The H.D. Book Notes 6

A Wall

Continuing aimlessness and lethargy, pie-eyed with the skinflint angels at dawn. Cloud-idle under the usurper sun. “The vowels are physical corridors . . .” They are not angels. All that “O Apollo” and “O Demeter” horse manure, that contralto chorus of “bright Mnemosyne”—avoiding the soil’d linens, the shabby untuck’d shirts, the unwash’d snot rags . . . Whence the pervasive sealants of the real? Pound (out of “Cavalcanti,” rail’d at—in The H. D. Book—by Duncan): “Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup. A soft terminology is merely an endless series of indefinite middles.” Against the duplicity (or complicity) of the (Duncan-favor’d) pun. Against the muddling effect of the metaphorickal throwdown. Against, seemingly, Pound’s own emergent “ply over ply”—“Life a fish-scale roof, / Like the church roof in Poictiers” he writes in Canto IV—conglomeratory method ideogrammaticks. Hugh Kenner (in the 1951 The Poetry of Ezra Pound) puts it clearly, Pound’s allegiance to the distinct, the tangible: “art as the process of compelling out of otherwise mute particulars, by their electric juxtaposition, traces, intelligible patterns, of an intense, clear, luminous intellective world.” He, too, turns to “Cavalcanti”—print’d in Make It New, and dated 1910-1931—pointing to Pound’s mediaevalist call for

‘harmony in the sentience’ or harmony of the sentient, where the thought has its demarcation, the substance its virtù, where stupid men have not reduced all ‘energy’ to unbounded undistinguished abstraction . . .

Virtù: “the defining quality of a thing.” Pound says (Canto LXXIV): “In the light of light is the virtù.” Pound’s complaint: “For the modern scientist energy has no borders, it is a shapeless ‘mass’ of force; even his capacity to differentiate it to a degree never dreamed by the ancients has not led him to think of its shape or even its loci.” And: “We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with a clean edge, a world of moving energies, ‘mezzo oscuro rade’, ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’, magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible . . .” So, the petals of ripples cut by “white petals”: “Ply over ply, thin glitter of water; / Brook film bearing white petals.” The clean short i sound (“thin,” “glitter,” “film”), the lack of articles: the lines sheer, fleet, and deft. Cauterized, seal’d off. Against what Pound calls “lumping” (“Loss of values is due usually to lumping and to lack of dissociation.”) Duncan notes Pound’s fussy rejecting of (disgust at) muddle, “filth,” “slush,” the supposèd unclean: “He is naturally repelled when in Rubens he sees the flesh portrayed as meat. He rages like a Puritan bigot faced with the Whore of Babylon at the adulterous—latinizing—syntax of Milton . . .” Quotes Pound, writing of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, how he finds “the middling-sensual erotic verses in this collection . . . a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so. . .” Pound’s commonly-noted hysteria confront’d by any (“feminine”) carnal yield, or softness. Too, Duncan points to Dewey’s similar “bias in aesthetic” in Art as Experience (1934):

If the perception is then eked out by reminiscence or by sentimental associations derived from literature—as is usually the case in paintings popularly regarded as poetic—a simulated aesthetic experience occurs.
      Paintings that seem dead in whole or part are those in which intervals merely arrest, instead of also carrying forward. They are “holes,” blanks. What we call dead spots are, from the side of the percipient, the things that enforce a partial or frustrated organization of outgoing energy. There are works of art that merely excite, in which activity is aroused without the composure of satisfaction, without fulfillment within the terms of the medium. Energy is left without organization. Dramas are then melodramatic; paintings of nudes are pornographic; the fiction that is read leaves us discontented with the world in which we are, alas, compelled to live without the opportunity for the romantic adventure and high heroism suggested by the story-book. In those novels, in which characters are the puppets of their authors, our revulsion comes from the fact that life is pretended, not enacted. The simulation of life by a show of animation and vivacity leaves us with the same irritation of incompletion that follows continued idle chatter.

Dewey’s cues unmistakable: it’s the “feminine” —“idle chatter,” “vivacity”—“holes” that fail as art. Back to my pie-eyed, art-fail’d wiles.

John Dewey, 1859-1952

“Resort to sports . . .”

Chionodoxa

Some intermittent Faustian gibberish, unmalign’d. “Crazy weather.” The allure of manic vocables, rough stertorous snuffling or wee reeking iactantia intempestiva (meaning: untemper’d jactancy), all that high-blood’d song, it’s chutzpah and oomph. Wind shear in the galactic disc, my singular star approaching the sun’s velocity, trammel’d by Oort’s constant, or Oort’s limit: any constant is a limit. (Trying to cut through the usual “game”—making the wilderness of borrow’d voices drop its ordinary regimen and travail: one way of “gearing up.”) Edmund Wilson—in Axel’s Castle (1931)—quotes Valéry saying that literature’s become “an art which is based on the abuse of language—that is, it is based on language as a creator of illusions, and not on language as a means of transmitting realities. Everything which makes a language more precise, everything which emphasizes its practical character, all the changes which it undergoes in the interests of a more rapid transmission and an easier diffusion, are contrary to its function as a poetic instrument.” Wilson, paraphrasing: “Just as the development of mechanical devices has compelled us to resort to sports in order to exercise our muscles, so literature will survive as a game as a series of specialized experiments in the domain of “symbolic expression and imaginative values attained through the free combination of the elements of language.” Dull enough. Wilson a reader of Wittgenstein? Nein. Philosophical Investigations, wherein Wittgenstein talks of the “language-game” (Sprachspiel): print’d in 1953. Valéry’s remarks recall Williams, in a piece call’d “Preface to a Book of Poems by Harold Rosenberg”—intend’d for Rosenberg’s 1942 volume of poetry, Trance Above the Streets, and un-used, “possibly because Williams could find so little favorable to say”—out of Something to Say. Williams makes distinct “the line” and “the sense, the didactic, expository sense”: “The meaning is the total poem, it is not directly dependent on what the poem says.” And, aiming, per usual, a dexterous inoculatory against the influenza of the not-so-feverish Brits:

Where the formal make-up is too heavily ridden by what is said we are likely to get into bad habits of thought. The line becomes an implement merely for stressing the explanatory statements and we fall inevitably into the error, so recently popularized by the English exiles to America, especially Auden, when he says that all writing is an instrument, an appliance. As a matter of fact no first-rate work of art can be described as an appliance. Man is the instrument; the poem, the whole poem—when it is “realized”—subordinates man and becomes “the word.”

Lapse into narcissism, a regular Kinbote. What’s the matter with capital’s what’s the matter with “me.” Meaning, “us” of la poesía norteamericana, fœtidly “free” to make each a “singular” mess. (Throwing down dice against my own truculent inheritance.) What is “style”? Robert Duncan, one of the late entries in The H. D. Book:

Style is an effort to exorcise or to control the magic or glamour of sound in music, stone in sculpture or evocation in words. The effort in style is to increase an awareness of the rationale of the works. Thinking now of the lure of women’s hair and dress, we see that in periods of style women cut their hair or keep it most in place, and that style in dress means the effortful projection of effect—all aims at increasing our awareness of what is there as a thing in itself. . . . Lure is the opposite of style; the sentence and thought must wander to distraction before the reader becomes hopelessly involved. And hopeless involvement is the underlying psychic need of the magician. Had magic intended power over all things it could have found power, but the deep desire the magician hides from himself is the bewilderment he seeks. Lucifer does not betray, he brings to light our secret wishes to be undone.

Hence the gibbering.

—

TO INCONSISTENCY

A field of the mad-blight’d
dogs of intelligibility, sturdy couriers
of what not to expect.
Behind the story’s “thrust” is
a man thinking about yellow
acacias, or how the sun
looks like a silk blouse
just out of the wash.
Fuck that. A story’s a
palm’d orb, a fiery-color’d
globular sac pitch’d with intent,
an ornery cuss blood’d with
capillary networks that fan out
against the albumin light, making
spending global and coagulatory. Like
capital. Here in the city,
convergences of eulalias grab sex
arcanas off the instructor’s clip-
board, husbandry is for money.
Like that. Fuck capital. Inconsistency
is rolling into Lubbock, Texas
with a dapper canary. Blithe
merch, accessible as a swarm.
The bread in the grocer’s
tubs is angelic and white:
heaven itself is heaving out
its broke-down chronic fiat
against clampdown, bullying, and dystopia.
No use. The mad chirren
go madder, an unheard-of
rose. That century’s gone, sweet-
meat, my cheat, today’s story
is how implacably the poor
bait and sucker the poor.

Edmund Wilson, 1895–1972

The Unobstruct’d

In a Garden

Snow in April. Knifing down, slicing into the yellow daffodils, into the hyacinths. A long weekend of spotty accruals, reading pages here and there, deferring the rare engines of making. (Ben Jonson says: “There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books: Habent venenum pro victu; imô, pro deliciis [They hold poison to be a victual; indeed, a delicacy]. And such are they that only relish the obscene and foul things in poets, which makes the profession taxed.”) Tax’d, yea, tax’d. Callimachus says Apollo recommends the poet “follow trails unrutted by wagons” and “keep to the back roads though the going is narrow”:

“We are the poets for those who love
        the cricket’s high chirping, not the noise of the jackass.”

Out of a fragment of the prologue to the Aetia (meaning “cause” or “origin”), “an elegiac poem in four books . . . made up of a series of loosely connected explanations of legends,” &c. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. One lovely fragment reads:

[. . .]
        when the Muses settled like a swarm of bees
near Hesiod, out on the hill with his sheep,
        by the fiery horse’s hoofprint
                                generation out of Chaos

                        water from the hoof

“hurt another and hurt yourself most”

                        to live worthily
                                all things you accomplish

                                                              accomplish
[. . .]

I think of Barbara Guest’s line (in “Composition”): “Writing, narrow and sparse, pungent as the lemon tree.” Or Gustaf Sobin (in “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables”) nodding to:

                                        what brought me then,
over the low
ledges.     brought that I
bring: impelled that I urge, herd, drive the
words into
that

luminous salvage.     and stand, there, in those
linked shadows, thus
lit.

“Luminous salvage.” Later: “luminous debris.” Vestigial discourse: canny assemblages of previous marks, the footprints of mania’d runners going to and fro, vestigia. Think of the fine fretting (two senses) of accomplishment. Accomplishment against the nod and against the nod out. An urge against the “herd” (see “jackass, the noise of the”). What is lovely is how Williams (in a 3 March 1950 letter to Creeley, print’d in Origin) calls poetry one of “the unobstructed arts” (“a means is at least present . . . where a man can go on living”). Here’s the whole (Williams doing a spotty Pound burlesque):

      My own (moral) program can be chiefly stated. I send it for what it may be worth to you: To write badly is an offence to the state since the government can never be more than the government of the words.
      If the language is distorted crime flourishes. It is well that in the unobstructed arts (because they can at favorable times escape the perversions that flourish elsewhere) a means is at least presented to the mind where a man can go on living.
      For there is in each age a specific criterion which is the objective for the artist in that age. Not to attack that objective is morally reprehensible—as evil as it is awkward to excuse.
      Bad art is then that which does not serve in the continual service of cleansing the language upon all fixations upon dead, stinking dead, usages of the past. Sanitation and hygiene or sanitation that we may have hygienic writing.

The kind of thing an ideologue (and there be plenty afoot in any “era”) might intercept and run with. Veering “off” track provides one with one means of continuance, skittish, untrellis’d, prestidigitatory, fleet. Against the noisy ycleptick of the present. Jonson: “The multitude commend writers as they do fencers or wrestlers, who if they come in robustiously and put for it with a deal of violence are received for the braver fellows; when many times their own rudeness is a cause of their disgrace, and a slight touch of their adversary gives all that boisterous force the foil. But in these things the unskilful are naturally deceived, and judging wholly by the bulk, think rude things greater than polished, and scattered more numerous than composed . . .”

Gustaf Sobin, 1935-2005

A Field of Action Painting

Queen Anne’s Lace (Last Year’s Model)

Fatigue or addle-patedness, some kind of deleteriousness’s clean’d out the cranny: I am bum-foozled (literally: ass-drag’d) by a morning’s jaunt in search of any “subsequence” to an untitled Spicer poem found in the Spicer / Duncan An Ode and Arcadia (Ark Press, 1974)—

I
Come watch the love-balloon, that great
Inflated tautology of angel-wings.
(They say it floats somewhere but I have seen
Its stupid flutter like the great-sea birds
Who stumble through the city in a storm.)
Its cord goes downwards, watch the dangling men
Upon its draw-strings, watch a sudden wind
Give them a shaking; tangle, change, and bind.
Each wind is fatal. Nothing knows its place.
Beneath that high-flown floater love is like a race
Between the horse and crouching rider; no one wins,
And neither stops till someone wins—or falls.

II
Come watch the love-balloon, that great
Inflated tautology of angel-wings.
(They say it floats somewhere but I have seen
Its stupid flutter like the great-sea birds
Who stumble through the city in a storm.)
Its cord goes downwards, watch the dangling men
Upon its draw-strings, watch a sudden wind
Give them a shaking; tangle, change, and bind.
Each wind is fatal. Nothing knows its place.
Beneath that high-flown floater love is like a race
Between the horse and crouching rider; no one wins,
And neither stops till someone wins—or falls.

Jack Spicer meets Saul Bellow. How oddly refreshing, that demand that one read it twice. (I think of a recording of Williams reading at Harvard in 1951, affably insisting he read “This Is Just to Say” twice: “Modern American poetry is . . . like a man without a head. We got the whole body of English literature right there, all that it need is a head, that’s all.”) In Duncan’s The H.D. Book, mention of Williams’s 1948 lecture at the University of Washington, “The Poem as a Field of Action”: “anticipating Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ with its proposition of composition by field.” (Variously, by Olson in 1950, saying a poet, “the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined . . .”) The “field”—Duncan spalling off Olson’s thinking in “the opening of”—okay. Whence “action”? What is the sequence whereby Harold Rosenberg’s naming of “action painting” comes about (in “The American Action Painters” in 1952)? Did Rosenberg read / know of Williams? Did Olson? (Though it seems “The Poem as a Field of Action” is finally print’d only in the 1954 Selected Essays.) Williams’s talk is contrarian, ranging, profuse: he complains both of American poems being “not subtly enough made” and that “the structure, the staid manner of the poem cannot let our feelings through”). The feelings: big, unfinish’d, conglomatory, a welter:

      We seek profusion, the Mass—heterogeneous—ill-assorted—quiet breathless—grasping at all kinds of things—as if—like Audubon shooting some little bird, really only to look at it the better.
      If any one man’s work lacks the distinction to be expected from the finished artist, we might well think of the profusion of a Rabelais—as against a limited output. It is as though for the moment we should be profuse, we Americans; we need to build up a mass, a conglomerate maybe, containing few gems but bits of them—Brazilian brilliants—that shine of themselves, uncut as they are.

It’s the unrefined, the unfound (two senses) Williams sees confounding the narrow, unfixing the prosodic “laws.” He writes how “we as loose, disassociated (linguistically), yawping speakers of a new language . . . [disturb] the metrical table of values” and compares it to the way “unknown elements . . . disturb Mendelyeev’s table of the periodicity of atomic weights and so lead to discoveries.” (How Dr. Williams’d jump to the existence of the “super-heavy” element Rutherfordium (detect’d in 1966), “not found in nature” and of no use.) Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters”: Is there a tenable relation between a remark like: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” and Williams’s point that one can “put it down as a general rule that when a poet . . . begins to devote himself to the subject matter of his poems, genre, he has come to an end of his poetic means”? Williams says, too, that “a new way of writing” ’s most apt to be found where there’s “instability in the language where innovation would be at home.” Instability: Rosenberg’s “ there is no point to an act if you already know what it contains.” Or:

A sketch can have the function of a skirmish.

Or:

The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which—or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension.

“Tension” is akin to Williams’s “structure” (gesture akin to speech). Williams’s canvas / field is act’d on by “the mouths of the living”—“the dialect is the mobile phase, the changing phase, the productive phase . . . It is there, in the mouths of the living, that the language is changing and giving new means for expanded possibilities in literary expression and, I add, basic structure—the most important of all.”

Rosenberg makes no notice of Williams in the essay, though he sutures in an odd line of Stevens: “The American will is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself.” (Just under the terrific Apollinaire line, story of the American artist / poet: “J’ai fait des gestes blancs parmi les solitudes.”) The Stevens quote seems to signal distrust. Rosenberg’s concern is “seriousness”—a way, one supposes, of making experience “authentic”:

      The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness—and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience.
      A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist. The canvas has “talked back” to the artist not to quiet him with Sibylline murmurs nor to stun him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue. Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new question. By its very nature, action painting is painting in the medium of difficulties.

Here the moral jones of American art outs. Difficulty makes genuine (an attitude rather lacking in Dr. Williams). A footnote Rosenberg here append’d to the essay in The Tradition of the New (1959) reads in part: “In a word, Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art; its mark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic uncertainties; and it judges itself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporation of a genuine struggle . . .” Contra:

      Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends in the opposite direction, toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

Which—my own jonesing for a stance beyond the flip complacency of the current careering hordes—sounds a little like Flarf & Cie’s watery slumgullion to me.

Elaine de Kooning, “Harold Rosenberg #1,” 1967

The H.D. Book Notes 5

Some Grasses

Reading, I jot down page numbers, tout seul, or accompany’d by one word notes. Returning to a page means retrieving a nexus of momentary particulars, some probable spur, or goad. Or not. Some moments coalesce to naught beyond a movement, some peremptory “en train de” took by the reading’s onslaught and continuance. One fails at the recovery, the fluidity of context siphon’d off. Here, retrievals sans cesse, denatured, of what limit’d use? Glints in the slurry that is The H. D. Book. A poetics is “the study of work to be done”:

      That one image may recall another, finding depth in the resounding, is the secret of rhyme and measure. The time of a poem is felt as a recognition of return in vowel tone and in consonant formations, of pattern in the sequence of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meanings. It resembles the time of a dream, for it is highly organized along lines of association and impulses of contrast towards the structure of the whole. The impulse of dream or poem is to provide a ground for some form beyond what we know, for feeling “greater than Reality.”

Duncan’s talk of “knots of meaning that refused any easy use”—gleanings of the Theosophic world and its “quest for meanings” become “a vital need in life that one recognized in romance where the hero must learn the language of birds, overhear the conversation of trees . . .” How it imbue’d a poetics, a sought thing. How I stand with Olson, the Olson of that Duncan-chiding in “Against Wisdom as Such”:

I fall back on a difference I am certain the poet at least has to be fierce about: that he is not free to be a part of, or to be any, sect; that there are no symbols for him, there are only his own composed forms, and each one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its creation, not any ultimate except what he in his heat and that instant in its solidity yield. That the poet cannot afford to traffick in any other “sign” than this one, his self, the man or woman he is. Otherwise God does rush in. And art is washed away, turned into that second force, religion.

Disturbingly, out of the hermetic roots, an accompanying sense of being one of the elect, the chosen. Duncan’s heroes (“company”), a bande à part:

We must move throughout the history of man to find many of our own kin, for here and now those who think and feel in the terms we seek are few indeed. But from each of these the cry goes up—to whom other than us, their spiritual kin—from an intense solitude. Not only Freud’s “There are very few who understand this,” but Stein’s “Do you know because I tell I you so, or do you know, do you know. (Silence) My long life, my long life,” or Joyce’s “Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?” or Pound’s plea from Canto CXVI:

I have brought the great ball of crystal,
                                who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?

Or, there’s the sense of the lock’d box, “the wisdom of ‘what words conceal’”—Duncan even attempts to enlist Williams’s forthright “no ideas but in things” in the magisterial hoo-hah, suggesting that it, too, “must” find its resonance in “the dreams of the race.” Duncan:

The very heightened sense of the relatedness of everything set poets apart. The very secret of the impulse in poetry is the troubled awareness the poet has of meanings in the common language everywhere that those about him do not see or do not consider so important. “We,” H. D. writes in The Walls Do Not Fall, “bearers of the secret wisdom,” and then:

but if you do not even understand what words say

how can you expect to pass judgment
on what words conceal?

Though: the riotous and conceal’d “relatedness” is got at—recall’d or gain’d—by a musically-attenuated and severe seeing. I suspect Duncan’s right about the import of the eye (“Vision itself may be the spear; the eye being struck, the necessary vulnerable spot, where reality can get at the hero-poet”) in H. D.’s work, though the lingo of restraint in the telling seems oddly “counter”:

H. D.’s intensity of image arises in her stricture of the eye to see in the clear, to penetrate the elf-skin or shimmer of excited vision and to locate the object. She holds a limit in poetry against the riot of the imagination, for she seeks a conscious recognition of what is going on. The very tenseness of her line is an attention that functions to hold back from the potency poetry has to produce its own luxe of the unreal, the world seen thru a glass darkly, the shadow of the dome of pleasure, the strange thunders from the potency of song, and the magic casements that open upon fairy seas. This reverie or “escape” in ascent or descent beyond the scale of the consciously analyzed is the medium of what she calls music that she resists.

Tellingly: “she does not dream or day-dream but strives to render an exact account of what she has seen.” Whence, then, one wonders, the correspondences, the hid, the necessary undivulg’d occult?

Robert Duncan, c. 1962
(Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark)

The H.D. Book Notes 4

Buckthorn and Cut

Of H. D.’s spare, cut, wrung out “Hellenism,” the “Greek perfection” style. Edward Sapir, reviewing Collected Poems in 1926, notes its “voluptuous harshness.” And suggests: “Such violent restraint, such a passionate pleasure in the beauty of the denuded scene and the cutting thrust, themselves but inverse symbols of caress, could only develop in a culture that hungers for what it despises.” A curious remark: one suspects Sapir of unknowingly making a gender’d appraisal. (Try applying the remark to Pound’s restrain’d work circa Ripostes &c.) Though: one is bemused by the minor contretemps between H. D. and Williams regarding something like “purity of style.” H. D. in The Egoist in 1915, talking about translating Euripides:

While the sense of the Greek has been strictly kept, it is necessary to point out that the repetition of useless ornamental adjectives is a heavy strain on a translator’s ingenuity. This is only one instance from many where the Homeric Epithet degenerates into what the French call a remplissage—an expression to fill up a line. Such phrases have been paraphrased or omitted.

To find a style by cutting fat off the Greek. And in remarks concerning Euripides’s Ion in 1937, H. D. says: “The broken, exclamatory or evocative vers-libre which I have chosen to translate the two-line dialogue, throughout the play, is the exact antithesis of the original.” Williams himself, in the 1918 “Prologue” to Kora in Hell: Improvisations quotes H. D.’s letter of 14 August 1916 regarding Williams’s long poem “March”:

      I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your Postlude (which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is real beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last.
      I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak direct are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivative tendency which, to me, is not you—not your very self. It is as if you were ashamed of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well to mock at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your inspiration—

Williams’s ferocious reply in the “Prologue” (Duncan suggesting “the words rankled”):

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

And: “We look for deliverance . . . from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style.” According to Williams, the excess is the improv: “The hey-ding-ding touch was derivative, but it filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time. It might be said that that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.”

One looks at Williams’s “Postlude” for a sign of what H. D. sought. In the 1914 Des Imagistes version (facing Amy Lowell’s “In a Garden”—“Gushing from the mouths of stone men / To spread at ease under the sky / In granite-lipped basins / Where irises dabble their feet . . .” oh my . . .):

Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philae, in and out,
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow
And our words arrows
To shoot the stars,
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.
But you’re there beside me—
Oh, how shall I defy you
Who wound me in the night
With breasts shining
Like Venus and like Mars?
The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle
As with waves above me
Blue at the prow of my desire!
O prayers in the dark!
O incense to Poseidon!
Calm in Atlantis.

(“With breasts . . . Like Venus and like Mars” deserves its heave of a disgrunt’d “oh my . . .” too.) “March” begins with nigh-sedentary conversing, staunchly refusing the lyric outburst: “Winter is long in this climate / and spring—a matter of a few days / only,—a flower or two picked / from mud or from among wet leaves / or at best against treacherous / bitterness of wind, and sky shining / teasingly, then closing in black / and sudden, with fierce jaws . . .” Ambling talk—“a matter of,” “at best”—hardly mocking, hardly “hey-ding-ding.” Its third part begins—

See!
        Ashur-ban-i-pal,
the archer king, on horse-back,
in blue and yellow enamel!
with drawn bow—facing lions
standing on their hind legs,
fangs bared! his shafts
bristling in their necks!

Sacred bulls—dragons
in embossed brickwork
marching—in four tiers—
along the sacred way to
Nebuchadnezzar’s throne hall!
They shine in the sun,
they that have been marching—
marching under the dust of
ten thousand dirt years.

Now—
they are coming into bloom again!
See them!
marching still, bared by
the storms from my calendar
—winds that blow back the sand!
winds that enfilade dirt!
winds that by strange craft
have whipt up a black army
that by pick and shovel
bare a procession to
                                      the god, Marduk!

One thinks of Pound’s “The Return”—“See, they return; ah, see the tentative / Movements, and the slow feet, / The trouble in the pace and the uncertain / Wavering!” Duncan quotes H. D. (out of Tribute to the Angels) saying, “Every hour, every moment, has its specific attendant Spirit.” One thinks H. D.’s “spark” is concern’d as much with such supposed genii as with speaking “direct.” It is, certes, what Duncan finds in H. D. Though Duncan sees, too, how the makeshift and gaps and flaws of any weaving become “qualities of the whole, of the real.” In a rather confusingly work’d out metaphor of “netting”—“History is a close-weave. Fishing for the event,” and “The dragon is created in the creation of the net . . . the imagination is flung out to come into its figures”—Duncan attempts to keep both Williams’s improvisatory and “excessive” “hey-ding-ding” and H. D.’s rejecting of it:

      When we first come into the attraction of words in poetry, it is the craft of the net, the novelty of usage, the knot effect, often, that strikes us. We mistake the effect for the art. Style and signature most valuable, and the direct, uncharacterized speech, uninteresting. The “flippancy,” the up-to-dateness or regular guy voice of Williams’s language—the risk of those knots, the craft, the thing posed—appears interesting in itself. To be original. To challenge the communal thing. . . .
      To tie fancy knots and to contrive a greater show of our abilities. But all these original knottings are mistaken, are “hey-ding-ding”—“lead nowhere” the common sense is—if they are all novelty, things of 1920, not lasting forces. The knots that are flames are not originalities, but origins.

Prestidigitatory feint and recovery: “not originalities, but origins.”

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Jeffrey Yang’s Birds, Beasts, and Seas

Tree

Anthology—old story—out of the Greek, flower gathering, fr. anthos flower + logia collecting, fr. legein to gather, see LEGEND. (Anthophagous refers to one who feeds off flowers.) I do recall a period, early, of feeding off anthologies: Paul Carroll’s 1968 The Young American Poets (Diane Wakoski aiming a gun, hirsute Berrigan’s zipping “Tambourine Life”—“FUCK COMMUNISM”), Padgett and Shapiro’s 1970 An Anthology of New York Poets (likely skip’d Clark Coolidge’s “prune acrylic whose / dives / marls pays loops watts / lock mix deem / white apart / sass” for Ed Sanders’s “Elm Fuck Poem”—“in to the oily crotch / place dick / [. . .] / . . . suck the pulse of the / Hamadryad”—not, then, noticing how each be, one to the other), Anne Waldman’s 1969 The World Anthology (repeatedly drug off the library shelves—where I work’d—never own’d, is it there I first encounter’d the unimpeachable possibilities of syntax in Berrigan’s “My god is immense, and lonely / but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If / I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless // my heart still loves, will break”? without ever seeing the O’Hara in it? and read with crazy belly-laugh glee Joel Sloman’s body measurements?), Donald Hall’s 1962 Contemporary American Poetry (wherein, undoubtedly, I initially read both “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going” and “. . . if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom” and refuse—under tutelage to O’Hara’s “I cannot bring myself to prefer / Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!”—to reject either), thus obliging—probably without reading—Hall’s “We do not want to merely substitute one orthodoxy for another . . . The trouble with orthodoxy is that it prescribes the thinkable limits of variation” in the introduction). The Allen anthology arrived late. (New Poets of England and America not at all.) To say: the years of my “emergence” coincided with a brief pre-Language writing détente in la poesía norteamericana. Another preface hardly scan’d (youth wants its poem untrammel’d by contextual verbiage, no?), Padgett and Shapiro’s:

It would be facile as well as misleading to see these poets as forming a “School,” to pass them off as a literary movement. Fortunately, most poets of any interest these days are so enlightened that they automatically reject in their lives and work, the unhealthy idea of being part of a literary movement. Like water off a ducks’ back, such abstractions roll back into nothingness.

With, too, its slightly ga-ga romp through the surrounding flowers, sheer unceremonious heel-kicking, refusing the earnest at all cost:

Are New York poets new realists, or dissociated from any sympathy for the wretched of the earth? Are they drifting into a penumbra? Or do their sleek attractive surfaces glide by in the light? Have they freshened up the diatribe? Have any of their collaborations produced beautiful corpses? Are New York poets a diploma elite that buries its children? Are they merely tasting the ripest apple on the table, in the air? Is it a dérèglement de tous les sens? Or has it become, peculiarly Americanized, only a “leaving-out business,” a taking-away process? Have they generated a whole vocabulary of forms, a new sestina, new collages, cut-ups? Is it “deep gossip”? Why have the old copula been expunged?

All that ruminant jawing arriving along with a look into a new anthology, the Jeffrey Yang-edit’d Birds, Beasts, and Seas (New Directions, 2011). Subtitled: “Nature Poems from New Directions,” a dandy fitting pocketbook-sized number (its heft and look recall the Hall anthology cover’d with something like tiny semaphore flags, signals of distress, with a severe print’d “plate” center’d against it—here the background’s made of lozenges with bird, or bear, or lone canoeist, a book for carrying . . .) New Directions is seventy-five years old: reason enough to draw up a celebratory bouquet out of the archives. (Yang writes: “Birds, Beasts, and Seas draws from the whole of ND’s long-tailed library.”) A cynic’d say “repackaging”—I see a culling of particulars along lines of cleavage, point’d similars arranged in new constellatory patterns. What an anthology comes to be for. So that one, pawing rather randomly around, reads the fifth century B.C. Greek of Herakleitos, translated by Guy Davenport:

The Logos is eternal
but men have not heard it
and men have heard it and not understood.

Through the Logos all things are understood
yet men do not understand
as you shall see when you put acts and words to the test
I am going to propose:

One must talk about everything according to its nature,
how it comes to be and how it grows.
Men have talked about the world without paying attention
to the world or to their own minds,
as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

And a number of pages along, William Bronk’s “Aspects of the World Like Coral Reefs”:

In the spring woods, how good it is to see
again the trees, old company,
how they have withstood the winter, their girth.

By gradual actions, how the gross earth
gathers around us and grows real, is there,
as though it were really there, and is good.

Certain stars, of stupendous size, are said
to be such and such distances away,—
oh, farther than the eyes alone would ever see.

Thus magnified, the whole evidence
of our senses is belied. For it is not
possible for miles to add miles to miles

forever, not even if expressed as the speed of light.
The fault lies partly in the idea of miles.
It is absurd to describe the world in sensible terms.

How good that even so, aspects of the world
that are real, or seem to be real, should rise like reefs
whose rough agglomerate smashes the sea.

And each is dislodged by the other, out of the humdrum place one’s put it, and a rhyme is made. Look how suddenly lines out of Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach”—

All is lithogenesis—or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?

—make echo with lines out of Eliot Weinberger’s “Dreams from the Holohurians”:

Atlantis! In the dark the holothurians eat and excrete and move on and eat, inching forward, thinking, sending out their mental flares in the hope that someone, something, anything will drop by and relieve the tedium of their biological fate, down there, at the bottom of the sea, with the calcified sponges, magnesium nodules, the crushed spines of sea urchins, the ghosts of coelenterates, unexploded torpedoes, skeletons of bathypterids and halosaurs, the hieroglyphic tracks of sea pens and ophiuroids, fecal coils, the waving arms of a burrowed brittle-star, manganese-encrusted dolphin teeth, the remains of a jettisoned crate of manilla-envelope clasps, zeolite crystals, pillows of basalt, calcareous shells of pteropods, the sinister egg-casings of skates, the broken anti-matter locks from a crashed spaceship, the short-crested ripples of sand, and the scour moats forming in the globigerina ooze.

The lowly sea cucumber surround’d by its own glorious haecceity. Yang stretches out magnificently what some’d call the limits of the “nature poem.” Out of Yang’s preface:

A century after Emerson, the poet Paul Valéry observes, “Whenever we run across something we do not know how to make but that appears to be made, we say that nature produced it.” Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani extends Valéry’s thought in our times when he writes, “Nature, therefore, is not restricted to ostensibly natural objects such as the seashell; it also includes things that are made by man but whose structure—how they are made—is not immediately discernible. Such things are called natural language because their making is not apparent.” Nature here is provisional, and inseparable from our own thinking and perceptions—it circumscribes the limits of our own making as what nature makes is a part of what humans make.

The works in Birds, Beasts, and Seas range widely (one measure of New Directions’ refusal of the parochial, or the narrow): verses out of the c. 1000 B.C. Book of Odes (translated by Ezra Pound) begin the book, lines by the Albanian Luljeta Lleshanaku (b. 1968) end it: “Here the elemental world of cold metals begins— / here identity, weight, gravitational forces end, / where I can no longer be I.” In between: lines out of Euripides by H. D., Medea by Robinson Jeffers, Lucretius by Basil Bunting, Ovid by Christopher Marlowe, Gerard de Nerval by Robert Duncan, Blaise Cendrars by John Dos Passos, Saint-John Perse by Eliot, Pessoa by Thomas Merton, Silvina Ocampo by William Carlos Williams, René Char by Samuel Beckett, plus a slew of others, the Goliard Poet to Anne Carson, Christopher Smart to Forrest Gander. For any who’d complain that the “natural world” ’s become the last unabash’d resort of the “dewy piety” squad, or that “we” need “get beyond” its call—that used up “thing” over there: I like Yang’s two epigraphs:

                                                                                      “Will I ever reach the aim that I’ve so long pursued and searched for?

                                                                                    “I am still working from nature and feel I am making a little progress.”

                                                                                                        —Paul Cézanne, September 1906, a few weeks before his death

. . . duce ac magistra natura

—

TO THE WORLD

No clouds mar the indistinct
whitishness of the sky. Hay-
color’d hummocks of saw grass
pinch off the new-mill’d
planks thrown down haphazard out
to where the boat is
being winch’d up. Leak’d motor
oil making iridescent the black
water. In the distant cattails
a wren burbles incommodiously, hid.
Belongings of the incessant world,
its immeasurable hurdy-gurdy, its itch.
No human property, its anthracite-
black liquid pours out of
a seam between two mountains.
It owns any wee physical
man unexpect’d who’d dare eschew
it, or tamper with its
green demesne, its unlit fuses.
One slices an uncanny red
orange, import’d out of Halicarnassus
or new Bodrum, shrugs off
the presumptuous banality of marketing
a thing made by sun-
light and soil, ineffable combo,
plethora of what circularity achieves.

Birds, Beasts, and Seas
(Cover by Rodrigo Corral Design)

Stray’d, Voluble

Buckthorn and Sucker

TO THE GREEKS

Art itself is a fix:
the crux of the matter
is that without its singling
exultant note, all things commingling
merge in constant flux unfocus’d,
a smear of forms preliminal,
unboundary’d, unlimn’d and skint by
the lassitudinous gods for whom
clarity is a kind of
decay, a fissile force breaching
the phenomenal mud. Up leaps
a proviso with a club
hewn of buckthorn, a story
torn up out of madness,
bacilli, eidola or the like.
A breeze is calling out
the name of a sun-
black’d cathartic some girls used
to chew in the dog
days in Thessaloniki, sweating out
a singularly limb-slacking stink,
presumptuous as a scholiast. Or
a cypress-tooth’d hill near
Patras, general in its refusal
of the dissolute, is loathe
to offend by scheduling anything
beyond its momentary persistence. A
scuffle must ensue. A sobering
radiant punch-up and grunt
dalliance with the helmet’d gods
who post-coitally slurp too
noisily at the ordinary soup.

—

Early in Ronald Johnson’s “Hurrah for Euphony”: “Thumb the roots of any word in a (large, preferably) Webster. No harm going further afield, or digging down, for there is new territory. Agassiz would have his students calculate every particle of soil clinging each root—and write exactly about it, and more exact again.” Nodding to Pound’s anecdote, certes, of Agassiz and the fish (“The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another.”) That root-particularity, though—so akin to Olson’s “leave / the roots on . . . // And the dirt”—where’s it found in Agassiz? (Pound’s talk of “roots” in ABC of Reading veers out of a metaphor of radical inherency:

You receive the language as your race has left it, the words have meanings which have ‘grown into the race’s skin’; the Germans say ‘wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist’, as his beak grows. And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

The German wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist refers to talking “naturally,” unaffectedly, exactly what comes unpawk’d up into the mouth.) One’d suspect Johnson’d found Agassiz pedagogy detail’d in Guy Davenport’s The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings. Davenport apparently found Agassiz through what he calls “the almost secret publication by John Kasper and Ezra Pound, of an abominably printed but wholly admirable collection of paragraphs entitled Gists from Agassiz, or Passages on the Intelligence Working in Nature, (Square Dollar Series, Washington, 1953) . Davenport’s clarity of complaint regarding the highly policed “zones” of “literary” achievement is ever pertinent:

      The place scientific writing might claim among the corpus of imaginative writing zoned off as literature by unstable rules for admission and rejection is a strong one, allowing for inevitable airs of condescension from the protectors of letters. The spirit of our age has been curiously denying, although its search for purity is understandable. The American in particular regards his mind as a showroom for certain furnitures as content, and this silly idea gets defended by the vulgar error that if the mind is stuffed, there’ll be no room for important things in their time. I first collided with this homely belief while teaching in St. Louis, that museum of Americana, and should have known that it came from Poor Richard or Sherlock Holmes. It is from Holmes. . . .

See A Study in Scarlet.Of Holmes, Watson reports:

      His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
      “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
      “To forget it!”
      “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

No closer to Johnson’s source. There is, in Agassiz’s A Journey to Brazil (written with “Mrs. Louis Agassiz”—Elizabeth Cabot Cary—prompting Emerson, according to Davenport, into saying that the book was “like a mermaid, so harmonious was the combination of ichthyology and travelogue.” Davenport: “This promptly became a Boston riddle: “Why is the Agassiz Brazilian book like a mermaid”? “Because you can’t tell where the lady begins and the fish leaves off”) a sensible practicum for collecting:

A large number of the trees forming these forests are still unknown to science, and yet the Indians, those practical botanists and zoölogists, are well acquainted, not only with their external appearance, but also with their various properties. So intimate is their practical knowledge of the natural objects about them, that I believe it would greatly contribute to the progress of science if a systematic record were made of all the information thus scattered through the land; an encyclopædia of the woods, as it were, taken down from the tribes which inhabit them. I think it would be no bad way of collecting, to go from settlement to settlement, sending the Indians out to gather all the plants they know, to dry and label them with the names applied to them in the locality, and writing out, under the heads of these names, all that may thus be ascertained of their medicinal and otherwise useful properties, as well as their botanical character. A critical examination of these collections would at once correct the information thus obtained, especially if the person intrusted with the care of gathering these materials had so much knowledge of botany as would enable him to complete the collections brought in by the Indians, adding to them such parts as might be wanted for a complete systematic description. The specimens ought not to be chosen, however, as they have hitherto been, solely with reference to those parts which are absolutely necessary to identify the species; the collections, to be complete, ought to include the wood, the bark, the roots, and the soft fruits in alcohol.

Gone, I see, “afield” in my query. So be it. “Pacyence come pryckyng with a sobre chere and hitte Ire in the helme that it flewe a feld.” (So readeth the fourteenth c. Booke of the Pylgremage of the Sowle by one Guillaume de Deguileville.)

Louis Agassiz, 1807–1873

Jacques Burkhardt, “Ptychemys Rugosa,” out of Louis Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America, Volume II, 1857

Jacques Burkhardt, “Variations of Species of Ptychemys Rugosa,” out of Louis Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America, Volume II, 1857

The H.D. Book Notes 3

Hommage à Jeff Wall

H. D., somewhere in End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, refers to talk of Pound’s “appropriating, stealing lines and phrases from Greek, Latin, mediaeval and oriental poets, and building a nest like a magpie”: “It asserted . . . that the effect was astonishing and ‘make it new’ had vitalized a host of lesser satellites.” H. D.:

I feel the process is that of a Phoenix, rather than of a magpie. There is fragrance. What did he write? “Myrrh and olibanum”? I said, “You catch fire or you don’t catch fire.”

Pound’s “myrrh and olibanum” out of Canto XC, the one beginning “‘From the colour of nature / & by the nature the sign!’ / Beatific spirits welding together / as in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.” A constructivist joinery temper’d by (guided by) nature’s template. And: “Out of heaviness where no mind moves at all / ‘birds for the mind’ said Richardus, / ‘beasts as to body, for know-how’”—sketching the original Latin of one early Church father, Richard St. Victor, elsewhere render’d “Watch birds to see how the mind works . . . animals for outside things.” I am tempt’d to make of H. D.’s “You catch fire or you don’t catch fire” an expressivist (Romantic) nudge, a minor canticle to the limits of the assemblagist’s work. “Myrrh and olibanum” shows up

                                                    on the altar stone
giving perfume,
                            and where was nothing
now is furry assemblage
                        and in the boughs now are voices
grey wing, black wing, black wing shot with crimson
and the umbrella pines
                                          as in Palatine
as in pineta.

Smoke (“furry assemblage”) of incense—Pound, with Sheri Martinelli, used to burn the stuff in St. Elizabeths—and what emerges out of it (a Roman landscape of Pinus pinea and—it’s likely—Corvidae). Something out of nothing (boost’d by, catalyzed by an initial joinery? or by the combusting itself? see H. D.’s “Phoenix”).

Dawdling, of late, back into The H. D. Book, uncover’d out of the stacks of things that make a skip-rickety corridor to my work table. Duncan, talking of the poetry of Provence (“divided into an orthodox language of single meanings and an heretical language where meanings were united in a spiritual double-entendre”), quoting Pound, revving the old antagonisms (out of The Spirit of Romance):

We find this poetry divided into two schools; the first school complained about the obscurities of the second—we have them always with us. They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry, especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the meaning while the man sings it.

Duncan’s reply: “Where there was, some objected, a willful obscurity, there was for others a matrix of meanings.” That matrix, oddly enough, is what Duncan finds in the works of the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky:

      Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures (“2100 quotations . . . without proper credit”) to form the figures of a new composition. In the conglomerate that Blavatsky gathered, things of disparate traditions whirl and take on new shapes for the conscious imagination, separated from their contexts and credits, tainted with foreign meanings.

It’s as if Duncan were speaking of The Cantos, or of the collages of Jess Collins. The H. D. Book itself proceeds in part by “midden heap” (originally, a dump for domestic refuse, a “kitchen midden”) making. Duncan deftly deposits lines out of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents—

Since the time when we recognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace, we have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for instance, when regression extends far back enough . . .

—with its marvelous attempt’d metaphor of Rome become “a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history,” a palimpsest (“on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site also Agrippa’s original edifice; indeed, the same ground would support the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built . . .”), a “Penetralium of mystery,” against (next to) “the grand project of the Oxford English Dictionary”: “. . . in the study of language, the same sense of all times indwelling in our time or of the essential person of each in man indwelling in every period of man’s history takes over.” The OED’s first volume appears in 1882. Duncan makes it part of a paradigm shift: “the English language was revealed in layers of usage laid bare, even as the city of Rome had been excavated by archeologists or the Earth by geologists. ‘The past’ of our words, once it was acknowledged, entered into the present of their meaning.” Meaning, something like Olson’s “These Days”—“whatever you have to say, leave / the roots on, let them / dangle // And the dirt // Just to make clear / where they come from”—is previously nigh-inconceivable.

Jess, “Hera Closing With Herakles,” 1960

Jess, “The 5th Never of Old Lear,” 1974

Jess, “Arkadia’s Last Resort; or, Fête Champêtre Up Mnemosyne Creek,” 1976

Awash

Crocuses

Unpreparedness’s dash’d down many a faulty ship, so I climb aboard my own wooden shoe. (The fat moon-wedge sagging like a hammock in the sky.) Marianne Moore repeats Sir Francis Bacon’s line: “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Making me think of something something Blake: no use. Nose in the dirt. Not, certainly:

When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line. both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts. and the prosaic, for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other.     Poetry     Fetter’d.     Fetters the Human Race. Nations are Destroy’d, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy’d or Flourish!

Recalling something something Pound: no use. In a 10 March 1916 letter to John Quinn, Pound says of Blake “that W.B.Y. is always going on about!!!!” that Wyndham Lewis’s got him “scotched to a finish.” Nose, again, in the dirt. All connects broke down. Moore—who loves to delect by divulging any tiny and precise preciosity, any agreeably quaint thing pull’d down off a shelf—says, too, of Bacon, that he “defines moss as “a rudiment between putrefaction and an herb.” (Bacon does so in reporting how “Salomon the king . . . is said to have written a natural history of all that is green from the cedar to the moss”—thus: “the same Salomon the king affirmeth directly that the glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out, as if according to the innocent play of children the divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out.”) Dr. Johnson defines moss simply: “A plant.” Though he quotes Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum: “Moss is a kind of mould of the earth and trees; but it may be better sorted as a rudiment of germination.” Bacon’s propensity to define turn’d to “Poesy”:

Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things . . .

In Johnson’s Dictionary (“The art of writing poems”) one sees how trammel’d Bacon’s pleasure in such “unnatural” severance and joinery got in the supply’d Dryden quote:

                            How far have we
Prophan’d thy Heav’nly gift of poesy?
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debas’d to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordain’d above
For tongues of angels . . .

Out of Dryden’s “Ode to the Pious Memory of the accomplished young lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of Poesy and Painting.”(Johnson’s homage to Dryden points to how “the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry.”) Dryden the refiner. The “Ode” continues: “O wretched we! why were we hurried down / This lubrique and adult’rate age / (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own), / T’increase the streaming ordures of the stage?” Hints of the quash’d “ordures” uprising under every refinery surface. So goeth unpreparedness, floody and unrepentant.

Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

Two

Crocuses

TO HART CRANE

Surely the moon’s white Benzedrine
rinsings look’d aslant and glorious—
like sun-shafts direct’d at
the manger boy’s halo’d knob—
pouring cloud-interrupt’dly down whilst
the Gulf deliver’d up its
final oceanic caul to fetch
you under. In an austere
lot behind a wide-porch’d
and white-paint’d Chagrin Falls
Victorian, black liquid overflow’d a
rose. Stars fell like czars.
Who recalls Verlaine extract’d with-
out tact by a yielding
sailor, half-riant in rain?
Who the seminal casuistry of
of the anguish’d bellying up
against a friendly lick, liquor
in the offing? Who bled
off the saintly excesses of
the groins into such prodigal
verbal sync and synth? Gargantuan
the energy that gather’d, unpatented.
That querulous eyebrow-arching word
circumflex got rhymed with sex.

Hart Crane, 1899-1932

TO STYLE

Brrrrap. Sorry, my bad.
Something disagreed with me.
My essay got call’d
“Hats” by the editorial
collectif. I submit’d it
under the title of
“A Malleable Dander”—no
joke. Whatever comes up
out of the un-
tend’d brute mouths of
the unconquerable gets jettison’d,
automatiquement, is how I
see it. I hate
that kind of talk,
so boilerplate apeshit, so
rabbit-in-a-hat
or scrotum-in-a-
knot, so Little Nemo,
so bounciest baby in
the “pram,” short for
perambulator. I like lying
under the tall tulip
trees and allowing small
tatters of sunlight scissor’d
by the tulip-shaped
leaves to cover my
inappropriate places with honey’d
light. The history of
prudery begins with sloppy
indifference, yak, yak, yak.
It’s like deciding at
the tender age of
nine to toss off
the obduracy of veranda’d
parentage and scoot up
into the hills with
the retriever dog, oh
the slavering yellow dog.

“The Elements of Style”

Emmanuel Hocquard’s Conditions of Light

Along a Fence

One week “off” a few years “back”—spent up north in some kind of swim-sustain’d dalliance, beery and unclutter’d—I truck’d along a copy of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Conditions de lumière (P.O.L., 2007), thinking I’d try my hand at turning its tiny memos into some kind of American speech. And diligently rough’d out about a half of it, penciling it down into a pint-sized stenographer’s pad. A way of both “exercising” my quasi-execrable French, and of reading Hocquard. Minor hint of “doing something” with my versions: I did put a couple “up” here and here and here, f.w.i.w.-ing it like a syntagmatick. (Or a skank.) And shortly learn’d of an effort underway by Jean-Jacques Poucel and Cole Swensen’s La Presse to “do” the whole book. Out now: Conditions of Light (La Presse / Fence Books, 2010). A sleeker, more expert thing, I’d warrant. Hocquard’s book consists of twenty-one number’d parts, each containing five tiny “memos” (my word—snapshots, ideogrammes)—identically-shaped phrase-arrangements. Here’s one (Poucel):

      These flowers are in the middle of their making   I think of you   The noise of laundry Inventing tools and rivers
      Solid white of names

The twenty-one parts (I-XXI): each is call’d “Conditions of Light.” Each “memo” anchors a single page: lots of white space. A final piece (with “Notes”) is call’d “Dans une coupe en verre” (Poucel, dodging “coupe”—with its punnery of cup, of cutting—translates it as “In Glass”). I read it as a kind of statement of poetics:

Propositions are independent Between them relations take place   So propositions follow or attract or repel one another or sound an echo   The narrative unfolds in these encounters Should they come to falter (aporia) a story falls short
      Words are the characters in the grammatical fable   You can only restate   You recite when you speak a language   You can’t hear it any further   You hear only its recitation   I remember words   I recognize them   When you say the sky is blue the entirety of language is contained
      Elegy is not in words of lament   It is in the repetition of the words of a language   It is this repetition   Language in its entirety is elegy
      One never speaks of oneself Never has there been a speaking subject   The only subject there is is grammatical   There is no beginning   There is no first formulation   There is but recollection   In a glass bowl
      Simple statements no longer exist   Every statement is legion Even an isolated word resounds It’s the Theater of language The staging of belief in   Of making believe that   To dream or make dream that a first statement is possible   Such a statement would be unheard and thus inaudible   It remains that this inaudible is secretly sought after in what is said or heard or written   The singular surprise is revealed in repetition   We called it littéralité   Littéralité dazzles
      Even if one does not quite understand what has come to be an unlatching has occurred A difference in intonation and speed
      The intonation of the recitation is neutral   Its speed constant   An interval or an exit space has taken place   For entering never was the question   In speaking or writing or reading or translating one seeks the exit   To escape
      Writing is this opening

Echoes of the put together “abbreviated pictures” / “luminous details” of Poundian imagism / Sillimanesque New Sentence-ry (“Propositions are independent   Between them relations take place”). Something of Duncan’s “law of the ‘the’”—how grammar itself serves to narrow the possibility of saying (“The only subject there is is grammatical”). Something of Spinoza’s “The more any image has reference to many things, the more frequent it is, the more often it flourishes, and the more it occupies the mind.” Or, of Zukovsky’s (out of A Test of Poetry):

The less poetry is concerned with the everyday existence and the rhythmic talents of a people, the less readable that poetry is likely to be. But the forms of particular communication—which are necessary enough for a varied life—may never, in any society, be absorbed as automatically as air.

Or Robert Hass’s “All the new thinking is about loss” line out of “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “word is elegy to what it signifies” (“Language in its entirety is elegy”). Or Italo Calvino’s line somewhere about “this world dense with writing that surrounds us on all sides.” Here’s the initial sequence of five pieces:

      Jusqu’à ce que le corps embrassés aient atteint la même température     Solution des gestes et des vitesses
      Ce qui est visé

      Il n’y a pas de souvenirs Odeur d’un feu de roseaux dans les années 40 en descendant les marches ce dimanche matin
      Photographies symétriques

      Ouvrir sans préposition   Le regard échappe au corps Tourne une porte d’air   La chaleur est l’événement
      Rouge te va bien

      Nuits d’il y a   Aimer par définitions   Les mots dans un ordre quelconque   Penser à sépare
      S’abandonner à la perte

      Une image est captivante Tu sais   Montrer   Donner à voir Escalier dont les degrés ne se suivent pas
      Expose ta couleur

In Jean-Jacques Poucel’s version:

      Until the interlaced bodies reach the same temperature Solution   of   gestures   and speeds
      What is being aimed

      There are no memories   The smell of burning reeds in the 40s that Sunday going down the stairs
      Symmetrical photographs

      Opening without preposition The gaze escapes the body Revolves a door of air   The heat is the event
      Red suits you well

      Nights of ago   To love by definitions     Words  in  any given order   Thinking of separates
      To surrender to loss

      An image is captivating You know       To  show         Lay bare Stairs   whose   steps   don’t follow
      Expose your color

And in my version:

      Up to where the clutching bodies have attained the same temperature Combination of movements and speeds
      The thing aimed for

      No memories   The smell of burning reeds in the ’forties on coming down the steps Sunday morning
      Symmetrical photographs

      Begin without preposition The look escapes the body Makes a door in the air   Heat is the event
      Red becomes you

      Night of there is   To love by definitions     Words in any order whatsoever     Thinking separates
      Abandon yourself to the loss

      A picture seduces   You know To show   To make seen   A stairway whose steps don’t line up
      Put forth your color

Out of Hocquard: “These flowers are in the middle of their making.” And: “The representation of the same is just right.” And “Meaning imposes its fiction.” I keep turning back to Conditions of Light. A late memo reads:

      A light brought back Objects settle in for the long run within the frame Fragment of characters laid out
      Read and arrange

Emmanuel Hocquard

To Doubt

A Wall

TO DOUBT

Pretty soon the dud
recompense of a formula
declares itself and is
avail’d of. The rest
is just the bric-
a-brac of whatever
dependency urges up one’s
brio, or whatever urgency
descends down out of
the sky-fill’d sky.
Phenomenally tumid doubt pricks
the mild audacity of
a hint of quince-
smell tender’d by breezes
arriving “out of nowhere”—
meaning a privet hedge
in a suburb of
Tangiers, or a hedge
fund manager’s motel mini-
fridge, or a Malagasy
boy’s shout of Maloto
ny rano! down a
corridor made by swim-
gear and kayaks dump’d
near the boat landing.
The water is dirty
and the tour sponsor
ought to be notify’d,
though somebody sign’d papers
forfeiting any compensation for
foul-ups resulting out
of irrepressible acts of
God, or His cohort.
That list is endless.

Tom o’ Bedlam