Isola di Rifiuti

One Man Working

Watch’d with some prevaricant itchiness Ron Silliman’s self-orchestrated hoopla—here and here and here and apparently to be continued in a sort of Horatio Alger dime novel of poetic adversity’s makeover into opportunity—(compleat with self-justificatory nods to becloud the irony of ’s participating in one of “Official Verse Culture”’s own most cherish’d and empty annual ceremonies) in advance of the Poetry Society of America’s granting of the Silliman-select’d William Carlos Williams Award to Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling, 2007). And subsequently read with some astonishment the Silliman-script’d “citation” for the book with its fraught lineage constructs and misappropriations of history:

The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake . . .

A “scandal”? Aram Saroyan’s first book, titled Aram Saroyan, released by Random House, a major New York trade outfit, in 1968, a “scandal”? Maybe (to those canny responsibles) a novelty item—hardly a scandal. Follow’d immediately the next year (1969)—cashing in, milking whatever stir—though it’s hard to figure who exactly bought the thing—I recall reading it in its meagre entirety upstairs in the old Marshall’s bookstore in Ann Arbor, standing next to its rows of semi-lurid paperbacks (made lurid probably more by the rumor that the gray-paint’d brick building with its creaking wooden sag floors ’d housed a brothel in some bygone, presumably simpler, year)—by Saroyan’s Pages. The books just the sort of thing semi-“literary” high school kids of the “era”—potheads, smart, terminally bored, fetching about for anything with a whiff of nosethumbing the “establishment” to it—’d glom to. I recall how, in a Pioneer High literary magazine call’d Overtones, that year I print’d a piece that went something like:

A man stands
On his head.

Then he sits down.

All different.

That’s how I recall it. I did a little India ink sketch, man standing, man sitting, to accompany it. Submit’d, if I recall rightly, by Ken Burns’s older brother, the red-head. When we’d accept’d it, he’d ask’d that we print it under the name of Dharma Juhdi, or Dharma Jhudi. Too late I read the Saroyan version:

a man stands
on his
head one
minute—

then he
sit
down all
different

We print’d another little story by Dharma Juhdi (or Dharma Jhudi) in the issue, something about a man trying to bury an elephant in the backyard. That one turn’d out to’ve migrated whole out of Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn. The scandalous Mr. Brautigan.

What Silliman attempts to argue by making the re-publication of Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems akin to that of Williams’s Kora in Hell and Spring & All is that each of the works define a kind of “originary moment” (a funny thing for a partisan of the “social text” to admit), each, Silliman says, is “foretelling.” I’ve made the argument before—ironically, then, using Saroyan’s work—amongst others—to put the kibosh to Silliman’s overly extravagant claims for ’s pal Robert Grenier’s work (“great works that would eventually make up Sentences . . . one of the crowning achievements of 20th century poetry”). Opportune extravagances and exaggerations—or, as princely Steve Katz says (another 1968 book), “exagggerations”—or why do I suddenly recall Silliman’s self-mythologizing story of reading all of Ketjak in Hallidie Plaza in 1978? Because the “tint” of the current tale is similar—heroic (“I spend the next several weeks reading, reading, reading”), interminable (“I dragged another small bookcase down to my office and shelved the books from the other two stacks there (with the exception of those where I already owned copies, which I put instead into a separate pile from which I donate periodically to Kelly Writers House)”), full of nudge-provocations (“the Poetry Society of America has not lived up to the stewardship of this award”), marvelously full of the torchbearer’s high import, the apostle’s impartiality (“two or three of the books represented a kind of poetry that I’m not certain William Carlos Williams would have approved of, were he still alive”).

—

CHAPTERS OF A MINIMALIST


I went off
by myself and
so did she.

*

Cadged a
smoke off
a codger
run amok.

*

Odd do for a ralpher.

*

Implacable ticket scalper’s rad tech kit offer.

*

High William’s skivvies in the gaillardias.

*

Rent. Rent.

*

Senility’s lens unleash
’d.

*

Door bang-
ing in
wind, rude.

One Man Working
(Ron Silliman Reading “Ketjak,” Hallidie Plaza, San Francisco, September 16, 1978)

Tree, Michigan

AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY

And so one long’d for
A tragedy-stain’d youth, smudge
Sullying its raw patina, the
Way a coronal splash of
Red wine, a greasy thumb-
Print, the billowing umber cloud
Of five centuries of insouciant
Handling, the cachet stamp of
Some cabinet de curiosités or
Ambrosia-odor’d biblioteca or cloister
Ripe with the sour renegade
Sweat of abstemious monks, or
The way dirt rubbed slowly
Into creases now uncreased marks
The sketchbook page detached by
The unscrupulous dealer in art’s
Ephemera and effluvia, sludge drawn
Down the unprovenanced river of Old
Masters, the drawings of three
Overlapping human parts, two muscular
Thighs, one hand cupping a
Poppy, wilt’d. That thigh, the
Pristine placard indicates, study for
That of the larger work
Depicting the minor goddess that
Comes next, the one with
The haywire mammaries uphanging, or
Cock’d sideways like curious birds,
Result more of the tradition
That allow’d only young men
To model than of any
Shallow or vacillant failure of
The august hand to see
Rightly what’s so palpably there.

—

Return’d up out of palm and balm (and lateral jut to New York for Anne Sophie Mutter at Carnegie Hall) with a slack sack (“nothing in the hopper”), and restless. Read Dos Passos in the various “terminals,” slung the camera around to point and bestill. “No nouns in nature.” Probably a little huff-puffery and gab-garrulity in the intervening, whilst my fingers flop about seeking a chord to plunge into.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man and Bust of a Child

Willow and Pond

Nothing in the hopper, “pretty vacant,” foul play suspect’d with my good intent. That kind of morning, and wet. Vague accetta uprisings in the brainstem region. (That’s Italian for hatchet, or for urp up. Some kind of unsettlement catapulting forth all kinds of untenables.) I read, I think, not four words last night, squib’d fewer.

—

John Dos Passos, in a fierce introductory brief for a 1932 Modern Library edition of Three Soldiers, after having pinch’d off the false buds of many a reason to write (“A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy icecream or aspirin or gin”), most succinctly with “Writing for money is as silly as writing for selfexpression”:

I think there is such a thing as straight writing. A cabinet maker enjoys cutting a dovetail because he’s a cabinet maker, every type of work has its own vigor inherent in it. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

Considering, did William Carlos Williams read Dos Passos? (Another reason to read novelists: possibility that the vigorous beasts’d arrive at things in advance of some of us poor trepidatious and fey poet-types with our comminuted bits of high-preciosity?) Dos Passos continues:

What I’m trying to get out is the difference in kind between the work of James Joyce, say, and that of any current dispenser of daydreams. It’s not that Joyce produces for the highbrow and the other for the lowbrow trade, it’s that Joyce is working with speech straight and so dominating the machine of production, while the daydream artist is merely feeding the machine, like a girl in a sausage factory shoving hunks of meat into the hopper. Whoever can run the machine runs it for all of us. Working with speech straight is vigorous absorbing devastating hopeless work, work that no man need be ashamed of.

Which’s got all the “manly” trademarks of the era, and with trace of Marxist theory. Against accusations of Joyce’s tendency to draw “literary snobs,” and how the work’s “a luxury product like limited editions, without influence on the mass of ordinary newspaper readers,” Dos Passos says, “The power of writing is more likely to be exercised vertically through a century than horizontally over a year’s sales.” And, in a move that may predict the late swing to rabid conservatism of Dos Passos’s late (post U.S.A.) writing, he notes the twin racehorses, Current Chaos and Classic Verities and hints at that prime right-wing-trigger the fear of loss of control (“years of confusion, when everything has to be relabeled and catchwords lose their meaning from week to week”):

None of this would need saying if we didn’t happen to belong to a country and an epoch of peculiar confusion, when the average man’s susceptibility to print has been first enflamed by the misty sentimentality of school and college English teachers who substitute “good modern books” for the classics, and then atrophied by the bawling of publishers’ barkers over every new piece of rubbish dished up between boards. We write today for the first American generation not brought up on the Bible, and nothing as yet has taken its place as a literary discipline.

Insert to-be-assembled speculations and innuendoes (based on examinations of control needs as evidenced by public doings and statements) as to what writers of the current “crop” ’ll age badly à la Dos Passos, drifting ever right.

—

A line stumbled on in a Campbell McGrath poem about “tourists with digital camcorders / pre-editing their memories.” Choosing in advance what’ll be recall’d: why do I find that terribly spooky, viscerally so?

—

APOTHEOSIS OF THE BLADE

Je commençais d’écrire une Ode à la Police
et une Apothéose du couperet.
                          —Albert Camus, La Chute

The way the chopper descends
With initial hesitant vibratory rattle
Mimicks imperfectly the tousle of
Sand accelerating into a liquid
Stream out of its particulate
Solid insusceptibility and inertia to
Rush down through the narrows
Of the hourglass: that is one
Beauty of the blade hoist’d
Up high above the hole
Wherein one’s head is stuff’d
Brusquely as a cabbage, and
Kept still with a yoke,
Final burden, leaving one free
To listen for the rattle
And, inevitably, the rancid thump
(Moldy worm-infest’d wheel of
Cheese) of that head, hearing
Itself hit the basket provided.

—

Off into hinterlands south, east, a vagary big loop. Jusqu’à mercredi, mes potes.

Tina Modotti, “John Dos Passos,” 1926

“Dos Passos traveled to Mexico in late 1926 to research articles for the radical magazine, New Masses, which espoused political and social views Modotti ardently shared. It was sometime during this visit that she took this snapshot, later identifying Dos Passos by name on the front of the photograph.”

A Wall (Helmet and Badge)

ODE TO THE POLICE

Je commençais d’écrire une Ode à la Police
et une Apothéose du couperet.
                          —Albert Camus, La Chute

Control presumes a list deviance
Off of makes one just
Liable to be declared clubbable
In a muddy fit of
Ligature gone to the dogs
That, train’d to attack by
Means of a fat quilt
Of raw material, a protective
Sleeve for the arm, launch
Fur and fury forth, all
Teeth, against whosoever dodges or
Dogs it, or declines with
Mock-amble smart-ass slouch
And smirk the bark’d hurry
Up, motherfucker of the officer
Who’d like to nudge that
Rubber baton that fits a
Fist used to fitting, up
Straight into the prevaricator’s nuts,
Hard, exaltingly, like an ode.

—

Back into the Duncan / Levertov letters with intensity undiminish’d. Duncan proves often a canny, petulant character, impulsive, capable of a tantrum. Mid-letter insert: “[[At which point I became so frustrated with this new misbehaving Parker pen that I hitchhiked into San Francisco to have it adjusted. And am sitting here at the Parker office to give the new adjustment its test.]]” (He’s in idyllic-sounding Stinson Beach with Jess Collins, getting by with who knows what money—though there is ample talk between the writers regarding what magazines pay, what presses offer what royalties, and, later, Duncan seeming goes with “slimy Rosset” of Grove Press for The Opening of the Field (1960) at least partly for a higher percent therein.) (Is there something rather puritanical about Levertov’s and Duncan’s continual complaint and admonishment of the direction of Rosset’s Evergreen and Grove? How it is “definitely aimed, with pornography and sensationalism, at a special public, with the idea of making money”?) The story of the Parker: another technology (most of the letters of both Duncan and Levertov hand-scrawl’d, the typewriter kept for the copying of poems). Struck by the energy and commitment of the letters: in a word to Levertov who’s become angry at, suspicious of Creeley (“When one reads Creeley’s letter to all & sundry one feels they are like form letters”), Duncan suggests: “If you could write him about why you haven’t been writing, would that at least restore the communication? The only important thing for us is our correspondence—and that becomes empty if it [does] not carry disappointment, anger, outrage as well as our appointments and joy.”

Duncan’s percipient art criticism, a terrific exposition of how la mode (the mob) recuperates any striking “original impetus.” Here, about Clyfford Still:

He is personally hostile and paints against the history of painting (and more distressing, paints against previous beauties in the art). . . . As a man, Still seems to do everything to prevent one’s arriving at this state of rapt satisfaction—of being “charmed,” and . . . he would himself hate this state, this end as charm or composed contemplation. & wants his paintings to be acts in themselves.

Duncan’s reception (after first seeing Still’s paintings in 1950) seems a miniature version of a general reception of the new (in spite of its self-critical perception of that in the letter):

It was not to be until five years later that I ever saw a canvas of Still’s as an instance of the beautiful [and these in painting are rare enuf], but what was clear then was that this was authentic, a command within the spiritual history of art that involved more than painting—as uncharming, as hedious in strength as revolt is; it had or I gave it authority. Not to be like it, but to take my place in a world where such painting must be a definition of the real.
      Withal I no longer think of that iconoclastic expressionism as the crux of the matter these days. All we have left here are modish derivatives, and the betrayal of the original impetus is the more striking in that the direction had been angry and all but stultified in its opposition to mode. There might be an irony in the fact that striking against the Beautiful—an artist is in danger of securing the chic. Even where his art is beautiful, Still’s work is grandiose, megalomaniac: he is incapable of the intimate. And the force of his egotism makes it impossible for me to think of him as heroic. Heroism for me has something to do with the engagement with and for the Beautiful.

A complex and possibly somewhat contradictory “set.” (Considering the letter Duncan jamming.) Nowadays, of course, there is no “opposition to mode”; there is only the ubiquitous rabid mêlée aim’d precisely at “securing the chic.” Blame a general herd mentality, fault of increased “communication.” Blame an unwholesome lack of independence, integrity, the fie in defiance. Duncan notes (talking against “programmatic sensationalism”): “W.C.W. said ‘Nothing is beyond poetry’ but in the same note warns that: ‘every school which seeks to seclude itself and build up a glamour of scholarship or whatever it be, a mist, that is. . . .’”—and quits. I’d like to retrieve the remains of that sentence.

—

Tomorrow: “Apotheosis of the Blade”

Clyfford Still, “1947-J,” 1947

Clyfford Still, “1947-R-No. 1,” 1947

Arrangement with Straw

In an unending period of torn attention and shoddy goods slapped together out of perishables, a period of shot memory, the cake dunk’d in tepid coffee “with slightly sour cream” only to dissolve completely, any act of attending, the murtherous slow mechanical seeing of something bestuck in all its surround is consolatory, dunning the age itself, an ethos. The Cooper’s hawk kek-kek-ing in the oak canopy, hid. The dog’s uneasy 4:30 a.m. pawing, distant ten-pin thunder, brief white room lightning, onrush and scurry of rain running up into position, the biggest drops first. Out under the “single gory punctum” of Venus and a Maxfield Parrish sky, tromping the spatter’d dropcloth of earth.

—

AN ETHOS


Out under the “single gory punctum”
Of Venus and a Maxfield Parrish

Sky, tromping the spatter’d dropcloth of
Earth. The Cooper’s hawk kek-kek-

Kek in the oak canopy, hid.
The dog’s uneasy 4:30 a.m. pawing,

Distant ten-pin thunder, brief white
Room lightning, onrush and scurry of

Rain running up into position, biggest
Drops first. In an unending period

Of torn attention and shoddy goods
Slapped together out of perishables, a

Period of shot memory, the cake
Dunk’d in tepid coffee “with slightly

Sour cream” only to dissolve completely,
Any act of attending, the murtherous

Slow mechanical seeing of a thing
Bestuck in all its surround is

Consolatory, dunning of the age itself.

—

Lazy morning, unsustainable. Out of nowhere it occurs that O’Hara’s line “At last you are tired of being single” echoes Apollinaire’s “Zone”-buckler: À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien, how obvious and predatory, sheer concubinage! Doubt-bitten shrieks that do not befit the day. Nose in a book:

      Whenever he read about anything he went down cellar and tried it out.
      When he was twelve he needed money to buy books and chemicals; he got a concession as newsbutcher on the daily train from Detroit to Port Huron. In Detroit there was a public library and he read it.
      He rigged up a laboratory on the train and whenever he read about anything he tried it out. He rigged up a printing press and printed a paper called The Herald, when the Civil War broke out he organized a newsservice and cashed in on the big battles. Then he dropped a stick of phosphorus and set the car on fire and was thrown off the train.
      By that time he had considerable fame in the country as the boy editor of the first newspaper to be published on a moving train. The London Times wrote him up.

That’s Edison in John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, a thing I scoop’d up recently thinking: what about Dos Passos? I don’t know if anybody reads Dos Passos these days or not. Somehow the speed of delivery here elided with the slight pitch of hysteria and slapstick reminds me of something like Daniil Kharms, or, later, and less so, the prose poems of Russell Edson. I’d think, browsing, one’d read Dos Passos for formal (“stylistic”) reasons just as much as Big Historical ones.

—

In the light of the bad historical innuendoes of some “spokespersons” here and there, that—on the one hand (mark’d “one of the tenets of my imagination”), “all famous writers already knew one another, must secretly hang out together, having fabulous gabfests, the ‘deep gossip’ we associate with poetry,” and on the other (general suspicious whipping post quietudinous shit), there exist’d distinct warring camps separate and unequal—it is instructive to note Levertov and Duncan’s discussing Robert Bly, Duncan writing to Bly, &c. One assigns those who construct history to meet such tawdry delimiting territorial needs to the dustbin, eventually, no? “Fabulous gabfests”? Is that David Bowie talk?

(My weekly spleen.)

—

Carcinology is the study of crabs.
Cinereous, grey tinged with black, “the color of ashes.”

David Bowie

Earth’s Debris and Nourriture

THINKING OF WILLIAM JAMES

Like a piece of congoleum beginning to curl up in the nigh-
Tropical heat of the Keys, something a boy with a cowlick’d
Like to pry up off the plywood with a kitchen knife and use
For a pretend Hindustani sleigh ride over the palmetto grass,

I am thinking of you in Brazil, standing in a port dump with
A terribly dark beard, clotted up with a motherfucker bunch of
Barely form’d ideas, trying to keep the binomials straight, the
Different fishes of the saltwater estuary that’s long as the whole

State of Connecticut. There’s the hill upstate named Connecticut,
Some professorial rambler claim’d a cloudless day’d allow one to see
The state itself if one climb’d it. I love the nineteenth century walkers
Putting the nomenclature down in neat manly scripts in leather-

Cover’d notebooks. The money’d story’d is what I say. Mid-
Twentieth century I spent one whole morning tramping Connecticut
Hill trying to locate a black-throated blue, a peevish flitting thing just
Out of reach in the scrap deciduous understory. A bird with

A rich cream-color’d lozenge stuck like a label to its wing. Or
A bookmark. There’s a man without money who hides during the day
In the library to sleep, who carries a stout bent walking cane he’s
Cover’d the end of with layer after layer of shiny duct tape

So that it’s the size of a boot. To beat off attacks by blackguards
Or spooks. He’s got a fine white beard he washes daily
In the public lavatory, keeping the cane nearby. He writes
A circular monotonous script that completely covers scraps of paper,

None of it decipherable for all its rhythmic preciosity. And James,
Wholly bewilder’d by tropical profusion and the “erratic drift” of the world,
Writes to Henry (dateline Original Seat of Garden of Eden) he’s capable
Only of “savage inarticulate cries to express the loveliness”: Houp la la!

—

How difficult it seems—thumbing, skimming—to enter into Oppen’s Daybooks. (In the Stephen Cope edited George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (University of California Press, 2007)). Too few the particulars. Too obvious the leanings up against the big statement: “A totally objective art, an art of caprice which means to say nothing of oneself or one’s situation, an art of pure construction.” Or:

The fact is, we are hopelessly caught in phenomena.
The mind’s inherent sense of logic is a phenomenon.

I keep looking for a miss’d smudge of humor, some sloppy tomfoolery. Assuaged only a little by the merest hint of a world, some physical thing: “fields of the mock-sage” or even “the big dumb form of the moon” What’s odd it how one argument Oppen makes for the poem is that it point, that it be nothing more that instructions to look:

The poem (narrative) depends for its “argument” on vividness—One might regard it as incoherent in the way that a man may seem incoherent whose argument consists finally in repeating—“But look, But look—!”

      incoherent in the manner of a man who repeats “but look, but look”—coherent and convincing enuf to those who will or can look—

Or, later, points to “images” themselves as “small narratives with the poem.” Which reminds me—thinking of the use of images—of an admission Duncan makes to Levertov (c. 1959) after receiving Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems from a Floating World, saying: “I did think the insistence on image a healthy one. Especially since my work right now seems to be getting more and more didactive ‘opinionated’—” Is there another variable function to put into play besides speech / music, namely sensual (imaged) / ratiocinatory (declared)? (Is there another integral between “brutality” and “preciousness”? See Oppen’s: “Brutality is a beginning: preciousness in an end.” Which is precious enough to my ear.)

(Is it totally accidental that I keep coming across what seem like thinly-veil’d admonitions to the young? Who’d lend sympathy—or buoyant goodwill—to someone who’d write: “you men may wish ‘to write poetry’ At 55, my desires are more specific”?) Though one’s mounting blank indifference is ruffled up somewhat by learning of Oppen’s “Pipe-Stem Daybook,” being “papers bound by Oppen into a small makeshift book by means of pipe-stem cleaners (ca. 1966).” Or one is intrigued by a note appended to the word “prosody”:

The line of poetry appears as a single foot which
centers around some point in the line”

The poem made of lines fitted one into another like gather’d stones uncut, the task being the finding of the “set” of each line, its heft and weight and bulge.

Admittedly, a wholly mischievous way to read, bouncing around, like chasing after the mucker’s truck (celery farm), stooping for gleanings, meaning whatever’s tumbled off. Is there a continual tug in Oppen between demanding the poem be a “process of thought” and longing for a “systematic aesthetics,” a stilling point? Everywhere signs of it: “The final look of things” and “form       the completed act of the intellect” versus say, “OBJECT in the poem: its function is to burst” or “Perhaps it has no form, we move thru it / ‘An indeterminate medium . . . / Empty of value’”

Noting how, regardless the lessons of Pound and Williams—“a breaking of conventional forms, a releasing of speech”—the young’ll turn “eventually to a reappraisal of Stevens and Eliot of the Quartets”: “For Pound and Williams are without intellectual interest” Confirming a swift-running thoughtlet that raced briefly around the brainbox, how Oppen’s tiny remarks remind’d one most of Wallace Stevens’s Adagia, the kind of vaporous niggles like “Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential” that one drifts erratically away out of reach of, trusting the old codger’ll not notice the audience gone. Too, there’s Oppen’s rejection of the poseur—“I dislike most of all the theatrical ethic, the ethics of posture. The English gentleman, the fiery Latin, the Boulevardier or the hermit”—missing the surly aphorist. As if perception might declare itself unshaped by any maker, he warns against even “grace”—oddly enough in words, judging by the strikethroughs, that clearly didn’t spring full-bust’d out of some Zeusify’d brow:

Williams is wrong, merely wrong, wheren he destroys or does not achieve the form of thought the form of language, of perception, and ^for^ the sake of grace, of manner.

George Oppen, 1908-1984

Grasses, Uncover’d

MY ENGLISH DAYS

A lob is a bumpkin
Reeling under the sun’s haw
Unharnass’d. Hath not the tongue.
A yob is urban-knuckled
And tattoo’d, brassy with defiance
Rude. Thus asymptotically a language’s
Rout’d out unwaveringly, and one’s
Preciosity gets ratchet’d down though
Never to expire finally, ô
Beau Geste! Something rather ta-
Ta, governor about the smell
Of carbolic soap in passageways,
About the jodhpur shape of
The hedges outside the rectory.
Only the American robin working
The massive grounds for earthworms,
Cock’d head and scurry, says
Buddy, we ain’t in Bristol.
A taw is a shooter
The thumb fires off a
Crook’d index finger to knock
A foe’s—Is foe short
For foreign?—marble out, down
Crouch, bent knee, short pants.

—

The sun rambunct’d, the tree buds bulged fat, the cussèd crocuses popped forth, the dog snuffled up interminable inter-fraught traceries of smells. I lick’d the pencil’s lead and apply’d it to 1040s, punching veritable holes in the newsprint with my splendid industry. A model citizen, vowing to withhold it all if the bastards sortie’d out to bomb the Fertile Crescent. Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia, words of my tender emphatic youth. Do not fat rolls of stark color lithography’d maps hang in history classrooms any longer? Do not teachers hoist they britches-slipping trousers and unclot they phlegmy-vocal tubes in the process of slapping a pointer (satisfying muffle-thudagainst an orange-color’d wedge): “Mesopotamia, call’d the Cradle of Civilization.” And one’d likely thrill a little to the way it echo’d Potowatomi, the local Indian monicker, so that one’d make always an untoward connection, peopling the beech and oak and maple forests of southeastern Michigan with ur-Iranians, Persians in moccasins.

—

Read most—the Duncan / Levertov letters thrust temporarily to the back “hob”—“A hob is a burner”—of a little book titled The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography, entirely unfinish’d (though not at all fragment’d as it stands) at Thomas’s death at the battle of Arras in 1917 at the age of 39. Terrifically writ early smudges of memory, of two “avoided” kids in “the lowest class of a large suburban board school”:

One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of “Lizzie”; the other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull.

Which so emphatically introduces out of one of the stage-wings of my brainbox the poorest and foul-smellingest member of my own elementary school class in northern Michigan, I sincerely believe her name to’ve been Wilhelmina, a dirty-blonde waif who wet herself in the middle of some quiet activity, urine pooling yellow under her chair. I think she got call’d “Willie,” though she seem’d to have no friends whatsoever, only those who didn’t pester her versus those who, cruelly, did. Thomas’s piece of autobiography is full of deftly-put ineffables:

A mad dog had run into one of the narrow front garden and lay just inside the railings; a man on the other side with a pickaxe was about to kill the dog; and a small crowd had collected in the roadway. I do not know that I saw the blow struck, but the idea of sharp heavy steel piercing the shaggy hair, flesh and bone of a living creature has remained horrible and ineffaceable ever since.

Et puis, sure sign of a writer, Thomas’s seeing words as particular and chewable as stalks of timothy glean’d in the fields (to use a mundane norteamericano metaphor):

Part of the pleasure of a book was still, I think, the strangeness of words as well as things. Thus I was arrested by the quaintness of Isaak Walton’s spelling, as in ‘pearch’ for perch, of his archaic names, such as ‘luce’ for pike, of unfamiliar personal names like those of the travelers Speke and Grant, as well as by the nasty horror of Africans eating fat torn from a live human body in Sir Samuel Baker’s book.

And accurate regarding the wrong sorts of hoo-hah award’d the classics—here, the Æneid and Shakespeare:

To me they remained prose rendered obscure and tedious, in the one case by foreign language, and in the other by archaisms, inversions, and other unfamiliar and as yet impotent forms. Often there were worse than obscure. The passages that stuck fast in the rut which they wore in our brains were bandied about for their comicality. ‘All became silent’, ‘The strawberry grows beneath the nettle’, ‘By thinking on the frosty Caucasus,’ ‘Tennis balls, my liege,’ and other phrases had to be uttered with a grin and received with a grin. . . . Blank verse I regarded as a form of prose, licentious in construction and divided wantonly into lines as if it were poetry.

Probably the kind of misapprehension that imparts a sly new proficiency, a turn’d diligence and occasions bravado. Thomas wrote something like one hundred and forty poems in barely two years, with a late beginning and untimely end. I love the 1915 lines:

But these things also are Spring’s—
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;

The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass: chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:

All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,

While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

Loved largely for its evidence of acquaintance with the tiny, with how everything begins so whitely, and ends so. And of a man who in boyhood wrote “in the worst possible Latin on the flyleaf of my algebra book: ‘I love birds more than books’”—cause of contemptuous smiles. Whose “wrists and hands and arms were always decorated with scratches during the bird-nesting season”—following the turn-of-the-century naturalist mania for egg collecting. Who liked nothing better than a ramble: “Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark. Students we were not: nothing was pursued to the uttermost.” To be partisan and devotee to that.

Edward Thomas, 1878-1917

Woodlot and Field

Coleridge (Notebooks, c. 1801): “A man illiterate but of good parts by constant reading of the Bible will naturally contract a more winning and commanding Rhetoric than those that are learned, the intermixture of Tongues & of artificial phrases debasing their style.” Tending to color the Lyrical Ballads Preface-entreaty for using “a selection of language really used by men” in the wan tints of anti-intellectualism, contra-alterity. Peut-être, one adds, wholly “unwinningly.” In an entry wherein, too, Coleridge notes some valiant meteorological reasoning of Paracelsus: “That the absence of the Sun is not the cause of Night, forasmuch as his light is so great that it may illuminate the earth all over at once; but that Night is brought on by the influence of dark Stars that ray out darkness and obscurity upon the Earth, as the sun does light.—” Though immediately revising the equation: “That Stars are Plants, & that the Lightnings without Thunder are as it were the deciduous flowers of the Æstival Stars—” Recurrent forms and forkings. I’d love to see “dark Stars that ray out darkness,” inhabit a world kin to a photographic negative. (Odd to think how digital photography stymies the negative, eventually it’ll become invisible to common fancy, no? Think of the shuddery thrill of squinting through old C-41 color reversed strips—faded, awry—the greens gone to magenta, the red lips complementarily and crazily cyan’d.) The stars, the stars: for weeks now I keep thinking of Emerson’s revelatory: “If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” A way to prime one’s board’d up well-shaft, get the pump-handle moving without that god-awful screech, just to (Preface, again) “Throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way,” meaning look at the present marvels with a little alacrity, bub.

—

Out across the snow-tamp’d fields, mat’d down grasses all mute yellows, a spurious number of grays, lovable grays, the buckthorn stubble chop’d back, shirt-sleeved. Grackles back north, hocking up the gutturals, dragging they big tails. Red wing’d blackbirds around the pond, reedy deep trills, wary, keeping a distance. Two mallards push off out of beneath the thicket overhang and stream out two trailing V’s to the other side, the dog pretending unconcern. Aimless finicks of sentry crows, off rookery duty. Tangles of red osiers and snow patches in the undergrowth. A flock of robins scouring the bare soil of the community garden plots. I love how Coleridge fills several pages of the Notebook with lists of plants, energies of hand-scripture making memory dents. Sampling:

      Adders Tongue. Alder. Ale-hoof. All-good. All-heal. Allisander. Alkanet. Anise. Agrimony. Archangel. Arrow-grass. Arrow-head. Arsmart. Ash-weed. Asp. Asphodel. Awl-wort.
      Balm. Bane-berries. Bank-cresses. Balm. Basil. Barbery. Barley. Bast. Bastard-Cress. Bastard-parsley. Bastard-pellitory. Bawd-money. Bear-berries. Bears-foot. Bee-flower. Beet. Bell-flower. Bent. Bethlem-star. Betony. Bilberries. Bird’s eye. Bird’s foot. Bird’s nest. Bistort. Bitter-cresses. Bitter-sweet. Black-berried Heath. Black berry. Black thorn. Bladder-Campion. Bladder-nut-tree. Bladders’ snout. Blea-berries. Blinks. Blite. Blood-wort. Blue bottle. Bog-moss. Bog-rush. Borage. Bottle moss. Box. Brakes. Bramble. Branks. Breakstone. Bromegrass. Brook lime. Brook weed. Broom. Broomrape. Bruisewort. Bryony. Buckbean. Bucks horn. Sea buck thorn. Buck-wheat. Buddle. Bugle. . . .

I linger, thinking if names I know correspond at the cusp of eighteenth-nineteenth century Britain to plants pushing forth up out of the woodlots and mown fields of twenty-first century Michigan. Is “Bucks horn” my buckthorn? Or is “Sea buck thorn”? Or, why’s “Bladder-nut-tree”—“constantly amalgamating disparate experience”—make me think of Ashbery’s “Fantasia on ‘The Nut Brown Maid’”—“loops of reading”? Or, why’d the line “the husbandry of blinks” begin a feral dominance of the early morning mid-shower oscultating of the voices “barking” in the brainbox?

—

Loops of reading. Think of Edward Thomas making natural history “field notes” in 1917 near Arras, France. “Snowdrops at foot of peartrees by Decanville Railway.” “Magpies over No Man’s Land in pairs.” “Larks, partridges, hedge-sparrows, magpies by O. P.” “Chaffinches and partridges, moles working on surface.” All drop’d in hallucinatory interspersal in amongst lines like “Tea at 244 after seeing 2 of our planes down, one on fire with both burnt to death after alighting.” “Fired 100 rounds from 12-1:30.” “Fired 600 rounds and got tired eyes and ears.”

—

LINES SNATCH’D IN PERUSAL

Crazily cyan’d the sky, blue
Minion to the sea below
In a kind of reversal
Whereby accuracy unaccountably flaunts whatever’s
Thrown over it for accounting.
—Henry ain’t here. Henry’s out
Gathering a bouquet of bawd-
Money someone’d announce and it’d
Bramble up the mystery of
Language’s husbandry of itself. For
It, too, flowers and forks,
Branches up out of loam
Or horizon like lightning, mete
With its own severe mettle.
Never bastard, never brakes, it
Is arse-smart and radical,
Raying out of the earth,
Grackle-black and guttural, launching
Itself up into the high
Reach of willow dragging its
Big boat of a tail.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Mr. Kirkland, c. 1815
(“that there may be sent by the Bearer three ounces of Laudanum—(in the accompanying bottle—or whatever quantity it may hold) half an oz of crude opium (if there be none purified)—& two ounces of the Tincture of Cardomum”)

The Use of Green

I plait together an argument I cotton to by half and barely trust: that language toute seule—rev’d up and fired off into the distance—eventually’ll come back in a fever, lap itself and continue of its own accord. That is, pursuant to no rational codex. Which is a kind of mystificatory pap and smear, a pitiable lay religiosity run amok. For surely, even with brainbox sunder’d by inebriants (mine isn’t, though there were those years of addled experimentalism with the obligatory barrage of substances, all attempts to reach, as René Daumal put it, “the beyond,” that momentary placement in the big scheme of things wherefrom one’d be pure receiver only), one is sentinel to even the most asyntactical lingual romps. If language is “coming through” (Spicer), it is doing so under some auspice, though there it is: one’s up in the divine tree again, squawking like an auspex. Trouble is, it’s found in all the reports and you, even you, recall finding things seemingly writ by the boot-tracks of a posse of tiny godlets, a snowfield mark’d by a traveling army, an unidentifiably warm breath still raising the neck-hairs. (A moment of blessèd writerly automatism, so rare it becomes all one talks about.)

Funny to see—just days after reading in one of the obituaries a report how Jonathan Williams’d turn’d down Howl (the verdict being: all for the better, if Jargon’d done it, it might ’ve sold “300 copies”)—Robert Duncan’s counter-stylings of Williams’s response to Howl, how he’d “written disparagingly of it,” a sign of “just being petty.” Duncan: “I think it exceptionally petty of J. to say ‘. . . might titillate Poetry Lovers at an Intimate Reading’ . . . ‘fortissimo’ . . . etc. That little boy at heart likes a nice tidy little artwork I suspect and no loose ends. I’m going to tell him too.” Ah poetry and its interchangeable minions. Too, there’s Duncan’s “civic scorn” for the historically much-vaunt’d notion of poetic community. It outs in talk of the Poetry Center job—Assistant Director—and how it “gnaws away at my freshness.” Duncan proceeds to admit that “essentially the concept of a civic activity I cannot stand by. At very point I am liable to betray my contempt. . . . I am revolted by all this promotion of, cultivation of Poetry, until one craves a colossal scorn that would put it all down.” Is that all part of the hid obverse to the spendable coin of Duncan’s manic exhilaration? It is liable to go sourer—two months later he’s calling it a “nightmare . . . where I must see the fact of poetry exploited and promoted until I sicken on the vine”—and more pointedly (individually, malignly) aim’d. (In one single letter of 12 February 1958 Duncan says about the barrage of readings: “discrimination or discretion is a paramount emotional necessity. Tolerance is fatal—” and attacks Jack Spicer’s work with rather savage vehemence: “it is a poetry used for inflicting miseries that proliferate from masturbation fantasies (the more painful because he projects now a poetry of the wet-dream).” Ah poetry and its interchangeable &c. And Levertov, though mostly kinder (her frets and burdens and worries follow predictably more “gender’d” paths—meaning, lopsided division of labor, with concerns possibly incomprehensible to even the empathy-mind’d duo of the Duncan / Collins household), does, and swiftly, accurately, read her contemporaries. She writes about Allen Ginsberg’s “letter he wrote me from N. Y. describing his ‘planned rape of the city’ e.g. seeing Laughlin, Grove Press, ed. of Mlle., etc etc, but everybody—in a word, hustling like mad.” Plus ça change city: who be the Ginsbergs of the contemporary “set”?

—

Sense of attending to too many things better drop’d. Or of simple breathlessness after a couple of long draughts (of reading). If I paw out Edward Dahlberg’s book of incidental prose, Samuel Beckett’s Wake, and learn at a page-turn that Horace claim’d poets “belong to the most irascible tribe of men” or that Pound “had the scantiest regard for the caitiff illiterates of the arts, demanding that a poet be a vigorous reader,” is it enough to make me fling aside the quill and toss my rumpled self down for a stretch of perusal (or sleep) under the apple tree fat with buds? No. First I need to look for evidence of Duncan in Dahlberg’s book. (Duncan spends a large part of one year in the ’fifties trying to write a review of Dahlberg’s Sorrows of Priapus.) None. A piece about Majorca, a sentence or two about Raymond Duncan. “He wore a Greekish clout, and sandals, and was a poseur of Hellenic civilization which he affected in order to hide a Stygian parsimony.” Kay Boyle, “drudging as a saleslady” work’d in the shop he had in Paris. (More rummaging about. Brainbox recalls Raymond Duncan being brother of Isadora, recalls G. showing me the shop in Paris, c. 1973, rue de Seine or rue Bonaparte, one of the narrow streets running down off the boulevard St. Germain to the river. Recalls photographs of Duncan in the window, impossibly handsome, did Dahlberg say he look’d like Carl Sandburg? tunic’d, imperious. Or sewing equipage in the window, a treadle spinning wheel? Brainbox is shot, I cling to the raw undyed dangling strings of memory.) Caitiff illiterate I be, lacking vigor in my reading. Skimming the Kay Boyle / Robert McAlmon Being Geniuses Together for some kind of verification not forthcoming.

—

In the mailbag, John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop admits to posting “a poem, partly in response to your question regarding typing v. ‘word-processing’ v. longhand v. typesetting” and Brian Salchert notes that “the way I’ve been using the computer / erases the past, unless that past is also in longhand somewhere or in offline space or in a manila folder.” Elsewhere: Seismicity Vaudevillean Allyssa Wolf is writing here.

—

FOR RIMBAUD

Just another amatory retard is
I (thank you, Art) running
Abaft the yipping dog pack
In a crouch of spleen
Protectives, prophylactic as a milk
Machine. I lob a brown
Canister of lachrymose distent into
A cricket match, into a
Briary thicket, into a hedge
Breach’d by no fundable gull.
I sing with my knees.
Which is enough canvas-sleeved
Mannerism for anybody to accrue
To, taxes being nearly “due.”

Raymond Duncan (1874–1966), Ensemble, c. 1920

Branch and Spatter

Robert Duncan: “I find I am willing to falsify. It is only when the voice in writing lifts into the language itself speaking that the truth of the made thing presides. The feeling of what is false for me is the evident use of language to persuade.” I read that and think it admits to something like a willingness to use rhetorical ploys (necessary primitive constructs) in order to get aloft the big pontoon’d seaplane of language up off the still mountain lake (in which is reflect’d itself and itself only) and into a flying state stratospheric wherein it is able (“made thing”) to look askance, anew. That is, all writing exists only to increase the odds of flight, of primal lyric necessity, language declaring itself unaid’d and bursting. (The misapprehension of the wilderness arrived at by such means is exactly what leads the present moment’s constructivists to wearifying denunciations of the plausibility of such outbursts. One is remind’d of someone who, having never “achieved” love’s orgasmic rout—the very fact of considering it an “achievement” is telling—decides the ischemic amassing of a fat portfolio’ll serve equally well. Constructivism, by definition, disallowing the uncanny spastic gait of language jerking out of its own accord, muscular, contract’d by no one but itself.) It is, I suspect, what Olson meant in calling a poem or two of Levertov’s “measured, ‘made’”—a disappointment that something be abandon’d prematurely, disallow’d its flight, pieced out of tenuous thread, or thicken’d with flour—to harry the metaphors into a little frenzy—to make the “sauce.” (The Basque ligado or pil pil wherein a slow cooking of salt cod, olive oil, and garlic, sliding the pan in ceaseless easy circles, arrives at “a creamy, opaque, ivory-colored sauce” out of some alchemy of the fats in the skin of the cod—that’s what one’s writing must be capable of, whatever the initial “ingredients.”)

I get away. Some tonsorial need to trim down the Duncan reading with a little of the Kurlansky book about the Basques “just before sleep” asserts itself. “It quarrels with the tune of things,” as Duncan’d say. Everywhere in the letters the sense of ridding oneself of, shrugging off, the “approach” with all its ratiocinatory binds and boundaries. Duncan, whilst “balking at the submissiveness of learning,” claiming it “necessary to yield so to the language—not to use but to be used.” Levertov, echoing, quotes something out of one of R. H. Blyth’s volumes of haiku, the rather koanic “the aim of the explanation . . . is to make itself unnecessary. . . . the indispensible must be got rid of in order that the truth must emerge.” Duncan pointing to a Ginsberg poem’s failure: “the earlier ‘Xbalba’ that appeard in Evergreen: with the proposition ‘No construction—let the mind fall down.’ My sense that there could be a poem is whetted. But then there is no dis-construction in it—only lazy lines, loose talk that get looser and soon he’s asking ‘what love in the cafes of God’ which is both exalted and gassy.” Or, talking about “two days struggling with ‘Sometimes I Am Permitted . . .’ [with all the irony of the reference in the poem to the grace of writing at all],” and admitting “I mistrust the rationalizing mind that comes to the fore, and must suffer thru . . . draft after draft to exhaust the likely and reach the tone in myself where intuition begins to move. It comes sure enuf then, the hand’s feel that ‘this’ is what must be done.”

There’s talk about Zukofsky (who’d come, summer of 1958, to do a poet-in-residence / workshop in San Francisco, apparently Ebbe Borregaard attend’d, whose imprecisions and expansions Zukofsky “attempted to curb”) Interesting how Duncan points to Zukofsky’s mistrust of Pound’s “only emotion endures,” mistrust of “mythos, aesthetic fervors rather than reason” and failure to comprehend what Duncan calls “the governance of desire.” Duncan: “It robs a long work like A-1-12 of emotional proportion and hence of epiphany.” In a lovely phrase, Duncan notes how he finds in Zukofsky’s work “an area of sympathetic contrary.” “He is always puzzled by my allowance for dramatic rhetoric . . . and the pursuit of the fantasmal . . .”

—

In the mailbag, part of a conversation with Bobby Baird, who quoted some of yesterday’s gabble back—

It’s stunning (to me) to conclude (suddenly, revelatory) how a whole monkey’s offspring of poets norteamericanos never had to retype a whole page in order to change a single word. That kind of busywork’ll cut into one’s certainty and spill in a hurry, make for a jive consider’d gel, and not no whippet-thin dribble. (A corollary: how, in the age of ransackable “fonts,” the experience of seeing one’s work suddenly dignify’d by variable spacing (in a magazine, or book) is no longer available. One sees final product thrown indefatigably up against the flat screen soon’s the get-go, no chewable moment of transformation (introspection and regret) allow’d. Duncan: “I do love the solid print. One sees again, meets the poem anew (as if the typescripts then are suddenly freshend too—a book springs to the imagination)—”)

—not a word of which had I to retype, and noted—

This is obviously right for a wide swath of said poetas norteamericanos, but I do think there’s a fair number of youngish poets who do recognize the virtues of the busywork you mention in yr first point. I couldn’t name them offhand, but I’ve heard of people who grew up on computers reverting to typewriters for just that purpose. When I write poetry I do it longhand, to preserve / create some semblance of viscosity in the writing process. Not true for my fiction, which I more often compose by the paragraph than by the word or sentence, though I do sometimes fear that I’m losing a valuable step. My justification for using the computer so freely is that it makes it so easy to save multiple hundreds of versions of the same document, draft after draft after draft. But perhaps that’s missing the point: maybe it’s better to put all the mental / creative effort into the gap between draft 1 and draft 2 than it is to dilute that effort over a dozen drafts. Dunno.

And on your corollary point: when I do write on the computer I do it all in Verdana or some other ugly font in order to achieve just the effect you mention. I’d guess I’m not alone in this, but I’d be curious to know if you get other responses along these lines.

To which I reply’d in part—

That’s interesting, the ugly font, the saving multiple drafts on the computer (something that never occur’d to me), the possibility of retrieving old typewriters for that purpose. I think what initially made me think about typing in the letters is the repeat’d “I’ll send you my new poems soon’s I get a chance to type copies for you” on the part of both Duncan and Levertov. Which led to thinking about friends of mine in the seventies, typing draft after draft of things. (I was never very persistent with revisions, I’d scribble a bit on a good copy, type it again and be satisfy’d.) But it’s also true that once I got a computer (mid-nineties, in order to “put together” my dissertation), I start’d composing in longhand, whereas before I’d mostly work’d straight into the typewriter. Now I do a little of both, though mostly straight out New Times Romaning everything so the flaws are unspottable!

And part of Baird’s reply—

The ugly font trick was something that Annie Dillard taught me, and I think it works well. After working to make something as good as you can get it, you get that little extra “bump” just from the letters all fitting together so nicely in print. She’s also convinced that the computer has ruined the contemporary novel . . . and so has tried to convince all of her former students (of which coterie I’m a sort of ersatz member) to get themselves legal pads and start there. Again, who knows . . .

. . . I would be curious to hear if what others say, if anything, on the matter. I count myself as one of those people who’s always checking out other writers’ material writing arrangements, the arranging of which obviously has so little to do directly with the putting of pen to paper or finger to key but which also provides a kind of psychological balm, the necessity of which is never to be underreckoned.

I used—in the days of hand-setting books for letterpress at Ithaca House, lifting each single letter of a piece into the job stick like some uncertain Isidore Isou—to argue that that speed of assembly drew attention to a poem’s faults better than any other I knew. That it ought to be required work for poets. I would get halfway through the setting and printing of a book and begin to suffer huge doubts about its worth. (I did the typesetting, if I recall rightly, for only a few of the poems in the Ithaca House print’d Rubbing Torsos—off in France for most of that—and I don’t recall any particular spot revisions in doing so, though I recall thinking about it. Probably my sense of its being already not mine (the way books become) ’d kick’d in.) Anecdotal way of saying I’d entertain public “thots” on such issues should you want to write.

Denise Levertov

Tangle and Pond

One thing one is astound’d by in the Duncan / Levertov correspondence: the amount of typing and copying and re-typing that’s done. I suspect there’s a whole “study” there, how, freed of the constraints of the era of smudgy carbon paper, freed to Xerox, effortlessly, or “print out” copies—the poets norteamericanos got down to uninterrupt’d sheer overwhelm of producing nonstop a glut and battery of work. It’s stunning (to me) to conclude (suddenly, revelatory) how a whole monkey’s offspring of poets norteamericanos never had to retype a whole page in order to change a single word. That kind of busywork’ll cut into one’s certainty and spill in a hurry, make for a jive consider’d gel, and not no whippet-thin dribble. (A corollary: how, in the age of ransackable “fonts,” the experience of seeing one’s work suddenly dignify’d by variable spacing (in a magazine, or book) is no longer available. One sees final product thrown indefatigably up against the flat screen soon’s the get-go, no chewable moment of transformation (introspection and regret) allow’d. Duncan: “I do love the solid print. One sees again, meets the poem anew (as if the typescripts then are suddenly freshend too—a book springs to the imagination)—”)

One thing that makes the book—The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford University Press, 2004)—tug so utterly (again, up too late pulling off long swathes of its prose) is Duncan’s capacity and range—for self-inspecting, certainly, though, too, for going against impulse, against allegiance. He is not stingy, not astringent. Duncan’s own comparison of himself to Coleridge seems apt (he’s in Bañalbufar, Majorca, c. 1955, completely itchy for “talk”):

My notebooks are becoming deformd by the “ideas” which ordinarily I throw away into talk, invaluable talk for a head like mine that no wastebasket could keep clear for a poem. I can more than understand dear old Coleridge who grew up to be a boring machine of talk; I can fear for my own poor soul. And, isolated from the city of idle chatter, here, my head fills up, painfully, with insistent IMPORTANT things-to-say. I toss at night, spring out of bed to sit for hours, crouchd over a candle writing out—ideas, ideas, ideas. . . . Nor does my reading matter help—I have deserted Cocteau for a while because his ratiocination was perhaps the contagion; and the Zohar which irritates the cerebral automatism.

And, maybe more to “today’s” point, here in the miasma of a period style “set” (as concrete does) by the rampant perspicacity that accompanies our watchdog socius and our unleash’d panoptic technology, is Duncan’s fight with the “modern” day’s expectations:

Calling up too conflicts of poetry or too—impulses toward extravagant fantasy, my attempt to reawaken the “romantic” allegiances in myself—to Poe, or Coleridge, or Blake—are inhibited by “modern” conscience; I grow appalld at the diffusion of the concrete. It’s I suppose an impatience with my inabilities more than a conflict. The hardest struggle is to give up achievement . . . The desire to have imagination freed again, with the preconceptions from the ways it was free before. It’s to give that up, to be willing not to have the power and to explore then, powerless to be willing to work.

Which, in an “era” of “projects” and mutual aid writing assignments and constant tatting up of the rags and scraps of one’s “achievements”—is refreshing indeed. A month later Duncan is defending the writing of ballads (“for Helen Adam who herself writes nothing but ballads which horrify all aesthetic sense and subvert because they appeal to something just long enuf ago to have preceded values”):

I do not know why we are ashamed of fancy. Has imagination really won the battle? So: there was another determination in yielding to these pseudo-ballads, for the freedom itself from my own technical pride. Yet there is no pure invalidity possible. And both ballads in spite of my concept return like crows to the corpse of some experience. My sense for it is anyway to let the writing loose from its moorings if need be but to allow range; and now where it might happen above or below, nobly or ignobly to disrupt the personal. When you ask why I am writing that way or is it the right direction that all belongs to the me who is shaped, impelld, made as I make the poem. But the words and the poem are also all other and less or more than what we use them for or how we are used by them. The Ballads are no more nor less than a nurse reading by a fireside, a simple minded bogey rime. Almost immoral when we are lined up in the Armageddon of verse against form or poetry. But I don’t believe in this battle of the species. It is not a question of “no matter what” any more than any interest is; and it is the interest in, not the faith, that I wld. take as my clue.

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” is another way of getting there. As is a certain contempt for (distrust of) “style” itself:

Style is certainly a part of the whole act—not the whole. Style whatever it may be, may be also so general as to transcend identity. The particular of style that gives signature or value, I think courage might disregard and even, outgrow. You know, the Olson-thing; or the Duncan-thing or the Levertov-thing. We can certainly and do if we are passionately moved confound aesthetics.

Funny moment of Duncan referring to Olson as a “horse” (brought to the water of Levertov’s poems, water, apparently, by Olson, undrunk—he discount’d some as “measured, ‘made’” (meaning, lacking the vatic “blow”). Funny to see Duncan and Levertov looking at Ginsberg amd Corso as “the young.” Levertov—after a visit made by Ginsberg, Corso, and the Orlovsky brothers to her in Mexico—noting how “they cultivate loneliness & all else, till qualities lose their original wild robust character; lose their scent as some flowers do when gardenbred.” She sees a kind of collective fetishing of experience itself: “And then, the making of a mystique out of what they (individually & collectively) are; that seems to me adolescent. One wants to relate one experience to another, to perceive one’s experience [so] that it fulfills its weight & meaning—but they go beyond that & make every experience have more importance than it can carry.” Persistent feature of groupuscular behavior. Funny to read Duncan’s term (pick’d up, no doubt, in Majorca) for the overflow of poets in San Francisco: “a muchedumbre of poets.” Meaning, simply, a multitude, though obviously cleaving to something akin to idiocy in its anglicized shape. (Of all Duncan’s orthographic irregularities and tics—and I am a connoisseur and purveyour of such—the only one that “bothers” me is the insistence on writing “thought” as thot as if it rhymed with snot.)

Robert Duncan, c. 1962

Thicket and Fringe

Coursing the southeastern Michigan freeways—passing one boxy block of offices after another, the lamely landscaped kind found in “research parks,” nearly all with signage recent and intact—things like “Metaldyne,” “Omnisysmatics,” “Dynosync,” (they could house anything), all post’d “For Sale” or “For Lease,” sign, one suspects, of the trickle-down effect of the automotive industry’s NAFTA-inspired cold shoulder to the region—into one of the tonier suburbs of Detroit Saturday, the incongruously-named Beverly Hills, where’s found one Detroit County Day School. There for a performance by violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Akira Eguchi, playing Mozart’s Mannheim sonatas, K.301-306, under the patronage of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit. Shaham and Eguchi clearly in dynosync, enjoying making music together, Shaham a slender wisp of a man (one thinks clothes must always look too big on him—at one point, during a rather extend’d piece of piano, he seem’d to collapse a little, shrinking down into a Beckettesque character, perplex’d, lost, defeated, huddled in), Eguchi seemingly unbudgeable, a solid unflagging presence at the piano, though probably the shyer of the two. Shaham’s eyes move constantly, traces of smiles and grimaces come and go, occasional tiny violent shudders, caught between anticipatory glee and a shudder against the grandeur confront’d, lead to a fierce bow attack. Terrific to watch music itself stir a man so unremittingly.

And then, Mozart being Mozart, that is, essentially frivolous, essentially an entertainment (that distend’d rot courtliness of powder’d men precisely beauty-mark’d and ringlet’d ladies with pinch’d off waists, art in full-blood’d service to a royal elite is never far off) my brainbox, that tiny stage, began to, well, entertain other notions there in the smallish auditorium of the Detroit County Day School, with its parking attendants in yellow slickers with electronic flares, portably orange, its Lincolns and Buicks, its trotlines and drop-off circle for a matron society. And looking about, one is overwhelm’d by the crowd, its pure whiteness, its age (precariously “hoist’d”), its obvious richesse, its self-safisfy’d readiness for art in its guise of empty spectacle, a canned consumable with no rough edges. The single bouquet at the long Lincoln-mimicking high-sheen reach of the grand piano is impeccable. These are, one supposes, remnants of the executive class that’s long inhabit’d the suburbs of Detroit, not the newer white flight (professional-classes on down), but the old school. (Prefatory remarks by a man with a shock of white hair and the demeanor of a fraternity brother—perpetual boyish smirk at being on stage—representing something call’d Comerica Wealth & Institutional Management, a “sponsor,” being precisely the outfit that recently announced it’d be moving its headquarters to Texas, hauling its financial ass out of the trouble-spot that is Michigan.)

In the Green Room post-concert, gain’d entirely licitly (note to usher to Shaham, usher returning with a thumbs up, long story) after traversing an area that seem’d to lead to a loading dock, one encounters Mr. Boyish Smirk (ignored), lots of champagne (triggering powerful thirst), and two matrons who eye with obvious disapproval one’s jeans and jersey quotidian-invisibility-costume, with smudge-color’d anorak puffy in the surround. Bustily manoeuvring they corner’d me, patiently waiting to greet Shaham, with the inevitable mock-innocence covering threat of low-level violence: “Can we help you?” If only, dear reader, I’d had the wherewithal to ask for “one of those tall flutes of champagne there.” No, I bow’d to my explanatory tale in all earnestness and they had to put up with my malign (unsightly) presence in the room.

—

Variation on a Line by Emily Dickinson

Remembrance enters through the back
Door, unclarify’d and abrupt. It
Shakes itself off like a
Dog and tracks the linoleum.
Entirely of the moment, it
Cancels all other plans, impertinent
And slobbering in its need.
Out in the front yard
A pliable whippet launches into
A pitiable howl. It drags
Its chain through spring run-
Off mud, clanking against bone-
Ends bury’d all winter. It,
Too, wants inside, to rub
Its concert’d individual self against
The newel posts of an
Ascent, or an assent. Yes,
And doggedly, I admit it:
A whole canine clan’s corner’d
My thinking, there’s no telling
What pack one’ll run up
Against in the stray metaphorical
Night. I’d better mop those
Paw prints off the floor.

—

Sign, instantly decipher’d, of a weekend fraught with the usual tearings off omnidirectional. A hoot in the making, and a bitch to reconstruct. Or maybe the result of desultory ambivalent readings out of a chaos of books—Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World’s the one I keep keeping to—though Paul LaFarge’s Haussmann, or The Distinction put in a valiant bid for attention, too. Such choice flailings rarely say anything about the particular volumes in hand, it’s something mischievous, intemperate, willful, perverse: a sudden revulsion to the very words one is reading. Then, last night late, I hoist’d up the Robert Duncan / Denise Levertov letters and, supine, balancing it against my sternum, thought I could probably remain like that through its completion, such was my sudden readiness for Duncan’s particular way of keeping thought liquid, waterlogged, swole up, und so weiter. (One is shy about predicting a forthcoming intensity, one’s found oneself out in midstream stuck in a book whilst the frolics go down in the tributary waters, yes one’s found oneself . . .)

Gil Shaham

“Nature Morte”

POEM FOR A POET

Accuracy’s one of the many things one is liable for, coterie-back’d or not. Out here in the plains, black clouds bungling up the horizon, reddish specks of wild horses in the distant crease of canyon, the cottonwoods shedding stuff everywhere, we ain’t got no bunkhouse, and no tight-blanket’d bunk to bounce a Webster’s off. No collateral mesmerism. No hellbent radical sidewinder snake making inroads for the collectivity. No fucking movies. We shoot any rangy peckerwood what gets gabby. We—pshaw—that’s my broken chair way of talking. In lieu of the rain-color’d cordonings-off of mutually borrowable desires (so I hear), one hunkers in the dust where a peccary’s dump’d. Counts the excreta, and looks for the beetles that’ll deposit it in the endless implausible corridors of desert. Just how kids is. Unflaggingly, one attends to the act of looking itself, wholly uncharm’d by the latest carney-bark’d immediacy, unkempt by any standard. A Chrysler full of jimson weed tears by. A Kurdistan settler sweeps the earth with trailing black robes, imploring the cropdusters to return. A dust devil dervishes by, pokes out one fat finger, and drops in a heap of exhaut’d camaraderie. Thank God we’re not
all stuck in mid-Atlantic up on the bridge
of some big fucking boat, talking about beating
the tar out of one another, or hoisting a sextant
only to lop up against some New Englander
captain’s funny hat, invariably bobbing, and he
there holding a Zippo to a cork, about to
malign a tradition.
                                      All the waves move in one direction
a little slant off the way the boat’s point’d, climbing
up like hair raked up with a comb into a tease,
and unraveling, lacy spittle flecking the green. Gulls
teeter and wheel, and cry out with human voices. Miles
away where the sea capitulates to land, gypsy
men paw bare-handedly at the clattery shingle in fits,
scooping shallow pits for dead daughters who
fled to the disarming cities. A surge of wave is nothing, dangle-rope of sluttish allegory unattached. If you’re thinking my horseplay’s smudged my mascara, oh, maybe so, maybe so. One’s as liable here to fall into plutocratic wheezing about one’s first editions as one is to find a boy who’ll scrounge a whole knobby arm down in the brine to fetch the final pickle out the barrel. Impossibly late it is, the mendicants assemble, the auctioneer’s start’d that hebbedy-ebbedy stuff and the house confederate’s mentally tracking the path one enormous drop of sweat is making, armpit to hip. Consider yourself the house confederate. Consider yourself the mendicant’s ass. Epigone city is where we’re at, or I haven’t dirtied myself. After fifty, if a man still wants a truck . . . (Insert irony’s poky little ellipsis.) I ought to make myself clearer: the social is broken, a mold and a swerve, a distraction. There are those who cannot speak without (howsoever subtly) histrionic flagellant manoeuvres. There are those who cannot speak unless raptly engaging (howsoever deludedly) in the blunt exercise of power. There are those who cotton to whatever washes over the wash that washday. Somewhere Ashbery speaks of how child and pervert
Join hands, in the instant
Of their interest, in the shadow
Of a million boats
at the exact moment when hunger’s become “merely a gesture.” Beauty built of mete sundry inaccuracies about to topple. Mad semaphoric flag-waving. A permanent regatta slip barter’d off by the commissioner of the marina. Wildly formal dining off platters of crudités become a wildly formal dunning. My hunger, confederate, is solitary, inextinguishable, and brute, and sweeps by.

—

Thinking about Robert Frank. The late Mabou-made messes, collaged combos with writing—sick of / goodby’s and hold still—keep going—drip and smudge and tape. Objects invading the pictorial plain / plane. How to scribble in a piece of writing, how to cover up (barely, so drawing attention to) earlier sketches, thumbnails. (Jack Spicer lemons.) How to make contiguous frames enjamb, the butting up plain a plain rebuttal of the desire to include everything. Salman Rushdie says of Frank: “Looking at the Mabou pictures, I remember these lines of Virginia Woolf: A masterpiece is not the result of a sudden inspiration but the product of a lifetime of thought.”

Robert Frank, “Andrea, Mabou, 1977 (with Ship)”

Robert Frank, “Sick of Goodby’s”

A Wall (Mask and Razor)

I know Chris Martin almost solely through the fine editorship of the whimsically named (and present’d) magazine Puppy Flowers, having never come across any of a handful of chapbooks he’s got out via Bench Press, isabel lettres, and Angry Dog Midget Editions. So I alight on the newly in print American Music (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) with little preconception. A kind of readerly tabula rasa’d “stance” that’s somewhat rare, I’d think, and provides an emphatic boost to one’s eventual judgment, no matter the verdict. Here, happily, uh, “innocent”? Meaning, I think it’s a terrific book.

Martin is up front about finding a way to write, detailing in a piece of back cover copy how “One of the things that opened the world of American Music to me was plagiarism . . . In order to feel comfortable speaking from my own voice, I found it necessary to include the voices of others, I wanted, as Creeley said, to find company.” The kind of statement that, I find, is capable of boding the baddest of bad weathers in the form of moronic “sampling,” all mere technique and knowing nudge. Even in a finely word’d note that ends American Music—“Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship”—that precedes a listing of some of the “voices in the chorus,” I suffer ignoble presentiments (though I am buck’d up by the sheer variousness of names, Jean Michel Basquiat, Ed Dorn, Lyn Hejinian, Werner Herzog, Bill Withers, I Feel Tractor, Gaston Bachelard, &c.)

If I expect’d a jittery recording of acontextual voice, proceedings interruptus of hint and miss, what I read is entirely different. Martin’s voice is remarkably present, sardonic, toying, sheepish, mischievous, full of exceeding wonder—indeed, the “chorus” barely impinges at all. The poems are models of velocity and containment—they fly short-linedly down the page, they scoop together a whole range of things, worlds of simultaneity (I am thinking of Lyn Hejinian’s recent work model’d after the three-ring circus). Here’s one titled “Fertility for Dummies”:

Reads the book thankfully
Unread on the shelf, the glass
Gym across the park

Deserted, the tips
Of three of
My fingers have grown

Waxy, taut, things
Welling between the surface
And the bone as a lady

In an eggshell
Shawl pours over her
Copy of Southern

Accents only to lift
Her eyes from the page, lean
Across the table and leer

At me, increasing my ever-present
Paranoia that strangers
Can read the intimate portraits

I make of them and will any
Minute be thrusting
A sharp part of their body

Against mine and now snow
Has begun to flutter
And circle tentatively beyond

The panes like some Felliniesque
Spring wildly jumping
The gun, this Thursday

Languor could use such an Italian
Commotion, the impromptu
Bonfire flush against a sudden and cartoonish

Bosom, it is in
This way that my biology attends
To the shapes my looking

Constructs and I am here
To appreciate the manner in which
A smoking woman

Wades through asphalt, how
One building dwarfs
A larger one merely by the affect

Of its character, the way the boy
Impatiently cultivates
His inviolate sheen, combing

The grates with his eyes, his fists
Hidden but surely
Balled, not often am I

Prepared for violence, though I find it
Natural, in me as in
The world, and it remains

Revolting, the brief
Desire to trample something
Living, loving certain

Registers of collapse, tiny pockets
Bereft of grief, it reminds me how Henry
Miller spent three years

Inside a slide
Trombone and I have
Found myself too

Sane, and sullen, and suddenly
I feel just like Bonnie
Raitt on the cover of Streetlights

Her mouth unself-consciously
Open, a little
Question in her

Eyes as if
To say, “I am so
Full of this . . .

This . . . what is this?”

“What is this?” indeed. One thing it is, is one long sentence—an approach that is remarkably consistent in American Music, no more that atomized puncta of New Sentence-ry, that pointillism array of disparate particulars un-melding. Here, things are streaming, like video, and the operative words are as and while and and and and now. Time, like the sentence, knows no division, howsoever minute, and only the sweep of a gaze is needed to depict its monstrous variety, its untrammell’d fluidity. The short lines, initially cap’d, offer speed and keep one off balance: insistent short-term ambiguities made by line breaks (“a lady / In an eggshell / [half beat of miniature visuals] Shawl [readjusting out of pleasant fairy tale and into fashion lingo, seeing the word “eggshell” switch diction-allegiance, a small exhilarating ride . . . ]”) The poem registers almost indifferently, that is to say, without any strain whatsoever, the constant undercurrents of sexual unrest so formidably display’d in cities, and in language. The other thing that carries the piece is its careening big diction, demotic “Spring . . . jumping / The gun” to the brilliantined up (almost greasy in its preciousness) “the boy / Impatiently cultivates / His inviolate sheen.” I love it.

—

The aim to conquer by
Purely aesthetic means the ordinary
Range and surly pedigree of
The natural world is one
Common enough to merit little
Fuss beyond the framed up
Shakedown—a repeatable coulee-style
Washout—of its driest capture.
All the nodding relinquishment that
Is beauty, grandeur purloin’d by
Seizure’s fits and snatches, mechanical.
All tracery and bulk, mass
Itself providing impetus to art,
As if, without it, it’d
Sleek down timorous, beastly, pale.
That brassy farmland with creak
Of weathervane, that understudy land
Shoehorn’d in under a flotilla
Of high white nimbus’d clouds
Misses completely the spittlebug’s saliva-
White wad hanging in that
Green fork of timothy, misses
The scree of shale tipping
Down into the creek bed,
Misses the field sparrow with
A bill the color of
A thumbnail pendulum-wobbly atop
A sedge-stalk, and grub-
Traffic below in the tamp’d-
Down dead zone grassy intersticials
Where the ordinary fuss is.

Chris Martin

A Wall (Smudge and Seam)

In the terrific brütt, or The Sighing Gardens (Northwestern University Press, 2008), translated by Roslyn Theobald, Friederike Mayröcker’s “I” sits writing with both feet (“marled”) in a tub of hot water, and worries that her notes’ll slide off the table into it and be soak’d. Her “I” is “an abashed loser”—she reads Roland Barthes and comes across lines of Robert Musil, and compares her own writing against Musil’s “stylistic means” only to see herself “lagging far behind”:

. . . if I compare the soundness as well as the transparency of Musil’s language with my own, mine seems vague, frail, superficial, and incapable of casting real shadows, one of the prerequisites for good literature : as we are dealing with living objects of art, they have a shadow, but this must be proven in the practice of language, I say, the most difficult thing I say, is the use of verbs. . . . often, I say, not having the appropriate verb at hand, early signs of dementia, mentally underequipped, or there are these tiny PARASITES in my body (head), etc., probably monkey business.

It is recurrent, a sense of wrongedness, of charlatanry, of uselessness and doubt. Mayröcker’s “I” summons up Francis Bacon’s paintings (“I could always trust in him, I mean I could trust in the ugliness and stench”—she mentions in particular “Self Portrait, 1973,” and, surely, the legendary slovenliness of Bacon’s studio is echo’d in Mayröcker’s own note-clutter and -scatter, dross-toss, repeatedly), echoes Beckett (“we end up standing at 1 open grave or another again and again”), mimics Kitaj:

I certify myself a failure, from the earliest years of childhood on, I say to Blum, always shaping everything into inexact forms, awkward, mashed, disjointed, etc., I submerge myself in the painting by R. B. Kitaj “bather (tousled hair)” (1978), that’s the way I would always liked to have written, I say to Blum, write the way this picture was painted . . .

Though the book’s “about”—in a large sense—itself, its own coming into writing, there is a story “casting real shadows,” though splinter’d, disjoint: that of Joseph and Mayröcker’s (“I”) increasing fondness for, attract and repulse movements re: him (“I say to Blum, and my heart is no longer bleeding, when I think about Joseph, he has become a character made of cardboard, cardboard comrade, I say to Blum, maybe again, over and over again, inadequate my feelings, arrangements, judgments, I tramp through the deep snow in the courtyard of City Hall, looking for an the exit . . .”)

(The compulsion to continue that draws long and longer what intended to be shortish quotes, seeing how each additional clause torques the previous, as if each sentence were a word in the Basque language Euskera, an agglutinating language of about 200,000 words, whose vocabulary is monstrously extended by nearly 200 standard suffixes, simple enough concepts becoming words of formidable length, and precision—so with the Mayröckeresque sentence tailings ever extendable . . .)

“Joseph” is immoderately link’d to Mayröcker’s story of writing brütt (which is brütt itself), he is goad and rein both (just the way anyone’s writing out of love—or into love—provides marvelous focus, a spur and a guide, writing with enough heft for shadows, even when done in the midst of aleatory jamming, or constructivist duty, see Jackson Mac Low’s “Stanzas for Iris Lezak” for example). He is cause and prevention of the writing:

I say to Joseph, just imagine! suddenly I’ve uncovered : invented the beautiful art of storytelling, against which I’ve struggled so often and so long, weathered that is . . ah, I say to Joseph, what shall I do with my BOX OF WORKING MATERIAL with my paper with my impulsiveness, it will turn out all the same no matter what I do, the fine art of storytelling is a trompe l’oeil, pretense, and there is a spirit rumbling around in me, mad spirit that is always and again and over and over again resisting this contrary SEDUCTIVE notion of a systematic / rational writing process, right, I mean I am spitting into a folded sheet of grayish white writing paper, HAVE YOU COUGHED UP ANY BLOOD?, the doctor asks, I bend over my folded and ragged sackcloth and writing paper and say : strands of blood, I say, there are these life strands in blood, leave me my life strand of blood, leave me my devastation, my wild curses, the temptation to pitch myself out of the window, my viper’s brood, etc.

Against the “rational writing process” there is the expressivist trauma (happily, Traum = dream) of cough’d up blood, writing as life itself, not as a representation (shadow-throwing) of life. And a vigilant wariness of ruts, a fundamental distrust of falsify’d goods:

A few of us become nothing but ardent businessmen, I say to Blum, who are trading on the goods of their souls they created 2 or 3 decades ago, because there is nothing new coming out of their heads, isn’t that right, all they care about is making a profit on the product of their minds which they created 3, 4 or more decades ago, the venerable powers of the soul : fruits of the soul presented to man and to woman as fresh produce right, I say to Blum, but a soul won’t allow itself to be sold without exacting a price it’s not like a cow on the hoof . . .

A brilliant seeping hint of prophet-tenor there, completely viable (meaning, it’s an international malaise that, not just the finagle-ware of a number of norteamericanos).

I keep thinking of the line of Wittgenstein that goes When one does not force himself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed. One of Mayröcker’s stories, recurrent, is how she is rewriting—evidence of the rewriting erupts without notice, and wars with the existing writing. Mayröcker:

And now I am making a cursory flight through my first draft, I am overflying my first draft, it has escaped me, but maybe in this superficial way (of reading?) there are still a few glowing ravages, or something like that, which can be brought into final, into the final, I mean into a usable form, etc.

And elsewhere, complaining of “running amok in the underbrush of my own words”:

. . .that damned coda, I say, you shouldn’t even be struggling for it, there’s something unseemly about it, isn’t that right, I say to Blum, better to have everything end worn out, rotten, ragged, each and every sequence simply disintegrating, without an end point, without remedial icing, etc.

It is that open work (opera aperta) refusal to feint, to weave and bob and ensorcelate with puppetry, with shadow puppets, (that’d throw, surely, a reasonable illustrative patch out for one’s story’d construction and consumption) that keeps Mayröcker’s brütt so completely alive. Or one might think of it as florilegia and pentimenti, an overgrowing of text over text, mold circles, debris layers, a palimpsest.

Francis Bacon, “Self Portrait, 1973”
(“Under, next to, behind the chair on which he is sitting with legs crossed, a soot-colored (steaming) shadow is spreading out across the linoleum floor, most likely necrological abstinence or liquefaction the broad-faced wristwatch on his left wrist reads 10:30, our : his and my : yoke association, etc.”)

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992

Friederike Mayröcker, 1924-
(Photograph by Barbara Klemm)

Fork and Bin

The grocer aligns the oranges
In pyramidal rows, navels down,
And pierces one with a
Pin attach’d to a shiny
Placard announcing a price determined
By meteorological patterns and union
Labor stoppages, a tussle of
Indeterminables. It all, the grocer
Decides, comes down to pennies,
And the way the sun
Lights up the perfect regularity
Of the tiny mountain of
Oranges puts the ‘ill commixture’
Of economics to a test
It need not undergo. For
History, diploid twin, is embedd’d
Within that cargo of oranges,
A story of origins, how
A single orchard in Brazil
In 1820 witness’d an abrupt
Saltation, genetic leap and offertory,
Culminating in a large-globed,
Near seedless fruit with heritable
Characteristics. One single cutting transplant’d
To clement California in 1870
Begins a marketing campaign intrinsic
In twinning, mimicking the pyramidal
Arrangement, if only by considering
Its obverse, like any coin.

—

That’s the kind of thing that emerges in a few minutes of rush with the fire alarums sounding, some unofficial procedure for “testing” that requires a lengthy loud commitment, yow. Likely it suffers a kind of apparent monomania, the danger of getting going with one “thing” too long. Would that, say, Roland Barthes had drubbed into it some semiotic tensility, or Norman Maclean had upped the ante by stumbling by to wolf down a big sandwich made of Monterey jack and mustard. Winter’s lockjaw bite is back, tearing the eyes, clawing the cheeks, wind-whipping bicycle, all icy ruts and blades. I read another big gulp of the Mayröcker, decided, late, I’d only addle my own pate and those of my genial “crew” of readers (that is, me and my diploid twin, that ingrown homunculus there beneath the “big dome” of my skull) by rushing anything “further” about it into print.

Oranges Drying at a Co-op Packing Plant, Redlands, California, 1943

A Wall (Adhesive and Scar)

Reading Friederike Mayröcker’s brütt, or The Sighing Gardens (Northwestern University Press, 2008), translated by Roslyn Theobald. Part of the newish Avant-Garde and Modernism Collection series of that press—Haroldo de Campos’s Novas is, too—under the general editorship of Rainer Rumold and Marjorie Perloff. Mayröcker (b. 1924), long a leading figure of the German post-war avant-garde, and long associated with Ernst Jandl, publish’d the book in 1998: one figures it written by a seventy-plus year old Mayröcker.

In the form of dated entries, Mayröcker’s “I” considers a rather empty quotidian of sharp reveries and sporadic naps, books pick’d up and put down, letters written and received. The writing itself—syntactically skippy, with cherish’d oddments of emphases, or sudden OUTPOURINGS OF THE MAJESCULAR—is fleet and sidewinding (slurry) simultaneously, lashing out here and there to include whatever swings up out of the daily rhythm, the gone, the current, the wayward. It is punctuated by (drawn up into a temporal frame by) several stock epithets unchanging: “I tell Blum” or “I write to Joseph” or “X (or William or Ferdinand) writes to me” or “Elisabeth von Samsonow writes.” So the universe of the book becomes one of stories exchanged, or sentences exchanged, a language parade (and growing old, and writing). Though I mark’d innumerable terrific air-sucking lines (Mayröcker’s particularly good at implanting sudden fiercely piercing images, seemingly out of nowhere, completely odd), it’s likely that it’s the cumulative effect, the gentle assault that’s typique. Mayröcker:

I say to Blum: language history, I say, everything is language history, we just don’t want to admit it. Where options are left open to us, I say, where options are left open to us in a work of art, we start searching in vain for some kind of rules to follow, I misread the address of the sender, instead of Schillerplatz : Achillesplatz, I wonder if there is any kind of connection here?, I couldn’t tell, was that car in the dark coming toward me or headed away, instead of writing the address “München” most of the time “Mündchen,” it occurred to me early this morning that I’m trying for a kind of NOVELNESS in my most recent work, I am striving for NOVELNESS, whatever that means, I say to Blum, what do you think about the transitions in your work, a journalist wants to know, but I don’t know what to think, I tell him : this constant, I believe impassioned attitude of fantasy (and so not actual fantasy) is still an overarching influence, and saw tears on the amputated tree, glittering gold-colored tears of resin, I say, saw roses on tall stems, wilting robinias along the boulevards, the shrimp on my plate, that is the entire secret, or as Botho Strauß says : SUDDENLY THE END RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DRESSING ROOM . . but sometimes, I tell Blum, when I take stock of everything, in these miserable, barren hours, it happens that I find myself having to say : I have done everything wrong, I have lost everything, wasted, missed, I headed off in the wrong direction, maybe the AESTHETICS OF LANGUAGE, which has been at the heart of my work since the beginning, was simply the wrong goal in the earthshakingly monstrous times, oh, the composites did it to me, the composers, the strolling, as Elisabeth von Samsonow writes, in her mind she sees me the way I was strolling in her ocher-colored handwriting, an ocher-colored woman’s hand with red border around the wrist, offering me a small bouquet of spring flowers, now in the middle of autumn, I tell Blum, stars in bright colors, plump green stems cut in uneven lengths, bundled together with a double cord, long-legged out of water (climbing) . . .

Elsewhere I scribbled the comment that Mayröcker’s poems “remind me of Bernadette Meyer,” and add’d, “some remind me (sparsely) of Joseph Ceravolo, both, undoubtedly, false etymologies, skew’d impossible lineages. ‘Of the international graphomaniac tradition.’” I think of neither in the case of brütt, Ceravolo lacking the heft and pull, Mayer the dada piquancies—things like Mayröcker’s “scribbled down on small folded mauve-colored napkins, my little finger gliding like a ribbon of syrup across the empty page” or “my transit body is exhausted, I lie down on a sleeping mat, a lark is shooting salvos around inside my skull.” Though I do keeping thinking something like cette écriture féminine qui n’en est pas une, this writing that exceeds writing, all overlap and splash, uncontainable and there, all-encompassing in the same moment. Mayröcker’s approving quote of Bataille: “The wind outside is writing this book.” Or Mayröcker’s writing, in a kind of damning comparison?

I never write anything down, says Blum in a rather distant tone of voice, before I have thought it through completely and understand it, Blum says, language is a tumult, I say, like the senses, like ecstasy, clearly our libidos are controlled by our brains, isn’t that so, I say, last night’s housefly has gone back into action, a page full of scribbles . . .

Reminding me somewhat of Luce Irigaray’s argument for a “language in which ‘she’ goes off in all directions and in which ‘he’ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning”: “Woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere . . . The geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is imagined—in an imaginary [system] centered a bit too much on one and the same.”

And, because I found a copy of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (because one “character” in it is “Glenn Gould”) and’d been plowing around rather aimlessly in it, I found a passage by Bernhard that rather echo’d some of Mayröcker. He writes about how, after spending “six weeks in uninterrupted writing” about Glenn Gould, writing the book in hand:

In the end . . . I had only sketches for this work in my pocket and I destroyed these sketches because they suddenly became an obstacle to my work rather than a help, I had made too many sketches, this tendency has already ruined many of my works; we have to make sketches for a work, but if we make too many sketches we ruin everything . . .

Versus (and is the difference one of degrees, Bernhard struggling, in fact, to throw over the pre-knowing?) Mayröcker’s insistence that:

I MUST FORGET EVERYTHING in order to finish this work, you have to get yourself in harness, no enmeshed, once you get involved in a writing project a writing diktat, there is no going back, or everything will be ruined, isn’t that right, maybe it’s getting your claw hooked into the robe of language, you attach yourself, you get snared, you get snagged in language in the MATERIAL in the TEXTURE, etc., and in the same way language seems to get hooked, attached, it hooks its claws into us the moment we acquiesce, so, we lead we guide each other, in equal measure . . .

Vatic voice as claw in the lingual firmament, I do love it so.

Friederike Mayröcker
(Photograph by Doris Poklekowski)

“Robot Oil”

Thursday’s late afternoon fatigue and two bottles of Labatt’s production:

ESSAY ON “LA PAROLE DESCEND”

Days go by wherein the nub of flattery lies just
Perpendicular to the long damp crease of the random
Fit that flung that one leg out so to begin with—

So that: coquelicots blush savagely out across fields denuded of
Anything lush, or green, pockmark’d industrial flats
Where rust-gnaw’d tankers square off.

What I mean is, I doubt if intent’s got much to do
With style, though one’s fitfully pleased if the kids
Knotting up in bunches near the Tilt-a-Whirl—

Wholly against the crowd’s impeccably general
Erring—forgo a moment the mischief of
Dispersal, clandestine and relax’d. Stunning is

The one with bobbed hair, pert in a tomboy way,
With eyes darting, sliding off up into sky
Where the journeywork of the stars proceeds continuously,

Though invisibly now in the sprung trap of daylight.
Such is the way of style, the words eschewing
Mean particularity as they come down off the ladder

That goes up to the heavens. There isn’t a one
One wouldn’t trade against a bigger glee, cranial
Beast that one is. They are windows. They are rockets.

They orchestrate and blunt. They are not “as if.”
So the kids disentangle and disperse, each
Meticulous with indifference, wired for sound.

That field is no field. Derisory trees propped up in ironwork.
Somebody’s broken Leica discard’d by the curb. The Soviet terrier
By the name of Laika that went, strapped down, up into space.

—

A late morning dawdle, bicycle tire unrepair’d. Snow, one predicts, coming in the afternoon, two to five inches, back to boots. In Nazi Literature in the Americas, one of Robert Bolaño’s entries is concern’d with one Max Mirebalais, plagiarist (“he decided to spare himself the difficult years of apprenticeship”) and inventor of heteronyms. What “Max Mirebalais, alias Max Kasimir, Max von Hauptman, Max le Gueule, Jacques Artibonito,” born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1941, sees, is that literature, “a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, . . . can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.” So the Maxes (Artibonito, “composer and singer,” arrives late in Mirebalais’s career) proceed, thieving the works of obscure poets of various nationalities, each Max with a story (“All poets invent their past”), with their poetic labors:

The poets gained in depth; the differences between them became more clearly marked (von Hauptman the bard of the Aryan race, a fanatical mulatto Nazi; Le Gueule the model of the practical man, hard-headed and militaristic; Mirebalais the lyrical poet, the patriot calling forth the shade of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Christophe, while Kasimir celebrated négritude, the landscapes of the fatherland and mother Africa, and the rhythm of the tam-tams). The similarities emerged more clearly too: they were all passionately devoted to Haiti, order and the family. In religious matters there was some disagreement: while Mirebalais and Le Gueule were Catholic and reasonably tolerant, Kasimir practised voodoo rites, and the vaguely Protestant von Hauptman was definitely intolerant. Clashes among the heteronyms were organized (especially between von Hauptman and Le Gueule, who were always spoiling for a fight), followed by reconciliations. The interviewed one another. The Monitor published some of the interviews. It is not absurd to suppose that one night, in a moment of inspiration and ambition, Mirebalais dreamed of constituting the whole of contemporary Haitian poetry on his own.

Reading a recent Marcela Valdes piece that Peter Culley point’d out, one joins the clamour that Bolaño’s book of essays Entre paréntesis (Anagrama, 2004) be translated into English. One is wholly struck, in reading Nazi Literature in the Americas, by the extent of reference, the width of Bolaño’s angle of view, what must’ve been the voracious (omnivorous) quality of ’s reading, as the Valdes article confirms. Max von Hauptman copies “Fernand Rolland, Pierre Vasseur-Decroix and Julien Dunilac.” Max Le Gueule concocts poems out of works by, among others, “the Malien poet Siriman Cissoko and the Guinean Keita Fodeba, to whose works . . . [he] initially reacted with howls and later with trembling.” One entry refers to a writer one of whose works is “a text in which quotations from MacLeish and Conrad Aiken are combined with the menus of the Orange County jail.” For one writer, he constructs a wholly imaginary (and enormous) opus based on Arnold J. Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe. Into a book chock’d full of invent’d writers and artists, Bolaño’s fierce intelligence plugs an audacious number of real, and often somewhat obscure, references. (One admits to be rather appall’d by the seeming near-contempt some of one’s contemporaries and “elder spokespersons” exhibit for reading. Or wide reading. That it might, one supposes, “get in the way” of the writing. Judging by some lists, even prose fiction (in all its migratory genres) falls out into some ambient purview of the negligible, the unnecessary—to say nothing of history, or natural history, or art, or travel literature, &c.)

Laika

Hemostat and Vial

I read a goodly chunk of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 2008), another Bolaño translated by Chris Andrews. Blackly funny, and quickly limn’d. One of the marvels of Bolaño’s prose is the uncanny ability to catch character itself in the tiniest of summaries, without “resorting” to dialogue. Here’s a paragraph about Ernesto Pérez Masón (“Matanzas, 1908–New York, 1980” under the entry, the book’s structure is that of a reference work, with short biographies of the “major” figures follow’d by end matter—“Epilogue for Monsters”—that lists “Secondary Figures,” “Publishing Houses, Magazines, Places . . .” and “Books”—its mockery is somehow of the scholarly apparatus itself, the critical insistence on category, and the blind belligerences of the social “network,” the self-appoint’d groupuscular doctrinaire toute à la fois):

A rather atypical member of the group that formed around the magazine Orígenes, he maintained a legendary feud with Lezama Lima. On three occasions, he challenged the author of Paradiso to a duel. The first time, in 1945, the affair was to be decided, so he declared, on the little field he owned outside Pinar del Río, which had inspired him to write numerous pages about the deep joy of land ownership, a condition he had come to see as the ontological equivalent of destiny. Naturally Lezama spurned his challenge.

Perfect dry understatement. I love the echo of Erle Stanley Gardner / Raymond Burr in the name. One of the Cuban Pérez Masón’s novels is discover’d by the censors to spell out, by means of acrostics embedded in each chapter’s paragraphs, things like “LONG LIVE HITLER” and “USA WHERE ARE YOU” and “KISS MY CUBAN ASS.”

Elsewhere, Bolaño’s reference work engages in cover description and critique. Regarding a “little book . . . entitled Twelve, by one Pedro González Carrera (“all concur in affirming . . . that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull”), Bolaño says,

the cover, which was the author’s own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to light only after his death). The letters of the word Twelve on the cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, “Mom, I’m scared!” The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.

(Which, for all its malign cartoonery, might’ve been submit’d under the smarm-meter of flarf, no? Or would that be inappropriately “inappropriate.” Something about its obviousness, its boosterism of the poorly-made, the childlike, the obvious . . .)

Too, there’s Bolaño’s report of the critical response to a book by one “Andrés Cepeda Cepeda known as The Page,” who, himself, through a daily column whose “articles, ranging widely, like those of Dr. Johnson, provoked hostility and lasting resentment.” Predictably, “because of The Page’s notoriety,” the critics go after the book like a pack of dogs, “each trying to outdo the savagery” of the other:

Among the expressions employed were the following: prehistoric Nazi, moron, champion of the bourgeoisie, puppet of capitalism, CIA agent, poetaster intent on debasing public taste, plagiarist (he was accused of copying Eguren, Salazar Bondy, and Saint-John Perse, in the last case by a very young poet from San Marcos, whose accusation sparked another polemic opposing academic followers and detractors of Saint-John Perse), gutter thug, cut-rate prophet, rapist of the Spanish Language, satanically inspired versifier, product of a provincial education, upstart, delirious half-blood, etc., etc.

Etc. Precisely. That endless stream of epithets, publish’d, publishable, or not, divots kick’d up by the number of horses coursing the “field.”

Or there’s Willy Schürholz, born in 1956 in Colonia Renacer, Chile (“literally ‘Rebirth Colony’), a completely self-sufficient community wherein “the ethnic origin of its inhabitants” is “without exception, German.” Schürholz, sent off to Santiago to study agriculture, discovers poetry. Bolaño’s brilliant assessment and conclusion:

He had what it takes to fail spectacularly: even his earliest works have a discernible style of their own, an aesthetic direction that he would follow with hardly a deviation until the day he died. Schürholz was an experimental poet.

And, too, the resultant initial mad enchantment of the groupuscule that embraces Schürholz’s “experimental” doings:

His first poems combined disconnected sentences and topographic maps of Colonia Renacer. They were untitled. They were unintelligible. Their aim was not to be understood, and certainly not to secure the reader’s complicity. One critic has suggested that they indicate where to dig for the buried treasure of a lost childhood. Another maliciously surmised that they show the locations of secret graves. Schürholz’s friends from the avant-garde poetry scene, who were generally opposed to the military regime gave him the affectionate nickname The Treasure Map, until they discovered that he espoused ideas diametrically opposed to their own. The discovery took some time.

Schürholz ends up, perfectly, a “guide for German tourists” in Africa.

Roberto Bolaño, 1953-2003

Five Years

Cold rain ongoing, with just enough wind to slant it up into the down-dragging physiognomy. Denuded, the streets. All the winter’s collect of debris exposed. Flat tire on the bike, a regular spring riddle. Cold enough the crows gather to spatter the walks in the Law Quad, its little stone replica of some pedigree’d arrangement in England, Oxford or Cambridge, who remembers? Night yesterday took me off to viddy Bruno Monsaingeon’s 2005 film Glenn Gould: Hereafter, and listen to Monsaingeon’s stories of Gould. Prodigious feats of memory. Marathon sessions of talk. Too, Gould’s “For me, the presence of people is a distraction” and the rejection of the company of “artists,” comparing such to the “apes of Gibraltar,” each one endlessly attempting to climb up higher on the rock than any of the others. Gould’s large black and white English setter named “Arnold S.” after Schönberg. Gould’s excellently lopsided head, ears drawn out of two different job lots, pointing in separate directions, teeth in tilt and lean, crooked. (The comforting ’fifties, last era before orthodonty made every smile the same.) Everywhere that fierce hermitry: “To be incarcerated would be a perfect test of internal mobility.”

—

And, out of “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould” (1974), Gould insists he’d “plump for a zero-to-one relationship between audience and artist”:

I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public—and let me get on record right now the fact that I’m not at all happy with words like “public” and “artist”; I’m not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology—that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with—or, better still, unaware of—the presumed demands of the marketplace—which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of “public” responsibility, and his “public” will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

—

In the new volume of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, a monumental (or “big”) thing call’d Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton University Press, 2008), one finds the “Forword to Some Trees by John Ashbery,” written by Auden in July of 1955 and publish’d in March 1956. Some vague recall of seeing some lines out of the piece quoted, though few. I know the copy of Some Trees I own—print’d by Corinth Books (1970) with a Joe Brainard limn’d suburban landscape looking as if it’s going green against the pinkish cover—omits it, wisely. Frankly, the thing reads for the most part as if Auden’d not a shed vestige of what Ashbery’s up to—he circles around endlessly wielding a pedant’s club, rehashing some watery version of the days of poetry’s alignment with ritual, with the sacred. All, one supposes, to differentiate between the “golden age” heighten’d reality of “myth” and the debased “now” of the “particular, the individual, the secular”:

Only concrete particulars seem real, and all concrete particulars seem equally real. Some may be brute fact without meaning beyond their occurrence, some may have a meaning known to God but imperceptible by us, in some we may perceive their true meaning, to others we may attribute a false meaning, but none of all this has anything to do with their reality. Human experience of time is an experience of a succession of unique moments, each of which is novel and will never recur. We may find one such moment uninteresting, we may forget it, but we cannot deny its importance, or if it had not existed we should not now exist.

Which seems rather a little like verbiage running out of its own accord. Auden next summons Rimbaud, who (apparently) discover’d that “the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions,” in “a numinous landscape inhabited by demons and strange beasts.” Which allows Auden to treat the “Mexican town” of Ashbery’s piece “The Instruction Manual” as one of Ashbery’s “holy places” (“Every imagination has its holy places but they are its private property.”) He quotes some lines and, while recognizing the “historically real but profane situation” of “doing hackwork for his living” that trigger’d Ashbery’s lushly present’d gaze at (“experience of”) Guadalajara, insists the memories be “sacred,” and the imaginative act one that “celebrates the inner mythological life.” Which seems to miss something like Ashbery’s “tone” (gently mocking) completely. (Is that precisely what all members of the “old guard” miss in reading the “new guard”?) A curious (and rather funny) Auden paragraph:

Reading this, I who have never been to Mexico nor wish to go there translate this into images of the happy life drawn from quite different cities. In this case, it is perfectly easy to do so, but even in the simplest case communication between poet and reader is indirect, demanding an active re-creation by the latter which ancient poetry with its public references does not.

Reveries of a lost seamlessness. The textual notes to the piece do recount the story of Auden’s not finding a manuscript worthy of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize that year “for the second year in succession,” and prints a letter to Eugene Davidson “at the Press”: “What bothers me particularly is that a young poet (John Ashbury [sic]) whom I know personally told me he was submitting a manuscript this year. I have reservations about such of his poems as I have seen, but they are certainly better than any of the manuscripts which have reached me. I don’t know how or by whom the preliminary sieving is done at the Press, but I cannot help wondering whether I am receiving the best.” Apparently it was Chester Kallman who “championed Ashbery’s work” and, in fact, got a copy of Ashbery’s manuscript to Auden in Italy. No mention here of Frank O’Hara. One notes that Auden suggest’d that Ashbery “adopt a less general title than just Poems” and “suggested as an alternative Some Trees.”

Glenn Gould, 1932-1982

Some Clouds

Jonathan Williams: “I write poems that are laconic as pebbles, so when it comes time to write prose I like to pull out all the stops and do a lot of throat-clearing and ground-pawing, like Anton Bruckner, another rusticated, mountainous person.” That in a preface to a book of essays and reminiscences of Edward Dahlberg he put together. Strong sense of foible and pose.

—

In a letter to Guy Davenport in April of 1965, writ in “Carmel, Caliph”:

      I have Mr Getz and Mrs Gilberto on the stereo playing the “Desafinado” and other pleasures. The night is young, etc. The bourbon is full, etc.
      Well, anyway to get you off a brief epistle before I answer a rancorous letter or two from the likes of several literary fatheads: Mr Dahlberg, Mr Patchen, Miss Levertov. God, what a shit-eating task it is, trying to publish poets. In the Next Life I’m going to be a pro-tennis player and get miles of California ass.

A brief period of raucous correspondence in the late ’sixties, Davenport’s address’d to “Mon cher Cast Iron Lawn Deer Owner of America,” or “Basho San” or “O Catulle de la Caroline du nord,” Williams in the habit of beginning “Cuz,” “Cud’n,” or “Cousin Blue-Grass.” After Davenport writes deploring a state of crowdedness (“Attribute all my remissness to the fact that I cannot get a moment to myself: moments in which one might draw, or answer letters, or even work. I long to be a hermit . . . Robinson Crusoe is pure myth; no one has ever been so fortunate”), Williams replies (“Dear Cousin Cruise-So,”):

Hermitude, like bliss, is pleasant to imagine since, surely, neither exists for more than fifteen minutes. Which, just as surely, makes them both so attractive.

—

Jonathan Williams on writing and reception, after a stew and gallimaufry of names of predecessors and contemporaries (“my ears don’t fall off and my stomach doesn’t curdle when I hear names like . . .”), pointing to the poems collect’d (“down from 1,450”) in Jubilant Thicket (Copper Canyon, 2005):

I would like to venture to say they are “monastic” and “tramontane.” They have been written in the Pennine Dales and the Appalachian Mountains, and their principal cohorts have been a few good and bad Brits and Yanks, Shortia, Dog Hobble, Bluets, timber rattlers, pileated woodpeckers, rowan trees, the Greater Bell Flower, Bear Garlic, and peewits. Most of American life is quite beyond me. It’s just too scary, except for the pitching of Greg Maddux. Let me quote Basil Bunting . . . : “Readers are not what one writes for after one’s got rid of the cruder ambitions.”

—

In a self-penned note about the author (Jubilant Thicket), after noting the life at “Skywinding Farm near Highlands, North Carolina and Corn Close, a seventeenth-century stone cottage in Dentdale, Cumbria, England” shared with Thomas Meyer and a cat “whose slaves they have become”: “Not a bad thing. They lead an aesthetic, monastic life in the tall weeds—not a bad thing, either. The Literary Life is far away. That’s good, too.” Duty to stray animals, scorn for the capitals.

—

Richard Owens of Damn the Caesars ’d mention’d several months back how he intend’d to put together an issue about Jonathan Williams and I bark’d out how I admired the essays and much of the poetry and how he, Williams, got bagged in the clothes of a publisher too often, and Owens encouraged me to put down something about the essays and I did nothing, or did little (is there the scratch of a note here?) and slunk off guilty-tail’d never wanting (“able”) to do the devoirs assign’d (“too hemmed in”).

—

Jonathan Williams to Basil Bunting with Thomas Bewick insert’d abruptus, a fine constellation indeed:

THE TERRIBLE KNITTERS OF DENT FABRICATE A NATALITIAL FRAGMENT FOR THE ACROSTICAL MISTER BUNTING ON HIS 70th BIRTHDAY BY THE TYNE, MARCH 1, 1970

Building a poem: the first requirement is to have good quoins.
A line and a rule would guide a fool, a saying runs.
Set off right or you can’t finish a roof—or a poem or a life.
In order to addle a living, set off in the dark for the far fells,
Loaf and some onions for food, built two roods a day.

Bewick was one; you, another—able to wall the gap in the tradition,
Unerring in the words to use for walling poems—
Not difficult for a man with good hands and a straight eye.
The wisdom of keeping a headstone in the parlour to carve in winter
Is obvious, like swallowing lots of tea when there is any.
Note: “The work should be simple,” say the Poem-Masons of Swaledale.
Good poems, like good walls, stand 60 to 100 years and never budge.

—

On the cover of Williams’s Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting (Gnomon, 1968) is a square-ass’d kine, a Bewick bull. Did I see that it’d been pull’d direct off an original Bewick boxwood cut? I think so. Therein Williams and Bunting talk about poetry readings, Williams looking to find a means of getting a little money for Bunting:

BB: . . . I don’t really have anything to say to anybody. I don’t think there is anything to say about poetry. If they’d be content to listen to me reading my poetry, I’d be very pleased.

JW: Most of the poets that tour are just there to read poems and engage people a bit. That’s about all, except to suffer the slings of idiot Pope professors, flat tires, terrible food, and sullen poetry-lovers.

And hearing—maybe wrongly—a telltale note of affection for the idiocies of the Pope professors (“slings”—saying, life’s too short and we is but monkeys, as in “’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or as one “Butler Jenkins, Caretaker,” puts it in “Three Sayings from Highlands, North Carolina”:

you live until you die—
if the limbs don’t fall

Basil Bunting Photograph’d by Jonathan Williams