

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest.”

~

To work.

The Bunch

~

Received:

In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, by Martha Ronk (Omnidawn, 2004)

Aversions, by Devin Johnston (Omnidawn, 2004)

The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon with Sample Poems, by Keith Waldrop (Omnidawn, 2004)

Each book is priced $14.95. Omnidawn is at 1632 Elm Ave., Richmond, California 94805-1614. All cover designs by Jeff Clark’s Quemadura. I order’d the bunch through a pre-publication offer—even after the quickest look, (add’d to last year’s Hejinian title, The Fatalist, that I bought earlier, and elsewhere), I’d argue for Omnidawn’s unqualified support by the community.

~

The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon . . . with Sample Poems, by Keith Waldrop (Omnidawn, 2004)

Jacob Delafon reads, somewhere, that all human activity lies along two opposing vectors: the centrifugal push of paranoia and the centripetal pull of hysteria.

. . .

Jacob Delafon locates the word orthoepy, meaning the “correct pronunciation of words.” The Word seems to him unpronounceable.

. . .

Jacob Delafon reads A la recherche du temps perdu.

In the last pages of the last volume, he finds the Past has been recaptured. The teeming World (i.e., the Novel) is now reduced to a single Character.

This must be, Jacob considers, hysteria’s major text.

. . .

Mindfulness, Jacob Delafon realizes, is not thoughtfulness.

But he cannot stop this train of thought. Neither, he continues—his ideas, as usual, in flight—is it a white cloak on a floating island. Nor creature of the night: not cat, not bat, not even dream. Not the hatching of plot while underground.

Odd, he thinks, how everything conspires.

Strange renga.

My impulse here—it’s likely obvious—is to quote large swaths of Waldrop’s book. Which is itself rather a book of quotations, citations, discovery-pratfalls, factoidal and fun. It’s a book one longs to swallow whole (avaler), gulp down greedily, and I took to reading it rather unstoppably. Or it’s a book one longs to be caught in the small avalanche of (swallow’d up), plung’d into, flung about by the (modest, likeable, discreet) roar of Delafon’s observations.

Jacob Delafon (I can’t help thinking of Jacques Derrida—surely a simple accident of event—though Derrida lacks the unfussy bemusement and humor of Delafon.) Delafon: fountain, source, “telephone,” news of the underworld, metaphysical investigations of the beyond. Robert Kelly indicates (blurbing) that Waldrop’s character is “named for a famous French supplier of sanitary fixtures.” Delafon himself refers to Valéry’s Monsieur Teste—surely an ancient of similar ancestry—also to wife Jane Floodcab, a rich monicker.

The Big Topics come up in Delafon’s ruminations, and readings (Delafon is above all a reader, that is to say, attentive to nuance, to detail, ready to pounce forth in delight on any nutritive tidbit, supremely aware of the “texturing” of text and how it is made by skitters and fits, an robust uneven weave. “Strange renga” exactly.) The teleological, the eschatological, myth and theology—Big Topics look’d at wide-eyed and unblinking (childlike), caressable perplexities intact, with the nimbleness that comes with age, th’ability to look unequivocally backwards and forwards. What one knows is motion:

He craves an interval.

Scatter’d in the midst of Delafon’s notes, and link’d by title (there is a poem call’d “Interval”) are poems, less syntactically-rigid structures. Here’s one:

Aftertaste

half-unawakened

lost word

absorption of light and
scattering

startling
and

the place

this is how it
happens, every
night a little weaker

dreams of uncertain etymology

If the poems—spare, skinny, highly lineated and stanzaick’d (“scattering”) act to slow the gluttonous reader’s eye within the whole of The Real Subject, they demonstrate similar capabilities within “themselves.” Here “half-unawakened” encapsulates a host of questions—What is the state of being “half-unawakened”? Is it different from being “half-asleep”? Or being “half-awake”?—and provides a refreshing pause where uncertainty supplants (the name Jacob means “the supplanter”) any possible stasis-gaining answers.

~

An ophthalmologist-rigged half-day, and I’m busy as a coot! I intend to talk about the Martha Ronk and Devin Johnston books next week.

~

To work.

“Big Boy”

~

Kent Johnson, our own Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, such is th’authenticity and verve he brings to our art, recently ask’d subscribers to New Poetry what they made of two (elided) points off Ron Silliman’s eponymous blog. I thought it a marvelous chance to interlineate, and flung myself to the task. The “points” (un-crud’d-up with commentary):

At the same time, Robert [Duncan] did not get the degree to which the New Sentence, if I may indulge in caps, figures precisely the role of the Other, the non-rational, the dark side (which is not without its many colors). The blank space between punctuation & the next capital is the X-file of language & we have just begun to scratch at its surface.

For a young poet today, replicating those scratches is not necessarily a step in the right direction. Time to look inside!

Okay, lexia by lexia: in honor of the corpulent and brilliant Monsieur Barthes:

At the same time,—apparently a functionless transitional term. What precedes it (“The U.S. post-avant canon is Robert’s reading list—more or less completely—more than that of any other single poet over the past fifty years.”) is rather baffling. Does it mean that “we”—us post-advanced dopes, dumb as posts—read (now) what “Robert” read (then)? Theosophy and Baudelaire? Or did “Robert” somehow read what’s since become the “post-avant canon”? So what’s that canon consist of? Jack Spicer, Harold Dull, H.D., Charles Olson, Robin Blaser, and—the New Sentence (uncomprehendingly?)? Is the hint’d-at incompleteness a result of the fact of Duncan’s death in 1988, um, over sixteen years ago? What is the post-avant canon? And precisely what period are we talking about? Are we “over” the post-avant hump and, if I may indulge in Italian, “dopo-dopo-avanti” now?

Robert [Duncan] did not get the degree to which the New Sentence,—an awkward way of being imprecise, hedging one’s doubts around about with modifiers. “To understand the degree to which a thing figures precisely” is dross and pleonasm to what he do not know. Nor we. Redundancy filed down by contradiction.

if I may indulge in caps,—false humility, ingenuousness, the New Sentence is, Silliman hopes, an institution, part of the poetic fabrick and Doxa, precisely because Silliman himself forcefully argue’d it into existence. Its “inadmissible” (unspoken) precedent is Pound’s Imagism: that juxtaposition of images gets moved to the sentence level and scores a new name.

figures precisely—that is, if one measures “precision” as the aporia between the period ending one sentence and the capital letter that begins the next. These grammatical items are perfectly sufficient to demarcate a sentence in the Silliman taxonomy.

the role of the Other, the non-rational, the dark side—an unfortunate eliding here, result of the category-mongering and essentially Enlightenment rationalist “self” that is the Silliman “one” discovers once he’s finish’d making post-alphabetickal arrangements of notebook gleanings. I think what he’s getting at is pure purse-bag Keats: “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—that’s what the “blank space between punctuation & the next capital” offers.

(which is not without its many colors).—a paltry and insufficient nod to “diversity,” “mulitculturalism,” “identity poetics.” See the popular series of “United Colors of Benetton” advertisements of the mid-nineties.

The blank space between punctuation & the next capital—is an abyss. Moils with irrational gunk. Is the via negativa to capital O Otherness. One of the first things “one” learns in language is its capability of saying “not.” What painting cannot say: “The cat is not there.”

is the X-file of language—T.V. O.D. I do not do it, I do not “know” it. “X-Files,” “Twin Peaks,” “Buffy,” memes of the même sad combat. Here, apparently, a metonym for that sinking vortex of th’irrational.

& we have just begun—Karen Carpenter? Incipience is the mother of high expectations. “What’s here is just a start.” (Cf. false humility.) “Just you wait.” Also: continues the happy fable that writing is akin to hard labor.

to scratch at its surface.—echoes of Michael McClure. Scratching the Beat Surface. Adds to the sense of the serious and hugeness of “our” enterprise.

For a young poet today,—I often get stuck with the notion that Silliman’s never written a word of critical prose that’s not a form of advice for the young. The prevalent mode of’s prose is one of high earnest hauteur and regal condescension à la Edith Sitwell, broken only by officious certainty and pedantry à la Allen Tate.

replicating those scratches—replicate, reply, “ply over ply,” “The eight ply of the heavens are darkness” (Pound). Poetry exists in the reply, not in the rabbity constant (impossible) advance. See Walter Brennan: “Say, was you ever bit by a dead bee?” All art is is scratching the same itch over and over again, akin to pouring salt again and again into the same wound. The high modernists knew enough to look back often enough to see what exactly might be gainful to “us.”

is not necessarily a step in the right direction.—experimentalism thrives on a sense of progress. “Go hither, step by step, little experimentalist.” “That’s one small step for Ron Silliman, one giant leap for . . .” The aplomb of sitting in (the middle of) a circle is that all directions become available and equal. Let’s end th’headlong linear rush—as if “we” had a goal!

Time to look inside!—Ah, the autobiographical imperative leaps up like a happy dog. Who’d a thunk the language boys’d finally get down to what every writer’s done tempestuously and immemorially since X: that is, sign the blood pact with that fidgety devil, the Self. “One” keeps hearing about the autobiographical “torque-ing” what’s been going on in some language camps, see Marjorie Perloff on Silliman, see Silliman on Silliman (“Under Albany” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 29). Or, is the outburst not a Cagean self-instructional at all, but a command. “You, you there, youngster!” Or is it a red herring, Silliman as agent-provocateur holding out, like a parent, the car-keys to a new expressivist aesthetic (park’d right there in the drive). One way to bolster the sense that one’s done something new and different in one’s work—something that’s “advanced” the art—is to suggest that that work need not be repeat’d. Essentially a rhetorickal ploy.

~

To work.

Proust Notes 9

~

Of note: James Wagner writes about my “reasonably-recent” collection—the poems writ circa 1994-5, the book publish’d 2003-4—titled Breeze. Odd to see how my “blog-persona” taints (or nurtures) the reading of the poems. Not exactly “sassy boy” graft’d onto “high earnestness”—but there’s a substantial difference between poems written near-daily, sitting on a porch after long neighborhood runs through Albany, New York,—and the late-night / early morning gaseousness, smarm, and twiddle that goes on here? Doesn’t it? Isn’t there? (I’m hearing hiccuppy Cyndi Lauper “Oh-oh girls—they just want to have fu-un . . .”) The new is new only to th’extent that it teaches one how to read the old?

~

Proust Notes 9

An accumulation of stray passages out of The Way by Swann’s, as—oddly enough, I just noticed the discrepancy now—the Lydia Davis volume is titled in the British Penguin edition (the old customary Swann’s Way does service for the U. S. Viking edition).

“. . . when a belief disappears, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to mask the absence of the power we have lost to give reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.” Which is sentimentality. Which is how one ages and turns against the “new”—into that barely evitable conservatism that haunts each person’s trajectory. Only folly rescues fetishism, recuperates th’animation on which reckless belief depends. Dependence on clarity—plain speech—is a kind of “fetishistic attachment,” as is experiential sobriety, as is “experimental hobby-horsing.”

~

Swann’s “little phrase,” the musical jolt into involuntary memory. And what familiarity breeds. Which is divestiture—the déshabillé-ménage of the same old same old new. Proust: “There were marvelous ideas in it which Swann had not distinguished at the first hearing and that he perceived now, as if they had divested themselves, in the cloakroom of his memory, of the uniform disguise of novelty.” That tendency to see in the new only the new, and make that the thing look’d for. If I say something like “So much of the new is a preponderance of signifying sheen, unweather’d and fatuous,” am I making that “barely evitable” move toward conservatism? Or am I re-aligning the quality “new”—knocking it back down off its regal “height,” claiming hauteur’s a blind alley inhabit’d by a sneak thief?

~

Against the “painful curiosity” of youth, habit flings “one” down into a “philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorizing the objects of their aspirations, try to derive from the years that have already elapsed a stable residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and which they will deliberately make it their primary concern that the kind of life they adopt may satisfy.” Writing, one’d call it “style.” Continuing, one’d call it “character.”

~

“He had not been jealous at first of Odette’s whole life, but only of the times when some circumstance, perhaps wrongly interpreted, led him to suppose that Odette might have deceived him. His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.”

~ ~ ~

Would the word idioterick find its uses? As in “idiotically or idiolectically esoterick”? I think of it at the end of a short ramble with the C-dog, the nuzzler-hound, wherein, walking, the phrase “recrudescence of lack” keeps jumbling with the sprigs of dry’d fleabane and asters that substitute for any real greenery in my brain-vase. Yah! (It suddenly occurs to me I should investigate my German heritage.) I’m thinking how little curiosity there is in the average current human “document,” by which I mean “person,” if not exactly you there shuffling through the street (“Asking people, “What’s the matter wit’ you boy?’”). Dagnabbit now, didn’t I learn, in school, that culture is a gas, and everywhere present and equal—that what “one” knows—is distinct and pervasive and immeasurable beyond the customary encumbrance and measure (answerable to no one) of pounds per square inch? Huh? I’m using the term “culture” for, well, everything: language, the body of referents, twitches, memory, baseball, Greek, mammaries, philately, herpetology, game theory, bookishness, agro-rhyming, calisthenickal bouts, celestial hues, all that that weighs precisely the same for each. And differs. Your culture is yoghurt and botanico-collaterals, so I think you’re un-cultured. My culture is straw-bale barn construction and Carolina flying grasshopper capture. You sneer. I yelp. As one culture-trademark indefatigable’d say: “Can we talk?” “Joan Collins, you ninny.” Cultural weight stops on a dime, and coughs it up.

~

To “my” idioterickal work.

The Keeper’s Nose

~

Greenblatt: “Throughout Shakespeare’s career as a playwright he was a brilliant poacher—deftly entering into territory marked out by others, taking for himself what he wanted, and walking away with his prize under the keeper’s nose. He was particularly good at seizing and making his own the property of the elite, the music, the gestures, the language . . . he had a complex attitude toward authority, at once sly, genially submissive, and subtly challenging. He was capable of devastating criticism; he saw through lies, hypocrisies, and distortions; he undermined virtually all of the claims that those in power made for themselves. And yet he was easygoing, humorous, pleasantly indirect, almost apologetic.”

~

Is Ron Silliman’s sense of being brand’d like a prize steer a veil’d attempt to inflict a round of cattle rustling on the community? I, for one, saw two unidentifiables, slackers (in slacks) and naggers (on nags) down in Lower Ghost Gulch just about sunset th’other day. What kind of economy is it, methinks, that attempts to display the goods of the common word-hoard in such a way as to claim a market-right? (I note with bemusement, boys, that Barrett “Ornery” Watten carefully “copyrights” every word he royally flushes at the back table at the One-Year Saloon. Gack.) Next thing we know there’ll be no free range, they’ll be severity and Enclosure Laws, and Clare, John Clare—“Who’s the cat who won’t cop out / When there’s danger all about?”—he’ll be madder’n a wren in a hen-house.

Maybe complaints about branding are no more than recognitions—and doubts—about hierarckicals and rôles, assign’d rôles. Remember how Romain Gary had to become Émile Ajar in order to free himself to write something other that another Romain Gary book? Is Silliman—inveterate slotter—haunt’d by the slot the “market” ’s assign’d him—a place of unchanging calculable, recognizable, and wholly recuperable expectations and limitation? That alone would—one’d think—be reason to begin putting into place the necessary feints and disguises in order to join (escape into) the shadow economy of poetry (run so brilliantly by the haberdasher sweet, Kent Johnson).

~

Idea for a new “reality” television show. Call’d “Petty Author Function.” Opening credits run over pictures of authors madly and coyly swapping negligees and slips whilst the train-to-market comes roaring ’round the bend. Last toot of the train buries authors up to the neck in the word-hoard.

~

The Heights, continued

Some bulletins
Get post’d
Against adversarial
Recklessness, and
Off I
Go, inhabit’d.
By what
Undertow I
Map by
Making—where
‘Lines meet
Diamond-wise
Or lozenge-
Like,’ there
Bury me.
So joy
Descends aflame,
A star-
Canny dog
Fallout into
Miasmic grump.
So feldspar
Glints back
Under dog-
Ear’d sun.
So I
Scrimp against
A scent
Of fish-
Monger, gall,
Sawdust, cabbage,
Quill, and
The restraint
Of Gallic
Grief, its
Haemorrhage and
Soak, its
Juice &
Chyle.
           Tall
Order is
A book:
A man
Dyes a
Hand, imprints
A folio
Square, jogs
Tiny ambiance
Into alignment
And calls
A lie
A reputable
History, hypnotic
And sweet.
It’s not.
It’s voice
Blown sky-
High as
An exasperate,
A redundancy
Unsummon’d filing
Away at
The edges
Of things.
It’s Walter
Maldè, a
Poor student
Pretending he’s
The Duke
Of Mantua
In Verdi’s
1850 opera
title’d Rigoletto,
Based on
A Victor
Hugo piece
Call’d The
King’s a
Regular Chicken-
Choker of
A Guy.
It’s a
Brutally incisive
Poetics of
Sass and
Discomfiture, an
Iconoclastic klaxoning
Against regalia
In all
Its mounting
Academickal forums.
The heights
Come down.
In hinterlands
A slot-
Tooth’d uncle
To nobody
Shreds a
Gopher’s hide,
Cutting laces.
A loan
Officer propels
Deodorant into
The smoke-
Sanctify’d crevices
Of Buick
Gloom, a
Way of
Readying oneself
For a
Date without
Destiny. A
Furtive kindergartner
Slips a
Baggie into
A mail
Shoot, first
Delivery of
A day
Of mischievous
Glory that’ll
Sour deadly
Before he
Learns simple
Cursive forms.
A man
Writes about
‘A kind
Of second
Nature, better
Than the
First,’ an
Indication of
Th’Enlightment-damaged
Singularities that
Drift officiously
About a
Moribund planet.
A Hoosier
Recalls th’adipose
Silos and
Community get-
Togethers that
Round’d up
‘Negroes, too’—
Affable proofs
Of something
‘Natural,’ too.
A tambourine-
Shaker sulks
Through half-
Heart’d thigh-
Slaps, tempo-
Frustrated—she’s
Got a
Sexual fire-
Luster to
Her cheeks,
And a
Teetering need
To dance
Out the
Door.
          Drop-
Down ceilings
Cover beams
Of two-
Hundred year
Oak, plain’d
With rude
Yanks of
A two-
Handled knife.
A man
Named John
Barlow cut
Bas-relief’d
Initials in
One webby
Corner. Of
Course, it’s
Hid, it
Is borne
Off by
History’s shadow-
History, the
One faked
Out by
Th’onerous prosperity
Of what
Gets record’d.
To record
Against th’adamant
Dismissal and
Whim heard
So clearly
In Queen
Elizabeth’s wanton
Call to
A minor
Warwickshire official:
—Come hither,
Little Recorder.
And that
Man, tremblingly,
Saw’d off
Th’appropriate old
Boards of
Official interests
And built
What seem’d
An indisposable
Shack, a
House made
To order.
The lambent
Recklessness of
Time’s unrehearsed
Music stops
And where
A man’s
Worry and
Doubt about
A prospective
Daughter-in-
Law make
Him forget
The wine
He’s out
To fetch,
What’s left
Is the
Shopping list
Itself, Michelangelo’s
It turns
Out, with
The items
Rebus’d in
Next to
The words,
A double
Code for
Th’illiterate rumbustickal
Heap of
A servant
Whose ‘personal’
‘Minor’ concerns
Go undivulged,
Beyond divagation
Or scoop.
A schooner
Of beer
Grows tepid,
Otiose, flat—
A sour-
Hoppy petulance
To its
‘Snout.’

~

To work, scout!

Aporia

~

Jacques Derrida slips off into a textual aporia and is gone. And I try to remember if I did or did not witness a Derrida lecture, dragged there one Saturday morning by the tall Cobleskill blonde divorcée after a night of informal riot. I picture being there, uncomfortably seat’d, alcohol sweat-soak’d. I cannot picture Derrida. A void and a blank. I can see ancient Jean Mitry there in the same auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall, I can see dapper Carlos Fuentes there, I can see affable Frederic G. Cassidy, the man behind the Dictionary of American Regional English. I can see husky-voiced Gwendolyn Brooks. One summer lecture I pretend’d I was a slothful Thomas Pynchon yawning into a Faulkner paperback, listening to Nabokov clobber English, reading. In a different auditorium I can see Fredric Jameson and hear him say “reify.” No Derrida. The man is not there. No voice-grain etch’d on the foil-cover’d cylinders (or wax discs) of my brainpan. No measure of stature, no “clothes that make the man,” nada. No fine-hair’d ceritifiable. I do remember the discomfort, the monstrous “head,” (gueule de bois) the thirst. I read Derrida late, and not extensively, nor thoroughly. I never loved the writing. He never interest’d me as a writer the way Barthes did. The writing somehow intangible, lacking body, like Derrida himself.

~

Received:

The Poetry Project Newsletter, Number 200, October / November 2004, edited by Marcella Durand ($5, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 181 East 10th Street, New York, New York 10003)

Creeley recalls Steve Lacy, and Tom Devaney Carl Rakosi. Part of a thing call’d 101 Designs for the World Trade Center, by Joe Elliot, apparently soonest available at Fauxpress.com/e. Steve Evans on Kevin Davies’s Lateral Argument on Jayne Cortez, and “the disobedient poetics of determinate negation.” Marcella Durand interviews Brenda Coultas. Reviews: Charles North on Bill Berkson’s The Sweet Singer of Modernism, Dale Smith on Lorenzo Thomas’s Dancing on Main Street, Noah Eli Gordon on a passel of chaps, Sarah Anne Cox on Kathleen Fraser’s Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. And others.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

The Untouchable, by John Banville (Vintage, 1997)

“There is a particular bit of blue sky in Et in Arcadia Ego, where the clouds are broken in the shape of a bird in swift flight, which is the true, clandestine centre-point, the pinnacle of the picture, for me. When I contemplate death, and I contemplate it with an ever-diminishing sense of implausibility in these latter days, I see myself swaddled in zinc-white cerements, more a figure out of El Greco than Poussin, ascending in a transport of erotic agony amid alleluias and lip-farts through a swirl of clouds the colour of golden tea head-first into just such a patch of pellucid bleu céleste.”

~

Words That Must Somehow Be Said : Selected Essays of Kay Boyle, 1927-1984, Edited and with an Introduction by Elizabeth S. Bell (North Point, 1985)

“Lawrence Durrell once wrote a number of letters to Henry Miller on the subject of the artist’s fear of accepting his own identity. He cited to Miller ‘Cezanne’s fear that society would get the grappins on him . . . Gauguin’s insistence on what a hell of a fine billiards player he was . . . and D. H. Lawrence fervently knitting, knitting, and trying to forget Sons and Lovers’—and there was Miller himself eating like mad to establish a reputation for himself as a gourmet. ‘Here are numberless types,’ Durrell wrote, ‘of the same ambiguous desire on the part of the artist to renounce his destiny. To spit on it.’ This was not for the moment Dahlberg’s desire or dilemma. He knew from the beginning who he was and that he was destined, both as man and writer, to be an exile in the land of his birth, ‘first in the wanton streets of Kansas City,’ he writes to William Carlos Williams in 1957, ‘then in an orphanage, and then a waif of letters in New York.’ His dilemma, rather, was how to be a writer, and he studied the works of others avidly, seeking to find the way.”

~

Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by Ellen Frothingham (Noonday / Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1961)

About Laocoon, or Lessing—as, oh, Sergeant Schultz’d say: “Nozzink. I know nozzink.” I do recall how a friend in Ithaca used to carry Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement around hid by the dust jacket of the Lessing book, or—another gap—was it Laocoon disguised by The Arrangement. Knowing nozzink about neither, no way to measure the meaning of the act. Same fellow used to exchange a few coins for a cold bottle of Labatt’s Blue on the way to school every morning, something to sip at the seminar table. “Those” “were” “the” “days.”

“A single incongruous part may destroy the harmonious effect of many beauties, without, however, making the object ugly. Ugliness requires the presence of several incongruous parts which we must be able to take in at a glance if the effect produced is to be the opposite of that which we call beauty.

Accordingly ugliness in itself can be no subject for poetry.”

~

The Words, by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Bernard Frechtman (Fawcett Crest, 1966).

Preparing—stock-piling—for my second adolescence.

I rather liked the pre-stamp’d four-cent Lincoln postcard tuck’d inside: from Endicott A. Batchelder, Director of Tulane University’s Office of Student Records and Registration, to one Mrs. Rasmussen in New Orleans, reporting how “your transcript has been forwarded to Jefferson Parish School Board.” And asking for the “customary fee” of $1.00. Dated 10-12-66. “Those” “were” “the” “days.”

“. . . boredom clung to me. At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a rest of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself. Led astray by idleness, I would sometimes hark back to my madness when I should have ignored it, when I should have kept it under control and focused my attention on external objects.”

~

In Parenthesis, seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu, by David Jones (Faber & Faber, 1978)

Jones’s World War I book, with Roman Britain and Arthurian legend and Y Gododdin—early Welsh epic—showing through in pentimento. The line in the title: “His sword rang in mothers’ heads.”

Childs-bane!—old wall-eye sees your dirty billikin through your navel.
She’ll nark Gertie’s grubby shift.
He smells your private ditty-bag from afar.
Amanuensis Nancy can’t jot his damaging hogs-wash fast enough.
Cotsplut! There’s bastards for you.
They’ll feel the pinch alright at
Daffy Shenkin’s Great Assize.
Roll on the Resurrection.
Send it down David.
Rend the middle air.
Send it down boy.

. . .

Pass it along—stand to left of trench—make way for carrying party.

Gretchen Trench gunner resumes his traversing. They low-crouched on haunches where the duckboard slats float. The freshly-set sand-bags fray and farrow; the hessian jets loose earth—clammy sprinklings, cold for your vertebrae. You hug lower crumpled against the quivering hurdle-stake.

~

Reading Stephen Greenblatt’s new biographical speculations on Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Which is well-writ, and puts the young Shakespeare in a predominantly Catholic circle. And proposes a hard-drinking father (John) leading to a temperance’d son Will.

High points and quotables come, rather expectedly, in the lines of Shakespeare Greenblatt deftly pulls down out of the seemingly sky-borne milkiness of text one’s always known, and never known, like (in a description of Malvolio): “an affectioned ass that cons state without book and utters it by great swathes.” How that ill-will’d state-conning ass rings today . . .

Queen Elizabeth to Edward Aglionby, Recorder of Warwick: “Come hither, little Recorder.” Hither, Little Recorder is a new book of poems by . . .

I took to collecting names of various gents in the Shakespeare surround: Adam Dyrmonth, John Bretchgirdle, Thomas Plume and Thomas Platter, Fulk Gyllome.

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Funny weekend. Saturday off to Ypsilanti where G. participated in an orchestra “retreat.” I slump’d in various lounges and sunny spots outdoors and read, happily enough. And mopped up chores quick and deliberate in the wane of afternoon. More Proust (the James Grieve-translated In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) in the offing, and additional notes to add to the slightly bulging reticular net bag soonest.

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Ongoing backwash of doubts about the Hotel. Its draftiness, its slog, its way of insinuating itself between myself and other “poetry-writing” projects. Under study.

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To work. To the treadmill!