Found

~

Received:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a couple of poems:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Goatsuckers spar in the linden.”

~

Reading. The dog.

Lost in Juarez

~

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

~

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

~

It’s like that.

~

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

~

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

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

~

A Dump

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

~

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

~

Straite-neckt vessels are long a filling.

~ ~ ~

Ben Lerner: “Goatsuckers spar in the linden.”

~

To work.

Rattler Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

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

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

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

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

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

~

To work.

The Bunch

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Received:

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

Aversions, by Devin Johnston (Omnidawn, 2004)

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

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

~

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

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

. . .

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

. . .

Jacob Delafon reads A la recherche du temps perdu.

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

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

. . .

Mindfulness, Jacob Delafon realizes, is not thoughtfulness.

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

Odd, he thinks, how everything conspires.

Strange renga.

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

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

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

He craves an interval.

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

Aftertaste

half-unawakened

lost word

absorption of light and
scattering

startling
and

the place

this is how it
happens, every
night a little weaker

dreams of uncertain etymology

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

~

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

~

To work.

“Big Boy”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

To work.

Proust Notes 9

~

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

~

Proust Notes 9

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~ ~ ~

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

~

To “my” idioterickal work.

The Keeper’s Nose

~

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

~

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

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

~

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

~

The Heights, continued

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

~

To work, scout!

Aporia

~

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

~

Received:

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

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

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

The Untouchable, by John Banville (Vintage, 1997)

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

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

Preparing—stock-piling—for my second adolescence.

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

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

~

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

To work. To the treadmill!

Raw

~

The Heights

Ineffable is
The way
Anything forth-
Right and
Ebullient gets
Put by
My ancestral
Cast of
Tatterdemalion’d raw
Millions—lowland
Scot sour-
Pusses all—
And what
Is meant
Is something
Like ‘off
The charts.’
Such heights,
Such beastly
Veil’d heights—
It’s analogous
To ink-
Spoil’d stumpy
Digits, be-
Grime’d and
Stain’d by
The soot
Of my
Upstart versify’d
Untameably blank
Profession, yea,
‘Upstart, crow
It out
Loud.’
             So
What start’d
Quickly out
Being call’d
One thing—
Gesture of
A boyish
Vagary—is
Newly re-
Tool’d, and
So, some-
Thing less
Negligibly wan
Is—I
Admit it,
I admit
Everything—coming,
Buck-salient
And woozy
Like a
Hacienda fire,
Or a
Catalog of
Mishmash, down
The pike.
Which is
Where most
High-talk
American writs
And ornery
Behemoths come,
Song-bent
And unshelter’d,
Hell-bound
In leathers.
Not to
Inject a
Barbarous or
Romantickal or
Overtly masculine
Swelter, swell
Or over-
Drive into
What is
Mere skinniness.
I love
The solid
Burgher of
The matronly
Corps, too,
Mistress Quickly.
And Brenda
Starr. Nay,
One’s a
‘Chirping Bowl
Of humming
Liquor,’ and
Two’s a
Genial treat.
That hap’d
Years back
In finicky
Millions of
Radickal haps—
And it’s
Leading me
By th’ambient
Nose of
My twilit
Revery back
To where
Scorn is
Not dispersal
And whim
Is not
Me. Me,
Who spokes
Of time
Turn about
Sailing for-
Ever faster
To defeat
Th’unpublishable moment,
Thin-skinn’d and
Metaphysical, a
Shout goes
Up: ‘Waylay
Not th’admonishments,
The tender
Of a
History bent
To serve
Pre-engineer’d
Purposes foul,
Yea, adjoin
And utter,
Rage and
Havoc!’ Truth
Is domestic,
A fallow
Spot, near,
Scored for
Folding in
One’s life,
Or musically
Sifting airs
Un-ruckus’d
As milk:
Milk cascading
With a
Sheer un-
Spurious whiteness
And splash-
Down into
The whatness
Of Special
K, a
Cereal named
By committee
(Of two
Moody inestimables—
One immediate
And discursive,
Th’other plodding
And over-
Wrought by
The feverish
Conjunctions that
Do occur,
And often,
In banal
Unfoster’d succession) . . .

~

René Daumal:
Cent cons m’enterrent
Sans commentaire.

~

To work, mec.

A Plausible Violin

~

Proust Notes 8

If the madeleine episode is the first rush of the drug of Proustian memory—bandied up through “taste”—a plausible second occurs during th’evening at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s when a violin plays the “little phrase” of Vinteuil. “Sound.” Is there a conscious working through of the senses? Recalling Beckett’s notion of a number of similar transports out, including one of paving stones uneven underfoot? “Touch.” And, here, note the sexual imagery, that deliciousness of “waiting and making the other wait” as, I think, Violette Leduc puts it, memory as orgasm:

What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come through, as one holds up a trap-door that would otherwise fall back. And before Swann had time to understand, and say to himself: ‘It’s the little phrase from the sonata by Vinteuil; don’t listen!’ all his memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, which he had managed until now to keep out of sight in the deepest part of himself, deceived by this sudden beam of light from the time of love which they believed had returned, had awoken and flown swiftly back up to sing madly to him, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness.

There follows an onslaught of precision: against the “abstract expressions ‘the time when I was happy’, ‘the time when I was loved’,” is posed “the snowy curled petals of the chrysanthemum,” etc. Involuntary memory return’d, though with the difference that, here, memory is unwelcome, an undesired dose.

~ ~ ~

An obscenely inefficient way to work: returning to a page whose number I scribbled down, with a couple “key” words, and trying to reconstruct the variant (skew’d) lines of “thinking” that some passage there trigger’d, one evening, in some no doubt fatigue’d circumstance last week. What results is likely an odd jumble of original impressionistic fragments with equal parts memory-loss and rascally invention slather’d over the top, as if I were making a kind of Proustian fudge sundae. The temptation is to pause for Rasula’s Syncopations after the Lydia Davis volume’s finish’d: the possibility that that’d wheel me off into something beyond—say, the way it sent Tony Tost bookin’ off into Paul Mann’s Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde,—“oh, well, ma’m, thass a chance ev’ry readerly cowpoke’s got to risk, thass what makes him a readerly cowpoke.”

~

Received:

First Intensity, No. 19 (2004) edited by Lee Chapman ($14, P.O. Box 665, Lawrence, Kansas 66044)

Poetry: Robert Kelly, Laura Moriarty, W. B. Keckler, Robert Haynes, Christopher McDermott, Michael Rothenberg, Ryan G. Van Cleave, Arielle Greenberg, Jeanne Heuving, Michael Heller, Ray DiPalma, Bruce Holsapple, Geoffrey Detrani, Jaime Robles, and Peter Gurnis.

Prose / Prose Poems: Diane Ackerman, Robert Vivian, Sean Mclain Brown, Toni Mirosevich, Tom Whalen, James Grinwis, Bradley Greenburg, Joseph Harrington, Richard Rathwell, Jacob M. Appel, John “Jay” Finnegan, Michael Hassan, Miriam Seidel, John Olson, Robert Wexelblatt, Debra Di Blasi, Priscilla Long, Max Winter, and Tim Keane.

Reviews: Dale Smith on Duncan McNaughton’s Capricci, John Olson on Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems, Charles Borkhuis on Hank Lazer’s Elegies and Vacations, Gary Lutz on Norman Lock’s Notes to “The Book of Supplemental Diagrams” for Marco Knauff’s Universe: Vol. 1: Principal Features, and Loren Keller on the novels of Andrei Makine.

Cover Painting: Ann Piper.

~

Where did I read a complaint about “flowery” Proustian language, that old grouse about language—the metaphorickal in particular—as being too “flighty,” overly-“decorative,” slipping one “away”—as if abducting—from the matter at hand? As if “the matter at hand” were not somehow that language itself. As if language—“successful” language—were a masculine thing: objective, hard-nosed, fierce, solitary, blunt. As if metaphor (witness the “frills” in the way it itself is metaphorized) were somehow feminine at heart. Metaphor: not a baggage (excess) “one” carries, but the baggage that carries “one.” As Karl Malden—surely an honest man with a nose like a rutabaga—used to snap: “Don’t leave home without it.”

~

Bah. To work.

Cache-cache

~

Proust Notes 7

How th’intrusions of the narrator in the Swann / Odette story—“And he did not have, as I had at Combray in my childhood, happy days during which to forget the sufferings that will return at night . . .”—even the most minuscule, startle. And, here, point one back to th’opening.

~

Mon habitude, je t’embrasse. That terrible smug stance of “knowing exactly” what one needs, or what one likes, who one “is.” Deadly, for any artist. Or writer. “For Swann was reaching an age at which one’s philosophy—encouraged by the current philosophy of the day and also by that of the circle in which Swann had spent so much of his life . . . where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to skepticism and nothing was real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person—is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorizing the objects of their aspirations, try to derive from the years that have already elapsed a stable residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and which they will deliberately make it their primary concern that the kind of life they adopt my satisfy.”

~

What’s love got to do with it? “And as for the voluptuous pleasure of being in love, of living by love alone, the reality of which he doubted at times, it was increased in value for him, as dilettante of immaterial sensations, by the price he was paying her for it—as we see people uncertain whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are delightful, convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality and disinterest of their own taste, by paying a hundred francs a day for a hotel room that allows them to enjoy that sight and that sound.”

~ ~ ~

Of note: Jordan Davis and Jeni Olin sass-back on “the professional dangers of being nice.” And, though the logic that gets him there is nil, or veil’d, or peccable, Ron Silliman’s assertion that “in poetry & politics, as well as in real estate, so much comes down to ‘location, location, location,’” another prop for the stage-play that puts Silliman, in’s obsessive construction of history, at the center of just about ‘everything.’ My druthers go for the ’Fess’s main man, the good Dr. Mac Rebennack, who ain’t got no ascertainable “real” “estate”:

I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time
I was sayin’ the right things, but I must have used the wrong line
I was on the right trip, but I must have used the wrong car
Head is in a bad place and I wonder what it’s good for
I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time
My head is in a bad place, but I’m havin’ such a good time.

The kind of positing of origins that goes into a sentence like—“What flowed from that initial spontaneous event would take days to explain here, just as it took years, literally, to be absorbed by a society that was only then beginning to understand that it was sliding into the morass of the Vietnam War”—points to an essentially heroic view of history, one that is, by definition, selective and narrow. Betray’d in the rhetoric: Silliman’s supposed communitarian, “social textual” ideals.

~

Debate: Um, Dick Cheney. Chronic nose-picker, or what? What’s that putting of the hands—two rodent paws—out in front, fingers all curl’d, like he’s rolling boogers, or worse, little balls of shit? Shameless as a mudpuppy or a hellbender. Constitutionally cold-blood’d, unbudging, ideological lizard. The body language, roll’d into himself, like a porcupine in defense-posture, protecting the soft unbarb’d underbelly. Red fox known to tunnel under snow to come up with that belly snared in sharp incisors. John Edwards: articulate, ready with the facts, tough, not the least intimidated. I liked what little I saw. (My peevishness regarding th’ascertainable differences at the bloat’d hearts of the two parties went unaddress’d, nor did I expect it to be. My anger at the utter immorality and illegality of the current occupation of the sovereign state of Iraq . . . same poop.)

~

To work, citoyens.

Ketchup

~

Fractured days, and high, and cold. Gunning out (bicycle) to the long east side of town today for a physical, meaning I skip a meeting (pshaw) design’d to knuckle into the future (as if one could). Distractedly: bills, G. off to school wearing the electric green sash and belt of a “safety”—he’s proud to have a “post”—and I am waylaid thinking about the long poem, or sequence, its attraction and demure demand.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, by Milton Meltzer (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978)

Lange: “I had begun to talk to the people I photographed. For some reason, I don’t know why, the people in the city were silent people, and we never spoke to each othre. But in the migrant camps, there were always talkers. This was very helpful to me, and I think it was helpful to them. It gave us a chance to meet on common ground—something a photographer like myself must find if he’s going to do good work.”

And Meltzer: “When they spoke to her, she wanted to get down their exact words. Knowing the limit she could hold in her head, she would find some pause in which to scribble down the words in her own shorthand, relying on the rhythm of the speech, and knowing that if she lost just one word it often meant that rhythm would collapse.”

~

Artists in Their Own Words: Interviews, by Paul Cummings (St. Martin’s, 1979)

A sucker for interviews. That, and the constant temptation to “apply” inapplicable arguments for one art to another, helter-skelter. Rockwell Kent, Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Pearlstein, Walker Evans, Isamu Noguchi, Fairfield Porter, Carl Andre, Lucas Samaras, Katherine Schmidt, Kenneth Noland, Ivan Albright, Robert Smithson.

Thomas Hart Benton: I studied privately for a while with a French painter named Berenol, whose forebears had been Indochinese colonists. He was a nut on oriental coloration, on theories of oriental color, which was quite different from Signac, who was interested in spectral colors—scientific—[Michel Eugène] Chevreul and all that damn stuff.

Cummings: Did you read all those books on color theory?

Thomas Hart Benton: Sure! Listen, there were no movies, there was no radio, there wasn’t anything. So what did you do? You read. And of course they got cockeyed theories in their heads. What they read they couldn’t understand. But they made it up anyhow. I was like all the rest of them. Paris between 1908 and 1911 was the most voluble world that you ever saw on earth. When you’d go into the Café du Dôme you couldn’t hear anything for people arguing.

~

Notebook 1967-68, by Robert Lowell (FSG / Noonday, 1969)

Which’s what got me thinking about the long poem “necessity”—how it hangs its slack outfit in the closet of th’American psyche, or that of its poets. That push to the heroic overreach. Lowell says: “the poems in this book are written as one poem, jagged in pattern, but not a conglomeration or sequence of related material. It is not a chronicle or almanac . . . not my diary, my confession, not a puritan’s too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, and triumph.” And: “My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose. Even with this license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.” And: “A poet can be intelligent and on to what he does; yet he walks, half-balmy, and over-accoutered, caught by his gentle amnesia, his rude ignorance, his too meticulous education.” (And Frank O’Hara’d add: “That’s when the refreshment arrives.”)

~

Hurriedly. Good to jot down just enough to throw up a bounty of half-thoughts, churlish sweats who’d rather play “keepaway” than come inside for a serious talk. Who cares about serious talks?

~

As Echenoz says: “I’m off!”

Catchall

~

On that bellicose revery-ship of sleep (later than the usual 6 a.m.) Saturday morning I caught myself insisting to myself that my “gorgeous” poem needed the word “pathogen” in it, as parallelism and catchall to “hatpin.” My way of feeding myself nutrients along the lines of th’Ashberyan “soccer” / “recess.” Not sure I’ve ever thought about turning to that particular kind of sly music in a poem (though I betcha’ I do subsequently, and in batches). It—that consonantal rearrangement—probably’s got a name for it, most likely a Greek name. Not being Greek, I will call it the TISH Effect. For I believe (without ever having been told) that I am an honorary Canadian, due to proximity, and the circumstances of my birth.

~

What would Niko Tinbergen say? Exiting into the backyard where two years ago I nail’d up a birdhouse designed for house wrens (and which’s stay’d empty) I hear a resonant hammering and see a downy woodpecker upright and pecking, chiseling away at the quarter-sized hole. Which is curious enough. I doubt there’s anything edible there. Is it fool’d by the existing hole. Is it trying to make the hole bigger, for use? Next, a red-bellied woodpecker—considerably larger—approaches, alights nearby, and drives the downy off. The red-bellied investigates briefly, without pecking, and flies off. When I get close enough to examine the work the downy’d done, what I see is a tiny swathe of freshly-exposed wood around the circle of the hole, mostly at the top. What kind of behaviour is that?

~

Lots of th’usual for a weekend, under a coldish high pressure’d bright sky. Indian food out Saturday night, spinach’d up lamb and curry’d up chicken and garlick’d up naan. Some odd purity in the post-spicestorm palate I like. Finally peek’d at the Hejinian BAP in one of the corporate-kill’d bookshops, and decided I didn’t need it, and wouldn’t’ve bought it there anyway. Try’d to figure out what Yusef Komunyakaa’s doing in the new Taboo, first volume in a proposed trilogy (The Wishbone Trilogy). Stagger’d triadic stanzas, poems lurching forth, it seem’d, retelling history. A thing about Frank O’Hara that I wasn’t either patient enough, or smart enough, to get, or to get what Komunyakaa’s getting at. Whilst the shorter pieces in Talking Dirty to the Gods seem’d to open a vein—a wide vein—and mine it (or bleed it) for all of everything it could have held, which was everything, what I read here is sort of earnest, pre-planned “major” feeling, always suspicious, always untrustworthy. “You never catch it unless you catch it unawares.”

~

G. cracks me up mimicking the school principal whose idea of important lunchroom- deliver’d news lately consists of following the brightening star of some, apparently, local girl who’s in the running for a rôle in the new “Partridge Family”? G. says: “We hold our breath for Audrey Murtie,” in Quaalude-inflect’d-style Southern drawl.

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

One big “enough” part of me is saying maybe it’d be better to peruse—a word that “means” both “to skim, read for gists” (in contemporary usage) and “to use thoroughly, to read with care and attention to detail” (in its radicals, and the dictionaries)—Proust through the remaining late afternoon, rather than provide more maundering ejaculate regarding the week’s haul of $1 books. One is nothing if not thorough though, so:

Selected Poems, by Conrad Aiken (Meridian Books, 1961)

Blame, if you must, my love affair with the sewn and hardy paperbacks Meridian launched in that period, cleanly print’d and durable. Aiken’s probably in danger of going the way of Maxwell Bodenheim, though Bodenheim remains as a bright curiosity through the pallor of general neglect due, mostly, to’s ending up murder’d, and on the day of my howlingly sardonic birth, at that.

Here are the bickerings of the inconsequential,
The chatterings of the ridiculous, the iterations
Of the meaningless. Memory, like a juggler,
Tosses its colored balls into the light, and again
Receives them into darkness. Here is the absurd
Grinning like an idiot, and the omnivorous quotidian,
Which will have its day . . .
. . .
What is the flower? It is not a sigh of color,
Suspiration of purple, sibilation of saffron,
Nor aureate exhalation from the tomb,
Yet it is these because you think of these,
An emanation of emanations, fragile
As light, or glisten, or gleam, or coruscation . . .

(Part of the first part of Preludes for Memnon.)

Love the Latinate overkill. Aiken’s also capable of something giddy and Williamsesque (and cringe-worthy) like “Speeches Made by Books, Stars, Things and People,” part of a longer sequence call’d The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones:

. . .

The stars
       Look at us

Shakspere
       And death being dead there’s no more dying then

The people
       Hi there Jones!

. . .

The stars
       Square of the distance?

The books
       I have not put out a fire when it should burn
       I have not driven cattle from their pastures
       I have not cut the dam of a canal
       I have not shunned the god at his appearance
       I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure.

The people
       Outside, outside!
       close the door after you, will you?
       who let him in anyway?
       hi there Jones

The pendulum
       Pain—pang—pain—pang—pain—pang.

~

The Five Senses, by F. Gonzalez-Crussi (Vintage, 1989)

“To the memory of Italo Calvino, who wished to write The Five Senses.” Gonzalez-Crussi’s a doctor. I am, obviously, a sucker for th’essay that shuffles the deck of a big “enough” subject and splays out a possible arrangement of associated factoids and beliefs. (See the Theroux’d up colors, primary and secondary.) Touch (“The Huicholes of Mexico, like other Indian groups of the American continent that ritually consume hallucinogenic plants, know that sounds are not for the ear only: colored [skin] blotches are created by the drum sounds . . .”), hearing (“According to Aelian . . . the Mysians . . . composed a tune called “Hippothroros” (“The Stallion’s Leap”), which they used to sound on their flutes to mares that were being covered . . .”), smell (“scrofula has the aroma of stale beer”), sight (“Consider the eyebrow. In man, this coppice of hair is expressive to a degree unmatched in the animal kingdom.”), and taste (a paean to hot peppers and a Mexican father who “taught himself, by assiduous and gradual exposure, a perfect tolerance to concoctions that, if accidentally spilled, would have bored into the table and straight through the planks of the floor.”)

~

The Room, by Joseph Lease (Alef Books, 1994)

Early Lease. Whom I think I used to confuse with Joseph Donahue. First part of “The Sun Drench”:

1.

Nerves torn to shreds,
in the red clusters

hanging from twigs
in the rain.

I was in need,
but also saying stop.

Bright red berries, mucus-slick, scattering
and bobbing on the water.

I stay in need, wide open,
not knowing how to stop,

begging you, claiming
I have outrun my anger.

Or, denser, the beginning of “Orient Point”:

Wavelets sound like sheets flapping.
A crab leg, just the leg, has gotten hold
Of a periwinkle. The top half of a crab shell,
Thin as enamel glaze, burnished ivory flecked

With purple, rough ovals, half ovals, squiggles.
The shell, translucent, has been cracked off
At the bottom. Green hair follicles
Are concentrated around the holes where the face once was.

The ocean, sage- and smoke-colored.
Dirty tidepools up where cars drive through . . .

Which provides two variants in a book that seems to offer several others—many prose pieces, or prose parts, narrativist / imagist in torsion, dominate the second half. Here: a high depictive concentrate that pinpoints details whilst keeping any simple coherence in abeyance. Meaning I don’t think I very readily see what’s up with that crab (and I think I should be able to).

~

Sometimes, by John Yau (Sheep Meadow Press, 1979)

for Gerome Kamrowski
       with Best Wishes
               & Admiration
                       John Yau
                               May 12, 1987

Robert Herrick

I like wallpaper that makes sense.

I own and operate a gas station
that stands neatly clustered on a wedge
formed by a fork in the road.
The dust is a hindrance, but not a veil.

Even on overcast days I can see my face,
like the shell of a scooped-out cantaloupe,
rising in the windshields.
And, sometimes, at night, I can see its ellipse
floating toward me, as if
what it was going to say this time
would make today a departure
from all the rest.

In the afternoon the lake is as smooth
as the polished black hood
of Mr. Meriwether’s vintage ’38 Cadillac
It has that bottomless dark feeling about it
that only cars and lakes and you can have.

Who can choose between Peter Scheldahl and John Yau! Good thing nobody must!

I see now Kamrowski taught here at the University of Michigan. Died 27 March, 2004.

~

And other books bought, numerous as the alors, pourquoi pas’s that greet the sniveling slate-gray dawn. If I “get” to enumerating, happy in my bungalow, I’ll let you know tomorrow . . .

~

To work.

Flak

~

Lounged in the Lumina, park’d outside Swing City, and read Proust for an hour or so. G. doing that tap-dancing thing. Mildly distract’d by the black man with a fat cigar and a wiry little boxer on a leash—he walk’d to the high end of a slight grassy incline, slipped the collar, and said: “Get ’m.” What “’m” I do not know. Stuck to Swann at the Verdurins, and Forcheville-competitor, and Odette. Noted: light that “spilled out—between shutters which pressed its mysterious golden pulp . . .” Something achingly tangible there.

~

Eyelids fattening up cozy to sleep.

~

Debate: I last’d roughly fifteen minutes in that particular low circle of hell. Th’unbearable smirky frat-boy President whose thinking’s about as nuanced as a pseudopod’s, whose intellectual complexity could be harvest’d by a common housefly (Musca domestica) tiptoeing across the agar of a Petri dish versus the “Challenger” Senator, panderer to the dumb’d-down thoroughly poll’d populace, letting the Republicans determine the terms of any engagement. I had to exit at th’insistence by Kerry that “we” ’d “finish” the “job” in Iraq. Why not intimidate and thrash the very premise and result of the illegal “Pre-Emption Doctrine”? Tidal bore of a namby-pamby party hack. I promise a swing-state vote to oust the flyweight cracker-asshole thief, but with little enthusiasm.

~

Flak, German, render’d out of the initials of the elements of Fliegerabwehrkanone “pilot-defence-gun.”

~

To work.

A Swan

~

Call it walking ambivalence, akin to walking pneumonia, the kind that comes and goes. What of the book that strikes one favorably one morning, and the next evening—zilch. Or rather something other than zilch and its zeroesque insupportable mullions, something like a vague irritant: what look’d perky—honest capture of speech-samples true to the baby millennium—suddenly looks retard’d. Ain’t nobody talk that way. What look’d like profundity (ha, when’s the last talk about profundity got you down for?) suddenly looks like smarmy prophylactic nonsense of the self-help set. What’s troubling is it’s a book “one”’d like to like.

~

Thumbing Cage’s Silence looking for a story that ends with Cage saying something like “because he’s left some writing in the hotel or somewhere, during such and such piece he’ll simply say nothing. And David Tudor admitting: “That’ll be a relief.”

~ ~

Riffs on a Line by Jordan Davis

Whereas the gorgeous intends to absorb attention, even, uh, retard it.


Gorgeous, you retard
My attention sufficiently

That the buttering
Up I normally

Obfuscate my manoeuvres
With falters, and

Down I go,
Necessary and prickly

As a hatpin,
Which, gorgeous, is

What I stood
To attention for.

~ ~

Hamper’d by time. Time, that hamper bulging with used-up items of the soil’d now. Oh dear, the kind of things one “comes up with” in the serious morning shower. Maybe it’d do no harm, Hippocrates, to, uh, just, leave it at that. A relief. Map of th’ornery doubt. Map of the clamorous, map of the Parsifalian hesitation: “Kundry, an ageless woman of many guises, rushes in wildly with balsam for Amfortas.” Who’s Abe Fortas? “Bob, who’s Ugo Betti?” A swan falls into the Priapic sea, panderistic, imponderable. A key worn down by insertion. “We know the French think time is weather”—it’s a gorgeous day out.

~

I’ll go off and sob in my stuff’d shirt now.

~

Twerp.

Proust Notes 6

~

Proust Notes 6

Proust against objectivist reductionism (and all its running dogs). Encountering Gilberte: “Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough ‘power of observation’, as they say, to isolate the notion of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes—which struck one so the first time one saw her—I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.” Suggesting the much-vaunt’d “power of observation” is just another social tic—rather like the “little dictionary of manners” the narrator admits he carries inside—so that memory and text (blonde “read” previously, “interpreted” as blue-eyed) combine with desire to stand-in for objective “seeing.”

~

Seeing “beyond the wheat the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, imbricated, chequered, yellowing and granulose as two spikes of wheat.” Adjectival exfoliation: spike and spire and all th’intervening gnarliness and spread of the field somehow caught. And not by sheer’d off, stripped down, “clean” language. By untidy buzz, and contort, and effluoresce.

~

The “blank” of content (that thing that authenticates the writerly “soul”): the narrator’s dreams of Mme de Guermantes’s demands that he “tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose.” Dreams that “warned me that since I wanted to be a writer some day, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes. I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain . . .”

And later: “the black hole that opened in my mind when I looked for the subject of my future writings.” Oddly enough, at first reading, the narrator’s self-portrayal as “one who aspires to write,” or “one with ambition” seem’d out of character, hardly credible, a thin design-lattice stuck to a robust character. I think I’d imagined the narrator / Proust as something like an idiot-savant, a naïf, one who, without command, or preparation, or intent, simply began accumulating moments, and so made a book.

~

Initial moment of excrescence deluxe, th’emergent emergency of growing light, the new world naked: “I was obliged, for lack of other company [“. . . singing softly to myself: / ‘I am lonely, lonely, / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!’”], to fall back on my own and try to recall my steeples. Soon their lines and their sunlit surfaces split apart, as if they were a sort of bark, a little of what was hidden from me inside them appeared to me, I had a thought which had not existed a moment before, which took shape in words in my head and the pleasure I had just recently experienced at the sight of them was so increased by this that, seized by a sort of drunkenness, I could no longer think of anything else.”

How landscape connects one to “that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. No doubt it progresses within us imperceptibly . . .”

~

“Since of the charms, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, . . . an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés.”

~

“. . .since a pure work of music contains none of the logical relationships whose alteration in language reveals madness, madness recognized in a sonata seemed to him something as mysterious as the madness of a bitch, the madness of a horse, though these can indeed be observed.”

~

Note to myself: danger of (merely) collecting the sententious remark, the “bon mot,” the happy truisms of naught. As if the “texture” consists of a few handsome bristles.

~ ~ ~

First jacket-weather. Little gusts of wind-bravado out, keening in the nooks. Crannies. Cranny of th’uncanny. Dog walk. The cold seems to’ve lower’d the boom on th’insect-choruses. A few thin stragglers, one unidentifiable whine high up. First exoskeletal leaf-armors scuttle against the pave—Eliotic scripts. Poor dry’d up Tom, nasal as a banker, fortify’d as a bunker. Is it enough to pickle the weightier cukes pluck’d off the tangled vines of Proust’s prose in the brine and vinegar of what begins to look like a commonplace book? Squat commentary.

~

Notes One Toy’d With Whilst Looking at Rae Armantrout’s Newest Book

By saying a writer
Is writing the best

Work she’s ever done—
She’s “up to speed”—

Aren’t we only admitting
That we’ve finally learn’d

How to read her,
And that through all

The foolish antagonisms of
Youth—finally half-shrugged

Off, only those of
Abiding consequence to th’art

Still adhering—what we
Took as her missteps

Were only our own
Faltering attempts to follow?

~

To La Plata.

Proust Notes 5

~

Proust Notes 5

Steve Evans point’d me at Theodore Adorno’s “Short Commentaries on Proust,” in the first volume of Notes to Literature (Columbia University Press, 1991). Apparently originally a radio address, one following which, Adorno says, he “received letters of protest about my allegedly excessive use of foreign words.” German tolerance for French on th’airwaves I can’t judge—what is astonishing is that such a dense intelligence’d be radiophonically dispersed at all.

Adorno, in defending an approach that examines a few individual passages versus one that presents an “orienting overview” or “grand survey” argues: “the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above, that Proust revolted. Just as the temperament of his work challenges customary notions about the general and the particular and gives aesthetic force to the dictum from Hegel’s Logic that the particular is the general and vice versa, with each mediated through the other, so the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes out of intertwined individual presentations.” Which seems both to offer Proust’s work as a culmination of an essentially organic manifestation of form, and to insist on the “rightness” of such a way of proceeding. Adorno: “Great musicians of Proust’s era, like Alban Berg, knew that living totality is achieved only through rank vegetal proliferation.” (The image itself is Proustian: note how often humans, in particular, go plantlike in Proust’s esurient metaphorical rooting in the Search. See the peasant-girl the narrator pictures in “the woods near Roussainville”—“that girl, whom I could only envisage dappled with leaves, was herself like a local plant . . .”) Is the formulation useful for justifying a turn away from constraint-based (generally, I think I’d argue, “top-down”) writing strategies? Is such a turn desirable? I’m thinking aloud, and without the Hegel. I’m struck though by Adorno’s next sentence: “The productive force that aims at unity is identical to the passive capacity to lose oneself in details without restraint or reservation.” That via negativa of finding a oneness exactly by dispersing oneself in the many. The line rings with Keatsian echoes: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,” maybe not a settling for half-knowledge, but a strategy on the way to knowledge. Or—I stray, far afield.

~

Adorno: “What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them. Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction . . .” Nothing so crass as psychology to disturb the surface-changes in the puddle of self. Think of Swann’s identifying of the features of acquaintances with painterly models—it is the painting, the fact of the individual characteristics’ existence in a painting, that gives meaning to the person.

Swann had always had this peculiar penchant for liking to rediscover in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization, the individual features of the face we know: for instance, . . . in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the cheeks fat by the implantation of the first hairs of the side-whiskers, the break in the nose, the penetration of the gaze, the congestion of the eyelids of Doctor du Boulbon . . . These individual characteristics gave him pleasure by assuming a more general meaning as soon as he saw them extirpated, emancipated, the resemblance between an older portrait and an original which it did not represent.

~

Bergson’s “allergic reaction to ready-made thought, to the pre-given and established cliché, is,” as Adorno says, “certainly characteristic of Proust; his sense of tact cannot stomach the things everyone says.” Which, one’d think, point one to Flaubert. Adorno, though, elsewhere (“The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”), seems dismissive of Flaubert, connecting him with the “report form”:

The traditional novel, whose idea is perhaps most authentically embodied in Flaubert, can be compared to the three-walled stage of bourgeois theater.

Adorno grudgingly admits that Flaubert sidesteps the supposed “objective purity” of such an approach by some manoeuvre “in the purity of the language, which, by spiritualizing language, removes it from the empirical realm to which it is committed.” Not at all clear what it means to “spiritualize” language. Adorno does make a distinction between two kinds of “reflection”—the “moral” sort, associated with the ”pre-Flaubertian,” that “takes a stand for or against the characters in the novel,” and that of the Proustian novel where “reflection breaks through the pure immanence of form” and “takes a stand against the lie of representation, actually against the narrator himself, who tries, as an extra-alert commentator on events to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding.” All of which leaves Flaubert half-floundering, a pivot-figure in no camp.

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Noted: Adorno’s claim that “in the guise of metaphors, disruptive Surealist ‘actions’ . . . would be completely appropriate” in some Proustian scenes. See, for example, the metaphor of the “pup-tent-man,” equal to any Man Ray invention: “He did not shut himself up in the edifice of his relationships, but had transformed that edifice, in order to be able to raise it again on the spot whenever he found a woman who pleased him, into one of those collapsible tents of the kind explorers carry with them.”

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Adorno, on accusations of snobbery against Proust: “Like every love, snobbery wants to escape from the entanglement of bourgeois relationships into a world that no longer uses the greatest good of the greatest number to gloss over the fact that it satisfies human needs only by accident. Proust’s regression is utopian. He is defeated by it, as is love, but in his defeat he denounces the society that decrees that it shall not be.”

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Unabashedly quoting now, shock’d by how well I glom to the literary Adorno—I countenanced Minima Moralia a few years back with rather negligible and tepid delight, if that. “False generality disintegrates under Proust’s ravenous gaze, but in return what is usually considered coincidental acquires an oblique, irrational universality.” With reference to Lukács’s “category of the contingent”—Proust “depicts a life bereft of meaning, a life the subject can no longer shape into a cosmos. For Proust’s perseverance, however, which surpasses that of the nineteenth-century novelists, contingency is not completely bereft of meaning. It carries with it a semblance of necessity, as though some reference to meaning had been interspersed throughout existence, chaotic, mocking, haunting in its dissociated fragments.”

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How hard Proust looks and how “oceanic” the glimpse, how the world, in pieces, is remade by metaphor’s ability to expand, to encompass, to carry. Point: the “thinly scattered” cornflowers that “announced to me the immense expanse where the wheat breaks in waves, where the clouds fleece, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting its red flame to the top of its ropes and whipping it in the wind above its greasy black buoy made my heart pound like the heart of a traveler who spies on a lowland a first beached boat being repaired by a caulker and, before catching sight of it, cries out: ‘The Sea.’”

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Bonus point. Tranmogrifying the Proustian rhetoric for the benefit of je ne sais qui: “He was not like so many writers, who either from laziness or from a resigned sense of the obligation created by their belletrist grandeur to remain attached to a certain mooring, abstain from the pleasures that writing offers them outside the helplessly perseverated situation in which they remain confined until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as poems, for lack of any better idea, once they have managed to become used to them, the mediocre amusements or bearable tedium they commit to paper.”

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To the barricades.