“Maudlin, yawning, uncertain . . .”

Awning

Fetch’d the bicycle out of the gritty drubbings of the snowbank, now gone, it’d lean’d against all winter, and rode it in, in the skunk-scent’d “morn.” Stuck in the big-shoulder’d city all weekend, back home for midnight’s sour reproach, a beer and a few maudlin Audenisms prised off the page. (Everywhere now one sees Audenesqueries ready for Ashbery’s plucking—who’d begin a sestina call’d “Have a Good Time” with “‘We have brought you,’ they said, ‘a map of the country; / Here is the line that runs to the vats, / This patch of green on the left is the wood, / We’ve pencilled an arrow to point out the bay . . .”?) So that—with the disorientating clock-change—one succumbs to pawing at finicky relativisms, forever detailing only how serendipity, that cataclysm, refuses to yield its runty nug “up” out of the oceanic reams of page-turning (Dickinson full leveling drone is apt here: “Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush / I hear the level Bee . . .” or Faulkner’s line in “The Bear” about how “the engine’s exhaust was already slatting in mounting tempo against the unechoing wilderness, the crashing of draw-bars once more travelling backward along the train, the caboose picking up speed . . .”) Something there is that frets against mere conjurers today: the world too plat’d into its zones of misery and the seemingly temporally redeem’d. (Think of Stephen Spender, in 1935, quoting Yeats with approval: “We can no longer permit life to be shaped by a personified ideal, we must serve with all our faculties some actual thing.” And adding: “The ‘actual thing’ is the true moral or widely political subject that must be realized by contemporary literature, if that literature is itself to be moral and serious.”) Though, wary of any ideology, one unpits—recall that decorticate is defined not by the ripping out of the heart, but by the stripping off of a disguise—the lousy demagogue with Auden’s “I saw the brain-track perfected, laid for conveying / The fatal error, / Sending the body to islands or after its father, / Cold with a razor . . .” A leaner train, merciless with certainty. “Certain”: how it is liable to convey a select’d particular, a choice against a sense of the unerring, the sure, the restrict’d and fix’d (“Knowledge no need to us whose wrists enjoy the chafing leash”), that narrowing danger of the “moral and serious” strain. In Auden’s commonplace book, A Certain World, he records Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s definition of a donkey as “A horse translated into Dutch.” Or, fittingly for today, two versions of the sonnet “Brussels in Winter.” One out of the 1945 Collected Poetry:

Wandering the cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains silent in the frost,
The city still escapes you; it has lost
The qualities that say “I am a Thing.”

Only the homeless and the really humbled
Seem to be sure exactly where they are,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like the Opera.

Ridges of rich apartments rise tonight
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn the stranger right
To warm the heartless city in his arms.

Versus the one out of Another Time (1940):

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

An industrious unslumbering man’d assess the various changes and “unpack” (is it here one finds the fons et origo of that term? the way it’s annoyingly become dud-workingman’s vocab for the roll’d-up sleeves variety of critic?) that drover’s van of meanings like a man, phrasal, certain, and adept, though I am not that man . . .

W. H. Auden, 1907-1973

Auden’s Whitman, &c.

In a Window

Grousing without precinct, unprepared in the lurch. A stolid half-drizzle, with fog. “One writes in order to leave off reading” (Norma Cole). Though, impertinently, a day goes by without that kind of unsully’d impingement. Just implacable reveries and minimal onslaught. Girdings up, readjustments. Looking about at the commonplaces of today’s story’d renegades, the lazy collectors and purveyors of the info-detritus, page by page (call it “conceptual”). W. H. Auden, out of “Whitman and Arnold”:

What [Arnold] said of the Romantics, “They did not know enough,” was no less true of himself. But this lack of knowledge was not, as he imagined, lack of classical and scientific book-learning, it was social isolation from “the dirt.” “Everything comes out of the dirt, everything—everything comes from the people, the everyday people,” wrote Whitman, and he was right. But so was Arnold when he attacked Whitman’s lack of discrimination. Flowers grow out of dunghills, certainly, but the flower and the dunghill are not the same thing. Whitman was so busy accepting everything, that he forgot to notice that one thing differs from another. A doctor and a disease, a gangster and a gasman, are all brute facts that have to be accepted as facts, but they differ in significance, and it is the business of the generalising intellect to fit them into an intelligible order.

(Auden’s concluding—“The dirt is getting tired of being just dirt”—provokes a gabble against a lack. That preening necessary monster of selectivity. Putting the energies of the world into some kind of integral or derivative, a seizable tracery of relation. Auden allows how “Matthew Arnold may have been a prig” and reckons up a necessity—against Whitman’s all-reaching illimit’d “congratulations”—for “Arnold’s cold accusing voice.”) Obviously, though, Auden himself quells no boundlessness within. He, too, randoms with capaciousness, cataloging:

As the gay productive months slip by, in spite of fretful discouraged days, of awkward moments of misunderstanding or rather, seen retrospectively as happily cleared up and got over, verily because of them, you are definitely getting the hang of this, at first so novel and bewildering, relationship between magician and familiar, whose deity it is to sustain your infinite conceptual appetite with vivid concrete experiences. And, as the months turn into years, your wonder-working romance into an economical habit, the encountered case of good or evil in our wide world of property and boredom which leaves you confessedly and unsympathetically at a loss, the aberrant phrase in the whole human cycle of ecstasy and exhaustion with which you are imperfectly familiar, become increasingly rare. No perception however petite, no notion however subtle, escapes your attention or baffles your understanding; on entering any room you immediately distinguish the wasters who throw away their fruit half-eaten from the preservers who bottle all the summer; as the passengers file down the ship’s gangway you unerringly guess which suitcase contains indecent novels; a five-minute chat about the weather or the coming elections is all you require to diagnose any distemper, however self-assured, for by then your eye has already spotted the tremor of the lips in that infinitesimal moment while the lie was getting its balance, your ear already picked up the heart’s low whimper which the capering legs were determined to stifle, your nose detected on love’s breath the trace of ennui which foretells his early death, or the despair just starting to smoulder at the base of the scholar’s brain which years hence will suddenly blow it up with one appalling laugh: in every case you can prescribe the saving treatment called for, knowing at once when it may be gentle and remedial when all that is needed is soft music and a pretty girl, and when it must be drastic and surgical, when nothing will do any good but political disgrace or financial and erotic failure.

A wallop out of “Caliban to the Audience” (The Sea and the Mirror), a kind of model for Ashbery’s prose doings in Three Poems. (Too, Auden’s lines out of the Ashbery-laud’d—though Auden himself call’d it “a case of the fair notion fatally injured,” an example of “good ideas which [Auden’s own] incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much”—The Orators, “A system organizes itself, if interaction is undisturbed. Organization owes nothing to the surveyor. It is in no sense pre-arranged. The surveyor provides just news,” seem to indemnify the radically including gush. Surely Ashbery’s frequently quoted (“The New Spirit”) lines, “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me to leave all out would be another, and truer, way. . .” sups off the Auden plate. Too, there’s Auden in “D. H. Lawrence” (out of The Dyer’s Hand), planking the E pluribus unum’d particular against the welter: “Whitman looks at life extensively rather than intensively. No detail is dwelt upon for long; it is snapshotted and added as one more item to the vast American catalogue. But Lawrence in his best poems is always concerned intensively with a single subject, a bat, a tortoise, a fig tree, which he broods on until he has exhausted its possibilities.”

Broods precipitously to exhausting. The distinct become indistinct under the exam. (Fog mash-up.) Auden’s brutal quip (The Orators): “It is a sure sign of a busybody if he talks of laissez-faire.” (Or, in the conceptualist’s “universe”: “busy body.”) Off, then, into the wordless welter, where choices matter. Auden (“Prospero to Ariel”):

But now all these heavy books are no use to me any more, for
      Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,
Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel
      To the silent dissolution of the sea
Which misuses nothing because it values nothing;
      Whereas man overvalues everything
Yet, when he learns the price is pegged to his valuation,
      Complains bitterly that he is being ruined which, of course, he is,
So kings find it odd they should have a million subjects
      Yet share in the thoughts of none, and seducers
Are sincerely puzzled at being unable to love
      What they are able to possess . . .

W. H. Auden, c. 1938

The Grand Piano Notes

Drain and Spigot

Lyn Hejinian, in a piece call’d “Amor Fati” (The Grand Piano 10) that contains, among a welter of other things—assessment and appreciation of the works of Jean Day (work wherein the world “in the conditions of late capitalism” appears “fatefully inscribed”; work that “recurrently explores the documentary elements that get written into events and appear in retrospect as debris from cosmic happenstance”) being chief amongst these—an irreproachable report concerning Hejinian’s actions (and those of others, including Day) during the fail’d “open rebellion” (The New Yorker) against enormous fee increases at Berkeley in 2010, seems determined to join “the fact . . . of contemporary, polymorphous heterogeneity”—the onslaught and noise of the “era,” that of “the ravaging perniciousness and utter pervasiveness of late capitalism”—to both a decenter’d model for “resistant political action” and a sense of Adornoesque “late style” wherein “subjectivity . . . is now at large.” Hejinian quotes Adorno (out of “Late Style in Beethoven”): “Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final word.” The implicit power in accepting one’s final dispersal, the blooming terse rebuttal of any sense of efficacy, political or poetical. Providing a ground against powerlessness. Hejinian, explicating (and quoting) Adorno: “The artist no longer brings the objective (that which is to be formed through the exercise of subjectivity) and the subjective (that which is being removed from objective possibility by death) into ‘harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.’” The upshot: one gains, out of fissiparousness and release, unregulated and wanton, a kind of sublime mastery. The via negativa: complete and radical loss approaching (some kind of) divinity. Hejinian (after admitting “The problem of art in the context of politics is not that art is insufficiently or erroneously political” and “I have no interest in dragging art into the political arena or coercing it to make statements. Nor do I want to impose a political connotation on particular works of art”):

      Politics may promise that control is merely a prerequisite to efficacy, and that contestation takes place over issues pertinent to society—whether local, national, or global—rather than control per se, but control itself often turns out to be the goal (and hence the limit) of political activity, even perhaps for political visionaries.
      Postmodern art, meanwhile, including Language writing, may still pretend to establish control (over materials, forms, ideas), but it knows it can (or can no longer) do so. Its efforts at control are spurious, desperate, doomed (and perhaps unwanted)—and it is precisely this, the inaccessibility of control—that provides postmodern art with its paradoxical sublimity: it is both life-filled (particular and teeming) and death-obsessed (unidentifiable and oceanic).

Language writing and control. Vex’d, comme on dit. (That howling abyss chez Language writing between eager “Choose Your Own Adventure” claims for the Barthean “writerly” (scriptable)—“ the writerly text is ourselves writing” text and a history (including The Grand Piano booklets) of trying to control its story itself, of suppressing “unfriendly” responses to it. Isn’t any attempt at control in the loud buzzing arena of art doom’d? It is.

Is there a slight shift legible herein in Hejinian’s sense of the “function of art”? She writes of a several-decade’s belief in its use in making “unremarkable things in life lively again”:

The assumption I’ve made is that . . . art should dehabituate us to our lived experiences, make the familiar unfamiliar and fascinating again, rejuvenate perception, and so on. Boris Eikhenbaum’s remark that “the process of perception in art is an end in itself and is supposed to be prolonged” or Viktor Shklovsky’s insistence that “the purpose of art is to make a stone stony” have seemed exactly right and entirely adequate.

Under the “info-glut” banner (“Our senses are not dulled by familiarity; rather we are stupefied . . . by the plethora of distractions that rather than interrupt experience constitute it”), Hejinian seems to return to a version of Adorno’s reject’d “harmonious synthesis”:

If defamiliarization and making it new are no longer the principle or relevant functions of art, then perhaps they might be related to the fomenting of knowledge of a certain kind—knowledge, perhaps, that is in and of connections. Or, if it isn’t knowledge per se, then perhaps it is the mere pleasure or potential of discovery or awareness of expandable systems and the points of intersection that proliferate through them.

Art’s capaciousness at seeing relations. (See Coleridge’s remark, 7 March 1815, in a letter to Joseph Cottle: “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is to convert a series into a whole.”) Hejinian’s slant: “I am speaking here of more than the exercise of synthesizing logic to produce novel experiences. What art can provide is a contextualizing force, a thickening of the temporality of experience and an opening of spaces for it.” For that trailing off into “space”—read “social space” (akin to the Debordian “constantly moving frontier” of spaces occupy’d by various groups at Berkeley during the protests), though I sense the difference between a syntheme [Greek σύνθημα collection, connection < συντιθέναι to put together] and a context [Latin contextus connection < participial stem of contexĕre to weave together, connect] is meaningless, or moot.

“. . . efforts at control are spurious, desperate, doomed . . .”

Auden’s James

Gate and Post

An okay without consequence, sung out, laugh’d off. Nobody stirs a limb. Agreeableness, its easy capacity for resistance. Auden call’d Henry James’s travel notes in The American Scene “a prose poem,” a book that ask’d one to read “slowly, for it is no more a guide book than the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an ornithological essay.” And, in a longish memo (with advice) regarding the “American writer,” that beast Auden’d attempt’d to become:

      It is harder for an American than it is for a European to become a good writer, but if he succeeds, he contributes something unique; he sees something and says it in a way that no one before him has said it. Think of the important American writers of the past—Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, Henry James—or of any group of contemporary American poets—Eliot, Frost, Marianne Moore, Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Laura Riding—could any European country (except, possibly, Germany) produce writers who in subject matter, temperament, language, are so utterly unlike one another or anybody else? (Blake and Hopkins are the only English poets I can think of who might have been Americans.) Further, without mentioning names, is there any country where discipleship is attended by such disastrously banal results, in contrast to Europe where apprenticeship is the normal and fruitful state for the beginner?
      The great danger for the young American writer is impatience. A wise uncle would advise him thus: “Publish nothing before you are thirty but study, absorb, experiment. Take at least three years over every book. Be very careful about your health and lead a life as regular as a commuter’s. Above all, do not write your autobiography, for your childhood is literally the whole of your capital.”
      The great danger for the European writer on the other hand is, or rather was, indolence. (For the present and future, as the novels of Kafka testify, his situation is probably to be the “American” one.) It was easier for him to write fairly well, but much harder to write as well as he possibly could, because he was a cultural rentier. His problem was how to possess the past, to do which he had to choose a present, and he was always tempted to think that rebellion against the past was such a choice, which it was not, for the rebel is a mirror image of the conformist. He had in fact to become by art what the American writer is by nature, isolated, and perhaps the only advice as to how to achieve this that his wise uncle could have give was: “Get out, or get drunk, or get ill.”

That, in 1946. In advance of the preoccupying flood of the “disastrously banal” that currently daunts the land. How align’d is Auden’s sense of the American epidemic and solace of loneliness to, say, Charles Olson’s mercy-clobbering “SPACE” (”I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.”)? There’s a story Charles H. Miller records in Auden: An American Friendship of Auden’s tirade about “the true America, the land of the lonely! The land of eccentrics and outcast lonelies. ’The Lonelies’ could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel.” Auden proceeds to picture “a likely hero, the homosexual ‘queen’ of Niles, Michigan” who, “each evening when the New York-Chicago train pauses there to put off a passenger or so . . . meets the train.” And: “Such queens may speak with an affected accent or lisp, trying for individuality; they idolize New York or Hollywood, but never escape the hinterlands.” Somehow that recalls Auden’s fine outburst of Americanisms ending the James piece, wherein he deposits each of “us” “much nearer than one ever suspected” to “the ‘hereditary thinness’ of the American Margin, to ‘the packed and hoisted basket’ and ‘the torture rooms of the living idiom,’ nearer to the unspeakable juke-boxes, the horrible Rockettes and the insane salads, nearer to the anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck and the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs, nearer to radio commercials and congressional oratory and Hollywood Christianity, nearer to all the ‘democratic’ lusts and licenses . . .” Mergers out of loneliness making fealties of the crass, the banal. Recalling, too, D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, faulting Whitman for refusing to make selecting part of the meaning of the impingement, the joinery (“The individuality had leaked out of him”):

      Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.
      And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you meet or know, why, something must have gone seriously wrong with you. You must have broken your mainspring.
      You must have fallen also into mechanization.
      Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of the individual you. Dead mentalized.
      I only know that my body doesn’t by any means gravitate to all I meet or know, I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn’t touch with a long prop.
      Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your own individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with everything.

Evidence of something suspect (in Lawrence’s eyes) about Whitman’s continually bang’d out conglomeratory mustering of the citizenry. The “dead mentalized” crowd affect. So that one arrives at the yea-saying apex (“a yes without consequence”), a dud public self.

W. H. Auden, 1907-1973

Ashbery’s Auden

Yellow Chair

How dubious, with the reproaches of late Sunday descending, the brilliant white sun dirtying itself up mid-plunge, aiming for a sizeable slot in the cloud-bank, is the fossicking in half-skim’d books, looking for a way out of the clutter of the half-grappled with, the un-elided feints of a befoul’d “thesis.” Still winter, unendingly: “The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind / Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate / Something between breaths . . .” How to get down with the lingo. Terrific chapter about Ashbery’s Auden in Aidan Wasley’s The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton University Press, 2011), with, contra the Bloom-insist’d “American Sublime” Emerson through Stevens lineage, Ashbery’s retort: “he sort of ignored Auden’s effect on me.” And: “Auden was the most important because he came first.” Wasley quotes an interview wherein Ashbery recalls beginning to read Auden intensely in 1944 at the age of seventeen at the recommending of a friend who taught at the University of Rochester: “She was the only person I knew who’d read any poetry and she told me I should read a lot of Auden’s poetry. . . . So I did and I found myself seeming to understand it and became mad about it.” And uncovers an Ashbery-pen’d essay of the “era” call’d “Recent Tendencies in Poetry” wherein Ashbery singles out Auden for importance, and mimics Auden’s own sense of “double focus”—that dialectic tension and split between a poetry of practical civic use and the enigmas of self: “poems are complex because they must spring from a mind which has been made complex by its double-existence—its social responsibility and its inward enigma.” Not exactly a Keatsian capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—though forever refusing, too, to uncountenance that “Penetralium of mystery.” (Wasley quotes Auden—in a review—marking off “the half-men and the half-women, the little either-or people,” lacking the dialectical ability: kin, one supposes, to Keats’s dodge failures, those “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.”) Too, Wasley examines an Ashbery thesis (“for the most part unstudied by Ashbery’s critics”) call’d “The Poetic Medium of W. H. Auden,” written at Harvard in 1949. Its initial salvo:

It is often said that we read so-called “intellectual” poetry for its style rather than its content; anthologists and instructors assure us that Pope’s Essay on Man contains not a single fresh idea; that its saving feature is the vigor and grace with which it expresses old ones. Such a false division between form and content presupposes two boxes, one of which contains old hashed-over idea which everyone assimilated years ago, and from which the poet takes whatever he needs to “stuff” his poem; and the other, brand-new, unthought of ideas, to which the philosopher resorts when seeking inspiration. But there are no new ideas, any more than there are any old ones; there are merely old and new ways of looking at the world. Every new poem is a fresh discovery, and Pope stands acquitted on the charge of commonplace subject matter; “what oft was thought but n’er so well expressed” might as well be what n’er was thought for those who, but for the poet, might have understood the idea but not been able to apply it within their realm of experience.

Something of the “stance” of Ashbery’s later note regarding O’Hara’s poetry (“a source of annoyance for every stripe”) here, “rejecting all” poised against an omnivorous shoveling in: “new” versus “old” hardly to the point. Compare with Auden’s remarks in “The Poet & The City” (1962) regarding “the word tradition”:

It no longer means a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; a sense of tradition now means a consciousness of the whole of the past as present, yet at the same time as a structured whole the parts of which are related in terms of before and after. Originality no longer means a slight modification in the style of one’s immediate predecessors; it means a capacity to find in any work of any date or place a clue to finding one’s authentic voice. The burden of choice and selection is put squarely upon the shoulders of each individual poet . . .

So much for the bum-eschatological trajectory of the avant-garde squadron, pushing ever “further.” In “use,” Auden’s manner of “choice and selection” gets spell’d out by Ashbery in terms one sees, in retrospect, as unerringly “Ashberyesque”: “Instead of a traditional presentation and examination of an object, its illumination through metaphor and simile, Auden gives us lists of objects interesting and significant without description; which are, indeed, often only named, and then draws or allows to be drawn the poetic conclusion.” And:

Such a poetic theory seems peculiarly of our time. In the first place, when we think of the ubiquity of the list, the sheet of tabulations, in almost every category of modern life; in science, business, even in popular poetry—think of the numerous popular songs in which the beloved is designated by lists of desirable objects (“You’re a Paris hat, a month in the country, a hot fudge sundae,” etc.) it is not surprising that a poet so completely contemporary as Auden should have absorbed the process. Secondly, our age seems to be characterized as well by a rapid drawing of conclusions from certain particulars—one thinks of scientists, technicians, and even our present-day conversation, which, in growing more sophisticated has tended to make a code of all that can be observed easily or rather easily, and is able to adduce particulars immediately when a name, a quality is mentioned.

That sense of conversation, its “code of all that can be observed easily or rather easily”: think of Ashbery’s ineluctable fealty to bits of demotic. In another example of Auden’s discriminant and consider’d omnivorousness, looking at Auden’s 1930 play Paid on Both Sides, Ashbery points to its Joycean registries:

It is rather futile to talk about “influences” in Paid on Both Sides, as it would be to discuss influences on Joyce in the “Oxen of the Sun” (hospital) episode in Ulysses. A literary influence usually implies an unconscious or semi-conscious assimilation of authors which slowly alters a writer’s style into something new. Auden, like Joyce, has gone out of his way to imitate many styles, and if, in doing so, he has finally achieved stylistic detachment, he has reached that state fully conscious of the direction in which he was traveling. At any rate, the many styles which occur throughout the early Poems and throughout the individual poems themselves are drawn from many sources: besides the saga language, we find technical and scientific terms, contemporary argot, Shakespearean rhetoric, satires on occasional, “family” verse, and the clumsy meter and rhyming of the political broadside, all jostling each other, yet in most cases seeming to form a unified and satisfactory whole. It is our task to discover how and with what justification, what purpose, the poet has used these sources.

Think of Charles Bernstein’s highly over-wrought and limit’d use of “the clumsy meter and rhyming of the political broadside” in recent years in pieces like “The Ballad of the Girly Man” (“A democracy once proposed / Is slimed and grimed again / By men with brute design / Who prefer hate to rime”), so irony-encrust’d it fails its encaustic intent. Ashbery’s final lines point to Auden’s “use”:

His poetry is, as Hindemith describes his own music, “for use”; its beauty as poetry functional, though surpassing whatever “pure” poetry we have today. He has absorbed certain common techniques of thought (the cataloging, the characterizing by denoting an unusual quality) and rhythms (those of the cabaret, the birthday card, the political broadsheet) which are very much a part of our life, using them to convey ideas which matter very much to us. If he is not a great poet, a decision which must be made by time, he has brought innumerable people closer to the world in which they live.

One recalls Ashbery’s chewing over Auden’s line “poetry makes nothing happen.” Ashbery: “It doesn’t, but its value is precisely the fact that it doesn’t, because that’s the way it does make things happen. The pleasure that you get, if you love poetry, is a pleasure that’s going to cause you to act, it forces you back into life. Poetry is in fact—I was just reading a quotation from Hazlitt—not a branch of literature but life itself . . .” Akin, perhaps, to O’Hara’s cheeky “Personism” line: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” Double focus’d.

W. H. Auden, c. 1960
(Photograph by Richard Avedon)

Little Means

Tree

If “form” means the quiet that attends the achieved . . . Something Hugh Kenner says (A Homemade World). My ambivalence, beginning to accrue (like “beginning to sun”), regarding the daily prose pursuance, its inexplicit fatidic ruts and rejoinders, its breezy sampling lunacy, its posture of delivery. Is there something inertial about writing? How, stop’d, it contents itself with minims of nothingness? And, going, must needs rave and thrash to dissemble, like an itch? “The quiet that attends the achieved”: Kenner’s talking about Oppen’s “systems of small words.” And I admit: there’s a longing for the ding’d certifiable music of the inexpungeable regulars, the foot soldiery, the grunts (“The little words that I like so much, ‘tree,’ ‘hill,’ and so on,” is how Oppen puts it, albeit noting sensibly enough: “just as much a taxonomy as the more elaborate words.”) The “purity” or “inherent fealty to the thing” or “just motility” of “tree” no greater than (nor less than) that of “conifer” or “baobab.” Rhetoric akin to dialectic, that tussle for one’s own-ness: Aristotle’s line about the “virtue of style [lexeōs aretē]” is found’d on both clarity (“to be clear”) and what’s “fit” (“neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate [prepon]”). Propriety in its pre-“correctness” meanings: particularity’s fit. What did Jack Spicer mean by the Robin Blaser-report’d line: “My vocabulary did this to me”? (He add’d, enigma-prone to the end: “Your love will let you go on.”) So, umpteenth and counting, I look severely into the pit of “Thing Language,” its off-stride seemingly allegorical jump-off, feet pedaling in the air:

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

“White and aimless signals.” The un-baffled white noise of language beating itself senseless. “The ocean / Does not mean to be listened to.” What’s the causeway of intent or reply that runs between Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur ocean-scat-trappings (“Sea” is dated 21 August 1960), recording the oceanic lingo—(“Plottit, bisp tesh, cashes, / re tav, plo, aravow, shirsh . . .” and “Parle, parle, boom the / earth—Arree—Shaw,/ Sho, Shoosh, flut,/ ravad, tapavada pow, / coof, loof, roof, / No,no,no,no,no,no . . . / Oh ya, ya, ya, yo, yair . . . Shhh . . .”) and the surround’s disguises (“The headland looks like a longnosed Collie sleeping / with his light on his nose, as the ocean, / obeying its accommodations of mind, crashes in / rhythm which could & will intrude . . .”)? Between that and Spicer’s piece? Big Sur print’d in 1962, Spicer’s Language in 1964. Thinking Spicer’d find such havockings silly. (“A noise / annoys . . .”)

One way to proceed is simply to write oneself into a corner’d contingency “wherein” any subsequent “move” is either pointlessly abrupt, or self-annihilating: “tapavada pow.” (Aristotle, too, calls wit “cultured insolence.”) So that, frankly, I cannot comprehend the (apparently Heideggerean) stance of the “achieved” piece Kenner is pointing to, epigraph and tag to Discrete Series—

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
      saying, but of boredom
Is—aside from reading speaking
      smoking—
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,
      wished to know when, having risen,
“approached the window as if to see
      what really was going on”;
And saw rain falling, in the distance
      more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-
      glass—
Of the world, weather-swept, with which
      one shares the century.

Out of Oppen’s notebooks: “Heidegger’s statement that in the mood of boredom the existence of what-is is disclosed, is my Maude Blessingbourne in Discrete Series who in ‘boredom’ looks out the window and sees ‘the world, weather-swept, with which / one shares the century.’” The lovely languors of that sentence—“ The knowledge not of sorrow . . .” and how it upticks something in medias res (“you were saying”)—one’s caught in the slurry of the world, succumbs to its pitchiness. And there, nodding amidst the insular and temperate seas, comfort’d and eschew’d, there’s where disclosure occurs. Boredom hardly enters in. One recalls the pleasures of puttering (in lieu of writing) of one Edward Gorey’s eccentrics (The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel): “Mr Earbrass belongs to the straying, rather than to the sedentary, type of author. He is never to be found at his desk unless actually writing down a sentence. Before this happens he broods over it indefinitely while picking up and putting down again small, loose objects; walking diagonally across rooms; staring out windows; and so forth. He frequently hums, more in his mind than anywhere else, themes from the Poddington Te Deum.” (Of Maude Blessingbourne’s inventor Henry James, Gorey admit’d: “I think Henry James is non existent. The longer he goes on, the more he explains, until there is nothing left.”) Une œuvre inachevée.

George Oppen, 1908-1984

Harold Schimmel / Charles Wright

A Wall

“Polyphonic, shifting, fickle”—being Harold Schimmel’s taut memo regarding “the style of the qasida”—work’d up in number’d apologia (“The apparatus of poetry itself . . . a poem as a formal mode without center, a qasida. ”) Out of the Peter Cole-translated Qasida (Ibis Editions, 1997). One item: “A surfeit of transformations against the ground of the changeless, as in a sex manual.” Another: “Ostrich, ‘a camel bird,’ the largest of fowl. Indiscriminate gluttony, an appetite for hard material which it swallows to aid digestion. Nonsense. Wives’ tales.” Knottings up, local storms, tracks made by countless feet, “unweighable evidence”: form construed by what is gather’d “around the question of an ‘I’” (“The ‘I’ in the qasida is compound . . . Comprehensive, malleable, taking up and dropping guises.”) Schimmel:

Mne-mon. A suggested unit defined as the smallest physical change in the nervous system encoding a single trace.

According to the qasida’s poetics, the time to begin to gather these memory units is when they are ripe, immediately.

(“The firmness and smallness of the dung. Therefore resembling ‘peppercorns.’ What once resembled berries, soft, black, and oily.”) Olson’s note—“The unit the smallest there is”—and that insistent “the smallest particle of all, the syllable. . . . king and pin of versification” sidles around Schimmel’s text (“What is the smallest unit one can still measure”)—that and its obverse, “forward-urging” projectingness: “spill is essential.” (Schimmel’s “The line is built with nouns. A concatenation of nouns. A chain like a caravan of camels. Like a constellation of marks within a tattoo” runs somewhat counter to Olson’s rebuke in “Projective Verse” of Hart Crane’s “singleness of the push to the nominative . . . along that one arc of freshness, the attempt to get back to word as handle.” Olson’s so jazz’d by the “VERB” that he distrusts “word as handle”: “The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second . . . because of their easiness”—a distrust that results in the Olsonian “processual” gaffe of: “Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem . . .”)

“Fickle.” I read through Charles Wright’s Outtakes / Sestets (Sarabande Books, 2010). Kafka, somewhere in the diaries (Roberto Calasso quotes it in K.):

It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.

Naming. And Wright’s ratifying riff in reply:

The Light at the Root of All Things

Splendor surrounds us, as Kafka says,
                                                                        invisible, and far away.
Will the right word reveal it?
Will the right name enter its ear and bring it forth like a sun?

He says you have to call, and not wait—
It’s not hostile, it’s not deaf.
I’d guess, if you got them right,
                  it’s like, when it appears, just what’s in front of you,
Something inveterate, some thing indestructible.

Persistence and obstinacy of fickle light itself. Some unsung (“indestructible”) balance between the lorn evidentiary and its call’d-up half-expect’d compensatory. (Think of Dickinson’s “Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the Lawn— / Indicative that Suns go down— // Monition to the startled Grass / That Darkness—is about to pass—”) If I shift and realign, if I flit and disgorge, if I dip and readjust (pans in the balance bobbing along columns of air) . . . Harold Schimmel and Charles Wright served in the military together in Italy (Schimmel later immigrated to Israel). See the piece in Wright’s “Tattoos” annotated “Harold Schimmel’s morning prayers; Positano, Italy”:

A tongue hangs in the dawn wind, a wind
That trails the tongue’s voice like a banner, star
And whitewash, the voice
Sailing across the 14 mountains, snap and drift,
To settle, a last sigh, here.

That tongue is his tongue, the voice his voice:
Lifting out of the sea
Where the tongue licks, the voice starts,
Monotonous, out of sync,
Yarmulke, tfillin, tallis,

His nude body waist-deep in the waves,
The book a fire in his hands, his movements
Reedflow and counter flow, the chant light
From his lips, the prayer rising to heaven,
And everything brilliance, brilliance, brilliance.
            1959

Calling up the light, what’s there in front of you. (Schimmel, in Qasida: “What’s the point of adding light to light. How will you thereby multiply its sufficiency.”)

Charles Wright
(Photograph by Michelle Cuevas)

“A patch’d fool . . .”

A Wall

The ruse of numbness, bedaub’d by light. Solitary statuary. All intent off. The formal method “reduced to a set of books” (Shklovsky). “Forgot to tighten the coordinates of time and space in my story.” In the raw velvety morning light, color of a bruise: two raccoon pups chittering in an oak, roughhousing, thirty feet up. Who recalls the bewig’d and moderate Heneage Finch, father of equity? Shklovsky recalling “the coming of electricity”: “crawling on all fours and burning with a yellow light.” (Pasternak likening the “blue-green shadows” to “ointment,” “a deliberate moving mass.” Eliot’s “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes . . .”) And Flaubert, who knew little of solace, shouting sentences into the purulent nights of Croisset where now the zone industrielle extends its brute rachitic cranes and levers, writing to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 3 July, 1860:

I love history, madly. I find the dead more agreeable than the living. Where does the seductiveness of the past come from?

[J’aime l’histoire, follement. Les morts m’agréent plus que les vivants. D’où vient cette séduction du passé?]

Flaubert, the pukka contradictory (“My basic character, whatever anyone may see, is that of the mountebank”):

Even now, what I love above all else is form, provided it be beautiful, and nothing beyond it. Women whose hearts are too ardent and whose minds are too exclusive do not understand this religion of beauty, beauty considered apart from emotion. They always demand a cause, an end. I admire tinsel as much as gold: indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because it is sadder. The only things that exist for me in the world are splendid poetry, well-turned, harmonious, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlight, pictures, ancient sculpture, and strongly marked faces. Beyond that, nothing.

That to Louise Colet, 6-7 August 1846. A half dozen years later (24 April 1852):

The time for Beauty is over. Mankind may return to it, but it has no use for it at present. The more Art develops, the more scientific it will be, just as science will become artistic. Separated in their early stages, the two will become one again when both reach their culmination. It is beyond the power of human thought today to foresee in what a dazzling intellectual light the works of the future will flower. Meanwhile we are in a shadowy corridor, groping in the dark. We are without a lever; the ground is slipping under our feet; we all lack a basis—literati and scribblers as we are. What’s the good of it all? Is our chatter the answer to any need? Between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists. Alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially. But since there is a reason for everything, and since the fancy of one individual seems to me just as valid as the appetite of a million men, and can occupy an equal place in the world, we must (regardless of material things and of mankind, which disavows us) live for our vocation, climb into our ivory tower, and there, like a bayadere with her perfumes, and dwell alone with our dreams.

“Bayadere”: a Hindu dancing girl. Même lettre: “I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your ideas like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellence of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose.” I love that combo of fatuous bombast and gruff to-the-pointedness. Mot juste-ism interrupt’d by unabash’d Quaaludesque blithery. (Shklovsky: “Writers are not streetcars on the same circuit.”) That implacable unburnish’d veering like a wrestling match in a tree. (See Bottom: “Man is but an ass, if he go about t’ expound . . . Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. . . .”)

Viktor Shklovsky, 1893-1984

The Grand Piano Notes

Mop and Bucket

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book, is what Mallarmé redact’d, plus ou moins. Nothing’s left of the semi-permeable human-singe’d world: it’s all citable gloss, a welter and chaos of pre-possess’d, pre-process’d lacks (of commitment, of intensity, of voracious oomph) tether’d to a convict’s lot of signifiers, sentence-ry deliver’d up by the gross. Is what I think of, reading Kit Robinson’s third base line dribble of a bunt (call’d “Timeline”) in the tenth booklet of The Grand Piano. Advancing no runners. Thrown out easily at first. Exercise: select a few notably-“remarkable” events, a rough half-dozen per year (plausibly-“memorable” or not, of “personal consequence” or not): “Watergate Convictions,” “Fall of Saigon,” “Pine Ridge Shootout,” “Hoffa Missing,” “Assassination Attempt on Ford by Squeaky Fromme,” “Patty Hearst Captured,” “Assassination Attempt on Ford by Sara Jane Moore,” “NYC Bailout of $6.9 Billion Approved,” “Term ‘Fractal’ Coined by Mandelbrot,” “Apple Formed by Jobs and Wozniak,” “U.S. Bicentennial,” “Mao Dies” . . . History is nothing if not headline-rich. Add a few sentences under each:

          Polanski Skips Bail

The signature of the time is written on the walls in blood. And the line lays down the lamb chops. It seems you have developed misunderstanding into a fine art. You order chicken soup with Hilton Obenzinger at La Victoria. When you see power you see red. You float in an interstitial geology of sound. The stand-alone sentiment circulating amid the sawhorse rodeo.

          One Love Peace Concert, Kingston

Turn the lights out when you live. You take a page out of somebody else’s book. In this manner, the feel for another time influences the weather of a domestic currency. When in trouble, put out flares. Art Ensemble of Chicago at the Julia Morgan Center. You see your shadow headed east. Then indulge the senses in the company of strangers at a moving picture. An eye floats in silence above the Bay.

          Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Proclaimed

You search for meaning in the big stack of facts. Not knowing has come to assume the status of an inner truth. The word skips a beat, flush against the flipside of chance. The Meat Market Café is only a memory. The school kids are out all summer. What does that tell you?

Is it Robinson’s easy-loping welterweight tone (against La Silliman’s mostly dourer humdrum and pummel) that makes the thing read like a send-up of The Alphabet? The knacker’d and cringe-meriting puns (“the line lays down the lamb chops”?), the quotidian nods (“chicken soup with Hilton”), the cocky enigma romp (“The word skips a beat, flush against the flipside of chance”). Elsewhere: sophomoric literary mayhem (Ashbery / Berrigan retread: “The corporation of the future is opening its windows”), the mild surreal (“These fanning sundowns cast a bleary light over the tick-tock tolerance of roasting bees”), supposed Pianist meta-commentary, mock or not (“You sit at the table and feel the oppressive claustrophobia of group formation” and “You have become each others’ ideal audience” . . . “You have become each others’ worst nightmare”).

Somewhere Robinson remarks: “History’s claim checks litter the floor.” Detritus of a particular age, a socius swathed in itself. There’s a blithe refusal in “Timeline” to engage with history’s particulars. History itself becomes a series of interchangeable remarks—or entertainments (under “Ayatolla Khomenei Seizes Power in Iran,” one reads “Dead Kennedys at the Deaf Club”; under “Iran Hostage Crisis,” “Anthony Braxton at Koncepts Cultural Gallery”)—of no consequence or definition, empty’d of any significant desire. Being, undoubtedly, precisely how we norteamericanos of the white middle-classes experience history’s brusque and regular upheavals, with banality and charm, and the unconscionably flippant side of chance: “The radio is a metaphor for inspiration fiddling with the dial.” There is hardly even evidence here of the ironic defeatism of O’Hara’s “I wonder if I’ve really scrutinized this experience like / you’re supposed to have if you can type . . .” in “For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson” and—faites attention!—O’Hara’s honestly and direly lamenting (“whither oh whither”) the murder’d Patrice Lumumba just a few lines later, no dodge city malingerer he. “You sit around a table and drink coffee and smoke. Maybe you should go back to school.” And: “The weak signals of dead ideologies reform as potent vectors alternately etched into aether. You inhabit your body, a proud ape.” And: “Your true feelings are always available even in a clinch.” The affable recalcitrance of the rarely inconvenienced, ever jocular, never un-manned: “When obstacles arise, you go right through them.” A collection of “elements”—it says here under “Moscone and Milk Shot”—“in a game”—“between a rock and a heart pace” (whatever that means). La littérature engage or la littérature gâtée?

“Then indulge the senses in the company of strangers at a moving picture . . .”

Feverishly Mend’d

A Wall

Influenza’d in the city. (And, with the grainy immediacy of a video “clip” one thinks of Frank O’Hara, with lips not working quite right, white-shirt’d and hungover, reciting “Is it dirty / does it look dirty / that’s what you think of in the city . . .”) Alphonse Daudet contract’d syphilis at the age of seventeen, and perish’d of it at fifty-seven. One is fell’d by a lurch, travels with grit’d teeth, and mends, impermeably mends. Returns like a model citizen and shovels out. I like the imbecility the sudden loss of contextual markers offers “up.” Idiot shuffles in fever-drench’d clothes, all streets petering out to join the big one way street. Daudet call’d Pascal “a neurotic in the full meaning of the word”: “He spent his life dying.” (In The Emperor Jones Eugene O’Neill writes: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue.”) Daudet (out of In the Land of Pain), how pain invades in a prolong’d series of firsts:

      At first, a heightened awareness of sound: the noise of the shovel, tongs near the hearth, the screech of doorbells; the ticking watch, a spider’s web on which work begins at four in the morning.

      Hyper-sensitivity of the skin, loss of sleep, then coughing up blood.

      The ‘breastplate’: my first awareness of it. Suffocation, sitting up in bed, panicking.

      The first moves of an illness that’s sounding me out, choosing its ground. One moment it’s my eyes; floating specks, double vision; then objects appear cut in two, the page of a book, the letters of a word only half read, sliced as if by a billhook; cut by a scimitar. I grasp at letters by their downstrokes as they rush by.

One of Daudet’s sons, Léon, grew up to co-found, with Charles Maurras, the ultra-nationalist, royalist, and anti-semitic group, L’Action française. (Daudet himself: so myopic that “he once talked for a quarter of an hour to a rug thrown over a chair, in the belief that it was Edmond de Goncourt.”) And O’Hara, in a hurry: “Run your finger along your no-moss mind / that’s not a thought that’s soot.”

Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966

The Grand Piano Notes

Mirrors (Hommage à Lee Friedlander)

If Ted Pearson’s plaintive cry (in The Grand Piano booklet numéro ten) of quash’d desire “to author pleasures I once could barely imagine” (“Have I, then, abjured a ‘linkage most lyrical’ to become a historical footnote?”) is quickly and magisterially hush’d (“But no.”), Bob Perelman cuts loose with all the bathos of the “the body’s autobiography” (“obscene” is the judgment, “in the false-etymological sense of offstage, behind the screen”), and stages a writing occurring post-op (“ablation of the heart”) whilst he is required “to lie still for six hours, with a doctor and nurse pressing hard on the two incisions in my groin for the first ten minutes so the thinned blood would clot.” In doing so, he writes (dictates to Francie Shaw) a pleasingly minor and messy (possibly mineable) piece call’d “Good Time Charlie” (working off James Cotton’s version, Best of the Verve Years: Perelman, joshing a little, notes it, the song, “enunciated such an excited enactment and savage critique of the conditions of hetero mastery that I said to Francie, ‘Her orgasms are his portfolio.’ ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.”) and rather freely, soaringly, moves through a round of memory without fetish or sacrum or show, or plausible gain. Memory “for use”:

Mary Carruthers, in The Craft of Thought, writes that the single point of all monastic intellectual exhortation was the building of usable, portable stuff in your mind: a memory / invention machine made out of movable particulars and plaint technique, in the brain, the “wreathed trellis” as Keats so nicely called it. Memory meant a stockpile to build new things in the present. Not a memory theater, but a well-supplied workplace.

Memory without portfolio. The “writing” (again, mocking the nervous earnest of one’s own youth, weighing Silliman’s “This is a poem” insistence in The Chinese Notebook against Michael Gottlieb’s fatuous (Memoir and Essay) stipulatory jack that calling a thing poetry’d be “old school”—“Writing was the way to say it.”) is rather rambunctiously atroce:

Beat heavy like walking in sand
like u are a transformer-figure on sports ads.
u are so juiced (roids).
Trembling
Juicing it up 4 the consumers

. . .

That’s all poems r, itineraries of esophaguses in
      distress.
You’re the pimp. (James Cotton)
We’re the scribe writing down everything & then
      later we’ll weed it or not
trembling
So, he’s the pimp Put on your red dress baby. No
      comment needed.
Come out and ball with me. . . .

And ending: “depending // to say that none of this works like we say.” What’s weed’d out of the mess: a sense of Perelman’s turn to (against the dismal severities of the technocrats of “form”) that “old shrine . . . unmentionable,” love. Perelman (prefacing the piece, addressing the grandees):

Remember the question I asked in Grand Piano 1? What is the relationship of love to writing? There’s “desire-writing” (unceasing revolution of form, say), but what about the other side? What about the words that have been written and now stay put, spanning different times? What about not the new but the old? The original vocabulary was quasi-impossible; I was nervous about it. Was “love . . . the oldest hat, important to keep in most secret closet?” Love, the old shrive, bathetic to the point of being unmentionable. Nevertheless, going on in the shadow of that encrusted word are the unspeakable activities that are the lifeblood of art.

Isn’t there a condemnatory hint (a scold) to the “Nevertheless”? Recall: Perelman’s initiatory gulp and plunge line in booklet uno: “I propose that we consider a basic issue facing writers: love.” And, post-Ted Berrigan riff (“Is this the oldest hat, important to keep in secretest closet?” nodding at Berrigan’s “Remembered Poem”: “It is important to keep old hat / in secret closet.”), the signal immediacy of doubt: “You can take it where you like, or veer from the word itself if it feels too old and inert. It was hard for me to write it there, above, posing it as a term in a discussion of writing.” Is there a sense of disappointment here, in one’s own cohort? Its failure to heed the need to move along? Most monumental fix only ever momentary. Perelman:

A certain baseline irony in such conditions that the sincerest doubt and most brightly annealed shame will never be able to wash away the sunny afternoon this was set down in the face of all the editorial entrances and exits to follow. The immanent ones especially. A word I never know, to hear it is to forget, at that very instant, what it means. Immanent = the opposite of imminent. But both imminent and immanent are right in the middle of the sentence being written, hence all the more annealed in the bright splash of appearing, and hence all the more just history dust, animated at best. . . . Old and New keep changing hats, like in Godot. Neither one fits. It’s a joke, the only one. The avant-garde is older than the wizened Sibyl in her cage. Tone rows like corn gods. . . .

“Tone rows” and “corn gods” echoing (down through the decades) “ant wort” and “brat guts.” Along the way Perelman recalls early music training (piano), “Classics, acid, not much” study at Michigan (“fellow Greek student Rick A for Acid to rewatch Valley of the Dolls just the lower righthand corner the fourth time because there was so much information there. My first inkling of information and of formal reading strategies”) and the recent Rethinking Poetics conference at Columbia (“I was hoping, I suppose, that the conference would summon what I remember as the open-ended immediacy of the Talks. That didn’t happen, to say the least.”) where he “wound up saying the avant-garde is a stale religious metaphor.” If Perelman dubs the piece “The Condition of Music” (tutelary god Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”), its finer moments appear Kerouac’d. Here’s a phenomenal paragraph about listening to Beethoven’s Opus 127 and wanting “to hold to certain nontellable moments”:

. . . play the tracks again to hear the whole thing thanks to engineering beyond my wildest dreams power stations music schools distribution networks dogged profit taking at all points and libidos at least those can be understood. But play it again to finally hear it. Want to keep holding onto simply to remain in contact with keep hearing that modulation to C♭ major some vista one almost lives in. Is from, in the impossible sense of that phrase. And to think, one confesses just the thing no one has much language for; language bats its paws clumsily toward where it just doesn’t go in any graspable way. Bark into the gathering dusk, hapax legomenon. Externalize your whole language, all speaking and hearing, in a single sound. So that finally, at just that moment, time stops completely. Oops. The jury is hereby instructed to disregard everything they ever knew and bask, just bask, in the entirety of sound. Soon enough similar modulations will be deeply corny.

Time’s radical fungibility versus the stolid jurisprudence of the Now (a word Perelman calls “the only mot juste” and adds, “it seems to be in a language that has just become foreign.”

—

Off a stretch.

“Old and New keep changing hats . . .”

“All Words Fall to the Ground . . .”

Some Tools

Orchestral miasma and funk. Sludge drag’d up out of the strings, a noxious strain. Marsh fever. Meaning, an unacquit’d evening swamping my tempo: nothing done. Left to mire about aimlessly in the sloughs of morning. Somewhere in the Journal de deuil Barthes says: “the world deafens me with its continuance.” Archaism: “sourd,” out of the French (deaf) < Latin, “surd.” Sir Thomas Browne (1682): “apprehend how all Words fall to the Ground, spent upon such a surd and Earless Generation of Men.” Reference in some polyglot lexicon (1659) to “a sourd, of deaf Emerald, which hath a deadish luster.” (Without the usual prompts, one begins to inhabit the din of a burgeoning frippery of words, wholly unleash’d, going slowly surd. One notes how “lexicon” descends out of the Greek λεξικόν and refers neither to the law (lex is Latin for “law”—see lex loci versus lex fori and other finicky disputatiousnesses) nor to the slippery dunnings of a barker (b. Alexander Crichlow Barker, Jr. in Rye, N.Y.) in a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs about a feral child grown to impeccably chivalrous and uncompromisingly ethical manhood . . .)

Clot’d ridiculousness setting in its rubber talons. I plough around in the new “uncollected Matthews,” New Hope for the Dead (Red Hen Press, 2010). The title out of Matthews’s dinky chapbook of one-liners call’d An Oar in the Old Water. About an inch and a half by four inches, one-stapled, print’d by Glad Day Press, in Ithaca, N.Y., the local anti-war leafleteers. I think it sold for a quarter. Matthews and jazz—quoting Zoot Sims’s line about Stan Getz: “He’s a nice bunch of guys.” Quoting John Coltrane saying, of Stan Getz: “We’d all play like that if we could.” Recalling Matthews’s enormous German shepherd call’d “Underdog.” Recalling how Mingus’s autobiography (Beneath the Underdog) begins, it, too, with the positing of a sprawling uncontainable number of selves:

“In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there’s an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he’ll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can’t—he goes back inside himself.”

Accountancy of art or race? (Or that desire in white America to make the two inextricable? Patti Smith writing Easter’s liner notes to the song “Rock N Roll Nigger” with its hosanna and honorific: “any man who extends beyond the classic form is a nigger—one sans fear and despair—one who rises like rimbaud beating hard gold rythumn outta soft solid shit . . .”) The need to strip away precisely the frippery (“soft solid shit”) of a culture that bombards one continuously with trifling inessential data, “merch” of its lying tepid heart. A little Matthews statement, undated, without context, call’d “The Poetry I Want”:

      Margaret Mead notes that “primitive” societies develop personalities the way some people do: by suppressing psychic white noise. That’s why such a life seems “simple.” But the cost isn’t invisible—it’s only hidden.
      A heterodox (“advanced”) society tends not to suppress anything: quite literally it will blow your mind: good if your mind is a logjam or a penis, bad if it’s electronic equipment or brain cells. Also, all noises seem alike. “Home” sounds like “Dallas,” and “me” like “what is possible for me.”
      The poetry I want was raised somewhere else, like a feral child. You can’t tell it how society works: it has no vocabulary. It has to develop, rather than to curse the inheritance of, self-consciousness. It can learn from anything because it belongs to nobody, nothing, no model of society. It will be forced to choose its allegiances: an act, finally, of imagination. Logic helps but you have to tell it what to do.
      This poetry will ask, “Where am I going to ground all this energy?” In words, in the earth. I’ll try to write such poems, because I want to read them. But it doesn’t matter where they’re found.

A petering out (“In words, in the earth.”) The “primitivist” stance of “no vocabulary”—akin to Spicer’s “A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” (“Home” sounds like “Dallas”—akin to “I yell ‘Shit’ down a cliff at the ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as ‘Alas.’”) Matthews is finally too canny and accommodating (“choose its allegiances”) to toss it all off: too human, dignify’d, and stuck.

William Matthews and Lex Barker

The Grand Piano Notes

Some Zippers

Zonal provender. “As yet in me unmade.” The tenth and final booklet of The Grand Piano, that precipitous exercise in something grand (the authors subtitle it—coyly, or habitually, or out of the pump’d-up retro-garrulousness of the minor mob, one “doth” not know—“An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980”) is here, and, compleatist that I be, it behooves me to read it, “and save the serpent in their midst.” Barrett Watten’s made bee-loud noises hereabouts and thereabouts about “every intent to respond”—no doubt he’s methodically putting wattle to clay and pondering it still in “deep heart’s core.” The final number carries a somber dedicatory line “to the memory of Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010)” and a semi-faux-expiatory epigraph out of Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns:

We question each other
while we do something down on the floor,
attacking each other at times,
but never stopping our questioning,
& always reasoning regularly.

We number some things or some people,
& we page some of the people
& either we harbor poison between cotton or
      we go from breathing to a common form

Curious choice for a cohort known for eschewing the natural: the pure organicism of that final line’d meet the mete ordinary regimen of la poesía norteamericana, like that of, say, language-writing stalwart Stanley Kunitz’s “the poem conceived as a way of breathing in words.” (Re: that “we do something down on the floor”—a little un-ensorcel’d openness about the “doings-something” ’d explain a lot. How’d Kent Johnson put it? “I am interested how all literary theory, however disinterested it may seem, is driven by the sex-drive, tell me honestly it’s not.” That “we” do not “get” in The Grand Piano. It never goes beyond Watten’s mysterious initials and Mandel’s flub’d encounter with the French travelots. “I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing.”)

Alors: Ted Pearson, the leading man. Reading Pearson’s opening gambit, a piece call’d “Etude 10: Threads”—the musical motif (with sections label’d “B,” “B♭,” “D,” “E♭,” &c.) here clumsy’d up with Penelopean warp-weftings (“The tapestry encrypts an ontological riddle” is offer’d, straightfacedly)—one’s struck by both the sheer joylessness of the recitatif, and by the extent of French theory’s congealment in the hands of ideologues, its status (for some) as Doxa, rote, formulaic, conventional. Pearson:

      The work site is where work is done. The work, cited, is what is done. The conditions that produce it persist as traces that underwrite the text. This, by convention, we address in the present—itself but a moment in the life of a text—where work continues to be done. For the reader, the text delimits a site where the work of making meaning takes place. For the writer, it also reveals a remainder that reminds her of work that is yet to be done. For both, it is a claim on the future that now includes it, even as it renews itself in the present it addresses. Every text, if only implicitly, begins with the words, “It is written . . .” But is this the work of the writer, or of the language in which it is written?
      Language is the medium in which “I” is suspended as an instance of saying “I.” Whenever I speak, it speaks otherwise, folding whatever I think to say into an excess that complicates my use of it . . .

Und so weiter. One thinks of the nineteenth c. New England blab schools, or the McGuffey readers. That Calvinist “work” doctrine. That sense of one’s place in a hierarchy. (Numerous the refs in Pearson to “knowing one’s place,” or it “heroic” refusal: “The politics of writing begin with the refusal to know one’s place—except as a ground of contestation and critical intervention” and “It entails refusing the social command to know and to keep one’s place” and, oddly enough, referring less to the larger social world than to the “nexus of private relations” (one guesses the grandees themself?): “Our work and our works are equally beset by epistemological questions—questions regarding our capacity to resist, as well as our complicity in, the episteme we inhabit—and which led a community of practice to emerge from a nexus of private relations—a community whose members continue to address the problem of knowing their places.”) See Mac Low: “attacking each other at times”? Where, in the documents, be the riffs on the rifts?

For Pearson, The Grand Piano is the “site” of vacillatory mayhem: retrieved heroics in the city versus dumbfoundedness and anxiety at the eventual “chronotope” (defined by Pearson: “the formal array of temporal and spatial elements on which a narrative is based . . . this project may be read as a chronotope—not as a monument to a community, but as the dynamic of a community in its endless weaving of past experience, present practice, and a future—even now unfolding—” and off into Penelopean metaphoricks.) History, according to Pearson, is cinemascopic:

I think of the Grand Piano years as having occupied “the lapse between lightning and thunder” . . . The lightning afforded glimpses of possibility against an anomic backdrop. And the thunder, louder than any noise we might have made, announced that the forces of reaction were gathering to rain on everyone’s parade.

(When history refuses to boom under the lights, it’s a quasi-lyrical mess. Pearson offers up a couple of paragraphs of daily anomie, freight’d with what reads like the heavy water of a personal code: “The cult of the difficult, exposed to desire. Tale of the Tyger. Hair of the dog. . . . Blue shirt, white pants. Night bleeds into. The morning after. My body double at their wedding. . . . In the decade when. Minimal wages trumped cultural capital. But my weekly reader loved to fuck.” Leaden with “import.”) Palpable anxiety: Pearson’s repeat’d (“doth protest too much”) acceptances of the onslaught of change: “In my experience, wherever one arrives is never the place one had imagined coming to.” And: “Rhythmic changes transport time—emblems of my desire—making me subject, over time, to forces that seek to author pleasures I once could barely imagine. Have I, then, abjured a “linkage most lyrical” to become a historical footnote? But no.” “But no”: high rhetorickal ploy of the utterly unconvinced.

“The Grand Piano Notes” (compleat): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75.

“The work site is where work is done . . .”

“Like a momentary fix . . .”

Some Clouds

Endlessly repeating oneself, exhausting a means by moot’d placidity and usual recompense. The orange sun thwack’d into a fat mitt of clouds. Loafing (pallet, flung-down greatcoat) with a vague honorary sense of the impinging emptiness, its collateral needs. Sense of the ongoing undoctor’d world in revelatory abeyance. The whitish-green slip of a monocotyledonous tendril easing out of blood-clot red cuff of its seed jacket, butting “at” the cold earth. Unmonitor’d swellings. Barthes (The Grain of the Voice): “I’m unable, unwilling, to sum up a book, to efface myself behind a capsule description of it on an index card, but on the contrary, I’m quite ready to pick out certain sentences, certain characteristics of the book, to ingest them as discontinuous fragments. This is obviously not a good philological attitude, since it comes down to deforming the book for my own purposes.” To keep everything moving, a rude indecent ploy: a self-center’d implausible fidgeting, a thing launch’d in solitary, against the crowd. Chaos unwitness’d, ideology unkempt, ransack’d, pliable, unpurchased. Pasternak, talking of “societies of every sort”: “Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities.” (See Emily Dickinson—“Then—shuts the Door— / To her divine Majority—”) Moving out and back along a changeable trajectory (the unphotograph’d cherry orchards near Paw Paw, gawky seedlings wrap’d in dirty bandages against the invading purity of snow): the way one carps against what one is beholden to. Philip Guston (out of Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations), talking about Toulouse-Lautrec, applauding the “absolute attention to what he’s seeing and what moves him. I mean a face, a figure, a gesture, a movement, and so on, and when the feeling runs out he stops too. . . . So you’re faced with the curious mystery of a fix, like a momentary fix, or a record, an evidence of a man observing something with such intensity.” And Guston turns to Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings of animals in Jules Renard’s A Bestiary, “struck by how he sees. . . . what he sees”:

Every kind of animal is there, a goose, a swan, a frog, etc., etc. And there’s a bull. And that bull is, to me, one of the most remarkable drawings in the book. It really looks like a vast landscape, as if the bull was right in front of his nose, he started drawing the tail and the hip, and he goes on this back and you can just feel it going on and on and on. And finally somewhere way over on the right are a couple of horns, and the whole feeling about this bull, this vastness of it, is that he must have been so close. He doesn’t bother to define the bull so much. The legs kind of peter out. But what he saw was this back.

And, honing the exclamatory by broadening it:

I think what I’m saying is that the immersion in the bull finally produces the most unpredictable thing, that he wouldn’t get either if he had thought of making a picture, or of drawing a bull. I mean, he somehow lost himself, was capable of losing himself, immersing himself in visual phenomena . . . I’m not giving a lecture, I just am proposing that kind of immersion, whether it’s being driven by concept or by visual phenomena, somehow seems to me to be . . . more fruitful, more chaotic but fruitfully chaotic, more unpredictable, that what we can conceive of when we become interested in painting itself. In other words I am proposing that painting needs more than itself. I suppose it’s a very traditional point of view.

Recalling Barthes talk of the ephemerality and radical repleteness of haiku, how it is concern’d with “a hyperconsciousness . . . acute, pure consciousness, with no interposition.” He, too (The Preparation of the Novel) referring (as counter-exemplary) to Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles, the “brief notations, always metaphorical, taken directly from Nature (which actually means the countryside)” a kind of “impression (altogether contrary to the haiku).” The lack: seemingly “a kind of mounting agitation, a sustained “infra-panic” that’s almost of the order of good manners . . . Tenuousness and concentration: fleeting concentration of emotion.” So (Renard per Barthes): “‘The cockroach. Black and sticky, like a keyhole.’ ‘The spider. A little hand, black and hairy, clutching strands of hair. All night long, on behalf of the moon, it affixes seals.’ . . . ‘The raven. Grave accent on the furrow.’ ‘The lark. It lands, dead drunk from having . . . poked the sun in the eye again.’” Against the full-pot’d stirrings of discourse, its batting at containment: slips of desire dibble’d (pointedly) into the mud. Against desire’s consuming itself in protract’d rigmarole and diffusion: a suasion, a lean, a cusp. Barthes (The Grain of the Voice):

The haiku is something else again: it’s the essential, musical future of the fragment, its form of becoming. I encountered it in its real and historical nature during my travels in Japan. I have a profound admiration, that is, a profound desire, for this form. If I imagine myself writing other things, some of them would be on the order of the haiku. The haiku is a very short form, but unlike the maxim, an equally short form, it is characterized by its matteness. It engenders no sense, but at the same time it is not nonsense. It’s always the same problem: to keep meaning from taking hold, but without abandoning meaning, under the threat of falling into the worst meaning, nonmeaning.

And Barthes refers pointedly to the “anamneses” of Roland Barthes—“memories of my childhood and youth, given in a few sentence at most, which have the characteristic . . . of being absolutely matte. Not solidified.” Guston’s “momentary fix.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Le Taureau,” Jules Renard’s Histoires Naturelles, 1897

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Canards,” Jules Renard’s Histoires Naturelles, 1897

Jules Renard, 1864-1910