Jean Cocteau’s “Indirect Criticism”

Iris

A YEAR

CLX
Aelianus, in On the Traits
of Animals, trumps the nay-
sayers of “verity poetickal” by
maintaining that if Anacreon’s got
keroesses (“antler’d”) modifying “doe,” none
ought mump the anomaly or
insist eroesses (“lovely”) the better
fit. I, John Latta, differ.
The poets I know interbreed
cow with cruller, dogma with
Dostoevsky. All about the sublime
quiddity of the referent un-
doable, or the unmull’d hazard
of the quoit thrown point-
blank at the abolitionist they
be, and only a few
know the animal kingdom’s precarious
fit in the sudden un-
plaiting of history. Anacreon wrote:
“I am mad and I
am not mad!” and “Eros
bang’d me up, and hammer’d
me with a smithy’s tool,
plunged me in cold water!”
Species of one he is,
taxon of whatever fuckin’ binomial
comes down the pike—biblical
giant, tawny moor, words inexact
click into the musical slot.

—

In Eliot Weinberger’s terrific essay “Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson” (out of Oranges & Peanuts for Sale)—a piece that first appear’d in the New Directions 2007 reprint of Howe’s book and, as such, likely got overlook’d by a number of “us” who’d read the original 1985 North Atlantic Books edition—I find mention of Jean Cocteau and what he call’d “Indirect Criticism,” what Weinberger, rounding up an extremely small herd of horses similar to Howe’s “avant-gardist criticism” in the Dickinson book—the bets put up for “Lawrence’s Studies, Olson’s Ishmael, Williams’ American Grain, Duncan’s still-uncollected The H. D. Book, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, H. D.’s Tribute to Freud, Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare—calls “a lost cousin of some of Howe’s work in prose.” Being a sleuth-cormorantickal, I dive (rather shallowly, it turns out) into the stacks and find—not in the “first New Directions anthology” (1936) that Weinberger points to (unlocated, presumably missing)—a 1964 issue of the Weiss’s Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to Cocteau’s “An Essay of Indirect Criticism,” translated by Arno Karlen.

(Two things occur to me: Cocteau’d just died in 1963—is the essay a reprinting of the New Directions item (no sign of it, if so). Too, QRL is headquarter’d at Bard in 1964: what if it’d remain’d there, and forsook the tony Princeton “air” of its later years? One notes that the Weiss’s print’d several poems by Robert Duncan in the “era”—though the effect of putting Duncan next to Horace Gregory’s version of Ovid or a Louis Simpson piece (“The Prince of Monaco / Was sick of English ladies”) is predominantly one of making the Duncan resemble its surroundings (“The lady in the shade of the boughs / held a dove in her two hands, / let it fly up from the bowl she made / as if a word had left her lips.”))

(What—still avoiding the Cocteau essay—Weinberger does in the Dickinson essay is a brilliant limning of Dickinson’s reception by (largely) the New American Poets (and its lineage). So, one learns that “D. H. Lawrence doesn’t mention her in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Ezra Pound found room for John Geeenleaf Whittier and James Whitcomb Riley in his anthology From Confucius to Cummings (1958), but did not include her.” And: “Olson refers to her only once, in an early draft of Call Me Ishmael (1947): ‘Dickinson loved Christ but jilted Him and married Death. Her stretch and yawn for the grave strained her nature, poisoned it.’” And: “Robert Creeley and Louis Zukofsky, though fellow masters of compression, did not write about her. (Zukofsky wanted three poems for his 1948 anthology, A Test of Poetry, but thought the permissions fee too high: $25.) Kenneth Rexroth declared that Dickinson ‘is the equal of any woman poet of the century except Christina Rossetti and the Brontë sisters.’” It’s a roundly damning catalogue—only Robert Duncan (in a 1960 letter to Denise Levertov) seems to see Dickinson’s greatness unqualifiedly:

Have you seen the new edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, restoring her punctuation? So that we see she was nearer akin than we might have suspected. The dashes (are spaces) articulate the line. And what a lovely measure, what an immediate thing comes out!

Levertov answers that “actually those dashes bother me—it seems to give a monotony of tone” and admits that “ever and again one feels (or I do)—‘Jesus, what a bitchy little spinster.’” Weinberger’s comb’d the archives (there are innumerable other stray responses). One wonders if the reception of Dickinson by the Hall-Simpson-Pack pack would register as equally miserable. One wonders how many of the (male) canon-worthy hopefuls of Howe’s own generation’ve written about Dickinson.)

Cocteau’s essay is divided into two parts, “The Secular Mystery” (1928) and—spinning off De Quincey’s “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”—“The Fine Arts Considered as a Murder” (c. 1932). He proceeds by aphorism, anecdote, rhetorical oratory, impression, never particularly defining what is meant by “indirect criticism.” The concern at hand: the paintings (and writings) of Giorgio di Chirico, and (somewhat less) of Picasso. Early:

        Chirico’s paternal family: mad uncle and aunt. The uncle used to push a chair in front of him to keep from falling over a precipice. Aunt Olympia undid her hair, kneeled before a couch and rolled her head on it till she was bald. Such antecedents contribute to clearing all picturesque character from Chirico’s work.

And:

        A man who falls from a window is a man who dwindles and brutally stops dwindling, in a mannikin pose. A man who recedes in the distance is a man who falls softly and, instead of being crushed, evaporates like a mist. All of Chirico’s perspectives are falls.

*         *         *

        An automobile accident, a train wreck, are the masterpieces of the unforeseen. One would like to see in slow motion the speed and immobility twisting the iron with a modiste’s fingers.

Admittedly, I am less attract’d by the specifics of Cocteau’s argument for di Chirico that I am by the method, the style, its source and its descendents. (In some sense, Cocteau is denying method, denying the possibility of criticism. He writes: “The new criticism will demand the use of the heart; which is to say that it will become a less facile business and end by disappearing.” And, syllogistically (and strangely): “The aesthetics of God escapes judgment. . . . Man is in the image of God. When an artist whom I admire perplexes me, it is a matter of performing an act of faith.”) One source possibility: Nietzsche. Cocteau points to one aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil wherein, he says, “Nietzsche smells out the jackpot”: the aphorism (254) apparently argues for a small (and secret) “elite of taste”—a “France of taste”—

He who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed—they may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied, besides perhaps being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons over-indulged, over-refined, such as have the AMBITION to conceal themselves. They have all something in common: they keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting of the democratic BOURGEOIS.

Refinement, secrecy, difficulty, indulgence, heart, purity: there’s something terribly precious here (Cocteau remarks at one point: “Nietzsche, Baudelaire, are preoccupied with hygiene”) and it wars with a counter-pulse of inexactitude and audacity, mess (“A great artist is inhuman, vegetal, bestial. If he tries to speak, his attempts throw us into confusion.”) Cocteau is arguing—like Blake’s “I am hid”—for a glance-hermeticism, an art that conceals itself (against the rabble) and whose greatness is only slowly reveal’d (in opposition, one suspects, to the predictable stout vagary of this year’s model). Cocteau: “The picture, inoffensive at first glance, worked on the optic center by the agency of a mirrored armoire whose complicity turned certain forms head over heels and stripped them of all shame.” Or consider how apt to 2000-2007 the following is: “Audacity takes shape in the wake of the audacious. A man is thought audacious if he prolongs an old audacity. Everyone thought himself superior between 1920 and 1927 because obscure art was entering its rococo period.”

Is the Pound of A B C of Reading (1934), its assured exhorting, coming out of Cocteau? Pound: in a 1937 issue of The Criterion (“D’Artagnan Twenty Years After”), complaining (rather cryptically) about the lack of anything new, refer’d to the first part of “The Essay of Indirect Criticism,” presumably he read it in French, perhaps between 1928 and 1934: “Cocteau in the Mystère Laïc years later gave us the silk-fine web of indirect criticism. Nothing is new and all good is renewal.” Isn’t the tonal jump-cutting similar to Cocteau’s in something like:

        Wordsworth got rid of a lot of trimmings, but there are vast stretches of deadness in his writing. Artists are the antennae of the race. Wordsworth vibrates to a very limited range of stimuli, and he was not conscious of the full problem of writing.

        The problem of sentence structure was undeniably discussed during several centuries.

        ‘A carpenter can put boards together, but a good carpenter would know seasoned wood from green.’

Swinging between the obvious and the oratorical, the bluntly assertive and the impressionistic. (Is Frank O’Hara’s art criticism in the lineage of Cocteau’s indirect criticism?)

A little Cocteauvian chrestomathy:

        Poetry is exactitude, number. But people find inexactitude poetic, romantic. The crowd adores inexactitude that has the air of truth. I wonder if scandal sheets relate inexact facts because they learn them fourth hand or if they warp the truth out of a profound knowledge of public taste . . .

. . .

        Brevity, precision, promptitude, contour, these are the reasons why we are taken for hermetic writers.

*         *         *

        People demand to have poetry explained to them. They aren’t aware that poetry is a closed world where one receives very few, where it even chances that one receives not at all.

. . .

Baudelaire’s best poem is outmoded to just the degree that Baudelaire was working with the avant-garde, approved by it. Rimbaud’s best poem remains young because he was working against the avant-garde.

*         *         *

        A permitted thing cannot be pure.

. . .

        True realism consists of showing surprising things which habit hides beneath a dust-cover and prevents us from seeing. Our name no longer has human form. None of us hears it. Sometimes a postman who wakes us by shouting it in a hotel corridor, a cashier who asks us for it, students who make fun of it in class, tear off the wraps and brusquely expose this name, detached from us, solitary and singular as an unknown object. A Louis XVI chair chained on the sidewalk outside an antique shop, like a dog, strikes us. Some dog! It’s a Louis XVI chair. In a salon you wouldn’t have seen it.

. . .

A DIFFICULT OBJECT TO PICK UP

        Title of a cotillion figure which I found in an old book on the dress ball. Perfect definition of a masterpiece. You see the gilt chairs, the bare-shouldered muses, decked with diamonds, mad with laughter, the poor critic in the middle on all fours.

*         *         *

        It is, in the end, to discover a method enabling one to pick up the difficult object to pick up that I am writing this book.

. . .

        The poet stops his ears with wax and ties himself to the mast; he dreads the sirens that ravish his epoch. The strangest part is that the sirens sing a song they owe to him, perfected by their sorcery to seduce the crew.

*         *         *

        When I was little I thought foreigners spoke no language at all, only pretending among themselves to speak one. That’s what the public thinks when faced with us.

Jean Cocteau, c. 1930
(Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene)

Eliot Weinberger’s Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

Iris

A YEAR

CLIX
Up out of
the suppurating vocabulary
and monosyllabic wad-

rancor of dunghills
literary and down
into the dulcet

moiling accruals of
the natural world,
oh yuh. Petulant

Charles Mingus, bolster-
big and tired
of a hammer’d

suburban drunk’s haranguing
commands, thrusts it
out like Sisyphus,

the bull stanchion
of the bass:
“You play it.”

And isn’t writing’s
work a little
like that? No.

Cur and ass,
ass and cur,
cure that sass

with vinegar, is
how one rhyme
goeth. And I—

rudely-tonsured, tough,
with bulgy anchor-
brand’d Popeye arms

like a leaf-
green mantis—I
who amiably harrumphs

and mutters misconstruals
without ceasing (“I
is disgustipated”)—I

a ‘foul stigmatic’
unwarn’d, caught by
the unleverag’d broth

of continual days
that drips down
out of (register

change) the great
IV bag of
the incurable heavens—

I is no
lyric comedy, no
“I yam what

I yam” natural
simpleton’s abecedarian ignorance
pluck’d with single-

minded impertinence, is
a unit of
utterance, improbable, fit.

—

Ah, the impetuous dispersals (unfocus’d) of the weekend—like tossing seed into the wind (good for the consequent prosperity of the species). (Refreshment arrives with its inamorata of high rhetoric—these cheesy lung-emptying outbursts about nothing in particular.) I finish’d La Sontag’s journal, skimpy though it be. Sontag deigns insert the Sontag brand of elitism even into the sex acts of others: “American idea of sex as hard breathing (passion). They’re indicating, not doing. They think less breathing = less passion, coldness.” (I love the nearby idea, however, of a writing that “indicates” writing in lieu of writing, a faked writing. The motions of a late style. “(Pages of illustrations.)”) I read several essays in Eliot Weinberger’s new Oranges & Peanuts for Sale (New Directions, 2009). In a piece originally written to review the recent reprinting of A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang (NYRB, 2008), Weinberger talks about the poet Li Ho (791-817), “who did not fit any of the traditional categories assumed for Chinese poets”:

He was neither a Confucian civil servant restoring meaning to language nor a Taoist adept out in nature, neither a libertine nor a Buddhist monk. He was a Crazy Poet—the Chinese refer to him as the “ghostly genius”—who rode his donkey all day and wrote scattered lines that he tossed into a bag. At night, he emptied out the bag and put the lines together as poems, which he threw into another bag and forgot. His mother complained that “this boy will spit his heart out,” which he did at age twenty-six.

(Graham himself notes how seeing the “peculiar qualities” of Li Ho’s poetry—“recently rediscovered after long neglect”—required “the breakdown of traditional literary standards in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”) The story of the bag of lines recalls the Wittgenstein of Zettel (the book of fragments wherein one finds, amongst others: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”) and the Marcel Duchamp of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)”—full of Duchamp’s notes and scraps, verbal compliment if not “explication” of what it’s made to accompany: “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).” Or—Jonathan Edwards. The ineffable Jonathan Edwards of Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract:

As an idea occurred to him, he pinned a small piece of paper on his clothing, fixing in his mind an association between the location of the paper and the particular insight. On his return home, he unpinned each slip and wrote down its associated thought according to location.

How I love that! Here’s a Li Ho poem out of the Graham anthology:

Dawn in Stone City

The moon has set above High Dike,
From their perch on the parapet crows fly up.
Fine dew damps the rounded crimson
And the cold scene clears of last night’s drunkenness.
Woman and herdboy have crossed the River of Heaven,
Mist in the willows fills the corners of the wall.
The favoured guest snaps off his tassel for a pledge:
Two eyebrows, smudges of green, knit.

Spring curtains of flimsy cicada-wing gauze,
Spread cushions braided with gold, and a flower which hides away.
In front of the curtain light willow fluff hovers, crane’s down—
No, for spring’s passion there is no simile.

Weinberger notes in the essay how “Women in the courts of the T’ang Dynasty (618-907) painted their eyebrows green; the standard of beauty was brows as delicately curved as the antennae of moths.” Too: “Foreheads were powdered yellow with massicot, a lead oxide, for yellow was the color of vitality.” And, again, talking about horse-riding women (Weinberger’s reviewing, too, an art exhibition call’d “China: At the Court of the Emperors” at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence—“one Renaissance paying tribute to another”—the exhibit containing ceramic horses, some with riders), he notes: “(It was later, during the Sung Dynasty, that foot-binding was introduced and languorous inactivity become the feminine erotic idea; the T’ang aristocratic male apparently preferred equestrian and acrobatic women.)”

Dancer, T’ang dynasty
(Weinberger: “One of the most beautiful objects in the show is simply identified as a ‘dancer,’ but seems to be some sort of other-worldly being, thin as a mantis, wearing a strange dress that evokes both beetles and old science-fiction movies. A foot tall, her fists are clenched in front of her, with both index fingers mysteriously pointing upward. Her hair has been shaped into two enormous wheels, which the catalog unhelpfully states was ‘poetically described’—it does not say by whom—as ‘double-ring-shaped, gazing at the immortals.’”)

Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize

Iris

What’s immediately apparent in Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009): the revels and joys of utter excess. Thumbing through: “prose poems,” though too raggedly untidy (odd long or variably short paragraph indentations, queer titular sprawl erratics—see—

                            Up in the Lonely Heavens
          Hieroglyphic Fever Dreams
    Lament the Fate of a Grey Lock Plucked from
the Head
        of a
Long-Dead Queen

—just like that, and occasional stuff that looks, not squared off blocky, something like verse with midriff-bulge). Studious (or not) “can’t be bother’d”-ismus. The titles blare infidelity to any serious “pose” (or “poise”) whilst generally avoiding the crime of the “merely zany.” Samples: the affliction-as-ornament “Don’t Get Me Started, Pink Eye, It’s Just Part of the Décor,” the how-to “Instructions for Inhabiting a Miniature World,” the unsettlingly logical “The Orchidologist Draws Yet Another Dirty Look from the Hermaphrodite Whose Petals Fringe this Curious Old Book,” the smarm-salacious “Rimming the Pacific,” the brilliantly lift’d “Lie Quiet, Divus . . .,” the pure cultural-detritus of “Was That Your Kid Caught Photo-Flirting on a Hallmark Holiday.” Here’s—randomly select’d (Young’s arranged the pieces alphabetically by title, file-directory style, à la the Ashbery of Can You Hear, Bird)—“Counting Pebbles While the Sibyl Shrivels in Her Jar”:

          It’s unruly come mid-summer. Lovebirds quiver and ignite astride our grimly thinning shadows. The light rain is replete with the smell of belly-dancing and the sound of fingertips alive as tessellating birds in search of a peckable feast.
          How beastly (we infer) just marginalia and strings reverberating to the frolic of some daydream weaver’s frond. Reduced to joystick jubilation. Tenderness the pink of things not really even born. How colorful! I can’t go on like this outraged by every glint of the brandy drinker’s eye, swooning at the limberlost, waiting for a throng of loved ones to march in, pull the IV out and feed me to the sound of one hand clapping.
          Don’t look now, the summer bride has entered the gazebo thinking this might be a film noir ready to rewind. Swaying like a wan Noguchi, she cuts the sky in half and as bells begin to peel screams out “diaphanous!” Look how the rainbows, mesmerized, bow euphemistic heads drinking deeply of the dresses never to be worn again. But the bridesmaids just keep talking. And children, though unborn, refuse to turn the other cheek. Meanwhile, fresh-cut orchids are too opulent to speak.
      April’s cruel—that’s not a joke. The bodies scattered so pell-mell you can’t just leave the rest to science or squeegee up the pain. You try to check it for a pulse, hidden cameras go “ping” and we’re left heaving in the silence of some momentary waxwing.

Now, I am of two minds here (like a man who’s just juggled two fiery surrealists). I love the spastic anarchy of it, the ga-ga gawkinesses, the insouciant (possibly “intentional”) “errors” (“bells . . . peel”), the odd conjunct of the various alluded-to’s (Hemingway, Gene Stratton-Porter, The Waste Land, one hit wonder Gary Wright?). I like its push against the tidy, the finely-wrought, I like its ramp’d up rampant all-over energy with broken off threads (or sunken under-juttings) of random narrative. (“All narrative is random,” and I am thinking of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, the way things (drips of paint, that is) coalesce around poles and unseen “structures” nevertheless (against the play of pouring) . . . Young is clearly in the piece as she assembles it around / under her (that is to say: she is no “preening / peering disdainfully at the untouchables through a monocle / hand lens à la The New Yorker’s Eustace Tilley” FlarfCo.® (subsidiary of ConCo.®) maiden, telecommuting ham-fingeredly in)). Or, flipping the other flaming surrealist high in the air, I think it (the poem) verges toward forcedness (“sound of fingertips alive as tessellating birds in search”). I think it too close kin to industrious beggarliness like: “The pastel bees I found in my mattress / really belong to the gravedigger. I was swallowing / my pencil down at headquarters when a meatloaf / crept out of the encyclopedia; it was shaped / like a chicken wearing a tiara but sinking in quicksand. / I hate this job, it’s murder. The profile of a horse, / even a champion, can get rabbity, if the knitting needle / slips just a little . . .” And so on: James Tate’s “Taxidermy,” out of Distance from Loved Ones (1990).

In other pieces, Young’s “mess and message” points less toward an engaged “worlding” in language and more toward a severer critique of where we find ourselves, here, now, languishing and languaging at the brute (or Google-zapped, hyperactive, info-plotz’d) beginning of a new century (in a continuum with the vicious (or inane, mediocre, shallow) ending of the old). Here’s “Ballad of a Disembodied Escapologist”:

No, you stock up on no-fuss smart food, rodent genius.
Twiggy, shoo, you’re not my inner interlocutor.
                It’s right there for the asking: a seven-headed dragon masterwork on microfiche. The “I don’t care” girl mellowing away in silent déjà vu. Kundalini prodigies, enough gobstopping let’s be honest—you’re not really double-jointed. Hold your breath, the sky turns blue and then the strobe light splits your tango into sluttish memories of a sine-wave’s landlocked sinecure. I’m sore and tired of multitasking. Yes, we need junk hauled away. But silken threads instead of tongues are wonders you once said would be the death of any kisser. And the feeling made us bold. But then electrostatic whispers peeled the paint straight off the walls and singed the master shadowlist.
                                Of course the world needs interlarding with a brainchild’s hit and run. Just watch them lick their finger bowls. But would you do that to your mother? Like wearing gold lamé in Vegas with Chernobyl left on pause. You’re, like, yelling at me and I bought all these sportsbras.

There’s a frank sassiness here that is capable of swerving suddenly to something like tenderness. In the middle of “Inside the Bleary Pyrotechnics of This Glass Menagerie” (“the fates fly down to snatch our matlepoo”), Young writes: “It will only leave you raw with googling, your freckles stitched into the fabric of a sky that shows no sign of blood. You’ll type, ‘Do German Measles itch?’ Do mute sensations hover like a jar of tsetse flies left out all night? The answer’s no. And all the loving in the world won’t make those tiny organs grow.” (What I am saying: I find Young capable of a prodigious range of “sensations” (though there is, too, perhaps, a tendency to quash some of the sterner perturbations and tumults under irony, it’s what “we” do now)—and I find a stunning “language-facility” (Young reminds of the Lisa Robertson of Debbie: An Epic in that way, and in her fearless way of choosing the exactly right adjective: “Turner’s skies, those far-fetched blues!”)

Elizabeth Marie Young is a classicist and author of a lovely chapbook of Shakespearean sonnets—titled, simply, Sonnets (Omahrahu, 2008—put together by Ryan Murphy (one sample final couplet: “Fuck hard, omnivorous and out of breath. / Outlandishly, we’ll knife the kiss of death.”) Experimental noise band background and Catullus dissertation (Berkeley), “now teaches Latin, ancient Greek and English poetry at Wellesley College”: suivre la piste du poète!

J. M. W. Turner, “Shields, on the River Tyne,” 1823

A YEAR

CLVI
Net’d out of the word-
churn: “Contemptibly rubbed, and so,
gypped by the promissory bait”
“the popular song, its contagion”
“honey’d yips, and coked up
kids” “raw cash of capital”
“a” “the temple gash like
a seizure, like a burqa”
“prefer’d spelling: aeroplane” “my revery
pound’d by listlessness” “scooching by
unmangl’d under the buzz of
the drone” “size XXL (contains
multitudes)” “buoy’d up by feign’d
instability” “burrow’d into a hole”
“the counterfeit Madame X’s trivial
profligacy” “a gallant” “fleec’d by
the middle distance” “granary” “haymow”
“my sentimental collapse” “barber snug”
“crust of impetigo, dearth of
worm” “(voon′dər bär′)” “pile” “slew” “wad”

Eliot Weinberger’s “Inventing China”

Constellatory

A YEAR

CLV
Big gunny sack of ice-
cold pop under the floor-
boards, in a kind of
hammock under the wagon, jouncing
up and down a little
with the horse’s gait. X
doing finger jive, inexplicable dumb-
show motions with one hand,
the other clamp’d tight around
the transistor he’d drug off
Okinawa in a blue tick
hound’s fury at being dishonorably
discharg’d for selling a few
poppers. Ah, fictive propensity, how
slyly it obtrudes, how meanly,
without aim or tenor, it
interposes to populate the sketchy
territory the I commands. Nigh
resourcelessly, like Blake’s traveler through
Eternity, it drags behind itself
“its / Own Vortex”—“a globe
itself infolding like a sun.”
To make ponder one need
only ensconce oneself with intent
(attending the boisterous etymological racket
therein of abscond, of stealing
off with, of hiding oneself
amongst, condiment and connerie, everything
that is food for light).

—

Continuing to read the essays collect’d in Eliot Weinberger’s new Oranges & Peanuts for Sale (New Directions, 2009). The book contains works—Weinberger says—“in one way or another, commissioned: oranges and peanuts for sale” (though the title itself refers to the extraordinary 1934 Anton Bruehl photograph of a Mexico City street vendor, a photograph that triggers a short Weinberger collage essay of peanut (“The astronaut Alan B. Shepherd took a peanut to the moon.”) and orange (“The color is named after the fruit; the fruit is not named after the color.”) intermittencies (whilst I—confronting the Bruehl photograph go transfix’d by the man’s asymmetry and the way the umbrella pole accentuates it so perfectly). I note that Weinberger calls the 2007 collection (An Elemental Thing) a “serial essay” (whilst noting that Part V in the current book—a single piece titled “A Journey on the Yangtze River”—continues it). Which’s got me stubbornly—which is to say, inconclusively—weighing the adage of Walter Benjamin that Weinberger flings back at Sontag (who liked to cite it): “All great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” (Weinberger’s own self-appoint’d task: dissolving the essay into poetry; making of the essay collection a thing vastly larger than its parts.)

Anton Bruehl, “Oranges & Peanuts for Sale,” 1934

Anton Bruehl, “Sombreros,” 1933

Reading “Inventing China” (in a somewhat truncated form, it served originally to introduce the 2003 Weinberger-edited New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry) I am struck by the argument (the way one’s dumbly struck by the obvious) that Pound’s Imagist aesthetic (largely derived out of classical Chinese poetry) “has dominated American poetry for the last ninety years,” Chinese being:

. . . perhaps the greatest example of direct presentation without generalizing comment, of “no ideas except in things.” Poets as dissimilar as Charles Reznikoff and Stanley Kunitz, . . . each publicly cited the Sung Dynasty critic, Wei T’ai (from the epigraph to A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang): “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.”

(Reticent, too, regarding ideas, arguments, logical claims, excessive rhetoric, lyrical flourish. Isn’t the whole “show, don’t tell” doctrine traceable to classic Chinese poetry’s invention of American verse? Isn’t the still-considerable prejudice for “plain-speech,” the stripped-down, the unclutter’d, and against the manner’d, the exfoliate, the over-exposed, too, a legacy of Pound’s China?)

In the course of Weinberger’s detailing the trajectory of twentieth-century translations of Chinese into English, he argues rather convincingly for the merits (overlook’d) of Pound’s complete translation of the Odes (Shih Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius), work’d up in St. Elizabeths (using Swedish Sinologist Bernard Karlgren’s 1950 translation, The Book of Odes, that includ’d, along with the Chinese texts, “reconstructions of the archaic pronunciations for the rhyme-words,” and prose versions), and publish’d in 1954. Weinberger:

Pound attempted to incorporate into the poems, along with the literal meanings, the etymological, pictographic elements of certain characters. Also ideogrammically, he inserted the poem into the simultaneity of all ages by frequently giving them wacky, cultural and historically specific titles like “Polonius on Ostentation,” “Evviva la Torre di Pisa!,” “Strip-Tease?,” and “Ole Man River.”

One might profitably compare the versions (Weinberger puts together a page consisting of Pound, James Legge (who publish’d an 1876 bilingual version of the Odes call’d, rather confusingly, The She King), Karlgren and Arthur Waley (of the 1937 Book of Songs, “the first Sinologist capable of writing poetry”) translations of one song. Look at Pound’s condensery against Karlgren’s prose:

Pine boat a-shift
on drift of tide,
for flame in the ear, sleep riven,
driven; rift of the heart in dark
no wine will clear,
nor have I will to playe.

Drifting is that cypress-wood boat, drifitng is its floating [So I am drifting helplessly along, without means of steering my way]; I am [bright =] wide awake and do not sleep, as if I had a painful grief; but it is not that I have no wine, to amuse and divert myself.

Weinberger, with an uncanny ability to re-assemble whatever textual components Pound (or anybody) may’ve originally used, notes how Pound “takes the component of the character keng (bright / awake), ‘ear’ and ‘fire,’ sees in Matthew’s dictionary [the 1931 Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, a notorious and much-malign’d book, a “modern usage” dictionary, unsuitable for the task—as Weinberger quotes Achilles Fang: “Would you use Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to translate Chaucer?”] that keng also means ‘disquieted,’ and produces ‘flame in the ear, sleep riven.’” The apparent sonic qualities of the version due apparently to Pound’s growing conviction that the “verbal sonorities” of Chinese were “hardly inferior to the Greek.” Weinberger:

The entire book was conceived as a songbook, with Pound’s oceanic eclecticism finding models from the Troubadours to the Elizabethans, hillbilly folk songs to some syncopated boogie-woogie. Rarely discussed by Pound scholars (other than Richard Sieburth, who thinks it Pound’s greatest translation) and largely dismissed by Sinologists, The Confucian Odes remains—alongside Samuel Beckett’s anthology of Mexican poetry and Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus—on of the masterpieces of idiosyncratic translation: a radical invocation of the spirits, if not always an accurate transmission of the words.

Eliot Weinberger
(Photograph by Nina Subin)

Collage and Its Malcontents

Brick and Sticker

A YEAR

CLIV
Nijinsky, who scratch’d
                                          out a record
of the incipient
                        and throttling descent

of beckoning madness:
                                          I love appurtenances
for I am
                        a holy appurtenance

myself! Meddlesome, bum-
                                          hearty, and fickle,
I foozle attending,
                        I stickle, putsch-

savvy and heedless,
                                          unscript’d and wild.
For any parchment
                        (caught up by

any cannonade of
                                          gel’d verbosity scrawl’d
foetid and languishing—
                        for a reader!),

I pause ravenous.
                                          I read high
conical peak’d words,
                        I read marl’d

desuetudinous obfuscs sunk.
                                          I read rhetors
and liars, pre-
                        canned recitativos of

lying sociopath motor-
                                          mouths, decorous grunts,
autochthonous molochs, mooches,
                        carpers, venters, trumpeters.

I read stains and dribbles,
                                          smears and leaks.
I cock one
                        weather eye up

to read cumulo-
                                          nimbickal atmosphericks, slate-
color’d rain slashing
                        down. I read

unconstrain’d by sense,
                                          grog-stupor’d by
clarity and its
                        malcontents. I slog

and tingle, I
                                          pirouette, plié, un-
knot and rearrange
                        the incalculable naught.

—

A minor note in Sontag’s journals—“Early example of collage / John Frederick Peto (1854-1907): called Oridinary Objects in the Artist’s Creative Mind (oil on canvas).”
•
And: “Read Miss Bosanquet’s Memoirs—James’ typist in later years. Leon Edel says the break between the ‘middle’ + ‘late’ (gaseous) style comes just at the point when James stopped dictating to a secretary who took shorthand + started dictating to Miss B. who typed as he spoke. A Remington was the only typewriter whose rhythms he could bear, + on his death bed—at this last moments—he called for his Remington. And she typed for him. James died to the tune of his typewriter.”
•
An assemblagist’s contract: what reading is. (Sontag gearing up for “Against Interpretation” says of it (interpretation): “Always the presumption of meaning. One criterion of interpretation . . . is that it doesn’t allow enough meaning (sense) to the text.”)
•
John Berger (in From A to X: A Story in Letters) reports a dream: “The universe was open like a book. Me looking at it. The top right-hand corner of the right hand page was folded inwards to mark the place. And on that small triangle of folded paper was written the secret of materiality—which was elegant and faultless as a fractal.” And adds: “I was so reassured by this, so happy, that I didn’t think of writing it down.” Faultless, and endlessly repeating.
•
My reading habits. Dog-earing. Skippiness. Inattention and loss. Hours spent thumbing and re-thumbing a book, certain something I vaguely recall is found therein.
•
Sontag enumerating: “1. Nothing is uninterpreted. 2. To interpret is to determine, restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into. 3. Interpretation is the medium by which we justify context. 4. To interpret a word is different from defining it; it means to specify a range of contexts (not equivalents).”
•
The dismissive capture of dog-earing, like writing, making notes. Allowing one to continue, empty-head’d, or “relatively” so.
•
Sontag’s report that “Goethe declared that only insufficient knowledge is creative.” (See Ammons’s remark that a writer ought “keep himself a little stupid.”)
•
Is there there (in the need for insufficiency) source of my discomfiture with what Eliot Weinberger says about George Oppen (in “Oppen Then,” in Peanuts & Oranges for Sale), working off the initial lines of Of Being Numerous (“There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves’”), how Oppen insisted that “the function of poetry was a test of truth” (“he may have been the last writer in the West to use the word ‘truth’ without irony”): “The poet’s task was to restore meaning to words—particularly in a time of official lies—and this was only possible through direct experience of the words themselves. Speaking of H.D., he once asked, in amazement, “How can you write a word like ‘angel’?” . . . He insisted on writing only about what he himself had seen, and the act of seeing . . . Uniquely among American poets, there are almost no mythological references and no myth-making, no exotica, no personae, only one or two passing historical references, and almost no similes in his work: in Oppen’s world, things are not ‘like,’ they are there, right in front of you, and there with an exclamation point. His metaphor for ‘seeing’ in a poem is apocalyptic: the man in the ditch, staring at the spinning wheels of his overturned car—as he himself, in his youth, had been the driver in a fatal crash.”
•
As if Oppen believed one capable of a-rhetorical (a-contextual) speech, with none of the “trappings” of suasion.
•
Sontag’s militant turn (simply a cynical recognition of the mirey of the contextual, the means to push one’s interpretive : “The time for writing to entertain other people is over. I don’t write to entertain others, or myself. This book is an instrument, a tool—and it must be hard + shaped like a tool, long, thick, and blunt.”
•
Berger: “The Inuit poet, Panegoosho, dropped in and started to talk about people he knew as a child. ‘They did not even try to be beautiful, only true, but beauty was there, it was a custom.’”
•
The way collage itself hoists itself up by means of rhetoric, assumes its own unaccountable direction, invariably points out a way “in” for the interpreter, against its presumptuous indirection, its constellating vibrance.
•
Sontag, quoting Melville: “Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness . . . I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.”
•
Sontag: “Shelley has Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound say, ‘The deep truth is imageless.’ Poetry is itself a ‘dome of many-coloured glass’ which ‘Stains the white radiance of Eternity.’”
•
“Returning exiles rarely take into account their own aging: if a place seems less marvelous than it was when they were young, obviously it is because things are much worse and not that they themselves are no longer full of wonder.” Weinberger, in “Where Was New York?” (Peanuts & Oranges for Sale). Self-administer’d trompe l’oeilism.
•
Berger’s prison house of language: “To tell the truth? Words tortured until they give themselves up to their polar opposites; Democracy, Freedom, Progress, when returned to their cells, are incoherent. And then there are other words, Imperialism, Capitalism, Slavery, which are refused entry, are turned back at every frontier point and their confiscated papers given to impostors such as Globalization, Free Market, Natural Order.
      Solution: the evening language of the poor. With this some truths can be told and held.” A turn to limit’d means, speech, the local, the village share.

John Frederick Peto, “Job Lot Cheap,” 1892

John Frederick Peto, “Reminiscences of 1865,” after 1900

John Frederick Peto, “Letter Rack,” 1894

John Frederick Peto, “Take Your Choice,” 1885

“Perfect Thyself”

Contingency and Fade

A YEAR

CLIII
The high ropes, rappelling and belaying course normally run by a semi-reform’d sadist named after a kid’s show: Scoobie or Peewee. ¶ Rave inflect’d blow-job video. ¶ A perfectly black iris. ¶ Idiosyntactic. ¶ Garrulity and mannishness burn’d Goody Able at the stake. ¶ Chopping the newly up nettles and hoisting each with the knife blade into a paper bag, delicious parboil’d with a little salt and vinegar. ¶ A major content-producing country. ¶ X meaning Christ, or X meaning a kiss, or X meaning a film with fucking in it? ¶ With an unbecoming identity, like most products of administer’d time. ¶ Prickly pear lunch. ¶ Blow-job inflect’d rave strobes. ¶ Is it the swallow of heaven that brings plague-news? ¶ Getting clown willies. ¶ Gongyla-creamy. ¶ A woman carrying a big bursting box of Kleenex like a peony: pull, dab, and wad. ¶ Along the slow St. Joseph, one lone sandhill crane flying out-stretch’d in the rain. ¶ The Hmong boy in a Homer Simpson T-shirt signs for the FedEx delivery and proceeds to shout “Thaddeus, Thaddeus!” with anachronistic fury. ¶ Dog-prickly cynicism assuaged by social thirst. ¶ Cut off by a Sikh-commandeer’d taxicab. ¶ The five-finger’d intaglios of Corporal Trim. ¶ Covering the material in Throwing Hammers: Mechanical Ire and Sexual Aptitude, for Wednesday. ¶ Red rash inveigling the one who scratches to locate the itch. ¶ Truckers a.k.a. logistical systems engineers. ¶ The vector sum of the jut combined with the way parallax-adjustment places the fit tangle at a matrix, half-swallow’d by curves. ¶ Corporate trim. ¶ Fixities of language the twentieth century’s insurgency fail’d to blast. ¶ Hitherto parkours. ¶ Priam’s hectoring to retrieve Hector. ¶ Authenticity of the jaded-empirical flank’d by fustian sexual knobbery (Aretinoesque Victoriana). ¶ “Summers I like go in for a new foundation.” ¶ To fish with fewer lures. ¶ In obeisance to the Buddhist regimen of avoiding kao-chen (comfortable bedding), we hack’d off some brambles with an oar, and fill’d the bottom of the boat. ¶ Is size determined according to need, or is size defined by perceived need? ¶ Traffic backup caused by a bottleneck approaching Climax. ¶ Husbandry of out-sourced text coding and pixel loading projects through the post-colonial wickets. ¶ Aretino’s mock-bequeathing (in 1516) of the genitals of Hanno, Pope Leo X’s elephant, to a lusty cardinal: excellent career move. ¶ Blue heron with neck crook’d flying south of the missile silos.

—

Inextricable knots in the rosary of days. (Nobody talks like that.) A dash through rain and T-storms to Chicago and back, coop’d up in the Vibe reading Sontag’s Reborn with rather dilatory aimlessness, and burgeoning “dislike.” Note the sequence that goes: 10/21/49—“I had naïvely supposed that it was better to do something meaningless than something pseudo-intellectual, i.e., teaching—I did not realize how apathetic, drained one becomes by the activity of most of one’s working hours.) That eliminated one-half of my aspirations toward proletarian living, + my present manner of physical existence has stripped off the other half of my illusion!” (That in reporting “a genuine, + almost defeating, ordeal”—presumably, uh, work.) And: 11/21/49—“Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me—to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff, who is working on, among other things, a reader in the sociology of politics + religion. At last the chance to really involve myself in one area with competent guidance.” And: 12/ 2/49—“Last night, or was it early this (Sat.) morning?—I am engaged to Philip Rieff.” (Nobody beyond the heart’d quarrels with the heart?) Is it a detectable, what, caginess—opportunism—that riles? 1/19/57—“Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even . . . Much of morality is the task of compensating for one’s age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.” (Or is that simply the ingrain’d adversarial stance of the elitist?) (See: 11/28/57—“Answer to Schweitzer—If all is valuable—even the ant—if the ant must not be killed, is as valuable as I, then, implicitly, I am as valueless as the ant—All people are not the same, worth the same—” And: “Either are or aren’t—aristocratic Judaism—either “one of us” or one of the Goyim—perfect thyself—there is an elect, an elite—”) (See the romping erroneous correlation of something like “My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists,” combined with “Weakness is a contagion, strong people rightly shun the weak.”)

Susan Sontag, 1933-2004

Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century

Poppy

A YEAR

CXLIX
Abashedly admitted to naming it privately throg-necking. ¶ One unintended consequence of the single unit placement wars. ¶ A questionable little book of spurious quotes parcel’d out of newspapers Canadian and foreign that he propped up to serve for a drivel-bib. ¶ Number the pauses, anchor the metaphors, name the hazards something chummy: the dog Shanks mysteriously lost in childhood, the Franklin half dollar-sized turtle Ben for whom you mash’d up all those flies, tweezering out the wings, the scorn’d girl Wilhelmina who soil’d herself during the state-required examination, a puddle ineffably yellow suddenly there under the chair. ¶ Offer up something lightly-salt’d and mouth-watering in the victual line near chapter-endings. ¶ Wagering that the clang certitude of a contemporary rondeau redoublé’d nab the thing, she mark’d out ‘something something Cheney something heinous’ and took off, in a plausible fit of lyric destiny. ¶ Visible bystander cringe and its replacement: the group shrug. ¶ Thumbing Certs at the zoo ducks. ¶ Numb Nuts and the RVs or Numb Nuts and the Recreational Vehicles. ¶ Who recalls the deceased minor jazzman, the Québécois alto saxophonist Hiccough ‘Hic’ Jacquet, isn’t he bury’d here? ¶ ‘Anus’ fits, too. ¶ Is it the vaporous pouring-forth of questionable utterance that ticks you off, or the unctuous smarm of the pre-guaranteed compliments? ¶ Quechua derives out of the Quechua word for plunderer, or robber, kkechúa. ¶ Imperialism hits home. ¶ Unaffiliated redneck, or hipster Doppelgänger? ¶ Fitting advice in the Captains of Industry boutique, its dressing rooms fill’d with hand-me-downs. ¶ Tantamount to the slings and arrows of your outrageous fortune maybe. ¶ At the sign of the Catamount Foutu. ¶ Towards a literature of anti-post-foreplay paroxysms—‘Folgend den Bomberschwärmen / Komm ich nach Haus.’ ¶ He put toxins to mouth (en su boca), y empezo a cantar (and vamp’d like a cantor). ¶ A nose for knowing exactly how to tweak the info-nose.

—

Reading, amongst too big a heap of other things half-cock’d and sprawling, the tremendously moving My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press, 2009), by Adina Hoffman. A biography of Taha Muhannad Ali, author of Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (Ibis Editions, 2000), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (Copper Canyon, 2006), the latter an expand’d version of the former, with the original Arabic en face. I recall reading a New York Times notice of Hoffman’s book wherein Dwight Garner, the reviewer, complain’d of Hoffman’s “waging a sit-down strike against linear storytelling and narrative momentum,” adding that “the book takes 300 pages to bring us to where Mr. Ali publishes his first poem.” As if a poet’s biography is about publishing something! What Hoffman’s book is clearly “about” is place, milieu, particularly Ali’s home Galilee village of Suffuriya, and the way place dawdles in memory—particularly, as here, place destroy’d (Suffuriya, completely razed by the Israelis in the wake of the 1948 war, no longer exists, though it—and a whole shifting Palestinian way of life, under the Turks, under the post WWI British Mandate—is heartbreakingly summon’d in Hoffman’s pages.) (Taha Ali, then aged seventeen, fled to Lebanon during the 1948 war, returning to settle in Nazareth a year later. Hoffman: “an autodidact, he has operated a souvenir shop near Nazareth’s Church of the annunciation for more than fifty years.”) I find myself full of some aching bittersweet nigh-physical pleasure reading Hoffman’s report of how Ali’s father, Abu Taha, (lame, unable to work) talk’d and told stories, “smoked cigarettes and drank unsweetened black coffee, sada, served in little cups” in one small “humble” room (“its minimal contents—a few straw mats, several thin wool-stuffed mattresses, a low stool, the worn shoes of the men cast off by the door”) in the house, a gathering place call’d a madafeh for just such ritual activity. Here is where Ali, as a child, gain’d a love of story, language. Hoffman: “It was the place where he first heard poetry and pre-Islamic legends, first encountered local history and world politics, first absorbed how men talked to one another, first learned how to listen. It was ‘the university of the fallah’” (literally, “peasant,” “villager”). What call’d up the ache, Hoffman’s description of the coffee being prepared:

The preparation of the coffee itself was an elaborately prescribed way of passing the time in the madafeh, very different but no less intricate than a Japanese tea ceremony, and Abu Taha was acclaimed for his excellent brew: he had small iron brazier filled with lit coals, over which he would first roast the greenish beans with a long-handled flat pan and spoon made for him by the gypsies who sometimes pitched camp in the bayader and were known for their metalwork. Then he’d transfer the hot beans to a small wooden scoop where they’d cool, then would move them again to a narrow-necked wooden mortar in which he’d pound them to a fine, aromatic dust. After transferring the grounds to a bird-beaked pot, he would add the water from a jug, and when it had boiled, he would let the liquid sit and intensify, then move it to another, smaller pot, to which more water would be added. Again Abu Taha would boil the coffee and only then, after pouring it into the third and smallest pot, would the coffee by served in thimble-like cups, know as abadi, which contained just a few precious sips—the pungent essence of all that work, time, and concentration. No matter the number of guests, these vessels were always arrayed on the tray in odd numbers, three, seven, five, though no one in Abu Taha’s day could recall the superstitious reason why.

Is it the ritual itself here, that regular knowingness and certainty, or the way it bespeaks a leisureliness completely gone that makes one find longing burst up like a scent? I often think the reason for our incipient madness is loss of dawdle . . .

I’ve hardly read any of Taha Muhammad Ali’s writings, though I do love the little poem that is the source of Hoffman’s title, how it talks of “What seems to you / so nimble and fine, / like a fawn, / and flees / every which way, / like a partridge, / isn’t happiness.” (Something of the simplicity, and the creaturely metaphor, recalling the poems of the Song of Solomon.) Here’s another, longer, in its entirety, engaging with some ferocity cut with humor, the facts, one thinks, personal and political, of the Palestinian century:

Post-Operative Complications Following the Extraction of Memory

In an ancient, gypsy
dictionary of dreams
are explanations of my name
and numerous
interpretations of all I’ll write.

What horror comes across me
when I come across myself
in such a dictionary!
But there I am:
a camel fleeing the slaughterhouses,
galloping toward the East,
pursued by processions
of knives and assessors,
women wielding
mortar and pestle for chop meat!

I do not consider myself a pessimist,
and I certainly don’t
suffer from the shock
of ancient, gypsy nightmares,
and yet, in the middle of the day,
whenever I turn on the radio,
or turn it off,
I breathe in a kind of historical,
theological leprosy.

Feeling the bonds of language
coming apart in my throat and loins,
I cease attending
to my sacred obligations:
barking, and the gnashing of teeth.

I confess!
I’ve been neglecting
my post-operative physiotherapy
following the extraction of memory.
I’ve even forgotten
the simplest way of collapsing
in exhaustion on the tile floor.

                              10.IV.1973

Taha Muhummad Ali

Adina Hoffman

“Damp and Inconsequential”

“. . . This leaving-out business. On it hinges the very importance of what’s novel
Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention
To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention
Isn’t the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.”
                                                                                                                                           —John Ashbery, “The Skaters”

A YEAR

CXLVIII
Making a sappy jab at discomfiture’s buss, and getting a leg up.
Heroic loquacity, and lip gloss, peach-tint’d. To rue one’s Gott-ruin’d
Militancy. The one counting cadence linger’d, and had to be cut
Out of the briefing. Three thousand fucking ducats! Going
All the way to Moscow and back in my space-annihilating headgear
(Another example is Kafka). The shrapnel’s way of smothering the dys-
Functional blanketing surmise that ‘nothing is / But what is not.’
High rhetorical hootings
In pieces, a
Scamp way of
Dazzling the eructing
Electorate, though un-
Patent’d by me.
I am thinking
Of the trochlear
Groove the rope
Runs along, its
Way of knowing
Each echt stitch
And cable of
Immodest ropery. All
The immaturely circumstantial
Fuckers just bury
The works under
In orgillous rejoindures
And pedant implausibilities
The likes of
Which’d blow doors
Off the kingly
Bed-chambers provided
He didn’t sleep
Standing up. They
Cry ‘Idiom! idiom!’
With moral anguish and copacetic delight. One brother had to be cut
Out of the silk briefs he’d donned for R & R in Tokyo, blood-gush
In the pitch of the Huey, and never evacuat’d be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Whatsisname come, shit
Bouncing everywhere. I wrote Spaceman on my pot. Cross’d it out
And wrote Mowgli. Got out of there without being turn’d into jungle-
Broth. Brother, ‘my heart hath but one string to stay it by.’

—

“Little Sadie” lyrics dogging the humid air coming up off the bicycle tire, shout’d to nobody in particular: “I run right home and I went to bed. With a forty-four smokeless under my [drawn out signifying diminuendo’d moan] head . . .” Solipsism’s only got itself to drag down into the flaccid varietals of amusement, no? I did finish off that Lopate book, Notes on Sontag, with increasing skepticism and disenchantment. Lopate talks about Hippolyte, the protagonist of Sontag’s early novel, The Benefactor, a man self-admittedly “in the enviable position of being entirely at my own disposal, free to pursue my own questions . . . and to satisfy . . . my passion for speculation and investigation,” and suggests that Sontag’s “bravery is in insisting on the allure of solipsism”:

I submit that I made a choice, admittedly an unusual one. I chose myself. And because of my absorption in myself and relative indifference to other people, my inward ear became acute enough to hear a mandate from myself which isolated me from others. The mandate was, so far as I understand it, to live out to the fullest the meaning of privacy.

(William Matthews’s riff off Polonius’s lines to Laertes in Hamlet trots up, tail going furiously—it is “Homer’s Seeing-Eye Dog” who talks:

                                                I think you bipeds
have a catchphrase for it: “To thine own self
be true, . . .” though like a blind man’s shadow,
the second half is only there for those who know
it’s missing. Merely a dog, I’ll tell you
what it is: “. . . as if you had a choice.”

Which is awkwardly put, the way any one-line joke insert’d (storyboard’d) into or, say, graft’d into, the trunk of a piece, is liable to fail to deliver the solid gut-grab it did when ad lib’d corner of the mouth E. G. Robinson style in the bar the night preceding.)

(Windbaggery: sign of trying to sneaky-Pete away without another look at the Lopate Sontag?)

What the book accomplishes, no little thing, is to turn one back to the works, particularly the brilliant early essays (though, admittedly, one turns so out of impatience and discontent with the character “Susan Sontag” herself: that is to say, she sounds simple insufferable, vain, obsess’d with stature, meanly serious, dismissive). Though, anti-up to an aperçu like—

Lately, the appetite for the truly great work has become less robust. . . . Stripped of its heroic statue, of its claims as an adversary sensibility, modernism has proved acutely compatible with the ethos of an advanced consumer society. Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions—of the unlimited proliferation, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself. Where so many blandishments flourish, bringing off a masterpiece seems a retrograde feat, a naïve form of accomplishment.

—(out of Sontag’s essay on Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s film “Hitler,” in Under the Sign of Saturn) and one is reluctant to fold early. Or, what about the line out of On Photography: “Television is a stream of under-selected images, each of which cancels its predecessor.” (Ah, so, too, the steady gratificatory miasma of Blogland . . .) There’s a fierce morality to Sontag that defines itself in contempt for something like a mass lack of selectivity (it’s a dangerous stance, knowing what’s “good for” hoi polloi). In “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning,” she says:

The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or “interesting”), that all stories are endless—or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story. By presenting us with a limitless number of non-stopped stories the narratives that the media relate . . . offer a lesson in amorality that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

Though, of course, novel follows novel, “fresher or more lurid”—there is mention by Lopate, too, of Sontag’s constant push to be first “fashionista” out of the shoot with news of what’s “the real thing and the rarest”—her approbatory nod for Roberto Bolaño. As Lopate puts it: one sees such a tendency either “in a negative light, as an insecure need to be always on the cutting edge, or, in a positive light, as a demonstration of her curiosity and unquenchable enthusiasm for making new discoveries.” (And, with that—and vaguely wondering if I know that dude—and a growing opprobrium for my own unfocus’d—lens smear’d with Vaseline making everything seem “damp and inconsequential”—spouting, I move “off.”)

Susan Sontag, c. 1962

That New Thang (Again and Again and Again and Again . . .)

“Moving Images”

A YEAR

CXLVII
A thrasher in the choke-
cherry, doing its twice-told
mimic deliberations while rainwater off
the eaves makes a crease-
mark in the mulch. The
Tyvek stretch’d around the Mulberry
Street addition hangs slack and
the leaves of the honey
locust look toxic, jaundice-yellow
in the drench. May: through
the fingers like water, or
money. X: “If anybody asts
yo’ ass to expend it’seff
for time against money, you
gonna choose time eb’ry time—
it nebbe lose.” A Panamanian
up in the Crimean yayla
with a butterfly net, squared
off and terribly white. It
reminds me of the cream-
color’d lozenge, the “pocket handkerchief”
of the black-throat’d blue,
coming through about now. Grief
lodges in my throat. Grief’s
hard lozenge in my throat.

—

Isn’t Stephen Burt, in racing, apparently, to score a follow-up success in trend-spotting (see the “elliptical” poets—first sight’d in 1998), stacking the deck with “The New Thing” (in the May/June 2009 issue of Boston Review) gambit? How’s the old argument go? “Elliptical” = “the most imitated American poets” of the last decade or so (a stretch) = “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic” poems with airy whiffs of narrativity-defying “life stories” or of argument-empty “continental philosophy,” poems “full of illogic” and “associative leaps” (echoes of Robert Bly?) = “sparkling bursts of voluble utterance.” No examples provided (though Fence “(founded 1998)” is offer’d up as “emblematic magazine”). Nevertheless, Burt, straw props in place, solemnly intones: “Their good poems were good indeed: we are going to keep reading them.” And adds (presumably mimicking Edgar Poe): “And yet the pendulum has started to swing.”

Burt next proceeds, with a nod to Tony Hoagland’s recent caning (in Poetry) of “the skittery poem of our moment” (that “moment” being, according to Hoagland, when “the poetic pleasure of elusiveness commits itself, inadvertently, to triviality”—as if the elusive—as opposed to the brute tangible—had a direct line to the trivial—one need only recall that “era” of the early ’seventies when it seem’d every American poem had its “stone” and poetry readings demand’d the husky voice, the “weight’d” cadence, material seriousness abounding)—Burt proceeds to reject Hoagland’s “nominee for a replacement” (poetry, the democratic art)—narrative—and, hoisting the blinders, (narrowing the field), trots off in search of the Next Big Thing. It’s no surprise that Rae Armantrout’s work provides the template for the excursus—the bandwagon for Armantrout’s so overload’d of late that it risks tipping all its riders into the creek. She is, of course, the easiest of the historical Language-crowd to rescue, to recuperate. Burt notes how her “compact, sharp work, too-long conflated with Language-writing-in-general [what is that?], now seems to some younger poets worth emulating on its own.” What Burt sees in Armantrout is “brevity and the skeptical pressure she puts on each word.” And he makes a point of quoting an interview wherein she says “I’m phobic . . . about ‘making things up.’” Her “difficult poems strive for accuracy,” says Burt, and “take bearings from real events.” The upshot, the payoff pitch, unarticulated by Burt, is: the New Thing is that old thing—sincerity and authenticity, “craft” and honor and seriousness. That (and here the enunciation is emphatic) “distrust of the unaided (or unchecked) imagination” informs Newthingism (and, presumably, Burt’s Newthingists).

Off of that beginning, model to hand, Burt attempts to “constitute a tendency.” He points to minimalist (Creeley) and Objectivist (Oppen, Niedecker, Zukofsky) forerunners, and Williams’s “No ideas but in things” and “small (or large) machine” front the parade; he jaws about the “well-made, attentive, unornamented” (casually linking the restrict’d, the humble, the faithful to durability, as if all lofty structures fall down). And just when one’s about to quote a completely “skittery” Armantrout poem out of Versed, as counter-exemplary proof,* Burt tosses down an escape hatch, skittery enough in itself: “The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit.” Those airy nothings. (Or: “Why, those airy nothings.”) Though, a few paragraphs later, that ’seventies “stone” gets wedged in tight to the fit: Burt rehashes an argument that sees classical antiquity’s lyric poetry oscillating between “fleeting song” and “an inscription in stone,” and declares: “The New Thing represents a shift from the first idea of lyric to the second: from performing art to hard craft, from air to stone.” What’s need’d, it is imply’d, is restraint, hard work, control, severest measure, and, fidelity. Poetry is no longer an exploratory means, a testing (as one gingerly—or brashly—swings oneself up into a tree to see if the limb’ll hold); it is a religion. (Burt: “Fidelity implies limits; it implies self-restraint.”) Oh dear.

There follows some exemplary figures and presses: Devin Johnston’s poems and Flood Editions (and some of its roster, Graham Foust in particular) get tout’d, as does Jeffrey Yang’s recent An Aquarium. (Flood Editions’s Lisa Jarnot is mention’d, who’d conceivably “fit” the scheme—though not always—not in the Night Scenes naming binges and neologistickal archaisms romps; Jennifer Moxley, particularly in the new Clampdown, is completely beyond the terms of Burt’s argument. See the opening of “The March Notebook”: “The intellect at work can alienate the world. / Should, during the progression of your life, / the fashions change and the young, / ever capricious, abandon you, it may be / because they know better than to follow / the compass of an unpopular idea, / upon which the most rarified needle / risks leading them away from the source.” William Fuller (a Flood Editions stalwart), writer of wily and difficult attempts to put down the shifting transfers and runs of consciousness in language liable to jump register mid-word, fits no “right basinski’d” New Thing agenda, unh-unh. Ange Mlinko’s musically lush and linguistically baroque maneuvers soar maximally faithful to no mere “thing”; the poets print’d by Rod Smith’s Edge Books pull together contemporary—often highly politicized—bric-a-brac, speech acts, popular detritus, noise, and effusions. Little “brevity, self-restraint,” or “material objects as models” there (though both Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia and Chris Nealon’s Plummet show amazing handiwork with large malleable structures, lattice-works capable of terrible expandings and embrasures). One could assemble a colossal heap of such errant practices, each countering the wan and pre-stress’d New Thing mirey categorical.

And, as if aware that the New Thing model’ll account for only that tiny slice of contemporary practice, midway through the essay, Burt attempts to expand the definition to include forms of documentary, apparently on the theory that “material conditions” is kin to “materiality”—thingness—tout court. Call it The New Fact. Or The New Condition. So Mark Nowak’s transcriptions of workers in Shut Up Shut Down is ink’d in under the New Thing rubric. Even more absurdly, Juliana Spahr’s Steinian grammar-exercises get roped so, too (Burt: “she . . . connects the material conditions she observes to her own inner life”). Don’t we all. (And Burt quotes some versets of Spahr’s “The Incinerator” about growing up in Chillicothe, Ohio, warning that if “read too fast” the lines “look like prose memoir. But they are not.” Neither, though, are they restrain’d, or compress’d, or Williamsesque. Nor (“We worried a lot about my father getting fired”) do they exhibit the incisive clean-cut measure Burt extols / calls for. How square it with Burt’s (rather awkwardly-phrased) pronouncement that: “The opposite of showy insubstantiality is not . . . narrative, but inscription: a poem that fits an object designed to last.”

Toward the end of “The New Thing” Burt turns sociologist, attempting to locate a reason for the claim’d shift in sensibility and means. The usual culprits tick’d off:

Is the New Thing—with its documentary cousins—related to 9/11? To the rise of the Web, where most texts seem ephemeral, and where short texts (but not long ones) circulate easily? To the depredations of the Bush administration, which cast as irresponsible a Clinton-era poetry of free play? Or simply to the exhaustion of the effusive, associative, neo-Baroque mode that came just before? These are questions better answered later on. For Wright, as for Spahr and Nowak, poetic attention to facts and things—emulated, reclaimed, quoted, re-framed—speaks to the material conditions a left-wing politics works to change. For other makers of the New Thing though, the solidity they seek is not so much economic as phenomenological: the poem finds, and emulates, some permanence—it is, and describes, something with weight and “measure,” small enough to hold in the hand.

The Wright refer’d to is C. D. Wright, whose work in Rising, Falling, Hovering, is described as “by turns documentary, thing-like and songlike.” Meaning, yakking and wild, and unrestrain’d, stone and air and hardly New Thing at all. I’d quarrel with the suggestion that short texts somehow circulate with facility (opposed to those lumbering billion-pixel’d long poems). I’d quarrel with 9/11’s having changed a thing. I’d quarrel with the idea that “poetic attention to facts and things—emulated, reclaimed, quoted, re-framed—speaks to the material conditions a left-wing politics works to change.” (As if only clarity and plain speech—and not satire, not caterwauling, not opulence, not music, not inebriation and excess—lent weight to change: that’s Pound’s use of Confucius—“making words precise” makes for durability and use.)

*A poem by Rae Armantrout, out of Versed. Consider how it fits (or refuses) Burt’s rejection of the “skittery” in favor of “accuracy” and the taking of “bearings from real events.” I’d wager there’s less concern with “thing” here, than a concern with the feints and parries of conversation, with relations, with the miasma of choices language itself always supplies. Its beauty is precisely in the tenuousness of its syntax (and imply’d situation); it is hardly an “inscription in stone.”

Through

1
The intentions come
previously.

Little apron leaves,

what are you
covering up,

plump

and forgotten on a
woody stalk?

Will itself

  unoccupied,

                        unowned


2
These dark tunnels
into

and through
the loving look.

Reaching both
and neither

always makes me hot.

“Did you have fun
playing with trains,

Phantom Stallion,

Rainbow Frog?”

Stephen Burt
(Photograph by Jessica Bennett)

Devin Johnston’s Creaturely

“What’s past is prologue”

Isn’t it one of the perennial (impossible) reveries of art to return things to thing-hood and beings to being-hood, stripped of any human (cultural) décor or use or encrustation? Such a dream haunts Devin Johnston’s Creaturely and Other Essays (Turtle Point Press, 2009)—signal’d by an epigraph out of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, “The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves”—long fermata bass note holding against the high treble passacaglia-work (or understory low-stealth to canopy gymnastics). For Johnston’s means of getting at the nature of beasts creaturely here is roundly (read: solidly, and layeredly, a musical round) digressive: in the spirit of Guy Davenport (capable of assembling and aligning the beams of a lecture—the walling-in accomplish’d in situ—while walking to teach at the University of Kentucky), or of A. R. Ammons, who claim’d “a poem is a walk” (and recalling, too, the terrific finely-observed natural histories of Merrill Gilfillan), Johnston writes:

In keeping with the etymology of the word digression, I drafted these essays walking around St. Louis and its environs, where I have lived since 2001. As Henry David Thoreau would say, I acted for a time as self-appointed inspector of thunderstorms and starlings, sycamores and squirrels, making my daily rounds. Weedy species and volunteers—common forms of life, opportunists like ourselves—I took as my particular charge. I sought out their local haunts, imagining what they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt. En route, a poem would often come to mind, my private anthology serving as a wayward field guide to whatever I found. In that sense, the poems quoted here are less objects of study than “equipment for living” (in Kenneth Burke’s phase).

So one is offer’d wondrous randoms through things like animal senses of smell (starring the dog Chester), urban crow gang behaviors, how birds see “hues entirely unknown to us,” mouse riddance (and the Cretan “Apollo Smintheus, mouse god”), and owl ossuaries. Each essay, with modesty and patience—that is, with consummate deliberation, without flaunting one’s lore—assembles and concatenates a marvelous set of tidbits into a prose condensery (Lorine Niedecker’s word, there is a kinship between Johnston’s decant’d and finely-alloy’d prose and Niedecker’s late pieces). Along the way, one finds quoted apt penetralia out of writers as various as Robert Adamson, James Thomson, Emerson, Yeats, Basil Bunting, Marianne Moore, Robert Burns, Tom Pickard, Chapman’s Homer, Jane Harrison, Aidan Higgins, and Coleridge (“A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers.”) There’s a piece at the end of Johnston’s “Murmurations” (about starlings—present in North America only because Shakespeare had Hotspur, in Henry IV, say he’d have “a starling shall be taught to speak / Nothing but ‘Mortimer’” and nearly three centuries later “A drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin decided that New York should be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare and joined the American Acclimatization Society for that purpose”—resulting in the late nineteenth century release of half a hundred breeding pairs into Central Park) where an enormous shifting flock of starlings descends to become “a concentrated darkness in the oak limbs,” and Johnston’s own essayistic meander and mustering method seems spell’d out in the murmuration’s collective self-organizing banter and rustle and squawk, its “pastiche of motifs”:

The starlings begin a dusk chorus, condensing all they have heard of relevance or curiosity. Just as dreamwork transforms the body’s stimuli and residues of desire, the birds’ song sifts the ambience of this day. Their chorus accrues much that we will never hear, learnt from unpopulated grain fields, parking lots, and unlivable spaces that we have built. It rises to a great cacophony against the last light before diminishing.

One motif that recurs in the essays: the liminal, the border, any division between inner and outer, home and away (or two fields, all that activity in the demarcating hedgerow between). In “Mouse God,” Johnston reports finding (one winter night in a St. Louis kitchen) “a deer mouse frozen in panic on the floor, forefoot suspended midstride,” and reflects: “The sudden manifestation of this creature—tiny yet intense—carried an uncanny charge. Unheimlich, the German for ‘uncanny,’ literally means ‘unhomely,’ something from outside that has crept indoors.” Elsewhere, in “Specific Worlds,” Johnston refers to biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s model of particularly “creaturely” scales (“We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exist on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world”), and writes:

More than mere organism, an animal gets constituted in its essential activities of perceiving and doing. . . . von Uexküll describes the organized experience of a particular creature as its Umwelt, a German compound meaning “a surrounding world” or “milieu.” . . . The Umwelt . . . is not a shared environment but an entirely subjective, phenomenal world. We can enter the Umwelt of another creature—its particular world of time and space, cause and effect—only through imaginative forays.

And there Johnston—rather like that deer mouse, “forefoot suspended midstride,” moves to consider the etymology of foray, and uses its “roots in foraging” to move off in a fine mode of aimlessly considering.

Particularly enjoyable, the recurrent (and various) references to classical writings and myths, making casually wise and “homely” connections. Here’s that mouse god and its appearance in George Chapman’s translation of The Iliad:

Apollo Smintheus remains familiar to us through the Iliad. At the epic’s opening, Agamemnon enslaves the beautiful daughter of Chryses, priest of the mouse god, and refuses any ransom. Chryses prays,

                                                                    O Smintheus, if crownd
With thankfull offerings thy rich Phane I ever saw, or fir’d
Fat thighs of oxen and of goates to thee, this grace desir’d
Vouchsafe to me: paines for my teares let these rude Greekes repay,
Forc’d with thy arrowes.

Smintheus answers this prayer after the manner of rodents, spreading through the Greek army a plague transmitted on the tips of his arrows. In Chryses’s temple, nearly a thousand years after the fall of Troy, Scopas carved Apollo with a mouse beneath his foot. Coins from the region depict the god cupping the little creature in his hand.

And, because writing is something of a braid or fabric of seeings, I find myself perfectly enchant’d by Johnston’s working together (in “Second Sight”) into a single piece of bright cloth, notes about the seventeenth-century Scottish minister and seer of fairies Robert Kirk, author of The Secret Commonwealth, an account of fairy life record’d, the suggestion is, by one of “hypersensory vision” (“Some have bodies or vehicles so spongeous, thin, and defaecat that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous liquor that pierces like pure air and oil”), along with Robert Hooke of the marvelous Micrographia and William Blake. Johnston:

According to Kirk, the senses of these refined spirits are attuned to vibratory hints of distant events, even those yet to occur. In this respect, they share with animals the intuitive powers that we have lost:

As birds and beasts, whose bodies are much used to the change of the free and open air, foresee storms, so those invisible people are more sagacious to understand by the Book of Nature things to come than we who are pestered with the grosser dregs of all elementary mixtures and have our purer spirit s choked by them.

Like the fairies themselves, “men of second sight” and seers of fairies have a spectral sensitivity that surpasses “the ordinary vision of other men.” They witness the hidden world through improvements “resembling in their own kind the usual artificial helps of optic glasses (as prospectives, telescopes, and microscopes).” Robert Hooke, the father of microscopy and a close contemporary of Kirk, argues in Micrographia that such instruments might compensate for the human loss of both sensory perfection and Adamic knowledge. A century later, William Blake conceived of our fall from full sensory awareness in similar terms. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he tells us that the senses were “enlarged and numerous” until contracted into five: “for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Another way by which unobstruct’d full human knowing of things and creatures is quash’d.

Creaturely is a terrific book, exquisitely design’d by Jeff Clark (an enigmatically crop’d full-bleed detail of Hans Holbein the Younger’s early sixteenth century painting, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling graces the cover).

Hans Holbein the Younger, “A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling,” c. 1526-8

Devin Johnston

A YEAR

CXLVI
A method coughs
up its loud
caucus and succumbs

to mannerist hair-
splitting: the sun
clangs down reverberant

like a big
brass cymbal, its
width precisely that

of the length
of Prester John’s
foot. All night

I dog-trot
the Asian periphery,
olive drab clad,

scooping up scolds
of rust’d dog-
tags in bazaars.

If art is
the conquistador of
naught, why flank

it with imperial
gusto? It commemorates
everything or nothing,

marshals itself against
the trudge-particular
dudgeon of high

martial music and
its inveterate squad
or company: art

patrols no edge.
Out of green
jungle and ‘unwholesome

fen,’ the wound-
sucking sun pulls
clamor and rot

twinning cancerously, strips
art’s radiant carcass
inch-meal clean.