Nod Mode

~

Received:

The Poetry Project Newsletter, edited by Marcella Durand (No. 198, February/March 2004, $5, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 East 10th Street, New York, NY 10003)

Lisa Robertson (I read every word I see by Lisa Robertson) writes about Niedecker: “‘In Phonographic Deep Song’: Sounding Niedecker”—“I’m interested in the presence of listening in Niedecker’s work, listening as a shaped, material practice of reception. Specifically, I’d like to consider listening not as a mode of consumption, but as a compositional practice—the listener devises tactics of receiving in order to turn sound towards shapeliness.” Marcella Durand interviews Edwin Torres: “I lived in a little studio apartment and I didn’t throw anything away for years. . . . I lived in this situation that was totally claustrophobic and it was like a womb. Everything I wanted was there. . . . In hindsight, I realize it fueled a lot of my writing. That the sense of holding onto things and the tangents I love so much in poetry come from this idea of collecting and holding on and seeing if it will work. This hodgepodge mentality.” Reviews, including Tom Devaney on Joanne Kyger’s As Ever: Selected Poems 1964-2001, Ange Mlinko on Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz, Chris McCreary on Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist and My Life in the Nineties, and a bouquet (terrific idea) of small reviews by Noah Eli Gordon. Reading reports and letters.

Director Anselm Berrigan reports that the NEA “will not be funding the Poetry Project for the 2004-05 season.” Which is, as Gertrude Stein would say “inaccrochable,” unforgiveably bête, the stupid doings of a bestial bunch. Apparently, the lost monies represent “approximately 10 to 12 percent” of the Projects annual income. I’ve been receiving the Newsletter free for the last couple of years (I think since responding to a sample issue offer on the Poetics list), but think I’ll put the $25 subscription price in the mail. And urge others to do so too.

~

A weekend gone to the dogs: the usual chores and movements, inane or amusing, among the bipeds. Little chance to read, no chance to write. A neighbor built a perfect igloo, sizeable enough, I’d suppose, for three or four to sit in comfortably, complete with extend’d half-cylinder’d entryway. I keep walking by it trying to figure out how the damn thing’s construct’d. It looks rather seamless, though igloos usually get fitted together with blocks. The snow is mostly too soft for cutting blocks, and not “packy” enough for making blocks (way too cold). Und zo? Mystère.

~

Reading rather indifferently Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. The English view of the French is a tiresome one.

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Lilt, Deft

~

Received:

Sugar Pill, by Drew Gardner (Krupskaya, 2002)

Care and precision (and “lobster on a leash” Jarryism?) right off the bat (first look):

“tethered seven shrimp to a platform

inside an aquarium and recorded their closing claws”

I like the deft lilt of “tethered seven shrimp” and the biologist’s clarity of “recorded” (though a musical riff does occur to me, a tiny microphone capturing the clicks and pops of fourteen claws snapping shut . . .)

Skipping a bit:

“spinning around, trying to learn the alphabet

and the scenes of everyday life toughen into confusion”

Every poem is laid out in double-space (what I like to think of as one-line stanzas, and use, in some poems, to aerate a pardonable density). Here, the feeling is different, there’s a sense of measure, rightness, selectivity, care: Gardner wants the lines savor’d, (or, I want to savor the lines, weigh each delicately, test it). That’s my initial sense, anyway. I’ll have to read it fully to see its larger structures.

~

Fence, edited by Rebecca Wolff, et al. (Vol. 6, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2003-2004, available for $8 at 303 East Eighth St., #B1, New York, NY 10009)

I find increasingly that what I read with the greatest interest and pleasure in Fence are the miniature reading lists that serve as contributor’s notes. Some are useful and authentic (pointing to books I’ve miss’d, with a fine ring of fervor and excitement); some are fashionable and false-sounding (the usual suspects trotted out, with a kind of opaque authorial fear that these, indeed, be the “right” usual suspects for the (always hastening away) moment); some are useful to my ever burgeoningly regressive fashion sense (“so X is the new lit hit, what’m I doing still reading Y?”); some are daft geek selections so fringe’d out of anybody’s interest as to make one wary that they’ll soon come all the way around and bite one’s ass with overlook’d brilliance and import . . .

Other notables and remarks in a quick riffle of Fence-pages: John Taggart; Mary Ruefle (I’m always interest’d in Ruefle’s poems, though I secretly think her early U. of Alabama Press books best; the slapdash, play-it-for-the-laugh quality that the Hoagland-Young crowd’s put her up to of late hides, I think, a more feral soul and chillier wit, less “likeable,” but surer, keener, smarter); Robert Paredez (I’m thinking probably another friggin’ heteronym, but then, I spend half my day thinking “another friggin’ etc.” about one thing or another; Diane Williams (whose Dalkey Archive book, Romancer Erector is a hoot and a wonderment); Chris Edgar (still got to get a copy of At Port Royal); Dan Beachy-Quick (my personal jury still out, my ears all prick’d up though—would anybody else say the “sound onslaughts” offer’d up resemble those of Lisa Jarnot? that is, a kind of sound-automatism and revelry, mostly done up in simple words, goes down in each?)

The Notley/Berrigan interview looks nourishing; the Rodney Phillips piece on all the 2002 poetry books heap’d up in a pile at Poets House looks impossible, an addling task, and one can only trust that the piece admits itself impossibly addled.

The thing you’re not supposed to do in a quick note like this is mutter doubt, (I suppose). But suppose somebody’s prodding you with a stick, poking (ouch!) harder than (cut that out!) you’d like (ouch, damn it!), and telling you you have to say (now, out loud) what you said to yourself in first glancing at the thing. Okay, okay, I give up: what I said was: “Charlie Smith? What the hell is Charlie Smith doing here? Doesn’t that business about “the whole pilgrimatic quality/of our marriage that year” just make you want to toss a meat cleaver into one of the machines at the manufactory? The poetry manufactory, I mean.” There you have it. There, you have it.

~

Noted in remarks on hypergraphia, and copied here for safe-keeping:

“One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!”
—Herman Melville

Mutable Delineate

~

A Contribution to a Short History of Critical Japery

Subjects that consist of a mutable Nature require exact distinctions, which are to be desumed from growth.

Whence the Avaunt-Garde is called either Praeliminary, Liminary, Recent, Inveterate or Terminative. A Praeliminary Avaunt-Garde, I must confess, is very Improperly named an Avaunt-Garde; for being absolutely considered in it self is no Avaunt-Garde, but in a Relative and Subsecutive way I have Imposed that Denomination only Doctrinae gratia, to express the root whence a commencing Avaunt-Garde doth spring and bud forth. This being praemised, I intend those Ebullitions comprehended in the Observations that are Delineated Elsewhere for a Praeliminary Avaunt-Garde, because they (Ebullitions, Moanings, Ticklish Witticisms, Outrage) praecede, and are generally Praeliminary to an Avaunt-Garde. A Liminary Avaunt-Garde is that, which upon the quietation and subsidence of a Praeliminary Ebullition buds forth. A Recent Avaunt-Garde is a confirmed Avaunt-Garde, but of no long standing, and is answerable to the augment of the Distemper. An Inveterate Avaunt-Garde is a Distemper of a long continuance, and alludes to the state of the Disease. A Terminative Avaunt-Garde is that Disease whereinto it doth pass, and puts a termination to the Distemper and Life also: as a Sad Dropsie, Boredom, Repetition, or Consumption, &c. for it is such a sort of Disease the Avaunt-Garde doth at length terminate into, and so prove Mortal.

Terminative Avaunt-Gardes, though Curable, require a long continuated strict course of Maudlin Humor and Invective; some are absolutely Incurable.

These Prognostics are to be understood absolutely considered, without the help of Remedies, which being praescribed according to the Rules of Art, dexterously praepared, and Methodically applied, are sufficiently impowred to frustrate the most of the praedictions, alwayes that one excepted, (which implieth a Period determined by the Creator), whereunto this Trite Versicle hath its Reference:

“Not this. What then?”

~

Le cafard

~

Blue. Le cafard.

~

Reading Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the mystical pull-downs. (Henry Gould, who’s been on a Berryman bender of late (I remember how Archie Ammons talk’d about having to sit up all night with Berryman—raving, drunk. Early ’sixties. Ammons, who didn’t drink (or did only barely), clearly detest’d the man. One got the distinct impression of the clash of two big babies.) ’s got it right with my “earth-bound empiricism” though I do like the notion of emptiness itself (or silence itself) being an embraceable “thing”—that via negativa back-door-to-heaven rag.) Howe on Edith Stein’s philosophical writings (on empathy):

“There is no sense of air and arrival. Is this just because the first person—her “I”—has been banished from the essay as being an inappropriate guest at the table of ideas? Closing the grammatical system off from the presence of the writer is often a way of banishing bewilderment from the prose. The “I” is the wild card that someone with her training does not allow in the deck. It undetermines the overdetermined. To be a questing presence in her own written sentence would be a symptom of uncertainty and would thereby undermine the whole system she was defending.”

Howe includes, too, an essay (a poetics) titled “Bewilderment.”

~

Big nausea.

Conjunct in Time

~

Do the oddest (most useful) conjunctions arrive (when one is) “between books”? Dipping into Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life, riding the Scio Church bus home in the snow:

“. . . the controlling mechanism at work in writing—that is, the effort at stabilizing time, of imprinting little figures on sheets of paper and packing them tight—is similar to the pretend games children play. . . The writer (like the child) is hunched over the page, controlling little signs and symbols that replicate, imaginatively, a population he or she is manipulating.”

To write: to stabilize time. I love that.

~

And carousing through web-interstices to look at Mark(s), and a longish Lyn Hejinian piece called “Eleven Eyes”:

“Aren’t children little pears and observant birds
I note that the green blanket is askew again briefly
. . .
Brevity is not child’s play though child’s play is brief but slowly
Today a man in a green leather hat advised me to sink my shovel
If I were to write a letter to Knut Handekker now he wouldn’t remember who I was which in any case is not who I continue to be”

Which is “working” via it’s own set of conjunctions, some visible to the casual reader, some probably not.

~

And poking at the fascinating carcass of T. E. Hulme’s Selected Writings, edited by Patrick McGuinness:

“School children at a fountain (moved mechanically by thirst) to someone looking down from above, appear as a pure instinctive mechanical act. Cf. Ants—we are unable to ascertain the subtler reasons which move them . . .

“Only in the fact of consciousness is there a unity in the world.”

And (Hulme): “All theories as toys.”

~

And Adams (pour la dernière fois): “Every fabulist has told how the human mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it; how—appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep . . . doubting its sensations and, in the last resort, trusting only to instruments and averages—after sixty or seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by this performance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask; but that it should actually be satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.”

~

So we hammer our little unities together; so we smother the physical world under undifferentiating neural-gray blankets. Think of Nabokov: that obsession with what becomes of th’accumulated knowing, the memories caught in the crosshair structures, hunker’d down in the brain-cases, knowledge as (gray) matter itself. And borne by what frantic release into what grim or casual afterlife? A shred of yellow’d corn-paper from a Gitane the young Vladimir smoked after punting on the Cam, or after a murderous tennis match, carried off on a breeze, pluck’d out of a meadow by a bird furbishing a nest; there’s a tiny history of disintegration and rot and reintegration and flourish one could trace—but of the sensation of the same young Vlad’s lips nuzzling the springy dark hairs along the back of M——’s neck, how trace that storage-cell? What becomes of it at the moment of death? And there’s idiocy in asking . . .

~

Tacking

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That Francis Bacon, Sir, had a tack-sharp notion: “The imagination must be given not wings but weights.” Meaning, I’d say, look to the natural world, the physical, the beat up old peasant shoes, and see how all that continues just fine without you. Never assume that any of it’s there to offer any particular meaning, or quality, to you, just because a seeing human mind sees it so. Oscar Wilde—not Chrissie Hynde—says “All of us are in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.” Which seemeth contradictory, but I think poor O.W. was talking about something else. And remember that Wilde died in Paris, his huge white and weighty body basically exploding. Full of black gunk.

~

Beware the poet who calleth th’undevout astronomer mad.

~

Hand-sized snowflakes pelting the earth this morning at about eight o’clock. Four inches in an hour and schools shut down.

~

Distractedly worrying about a lost article of clothing. A black headband, found. He who never misplaces anything, going about looking at the ground. Finish’d the Adams (my two remaining readers lift up ennui-buckled heads: “Wha? He say wha?”) Probably a couple more lines out of it to “capture.” (Sound of two flesh-damp’d clunks.)

~

Lunch!

Simian Briefs

~

A Theory of History

In search of
New thought-machinery
For improv’d simianity.

~

Back to Results

Brief is my
Confutation of your
Idea: it stinks.

~

Pick’d up a flyer to a small photographic exhibition call’d “Twelve Black Classicists” and read about one John Wesley Gilbert, born c. 1864 in Hephzibah, Georgia. Earn’d degrees in Greek at Brown University and in 1890, went to the American School in Athens, Greece; help’d with mapping of Eretria. The photographs are stirring, by Michele Valerie Ronnick. I veer’d off at Hephzibah though: the name Biblical my sister J. gave to her imaginary friend. We was not, emphatically not, a Bible-reading family (we “was” Unitarians)—so it’s always been a kind of mystery where J. could’ve found that name. My son G. had two “major” imaginary friends, one named “Compromise” (tout court) and one named Bill Pomeroy. He also had an imaginary character named Bobby Wilson who constantly set fire to things. (Providing G. with many opportunities to spring into firefighting gear, etc.) I had no friends, imaginary or otherwise. Just me, on my barrel-stave snowshoes, investigating the snow fleas, tracking through the empty wastes . . .

~

Two cultures collide. Destiny of us late breeders to spend the ’thousands singing:

And Dobby doesn’t know what day it is.
Doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is.

~

A rare early Saturday morning in bed, thinking. How a dog trainer’d explain’d that the sharply bark’d out No! should be saved for most dire situations, and it its place the gentler Wrong be used. And I’m thinking: “For example, if the dog is running loose on the beach and about to chew the leg off a baby whale.”

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Hecate, Hector

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

Memoirs of Hecate County, by Edmund Wilson (Signet Books, 1961)

Wilson says: “Hecate County is my favorite among my books—I have never understood why the people who interest themselves in my work never pay any attention to it—” I pick’d it up mostly for the “NOT FOR SALE IN NEW YORK STATE” emblazon’d across the cover.

What to Listen for in Music, by Aaron Copland (Revised Edition, Mentor Books, 1957, 1961)

Wearing my dilettante pants (over my head) I pick’d it up after somebody nearby carry’d on vociferously and convincingly about its excellence, and worth. “Don’t become hypnotized by the antics of the kettledrum player, no matter how absorbing they may be.”

The Plant-Magic Man, by Lawrence Durrell (Yes! Capra Chapbook Series, No. 5) (Capra Press, 1975)

About Ludovic Chardenon, of Arles, herbal medicinist. I count Durrell as one of a handful of best recent prose stylists in English, and recall casting wars in the Royal Palm Tavern in Ithaca, New York over the imaginary movie version of the Quartet: everybody I knew reading it and arguing.

The Singer of Tales, by Alfred B. Lord (Atheneum, 1970)

Skinned Alive: Stories, by Edmund White (Knopf, 1995)

Another impeccable stylist, though I think he’s getting slack with age. The first two novels, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples are terrific, lush and tautly writ, if that’s not wholly unimaginable. I start’d to think I saw bags in the prose with Caracole.

The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970)

The book about which my son G. always asks: “Is that the one that made you cry at the end?”

~

Carmen the dog caught a mole in the backyard. I spotted her flipping it up in the air, jump’d into my boots. Too late. Tiny pink spatulate diggers, hanging down limp, looking glue’d on to the dark wet fur. Flipped it off into a snowbank.

~

A little writing late Saturday afternoon. Revision a matter of opening files dated (I notice) in the 2002’s. First, it’s “What a pleasant surprise!” Then it’s “What have we here?” Then it’s “Oh, I see what’s needed!” or “What the fuh—’dj’ever see anything so irregular and cootified?” So endeth our first lesson on revision.

~

Dogged Pen

~

Adams, on writing the Mont-Saint-Michel book: “. . . the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of a year’s work depends more on what is struck out than what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play or variety.”

Part organic form, part Shaker Mother Ann Lee’s “every force evolves a form,” part hymn to the processual urge. Something kindred about Adams, maverick, solitary, slightly distrustful, with a fine obsessional drive.

~

I was looking for a book by Stephen Shrader call’d Leaving by the Closet Door (Ithaca House, 1970) because I’d come across a reference to Samuel Johnson’s definition of the sensation of happiness as “being swiftly drawn in a chaise over undulating turf in the company of a beautiful and witty woman” and I recall’d a Shrader prose poem therein “about” steering a race car over the Bonneville Salt Flats, and stepping out after to enjoy a tall drink with a beautiful woman, and I thought I’d “see” something by setting the two quotes into relation. (I’m also interest’d in Tony Tost and Co.’s “Recovery Project” at Octopus, and keep thinking of “lost” poets I like. Tim Reynolds. Thomas Johnson. E. G. Burrows. And Shrader, who seems to’ve gone to Oberlin—winning something called the Natalia Stone Gage Prize in 1966 “for attainment in prose and poetry composition,” and I think went later to Iowa, and since disappear'd.) (I’m also dallying (in tandem-thinking, or parallel, and equally) with th’idea that happiness, for me, need not depend on celerity or company: how about lolling on a lolloping raft with no upright two-legged walker within miles? I'd like that!)

I didn’t find it. The Shrader book. I did find a David Melnick book I’d been looking for (and unable to find) some weeks back. Eclogs (Ithaca House, 1972). For the Ron Silliman blurb that graces its cover:

“One’s immediate attraction to these poems lies in their clear craft and almost infinite suggestiveness. Yet beneath this dreamy, erotic world of glimpses awaits a powerful and complex machine, a structure which can be perceived through the jeweled surfaces if only the reader will understand the title of “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” to be statement of literal fact. Uniting for the first time the “French idiom” of the New York School and the field composition techniques of Duncan and Olson, Melnick has achieved the last significant goal of modernism and begun a major career.”

Well, blow me down. Mopped up modernism with first book, what’s next? I’ll leave it to others to determine if Silliman’s thinking (or style)’s changed any in the succeeding thirty-odd years. For the archives.

~

One more Adams tidbit, a sort of motto for Hotel Point, against the categorizings of Big Theory, or Big Unifying Theory Talkers (BUTTs):

“For human purposes a point must always be soon reached where larger synthesis is suicide.”

~

Fifty-five degrees in the house on waking. The thermostat battery’d got so low that it was too weak to lift it’s tiny snout and murmur to the furnace its usual commands. Below zero outside. No biking these days. Took the bus.

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Itch to cram more and more into a sentence, uneasy syntactical freight. For the fun of it.

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Rot Lying Down

~

New and noted (The Library):

Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life, by Katharine Conley (University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

Desnos appropriating the Rrose Sélavy (“Eros is life”) of Marcel Duchamp (“Sa robe est noire, dit Sarah Bernhardt”) and gumming it up exquisitely. Materiality of the word as shape-shifter: “Le plaisir des morts, c’est de moisir à plat.” “The pleasure of the dead is to rot lying down.”

~

Adams: “. . . the American people had no idea at all; they were wandering in a wilderness . . . They had lost the sense of worship; for the idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of money was an old world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship of the Gods, or to worship of power in any conscrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than any one ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make more, or throw it away . . . The American mind . . . shunned, distrusted, disliked, the dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in history for its ignorance of the past.”

And I think of a teacher at the Alliance Française, exactly Gertrude Stein’s old neighborhood, then (’seventies) achurn with (mostly) restless French-language-mad youths (Iranian exiles, American Mormon missionaries, German hippies, sad-eyed Ethiopians and proper Brits . . .) How turning in a writing assignment writ in my (then) legible, tiniest print—it barely fill’d a half sheet of paper—provoked that teacher (a “buoyant” voluble Parisian) to ask: “M’sieur Latta, you’re not Scottish by any chance, are you?” Which, yes, by chance, I was. He’d glean’d it by my economickal (think “stingy”) use of the paper.

~

Late again. What does O’Hara (again) say somewhere? Something like:

“I seem to be defying fate, or am I merely avoiding it.”

—Them Gizzi notes, they bustin’ my chops. I get back there. Tomorrah.
—You ain’t gonna do nothin’ wit no Gizzi notes, you dog.

Writing like reading. The more you give in to it, the more it points to all that’s undone. Logarithmically scooting more and more into the hopper. That Ulla Dydo Stein book found its way (in the dark) back to me, and’s clamp’d itself to my foot like an unleash’d lobster belonging to Alfred Jarry (who got it from Tristan Corbière). There’s the new Wesleyan Zukofsky book of WPA-trigger’d American design writings, with radio scripts. There’s the plan to continue with the Adams, at least through the Mont-Saint-Michel book. There’s the Peter Culley point’d out The Lunar Men. There’s Paul Shepard’s classic Man in the Landscape. There’s Some Alphabets to wrap up.

Monkhood, prison, exile, hermitage.

—You is a strainge muh-fuh.

~

So, out with el doggo into the night. A kind of sharp, granular snow is spritzing down. If I stand still I can hear it—carrot-seed siz'd—tick and skitter bouncing against the shoulders of my greatcoat. At the end of the block a US flag, spotlit by harsh ground-mount’d lights, snaps briefly. The Republic never sleeps, though the Republicans who live there are likely out—nodding—attending to some lower-level terror alert, a mauve, violet, or indigo state wherein they, poor things, can douse that perpetual emergency-preparedness against the unimaginable, and get, heart’s ease, some rest.

I’ve seen him, Mr. Republican, shining up the fenders of a red Fire Chief-mobile he keeps in the big garage. She, Mrs. Republican, is apparently the one who fills all the plenteous big windows of the house with a rotating display of stuff’d animals, mostly bears. They sit, mostly, looking out, in ready rows. Is there a single other country in the world where such behavior (the woman’s, not the wee tim’rous beasties’) in a fleshly grown woman would not be interpret’d (correctly) as proof of complete and utter insanity? (And, truthfully, I see similar things in the library here: cubicles completely shingled with one-a-day calendar tear-offs of “Far Side” or “Dilbert” cartoons, cubicles as shrines to “identity”—“She’s the one with four hundred troll dolls on her desk; you can’t miss her.”)

I remember hearing John Cage interview’d on the radio. Maybe twenty years ago. He’d been tracing the shapes of rocks he’d found, carefully outlining them on paper. He suggest’d that such activity could be something—art—that anybody could do. Particularly older citizens. And I thought: that’s a little nutty. Now, though, I’m thinking of bringing Mrs. Republican a few select’d and shapely rocks . . .

~

Adams: “The American mind . . . likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality.”

~

According to a University of California Press e-mail today, the new Joan Retallack book of essays, The Poetical Wager is finally out.

~

Hugging a Shoulder

~

I’d better rectify that O’Hara remark.

The first section of Gizzi’s book (Some Values of Landscape and Weather) is titled “Forensics.” The section consists of a single poem, “A History of the Lyric.” That poem consists of six (unnumber’d) titled parts, the first being “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” I toy with all that largely because I did so in reading: that first poem’s a little top-heavy with titles (there’s a W. S. Graham epigraph in there, too), and the way into the book a little clutter’d.

Some (beginning) lines to look at:

they are right next to you
in the lanes, hugging a shoulder

•

they twitter in rafters
calling down to your mess

in rays, crescents

the white curled backs
of snapshots tucked in a frame

eyes of the dead

•

there is a gimbal lamp, ledger
a table of solid deal

clocks & militaria

a dirty blotter
its crusty bottle, a plume

•

there are beetles and boojum
specimen jars decorated

with walkingsticks, water striders
and luna moths

a treatise on rotating spheres

•

The opening salvo continues thus for another three similarly-wrought sections—passing a “swivel chair” and a “mountain face / empurpled” and arrives at:

an avant-garde
a backward glance

O’Hara, for me, butts in with “calling down to your mess”—and abruptly, irremediably I’m thinking: “. . . And if / some aficionado of my mess says ‘That’s / not like Frank!’, all to the good!” The other details, though, a kind of attic (and antic) detritus of eighteenth (and nineteenth) century science and militarism present’d with a kindly, near-affectionate eye: though the precisely select’d details and some of the diction (“solid deal” and “beetles and boojum” (the latter OED’s out as “An imaginary animal, a particularly dangerous kind of ‘snark’”)) call up Ashbery, the tone here is more reverential (than Ashbery's), almost tinged with nostalgia. Those “specimen jars” store up a little nod (in formaldehyde) to Whitman (along, of course, with the “backward glance”—referring to the travelled roads (here, and there) and what the French call a retroviseur, a rear-view mirror (see section title)), (there’s a tricorne hat that probably isn’t Marianne Moore’s, I hate to press too hard on a thing and crush it) and that “empurpled” mountain is sheer Bierstadt American sublime. So: question is: what’s all such truck doing drug howling into “an avant garde”?

Claiming a kinship. Staking out a new homestead for a tradition. Making use, that way we have of honoring the dead forebears, and making meaning.

~

An endless series of starts? Call it “serial reviewing.” Or “Notes in Need of Rewriting for a Possible Reading of a Peter Gizzi Book.”

Quit I did, for the moment. Walk’d the dog under indifferent skies. Try’d to read the palimpsest of hieroglyphics made where a clergy of crows had peck’d apart a kill’t squirrel. Return’d to poke a cold nose at Mr. Adams, who “at past fifty, . . . solemnly and painfully learned to ride the bicycle.”

Adams (on education “at past fifty”): “Accidental education could go no further, for one’s mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.”

~

Boss boojum over my shoulder.

~

Eager, Leery

~

Intending to sort out my notes to Peter Gizzi’s Some Values of Landscape and Weather, a book I was terribly eager to get to, read with some alacrity (with several pages of notes, now pencil-smeary) and? Did ambivalence lift up a red sandstone mitten (think George Herriman) and impel me to go slow? Not exactly. Did my casual mention of intent (to write something about it) to some few acquaintances make me leery, as if any semi-guarantee of audience’ll sap my idiot-big head? I don’t know.

What we gots here? I think I went into Gizzi’s book thinking Ashbery, and what I read as O’Hara jump’d me quick. First page. Not that the book is full-up of O’Hara—it isn’t—but the upshot was that I had it boom’d into me noggin that I was coming “at” the book with some hearty assumptions.

(Maybe I should tell a little story here. Circa 1975, I got sent to Mount Holyoke College as Cornell’s representative to something call’d the Glasscock Poetry Competition. Poets out of some of the hoitier of the toitier Eastern universities invited for a reading / competition before a group of judges (that year Marilyn Hacker, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wilbur.) Fantastico. Incroyable. Representing Brown University was Michael Gizzi (and representing Smith—I think Smith—was Mary Jo Salter). In those days, any occasion at all gave license to my prodigious, rampant and intemperate drinking, so I down’d as many scotches as I could, mostly skipped the dinner, and got up wobbly and stupid to the podium for what was later politely described (by a member of Holyoke’s journalism squad) as a rather “uneven” reading. I cannot recall who “won.” Certainly not me. (What I do recall is Spender using two fingers of his drink-holding hand to “discretely” push ice cubes out of his tumbler—whence they crash’d to the floor below—all the while tossing his great white-maned head in conversation. That and Wilbur’s ever-redder phizz. I think Spender, later, in a note ostensibly regarding the poems, wrote something about “this gawky-souled poet”—which strikes me oddly even today. I recall Michael Gizzi as rather good-looking, dressed with a kind of flair and style I thought extravagant, and accompany’d by his wife, whose name was Ippi, or Izzi?—or was it Barbara Barg? I’ll ever shore up a ruin’d memory with trump’d up foolishnesses . . .))

(I tell that story so that I can tell another story. Some fifteen years later, in Virginia, in a seemingly continual fog of alcohol, I somehow got word of one o-blek, edited by a Gizzi. And somehow convinced myself that the Peter Gizzi list’d for editor was a mistake, and that he, Peter, was Michael Gizzi, lost comrade (though we’d exchanged maybe two words at Holyoke), double and chum, editing a new magazine. I sent a letter with poems: Tu te rapelles? . . . fantastico, très chouette . . . etc. And I think it simply vanish’d. Kaput. Gone. Maybe a couple of years later (days not so stung with haze) I figured out my mistake.

~~~

Which didn’t get me a jot closer to the Peter Gizzi book. À demain, mes camarades!

~

Which (demain) brings cold holding. Sea-smoke in Maine, is what I learn about in the elevator coming up, how, in cold weather, it lies out over the ocean. Lovely.

~

Blighter

~

Contribution to a Blighter’s Defense

Being a copy of the letter I wrote to The Believer, protesting the treatment of the Yasusada-author.

~~~

18 January 2004

Editors, The Believer:

Too bad about the Michael Atkinson (“Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!”) piece in the December 2003/January 2004 issue. Where one hoped for an elaboration and exfoliation of the Yasusada-author’s terrific, pointed, and theory-savvy writings, the building up of a more lofty structure on the impeccably (note: word used advisedly, in its original sense, without sin) wrought foundations of Mssrs. Johnson and whatever band of confederates he’s mustered, what one discovers is mere journalistic cant, dutiful and polite. A mush. “Neo-meta-post-deconstructionist ironism,” indeed. (Rather than a fierce moral outrage, Atkinson settles for the clever jibes of a poseur, just another sniffer at the pants, like a hungry dog.)

The best way to respond to a hoax is to “hoax more, hoax without remission.” So Rufus Grattius put it. (Akin, I suppose, to Oscar Wilde’s dictum, a favorite of mine: “To stay young, what one must needs do is continue uninterruptedly and repeatedly to commit the follies of youth.” Akin, too, to Henry Adams’s singular admission, as a writer of history, that “the worst lives were the candid.”)

I admit it: what I looked for here in The Believer (for who’s more gullible than a believer-reader?) was a revival of the Yasusada story (already, you must admit, ’nineties old-hat in these mid ’thousands) in the form of a feigned, but near-seamless piece of anger-cavort. And I tried damnably to find it: in the clunky Britishisms (“peg the blighter)”, in the Time-ese punning (“the prevailing yen”), in the over-the-top excrescences of metaphor (“yanking the author out of the dynamic like a bad tooth”?), in the merely laughable (the claim that hoaxes “cut new wounds in the tender flesh of readerly hope,”), in the Snidely Whiplash (or is it Mortimer Snerd?) ending “revelation” that Atkinson’s been offloading another hoax-pox on us : that when it comes to the James’s: William’s the syphilitic, Henry’s the Hudson.

I cannot quit without one final admission: I did, hyper-reading, begin hyperventilating (though briefly), thinking I’d uncovered the tidy flaw in the carpet (the one that’d make it human, a beautiful fake). I googled “Richard J. Griffin” and found reference to little more than an Inspector General of that name, Department of Veterans Affairs. In one story, a few notches down, Veterans for Justice asked: “Why do we believe that Inspector Richard J. Griffin is not honest?” Aha, I thought, innocuous name or no, here’s the snicker-footprint of Mr. Johnson, pretender to the believer-throne of Mr. Atkinson, or of Mr. Atkinson, pretender to some new throne. There is no book titled The Faces of Anonymity, I thought, ho ho, rich title. What a terrific piece, I thought, full of frisson and premeditation and verve, I’ll have to send kudos to Kent Johnson and see what he says.

It lasted all of three wonderful minutes. Time it took to search WorldCat and locate the table of contents for The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, edited by Robert J. Griffin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Robert? Robert. My pleasure all due to a Believer fact-checker’s temporary nod-out.

My thanks for pleasures momentary, and writers’ mistakes authentickal, though I continue to feel bad for Mr. Atkinson. He might better turn that roller-coaster insobrietous prose-style of his to something more fun and, finally, more important than mere believing.

Sincerely,

John Latta

~~~

Bought:

My Paris, by Gail Scott (Dalkey Archive, 2003)

“We ambling along leafy banks. Locks. Curved bridges. Birds in brown air.”

~

Henry Adams (on an adversary): “S—’s mind had reached the calm of water which receives and collects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself. The images from without, the objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesy until the mental surface was ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would have ceased to exist.”

~

My prose-writing here revivifying my somewhat stall’d out poetry writing, or maybe it’s the new viable machine my sister J. gave me. Connect’d, meaning I can move files into the aether (and back out) without mire or mishap. How many clean copies got execute’d and capture’d in a quarter century of trying to look “presentable”? Who’s still got a orange-box’d hundred-weight of Eaton’s Corrasable Bond tuck’d in a deep drawer? Smudge city, that stuff was.

Digging around for something in the files. A manila folder, maybe an inch thick, mark’d “Old Drafts.” I always intend’d to type all that kind of stuff up (without editing, that is, with no arranging, no squelching, no additives, a pure recital of accumulation, what the hand pluck’d off the trees of the years and stow’d with an eye for use). I call’d it “A Notebook Without Pity.” –You! Into the notebook! And it’s impossible, of course. So the words stay put, there in the little yellowing word-dormitory. Here come a gaggle now, gawky teenagers, pimply, and in no hurry. A page of Ithaca House offset mess.

We had an old A.B. Dick 1200 (I think) offset machine in the cellar, and try’d none too successfully to do work on it, using paper masters. Meaning: one could type (using a composer, or a typewriter, with a carbon ribbon) directly on a somewhat elongated piece of heavy paper, clamp it around one of the drums of the machine, and be cranking out copies immediately. No light tables, no burning plates, etc. So, practicing, I kept writing these little poems directly on masters, and running scrap paper through the stuttery maw of the machine, all the while trying to get the paper feed working, or the paper delivery table, or the ink fountain, etc. I didn’t know exactly how the damn thing work’d, so I mess’d with it long and often. And try’d to save whatever spitfire idiocy I typed up:

TITLE GOES HERE

Not quite. The green cardigan
Hanging on the door
I found in the pond
Reflected in the doorknob
Hidden behind this sandwich
I keep seeming to eat.

~

POEM

Six of these willowy ones
And then the sparks hit.
We transpire freely like
O forget it . . .
In the future lunchpails
Will be packed with heaven.

~

Those two placed upside-down to what I recognize as two William Hathaway poems, spoilage out of A Wilderness of Monkeys, Hathaway’s second book. “So lonely he’d kiss maggots from the mouth / of a dead trick, weeping in disgust and passion.”

~

Hid Greenbacks

~

More epigraphs. Two more out of Some Alphabets. The book is construct’d of six sections of twenty-six poems each. Each section to carry its own epigraph, is the idea. Unfinish’d. And other odd (unseen, hid) constraints pertain to each section. I think the Biblical mishmash jobbie there is the Wycliffe translation, though I could be well mistook.

~

I am hid.

—William Blake

~

Wisdam forsothe is drawen of hidde thingis;
ne ther shal be maad euene to it topasie of Ethiope,
ne to the most clene steynyng shal be comparisound.

Job XXVIII, 19

~

My first book, Rubbing Torsos, that dog-certain heirloom of a quarter-century of blessed neglect, is sweeten’d considerably by Monsieur Merz:

There is no such thing as chance.
A door may happen to fall shut, but this is not by chance.
It is a conscious experience of the door,
the door, the door, the door.

—Kurt Schwitters

~

My second collection, Rue Hazard, long consign’d to the drawer of a rolltop desk left in exchange for a tawdry sum of dirty greenbacks in an Albany, New York pawnshop circa 1991, carried two graceful (and near-dire, I'd wager, as extinct species of radical optimism) ditties to written communication:

It is a common superstition that when one wishes to communicate with dear ones temporarily at a distance, one should toss into the appropriate orifices . . . the written expression of one’s feelings, after having encouraged the postmaster with a small pittance and received in return some little pictures, no doubt blessed, which one devoutly kisses on the back. This not the place to criticize the incoherence of these maneuvers, it is beyond argument that they make possible communication across great distances.

—Alfred Jarry

~

But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of speaking with those who are in India, of speaking with those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page!

—Galileo Galilei

~

My brother S. who lives north of San Francisco, sends me a 21 December 2003 Chronicle Magazine clipping with a center-spread map of the “San Francisco Literary Universe.” Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon pulse huge at “red hot center” orbit’d by “moons” Vendela Vida and Ayelet Waldman. Asinine isn’t the word for it. I thought they call’d it the “Left Coast” out of progress and conviction, not because of its being “left” behind, har har. The map idea (complete with “red-hot center”) is thieved fully-clothe’d out of a circa mid-’sixties Esquire. You could look it up. As S. says (of a creature named Kem Nunn): “‘surf novelist’? what the hell is that?”

~

Adamsiana

On Darwinism: “it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no more value for him that the idea of none; that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.

. . . Never since the days of his . . . ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.”

(I’d like to be able to say that, reading th’above whilst standing hatted and mitten’d in the ornery-cuss cold outside the Blake Transit Center (a bus terminal, and not that Bl—), I grew woozy and had to lean up against Dorky D. the panhandler who tags the walls thereabouts in black lightning-script:

“Dorky D.’s got a STD—”

but the truth is, I didn’t. I bark’d my hollow snort-laugh into my greatcoat collar and kept it to myself. Henry Adams, postmodernist. Henry Adams, who’d a thunk it?)

~

Brooks Adams, brother to Henry, wrote in a letter that Adams “stickled for form.” And Henry Adams, in a letter to friend John Hay, before beginning on the Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres, ponder’d the possibility of a book construct’d as “a sort of ragbag of everything; scenery, psychology, history, literature, poetry, art.” (And so I plow earnestly through some few handy books trying to find something I “imagine remembering” about a poem, possibly “Second Avenue,” having the form of “a bag into which everything pour’d ends up belonging,” and find only Ashbery’s (on O’Hara) “inspired ramblings of a mind open to the point of distraction.”)

~

Mf!

~

Three Essays


Snow. The fluffy fine-sift’d variety, probably six or seven inches. Shovel’d and re-enter’d sweaty. How would Thomas Jefferson record such weather? In a tidy pencil-led hand, on good French papier carré, whilst pondering the barren back garden, or that gap in the hills to the south? J. is listening to (watching) Joshua Bell. I stuck my head in and caught a few minutes: too histrionic a style, I thought. Tossing the head like an over-coax’d mare. Music should be a somber occasion of doubtful mastery, ever-surpass’d by the gods. And by the inner irregular musicks. Here, Becky Thatcher would, I am certain, hoist aloft her nose and say, “Mf! Some people think they’re mighty smart—always showing off.”

Snow. I start’d with th’immediate (that is my inherited “period style” tic). What deaden’d in my walnut-brain’s brown-red swill, pickled as a chunk of herring: a complaint about The Writing. I mean, what’s the point? Oh, the futility! Heave and gnash, mutter and morph. It is a visceral disgust with, not the activity (Why, guv’, I druther line up words in little rectilinear rows and stretches than do most anything a living specimen would know to do . . .), and not the resultant swatch of conniving and spittle-caught exasperate, but the placing it on the holy stage of the world’s tremulous lip, there to speak and be spoken through in the great dynamo of the word-industry! (“Mf!” say the Beck.)

Snow. Wallace Stevens surtout. That immense nothing (I don’t mean Wallace Stevens. I like thinking about him going on long, contemplative “tramps” up the Palisades. Or what to think about all those Mercury dimes—each dime with a bas-relief of Stevens’s wife on it—banging about in millions of linty pockets, workingmen carrying black lunch pails shaped like barns, sailors in button-fly bells, card sharks and manipulators. Did Stevens think about dimes?) What does the Italian Ungaretti write: “Mattina”: “M'illumino d'immenso.”? And Ted Berrigan translates as “Morning”: “Ripped out of my mind again.” Whatever I was thinking about snow: I muff’d it. Gone.

~~~

Enjoying all the talk about putting manuscripts together that’s been careening around here (Jordan Davis, and Josh Corey, and Tony Tost). I find that I collect titles and (book) epigraphs, rather casually, but with a burning feverish delight in picturing some future apt employ. That is, I go giddy to a more splendid degree (impossibly construct’d, this) (almost) for the tack’d on quoted bit than I do (go giddy) for the writing (itself) that provides the firm bulkhead (mast-pole) for the tacking (nailing). Thoughts of Melville (Captain Ahab) (and a particularly good epigraph) is gumming up me speech. Here’s one (epigraph) for The Joinery, (my manuscript-in-waiting):

If the want of uniformity of style constitutes liveliness, Mr. Hazlitt must be a most sprightly writer. For his style is neither the familiar, the classical, the old, nor the new, but an odd composite of all these. Sometimes a mock dignified, then a contemptuous negligent, and, again, the tame modern, may be met with; and amidst the last kind, you will occasionally happen upon a fine old English word or phrase, about as much in place as a slab of dark, rich mahogany set in pine. And, lest this should not be enough, we are sometimes relieved of the wearisomeness of prose by a sentence of very tolerable blank verse. After all, Mr. Hazlitt shines most in quotations:— ‘he has been at a great feast of words and stolen the scraps,’—’he has lived long on the alms-basket of words,’—we ‘marvel’ the lady-auditors ‘have not eaten him for a word.’ One sentence begins, and another ends, and a third is kept together in the middle, by a quotation. It is a curious piece of joinery, and well worth examining.

—Richard Henry Dana

And the Melville, currently affix’d to an unfinish’d something called Some Alphabets:

. . . the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what
in all things makes the sounding-board is this—
there’s naught beneath.

—Herman Melville

~

Late walk with Carmen. Wellingtons and wet socks. A green tint to the Ann Arbor sky. Carmen’s throaty gutturals nosing up the car-slammed squirrel body, now cold-harden’d into a little fur-cover’d log. I tug her off, el doggo. Thinking about William Carlos Williams and a line, mine, caught and brung down out of the green atmosphere, something like “the ungainly pet of my prose.” A desire to make writing a disaster, star-dissing, star-slam, no more heroics, lambkins. Some long lugubrious fit that passeth. I swear that I read in Life magazine that Hollywood kill’d Marilyn Monroe. Because she walk’d ungainly in her walk, like a moose calf, like a fuckin’ moose. 1962. Me, eight. Oh dilemma’d horn-toss of memory!

~

Adams: “[Contemporary American poetry] had no unity; one wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.”

Okay, “Society.” And English to boot.

~

Note to self: Emily Dickinson (b. 1830) and Henry Adams (b. 1838). Civil War generation (Adams in London, Dickinson in Amherst.) Prose styles against a backdrop of slaughter.

~

Lunch Voodooist

~

Lunch Poetics

(Reading my Silliman, with a Cojack cheese sandwich.)

What would an anthology without an agenda look like? And why use the language of Alexander Haig?

Why the pejorative "a practicing new formalist?" That's cop talk. A practicing homosexual. A practicing voodooist.

What does "political" mean in a sentence like: "So for political reasons, I almost always say yes to being included in a project like this." Because it is a textbook? "Without Contraries is no progression"?

What's up with the constant tallying and quantificatory markers? Ain't no science here. That was what the New Critics sought, too.

~

Mown Down

~

Found: “bewildered” and “bug.”

~

Mown Acres of Incorrigible Prose

Such acerb yellow’d vittles. Chum akimbo vetch-seizure. Sour at Coxcomb Sneer. Err, filch blini, skedaddle. Loud lewd picnicking stint. That slovenly skittish cloudlet! Sere zygotic quid-fumigant. Fey blue mayhem engine. Rhomboid egging-loft joint. Toy curt noun: cup. Abundant vernal linen girth. Sincere quarry-spent veery. Discern cotyledon-resin imprimatur. Perfervid dormer-measles lipid. Whelk-burin nail phlogiston. Subtle rain besmirch’d horehound. Parallelogram, bewildered bug, doe. Scorn Cineplex caryatid-abs. Ensconce vichyssoise detritus, albeit. Pssst of smoky nightjar. Prompt bandy-legged rural entelechy. Tar-rancid nylon pommels. Necessary essay-opprobrium contrariety. Vellum auk-apple offal. Tansy-lit plonk-scrounge.

~

Proofing, stump’d my toe on th’uncanny (below) and thought of Tony “The Unquiet Grave” Tost, and the excellent journal Octopus he edits with Zachary Schomburg. Oddly enough, Tost says (Wednesday, January 14, 2004) he needs a word, a single word! Here, take “bewilder’d.” Hell, Tony, take “bug” too.

“I am (quoth he) the Unfortunate Tony, that has been in his Grave now this many a fair year, and yet your wise Worships forsooth have not wit enough to make your Selves and your Company merry, but Tony must still be one half of your Entertainment and Discourse. When any man plays the Fool or the Extravagant, presently He’s a Tony. Who drew this or that Ridiculous Piece? Tony. Such or such a one was never well taught: No, he had a Tony to his Master. But let me tell ye, He that shall call your Wisdoms to shrift, and take a strict accompt of your words and actions, will upon the Upshot find you all a Company of Tonys: and in Effect the Greater Impertinents.”

~

The [poets] I observ’d, were a Generation of Modest Fools, that pass’t there under the Notion of people Diffident of Themselves.

~

Old Notes (Undigest’d, Bitter)

Moon big in the sour-color’d eastern sky at dusk, a companion. Carmen and I shuffling along the ice. She upturn’d me a couple nights back, I dropped the leash. She stopped and turn’d back with a “What in tarnation fool thing you doing now?” look.

G. is whistling “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” J. is listening to the Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor reading a poem about immigration. Home.

~

Who Am I?

With an “ideal of life . . . beyond all, with a social status that should place him above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances . . . he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will.”

~

One confederate writes: “I bet he ignores you.”

Meaning Silliman.

“Still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous [man . . . whose] ideal of life was to be a great [ . . . ] with a social status that should place him above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will.” (Adams)

I bet he does, too.

~

(Scrawl’d out big on a small canary-yellow legal pad. No memory of writing it.)

“We should all be so willing to expose our blindspots . . .

That ten thousand hisses’ll bloom . . .”

~

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.

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

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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.