Field Chorus

~

Back. Field notes (rough style) concluding with the unsung chorus of a wedding ditty follow the latest installment of (the never-ending) “Poetics.”

§

A POETICS—10

FUTILITY AND CAPRICE AGAIN

“What I mean is a man . . .” The “midriff” of the poem “Plots a history, prefigures a life” out of the imaginary detritus of that “disused field” of “ruins.” Time collapses: what is gone (“history”) is both charted, mapped, laid out and contrived, schemed, conspired toward in advance (“Plots”), as the trace (“smudge”) of a garden announces the entrance of a series of possible lives, lives already lived out in futility (“trudging,” “Laboring,” “swaying,” “passing”)—gone but not gone. Only words, names, “peculiar,” inappropriate—“Biltmore, Adeline, Zephyr”—remain. Words as measure—“Geometries cut to endorse”—of precision and its lack, its futility. Noticing (“what begins”), the epistemological maneuver, the attempt to say what is “out there,” succumbs to language—“a mere collection of nouns, inert”; what remains is only a “commemorative edition,” a version, “what I mean.” Meaning goes local, all “real” “verity” is “antic,” despite the “landscape’s” (or the text’s) “Desire to deny whatever alters it,” to signify, to avoid the unavoidable insinuations of words, “nouns,” those “murderesses,” queerly “inert,” destabilizing in stability. Only an appeal to a reader (other), another witness, an opening to viewpoint’s alterity, allows the caprice to “take,” for “what I mean” to be recognized as futility, caprice (I think of Valéry’s remark—“Je suis l’instable” or Artaud’s “I am chance”) and the poem to become a manifestation of individual hazards vexed by something like its own “‘social fact’-edness,” language “Slopping” through—outside to inside to outside—a man sitting on a porch on 9 May 1994.

~

DIFFERENTLY

I could “read” the poem very differently—tracing some of the “personal” elements, emphasizing how that language got in that sitting man, rather than how the poem proposes lives stuck in language (like being stuck in traffic). I could point to tromping around the pasturage behind a structure I lived in briefly in Virginia, a tiny two-story outbuilding to an early nineteenth century inn, what had been the summer kitchen for that inn and was now where I read in bed nights in mittens and listened to mice ransacking the cupboards. I could point to discovering the foundations of what I took to be a settler’s cabin in that pasturage. I could point to my sincere belief that Biltmore is the name of a Vanderbilt estate in the North Carolina mountains, and that it is named thus in a William Hathaway poem called “Several Estates in North Carolina.” (I check The Gymnast of Inertia. It is not.) I could point to that line about the “white cabbages” as echoing a curious line in Flaubert’s letters that I remember jotting down in (I see now) 1987: “It is too generally believed that the sun has no other function here below than to help the cabbages along”—though I always remember it as referring not to the sun, but to us, humans, and connect it oddly with another Flaubertian mot: “It bores me to eat” and that to O’Hara’s line (in “Music”) “I have in my hands only 35¢, it’s so meaningless to eat!” and that to Guy Davenport’s line “Eating is always at least two activities: consuming food and obeying a code of manners” and so, connecting, demonstrate how “unmannerly” language’s code can be, so consuming and consumed. I could point to, as a boy, visiting distant Canadian relatives, a stooped man named Fred and Fred’s more solid wife, and glimpsing, through a half-open door, a perfectly Victorian bedroom complete with a lumpy, too human mound breaking the still-taut linens of the bed: daughter, invalid for thirty or so years. I could point to an exhibition of monochromatic etchings by an artist named Susan Blake in Ithaca, New York, all the titles deploying oddly archaic nomenclatures for the pigments used: cupric, cinnabar, vert, and how the words sang materiality, seeming more the thing to look at than the etchings did themselves.

My pointing here is mere documentation, after the fact—though there’s a sweet pleasure in seeking out such tiny indices of the whole commotion of something like “my life in language” that the poem draws on, gesticulates at, as the prior field of its making, howsoever partial. The poem, though, constantly insists on that partiality: the provisional nature of any “plot,” any “perfect plate.” Any characterization or naming, any habitation of a landscape is recognized as a provisional construct, both of the “I” and including the “I”— this plotting, this prefiguring, this caprice on the part of the capricious “I.” The single perspective is (in spite of “Euclidean”) denied more than a provisional truth, the extended metaphor (the “midriff” of the poem seems nearly an extended metaphysical conceit) works not to transcend, not to point to things beyond, not to capture and pin down the “tempestuous / Array,” but to propose one measure of the possible in the ongoing suasions of the whole. One could argue that the “I” here remains the site of the construction, that the vision is constituted through it, imperially, subjectively, that the refusal (“Or maybe not”) is a merely local denial that succumbs to, is incumbent on the finicky “I,” the controlling interest in the poem. What of Blake’s notion—“Mental Things are alone Real”? Is not the “I” here positioning itself simply as the “it who characterizes the characterization” (—the phrase is Bernstein’s in Content’s Dream—) creating not an indeterminacy of “Array,” but a simple “dyadic movement” (Bernstein)—this, not this—enforcing a binary that rides only the “Real” of the “I”’s imagination? Is not the “I” here simply a somewhat jittery persona, a voice ordering, categorizing, self-consciously composing the scene only to deny it? In After the Death of Poetry Vernon Shetley suggests that “Self consciousness has become a reflex of art after modernism and in itself no longer bears any particular value.” And in an interview in Content’s Dream Bernstein proposes the I (variously, “the voice,” “the individual,” “the self”) as “the most salient concept with which to describe the site of [a] resistance” to the “matrix of social and historical relations that are more significant to the formation of an individual text than any personal qualities of the life or voice of an author.”

Is “Futility and Caprice . . .” unavoidably privileging voice, self, making less an inhabitable structure, one the reader is allowed or invited to enter, to furnish, than one impermeable, “loaded” (as they say of new cars) with all the predictably “modern” features of a self self-conscious but nonetheless governing? Though the “matrix of social and historical relations” pertinent to the poem’s production are finally inestimable (I think of a Donald Hall poem titled, I think, “Woolworth’s” beginning with something like “My whole life has brought me here!”), I could point to the usual suspects—expressionist and Romantic theories valorizing speech / voice as ontological evidence of self, an academic “career” with its attendant schizophrenic privilegings of objective and subjective ways of knowing, or the twentieth century E pluribus unum collapse where E pluribus becomes the execrable (avoided) din of the socious and a muddy mouthful of odd syllables to be spat out in the gutter if “one” is serious about “looking out for number one.” (The Wildean formula of “All of us are in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars” sung loud by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders comes up. Hynde is busy pretending community —“some of us”—whilst “fronting,” that is, “starring,” as the “star” of our attentions, providing an object for our dreams of getting out, “self-reliantly,” of that gutter . . .) There are countless such unclear reasons to find oneself at Woolworth’s, making those “choices” that are not choices. And if I say (as imperative)—“Come here. Look for yourself” at the end of “Futility and Caprice . . .” am I just opening the doors to a five and dime always already (over)-stocked? Perhaps I am. (I think of John Barth’s Ambrose in “Lost in the Funhouse”—“I’ll never be an author.”) At the moment when author-ity is passed to the reader it is too late for authority (that imperative “voice”). Is the self here resisting by self-recognition of its limit? Perhaps it is. Bernstein: “a limit is just the measure at hand.”

Perhaps the final line of the poem could be read differently—less as imperative, more as the very signal of the futility (—one never gets to the thing itself—think of Jack Spicer: “I would like to make poems out of real objects . . . a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper” or “the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary”—) that makes every poem a caprice, a play, a masque, an allegorizing of the stupefying provisional, of the self’s constructedness. Daily I put on my fright-wig, the Italian one—caprice, capriccio, literally “head with hair standing on end” and predictably shudder into figuration, so predictably, gaming. Perhaps the final line works to effect a changing of the guard, is, rather, an anti-heroic, deconstructivist gesture to shove the whole thing over, topple the artifice (heroically, after all?): “Look here, you make your own structure. This one is arbitrary as yours too can only be. “

In Radical Artifice Marjorie Perloff identifies three ways or strategies “radical poetries” have uncovered in attempting to effect “the deconstruction of image”—a move that foregoes atemporal epistemological certainty in favor of a temporal, provisional, “ontology,” a move that replaces a longing for transcendent forms with a recognition of every form’s partiality and “constructedness,” a move that posits the synthesis of the poem as object in terms of the latter of (as Charles Altieri notes in Enlarging the Temple) “two logical models—symbolism and immanence.” Perloff’s “ways”:

1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be fore-
grounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that
which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny . . .
2) the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced
by the word as Image, but concern [is] with morphology and the
visualization of the word’s constituent parts . . . and 3) Image as the
dominant gives way to syntax . . . “Making strange” now occurs at
the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of
the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the
discourse of the media.

The strategies of “Futility and Caprice . . .” (and those of the majority of my works—I think of a long poem in Rubbing Torsos titled “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Latta”) correspond most obviously with the first “way,” one Perloff associates with the modes of Ashbery and O’Hara (of poets of the post-W.W. II period), and with those of Michael Palmer,

~

ALOGY AND ILLATION: STRAY THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE, DECONSTRUCTION, AND WRITING

[I append here a writing that considers a Michael Palmer poem and one of my own early works using a species of critique possibly identifiable as deconstructivist. Its concerns seem to parallel some here, without overlap, and thus may offer another “take” on what it is I am doing, which is inevitably framed by how it is I am reading—Palmer or myself. My comments on the writing are interspersed—bracketed, italicized.]

1

The title here comes about curiously. I was thinking of a writing that would—by autobiographical anecdote, by fragment and accumulation, by critique of some of my own writings—examine a relationship to language, mine, one obsessive, ongoing, inconclusive. [Much like the current “writing.”] Any writer would say that. Language, in the claims for it made by an endless number of writers, is always somehow outside, uncontrollable—even undeserved—less a medium to be used than a medium using, dictating, cowing intentionality, mischievous. Like a petulant child, language refuses to behave “properly”—that is, accurately, decorously, or appropriately: it refuses any exclusive ownership. I was reading this morning an interview with Michael Palmer (not so idly—I had turned to him as one of the so-called “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets,” a “school” whose individual member’s works often draw on linguistic notions of such theorists as Jakobson, Saussure, and Vološinov, and I was trying to determine how Palmer spoke of language so that I could bounce my own nascent—inchoate—speculations off his . . .) And these remarks (by Palmer) caught my attention, verifying, as they seem to do, my sense that a writer’s obsessive relation to language is the result of a dimly perceived loss of ownership, not to the “muse,” or to the “other,” or to “inspiration,” but to language itself, a primarily social construct that effectively unburdens the self (of the self) and denies any strict subjectivity. Palmer (in Bartlett’s Talking Poetry):

If you are speaking through language, it is after all not only your
voice . . . It’s like the question of Blake. When he says a fairy sat
down on his desk and whispered “Europe” to him, you wonder did
it really happen, or is this simply a metaphor for the poem which
arrives from “outside,” a case of pure inspiration, breathing in? Jack
Spicer represented that notion of dictation by talking about Martians
and spooks arriving and giving him his words. For Yeats there are the
famous other-world figures who gave him his metaphors. For me this
represents virtually a linguistic model—an abolition of pure subjectivity.
You become receptive to a whole variety of language that is more
expansive than your own, that can see more than you can see. When
you do enter into the poem . . . you wonder, did I do that? Well, the
answer is, of course, that you didn’t. Various selves, aspects of a
heightened attention, did it in a certain way, but not your self.

I need to return to the question of my “curious” title here. It is, perhaps, an impure example of “language that is more expansive than your own.” It certainly does not feel like my language (and isn’t); it feels like language offered me by a fairy on my desk, but the route to its presence here is too easily traced. (A better example of language arriving unannounced, unbeckoned, from “outside” is this: “Is beauty fate’s resultant / Apotheosis or do we harness / / Love’s stray apogee in the quandary of / A life so fully enjambed by sweet convergence / Of opposites that whatever is / Transdispositional is so only by degrees? / / A dream of walking / The length of the Danube, / Source to mouth.” I remember writing that in a hot, airless room above a restaurant called Chef Italia in the summer of 1975 in Ithaca, New York. The words [now inserted into a quite long poem titled “For Meropi Ypsilantis”] arrived unsummoned, full-blown, whole, as if tapped out elsewhere by some complexly humorous telegraph agent; I simply received, my fingers translating electrical impulses to typewriter keyboard.)

And “Alogy and Illation”? In my morning’s reading—that interview—Palmer is asked about a word, “alogon,” that he uses as a title for a poem. He admits to getting the word from the artist Robert Smithson:

It means the irrational, though it also means something that stands
aside from the Logos, from logical speech, outside the Word. It . . .
means an irrational number . . . Also, it means horse, because horses
were “crazy.”

“Alogon” seemed a particularly rich word to me—a word to trouble the imperatives of the Aristotelian linking of reason (logic) and word (logos)—and I went off to the OED with (unfounded) optimism. But “stand aside from the Logos” “alogon” does not—or does so only “unreasonably” or “illogically”; the system linking reason and word goes uncontaminated, unchallenged. What I did find (under “alogy”) was a citation of Sir Thomas Browne (from the Pseudodoxia epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenents, or commonly presumed Truths—a book of vulgar errors like my own) that read: “The Alogie of this opinion consisteth in the illation.” This sent me into more (scholarly) scurrying to learn that “illation” refers to “the act of inferring or drawing a conclusion from premisses . . . an inference, deduction, or conclusion” and the citation of some sermonizing wag that read: “It is permissible to smile at such an illation from such a major and minor.” And smile I did. Because “Alogy and Illation” appeared promptly (with a kind of musical truth) as apt for the writing I imagined—one proceeding by fragments of local meaning, but alogically, towards a conclusion, then, “permissible to smile at.”

2

A starting point. Michael Palmer, in the aforementioned interview, remarks: “certainly it’s a lifelong proposition for me to understand my own work. There is the famous remark by Robert Browning about “Sordello”: ‘when I wrote it only God and I knew what it meant; now only God knows.’” Elsewhere Palmer speaks of a poetry of “a self that is transformed through language” and of poetry as “an attempt to bring into question surfaces of language, normative syntax, and so on . . . less a conscious attempt than an insistence by the poem itself.” [This last phrase makes Palmer a renegade from the partisans of artifice in the Language camp, it seems, and closer to a position I can “identify” with. Cf., O’Hara’s “stopped thinking . . . when refreshment arrives.”] I think a number of things should be noted here: that writing is a constitutive act, transforming of self, knowledge, and self-knowledge; that writing is always historical, a production in time; that writing (in apparent near-contradiction of its constitutive / appropriative power) is—because it occurs in time—near simultaneously a depropriative activity: our constituted knowledge is immediately revealed as text, a construct, a “fiction” defamiliarized, something not our own and thus “available” for transformation, for “reading” (whence Plato’s fear and banishment of the poets). Just as Browning suggests, we cannot read our own texts. To do so means to participate in a “rewriting” of those texts—and a disavowal of a particular self as “historical,” a “fiction.” Rereading our own writings becomes a “lifelong proposition” because those writings—claims of inalterability and monumentality to the contrary—are ever different, ever offering themselves only as “rewritings” with each “rereading.”

With Palmer’s remarks (and my “reading” of them as illustrative of deconstructivist thinking about language) kept foregrounded, I propose to read two poems—one that I wrote in the early spring of 1972 (subsequently published in Rubbing Torsos) and one that appears in Palmer’s 1981 book, Notes for Echo Lake. Me first:

ANN ARBOR

Everywhere is a smattering of lament.
Incisions of bleeding doubt.
Tired of waiting bruises me like a doormat.
These scuffle marks hang on my skin
like oranges, only plummeting off
if I leave quickly, trailing
the Cessna like a sash.
Flight defined as a shadow’s wreckage,
the perfect cleavage of feet and ground.
Resignation a part of my anatomy,
a razor blade gone loco
and no loss of blood.
It doesn’t matter anymore,
It doesn’t matter anymore
ho hums like an electric drill,
the shrillness that occupies wooden hearts
released like a tough dirge.
And the walls of these houses, upright
with unknowing neglect, straight
like the path a sigh travels
as it leaves the body. It is leaving now.

There. An Americanism of mosts!
Here only these words
like tracings of abandoned episodes:
symbiosis, schism, rat’s hide,
nauseous, vetch, pointillism, continue.
Still friends jolts hard like coffee,
Ann Arbor, the snow, and wanting
to throw you hard akimbo like a sled,
jump on with a viciousness
even the French have never seen.

Some background. I recall writing this during or shortly after a trip home (I was in college) to Ann Arbor, late winter, not long after breaking up with my “high school sweetheart.” I think she was back in Ann Arbor too. I think we had one of those impossibly polite and empty meetings wherein two people repeat the conventional formulas, the language of loss and continued caring, to one another, denying all the while any anger, any blame, any failure. I can trace some other features of the text to odd sources—these are texts and contexts lingering around my reading of the poem, unavailable for the most part to any other reader. I would maintain though that that other reader would supply another concomitant set of incidental texts and that the differences between the two sets would correlate directly to the difference in our readings of “Ann Arbor.”

Some texts. “Cessna”: she was learning to fly an airplane, taking lessons. To me this must have seemed exotic, rather dangerous; it became an obvious metaphor for a different kind of flight. “The walls of these houses, upright”: I was living in Ithaca, New York, a town defined by steep hills cut through by gorges where houses snuggled against the landscape, or perched precariously on cliffs. I was always struck by the banality and rectitude of flat Ann Arbor. In Ithaca I was “in the world,” a little wild, independent; Ann Arbor represented the civility, decorum, propriety of family. A town without feelings, where a sigh appropriates anger, or approximates it and bloodless resignation bleeds passion dry. “Vetch”: a shared wildflower, one that covers some Michigan highway embankments where we had traveled together. “Pointillism”: how we had taken Seurat as our painter after seeing “La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute during a trip to Chicago. “A viciousness / even the French have never seen”: straight out of Lenny Bruce’s autobiographical account (in How to Talk Dirty and Influence People) of visiting a whorehouse in Marseilles—“She walked toward me and menaced me with a riding crop, raised it over her head and screamed something in French, baring her sharp white teeth. Just as in nearly every other delicate situation in my life, I began to laugh.”

§

[Monday, May 17]

Up at five, off to th’airport. Spirit. Low ghost flights. Which would be a good advert slogan for a niche market of less than .000001 percent of the pop.

Nodded out after liftoff. Head bobbing on the string of my muscle tonus alert jerk cord. After the second coffee around nine, I steady’d into Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler. Landed with a bump. Usual hour or so of “somnolence dragged behind on wheels like a child’s toy” got us finally out to the highway in a royal blue Mitsubishi Lancer.

Anhingas and herons in the ditches. Pelicans along the causeway. Big off-road turtle. Sanibel vegetation of mangroves and pines. What I think is eucalyptus unwinding the scrolls of its “arms” “heavenward.”

A short Gulf swim between late afternoon thundershowers. The daily rinse. I am the sentimentalist of the seashore. Looking for shells—remembering all the other shells and stones select’d or sent. A tiny purple bivalve reminds me of M. and a sizeable baked fish in someone’s yard in Geneva. And I’ll be damn’d if those weren’t kites high up whilst G. heap’d up sand and boy W. goof’d off on the skimboard. Long tails and angular point’d wings—no binoculars. A good look at a ruddy turnstone outrunning th’incoming surf.

High-stepping white ibis jabbing around under the pine clump as we flee a spring-release’d storm of monstrous raindrops.

Post-storm a look with the binos. Ruddy turnstone verify’d. And possible western sandpipers (mostly buff-breasted, backs with scale-like pattern, fitting the description of Baird’s—impossibly wrong range: j’en ai marre des foutus sandpipers crapauds . . .)

Dud sunset. I don’t hoot about sunsets anyhoo. I liked the fleet white lint light creaming the topmost fluffies of the solid slate cloudbank. I liked the solid slate cloudbank.

~

[Tuesday, May 18]

My father turns seventy-nine. He’s an inveterate and sporadic journal-keeper, particularly whilst traveling. Weather and wildlife notes variety. In a 3-ring looseleaf binder, handwritten.

Early beach walk. Same sandpipers and turnstones. Breakfast at the joint connect’d to the rented cottage. There Agnes the snowy egret, apparently a regular, gulps down two jumbo Gulf shrimp and gets a temporary “big” neck.

G., J. and I off to J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel. The list (probably somewhat incomplete): snowy egret, brown pelican, Louisiana (tri-colored) heron, great egret, white ibis, royal tern, least tern, willet, reddish egret, anhinga, double-crested cormorant, prairie warbler (heard the chromatic wheezing rise—probably perched in the mangroves—and never did spot it), osprey, frigate (man-o’-war) bird. A retiree—volunteer naturalist—point’d out where he’d located a gray kingbird near a pavilion. Walk’d the shell mound path around the dumping grounds of the original Calusa inhabitants, decimated by the Europeans. Gumbo limbo trees—green chlorophyll-plenty bark showing through a frowsy, peeling orange outer garment. First “development” on the right on exiting the refuge: “Calusa Estates.”

Long walk late down the beach: where’d that fat woman get that big pile of sand dollars and sea urchins (oursins)? I hain’t seed a single one.

They call it Captiva ’cause you can’t get away from the dippy music dribbling incontinently out every ramshackle bar all day long—two-bit knockoffs of Jimmy “Two-Bit” Buffett: “my own damn fault” faux-sensitive-lament city.

Ironic then to fall prey to margaritas and Red Stripe Jamaican beers poolside. The two wedding-party fathers getting drunk nearby. Longueur follows longueur the way dirt breeds dirt, so I read Kerouac who says: “Now I’m going to tell you the truth.”

Which I didn’t. I drank the margaritas and Red Stripes and thought how apparent it is in large family gatherings who the solid citizenry be. Gladhanders versus miscreants. Eye-meeters versus shirkers. I be not the solid citizenry.

~

[Wednesday, May 19]

Ragged hincty osprey squeak-chalking it up on the blackboard of day. Up in the Australian pine, non-indigenous trash tree.

Off to rent bicycles with J. and G. Big balloon tire’d affairs, backpedal to brake. “Up” to the resort-saturated island tip with all its colonial trappings. Prairie warbler spotted. Lone female cardinal. Along the main road the splurt-burble of the red-bellied woodpecker, oddly common here (and in the oaks of Ann Arbor too). Osprey nesting on a telephone pole platform.

Bike’d alone down to the Sanibel end of Captiva along the too-busy road. Innumerable winter “cottages” of the stinking rich. What is this ungovernable predilection for naming “one’s” dwelling space. Brit colonials we be with pretensions to aristocratickal smutch? The cutesy Pair-a-dice. The bizarre Syzygy. The moronic Sun Dancer. The forced bonhomie of Bali Hi! The constipated Captivated. The not-so-hid French cachet of Cachette. So thinketh the bicyclist of the big blubbery tyres . . .

Prop the bicycle against the causeway abutment and hike down into the shell flats. Rattle-stitch of dry palm fronds—gecko. A couple of egrets fly over dragging big yellow feet behind. Which remind me of rubber gloves. Cardinals sure look odd in palms.

A couple of dolphins fleeing the “waverunner-ing idiots” turn up offshore, jumping and arc-ing in the froth. A whole flotilla of human heads bobs out to join them. Something internecine, interspecial cozening.

~

[Thursday, May 20]

Blotto hier soir. Vodka and anything. That old creeping nervousness that I’ll never get another drink (or enough at this moment). So I’d better pour it bigger. And blotto morning. Sun-weariness. The hearty fool’s done stepped out of “my” “self” into a hardier (foolhardier) “other” “self.” Ahem.

Beach-weariness. The maw of routine that beckons just as its breakage beckon’d.

Idling the pages of Specimen Days, one of the books I carry’d down here. (Others: Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World and Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s Jack’s Book.) Whitman, fearing the notes he muster’d of the war “would prove, at best, but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so. They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times. The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness.

~

[Friday, May 21]

Loggy day of key lost whilst swimming and waiting. Brown pelicans skiving the water, up apparently fishless. Wedding in the offing. Drubs the motion of the risers. Poked around in Jack’s Book, not reading.

Pileated woodpecker that winged a straight horizontal across the huge windows of the restaurant (The Green Flash).

~

[Saturday, May 22]

Little longhair’d dog with a bow in its forelock. G. petting it. Conversation about the breed. The “gallery” owner says it’s a “teacup” shitzoo (or whatever it’s call’d). And someone explains that “teacups” are just “runts.” In fact, “runts” crossbred with other “runts.” (Which strikes me as Mendelianism amok, patent nonsense.) The owner is showing signs of incipient huffiness and I’m “inwardly” laughing, and “mentally” making notes. These notes.

And so: the wedding went off “without a hitch”
Though at the end

“Most guests most clothedly leapt
Into the most moist pool.”

~

Leamington Tomato

~

In Leamington, Ontario, cut through next to the Big Tomato. That’s one thing I recall about how to get to Point Pelee. Shortly thereafter, “one” sees the “Curling Club” (closed in summer) slide by on the left. Leamington is home to a Heinz canning plant, also on th’outskirts of town, all that old rich flat bottomland, ancient lake bed, much of it used for tomatoes. Up the road is Colasanti’s, with acres and acres of greenhouses. There are roadside stands carrying fresh-in-May-pick’d tomatoes.

Up at five-thirty, left by six-thirty, coffee and one sour cream glazed donut at Tim Horton’s in Windsor around seven-forty-five. Park’d at the park by nine. Warblers seen: black and white, Nashville, yellow, magnolia, black-throated blue, yellow-rumped, black-throated green, blackburnian, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, palm, yellowthroat, and redstart. Several scarlet tanagers, dazed-looking and dazzling at the tip where the Point skinnies out to scrub and sand. Maybe a half-dozen red-headed woodpeckers, “the most beautiful bird in the Americas.” Most common: yellow warblers, Baltimore orioles, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, and cowbirds. The barely distinguishable vireos. The indistinguishable flycatchers. I was happiest with an orchard oriole in the grass: brick and black.

At lunch in the parking lot a “competitive sport birder” type yell’d “Mississippi kite,” pointing at a distant black speck high in the sky. Next: “one hundred and seven,” presumably the number of species he’d located that day. (Being about forty more than our total.) To which we respond’d with derisive (furtive) snorts and hoots, and (later) excited shouts to punctuate our drabbest finds: “Mississippi kite! I mean, American goldfinch!” Saith Kerouac: “Dunt be silly.”

Late afternoon we drove slowly the dike-like elevations surrounding the onion fields. Black muck, miles of slender little scraggly onion shoots, some migrant workers in the distance “setting out” plants, follow’d by a tractor. We scanned the fields for shorebirds, found none. In some dying trees across a stretch of water, hundreds of cormorants perched, nearly invisible in the haze. Small thunder-rumbles.

Home by seven-thirty or so. Hot dogs and potato salad. Sunburn.

§

A POETICS—9

A thing as simple as a rhyme causes a jump-cut back to the initial instance of the rhyming sound. The isolation—or italicization—of a word on a page draws one to it, draws it out of the background, the romanized spread of the page. It is where the eye goes. Not unlike that piercing fuchsia spray against the olive drab texturings and flat calligraphies of Joan Mitchell’s Girolata. (This painting is reproduced in John Ashbery’s Reported Sightings.) As a child of seven or eight, I used to experience an incredible thrill whenever I opened a Nancy Drew mystery to a page containing an italicized sentence. The sentence—something like “There, in the rafters of the abandoned barn, hung a satchel marked with the letters J. A. L.”

What thrills, of course, in both Joan Mitchell and Carolyn Keene, is difference. Mere reception is not enough—discernment (of the italicized sentence lifting “out” of the romanized prose field, of the fuchsia spray lifting “out” of the olive ground) is the constitutive act. The frisson is the body’s recognition of its own constituting. Two thoughts. One is a claim that the writing (text) is always the site of a spatial organization as much as it is one of a temporal duration. Lines mark the thrust of a poem’s desire for stasis, atemporality, but the thrust is unstoppable, what is being enacted in the line (most handily, in the conventionally syntactical line) is a duration of meanings. Time and space in the poem interpenetrate, carouse, perform a different dance of difference—now immobile, now thrusting. Williams in “The Descent” (Pictures from Brueghel):

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
/formerly
//unsuspected. A
world lost,
/a world unsuspected
//beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness

[Clumsy virgules to indicate a pattern of indentation, each equal to a tab.]

Defeat as a measure of the unsuspected: language will not come to rest, will not quit trying to come to rest. “What does not change / is the will to change” (Olson). Williams’s “the world it [poem, in condition of defeat, in futility] opens” is the poem, the “new place.” Again: perpetuum mobile. A question regarding “Futility and Caprice in Yellow and Red”: what space does it mark? What are the ideological marks of that space? What tensions does its “spaciality” generate, and to reaffirm or to deny the ideologies of its temporal thrusting, its saying?

~

THREE LINE UNITS (I)

My poems tend to get organized into three line units, with justification to the left margin. The “look” is orderly, complete, a tidiness that bespeaks closure, nothing left hanging. (I seem to recall somebody, similarly, in a stanzaic piece of writing, ending with a line like “and just saying so rounds out the—”—here it is, just found it, just as I should have expected, A. R. Ammons’s finishing up of the long poem “Hibernaculum” (in Collected Poems): “I’m reading Xenophon’s Oeconomicus ‘with / considerable pleasure and enlightenment’ and with / appreciation that saying so fills this stanza nicely.” Another, shorter poem, “Phase” does a similar self-aware full-stop: “flat-open reduction: I just now bagged it up”) Does the mannerism—my triplets—derive out of Ammons’s work? Certainly my thinking about the kind of effect the stanza produces seems akin to “concerns Ammonsesque”—centers versus peripheries, the one versus the many, disordering saliences, particularities protruding out of the ordering shapely insistence, a tension affixed to the page. What if I say a field of energy gains energy under pressure—that energy sprawled out, bounded only by the page, goes diffuse, the reader’s attentions falter in the dispersal? Do I end up positing form as not coextensive with content? What are those “saliences, particularities” if not the jittery semantic shifts and feints against the regular stanzaic packaging? Is the ideology of control, of handing the reader a series of ready-made parcels, pre-focusing that reader’s attention?

~

And what space / time struggle is being enacted here, in the impossibly truculent denials of sequentiality that “A Poetics” enacts so self-consciously?

~

BARTHES AGAIN (AND CIRCLES)

“A Poetics” in fragments, notational: dispersal, randomness, brief bursts of sequence, duration, interrupted by page-turning, a circling out, a return to recover the dropped stitch of a single “patch” of argument, a circling out again. Where does “A Poetics” end? At the end (marginal, exterior) of its final page (in the claim that “we mustn’t . . .”) or at the “center” (interior, heart) where these sans serif Helvetica “intrusions,” [Clearly the typographic brilliance translates not to th’humble Hotel Point, though some of the incoherence indubitably must? “One” hopes so.] these “patches” cease (in the claim that “we must”)? The attempt is to create not one circle but many—local figures dispersing self, dispersing “poetics,” plurivocal, journalistic (daily, time’s tiny local circles). Barthes (in Roland Barthes):

With the alibi of a pulverized discourse, a dissertation destroyed,
one arrives at the regular practice of the fragment; then from the
fragment one slips to the “journal.” At which point, is not the point
of all this to entitle oneself to write a “journal”?

I think of the “daily writing stint”—I am “crabby” without it, pinched. (“A Poetics” wants to enact the moodiness of time. I think of Frank O’Hara’s remark that the “[Statement for The New American Poetry]” is “mistaken, pompous, and quite untrue” [imposture], but “also, like the manifesto [“Personism”], a diary of a particular day and the depressed mood of that day.”) So: circles, daily gestures, alibis against a determining identity, or a determining “poetics.”

—But of all geometric figures, that of the circle most obviously posits centrality. The compass is an instrument that both roots and sweeps, its “trace” (the circle itself) is understood only through its fixity, its having anchored a part of itself to a point. Because it exists by a constant (democratic?) equidistancing from that point, it implores centrality; it deconstructs and belies its own leveling, non-hierarchic (in the “trace”) structure; it points to its one point. The central point determines the infinite outer points of the circles (—sans serif Helvetica or serif’d Palatino? —how determine outer? —how inner?) and, as such, is of a different degree, is a kind of superior, organizing other. Why, then, in the attempted dispersion of self, of “A Poetics,” or in fragmenting as autobiography (another “poetics,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes), the preponderance of (the weighting of the text with) the figure of the circle? Barthes: “To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what”?

—At the center: he who spreads himself around, the fixed leg of the compass, Barthes-the-determiner, a (finally) “stumped” Rumplestiltskin.

—Another circle (and another, of pronouns, within): “if he could, he would have an exemplary library of reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, etc.): so that scholarship would be in a circle around me, at my disposal; so that I need merely consult it—and not ingest it; so that scholarship be kept in its place as a complement of writing.” Here the Barthesque self is a writing-machine (admittedly imperfect, needing completion, whatever can fill up the un-full); it is also other, distinct, near-kingly, a figure surrounded by (pronominal) counselors, the one in the awful (in the venerable sense) hierarchy of the one and the many.

—And still the figure of the circle—or circles—for “A Poetics”?

—The figure of the circle also dominates John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” maybe more convincingly, more “democratically” as a figure of dispersion:

I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

By placing the self (and the not-self) on the carousel (“I feel the carousel starting”) and the self not on the carousel (it “surrounds / Me on all sides”—though, of course, the line break puts the self back out there [“everywhere”] where the “I” must “look”), Ashbery announces and maintains the indeterminacy of the self: there is a constant wavering, irresolution, oscillation between the self thrown out (centrifugal force: a fleeing of the center) into the landscape (desk, books, etc.) and that same self centered, detached, viewing the “neutral band that surrounds.” The tension between the exteriority of the objects (photographs, trees, etc.) and the supposed interiority of the self is caught in the “action of leveling.”

—So. To become both subject and object? The point of the circle is to collapse the circle? And “A Poetics” desires that?

—So.

~

Two is the claim that the painting (text) is always one of duration. The painting “speaks” in partialities, sequences. The eye moves and is encumbered (slowed, gladdened) by formal repetitions, textural constraints, the incantations of color. The “all at once” is a foreseeable kind of seeing, safety in the future deposited alongside (as direct object of) a finalized past. The same animadverting of seeing as limitation animates the painting—its desire is to break its own spatial boundaries and participate in time. Williams’s Pictures again:

and there came to me
/just now
//the knowledge of
the tyranny of the image
/and how
//men
in their designs
/have learned
//to shatter it,
whatever it may be
that the trouble
/in their minds
shall be quieted

(“Tribute to the Painters”)

[Ragged left margin, tabs indicated by virgules.]

And Barthes (in The Responsibility of Forms):

[I]t is no longer possible to conceive . . . the picture . . . as a neutral,
literal, denoted state of language; nor as . . . the infinitely available
site of subjective investments: the picture is neither a real object nor
an imaginary object. . . [T]he identity of what is “represented” is
ceaselessly deferred . . . the analysis is endless; but this leakage, this
infinity of language is precisely the picture’s system: the image . . .
is not the repository of a system but the generation of systems.

~

THREE LINE UNITS (II)

In the plastic arts, in the analysis of two-dimensional renderings (drawings, paintings, etc.) there used to be talk (classical in origin, I imagine) of “tripartite” organizations. Both horizontal and vertical planes were viewed in terms of dominant, subdominant, and minor gestures. A nine-square grid could be drawn invisibly over the painting’s surface and where the two dominant (one horizontal, one vertical) gestures overlapped the painting’s center of interest would be defined. The thinking went: that center had better coincide with the beatific and serene face of Christ, say, and not with the moody cow, say, who just happens to be attendant at the miraculous proceedings. (Who or what is “central,” of course, gets manipulated. The Enlightenment’s later noticing of the “human position” of “suffering” sees how “everything turns away / Quite leisurely” from those very proceedings—see, of course, Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”) One effect, it seems, of the three line unit is to make a series of shifting dominants—a line that momentarily “dominates” a particular unit / stanza (and I want each line to break out of the syntactic / semantic thrust of the sentence that carries it—hence the capitalization of each line) is next made sub-dominant or minor by that thrust. The notion is akin to some achievements of music—I’m thinking particularly of the blues, with its Mississippi delta “country” tradition of similar triadic uniting (one based, however, on a couplet whose first line is repeated, though most often with a slight variation). Take the final lines of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Shuckin’ Sugar”:

Lord I’m worried here, worried everywhere.
I am worried here, worried everywhere.
Man, I get started here, and I not be worried there.

The final line, by dint of its humor or irony (or, here, its strange self-referential collapse of the initial premise, music—what “gets started here” at song’s end—chases worry away, “there” and “everywhere”) or perhaps by dint of the simple fact of its not being a repetition, tends to dominate on the page, read. However, the blues is always involved in a system of play against restraints of its supposed ideal form—it is inseparable from that play against restraints. That’s what a “blue note” is: “a minor interval occurring in a melody or harmony where a major would be expected,” that is, shifting “dominance,” stretching, cajoling the listener’s attentions away from the ideal form, refusing to let a too simple order coalesce, and, finally letting it coalesce as a shared relief.

I do not mean to suggest here that “My poems are like classical paintings” or that “My poems are like gussied-up blues riffs.” I am also aware that the writing nods with a formal little bow in the direction of a number of conventions and may seem to legitimize practices I have little interest in sustaining. I turn to Barthes (in The Grain of the Voice) for justification. If the overall “signified” (look) of my “system” (all those orderly groupings, a mold “filled” just to the brim) is one of closure, “the thud / Shut of a Webster’s” (in my Rubbing Torsos), regimentation, order, etc., is it necessarily the result of a desire to valorize these? Barthes, speaking of the fragment (as “spoilsport, discontinuous, establishing a kind of pulverization of sentences, images, thoughts, none of which ‘takes’ definitively” calls for “[anarchic writing]. . . only on the condition that “anarchy” not be the signified of [the] system.” Barthes recognizes that the position “is a bit paradoxical in relation to avant-garde style” while rather tentatively (“I’m not at all sure that such is the result of what I do”) defending it:

[P]erhaps the best way to prevent this solidification is to pretend to
remain within an apparently classical code, to keep the appearance
of a writing subject to certain stylistic imperatives, and thus to attain
the dissociation of an ultimate meaning through a form that is not
spectacularly disorganized.

And in Poetic License Marjorie Perloff, considering the alphabetical ordering of fragments in Roland Barthes par Roland Bathes, notes that the “seemingly orderly sequence of parallel items is thus no more than a form of etiquette, as if to say that once these codes are established, the author can then do precisely as he pleases.”

~

FORM AND CONTENT

A linkage always vexed. [There’s a word “one” could usefully put on the train Kool & the Gang left the station on, no?] Is Barthes (am I?) simply pulling punches? What does it mean to “pretend” to insert oneself into a code? Is this simply a roundabout acknowledgment of the dream of a content separable from form, something that is available to be poured into a mold called form? Is Barthes’s notion of form here akin to “look,” some outer garment? He says “spectacularly disorganized” (from the Latin, spectaculum, from spectare to watch, from spectus, pp. of specere to look). Is it not terribly rudimentary to consider only appearance as form? Creeley’s famous dictum: “Form is never more than the extension of content.” Levertov’s (“An Admonition,” in Donald Hall’s Claims for Poetry) less known alteration: “Form is never more than the revelation of content.” Is content (“ultimately”) revealed by a polite (“etiquette”) of veiling? The text most erotic (in The Grain of the Voice Barthes links “the quests of texts” to “the erotic quest”), most full of desire, being not that which refuses to “take,” but that which takes on the trappings, is clothed by (in) “stylistic imperatives,” an artifice? Compare this to Bernstein’s call for a “‘constructive’ mode [which] would suggest that the mode itself is explored as content, its possibilities of meaning . . . investigated and presented, and . . . this process . . . recognized as a method.” If mode (dress, form, code) is “explored as content,” if it is “investigated,” “presented” (as a “method”) (the words smell of scientific discourse), is desire vanquished, spent, all tension released, erotics forgot? Are we left satisfied and fulfilled or empty, or are the two states coterminous?

Barthes’s delineation in The Grain of the Voice between pleasure (plaisir) and bliss (jouissance) (“one of those voluntarily artificial oppositions . . . intended . . . to clear more ground . . . —just to talk and to write”) seems apt here: texts of pleasure are “linked to a consistence of the self, of the subject,” those of bliss are texts “through which the subject, instead of establishing itself, is lost, experiencing that expenditure which is, properly speaking, bliss.” Barthes further identifies “texts of the avant-garde . . . of a certain level of illegibility” with bliss and texts “subject to codes of verisimilitude” with pleasure. Oddly neither denomination appears to fit Barthes’s own writing practices. Nor the space I am attempting to claim as that of my own writing practice. I am proposing bliss here as finally associated with a kind of emptiness, post-coital tristesse, the body left behind—a less “exciting” state than that which immediately precedes it. (A friend of mine, Lou Robinson, in her novella Napoleon’s Mare, disagrees: “Why does everybody talk about the body? All the best states leave it behind. It is a launching pad, a jetty.”) Of course, Barthes’s line is “a certain level of illegibility,” hinting that illegibility (bliss) itself is never fully achieved—all writings of it remain partial, and as such, constitutive of a pleasure, body, world.

In Content’s Dream Bernstein quotes Don Byrd as saying “the music of poetry is just the experience of sound coming to mean something” and calls for the “ability to let language resonate absolutely.” Music, inevitably built into the structure of the poem, one with the poem (we have to use words) is itself constitutive, and always thwarts the drive toward pure illegibility, pure bliss. We constitute a world only out of pieces of worlds already constituted (that is, by sounding the heard). It may well be (as Bernstein claims) that the “essential thing is to build a world” (an ontological demand opposed to the epistemological courtesy involved in building a model—complex or not—of the world we inhabit)

~

ONTOLOGY VERSUS EPISTEMOLOGY

In Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale, using Roman Jakobson’s concept of the “dominant” (defined by Jakobson as “the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components”), claims that “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological.” That is, McHale asserts, the “postmodernist [text] deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like [quoting Dick Higgins in A Dialectic of Centuries] . . . : ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ [and] . . . What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? . . . [and] What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects”? McHale’s use of the “dominant” seems peculiar in light of the ways postmodernism’s apologists have defined the project, what McHale himself notes as “the protean variety of postmodernist phenomena.” The argument McHale offers depends on a seemingly audacious inference that “one and the same text will . . . yield different dominants . . . [that is,] different dominants emerge depending upon which questions we ask of the text, and the position from which we interrogate it.” The inference appears less bold if one accepts (as McHale does) Jakobson’s notion of “the shifting dominant”:

Within a given complex of poetic norms in general, or especially within
the set of poetic norms valid for a given poetic genre, elements which
were originally secondary become essential and primary. On the other
hand, the elements which were originally the dominant ones become
subsidiary and optional.

A troubling thought remains however. If postmodernism depends to such a degree on the reader’s interrogatory “position” vis-à-vis the text, what prevents any (every) text’s being labeled “postmodern”? Perhaps the very “center” (it is not a center, but a motion, an instability, a “shifting,” an interval, a gap) of postmodernism is not ontological, and not epistemological, but the perfectly jittery relationship between the two, another figure / ground ambivalence. As McHale states:

Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point
ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions
far enough and they “tip over” into ontological questions. By the
same token, push ontological questions far enough and they tip
over into epistemological questions—the sequence is not linear
and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible.

Another inescapable binary.

~

but that world must needs always be built of both words (“content”-ed)—”umpteen centuries of / Canned distinctions” and sounds (“form”-ed)—“a music / Slopping side to side like milk in a pail.” None of it is ever “too precise”—it is this very lack of precision that calls for me, or you, to “Come here. Look for yourself.” (Or better: “Listen and so build.”)

§

A wettish day, lots to do before we leave for Florida Monday morning. Behave your bad selfs whilst I be gone.

~

Salient Whazzats

~

Note to myself: Extract all the C-dog passages for bundling and presentation. With a “single fearsome salience” (whazzat?) to accompany each.

§

A POETICS—8

SORRY TO BE SO LATE

Perhaps we are all epigones, late bloomers, dilatory constructs of our own particular “moment” which is not ours at all. Always playing “catch-up.” Always reactionary, turning back to take up the old unfinished projects, but, we must assert, with a difference! We have never been “clear thinkers.” We pat ourselves, perhaps, too readily on the back for that. We are allowed to do so—the days of “honesty” are gone, slipped like zeroes into the relativist night of entity / identity co-strangulation. Are we any closer to knowing what it is we do, writing? Any closer to what is being done (to us) by writing? We seem to agree we are both “here, now” (entity) and “in pieces” (identity—history moving in terrifying patches under our skin, language, as William Burroughs says, “a virus”). I don’t mean to burden a poetics with apocalyptic fevers, just as I don’t mean—by simply rabble-rousing up the Dickinsonian imperative to “say it slant”—to prettify whatever could (could it?) proceed differently. We are entities caught in the arms of (or just released by) that blowing angel of différance, the Angelus Novus of history, backwards-facing, deferent. We are wreckage in piles not events in chains. We make these stories hard for our Puritan selves, we make them out of what’s “at hand” for our pragmatic self-reliant selves. Let me turn to a poem—recent wreckage of that “here, now.” My intent is to trace a reading as a means of investigating my intent, my process, my result. I select the poem at random from an ample stack, work that has accumulated near-daily for the last six months or so.

~

A POETICS JOURNAL

[What follows is an entry dated 14 September 1994. Documentation of what succeeded the daily poetry writing stints begun in March 1994. The project quickly abandoned for the present project which, though it expands daily, attempts, sometimes successfully, to hide the seams of its patchwork progress. I include the writing because it addresses (offhandedly, in rush of “new morning” song) a number of initial and continuing concerns, some of which the current writing neglects.]

I haven’t put a single mark down beyond title and the marks leading to here and I can already sense, not anticipation, but something like the tremors, knee-quaking of the epigone, the belated, the one who knows he will always be tracing the insufficient and partial afterthought of thinking, the noun to the verb. Every writing is a reconstruction of a marvelous writing done in (on) the dark bellies, insinuations, curvatures of the brain itself.

Some of what got away: I intended to announce immediacy as a project. “Start with the immediate—a rainy morning, a little drab, coffee and cigarette on the porch.” The idea of a journal starts with my reading of a couple of days back, a report by William Corbett in Palmer’s Code of Signals on Corbett’s experiment / experience writing Columbus Square Journal, a year-long project stemming partially from a desire to open up the work—as John Mayhall used to sing, to get “room to move.” I then connected two things. One: my ongoing daily writings, beginning in March or perhaps earlier, trying each morning to sit at this same table and write—beginning with whatever was available, often a tiny thread, a title, rarely an “idea,” though sometimes some glimmer of such would be there, kicked up by my reading. The method, aim, project: to “complete a gesture.” That’s how I described it to myself. Closure. Or not. Simple energy diminuition. Get to an end, something that intuition told me stopped the movement, the tumult and zig-zag of thinking or perceiving. Something improvisatory here: the insistence that there is always something there, something to begin (like a musical attack) the riff. And there is always a moment when you see the way out, what the drummer Elvin Jones calls the “door.” Jones (in Palmer’s Code of Signals): “The length of my solos doesn’t mean anything. When I go on for so long, I am looking for the right way to get out. Sometimes the door goes right by and I don’t see it, so I have to wait until it comes around again. Sometimes it doesn’t come around at all for a long, long time.” The other connection. Two: I, for the first time in writing, found myself dating the daily output. Source of this is muddy. Effect, perhaps, of writing longhand, with a pencil, and the dailiness itself. Effect, perhaps, of writing mornings. A burgeoning sense of my own slot in the history of things, that nod to a possible destiny that allows one the audacity of preserving drafts, tidy, in folders. Be it said: for years I wrote nights, fragments, riding the pleasures of bourbon poured steady into a tall glass of ice, likening the gesture to surfing (as John Logan, another sorry drunk, did), riding the wave of writing until the inevitable wipe-out, the moment when the hand pouring the drink no longer lifts even to its duty. I also wrote directly on the typewriter: the tension was that between the impeccable order of the typed lines arranging themselves on the clean white sheet of the page and the inevitable disorder of the writer, accelerating into mayhem, entropy, butts overflowing the ashtray, radio turning witlessly on, distractions abounding.

Do I romanticize this? Truth is, everything arrived as fragment—the door out of the writing never inhered in the writing, but in the writer, the sighing one deciding the body’d had enough, let’s call it quits. The “finishing off” of the poem: a matter of arranging the fragments, bloc-notes, seeing hints of coherence in the terrible light of day. Collage. Sewing the seams flat. Poems jimmied together out of my own quotations, marks removed. In music, a sampling of all my old same old songs. I wouldn’t deny that viable structures can be made this way; I only want to note the process, to explore the way process insinuates its way into subsequent activities, this activity.

The cluster, node, fiery rhizome of my initial thinking—what occurred before my first marks here—is shredding, gaps in that first invisible fabric. Poetics. Journal. My nod to (growl at) what Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten put together under the same name.

Ground rules. Anything goes. If I lift my gaze off the page and notice the sunlight sparking the hedge, rain-splayed, with hundreds of tiny suns tossed into unsure cadences, blotted and returning, by the unseen breeze, let the driving ratiocinations pause, let the recovery of the real begin with the eyes. (Project: not to ditch immediacy, but to use it as a drag parachute, what slows the incoming jet prior to its parking. Use it as tinder, what the mind’s sparks are caught by, eventually destroyed / transformed to ash by the mind’s necessary conflagrations.)

Ground rules. Day after day. Without bother, without revision. Ni loi, ni toit. Reading, too, a selection (in Gibbons’s The Poet’s Work) of Seferis’s “A Poet’s Journal.” He quotes Stendahl-the-diarist’s intention: “J’entreprends d’écrire l’histoire de ma vie jour par jour . . . je prends pour principe de ne pas me gêner et de n’effacer jamais.” Day by day for how long? Is it inevitable that I will rework these notes, suppressing what and opening up what? Ground rules made to be broken. (Project: all writings cohere in the local, the only way to proceed is journalistic.)

Doubts. A journal with a subject: poetics. Is there a contradiction between the poetic long-view and the journal’d daily takes? [Something Ashbery proposes in the Paris Review interview seems pertinent here—that inconstancy’s contradictions are assuaged by constancy of source: “on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up . . . It will be not dissimilar to what I have produced before because it is coming from the same source, but it will be dissimilar because of the different circumstance of the particular moment.”] Does the announcement of a subject inevitably force the hand? The subject of the poetry versus the poetry of the subject? Is the intent here to write a poetics that mimics the poem it bespeaks as the poems bespeak a poetics. Genre collapse. Redundancy, derided, rides the one horizon.

~

FUTILITY AND CAPRICE IN YELLOW AND RED

Six yellow tulips and two red, wild.
The word Euclidean insinuates its short diminuendo
Into the scene, and cinnabar.

What begins in noticing, in the immediate noose
Of the here, stumbles up against umpteen centuries of
Canned distinctions and a music

Slopping side to side like milk in a pail.
That’s not too precise. What I mean is a man
Who sits looking out over a disused field

Where the ruins of a cabin poke up through green
Timothy and yarrow and the tiniest smudge
Of a garden plot

Plots a history, prefigures a life
Of small bent figures trudging out, black
Cut-outs against the yellow sun,

Laboring to feed livestock with peculiar names—
Biltmore, Adeline, Zephyr—
Or hoeing white cabbages in the white

Light of the moon.
Maybe a wife tends beds of color, swaying
Geometries cut to endorse

Any passing, the invalid daughter
Sarah gone to typhoid.
Or maybe not.

There’s a certain futility to landscape’s
Desire to deny whatever alters it, the way a sentence
Like There’s a perfect plate, a World’s

Fair commemorative edition,
Lying in blackberry brambles
Down by the dump is a mere collection of nouns, inert

Begrudging murderesses of the tempestuous
Array, the antic verity that’s not too precise.
Come here. Look for yourself.

~

NOW

The abrupt “natural” smell of the quotidian, the immediate “scene,” may seem to trigger the poem—those tulips. Those tulips were blooming across the street next to a house “at” 363 Partridge Street in Albany, New York on 9 May 1994 just as a man was sitting at a table believing in the knowledge attainable by vision. Though a memory of an exhibition of paintings by James A. M. Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.—impressionist views of docks, ports, light smearing objects out of objectness—with titles like “Caprice in Pink and Gray” and “Diminuendo in Blue,” hinting that the painter’s project was to reclaim the musicality of color out of the visual clutter of representation, hinting (“caprice”) that play could play a part in perception, vision—all this enters the poem unannounced. I originally put down “Caprice in Primary Colors” as title: there were the colors—”yellow,” “red,” count the instances of their manifestations, “six,” “two.” Or I was (another memory) thinking hard in early May about Jorie Graham’s story of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s successive attempts (in a journal) to write green. (Or blue: Hopkins is obsessed with color—on 30 August 1867 he puts a hand “up against the sky” and sees “glow and colour . . . not transparent and sapphire-like, but turquoise-like, swarming and blushing.” And in “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”: “How air is azurèd. . . / . . . you can lift your hand / Skywards: rich, rich it laps / Round the four fingergaps.”) Color is never “transparent,” never noun, never stable: color swarms, color “laps.” I think now of Louis Althusser’s “wild practice” (“two red, wild”); then, writing that day, I seem to have had Ernest Fenollosa’s “no nouns in nature” in my thinking. (Fenollosa: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature,” “The sentence . . . is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal,” and “Nature herself has no grammar.” The notions get obsessive attention in a number of my recent poems.) Those tulips cannot remain tulips (they are gone now, today, 30 September 1994; where they once nodded and beseeched [swarmed and lapped] now a dull rose-burnished hydrangea flops, and blooms the size of softballs teem with ants under the glowering sunless air, autumn’s entropic nod.)

Futility. It lies in “insinuates”—word-images (Euclidean, cinnabar) despoiling the false transparency of the opening line. Claude Royet-Journoud (quoted in Perloff’s Radical Artifice): “Replace the image with the word-image” Lyn Hejinian (in “If Written Is Writing”): “Where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies” Euclidean: the word’s music.

~

MUSIC AND NOISE

Perloff quotes John Cage quoting Henry David Thoreau as saying “Music is continuous; only listening is intermittent.” The line reminds me of Ashbery’s remark about poetry’s being an “underground stream” into which one can “let down one’s bucket.” In Michael Palmer’s Code of Signals, Ashbery (in discussing the “clash of the voices” in the two-column poem “Litany,” resulting in the loss, in performance, of “enormous amounts of the text”) also points to disruptiveness and intermittence as mimetic—“the way experience and knowledge come to me”: “I think we’re constantly in the middle of a conversation where we never finish our thoughts, or our sentences.” He admits to writing “best when there are a lot of distractions around just because that seems to be the situation of life. I always answer the telephone when I’m writing, and it very often helps me with what I happen to be writing.” (Ashbery’s remarks recall those of Joe Brainard in “Frank O’Hara”—with one difference: if for Ashbery the telephone usefully disrupts a poem, for O’Hara the poem disrupts—and is disrupted by—some other activity, the ongoing business of life.) Brainard:

I remember seeing Frank O’Hara write a poem once. We were watching
a western on T.V. and he got up as tho to answer the telephone or to
get a drink but instead he went over to the typewriter, leaned over it a
bit, and typed for four or five minutes standing up. Then he pulled the
piece of paper out of the typewriter and handed it to me to read. Then
he lay back down to watch more T.V. I don’t remember the poem except
that it had some cowboy dialect in it.

(A number of late O’Hara poems seem likely candidates. ”At the Bottom of the Dump There’s Some Sort of Bugle,” “The Jade Madonna,” and “Cheyenne” all contain snatches of “cowboy movie” dialogue.)

The mimetic trade-off, the merging of “life” and “art” (Perloff details it thus: “the art construct must consistently tap into ‘life,’ must use what really happens in the external world as its materials, and . . . vice versa, ‘life’ is only ‘lived’ when we perceive it as form and structure”) occupies me less here than the mechanics of that “tap[ping] into” and how it effects an opening up of the poem. Nathaniel Mackey’s idea of “discrepant engagement” in the volume so titled calls for an acknowledgment of “noise” and sees open form as “a gesture in the direction of noise.” Mackey quotes Jacques Attali:

A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in
the process of emission. . . . Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only
in relation to the system within which it is inscribed. . . . Information
theory uses the concept of noise . . . in a more general way: noise is the
term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a
receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for the receiver.

And Perloff again (quoting Michel Serres in Hermès) defines “noise” as “the set of those phenomena of interference that become obstacles to communication,” noting, however, that noise “is not only incidental but essential to communication”—it is “unanticipated excess” and “a function of the actual dissemination of the message.” The concept of “noise” here is akin to that in information theory where the amount of information (not meaning, not reference) in any message is in indirect proportion to the amount of noise it contains. (Linking “information” to “meaning” in the formula is what leads to a privileging of clarity, linearity, the unobstructed, unobtrusive style as the communicative ideal.) Perloff (quoting Wittgenstein): “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information”—surely a prescient remark in this context.

I am thinking again of “Futility and Caprice. . .” That “music / Slopping side to side like milk in a pail.” “Pail”: “system.” I tend to label as “music” those disruptions and diminuendos, “Euclidean” and “cinnabar,” what could more precisely be called “noise,” those places in the poem where “listening” to something seemingly “outside” the poem “intermittently” jars its safe trajectory, aspires to open it to noise as a validation of that outside, a nodding refusal to let the poem resolve into a pure “inside,” autonomous and collapsed. This “music” I could align with (as Mackey notes) “Duncan’s invocation of ‘disturbance,’. . .Olson’s insistence that things ‘keep their proper confusions,’ his advocacy of ‘shout’” or to Williams’s “Dissonance” that “leads to discovery.” Or I could argue that the “music” is akin to O’Hara’s notion in “Personism” of “stopped thinking”—that inevitable, sought, turning away from “ideas”: “I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.” The notion of “music” is one I see as central to my poetics—what lets an alterity (“life,” “art”) in—“in relation to the system.” If—as in the case of the Language poetries—the system is the letting in of that other thing, the result is no longer noise, the openness of the form collapses and one is left with the gimmick, “white” noise, randomness, entropy, something like the blue paintings of Yves Klein. If—as in the case of the poetries of “official verse culture” (Bernstein’s term)—the system refuses the letting in of that other thing, in favor of limpidity, clear-thinking, the idea dressed in language that fails to admit its yearning to make “noise”—the openness of the form again collapses and one is left with the bauble whose clarity and closure no one can trust.

~

Its cadence undergoes a diminuendo in its short duration, syllables quickening, trailing off. Euclidean geometry is one of objects, of order, stasis; it is a diminishing to arrangement (“Canned distinctions”). The order (“six,” “two”) of those tulips is noted just as it is on the verge of coming under attack: history, a way of looking for “umpteen centuries,” is being insinuated, is bending to the curve of music, and the danger is in the ingratiating gesture (the “stumbl[ing] up against”), the kowtowing to a notion so simple as naming as presence enough. Cinnabar: the intrusion here desires to be one of sound. The short i (\i\) echoes that of “Euclidean,” and the syntax, the tag-along “and cinnabar” afterthought and zeugma to the semantic intent of the rest of the sentence—both strategies act to throw the reading back: the two italicized words are seen as words; there’s no seeing through them (back) to the tulips, the “scene” is disappearing. One futility is this: one cannot escape the “wordness” of writing—those tulips are only momentarily presentable. “A music,” capricious, rhythmic, “Slopping side to side,” always invades—it has its own agenda, real, and disruptive of any positing of the real. We are back to the figure / ground shift—pure sound of words breaking into the hive of the words’ meanings (organized, representational). I can read “cinnabar” and hear “suddenly” (or “Eureka”). This is the result both of expectations engendered by its syntactical placement (the conjunction “and” read as introducing a new phrase—“and ‘suddenly,’ / What begins in noticing. . .”) and by odd phonemic linkages—the \s\ of “cinnabar” and “suddenly,” the \yu\ of “Euclidean” and “Eureka.”

~

READING READING

At the risk of (with the intention of) getting off track of a reading of “Futility and Caprice in Yellow and Red,” I want to pursue the question of reading here. Reading is always off track—omnidirectional. Despite the claims of someone like Bernstein (drawing on Piaget) that pictures exist in space and thus are (capable of being) “apprehended all at once,” and that words exist in time and thus are “experienced in pieces, a duration that never transcends its utter sequentiality,” the actual reading process is often out of simple sequence, full of echoes, returns, brokenness, repetition.

~

CONTROLLING INTERESTS

Bernstein tends to see control (here that of words’ “sequentiality”) everywhere in language. It is not my place here to offer a psychological portrait of Bernstein except, perhaps, as it inhabits the postmodern aesthetic that issues forth in the bounty of theoretical writings he has assembled in both Content’s Dream and A Poetics. I find it revealing that in “Three or Four Things I Know about Him,” offered as the initial essay in Content’s Dream, the most conventionally “subjective” piece of Bernstein’s I know of, he admits such things as these: “My security was in what I personally had complete control over . . . In fact, this keeping personal control of one’s life, keeping distance, really does get social power—it’s harder to pin such people down, it’s harder to get to them . . . I have a technique of bathing people in that cold, a puritan conviction that people should know the world is hard, and they should face it strong and stern.” In such a light, the notion of language as something that “holds us captive” (the formulation is Wittgenstein’s) is understood as a threat to Bernstein, a subjectivity who longs to refuse any subjugation by the end-around maneuver of removing any trace of that subjectivity from the “artifactual” “constructions” (made, in a howling contradiction, by “keeping personal control”) he will then offer to the world. But the lines also shed a curious light on the postmodern project of allowing the reader a place in those constructions, a place in which he or she can or must act or interpret in order to read. In “Writing and Method” (Content’s Dream) Bernstein proposes writings that banish “the stasis of the monologic picture of a world sealed off in its preconstitution” in favor of those that constitute the world (in writing) “in which I know you not by a consumption of your persona, or by gazing intently at the trace of your body or mind, but by my response to you in a specific situation, my call of your name.” There’s a presumption here not unlike the false etiquette of the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” variety—a willingness to read “you” only in “my” terms, an insistence that “you” read “me” similarly. Later in the essay Bernstein claims that “the struggle [“puritan” echoes here as much as “revolutionary”] is to bring to conscious scrutiny the social function different modes of reading / writing play and how they function in legitimizing or constituting or undermining the hierarchical power relations within the socious.” The problem here is a common one. Any “scrutiny” that results in a “banishing” is only an “undermining” of “hierarchical power relations” through the positing of “new” “modes of reading / writing,” constituting only a realigned hierarchy. Readjusting the binaries. I don’t doubt for a minute the need for a “heave” (Pound). I yawn (or snarl) as much as the next “guy” at the prospect of opening another book of watery authentications of a sensitive self in the pre-epiphanic throes of fixing a Volvo (O Sweden!), or visiting Prague (O Kafka!), or hectoring composition students (O youth!), but I remain wary of the panaceas of ideologues.

§

Hot. Supper of Mexican food. Keep thinking about Thoreau’s remark in the Journal, something the gist of which is that the biggest struggle is to keep the trivial from lumbering up “one’s” mind. Lumber. These writings as, if nothing else, a place for that lumber. In the throes of the trivial.

~

Tomorrow to Point Pelee early, and back late. With my father and my sister J. For the warbler migration. Pack a lunch and “a” birth certificate. “An expire’d passport is no passport at all.”

~

Ze manuscript est fini.

~

Big Top

§

A POETICS—7

The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 contains work by forty-four poets, four of whom are women. About one quarter of these are represented by one or two poems only; the largest selection is that of Frank O’Hara, who is represented by fifteen poems. Editor Allen divides the book into six numbered sections—five sections representing “alignment[s]” of the various writers and one section reserved for statements on poetics, biographical notes, and a short bibliography and discography. This is how Allen explains the grouping of the poets and arrangement of their works:

In order to give the reader some sense of the history of the period and
the primary alignment of the writers, I have adopted the unusual device
of dividing the poets into five large groups, though these divisions are
somewhat arbitrary and cannot be taken as rigid categories. Within each
of the five sections the poets are ranked by year of birth, and their
poems by year of composition.

The five groups, as Allen labels them, are as follows: 1) “poets who were originally closely identified with . . . Origin and Black Mountain Review,” 2) poets of the “San Francisco Renaissance” of 1947-1949, 3) the “Beat Generation,” 4) the “New York Poets,” and 5) “younger poets who have been associated with and in some cases influenced by the leading writers of the preceding groups, but who have evolved their own original styles and new conceptions of poetry.” Obviously, there are difficulties with these kinds of taxonomies, and Allen recognizes this, admitting that, for example, Robert Duncan was a leader in the San Francisco Renaissance before being a member of the staff at Black Mountain College. Allen defends the somewhat arbitrary nature of the classifications on both editorial and historical grounds: he aims “to give the reader some sense of milieu and to make the anthology more a readable book and less still another collection of ‘anthology pieces,’” and he suggests that “the statements on poetics, the biographical notes and the bibliography are aids to a more exact understanding of literary history.”

Two things strike me regarding the anthology in general in considering it close on the heels of New Poets of England and America. One is related to how a dominant tradition signals its dominance (partly) by a refusal to examine its assumptions. It is left to those representatives of alternative traditions to examine those assumptions, most often through manifesto, theoretical argument, or statement of poetic (or aesthetic). As James Dickey, standing in the dominant camp, rather snottily writes (in a review of Olson’s The Maximus Poems): “All ‘schools’ theorize endlessly, it may be noted.” My argument is this: Allen’s decision to order The New American Poetry by those “schools” and to include that “theorizing” comes of necessity and duty: this tradition’s examination of its assumptions is the only way to move the dominant tradition to do the same. As Allen notes: “the field is almost completely uncharted; there is, not very surprisingly, very little first-rate criticism of any of the new poetry, and that little has been written by the poets themselves.”

The other striking thing about the Allen anthology is just how tentatively it proposes its alternatives, how it seems to offer itself more as a moment than as a monument. This seems entirely apt: process is all. Allen remarks that the statements on poetics (“on” is important, not the more solidified “of”) are “interim reports by the poets.” The sense is clearly of something “becoming” and a glance at the statements themselves verifies this. Duncan offers “Pages from a Notebook,” that place for jotting down and working through; Robert Creeley implies in “Olson & Others” that the poem should be not a “signboard” but “a structure of . . . cognition itself”; Philip Whalen says: “This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history,” thus suggesting that both history and the poem, too, can be grasped only by “interim reports,” liable to “move” or change; and Gary Snyder speaks of “a long poem [he is] calling ‘Mountains and Rivers without End’ after a Chinese sidewise scroll painting . . . [which] threatens to be like its title.” Here, the “postmodern” begins. (As Joseph M. Conte points out in Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, Charles Olson used the phrase as early as 1950 in an essay entitled “The Present Is Prologue”; Olson speaks therein of the “writing acts” of those “who projected what we are and what we are in, who broke the spell.” Olson equates the “post-modern” with “the post-humanist, the post-historic, the going live present” [emphasis added].) Postmodern marks—fragmentation, “open” forms, aleatory methods, the poetic series, dis-continuity and indeterminacy—are in evidence in many of the statements (and poems), though sometimes coinciding with a return to expressionist / Romantic marks. Michael McClure writes (somewhat contradictorily): “Projective verse . . . allows the language to govern me instead of vice versa . . . I have lost emotional relationship to writing” and “I repeat to myself: ‘There is no logic but sequence of feelings.’” In another statement that looks both “back” to Romantic impulses and “forth” to the Barthesque notion of the “writerly” text, inviting the reader’s participation as “writer,” McClure says: “I write and make no / or few changes. The prime purpose of my writing is liberation. (Self-liberation first & hopefully that of the reader).”

Donald Allen’s “Preface” to The New American Poetry is fairly restrained. He tries to sketch the outlines of the tradition out of which these poets emerge. He writes of the work as “following the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams”; he sees the work as being “closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting”; he claims (more brashly) that this work is “now becoming the dominant movement in the second phase of our twentieth-century literature.” He also notes that the work shows “one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse,” without identifying those qualities. Those qualities are identified (as suggested previously) by the proposed alternative ways of proceeding in the various statements on poetics and by the testimony of their absence in the poems anthologized.

I want to look briefly at a passage from “In Memory of My Feelings,” a poem in the Allen anthology by Frank O’Hara. It is an abiding interest in O’Hara’s writing that, perhaps more than anything, has moved me to examine the “anthology wars” as a kind of microcosm of a shift—a “moment” when New Critical assumptions are (partially) overturned and postmodern assumptions begin to offer alternatives for writers of poetry. I say “partially” because, as we have learned from Thomas S. Kuhn, paradigm shifts (in science, though the model has been widely interpreted as being applicable to other fields), while seeming drastic in their reorientations of a field, are, nevertheless, never complete. Richard Kostelanetz, in an essay entitled “‘Avant-Garde,’” describes Kuhn’s thinking and how it relates to the history of writing in a manner that reflects quite accurately the story of the “anthology wars”:

It is Kuhn’s thesis that the history of science does not follow a
cumulative and linear path, where contributions inevitably follow
upon each other. Rather, each field of science has witnessed a
discontinuous series of drastic reorientations.

The histories of modern art and writing have, of course, the same
structural shape, not only because every genuine artistic advance
incorporates at least one prior aesthetic heresy, but also because
every innovation attracts, almost as a measure of its success, both
a squadron of followers and a squadron of detractors.

Kostelanetz identifies, in the history of poetry, two shifts: “free verse and then associational syntax, where images and perspectives are strung together, rather than developed in a step-by-step linear fashion.”

Here, then, is the O’Hara passage:

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception
of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications.
I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and I’ve just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
What land is this, so free?

[Each of the four shortest lines here should be substantially indented.]

The lines come in the middle of the rather long “In Memory of My Feelings,” a poem about identity and self, and constitute, as Marjorie Perloff has noted (in Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters): “the breakthrough [the poet] . . . longed for all along.” Perloff also refers to Donald Allen’s notes on the poem in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and remarks: “In the first version . . . O’Hara arranged these images in four 4-line stanzas, each having the refrain ‘What land is this, so free?’” The disorder and “multiplicity of selves” cannot, however, “be presented in the orderly little ballad stanzas of the original.” What O’Hara does here (among other things) is to illustrate the shifts Kostelanetz identifies—“free verse” (here coming out of Whitman—the passage might, as Alan Feldman has stated, be read as “a parody of (and comic reply to)” the author of “Song of Myself”) and “associational syntax.” This latter technique includes what Paul Carroll calls “impure images,” that is, images “unpoetic,” but, more importantly, images—whether from “the poet’s unconscious” or from “his everyday (more or less) rational life”—for which, in New Critical terms (that is, for reasons of ambiguity, irony, tension, or an “organic” whole) no reason exists for inclusion in the poem beyond the fact that those images somehow “happened” or “occurred” to, or were “written” by Frank O’Hara. The technique of “associational syntax” is also noted in the shifting perspectives in the O’Hara passage—for example, the “I” is both the “Indian sleeping,” dreaming of sighting Columbus’s ships (with pony nearby) and the “pony . . . stamping” itself, seeing those same three ships. If the technique leans toward the “postmodern,” with its fragmentation of self and refusal of wholeness, its moment of ecstasy is, arguably, leaning toward the Romantic: the truth is unadorned (or “sordid”) but is still beauty (or “grace”). This, then, is how O’Hara (and, obviously, other poets of the Allen anthology) becomes (for me, for the time) that two-faced Janus figure every (r)evolutionary artist is, facing the past, facing the future. How, then, do I, not “of the time,” writing poems these three or four decades later, respond?

~

OVERLOAD

My argument goes in fits and starts. Too much information. My poetics is overload—the page overwritten, words jostling words, canceling out and letting through, a palimpsest or, in Michael Davidson’s term, a “palimtext.” Or a Derridean “supplement”—adding to (over-writing) and substituting. The alternative is silence, the whittling down, Olson’s slant angle typography (reproduced in Don Byrd’s The Poetics of the Common Knowledge) of

the unit / the smallest / there is

[The virgules each represent several em-quad’s worth of horizontal space.]

The modernist “box of tools” contains both palimpsest and blank. Ashbery begins Three Poems with a matter-of-fact appraisal of “The New Spirit”:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

clean-washed sea
///// The flowers were.

These are examples of leaving out.

[Again, virgules represent several em-quad’s worth of horizontal space.]

Two techniques, neither satisfactory—the impossibility of pure overload, the all, in the former and, as Ashbery immediately admits regarding the latter: “something soon comes to stand in their place . . . yourself.” The reader enters the gaps in the text, constituting, and is constituted in language: Barthes’s “writerly” deal is struck. What Bruce Andrews (in Robert Frank’s The Line in Postmodern Poetry) calls the “unmappable space,” a “dynamic in fragments” completes its articulation in the closed circuitry between reader and text. As Ashbery puts it in “The New Spirit”: “It is you [reader / writer] who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on / / to divide all.” The dream of the non-totalizing, non-instrumental text awakes to find itself still dreaming in (and of) the singular “true” reader; in a nation of difference the poem becomes an instrument only of difference, “divid[ing] all.” The result, finally, is only the none-too-splendid disjuncture, warring, weary particularities, poems and readers ineffably reflexive, industrious taut tautologies, incommodious except as commodities onto themselves in a venal, useless economy where nothing can even be exchanged, or swapped. Ashbery (in Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror): “All things seem mention of themselves.”

~

THREE TREES

I am being rhetorical, overly so, and rhetorically glum. I am fragmenting (here, that is, directly “above”) Ashbery’s “Grand Galop” for the purposes of working over a notion about the “nature” of language, its “artifice.” Ashbery’s writing continues and one must needs honor its continuation: the movement is exactly like that of Barthes’s tree (“a tree”) and Minou Drouet’s tree (“a tree which is decorated”). “Grand Galop” continues (“And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents. / Hugely, spring exists again”) and becomes Drouet’s tree, or mine, or ours. “Hugely” welcomes in the world, clinging to the names’ stems and branches. It is an artificial spring, and recognized as such, but one in which we can all revel, revealed in language which denies its own boundaries, mentioning more, on this occasion, than itself, constructing just as it admits its own “constructedness.”

I want to add another tree to the collection. In an early poem entitled “The Arboretum” (written in Ann Arbor in June 1951, with the canceled earlier title of “Revery”), Frank O’Hara begins: “This tree is black with dry feathers / sprawled as if the sun had smashed it / cluttered with broken bicycles / the river flops on the grassy roots,” In the course of this short (twelve line) poem, something (“light”) pushes the tree “aside,” replacing it with visions of “two Chinese homosexuals,” of “a bicycle fall[ing] into the river,” of “Jane painting,” of “dust” on the poet’s “shoulder.” The poem ends “and the tree is out of sight.” In spite of the syntactical irregularities here (effect of the refusal of all punctuation) leading to some semantic ambiguity (does the second line refer to the tree’s “sprawl” or to the river’s?), the language here is not overly conscious of its status as language—O’Hara is working within the confines of a poetry of Eliot’s “one person talking to another.” The language is “trustworthy” even if the shifting contours of the landscape are not. (The poem partakes of a kind of Everyman’s Surrealism—this grafted to the poet’s essentially Romantic, organicist vision of subsuming, being subsumed by the landscape.) O’Hara becomes that tree “cluttered” with the “broken” reveries “light” and “dust” provide. The reader notes the progressive replacements of the natural world by the poet’s world (not by the poet’s words), a hierarchizing gesture that ends with the poet in the first position (the only presence), world and reader trailing along as secondary, furtive, supposedly-admiring witnesses.

~

NATURALLY

I am trying to delineate here two prevalent modes in the languages (dictions, conditions) of poetry, the “natural” and the “artificial.” I am merely positing a model. Language is, of course, all convention, all “artifice.” Natural language claims an affinity to speech; artifice moves away from quotidian discourses. That movement, though, is never unidirectional. What begins as a mode or style of artifice eventually is subsumed by the quotidian language. As it becomes prevalent it enters to alter the quotidian—greeting cards carry bastardized verse, advertising is broken into free verse lines, TV ads (now copiously “worded”—a reaction to the remote control “mute” button) screen as pages of open-field poetry. The artificial is defined by formal self-consciousness, the natural by an unstated desire to disappear, go invisible, transcend. The modes operate, of course along a continuum, and fade into one another. And, in poetic discourse, some manner of “formal self-consciousness” seems always present—that unstated aim to be “all signifier.” A matter of degree, not kind. Relationship to the modes—“natural” or “artificial”—marks the poetries of the modernist (and postmodernist) moment(s). One could relate a complex story of shifts along that line stretching from highly “natural” to highly “artificial” both in the histories of individual writers and in the histories of successive poetic generations. Put simply, although at any particular historical moment a wide range of styles is always observable, one style tends to claim the role of continuity, of honoring a tradition; other, opposing styles tend to position themselves as necessary agents of change—as return (renewing), as progressing (making new).

Example: in Olson’s “Projective Verse” one can witness both an ongoing rejection of “subjectivism” (a “natural” mode, what has already, variously, through Pound and Williams, “excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying”), and an embrace of the “natural,” a return to a speech-based poetics as a way of opening the field of the poem, rejecting “what a French critic calls ‘closed’ verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got.” Olson calls for “the possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings,” which call seems inevitably to end by re-shackling Olson to a “natural” and “subjectivist” mode. Olson is (despite these internal contradictions) working against (in 1950) a tradition coming out of Eliot’s own set of contradictions—the one (“natural”) calling for a poetry of “one person talking to another” the other (“artificial”) calling for the “objective correlative,” a notion bound up with that of the poet as craftsman, as impersonal, “objective” worker, one “who,” as James E. B. Breslin observes, “refuses to reduce the full complexity of human experience by thrusting [a] private vision upon it.”

Generational shifts. In From Contemporary to Modern, Breslin presents a picture of the prevalent poetic mode at the time (immediately following World War II) of Olson’s writing of the “Projective Verse” essay that helps explain Olson’s turn to breath, to speech, to a poetry of “natural” process. What interests me in the depiction is how closely it corresponds to some aspects of the current situation in American poetry. Breslin notes that “When the postwar period was not calling itself ‘the age of anxiety’, it was calling itself (somewhat anxiously) ‘the age of criticism’.” He notes that “New Criticism, with its insistence on ironic tension as value” was “virtually unchallenged.” “What the age demanded,” writes Breslin, “was a densely textured lyric, crammed with learned allusions, witty metaphors, startling changes of tone, verbal ambiguities—all packed tightly into the hermetically sealed space of the autonomous symbolist poem.” How compare that “age” to today’s? Leaving out, for now, the question of the poem’s “autonomy,” how does such a demand compare with the practices of, most particularly, the grouping of writers of poetry and criticism now widely referred to as the Language poets.

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GROUP AUTONOMY AND THE CLUB OF LANGUAGE

See, for example, George Hartley’s Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Individuals associated with Language writing (another formulation) tend, of course, to reject the label. Bernstein (in Content’s Dream): “I guess I have ambivalent feelings about the expression ‘language writing’ ‘as a compositional mode’. I could speak of my work, or specific other’s work, but feel uncomfortable generalizing since what seems more compelling is to understand (be troubled by) the situational dynamics of categorization and characterization rather than accept them as intrinsically useful . . . this is not a movement in the traditional art sense, since the value of giving an aesthetic line such profile seems counterproductive to the inherent value of the work.” (As with Derrida’s refusal to lend the deconstructivist project its “ism”—claiming it as praxis rather than theory, Bernstein’s refusal to “aestheticize” the Language project[s] strikes me as disingenuous, and as an attempt to claim representational authority here, while questioning its existence and use elsewhere.)

As regards the question of autonomy: I note that one Language poet, Steve Benson, seems to call (in an untitled piece in Frank’s The Line in Postmodern Poetry) for a “decisive site-specific orientation,” each poem “conceived situationally relative to the formats and technologies of anticipated publication, as well as editorial precedents and circumstances of reception,” a sort of “well, I know the editor” approach that cops out on the question of autonomy to say nothing of form. As any club member would probably do, whether part of the New Yorker club or part of the Tuumba club. (I realize, of course, that a poem’s autonomy, its “objectness,” its refusal to delineate anything beyond itself is not the same as form seen in terms of “precedents” and “reception,” that is, in terms of publishing opportunities. However, Benson himself seems to make the conjunction: he speaks of the poem’s line as “resolving towards a more stolid concreteness, the identification supposed by a line still meant to push an irony in the face of the lyricism swung, twisted and propped into place by the conventions so readily at its disposal.” Here, though the talk pertains specifically to the line, the poem’s autonomy seems defined only in opposition to “conventions” of “lyricism,” what it pushes “in the face of.” Danger of the binaries. Any autonomy defined by the prevalence of its lack elsewhere, it seems, is no autonomy at all.)

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It seems to me that the artifice of the last decade and a half (this age of criticism) turns to meet the artifice of the postwar period. Some indications, mostly rhetorical. In Howard Nemerov’s Poets on Poetry Richard Wilbur (first book—in 1947—The Beautiful Changes, a title that could provoke interest in many a Language poet—is “changes” a verb or a noun?) recollects: “We were led by our teachers and by the critics whom we read to feel that the most adequate and convincing poetry is that which accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas, and incongruous images. Poetry could not be honest, we thought, unless it began by acknowledging the full discordancy of modern life and consciousness.” Language poet Steve Benson: “We all want to be awakened from a bad dream but any alternative to the contradiction, ambiguity and confusion that we know proposed a system of organization hegemonically dreadful to our urge to break a spell.”

The “spell” (its breaking recalling Pound’s “break” and “heave” of “the pentameter” or Tzara’s “dissolve” of the “cement” “syntax”) Benson refers to is the “fiction, [the] trope of self-consciousness . . . the magic illusion of isolation,” put differently—a self capable of choice, of “measure.” However, the difference here between (Wilbur’s) embracing an “adequate and convincing poetry” (one that is “honest,” that is “self”-ed) and (Benson’s) rejecting such a poetry as “a system of organization hegemonically dreadful” (in favor of one that denies “self” and “self”’s “honesty”) becomes less marked if one turns to technique, to approach. Here’s Allen Tate, whose “pronouncements,” Breslin writes “were coolly absolute [I think of Charles Bernstein in Content’s Dream: “I want to attack Derrida, I don’t attack the Yale critics who are easier targets . . . ‘The King speaks to the King’”], austerely purged of romanticism and doggedly New Critical”: “a good poem [has] nothing to do with exalted feelings of being moved by the spirit. It [is] simply a piece of craftsmanship, an intelligible or cognitive object.” Such a stance can rather unhappily be compared with Bruce Andrews’s call (also in Frank’s volume) for “[r]efusing the normatively linear & its disciplining . . . in favor of a constructed conversation.” Andrews makes “absolutely” and “coolly” clear the emphasis on artifice required in an attack on writing-that-claims-to-be-“contemporary” (that is, writings in the prevalent academic mode today—“free verse,” “I-oriented,” “gestural,” “immediate”). Andrews: “A formally ‘contemporary’ writing may propose the bogus immediacy of gesture as a codeless transparent revelation of the body [recall Olson’s “breath,” O’Hara’s “nerve”], as if its markings were natural, neutral, to be taken for granted.” The “natural” is “bogus.” As Charles Bernstein writes (“Stray Straws and Straw Men”): “Natural: the very word should be struck from the language.”

The position is inarguable. In language, a system of conventions, we cannot speak of the “natural” undeludedly. Of course, as Bernstein notes in an “unnatural” rhetorical blast (or is it “natural” to insist by repeating, is it natural to stomp a foot many times to make a point?): poetry is “constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact—monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, willful.” I find it alarming, however, that such calls for artifice (or for its opposite, “naturalness”) should occur with such regularity. Speaking of the poems in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), Robert Lowell recalls (as Breslin reports) that he wanted “to write in meters but to make the meters look hard and make them hard to write.” “Look hard”: hard to read. “Hard to write”: “everywhere circumscribed.” Puritanism, siege mentality, work ethic, the dogged earnest—poetry is “never no more no fun again” seems to be the message here. And Bruce Andrews calls (in, oddly, idly scanning here, perfect “hard” iambs) for “cónstant créase & flúx, a rádicál discóntinúitý as láck” in the poetic line, the foregrounding of “an artificial, constructed process, a de-natured measure of kinetic shifts, registers of differentiation.”

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More rain. The humidity returns. Toads in the pond across the street shrilling, puffing out the membranous sacs under the lips. Some nights a toad’ll go at it too hard and the underpouch’ll explode.

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