The Grand Piano Notes

Solitary Hollyhock

THE EVERYDAY

Dilute, the hammerings on, dissolute,
The musickings. The necessity of
Populating a saga with extended
Family, one wild-eyed blatherer
Thrashing scrawny legs against a
Park bench in Dupont Circle,
Black-nail’d fingers collapsed around
A brown-bagged bottle of
Something fortify’d, suggesting we ought
To hitchhike out to California.
One a black lump of
Sheets in a Vicks-smelling
Room with draperies blotting out
The flat disc of Ontario’s
Sun. Dispersal and distancing, young
Blades in credit-bought duds
Making off for foreign ports,
Mailing home photographs hinting at
Nothing so much verifiable as loss,
Something gone awry, fires combusting
Up in the prairies, sod
Walls bung’d out, tornadoes licking
Up a swath of earth.
The family sets down stakes
Nowhere and everywhere, plotting out
A tent big enough to
Hold it, a circus of
Particulars, each lowering itself down into the slot of its oneness. Or is it history that is simultaneous, a rash and not a line cut by a knife come suddenly out of nowhere, we were sipping ouzo and now there’s a long row a shiny red globules of blood blistering up along one arm. A succession of simultaneities: how make that visible? The invisible is what’s in plain sight, hidden by the rapt countenances of the visible: history says that. Roberto Calasso says Kafka sensed that “only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named.” Every photograph is called “Local Trees.” Just so, “history” draws its power off a barrier and sequence of dynamos, enormous black shiny turbines, blue with spilled oil, a deafening array. Every story is called “E Pluribus Unum.”
A circus of particulars, accreting
And dispersing with all the
Rampant punctuality of time itself,
The way it so ceaselessly
Courses its bland continuum, though
We inevitably rearrange its doings
To suit makeshift maps of
Longing and encumbrance, speeding off
To goals never realized, or
Nodding off into reveries of
A period of an obsession
With slot cars built to
Run endlessly around tracks at
A cost of so much
Per hour, the place used
To be a roller rink
And skating no longer drew
A crowd. One moved away
Shortly thereafter, and subsequently met
Some new friends with other
Leanings, one an amateur paleontologist,
Another a falconer, thus one’s
Youth got sopped up by
Terribly serious pursuits, though the
Porosity of self that that
Seriousness allowed eventually out’d, and
One turn’d to fiercer regimens
And alcohols and a considerable
Accumulation of something ebbed away,
To no perceivable consternation. It’d
Return at odd moments, trilobites
And brachiopods hacked out of
Shale up where Cargill Salt
Work’d its diggers, a mania
For coastal estuaries. Just the
Way the saga of everyday
Life allows one to go
Off into some other room
And nurture strange expediencies there,
Only to return invigorated, to add some paragraphs “covering the war years” to a piece of writing here, aimless and inconstant, apt to turn on itself like a dog trying to capture a flea between its incisors, biting at the fur of its haunch. Which causes a local itch to launch its trireme fleets across one’s elbow, oaring. Off one goes to put clear the table of signs of eating, knowing it’ll require new settings again shortly.

—

Lyn Hejinian, still “rebellious,” (a word she uses) isn’t going to be bother’d with the body. Not exactly petulantly, though precisely, with the force of clarity (it is the increasingly luminous nature of her writing, unmuss’d, utterly without pretense, nimble, and direct that I love), she stops—after several pages of thinking about the differences between epic and saga—to say:

I’ll get to the 1970s eventually. Force of will alone, however, can’t get me there. I’m caught in the encompassing present moment, demanding and obliging as we know it rationally to be, in which we age and mourn and are unfree.

And, rather like a small joke, at the end of Hejinian’s entry, she admits a kind of writing / body conjunct: “Writing itself provides a perfectly viable site for sequential (and more rarely, simultaneous) alterities. One can cross-dress at one’s desk: one can become a mule, or a goose. I know, because I do so.” “At one’s desk”: the entry begins with “John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run is on my desk” and makes mention of a maelstrom of writers and titles—Henry Darger, Erlich’s Russian Formalism, Kenneth Irby, Wilhelm Dilthey, The Classical Greek Reader, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Ketjak—citing and quoting out of the teeming node and collision, “desk” become site and signal of a primitive exploratory brainbox (that is the body), a kind of energy attractor. About saga and epic:

Power and time are elemental themes of both the epic and the saga, but the two modalities treat them differently. The epic is monumental; it erects power (whether or not its content deals with a quest for power); the saga is long, a testimony to powerlessness. The epic aggrandizes and culminates; the sage chronicles and continues. In its monumentality, its bulk, the epic takes time into itself and posits it as historical fate, the future perfect: that which was and always will have been. The saga, meanwhile, is caught up in the turbulence of time—swept along, sucked into an eddy, left bobbing. Girls would not be on the run in an epic, but they could be in a saga, and often have to be. If the telos of the epic involves nation building, that of the saga is something like the negative of that. The saga depicts the impossibility of empire. Or it portrays the fraying of empire and foresees its inevitable undoing. It focuses on genealogy, sequence, even seriality, and emphasizes the reversal and revolution inherent to generation. Ultimately, the saga is skeptical.

Written in an exemplary conjectural-declarative mode that seemingly allows innumerable ports of entry. A “putting into relation” of two items for epistemological ends, a testing. (A terrible anticipatory eagerness to read Hejinian’s new poem “The Distance” that is the Saga half of the forthcoming Saga/Circus (Omnidawn, 2008). Hejinian quotes some of its opening lines: I am struck and thwarted by this: “I’ve been swept / Against objects, lost habits, / Knowledge grows / But it has to be connected to things. / That connection is usually best achieved / So they say / Through perceiving similarities. No way! [. . .]” The ellipsis—is it wont to justify the rejection of the canny relation? Elsewhere, completely elsewhere, in the Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian collaborations in Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), a rocketship of a book for anybody who’d hie to exploratory, Hejinian says:

Philip Whalen told Joanne Kyger that poetry is to be practiced every day, like play. And just as the little girl playing in the shade with plastic animals would never think to ask if the play was “good” or even “the best she could do,” so the poet shouldn’t ask such questions of her poems.

And isn’t any writing inescapably, prima facie, a putting into relation of things? Word to word, word to thing? Pins jabbed into a map invariably defining a frontier?

What Hejinian says about solitude (circa 1960-1975, pre-Grand Piano, that is, roughly covering the years when she—reflecting back—admired “above all else the heroic nonconformity and rebellious eccentricity of (artistic) genius”):

I believed in progress but with an emphasis on my own progress; I believed in individualism and I thought to develop my own individualism through self-improvement. Calling myself a rebel, I considered myself antisocial; not wanting “to compromise with reality,” I valued solitude; considering “the world” a source of interruptions and distractions, I repeatedly “dedicated myself” myself to poetry.

She admits the portrayal is the result of “a fantasy life that was quite unlike what I actually did every day, but even as I was living a more worldly life than I might have admitted, it was centered in the domestic rather than in the social.” The route to the “social” is not explicitly traced, though one marker provided is the reading of Creeley’s For Love in 1962 after Kenneth Irby present’d it to her (“it is probably with my reading of that book that I date the beginning maturation [surely an odd phrase] of my own literary project,” Hejinian writes, though in the next sentence warns how she doesn’t want to “unduly exaggerate the influence.”) The other marker: the beginning of the Tuumba chapbooks. Is it the “social” one moves into in any attempt to include the world? Hejinian says she “did not stand firm” vis-à-vis that “preference, as a poet, for solitude.” “My work has not had solitude at its center—and it has not been immanently lyric—since at least 1977 . . . ; in fact, my writing seems to have grown, over the years, increasingly populous.” Which seems to correlate the solitary life (hermit scarcity and refusal) with “the lyric” and with a stripped-down de-populated writing. Isn’t that a too reductivist stance? Solitary Henry Darger’s own squads of Vivians counter it. The mark of one’s “beginning maturation” is, I’d argue, not found in the “social” so much as in one’s finding a way to integrate one’s writing with the overwhelming saga of everyday life with all its claims various and concomitant. An entirely individual task, that is: determining a right (shifting) permeability for that membrane.

S=O=L=I=T=A=R=Y

Some Notes on Lyn Hejinian’s “The Distance”

Locks

A YEAR

LXXVI
High maudlin hincty,
that’s one way
to put it.

Grief pull’d down
like a peek-
a-boo thing,

a veil, a
“never heard the
likes of that.”

Impresario with cheroot,
with cravat, with
a direct line

to ignominy’s kitchen
(dishing out hash-
browns and reds).

“Girl, you work
that Facebook” is
one thing I

recall. And Pound’s
making a work-
table, “furniture registers

a habit of
mind.” He puts
no board flat

against another & achieves
an uncommon rigidity,
support’d by nails.

—

1. In the opening lines (in the first number’d section) of “The Distance”—in Lyn Hejinian’s two-poem book Saga / Circus (Omnidawn, 2008)—is an implicit nod to William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things” follow’d by an emphatic (and rather uncharacteristically petulant (a foot-stomp for Hejinian)) dismissal of the powers of metaphor:

Knowledge grows
But it has to be connected to things.
That connection is usually best achieved
So they say
Through perceiving similarities. No way!

Why, then, is the poem chock’d full of figure? Nigh immediately one encounters “forbidding clouds of hemlock and pine, a forest that was / Like a terrestrial sky.” If the story is a particularly gender’d one of a woman “Banned from ships as if I were fate / Herself”—note the personification in the opening lines—for whom “it came about / That the ban to my surprise was lifted / Suddenly one fall / And I went to sea after all,” is something being suggest’d regarding the gendering of perception? And what exactly is it?

2. I start’d with “The Distance.” (I’d read—and heard Hejinian read—some parts of “Lola”—the “Circus” part of Saga / Circus in the Belladonna-print’d chapbook of that title. It—the look of it—is Williamsesque, too: the Williams of the jumbled chapters of the experimental prose works, Spring and All or Kora in Hell or The Great American Novel.)

3. Is it “merely accidental” that “The Distance” comprised thirty-seven number’d sections? Hejinian’s My Life in its first (Burning Deck) version contain’d thirty-seven chapters (each of thirty-seven sentences).

4. Hejinian makes it plain in “The Distance”’s second part that if—in the new found world of the ship (the ship, too, named The Distance)—things seem knowable with a kind of animated immediacy (“The planet seems young—raucous, ravenous, quick, and wet. The planet exists / With gusto. Things fall to it and sink, things are rooted in it / And rise,” it is the emotions (“Obscure emotions”) that remain beyond the epistemological horizon, veil’d, undefinable. Hejinian:

                It’s impossible
To clear the way and come within
Sight of my subject. Obscure
Emotions cling to it—obscuring emotions. The analytical imagination
Naturally undertakes analysis of the imagination
While the emotional imagination does what, emote? I’ve tried to give emotions
The slip
By attributing them to other people
Named Felix, Sasha, Nils, Miroire, and when a new one
Rises I will call it Sam
Or Angelique, an iffy strategy
At best.

5. Is the problem one of knowing one’s emotions, or of knowing oneself (and the world) without the emotions interceding, without the emotional “pull” that deflects (and contorts) the knowing?

6. Late in the poem—in the thirty-sixth section—there’s a rather disturbing reply to the “iffy strategy” of naming (and mustn’t it, too, “apply” to metaphorical larking, knowing things by similarity?) Emotion, in Hejinian’s terms, comes to seem a void:

There’s only an inside to an emotion, there’s nothing
On it to grasp, nothing
To be seen of it, it’s nothing
But a structure without a form, a structure incapable of producing
A form, I feel all that I feel but there’s nothing
There, nothing
Could be there: an emotion is held
In an absence together only
With the strength of an interior—anterior—presence.

I hear Cordelia / Lear in the repeat’d “nothing”—both Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing” and Cordelia’s “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth.” There is, too, something of the same thrilling integrity to Hejinian’s lines (here and elsewhere), thrilling in a poetry world of Gonerils and Regans.

7. Too, I hear John Ashbery (particularly the Ashbery of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”). Think of lines like these:

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

Put that next to, say, these lines of Hejinian (out of section XXIV):

We are a tilted species
Dipping and lunging forward, swinging our baskets
Of eggs, stuck to our shadows
Which gravity in turn sticks to life
Throughout the long days that night disarrays.
The fog is taking shape, it is forming
Gulls and longshoremen, dolphins and cities
It sweeps from a sliding circle
Whose circumference lies beyond the edges of the field
Of vision by which we are engulfed. It leaps
From under a sheet and mumbles a sound that might have been a word—
It was probably not.

8. Hejinian’s working a terrific line, one that’s willing to go “out” to magnificent ends, or stop short, break off, entirely, blissfully flexible. I want to call it a glacial line—it picks up everything in its path (and’s capable of eventually depositing it anywhere). Never compell’d before to attend to the line-breaks: here, the highly enjamb’d lines work up ambiguity, irony, wonder, by turns. “But I am throwing off conviction, bound / To regard the sea.”

9. Troubling, still, the workings of metaphor. If Hejinian (presumably attempting to plumb an emotional state, or identify with it) writes—in a whole slew of quick-outing “feelings” (disbelief, ambivalence, scorn) in section X—of:

               thinking of the hateful
Regret rescued from a log somewhere
Off Tierra del Fuego three years ago and now
Confined to a stinking cage
Which she (Jane thinks she’s female) filthies (she even shits
In her water dish) and into which I stare
Without being able to discover any grounds at all
For affinity.

And it continues, later—“we are stuck / With Regret”—and I want to ask how that’s any different from, say, John Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress with Hypocrisy (companion of Formalist) or Timorous (companion of Mistrust) or Pliable trying to avoid the Slough of Despond?

—

Continuing (likely).

Lyn Hejinian
(Photograph by Carolyn Andrews)

Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian’s Situations, Sings

Some Clouds (Sturgeon Bay, Michigan)

Out of Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), a book of collaborations by Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, a book I “turn to” constantly, something of its rambunctious clarity (“not merely zany”) and purpose (it means to find, and finds means to that end) goads me gently well. Here, lines pluck’d out of “Revival” (done up in, according to the “Postface,” a form “loose, even casual . . . unfolding without any other goal than that of discovering (or generating) the surprises contingent on unfolding itself”):

The point was, it put the fire out. We breathed again, looked about. Nothing
          but blue / blue
Depths were mirrored in the blue / blue heights. The driven plenitude
Reminding me of a waterfall laid on edge, nodding off perhaps, but still
          radiant of its very definition. Soon
—As “soonness”—the waters, having fallen, (will) flow, defining “down”
          —aimlessly
According to strict laws that are nevertheless so tiny dawn throws its hands up
          in surprise
As if declaring independence so as to take its own view of things as they
          dispose themselves constantly along the stream or on its banks anew
Slowly, in such a slowness, in fact, that the generative point in the heart of
          action’s initiation is calm, is as calm as a pebble of granite underground
In contrast to which a drop of moisture in a cloud seems wild
As fire. But it’s winter. The excitement of cold is like that of marriage, in the
          pressure
That propels the wind that animates the tree that, just as Lin-yi says, in
          achieving nothing achieves everything
At once. The shade alone’s worth all the light that borders it, sometimes more
Tree than shadow of tree and at night neither. As for me, I’m in no particular
          hurry
To achieve the general. My split personality only guarantees embrace
Of ambiguity and ambivalence both coming or going through the always-
          open windows that at night admit breezes so cold that as I write this
          I wear a knitted nightcap
Because it’s too thick to drink. Oh well, I have the feeling house and land are
          sliding at a good rate
Back from reality, where events come to pass that were long predicted and
          can be regarded in retrospect as having been inevitable, though that’s
          not to say that they were destined to happen. Or is it
Not vanity to say that Destiny, like Cleopatra, presents a “poop of beaten gold,”
          in contrast to the thick steel plates of inevitability
That reflect the light of the setting sun and bar us from entering
The enlisted mess of “The Golden Vanity” before repetition swallows
          distinctions and substitutes metamorphoses for them? Who
Knows (i.e., who cares)? The opaque clouds veiling the sun above seem like
          emblems of a state of
Declare passed through a condition of stage, basically a white seed
Of optimism sprouting in the soil of uncertainty.

Which’s got all the marvels of le style Ashbery (particularly of Flow Chart?), languors and hoops made of its own verbiage it then inserts the needle of its going into. (—And isn’t that “Destiny” with its “poop of beaten gold” the name of Hejinian’s ship in “The Distance,” being the “saga” half of Saga / Circus? —No, compadre, the ship’s call’d “The Distance,” too.) In the “Postface” Collom and Hejinian mention how they “opted to communicate by ‘snail-mail’ rather than use a faster technology,” in part “to preserve the unhurried pace of the more traditional, contemplative epistolary space.” (Long unrecord’d ruminant churnings about loss of chances / realms / vehicles for spates of unstint’d mulling, the meek contemplative discharges . . .) One thing I find curious about the pieces in Situations, Sings: how seamlessly meld’d they seem. There is little of that back-chatter that usually occurs in one’s own greasy brainbox at the reading of the majority of collaborations: the talk that says, “Oh, that’s Hejinian there, that’s a Hejinian sentence.” Though, parcel’d out here and there (or drop’d in): jokey half-refs to the duality of the thing (see “My split personality” above). The final lines of “Shims”—the final lines of the book—point there precisely:

Two aphorisms never meet
because structure intervenes
—truth’s contradictory
hedge

Mr. Keats: “Hedge crickets sing.” Any naturalist knows how the hedgerow, the buffer-zone, the borderline where things try to “meet” is rife—that’s where the count erupts, diversity of species, habitat overlap, a place of possibility and doubt, hedging of bets—song sparrow or Ipswich—truth is contradictory. My other prefer’d song in the book is “Wicker”: “The material in the left hand column of “Wicker” consists of quotations from famous, unknown, or purely imaginary, people. Many of the quotations are correctly attributed; some are not.” Reading, then, down, sequentially (though beginning rather randomly):

Here is a sketch of eye-
glasses—two circles joined
by a crossbar—so it must
be a bicycle or maybe two
buckets on a yoke.
(A. R. Luria)

Because there is Friction be-
tween the balls, a cueball
with left-hand spin will
grip the object ball for an
instant and throw it off-line
to the right.
(Robert Byrne)

I burst into tears and
stretching my hands appealed
to the humanity of the
audience; but no one would
raise even a finger to help me.
(Apuleius)

“my own end?” “But the
yellow eyes multiplied,”
“became so numerous” “that
the blackness was covered
over” “by them”
(Alice Notley)

The gigantic eye of Tolstoy
opens and closes many times
and at many doors—a kind
of primitive wooden flicker.
(Barrett Watten)

Other names: Yellow-shafted
Woodpecker; Golden-winged
Woodpecker; Clape; Yellow-
hammer; High-hole; Yarrup;
Wake-up; Wood-pigeon; Heigh-
ho; Wick-up; Hairy Wicket;
Yawker-bird; Walk-up.
(Birds of America, T. Gilbert
Pearson, ed.)

I see a woodpecker and then
know that my body’s a piece
of wood. I’m stroking the
dog and then I know that this
dog’s gonna bite my feet.
(Dave Van Ronk)

Is it the uncertainty of attribution, or the de-contextual piecework (more accurately, “re-contextual”—there’s obviously a fine mite of selecting and arranging here—how Apuleius’s distress triggers Notley’s “end” amidst the yellow-eyed, witness’d by Watten’s Tolstoian eye banging like a wooden shutter, “flicker” pick’d up—my bet here’s on Collom, who knows birds, doing the detective work, and isn’t “Heigh-ho” as a bastardy of “High-hole” a terrific bird name?—for a lovely raft of vernacular, and the Dave “Stomping Through the Swamp” Van Ronk coming out of who knows where?)—what is it that makes the sequence so live-wired, throwing off sparks? Parallel to it, in a second column (with its own set of “rules”—a 2, 3, 4, 5, 3 number of words per line and an repetition compulsion—“the last line of each stanza is repeated as the second line of the next—setting up an interlinkage that is intentionally tricky”):

reflections moving
to touch at
themselves, so we went
wading in a river with
clear optical echoes

see? see?
clear optical echoes
e-c-h-o
that’s really just one of
them, one of

us, imitating
them, one of
them having turned into
a bird; but it’s turning
out of it

and into
“out of it”
itself—the century lays
an egg; Coyote Chronos cracks,
sucks it up

wonders who
sucks it up,
self-consciousness not being his
impediment to act or age
as it’s ours

and hours
as it’s ours
and years to suck
a Middle-Ages donjon rampart made
of crushed labels

and labors
of crushed labels
we domesticate as walls
that suggest art to literary
or scientific intellectuals

I find that rather thin, a little extraneous to the main “play” of the piece. Or maybe the rules too obvious, and too constraining. (The same time: I wouldn’t leave it “out” for a minute. It is the brash rectitude of inclusion that I like in both Hejinian’s and Collom’s work, singly and doubly.) What I long for: the publication of the Collom / Hejinian “Interview” (a big chunk show’d up in the first volume of the Zoland Poetry annual). In the “Postface” again:

      Beginning with the exchange of free-verse lines that (some 300 mailings later) became Sunflower (originally published by The Figures in 2000), we gradually multiplied and diversified our projects. Soon, a typical exchange would include ten or so formally different works.
      Only one of these works, called “Interview,” is not included in this volume; we anticipate that it will appear as an independent book, a companion (though not a necessary companion) to this one.
      Apart from “Interview,” all the poems we’ve composed together to date are collected here. There are eleven of them.

Jack Collom

Lyn Hejinian
(Photograph by Paul Kiparsky)

A YEAR

CCXXX
“A series of blind grabs”
is one way, abuttings sans
jointure. That base Hoosier predilect
for the monstrous penny-pegged
to the genealogical. A zillion-
leaf’d tree of rain, my
darling, my paulownia, my figwort.
Assiduous chums, perfect nuts, migratory
souls hunker’d for a spell
along the Wabash. Isn’t walking
a structure of itself, omni-
contiguous and moving? It digresses
the too plausible march, makes
pulling a tendon a pathological
Dietrich. I pull my hat
down low, kerchief up—“a
penurious cinema of thinking, Abu.”
I hurry up the negligee-
bunch’d urine-puddlers, adding naught
to the fat tomes of
hurry, or of story. Beyond
the ectoplasmic slouch of my
benign hoofery through a chaos
of rents, I see something
airy and incapable of tomfoolery.
It is an adjutant, adjutant.

Some Notes on Lyn Hejinian’s “The Distance”

The River at Delhi

A YEAR

LXXVII
The fields completely denuded now, and the fresher green
Isn’t in evidence much, a pentimento of green under the rough
Straw-color’d coarser grasses that’ll slough off with the push.
Denuded of snow I mean. Push of green. Cecilia
Bartoli is barking out a series of high-pitch’d notes, an implacable
Stairway of notes descending into some lower ruminant region
Where the oboe signals for the tenor’s story about the wolves of
Gubbio, something like that. Home, I flopped down to read about Grace
Hartigan’s Pallas Athena portraits (classical temper’d air the result of
The tutelage of Barbara Guest). It’s possible that getting overly caught
Up in thinking about that (and how the sky’s shiny whiteness look’d
Like the belly of a smallmouth bass) made me fall to sleep briefly
Enough that, waking, I recall’d the gruff-impeded voice (with a hint of
Slobbery looseness that probably got mistook for mere
Lasciviousness rather than a shy man’s radical impetuosity) of James
Schuyler reading “Hymn to Life.” Particularly where he says something
About “spring hints and wintry arrears” or compares the sizes of
Monuments, or, with a nomenclature born out of love of the world’s
Smaller inhabitants, the furry and the succulent, mute onlookers to crazy
Human doings, refers to the “mouse-eared chickweed,” a hardy returning
Thing.

—

10. One’d do well (I suspect) to trace and record (thinking of the lumbering dinosaur “concordances” assembled in pre-computer-rife days) all the references to music in Lyn Hejinian’s “The Distance” (in Saga / Circus). Though I don’t immediately assign Hejinian to the highest ranks of “writers with an ‘ear’” (I think her complicated rhythms occlude any too splendid tonality—she’s a drummer, polyrhythmic, off-beat, jagged with hard salients and plush with sibilants by turns), I think she attends to music’s possibility for sheer meaning-registration to a T. (Yeah.) She puts it more clearly (part XXIV):

                                  It leaps
From under a sheet and mumbles a sound that might have been a word—
It was probably not. It is late
Afternoon before it hesitates. It says something
Inseparable from what it doesn’t say
But of course that would be the case—we’re talking about music.
A buzzer goes off.

That saying of “something / Inseparable from what it doesn’t say” is a kind of saying of the all, isn’t it, a fine-tuned nigh-invisible dialectical spin? (I see I fall into a visual perception / interpretation of the phrase: I am picturing a card turn’d rapidly, spun between two strings. On one side of the card a basket; on the other a ball. The way the spinning puts the ball in the basket.) Elsewhere (part XII) Hejinian speaks of “the sound in the sounds” and notes (part XVIII) how “the distance . . . / Presses against the distance / With the force of music—loud with drums—nothing / Interrupts us—we are in an interruption” and parallels that state to “clarity / Which is perfect and perfectly refuses / Dialectic.”

11. Is (musical) sounding itself—beyond aural décor, beyond ornament—an investigatory “tool,” a means of thinking? It is, in “The Distance,” associated both with the sea and with the distance. Here (part XIX):

                      The sea
Is never silent—it subjects one to sound—the at the only name I know
For the distance. It has noisy spans.
They rumble and splash as the ropes pong
Against the stanchions, the decks roar
With cold. I know these words.
My thoughts are dead without them.

And, in a lovely stretch (part VIII): “It’s not quick / Thinking that will save us. The constant commentary of the sea is so slow / The simplest remark can take it years / To utter.” I begin to commingle the tropes (I think it’s right to perceive the turns and turnabouts so): the sea, sound, the distance (and the vessel call’d The Distance), thinking, writing—all truculent undertows ongoing, white noise out of which things emerge, get examined, plunge back. Another example (the tenor of the metaphorical vehicle cut loose):

          She is called the Distance and we go where she goes and arrive
Willy-nilly at times and places of whose existence we’d known nothing before
And which therefore, though we come upon them inevitably, we reach
Involuntarily. There
Is always somewhere and always in or at it
Something—whether material or musical—

Metaphorical thinking. (I persist in sensing some upheaval of Hejinian’s means here. In a seemingly autobiographical sketch, recalling an aunt who call’d champagne “sham pine,” Hejinian, labelling the aunt’s airs (and flights?) those of “a mock soldier and a real fool,” claims: “I took things literally; I equated the literal with the authentic.” No longer?)

12. What to do with the lines that gender metaphor-making? “We are used to being reviled as makers of metaphors / And feared. Men have accused us / Of witchery. . .” (Part XI).

13. It’s hard not to read some parts of “The Distance” as simply (simply?) enumerating the ups and downs of Lyn Hejinian’s writing life. So often there’s the buoyant “sense of well-being, excitement, and resignation—all of these / At once but separately”—that rakes at one’s familiar. Or, there’s a kind of (wryly humorous) assessment (of a career? Of a troublesome period of doubt?):

                    Whited-out, I despair
Of getting myself right and if that’s not the despair
Of the vain I don’t know what is.
Humorlessly the humorless cook has been trying
To force me into explanations. I communicate
Nothing. It could be I’m lazy,
But no one has said as much. I have a stack of pages to my credit, after all.
I’ve drawn elevations, projected horizons, balanced rocks
On waves, and I can declare that in both there is as much past as future. But what
Of the present? I’m projecting horizons I can’t see. I might as well be writing
Novels, it being the point of fiction as of science to enable us to perceive
How others live, how other things are.
They exist like us, alone.

“They exist like us, alone.” How to read that? With a tone of, what, dismissive reassurance?

14. I thrash and reiterate. Cannot quell the swoll’d up wave-lashings of the piece, cannot make it into anything pocketable. No need for that. Still. I did not explore the way history loops through “The Distance,” or a war is somewhere out there, or all the places where a thing is wrapped around by itself (“Doubt grasps / At the very thing / It doubts”) or the sentences that one puzzles together (or dissects) like a tangram (“Life can’t be studied / As if it were the nonlife of something / Lived by someone studying.”) I like this (amidst much else, it should be obvious, I can’t stop quoting for the pleasure of putting the words down, letting words heap up vociferous and sightly). I like it largely for its sense of balance (rocks on waves, life and “onslaught of / Meaningfulness”) (Is there a pun in that first sentence, “my life” and My Life, the way the writ inevitably inflows into (torques, diseases) the writing and the life?):

                    The first element
To impose its influence on me was my life. But life cannot stem
The onslaught
Of meaningfulness. I’ve committed
That to paper, ‘that of which one cannot speak,’ ‘I’
Registering a boundary. That’s sentimental
Which is what all ruptures generate
And all gaps demarcate
And there’s no ‘and so’ nor ‘but’ nor ‘meanwhile’
That can limit the irony. Irony is the limit.

Lyn Hejinian
(Photograph by Alan Bernheimer)

“Seeing Is Not Interesting”

Homage to Joe Brainard

THE EVERYDAY

25
Net change in unrealizable appreciation
Equal to cancelled disbursements minus
Applicable participant transactions: who’s in?
Fees incurred on overdrafts by
Unaffiliated borrowers equal to gravity
Of the requests: is that
A hand up there? Underivable
Pricing matrices cover defaults along
The axis of unforeseeable maturities:
There’s a stack of repurchase
Agreements on the table here.
The dog is delirious after
A day expend’d amorously guarding
The opossum’s “hole” she’s dug
Next to the shed. I
Suspect a thorough investigation’d determine
Only the skank’s left, the
Beast itself hied off opprobrious
Of that kind of unrelenting
Love. I knew a girl
Like that. So the dog
Flops down to bivouac next
To a pile of library
Books, a rotating cache, meat
Of my solitary researches into
Rustick airs and Flaubert’s own
Defiable Carthage. I read a
Few pages of Marianne Moore.
She isn’t afraid of adjectival
Bluster and pin, is characteristically
Accurate. If it’s summer it
Is permissible and proper to
Say summer. With the autumnal
Sting entering the air, I
Recall (soak’d in the briny
Nostalgia of a single tear—
Here it is, penny-sized)
My poke-salad days with
Lady Bracegirdle, the saga of
The errant avoirdupois, the circus
Of my legerdemain. Levity rode
Sidesaddle throughout: we’d glommed “onto”
One another at the headbanger’s
Ball, shining young aesthetes amongst
All the crockery, like Zelda
And F., a man with
The monicker of a cat.
Of the master-piece (she
Likes to expose its parts
That way) Gertrude Stein says,
“It may be unwelcome but
It is never dull.”

—

Ned Rorem says Stephen Spender says “German art constantly moves, comes toward you and passes like a train; but the whole French aesthetic is based on cooking in a series of additions (a pinch of garlic here, some tomato sauce there).” And Rorem adds, rather brilliantly demolishing the argument by means of noting its form, that “the curt preciousness” of Spender’s kind of expression is “basically French already,” and therefore the opinion “cannot, for the moment, mean anything.” Did I ever report how, monstrously drunk, I attempt’d a conversation with Spender (about what, aucune idée, he, too, apparently schnocker’d as a pup) and got royally distract’d by the way he, discreetly holding a tumbler of whiskey between pinky and thumb, kept clawing the ice-cubes out of it—they bounced around the carpet at ’s feet—all throughout a peroration? Rorem’s obsessions: death, particularly gruesome death, and alcohol. He’s a brilliant fabulist, too. In Morocco:

A few minutes ago, as I was sitting on the toilet reading Giraudoux, a big insect flew in the window. It looked like a wingèd scorpion with a Frankenstein head. It hovered hypnotized, stared at me, quivered a full minute, and then flew off again. But I could do nothing more.

—

Had to re-read Stein’s “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” with heighten’d attention after skimming it yesterday. It is, of course, largely an argument for imagination, the way it’ll shrill down out of nowhere and abscond off with one’s “self” entirely. Subsequent temporary loss of “identity”—that bland regular construct of memory and time—its replacement by “entity,” a kind of recording angel, a Martian, everybody’s got a name for it. I like how she puts the kibosh to mere description (“seeing is not interesting”)

The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one.

Seeing, being the body, is only the occasion of a firing, a “launching pad” into that entitative state (Stein: “any moment when you are you . . . without the memory of yourself”) that allows for the writing (of master-pieces). And, to worry the motor-mouth poetics crowd: “talking essentially has nothing to do with creation.” Though one’d argue with some chance of bringing down a quarry that “the dilatory preciousness” of Stein’s interminable yakking is “basically a sign of identity refusing to relinquish itself to entity already,” and therefore Stein’s opinion “cannot, for the moment, mean anything.” (One hedges one’s bets with lectures and “literary formalism.” As Stein admits of “I write for myself and strangers”: “that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity.”)

A final scribbled thing: “the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation.” The untether’d.

—

“Absent jusqu’à lundi. Soyez sages.”

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946