The Grand Piano Notes

Flag and Gadgetry

The Grand Piano episode: What is one to make of this? Barrett Watten, early in the writing he’s muster’d up for numéro six, attaches a footnote to the sentence: “Proofs for the second edition of In the American Tree had just arrived, along with a request for a new introduction to Tjanting. The footnote reads:

The first version of this essay, from early in The Grand Piano process, was published as the introduction to the second edition of Ron’s Tjanting (Salt, 2002). In it, I rearranged the paragraphs from my introduction to the first edition (The Figures, 1981) and interspersed them with newly written material. In this version, I have substituted fourteen stanzas from Progress (Roof, 1985) that mention “body” or “bodies” for the paragraphs of the first introduction, and interspersed seven new, titled sections that question the relation of “body” to “language.”

Chiaro? The “essay” (assuming that means the piece one is reading) is titled “The Turn to Language” and, yes, one recalls vaguely something like that, though damn’d if we’d look it up. I do recall that method: stretching the dough of one’s skimpy “output” into saliences it never meant to address, that is, turning in (recycling) the one and the same ten-pager to several different profs. We outgrew the practice.

Snark city breakdown, what’dja expect? Truth is, one’d probably’ve ignored the whole precious thing if Watten hadn’t subsequently made a point (in one of the “seven, new titled sections”) of how, oh, (beyond) rad and (post) zesty such a re-use ruse is (all the while managing to pat ’s own back):

In Total Syntax (my first critical work, and the first of our school to appear) occurs a careful distinction between technique and method. By technique I meant the sum total of constructive devices that make the work, while method was the extension of technique as an engagement with the world, in the public practice of art (mapping intension and extension as entailments of the work). The work does not remain on the page but is the beginning of a series of acts, of which “interpretation” is only the first. Interpretation could also be deferred and thus constitute the agency of the work, always deferring its interpretation in becoming the site of endless (and public) consternation and projection.

For the “say wha?” crowd, Watten reiterates: “. . . the nonidentity of these terms was what I wanted to stress—that technique is the beginning of a series that provisionally arrives with the work, while method is its conscious re-presentation in different contexts, toward meanings that could never have been foreseen.” (Isn’t, I am thinking, leafing through my zoological specimen books, there a kind of parasite that for sustenance latches on with a powerful absorptive “mouth” to—not its own kind—but its own self?) Watten then claims the technique / method distinction “paralleled much theoretical work of the 70s,” naming Barthes, Eco, Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser. (Uh, yeah, precisely.)

So one supposes that the theoretical comb-over excuses the bald expedience of the practice, then what? (Or, for those who like to nod knowingly: “What then?”) The totality of a work’s “always deferring its interpretation in becoming the site of endless (and public) consternation and projection” recalls a little too strongly, I’d say, recent claims for the requisite endlessness of the “war against terror.” Vigilance without end, deferral sans cesse. One must “attend” to language writing now and forever. The monumentalism of Watten’s proposal is staggering. The final section, titled “Site,” begins: “The body is in pieces; language constitutes a new order of reality; the work is constructed; what can be said of its agency?” (At what point is it appropriate to stop politely overlooking the hints of fascism inhering to such rhetoric?) There follows a fantasy of language writing as kin to the Chinese “classic text, hidden by scholars in dangerous times only to be dug up later.” Watten recalls a “Chinese funerary inscription” reading “The clean air comes from the mountain of things” and, bizarrely, launches into a story of a site, half-shrine, half blogspot:

In Chinese, wen xian would be that mountain, to which all literary production adds; imagine oneself at the heights! This is what history ought to provide, for the careful and long-lived scholar. I think the provenance of history will be otherwise: I can only imagine a return, not to a snow-capped mountain, but to a site that has been constructed of the traces of what has gone before. Such a site would be the work of art as reembodied: in my own case, Progress and Total Syntax; with us, I hope, The Grand Piano. A site continues to create the moment of its method through the technique of its construction, which could be both literary and archival. The site persists; it is a place one comes back to. It makes sense of the time in which it was first intended and all that has happened since. It is material: the primary responsibility of a site is to maintain it. It is virtual: we need to maintain a form of continuous activity on the site. If the site were material and virtual in this sense, we would still need to facilitate its being seen or read. I intend to construct a site in this way, as a work whose meaning is a prospective return. The clear air comes from such a work, as it inscribes the condition of its making as available to other times.

Spooky, no? I picture Mussolini’s sterile cube unassailable, the menacing “Colosseo Quadrato,” high up overlooking Rome. If one approaches it, is one likely to be accosted by “facilitators” to its being seen or read? Reception and its control: “literature,” for Watten, ’s never ceased to be about reception and its control.

Colosseo Quadrato
(Photograph by Paolo Fusco)

I want’d to note one other thing. Watten tells a story of the body (“the body in pieces”—or in pain—he busts two bones in one leg in it). It is a story of driving back to Iowa City after visiting Robert Grenier at Franconia College, late November 1971, with Bob Perelman and “a Slovenian poet” who’s at Iowa’s International Writing Program. There’s significant Watten distrust of “the Slovenian” (who insists on driving)’s driving ability; there’s a sotto voce exchange between Perelman and Watten regarding that ability (“my distrust of the Slovenian’s driving skills was questioned by Bob—in the basement of his parents’ suburban home in Youngstown (pool table and hanging lamp)—an early instance of ‘who’s driving the car’; so I let him drive.”); there’s the requisite vindicating fuck-up by “the Slovenian” who skids out on an icy overpass (“not being used to American highways”) and rams a guard rail, precipitating Watten’s injuries. Throughout: “the Slovenian,” nameless, wholly Other’d by lack of name. And, this: “The Slovenian, who has gone on to a relatively big career by Balkan standards, as a workshop poet of moderate notoriety (due in part to the status reserved for international figures of the Brodsky, Heaney, or Simic variety), insisted . . .” Is there more than a mild whiff of nativism there? What are “Balkan standards”? (How do “American highways” differ?) Watten’s broad-brush’d contempt (what “variety” is “Brodsky, Heaney and Simic”?) indicates pettiness, fear, bristly aloofness, a stunning kind of narrowness. “The Slovenian” obviously refers to Tomaž Šalamun, a fact confirmed by Steve Evans’s piece on Bob Perelman written for The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Oddly enough, there the crash is precipitated by a truck suddenly swerving into the car (in Watten’s version the car is “narrowly missed by a truck immediately behind”). One so adamantly concern’d with “agency” ought to ascertain cause with undeniable certainty.

M=O=N=U=M=E=N=T

The Grand Piano Notes

Blunt Tin

‘PERUIALL AS ORATORIE’


Pluvial is the reigning word
Banter’d about the cathedral where
The torrid distinct is up-
Ended by applauding that sounds
Like rain, turbulent and falling
Against itself like that. Apt
It is to eye bathos
With a denatured sense of
Form: no straight lines in
The wild kind of thing.
Of one écrivain Français George
Sand née Amandine something or
Other’d say only: ‘His forehead
Is flat!’ A damnable nuisance
Pressing forth against the real,
All a green and spiny
Tangle the way it is.
When disorder mocks a tableau
Put squarely up against a
Wall, when a simple off-
Red-studded buoyancy of rasp-
Berry vines is plunged into
By kids in a gabble
Of thorn-abated procurement, when
One boy’s sneaker squashes the
Semi-cavity of an abandon’d
Field mouse hole wherein squats
A furious squad of yellow-
Jackets, when the stinging begins
And the running and pain
Devising its noise-packets unloos’d:
That is no picture hanging
In a gallery, no rainy
Pittoresque caulking up a floody
Leak in the magnified perusal
Of one’s sentiment, unspecified, no
Sodden mortifying nod to an
Historical shim under a delinquent
Moment (keeping it upright, Time
Itself seeming to teeter), none
Of that. One’s a mere
Discard, sample off a barrelhead,
And is sampled in turn,
Enough ‘to make the Asse
Runne proude of his eares.’

—

The Grand Piano episode: Kit Robinson offers a capsule history of a life (half) in theater—from the kid playing Bottom in Cincinnati, through Living Theater quasi-guerrilla manifs and R. D. Laing-inflect’d “physical and interpersonal exercises” at Yale, to early ’eighties Poets Theater work (acting and writing) in San Francisco. Informing (in its limit’d way): I kept thinking my usual skeptical “I don’t know about theater”—and seeing that shift slightly towards “I don’t know much about theater.” (I recall— department of puzzling sudden whims—one night in the Wyckoff half-cellar, in the big white house built by Ezra Cornell for ’s sisters to inhabit—that’s how I heard it—deciding to write a “piece for the theater.” I list’d maybe four or five characters—easy enough—and near-immediately slump’d at the daunting occasion—uh, requirement—of making a single one of them say a thing. The only one I remember: “Curt—An abrupt young man.” Declaring a loyalty to the lisible versus the physical: language acting out its little jokes for the solitary reader versus its offering up anything actable. Kin to Frank O’Hara’s barrage of (impossible) stage settings throughout “What Century?”—“Waves breaking like bees on the shelf of Armorica, while the scent of burning almond leaves fills the nippled sky. . . . Which of us has not cried “Bearings? what bearings?” at one time or another when disaster seemed to be gathering its bouquet for the maiden toss? To be alert is to be decorative. Winter.” With that for a model, who needs the messy body?) (Reminding one of Lou Robinson’s terrific lines in Napoleon’s Mare: “Why does everybody talk about the body? All the best states leave it behind. It is a launching pad, a jetty.”) Truth is, the activity of theater / performance as such is insufficient evidence of the body. For the body’s natural alignment is expressivist in tendency and, in Robinson’s practice and orientation, theater is solidly, admittedly, constructivist:

I wanted a constructivist theater, not a psychological one; my model was not Stanislavski, but Meyerhold. What I was after was not intimacy but a kind suspension of characters in time and in relation to each other, as evidence of the recombinatory power of the imagination.

Characters as words, essentially: like the relation of “Curt” to “abrupt.” Robinson’s method of writing the play Collateral is indicative:

I did not sit down to write a play. At the time I was writing prose works in notebooks that blurred the lines between theory, poem, and personal journal. . . . To compose a play, I tried to identify different voices in various fragments of the prose, assigned a character to each voice, rearranged the fragments to form dialogue, and deployed dialogue to create scenes. . . . There is no plot, no exposition, no context, and precious little to grab hold of. There are forty numbered scenes, ranging from brief dialogues to cryptic one-liners like “Litmus settee bodega hamlet” or “Blossom harping vitamin.”

Mildly amusing to read, possibly excruciating to see perform’d? Surely it is the awkwardness of the body (humor, cruelty) in collision with the artifice of language that is point’d at here (in performance)—a rather limit’d effect (guffaws dying out to titters). Toward the end, in a curious turnaround, Robinson sees language squeezed completely out by the body, so that the question becomes not “Where is the body?” but “Where is the language?”

The theater achieves power by the physical embodiment of meaning. In theater, speech, abstracted from life into writing, is again returned to the body that occupies time and space. It is in this respect utterly unlike film, with is arguably simply an extension of writing by other means. In the theater we experience the limits of writing, as the physical dynamics set in motion by actor and director outstrip the senses of the written word. Here we are reminded that words only signify up to a point. Where that signification leaves off, language continues in the form of physical movement, light, darkness, and the dim, common ground of theater seating, which signifies our collective dream state.

There’s something primal and pre-linguistic about that ending—womb-reverie, or Plato’s cave, or theater as sensory-deprivation tank—all rather annihilating “states,” body- and language-empty (with language first to go). Partisan of language, its snares and rococos, I find it vaguely troubling. Surely a languaged theater is less limit’d than a theater of grunts and twitches, strides and sighs . . .

—

Note: I gulp’d a little at Ron Silliman’s self-portrayal in The Grand Piano numéro six as a former “ethnographer in the Tenderloin” and how the reading of Ketjak’d be a “perfect way to punctuate the end of my work on the ethnography.” Hadn’t all previous references been to “running the Tenderloin Writers Workshop” or “editing the Tenderloin Times” or working as administrator and editor for some researchers at the Central City Hospitality House”? Now, though, I see the self-mythmaking at work: if the University of Alabama Press’d like to call the forthcoming The Alphabet “a work of American ethnography” (a rather bumptious assertion), one’d better strart reflecting it in one’s own self-notices, no?

C=L=O=W=N=S
(Photograph by Russell Lee)

The Grand Piano Notes

Scales with Figure of a Man

Steve Benson’s piece in the latest installment of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980 (to be exhaustingly “formal” about it) negotiates “the shipwreck / Of the singular” (the epigraph is George Oppen’s—and, in the context, that “shipwreck” comes to represent the body, what each is “Obsessed, bewildered // By”) with no little savvy, and only occasionally hamper’d by the vagaries of psychological jargon that’ve marred earlier entries. Benson’s writing about how—beyond the never-ending process of “settling into” one’s sexual identity and habits, a thing invariably difficult, though likely moreso for gay individuals in the period in question—beyond that, Benson is confront’d with new (literary) constructs of “gay identity” (“the branding and codification that was ongoing in gay male culture at that time, unremittingly structuring and canonizing and valorizing”) and figuring out ways to respond to that. He salutes (and rejects) the “hilarious, moving, generous, and wry” stories of Bruce Boone and Robert Glück (“exemplary of a new gay literature”) with a somewhat wryly perceptive remark: “My actual affections for others, whether unfulfilled or complexly baffled, lent themselves to turgid, relentless melodrama of a self-demeaning ruminative kind I was not ready to find comedic or lucid in any way worthy of print’s equivocal integrity.” And seemingly settles avant la lettre into what he claims the “queer movement” eventually coalesced around, that is, a “feisty assertion of variance as value.” “Gay,” Benson writes, “honestly conceived, Whitmanesque, contains multitudes.” And, indeed, it is likely the case that Benson’s practices—along with Lyn Hejinian’s—prove the most various (least dogmatic?) of any of the Grand Pianists:

The ways I did conceive gayness . . . as value showed up in my writings and performances in variously obvious, pervasive and systemic ways, through costumes, undressing, changing clothes, through performances without advance plan or fixed focus, with arbitrary, often unduly awkward constraints, through reframes, pronoun changes, occlusions of identification, and inversions of sense and context, through willful shifts of syntax and expository intention mid-sentence and an elastic orientation toward narration, form, and address that refused stabilization while still insisting on any present state or statement as it is.

Writing with the (gay) body as such finding “form to some degree in the open fall (a.k.a. negative capability) of reorientations,” constant and restless and assertive reorientations. Even Benson’s vocabulary bespeaks the wanton body with its talk of “engaging the medium as something elastic, tensile, porous, mutable, everywhere resistant and yielding, immanent and ready to be overthrown.” Body of language, both angel of light and ruinous muddy tangible besmirch’d with use, the body intervenes with its taut sinews, its reeks, its rough-voiced warnings, its habitudes of use, and it shapes a body of work.

—

For Bob Perelman, the body is other (Le corps, c’est lui as Flaubert puts it in the one policier he wrote in Egypt with that stringbean Maxime du Camp), rarely (or barely) one’s own. The premier body is seemingly not the writer’s own, but the measuring body, the receptive / rejective body. Perelman deftly weaves together exemplary incidents of each: Norman Fischer’s reassuring laugh (“the embodied reaction”) at a shared (and grand) passage out of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Barrett Watten’s attack (“violent repudiation”) of a Perelman-offer’d snippet of Robert Rauschenberg on method (“I put my trust in the materials that confront me because they put me in touch with the unknown. It’s then that I begin to work. When I don’t have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too . . .”) during a post-“Talks” discussion (after David Bromige’s “Intention & Poetry”). Lots here. The Rauschenberg line sounds like Keats’s “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” with a dollop of sauce for good measure. That “Negative Capability” that fail’d Coleridge so spectacularly—I hadn’t known, or’d forgotten until just now, looking again at Keats’s letter in order to fossick out the line—how Keats himself sees Coleridge’s failing, pointing to how Coleridge “would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.” Donc, one suspects, Watten, whose sniping about Rauschenberg (“this huge figure of a self that’s being ‘acted on’ by these materials”) I’d read today as discontentment with (fear of) “half knowledge.” Which’d make Watten’s outburst parallel to what Perelman (unfairly, I think) calls “Coleridge’s gripe”: “a pedantic fulmination by the inventor of the clerisy (a vision of the professoriat).” Professor Coleridge, meet Professor Watten.

Because I enjoy Coleridge’s sass so much, here’s the passage Perelman lineates and abridges (slightly), follow’d by Perelman’s own enjoyable sass-reading of its “application for today.” Coleridge:

I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems.

Perelman:

My enthusiasm didn’t arise from some trans-historical truth value of Coleridge’s words. While one could read the sniffy “Anglo-Gallican fashion” as anticipating contemporary tut-tutting over Derridean styles, read “unconnected epigrammatic periods” as a version of the New Sentence, and read “a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces” as prefiguring Flarf’s internet appropriations, such more or less strained prophetic analogies are not what grabbed me. The excitement came from watching a powerful verbal boxer landing real blows: “spares the reader the trouble of thinking,” “prevents vacancy while it indulges indolence.” with the final ‘couplets’ [here, the final sentence] a vicious pair of one-two’s knocking poetry—or at least contemporary poetry, that hapless hostage to “the present state of our language”—clean out of the ring.

—

Reading, too late, and in terrific long gulps, the autumnal air beginning to flood in through the windows, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s moving Sepharad, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. One thinks of W. G. Sebald’s hybrid fictional / non-fictional narratives, one thinks of Peter Weiss’s terrific The Aesthetics of Resistance (two volumes of which remain un-English’d). Mid-book, Muñoz Molina offers up what I read as vignette of’s technique:

For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn’t have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theatre, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.

Written in discrete and not obviously sequenced chapters (“large billboards”), the book is ideogrammatic, surely a species of Shklovsky’s “plotless prose”—or, one’d say: “all narrative is local.” Lives get traced (most movingly, perhaps, those of some members of the regularly decimated German Communist Party, Willi Münzenberg and leader Heinz Neumann and their wives, the sisters Babette Gross and Margarete (Greta) Buber-Neumann, who, at “the death camp of Ravensbrück . . . listened to stories her friend Milena Jesenska told her about Kafka.”) The lines between invention and history cross and weave: I sit upright at the narrator’s announcement of finding “Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, Invisible Writing, published in London in 1954”: “I had bought that volume with the red binding and coarse yellow paper in a secondhand bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, one winter day in 1993. The store was in a red wooden building that reminded me a little of a cabin or a barn, at the edge of a snowy woods.” And one’s caught in the crosshairs of Muñoz Molina’s capacious technique, unable to “account” for that red bookstore (one reminds oneself, one left Charlottesville two years earlier), longing, though, to delineate the tangible, get one toehold on the “real.”

B=O=X=E=R

The Grand Piano Notes

Sun Set Acres

THE HUSTINGS


Such animal scrutiny is a
House assembling itself, making a

Scorcher of a solo out
Of its one gradient song.

Or “radiant,” I don’t know.
Feedback welcome means Google me

First. The Italian word for
Today is oggi, an exemplary

Pile-up of vocables, all
Ball’d up like a sock.

Is an équerre a T-
Square in French, or a

Right angle? One’s très confined
Sense of the radical conjuncts

The rearguard likes to enthuse
Itself up by regarding—well!

(Utter’d with the petty explosive
Petulance of the solitary windbag.)

And here a horse’s ass
Hove up into sight, a

Big peachy duel-globular thing
Like a dumptruck, with a

Twiggy braid for a tail,
Trying to drum up support.

—

I like how “off” one goes out there in the nether-bracken, messing about in the woods, the cyber-pipeline turn’d completely “off.” One comes up with a travelogue (“I changed my handwriting and way of doing my hair, jumped first instead of last into the fetid plunge-bath, played football better and became an exhibit: the gay, generous, rebellious Irishman, with a whiff of Kipling’s McTurk”—thus Cyril Connolly in 1938)—or succeeds in shedding an ounce or two of quotables and finds oneself suddenly exhaust’d, or singing tunelessly to mock-surreptitious (the sneaky surreal, like nudging a Gila monster with one’s toe and calling it a poem) Tate-Simic ditties of the late ’sixties, nigh-comatose with wonder at one’s apparent lower’d estimation of oneself. (Or, one addles forth with random noises, seeking to jumpstart a parade, savage for it, “a vicious little golden-haired Caligula.”) I did (I swear I did) try to impose a duty on my wayward self: I took down off the lectern (it’d been splay’d wide to support the atlas of the former Soviet states in turmoil) the latest volume (I use the word grandiloquently, trading “up” for “effect”) of The Grand Piano. Part six. Meaning the marvelous marketing mis-adventure’s about to come full throttle or my name’s not Norman Douglas (“They were both at their best when serving on committees. They did not make the mistake of handling human affairs in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply. The body was the item before them now, and on it they turned their well-trained brains. Ron Silliman, after a little demur, accepted the body as genuine, and they passed on to the next point.”)

If only. How many attempts did one make to “begin” the Crayola “regulation-brown” book? “Where is the body? Where’s the body in the text? That text, this text, any one? Silliman’s idea of a rhetorical strategy advancing like a cloud missing its trousers (or a bored cop on the beat)—no sign anywhere that that interrogation (“this interrogation, any one”) ’ll ever relent (see “Sunset Debris”). The disappointment in Silliman’s squibs for the Piano persists, and the reason for that disappointment comes clear: these are pre-rehearsed pieces. There is no “essaying” in sight, no exploratory anything—all is pat, pre-determined, vetted and signed. Nowhere is Silliman out to see where thinking goes, to try out some mischief, to collapse in a fright-puddle at the sound of a dud of one’s own making. He is “product-oriented” and must think “quality control” means never having to dodge, say, a yipping wire-hair terrier of a sentence that is doubling back to nip one’s preconceptions (to quote Montaigne). A whole carload of trademark Silliman “petites histoires” shoots off the assembly line of the prose, wrench’d here and wingnut’d there. So: the story of the “unreadable” “‘typewritten’ Courier text” of Duncan’s Ground Work: Before the War; the story of Denise Levertov and “The People’s Prick”; the story of Jack Gilbert’s creative writing class strategically interrupt’d by two dancers who “suddenly burst through the door stark naked” (the assignment to “write what we saw” apparently lost on Silliman, who invariably reports the scene in terms of “burst,” “door,” “stark” and “naked,” as if he drew a bad lot of vocabulary-leftovers out of some rejected Penthouse letters); the centerpiece story of how Silliman, in September 1978, read the whole of Ketjak “at the corner of Powell & Market in San Francisco, in front of the original branch of the Bank of America” (why that particular detail in every recounting?) “to celebrate my first ‘big’ publication as a poet.” The story of a particular performance lends little credence to Silliman’s “argument”—an attempt’d refuting of the “accusation about Language poetry . . . that it had (has) no relation to the body”—though it allows Silliman to trot out another heroic (and favor’d) detail: that at the end of the reading he’s “literally spitting blood”—here with the curious appendage “tho not enough that anyone would notice.” Stories without depth. Nowhere a consideration of how Language writing react’d against the Olsonian breath, the count’d breath-measures of Duncan, the mantric prosody of Ginsberg. No attention to what “I HATE SPEECH” meant (means) to writing’s relation to body. No contemplation of how the line (essentially disposed of by the New Sentence) might enact the body’s own fierce and variable measures. Beyond the heroics: a fetish for notebooks (“I can take weeks just deciding which notebook to use for a new project & I’m willing to spend serious money to get one that I think might have a good text hidden within, just waiting for me to come and release it”—see Language text as damsel-in-distress) and pens (“I’ve largely used the same pen, a Waterman converted to a felt tip, since maybe that same year of 1978 . . .”), sophomoric stuff. One lovely paragraph, oddly short for “motor mouth” Silliman:

As for sex in my poetry—it sometimes seems to me that it’s everywhere. Just pick up Sunset Debris and start reading aloud.

Which strikes me as smelling of that same disingenuous faux-innocent pleading George W. Bush indulges in, a kind of entitled whining. Accompany’d by unfound’d insinuatings as to one’s—in Bush’s case—patriotic or moral fervor, or one’s strength in adversity. Silliman’s own version of using insinuating tactics against perceived “enemies” of Language writing goes like this:

The formula, “the Language poets don’t X,” whatever X might be at the moment, strikes me as part of a larger phenomenon, the fear of Language, just possibly with a small l.

Nowhere expand’d. No troubling of what such a “fear of Language” (or “language”) might mean or entail or how it might manifest itself. Just a bugaboo, a threat, that free-standing linguaphobe.

B=O=D=Y

Out Swimming with Asklepios

Board and Patcher

A week dawdled away just south of Elk Rapids, swimming sandbar to sandbar out into the East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay, lazing in the wind-pummel’d blue to see the Caspian terns rifle by. High bluffs of cherry orchards and sunflowers, the usual junk emporiums (and its desperadoes), the remainders in the cellar of Horizon Books in Traverse City, generally good for coughing up a couple of five dollar numbers: John Banville’s Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City and Wu Ming’s 54, translated by Shaun Whiteside, work of the anonymous Italian collectivity (of five) whose name means “no name” in Mandarin. I transport’d a deadweight of books north and read (ignoring a few chapters of Melville’s Israel Potter) only one: Cees Nooteboom’s rather minuscule The Following Story (1993), translated out of the Dutch by Ina Rilke. Epigraph’d by Theodor Adorno (Notes on Literature, II): “Modesty hesitates to express metaphysical concepts directly; if one tries, one delivers oneself up to jubilant misunderstanding.” Because I conceive of Adorno as rarely “jubilant” about anything, because I love Jonathan Williams’s title Jubilant Thicket with the Harry Callahan pubic tangle (demurely call’d Cape Cod, 1972) gracing its cover, because “jubilant misunderstanding” ’s got echoes of Beckett’s “fail better” or Stevens’s “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” or Stevens’s “Lean encyclopædists” or Stevens’s “cloud-pole / Of communication”: look what occurs if one, stymied, decides to open the book of Stevens. I did pursue a translation with some vigor, roughing it out, going a little courser-batty hunting down possible unbeknownst (by me) idioms: of Emmanuel Hocquard’s 2007 Conditions de Lumière: Élégies. And somehow, particularly whilst out swimming (“the body whole, working perfectly”), the two books, Nooteboom’s and Hocquard’s, twined up against one another, interloop’d, tangled. I suppose one’d say, too broadly, that Nooteboom’s writing about “time, narrative time” and Hocquard “the changeable ‘look’ of things.” Which is to say each is a memoirist, an elegist. Nooteboom’s broodings about time (“time is an enigma, an intractable measureless phenomenon into which, out of sheer helplessness, we have introduced a semblance of order. ‘Time is the system that must prevent everything from happening at once.’ I had caught that sentence in midair, so to speak, coming from the radio one day . . .”) seem’d to transform into measured and genteel havockings about the conspiracies of light:

. . . there are nights when the stars are out to strike fear into us, and this was one of them. I had never seen so many stars. I felt as if I could hear them above the sound of the sea, calling to us, longing, angry, jeering. Due to the absence of all other light, they encircled us like a dome, light-holes, light-gravel, laughing at the names and numbers we had given them long ago in the belated second of our appearance on earth. They were ignorant of their names, of the bizarre shapes our limited eyes had once seen in them—scorpions, horses, serpents, lions of burning gas—and far below them we stood, suffused with the ineradicable notion that we were standing at the very center, with far beneath us another closed dome, a safe, spherical screen all around us which would present itself forever in the same guise.

(Perfect, certes, for one lolling out in the blue of the East Arm, looking up into the whole big welter of blue, disfigured only by the series of spit-clouds running along the land that runs out to Old Mission, land that “divides” the water, making East Arm identifiably something “other,” West Arm too.) Nooteboom’s invasion into Hocquard’s “changeable ‘look’ of things” occurs in the next paragraph:

I . . . looked at the others. There was nothing to prove it, but they had changed—no; they had changed again. Things were disappearing, lines were missing. I kept seeing part of someone’s mouth or not, or an eye, for the tiniest fraction of a second their identity would be gone; then I would see the body of one through that of another, as if their solidity were being dismantled, and at the same time the radiance of what was still visible intensified. If it didn’t sound so absurd, I would have said that they were luminous.

Put against—for the sense of the decipherable part of the Nooteboom-Hocquard mind-braid—the third (of twenty-one) sequence of Conditions de Lumière, rough, excising (with the sudden whim of the imperatrice) whatever counter-readings I noted or intended, making a “thing unchangeable” out of a week of lovely flux. The attraction of translating is surely that processual sense of constructing a work of innumerable spinning plates, none of which need topple or stop. Hocquard:

No more metaphors
H is the letter of the door
Surface calendar or
self-contained garden
      One’s back against the wall

—

The day’s mark       Prohibited
by its body       Terrestrial lines
To count by subtracting       How
the weather is
      Insistence with claws

—

The character of subordinate
questions       Limpid iris-light
The third wall or the door
extended out
      Entry & exit

—

Pose a question in its
place       Two gets bigger by
diminishing       Light penetrates
“for communal use”
      Going off separately

—

To join together with bodies       The
inventory is welcoming       Hand-worked
passages       The book is opened       Light
enters in
      An index unfinished

—

Each to its page. A thousand minor adjustments possible. Tempt’d to hoodwink the enterprise, knot up a harness to fetch the word-regiments into one’s own turf, cut loose with a volley of different intent (one’s own), to hell with accuracy and couth. (Some’d say I did that anyways.) One notes: how fraught with hair-trigger traps the translated is! A single lapse of diction enough to blow the whole thing to smithereens—make of it something entirely different! And how lumbering and hide-bound and witless one’s “own” work appears next to it! Skin of a bull elephant. Or it is ding’d and malleable, a cloud-jalopy, a fume, a rough-houser! Tough canvas bolster with legs, clod of no finesse whatsoever! One might replace all of its words and still, a nigh-identical poem’d remain.

—

Side marks. The big bald eagle up in a white pine like an old overcoat flung there, with scarf, rumpled, white. My father noting a geological shift—some combo of sand, vegetation, elevation—coming down a slight incline just shy of Clare: “Here’s where the North Country ends.” Nooteboom’s talk of “owing a cock to Aesculapius”—“which I say to show them that I want to die in this world, the world of reality,” And a radio announcer—near Grayling, or maybe with my brother returning up out of the jaunt to several barns full of rusty traps (fox, weasels, mink, &c.) and sack’d cane chairs and the most God-forsook mildew’d collection of books and magazines ever in Rapid City—saying how Neil Young insists, particularly of late, on “the real.”

Cees Nooteboom
(Photograph by Serge Ligtenberg)

“A Lupus Loping through Lupine”

“Into the Woods”

NOTES TO THE TRANSLATION

Line
1     mere off-white figures:   Undoubtedly, the reference is to the Achaians, the intruders to the Eastern continent, they who, having carefully advanced a pre-fabricated story of abduction and honor in order to rally a people at once downtrod and made imbecilic by ease, entered into a foreign excursion for eventual wealth and control. Imperialists are always “off-white.”

5     xanthopemphredoniae:   The Wasps, a penumbral squad of twenty-somethings led by a Hollywood noir teetotaler who went by the name “Guzman.” Guzman’s aims were unintelligible, vociferous, crude. He advocated what he called “serene excess” as a means of toppling the Achaian usurpers.

7     wine-borers [oenotrype]:   A rare usage, here seemingly referring less to the fabled midges of the amphora (who, in a manner not unlike that of the pourriture noble or noble rot’s striking the grape itself, aided in what the Bourdieuvians called “taste-formation”) and more to the endless ratiocination without pause of wine drinkers.

8     [                 ]:   A clean gap in the shape of a parallelogram is mysteriously cut into the papyrus here, as if with a razor blade. The previous word chasma [gaping] and the succeeding cathamma [knot] led some early commentators to propose (famously punning) “a riddled text,” that is, an intentional material aporia. Others pointed to state-controlled conspiratorial archivists; others to vandals.

14     See Pound’s definition in “Provincialism the Enemy”:

Provincialism consists in:
      (a) An ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of people living outside one’s own village, parish, or nation.
      (b) A desire to coerce others into conformity.

To the point, too: the way Pound identified the mania he’d eventually succumb to himself with the prescient epigraph by Gustave Flaubert: “If they had read my ‘Education Sentimentale’ these things would not have happened.”

20     ram-clannish:   A species of apple of my eye-ism, “best-of-ism.” The Achaian self-construct required continual delineations and declaration of it, veritable epidemics of self-righteousness, celebratory ruts and displays of bounteousness, God-dispensatedness, yea, holiness. Historical record points to a people mean, dumpy, delusional.

21     cerebrophenax:   Literally, “braincheater.” A dish favored by The Wasps. Baked succulent cauliflower tops and calf brains drizzled with olive oils and a sort of precursor of parmesan cheese. Cooked, the two main ingredients ought to be indistinguishable.

24     Lucas Cranach type:   Clearly an anachronism. See Cranach the Elder’s Eve. Trying to point to a “ripe skinny without slatternliness.” An earlier version had “trailer park girl.” Raphael’s “La Fornarina” ’d serve, too, but for the sullen coquetry about the eyes.

—

One could continue rather endlessly, though the chore of “filling in” a form that’s declared itself and beckon’d—that’s always struck me with the long gong of tedium. I lit (like a starling) “upon” this particular saucer full of milk in a coincidental perusal of Georges Perec’s “last complete book”—it’s novella-sized—A Gallery Portrait and Peter Russell’s The Elegies of Quintilius (Anvil, 1996), a thing I found in Pittsburgh, the two in rapid succession. The Perec, I read now in David Bellos’s introduction, “is a kind of jigsaw puzzle in its construction, . . . made up at least in part of fragments of other texts, of allusions to others works . . . and of personal nods . . . to friends and to places associated with them.” Code fun! The Russell provides appendices and notes (a whole apparatus I’ve not exactly untangled the riches of, thinking it better to proceed in a confident—though not swaggering!—stupor into most literature, a little off-balance) to, particularly, a couple of “late” elegies (one is subtitled “A poem of Quintilius’s madness”; another begins with the lovely line: “Spartan I am indeed, lentil-fed, farting”). If translation is all about relations, word to thing, word to word, thing (cultural practice, etc.) to thing: where a better ground for romping through relational mayhem (that is, making literature)? And look, here’s Peter Russell supplying a note to a line in the “madness” poem that reads in its entirety, “In the Age of Wolves”:

Q.’s extremely vulgar Latin has variculti which plainly does not fit the context here even if it is construed as dog-Latin. In the archaic Scandinavian context, plainly it is a transcription of vargöld, ‘time or age of wolves.’ This seems more plausible that a possible vargljoth, ‘wolf howlings.’ The lack of culture in Q.’s time was indeed appalling and in may ways due to its ‘variousness.’ It was at first tempting to accept the seemingly Latinate word at is face value.
      Q.’s inspiration plainly comes from some rudimentary knowledge of the Eddaic traditions though they could hardly have been written down in his day. Even so, his memories of Rome or Athens or Hadramaut, where homo was indeed homini lupus, can hardly have been much different from those of Santayana, or of Mandelshtam (in the Third Rome), with their animadversions on wolves. The translator himself has seen a wolf in Venice at a late hour of the night, though it is only fair to mention the fact that his verbatim report to the International Association for the Protection of Wolves has been held up to doubt on the grounds that the observer maintained that the wolf was in hot pursuit of the poet Shelley. In any case, it is plain that wolves are with us to stay, whether in the Alban Hills or in our supermarkets and gift shops, not to say the Foreign Office. Celtic etymology—and I shall shortly be publishing fragmentary evidence for Q.’s familiarity with the Celtic world—bears this out in a singularly convincing way. The German Volk, ‘the people,’ neutered in English into ‘folk,’ appears in Irish of olc meaning evil, rapacious, wicked. Obviously this is cognate with the Russian volk, ‘a wolf,’ and the Sanskrit vrka or Avestan vəhrka, so identifying the root with the predominant class in modern society. That Quintilius was aware of this connection some fifteen hundred years before Karl Marx was born is surely noteworthy? Indeed I shall demonstrate before long from another Quintilian fragment carved in Runic letters on the tail of a maple-wood mermaid now in the museum at Cape Breton that Mr Al Purdy’s celebrated lines

Tho we run to the edge of the world
our masters would track us down

—probably the best Canadian poetry has produced in the modern age—are in fact, though of course quite unwittingly, a word for word translation of a couplet—yes—of Quintilius, which permits us to claim the latter as the first Canadian poet . . .

And so forth. One might suspect Peter Russell’d sprung fully grown out of the hornèd brow of Mr Kent Johnson, if one didn’t suffer the oddest sensation at the very (meagre) thought: a kind of subcutaneous growling that sets in all up and down one’s body, accompany’d by uncontrollable salivating and a tendency to lope.

—

Off, points north, for a week.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Eve” (Detail of “Adam and Eve”), c. 1538

Raphael, “La Fornarina,” c. 1518

Oil on Wood

Same Fire Escape

BAD STORY

If the writing itself knows
                                                 the outcome of one’s attempt
to attenuate its motion or extirpate
                                                 its commotion, is my dogging
inspecific a route or a
                                                 rout? Determination backs off its
intended end, is a settler
                                                 in a desert where God
(that’s one word) nuzzles hazard
                                                 and sheer greenery divvies up
the enormity of the light
                                                 it cuts into manageable pieces.
At the Hôtel La Fureur
                                                 d’Aimer, the skinny torso, too,
is poop’d out. Its tongue
                                                 is loud with crisis, stubbornly
it brays out a series
                                                 of big-tooth’d haw-hawnnhs,
reminders of its jawing days
                                                 at the ur-temple of
Thugga. It is continually making.
                                                 It’s read all the books.
There’s an unfathomable lout of
                                                 a journalist, a shapeless thing
delivering an off the cuff
                                                 rodomontade to a plate of
garnishes, reifying stuff to black
                                                 olives, celery stalks, etcetera, and
we, too, a handy couple
                                                 of brickbats, eat it right
up. There’s a beer just
                                                 the pink-amber of a
wheatfield under a slate sky
                                                 in front of me, a
pine-brutal retsina by you
                                                 and one hundred leagues of
wasp-infest’d forest between two
                                                 capitals and one aimless naïf
to walk it with between us.
                                                 Off we go! Jakob Boehme
says no writer ever perceives
                                                 the truth, though the greedy
voraciousness of writing itself may
                                                 come to lap it up
off the writer who brooks
                                                 no quarrel with a pre-
disposition for the sorry fact
                                                 that beauty isn’t a métier,
and not we, nor it,
                                                 shall endure the coming defunct.

—

I don’t know. (“I ‘eschew’ knowing.”) Perceptibly colder out. Some assembly required. I root’d about like a peccary in the undergrowth of that thing. Made such a mess a solemn “look” descend’d down my rather imperceptible “brow.” Made the mistake of thinking I was “saying” something. Finally threw the whole idiot lot of words “back” into the barrel and dump’d again, determined to “use” each and every one. My one identifiably “smart” move: to act the bouncer (“I may be scrawny, but I’m wiry like the devil” is what, drunk, I announced to Joe Leopold, the owner of the Royal Palm in Ithaca, New York, and the regulars hoot’d) and toss the “real” out—“That shirt, a blue smocky thing a little short in the sleeves belonging to Anne Bancroft a girl’d loan’d me, she’d lived in her West End Avenue bldg.” didn’t make it, the i.d. look’d a little “funny.” A. R. Ammons says somewhere the available revelations amount to “sound and motion” and the writer’s stuck “moving / and saying through the scary opposites to death.” “Scary opposites” meaning, one supposes, any abiding stillness and quiet. To keep one’s brainbox (it is not a box, it is a wave, or a wind) constantly “indirect’d by the take.” I think of—odd combo, though think how each served as sonar operators on U. S. Navy destroyers during W. W. II—O’Hara’s “the cool graced light / is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind / and everything is tossing, hurrying on up” and “joy seems to be inexorable / I am foolish enough always to find it in wind” and Ammons’s own countless championings of the wind: “In the wind my rescue is / in whorls of it” and “My subject’s / still the wind still / difficult to / present / being invisible.” The two—O’Hara and Ammons—connect’d by each’s emphasis on “moving” (the dance) as opposed to “saying” (the song). I just threw that out. Is it permissible (even if benignly stupid) to lump and split all American poets into two categories? (“Uh, there is a precedent . . .”) I mean, what, Korybantes and Orphéans? Windsocks (sock-hoppers? in that Larry Rivers portrait of O’Hara is he wearing (just) socks, or boots?) and crooners? What is undeniable is how the movers tumble down out of the Emersonian tree, that uproot’d one of “action,” its processual constant wobble and stir “out of unhandseled savage nature”: “That great principle of undulation in nature that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingratified in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of polarity—these ‘fits of easy transmission and reflection,’ as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.” (“On the American Scholar”) Is Ashbery a corybant or a crooner? Certainly the reason he leap’d (momentarily) into Harold Bloom’s stable had all to do with the jazz’d “polarity” (“wobble and stir”) of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in its insistence that Parmigianino’s still’d painting (“pure / Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything”) is insufficient (“The balloon pops, the attention / Turns dully away.”) “Whose curved hand controls,” Ashbery asks:

. . . the turning seasons and the thoughts
That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
Like the last stubborn leaves ripped
From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos
Of your round mirror which organizes everything
Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,
Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

And the language boys? Corybants or crooners? (Or one-note johnnys.)

Parmigianino, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” c. 1524

On the Corner of Prestige and Timidity

Awning and Belt

RURAL OKAYS

Or rural ofays with semi-
                                               companionable grudges fueled by drinks
the fluster-color of alloys
                                               made of fire-raked byproducts,
brittle spit-metals that shine
                                               don’t take to, that break
off easy, porous as foam.
                                               One raises up Brittany pups,
dogs covered with blotches the
                                               size of calf livers, pulled
twenty-nine barbed porcupine quills
                                               out of its snout with
a pair of needle-nose
                                               pliers, damn nuisance it is.
Anger’s the common currency, the black muck of decay
stinks of fury, blood-offal of the untenable rut
of seeing: the beyond is out there just off Prestige
Street, the sagging porch we ought to back the Chevy up to it
with a winch and a chain, pull it down with that God-
opulent charity bucket to smithereens and beyond.
To see per-
                        force in advance
what a thing
                        is, makes becoming
hardly a thing
noticeable beyond the confines of duck-fatalism, that way of ending up with one’s ass in the air, dabbling. The country’s a mess, and the quick singular self is out getting the upper hand against a cloud, a Dagwood Bumstead sandwich of a cloud, a towering cloud, a cloud that rains down parcels of contaminants, organochlorides and polychlorinated biphenyls in a torch song of what the rain contains. Its momentary clatter against the broad green leaves of the sycamore singes one upright, resolving to make a midpoint out of one’s luck, and stand to it. Luck ain’t a thing
one pays out pretty like
                                               a guy wire, is no
measurable rent in a solid
                                               field of rents and gaps
and behoovings, luck is no
                                               off-beat tempo ragging up
the sodden level continuum of
                                               ovation, its self-summary, its
end in itself, res publica.
                                               The country’s a mess, self-
soiling and adamant, or cat-
                                               like, contentedly impervious, a pink
tongue out for any milk,
                                               ass-dandy, vicious, razor-toothed.
Sleeping martial impulses get a
                                               corner on timidity, and everybody
is suddenly out beating drums
                                               in general alarum to defend
a fat mastiff’s seizure of
                                               whatever it takes to haul
home the fatback, or de-
                                               fructify the land out beyond
one’s own bunting-draped cane-
                                               breaks just a little more.

—

Reading (my style is omnivorous, my method is pointedly exhausting—I’ll detect a former logger’s two-track winding in under the jack pines and bury myself up to the axle trying to traverse all the way out to its egress near Johannesburg, the town in northern Michigan where we’d go for Independence Day. I’d gape fixedly at the brawny towheads who’d try to shinny up the greased pole to reach the ten-note nail’d to its top, or dodge and hoot with the crowd when a gaggle of boys in mud-soil’d T-shirts shot by in loud pursuit of a pig, greased too. One day I read in a newspaper how a postcard mail’d in Detroit in 1926’d made its way—thirty-some years later—to an address in Johannesburg, its recipient long moved away or expired. The theory went that it’d baffled a number of postal employees in South Africa in its haphazard and roundabout route to its destination . . .) reading, I repeat, another book by Jaimy Gordon, 1990’s She Drove Without Stopping, largely a soberer thing than Bogeywoman. Long being a reader of sentences—measuring a book by its quotient of terrific sentences—I am indifferent to such restraint. That is, I revel too in the “plotted and pieced” tempos as the slapdash and reckless. Or, look how Gordon marks a boy slump’d in a brokeback couch on a porch, the bottle he’d been pouring down dropped mercilessly to the floor: “His white hands lay in his lap, each touchingly curled as if holding the two halves of some precious but broken thing until he could think how to repair it.” Or how she marks a teenaged girl: “now and then she would flag at her mission of disputing every word her father said.” Which reminds me (uncontrollably gulping in fail’d attempt to saddle my smirk and sneer with something less opprobrious than smarm), what’s that “new symbolism” Silliman’s proposing? I’d agree there’s a lot of writing hereabouts of late chock’d full of miasmas of those deadly gray gradations with no discernably particulars to jaw (like a jawbreaker) usually characterized as somehow following the intricacies of “thinking” (see Jorie Graham and her spawn, see Leslie Scalapino and hers) (I “think” if that’s “thinking” I want no part of it). Is that “symbolism”? A game of guess-what-the-heck-I’m-thinking-of? It’s true that Symbolist-explorer Arthur Symons, in a rhetorical flourish that (now) seems to fall in a heap of indistinguishables, call’d Symbolism “a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream.” Ugh. One’s mired enough in dull verbiage without any unnecessary platitudes of praise for oatmeal-textured generalities, songless slurries of masquerade.

Greased Pig Race, Fourth of July, 1941
(Photograph by Russell Lee)

Carl Martin’s Rogue Hemlocks

Blue and Orange

Carl Martin’s Rogue Hemlocks (Fence Books, 2008)

My immediate sense is that Carl Martin’s earlier work (in Genii Over Salzburg) owed less to John Ashbery (who champion’d it) than the newer stuff: the Genii pieces immoderate, sui generis, awe-compelling the way stumbling up against, say, Georg Trakl is. Here’s “The Vision” out of the 1998 book:

The shrill, militaristic scream
Of a bird
Over the Baltic sea
Is as dented, gray
As a warboat’s hull, its white wind

Captain’s compass, in the pilot-
Cabin console reflecting clouds.
A witch’s memory
Of Walpurgisnacht, conjured up.
Needle and ice.

Watchfires at sea are an illusion,
A desert’s swill mirage
Spilling into the sailor’s eye.
Homeward to port the sickness leans
Off balance like a drunk.

The ropes are fouled
That anchor cloud to sea, gull to ocean
Like wings of Bismarckian gold
Rain seeds the waters with red.
A corpse like a scarecrow rises into the sky.

One senses less (result of shorter lines, clip’d sentences) of the demotic swell and omnivorous chattiness one sees in the later book, even in its short pieces. “The Vision” dons a nigh-syllogistic patter (or, more precisely, pattern): bird to sea, boat to wind, compass to clouds, needle to ice, mirage to eye, rain to waters, corpse to sky. All being somehow insertions. A threnody of particulars-in-relation moving through the brainbox, expiring one by one by replacement. If one sees a hint of Ashbery invading the pukka Martin (in crazy nonce-trounced botanical sparring one thinks of, say, garlic mustard up against buckthorn, two unexpulsibles “de-naturing” the suburban lawn), no matter: there’s plenty of heart-stopping mischief here, with effects identifiably Martin’s own. Here’s “White Cargo”:

As the adverse account shoos flies
there are still remnants of the dynastic fan.
Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art.
Camels like glittering ashtrays in the barber’s mirror
sink to their knees with domino teeth:
an advert for a fleshy deck of cards. Only
a straight razor separates hell from marriage.
And if camels are marriageable they adorn
the stern of this ancient bateau-citerne: The captain
smiling like a mule. How fitting for the French coast!
Noël, old boy, pass the oxygen—would you?

Still, there’s that highly palpable sense that this is verging on a logical (paraphraseable) sense—is not “merely” surreal. It puts it into the territory of the uncanny, limn’d hints of the beyond, unknowable and unveil’d. (Surrealism rarely does so: in the hands of most of its adherents it becomes tedious, mechanical, predictably “zany.”) Not to say Martin’s forebears all fall out of the German Romantics, the French Surrealists, the Ashbery world-whorling centrifuge of the cavernous or swampy American ear. Look how Martin rewrites Stevens, and comes out looking like the King of the Ghosts!

NO SOP, NO POSSUM, NO JIVE

We must pit ourselves brutally,
testing the tar and pitch
of immaculate forefathers. Ditto, etc.
X-temporizing, scrounging luxuriously
as we climb intricate cobs, nipples
and rosy vellums inscribed with an oriole.
I see no further than this, though
I’ve been lower, into hell’s orifice;
popped back in like a rabbit!

Do I think that I could “explicate” that? I don’t know. I’d make “in” (as opposed to “out”) in the final line carry extraordinary weight. I’d make “pit” and “orifice” echo. I’d make the dismissive “Ditto, etc.” a way of climbing up those damn “rosy vellums” (see fine printing, see the history of American poetry as a history of upper-class privilege) into the “heights” of the American tree (with the tar-capable and pitch-capable—all sorts of senses bouncing around) “forefathers,” those “immaculate” “X”es. I’d make noise about the sound relations between pit and pitch, and brutally and luxuriously, vellum and hell, oriole and orifice. I’d likely get into the knotty politics of vernacular appropriation and recuperation, that who’s-zooming-whom question. And I doubt any of that’d make the piece my familiar, or any less odd, preternaturally so. Or look how Martin puts the burden on some sophisticated scat (kin to Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, leastwise by way of a shared parentage in “traveling bag” blues and shouts, all the tremendous gumbo of the African / American diaspora:

ELLA FANTASY

The wharf is dripping the sounds are gripping
in the conch shell diddle de possum belle ripping
the seagulls like spots on a shoe
Could this be the right fight the selectively high kite
in this final year of my dusky farewell?

O say can you ask the black traveling bag does he
hold the demanding the soul sifting canister
world-war annoying hell’s circuit of stars!

I’ve flown farther still than the old Father Guild
picking and singing the cotton-gin moonlight
delighting and wooing candy cane in the chair-posts
before running to Tara and tarrying still.

But sense without feeling still ain’t worth a pence,
it’s the cribbing and snuffing that runs up the candle
and babies come tumbling like tubas from Sousa.
Let’s give it a heyday for widows in black!

In Martin’s work, the temptation to point to precursors in the lingual adventures of, say, Joseph Ceravolo or Clark Coolidge, probably ought to be “quash’d without emoting.” One might better (here) point too Mother Goose (“the seagulls like spots on a shoe” = “the dish ran away with the spoon”). The details (words) pick’d seem too precise, and point beyond “simple” sound-material, rhythm-material to summonings educed with deliberation if not intent. Even lines like “The vexing crater is weary and astute: / a molten ox eye, a chute of dreams” (in “Landscape It’s ‘OK’ to Sleep With, Really”) seek and avoid “the blank tube of reflection” to move with confidence toward “meaning unearthed.” Martin puts it magnificently, the way that saying (anything) negotiates not saying (anything much), every attempt at speech “merely an entrance”: “taut words are amazing / in their overabundance, their rummy cadence, their dissatisfaction.” Surfeit of satisfaction, though, in the saying of it “like that.”

Carl Martin

—

A PENCIL COVER’D WITH TOOTH MARKS

                    A sunset is an intellectual phenomenon.
                          Fernando Pessoa / Bernardo Soares

The apparatus always shoos one off its engine
So entirely the pulse of the thing continually beckons, its
Finger crook’d and moist. Three crows meander
Around a sundial, beaking things aimlessly, uttering
Nonce words. One’s wearing an old school tie,
Reunion of sorts. I don’t think there’s any need
To apply pressure to a landscape like that by
Bargaining with possible simulacra: it is, as the gals
At the launderette say, what it is. They’re talking
About what couplings occurred after last call at Benno’s,
Resignedly talking about troubles “better than
No troubles at all.” Alliance in a leer, its tiniest fire.

A Ten Hut!

Paint Job (Unfinish’d)

RECITATIVO IN ASPIC

The antirrhinum’s a flower, malleable and porous, “gubber’d and gravid” one longs to say, seeing the tubby bee so gracelessly butting at its fatty “lips” (yellow’d thighs fatted up like a varsity member’s): genus of the snapdragons. I read it in a book sodden with words. Or “sudden.” Effigies of things that bend out under that naming, just as the snapdragon bends out under electrical wires running off a pole twined about by trumpet flowers where hummingbirds hang in the air buzzing like “molecular models atomic,” the kind of syntactical rip-rap Milton’d laid down had that particular (scientific) vernacular got dispatch’d “then.” They are poking long bills into the tubular orange flowers. “Long bills tubular.”
There’s a new spirit raking through
                                these marble ruins like a mistral, it’s making
                                                                us snap our nerve ends cat-o’-nine-tails-ishly
                                against one another’s imponderable
                                                                lack of grace, grace never holds up under
                                scrutiny. More strange is the dilute way
                                                                the roseate afflatus that is the sun balling
                                down into the ocean out beyond
                                                                the columns tints everything with the rinse
                                and patina of its sinking, mournful
                                                                and magnificent like a big horse dying in battle.
                                The pain is impersonal and abrupt,
                                                                I know no better words for it.
Cold breezes rake one’s neck.
Tiny orange carrot-nubs around a mound of duck, a succulent and variegated array, servable, serviceable. The snapdragons nodded and mumbled through the shifting loaves of air, the conversational humps. Three kids giddy in the interstices, mimicking a well-composed retardando in the grown-ups, the slurry, the gross, the fecund, the droop. The furious green light gel’d and wobbled, wore down its changeableness in mock repose, a brown study. Concertina irregular. Living to live. In the boulevard a stretch “limo” uncoiled by, two snakeskin boots angled out one shiny-black window. Blanche, one bystander call’d out, it’s fuck midnight and sun-muddy is the grave.
Arbitrary the bar-
                                tender one chooses
                                                                to spill out
one’s guts to
                                (voiceover speakeasy din)
                                                                in a liquid
moment of satiety,
                                the razorblade hanging
                                                                perfectly cupped in
the tensile dent
                                where the tall
                                                                schooner of oily
gin (and particulars)
                                brims up high
                                                                above the glass-
edge, calculatedly balanced.
                                Arbitrary, too, the
                                                                Scatman Crothers lookalike
(lexical the vocables)
                                one chooses to
                                                                spill out into
the street behind,
                                recompensed and savvy
                                                                with a sassy
jabbing right, a
                                roundhouse left, a
                                                                way of reciting
one’s blood apostrophes
                                to a new
                                                                addition (some lingual
thing) to keep
                                one’s spirits “up”
                                                                and prepared for
the shock of
                                the controlled “blast”
                                                                of a pummeling.

—

Notably famish’d result of limning idiocy post-long hauling it (again) north and back. A man need traverse the fishing pole punctured stretch of pre-campground highway “between” the lakes in Cadillac weekly? Though to shoot between hummocky cedar swamps deadwood impaled in a light by turns grey and copper—my heart, oh my heart! That hankering cankerous chance of a seeing a harrier spill down into still water, or something bigger. A little reluctantly I “put together” my ten or so books of poetry for Steve Evans’s Attention Span—mostly reiterating noticings made first here at the Isola. Though I love to go through the listings for what is mostly a stunning variety, a “pointings-to” what one’s overlook’d, I resist attempts to turn it into a measure of something (beyond renegade and momentary fervour-blurts, the kind of thing that ought get exchanged by being bark’d out à haute voix across the playing fields or down the mahogany bar, “Read that thing, you’ll love it.”). I recall Ron Silliman making hoo-hah about, I think, the number of appearances (across years, across gender, across ages—you know the statistician’s ruse of niggling up a chance rendezvous into a national hankering . . .) by Lisa Robertson. When it (such listing) becomes a tool of narrowing the thrall, it ceases to be useful. (Insert remark regarding the aptness of its monicker, breadth and pointedness.) That said, I do admit that I did not “admit” books to my list that I attend’d to (at cranium-soaking length, in some cases)—and did so (some’d say) “negatively.” I did not “admit” prose fiction (though I read it interchangeably and for mostly identical reasons that I read poetry: for some perceptible involuntary “rise” the language itself seems to act the voluntary agent for.) To reduce Attention Span to a way of culling out some “leaders” points down the road to group-think, reciprocity, fashion. Isn’t one definition of any intelligentsia (one trading intelligences, that is, news) “part of the population that aspires to independent thinking”? It is, it is.

Enlistees Standing at Attention at the Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago, Illinois, c. 1926

Dissipant, Dissident

“The New and the Newer”

Kielbasa and beer and the Mudhens routing the Indians, eight to nothing, out in the collective-real of downtown Toledo where half board’d up warehouses with glorious brickwork and high arches stand lordly, the size of a city block. The locals treat the ballpark like a living room, missing only the upright Steinway, the game itself incidental, something play’d out off in the corner where the black and white TV console stands. Chatting while the kids go about roughhousing, or waggling monstrous fielder’s mitts at the ends of skinny arms—throw a ball up here, Mister, throw a ball up here—scooting off to fetch a hot dog. The sun slinks off unseen under the battery of lights.

—

The push for new forms. I like to look hard and woozy at something like—

Eel s’ fee s’ lwee kee deesseep p’
Ahng kohnsaykahng s’ sohng Prangseep p’,
Ang aytwal l’, sonn Ewneetay.

Which is Laura (Riding) Jackson making out a sounding of some lines of Paul Valéry’s “Ébauche d’un Serpent” (“Sketch of a Serpent”)—

Il se fit Celui qui dissipe
En consequences, son Principe,
En étoiles, son Unité.

In the monumental Jackson Mathews-edited Bollingen Series Collected Works (one of the mysteries of that bygone “era”—the stature of the quaint Paul Valéry), the lines (post-makeover) become—

He became He who fritters away
His Primal Cause in consequences
And in stars his Unity.

(Though, if that seems a little hoity-toity, one’d do well to remark that the translator’s, too, made “ébauche” “silhouette.” Whatevs.)

Mostly I simply want to descend into the depths of that word “Prangseep.” I am thinking it is in one of the many tongues of the Malay Archipelago, Forak or Asaro’o, possibly Yagomi. I am thinking it is a post-ejaculatory form of a transitive verb (meaning, essentially, the verb’s action is completed, a sort of “verb of aftermath”). “Prangseep.” I speak it out loud. I say “All about the Dissipating one’s Whichness lies Prangseep.” I throw a sidelong aiuto-aiuto look at Valéry: he’s caught up in some mumbo-jumbo—“Honor of Mankind, Sacred LANGUAGE, / Ordered and prophetic speech, / Chains of beauty that enwind / The god bewildered in the flesh, / Illumination, and largess!” Well, I certainly never look’d at it that way. Isn’t language for the belling? “Kohnsaykahng s’ sohng” and all that? Where goeth the carking ludic froth if one’s busy frittering with Primal Causes, or clubbing (two senses) about with formal “solutions.” (Throw me a ball, Mister.) Even Williams (c. 1941) got a little parboil’d and member-of-the-harrumph-clubbish in stray notes for a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference talk (in Sulphur 4):

We all seek a solution . . . some of us are seeking it through writing. . . . Not, mind you, that we have a solution which we want to jot down: or is that mostly what is intended? The solution we seek will be in the writing. . . . Each writing in itself assumes a form . . . This form may be borrowed or invented, within limits and as it is borrowed or invented a poet grows to be of first or second rating. . . . My conviction is that today the surpassing requirement would be a new measure. . . . This would be a solution. The enlargement of ideas and opportunity will follow.

It’s scribbled out in a series of number’d points I elide in order to deliver the shape of the argument. Out of an initial (tenuous) premise (that terrible scientific “need” for “solution”—why not oppose that with rampant idiocy, romping about in the wholly unsellable job-lot of language), Williams first, seemingly, refuses to take the bait (“Not, mind you . . .”—the writing itself’ll find its way), then—making the Poundian pseudo-distinction between “borrowed” and “invented,” and its alogy in “rating”—Williams succumbs to calling out a “requirement.” A dithering but absolute hardening of position. Like collecting “Eel s’ fee s’” for a simple bout of “Prangseep.”

“Hardening of Position”