Aesthetic Dissolves

~

Bought (Kiwanis Rummage Sale):

The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, by Harold Rosenberg (Mentor Books, 1969) Paperback reprint of second edition (1966).

On Duchamp’s version of Poe’s “Poetic Principle” (“All excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient” leading to “a long poem does not exist”:

Discussing “the short life of a work of art,” [Duchamp] declared that a painting possesses an esthetic “smell or emanation” which persists for twenty to thirty years, after which it dissolves and the work dies. As illustration, Duchamp mentioned his own celebrated “Nude Descending a Staircase”; despite all the fuss about it, he said, the “Nude” is dead, “completely dead.”

Rosenberg:

The painting with a “short life” is an antidote to the painting as an object that obstructs the psychic transaction between the artist and the spectator. One who today reacts with excitement to Duchamp’s “Nude” is, in the opinion of her creator, stimulated by “the thing he has learned” rather than by the painting itself. From the artist’s point of view, better a dead work than one enveloped forever in [art historical] abstractions.

I found reading Rosenberg of (more than just “period”) use in thinking about O’Hara. Trying (now) to think what manner or method could possibly push a poem out of its trailing constant orbit-shreds of literary historical abstractions, or prevent th’accrual of the gravitational (orbital?) pull of such. Was it Jacques Debrot who want’d to use the telephone—call up sewerage systems experts and hair stylists and speak poems to them, which poems record’d and replay’d (with expert / stylist commentary / shrug) would then constitute Debrot’s “poetry reading”? Can a poem that I speak (to an occasion) (once) (and leave unrecord’d) be said to exist?

At some (fairly early) point in all such self-inquisitions my “mind” drops away from itself, goes galumphing off to do something “physical” involving, oh, sun dresses (in one mode) or Peterbilt semis (in another).

~

A Gathering of Ways, by John Matthias (Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 1991)

History and narrative (both local, finite, detail’d, of use):

The aging author whose new book will be dismissed
for tedious didacticism & a meager plot
engages Mrs. Martineau from London in a civil conversation

interrupted by her not infrequent jottings in a diary
about how wisely planned
and prettily she finds with road from Niles

which the Iroquois took to slaughter Illinois women
at Starved Rock and which, from
Ypsilanti down to Edwardsburg and then beyond

80,000 western emigrants began to stream by 1838 or 39.
We cross St. Joseph’s River,
Mrs. Martineau observes, upon a ferry towed by ropes.

And as the clever horses pull us up the bank
we find ourselves in Indiana territory. She glances up
at Cooper who, in turn, acknowledges her smile.

Fenimore Cooper, I presume, though probably not Harriet Martineau. The road—now U.S. 12 and known in parts of Michigan as the Chicago Road—apparently overlays an old Sauk trail. It runs through the Irish Hills, an area of more or less rundown or abandon’d resorts, tourist trap also-rans, mystery spots, &c. In April 2003 I drove U.S. 12 in the Lumina, got lost in St. Joseph, found my way to Notre Dame for a reading, and fail’d to meet John Matthias.

Fierce and tender oddity: the copy of A Gathering of Ways that I bought is inscribe’d on the title page:

For James Laughlin
with admiration
and all good wishes
John Matthias
July 23, 1993

Which I find touching and slightly disturbing. How did it end up in Ann Arbor, amidst the jumble that is the Kiwanis rummage sale? One’d think the Laughlin library’d resist any random dispersal. (Nothing resists dispersal.)

~

Lazy Sunday afternoon.

~

Which with near immediacy and suitable succor turn’d into a nap. Up in a woozy debilitant sway to meander and amble Carmen around the block, G. darting nearby on a bike. Read some poems for a lately underway editing proj. And shot to th’airport to catch th’incoming Fort Myers flight #1107. J., fatigue’d, deplane’d.

~

Finish’d Three, and start’d Berg (in an old Scribner’s edition, hideous green spiral blot cover, sure sign of “insanity,” with picture of Ann Quin—“brooding verging on bemused, soulful”—on the back). Nitty-gritty (meaning applicable to the task of writing itself?) of the former:

Mantis-like I hang over many desultory designs, toy with subterfuges. Attempts at censoring any desire to think what should be felt. This the most difficult. So conditioned are the reflexes they become part of a mausoleum, when emotions outweigh surrounding matter a figure monstrous in shape chiselled from soft substances. When thought is chipped out, thrown as titbits for those who look on. Waiting.

How begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again—turning the inside out: find one memory that will lie married beside another for delight? Seems beyond attainment.

~

The prose of Berg (1964) lusher, the sense of existentialism’s gooey syrup drip’d a little too calculatedly over it:

. . . bald-headed weekenders, serviced twice daily; smooth tightly-sheaved sirens sidling along channels of anticipation. But this was hopeless, far worse being the border-line case, brewing on tit- bits made up from the antidotes of artificial respiration upon the imagination; the survival of those who preferred remaining half way, never accepting, or rejecting, aware only of the urge to defeat boredom. I take, I see, I subject my own mediocre self into something big.

And later:

The tragic sense of destiny is inherent in every man; but I defy fate, I alone am responsible for every action, every scene; in my nothingness I will create the idea, I shall see what I have imagined, and from that alone will spring my entire actions.

A sort of L’Étranger in Brighton. Compare to O’Hara’s more sardonic “Am I defying fate, or merely avoiding it?” line—or howsoever “it” “doth” “go.”

~

Bon, alors.

~

Thin Cruelty

~

G. and I drawing at the table: he a black-eyed Susan in a coffee cup, me trying a tiny Manet-etch’d Baudelaire found in a book on th’Impressionists. In Baudelaire, the line of the mouth is everything, that thin cruelty crucial. I muff it. And some crosshatching under the lower lip ceases to identify as shadow, becomes jazz afficionado’d soul patch, or worse, herpetologist’s gob of sphagnum, that moss soldiers stuff’d hard into gun and other open wounds during the Civil War, known for its curative antiseptic quality. Muff’d. One Baudelairean eye’s got too big, the pupil, Goya big, nearly as terrifying. Rather like a mangy Charles Manson, my drawing. G. notices not. Nor anything much of my sour ruminations, which were probably not these, but kin and precursor to these. The trappings—neck and shoulder draperies—come easily enough, cut and taper of any 19th c. gent.

~

Reading Ann Quin’s Three (1966), her second novel, review’d at time of delivery by one B. S. Johnson. Curious if Anne Carson learn’d anything here. Her broken field running, odd rhythms, odder line-breaks. Interior monologues all interchangeable with there’s a pot of yellow flowers on the table and a book she shouldn’t have done that, no. Not the way she’s been acting. Though shorter, more staccato. Here’s random Ann Quin:

. . .Birds in
flight
coincide with notes of music. Her fingers. Glide. Mouth curled.
A secret smile. Opening a letter in a crowded street.
Oblivious
reminiscent of a man crouched against a wall talking to his shadow.
Decisions. To put emotions as a pair of shoes under the bed.
Their bed
the dividing line. Wanting complete annihilation. At the highest
point. Incidents dwelt on
imagination
dictates its own vocabulary.
Clarity
confusion. Pursuit to the point of indiscretion. The moment one’s
victim suspects. Evading begins.

Here’s captious (captivating) Anne Carson:

No one knows what the laws are. That there are laws
we know, by the daily burnings if nothing else.
On the second

day of shooting in the Place de la Concorde
I notice the leaves in the Jardin have changed
overnight,

but mention this to no one
for fear of continuity problems.
I had already invalidated 16 (otherwise good)

takes this moning by changing an earring.
You cannot erase.
Is this a law?

No, a talent. To step obliquely
where stones are sharp.
Vice is also sharp.

There are laws against vice.
But the shock stays with you.

(The first part of “TV Men: Sappho” in Men in the Off Hours. Maybe I’ve de-convinced myself. I’ll have to look again at a longish thing in Glass, Irony, and God that I’m probably misremembering. I only pick’d it up because Guy Davenport’d written th’introduction. I was reading “A” every night in that big headboard’d bed. About the era of the bat finding its way in (“a hole the size of a quarter’ll do”) and flying crazy circles, G. sleeping in crib. And trapping it in the bathroom. Wherein I enter’d the next morning. In full combat gear. And looking everywhere up didn’t locate it in the toilet a tiny splash drew down my attention. Down.

~

Ugh. Though surely there’s a familiar clumsy touch to each.

~

Slept late. Drag’d with G. in to work. He is surfing. I am doodling. I’ll do a little work and we’ll fly out around lunch, off to the playlet he’s the elephant in at the day camp. Ciao.

~

Big Oak

~

G. and I batching it for a few days, J. off to Florida. Which means a raggedy schedule, in and out of work, dashing here and there.

~

And tonight, zilch. That leaden semi-exasperated sense—brain activity measure’d by the thimbleful. Did talk with the neighbor across the street who, yesterday, had a brilliant orange-yellow flood of mushrooms under a big oak. I ambled over with G. and the C-dog to look just as he march’d out with the garbage. Only to learn the mushrooms were the garbage. He’d torn the whole patch out to prevent an oceanic swell of propagating. I found a couple he’d miss’d: slender stalk’d, no cups, plenty of gills.

~

Arrangement in E and M

(after Paul Hoover on James Schuyler)

Shrewd-
ear’d
intimist

of
Korean
mums.

~

Venereal Criticism

Ah, you
Clapp’d out

Clapp’d out
Iambic prick.

~

Candidate for a Beauty

Ephemerae.

~

A Good Title

Solarium and Ovolo

~

A Perfect Sentence

(by Ann Quin)

The sea seas.

~

The Failure of Rhyme

An allegro
Negro.

~

Off to goof off with the boy.

~

Tinier

~

Joseph Massey sent me a .pdf file of a thing call’d Minima St. Twenty or so extremely tiny pieces, a bare handful of words each. Here’s one:

Cricket?—

no.

Refrig-
erator motor

staccato.

Which surrounds what I’d label the cricket noise—erator motor—(akin in my mind to Nabokov’s sound of a pencil being sharpen’d--Ticonderoga Ticonderoga Ticonderoga) with a couple of other repetitions (frig-, crick and no, -to), all making for a sweet bundle of sounds. (“Sweet bundle” akin to “churning urn”? Uh, “of burning funk.”)

Here’s another Massey poem:

Hills blue

within this

thin fog.

Here I’d argue for stripping the piece down more: removing “this” in order to pile up and overlay the -thin, thin sounds, one th aspirated, one not. I admire the difficulty of such poised plenitude, balancing words (and sounds) so nakedly—sort of like a poem-model: all moving parts exposed! I tend (naturally?) to go in a completely opposite direction: exfoliating wildly, hothouse profusion, making a thicket wherein any number of colossal clumsinesses may hide. Some four years or so ago I decided to write a series of “small poems”—five words per line, sixteen lines per poem = eighty words per poem = a 1600% increase in size, compared to my “revised Massey.”

Good to push (be push’d) at th’extreme to one’s tendencies. Though earlier attempts at such tiny machinery always got subsumed into some bigger Yves Tanguy racket, or some mundane chinoiserie. (Of course, in morning light, I see it’s not Yves Tanguy, but Jean Tinguely clanking away in the machanistickal pools . . . nearby the bright-primaries beastly things by that Niki de Saint-Phalle who eloped, age eighteen, with the young Harry Matthews . . .)

~

A month or so back Stacy Szymaszek mail’d me a copy of her new chapbook, Some Mariners (Etherdome, 2004). The cover dragon sort of recalls the intricate dragons one’d see on small town high school girls’ dark silk jackets circa 1962, the ones who had sailor boyfriends in, say, Okinawa. Opening the chap though, and encountering the crew and passenger list endpapers (a fine design touch, perfect lead-in), one sees it’s a list for a 508 ton ship called, apparently “France”—or “Franck”?—sailing out of Noumia, New Caledonia, heading to Sydney, New South Wales, with a mostly French crew, including a fourteen year old boy named Gustave Lanneau, leaving mid-December , 1872 . . .) All of which throws the provenance-associations of the dragon back a century or so.

Which is all just a small part of the way one proceeds, reading. What the words say is another: here, elegiac, broken, (in first fragment: “grieve with me”). A story of someone, a sailor, named James, probably one-arm’d, with prosthetic device (“pocket knife in robotic hand / James cuts leaves of French pages / in nailed down chair”), arm apparently lost to the sea (“tan arm / in a Sicilian net / gilled and thrashing”). The fragments of narrative hints interrupt’d by a handful of poems “translated by James,” mostly “after” various Chinese poets. And a story of another—the “me,” “I,” “my”—apparently awaiting James’s return (and James longing is wholly reciprocal, spell’d out in the Chinese poems, and in marks tick’d off by fives, “ORA PASSIM.”

That’s a sketchy situating, or grounding, and may shift and dissolve with subsequent readings. What is strongest in Some Mariners is a stark language of sexual yearning, remembrance:

grappling iron your legs

moor me in full tide

whet against protean shoulder

breath is fuel open your mouth

seep into luminous prowl of sea

night is shell eloquent

transient lid

And:

chest of phalli cradle

hands to torso till rose

hips in bowl crushed

dark pit of mollusk

lip down scoliatic spine to

foaming Ionian uprise

beneath flex of land

your shores are drowning

Szymaszek’s poetry is, again, one of poise and counterpoise, the syllables weigh’d and placed, fraught. What is evoke’d is a care to recover and reconvene a gone world piecemeal, in hefts and turnings, like a hank of rope. The sounding (echoing and locating) keeps the surface high, and story is bonus to that. To end with the beginning:

sequent of waves albumen ferment
white cap floats hum syllables of elegy

veer anchor train to sea bottom— . . .

~

G. and friend N. watching some Eddie Murphy spooky-goof. Whatever happen’d to my copy (45 rpm) of “Boogie in the Butt.” Erm, classic?

~

Re: Qui?

“There’s always that sense in a ________ book that he’s trying to prove something instead of simply enjoying the beast for whatever it is. There’s always a sense of QED at the end of ________’s books, which does limit him as a writer.”

~

Period of the loud insects percolating through the summer night setting in.

~

To work.

~

Poop Deck

~

For James Wright, “Where He At?”

Off in the sky, twittering swifts
Cut and stammer, flying
Correctives across the cloud-color’d moon.
Hill follow hills into distances like buffoons.
Two cows catch fire to Billy
Strayhorn’s “Vinegar Rip.”
I have misplaced my wife.

*

Over my head some wittering twits
Strut and yammer, talking up
Thierry de Duve. The flocculent spit of clouds
Shines like the pearl in a pearl-handled
Revolver handled by a moll.
Gunk steams in the breach.
I am tasting my knife.

*

And a slight sneeze moves me to dress in lawn gear
That is immaculate and tribal like an iron lung’d warrior-narc.
Suddenly I see
That if I snapped off my body I would break out
Into hives.

~

Not right “conditions” for scribbling last night, so here I am—poop deck of the idiot ship—transcribing whatever small morning malarkey is apt, or inept. Bilious bicycle phraseologies, mostly. Numbskull lines, “golden oldies,” “Sedrach / Mesach / & Abednego.”

“For the signe & the thing signified be correlatyues one answering the tother or els must it be but a false and a dissynbling signe whiche these poets so stoughtly defende with fyer and fame.” (1545)

~

And Tom Stoppard talking about form and using “this image of a children’s join-the-dots picture: he said before you start writing you don’t know what it’s going to be, and then you start out and you think maybe it’s going to be a hippopotamus and when you’ve finished you see it’s actually a giraffe but you didn’t know this, you find out as you do it.”

Why codify th’experimentalist in ya? Thinking how something like The Alphabet must take its cue partly & ultimately from Joyce’s Ulysses—that insistence-ploy of “a different style or literary technique for each chapter” (with unifying element of, here, a finite set, A-Z). Thinking of it whilst reading about B. S. Johnson’s first novel, Travelling People, même combat, and he fault’d for it, derivative. Though I did like the “sheer ballsiness” (possibly oxymoronic) of Johnson’s cover letter when sending the thing out to roust a literary “agent” from under a rock [John, you’re showing your peevishness and bias and muddying your tale]:

Joyce used this device in ULYSSES, of course, but by allowing the nature of the subject matter of each particular series of events which form one chapter to determine organically the style chosen, I seem to have avoided the contrivance to which Joyce was sometimes reduced.

~

Johnson’s first collection of poems, sent out under the title Too Many Flesh Suppers?

~

A tradition: Petronius, Rabelais, Burton, Nashe, Sterne, Beckett, (Johnson).

~

Go here to read Eliot Weinberger’s terrific piece “Republicans: A Prose Poem.”

~

A Gallon of Orange

~

Reading: Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. Coe, a novelist, skirting around, fussing about the fictional horns that must needs blare up wildly in any too-orchestrated literary biography. And I wants to say, “Cor, Coe, get on wif it.” Factoids of note: Johnson’s friendship with Zulfikar Ghose. A Johnson film call’d Fat Man on a Beach.

~

Sunday morning dreamscape included a tanker truck shaped like a gallon of orange juice. With two square half-gallon “outriggers” rolling along, one to each side. It took up three traffic lanes, in usual Tropicana colors. Glimpsed whilst trying to find the bathroom in a municipal government building, obviously a convert’d former fire station (brass poles remaining). And got told to slide down centrally-placed stairs (hidden by overhang covering slot) construct’d where some sort of slide must’ve originally gone. A feet-first plunge, no headroom, unable to slide, stuck.

~

Measurement of th’ennui accompanying dream-redaction. Stuck.

~

Received:

Notre Dame Review, No. 18 (Summer 2004), edited by John Matthias, William O’Rourke, Steve Tomasula, et al. ($8, 840 Flanner Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556)

Four tiny Charles Wright “Franz-Kafka-finding-himself-himself-in-the-T’ang-Dynasty- decides-to-pretend-he’s-Tu Fu” pieces. Here’s one title’d “Waking Up After the Storm”:

It’s midnight. The cloud-glacier breaks up,

Thunder-step echoes off to the east,

and flashes like hoof sparks.

Someone on horseback leaving my dream.


Senseless to wonder who it might be, and what he took.

Senseless to rummage around in the light-blind stars.

Already

The full moon is one eye too many.

And a terrific Sebaldesquerie of a Robert Kelly poem, a slow romp to smudge all borders (“dead elm leaf / colored pages” to “a plain / stretching through Silesia / shabby under old snow”), a skinny thing call’d “Threads 37.”:

What the eye falls on
feeds the soul, the curious
relationship or
appetite lodged between
or amidst the ever-arising
and the never
completed edifice you are,
she said, quoting
from the book whose flimsy
dead elm leaf
colored pages still
managed to bear
the dark of word
after so many
fingerings, looking,
looking o they wear
things out
with their inspections,
checking the window sash
every night to know
what’s locked out and
who’s trapped in,
o tender curtain
of you,
words as words are
boundaries, words as
things, though,
her sweet
cuneiform, are doors,
so meanings trap you
and the wolf runs free,
but look
without reading
the shape
that matter dances
your way,
it is the property
and necessity of love
to be so ignorant,
just the ferocious
quiet pressure in you,
she said, reaching
you think the thing
beyond the shape
written before you
you stare at,
it could also be a plain
stretching through Silesia
shabby under old snow
and no one waiting,
as rails go on converging
in the ashen distances
and the Allied bombers
curiously spare
the lines down which
the already dead are
wagoned to the actual
article of dying,
their throes the strange
letter on her page
and the reek of gas
till no one left on the earth
knows what means,
smell of a word.

Which manages to remind me of both Robert Hass’s sweet and querulous-voiced bramble about blackberry (“word is elegy to what it signifies”) and something like Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov,”—the “Silesia” no doubt—its “life,” (as Frank O’Hara’d say) “its changeability, its pulsation, its ambiguity.” A poem I foresee reading regularly and frequently, for its mystery and solace.

Others amongst the slew in Notre Dame Review: Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Anania, R. D. Skillings, Debora Gregor, John Peck, Mark Helperin.

~

Lumina’d down to the Huron and walk’d with G. and Carmen some swampy trails below Barton Dam after crossing the dam on the catwalk (Carmen balking a little). Lots of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans in the fields, in the wetter spots—purple loosestrife. An indigo bunting looking as if mottled (drab brown seeping through stunner’s blue) singing: “Sweet sweet, sweet sweet.” On a dock sticking out into Barton Pond where we’d thought to scoop some algae to bring back for under the microscope, Carmen decided to plunge in: popped up looking a little confused and chagrin’d. Though earlier she’d walk’d in chest-deep at several points along the trail.

~

New and noted: Paul Hoover’s got a new book of essays out, Fables of Representaton, in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, generally smartly-edited by David Lehman. Two pieces included that I completely missed—“Pair of Figure for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey” and “Stark Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler.” The title piece is a consideration of the New York School. Also: memoirs of Paul Carroll and Ted Berrigan. Another for the stack of unreads that’ll possibly burn a brand in my forehead if’n I don’t get to them soon . . .

~

A poetry slung up out of th’hold of polysemous confidence: poet as con, and shark. Confidence, I confide. Confident, I spiel. Convict’d, I am held. Convect’d, I go skyward (hot air). Confect’d, I make myself.

~

The idiotic fuel’d by the demotic. The Spicer Circle meets the Spice Girls.

~

Post-weekend debris rattling around my skull. Dreamscape of bannister / stairwell sex, you figure it out. To(ward) (off) work . . .

~

Bok choi, my friends!

~

Dog Lazy

~

Is it dog days of summer? That lazy drop down against the summitry of autumn, when the cold nights clock the skull and send it spinning? “The energy collapse is general and complete.”

~

Finish’d reading B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo.

“Mr. Albert said that while in his childhood ‘ain’t’ was common, this usage had now shifted to ‘ent’ in London. This was an example of the continual progression of sound changes in speech, in the face of which any standardisation was quite wasted, even ludicrous. And the working-class always led in such speech changes, and the upper classes were farthest behind: the Queen, for instance, always lanches a ship, and uses lorst for lost.”

Like fashion, like popular music, like the periodic “return” to “speech” in poetry.

~

“He is orable for one thing for a nother he is a nosens
His face is like a back of a bus.
. . .
He walks like a firy elephant.
We all call him puw long of the elephant.
He has got hire like a goly-wog.
All the clouth he wers are from the rag shop
I wouldnot say wot I think of him in publick.
. . .
Evry time he gets on the scals the scals say one at a time.
or no elephant alowd.”

~

“—And also to echo the complexity of life, reproduce some of the complexity of selves which I contain within me, contradictory and gross as they are: childish, some will call it, peeing in the rainfall gauge, yes, but sometimes I am childish, very, so are we all, it’s part of the complexity I’m trying to reproduce, exorcise.

—Faced with the enormous detail, vitality, size, of this complexity, of life, there is a great temptation for a writer to impose his own pattern, an arbitrary pattern which must falsify, cannot do anything other than falsify; or he invents, which is pure lying. Looking back and imposing a pattern come to terms with the past must be avoided. Lies, lies, lies. Secondbest at best, for other writers, to do them a favour, to give them the benefit of innumerable doubts.

—Faced with the enormity of life, all I can do is to present a paradigm of truth to reality as I see it: and there’s the difficulty: for Albert defecates for instance only once during the whole of this book: what sort of a paradigm of the truth is that?

—Further, since each reader brings to each word his own however slightly different idiosyncratic meaning, how can I be expected to make my own—but you must be tired.”

~

Morning of one remaining available word: “box.”

~

Sontag: “. . .I tend to repress images in my writing. It seems that what was perishable in a lot of writing was precisely its adornment and that the style for eternity was an unadorned one.

Somebody says: ‘The road is straight.’ Okay, then: ‘The road is straight as a string.’ There’s such a profound part of me that feels that ‘the road is straight ‘ is all you need to say and all you should say.”

~

Isn’t the string exactly what throws the writing out of something like two-dimensionality (and into three-)? The alignment of “road” (a thing) and “straightness” (a quality) rubs up no frisson of relation. It is inert, a congress without life. It is th’addition of “string” (a thing) that vivifies the “road-straight” world. “String” adds measure to “road,” and encumbers “road” with possibility (always an additional dimension). It is not a question of adornment.

~

So spaketh the nitkeeper and git, Mr. Latta.

~

To woik, lads.

~

Minimal

~

Here’s a word I dislike: “dicey.”

~

Time-trammel’d tonight by a final baseball meet-up: Bulldogs versus Lugnuts. Which we lose handily, with a lousy ump.

~

Minimalism “rains.”

~

“Ape free will.” (Thomas Lowell Beddoes)

~

Most favor’d word status (according to Merriam-Webster): “defenestration.”

~

What about “rinse”?

~

“Linseed.”

~

The ever-velvety “of.”

~

Susan Sontag: “I write partly in order to change myself; it’s an instrument I use.”

~

New Bookforum is out. Gary Indiana on Jean Echenoz, interview with John Barth, John Banville on Evan S. Connell, Brian Lennon on the autodidact / academic split, is it possible to work a job in the ’thousands and read, too? Or stay minimally inform’d? (I skimmed a little last night—too tired to attend to it single-mindedly . . .)

~

To, uh, work.

~

Fuss, Snatch

~

Period of the periodic paper-fuss, snatching bills out the desk-debris, cornering off the piles, re-balancing the topple-bound, interpretive work on the checkbook, &c. That’s what kill’d the evening. That and a lousy contretemps with the night. Too restless to complete th’intend’d reading of The Poker. Whatever else life is in the bad-ass twenty-first century, it is a belabor’d inevitable dropping of half-done reads.

~

Rather than lament
The plangency of
A lossy inhospitable

Like that, why
Not cleave to
Its redolence like

The big cheese
That you think
Everybody thinks you

Are.

~

The day will
Come when one
Of your fashionable

Sentences will fall
Out the mouth
Of a trustee

Just there for
The keeping down
Of the implausible

Distrust of the
Unruly down, and
Ambivalence will doctor

Up a meagre
Result to insult
Whosoever is opposed

To what you
Said he never
Said to begin

With.

~

Which is the kind of thing that’ll send one scuttling off to nose-in-book pose. Or walk-the-dog stance. Some preeningly officious other. Night brought stark rain and more cold. Morning brought a sweet clarity and cedar waxwings high up in a big ash. I noted first the thin chain-rattle call and spotted one twisting around hovery, halfway up. Another rasp and suddenly twelve more moved, a simultaneous feed, positively apostolic. I don’t, in truth, know “whereof” I “spake.” The widow Constance took that moment to shoot by in her white Honda. Some mornings I see her setting off with a huge white kerchief tied about her head and a severe finality to her step. As if she were about to march twenty miles in order to scold someone, turn around and march right back.

~

Tail ends of errands to do, calls to make, opacities to run up against, Zimbabwean directories to run through, incompatibles to sneer about, duties to perforate, shandies to pour, oh stop it.

~

Twork.

~

Poker

~

Received:

The Poker, No. 4 (Summer 2004), edited by Daniel Bouchard ($10 single issue, 3 issues for $24, P. O. Box 390408, Cambridge, MA 02139)

Poems by Anna Moschovakis, Cole Heinowitz, Aaron Kunin, Giuseppe Ungaretti (translated by Robert Fitterman), Hoa Nguyen, Ange Mlinko, Nathaniel Tarn, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Cedar Sigo, and Elizabeth Marie Young

Ange Mlinko interviewed by Daniel Bouchard

Essays by Juliana Spahr (“Response to “Impoverished Theory of Reading”) and Steve Evans (“Field Notes, October 2003-June 2004”)

Reviews of The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek translated by Alexandra Papaditsas and Kent Johnson (Skanky Possum, 2003) (Joe Safdie) and The Flood and the Garden, by Dale Smith (First Intensity, 2003) (Randy Prus).

I found time to read only the full score plus of tightly argued, clearly inform’d, and highly entertaining pages that make up Steve Evans’s “Field Notes.” In part a kind of Jed Rasula-esque sociological / numerical approach to account for various poetic (and non-poetic) activities for the last several months (since the appearance of The Poker #3)—a valuable service of collecting data and putting it in one place. In part a look at “the banalization of poetic good,” the result of poetic overpopulation / overproduction (“we talking about a publishing clip of about fifty new full-length volumes a month”). In part a further indictment of the idiocies and inadequacies of the prize culture that’s grown up around a sizeable portion of the poetry-publishing world (a system “predicated on pyramidal structures whereby a large number of small-time losers front the money eventually collected by the slightly-less-small-time winner in the form of a purse and a book”). In part a look at who gets the prizes in this time of seeming challenge to the mainstream’s hegemony (“one stronghold of the Dominant Poetic has proven impregnable, and that’s the one where the cashbox is kept.”) In part a Roger D. Hodge-style round-up of the time poetic and political (“Time of the $400b defense budget, excluding the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the $521b projected deficit. Time of prolific output by Lyn Hejinian, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Fanny Howe . . . Time of the anglo-neo-OuLiPo-eans . . . Time of the edifying and stupefying blogs. Time Ronald Reagan’s corpse lay in state.”) In part a spliced-together cross-section rapid-fire omnibus review of a number of items that appear’d initially list’d on Evans’s own Third Factory “constellations”—“one reader’s present in eleven titles” (including—most intriguing mention for me—“Emmanuel Hocquard’s ma haie—part hedge, part thicket, part labyrinth—is a vast (550 pages plus apparatus) and endlessly thought-provoking collection of essays, letters, interviews, photo-novels, poems, and generically-unplaceable texts; published in 2001, and as yet untranslated, it is to my mind the most substantial volume of poetics so far this century.”) And in part a listing of what poetry books got reviewed—232 titles—drawing on four sources (Rain Taxi, Publishers Weekly, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Boston Review) in the ten months since th’appearance of The Poker #3.

With the fourth issue The Poker becomes, if anybody thought it not before, one of the “must haves”—an indispensable document of the current “era.” If that sounds like hyper-blurbage, it is—and design’d to get readers here to subscribe. Editor Daniel Bouchard intends to publish at least eight more issues, is gunning for three issues per year, is an impeccable bookkeeper, and notes that he’s currently low on funds. If I recall rightly, Bouchard intends to continue publishing subsequent installments of Evans’s “Field Notes.” Subscribe.

~

Out into the orange cast of night, the moon sliced off, ragged sliver, ginger-color’d. Rabbit scoots off, dog bolts. Fandango and must. Dance and smell. Back to pour over the Sontag & Kael, one of those books that halfway through “one” wonders if the inertia of continuing is overcomeable and decides not, reading on with increasingly clench’d teeth . . . Amusement occasion’d only by half-ass'd re-transcriptional hijinks, replacing “the movies” with “poetry”:

sometimes bad poems are more important than good ones just because of those unresolved elements that make them such a mess. They may get at something going on around us that the poet felt or shared and expressed in a confused way.

Uh, maybe.

~

Pouring rain and me slicker’d up yellow biking in. Period of “most apt to shout obscenities at automobiles.” Period of hanging rain pants up to drip dry next to my desk. They remind me of some throttled beast, a coyote, a wolverine. Period of keeping the wet leather of the oxfords plunged deep into the under-desk cavity, suspecting something like “a garous excretion or a rancide and olidous separation” (Sir Th. Browne) to displace (and displease) the small (shared) office’s morning air.

~

To work.

~

The Maim’d

~

Weekend of the maim’d, the dullard. Bum knee and sleep without ceasing. Trying to sleep to finish off sleep. And always, a sketchy modicum of sleep is left there unslept—like laundry in the hamper.

Skimmed, between snoozes, a few pages of Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, pick’d up off the new book kiosk of the public library, Saturday, with G. on a back-to-the-routine bicycle ride downtown. Never heard of Seligman. Never read Kael. (Though I generally leap to read anybody that gets call’d a “stylist,” in pejorative lingo, or not. And, according to Seligman, in the beginning of an argument I largely agree with—though differ with the particulars of its application to Sontag, another stylist: “[Kael’s] writing is her criticism.”)

Seligman, fanning out the compass: “There may be beautiful vacant writing [I strongly doubt it. —JL], but I can’t cite any beautiful vacant criticism. What I can cite is a lot of bad critical prose that thinks it can get away with its mediocrity by virtue of the (ostensibly) excellent quality of the thought behind it [Ready-made culprits and th’usual examples throng my neural highways, thieving the hasenpfeffer tidbits. —JL].” Seligman, plainly having fun, quotes Oscar Wilde (in the guise of Algernon “rising from the piano”): “I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.”

~

My other delirium whilst napping concern’d the parataxis of photography, the selecting and presenting of “a democracy of details,” that is, the way picture-taking (or any essentially descriptive mode in art) is a giant leveler—all the vital senses of relation, and of hierarchy, get erased, subsumed. Seligman: “The relative importance of things gets jumbled in a democracy of images, ‘a garbage-strewn plenitude’ that, by confusing or erasing values (e.g., a picture of litter can outshine a picture of the Parthenon), degrades reality into kitsch.”

Is an unending parataxis immoral? That is, a refusal to exercise judgment? Moral considerations give me the willies—thus, I napped harder to escape. Hard not to think of Ammons’s colon (an equals sign) and Garbage, or Silliman’s Alphabet, with its parade of identically weight’d particulars. Temptation to say (after all these years), uh, jeez, L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E, after all . . .

~

Sontag’s contrarian necessity. “The very nature of thinking is but, and:

If the mainstream changes, the criticism of it has to change too; which is to say that the oppositional or ironic attitude, the counter-attitude, must change. I am very interested in counter-attitudes. They are absolutely necessary ingredients in culture. If those attitudes are not present, any culture becomes a form of lobotomization.

~

Is the act selecting of any detail out of the phenomenal smear automatically an aestheticizing of the real? That nap’s got me way too awake now, and pounding at th’imponderables . . . whereof—of a “normal” Sunday’s eve—I’d be just another brute stand-in for Mr. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Think I’ll hobbledehoy the Carmen-girl bum-knee’dly around the neighborhood, see if any of my compadres of the “starter” houses got any ideas about the phenomenal smear, and, or, its capture. (Recalling one Grunwald boy, son of the bus driver, son, too, of the fat woman who sold us the World Book encyclopedia circa 1964, who liked, at recess, to play “Smear ’Em”—“You toss somebody the football and then you all jump on and smear ’em!”)

~

Dog, gone.

~

Monday morning sighing petulance.

Because I read late, and cobbled down more night-gamy witticisms, what look dishevel’d and hirsute come morning . . .

Because I hit the wall of morning’s freshet with a vengeance, singing of the vast empires of sleep, musical and kook’d . . .

Because I did not stoop for meth, that wake-up call, its riparian rush and reediness . . .

Because I’ve never stopped to wonder where the hell Odradek Stadium was . . .

All by way of shuffling of to Buffalo, ditching the incipient carnage of work, dusting off the folderol of Parsippany, its radical empty foreplay. This radically empty . . .

~

Too many chores, write-ups and finish-offs. To work!

~

Joss’d

~

Remarkable how summer laps up the time. I find myself at ten o’clock inert and feverish, affront’d by the sassy blankness of the page.

~

And, again, at eleven.

~

Cloud-joss’d sky of morning.

~

Here is Imbecile Gulch.

~

A Flaubertian “Thunder against . . .”

~ / ~

Stunning to learn that A. R. Ammons figure’d as “anonymous witness to the Berkeley Poetry Conference.” In 16 July 1965 letter to “W”:

You should see the attendance at readings: 600 or better. DUNCAN, CREELEY, SPICER, SNYDER (he’s terrific!), GINSBERG etc. You should be here. I’m strictly an observer. Nobody out here has ever heard of me.

And in 23 July 1965 letter to Vida Cox (Ammons’s sister):

They’re having a big poetry conference on the Berkeley campus here. Up to 1000 people at $1.50 a ticket to come to a reading. Amazing. Poets out here are heroes. This is undoubtedly the wildest part of the country.

Plaint in what apparently start’d out a journal entry (subsequently sent in a letter to John Logan, 14 January 1958):

I thought I would type up some poems to send out—but I am weary, weary of all that, so goodbye to all that. Not having learned yet the meaning of a lost pebble or a nail paring or a scratch on a watch crystal, not having determined the meaning of these, which are equivalent to poems, why? why? should I trouble the editors, printers, readers (of critical articles) with my poor lines? I am a genius, but no one hearkens, or reading believes. Only those who scan and trouble not their souls perceive my poems.

Oh nibbling, jibbling, twittering eternal adolescence, that I in manhood should sit here bubbering about poems, in artificial tones. How I love tone. How complicated is the tone of some of my poems. Oh, hell!

The other night I wrote—just like that—my greatest poem, reducible into nothing but itself . . . “The mountains said they were.” I am an actamist. That is an imagist of acts, not images. I build the behavior true, Oh Lord, and let the reader transform the actions into his own ideas. I can’t stand the naked statement of an unclothed, unbodied idea. It hasn’t reached the level where the poet works: transformingly transforming. I must have made a note somewhere: poetry is but about change.

Were I Cortes, believe me, I would pound no typewriters. Yet, I don’t want to be Cortes, I want to pound typewriters. It makes me happy. I’m delicious to myself, and so uncomfortably aware how repulsive that is to others, whom I love and hate.

All out of the recent Epoch issue: “This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons.”

Odd combo of self-doubt, loathing, charm, affability, disgust, and arrogance thaty Ammons. Hard to limn him in shortly. He’d say things like: “how’d I get into this fuckin’ racket,” meaning all the idiocies of literary politics.

~ / ~

Doctour Doubble Ale.

~

The vpcheringe of the messe.

~

“The upcringe of the masses.”

~

Bucephalus or Bocephus? (Just horsin’ around.)

~

“Head like an ox.”

~

Têtu. Tais-toi.

~

Jordan Davis: “I’ve been obscurer.”

~

T’work.

 ~

Ever About to Write

~
 
Ambiguous urges. Fragmentary compulsions. Semi-defeat’d ambitions to write something call’d Nevves out of Novvhere. Or something like B. S. Johnson’s “A Few Selected Sentences.” Finally drubbed up out the morass that is my memory the other British experimentalist fictioneer “seemingly a suicide” in 1973. Ann Quin, author of Tripticks, (1972), Three (1966), Berg (1964), and Passages (1969). Again, it is Dalkey Archive who keeps her work in print here.
 
~
 
Compulsive ambiguity. Demi-urge’d fragment. Flaubert, whom Avital Ronell calls (along with Barthes), “the other subject ever about to write,” saw “writing as ‘l’acte pur de bêtise,’ and argued that writing was always an immersion in stupidity.” Bof! Parfait! How many more occasions’ll upthrust wherein the ability to recollect th’Ammonsian admontion (“A writer ought to keep himself just a little stupid.”) ’ll be greet’d without mutter’d imprecations, doom’d implorables, and outright big profanities?
 
~
 
Thunder thwacking around the western hinterlands. Think I’ll go read a good book.
 
~
 
Which I did. Drifting in liminal soporificks of minimal angst. Not a terribly “good” book, either. The Johnson Aren’t You Rather Young . . . Though I did enjoy: “a cardigan torn near the trapezius” and “the monosyllabic grunter,” and “the setness, the execution of an arbitrary but pre-determined decision” and “fescennine joke.” I seem to be avoiding a tiny stack of books and magazines receive’d. That summer doldrum’d sleepy affability. Phlegm. A midday glottal stop. Aujourd’hui. I’m sure I’ll be back at it . . .
 
~

To Scissor Up

~
 
Odd to continue riffing off my one tiny blue card of “up north” notes, index to the way things expand unfathomably, depth charges pack’d inside a few cravenly align’d and miscible words.
 
~
 
A couple of solitary Caspian terns regularly cruising the shallow inlet (a quarter mile across, reed beds and the detritus of duck blinds), divebombing with a swift wing-tuck, flinging themselves waterward to scissor up fish. Big bright red bills, inimitable flyers. I could dally away a life just watching.
 
~
 
Or, closer, at the end of the dock: whirligig beetles in infectious covenant, a few dozen or so mapping a monstrous Boolian system of overlapping circles. Sometimes a solitary misfit’ll shoot out a tangent, a vectoral push. (Probably suffering math-collapse here, my nonsensical metaphors. “All metaphor is nonsensical.”) After some concentrated study of the whirligigs, I conclude them capable of locomotion by two means:  by paddling the long oarlike appendages (witness a moving series of continually re-beginning concentric ripples), or by a sudden darting propulsion, much faster, probably the result of a “squirting,” and—like most “squirting”—not indefinitely sustainable.
 
~
 
Whence my amusement at such indomitable vagaries? Whence my amusement at tithing out the words of attempt’d representation of such indomitable vagaries? Yo, Petrarch! Yo, Tinbergen! Henry David’s in the woodshed / and won’t be stump’d.
 
~
 
Sly-eyed and goofily happy to shout out Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” along with the Lumina radio all down Scio Church Road to drop off the C-dog at the kennel.

A sudden motion made me stiff,
Now we're into a brandnew trip . . .
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting,
Those kids were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit fright’ning,
But they did it with expert timing
Oh-oh-oh-oh . . .

Coming back: some Peter Gabriel shit. Or Peter Frampton. Or that Slits offspring-band call’d Contempt for Peters. Oh-oh-oh-oh . . . Same stiff. Same diff.
 
~
 
G. lands a tiny perch—hook and bobber method. The perch’s swallow’d the hook and gets cut up severely enough in the extraction (no hemostats handy) that, though it darts off, it’s soon witness’d going belly up a little further out. G., somewhat later: “The spirit of that perch is warning off all the others.”
 
~
 
Factoids for modern living: via the same source whereof I learn’d that the coumadin / warfarin I eat daily is chemically akin to what is used to poison rats (it basically makes the “wee, tim’rous” varmints internally haemorrhage to death), I learn that Botox is short for botulism toxin—injected under the skin anaerobic muscle- paralyzing or -weakening hoodlums—“first bacterial toxin to be used as a medicine,” okay’d by the FDA in 1989. En plus: that arsenic is used (in large enough quantities that a foot-long board’d kill a man) in the wood preservatives for deck planking, fences, &c.: tons of it dug out of the ground in China and import’d.
 
Ground control to Major Tom . . .
 
~
 
Leafing the latest Rain Taxi at breakfast, I noted Stan Brakhade’s:

Primarily I write to exhaust language on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off, veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full sway so that I can commence my work: I am a filmmaker.

Which bethunk me back to th’early ’seventies, reading O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” and writing a lengthy poem in prose call’d “Fragging.” That same impulse: to write the language itself into exhaustion, to write somehow so fiercely that one finally emerge’d into a pared-down emptiness, a sheer space, a minimal noise. Attempts to define it invariably fail, flatfoot off, gumshoes gumming up the shrubbery suddenly growing there in the inviolable glare. One part of “Fragging” seem’d to stumble toward it, ending:

. . . a diamond cutter, ice rink, ringworm, a furloughed wench, a wurzy finch, potatoes degroined without liability, cardinal wantonessness, fear, worth whrrrs, trunneled wisteria, hysteria sprinting through an underbrush of slobs, a glacial molaine, arcs like glands, arrows ridding whalestems under tundered absolvancies of treacled soap, fish treadfare voltive, seriffing tangible sauce, rall strubel, megaphone sumstra, a morphic cyst, tremelos of wust, “fiction,” “troughs,” “sloe,” “trusk,” “ear,” “clemency.”

I’d revise the Brakhage: “veer the linkages into sound, each aural connective synapse, to effect that my ear have full sway . . .”
 
~
 
Under unsustainable hint-vollies here to get busy (or get bust’d): to work!
 
~

Traveloguery

~
 
Continuing with the small abundancies of traveloguery (I think). After another baseball night, G.’s team overcoming a meagre deficit in a final burst. And G. handling himself with a minimum of deep right field raptures. Playing second in alternate innings help’d there.
 
~
 
Read the Dalkey Archive’d Chopin’s Move, Mark Polizzotti’s 2004 translation of Jean Echenoz’s 1989 Lac. And follow’d it with Echenoz’s 1995 Les Grandes Blondes, (Big Blondes) again done up by Polizzotti, in 1997, part of the New Press International Fiction Series. Drawbacks to my tendency to read everything I can find by an author in one mighty swoop: I tend to end up with a miserable set of wholly indistinct details. The man who attach’d audio “bugs” to living insects (flies) is Chopin of the Move, a kind of spoof of spy novels, a fine imbroglio of deception’s simultaneous narrowing and broadening of the field of play. Whereas Gloire Abgrall is the tall blonde ex-vedette who’d disappear’d a few years earlier, who’s saddled with a “homunculus” (or “illusion,” or “hallucination,” or “guardian angel”) named Beliard (“a skinny little brunette, about a foot tall and with a slightly receding hairline, part on the side, drooping eyelids and upper lip, muddy complexion. He is wearing a brown cotton suit, dark purple tie, and shiny little brown shoes, spit-polished. Rather disgraceful spineless face, though with a determined expression. Arms folded, his fingers stick out of sleeves that are a bit too long for him, and drum on his elbows.”)  Gloire’s propensity is for pushing bothersome pursuers off extremely high places, and she is being pursued by Paul Salvador (of “Stochastic Films”), who is doing a series for television on tall blondes.
 
For being rather short, Echenoz’s novels seem densely populated—both here manage a lively full-blood’d panoply of secondary and tertiary characters. And (Big Blondes moreso) move actions widely, and with a thrift and easy nonchalance, over a variety of global locales. Here’s the Seine-Maritime (and how Echenoz’s narrator caters to Echenoz’s ranging, essayistic, inclusive “straying into scholia” tendency): 

The days passed, meagerly furnished with short walks in the country (hawthorn, sunken paths, hedges, cows) or by the sea (iodine, jetties, wrack, seagulls), with the soon-wearisome observation of the horses, with inattentive readings and distracted spells in front of the television . . .
 
She was finding these days very long, checked the time too often. Never had the march of time seemed so slow. A discouraging slowness, multiplied by itself, weighing at the threshold of immobility. The slowness of grass growing; the slowness of an ai, of glue. If there are words whose meaning determines their career, slowness is no doubt in the first rank: so slow that it hasn’t yet found the slightest synonym for itself, whereas speed, which doesn’t waste a minute already has a ton of them.

 
And, how percipiently Echenoz details the sudden slides and impingements of something like madness. In Bombay: 

. . . these days she ventured out of her room only at mealtimes, leaving her breakfasts unfinished, hidden behind dark glasses. As soon as she got up, the crows would swoop down onto the leftovers and divvy up toast, sugar, butter, and artificial marmalade before flying off again to savor their delicacies in peace, motionless on the blade of a fan.
 
And then there was one evening, at the club restaurant, when Gloire jumped on discovering a very agitated spider in a spoon resting on its convex bowl next to her plate. The imprisoned insect turned around and around, struggled in the bottom of the utensil. An instant of revulsion seized her before she saw wriggling in that concavity only the reflection of another fan above her.
 
Fans, it appeared, were beginning to occupy too much space in her life. But only at the end of a week, worn out by her sleepless nights, when she began seeing fat frozen mosquitoes in the filaments of electric lightbulbs, did she begin to worry . . .

 
Remind’d often in the Echenoz titles here of Toby Olson’s fictions—the wry-manner’d kicking out of several panes in perversity’s window, in order to let some fresh air in, or, out. Or maybe it’s just (in Big Blondes) the six horses Gloire is “selected” to accompany by air Bombay to Paris, horses too large for th’usual x-ray screening devices, horses “full” of ample cavities. Olson’s horses were miniature (see The Woman Who Escaped from Shame).
 
~
 
Which skips the traveloguery and abolishes th’available time, its insufficiency is a snarker. Perusing B. S. Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: he writes of “float-fishing for roach or perch . . . with lobworms as the comehither.” Primitive Joycean language: verbing up any available noun. He writes of “the English disease of the objective correlative.” Of first novel, Travelling People, which he “will not allow it to be reprinted”: “I learnt a certain amount through it; not least that there was a lot of the writing I could do in my head without having to amass a pile of paper three feet high to see if something worked.” (Heady advice, and one rare-heed’d in our scoundrelly profligate age.) And Johnson provides details regarding The Unfortunates, (1969) the novel in a box: 

. . . randomness was directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book: for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material. I think I went some way towards solving this problems by writing the book in sections and having those sections not bound together but loose in a box . . .
 
The point of this device was that, apart from the first and last section which were marked as such, the other sections arrived in the reader’s hands in a random order . . .

 
Usual stuff, with usual reasoning, though 1969 marks one of the earlier (in English) instances of an attempt to defeat the teleological technology of the book. Though Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela appear’d in 1963, with Gregory Rabassa’s Hopscotch translation following in 1966.
 
~
 
Enough niggling. Remember: “Lobworms, the new Comehither.”
 
~
 
To work.
 
~

Shot Down

~
 
Back. Shot down out of the north late last night in the Lumina: “handles like a ball of light.”
 
~
 
And back, more immediately—it being Sunday evening—from a Tiger-Yankees baseball game in Detroit. G. and I meeting up with other team members after getting “slightly lost” around the Eastern Market. High in the third deck overlooking left field. G. wearing a Yankees T-shirt J.’d brought him a couple years back. Me going with the noncommittal, or th’incongruous: a Mote Maine Laboratory cap pick’d up in Sarasota, Fla. One of a gaggle of twenty-somethings drinking beers out of enormous cups down the row kept inserting, rather casually, conversationally, a “Jeter Sucks” into every sentence he spoke, or yell’d. Impeccable timing. I could see a mustachio’d Yankee booster turning around regularly, sizing “Jeter Sucks” up, readying “a biff in the face.” Apparently, the old story of the (perceived) turncoat: Jeter out of Kalamazoo, play’d for the University of Michigan, how could he end up with th’Yankees?
 
Annoyance at the lustiness of throat and seeming wholeness of heart in the PA system led (and enforced, if decibels act as enforcer) rendition of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. G. and I skipped the unity-show and toodled off for Crackerjacks.
 
~
 
Loose ends, tatters of my days. The half-dead cedar swamps of the central plateau must register as my favor’d landscape. Perk’d up by standing deadwood in black water.
 
Black Lake prove’d, against all bold tales, not “bottomless”—though mucky and extremely shallow. Knee-deep in cold silt. Leveling off one could “swim”—though belly-tickled or arm-trapped by an underwater hell of elodea.
 
~
 
What We Caught
 
In a two-poled seine net: Johnny darters, blunt-nose minnows, sand shiners, one miniature gar.
 
By pole and line: small-mouth bass, large-mouth bass, perch, pumpkinseed, bluegill, pike.
 
On arms and legs: leeches. One of us pull’d up a black gelatinous mess of one the size of a fat man’s serving of chocolate pudding. After a seining outing across the lake I pull’d about a half-dozen straight-pin-sized leeches from out between my toes. Variety of biting insects: deer flies, horse flies, enormous moustiques.
 
~
 
That man inconsolably dangling a safety-orange color’d life-jacket at the rear corner of a brokedown Winnebego. On I-75, near Roscommon.
 
~
 
Two loons on Black Lake. Two-note answering persistent three-note, who is paddling fiercely to join two-note. Who mostly continues diving for fish. Join’d together, no lunatic laughter. The lunatic laughter only occurs singly, sporadic, riddle’d outbursts of joy. Or lunacy. Or the thin borderline edge of sorrow, indistinguishable.
 
~
 
Rare sighting of a luna moth, freshly emerged, pale green with—underneath the pale—a vibrant hum of something brighter. Clinging to a concrete wall just outside the entrance to the women’s bathroom, Fort Michilimackinac. Where we (with my brother S. and family) look’d at the archeological digs, and the historical reconstructions, and the (rather meagre) findings. And where S., after the thirteen-minute capsule-history loop (form: cinema), announced he’d identify’d with the “fair-mind’d French hivernants.” Me: the “strong-arm’d voyageurs” (who paddled the big cargo canoes). And where I shuffled a flat cut of brass, no doubt contemporary, out of the sand, and pocket’d it.
 
~
 
Odd to return to my (work) desk and find a little note to myself: B. S. Johnson. Referring to a new biography titled Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe. Experimental novelist cut down by depression, a suicide in 1973, aged 40. I recall reading, at N.’s urging, House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry in the early ’eighties. Johnson’s “innovations included books with holes cut through the pages, and a novel published in a box so its unbound chapters could be read in any order.”
 
Odd, not that I’d noted it (after seeing a review in a recent TLS), but that I’d so thoroughly forgotten my noting of it.
 
~
 
Another note to myself: Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s.
 
~
 
To work.

~

Forever Young

~

Received:

The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2004, edited by Peter Stitt ($6, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325-1491)

Essays by D. R. Cruikshank, Elizabeth Weld, Norma Marder, Molly Hutton, James McKean, Diane Comer, and Kristin Bair.

Fiction by Charles Yu, Akshay Ahuja, James Magruder, and Marlene Roberts.

Poetry by Judith Vollmer, Mark Kraushaar, Scott Brennan, Dean Young, Carol Frost, Alice Friman, Brian Brodeur, Alan Michael Parker, Stefi Weisbrd, Rebecca Givens, Gary Fincke, and Oliver Rice.

Paintings by Frederick Brosen.

~

Seventeenth volume, numéro deux, four “numéros” per annum, makes the present number the seventieth, all (I would think) roughly 175 pages of lean-quarterly tidiness, all (I know) edited by Peter Stitt. Which is cause for kudos or concern. Or kudos and concern. What did Jefferson say about the periodic need for revolution? A good rule of thumb: no magazine should last beyond twenty-five issues. Or no one editor. (Not to suggest that The Gettysburg Review’s got unsung radical roots, or that Jefferson & Co.’s little revolutionary bash dug deeply . . .)

Periodically I try to figure out Dean Young. Dean Young’s got three poems here: one is title’d “Ghost Grease” and begins “It’s eschatology kegger night / and some guy in an Abort the Pope T-shirt / says the gum left behind when a Band-Aid’s / ripped off holds the cosmos together . . .” One is call’d “Ephemeroptera” and begins “Typically soft bodies, loony legs, / forewings triangular and disco, / sensitivity to Gertrude Stein, / how above the above the underneath. / All the time he’s strumming her web, / idling in her alley, the threat / he will be eaten . . .” The third, “Venus,” goes:

Semisolid metal core surrounded
by rocky mantle, her sex organs
are generally in two bundles but
her sexual characteristics are all the hell over.
Even Aristotle couldn‘t stabilize her.
For Botticelli, the power of her right nipple
was so great, it asserted itself through
the hand covering it as the styloid process
of her right wrist. Sometimes it seems
you can see the back of the inside of her head
looking into her eyes and there:
in-no-guidebook pornographic frescoes!
Not very helpful during office hours.
Thick sulfuric clouds, crushing
air pressure, several active volcanoes,
no stickler for virginity like her sister
but get too stuck on yourself,
she’d be meaner than Mars.
Even Frank Sinatra couldn’t help you then.
Lisa Twobodies, Jill Wolfgang, Barb Zorn
wearing nothing but my only good white shirt.
Physiology demonstrator.
Girlfriend of my best friend.
Celluloid. Branch librarian.
Dogwood sapling, soft-shell crab,
spark plug, wet suit.
Once I washed the outsides of her windows
in Marion, Indiana, my partner,
who won the toss, got her insides.
She rode a silly bike with a bell.
She hated me. She turned my head
into a block of cork. It’s for her
and the bits of high-speed drills
that diamonds are mined. I never
saw her again. I married her.
I painted the room two shades of blue.
This dress costs only nine thousand dollars?
Who needs sleep?
Imagine a hundred-pound rose.
Now imagine that rose falling from Mount Olympus
onto your chest.

Okay. What I think: Misogynist (“all the hell over”) (See the adolescent sneeriness of: “I washed the outsides of her windows / in Marion, Indiana, my partner, / who won the toss, got her insides.”) The (attempt’d) humor is mostly notable for how aggressively it’s pursued, as if any other “state”—pensive, somber, decorticated—were plague-struck. Musickally, a washout compleat: even unsuccessful hilarity’s got no pause for listening. No pause for language—its material weight and heft, either. (Even the pleasures of the spondee’d bump of “spark plug, wet suit”—lost in th'onslaught.) Manic hostility. Incoherent line-breaks. Wordy. Awkward. (What the high school teachers wrote. See: “Sometimes it seems / you can see the back of the inside of her head / looking into her eyes and there: / in-no-guidebook pornographic frescoes!”) Bah. A look at Young’s contributor’s note confirms both the narrowness and the snottiness of the suspect’d fullblown narcissist: “The latest upcoming oddity in my own life is I’m to marry two friends in a little less than two weeks in the art museum in Milwaukee. I know there’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. Let’s move backward. I am indeed assured that Milwaukee has an art museum, but we will see. I am marrying these two friends not romantically, so don’t get too excited, but they have asked me, dear youths, to be what I learned is called the celebrant, and I know enough about myself to say I should qualify for being a celebrant, public intoxicant notwithstanding . . .” It goes, rather interminably, on, but we, dear youths, shall leave the wanker (and the magazine) here.

~

Um, et puis, c’est à dire, gosh: Morning. At work. I go to put th’above “up” and, whilst, um, reaching out for a link, stumble, “ouch,” on a newly-post’d poem by John Latta (The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 16, No. 4). Ain’t that enough to make “one” feel a caddish uncertifiability? A thankless truculence? It is. Certainly behavior well-nigh outside the foolish “American” tradition of buttoning up and battening down any nay-saying infamy, critical snicker, or scuttlebutt regarding th’institutions that sustain us. Alors, basta with the self-flagellants: I stand by what I say.

~

Je m’en vais. Oop norse. Back the nineteenth.

~

The Fielding

~

G.’s baseball game (a 41-24 win—though the fielding gets better, the batting gets more better . . .) shot a hole the size of a Cadillac in an evening suffering already the direst lack of industry outside of a soap-handler’s washroom. (I need to brush up my Chandleresque to a fiery riot of Peckinpaughs if I’m ever to get out of the desert my perfervid intellect’s done got itself abandon’d in, like a hog on a rope . . .)

Thumbing the newest Verse (“The Prose Issue II”). What is prose? Prose is writing that is “too gorgeous for its underpinnings.” Prose is a ferret scenting th’immediate space of a ruse undone by weather, a showery washdown to drub out consistency. Prose is “Sitka, precisely.” Prose is “the soul, unable to overflow.” Prose is a taunt, a tickle, and a fever. Prose is “a pitiful liquid pearl, opalescent, fiery, caught in a giant block of ice.” Here’s some prose:

“The woman who is leaning against him in the photograph is wearing a snug hat, one that looks like a Roman helmet, or a piece of dark crockery. It is her smile—wide and pleasant, the smile of the self-enraptured, the brave, the adventurous—that asks for interpretation. That smile has been put together as a text is put together, as an invention of the moment, one elastic, one tempered and sullied by time itself and the sheer dignified endurance of place. But the place is nowhere—they are passing through. This is why adventure plays out its landmarks on the changeable map of her face. This is why she looks a little uneasy in her leaning. She knows this moment is gone— the very bland picturesqueness of the postcard landscape behind them betrays this to her. The moment is a construction, a tiny fictive scrawl on the emulsion of time—a scrip (a writing, a money) exchanged for this brief life—total, naked, new—and common, as death is common.

He does not smile. He is stoic, a hint sullen. He presses the woman to himself with a practiced indifference, a feigned steadfastness. Souvenirs, their futility, their taint of corruption, and completion, their baggage, all that troubles him—he does not wish this moment singled out by its capture. He does not like this woman’s pride at their sufficiency. He does not like this woman.”

~

Gulpe. Or golpe. O golpe—the heist. O golpe italiano—the Italian job. Golf. Gulf. Golpe por Golpe. Gulp. Just let me clip another round of language cartridges to my belt here.

~

Which, clearly didn’t “get” to the overflowing new Verse.

~

My restlessness drives me out into the shrub-shuddery dark, Carmen padding along, tiny nail-scritches against concrete, a pinch’d-off jangle of tags, pant-noise sunk into the general susurrus: night. Malarial-sad air suck’d deep into the body’s tremulous pink cavities: if only I hadn’t used up my tobacco-quota by the age of about twenty-three, going “like a house afire” (though I borrow’d mightily against a collateral cough’d up regularly for a second quota, and a third, a veritable quorum of successive quotae grow’d—please don’t say it—“like Topsy.”) (Somehow I’d got myself parenthetically to a point where I was about to commence with a self-portrait in zipper’d pocket’d black leathers, a jacket stuff’d with a parley of Marlboros, like a smuggler going over the Pyrénées, or bringing duty-free goods down out of the municipality of Andorra where one night I saw a shooting star slam into a mountain and slide down—a large yellow liquid tear . . .) (Let me thank the old theologian parenthetickal that that particular one got squelch’d, hammer’d to the door of the reform school . . .)

What I though in the stepped-off brackish air of night: I am in a “holding pattern”: a week home is good only for circling and sussing, arching one’s back against one’s dailiness. The Magee book still in abeyance, the Ammons regalia, the Verse issues. Sunday I go “up north” (that’s the way it is in Michigan—akin to “upstate” in New York) to Black Lake, annual peripatetic clannish gather-grouse. (The locals say “Somebody done come and stole the bottom out of Black Lake,” and they swear it “were” an Easterner . . .) And I’m muster more Flaubert (Sand and Turgenev letters), more Echenoz (Big Blondes, Double Jeopardy) in my usual overly optimistickal way. Though I may get “there” only to find I’m in need of, say, Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. That’s the kind of thing that happens in my “reading life”—fickle preponderabler that I am.

~

Flaubert: “La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des melodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.” Which, once, I “freely” translated as: “Human speech is like a crack’d pot on which we bang rude melodies to make bears dance, when we only long to touch the stars, to melt the stars.” Which disappear’d into a “novel” I’d start’d. Call’d Percy. With a character obsess’d with Gustave Flaubert. Whose name was Joe Parsley. Can you believe it? Joe Parsley! What is prose?

~

Oh, now I remember: Joe Parsley a.k.a. Joe Persil a.k.a. Percy. Some proposed smarmy-snarly Doppelganger nonsense that never did out.

~

To work.

~

A Spanner Is a Wrench

~

Attention Span

A contribution to Steve Evans’s chronicle of books attend’d to in the last year or so. Arrived at (with the imposed limit of eleven) with some difficulty—after weighing several strategies of “balance” (wild churning considerations of gender, generation, trade versus small press, praises unsung versus lauds oversung, jeez Louise . . .) I pretty much quit the gob-smackin’ and look’d around the room: what (for the most part) seem’d the flotsam bobbing to surface in the sea of books got the nod. One I was unhappy to leave out: Jordan Davis’s Million Poems Journal (really, the whole project—I’m not entirely convinced that the best Davis poems here end’d up under the Faux Press imprint). Another nod should go to Dale Smith’s tremendous Black Stone project—seventy prose ditties to help a new son into the world—that he recently finish’d, all post’d at Possum Pouch.

So, alphabetically (whatever caches the fancy footwork of preference, and makes all equal in the eyes of jeez Louise):

1. The Sleep That Changed Everything, Lee Ann Brown, Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
2. At Port Royal, Christopher Edgar, Adventures in Poetry, 2003.
3. As In Every Deafness, Graham Foust, Flood, 2003.
4. The Seasons, Merrill Gilfillan, Adventures in Poetry, 2002.
5. The Fatalist, Lyn Hejinian, Omnidawn, 2003.
6. The Midnight, Susan Howe, New Directions, 2003.
7. Black Dog Songs, Lisa Jarnot, Flood, 2003.
8. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, August Kleinzahler, FSG, 2003.
9. The Red Bird, Joyelle McSweeney, Fence, 2002.
10. Songs Aside: 1992-2002, Ted Pearson, Past Tents Press, 2003.
11. Invisible Bride, Tony Tost, Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

A few notes: though most of these I think I spoke about at th’Hotel sometime or other in the last several months . . .

Fought down a temptation to put some other Hejinian books to the list: The Beginner (Tuumba, 2002), Slowly (Tuumba, 2002), and My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003) could all arguably be present—Hejinian is just now writing her finest work, fluid, all-encompassing, having “natural” (oh dear) grace.

The newest discovery here is the Pearson (and he’s apparently almost a homeboy, living nearby in Detroit)—the book is four sequences, each in number’d sections of eight short lines (four couplets) with impeccable attention to sound. I go mindful of the Harryette Mullen of Muse and Drudge reading him. Pick’d at random (from “Acoustic Masks”):

Rat data lulls

condign digs

the illiberal scruff

of private parts

terminal rust

in a techno-suit

tests its mettle

by fits and starts

Or (from “Hard Science”):

Erect racemes

grainy flow of lichen

ranunculi set

in Perpetua

the melody mimics

the order of bloom

whose quitclaim frees

das Ding

The Red Bird appeals to something like my vestigial love of “surrealism” (or something like it, thank you, Georg Trackl), one that seems “natural,” not over-stretching, not “dream-work,” not research’d, more like th’eyes of a curious 19th c. naturalist stuck into the ratty consumerist 21st c. Notebook in hand. “The bobcat poses in a tripod of rifles.” I like the humor, especially the humor; also the mischief, mystery and mess of it all.

The Midnight: I keep wanting to fault Howe for something like “unavoidable and leaking Brahminism” (a charge that could be level’d at innumerable men and women “of letters” in these historical States). Something faintly precious in th’infatuation with colonial history, and “things”—“dimity,” for Chrissake:

1775 landscape America
blindstitched to French
edge silk damask cover
Silhouette of Gothic city
soaring bird needlework
Quiet under false scant
lonely ecstatic incessant
white on white coverlet

Then I relent, “took” by my language affliction, its variables and vagaries (and “dimity” is a lovely word, just as “wade” below enlarges my world . . .):

Sweet affliction, sweet affliction
Singing as I wade to heaven

Or:

Is the cloven rock misled
Does morning lie what prize
What pine tree wildeyed boy

~

To work.

~

Quibble Newspaper

~

“In Chi-town”: Rough Notes

Mallarmé to Edmund Gosse (1893): “The only quibble I have to make is on obscurity; no, my dear poet, except through awkwardness or clumsiness, I’m not obscure . . . of course I become obscure if the reader makes the mistake of thinking he’s opening a newspaper!” (Quoted in Julian Barnes’s Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture.)

~

A work of art that begins as provocation, and remains a compelling thing (powers of provocation recuperated, neutralized, stood down). A work of art whose flimsiness, slightness is notice’d, once its provocation’s “worn off.” “Pages of examples.”

~

Mallarmé, writing of “meaning” in La nuit approbatrice: “It is inverted, by which I mean that its meaning, if there is one (but I’d draw consolation for its lack of meaning from the dose of poetry it contains . . .) is evoked by an internal mirage created by the words themselves. If you murmur it to yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation.” Poetry is “dose” (drug, medicine), is “mirage” (elusive, insubstantial), is capable of providing a “cabbalistic sensation” (mystery, esoterica, lore via chant, “sounding”). Odd conjunct of material “words themselves” and the resultant approvals and acquiescences: “consolation” drawing its fine precedence over “meaning.”

Which thinks me back into a night in October, the sixteenth, two zero zero three:

“Say it fast:

Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,
aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,
aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore.”

~

Mallarmé on the bicycle (in the newspaper, Le Gaulois at the point where, according to Barnes, M. had become nourishment for celebrity-hounds, who exist solely to bother immortals with inane trivialities): “A bicycle is not vulgar when wheeled out of the garage, and soon becomes sparkling in its rapidity. Yet whoever mounts it, man or woman, reveals something disgraceful, that of human being reduced to mechanical object, with a caricatural movement of the legs.”

~

Mallarmé’s “nose-holding fastidiousness” extend’d to sex (Barnes). Writing to friend Cazalis who’s “fretting over whether or not to marry an English girl called Ettie Yapp,” Mallarmé, “connoisseur of renunciation” “rebukes” him for seeing marriage as “too much in terms of lingam fiction.”

~

Tempt’d to bag these writings: back to Flaubert’s dictum: faire et se taire. “Do the work and shut up.”

Of course, there were all of F.’s semi-public letters, Sand, Turgenev, Louise Colet, Maxime du Camp, Louis Bouilhet, etc.

~

Littré: “Man is an unstable compound.” How goes the genealogy? To Valéry’s “Je suis l’instable”? To Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy”?

~

Eremitic lusciousness. Emetic plush. “Tea is a purgative.”

~

Dr. Johnson: “the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.” (In order to eschew the risible and un-stuff the farce—“life is so daily”—I’d like to recite a new poem title’d “Fuck You, Bruce Andrews, You Lantern-Jaw’d Fake, You.”)

~

Barnes reporting how George Sand admonish’d Flaubert: “you look only for the well-turned phrase.” As if, um, one should sully oneself with some other chore?

~

Violin bowing, the tripartite Aristotelian note: “attack, sustain, release.”

~

A large black lady in the chapel: “I come from the school of ‘you moves your meat, you lose your seat.’”

~

Finish’d reading the Julian Barnes book, the last half or so a series of essays (occasional pieces, mostly) on Gustave Flaubert, and moved directly to Jean Echenoz’s Piano, recently (2004) translated by Mark Polizzotti. Only to note that the novel’s opening lines mimic (rather more imprecisely than I recall’d) those of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet:

“Two men appear at the end of Boulvard de Courcelles, coming from the direction of Rue de Rome.”

And ends: “. . . growing smaller on the receding boulevard before turning right and disappearing into Rue de Rome.”

Which momentarily fires up in me the impression (for some vague unascertainable reason beyond ken) that Julian Barnes is Jean Echenoz. Or vice versa.

Piano is short, and like Gaul, divided into three parts. Max Delmarc, the pianist, who lives in a state of near-pathological fear of the next performance and must needs be “handled” (meaning, mostly, kept to pre-concert sobriety) by Bernie, is, one reads on the first page, “going to die a violent death in twenty-two days.” Which turns out to be sixty pages later, precisely one third of the way through the book. There follows a precise sixty pages of Echenoz’s version of the afterlife complete with Peggy Lee and Dean Martin as members of the “junior staff.” (Rather puckishly Flaubertian, Echenoz’s “purgatory” reminds one of the working model farm in Bouvard et Pécuchet.) The final sixty pages of Piano detail Max’s assignment—with alter’d physiognomy and new employ (bartending)—to the “Urban Zone”—a place indistinguishable from the Paris he left behind, and—once reach’d after an identity-papers stopover in th’Amazonian river town of Iquitos—populated with the same individuals.

Echenoz’s tango with Flaubert. Upping the ante on Flaubert’s famous style indirect libre, Echenoz seems to move beyond the homme-plume’s rendering of a character’s thought—he tosses down an incredibly changeable, wildly ranging, elastic voice, one able to include third-person narration, indirect’d character-sized thought, direct address to the reader, and a kind of meta-commentary on Piano itself:

Marvelous shifts:

“Max opted to study his subway ticket.

“As nothing special is happening in this scene, we might as well take the time to look more closely at this ticket. There’s actually a lot that can be said about these tickets, about their secondary uses—toothpick, fingernail scraper, or paper cutter, guitar pick or plectrum, bookmark, crumb sweeper, conduit or straw for controlled substances, awning for a doll’s house, micro-notebook, souvenir, or support for a phone number that you scribble for a girl in case of emergency . . . [and so it rollicks along into ways to fold a ticket, where a ticket ends up, etc. to end:] . . . but perhaps this isn’t the moment to go into all of that.”

Or:

“Then, entering his studio, he tossed his raincoat carelessly on the couch, not lingering awhile as he usually did but heading directly into his bedroom, where he threw off his clothes in a rage and went to bed in a rage. But after a moment of immobility, he was hurriedly throwing them back on again, perhaps inside-out, re-crossing the studio, and walking precipitously out. She must be home by now, but you never know, still no idea what I might say but basically what do I have to lose? But wait, what do I see: there she is. She’s there, the dog is there, they’re there.”

~ ~ ~

Out for a walk after dark on the friggin’ Fourth. The C-dog is shy of the neighborhood’s righteous with imbroglio and ambuscade of fireworks, so we scoot down the blackest avenues and blocks. Thud-thuds muffling in in a barge and barrage of smoke that stays press’d down to earth—shoulder-level and thick—by the humidity. To G. earlier whilst walking through a gauntlet of flags: “I’m not very proud to be a citizen of this country today.” G.: “Me neither.” And discussing reasons why one neighbor’s flag is draped with a wide black ribbon. Seems like more aimless negligible flaunting of the “colors” than nearly any year since the friggin’ Bicentennial.

EVERYWHERE THIS BICENTENNIAL, FRANKLY I HOPE IT DYSFUNCTIONS

The only nation I ever loved is divine &
ragtag like a second-string team . . .
The baseball flies over the railroad tracks

just missing a locomotive loaded with heifers.
We say texture like leather but we mean something
akin to autonomy is dying. A rain falls

over our towns and fields. A run is barely batted in.
Geese overhead undo in a shaggy & vacant breeze all
we have ever done. We have done

nothing & migratory leadership is a process we
recognize: the poke in, the ease out.
We are replaced by our own sex & nearly

perish in the untaking. Our nerves grow mean &
sullen & we roll and pitch a yawing bravado
when we least need it so

we stomach what we can stomach &
our stomachs growl menacingly wishing to
“lie down in darkness” with truly stoic food.

We eat greens. The clouds goose-step across the sky
like men uneasy, alert with uneasiness. We say
what isn’t sold is remaindered & we aren’t and we are.

We conclude exhortingly specific with shouts, with
language, with our pennants flying for the home team,
with horns honking, with hormonal imbalance,

with feelings distinct that—discussing our good
deeds, municipal & partial, with the friendly
ornithologist, scanning the honkers wisping

off south—they are not the right ones to come out with.

~

“New Breed poets are enthusiasts, with patent sincerity interleaved with naïveté. The kind of rare miscible that is, in the snowier climes of ideological “maturity,” dearly paid for by neglect and willful ignorance on the part of the “snow-heads.” And, just as there is a revolutionary temperament as distinct from an authoritarian temperament, so among poets—New Breeders and “snow-heads” alike—there will inevitably be those who feel an instinctive sympathy for the enthusiastic, if sometimes misguided, writers in the green-greeny vineyards of the poetickal rut, and those who on the contrary will dismiss them as trouble-makers, hooligans, sex-maniacs, or oddball followers of some invent’d party line.”

Cobbled together.

~

Three tidbits out of Friedlander’s Simulcast, the book that clings to me like a barnacle, a sea-flagellent collecting (or dispersing) tidal-nourriture. (It is, like Emily Dickinson, being “called back.”) First, “a few rules-of-thumb for distinguishing between language poets and non-language poets.”

“If we say: Subjectivity is a vector of social forces; desire, a function of ideology; freedom, a matter of conscious critique and transformation; then we are speaking in the manner of Watten and Silliman. If we say: The individual, self-aware as a consequence of language, strives in language to apprehend ‘the real,’ seeking thereby to connect with ‘other minds’; then we recognize the accents of Hejinian or Bernstein. If we say: ‘A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives,’ as Adrienne Rich says; or ‘No poet is ever quite sure what she’s going to say next, if she’s doing it right—in any poem,’ as Alice Notley says; or, ‘The unrealizable ideal is to write as if the earth opened and spoke,’ as Frank Bidart says; then we are moving in a sphere which is no longer that of the material text.”

~

The talk following Friedlander / “Hecuba Whimsy”’s “Short History of Language Poetry” with discussants Guantanamo Bey, Nils Ya, Winnie Nelson, Wyman Jennings, Kimberly Filbee, and Dirk Jefferson contains some of the liveliest (and “pointedest”) remarks in the book. Of Bernstein’s penchant for play, Bey notes (rightly) how “defending a position is antipoetic from the point of view of play.” Bernstein’s need to doctor and prop against Coolidge’s acceptance of the “decisiveness of playing.” Bernstein’s refusal to play and se taire.

Bey: “In defenses of poetry—in every defense of poetry—the play of language is minimized. Play is minimized because its purposelessness in indefensible, except when fitted into a pragmatic frame.”

~

Filbee: “To read or write language poetry means to experience language—the very measure of thought—as form, a form that itself produces meaning, and that acts on the reader in a meaningful way whenever language is consumed. Form is thus the essential element of any utterance, its true meaning. Until recently, the meaning of an utterance has been a reality independent of its form. This meaning, which, in the Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as use, remains quite serene and equal to the rigors of communication among all the mishaps that befall an intention, appears in language poetry as the mishap itself, as form’s adventure.”

Being that a mishap befell my intention, I am not saying anything, and that is my poem.

~

“Hotter ’n a matchhead.” (A metaphor I “thought about” for several Indiana miles. A metaphor that “shouldn’t” work.)

~

Billboard: “Déjà Vu Showgirls!” (A billboard I “thought about” for several Michigan miles. A billboard that “shouldn’t” work.)

~

Pass’d a black motorcycle gang outside Chicago. Impeccable discipline: eighty or ninety bikers, pair’d off, keeping the intervals even and sweet. Only a couple had women riding behind, white.

~

Isn’t there a need, too, for a poetic rearguard? A kind of pitchfork posse? Whose boulot is to jab and roust a self-satisfy’d vanguard out of the haystacks they find themselves now sleeping in? New Breeders! Fall in!

~

“Ah, the vanity and boastfulness of self-educated cranks!”

~

Richard Cobb slipping in. My francophilia unsated. I read differently whilst out and about. Carry durable books, a somewhat too large selection—I’d brought the Humphry House-edited volume of The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which proved a door too oaken (or rusty, or Jesuitical) to swing open—and read what can be read in a series of short maneuvres, th’explicitly put-down-able, the tote-able, the “easy.”

So: A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History, by Richard Cobb (Oxford, 1969).

~

Peeking at Blogland from the vantage point of a Suzuki violin camp: one cult looks at another. Or one village. I could have been looking at Yonville, or Ry. There’s Homais the pharmacist, there’s steady dull Charles, etc. Wondering which of Blogland’s denizens is “fit” to be Flaubert, in guise of Emma—that “c’est moi” malarkey’s just that, malarkey. Allez, venez, Milord . . .

~

Cobb line about followers who imitate, amplify, and fossilize the Master’s voice, talking about the Annales historians, génération deux. The recipe in history not unlike that in poetry: “it does not matter what you say as long as you say it differently.”

~

Avant-gardism formalized as an unending search for mere novelty?

~

G.’s friend H., who is Japanese-American, says: “The meaning in Japanese of what you’re saying is ‘fly about like a bird.’
And G. says: “What means ‘fly about like a bird’?”
H.: “What you’re saying.”

G.’s talking about the love-stitch in the heart: crushes for X. at school, and Y. at camp, and Z. who fiddles, and H. says the Japanese word: “fly about like a bird.” Clearly not an enviable quality.

~

Cobb, on one Charles Tilly’s book (1964) on The Vendée, the marshy impenetrable royalist stronghold of the Atlantic seaboard: “Being only interested in collectivities, communities, neighbourhoods, Dr. Tilly will not allow the individual to get a word in, and in this whole account not one single personality emerges, even among the élites. His rebels are quite characterless, save as regimented members of definable groups (and let them not dare attempt to step out of their assigned platoon!) . . .”

A silly man, that Dr. Tilly.

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Received:

My Vote Counts, by Dale Smith (effing press, 2004) ($5, 703 W. 11th
Street, #2, Austin, TX 78701)

Verse, Vol. 19, Nos. 1 & 2, “The Prose Issue,” edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki ($10, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602)

Verse, Vol. 20, Nos. 2 & 3, “The Prose Issue II,” edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki ($12, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602)

Epoch, Vol. 52, No. 3, “This Is Just a Place: An Issue Devoted to the Life and Work of A. R. Ammons” edited by Roger Gilbert ($12.95, 251 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853)

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