Isola di Rifiuti

Edith Sitwell Notes

2012-02-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

Edith Sitwell, c. 1927
(Photograph by Cecil Beaton)

One oughtn’t, apparently, go athwart Dame Edith. If critic F. R. Leavis, in the wake of Sitwell’s 1930 Collected Poems, hinted that “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than of poetry,” Sitwell herself seemingly kept up a retaliatory poking at Leavis for the next thirty-odd years. In the 1964 “Preface” to Sitwell’s autobiography Taken Care Of, when she talks of “the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters,” Sitwell makes certain the harangue occurs in the vicinity of Leavis’s name. More needling in the autobiography’s pages:

It is both instructive and pleasurable to study the works of those living critics whose ears, long as they may be, seem not to have been constructed for the hearing of poetry.
Dr. F. R. Leavis’s pronouncements are a constant pleasure to one. For one thing, he has a transcendental gift, even when he is writing sense, of making it appear to be nonsense. With this, he has a genuine, natural and cultivated gift for wincing—which, from time to time, makes him resemble a ruthless, yet graciously antiseptic young dentist discovering the root of the trouble and explaining it to the patient.

And there’s the question of Leavis’s Milton:

But happiest of all is the moment when we read Dr. Leavis on the subject of Milton, whom he decided to show up in his magazine Scrutiny. He has decided that there is very little of interest to be found in Milton. The sound of a great deal of Milton’s poetry, too, affects Dr. Leavis much as the sound of a motor bicycle affects my less sensitive nervous system. “We find ourselves . . . flinching from the foreseen thud that comes so inevitably, and, at last, irresistibly; for reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting, of standing up against the verse-movement, or subduing it into something tolerable like sensitiveness, and in the end our resistance is worn down, we surrender at last to the inexplicable monotony of the ritual.”
This thunderbolt is followed by a lot of the usual wincing and whimpering about “sensitiveness” and by an analysis of the following passage:
The hasty multitude
Admiring enter’d, and the wórk some praise
And some the Architect: his hand was known
In Heav’n by many a Towred structure high,
Where Scéptr’d Angels held their résidence,
And sat as Princes . . .
It is sad to see Milton’s great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis’s mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels.

(That line about camels dating back to a 1933 letter to Geoffrey Gorer: “Scrutiny is still affording me some innocent joy. It is all that mincing about which pleases me so much, together with the camel-like bobbing about rhythmically with which Fr. Leavis endows Milton. He makes Milton’s lines move just like a fleet of camels.”) To love, too: the indexical entry for Dr. Leavis found in Sitwell’s Selected Letters (1970):

Leavis, F. R.: makes Milton move like camels, 46; E. S. accused of plagiarizing, 47-9; as Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 48; not important enough for blurb, 168; Russian lunatic promises to bother, 185; eccentric referred to, 194; E. S. must stop teasing, 203

Odd charging of seeing with auditory heft in Sitwell, as if visibility spoke (sound like “a fleet of camels”). She quotes Bacon’s Naturall History (is it simply the “Beames” that recall Ronald Johnson?):

“The Species of Visibles,” wrote my collateral ancestor Francis Bacon, in his Naturall History, “seem to be Emissions of Beames from the Object seen, almost like Odours, save that they are more Incorporate.”

Sitwell’s comment: “So should be the sound of poetry. And from my earliest age, these Emissions of Beames came to me from all the objects I saw.” And quotes a line out of Chaucer (“Wyf of Bathe”): “Al was this land fulfild of faëry.” As if seeing’d become a matter of capturing auditory emissaries. So, too, when quoting some several echoing lines out of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”:

Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,
Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of gold.
Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin, glitt’ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dyes,
While ev’ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene’er they wave their Wings . . .

Sitwell’s comment would seem to locate all the world’s animating force in sound: “The changes in the movement are caused . . . by an incredibly subtle and ever varying arrangement of alliteration and of vowel-schemes, these latter stretching the line, making it wave in the air, heightening it or letting it sink.” Sitwell, quoting St. Bernard:

“The Word,” wrote St. Bernard (Cantico, Sermon 74), “has sprung in me more than once: if It has entered frequently, I have not always been conscious of Its arrival. But I have felt even the forerunning of Its entry.
“Whence did It enter my soul? Whence did It return on leaving me? What is the place of Its entry? . . . It does not enter through the eyes, for It is not a colour; nor through the ears, for It is not a sound.”

Here Sitwell adds a drily pertinent note: “Here the experience of the saint and the poet differs. The Word, for a poet, does come as a sound. But one from far away.”

Ronald Johnson’s “Six, Alas!”

2012-01-31T06:41:00.000-08:00

Edith Sitwell, 1887-1964

Lately alerted to Ronald Johnson’s “Six, Alas!”—a circa 1990 Chicago Review-published “toast to six women writers, hardly unknown but alike disregarded at present by fashion”—with its deftly considered applaudissements. For Edith Sitwell (“in England I was prepared for many an incomprehension, but the blank wall set up against Edith I always wanted to leap over and set up a ruckus of quotation”), Edna St. Vincent Millay (“No other poet I recall has been so acclaimed then so eclipsed. Within a decade Eliot had made her old hat”), Louise Bogan (Johnson quotes Bogan’s clipped and pertinent verdict regarding “the practice of lyric poetry”: “The chances of getting away with pure fakery within it are very small. One cannot fib—it shows, one cannot manipulate—it spoils. One cannot apply decoration from the outside; or pretend that non-feeling is feeling; or indulge in any of the lower-grade emotions, such as self-pity”), Stevie Smith (“As to technique, she was as unselfconscious as Blake about jarring sense into song. For those who never heard her, the poems can seem ungainly on the page, though when she read aloud they could stick in the ear like Tin Pan Alley”), and Lorine Niedecker (“We admired each other’s poems, though we never met. Shy, she liked it that way, for most attention, other than letters, made her too self-conscious and awkward, she was so unused to it. She’s likened by her readers to Emily Dickinson, not only for this, but for her plain wry dignity with every word.”) The sixth “alas”—Johnson’s opening is a remarkable paean to the way we lose things, alas—some unjustly, others not so—and the need for looking, and selecting:

We all like to believe, as readers, the sands of time might part to show landmark authors, shining a new horizon. It is part of our myth that straw for the bricks of Modernism might be threshed from things like Pound’s exasperation with Sordello, his fascination with Provençal poets’ reiteration of sounds, from Eliot refurbishing Donne for the pantheon, and the unwrapping of fragments of pure Sappho, forgotten, from minor Egyptian mummies. Though every time has its winds—in truth there is not an Ozimandias under every dune.

The sixth “alas” is Elizabeth Bowen, allowing Johnson both to quote the terrific opening to Death of the Heart (“That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam”—Johnson’s remark: “Indelible, that “down which swans in slow indignation swam”—a frieze with all the swans’ neck s’s held in rhythm’s sway”—critical sentence-ry mimicking what it addresses) and to defend the capacity of prose, too, to “make the stone stoney” (Shklovsky). Johnson:

Our first read-through of Shakespeare makes any defined border between poetry and prose a quicksand. Later, we might make the distinction that whereas poetry is always visible, like stepping stones on a page, prose is more like water you swim through. First from Flaubert and Joyce, then Henry James, I began to see prose might be also word by word, and phrase after phrase, actually physically enjoyable as poetry, something to read and re-read for itself. And that this might include many before and in between Sir Thomas Browne and Elizabeth Bowen.

One begins to comprehend how Johnson’s own work ranges so effortlessly along genres, visual poetry’s distinct markers to “watery” prose poems. And, noting the humble incisings of Johnson’s criticism, the deft grace of its modesty—oughtn’t “the age” have demanded more of it?

Johnson’s “Six, Alas!” sends me off to the derided (F. R. Leavis apparently opined: “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than of poetry”—a remark probably more apt for some of “our” own current Twittering marketeers) Sitwell’s “Some Notes on My Own Poetry”—Johnson calls it “a text to shove alongside Charles Olson’s Projective Verse and Louis Zukofsky’s anthology A Test of Poetry.” A sample:

At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
The great architect, Monsieur Le Corbusier, said that, as the result of the Machine Age, 'new organs awake in us, another diapason, a new vision.’ He said of persons listening to the sound of certain machinery that ‘the noise was so round that one believed a change in the acoustic functions was taking place.’ It was therefore necessary to find rhythmical expressions for the heightened speed of our time. . . .
There was a great deal of opposition to the revivification of rhythmic patterns. But even the greatest of all rhythmic patterns, those not made by the hand of Man, have been misapprehended. The otherwise great mind of Bishop Burnet, who died in 1715, was so seriously disturbed by the unsymmetrical arrangement of the stars that he rebuked the Creator for His lack of technique. ‘What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made,’ he exclaimed, ‘if they had been placed in rank and order; if they had all been disposed in regular figures . . . all finished and made up into one fair piece, or great composition, according to the rules of art and symmetry.’
We must not complain, therefore, if the patterns in the humble works of Man are not perceived immediately by the unobservant.
Therefore, to rebukes and protests, I returned the answer, ‘God comfort thy capacity,’ and went on my way.

(“A ruckus of quotation.”) Devilishly sly stuff.

Omnidirectional Unpreparedness

2012-01-30T06:43:00.000-08:00

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, 1783-1840

Two days of conducting myself out and back across the snowy reaches like a projectile in the night, sucking down the long skittish and cock-eyed slants of my own lights, their coldly inebriant draughts making reverie itself word-bound and prevaricatory (Williams: “Though the eye / turns inward, the mind / has spread its embrace—in / a wind that / roughs the stiff petals—”). Meaning: unpreparedness, no penny in the slot. So I am stuck here about to deliver myself up to another unconsidered round of what Kenneth Burke somewhere calls “versificationally primping”—that nowhere junket. (Horace Walpole, in a letter dated 28 June 1760, writes to cousin Henry Seymour Conway: “Now you have a whole summer to yourself, and you are as junkettaceous as my lady Northumberland. Pray, what horse-race do you go to next?”) Horse-race after horse-race. One thinks of the rabid and omnidirectional energies of the nineteenth c. naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. I love the candle-bearing beetle episode reported by John James Audubon. The violin-destroying collecting method. Out of the Ornithological Biography):

It was summer, and the heat was so great that the windows were all open. The light of the candles attracted many insects, among which was observed a large species of Scarabæus. I caught one, and, aware of his inclination to believe only what he should himself see, I shewed him the insect, and assured him it was so strong that it would crawl on the table with the candlestick on its back. “I should like to see the experiment made, Mr. Audubon,” he replied. It was accordingly made, and the insect moved about, dragging its burden so as to make the candlestick change its position as if by magic, until coming upon the edge of the table, it dropped on the floor, took to wing, and made its escape.
When it waxed late, I shewed him to the apartment intended for him during his stay, and endeavoured to render him comfortable, leaving him writing materials in abundance. I was indeed heartily glad to have a naturalist under my roof. We had all retired to rest. Every person I imagined was in deep slumber save myself, when of a sudden I heard a great uproar in the naturalist’s room. I got up, reached the place in a few moments, and opened the door, when, to my astonishment, I saw my guest running about the room naked, holding the handle of my favourite violin, the body of which he had battered to pieces against the walls in attempting to kill the bats which had entered by the open window, probably attracted by the insects flying around his candle. I stood amazed, but he continued jumping and running round and round, until he was fairly exhausted, when he begged me to procure one of the animals for him, as he felt convinced they belonged to “a new species.” Although I was convinced of the contrary, I took up the bow of my demolished Cremona, and administering a smart tap to each of the bats as it came up, soon got specimens enough . . .

By my lights, offertory enough to saddle up (or wing out), and make my escape.

“In pulses, in strokes . . .”

2012-01-27T07:03:00.000-08:00

George Santayana, 1863-1952

Doodling. Somewhere William Gass says “and” is a “sunderer”: any conjunct a wedge keeping distinct the objects it attempts to join. “And then went down to the ship”: Pound beginning the Cantos with a temporal rip. Pulling the long adhesive strip of the poem down off the expanses of confusio, that ongoing continuum of aimless voicings. (Some found within.) “Þerfor was clepid þe name of it Babel, for þer was confoundid þe lypp of all erþ.” Out of the Wycliffe Bible. “The lip of all earth.” Lip meaning “language”—recall the idiom of the sass police: “don’t give me any of your lip!”Williams’s Babel being the Great Falls of the Passaic: “The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking and my search, as I looked about, became to struggle to interpret and use this language. This is the substance of the poem.” And:

(What common language to unravel?
. . combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock’s
lip.)

And:

I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself—
comb out the language—or succumb . . .

Hardly doodling. There’s a reply (dated “Grand Hotel, Rome, 4, I, 1941”) by George Santayana to a letter by Ezra Pound (reproduced in Machine Art and Other Writings) that may be apt. Santayana, after dismissing Pound’s doodle-covered verbiage (“vide diagram”) with a rebuke gently put for being, I suspect, merely honest (“I can’t reply to your suggestions and diagrams because I don’t understand them”) writes:

Existence comes in pulses, in strokes. I see no reason for not stopping, or for stopping, anywhere in that flux. Existence has as many centres as it happens to have, as many moments[,] feelings, assumptions, questions—all in the air and with no power over one another. But if we have time and patience to study a natural world, posited as the source and common continuum in all this existence, we assume that it has dynamic unity: otherwise from one point in it we could never justly infer or posit any other point in it. This is my argument for materialism.

One recalls, in Paterson, the “tabular account of the specimens” found in the “Artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson” that Williams places directly en face excerpts of a hectoring and condescending letter sent by Pound (“Enny how there must be / one hundred books (not / that one) that you need to / read fer yr/ mind’s sake. . . . & nif you want a readin / list ask papa—but don’t / go rushin to read a book / just cause it is mentioned / eng passang—is fraugs.”) Williams’s counter list. In manuscript, Williams specified that the excerpts “occupy a full page, as it stands—facing the page following,” that lovely “description of materials”—“Fine quicksand, reddish . . . Pyrites . . . Sandy rock, under quicksand . . . Dark red sandstone,” &c.—confronted at various depths by those doing the boring of the substratum for the well. “Existence comes in pulses, in strokes.” And Williams (adducing energies beyond the mantric usual “No ideas but in things”):

I see things, . .

—the water at this stage no lullaby but a piston,
cohabitous, scouring the stones .

And Gass: “‘And’ is produced initially with an open mouth, the breath flowing out, but then that breath is driven up against the roof, toward the nose, even invading it before the sound is stoppered by the tongue against the teeth.”

Williams’s Stray Essays, &c.

2012-01-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

Williams Carlos Williams, c. 1951
(Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

In the Williams number of Perspective (1953) is notice of “two new books by William Carlos Williams in 1954”:

Mr. Williams has just signed a contract with Random House to print a 50-page book of his latest poems. This book is scheduled for early next year.
Next summer a volume of his collected prose will be published. Its probable title: “Essays, Addresses, Criticism, Reviews—The Shorter Prose Pieces of W.C.W.”

Intent evidently narrowed (or notice inflated): Random House releases Williams’s Selected Essays in 1954, hardly a “collected prose.” In 1985, New Directions prints the James E.B. Breslin-edited Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, labeling it the initial volume in the “William Carlos Williams archive series.” Even a casual leaf-through of Emily Mitchell Wallace’s 1968 Bibliography of William Carlos Williams uncovers a goodly number of uncollected prose pieces, some nigh-entirely fugitive (see the 1937 essay called “The So-Called So-Called” in The Patroon, a magazine out of Teaneck, N.J., accompanying a “demonstration” poem titled “The Girl (With Big Breasts)”), some traceable with little difficulty (see Williams’s Villon note in the Anthony Bonner-translated Bantam paperback edition of The Complete Works of François Villon—“Published February, 1960, at 50¢; 80,000 copies printed.”) Isn’t a complete “collected prose” of Williams long overdue? Here’s one item—not scarce, but somewhat overlooked, Williams continuing the attempt to define “objective”—out of the William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson-edited Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1938):

A Note on Poetry

The American writer, insofar as he is child of the Anglo Saxon tradition, uses a language which stems largely from Elizabethan England but which has been modified by time and the accidents of place to acquire a character differing greatly from that of present day english. For the appreciation of American poetry it is necessary that the English reader accept this language difference from the beginning.
Its effects are discernible in many ways. Pace is one of the most important of its manifestations. This is particularly significant in versification since it is the direct forerunner of poetic form. It is by paying attention to the character of the spoken language that form is detected in its beginnings and later refined for exact use.
By listening to the language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of his imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. Thus anything that the poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material. Anything. The commonplace, the tawdry, the sordid all have their poetic uses if the imagination can lighten them. This broadening of the choice in the materials of poetry has great modern significance; there is an older parallel to it in painting, where by dwelling upon light itself the artist has often drawn many otherwise unsightly objects into his works.
Emotion clusters about common things, the pathetic often stimulates the imagination to new patterns—but the job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic. In my own work it has always sufficed that the object of my attention be presented without further comment. This in general might be termed the objective method. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain; it presents.
But an image is not a poem, for that would leave the language and the form of the poem at loose ends. A poem is a whole, an object in itself, a ‘word’ with a particular meaning old or new. The whole poem, image and form, that is, constitutes a single meaning. This is the full meaning of the term ‘objective’ as I employ it.
Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the spoken, the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination, depriving us of its greatest benefits. In the forms of new poems will lie embedded the essences of future enlightenment.

Accompanied by the poems “Peace on Earth,” “The Bull,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “The Sea-Elephant,” “Rain,” “The Botticellian Trees,” “Nantucket,” “The Red Lily,” “This Is Just to Say,” “The Yachts,” and “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.”

Dogged

2012-01-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535-c. 475 BCE
(Painting by Johannes Moreelse, c. 1603-1634)

“Dogs, too, bark at what they do not know.” That according to Heraclitus (according to Plutarch). Crows blacking up the tree’s reaches, iniquitous flowers of the damned, refusing to bloom. Tourniquets in the limbs. Cawing foolishly. Making dog noises. (Plutarch assigned to Heraclitus, too, a remark about “the Sibyl with raving mouth” who “utters things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed,” and whose “voice carries through a thousand years because of the god [who speaks through her].” One commentary reads in part: “just as the Sibyl’s power comes not from herself but from the god, so Heraclitus’ authority is derived not from his own person or opinions but from the cosmic logos in whose name he speaks: “listen not to me but to the logos.” Jack Spicer city. The breakdown: “The point is that words are not something which in themselves are anything but Lowghosts, instead of the Logos. Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else’s head, just as memories are, various other pieces of furniture in this room that this Martian has to put the clues in . . .”

Kenneth Burke, writing to William Carlos Williams in a letter dated 14 February 1947 (opening, “Dawlink, be my valentine”): “Some years ago, I suffered from a most damnable symptom. When I read certain words, I would ‘hear’ totally different words. I recognized the word as it was, but at the same time I ‘heard’ this other one. And apparently this outlaw word would always be the same. (Though I know I had something here, I was really too frightened to encourage the dislocation by taking notes on it. Rather ‘waste’ it, I thought, and try to kill it, than ‘cultivate’ it, perhaps to my permanent confusion. But I do, in spite of my resolve, remember one such outlawry, such dissociate association: every time, in the newspaper, I read ‘industry,’ along with this word, I heard ‘insanity,’ just as clearly as though it had symptoms of the same sort: I would wake up in the night, for instance with the suddenness of a shot; some word had been spoken, and this word awoke me. And then something would occur which I can best suggest by calling it a zigzag flash of lightning. For of a sudden, spontaneously, I would remember a whole series of ‘connected’ things (things that I had never before thought of as connected, or often things I had not remembered at all, but that seemed ‘connected’ from the standpoint of this ‘key’ word that had awakened me). The zigzag might connect, for instance, something that had happened yesterday, something I had written in a review, something I had said in an argument or as a wisecrack, some hitherto unexplained response to another person, something out of my novel, something out of my childhood, etc. On these, too, I started to take notes; and then I quit because the symptom was increasing—so for months I resolutely refused to take a single note that thus occurred to me spontaneously . . .”

Out of Spicer’s “A Textbook of Poetry” (“It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, ‘The public be damned,’ by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them . . .”):

6.

The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.

Seeking experience for specific instances, drawing upon the pulp of the brain and the legs and the arms and the motion of the poet, making him see things that can be conveyed though their words.

Or disbelief too. Seeking experience for specific instances. And in the gradual lack of the beautiful, the lock of the door before him, a new Eurydice, stepping up to him, punning her way through his hell.

They won’t come through. Nothing comes through. The death

Of every poem in every line

The argument con-
tinues.

Stupendous gaffe of the Martian commandant: “. . . things that can be conveyed though their words.” Triggering the oscillatory ruse: “conveyed through their words” and “conveyed though they’re words” in alternant survey and exam. “Define ghosts as an India-rubber eraser created to erase their own past . . .”

Incessant Flux

2012-01-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

Great Falls, Paterson, New Jersey
(Photograph by Mark Hillringhouse)

Tired of scratching at the midden-
heap to pull out some ready
bit of usable debris or delectable
chunk of supposed commonality, I chop
green cilantro ‘coarsely’ and throw it
into a pot of canned cannellini
beans and cumin-smeared chicken, ‘expert
in home-cosmography.’ I am surrounded
by books, relics of the incessant
flux of novelty into the world,
useless imperturbables of the sweet constant
juddering . . .

The beginnings of something. Maybe. Riding along a wave of sluggardly dilatoriness and deferral, doing anything but. Reading Paterson

in which a falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls—and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated

—“rumor / unabated” being precisely what is found in books, hearsay crudely limned, snatches and forays “at” the world, little anticipatory nothings, din subsumed by itself. (I think of Roman Jakobson’s line in “On Realism and Art” (1921): “verisimilitude in a verbal expression or in a literary description obviously makes no sense whatever.”) Recent tendency to long to shove words—unfixed, petulant words; foot-dragging adherents to “meaning”—its obstinacy and inflexibility; suborned words; loosely clumped and vasty words—aimlessly about against the dull torrent of sense. Paterson:

Texts mount and complicate them-
selves, lead to further texts and those
to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it.
Until the words break loose or—sadly
hold, unshaken. Unshaken! So be it. For
the made-arch holds, the water piles up debris
against it but it is unshaken.

A line out of Langland’s Piers Plowman: “The erthe quook and quashte • as hit quyke were . . .” The seemingness and pretence of making a word “break loose”—shucking off its verisimilous “quyke”—not unlike the juddering of the “erthe.” Paterson:

“The 7th December, this year, (1737) at night, was a large shock of an earthquake, accompanied with a remarkable rumbling noise; people waked in their beds, the doors flew open, bricks fell from the chimneys; the consternation was serious, but happily no great damage ensued.”

Or (out of the Marcia Nardi letter): “living (unsafe living, I mean) isn’t something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake . . .” Williams’s sense of the earth: source and rumor-monger, immovable movable ongoing, ceaseless (futile?) chatterer against the “din”:

And standing, shrouded there, in that din,
Earth, the chatterer, father of all
speech . . . . . . . .

That at the end of Book One, succeeded only by the late-added note (out of John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets) concerning the “deformed and mutilated verses . . . called Χωλίμβοι or ἴαμβοι σχάζοντεσ (lame or limping iambics)”: “Deformed verse . . . suited to deformed morality.”

“Speech is the fountain . . .”

2012-01-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003
(“I am the last man alive to have heard Ezra Pound’s impersonation of Henry James.”)

Shreds of fog low to the ground. The weekend’s snow in messy retreat. A distinct sense of “nothing to say.” Or “nothing left to say.” The overweening high timbrel of the thinking helmet busted off. (Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid: “The portratour of armes was mysknaw, / All war bot Grekis tymbrallis at thai saw.”) Took by Kay Boyle’s remark c. 1932 concerning form, its lack. Reported by Williams in a letter to Boyle:

You say: “Some kind of poetic form has to be found or I’ll go crazy. I can’t go on taking what you (and others) make possible and beautiful. I think I’ve got lots to say in poetry and no, no, no form. Lousy—loose—no punch—no shape—no agony of line like the back-side or a lovely thigh or whatnot.”

Williams’s initial reply: “Precisely.” With, somewhat predictably, renewed call for a turn toward speech: “there can no longer be serious work in poetry written in ‘poetic’ diction. It is a contortion of speech to conform to a rigidity of line. It is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists undiscovered. To go back is to deny the first opportunity for invention which exists. Speech is the fountain of the line into which the pollutions of a poetic manner and inverted phrasing should never again be permitted to drain.”

Stasis and fallowness eighty years down the road. (Or, say, forty years along, measuring off the exceedingly contra-Williams oomph of Robert Grenier’s 1971 “I HATE SPEECH” declaration, breach-mark of what adherents love to call “the turn to language”—mannerist sclerosis in the making . . .) My sense of form in the current period: oddly, a thing hardly considered, viewed as inapplicable, hardly a cumbrance or a concern, simply a non-issue. The available mish-mash—organic form’s slovenly offspring stepping out with the gauds and baubles of worn-out New Sentence accessories—that’ll do. (That’ll have to do.) Lack of formal investigatory means or desires. Form second fiddling to content: replaced by evacuatory gush dependent on mere excess, replete with a newly codified abject. Isn’t there every sign of a mostly form-vacuous neo-confessionalism at work un peu partout? See, say, Ariana Reines’s tawdry narcissisms.

Williams, out of The Great American Novel (1923), that irascible and undainty spoof, earnest in its spoofing:

Bah. Words are words. Fog of words. The car runs through it. The words take up the smell of the car. Petrol. Face powder, arm pits, food-grease in the hair, foul breath, clean musk. Words. Words cannot progress. There cannot be a novel. Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them—Awu tsst grang splith gra pragh og bm—Yes, one can break them. One can make words. Progress? If I make a word I make myself into a word. Such is progress. I shall make myself into a word. One big word. One big union. Such is progress. It is a novel. I begin small and make myself into a big splurging word: I take life and make it into one big blurb. I begin at my childhood. I begin at the beginning and make one big–Bah.

Geoffrey Grigson, in a 1952 review in Poetry, called Williams’s work “poetry of the incessant ticker-tape.” (One wonders if Philip Whalen’s formulation of the poem as a “picture or graph of the mind moving” or as “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines” owes anything to Grigson’s offhand metaphor?) Williams himself, writing to Kenneth Burke (in a letter marked “Rome, March 26, 1924”), admits (and protests): “Yes, my Gr. Amer. Novel never found a beginning. It was that I must have wanted to say. And that’s how you get me, one of the ones with that in him that I am after. It’s got to be said to be read. I am trying to speak. To tell it in the only way possible, but I do want to say what there is. It is not for me merely to arrange things prettily. Oh purple anemones! (you get what I mean? I mean ‘Shit.’ But I’m through with that now. No more “shits.” It is dead, that kind of slang.)”

Williams’s enormous doubt, and doubt’s vacillatory burdensomeness. Hugh Kenner—in 1953, in “A Note on ‘The Great American Novel’”—notes how “the American language, or the part of it that interests Williams, is distinguished by a sort of amnesia:

Though their colloquial vocabularies are restricted, their syntax simple, and their speech-rhythms the reverse of Ciceronian, Americans don’t utter a gelatinous Basic English. They have rhythmic and idiomatic means of concentrating meaning in these counters, shifting the burden of the sentence with a certain laconic grace from word to word, which falsifies the unthinking novelist’s assumption that the way to extract the unuttered meanings of American experience is to assist these pidgin gropings with the fuller cadences of European prose. European prose, when it attempts to grapple with American material, yields nothing but suave cliché.

Kenner quotes the “European voice” at the beginning of Chapter XI:

Eh bien mon vieux coco, this stuff that you have been writing today, do you mean that you are attempting to set down the American background? You will go mad. Why? Because you are trying to do nothing at all. The American background? It is Europe. It can be nothing else . . .

Kenner’s argument: “This mind”—the European one—“thinks in phrases, not in words: the upward lilt between its punctuation marks is the signature of a habit of apprehension shaped by Latin prose. A European would have imparted a more elegant rhythm to the answering sentence, which comes with Williams’ own unmistakable flatness: As far as I have gone it is accurate.”

Small fogs in retreat. “Pretense to integrity an empty shell.” Bah. A cur’s defiant intent (“nothing to say”) to avoid, at least, inaccuracy.

Machinery

2012-01-20T07:57:00.000-08:00

“It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room.”
(Out of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships . . ., London, 1726)

One degree morning. Thinking machine’s lubricant nigh-solidified. One obvious point de repère. Williams, The Wedge (1944):

To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

There’s Williams, too, “An Approach to the Poem” (1947), refining the note: “. . . it is a small (or large) mechanism or engine, as Saintsbury said, composed of words to do a certain job.” And adding, “as a forewarning”:

. . . it is an engine that needs continual redesigning in each period of the world so as to increase its capacity in order to refresh the world (if possible) in each period by conceiving the world anew . . .

(Hard to figure exactly what particular, if any, Saintsbury reference Williams is recalling. In a 20 June 1947 letter to Kenneth Burke, prior to attending a writers’ conference in Salt Lake City, Williams reported “reading Saintsbury’s Manual of English Prosody in preparation for bouts with [Allan] Tate who will be also at Utah—so’s not to be caught with my pants too far down on technical matters.” Saintsbury’s usage of “engine” seems mostly to mean “device”: “certainly that powerful and dangerous engine, the pause, comes into play here,” “Pope’s other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology,” &c.)

—

Machined. That ongoing reverie of some “Contrivance” by means of which “the most ignorant Person . . . with a little bodily Labour, might write Books in Philosophy, Poetry . . . without the least Assistance from Genius or Study . . .” Donc, Jonathan Swift’s writing machine in Gulliver’s Travels:

It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.

Operated: “Pupils . . . took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed . . . Six and Thirty of the Lads . . . read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes . . .”

—

Pound, out of “Machine Art” (1927-1930):

The Form

The necessity is to keep one’s different ideas from barging into each other.
In looking at any machine one must sort out the essential parts from the parts that merely happen to be there and which keep an assemblage of machines in more or less fortuitous relation to each other. . . .

Objections to Machines

Objection to machines has probably disappeared from all, save a few belated crania. No machine ever interfered with a man’s personality or damaged his liberty. Machines were made to eliminate work and produce leisure. Overcrowding, bad placing, bad ventilation of work rooms, all these results of greed and ineradicable human stupidity may have done harm, but can not be blamed on the machine. Machine products have been ugly but even the parochial aesthetic knows by now that this is due to human stupidity and not to machines; the same result has occurred in handwork, painting, music, whenever the worker or artist has gone in for flummydiddle instead of proportion.

—

Beckett, out of Molloy (French, 1951 / English, 1955):

. . . I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? . . . It was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen . . .

—

Gunk in the gearing. Williams (“An Approach to the Poem”):

When the form has been completed, when it has at last flowered, it begins at once to become sclerotic and has to be broken down once more to the elements—elements, as when English first differed from Latin and Greek, as when Italian grew from Latin and Dante adopted it . . . The elements were new—opening new realms of feeling unknown to the earlier languages.
Everything has to be broken down, not cynically, not without a deep sense of its old dignity, to get at the essential: the formal unit in its purity (that has been tied into now partially meaningless configurations by old languages) . . .

Alan Halsey’s Even if only out of

2012-01-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Alan Halsey, c. 2006
(Photograph by Peter Griffiths)

The initial piece—untitled, suddenly there—in Alan Halsey’s Even if only out of (Veer Books, 2011) reads:

white persimmon
pianissimo
white persimmon
pianissimo
without permission
pianissimo
pianissimo
white persimmon
without permission
pianissimo
without permission
pianissimo

Pure relishing of plosives and sibilants severally arrayed. Lip stretches and ear exercises for the goofy heck of it. Somewhere out beyond Gertrude Stein territory, aimless tonguing of a virelangue “without permission.” I think of Ashbery’s remark about O’Hara’s poem called “Poem” that begins “At night Chinamen jump / On Asia with a thump”—how O’Hara, “in the academic atmosphere of the late 1940s” is “amusing himself, another highly suspect activity”—and concede that the current “atmosphere”—caught among the aggressive fatuousness and terminal ironies of flarf’s knowing “humor,” a hybridity all self-consciously a-bristle with the worn-out marks of “experimentalist” doxology, and the determined excesses of Cambridge-sycophancy gibberish (to point to only three areas of earnest) may, it too, warrant the “activity.” Anything for a—O’Hara again—“sign that people do not totally regret life.” Here, in Halsey’s work, a ludic sensibility is combined with a nuanced sense of literary history, an easy-in-its-skin bookishness without idolatry, what Halsey himself calls the work of a “logoclast”—to break the too-serious word, to twit the dogmatic:

A Logoclast’s Lost Weekend

A live ideal dead
vade mecum or linger,
singer: disappointment’s
only one of the reasons

to feel discouraged.
‘He wrote against’
that is
he opposed both manner

and matter and expressed
as much in the margin.
Another showed
‘adequate charisma’

but it was after all
October. Just as
limousines to
limestone are but

vacuums to a beach
the wide sum denoting
misprinted wisdom
is less roused

than Rousseau’d.
Just as also and
without less love
his dearest said

‘Your prodigious
knowledge of
books is
incidental.’

Adherence to the trappings of the bibliographic—or faux-bibliographic. See the wonderful “Mercurialis the Younger: Fragments translated from the ‘Fortunatus’ Codex with an Exegesis” with its scholarly apparatus intact: one sequence of fragments reads:

IV

[ ] anticipates—
[ ] antiquates—

V

stinks of Black Sea herbs—chants
from a Thessalian hymnbook—
spends all day at the gym
watching that wrestler with the moustache—
cheeks the colour of pistachio—
the same Sibylla I [ ]

VI

‘the One which inclines toward the One
is the One without before or after’—
Posthumus’ new treatise
comes free with a bottle of Avernus water—

The corresponding exegetical notes:

IV. The most corrupt fragment in this codex. Does it suggest that knowledge of the future would give the present the status of the distant past? M was rarely so philosophic and would have been no admirer of the Four Quartets.
V. The last words have been knifed from the MS. Would anybody censor a phrase such as ‘once loved’? An obscenity seems the likelier provocation. The ‘Black Sea herbs’ and ‘Thessalian hymnbook’ imply that Sibylla hoped to win her wrestler by spells. Perhaps these also required ‘pistachio’ make-up but there is an ambiguity: the complexion is possibly the wrestler’s.
VI. A fragment so obscure it must speak for itself. There are references in the Annales Anticyrae to Posthumus’ Lectures on Plotinus but no text survives.

Against the (presumably) invented works of Mercurialis the Younger, see Halsey’s reworkings of Martial in “Some Versions of Martial.” Gists and piths. Here’s one:

[1.3]

Go, little book.
To read your dirty bits
in Bohn’s edition
London 1860
if they don’t know Latin
the English will teach
themselves Italian.

That expertly parsing what Walter C. A. Ker renders thus:

Would you rather dwell in the shops of the Potters’ Field although, small volume, my bookcase stands empty for you? You don’t know, alas, you don’t know the superciliousness of Mistress Rome; believe me, the crowd of Mars is too clever for you. Nowhere are heard louder sneers; young men and old, even boys, have noses tilted like a rhinoceros. When you have heard a deep “Bravo,” when you are throwing kisses, up you will go, shot heavenward from a jerked blanket. But you, to avoid your master’s constant erasures, and the scoring of your playfulness by his critical pen, are eager, wanton one, to flit through the airs of heaven. Go! fly! yet you might have been safer at home.

Or see how Halsey reduces nine lines of Martial [4.89]—cringingly rendered by Ker—“Ho, there! Ho, there! . . . enough, my little book. We have now come to the very end: you still want to go on further and continue . . . &c.”—to:

Stuff it, little book. Self-love
won’t prolong your shelf-life.

Succeeding in shelving the “literary” (along with its “Ho, there!” littérateurs) right up there next to the grocery’s can of corn. (See, too, Halsey’s deft limning of the seventieth epigram of Martial’s Book X: “I’ll tell you why I’ve written so little / this year, Potitus: I spent a whole / day at a literature festival.”) A final Martial, without commentary, too tempting to relent:

[11.16]

Even Bohn translates this one
but in pussyfooting prose. I didn’t say
the gent had his ‘desires aroused’
I said he had his hand in his fly.
The girl was certainly ‘not without emotion’:
her knickers were wet. But Lucretia
did hide my book when Brutus came in
and picked it up again when Brutus went out.

Included, too, amongst much, in Halsey’s Even if only out of: ten additional pieces for the terrific Lives of the Poets. St Robert Southwell, John Aubrey, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, Laetitia Pilkington, Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood, George Meredith (“I may take strange leaps and eyeing the English public / be a Dd. Dd. Dd. difficult Box Hill donkey”), Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. Here’s the one for memoirist Laetitia Pilkington (c. 1709-1750), erstwhile wife of the Church of Ireland priest and poet Matthew Pilkington (Jonathan Swift’s report: “a little young poetical parson, who has a littler young poetical wife”):

Laetitia Pilkington

pretty pert Highness of Lillyput always a-breeding
She was taken in the fact by her own Husband
Dear Worry I could pluck the holy Furr from off his Back
I had every Day some new Story invented of me
in Poetical Stock-jobbing a distrest Noun Substantive
frolicksome Farce of no Fortune but my pen
barebit and gnawn Madam Pill-Kill-Tongue
under all the Rubbish of her Misfortune
would as soon write against as for herself

Pertinent lines out of Pilkington’s Memoirs:

These Facts are so publickly known, that for the Evidence of them I could produce even a Cloud of Witnesses, were it necessary.
And yet, who that beheld this Man, clad in holy Vesture at the
Altar, appearing like white-robed Innocence, with Eyes up-turned to Heaven, could believe him capable of all Manner of Crimes;
Perjury, Perjury in the highest Degree!
Cruelty, Cruelty in the sternest Degree.
He may, indeed, like Richard III prove himself by these to be a Man; who, when his Mother upbraids him with his manifold Acts of savage Tyranny, she says,
No Beast so fierce, but knows some Touch of Pity.
Rich. But I know none, and therefore am no Beast.
And, indeed Mr. Pilkington may again say with him, that he has nothing
But the plain Devil, and dissembling Looks
To back his Cause.

Oh that Ithuriel’s heav’nly temper’d Spear
Would make the Fiend in his own Shape appear,
Or pluck the holy Furr from off his Back, and let the World, for once see what the Inside of a wicked Priest is made of.

Extraordinary concocting of disparates there, nigh akin to Halsey’s own. Pound’s adage regarding “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective” keeps imposing itself in my thinking about Halsey’s work, its carefully appointed assemblings and alignings. Done with humility and empathy for the grand range of human foibles (even those of the overly-ambitious, the earnest, the corrupt) So that another Pound extract comes to importune my reading of Halsey, aptly asserting its “forméd trace”: “nothing matters but the quality / of the affection— / in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind” (Canto LXXVI). Palpable in Even if only out of.

Neologisms in America (Stray Notes)

2012-01-18T05:40:00.000-08:00

John Ashbery, c. 2010
(Photograph by David Shankbone)

All my thinking about neologisms seems invariably to return to John Ashbery matter-of-factly reporting (in a poem titled “Qualm”) that “Warren G. Harding invented the word ‘normalcy,’ / And the lesser known ‘bloviate,’ meaning, one imagines, / To spout, to spew aimless verbiage.” Claims devilishly (humorously) inflated into likelihood, but apparently untrue. According to the OED, citing a Norwalk, Ohio newspaper, one Peter P. Low, Esq., planned to bloviate “with open throat” regarding farm taxes, that in 1845, roughly twenty years prior to poor Warren’s earthly arrival. (Though Harding did, in 1920, pluck the term “normalcy” out of mathematics—or, more likely, butcher the customary mot “normality” in announcing America’s “present need”: “not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.” Spewing, that is, “aimless verbiage” like any politico.)

I suspect that such baldly self-assured “spewing” is likely how any number of new words arrive, honking forth unanticipated, up out of the edges of sense, or of use. (When Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day makes one of the Chums of Chance say: “Think, bloviators, think!”—I like to think he’s not only regaling the lavish miasma of the American lingo in all its sempiternal “chaunge and mutabilitye,” but that he’s nodding, too, in Ashbery’s direction, if not Harding’s.)

Ashbery, with a particular ear for slang, demotic root of the new, says, too, of Harding: “He wasn’t a bad egg.” Ashbery’s 1975 poem “Mixed Feelings” is listed in the OED as a source for the lovely resurrected ’thirties slang word “nerts”: “Aw nerts, / One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.” And sure enough, in a wholly annoyed 1935 letter to Ezra Pound—who’s beginning to spout the insupportable verbiage that’ll put him in detention in St. Elizabeths—William Carlos Williams writes: “Nerts to you.”

Is it Benjamin Franklin who offers a model for American writers regarding neologisms? In a letter to David Hume (dated 27 September 1760), he seems to vacillate between nodding agreeably to some dubious Old World standard of clarity (and class) and defending a feisty New World demand for new forms:

I thank you for your friendly Admonition relating to some unusual Words in the Pamphlet. It will be of Service to me. The perjorate, and the colonize, since they are not in common use here, I give up as bad; for certainly in Writings intended for Persuasion and for general Information, one cannot be too clear, and every Expression in the least obscure is a Fault. The unshakeable too, tho’ clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new Words where we are already possss’d of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong, as it tends to change the Language; yet at the same time I cannot but wish the Usage of our Tongue permitted making new Words when we want them, by Composition of old ones whose Meanings are already well understood.

Franklin points to German and Latin precedents for compounding, and offers a terrific example: “For instance, the word inaccessible, tho’ long in use among us, is not yet, I dare say, so universally understood by our People as the Word uncomeatable would immediately be, which we are not allow’d to write.” Sign of the slipperiness of the emergent neologism: Franklin’s uncomeatable (out of William Congreve’s 1694 comedy The Double-Dealer: “My Honour is infallible and uncomatible.”) is unlisted in both Dr. Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary and the considerably revised 1773 edition, though somewhere Johnson opines that it is “a low, corrupt word.” One begins to think new words, like new styles of dress, begin with the lowly, the homely, the disjecta, and ascend. (I was once instructed to observe the odd dress and accessory quirks of the commoner prostitutes along the rue St. Denis in Paris if I deigned predict what the haute couture houses would offer the next season . . .)

Henry David Thoreau, inventor of the sound-mimicking honk (an amateur ornithologist, he added to the written record, too, the bird names veery—“A North American thrush . . . also called tawny and Wilson’s thrush” reads the OED, though every Peterson’s field guide uses Thoreau’s term—and flicker—a species of North American woodpecker)—Thoreau, too, insists on the homely origin of words in a Journal entry dated 16 October 1859. Beginning with the claim “the roots of letters are things” (predicting Williams’s later formula of “No ideas but in things”) Thoreau writes:

Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as “Americanisms.” It is the old error, which the church, the state, the school ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to tradition. A more intimate knowledge, a deeper experience, will surely originate a word. When I really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimack, shall I continue to describe it by referring to some other river no older than itself which is like it, and call it a meander? It is no more meandering than the Meander is musketaquidding. As well sing of the nightingale here as the Meander. What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufacturers? Have we not the genius to coin our own?

Thoreau’s tongue is only half in cheek. The Musketaquid being the indigenous name of the Concord, the “grass-grown” river, whence Thoreau descended toward the Merrimack and heard—and named, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)—the bloviate-loud flicker: “The wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the citizen, and when the flicker’s cackle is heard in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought little change here.”

How timid Thoreau’s call for “home manufacturers” seems, put next to William Carlos Williams’s later (1936) brash sense of America’s unstoppable lingual destiny. Reviewing a late edition of Mencken’s The American Language, he notes “the unrelenting warfare between England and the United States over a language which had burst the bounds of a narrow world and was spreading helter-skelter over a vast new continent.”

Paterson Notes 2

2012-01-17T06:40:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams on Garret Mountain, Paterson, New Jersey, 1957
(Photograph by Eve Arnold)

Guy Davenport, quoting Thomas Kyd’s The Housholders Philosophie in a piece titled “The Nuclear Venus: Dr. Williams’ Attack upon Usura”:

So that offending Nature we immediately offende God, and he that offendeth arte offendeth God touching the hurt or annoyaunce of Nature; but the Vsurer offendeth Nature, for it is not naturall that money should beget or bring forth money without corruption, since Nature willeth that the corruption of one bee the generation of another; and it offendeth God because it doth not exercise the arte according as God commaunded the first man, when he saide, in the sweate of thy face thou shalt eate thy bread; and it is not artificiall that money shoulde bring forth money, as the Vsurers wold have it, which putteth the vse in the thing.

(And I think immediately of the usury of the current conceptualist charlatans, most aptly Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, who “putteth” no “vse in the thing”: it is not “artificiall” that text unworked should bring forth text . . .) I am thinking, though, of Williams’s Pound-boxing in Paterson. The lines early in the poem (Book I, 3) wherein Williams makes retort against a Poundian slight (or sally):

P. Your interest is in the bloody loam but what
I’m after is the finished product.

I. Leadership passes into empire; empire begets in-
solence; insolence brings ruin.

Editor Christopher MacGowan noting: “In a notebook in which he began the notes for his Autobiography WCW records: “Pound’s story of my being interested in the loam whereas he wanted the finished product.” Williams turns Poundian certainty against itself, points to the hazards inherent in “finish”: orthodoxy, arrogance, recklessness, contempt. Rehashing in two lines one reading of Pound’s own trajectory. I read Williams’s “I” as making argument, too, against the eventual “produce” of any literary movement, no matter what idealism accompanied its beginning. (One thinks of Jefferson’s letter of 13 November 1789 to William Stephens Smith wherein he cautions, “God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.” And, earlier, warns against the unfettered insolence of imperial control: “Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.”)

In Paterson (Book Two) Williams turns Pound’s certainty in the “finished product” against itself by rehashing Pound’s litany against usury (Canto LXV) in terms of invention, rather awkwardly mimicking its rhythms:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channel of the old swale,
the small foot-prints
of the mice under the overhanging
tufts of the bunch-grass will not
appear: without invention the line
will never again take on its ancient
divisions when the word, a supple word,
lived in it, crumbled now to chalk.

The “all / but spent” soil where “the alder does not grow” recalling the “bloody loam” of Pound’s taunt. (Williams’s talk of a “new line” making one read Pound’s “with usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear demarcation” somewhat differently—beyond mere plasticity.) Williams’s rewrite of Pound’s “With Usura” in terms of inventio registers no quarrel with Pound’s damning of usurious practices—see Williams’s interjected excerpts in Paterson of various Social Credit materials:

The Federal Reserve System is a private enterprise . . . a private monopoly . . . (with power) . . . given to it by a spineless Congress . . . to issue and regulate all our money.

They create money from nothing and lend it to private business (the same money over and over again at a high rate of interest), and also to the Government whenever it needs money in war and peace; for which we, the people, representing the Government (in this instance at any rate) must pay interest to the banks in the form of high taxes.

And:

In other words, the Federal Reserve Banks constitute a Legalized National Usury System, whose Customer No. 1 is our Government, the richest country in the world. Every one of us is paying tribute to the money racketeers on every dollar we earn through hard work.

It’s hard not to see Williams’s quarrel with Pound’s glib brusqueries and traveled unerringnesses continued in the subsequent lyric plaint (at the end of Book II, 2):

Why should I move from this place
where I was born? knowing
how futile would be the search
for you in the multiplicity
of your debacle. The world spreads
for me like a flower opening—and
will close for me as might a rose—

wither and fall to the ground
and rot and be drawn up
into a flower again. But you
never wither—but blossom
all about me . . .

Or, in the live portrait of Williams working of a Sunday—

all of a piece, alone
in a wind that does not move the others—
in that way: a way to spend
a Sunday afternoon while the green bush shakes.

. . a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress

That’s Poundian lingo (“clarify / and compress”), unbegrudged, took, and of use to Williams, there indefatigably working the loam, there to “exercise the arte” honestly.

Paterson Notes 1

2012-01-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

Plate 8, out of George Frederick Kunz’s Gems and Precious Stones of North America. (1890).
A Pearl from common clam [Venus Mercenaria], Long Island Sound, [twice natural size].
B “Queen Pearl,” natural size, found in 1857, near Paterson, New Jersey.
C Right valve of mother-of-pearl shell enclosing parasitic fish [oligocottus], Coast of Western Mexico.
D Curious pearl from Unio from Cumberland River, Tennessee.
E Pearl showing concentric rings [magnified four diameters], from Little Miami River, Ohio.

William Carlos Williams, early in Paterson:

Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair
spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into
the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run
and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.

In February 1857, David Hower, a poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, collected a lot of mussels from Notch Brook near the City of Paterson. He found in eating them many hard substances. At first he threw them away but at last submitted some of them to a jeweler who gave him twenty-five to thirty dollars for the lot. Later he found others. One pearl of fine lustre was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to the Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known thenceforth as the “Queen Pearl,” the finest of its sort in the world today.
News of this sale created such excitement that search for the pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios (mussels) at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains which would have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Editor Christopher MacGowan, in notes to the 1992 revised edition, writes of the prose:

No source found. To judge by an article in the Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society of November 1956, pp. 38-39, 44, this prose conflates two stories. Jacob and John Quackenbush found and sold to Tiffany what became known as the “Queen Pearl.” The article cites The Paterson Guardian of May 1, 1857. The article goes on to tell the story of “a South Paterson citizen . . . One account names him as a poor shoemaker . . . one David Hower. Another source names him as Daniel Howell, carpenter.” Hower / Howell brought home mussels for dinner, found them tough and fried them, and while subsequently eating them bit into the 400-grain pearl—which had been ruined by “too much cooking. . . . it was, by far, the largest pearl ever found in fresh water mussels.”

Scouting about for sources, one uncovers an essentially verbatim version of Williams’s second paragraph in George Frederick Kunz’s 1890 Gems and Precious Stones of North America. Kunz:

Large and valuable Unio pearls have been obtained in New Jersey. In 1857 a pearl of fine lustre, weighing 93 grains, was found at Notch Brook, near Paterson. It became known as the “Queen Pearl,” and was sold by Tiffany & Co. to the Empress Eugenie of France for $2,500; it is to-day worth four times that amount. (See Colored Plate No. 8.) The news of this sale created such an excitement that search for pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed, often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains, which would doubtless have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Kunz’s book makes no mention of Hower / Howard. Kunz apparently presented some material out of the chapter (“Pearls”) at the 1893 meeting of the American Fisheries Society in a paper titled “On the Occurrence of Pearls in the United States, and Shall We Legislate to Preserve the Fisheries.” (The lines quoted out of Gems and Precious Stones appear in the annual Transactions of the American Fisheries Society with the added note that the “Queen Pearl” is “finer than any pearl shown at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition.”

Sleuthing in a rush. Everything in a rush. Williams (out of the “Preface”):

In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.

(The multiple seed,
packed tight with detail, soured,
is lost in the flux and the mind,
distracted, floats off in the same
scum)

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with
numbers.

It is the ignorant sun
rising in the slot of
hollow suns risen, so that never in this
world will a man live well in his body
save dying—and not know himself
dying; yet that is
the design. Renews himself
thereby, in addition and subtraction,
walking up and down.

Sun up out of its usual slot. MacGowan quotes, too, cut (in the galleys) lines out of Dahlberg letter that ends the second part of Book I:

I have always abhorred busy people, being too busy to talk, to be able to sit down a few minutes the way the Brahma or the Sacred Cow sits, to put together a letter, which is a way of arranging the pieces of one’s spirit, it is just a hoax, and you ought to know that, and if you don’t you ought to spend some time finding it out, even, if you have to damn me for pointing it out to you.
Frankly, I don’t know what you are saying when you put the past into a frozen theorem, separate and apart from the present. I know of no such past or present; I only know of Nero, of Abraham sitting underneath the terebinth, or Modigliani painting glandular physiognomies, or Socrates prattling in the Symposium, or Sherwood Anderson walking through one of those blighted and noisesome downtown sections, and answering me, as I said to him, ‘Consider with what malice this city must have been conceived.’ ‘Oh, it just happened,’ as of one kind of human continuum. Time to me is an infant’s conception, which Heraclitus so detested. Time is something you mention when you have sick nerves and cannot stand still or sit in quiet either to paint, or smile or talk or listen to somebody else. It’s an occidental fraud, in the main, and there are no people in the world so concerned as the American, who positively has no time, with the clock. It always appeared to me that it was no accident that the glum little Swiss were clock-makers, and that the inhabitants of Königsberg set their watches soon as they saw the apriori Immanuel Kant. The hatred, by the way, of the past, all human lore and poetry, is best illustrated by the modern state which always commemorates and canonizes its own murder-uses by starting a year one for the people. But enough.

A sobering tincture, like so much of Dahlberg. MacGowan reports, too, how, though Dahlberg admired WCW’s In the American Grain, he was no fan of Paterson, writing to Robert McAlmon in 1953: ‘I think his Paterson. . . is a fraud. The man is very spongy, and imagines by repeating the word rock about a hundred and thirty-five times that he can become hard or give the effect of having ophidian intellect.’” A hard judgment to expel, at points, in reading it.

Dérive, Bookish

2012-01-13T07:49:00.000-08:00

Gustave Doré, “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” 1855

Skiff of snow, barely enough to shovel. Acceding to the earth’s usual demands. “I deryve, or bringe one thynge out of another, as water is brought whan it is brought from the spring, je deriue. Out of Lesclarcissement de la langue Francoyse (1530). How little I write “To my Contemporaries” of late. Sign of incipient laziness, pitfall of the long avid. (See Marianne Moore: “Advertising is . . . arduous, and whereas derogation has the attraction of not being extorted, devising testimonials is not so simple.”) Sign of disgruntlement thwarted by my newly burdensome politesse. (There’s rarely much to cheer in the whipping thickets of ambition. One notes only the careering ambition itself.)

Moore again: “I seem to myself an observer, an interested hack rather than an author, but am an extremist with regard to exact statement; am quoted as having said, “I write exercises in composition”; perhaps said, “I look on my verse as exercises in composition.” Too, Moore routinely quoted Pound’s Confucian ethics (out of The Great Digest): “If there be a knife of resentment in the heart or enduring rancor, the mind will not attain precision; under suspicion and fear it will not form sound judgment, nor will it, dazzled by love’s delight, nor in sorrow and anxiety, come to precisions.” Which just about covers the whole contemporary “field of cultural production,” the way mutual alliances and denials bend it into whatever shape it assumes (“precisions” thus the result of social gum . . .) Just the kind of thing that makes me haul down my Hopkins, to amble rather aimlessly through the letters to Robert Bridges:

Roehampton, 10 June 1882

Dearest Bridges,—It was a needless and tedious frenzy (no, the phrase is not like Flatman’s ‘serene and rapturous joys’ to which poor Purcell had to drudge the music):* another train came up on that train’s tail, and indeed it was a dull duncery that overhung us both not to see that its being Ascot day ensured countless more trains and not fewer. There was a lovely and passionate scene (for about the space of the last trump) between me and a tallish gentleman (I daresay he was a cardsharper) in your carriage who was by way of being you; I smiled, I murmured with my lips at him, I waved farewells, but he would not give in, till with burning shame (though the whole thing was, as I say, like the duels of archangels) I saw suddenly what I was doing . . .

One soaks in the affability of taunt (“no, the phrase is not like Flatman’s”); in the way Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another”—

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading . . .

(is that, too, “about” the “field of cultural production”?) is called forth in some silly and pertinent way by “another train came up on that train’s tail”; one admires the thud irrevocability of faux-doom—dunned out by that succession of dull short u’s—in “drudge the music” and “a dull duncery . . . overhung us”—Hopkins’s friend is departing; one notes the mock erotics of the mute exertions between Hopkins and the unresponding “cardsharper,” mimicking Bridges; one applauds the shame-assuaging lightheartedness of “the duels of archangels” (another metaphor for the “field”?), Hopkins’s recovery effected by intangible alliances . . . So, the dérive, chance, bookish, avoiding, out of the contours of the now, with its untoward lolling** and insapient matchlessnesses.

* In 1684 Purcell composed an ode or song of welcome entitled On the King’s return to White-hall after his Summer’s Progress. The words are by Thomas Flatman:
From these serene and rapturous joys
A country life alone can give,
Exempt from tumult and from noise,
Where Kings forget the trouble of their reigns,
And are almost as happy as their humble swains,
By feeling that they live . . .
** Lolling: meaning both “resting at one’s ease, lounging” and “thrusting out (the tongue).” It’s conceivable I mean lalling (“baby-speech”) . . .

“Furiously laboring at random . . .”

2012-01-12T07:48:00.001-08:00

Marianne Moore, 1887-1972
(Photograph by Esther Bubley)

Prevaricatory in the slant fuzzy way of the sleep-boondoggled. Hours expended in the examining of sentence-ry. Marianne Moore, in a nudge against the overtly recherché (“It is true that ‘peculiar style must precede peculiar expression’ and that literary fastidiousness is for the most part, implicit in precise, brilliant thinking”): “Suggesting conversation and strengthened by etymology there is a kind of effortless compactness which precludes ornateness, a ‘fearful felicity,’ in which like the pig in the churn, imagination seems to provide its own propulsiveness.” And, in order to precisely roister the intricacy of such a stance, Moore turns to Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici wherein is promoted a kind of ineffable admirableness of restraint (“There are no Grotesques in Nature”) in the design of “Bees, Ants, and Spiders”: “Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of Nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these, I confess, are the Colossus and majestick pieces of her hand: but in these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth Wisdom of their Maker.” Moore’s note recalling William Carlos Williams’s remark (out of the “Introduction” to The Complete Works of Francois Villon) that “if there were the faintest feeling that Villon ever wrote to be effective, it would have destroyed the validity of what he had to say.” Williams:

Le mot juste is the ready word—it has no other significance. This is fundamental. In literature there can be no seeking for words. For a writer to so indulge himself is to tread dangerous ground.

Pertinent in a period of increasing decorousness, “daring” larks of mere vocabulary contrivance. (Making distinct: the unforeseen floody wash or exorbitant pummeling of words beyond ken versus the collector’s ostentatory ruse and hustle. I think of Bill Berkson—among others—copping precisely to such anomalous onslaughts of the unknown word:

Sometimes a word shows up in my critical prose and sometimes in poetry too: a big word that somehow shows up in the writing. I may look askance at it, unsure of what it means but certain that I’ve never used the word before, in either speech or writing. I look it up in the dictionary and, damn!, it’s just right, le mot juste. Now how did that happen? There must be an inner vocabulary monitor that knew it; I didn’t know it, except by osmosis.

One inclines toward the willing receipt part of the Keatsian bargain: not the “irritable reaching” of those seeking to pony up against possible loss, but the due welcoming of any “fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium.”) Moore: “These ‘things that are stated without being said’ are the most valuable . . . A poem is not a poem, surely, unless there is a margin of undidactic implication,—an area which the reader can make his own.” And, in reply to received huzzahs for Ezra Pound’s “intuitive mind” (“a mind that moves back and forth like sea-weed”): “We confessed to admiring instinctiveness, concentration, and tentativeness; to realizing that gusto is not incompatible with learning, and to favoring opulence in asceticism.”

Bah. I am likely beginning to offend my own clutter-y with my excess clutter. Think of Pound writing Moore, 23 November 1931: “The idea of civilization includes an occasional exchange of knowledge . . . I dont quite see you as the girl gunman holding up N. Y. licherary iniquity / but I believe you cd. be of distinctly more use . . .” I do too. I do too. Though isn’t every artist—as Williams cheekily proposes (“The Basis of Faith in Art”)—just another “rudderless nonentity furiously laboring at random whims, from among whose works, with time, a public takes the initiative to select its equally haphazard choices?”

Walking, &c.

2012-01-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001

A morning (dog walked under a sketchy Orion, bicycle slicing through the fraudulent blue-blacking of dawn) of juggling several distended anomalies. One is Coleridge’s noticing (in the Biographia) how poetry “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment, ever awake, and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement . . .” A. R. Ammons repeats the initial line in the 1967 talk “A Poem Is a Walk.” And, a couple paragraphs prior to quoting it, in the midst of a Cagean opening gambit (“I don’t know whether I can sustain myself for thirty minutes of saying I know nothing—or that I need to try, since I might prove no more than you already suspect, or, even worse, persuade you of the fact . . .”), writes:

Nothingness contains no images to focus and brighten the mind, no contrarieties to build up muscular tension: it has no place for argumentation and persuasion, comparison and contrast, classification, analysis. As nothingness is more perfectly realized, there is increasingly less (if that isn’t contradictory) to realize, less to say, less need to say. Only silence perfects silence. Only nothingness contributes to nothingness.

That “contrarieties . . . build up muscular tension” points to Blake’s proverb out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” Dialectical tension, focus and blur, accretion and wince. A whole rhythm of balances measurably unbalanced. Like walking, its regular consequent fall and catch. (Ammons: “I’m not, of course, interested in walks as such but in clarification or intensification by distraction, seeing one thing better by looking at something else.”) Focus through its lack, the spray off the wave’s curling (disintegrating, foamy) top slapped down into its trough.

William Carlos Williams, in a piece called “Speech Rhythm” (found “uncatalogued among the Viola Baxter Jordan papers” by Mike Weaver and quoted by him in the 1971 William Carlos Williams: The American Background) talks of such: “Each piece of work, rhythmic in whole, is . . . in essence an assembly of tides, waves, ripples—in short, of greater and lesser rhythmic particles regularly repeated or destroyed . . .” And: “The one thing essential to rhythm is not sound but motion, of the two kinds: forward and up and down, rapidity of motion and quality of motion.” A poem is a walk. Weaver points to the rhythmically repeated word “Walking —” toward the end of the “Sunday in the Park” sequence in Book Two of Paterson:

Walking —

Thickets gather about groups of squat sand-pine,
all but from bare rock . .

—a scattering of man-high cedars (sharp cones),
antlered sumac .

—roots, for the most part, writhing
upon the surface
(so close are we to ruin every
day!)
searching the punk-dry rot

Walking —

The body is tilted slightly forward from the basic standing
position and the weight thrown on the ball of the foot,
while the other thigh is lifted and the leg and opposite
arm are swung forward (fig. 6B). Various muscles, aided .

Weaver locates the lines “The body is tilted . . .” in an article by one Beckett Howorth called “Dynamic Posture” in the 24 August 1946 number of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He quotes pertinent lines therein: “Alternating contraction and relaxation with balanced timing produce rhythm in movement and increase the capacity for sustained action . . .” And: “Correct walking is done with a smooth rhythm, the muscles contracting gently with a brief wavelike action and relaxing in the interval.” And: “The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up or down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm . . .” That recurrent “Walking —”: six fermata’d notes, sign of a pulse, hold and proceed.

I think, too—thinking of the walk, and writing, and silence—of Kandinsky’s remarks in the 1925 Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane): “The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement—specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs.” Walking out of “the intense self-contained repose of the point.” Out of the settled, the assumed, the writ. Ammons (working off Creeley’s “Form is never more than an extension of content”?): “Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.” Somewhere in Paterson (Book Three) Williams writes:

We walk into a dream, from certainty to the unascertained, in time to see . from the roseate past . a ribbed tail deploying

Tra la la la la la la la la
La tra tra tra tra tra tra

Movement into origin, lalling, a beginning. Ammons again: “A work of art creates a world of both and many, a world of definition and indefinition. Why should we be surprised that the work of art, which over-reaches and reconciles logical paradox, is inaccessible to the methods of logical exposition? A world comes into being about which any statement, however revelatory, is a lessening.”

Michelle Disler’s [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography

2012-01-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

Michelle Disler

Thumbing through the Sara Crangle-edited Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive, 2011), I am struck by the giddy conceptualism of “All the Laughs in One Short Story by McAlmon”:

, and crackled a laugh that came out in sharp hard spurts
of metallic sound.
Yoland laughed harshly disdainful.
And she smiled her glistening
mechanically glamorous smile into his eyes
was laughing her unlubricated
laugh, steadily now – – – –
The jeer and taunt in her weird laugh – – –
She laughed a warmer rusty
chortle now
She smiled sphinxly
, and they shrilly shrieked laughter
– – voice was higher and more abandoned than usual. It shirieked, but rustily mechanical rather than human.
Their jokes could not be heard
because of the laughter,
She gave an inebriated rasp of laughter
– – caused the other girls to shriek their shrill hyena laughter again.
. . .
, and she merely rattled her machine laugh,
again to chortle dry rattling laughter
“I love her laugh.”
Her laugh is cleared of emotions.

A roughly two-page piece (here truncated by about half), put, by Crangle, into the “Essays and Commentary” section of the book. Of it, she writes:

McAlmon wrote many short stories that could be the unnamed focus of “All the laughs,” but in terms of its content, Loy’s piece bears a distinct resemblance to “The Laughing Funeral” of Post-Adolescence. “All the laughs” has a title page in Loy’s hand. Although it appears to start in medias res, this speculation is complicated by Loy’s use of a comma at the outset of the occasional line throughout. The handwritten text is formatted like a prose poem; in spite of the vagaries of Loy’s margins, every attempt has been made to preserve the integrity of her lineation.

“Giddy conceptualism” (that is, a thing designed to amuse and reveal—unlike the ennui-burdened work of the recent brute copyists): I read the piece as a kind of pointed sampling of the McAlmon story. A laughter chart. It’s likely that I am “attuned” to read it thus by my reading of Michelle Disler’s recent book, [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography (Counterpath, 2012). A book that seemingly runs Ian Fleming’s Bond novels through a series of mock-mathematical dismantlings, attempts to “solve” Bond’s overall “linear equation” by listing possible variables, and their values. See something like “Y Solve for Unnamed Variables [Bond, James]”:

y = double agent (lure) z, n
y = trees (bloody) l, k
y = red telephone (top secret) z, x
y = “Was he getting serious about this girl?” (express train) p, w
y = “We’ll get plenty of sleep in the grave” (Vegas) z, b
y = champagne (too much, not enough) z, w

Formulaic reductions. Core sampling. Closer to Loy’s stripping the laughs out of a Robert McAlmon story—a kind of Shklovskian “laying bare the device” (obnazenie priema)—is Disler’s cataloguing: “Dislikes [Bond, James]” begins

hates, displays aversion to double-agent girlfriend ALSO dirty jobs, women drivers, women spies, poisonous fish, poisonous insects, poisonous plants, egomaniacs ALSO villains who touch his gun, sodden guns, hired guns ALSO peace, panic, henchmen, genital mutilation, losing at cards, restraint, flowers ALSO crying in double bourbons, in airport bars, cheaters, prudes, liars ALSO helpless women, women of privilege, women who are overly made up, unattractive women ALSO Barracudas ALSO being held hostage, vague death threats . . .

And, later: “boredom, sediment, long seductions, “pimping for England” ALSO kidnapping, kimonos . . .” Bond’s character found in the juxtapositions generated by the list-making. Elsewhere Disler assembles indices (“Unspecified [Bond, James]” is labeled “absurd categories, an index of” and includes such items as “Bond’s Best Most Meditative and Introspective Moment. See also Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed” and “Worst Bond. See also Best Girl; Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed . . .”), multiple choice problems (“1. Bond’s heart at the sight of her. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold / 2. Bond’s heart at the thought of sporting with the villain at golf. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold . . .”), and ferociously revealing (of “[Bond, James],” of Ian Fleming’s writerly mannerisms, and of something of Disler’s own discerning eye) accounts:

Approximate Number of Times [Bond, James]

not quite exact, ballpark takes cold shower 10; takes ice-cold shower 1; takes sizzling cold shower 1; takes hot shower followed by cold 2; takes hot or cold bath 2; orders Bourbon 6; orders martini 10; is drunk, hung over 2; smokes 70 cigarettes per day 1; admits doesn’t like killing in cold blood 7; smiles grimly [17?]; is in villain’s employ 3; admits he has no plan, no way out of serious trouble 2; doubts ability to defeat villain [4?]; pumps round from gun into hotel bed or other furniture [5?]; dreams 5; sleeps dreamlessly [8?]; sleeps the “shallow sleep of ghosts and demons and screams” 1; proposes to needle villain 2; proposes 2; needles villain 3; is needled by villain [6?]; is offered a woman in marriage 1; bluffs villain [56?]; appreciates villain as a worthy adversary 6; speculates villain is completely insane [8?]; shoves gun into trouser waistband 9; says breakfast is favorite meal 3; contemplates animal beauty [taut breasts, etc.] of girl [89?] . . .

Etc. A bruising kind of lark amongst the stripped down particulars. Disler’s “ballparking” allows some likely less-than-fortuitous alignments, that “[89?]” count for “contemplates animal beauty” gets assigned, too, to “loses consciousness.” One at random (for the copyists amongst us). (Disler’s epigraph reads, cheekily, after all: “‘No escape. There was only bluff.’ Ian Fleming.") And then, mid-alphabet, the contextualizing move puts Disler precisely in Bond’s own boots:

Epigraph [Bond, James]

“Bond peered through the slits in his mask. Yes, by God! Two of the thugs were standing beside the ticket man watching the throng with deadly concentration. On the far side of the road stood the black Mercedes, petrol vapour curling up from its exhaust. No escape. There was only bluff. Bond put his arm round Tracy’s neck and whispered, ‘Kiss me all the way past the ticket-table. They’re there, but I think we can make it.’
She flung an arm over his shoulder and drew him to her. ‘How did you know that that’s what I've been waiting for?’”
“Fork Lift for Hell!”
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ian Fleming 1963

Or another:

Forgetting [BOND, James]

contingent, like acts of mastery, on beauty, champagne, empty magazine, loaded magazine, rare blood type, her broken nose, killing in cold blood, license to kill, limits to a man’s courage ON TOP OF death-cure, voodoo curse, vomiting on the beach, violet hour, velvet dress drawn tightly across the breasts, the saying of unpleasant things AS WELL AS shark repellent, sleep of dreams, small curling waves inside the reef on a foreign shore, slight tingling of the scalp, scent in the nose of a clean sea, nightmares, non-essential parts of the body, bamboo shade along the sweltering banks, beach sand littered with bullets ADDED TO holiday in the sun, hypocrisy toward her, hot silence, hard sand too warm for sleep, “Why do they hate us so much,” sweeping waves of sleep, “Would you like me in white with pale blue birds flying over me,” phantom memories, manacled wrists, memory of pain, illusion of power, “pair of queens kiss[ing] the green cloth,” her glittering body, her body torn lifeless from the churning sea OVER AND ABOVE swirl of movement in dark glass, sass, soft mission, standing transfixed, slight flush at the temples, “the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes,” too much champagne, too many cold showers, too much blood, a terribly exciting girl, colored glass, gone soft on account of poisoned fruit, gone pale WITH clenched teeth, cruel eyes, unnamed curses, gun-sight ground into the coccyx, grated egg with caviar, skeleton grip, imagination above everything else PLUS empty window frames, expensive pine-bath essences, questions as easy as possible, the vital purpose of evil, peccadilloes, “privileged to emerge better and more virtuous men”

There is emergent here, one thinks, “after all, a place for the genuine.”

Essai sans but

2012-01-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

Alfred Stieglitz, “Self-portrait,” 1890

Bloated yellow moon hanging cheekish and low making the pre-dawn sky look green. A car horn’s sudden low chortle, distantly unlocked. Wind-made tremolos all along the viaduct. Tremolos of tremolos. To connect beyond with. “Withness”: a William James-invented word. In 1904, predating imagism’s codified joinery: “This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation of withness between some parts of the sum total of experience and other parts.” And (1907): “The lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness.”

—

Samuel Johnson (Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides): ‘I remember I was once on a visit at the house of a lady for whom I had a high respect. There was a good deal of company in the room. When they were gone, I said to this lady, “What foolish talking have we had!” “Yes,” said she, “but while they talked, you said nothing.” I was struck with reproof. How much better is the man who does nothing. Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.’ (Partially quoted by Guy Davenport, epigraph for Every Force Evolves a Form.)

—

Stéphane Mallarmé, out of the Preface to Un Coup de Dés (1897), translated by Henry Winkfield: “The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking; versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centered: I don’t transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the intent they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude.”

—

Henri Michaux, out of “Cannabis Indica” (Light Through Darkness), talking about the hemp-seized phenomenon of proliferating words (“explaining themselves in commentaries and in commentaries of commentaries”) he calls “neotenic thinking”: “Before a thought has fulfilled itself and matured, it gives birth to a new one, and this one, scarcely born, incompletely formed, brings still another into the world, a litter of others which similarly respond to one another by means of unexpected and unseizable references, which I have not so far succeeded in rendering.” (Quoted by Jed Rasula in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (2009). Neoteny: “Through the process of neoteny a whole slew of new traits may be introduced very rapidly, thereby increasing the variation available for natural selection.”)

—

Leo Bersani: “Immediacy is an ontological error; the immediacy of sense perverts the nature of thought. The opposite of such immediacy is not ‘profound’ or non-contingent sense, but rather the moving sense of a thought continuously proposing supplements to the objects abolished by its attention.” (Quoted by Rasula.)

—

William Carlos Williams (out of the 1939 essay “Federico García Lorca”): “‘I proceed,’ Unamuno says still in the twentieth century, ‘by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without documentation, without proof, outside of modern European logic, disdainful of its methods.” A line likely gleaned out of the final “A Funeral in Madrid” chapter of John Dos Passos’s 1922 travel book, Rosinante to the Road Again): “Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the lash of strong wine have made people’s minds ingrow into the hereafter, where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying angel.” Dos Passos quotes Unamuno out of “an essay in one of the volumes published by the Residencia de Estudiantes,” adding, too, Unamuno’s

“. . . I want no other method than that of passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come as they come.

“We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls, casuists and all that.

“I’ve heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence.”

The last Dos Passos quote of Unamuno thrust by Williams, too, into the Lorca essay.

—

Williams (out of the 1947 talk, “An Approach to the Poem”): “To be men today we must emulate the past (we need not exceed it), we must take the elements, the particulars (which exist today as they existed then) and combine them today in a manner similar to the work of the past—but completely different in form—we must make anew! of old particulars.
“And if we cannot do work comparable to theirs, in its differences as in its comprehensiveness, then we cannot say that we, as they were, are alive. Our world is not real to us.
“But imagine what we are if we only copy them! Imagine what we are if we are so bound in our minds that we are obsessed by poetry and make no poems comparable to those of the past. If we cannot invent anew.
“Alfred Stieglitz used to tell an effective story about this. He would say, ‘If there were two doors and over one was written, “This way to see God” and over the other, “This way to hear a lecture about God,” everyone would rush toward the second door—for the implication inherent in entering the first door would be so overwhelming that no one would dare to face them.’

—

Davenport (“Every Force Evolves a Form”): “An osprey, swooping and crying with a ‘barbaric yawp’ (both words referring to sound, speech that is not Greek and seems to be bar bar over and over, yawp, a word as old as English poetry itself for the strident or hoarse call of a bird) seemed to Walt Whitman to be daimon upbraiding him for the ‘gab and loitering.’”

“Catches in the reticulum . . .”

2012-01-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

Friday, the customary day for “vaguer gleanings.” To browse and crosshatch. To see what, unsought by thesis and specified by whim, catches in the reticulum. Grid city conjunctures, and blessures. (Wounds without stigma.) All week under the plotz’d black sky of six a.m. I toy with a sentence about how “the mind, singularly adept in its suasions and curvatures, is nevertheless like a coastline, or a cauliflower, allowing sweet mimickry tenancy in its reductions, and its accretions.” Fractal goulash. Or I finick (“to mince, to affect airs”) with a negligible “piece” under the self-defeating (though accurate) title of “Beginning with Unh,” oblivious in the vocable-rampant lurch:

Unh is one way, grunting
out the putative residue of
a minimal thinkable, a monaural
nudge at meaning. Another is
to spar with the routine
lingual faineance by using two
red leather boxing gloves, ass-
fat, to punch a way
out of the usual cul-
de-sac made by heaps
of used-up words. Unh.
Unh-unh. The two approaches
commingle to make efficacy of
any mere contingency, the clean
uppercut subsumed by a flurry
of random fisticuffs, the punch-
drunk yatter of the amnesiac
annulled by deep Okeanos steering
‘all things through all things.’
Loss itself is thus regained
by its own preternatural gain-
saying, irregular, predetermined, and lit.
Thus the nights go by.
Thus one is pitched into
the light of rebuke’s ordinary
smoldering book, discursive as Vesuvius.

No wonder my seriousness quotient is so low. (Mimic here the obligatory sass-sincerity—a difficult “strain” to reach, or repeat—of O’Hara’s lines about “wondering whether you are any good or not / and the only decision you can make is that you did it . . .”) Somewhere Marianne Moore quotes Edith Sitwell’s lovely pourquoi écrire remark: “The behaviour of the world affects our beliefs and incites the mind to tumult to speak as a Cassandra or as an elegist.” Only to follow it with Robert Frost’s “It is what every poem is about—how the spirit is to surmount the pressure upon us of the material world.” (Elsewhere Moore says Frost labels it: “—the triumph of the spirit over the materialism by which we are being smothered.”) A way of puncturing (incite, incisor) the usual massy continuum (I think of a cloud, shapeless, wholly blotting) and its way of dopily effacing—what? one’s own preternatural, heroic way of attending to it?

One style: grunt avoidance. Blasé word fervors. Vocab shrug. Skint verbal rigidity of the merely petered out. Or of the defiantly pruned. Tomas Tranströmer (in the memoir sketch Memories Look at Me (New Directions, 2011), a piece culled out of the Robin Fulton-translated The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems) talks about drawing, on rolls of brown paper, cartoon strips “consumed only by myself”—though he’d taught himself to write “at the age of five”:

But it was too slow a process. My imagination needed some speedier means of expression. I didn’t even have enough patience to draw properly. I developed a kind of shorthand sketching method with figures in violent movement: breakneck drama yet no details.

Another style: denaturing glut. See Edward Dorn’s remarks in the 1977 talk “Strumming Language”:

To a certain extent my interest in the extreme heterogenous vocabularies of English is fanatical. I “think” I need a large rush of data coming in all the time. I like the media in that respect. I spend a lot of the day monitoring the flow of news and so forth, watching how the language is being used. But the way in which these contexts fold in on themselves and overlap and disappear at the margins and so forth is interesting, and since I myself don’t have those classical kinds of habits of writing, which have always been said to be precise times of day and constancy, I tend to float until the pressure says I have something I want to say badly enough to stop monitoring the news.

And, later (“two approaches / commingle”): “. . . one of the consequences of paying attention, perhaps inordinate attention, to the ebb and flow of language is that . . . the language tends to disappear, because that behavior, that attitude, that relationship to the language, tends to reduce the language. It’s a refining process, it tends to make the language granular, and for me recently it’s resulted in shorter and shorter piece of expression . . .” Elegy out of tumult. The fork-tongued snakes of Apollo’s temple cleaning out Cassandra’s ears (licked clean by rampant utterance itself) that she may speak, riddling disconnectedly (“breakneck drama yet no details”) of the past, of the future. Ineluctable merger of means. “Unh. / Unh-unh.”

The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

2012-01-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Abjuring hacks and sniffles. Some notes out of The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, edited by Barry Ahearn (Wesleyan, 2003). Williams (29 January 1943), regarding the work of the “surrealistus” (here, Alain Bosquet):

He seems wordy, wanders on as I imagine most surrealistus are bound to. If you give yourself over to the unconscious you know as well as I that it’s going to be repetitious . . . Maybe a nugget will be turned up . . . We’re to suppose that the poet is born perfect—if only he can loosen the neck of his bladder and piss it out.

Later, in a 22 December 1944 letter, Williams talks of reading a piece by André Breton, “one of those rarities—something simple coming out of an insensate complexity of method”—making something of an oxymoron attempt to do the dialectical work of defining. It’s a practiced move for Williams. I am thinking of how he works to nail down the shiny mercurial blob of the writerly “fit” (socked-in and stuck like a peg in a hole and sliding off into the vacuum-hatch of its own continual departure, motility’s grease) in the essay, “The Work of Gertrude Stein”:

Either, we have been taught to think, the mind moves in a logical sequence to a definite end which is its goal, or it will embrace movement without goal other than movement itself for an end and hail “transition” only as supreme.
Take your choice, both resorts are an improper description of the mind in fullest play.
If the attention could envision the whole of writing, let us say, at one time, moving over it in swift and accurate pursuit of the modern imperative at the instant when it is most to the fore, something of what actually takes place under an optimum of intelligence could be observed. It is an alertness not to let go of a possibility of movement in our fearful bedazzlement with some concrete and fixed present.

That movement stilled still moving, the present held forth in its hurtling between what’s gone and what’s arriving. It is precisely there where Williams repeatedly locates himself (hence the warnings against ga-ga experimentalism). Think of how, in “The American Background,” he writes, of the early American settlers, how “two divergent forces were steadily at work, one drawing the inhabitants back to the accustomed with its appeals to loyalty and the love of comfort, the other prodding them to face very often the tortures of the damned, working a new way into a doubtful future, calling for faith, courage and carelessness of spirit.” So Williams’s own “inner tension” and “cultural dilemma”—that of the “conflict between present reliance on the prevalent conditions of place and the overriding of an unrelated authority.” So the animus against any sign of “a cut-off and imposed culture from Europe. See Williams’s vexatious and somewhat amusing report (3 February 1943) of a patient, “a ponderous, 65 year old Englishman”:

You’ve got to hand it to them. He actually sacred me—like my father. A big, big fisted, slow speaking, red faced, H dropping Englishman from Birmingham—the town where my father was born. He came in as if the world were really his and he was destined to be tolerant of it, completely sure of himself, a bit out of breath, very polite but one of God’s own chillen. Had been a [guard] on an armored truck that takes money from one bank to another. Absolutely trustworthy, would die on the spot rather than have a penny lost. The ribs of the Empire. [Jesus!] what am I beside that magnificence. All you can do or could do would be to fuck it. I can now understand why Englishmen are buggers by nature, there’s [absolutely] nothing else to do but take out a 3 ft tool and shove it up the man’s ass. It would be like a crown on one’s head to have been connected with so much empire.

Scribbled pre-American imperium: the thing rings differently seventy years of largely immoral post-WWII adventurism along . . . Is Williams’s essential humility what is lacking in the present “age”? (22 December 1944: “It really takes a lifetime not only to do anything worth while but even to find what we want in others—one is so unsure, so tentative because of lack of [opportunity] to observe. And any decent intelligence is humble at core, too humble to want to make [too] brash an assertion in a fluid world. Finally a small amount of positive statement is possible.” Recalling, somewhat, Marianne Moore’s rarely attenuated regard for the occasion: see, say, “The Steeple-Jack”—“it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.”)

Zukofsky (5 April 1941) brooding about the writerly “demarcation between imposition and necessity” seems to preen a little toward the necessitous (pissing): “Sometime after several years—as the other day—I look thru a batch of poems and make some revisions, and then the next day maybe only one or two revisions stand up. Usually the original—if worth keeping—is the final choice. I think that’s true of most work in which a guy is not merely a writer but saying something. . .”

Williams (“[April 1943]”), revising The Wedge (“I cut the book by about twenty three pages and that is final”), obtaining fortitude and grace in chance local conditions: “I had almost to get a fever to do it—in fact I was helped by an article on gardening which said that the victory [gardeners] next year, it is hoped, will profit by their errors next year. That if you plant too much and have not the hardihood to weed out what you cannot use or that you have not the place for, the overabundance of no matter what you have growing is a WEED! Tear it up.”

Zukofsky’s odd aping of Williams (15 April 1960). After Williams suggests he “can’t do it any more”: “And as for stopping to write, I am really waiting for a time when—and that’s not hard to imagine having gone thru what we have—life, and that is the poem, will be no poorer even when poetry is not being written. Because that’s when it’s written and even literally gets written down.” Or, out of an unsent letter regarding “A” dated “Thanksgiving Day 1957”—Zukofsky echoing Williams’s “cleanliness” of technique (think of, say, Williams’s 1925 remarks on Marianne Moore’s pleasure in “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts”). Zukofsky:

I was moved by your grasp of its poetic means: what I always want to be its means, if I have done well. That is: the clean statement—no matter what one’s personal interests, leanings, refinements, excesses, abstentions, historic subjects, and so on are at any time—that does not impose a lie on the incontrovertible fact that because the statement is clean it compels only thru the construction in its music. In this sense, I do not have to tell you, the poem has no subject but the poem.

Or, replying to Williams’s poem “Mounted as an Amazon”—originally titled “The Swivelhipped Amazon”—

She rides her hips as
it were a horse
such women

tickle me a pat answer
to philosophy
or high heels would

put them on their
cans if fol-
lowed up most women

are more pliant
come of
a far different race

—Zukofsky writes (21 May 1958):

What’s “The Swivel hipped Amazon” a preview from? Do you want it back? Gives both C. & me a good laugh. And, by the way, it’s a good clue to reading Bottom in Black Mtn. Rev.—if you read it as the product of a pliant breed not forcing any thing on one, but presenting, as much as it can, everything around a thing, without, if possible, cluttering: instead of a pat answer to philosophy, to show up how swivelhipped it is. So I proceed in prose as I do in “A”: I show & come back to it, & show something related, & come back to both . . . always (I hope) saying it’s neither the pat answer nor philosophy that makes or sees anything solid-like.

A little stretched, isn’t that, like foisting off into a hardly suspecting or appropriate comment box the besiegement of one’s own momentary obsess? Cough, snort . . .

Some Accounting

2012-01-04T06:05:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, c. 1954
(Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

Muriel Rukeyser (out of the Wendell Willkie biography / documentary poem, One Life): “All is leaf. This simplicity makes possible the greatest diversity.” Recalling Pound’s “leaf over leaf” or “ply over ply” (the base accumulating construct in all its repeatables) or the loud nod at the “Oirishman” Scotus Erigena in Canto LXXIV:

“sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
“OMNIA,
all things that are are lights”

(Browsing around The Cantos, I note the final line of Canto LXXX—“sunset grand couturier”—and mutter vaguely how it nods at that of Apollinaire’s “Zone”—“soleil cou coupé”—though rather mockingly, inserting the latest finickings of “style” into Apollinaire’s primeval bloody sun-slaughter . . .) All that making me think of the work of “gussying up” versus that of “stripping down.” Bill Berkson, in reply to Bernadette Mayer’s query “Is elegance opposed to innovation?” (What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?) says, elegantly enough: “Pretty iffy.” And:

Can we name a single innovator whose innovations are of value whose work at any point lacks elegance? Well, early Cézanne (before he innovated) and a lot of Williams has no elegance whatever. In music, a lot of raw music is more elegant (country blues or Cajun) than the refined versions of the same material. Innovation being a reaction against dull flatness or vulgarized mechanical “cheap imitation” style is always the revelation of furthered elegance.

What “age” is the present? One of predominant gussying up—heaped up audacities of the unslung vocable, exfoliant empirics gerrymandered up against the presumed “dull flatness” of the empire’s previous experiments, so soon become ready-mades? (Is there exemplary poverty in the overloading of the query itself?) Is what is needed now a flinging off of such obesity of means? I keep returning to Williams’s (Berkson points to Williams’s “raw awkward flatness” with the proviso and rejoinder that “it wasn’t dull”) warning against any penchant to merely “play tiddlywinks with the syllables”:

Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of the younger writers have forgotten that writing doesn’t mean just inventing new ways to say “So’s your Old Man.” I swear I myself can’t make out for the life of me what many of them are talking about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not find in many another.

Williams aged roughly forty-seven (c. 1930) at that salvo. He’s warning against dallyings with freighted substancelessness: “Technique is a part of it—new technique; technique is itself substance, as all artists must know; but it is the substance under that, forming that, giving it its reason for existence which must be the final answer and source of reliance.” Twenty-five or so years later: still the inaccrochable doubt, writing to Louis Zukofsky (1 April 1956): “I firmly believe that with the nutty experimentation due before long to have evaporated from our systems (necessary as it was to break down stodginess) a great dawn in soon to burst above American letters.” See, too, Berkson’s seeming fatigue (c. 1981, in a letter to Mayer) at mere rampant industry repeating the new doxy’s foibles: “I do feel my attentions need to be tricked to a new alert state for, in & then back out of writing . . . Like you once said, the accumulation method is dog-tired (I know you didn’t say dog-tired) & likewise the ‘popcorn / snapdragon’ jabber voice.” Isn’t that fatigue, too, what’s displayed in Berkson’s lines out of the “Gimme a Swig” section of “For Jim Gustafson” (Fugue State)?

There must have been a saturation of enchantment
at some point before the crafty badgers
dismantled their catch, the Actual, for
meathead determinism, pestilence futures, sub-
dular glitches, et alia. You had plenty to read,
a river slipping, sliding gently though it
every day, the first pineapple.

One is, I think long gone beyond what Williams calls—speaking of Marianne Moore’s work—“a swiftness that passes without repugnance from thing to thing.” A sense of “the Actual” beleaguered (in the present “age”) by overdetermining glut, excess harrying the clean fit (“cloud over cloud” or “steel over steel”—the muzziness of the particulars offers no quandary) of percept. Williams : “The goal is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.”

(Accounting: the new year’s offertory must needs consider at the outset one’s own likely insolvency of means.)

Bernadette Mayer / Emily Dickinson

2011-12-23T07:41:00.000-08:00

Bernadette Mayer

Cold again. The usual doubts and furies. (The usual dawdling and prevaricatory page-turning.) “Using self in the hermetic tradition, that is, against the ceiling of everything, to include all.” A lovely way of putting it—Bernadette Mayer’s, out of What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? (Tuumba, 2006). Rather like Emily Dickinson declaring to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” Think of Marianne Moore’s undaunted prickly precision regarding Dickinson’s—and by extension, Mayer’s—supposed “vanity”:

A certain buoyancy that creates an effect of inconsequent bravado—a sense of drama with which we may not be quite at home—was for her a part of that expansion of breath necessary to existence, and unless it is conceited for the hummingbird or the osprey to not behave like a chicken, one does not find her conceited.

Or see Moore’s entirely apt claim that “the behavior of an ear that lives on sound is as sudden as the rush of the canoe toward the rapid” against something like Mayer’s “Perfect Berry Architecture”—out of Indigo Bunting (Zasterle, 2004):

polyglot company disinters her
ossuaries engulf recidividists everywhere
now we are in alphabet creek perfect tense
so far every loner with us—would she begin
to risk her identity, a beginner
to fall down that wave, witness this: who
gets whom into troubler, troublest waters female

good news! a marble cat is on the prowl
a wolverine in laos, i am a user i use you
interminable until walked-out nights
become sepulchral, lacustrine & crepuscular
there’s a rainbow in the same part of the sky
it’s always in except when it’s in the forest
where there cant be any light, red rock

Dim fluid wash of “the gloaming” in the soft-mouthed acrobacy of that “sepulchral, lacustrine & crepuscular”—a sequence whose “prequel” is “ossuaries engulf.” That “red rock” summoning up a Niedecker-inflected wintergreen berry, its shy perfect architecture in the wax-colored light. Moore talks of Dickinson’s ability “to make words convey ‘more than the sum of their meanings laid end to end’; and to attain splendor of implication without prefatory statement”—one’s concision found “at” the exact same extremity or extension as one’s largesse. (See Mayer’s reply to Bill Berkson’s query, What is the distance between word and referent in your poems?:

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””” my “””””” I don’t understand what distance means.

Probably a sidelong peckish reference to John Ashbery’s “Idaho” with its freighted story of Carol and Biff’s “small hand-assemblies”—and the giddy quandaries of its punctuational voluptuousnesses: “Exactly what kind of perfection??????????????????????????????????????????????????” and “Every tendril of thought,,,,,,,,,) Is it pertinent to demand of largesse that it expand not into excess? (Dickinson’s pert reply: “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—”) Is excess a kind of panic? Mayer:

Panic is essentially a sexual activity . . . Panic I think brings the whole body a lift & reorganizes in a necessary way . . . it’s not a crazy response, it’s the response of a person who wants pleasure & not its opposite. It’s chaotic though . . .

And, to Berkson’s question, Do you think panic is necessary to change the scenery or what?

Yes . . . change the whole scenery, change the body & mind though panic still is associated with death so it’s not a pleasant method at the moment but it prevents the more desolate pain of boredom & reminds you that you have strong feelings all the time. Panic, though, oddly ’s not attractive & one has an image of the completely self-composed man or woman. I hid my panic in my eyes.

See the etymology: panic out of the French panique (adjective) (of fear) sudden, wild (1534 in Rabelais in terreur Panice), of or relating to the god Pan (1546 in Rabelais) < Hellenistic Greek πανικός (adjective) of or for Pan, (of fear) groundless, also πανικόν panic terror. With a note: “Pan was thought to frequent mountains, caves, and lonely places, and sounds heard or fears experienced in such places came to be attributed to him.” (“I hid my panic in my eyes”: highly Dickinsonian in the sly obviousness of its evident concealment. Sign of Mayer’s blunt “recidividists” lack of any overly compunctious “cut” to her style—somewhere she says: “I’m afraid of having a style that’s easy for me to write in without any risks or cutlery.” Or, as Dickinson put it: “I was thinking, today—as I noticed, that the “Supernatural,” was only the Natural, disclosed—

Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes—”

And Emily Dickinson, though she famously reported to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid,” seemingly never used the word panic.)

—

Off a week or so—for “seasonal adjustments.”

Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s Vaudeville

2011-12-22T07:20:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey Hilsabeck

Received and read tout de suite: Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s Vaudeville (The Song Cave, 2011). It begins (epigraph by Buster Keaton: “I don’t act anyway”):

We are left with the word vaudeville and little more than that, the word itself a kind of elegy. Vaudeville. We are left only with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, and what survives in early Hollywood, the anarchic Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Buster’s great stone face, which he learned on vaudeville where deadpan was king. Pan was slang for face: the comic puts on a dead face, like a death mask, that plaster cast made soon after someone died in the days before photography, and walks among the living. He learned as a kid that there is something hilarious about that. He wears a mask, like the actors in Greek theater, Noh theater, Commedia dell’arte where the clown was born. It is rather an archaic thing to do. It lets silence back into life.

Beyond the initial nod to the Robert Hass iteration of the “notion that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies” (“Meditation at Lagunitas”), Hilsabeck deposits all of vaudeville itself, under the “deadpan” of Buster Keaton, some elegiac blank waiting to be filled. (Hilsabeck: “Such common feelings, so everyday—our monotonous sublime—we find written across Buster’s blank face.”) Vaudeville is up and down memoir, a way of revivifying both what Hilsabeck calls “a mongrel feeling,” that is America “at the butt end of Thoreau’s ‘restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century’,” and a particular: Hilsabeck’s vaudeville-loving grandfather. The two merge (along with numerous vaudevillians: John Carl, who played the banjo and sang “a song called ‘The Lively Flea’: Feeding where no life may be, / a dainty old chap is the lively flea . . .” only to “stop suddenly and recite Shakespeare, Shakespeare both straight and in burlesque”; “A dancer called Fleury in a long cape, tossing the cape up so that it settles on his head like a turban, revealing nipples painted to resemble large eyes, a painted nose over his stomach, and a bellybutton done up like puckered lips”; or Eva Tanguay, “The Evangelist of Joy,” who “moved, constantly . . . had wild, unruly hair and wore . . . a skimpy dress with pennies glued to it, a chandelier-like hat, . . . a thing with feathers . . . Reviewers described her voice as ‘a hairshirt to the nerves’ and compared her dancing to ‘a mad dog fleeing a mob of small boys’”—the details mount and collide . . . Hilsabeck’s text performing its claim: “An improvisatory, vernacular spirit ran like a current through vaudeville, kept alive by interruption . . . giving the show its air of . . . instability, even menace, the menace of things breaking down.”) Out of elegy, energy, as Hilsabeck puts it, and, in lovely adjectival pile-ups, those gestural Whitmanesqueries (“Vaudeville. Irrelevant, unpredictable, an ad-hoc hodgepodge, rude, stretching its long arms across the wide country, sounding its barbaric yawp . . .”), makes it central to the “blood-soaked American landscape,” pointing to its origin in racial mimicry:

A white man smears burnt cork on his face to mimic one of two types of black men, neither of whom exist: the lazy field hand and the foolish dandy with a watermelon grin. A white dance troop performs a cakewalk . . .

But the cakewalk started not in Africa but on plantations in America, a burlesque of the ballroom dances performed by white bosses at the big house. Whites came down to watch blacks do their funny dance, not realizing that the black dance lampooned the white, and then they started doing it on stage for an audience: whites spoofing blacks spoofing whites. Forms of popular entertainment based on stereotypes and misconceptions, mistaken identities, fantasies based on fantasies, acts that can only be traced back to other acts. A match is a fire to start another fire.

Hilsabeck’s (I assume) fire, the contemporary interrupting / underpinning the historical:

A vaudevillean monologue: I am so wild, furious, rabid, savage, and violent right now about the miserable state of interior decorating and the soil generally I could scream. I did, in the shower, the whole time. Bristol Palin is not Bristol Palin! But you knew that. This world is a world not of the old weapons—lance, arbalest, and spontoon—but the new—pistol, wire, and drone. Not of the old words—Antipathy and Revulsion, Animus—but the new—Nail. Gut. Rabbit. And so and thus I screamed and screamed and I soaped up my hairy ass and armpits and between the fingers and all those toes, all those areas are really clean right now, pal. So don’t even think about shouting out the answers because I’m super at-home in the questions.

Against the manic, the calmly-conferred quotidian veering off into something “archaic,” a kind of near-mystic sense of system, all couched in “deadpan” matter-of-fact:

I am writing a memoir. I use my grandfather’s books. They stretch down into the 19th century: American Vaudeville; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845; books on the Indian in America with titles like The Great Father and The Long Death; a book on water. The rotten voice of my memoir is America, and so is the sweet mystery of its face. It won’t sell. It begins and ends in Iowa, Iowa from the French word for the Bah Kho Je tribe. It begins with the wild canary and the wild rose and the geode and ends with the guttural muttery grunt of a hog. Each chapter has its color—brick, sand, daisy, wax. After green comes black, a black scarf we tie around the mailbox. And we long for the open piano. The grass grows stranger. Some creeks, some rivers—a weedy affability inhabits the edges, but we cannot bury our dead there: it is too close to the water. I pass them on foot, only myself. I drink from them and know only a fraction of what I taste and become.

One likely origin for the term vaudeville: out of “the French voix de ville, voice of the city.” One of the pleasures of Hilsabeck’s writing here: the sense of a multiplicity of competing, converging voix. See Keaton’s The Playhouse. Wherein Keaton “finds himself watching himself. Conducting and consulting and telling jokes to himself. . . . Buster playing an audience member says to himself playing the wife of that audience member after scanning the program, this fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.”

George Stanley (Some Notes)

2011-12-21T06:51:00.000-08:00

George Stanley
(Photograph by Star Black)

Somewhere George Stanley uses a line by Czesław Miłosz (out of “Reconciliation”) for an epigraph—“The poet: one who constantly thinks of something else.”

Stanley’s sense of the world’s distant ongoingness (somewhere beyond, colliding only briefly with one’s words, or, rarely, providing one with one’s words). Out of Vancouver: A Poem (New Star Books, 2008):

This is being written just after noon on September 22, 1999 — probably the last day of this gentle, warm late summer that followed a cold, rainy August. I’m perched on a welded steel stool leaning on the steel counter of a pomo coffee shop which I guess is called Trees Organic Coffee Co. (at least that’s what it says on my coffee cup — dark Sumatra coffee — the image — the image of the map — of Indonesia — from the Globe & Mail & the BBC on-line — in mind) — east side of Granville just north of Pender — this soft bright sunlight off the young maples on the Mall — light & shadow sharply delineated on the pavement — to right, Sinclair Centre — the old Post Office — where the 1938 demonstration / police riot still goes on, black-coated arm upraised coming down on the men running away escaping down the short flight of steps at the entrance on Hastings St., now Plaza Escada — dress shop — so are we (tuna sandwiches) now at lunch time seated at round tables with red & yellow chessboards on them & painted scalloped edges in two shades of green, behind a low ornamental steel railing — & people walking the Mall, two men stopping to talk between the potted plants, one wearing a madras jacket, hand on hip to indicate midmorning ennui — bicycles, buses . . . I really don’t know what I’m doing — this is not the world. It’s just my take. My lucky take. My sunny day September take.

After the focus and precision of the “take”: a toss-off and denial. A plunge back into. See, too: “And know that these words were so strong / I could live in the world they made. / But that I had made the words myself / to build a world — a world we could talk about, / using the words. To forget it was just raw longing / not to be alone.” (A few lines subsequent, Stanley posits being “better / off now, without any common language” and that “Words have to come out of the / world (like ‘gold ink’). There’s no good / flopping around like a fish . . .” I am entirely “took” by the dilemma. In “The Set”— out of A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems, 1957-2000 (Qua Books, 2003)—Stanley talks of missing “That sense that there was a world & meaning / outside your mind.” And briefly becomes, late in the piece, “a steel ball in a Bally machine”—banging around like a pinball, such the vacillatory glee / want of the poet. Here’s the whole terrific thing:

The Set

Remembering how it felt
working on the Grape
in ’72, doing layout
in a grey former grocery
on Powell — we’d take a break
at suppertime & head for the pub,
knock back six or eight drafts,
a package or two of chips,
maybe a pickled sausage,
& tell the waiter,
“Take one for yourself.”

We were a part of history
in our mental spotlight, drinking beer
with trade unionists from the ’30s,
in that battered pub (soon to be closed,
renovated & turned into a fern bar).
They told us tales
of struggles of the past.

We’d troop back, half-lit
through snowy darkness or summer shadow
to that grey, dingy, dimly lit
former grocery, to finish our layout.
There was never enough liner
or blades for the X-Acto knives & the
typeset “corrections” always came late
from the Peak & had to be pasted
in by hand, but the beer in our heads
kept us going past midnight — also the link
with the old union guys — with the dirty ’30s —
we were for real — & we were dirty.

Do you miss all that? Do you miss the dirty ’70s?
That sense that there was a world & meaning
outside your mind? Tho sceptic Ed Dorn
said “the set,” you could account
not just for the world but for nature itself:
the trees that leafed in the spring on Powell St.,
the stars — for you thought,
why would there be stars if there were
no world for them to shine on?

& by the third or fourth draft
your hangover would lift
& there’d be the sacred streets, in long
purple & orange stripes of sunset
to the eternal horizon,

& you called yourself a cadre,
a little yeast cell, making
tiny, correct changes in people’s
consciousness, getting the paper out
on the streets. Miss all that?

I shot up to Rupert for no reason
like a steel ball in a Bally machine,
banging around the pink bumpers,
racking up point for god knows who or what.

I came almost to a stop, poised at the entrance
to one of those long, gently raked, steel alleys
you can roll down for years, decades, & still
be far from the flippers. Then I missed the world,
the beery romance of politics,
(the whiskey romance of poetry),
the set.

Fighting the romance, that “mental spotlight,” and succumbing. Is it the loss of that X-Acto knife’d world of print tangibles that makes the piece sting so sweetly? World interspliced with “set” so there’s no telling where the act ends and the work begins: a kind of definition of youth.

“Meaning outside your mind.” There’s Stanley talking (interviewed by Brook Houglum and Jenny Penberthy in excellent George Stanley issue of The Capilano Reiew) about “Aboutism”:

Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”
Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that’s a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can’t do that.” It’s not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn’t go away.

That lovely moment in Vancouver where Stanley admits: “I’ve been doing, no, writing, this so long — / nothing wrong.” And counters it with simple relief, that humble marvel of writing itself:

Now the words tell of something so obvious
as to see the air in front of you
but not to have known it was something
to see.

“Writing — to see what turns up, or to keep going.”

Cod and Stravaig

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Pyrrho of Elis, c. 360–c. 270

Dopey notelets. En miettes. My habit of manhandling the superficies. Palping a book with unstudied intent, trying to dope out its requisites and indispensables. Rather like running a stumpy thumb along a knife blade, ascertaining nothing, with no particular prospect. Compiling the detritus of my own waywardness, thus. Out of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956, a reply (dated 18 December 1953) to a lost query (by one Patricia Hutchins) regarding Pound:

The only time I remember having met Pound was one evening at dinner with the Joyces in the Trianons, place de Rennes. He was having great trouble with a fond d’artichaud and was very aggressive and disdainful.

In a footnote:

SB told Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) that he had met Ezra Pound in 1929 while at dinner with James Joyce. In a letter to Kenner, SB recalls: “My memory is of the Trianon restaurant and I can still see the artichoke’s heart evading his fork while he inquired cuttingly what epic I was engaged on at the moment” . . . As told by Kenner [in The Pound Era], Pound “came upon Joyce holding court and was enraged by what he took to be a climate of sycophancy. Of one slim youth he enquired, in withering tones, whether he might be writing an Iliad, or would it be a Divina Commedia.” Kenner added: “One should not say such a humiliating thing to anyone . . . but it is especially regrettable that he should have said it to Sam Beckett.”

Kenner calls it Pound’s “needless irascibility.” (Isn’t one sign of aging the begrudging of youth its youth, meaning its sheer ungainly possibility. Hence, I suspect, Pound’s momentary fork-fingered loss of motor control. One routinely sees it in the petulant fierce occludings of the “arrived” . . .)

Beckett to Grove Press’s Barney Rosset (11 February 1954):

I thought myself of trying again in English, but it’s only evading the issue like everything else I try. If there was a head and a rock I’d rather beat that against this than start the old fake stravaguing again. It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation. . . . At the moment I have a “man” crawling along a corridor in the rock in the dark, but he’s due to vanish any day now. Of course there’s no reason why it would start now or ever for that matter. I’m horribly tired and stupefied, but not yet tired and stupefied enough. To write is impossible but not yet impossible enough. That’s how I cod myself these days.

Stravague, or stravaig. To wander about aimlessly. Chiefly Scottish, northern dialect, and Irish. Aphetic form of extravage < medieval Latin extrāvagārī.

In Guy Davenport’s Trois Caprices, in the story of “Pyrrhon of Elis,” “an agnostic who withheld his opinion of every matter”:

He denied that anything was good or bad, right or wrong. He doubted that anything exists, said that habits and custom dictate our actions, and would not allow that a thing is either more this than that on its own.
He thus went out of his way for nothing, leaving all to chance, and was wholly incautious with encounters, whether with carts in the street, cliffs toward which he was walking, or dogs. He said he had no reason to believe that his solicitude for his welfare was wiser than the results of an accident. Antigonos of Karystos tells us that his friends followed him about to keep him from falling into rivers, wells, and ditches. He lived for ninety years.

Amongst Pyrrhon’s teachings: “A thing can be known in relation to something else, therefore nothing can be known in itself . . . To confirm one thing by another, as we always must, is to move in a futile circle.” I think of Dana Ward in “Typing ‘Wild Speech’” (This Can’t Be Life, why so determinedly piecemeal my reading thereof?) writing: “Stephanie has a line—‘the real sickness of comparing unalike things’. I squirm as I ring my variations on this illness. All I ask of promiscuous affinity is that it cross the valediction of their bodies.” Or the Pyrrhonesque in Ward’s lines:

I used to see ‘being a poet’ as an intoxicating costume that was just over there & if I could inch ever closer to it I’d be contaminated fully & mixed with its essence forever. Often times I have nothing to add to this confusion beyond the lightning storm of my own political depravations, for which my poetry is an endless sea of waiting metal rods. So there’s the face of a part of my trouble. Thus, as a ‘poet’, I must drink, must smoke, must travel, must dodge employ as much as possible. I guard these aspects jealously as I’ve allowed their presence to assume a causal life inextricably linked to my production as a poet. A sort of Fordist assemblage of romantic clichés that when operating in consort give me access to a consciousness that floods the factory backwards, destroying it, & that’s called a poem. Then its ruins in their sentience gather back together & the whole fucking thing starts again.

Kin, surely, in its tough and tender command of its “stance”—amidst wild uncertainty—to O’Hara’s “Personism”: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” So Davenport’s Pyrrhon of Elis inhabits a world made grace by means of its welter of particulars, nothing “like” any other thing, nothing “either more this than that,” all detritus, waywardness, extravagaria, the artichoke sliding off the plate:

So for ninety years Pyrrhon, the son of Pleistarkhos, lived . . . in the charming town of Elis, with its horse-breeding citizens; and Olympic coaches and umpires; its swarm of splendid athletes and spectators every four years; its shady streets with sleeping hogs and their nursing litters; yellow dogs running in packs; choruses of Spartan trumpeters; fleets of Corinthian girl companions with raccoon eyes, pink frills and Asiatic embroidery from shoulder to heel and gaits as if to the flutes of Lydia; goats in a mist of flies; eloquent sculptors talking style in the wine shops; long-haired painters jibbering over onion stew in the ordinaries; mathematicians playing chess under the chinaberry trees; children tossing knucklebones in the parks under the gaze of Gorgon nannies; ladies of the Sodality of Hera rolling though the avenues in donkey carts, demure under parasols; grizzled philosophers and their raunchy boyfriends tumbling naked in the palaistra . . . a sad Gaul who was writing a book about the moon; acrobats; priests of every mystery you could think of, Eleusinian, Delian, Sabazian, Dodonian, what have you, even a brown Egyptian who ran a temple of Isis and Osiris down near the tanning yard (much heckled by the stable boys); in short, a fine round world of people and things, seasons and years and rumors of other worlds as far away as the Indus and the Nile, the Thames forever hidden by fog and the Danube said to be as blue as a Doric eye; but was honestly uncertain that he did, and would never admit to any of it.

“That’s how I cod myself these days.”

Haniel Long / William Carlos Williams

2011-12-19T05:43:00.000-08:00

Haniel Long, 1888-1956
(Oil portrait by Agnes Tait)

Miles of bare trees, colossal the variance within a band, gray, or the grays interrupted in the low shrubby foreground by the reds and ochres of osiers. (Reverie whilst conducting the Vibe across the gelid plant under yesterday’s storm of yellow sunlight.) Some initial desultory reading of Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935) makes me wonder if William Carlos Williams read it. Something Paterson-esque to its way of accreting and juxtaposing anecdote. Here’s a chunk, beginning with Henry Clay Frick, barely two weeks after Alexander Berkmann attempted to assassinate him (23 July 1892) in revenge for the murders, by Frick-hired Pinkerton detectives, of seven steelworkers at the Homestead strike (Long: “Berkmann told about it later: ‘Carnegie selected Frick, bloody Frick of the coke regions, to carry the program into execution. Must the oppressed forever submit? Human life is indeed sacred, but to remove a tyrant is the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people . . On and on rushes the engine . . “Pittsburgh! Pittsburgh!” the harsh cry of the conductor startles me . . .”), only to be subdued:

August fifth Frick walked alone across his lawn, stepped upon an open trolley car, entered his office at the stroke of eight, and rang for the morning’s mail. “If an honest American cannot live in his own home without a bodyguard, it is time to quit,” he told the reporters.

Out at Homestead it kept on, about the worst affair ever for strikers and their wives and children.

Ben Butler wanted Carnegie extradited for murder.

General Grosvenor called him the arch-sneak of this age.

A London paper said: “Here we have this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for His self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.”

A St. Louis paper said: “Say what you will of Frick, he is a brave man. Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward. And gods and men hate cowards.”

But Gladstone wrote Carnegie: “. . . simply to say . . . that no one who knows you will be prompted by unfortunate occurrences across the water, of which manifestly we cannot know the exact merits, to qualify in the slightest degree either his confidence in your generous views or his admiration of the great and good work you have done. Wealth is at present like a monster threatening to swallow up the moral life of man you, by precept and example, have been teaching him to disgorge. . Very faithfully yours . .”

A form recalling, in its jagged contours, what Williams called, in the 1927 ur-“Paterson”: the “divisions and imbalances” of the “whole concept, made small by pity / and desire . . . no ideas beside the facts—” (Long himself, in a lovely phrase, admits to putting form to work in a sort of accuracy-taming manner, counter to the wild plethora of “versions.” A paragraph detailing Berkmann’s attack reads:

Colonel Harvey told about it later (everyone told about it but Frick): “The first bullet passed through the neck near the base of the skull and down between the shoulders; the second bullet passed through the right side of the neck. Mr. Frick, in a low voice . . ‘Don’t kill him—let the law take its course; but raise his head and let me see his face . .’ The Sheriff, following the direction indicated by Mr. Prick's index finger, saw that Berkmann had a capsule between his teeth. ‘Remove that capsule.’ It contained fulminate of mercury,* enough to blow all in the room to bits.”

Long’s footnote: “The capsule of fulminate of mercury mentioned by Col Harvey and Winkler does not appear in Berkmann’s detailed account. I had arranged the cadences of my page before I noticed the discrepancy.” See Williams’s own lines at the beginning to the “Preface” to Paterson: “To make a start, / out of particulars / and make them general, rolling / up the sum, by defective means—”)

It’s resemblant cadences though—Williams to Long—that I mostly note. Out of Paterson:

A false language. A true. A false language pouring—a
language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without
dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear. At least
it settled it for her. Patch too, as a matter of fact. He
became a national hero in ’28, ’29 and toured the country
diving from cliffs and masts, rocks and bridges—to prove his
thesis: Some things can be done as well as others.
THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that
old time Jersey Patriot
N . F . P A T E R S O N !
(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short)
“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.
So far everything had gone smoothly. The pulley and ropes were securely fastened on each side of the chasm, and everything made in readiness to pull the clumsy bridge into position. It was a wooden structure boarded up on both sides, and a roof. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon and a large crowd had gathered—a large crowd for that time, as the town only numbered about four thousand—to watch the bridge placed in position.
That day was a great day for old Paterson. It being Saturday, the mills were shut down, so to give the people a chance to celebrate. Among those who came in for a good part of the celebration was Sam Patch, then a resident in Paterson, who was a boss over cotton spinners in one of the mills. He was my boss, and many a time he gave me a cuff over the ears.
Well, this day the constables were on the look for Patch, because they thought he would be on a spree and cause trouble. Patch had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.

Out of Williams’s letter dated 31 May 1951: “I have no recollection when it was that I first began thinking of writing a long poem upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” And: “The thing was to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him.” And Long, toward the end of Pittsburgh Memoranda: “A city finds life when a human being / finds life, when he learns how to walk between / forgetting and remembering the self.”

Colt and Trial Horse

2011-12-16T06:56:00.000-08:00

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1874-1927

Two measly fragments: Dana Ward’s reference to a “reverential feeling for art that moves on colt’s legs” in “Typing Wild Speech”—out of This Can’t Be Life (Edge, 2011)—that tenderness for the ungainly, the awkward, the uncoaxed geomancy of totting the earth by merely advancing. That, and William Carlos Williams’s play Many Loves (put together c. 1941), constructed of three single-act pieces. Initial title: Trial Horse No. 1. A trial horse being one put up as opponent for a champion in trial competitions or exhibitions, or for workouts. Williams in the figure of Hubert (“a poet—and dramatist in the making”) argues precisely for all the gawky grace and unfouled exuberance of any raw push to “enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter . . .” Against the derisive and skeptical Peter (“a man of considerable wealth”) who brings only brute rapacity (meaning formulaic, reliable, certain, adult) to art (“Trial, yes. The theater is a trial, / truly. It’s not a plaything. But / in the theater to kill you’ve got / to kill! With a hammer if need be . . . / Or they’ll walk out on you. . . .”) Williams:

Hubert:
I have a play, mature
enough to suit you, which has been sketched
scene for scene, act for act.
But lacking experience, as you know,
I have adopted this method
of a trial-horse to approach it.
And were it not for the bitterness
which . . .

Alise:
Go on, Hubert.

Hubert:
I say: when we see,
on the stage, what we expect to see—
I’m not speaking of circuses
but something to turn our minds a little
to the light—it should project
above the coarseness of the materials . . .
something else, in the words themselves,
tragic without vulgarity. Seen—
in the mind! The mind itself . . . today,
without firearms and other claptrap,
in its own tragic situation. We can’t
do this at once but must restudy
the means. If I wish to present love,
dramatically today . . .

Peter:
Yes.

Alise:
Yes.

Hubert:
I might do it—with a coalscuttle.

Peter
How?

Hubert:
By spitting in it.

Peter’s only reply, a negligible, vacuous attempted dismissal: “Puh!” (Williams’s “coalscuttle” inevitably recalls the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. See the report of Margaret Anderson in My Thirty Years’ War: “She wore a trailing blue-green dress and a peacock fan. One side of her face was decorated with a canceled postage stamp (two-cent American, pink). Her lips were painted black, her face powder was yellow. She wore the top of a coal scuttle for a hat, strapped on under her chin like a helmet. Two mustard spoons at the side gave the effect of feathers.”) Williams (writing c. 1939 about Kenneth Patchen’s work, though the words apply directly to Williams’s own, too, and to Ward’s wild and restlessly memorious prose and poetry—I think of Pound’s “nothing matters but the quality / of the affection— / in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind . . .”)—Williams identifies the “great theme”:

Love . . . divine and human, and, un-winking, what our life has done to it. To this he brings a structural device filling the page at its best for what he wants to say—scattered, jagged, irregular, with long explanatory titles—burdened with uncertainty.

“Sentences as a refreshment . . .”

2011-12-15T07:13:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Smallish winter itches, though the approaching day is balmy. Disconcerted by the immodesty of its jut. (A sentence that only decided itself in its delivery—disconcerted largely by its empty reach, it latched itself to an innuendo’d salient, somewhat hurriedly, somewhat embarrassedly.) I think of what Gary Lutz says:

I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs. The paragraphs, to me, are nervous little cliques or sororities of like-natured outcasts who put up with each other despite the friction.

Akin to what I maintain is my reading style: making prose plotless by the adamancy of my atomizing, that is, weighing each book sentence by singular sentence. (See Sir Philip Sidney’s “not speaking table talke fashion, or like men in a dreame, words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peasing each sillable of eache word by just proportion”—early demand to “recontour their casings.”) Peasing out of peise, v. < Anglo-Norman paiser, peiser, peisser, Anglo-Norman and Middle French peser (c1050 in Old French; French peser) to burden, oppress, grieve (a person) (c1050), to weigh (an object) (late 12th cent.), to consider, ponder, examine attentively (a person or thing) (end of the 12th cent.), to have a specified weight (c1170), to be heavy (c1200) < classical Latin pēnsāre to weigh, ponder, consider. A terrific word: it makes thinking itself material, something like a coin tumbling down into the slot of the mouth, burnished and tongue-palpable. Ought I ponder whether or not Lutz is slyly aping Gertrude Stein’s insistence that “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are”? Stein:

I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.

And I try to make my ears encumber that aberrantly loud knock of dog’s tongue against water, its final lingual materiality, its brusque affability. Gertrude Stein in How to Write (1931): “I return to sentences as a refreshment.” And:

Grammar is restless and earned.
Walking in can field a dance grammar is restless and earned.
. . .
Is simplicity conviction or grammar and is simplicity more than put in.
How whatever.
Grammar is intense in dried again there and then.
The question is if you have a vocabulary have you any need of grammar except for explanation that is the question, communication and direction repetition and intuition that is the question. Returned for grammar.

Grammar is intense in dried again there and then. Repetition syndrome. I think of Laura Riding’s complaint regarding “corruption of the reasons of poetry” in remarks “To the Reader” prefacing the Collected Poems (1938):

In poem-writing and poem-reading the stirring up of the poetic faculties has been a greater preoccupation than their proper use; the excitement of feeling oneself in a poetic mood has come to be regarded as adequate fulfillment both for the reader and the poet. Hence the frequent vulgarism ‘What is this poem about?’—when the reader feels that there is an element in a poem beyond that designed to evoke in him the flattering sensation of understanding more than he knows . . .

Isn’t one counterpoise to that “design” (prevalent hereabouts, a glut of the “era”) the kind of sentence-myopia that Lutz so intrepidatiously (and slowly) executes, all remnant sardony watered with joy? Against the “how whatever” sprints of mere grammar. “Smallish winter finches approach the day’s balm. Concerted in the modesty of their route.”

Bill Berkson / J. H. Prynne

2011-12-14T06:49:00.000-08:00

Bill Berkson

In the Roland Pease-edited annual (deplorably now suspended) of “poems, translations & interviews,” Zoland Poetry No. 5 (2011), a lively interview with Bill Berkson, conducted by Thomas Devaney. In it, Berkson talks about “The Waste Land,” the use he made of it, and how it provided a serious initial point de départ and point de repère both (“I followed the notes to “The Waste Land.” So that gave me John Donne and Dante, Jessie Weston, The Golden Bough, John Webster, Ovid, and so on.”) Berkson, offering a plausible (and rarely so put, Eliot’s suasion amongst the avant-garde so spalled off by Williams’s constant bombardments, see Berkson’s own story of how, shortly after the appearance of “The Skaters” he remarked to Ashbery how it recalled “The Four Quartets, and he [Ashbery] said he’d always meant to read them, and probably would”) lineage:

One of the critics called it a “cinematographic” way of composing. So that business of one line put next to the other, phrases from diverse sources—I now realize how that persists with me. Frank O’Hara once introduced me at a reading at NYU by saying that I was the only young American poet making an interesting use of T. S. Eliot. How he figured that out I’ll never know. There’s a funny connection, too, between that brief phase of Eliot and what is loosely called Cubist poetry, “Lundi rue Christine” by Apollinaire or certain poems of Reverdy, the really adventurous French poets Eliot seems to have had no interest in. But then on to “Europe”: from “The Waste Land” to John Ashbery’s “Europe” seemed like a simple step.

Devaney’s query a simple “Simple?” And Berkson again:

No, but clear to me. “Europe” was, in those terms immediately comprehensible. Both “The Waste Land” and “Europe”—and this is, I think, key—allowed for a sense of format. Which is to say, whether it was Coolidge or Padgett, Dick Gallup or Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo—those of us inspired by what John Ashbery was doing in the poems of The Tennis Court Oath, particularly “Europe,” each poet responded in his own way. Format was the handy aspect there. Ashbery was taking apart his native language, which had, because he was living a French life in Paris, become distant to him, his relation to language being already aslant with irony, as it is. The so-called “pulverized” language of “Europe” and those other poems was different from ours in that ours would not or had not yet composed itself. For myself, a nonsyntactical grid of words and phrases—or one where the syntax is slippery—allowed for a way of locating what I had. For the poems, or some of them, early on, all I had was a feeling for how to lay them out, some of which came from print culture generally, some from how “Europe” looked on the page, and otherwise from visual art and music. . . .

That “grid” and its “way of locating what I had”—largely because of late I keep turning to (making a feeble considered ruckus in) J. H. Prynne’s work—triggers a furtive reconnoitering of likes. It commenced with my reading of Berkson’s poem—quoted by Devaney, who notes its “unflagging sense of forward momentum”—“By Halves”:

do limits build
both sweet and cruel
or over to you off at
your compass studies,
visor at odd angles perforated,
plumb to sky
to service mouthful signage in pearly
cantina load where squawks from a ceiling,
headed down the demon slopes
for work place, total their sheer
carbon feed on an average night
that at any guardrail slick nails the morphological in bins?
Thus backup wealth lifts an ancient spume, glowering with grammar
whose joined bronze gives pause,
erect lapse paging glory, when wing is rag

Isn’t that of the untroubled ilk and near kin to something like:

At late stage the defect of scale scrapes off
the felt lining to slight down the huff, displaced
into wrong water. Split finish by large numbers
will cruise to punish the knife, in common rite
cuffed and bled to moral ennui, each wave mortal
with rapt digression. Who doesn’t count won’t
matter, leaf cover shimmers to greet day-care

blips on the cycle, citrus screened, doing a turn
on borrowed wheelskates. In the avertive cleft
of ‘an arithmetical curiosity’ a link itself blisters
to foil up front treatment, choosing up against
warded splines. Mis-timed by equity trap points
to run and run like colour all down the blade,
this scant fuel thins to vapour in vacant air.

Being a part of Prynne’s sequence Unanswering Rational Shore (Object Permanence, 2001). (The minor echo of Eliot’s “gathering fuel in vacant lots” entirely unanticipated, that is, unintended in my rather random selecting, noted only in the typing. Lo mismo’s salient upthrust.) Berkson, in the interview, recalls “trying to short-circuit any kind of anticipated meaning, to defeat the reader’s habitual expectations at all costs. I thought I wanted to write poems that didn’t mean anything.” And, later:

Then again, I came to this sort of joyful, but also scary realization that meaning is unavoidable—you have to watch your language, what it might be saying. I got more interested in poems with a presence of meaning, or in which meaning is a sort of felt presence—sometimes you feel you could get it, grasp and define it, and sometimes not, but you feel an impingement, an atmosphere where shifting connotations appear almost graspable. . . . With that came this other realization, that the scatter all fits, whether one intervenes or not, to make it so. As Beckett says, the mess gets accommodated.

Think of that—attending to what arranged language “might be saying,” that “presence of meaning”—against Prynne’s sense (spelled out in the 2008 talk “Difficulties in the Translation of ‘Difficult’ Poems”) of constructing the poem as a semantic field with “not meaning determining its pattern of expression, so much as pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning—or perhaps we should call this ‘meaning’, in some second-order sense.” Prynne’s version of Berkson’s aim of short-circuitry: “When links in text-cohesion are violated or cut off, when extreme ambiguity displaces recognisable topic-focus, when discourse levels and fields of reference are switched abruptly and without sign-posts, these features may begin to comprise a second-order strategy of pattern-making in a new way.” Oddly, both Prynne and Berkson provide what I read as warnings / distinctions against such disruptings become “style” or mere “playfulness”—just another means in a supposed arsenal of techniques. Berkson compares the shiftings (“multiple meanings thicken the plot”) to Cubist doings and notes how Cubism’s successors Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky “took Cubism as design, a design style”:

It wasn’t composition like it was for Braque and Picasso, or even Gleizes and the other Parisian Cubists. Shifting planes—“planometrics,” they called it in midcentury art classes, when Cubism had become an easy teaching tool—for Gorky and Davis was a format into which you could plug whatever meaningful matter you were carrying.

(Nota bene, would-be Prynne acolytes.) Prynne’s own distinction puts enormous weight on claims of authorial intent. Of “pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning,” he says: “I don’t think this is equivalent to post-modernist playfulness, where meaning is allowed to skim across a surface in a deliberately arbitrary way, because the use of difficulty as a method of poetic thought is different both in intention and effect from difficulty as a playground or a funfair.” Or, as Prynne’s lines seem to suggest in Kazoo Dreamboats or, On What There Is (Critical Documents, 2011), “phrasal turmoil in cap position” may offer one possible means to assay (“purchase grind on”) the lingual “scam of scams”:

I saw too by links of redaction in fluency, not yet perfect because by nature self-mutable even the bounds transient each to alter in replacement through pair logic overlay, in otherhood unfinished bearing phrasal turmoil in cap position, limit across rotation the corridor not self-invaded by sweetness each time in momentary batch flavour. Equalised to run its surplus attached to overdrive each word capsule clamped at reward issue upper to lower jaw purchase grind on this scam of scams.

Endlessness and Hurry

2011-12-13T07:52:00.001-08:00

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

A hash of impositions and instabilities, how the day begins, grousing unreadily, stubble salting its chin. Out of what Williams (writing to Zukofsky, 28 January 1934) called “advice to the unborn as it were telling the world (of them) that life is endless and consists mostly in ripping down the scaffolding from the Grace of God”—he’s talking about a “two page blurb” called “The Element of Time”:

If genius has anything to say in America it had better be strongwinded. Because a life, contrary to the classic opinion, is endless. There is plenty of time. And no hurry. Nobody ever overtakes anybody else. Longwindedness is always a competitor and has to be lived down but even that dies finally from living in its vacuum. Then genius has its chance. Nothing grows old.*
. . .
I emphasize, it isn’t the mass of difficulties that need unhorse a genius. It is the slipping, sliding wastefulness of useless rushing about. There isn’t much to do. It’s just the flip of a word sometimes. One doesn’t have to live this kind of life, that kind of life. The only thing that has ever seemed to me to be important is never to yield an inch of what is to the mind important—and to let the life take care of itself . . .
. . .
If anybody can hold to anything and cling to it long enough to have it be beaten into some shape by the holding and the onslaught, it will at least be refined enough for one to make out clearly its original futility. And even that would be a distinction.

Dashed off for James Laughlin (Williams calls him “Louglin”) at Harvard (“I advised him to throw it into the waste basket and maybe he’ll do so. I didn’t keep a copy.”) Seemingly Williams’s initial exchange with Laughlin, pre-Pound. Williams, lately turned fifty, is equally full of doubt and adamancy, modicums of defeat and furious purpose—see these lines out of a 20 June 1933 letter:

I don’t know what has come over me but at times I’m pretty well convinced it is the end of me as far as writing is concerned. Perhaps it is extreme fatigue though I look well enough. It is heartbreaking to toil at something and feel one’s interest grow less and less the more he works—panic finally. But you make a mistake if you take this to be pathetic. I’m not making excuses. All I mean is that when I can’t write any longer then I’ll be through with writing. Though I confess there’s nothing else.

Which makes sidelong tongue-cheek’d cheer of the “original futility” prescript seem astoundingly buoyant. (The letters, heavily Williams-sided, collected in the Barry Ahearn-edited The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Wesleyan UP, 2003), offer, in stretches, a terrific sense of “quotidian Williams,” that dash amalgam of croup and script, unbolted moroseness and sudden cheer: “Great weather since the rains. Birds sing me to sleep and wake me up. What singing! What luminous dumbbells. Excrement (expletive)!”

* I think of the definition of voice (“My Voice”) as “perseverance codified.” I think, too, of the opening of Hugh Kenner’s 1968 “Of Notes and Horses” (concerning Zukofsky’s “strongwinded”—“forty years in progress” and still, then, largely incomplete—“A”:
(In medias res) . . . when what was put on the page collaborates with what readers understand in its presence. The former is constant (more or less, despite editors’ tinkerings), the latter mutates with time, and given enough time, as with Homer, a spectacular inventory of mutations will accumulate. An Iliad totally (radically?) unlike ours glowed in the mind of Socrates. Until the collaborative process is moving the poem exists only as an unperformed score exists . . .

William Fuller’s “For Dally Kimoko”

2011-12-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

William Fuller
(Collage by Tom Raworth of Photographs by Chuck Stabelton)

Pas grand chose. Thwarted by the routine chores of the day, its light slanting off southerly in a geometric splash of board-lengths, white with verges yellowing greasily. A proxy for color, drawing additives out of its surround, the way light seemingly caught in its purity usually does. Torn paper crows gusting through it, bound for town. A smallish rhumb line of sentence-making accrues in that “greasily.” A tagalong adverb crossing the meridian at an angle consistent to its imaginary precursors. One is the epigraph to J. H. Prynne’s 1997 piece For the Monogram. Out of editor Austin Farrer’s 1951 introduction to Leibniz’s Theodicy: “Why should the dog ever be displeased spontaneously?” (Leibniz is apparently making distinct the spontaneous and the voluntary: “many things occur in the mind, of itself, but not chosen by it.”) The second greasy “precursor” (because, nearly unbeknownst to me, I’d been aligning Prynne’s line with it all day), another doggish sentence (wagged by its adverbial tail), out of William Fuller’s Hallucination (Flood Editions, 2011): “A happy, inquisitive, spontaneous dog, eating hungrily.” Out of the lovely “For Dally Kimoko”:

Who forgets to perfect enjoyment flakes apart from the force of a will to fail. After which, claims encumber thought. They cause the phone to be handed to her, into which she speaks, then hands it to me, and I speak, then a voice speaks, then several voices speak, and a shadow breaks apart. To be valid, this episode must be imputed to those who are absent. But why be anxious? Why care about what else could be possible when the true goal involves having all our senses register every aspect of physical existence constantly and unremittingly? Such an attainment would fill up our hearts without resorting to paradox. Any estimated shortfall would still leave adequate amounts set aside to satisfy our need not to fluctuate. Even a dog knows this. A happy, inquisitive, spontaneous dog, eating hungrily. When in the future a kind of perpetual hum is heard, which grows louder as temperatures rise, strong hands will take command and clear light will darken us. At night a heavy body will be thrown against the floor and a tambourine will vibrate.

Reverie of a bodily attunement and presence functioning so completely and purely it thwarts the castigate tendency of the mind’s will. Is there a complicated math of desire’s irremediable shortfall here, though? If “all our senses register every aspect of physical existence constantly and unremittingly”—why the subsequent intrusion of doubt couched in the lingo of the banking primer: “Any estimated shortfall would still leave adequate amounts set aside to satisfy our need not to fluctuate”? Is that the impertinence and press of “claims,” their encumbrance seemingly a kind of second-guessing? Why the odd pointing to Africa—after the initial nod to soukous guitarist Dally Kimoko of the Congo, the palpable longing that “strong hands . . . take command and clear light . . . darken us,” the increasing heat, the hint of violence? Is it arguable that the piece itself “flakes apart” / “breaks apart” under the welter of its anxieties (thus viscerally enacting its willed argument)? Arriving here (my own buoyancy a little drubbed by the relentlessness of my queries, possibly opaque, or addled) I think of William Carlos Williams’s 5 August 1932 reply to Zukofsky, writing after receipt of An “Objectivists” Anthology:

’s a wonderful book, a distinguished object, and the preface is like the Bible for impressiveness and impenetrability—it’s a veritable glass miggle for slipperiness.

(Williams adds, rather stupefyingly, that “the most impressive feature of the whole is that it is a whole and like nothing else I have ever observed.” Williams seemed routinely to go marble-mouthed in any attempt to talk up the pleasures of Zukofsky’s work.)

Scrupulous

2011-12-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

J. H. Prynne
(Photograph by Eirik Steinhoff)

Rather stymied by the press of my own habits, their hegemony in the usual lurch. Cortázar: “The ego refuses to compromise, an eye devouring the world—without seeing it.” Reading, under the slender stalk-delivered cone of a clip-on light, J. H. Prynne, out of “Tips on Reading”:

When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged . . .

And thinking: the “test-rig” of my quotidian writing’s begun, merely, to flatter my habit. No pleasantly unreachable itch to it, no adrenalin-charge or massy onslaught of percept in the offing. (Cortázar: “I wonder whether it occurs to him to suddenly consider the absurd, as a comparison with the cosmic, whether he sometimes takes a step back so the monster in front of his eyes turns back into the fly hovering in the air. Techniques, nothing more. Baruch Spinoza, what a swine.”) You see: pure effect, a sleight of hand game, easily played. Longing for a dry hesitancy, an exactness to thwart the usual ready gush, a cursive mingling that is sere and serene. (Prynne, “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance”: “The private / recourse that might also reclaim the transfer / is our hesitancy. Whenever we / find our unwillingness a form on which to pause.”)

A couple of inches of cakey snow shoveled off the walk. Scrupulously—see Latin scrūpulus, diminutive of scrūpus, rough or hard pebble—a word Cicero put into lingo, uneasiness welling to a nub. Or anxiety weighing in. An intent to name and delineate the things of the world with prudence (contracted < prōvidēns < classical Latin prōvidēre, to foresee), though all such finicking be, possibly, futile, names being such monsters of uncertainty, and liable to become flies . . . Prynne, out of The White Stones (1969):

Mouth Open

To set a name to it, hold them
down and ask merely
are they shouting, with both feet
planted and leaning towards me

the note forming no con-
sequence, they gulp the
landscape before them

Alert, to the name of an occasion
which is theirs as I take
it from them, the offered gift
met by the purest sound

I cannot hold this
it is a name: shouting
or leaning, on the single

earth which is below them, each one

The name itself: temporary holding tank, “purest sound,” momentary stay.

Tu m’

2011-12-08T07:11:00.000-08:00

Marcel Duchamp, “Tu m’,” 1918

Is it Leopardi who writes of “the acid-burned hole in the continuum / that hole called life”? I doodad it up considerably. Memory is a disburdening. A gash in the screen the constantly projected movie leaks through. I look at Marcel Duchamp’s final painting Tu m’ (1918), the title a truncating of tu m’emmerde or tu m’ennui (you bore me): bicycle wheel, corkscrew, hat rack. Color samples. Gash with safety pin spanning it, futile repair. Three templates for Stoppages. Pointing index. Self-referential whimsy amounting to a décor entirely habitable, sleek and preening with self-reverence. There’s something fundamentally slippery about Duchamp, a mercurial “I” providing ready clownish countenance for a wholly protean “self” in its obliging routines for achievement’s lack. Gianfranco Baruchello, talking to Henry Martin in Why Duchamp (Documentext / McPherson & Co., 1985) suggests Duchamp’s is a “provisional” ego:

It’s an ‘I’ that’s not present or respected as a structural part of the person, it’s an ‘I’ that the person uses when and if and however he wants, and it’s not at all the ‘I’ that defines the person, what defines the person is his ability to take his distances from the ‘I.’ What makes his works seem mad is that you can’t see the ‘I’ that’s involved with them or responsible for them.

Or is Duchamp’s an “exploded” I? Baruchello (he’s referring to Duchamp’s remarks to Pierre Cabanne in Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp):

He said that the meanings of certain words ‘explode’ and leave dictionary definitions behind them. And all of his work could be interpreted as a way of giving meaning and value to things that don’t make sense from simply dictionary points of view.

Caustic inevitability, bilious steam sliding out under the door. The door to the room that is keeping one here, typing. A salience of lost initiative is heard burning out in the streets: “my fire in regard to its execution.” And: “I had had enough of it, and I stopped, but with no abrupt decision.”

Berger, et alii

2011-12-07T06:28:00.000-08:00

John Berger, c. 1962

Early morning. Scuttling inveterate sleeplessness. (Sleeplessness, the longest single-vowelled word in English, I recall being instructed. And countered: what about Tennesseelessness, what Wallace Stevens captured in that jar? It shined like a firefly . . .) Tossed insomniac amongst fey slivers of sense. Thinking of some dire need to prod the spurious world with a pointed stick, to alleviate its surfeit and fulsomeness by means of a venting. Whence’d fly up countless black birds, or spout putty-colored geysers. The world pie. The meaning of gonflé. Stuffed up, full of itself, disallowing, by its tenor the vehicle of one’s doubt. John Berger, out of the 1958 novel A Painter of Our Time:

August 14
I should never have been a painter. Only the moral obligation to work makes me persist.

August 15
When ideas and actions are judged by their intention or sincerity instead of by their results, it is one of the paradoxes of human nature that confidence tricksters thrive. . . .
Anything is justified in art, but everything must be related. There is nothing that the painter need be forbidden to do. Nothing at all. But when he has finished, what he has done must be judged in relation to the always different and always present struggle of men to realize their potentiality more fully . . .

And, out of Bento’s Sketchbook:

One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, to deadly. One protests (by building a barricade, taking up arms, going on a hunger strike, linking arms, shouting, writing) in order to save the present moment, whatever the future hold.
To protest is to refuse being reduced to a zero and to an enforced silence. Therefore, at the very moment a protest is made, if it is made, there is a small victory. The moment, although passing like every moment, acquires a certain indelibility. It passes, yet it has been printed out. A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present. The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective inconsequential.

A statement that so thoroughly enunciates what writing (particularly writing here) means that I neglect to see how pertinent it is, too, to the nascent push of the occupying 99%. I think of Beckett’s sapped enunciation (in Proust) regarding “the poisonous ingenuity of Time” and how it indefatigably locates itself within the individual human being, who’s sapped—he, too—“in the haze of our smug will to live, of our pernicious and incurable optimism”:

The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours.

Sense of menace residing in that “smug will to live”—as if mere volitive ongoingness suffied—is it that that allows one’s being “reduced to a zero.” Gonflé. Fey slivers of sense. Berger says: “People hold books in a special way—like they hold nothing else. They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner.” My writing, my toy, my sleep. One continues out of a sense of necessary exacerbation. Roiling the moment, churning its liquors immiscible. Inconsequentially embedding in each daily “reach” what Barthes calls—seeing it contained in photographs—“this imperious sign of my future death.” Oof.

Bento’s Sketchbook

2011-12-06T06:58:00.001-08:00

John Berger

John Berger, in Bento’s Sketchbook (Pantheon, 2011), quoting Spinoza:

The more an image is joined with many other things, the more often it flourishes.
The more an image is joined with many other things, the more causes there are by which it can be excited.

Identified thus: Ethics, Part V, Proposition XIII, Proof. I long to make of that an argument for plethora and welter, clot and burgeon. (Just now I walked under a series of sycamores, each brimming with noisy crows, skirl and abate, splutter and caw.) I long to see in the implacable surge of “mere” incongruous joining a mimicry of worlding. Berger (“The Moment of Cubism”):

The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art. The incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it, is the secret of art. What is the meaning of that incongruity and the shock which accompanies it? It is to be found in the distinction between the actual and the desirable. All art is an attempt to define and make unnatural this distinction.

Words, mustered, to placate and measure amorphous desire. (Spell of greasy intangibility ascending into the easy gloom of a fugue state, the air’s “molecules”—invention of my flight—seemingly disporting out of their usual grainy regularity.) Writing seems so unanchored, fraught by its perpetual lambency, its immaterial way of grazing, barely making contact with the world. How writing longs to be drawing. Berger: “When I’m drawing . . . I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning. . . . When I’m drawing I feel a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter if pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.” (Handwriting—execrable, torturous, smeary, wayward—handwriting isn’t writing. Berger: “Write by hand with a knuckle bleeding. Like this blood underlines some of the words.” Again: handwriting isn’t writing.) Berger’s plethora, pilings up, a chrestomathy:

Soft. Medium. Hard. Traces made by the soft graphite are jet black like thick hair, and traces made by the hard are like hair turning grey. Graphite, as skins do, has its own oils. It is a very different substance from the burnt ash of charcoal. Its sheen when applied on paper is like the sheen on lips.

—

‘Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there’s skin behind it.’

—

I’m drawing with black ink (Sheaffer) and wash and spit, using my finger rather than a brush. Beside me on the grass, where I’m sitting, are a few sheets of coloured Chinese rice paper. I chose them for their cereal colours. Maybe later I will tear shapes from them and use them as collage. . . .
Irises grew in Babylon. Their name came later, from the Greek goddess of the rainbow. The French fleur de lys was an iris. . . .

—

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)—generally known as Benedict (or Bento) de Spinoza—earnt his living as a lens-grinder and spent the most intense years of his short life writing On the Improvement of the Understanding and the Ethics, both of which were only published posthumously. We know from other peoples’ souvenirs and memories of the philosopher that he also drew. He enjoyed drawing. He carried a sketchbook around with him. After his sudden death—perhaps from silicosis, a consequence of his grinding lenses—his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes, but apparently didn’t find a sketchbook. Or, if they did, it later got lost.
For years now, I have imagined a sketchbook with his drawings in it being found. I didn’t know what I hoped to find in it. Drawings of what? Drawn in what kind of manner? De Hooch, Vermeer, Jan Steen, Gerard Dou were his contemporaries. For a while in Amsterdam he lived a few hundred metres away from Rembrandt, who was twenty-six years his elder. Biographers suggest the two of them probably met. As a draughtsman Spinoza would have been an amateur. I wasn’t expecting great drawings in the sketchbook, were it to be found. I simply wanted to reread some of his words, some of his startling propositions as a philosopher, whilst at the same time being able to look at things he had observed with his own eyes.

—

The centre of the city of Dresden was still razed to the ground when I first met Erhard Frommhold there in the early 1950s. The Allied bombing of the city on February 13, 1945, had killed in a single night 100,000 civilians; most of them burnt to death in temperatures that reached 1800° Fahrenheit.

“It’s a drawing of Maria Muñoz, the Spanish dancer . . .

“We call it the Bridge, because our weight is suspended between our left hand palm down on the floor and our right foot also flat of the floor. Between those two fixed points the whole body is expectant, waiting, suspended.

“The paper became grey with alterations and cancelations. The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.”

John Berger, “From a Woman’s Portrait by Willem Drost”

“This pupil of Rembrandt was called Willem Drost. He was probably born in Leiden. In the Louvre in Paris there is a Bathsheba painted by him which echoes Rembrandt’s painting of the same subject painted in the same year. Drost must have been exactly contemporary with Spinoza. We don’t know where or when he died.

“She is not looking at the spectator. She is looking hard at a man she desired, imagining him as her lover. This man could only have been Drost. The only thing we know for certain about Drost is that he was desired precisely by this woman.

“. . . To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in this life to feeling immortal.”

Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station

2011-12-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner, out of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House, 2011), talking about the narrative impossibility of some grand percentage of one’s experience, periods of “pure transition . . . possessed of no intrinsic content,” periods ascribed, albeit only in retrospect, with “a sense of directionality,” pointing toward the eventual arrival of what will subsequently provide their definition, periods Lerner calls “dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient,” and adding quickly, “that’s not really right”—for such amorphous reaches leveraged up out of the continuum can only be defined negatively:

Not the little lyric miracle and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame. But such moments were equally impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and canceled the experience where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and did not make contact with the real but performed such contact . . .

Later in the novel, Lerner quotes Ortega y Gasset saying something equally fraught with doubt regarding the veracity of captured experience: “By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.” Lerner’s protagonist, one Adam Gordon, young American poet scooting through obscure and prestigious literary fellowship monies in Madrid—clearly modeled on Lerner himself (one reads with a distinct sense, not that the writer’s own doings are poorly camouflaged, but that the book itself hardly wants to be taken as a novel, wants to inhabit some other, shiftier, or more forgiving, ground, Sebaldian or Bolañoesque, for reasons of its own)—largely considers himself a fraud, what William Matthews used to call a “beautiful fake.” And he is—by turns wholly insufferable and grimly amusing in the completeness of his narcissist throes, damned and saved by the utter thoroughness of his self-consciousness (I recall somebody talking of a John Hawkes novel, Second Skin I think, wondering aloud if it’s at all possible to like a novel whose narrator is, at bottom, unlikeable). Lerner’s Gordon seemingly sees the narcissism / fraudulence as part of a period affliction:

Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small-time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems.

The supposed “ease” of the “ready-made”—literature made of literature—performativity’s routine and wily dance, is that what lies at the core of Lerner’s—and the age’s—disaffection? (So conceptualism’s ostentatiously surrendering of the device: it’s all shill copying, arms akimbo with a look of preternatural boredom at the routine.) John Berger, out the Bento’s Sketchbook (Pantheon, 2011), a thing he thrice repeats, a kind of mystical intoning: “We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.” Which is a warning against contemporaneity’s smug refusals and bright accruals both, the peculate insincerity of its knowings and the unplumbed meagreness of its not-knowings. Berger writes to decry the difference, to insist that duration be embedded in the durationless:

The challenge of drawing is to make visible on the paper not only discrete, recognizable things, but also to show how the extensive is one substance. And, being one substance, it harasses the act of drawing. If the lines of a drawing don’t convey this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign. The lines of a sign are uniform and regular: the lines of a drawing are harassed and tense. Somebody making a sign repeats an habitual gesture. Somebody making a drawing is alone in the infinitely extensive.

A Lerner version of which may be (he is talking about the “narrative function” of cigarettes “as bridge or exit strategy,” about how “the little cylinders” provide “a prefabricated motivation and transition,” integrating event and extent): “Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.” Except that the “extensive” here is no longer the world (its “all possible paths”), but literature: see Georg Lukács’s opening to The Theory of the Novel (1920): “Happy were the ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar . . . The world is wide and yet it is like a home.”

E. G. Burrows, 1917-2011

2011-12-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

E. G. Burrows, 1917-2011

Heard—reported by radio, aptly enough—of the recent death of E. G. (Edwin Gladding) Burrows (b. 23 July 1917 in Dallas, Texas—d. 20 November 2011 in Edmonds, Washington). I say aptly because of Burrows’s long career in public broadcasting, work done, it seems, concurrent with an unstopped and nigh-constant attention to writing poetry. (I sense Burrows being prolific in the magazines, and skint by the books.) At Ithaca House, I printed Burrows’s The House of August (1985). Accuracy of seeing, curiosity bolstered by apprehending, particularity of diction, love of the natural world, game and wily enough to comprehend the ineradicability of human foibles. Other books include: The Arctic Tern and Other Poems (Grove Press, 1957)—finalist for the National Book Award, Man Fishing (Sumac, 1969), Kiva (Ithaca House, 1976). A nod here to a neglected. Three poems, dated roughly 1960, 2001, 2003:

Nicias to the Athenians

The sea’s on end, a scoured
plate on my mind’s mad edge,
red, with all the wrong ships.
I wash them with my sleeve
swabbing the grit of sails
from that bowl like a scrub-
woman, still their yards glint.

Where is my sister stood
in morning’s gold motion
motionless, held the cold
flat grape dish with its freight
of iced fruit toward my mouth?
Did I see her comb snarls
of sunlight from her hair?
The door closed while I slept,
the fruit grew plated beaks.
The sea is that dish, the sea
poison with tainted sails,
a shield scenic with war,
itself an act of war.
It is my mind that flows
from the blue tilted bowl.

The lie in wait for me
those ships like spit out seeds.
An ill sort, stabbed by stones
in the kidney, too long
camped among damp meadows,
I am devoid of zeal.
Eat of my body, plant
your teeth in me, anchors.
I have no taste, only
acidity of time.
I have the yellow flesh
of one fifteen years turned
over the war’s slow fire,
tough, unpalatable,
yet the first and last course
served up by demagogues.
I am the old morsel,
reliable raisin,
but when I am nibbled
to nothing, when the skin
is peeled back from the shrunk
comedy of my core,
who will nourish their war?

There are no soldiers here.
They have run together
like unfired rust and rose,
the one color valor
smudged on the ware of weeds.
Between the long door and
the sun my sister stood
holding their bodies’ shards
like dolls’ limbs in her hands,
wet with her sallow wine.

Athens, my mind runs down.
Trumpets whisper behind
the hill, the ships lean in.
Was it empire you saw
in a pot of wild doves,
dukedoms of Sicily,
docile and spice-odored
to the nostrils, heaving
the oracular dregs?
That scent is blown, that feast
consumed, and Athens ends
here in this outcountry
like a drop of blood on
the outstretched fingertip.
The world’s on end. Come, cup
of the cold sea, pour death.

—

Camping Out

I watched the nesting redstart
when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee.
The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil.
Rain made pawprints on the canvas.

So much clings to the shoes,
the old shoes must be discarded,
but we’re fools to think that does it:
burning the scraps.

I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock,
for the barred owl on a tent peak
among scrub pines in Michigan.
I can hear my father stir

and the cot creak. The flap opens.
He goes out and never returns
though the coffee steams on the grill
and the redstart sings in the alders.

—

Fly-by

Two above me rattling
in agile dogfight hugely
exuberant I thought they were
small hawks they were kingfishers
this August the old pursuit
and nipping at heels joy
of the genially royal and tail-spinning.

There’s nothing I’d rather do:
whoop and holler and backtalk
over the banal marina
and boat dock above the pawky
rock doves and bawling gulls
on their outposts I am tired
of the dull wait or the brawling
over schools of the meek and tasteless.
I’d rather spar and peel off.
I’d rather rattle.

“Cruel hand . . .”

2011-12-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

English Sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Sapped and distracted. What if I do a little housecleaning, dumping off a rat’s nest of stray pronuntiationes in a fever of splicing? (To droop untowardly indicates humility.) It’s odd to think of Marianne Moore quarrelling. She sees fit to belatedly bromide regarding it (out of The Dial: A Retropective”):

To some contributors—as to some non-contributors—The Dial and I in particular, may have seemed quarrelsome, and it is regrettable that manners should be subordinated to matter. Mishaps and anomalies, however, but served to emphasize for me the untoxic soundness of most writers. And today, previous victims of mine have to dread from me, as pre-empting the privilege of the last word, nothing more than solicitude that all of us may write better.

Likely right, though isn’t there something always a little smug about putting away one’s bad manners? (To behave decorously indicates a sensibility arriviste.) Thoreau’s talking about clothing made by the “factory system” when he notes that “the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.” So it goes, too, for solicitudinous non-aggravarians. Or, as Thoreau protested (to Daniel Ricketson, 18 August 1857) of nature-writer Wilson Flagg: “He is not alert enough. He wants stirring up with a pole. He should practice turning a series of somersets rapidly, or jump up and see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.” And:

His style, as I remember, is singularly vague . . . before I got to the end of the sentences, I was off the track. If you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end. As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. There are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a chance. New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody’s castle roof perforated. To try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible. Your polished stuff turns out not to be meteoric, but of this earth. However, there is plenty of time, and Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.

Par contre Flagg, who outlived Thoreau, called him “a poet, rather than a philosopher”:

The luminous medium through which he saw all things appertaining to nature incapacitated him for logical reasoning. He lived upon his intuitions. His style of writing was very simple, occasionally flashing with brilliant metaphors, which he rarely used, but which always came unsought, and were not elaborately nailed to his sentences, like pictures on a wall. His satire is inimitable, and he utters his paradoxes with such an air of inspiration that you admire them in spite of their absurdity. He saw visions and described them like a prophet, but they were unintelligible to men of the world. He saw truths, but they were for the imagination, not the reason. “I would,” he said, “rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.”

Another route to that “untoxic soundness” the anomalies boast of. I think of Henry James’s remarks regarding Thoreau’s epigone John Burroughs (“a sort of reduced, but also more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau”) : “He is . . . intimate with the question of apples, and he treats of it in a succulent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat trivial theme a kind of lyrical dignity. He remarks, justly, that women are poor apple-eaters.” (To contend “in sequent toil” indicates mere forwardness . . .)

Jefferson and / or Williams

2011-11-30T06:01:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, c. 1943

All the makings of sloth and lethargy hereabouts. The snow, the crows, the routine trudge . . . Or the morning’s stray fossickings unearth two counter-notes. Jefferson’s preposterous (and prevalent) sense that writing means clothing, sumptuary and vain (out of a letter to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 March 1818):

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. This mass of trash, however, is not without some distinction; some few modeling their narratives, although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of a sound morality. . . .For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged. Some is useful for forming style and taste.

Versus Wallace Stevens’s sense of writing as a stripping off, with no remedy except itself (out of the William Carlos Williams issue of the Norman Macleod-edited Briarcliff Quarterly, printed in 1946):

If a man writes a little every day, as Williams does, or used to do, it may be that he is merely practicing in order to make perfect. On the other hand he may be practicing in order to get at his subject. If his subject is, say, a sense, a mood, an integration, and if his representation is faint or obscure, and if he practices in order to overcome his faintness or obscurity, what he really does is to bring, or try to bring, his subject into that degree of focus at which he sees it, for a moment, as it is and at which he is able to represent it in exact definition.
A man does not spend his life doing this sort of thing unless doing it is something he needs to do. One of the sanctions of the writer is that he is doing something that he needs to do. The need is not the desire to accomplish through writing something not incidental to the writing itself. Thus a political or religious writer writes for political or religious reasons. Williams writes, I think, in order to write. He needs to write.
What is the nature of this need? What does a man do when he delineates the images of reality? Obviously, the need is a general need and the activity a general activity. It is of our nature that we proceed from the chromatic to the clear, from the unknown to the known. Accordingly the writer who practices in order to make perfect is really practicing to get at his subject and, in that exercise, is participating in a universal activity. He is obeying his nature. Imagism (as one of Williams’ many involvements, however long ago) is not something superficial. It obeys an instinct. Moreover, imagism is an ancient phase of poetry. It is something permanent. Williams is a writer to whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly. His delineations are trials. They are rubbings of reality.

(Oddly enough, Marianne Moore, in a tiny approbatory squib in the issue, seems to mimic Stevens’s image of the focusing lens: “I can only say that for me, lacklustreness and aesthetic mildew vanish under the burning-glass of real poetry, and William Carlos Williams is the real thing.”) Stevens—nearly, I suppose, slipping back into talk of the “rig” (meaning some high-toned dress-up and deportment defining the work)—later calls Williams’s itch “an intellectual tenue.” That quotidian tonus holding, against holding out.

“Expelled in all vicissity . . .”

2011-11-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

A good thing, some days, to come at it unprepared. (Gertrude Stein: “Nothing I like more than when a dog barks in his sleep . . . How much does he know that he is barking.”) That longing to write in one’s sleep, words expelled in all vicissity without the retardant viscosity (or urbane velleity) of reason (or reasonableness)—expelled in a brash “nativity of everness.” To feed off the soup of unsorted vocables that sloshes full, daily, in the tureen of being, that unforesought and unforesold aliment. Words—paragraphs—pulled up out of the reliably uttering ticker tape. Or, stuck in a reverie of murth’rous discordance, all song quashed, all “dingy twaddle” stymied by something like a Pleistocene white-out, some untongued glacial push across the word-teeming savannahs: the nada look, in tenebre e in oscurità—what Beckett translated by “bored to extinction.” See, too, Thoreau’s pertinent Journal-note (26 January 1858):

Some men have a peculiar taste for bad words, mouthing and licking them into lumpish shapes like the bear her cubs,—words like “tribal” and “ornamentation,” which drag a dead tail after them. They will pick you out of a thousand the still-born words, the falsettos, the wing-clipped and lame words, as if only the false notes caught their ears. They cry encore to all the discords.

Twaddle, the discordant, the flub, the shill, the blank: all the intrusory mitigants against the superfluidity of the ongoing occasion, the unruddered endless drift and impetus of pure saying. Surely William James, who claimed man defined himself against the beasts in the “exuberant excess of his subjective propensities”—“Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. . . . Prune down his extravagance, sober him and you undo him”—surely James might agree that all writing is slipshod, piecemeal, saltatory, wrought and incomplete. Still, the unvented fundament compels it, and the hortatory go.

—

Add an obligatory “bah” to the preceding. Off for a week or so. “That’ll be a relief.”

Samuel Beckett / Bram van Velde

2011-11-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

Samuel Beckett, c. 1964
(Photograph by Steve Schapiro)

A nigh simultaneity. Poking around in a book of Dorothea Lange photographs, I read Lange’s unabashedly pragmatic formula: “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” And consider, briefly, how that “seeing” is apt and liable to become a captious bludgeon of seeing, how one begins to see only what some prior camera’s selected for seeing. Doxa of the lens. And, later in the day, the shiny black night’s radiant aimlessnesses convened, the distraught road assuaged (I like to think) by my newly Hanook’d wheels, home, the tenably live succors of a book writhing in hand, I read in Charles Juliet’s Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (Dalkey Archive, 2009), Bram van Velde saying: “Painting is an aid to vision. It turns life, the complexity of life, into something visible. It reveals things that we don’t know how to see.”

I recall what Beckett (in a 1937 letter to Thomas McGreevy) reported of reading Schopenhauer (“like suddenly a window opened on a fug”). Here, according to Beckett: “a philosopher that can be read like a poet, with an entire indifference to the a priori forms of verification.” How attain that wild unravaged “indifference to the a priori”? Without it, one merely writes what one reads (Juliet writes of Beckett: “When he started writing, he stopped reading, believing that the two activities were incompatible.” Beckett: “I had to reject all the poisons . . .” And, admitting, glee-repressedly: “Yes, there was a kind of indecency—ontological indecency.” And: “Up until 1946 I tried to learn as much as possible in order to try and have some degree of power over things. Then I realized I was following the wrong path. But perhaps all paths are wrong.” And: “I have never studied anything in depth.”) Par contra, there’s Beckett’s hollow-voiced remark, ruining the idyll of the naïf: “Listening to yourself, it is not literature that you hear.” (Or, one succumbs to add, listening to—recording—the insipid hubbub of the cyber-screech. Not literature.)

No reading. No eavesdropping the interior / exterior voices. Whence, then, the materiel? Bram van Velde (whom Juliet quotes as saying: “I am a watered-down being”): “You can’t control anything. What you have to do is let yourself be taken over. . . . All the paintings I have made, I was compelled to make.” (One recalls a ravenous period of reading through countless sheaves of the current poetry-detritus, repeatedly noting how none of it showed any sign of writerly compulsion beyond that of “expected productivity.”) Beckett talks of “submitting to the unintelligible.” One thinks of the “via negativa.” And, apropos Beckett’s rejected reading, notes a reply to Juliet’s asking if he rereads the mystics—“Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck.” Beckett answers, apparently haltingly: “Yes . . . I like . . . I like their . . . their illogicality . . . their burning illogicality—the flame . . . the flame . . . which consumes all our filthy logic . . .”

One bout of activity (Juliet’s entry dated 11 November 1977). Beckett animatedly pushing aside drinking glasses, light, metal box of small cigars, &c. at the café table in order to detail a one minute play, invention of the previous night’s insomnia:

“One human being, standing silent, motionless, Slightly to the rear, almost offstage.” He points to a place on the table which stands for the stage. “Everything takes place in twilight. Someone else enters. He steps forward. Slowly. He notices the character standing motionless. He stops in wonder.
“‘Are you waiting for someone?’
“The other one shakes his head no.
“‘For something?’
“Same answer.
“After a few seconds he continues on his way.
“As he does, the other one asks:
“‘Where are you going?’
“‘I don’t know.’”

Beckett: “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation . . . But as far as work goes . . . What can be said? Nothing is sayable.” A certain lethargy and greed of lethargy. Today locates itself between the Beckett at the end of the second of the “Three Dialogues” with Georges Duthuit—who, to Duthuit’s plaintive “Are we really to deplore the painting that is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that endures and gives increase?” make the non-reply of “(Exit weeping.)”—and the “mal armé” Beckett at the beginning of the third dialogue who sings out: “Frenchman, fire first.”

“Of the wash . . .”

2011-11-18T06:55:00.000-08:00

Bram van Velde, 1895-1981
(Photograph by Marc Trivier)

Ferociously cold and furiously pedaling, the eyes tearing up. Sundry beatitudes of the wash. A man in a yellow rectangle reaching up into a T-shirt’s floppy recalcitrance. A cut-out row of crows topping a sycamore, each to its seat. Awaiting the unpleating, the expansion of that series of low clouds, clotted up along the easterly horizon. What gluey sempiternal mathematics keeps the bicycle upright, and me, gangly, astride? Virtue and fault, frustration and completion (I’m thinking of the lines in Spring and All: “The virtue of the improvisations is their placement in a world of new values— / their fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete.”) In a late 1928 letter to Louis Zukofsky, Williams, dickering with some intractable piece of writing (“Anyhow I grew bored. I almost got into a nervous fit over not having time to play with the points and arrange them . . .”) says, finally: “I slammed my random shots together and—so it always seems to go. More mania.” Justifying the method (in an earlier letter dated 18 October 1928): “I find invariably . . . that when the instinct has clicked the mind will come lumbering after.” Williams everywhere insists that writing be unthrottled, unwashed, unrefined, that it refuse to serve as mere collateral for thinking. (Out of The Embodiment of Knowledge: “The only real in writing is writing itself.” And: “It is pure writing that can’t get away from itself to be thought.”) Is Williams kin to Beckett? Thumbing Charles Juliet’s Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (Dalkey Archive, 2009), seeing a Beckett “disjecta” (“La peinture des van Velde or le monde et le pantalon”) reduced to two lines:

Impossible to apply reason to what is unique. [...]
Impossible to create order in what is elemental.

Or I note Juliet’s reporting of “not signs of rewriting” in the manuscript of Waiting for Godot, and how, of it, Beckett admits: “It all happened between my hand and the page.” (Bram van Velde’s utterances agree: “You are in an area where knowledge fails. Where you have to advance in ignorance, not even knowing where you are going.” And: “Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.” And: “Mondrian? . . . The Constructivists? . . . They had certainties. They wanted a stable basis to work on, but I’m afraid that that was enormous arrogance on their part, Nothing is stable and no certainties are possible.”) A remark pertinent to the current “age,” its mechanically self-imposed “projects,” its sopping wet certainties found in constraint. (Williams to Ezra Pound (11January 1950): “Everyone is writing ‘poetry.’ My suggestion is that they start writing a few poems.”) Implying confrontment with the exigencies of unencumbered disorder, the sere terms of the irreparable blank, arrangements of self made selflessly out of words, words shared between us all, “words which have been used time without end by other men for the same purpose, words worn smooth, greasy with the thumbing and fingering of others” (The Embodiment of Knowledge). Sweet buttery light of morning made by the socius ejectus, with borrowed goods. One loses the unleashing, the cut scabs over under a blaze of suns, sundering the breach itself (and its apparent coherence). Is it sheer impertinence against the foibles of chronic reason, its hardy thinking, that points Pound toward the quasi-insufferable Uncle Remus gimcrackery? (See un peu partout in Pound’s letters, though I am partial to these lines to Williams (“[December 1954]”), replying to Williams’s query regarding an earlier use of “criks”:

2 be more eggsPlicit.

criks is the buzzards what yakyaks about awt an’ le’rs without bein’ abl to purrJuice any (vulgarly spelled with 7 le’rs)

So we “purrJuice” away, instinctual and hugely accommodating . . .

Bram van Velde, Lithograph for Sans fin l’affamé, 1976

Bram van Velde, “L’attrait,” 1978

The Croatoan Poetic Cell Interview

2011-11-17T06:00:00.001-08:00

Discovery of the word “CROATOAN” found carved into a tree, Roanoke Island, c. 1590

Raúl Zurita, in the Chilean newspaper La Tercera (October 4, 2011) on the actions of the Croatoan Poetic Cell at Zurita’s reading at the Poetry Foundation (September 27, 2011): “Sentí una profunda ternura al ver a estos chicos, porque supe que era el signo de una lucha mucho más profunda, de la poesía contra los poderes de un orden avergonzante.” (“I felt a profound tenderness on witnessing these young people, because I knew it was sign of a much deeper struggle, that of poetry against the powers of a shameful order.”)

William Carlos Williams, out of “A New Line Is a New Measure” (c. 1947) writing of Louis Zukofsky’s Anew:

It may be inconceivable that in a single poem the world can be set right, but it is the truth. Nothing does happen, except in the minds of a few; but it is drastic, what sometimes happens in the minds of a few.
Good taste, that’s the thing; and not by exclusion, in the vulgar way, but by an inclusion that puts its grace upon common objects, that raises the common to grace. That’s what a poem is . . .

What follows is an agglomerated interview with the stalwart members of Croatoan Poetic Cell, authors of two (and counting) actions at the pristine (some would say obscene) corporate home (some would say bastion) the Poetry Foundation recently constructed for itself at an expenditure of $21.5 million. Sign of the rote vapidity of the moneyed in its usual form: corporate vanity. Monumental institutional preening at its worst. The interview is pieced together out of raw footage collected by Jeremy Axelrod, author of the recent Salon piece (“It’s Time to Occupy Poetry”) about the Croatoan actions, with some added material. Needless to say, the Poetry Foundation’s fleet squad of newshounds, those omnivorous gatherers of all things “poetic” at Harriet sedulously “overlooked” the Salon piece. Maybe nobody submitted a pre-formatted and properly subject-lined “Harriet news tip!”

Interviewer: This Montevidayo post is said to be a “report” from you. Is that true?

Croatoan: Yeah, I wrote the Montevidayo post. Though, the leaflet which appears there was composed by the group over a bottle of whiskey the night before the Zurita action. There seems to be a slight misunderstanding or misinterpretation about whom these things are to be attributed to. I want to make clear that there is no singular person at the reins with this. Our aim is to move away from modes of authorship which are tied to specific personages and, in fact, we prefer anonymity. That being said, since Steph’s [Stephanie Dunn, arrested at the initial spontaneous action at the Poetry Foundation (September 7) on a “public disturbance” charge] name and mine are out there, here are the names of the rest of the people involved the night of the Zurita reading: Neda Mouzayanni, Raymond Zibits, Jordan Walsh, Ben Stephens. Use any of these names interchangeably or refer to us as Croatoan, CPC, whatever.

Interviewer: According to that post, a “half dozen” or so of your colleagues handed out a statement at the Zurita reading on September 27? I see the text of the statement on the website. Did you write this statement? If so, what is “the spectacle and its myriad illusory modes of reification”?

Croatoan: The quote you refer to ought to be interpreted through its Situationist connotations, I guess. [Cultural] institutions are an integral part of the Spectacle. They are the conduits through which images, objects, and language “transform” into high art or, precisely, that which is separated, somehow, from the rest of our daily life. One usually enters and interacts with these spaces as a sort of tabernacle, as sacred space wherein the desire is to be wowed or whatever by the art that a given cultural institution has deemed worthy of praise. Our feeling (which certainly isn’t a new idea or anything) is that this attitude is often overrated and problematic. Behind this edifice, it’s pretty clear that most museums and cultural institutions are in the business of storing wealth and getting tax breaks for wealthy patrons. The language that John Barr uses in talking about the Poetry Foundation, for example, is eerily reminiscent of the corporate language of marketing and branding. The PF and similar institutions are wholly integrated into the fabric of neo-liberalism; from the architecture of their buildings to their rules of decorum and ways of dealing with (i.e. silencing) “undesirables,” to the sort of art / poetry that they usually champion. Disrupting or queering the normally passive experience that folks have with a museum or an institution is a pretty effective tactic for fleshing some of these issues out.

Interviewer: Your flier objects to Stephanie Dunn’s arrest on the grounds that a poetry organization shouldn’t seek the arrest of someone who commits “what is essentially a poetic act” at one of its events. One question here is when (if at all) it’s reasonable to arrest someone for a non-violent public disturbance. But the question I’d like to ask is: Where would you draw the line between the freedom to perform poetic acts and the freedom to disrupt an organization’s events? The question applies, I think, to both Stephanie Dunn’s acts and those on September 27 at the Zurita reading. (As I understand it, Mr. Zurita was not in the least bothered by the surprise, but it’s arguable that his approval is not the only consideration, as the reading was planned and housed by a foundation that invited him as its guest.)

Croatoan: It is never “reasonable” to arrest someone for a non-violent public disturbance . . . though I suppose that from the perspective of an organization like the police, whose prime directive is to serve the wealthy and to protect the sanctity of private property, this sort of arrest is perfectly reasonable. . . . We understand that oftentimes civil disobedience results in arrest and we all accept this as a possibility when we undertake actions. We also understand that an arrest can be used as a tool to highlight the injustices behind it.

Interviewer: The Chicago Reader claims that the police report related to Stephanie Dunn’s arrest indicates that she took a bottle of wine from the Foundation and refused to return it. Do you think it was within her rights to take this from the Foundation (though it’s certainly a negligible loss) on the grounds that she disagrees with its use of money and objects to the attitude with which its employees responded to her when she threw a cup of wine to the floor?

Croatoan: Look, we are thieves . . . and ones with a pretty strict code of ethics; namely, that we don’t steal from people and that whatever is stolen is shared joyously and without discrimination. Stealing from corporate entities, or banks, or the gods, or whatever has a long and venerable tradition. It’s how we got fire, how Hermes became a god, how so much great myth, art, & literature has been conceived—acts of thievery and transgression, which restore a certain sort of balance; tiqqun. In any case, it was a fucking bottle of wine which, as you say, is pretty negligible in all actuality. Especially considering the Poetry Foundation made $2,189,154 from interest and securities in 2010. See the Foundation’s tax returns here.

Interviewer: It sounds like around six of your colleagues have organized their demonstrations together and united under the name “Croatoan Poetic Cell.” If so, why this name? And do you have a particular connotation in mind with the word “cell”?

Croatoan: While six of us participated in the Zurita action, there are more than six of us. I can assure you. “Cell” has both biological and political connotations. In essence, the global struggle lies in combating biopolitical power which governs (read: coerces) and defines individuals and what they can do with their bodies, minds and voices. We feel like we are a small ripple in this much greater context of what’s happening globally, which the occupations are a big component of. The hope with this project is to create dialogue which might embolden others to autonomously practice their own forms of intervention, institutional critique, and direct action, rather than to make some kind of definitive statement with our actions. You could also call us a rhizome or a tong (see Hakim Bey’s excellent essay “The Tong” here).

Interviewer: What demonstrations have you or your colleagues planned besides those at the September 27 Zurita reading and the impromptu protest with Stephanie Dunn in late August? Have you been picketing or demonstrating at any other times? Do you plan to continue disrupting events, as your statement seems to indicate?

Croatoan: The night Steph and I met, she tagged the wall of a bougie art gallery (which was displaying photographs by Ginsberg and paintings by Burroughs). I ended up taking the fall for that one. A few of us in the CPC (before the official conception of the group) also planned and organized a midnight march this past May Day. Funnily enough, a group of about forty of us were on our way to occupy the Federal Reserve when Steph was arrested for sitting atop the Haymarket statue and playing a banjo. Some of us in the group have been participating in the occupation here in Chicago—in fact, we met one member of our group the first day that Occupy Chicago began. However, many of us are frustrated with the cloying & overly compliant attitude towards the police that the leadership of the Chicago manifestation has been pushing.

Interviewer: Do your complaints about the Poetry Foundation relate to the experience you or your father Kent Johnson have had with submitting work to Poetry?

Croatoan: I’ve never submitted to Poetry—not sure whether my old man has or not. At any rate, my old man has NOTHING to do with the CPC except as a cheerleader from the sidelines. Besides, his Old Left politics are not exactly in line with the anarchist sources of the CPC. I really like the Jack Spicer serial piece “6 Poems for Poetry Chicago.” I don’t think they published those, though.

Interviewer: To what extent were you or other Croatoans (if I may refer to your group collectively) inspired by Occupy Wall Street, or by the general anti-Big Money sentiments that have gained such widespread expression in protests this past year?

Croatoan: While we all hold varying opinions about strategies and tactics involved in the movement, we are certainly deeply inspired by the idea. It feels like this is only the beginning. Through these various occupations, we are finding each other and making the sort of deep connections that are so necessary in the continuing struggle.

Interviewer: Do you have any thoughts on the recent “Occupy Museums” protest at MoMA?

Croatoan: Another recent example of détournement / institutional critique (which can be found here and in the forthcoming issue of Sous les Pavés): Edmond Caldwell disguised an excerpt from his novel into counterfeit covers of the yuppie-paradigm-skewed choice for Boston’s “one city one book” program. Hilarity ensues. To be honest, none of us had heard about the Occupy Museums movement. I’m really glad to know about this group. It’s deeply encouraging to see others taking up the mantle of institutional critique. That they have situated their grievances within the context of the labor movement is really important. Some of us are members of the IWW and believe that a general strike is still probably the only tactic which stands a chance of enacting the sort of transformation that so many are talking about. The CPC stands in solidarity. Hopefully the feeling is mutual.

Interviewer: The fliers you handed out state that “the home of poetry . . . certainly doesn’t look like an Apple store.” What is the “home of poetry,” exactly, and why should its aesthetic be different from that of an Apple store?

Croatoan: The home of poetry (if it isn’t a mendicant wanderer) is a commons. The existence of the Po Foundation HQ is really a strange thing because it attempts to spatialize poetry in this way that doesn’t usually happen (at least not so overtly). The architectural language seen at the Po Foundation is not just that of an Apple store. There is a Starbuck’s not too far from there that also looks eerily similar. The building is completely typical of current corporate aesthetics. We feel that these sorts of spaces are psychically hostile towards the sort of imagination and freedom which is necessary in the establishment of a commons.

Interviewer: In short, why do you object to the Poetry Foundation? Why is “the true spirit of poetry precisely about disturbing the peace”? (I realize you’ve made statements about this already. I’d simply like to hear an abbreviated version, if possible.)

Croatoan: We received a message from J. H. Prynne, of all people, who articulated our feelings better than we have been able to. I can’t tell you how much it meant to hear from him. Here’s an excerpt from his letter:

Poets and artists have an honourable share in resistance to imposed control, especially since language is a major instrument of social oppression by power-hungry institutions. So it’s more than right that concentrations of power and control in the art world should be challenged, by spontaneous incoherence and flights of free invention. The Poetry Foundation building in Chicago deserves to be a prime target, because it’s a capitalistic formation based on undemocratically accumulated wealth: the place looks like the corporate headquarters of a banking conglomerate, and that’s indeed how it functions. It seems like anarchism to say these things, but actually it’s liberational dissidence, to reclaim and occupy the free space of the mind and imagination, and to open these august portals of institutional repression.
Indeed it is a kind of trespass, to stream into controlled spaces and just overflow them, not by reasoned argument but simply by shared presence: demography! Thus the legal formats of punitive exclusion are also challenged, not by violence but simply by spillage of peoples in large numbers and by acts of individual self-positioning.

Interviewer: One last question: does your group meet in a warehouse? As a kind of headquarters. No need to tell me where, but it’d certainly be fun to describe your “hideout,” if there’s something like that around.

Croatoan: This “hideout” you mention . . . I don’t know if I’d describe it as such but some might, I suppose. Our aim is to make this place into a functioning community center. At the previous punk house some of us lived in (Dr. Who’s Wherehouse of Ideas), there was a free school which, unfortunately, has gone relatively dormant though there are still a few classes and we plan to begin again in earnest as soon as the major building projects are finished. We have a lending library here, someone is always playing music. We all sleep in the same room (the library) in a pile of unwashed blankets, couches, arms, legs. Sometimes it becomes difficult to figure out where you end and someone else begins. If you’ve ever seen The Abyss, you might get the idea. It’s a really strange, constantly morphing space filled with dust, oceans of random objects and non-Euclidean geometry; unitary urbanism, so to speak. We have been living in a construction zone for the past three months. Currently, we are in the midst of building rooms, installing heat and electricity, and getting the place ready for winter. We want to actuate an autonomous zone here on the West Side, to use it as a place for education, creation, and subversion.

Williams / Zukofsky

2011-11-16T06:57:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, c. 1960
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

William Carlos Williams, in a letter to Louis Zukofsky (25 July 1928): “Perhaps by my picayune imagistic mannerisms I hold together superficially what should by all means fall apart.” Out of the Barry Ahearn-edited Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Wesleyan, 2003). That tremendous doubt at the heart of the juxtaposed, its lightning rod, what pulls the heavens—flying asunder (isn’t that the definition of the heavens, colossal, sundry, electric?) down into it. Doubt that animates the aligning of any rapturous (ruptured) dissilients: “Two ymages huge, of disparayl fourme.” Doubt that vivifies the mash-up. There’s that, the teetering skepticism of one’s own “violent torsions.” A note in the Correspondence points to four Zukofsky poems printed in a 1928 issue of The Dial (LXXXV: 12), with the comment that only two reappear in Zukofsky’s Collected Shorter Poems. (Williams, responding to the news of Zukofsky’s Dial acceptance, praises editor Marianne Moore—“willing but . . . suffers from the terrific weight of indifference under which all labor in these here United States just as we do”—and advises Zukofsky: “All the good that comes from such a success is . . . the cash you will pocket. The Dial to me is about as dead as a last years birds nest. One must believe in spiders—”) So, I looked the poems up. The two retained in the Collected Shorter Poems: “tam cari capitis” (lacking, in The Dial, its second part) and “Song Theme (to the last movement of Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor).” The discarded, two untitled sonnets:

III

Someone said, ‘earth, bowed with her death, we mourn
Ourselves, our own earth selves,’—yet for me crept
Rattling a small wind bitter, and I wept
But your own little form that might be torn.
And suddenly I could see your face borne
Like the moon on my sight, it had not slept
But looked, as once, at rest though waking, stepped
To the grave peace of death and not yet worn.

‘Look at the moon,’ you said: ‘Those are no tears
Falling, unclasped through space, for what appears
Dead crater sheds no tears.’ And your face form
Where it came vanished, so I was too soon
Oblivious among the wind, the moon
Clouding then, her high dissolution come.

IV

The silence of the good that you were wrought of,
Do I find it transformed by some strange leaven
From you to earth only my earth knows aught of,
And know it silent mound outlined on heaven,
Till all the life of you in our still room
Returns to me—your presence past the wall
Of death, the confines of your dark? So fall
Death’s guerdon to me neither sun nor gloom;

But quiet—your silence, when you would stir
With me—its being, what you are and were.
It cannot change though it must change the mode—
Not with you living, but with you dead to darkle—
Yet is no less obliged thus to corrode
In earth with you—earth, shadow of your sparkle.

Williams, pertinently: “Eyes have always stood first in the poet’s equipment. If you are mostly ear—a new rhythm must come in more strongly than has been the case so far.” (Oddly prescient of Zukofsky’s later Bottom-formulation that “speaks and sings of a proportion: love is to reason as the eyes are to the mind; or, says it so that means equal extremes: when reason judges with eyes, love and mind are one.”) If I mostly drowse unplucked by the discards, I do admire the paradox of the moon’s sudden clarity at the very moment of its clothing: “the moon / Clouding then, her high dissolution come”—the long i of “high” tossing the mind’s eyes skyward, up out of the tender earth’s rubble and occlusion. Too, the rhythmic awkwardnesses of foundering speech in “The silence of the good that you were wrought of” begins a jaunty and complex delivery finally unmade. (Reading the discards, one is tempted to quote Zukofsky’s own line out of “An Objective” (1930, 1931): “The disadvantage of strained metaphor is not that it is necessarily sentimental (the sentimental may at times have its positive personal qualities) but that it carries the mind to a diffuse everywhere and leaves it nowhere.”) One notes that Zukofsky’s wife Celia Thaew reported that Zukofsky’d “said he’d written and discarded 500 poems”:

A manuscript at Texas under the name of Dunn Wyth is Louie’s work. He called the poems “juvenilia” and he wanted never to be reminded of it. He wanted to throw it out. But I said that would be foolish and he ought to send it on to Texas since another name was on it. Nobody would find out who Dunn Wyth was. It would make a nice little problem for scholars.

Or allow it its unburdening reprieve: “enter it not into your Audit, nor account that amongst your Supers, which is your Onus.”

Uncollected Williams: Addenda

2011-11-15T06:54:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Tracked down the issue of Antaeus (Nos. 30 / 31, called “Poetry & Poetics”) in order to ascertain the provenance of the Williams “improvisations” therein collected, expecting some explanatory squib. Zilch. Only the title (“Eight Improvisations”) and imprecise date (“ca. 1924”). And (under “Poetics”) a stray letter to Frances Steloff, proprietress of the Gotham Book Mart, dated 15 March 1939. Williams is replying to a query regarding a definition of poetry he’d recently provided “at the Munson studio.” Williams protests: “I can’t remember my precise words” while insisting that such a thing’s “remained reasonably stable for a number of years.” And thus proposes:

Impassioned language takes on, by physical law, a rhythmic flow. The poet’s task, in any age, is to listen to the language of his time, when it is impassioned and wherever it occurs, and to discover in it, from it, the essentials of his form, his form, as of his own day. From these essentials he makes up his patterns—embodying the characteristics of what he finds alive in his day. This is the task of the major poet in any time.

The secondary task which a poet assumes is to jam the tide of his day into the forms of the past. This is what is usually understood by “poet.” It is safe, it is respectable, it is easy to understand and—it stinks.

Now. The term “objectivism” (useful only as a screw driver is useful to a carpenter or a mechanic and not for label purposes) helped some of us for a year or two to associate the subject and the form of a poem into a whole. The poem being made of words the form itself becomes a “word.” An 8th century form, that is, means in some measure the whole conceptual world of the 8th century which invented it and to which it is fitted . . .

Poetry should be the synthesis of its time in passionately communicable form. The braying jackasses say it isn’t possible to write poetry today, that its form is insignificant. But the jackasses have always brayed . . .

Too, I stumbled into Barry Ahearn’s piece—called “Editing the ‘Working Copy’ of The Wedge”—Appendix C of the Ahearn-edited Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Wesleyan, 2003). Containing a short history of the fate of the “improvisations” in the manuscript of The Wedge. Apparently Williams originally (“in March 1943”) sent Zukofsky “a hefty 115-page typescript entitled, ‘The (lang) WEDGE’: a diffuse pot-pourri of 83 titles, including poems going back to 1905 (‘Acrostic for H.D.’)”—that out of Neil Baldwin’s report (“Zukofsky, Williams, and The Wedge: Toward a Dynamic Convergence”). Williams:

Just as soon as I am able I’ll send you the tome of my new book of poems by express—the damned book has assumed the proportions of a tome—and ask you to slash it unmercifully. Not that I intend to take your advice holus bolus, I don’t but I’d like you to indicate for me just how much could be cut from the script without hurting it, in fact I want you to help me get rid of the downright bad scribbles and the worst of the repetitious ones. Don’t hesitate, go to town, cut the whole damned book out if you feel like it.

And (27 March 1943): “I am sending the conglomorate of scripts of which I have spoken to you. It is obviously not a book. I don’t want to burden you nor am I asking you to make a book of it for me. . . . Naturally, if you want to tell me how the book should be constructed (now only slung together assways) that’s up to you. I’ll probably follow my own advices in the end anyway so don’t waste your time.” Odd diffidence and plea. Zukofsky, suggesting it be called The Language, cut it to 86 pages, 69 titles arranged in four sections. (Of the bilingually punning title, complete with Williams’s title page epigraph—

The (lang) WEDGE
With the tip of my tongue
I wedge you open
My tongue!
the wedge of my tongue
between those lips parted
to inflame you . . .

—Zukofsky wrote “The first three lines are enough,” and bracketed out the remaining three in pencil. The whole “lick” is eventually abandoned by Williams.) Later (letter of 11 May 1943 to Zukofsky), Williams reluctantly makes “a final determination to cut out the prose bits entirely” (calling it “the sort of thing I wanted to avoid but . . . couldn’t escape. If it doesn’t involve heart searching and hard work nothing evolves satisfactorily”) thus reducing (Baldwin reports, without naming the specific prose pieces) the total by seven. Still later Williams cut seventeen additional poems, and added five, making for a total of fifty. Ahearn:

The “working copy” of The Wedge” shows that Williams tended to jettison poems even when Zukofsky merely expressed doubt about their form. The manuscript Zukofsky examined contained numerous lengthy prose poems (Williams called them “improvisations”). Zukofsky did not suggest taking them out, but he did find their form as prose problematic. Of one of these, “Thatpoemjayjay,” Zukofsky observed, “OK, but I wonder whether it wouldn’t fit it in better, in a volume of poems, written out as lines rather than one prose stream. It’s solid enough, & doesn’t really need to call attention to JayJay’s (James Joyces’) device.” He offered much the same advice for another prose poem, “Wellroundedthighs”: “This means less to me than Thatpoemjayjay—but in any case, this too might gain in clearness written out as a poem in the line lengths indicating the sense.” Zukofsky sounded the same note with the prose poem “THEESSENTIALROAR”: “OK, I’d break this up into line lengths, too.” Even when Zukofsky sounded a bit encouraging, as he did when commenting on the prose poem “The Runner” (“This can be chiseled down & written out as verse”), Williams evidently saw little point in recasting the prose poems as poetry. Perhaps he was discouraged by Zukofsky’s comment about still another prose poem, “THICKCAKE”: “Writing this out in verse lines would make it clear and show you where it ought to be cut, if —.”

I find no Williams piece, prose or poetry, called “The Runner” anywhere. Is there a need to sleuth through Williams’s papers in an act of homage and retrieval? Here’s another of the “improvisations” (out of transition No. 13, 1928):

The Dead Grow

The most striking anachronism in N. Y. is of course the Metropolitan Museum of art with a slab by clever Paul to able John at the right of the entrance, badly worded, where Stonebridge of Hartford put a weight in the balance when he was sick of the ton of stuff he had lifted and the worst is that it spills over on the tall buildings but it doesn’t do it enough, like the rotten Stock Exchange like a dirty face without Pallas Athenas in it and the Telephone building and that crappy stuff—but the bronze tablets by Manny aren’t so bad but nobody ever sees them thank goodness it would clip one ball if they did and that’s what I mean, there isn’t a more potent anachronism in the city than the museum—it is right because it’s deadly, the detail of the ornaments and plates and vases even one or two pictures, the Burmese jewelry, they’re the essence of the quietness, it’s that that forks the noise out of its hole but if it weren’t for the roar there wouldn’t be any museum because the price of exchange depends not so much on the spiritual values but on the fat which has jus this to do with art that it collects everything that is cast off by the dead and puts it on like the peschecani, you know, Thenewrich, the fellow who just has written a novel, without knowing that Leonardo invented the toilet-seat—you see the poet’s daughter all nice and ripe, as Ken says, is noisy around the knees, that’s what gives her the pull, Kiki in spite of her noise is made of quietness but the roar is full of pulp into which nerves and sinews grow a this and that anti-roar, is, valuable as it is to something or other like the history of Ireland or Ulysses, a compendium, very dangerous to growth. It is quite stark in its gentleness, it wants to—needs to have a kind of starvation on which to thrive and so make the kind of flabby shank devotees and condoms that John enjoyed when he was tired—it is a monument to John’s fatigue when he felt a lead loose in his pencil, as Pop used to say, so it’s dangerous and that’s why we have prohibition, we don’t need alcohol, WE DON’T NEED ALCOHOL, we have all the noise we want but even poverty can make noise enough to be heard in those places I’d like to see anyone he heard because he was poor here—here we are NOT ALONE, we’re enclosed TOGETHER.
We don’t know there is nothing because the essential noise won’t let us hear it whispered so we don’t need to play chess but there where the oil is burnt out the emptiness is being felt by the muscle—so we grow and they atrophy: they tried to make a noise with the war but it was a very silly deception, all we had to do was to know they couldn’t make a noise and there it was.

Oddly “recalling” the intrepid dash and incautious speed of O’Hara, and O’Hara’s nonchalance with the monikers. (Williams’s “clever Paul” and “able John” likely referring to sculptor Paul Manship and John Pierpont Morgan. “Ken” to Kenneth Burke, “Kiki” to Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray’s mistress.) Odd to ascertain (impossibly) echo of O’Hara’s “My quietness has a man in it” in Williams’s “her noise is made of quietness,” or of O’Hara’s “we don't like terrible diseases” in Williams’s “we don’t need alcohol,” or even of O’Hara’s “Twin spheres full of fur and noise” in Williams’s “the roar is full of pulp into which nerves and sinews grow a this and that . . .” Or vice-versa, O’Hara echoing Williams (equally impossible).

Williams / Thoreau

2011-11-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, c. 1955
(Photograph by Paul Bishop)

“When the world takes over for us / and the storm in the trees / replaces our brittle consciences / . . . when the few last yellow leaves / stand out like flags on tossed ships at anchor—our minds are rested . . .” (Williams, “Lear”) Piercing yellows, sparse and endless in their arrangements, poplar to poplar. Hurtling across the deer-slaughtered demesnes, the common highways smeared with doe-blood, the remains haunch-hacked, lacking a hind-quarter, or strewn, impossibly flung out along the meridian: a half-mile of pure blood-rubbish. Eyes averting up aslant to a sailing red-tail, guerdon of the raffish sensibility. The drive (Ann Arbor / Chicago / Ann Arbor) snarls up intent, stoppers the prothonotary release, allows a certain gold-throated “region November” (Stevens), whereat the jugular vein glugs out its own thingly freight of vocables regarding “the treetops, as they sway”:

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge.

Is that Stevens’s reply to Williams’s “No ideas but in things”? (Odd to see, in Jacqueline Saunier-Ollier’s enormous 1979 book William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): L’Homme et l’œuvre poétique, the long reach back to Thoreau: «No ideas but in things» ne résonne-t-il pas comme un écho de la belle formule de Thoreau: «The roots of letters are things»? The line is out of the Journal, in an entry dated 16 October 1859, and likely unknown to Williams:

Talk about learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as “Americanisms.”

Later Thoreau asks: “What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufacturers?” A line I probably find particularly pertinent, result of reading through the Hugh Witemeyer-edited Pound / Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (New Directions, 1996). To read therein Williams quoting John Dewey’s “Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in an intimacy of intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range.” Or to read Pound’s endorsement of the local, with crudely-limned ideogram-provided: “King Wan worked from where he was at.” (Referring to what he calls, in translating Confucius’s Analects, “chih . . . the hitching post, position, place one is in, and works from.”) Or to read Pound’s rather funnily reprimanding line in a letter to Williams—who formerly edited a magazine called Contact—of 10 May 1940: “I do NOT get MY views from the nooz wypers. I get ’em first hand or at worst from private letters which show direct contact.” The prevalent strain of American letters: the homemade, the stay-at-home. See Thoreau’s letter to H. G. O. Blake (1 January 1859), asking “What mountain are you camping on nowadays?”:

You must first have made an infinite demand, and not unreasonably, but after a corresponding outlay, have an all-absorbing purpose, and at the same time that your feet bear you hither and thither, travel much more in imagination.
To let the mountains slide,—live at home like a traveler . . . What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives!

And in praise of the “ravine” of the body itself (“in which the ‘soul’ is encamped”)—“eagles always have chosen such places for their eyries”—the local accommodating low source and high outlook both:

It is a capital advantage withal, living so high, the excellent drainage of that city of God. Routine is but a shallow and insignificant sort of ravine, such as the ruts are, the conduits of puddles. But these ravines are the source of mighty streams, precipitous, icy, savage, as they are, haunted by bears and loup-cerviers; there are born not only Sacos and Amazons, but prophets who will redeem the world. The at last smooth and fertilizing water at which nations drink and navies supply themselves begins with melted glaciers, and burst thunder-spouts. Let us pray that, if we are not flowing through some Mississippi valley which we fertilize,—and it is not likely we are,—we may know ourselves shut in between grim and mighty mountain walls amid the clouds, falling a thousand feet in a mile, through dwarfed fir and spruce, over the rocky insteps of slides, being exercised in our minds, and so developed.

Align that against something like Frank O’Hara’s lines out of “You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming” (though O’Hara’s incipient “purple roar” is probably not the sound of the “soul” decamping . . .):

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Métro towards a realm of encircled travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens’ stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being

Another way “the world takes over for us . . .”

Uncollected Williams

2011-11-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, c. 1949
(Photograph by Musya Sheeler)

A minor flurry of sleuthing for mislaid William Carlos Williams pieces yesterday—mostly what WCW bibliographer Emily Mitchell Wallace labels “improvisations”—prose outbursts uncollected in the two-volume Collected Poems. Turns out Antaeus printed eight of the pieces in 1978, including two (“Pubic” and “Thickcake”) unlisted by Wallace. One of the eight:

Wellroundedthighs

It is the pad that protects the adolescence, insulating it against the injury of knowledge and so permitting the strength for knowledge to grow, rather than the quite bare wire on which the colored swallows sat, the very small egg buried in the thick roaring womb that rides the elephant and turns three somersaults as if Jockey Joe Sloan did an snappy jig act between what’s his name, the fellow that took Nijinsky’s place, did that elbow trick SALADE and the scraped off evening in the Bois piece. Poor Nijinsky with a wife and Diagileff, one driving him to rehearsals and the other dragging him home and both in love and noendtoit with the drill drill drill. He tried to manage himself but the English ass didn’t get him his boots on time so he had to go insane diametrically opposite as it the Edinborough Review should say something uncertain it’s the thunder that holds the lightning as much as to say: when the machine scrapes and screams carrying the advertisements of ladies hose around the curve, there is a machine implied that accidentally carries the train and its occupants along. Without the roar to insulate the petty pimple of their comprehension there would not be a ground in which the MASS could accumulate, THUS conversely the Essentiality of the blatant and perfectly stupid excrescence like the New York Journal is mechanically sound and morally effective—and the whole mass is knit, generating the game of football—with its organized cheers. Baseball is something else the ball being harder, smaller, different in color and you hit it with a stick, that is although Babe Ruth may shine for a season there will always be a strong party opposed to him as a factor detrimental to the spirit of the game which is silent, saturnine, close to the principles of physics and lyric poetry.

Speed of the conjunct. That out of Eugene Jolas’s transition (No. 13, 1928). (Compare Williams’s 1923 “crowd at the ball game” “moved uniformly // by a spirit of uselessness / which delights them— // all the exciting detail / of the chase // and the escape, the error / the flash of genius.”)

Two uncollected pieces. Both out of the The Little Review. In 1918:

The Ideal Quarrel

Anger spitting through a mush of lumpy stuff—mouldy words, lie-clots—transforms it into that which lets a world beyond come through, before that, blocked out. But that is only the beginning. By anger I mean outraged justice of position wrathfully demanding its wavering complement—on the brink of a new alignment: righteous wrath.
This implies one in the right: counter: one manifestly and frankly in the wrong: bold lies. This implies a dissolving union. This means a further dissolution ending in complete separation, involving a rebeginning or it means a reunion between the severing parts.
The nature of this reunion is the end toward which I attack. It is, as I take it, something as virginal, as completely pristine as any fresh choice, any new alignment can be. More new! The only new!
For to break and begin a new alignment is recapitulation but to recement an old and dissolving union is without precedent, a totally new thing. The old union in this case is a part of the new and being directly a part needs no counterpart, the recemented union being ready at birth to go forward. Every part of a changed alignment is a counterpart of the dead old.
This is hard but important.
A dawdling complement struck full-face is split—a shell of words scaled off. The face comes from behind its mask. The mask is smooth coin:—slimed their water, fish dung, a stinking, soupy liquid, endearing terms, bare hands on —, in bed at night, the children, dirt under the piano, systematic, get up earlier, the dishes, smell of cooking, sweetheart, darling, dearest, pimples on your back, your breath smells, your thighs are not —, you are cold, I am tired tonight, I feel lively tonight, your kind of man, what a fool I was, our whole married life, I thought I was marrying a —, Undank ist der Weltlohn, coward, self, the selfish get the best in this world (of course) I am not young now— Flash!
Anger will recreate a world. The white bayonette of anger is: I demand. But lies and deeper lies are the spawn of action. Filth breeds. The white flash of justice is eggs split by an edged flame. Justice lives on lies: a buck-pike that eats its own spawn.
The birth is in a nest of dead words slimed over: soft down to the mother’s breast.
Action brings good. Action upon an old act brings a splitting from the end backward to the beginning so that the cleanliness resultant is a thing opposite to nature, an inversion of whiteness— Back to the beginning.
“I thought I had married a God” to, “I demand a God” is a stroke from the end back to the beginning—but a new beginning, yet resting with its feet on the neck of the old, crushing the old under its feet—unearthly—this is the actual heaven—temples fanned by a wind moving in the wind.
But ac-shun! ac-shun! ac-shun! ac-shun! It is a steam-engine getting under way: the result is a lily opening upon a crowbar stem. Out of it the cleanliness of spring air! It is the roots of roots we desire! the flower of a flower! the man of a man! the white of white— From the beginning, again! Fourth dimension—well? It is my old life. I hold it off. I have rebegun. Nothing of the old remains or will remain—after. Halleluiah!
I hate you! Flame will be tied to the heels of love in no other way.
The hard backbite of anger recurring in the ebb flow is sturdiness holding its own.

Williams’s homely (ungainly, homegrown) anger. In an essay called “Belly Music” (“I insist that it is I, I, I who PUTS the music into the throats of those in whom I HEAR my music. I’ll sing when the veins below my belly are clotted solid”)—in the final issue of the Williams-edited Others (1919), Williams faults what he calls “the futility of this American habit of hanging upon the lips of loveliness.” And writes:

Perhaps I am a sullen suburbanite, cowardly and alone. Perhaps it is true that I have not seen the cocottes of Montmartre or the Lady Diana. Perhaps it is a preposterous longing for the wealth of the world. I sit a blinded fool, with withered hands stretched out into the nothingness around me. Perhaps this is a sickness. Perhaps what I call my singing is a stench born out of these sores. I deny that that makes any difference. AT LEAST I AM THAT. Or if the answer is that no one will listen to my singing or even call it singing I say that they cannot help listening and that—it doesn’t matter one way or the other.

How bracing the ferocious defiance of the unjustly neglected . . .

The other uncollected “improvisation” is printed, too, in The Little Review (XII. 1, 1926). A piece of ventriloquism. The prose block preceding it (called “Poem” and beginning “Daniel Boone, the father of Kentucky”) is included in the Collected Poems. Something dubious and indistinct in the choice, or measure. Alors:

Stolen Letter

Dear Aunt N.:—
Wow! “a good for nothing—drink and bad women—no honor—go west” Some charges, must say something, West Carruth sinking, I stay below as engineer, the others lacking courage. West Nohno 4 long trips to West Africa with a sick and physically dead chief engineer. I break my leg—he dies—all hands drunk and criminally neglectful—I take charge with a useless leg and body filled with fever and bring her home with credit. Now holding ship for me, also offered post engineer and dock master’s job at Nigeria—unable however to take either account this broken leg.
Drink is something that does not bother me—a drink or two and finish—that is my absolute rule—there have only been some three times during my life time when I have gone under. One at Doc. B’s after coming back from a big party and celebration in Newark, poison home made stuff and then at B’s a glass of absinth on top. I’ve felt more sorry than I can say for that. Once in France when because I would never carouse with the gang they doped a bacardi on me, then left me to stagger on by myself. But though it took near all night I got safely back to my ship alone. The other time I can’t remember except in a foggy uncertain way, I’m certain however that there was another. That is the extent of drink. I’ve got a bottle of Johnny Walker, black label, right here in my room—for me it will last six months or a year. I like however to bring it back to my friends—think perhaps they might appreciate it.
Now for women—yes—I don’t hate them too much—but not just any woman and never a bad one. Comparing myself with a lot of men I know I would certainly draw down the grand halo for purity etc. etc. etc. No joke.
Now what’s next? Go west. Well we’ll see. I had hopes of taking a run out there this time being as I simply can’t do any work anyhow. As to staying out there—I can’t see it—that is to staying in Chicago. As to running vessels on the Mississippi—well—
Now please write some more and let’s get at the base trouble of your wonderful attitude. One thing is sure, I never loaf—with health and able body I couldn’t—not only on my own part—but the shipping men who know me wouldn’t let me alone. I’m wanted. How now for your good for noting—drunkard—women master and man of no honor. Pray that I may get a good leg that I may go some more.
Love and kindest wishes B.O.S.

Speech and its abrupt rhythmic locales: “poison home made stuff and then at B’s a glass of absinth on top.” In Williams’s “A Tentative Statement” (The Little Review, 1929)—lashings out at the “academy” coupled with an insistence on “place” as being that which “creates the new, by necessity, and frees it from thralldom to ‘beauty’ which is a kind of death and an origin of philosophic despair”:

The difficulty with the secular “academy” is that while it tends to increase erudition, it detaches it from place. Therefore, instinctively, artists with sense fly from it, to their cost, but by necessity to save themselves. It fails to connect knowledge with a source. . . .
Paraphrasing the young Jefferson: All literatures are created free and equal—each in its place. The later differences are modifications of the original character by erudition which increases the surface, involuting it, twisting, fanning it out, caving it in but never changing the unique plasm, never superceding the original character and vigor or the lack of it.
It is true, I believe, that no great literature has come from an insignificant place but has been stamped always with the local power that has generated it.

Recall that Williams’s 1921 piece for Contact (No. 2) called “Comment” (in Selected Essays) originally ended with two quotes. One by John Dewey—“We are discovering that the locality is the only universal.” One by Maurice de Vlaminck—“Intelligence is international, stupidity is national, art is local.”

Yatterlessness

2011-11-09T05:43:00.000-08:00

Life Mask of Ezra Pound by Nancy Cox McCormack, c. 1922
(Remnant of a Poundian hoax. “Calling it a death mask, he had photographs of it sent on Good Friday to The Little Review.” Editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were not fooled. Pound to Williams (21 May 1922): “If you hear a report of my death don’t fer Xt’s sake deny it. Say you expected as much. Suggest Xifiction or assifiction or any other— / & express perlite regret.”)

Rain sloshing down. Marianne Moore, out of the “Foreword” to Predilections (1955):

Silence is more eloquent than speech—a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it—or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait—a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false . . .

And T. S Eliot, out of the 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism”:

When I say criticism, I mean of course in this place the commentation and exposition of works of art by means of written words . . . No exponent of criticism (in this limited sense) has, I presume, ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic activity. I do not deny that art may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself; but art is not required to be aware of these ends, and indeed performs its function, whatever that may be, according to various theories of value, much better by indifference to them. Criticism, on the other hand, must always profess an end in view, which, roughly speaking, appears to be the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.

Ezra Pound, out of “Prefatio Aut Cimicum Tumulus” (literally, “Preface, or Heap of Lice”), in the Pound-edited Active Anthology (1933):

Mr Eliot’s flattering obeisance to ‘exponents of criticism’, wherein he says that he supposes they have not assumed that criticism is an ‘autotelic activity’, seems to me so much apple-sauce. In so far as the bureaucracy of letters has considered their writing as anything more than a short cut to the feeding trough or a means of puffing up their personal importances, they have done little else for the past thirty years than boost the production of writing about writing, not only as autotelic, but as something which ought to receive more attention from the reading victim than the great books themselves.
Granted that nobody ought to be such a presumptuous imbecile as to hold up the autotelic false horizon, Mr Eliot describes a terrestrial paradise and not the de facto world, in which more immediate locus we observe a perpetual exchange of civilities between pulex, cimex, vermiformis [flea, bedbug, maggot], etc., each holding up his candle before the shrines of his similars.
A process having no conceivable final limit and illustratable by my present activity: I mean on this very page, engaging your attention while I talk about Mr Eliot’s essay about other essayists’ essays . . .

Out of John Cage’s A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967):

When I got a letter from Jack Arends asking me to lecture at the Teachers College, I wrote back and said I’d be glad to, that all he had to do was let me know the date. He did. I then said to David Tudor, “The lecture is so soon that I don’t think I’ll be able to get all ninety stories written, in which case, now and then, I’ll just keep my trap shut.” He said, “That’ll be a relief.”

One added louse plucked out of Pound’s pile: “Willingness to experiment is not enough, but unwillingness to experiment is mere death.” Drench of rain redounding. Pure exhibitry, no yatter.

“A raucous circus . . .”

2011-11-08T06:15:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Colder days bring a raucous circus of crows into town, all disjoint mummery and fuss, flummery and muss, moveable clots in the treetops. Inadvertent mischief and disintegrating integument. An affray and row in the welter itself. The roof coming un-thatched. “Gesticulating, in the rotted light” (William Fuller). Such promissory mishaps. There’s no way to say it, any of it. The lowliest functions of the heart circumscribed by the ethereal candor of those come undone, by the prerogatives of most regal feculence, that city. “Thank God that’s about finished” (William Carlos Williams). A measure of Williams’s grit and humor: how, corresponding, he repeatedly addressed Pound Liebes Ezrachen, Dear Little Ezra. Measure of how he (Williams) saw through the “piecemeal excellence” of “undesire”—the settled-for loss of banality construed by writing “a smooth page no matter what the incoherence of the day, no matter what erasures must be sacrificed to improve a lying appearance to keep ordered the disorder of the pageless actual” (A Novelette). Williams, who writes (In the American Grain) of entering the citadel (Paris) and meeting its ferociously insouciant citizenry, inhabitant by inhabitant, gutter by gutter—“Picasso (turning to look back, with a smile), Braque (brown cotton), Gertrude Stein (opening the doors of a cabinet of MSS.), Tzara (grinning), André Germain (blocking the door), Van der Pyl (speaking of St. Cloud), Bob Chandler (prodding Marcel), Marcel (shouting), Salmon (in a corner) . . .”:

I was, during that time, with antennae fully extended, but nothing came of it save an awakened realization within myself of that resistant core of nature upon which I had so long been driven for support. I felt myself with ardors not released but beaten back, in this center of old-world culture where everyone was tearing his own meat, warily conscious of a newcomer, but wholly without inquisitiveness—No wish to know; they were served. I saw exhibitions and sat at a few tables, here and there.

Williams, who writes of Williams by writing of Poe’s own impetuous vacillatory glee:

Sometimes he used words so playfully his sentences seem to fly away from sense, the destructive! with the conserving abandon, foreshadowed, of a Gertrude Stein. The particles of language must be clear as sand. (See Diddling.*)
This was an impossible conception for the gluey imagination of his day. Constantly he labored to detach SOMETHING from the inchoate mass—That’s it:
His concern, the apex of his immaculate attack, was to detach a “method” from the smear of common usage . . . He struck to lay low the “niaiseries” of form and content with which his world abounded. It was a machine-gun fire; even in the slaughter of banality he rises to a merciless distinction . . . He sought by stress upon construction to hold the loose-strung mass off even at the cost of a icy coldness of appearance; it was the first need of his time, an escape from the formless mass he hated.

“To get from sentiment to form,” Williams writes (a tiny after-echo says—“that was the first heave”), “a backstroke from the swarming ‘population.’” (In a 11 August 1928 letter to Pound, Williams—talking of Henry Adams—notes how “much of what he said is—after all—pure style: never to be understood.”) And see, too, in A Novelette:

The rush that simplifies life, complicates it. There is no time to stop the car to write when only the writing that comes of an intense simplification would be actual. January. January. Now actually the sun returns. Ezra Pound is already looking backward. And we, as if unborn, stare at the impossible cluttered with the temporary, the circumscribed. The composed. The inadequate. While the real, by leaves, by a table, on which lies a ten cent bottle of Aspirin tablets stands sufficiently. Under the cheap crochet table cover—the table is of stained wood, square is a yellow cloth that shows through the open-work. An electric lamp, lit, is in the center, a cloth covered cord running from it to the floor. —This is banality.

A pure (enough) rendering of “the destructive! with . . . conserving abandon . . .” That is to say: sloppy moving into “detailed,” disjunct with lyric moaning (“January. January . . .”), contaminated by the everyday occlusions (and taunts), writing as thigmokinesis (“. . . in which the stimulus is absence of touch or body contact”). Oh dear.

* Out of Poe’s “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” (1850):
Your diddler is minute. His operations are upon a small scale. His business is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight. Should he ever be tempted into magnificent speculation, he then, at once, loses his distinctive features, and becomes what we term “financier.” This latter word conveys the diddling idea in every respect except that of magnitude. A diddler may thus be regarded as a banker in petto; a “financial operation,” as a diddle at Brobdingnag. The one is to the other, as Homer to “Flaccus,” as a Mastodon to a mouse, as the tail of a comet to that of a pig.
. . .
Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done—when his allotted labors are accomplished—at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment.

The 1% (News Sorely Lacking)

2011-11-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

At the Poetry Foundation’s seemingly pig in a poke “news & community” aggregator Harriet, a “joint” known to trawl up any old wire service rehash whatsoever (see, say, “Cindy Crawford Reads Kenny Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing”), why no nod to current Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s exchange with Andrew Goldman in the latest New York Times Magazine (“Philip Levine Still Knows How to Make Trouble”)? Two possibilities, each an impertinence in its way to the Foundation and its bevy of apologists:

You’ve written that as a kid, you had such hostility for the upper class that you fantasized about firing a gun at every Cadillac you saw. Still hate the rich?

I don’t, because I’ve met them now under silly circumstances, and they seem like hopeless jerks to me, for the most part. There’s a kind of Protestant ethic that believes that if you’re really a good person, God will reward you with a full table and a garage full of automobiles and a beautiful husband or wife—that we should be judged by what the world has delivered to us. I think if we started making radical changes in the way wealth is distributed in this country, it would be a hell of a lot better.

. . .

I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems.

Hell, no. I can’t believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.” You’re going to run with it.

Noted, too, today, serendipitously—Charles Bernstein’s upcoming reading at the Foundation on Superior Street is, ahem, sold out. Just another ham-handed story of ordinary outsider become consummate insider . . . call it The Sell Out’s Sell Out . . .

Context N° 23

2011-11-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

Roland Topor, “La Grosse tête,” 1970

A new number (N° 23) of Context, a sort of “house organ” of the redoubtable Dalkey Archive Press—standard bearer against know-nothingism and literary provinciality in these States—is out. Included, among interviews with Slovenian writer Boris Pahor (Necropolis) and the Swiss-Italian Giovanni Orelli (Walaschek’s Dream) is a piece called “How I Write” by Viktor Shklovsky, translated by Adam Siegel:

. . . Creation in general and the creation of a new literary style in particular often arise when a chance mutation takes hold. More or less like what happens with the development of a new breed of cattle.
. . .
I write beginning with facts. I try not to modify facts. I try to link disparate facts. I may have gotten this from Lomonosov—the juxtaposition of disparate ideas—or it may come from Anatole France, banging the heads of epithets together.
. . .
I begin a work by reading. I read without trying to strain myself. Rather, I try not to commit things to memory. The strain, the attentiveness—they simply get in the way. One should read serenely, just looking at the book . . .

Too, “100 Good Reasons to Kill Myself Right Now,” by Roland Topor, translated by Edward Gauvin (with reason N° 1: “Best way to make sure I’m not dead already”). Too, there’s an excerpt (translated by Aaron Kerner) called “On Noise and Racket” by Arthur Schopenhauer (out of “the great post-Kantian pessimist’s 1851 collection of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena”) lamenting “the pain occasioned by noise” (Schopenhauer’s particular bête noire appears to be the “abrupt, piercing, brain-shredding, thought-murdering cracks” of the whips of hack-drivers):

For my part, I construe the matter thus: as the value of an enormous diamond smashed to pieces is reduced to that of so many slivers; or as an army, if it scatters—that is to say, dissolves into tiny bands—is rendered impotent; so a great mind is likewise reduced to the commonplace as soon as it has been interrupted, violated, scattered, diverted; for its superiority is conditional on all of its strength—like a convex mirror all its beams—being focused on a single point and object, and precisely in this is it thwarted by clamorous interruption.

And a Craig Dworkin-assembled “catalog of works of silent music”—titled “Unheard Music” and beginning with fictioneer (“best known for pioneering fiction structured on holorhymes”) Alphonse Allais’s 1897 Marche funèbre pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (“Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf VIP”), precursor to John Cage’s 4’33”. (Of the latter, Dworkin writes: “Not to be confused with either the showier 0’00” (1962), “to be performed in any way by anyone” “in a situation provided with maximum amplification” or the watered-down Tacet (1960), which “may be performed by (any) instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.”) A piece of Emmanuel Hocquard’s called “Ma Vie Privée” (out of Hocquard’s 2001 collection Ma haie: Un privé à Tanger 2 (P.O.L), a thing I keep desultorily rendering, gets a partial airing, too:

14. Literature is a machine to produce Literature, not thinking, not critique. In order to study, or to critique, I have no need of Literature. No more than I do philosophy. To tell the truth, for thinking, nobody needs it. I have no need of Literature for critical thinking, but I need to think critically about Literature seeing as how I’ve so imprudently fallen into it. To think critically about Literature is not a way to make it; it’s a way to remove it, to rub it out, to undo it. And, by doing so, remove it in me, undo it in me, rub a hole in the paper of my faults. I’m in the camp of the chicken and the cow, but I think about what the little girl reads. About how there’s something a little suspect in what she reads.

15. Nevertheless, you’ll say, you write. And you publish the things you write. I write. I write out of a need to think. That’s how I’m made. I need to think by writing. For myself. I myself am the one who’s addressed, not my reader. Olivier said it—and he was right—, “the reader’s the one who sinks a book.” Who makes of it something more, in place of something less. I try to write books of less. Because, for me, to think by writing is an attempt to focus.

16. The private is employed so as to focus or shine a light into obscure regions, not so as to make them more numerous.

17. Regarding literature though, that obscure region—it’s no more than a drop of water compared to the Pacific Ocean of unadulterated obscurities that makes up my life. And, talking about my life—it, too, is terribly murky. I sense somehow that there’s something suspect in saying my life. I keep the word life under extremely high surveillance, as a doubtful concept. My sixth sense warns me that it’s a big word. One of those big words on which one constructs the kind of dam that bursts on the river K. What makes me say that my life seems suspect to me? The fact that my in my life means something different than my in, for example, my shoe. It’s got a different tone. If I write, I lost my shoe, the shoe’s the object I lost. If I write, I lost my life, I can’t simply think of my life as an object. Who’s ever bequeathed his life to anybody by will and testament?

Williams’s Joyce

2011-11-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

William Carlos Williams, c. 1962
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Williams Carlos Williams—“Just finished Ulysses . . .”—writes to Ezra Pound (15 August 1922) with “one comment”: “It encourages me to champion my own particular form of stupidity.” Likely he’s talking of The Great American Novel (1923):

It is Joyce with a difference. The difference being greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception—Si la sol fa mi re do. Aside from that simple, rather stupid derivation, forced to a ridiculous extreme. No excuse for this sort of thing. Amounts to a total occlusion of intelligence. Substitution of something else. What? Well, nonsense. Since you drive me to it.

That “you” being Pound himself. Who’s carped / harrumphed some years earlier about Williams’s “opacity” (10 November 1917: “The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t you forget it. Opacity is NOT an American quality. Fizz, swish, gabble and verbiage, these are echt Amerikanish . . .”) and who’s (12 September 1920) spluttered out against Williams’s Kora in Hell: “what the French real reader wd. say to your ‘Improvisations’ is / Voui, c(h)a j(h)ai deja (f)vu c(h)a c(h)a c’est de R(h)imb(h)aud,” the finicky typing required to capture that wholly indiscernible accent effectively thwarting whatever oomph Pound intended by the remark. (Williams worries the slight, though, and repeats it in The Great American Novel: “Take the improvisations: What the French reader would say is: Oui, ça; j’ai déjà vu ça; ça c’est de Rimbaud.” Adding trenchantly enough: “Representative American verse will be that which will appear new to the French . . . . prose the same.”) For Williams, Joyce’s “real, if hidden, service” is—interminable struggle against the ever-shifting doxology of “literature”—in seeing that the art “consists of words”: “He has in some measure liberated words, freed them for their proper uses. He has to be a great measure destroyed what is known as ‘literature.’”* Thus Williams’s exchange:

That’s all very fine about le mot juste but first the word must be free. —But is there not some other way? It must come about gradually. Why go down into hell when— Because words are not men, they have no adjustments that need to be made. They are words. They can not be anything but free or bound. . . .
The word is the thing. If it is smeared with colors from right and left what can it amount to?

The purely material word. Emphatically put in Williams’s piece called “Marianne Moore” (1925) wherein he talks of Moore’s “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts”:

With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried and placed right side up on a clean surface.

Making of the word a curiously empty vessel—rather like an impertinently fillable form, like the Williams-detested sonnet. Williams says such an acid-washed word “may be used to smear it again with thinking (the attachments of thought) but in such a way that it will remain scrupulously itself, clean perfect, unnicked beside other words . . .” All somewhat mystical—extremity ever is—a way of making a clearing, a zero point against the stylishly “literary” (Williams calls the era’s “usual ‘poem’” a “commonplace opaque board covered with vain curlicues”—a definition fit for exhuming, apt for some of “our” own gewgaws . . .)

* Note, too, the lines—“But Joyce. He is misjudged, misunderstood. His vaunted invention is a fragile fog. His method escapes him. He has not the slightest notion what he is about. He is a priest, a roysterer of the spirit. He is an epicurean of romance. His true genius flickers and fails.” Is Williams out to “do the police in different voices” here, or is that to be read as sincerely “against method,” all art “advancing” by unremittent brave goofing off?

Franklin’s Progeny

2011-11-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
(Portrait by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis)

Trying, briefly, to dodge Thoreau, who willy-nilly skirts my intent, commandeering my reveries. (Rather like a fine mopery, or melancholy—where is it that Thoreau reports “feeling a fertile regret—and deriving even an inexpressible satisfaction as it were from my ability to feel regret”—that kind of husbanded strain, a nigh musical thing . . .) He writes (letter to H. G. O. Blake, 16 November 1857):

It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?
I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. Its broad base spreads over a village or two, which do not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. It ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse.

Mysterious lines, akin to the notorious report of losing “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove.” John Burroughs points to Thoreau’s glee-sopped exaggerating: “He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he went about it deliberately.” And quotes a line out of an earlier letter to Blake (10 April 1853): “I trust that you realize what an exaggerater I am,—that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity,—pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness-stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four.” And Burroughs comments: “Exaggeration is less to be feared than dullness and tameness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it swift enough; you must make its heels crack—jerk it out of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good provided they are well stuck with pins; you will be sure not to go to sleep in that case.” Isn’t that kind of talk straight out of Franklin’s Poor Richard? Look here (Poor Richard Improved, 1750):

What an admirable Invention is Writing, by which a Man may communicate his Mind without opening his Mouth, and at 1000 Leagues Distance, and even to future Ages, only by the Help of 22 Letters, which may be joined 5852616738497664000 Ways, and will express all Things in a very narrow Compass. ’Tis a Pity this excellent Art has not preserved the Name and Memory of its Inventor.

—
Those that have much Business must have much Pardon.

Discontented Minds, and Fevers of the Body are not to be cured by changing Beds or Businesses.

Little Strokes,
Fell great Oaks.

You may be too cunning for One, but not for All.

Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine.

Many would live by their Wits, but break for want of Stock.

Poor Plain dealing! dead without Issue!

You can bear your own Faults, and why not a Fault in your Wife.

And so forth. Wit-inspissate maxims. Isn’t Franklin one obvious source for something like the doggedly “clever” spasms of Bruce Andrews? Read a little of, oh, “Capital Is Not a Quantity of Money,” out of the 1992 I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism):

Capital is not a quantity of money, it’s dressed like a poinsettia, the fixed air, for nice gifts
go for broke, sentient beings, trill your dick—numbers count themselves! Investigation doors restore the mother
dwell on unreal facts someone is receiving healing in the left
ear, right now! Immune to depression, he cuts up bodes with grace:
TV brood norm orthopedic, speech alloy tests imperial patience, Latin Americanization of Finland drop earrings into your mouth. Be a coward ersatz for Christ
Judy fudge fruit Paladins of restrain
anxious beeps
advise the beat old men pass the test
all homophobes subjected to temporary sex-change operations; I forgot to become a devil dog.

Keep the icing from getting hard—in slug mood
turn blue-grey sound janitor
out of alienation, imposter puds: let Jesus come on the scene & itemize our calendars, smarmy sticky judge. Officers are not pretty; I spend most of my time shopping for sofas—just go educate yourselves. Toot my tubes—I just changed my sneakers; I’m sorry you were born—production can just as easily become a fetish. . . .

Und so weiter. Later: “The key to success is: never leave your neighborhood; in your spare time do not fail to study the dictionary . . .” Combo of Poor Richard and Heloise of the “handy household hints” undergirding the Andrews Weltanschauung (“put your box on the thing interested in your interest—why stop hugging yourself?”) With requisite noise in the signal (“anxious beeps”) and adjustable rate ironies. (See Franklin: “When Reason preaches, if you won’t hear her she’ll box your Ears.”)

Precedents to such cannings and picklings? I think of the Stevens of the “Adagia”: “There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.” And: “Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.” And: “Poetry is a form of melancholia. Or rather, in melancholy, it is one of the "aultres choses solatieuses." Or there’s the odd “Schemata”—questionably dated 1918, seemingly enumerating what Robert Duncan calls (The H. D. Book) “the pretensions of the poetic”:

I.
A vivid fruit in a vivid atmosphere.

II.
Wear only your golden masks tonight.

III.
Land of pine and marble.

IV.
Good worm . . . . .

V.
Diamond on the slipper of her naked ghost.

VI.
Is it a goat, or a cock you chase now, skeleton death?

VII.
The old marble is gray in the rain.

VIII.
A weaving of the slow shadow-wheel.

IX.
The hairy saints of the north.

X.
Mrs. Burbank’s cakes.

XI.
Time on time’s revenges.

Duncan’s phrase refers to Pound’s similar list, cached in a 21 October 1908 letter to Williams (“Here are a list of facts on which I and 9,000,000, other poets have spieled endlessly”):

1 Spring is a pleasant season.
the flowers, etc. etc. sprout bloom etc. etc.
2 young mans fancy | lightly
| heavily
| gaily etc. etc.
3 love, a delightsome tickling.
indefinable etc.
by day, etc. etc. etc.
by night, etc. etc. etc.
4 trees, hills, etc. are by a provident nature arranged
diversely, in diverse places
5 winds, clouds, rains, etc.
flop thru and over ’em.
6 men love women.
(more poetic in singular, but the verb retains the same form.)
(in Greece, & pagan countries men loved men, but the fact is no longer mentioned in polite society except in an expurgated sense.) I am not attracted by the pagan custom by my own prejudices are not material poetica.

Thus Pound’s tumulus of “the bulk of the poetic matter of the ages.” Though he immediately (“wait”) adds:

7. men fight battles. etc. etc.
8. men go on voyages.
Beyond this, men think & feel certain things. & see certain things not with the bodily vision. about this time I begin to get interested & the general public too ruthlessly goes to sleep?

(Duncan, whose quoting of Pound stops just prior to “men love women,” compares Pound’s list—what he calls “a sophisticated putting-on of common sense”—to Dante’s in De Vulgari Eloquentia: “as man has been endowed with a threefold life, namely, vegetable, animal, and rational, he journeys along a threefold road . . . Wherefore these three things, namely, safety, love, and virtue, appear to be those capital matters which ought to be treated supremely, I mean the things which are most important in respect of them, as prowess in arms, the fire of love, and the direction of the will.”) Is it there at the end—in Pound’s seeing “certain things not with the bodily vision” (akin to Stevens’s “weaving of the slow shadow-wheel” or the odder summoning of the “hairy saints of the north”?)—that the essential “norm orthopedic” practicality of Franklin (and Andrews) is ditched (Pound’s “putting on” put out of joint by leaky sincerity and heaven-reaching)? I exaggerate somewhat (hardly), husbanding my strain, making “imposter puds” of my songs.

“A lump, superfluous to the chore . . .”

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862

Robert Duncan, somewhere in The H. D. Book, quoting William Carlos Williams: “Knowledge, the contaminant.” Williams, in a letter to Ezra Pound (8 July 1946), quoting John Dewey: “Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in an intimacy of intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range.” McKenzie Wark, somewhere in A Hacker Manifesto, quoting Georges Bataille: “The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance, the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life.” Thoreau, of whom Henry James, simply unable to comprehend willed attenuation of any sort, wrote that “he suffers something of the amoindrissement of eccentricity,” noting famously that “life is frittered away by detail” and urging men to “simplify, simplify.” Questions of focus and scope. Thoreau’s stubborn rectitude of a self uncompomised and full of its contradictory ways. (Hawthorne, in a letter to Evert Duyckinck, whilst, too, touting Thoreau’s “great qualities of intellect and character”: “He is the most unmalleable fellow alive—the most tedious, tiresome, and intolerable—the narrowest and most notional . . .”) So, against routine humdrum simplicity Thoreau cautions (Journal, 26 December 1860):

To such a pass our civilization and division of labor has come that A, a professional huckleberry-picker, has hired B’s field and, we will suppose, is now gathering the crop, perhaps with the aid of a patented machine; C, a professed cook, is superintending the cooking of a pudding made of some of the berries; while Professor D, for whom the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book—a work on the Vaccinieæ, of course. And now the result of this downward course will be seen in that book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry-field and account for the existence of the two professors who come between D and A. It will be worthless. There will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. The reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. To use a homely illustration, this is to save at the spile but waste at the bung. I believe in a different kind of division of labor, and that Professor D should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry-field.

Vaccinieæ: the “blueberry tribe.” (Emerson, in the “Eulogy” saying of Thoreau: “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition . . . instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”) Complexity’s measure maintained by participating throughout. So, the demand one steer clear the trappings of “stereotyping” (a printing method using a solid plate of type-metal) so singular and inutile a thing as a poem, mere processual-debris of the human-making (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers):

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.

Though, just prior, Thoreau’s hymned the grandeurs and exigencies of prose in somewhat monumental terms, the author-manikin yielding to a stabler thing:

Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of thought. The poet often only makes an eruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman, and settled colonies.

In a letter to Daniel Ricketson (18 August 1857), Thoreau’s “eruption” is an expulsion whole, unniggled, peremptory, flash: “As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. There are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops whenever he can get a chance. New ideas come into the world somewhat like falling meteors. With a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody’s castle-roof perforated. To try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible.” Compare that to Thoreau’s Journal-entry of 28 February 1841:

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author’s character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs. We read it as the essential character of a handwriting without regard to the flourishes. And so of the rest of our actions; it runs as straight as a ruled line through them all, no matter how many curvets about it. Our whole life is taxed for the least thing well done; it is its net result. How we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion to excite us, determines our authority and capacity for the time to come.

An entry ransacked in the writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Wherein one reads:

A man’s whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man. The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done.

Pertinent, too, the lines in a letter to Harrison Blake (16 November 1857), suggesting “a theme,” that Blake “state . . . precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to”:

Don’t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Discordance of method and aim un peu partout. Dialectical envy in the woods. Still, the soaring comes unfettered and seemingly unaccoutered: “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. . . . An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

Details, Whole

2011-10-31T07:16:00.000-07:00

Thoreau’s “Neottia pubescens or veined Neottia Rattle-snake plantain”
In Curtis’s Botanical Magazine:
DESCR. Radical leaves five-nerved; ovate, acute, dark green tessellated with white bars: petioles sheathing the scape and one another. Scape erect, not at all twisted, pubescent, not six inches in length, clothed with alternate, linear bractes, or cauline leaves, somewhat twisted round the scape, the lowermost one broadest and tessellated like the radical leaves. Flowers white, scentless ? in a long straight spike, not secund. Bractes lanceolate, concave, one to each flower, equaling the german, which is pubescent, obsoletely three-cornered, with a projecting dorsal rib, a little incurved. The two superior internal petals connive so as to form a galea; the two lateral petals are patent, and equal to the labellum, which is concave above, and acuminate. Pollen masses 2-lobed: lobes nearly globular.

Thoreau to James Elliot Cabot (8 March 1848): “My book, fortunately, did not find a publisher ready to undertake it, and you can imagine the effect of delay on an author’s estimate of his own work. However, I like it well enough to mend it, and shall look at it again directly when I have dispatched some other things. . . . I esteem it a rare happiness to be able to write anything, but there (if I ever get there) my concern for it is apt to end. Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know. I can sympathize, perhaps, with the barberry bush, whose business it is solely to ripen its fruit (though that may not be to sweeten it) and to protect it with thorns, so that it holds all winter, even, unless some hungry crows come to pluck it.” “My book” refers to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), then making its futile rounds with various publishers and obliging, apparently, Thoreau’s repeated rewrites (Thoreau ended up, at Emerson’s counsel, paying himself for the printing of a thousand copies. Less than three hundred sold.) James Elliot Cabot assisted Louis Agassiz, for whom Thoreau periodically collected specimens. Sent with queries and field-notes: “Snapping turtles are perhaps as frequently met with in our muddy river as anything, but they are not always to be had when wanted . . . As no one makes a business of seeking them, and they are valued for soups, science may be forestalled by appetite in this market . . .” And:

Suckers. The horned, which I sent first, and the black. I am not sure whether the Common or Boston sucker is found here. Are the three which I sent last, which were speared in the river, identical with the three black suckers, taken by hand in the brook, which I sent before? I have never examined them minutely.
. . .
Lampreys. Very scarce since the dams at Lowell and Billerica were built.
Shiners. Leuciscus chrysoleucas, silver and golden.
What is the difference?

Details of use. Engagement with the ferocious and unstinting welter of the natural world, what lies beyond mad human striving. Larger sense of “Time & Co.” (effect of the Lowell and Bellerica dams on the lamprey population in the Concord). Cabot reports (c. 1 June 1847) that Agassiz’d found “one, and he thinks two, more new species” among Thoreau’s specimens: “one is a Pomotis,—the bream without the red spot in the operculum, and with a red belly and fins. The other is the shallower and lighter colored shiner.” I keep thinking of a line of Kenneth Burke’s—out of Counter-Statement (1931)—concerning the split between the rhetorical approach that “makes of literature the verbalization of experience, the conversion of diction into life” versus its opposite, that “would make of literature the verbalization of experience, the conversion of life into diction.” (Burke’s exemplar is Flaubert, whom he sees as “an admirer of Shakespeare, of Chateaubriand . . . attempting to write in the aesthetic of a Stendhal, . . . a novelist [who] despised the protrusion of art, [whose] greatest ambition was to write sentences which could make the reader forget them as sentences . . .”) Isn’t there something of that in Thoreau’s brave vacillatory medium? He writes: “As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things . . .” and proceeds (Walden, “Conclusion”) to succor pure outré verbalization in all its undeniable outbursting:

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? . . . The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

Something of the bon mot electricity there, something of the enigma-split of some of the sayings pulled out of the Journal—“When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.” Or: “He who resists not at all will never surrender.” The unspared indefinite body of the word itself: that “literal monument” left behind, shrugged off exoskeletal shriving cloth. Snake skin. Compare it with Thoreau’s worries in the Journal-entry for 19 August 1851:

Chicadees & jays never fail—The cricket’s is a note which does not attract you to itself. It is not easy to find one
I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct & scientific–That in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope—I see details not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, & say ‘I know.’ The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry fields near pine wood.

And thence is moved to consider the aptness of the “richly veined leaves of the Neottia pubescens or veined Neottia Rattle-snake plantain”: “I like this last name very well though it might not be easy to convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. We want some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. Such work as men imitate in their embroidery—unaccountably agreeable to the eye—as if it answered its end only when it met the eye of man.” (The worry and upshot of the rude mechanickal’s continuous reading, unadroit, with few hints and faint feelers to the beyond: “I see details not wholes.”)

William Ellery Channing’s Thoreau

2011-10-28T07:03:00.000-07:00

Pencil Box, J. Thoreau & Co.
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Emerson (“Eulogy, 1862”): “From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”

Cold morning. Up, dilatory, rebelling, at four (to light up the lamp at five). Odd sleeps. Perused William Ellery Channing’s Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, the 1902 F. B. Sanborn-edited version of the 1873 original. One gathers something of the “somewhat mercurial Channing” (Krutch) through the rampant quotational jitters of the “Preface.” In part:

In a biographic thesis there can hardly occur very much to amuse, if of one who was reflective and not passionate, and who might have entered like Anthony Wood in his journal, “This day old Joan began to make my bed,”—an entry not fine enough for Walpole. At the same time the account of a writer’s stock in trade may be set off like the catalogues of George Robins, auctioneer, with illustrations even in Latin or, as Marlowe says—
“The learned Greek, rich in fit epithets,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words.”
Byron’s bath at Newstead Abbey is described as a dark and cellar-like hole. The halos about the brows of authors tarnish with time. Iteration, too, must be respected,—that law of Nature. Authors carry their robes of state not on their backs, but, like the Indians seen by Wafer, in a basket behind them,—“the times’ epitome.” But as the cheerful host says:—
“I give thee all, I can no more,
If poor the offering be,”
the best scraps in the larder, like Pip’s pork-pie.
. . .
Claude Lorraine used to say, “I sell you my landscapes: the figures I give away.” So there are patch-work quilts made by the saints where bits of fine silk are sewed on pieces of waste paper,—that seems, madam, not that is. But recall the trope that “very near to admiration is the wish to admire” and permit the excellence of the subject to defray in a measure the meanness of the treatment . . .

Whew. Sanborn, regarding Channing’s re-drafting of an earlier (1863) manuscript, notes Channing’s “perversity of genius” in the redoing. And unsigned review in the New York Times dated 25 October 1873 reads in part:

The preface is an epitome of the book, which is written without order or method, and in a style oftentimes so obtrusively bad as to suggest the suspicion that Mr. Channing has purposely adopted it, the better to set off the simplicity and clearness of the extracts he gives from Thoreau. Of the latter he tells us that “for so learned a man he spared his erudition,” and that “there are so few obscurities in Thoreau’s writing, that his style has that ease and moderateness he appears to lack.” The exact reverse is true of his chronicler, amid whose clumsy inversions, deplorable Latinisms, and uncouth efforts at humor, Thoreau’s clear and clean-cut sentences shine like diamonds in a dust heap. Mr. Channing talks of “isolate houses,” or “at-length-deserted pathways,” and the “breathing aloofness”; a hen is the “origin of feathers,” ice is “shaggy enamel.” . . . What can be expected of a man who talks of “tadpoles beginning, like magazine writers, to drop their tails” . . .

Ah, the pleasures of vituperating. (Ah, the pleasures of a poverty of epithets . . .) One recalls Thoreau’s own sense of the stifling air of “poetry . . . collected into one alove”*:

When looking over dry and dusty volumes of the English poets, I cannot believe that those fresh and fair creations I had imagined are contained in them. English poetry from Gower down, collected into one alcove, and so from the library window compared with the commonest nature, seems very mean. Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. . . . I can hardly be serious with myself when I remember that I have come to Cambridge after poetry; and while I am running over the catalogue and selecting, I think it would be a shorter way to a complete volume to step at once into the field or wood, with a very low reverence to students and librarians. Milton did not see what company he was to fall into.

(Journal, 30 November 1841, quoted by Krutch.) Continuing: “On running over the titles of these books, looking from time to time at their first pages or farther, I am oppressed by an inevitable sadness.”

Alors, some few reading notes out of the Channing biography:

Henry retained a peculiar pronunciation of the letter r, with a decided French accent. He says, “September is the first month with a burr in it”; and his speech always had an emphasis, a burr in it.
. . .
When he was fourteen months old, his family removed to Chelmsford, where they were settled for two years . . . At Chelmsford he was tossed by a cow, and again, by getting at an axe without advice, he cut off a good part of one of his toes; and once he fell from a stair. After this last achievement, as after some others, he had a singular suspension of breath, with a purple hue in his face, owing, I think, to his slow circulation (shown in his slow pulse through life) and hence the difficulty of recovering his breath.
. . .
His own house is rather minutely described in his “Walden.” It was just large enough for one, like the plate of boiled apple pudding he used to order of the restaurateur, and which, he said, constituted his invariable dinner in a jaunt to the city.
. . .
For shoddy he had an aversion: a pattern of solid Vermont gray gave him genuine satisfaction, and he could think of corduroy. His life was of one fabric. He spared the outfitters no trouble; he wished the material cut to suit him, as he was to wear it, not worshipping “the fashion” in cloth or opinion. He bought but few things, and “those not till long after he began to want them,” so that when he did get them he was prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.
. . .
Ever on the search for knowledge, he lived to get information; and as I am so far like Alfieri that I have almost no curiosity, I once said to him how surprised I was at the persistence of this trait in him. “What else is there in life?” was his reply. He did not end, in this search, with the farmers, nor the broadcloth world; he knew another class of men, who hang on the outskirts of society, those who love “grog” and never to be seen abroad without a fish-pole or a gun in their hands; with elfish locks, and of a community with nature not to be surpassed. They lived more out of doors than he did, and faced more mud and water without flinching, sitting all day in the puddles, like frogs, with a line in the river, catching pouts, or wading mid-leg in marshes, to shoot woodcock. One of these men, who called cherry-birds “port-royals,” he long frequented, though looked on in the town as by no means sacred; who, having a prejudice for beer, at times transcended propriety.
. . .
He was a natural Stoic, not taught from Epictetus nor the trail of Indians. Not only made he no complaint, but in him was no background of complaint, as in some, where a lifelong tragedy dances in polished fetters. He enjoyed what sadness he could find. He would be as melancholy as he could and rejoice with fate. “Who knows but he is dead already?" He voyaged about his river in December, the drops freezing on the oar, with a cheering song; pleased with the silvery chime of icicles against the stems of the button-bushes, toys of “immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”
. . .
So, through life, he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations; and some have thought his refusals were unwillingness. When he had grown to an age suitable for company, and not very fond of visiting, he could not give the common refusal, that it was not convenient, or not in his power, or he regretted, but said the truth, “I do not want to go.”
. . .
In Boston he . . . visited libraries, and the end of Long Wharf, having no other business there than with the books and that brief sight of the sea, so fascinating to a landsman. Thus he had no love at all for cities; those curious outcroppings of mortal ingenuity, called “institutions,” furnished him more than one good mark to shoot at. “One wise sentence,” he said, “is worth the State of Massachusetts many times over.”
. . .
Once walking in old Dunstable, he much desired the town history by C. J. Fox of Nashua; and, knocking, as usual, at the best house, he went in and asked a young lady who made her appearance whether she had the book in question. She had, it was produced. After consulting it, Thoreau in his sincere way inquired very modestly whether she “would not sell it to him.” I think the plan surprised her, and have heard that she smiled; but he produced his wallet, gave her the pistareen, and went his way rejoicing with the book, which remained in his small library.
. . .
He was by no means one of those crotchety persons who believe, because they set up Plato or Goethe or Shakespeare as the absolute necessities of literary worship, that all other students must so make idols of them. I never knew him say a good word for Plato, and I fear he had never finished Shakespeare. His was a very uncompleted reading; there being with him a pressure of engrossing flowers, birds, snow-storms, swamps, and seasons. He had no favorites among the French or Germans and I do not recall a modern writer except Carlyle and Ruskin whom he valued much. In fact, the pointed and prismatic style now so common, and the chopped-hay fashion of writing, suited not with his homely, long-staple vein. For novels, stories, and such matters, he was devoid of all curiosity; and for the works of Dickens had a hearty contempt. Usually, all the popular books were sealed volumes to him. But no labor was too onerous, no material too costly, if expended on the right enterprise.
. . .
Another faithful reading was those old Roman farmers, Cato and Varro, and musically named Columella, for whom he had a liking. He is reminded of them by seeing the farmers so busy in the fall carting out their compost. “I see the farmer now on every side carting out his manure, and sedulously making his compost-heap, or scattering it over his grass-ground and breaking it up with a mallet, and it reminds me of Cato’s advice. He died 150 years before Christ. Indeed, the farmer’s was pretty much the same routine then as now. ‘Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. Stercus sedulo conserva, cum exportatis purgato et comminuito. Per autumnum evehito.’ Study to have a great dung-heap. Carefully preserve your dung. When you carry it out, make clean work of it, and break it up fine. Carry it out during the autumn.”
. . .
Abroad, he used the pencil, writing but a few moments at a time, during the walk; but into the note-book must go all measurements with the foot-rule which he always carried, or the surveyor’s tape that he often had with him. Also all observations with his spy-glass (another invariable companion for years), all conditions of plants, spring, summer, and fall, the depth of snows, the strangeness of the skies, all went down in this note-book. To his memory he never trusted for a fact, but to the page and the pencil, and the abstract in the pocket, not the Journal. I have seen bits of this note-book, but never recognized any word in it; and I have read its expansion in the Journal, in many pages, of that which occupied him but five minutes to write in the field. “Have you written up your notes in your Journal?” was one of his questions. Such was the character of his mind, to make what is called little become grand and noble, and thus to dignify life. “To have some one thing to do, and do it perfectly.”

Assez.

“Put to the block . . .”

2011-10-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

Stud with nails, out of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

How soonish the books—examined with fealty sputtering, diligence caught up out of the day’s sloughs, moments thieved out of supposed industry—commence a nattering. Some smallish correspondence noted causes a veering, bookishness adding to bookishness, and the whole grope-intelligibility is put to the block. So Walter Pater, in “Style” (1888)—a piece beginning, “Since all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved distinctions . . .”—says of the “literary artist”: “the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor’s marble.” Humph. So, a chance espying of some lines out of Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (1802):

Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

Isn’t that fons et origo for Thoreau’s Journal-chewing for February 2, 1841?

It is easy to repeat, but hard to originate. Nature is readily made to repeat herself in a thousand forms, and in the Daguerreotype her own light is amanuensis, and the picture too has more than a surface significance,—a depth equal to the prospect,—so that the microscope may be applied to the one as the spy-glass to the other. Thus we may easily multiply the forms of the outward, but to give the within outwardness, that is not easy.

Maybe. And maybe of an obviousness indiscernible here in my toolbox.* So the half-assed onslaught of bookishness, evidentiary mustering. Rooting in the compost. Leading precisely and invariably to a loss of “the sense of achieved distinctions.” That is, to a point where something arrives (“The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden . . .”) Somewhere Thoreau says (akin to Whitman’s “This Compost”—“It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, / It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, / It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, / It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, / It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last . . .”): “Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.” And, of a day spent in Cambridge Library (Journal, March 16, 1852):

The library a wilderness of books. Looking over books on Canada written with the last 300 yrs could see how one had been built upon another each author consulting & referring to his predecessors. You could read most of them without changing your leg on the steps . . . I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear—as wild & unexplored as any of natures primitive wildernesses. The volumes of the 15th 16th and 17th centuries which lie so near on the shelf are rarely opened are effectually forgotten—& not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’ Pilgrims—it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp—10 feet deep with sphagnum where the monarchs of the forest covered with mosses & stretched along the ground were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility—an Ohio soil—as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bull frogs & the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book.

Pertinent to the daily news is Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1948 prescient assessment in Henry David Thoreau:

He disapproved of the way America was going and he refused point-blank to go along with it. Since his day, both America and the world have gone much farther along the road they chose, and they seem even less likely than they did in Thoreau’s day to heed his injunctions or even to see how they could possibly be heeded. But the dissatisfaction which he expressed with things as they are has come to seem more and more justified and his prophecies have in many respects been fulfilled.
His contemporaries lived in an age of growing complexity and hope; we in an age of growing complexity and despair. “Progress” was not in his day a word of which even progressives were critical . . .

And Krutch quotes Thoreau’s succinct damning of sheepish human naïveté here in Walden:

Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”

So the “melancholy accident” of the 99% . . .

* I am thinking of Thoreau’s only half-riotous talk (“Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of”) in the “Shelter” chapter of Walden regarding the possibility of dwelling in such a box:
I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free . . . You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this.

“In isolate flecks . . .”

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Daniel Ricketson, “H. D. Thoreau as he presented himself at the door of Brooklawn Dec 25th 1854—age 37,” 1854

Odd blatting thundershowers of short durance in the night, the dog nervously prowling. Warmish by morning. Pondering, aimlessly, what connects, and to what end. Wallace Stevens, writing of Marianne Moore, saying: “An aesthetic integration is a reality.” And: “To confront fact in its total blankness is for any poet a completely baffling experience. Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.” (Sidling back, again, to Thoreau’s sense of poetry’s being “not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.” A glancing blow, a ricochet, “some bearded meteor, trailing light.”) Stevens: “No fact is a bare fact, no individual fact is a universe in itself.” And: “An isolated fact cut loose from the universe, has no significance for the poet.” So Thoreau, out making connections in the inconstant welter, constantly “reminded of”—and serially: “reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds”—writes in the Journal (September 5, 1851): “All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.” In its context (initially “reminding of” John Keats’s flighty reply to Reynolds dated February 3, 1818: “Would we were a sort of ethereal Pigs, and turned loose to feed upon spiritual Mast and Acorns—which would be merely being a squirrel and feeding upon filberts, for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert but a sort of archangelical acorn? About the nuts being worth cracking, all I can say is, that where there are a throng of delightful Images ready drawn, simplicity is the only thing”—it’s possible Thoreau read the letter in the Richard Monckton Milnes-edited 1848 Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats):

No doubt, like plants, we are fed through the atmosphere & the varying atmospheres of various seasons of the year feed us variously. How often we are sensible of being thus fed & invigorated! And all nature contributes to this aerial diet its food of finest quality. Methinks that in the fragrance of the fruits I get a finer flavor and in beauty (which is appreciated by sight—the taste & smell of the eye—) a finer still. As Wilkinson says “The physical man himself is the builded aroma of the world. This, then, at least, is the office of the lungs—to drink the atmosphere with the planet dissolved in it.” —— “what is the import of change of air, and how each pair of lungs has a native air under some one dome of the sky.”
Wilkinson’s book to some extent realizes what I have dreamed of a reeturn to the primitive analogical & derivative senses of words— His ability to trace analogies often leads him to a truer word than more remarkable writers have found.— As when in his chapter on the human skin, he describes the papillary cutis as “an encampment of small conical tents coextensive with the surface of the body”— The faith he puts in old & current expressions as having sprung from an instinct wiser than science—& safely to be trusted if they can be interpreted.
The man of science discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit— Wilkinson finds a home for the imagination—& it is no longer out cast & homeless. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.— we reason from our hands to our head.

Too, the previous day (September 4, 1851), Thoreau self-exhorts:

Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each object however humble—however slight & transient the provocation—what else is there to be improved? Who knows what opportunities he may neglect. It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that. Follow its leading—apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one—as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak. He is a wise man & experienced who has taken many views— To whom stones & plants & animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something—contributed something.

Semblances pulled down out of the myriad. Somehow I think of William Carlos Williams’s notes (In the American Grain) concerning Benjamin Franklin’s “voluptuousness of omnivorous energy brought to a dead stop by the rock of New World inopportunity”: “His energy never attained to a penetrant gist; rather it was stopped by and splashed upon the barrier, like a melon.” Williams’s Franklin one of the many “pure products of America”—made “crazy” by the sheer surrounding “mass of impedimenta”: “His ‘good’ was scattered about him. This is what is called being ‘practical.’” Contra Thoreau’s implacable impracticality, all gist and saunter, the eye’s untoilsome traveling. Williams: “It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off . . .” Thoreau (Journal, July 16, 1858): “I suspect that such are the laws of light that our eye, as it were, leaps from one prominence to another, connecting them by a straight line when at a distance and making one side balance the other.”

Isola di Rifiuti

Edith Sitwell Notes

Edith Sitwell, c. 1927(Photograph by Cecil Beaton)

Ronald Johnson’s “Six, Alas!”

Edith Sitwell, 1887-1964

Omnidirectional Unpreparedness

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, 1783-1840

“In pulses, in strokes . . .”

George Santayana, 1863-1952

Williams’s Stray Essays, &c.

Williams Carlos Williams, c. 1951(Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Dogged

Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535-c. 475 BCE (Painting by Johannes Moreelse, c. 1603-1634)

Incessant Flux

Great Falls, Paterson, New Jersey(Photograph by Mark Hillringhouse)

“Speech is the fountain . . .”

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003(“I am the last man alive to have heard Ezra Pound’s impersonation of Henry James.”)

Machinery

“It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room.”(Out of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships . . ., London, 1726)

Alan Halsey’s Even if only out of

Alan Halsey, c. 2006(Photograph by Peter Griffiths)

Neologisms in America (Stray Notes)

John Ashbery, c. 2010(Photograph by David Shankbone)

Paterson Notes 2

William Carlos Williams on Garret Mountain, Paterson, New Jersey, 1957(Photograph by Eve Arnold)

Paterson Notes 1

Dérive, Bookish

Gustave Doré, “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” 1855

“Furiously laboring at random . . .”

Marianne Moore, 1887-1972(Photograph by Esther Bubley)

Walking, &c.

A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001

Michelle Disler’s [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography

Michelle Disler

Essai sans but

Alfred Stieglitz, “Self-portrait,” 1890

“Catches in the reticulum . . .”

Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Some Accounting

William Carlos Williams, c. 1954(Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

Bernadette Mayer / Emily Dickinson

Bernadette Mayer

Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s Vaudeville

Geoffrey Hilsabeck

George Stanley (Some Notes)

George Stanley(Photograph by Star Black)

Cod and Stravaig

Pyrrho of Elis, c. 360–c. 270

Haniel Long / William Carlos Williams

Haniel Long, 1888-1956(Oil portrait by Agnes Tait)

Colt and Trial Horse

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1874-1927

“Sentences as a refreshment . . .”

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Bill Berkson / J. H. Prynne

Bill Berkson

Endlessness and Hurry

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

William Fuller’s “For Dally Kimoko”

William Fuller(Collage by Tom Raworth of Photographs by Chuck Stabelton)

Scrupulous

J. H. Prynne(Photograph by Eirik Steinhoff)

Tu m’

Marcel Duchamp, “Tu m’,” 1918

Berger, et alii

John Berger, c. 1962

Bento’s Sketchbook

John Berger

Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station

Ben Lerner

E. G. Burrows, 1917-2011

E. G. Burrows, 1917-2011

“Cruel hand . . .”

English Sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Jefferson and / or Williams

William Carlos Williams, c. 1943

“Expelled in all vicissity . . .”

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Edith Sitwell, c. 1927
(Photograph by Cecil Beaton)

Williams Carlos Williams, c. 1951
(Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535-c. 475 BCE
(Painting by Johannes Moreelse, c. 1603-1634)

Great Falls, Paterson, New Jersey
(Photograph by Mark Hillringhouse)

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003
(“I am the last man alive to have heard Ezra Pound’s impersonation of Henry James.”)

“It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room.”
(Out of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships . . ., London, 1726)

Alan Halsey, c. 2006
(Photograph by Peter Griffiths)

John Ashbery, c. 2010
(Photograph by David Shankbone)

William Carlos Williams on Garret Mountain, Paterson, New Jersey, 1957
(Photograph by Eve Arnold)

Marianne Moore, 1887-1972
(Photograph by Esther Bubley)

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

William Carlos Williams, c. 1954
(Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

George Stanley
(Photograph by Star Black)

Haniel Long, 1888-1956
(Oil portrait by Agnes Tait)

William Fuller
(Collage by Tom Raworth of Photographs by Chuck Stabelton)

J. H. Prynne
(Photograph by Eirik Steinhoff)

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Samuel Beckett, c. 1964
(Photograph by Steve Schapiro)

Bram van Velde, 1895-1981
(Photograph by Marc Trivier)

William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, c. 1960
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

William Carlos Williams, c. 1955
(Photograph by Paul Bishop)

William Carlos Williams, c. 1949
(Photograph by Musya Sheeler)

William Carlos Williams, c. 1962
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
(Portrait by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis)

Pencil Box, J. Thoreau & Co.
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Emerson (“Eulogy, 1862”): “From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”

Stud with nails, out of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)