Zephyrus Image

Tracks

Extend’d peregrinatory “out and about” period. That kind of necessary (and mostly fallow) seizure. Unremitting dawdle. “The Sufi notion of having ‘one foot in the world, one foot out of it’—this would be a condition of authenticity—a way of mitigating one’s conditioning.” That out of memoir materiel writ by Rick London, found in Alastair Johnston’s excellent Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography (Poltroon Press, 2003). ZI = linotypist and printer Holbrook Teter and artist Michael Myers, with Tom Raworth and Ed Dorn riding shotgun, among others. Anarchic wit eclecticists. See Bob Callahan (of Turtle Island) recalling:

. . . we were all print freaks. There was this kind of sense of liking the smell of print. We were never happier than when we got back in the shop and had some goofy fucking prank to pull off. We lived for that moment—when things got that clear and we had to execute the prank as perfectly as the prank called for. There was always something lawful in the gesture that followed. It had a law of its own that it obeyed and we recognized. I remember them coming over frequently at 10:30 at night with the day’s harvest. It was almost like fishermen bringing in the catch. It was normal to have Holbrook walk through the door at 11 o’clock at night and we’d be giggling for a half hour and thinking, “OK, what does this mean? What’s next?” And it created a kind of comic language all to itself that dictated one production after another. It was always like our normal activity of getting out product—what we did for real—was publish books of poetry that had no future either. It was the straight side of what we did, and this other thing was a commentary on the absurdity of that.

Something to quash the earnest careerist funk that lingers all around the ’seventies Bay Area “scene”—result of Language writing’s own fastidious history occluding other, richer histories. Herein numerous signs, dug out of the daily ephemera— “ephemera” is “everyday life”—that people did not “totally regret life.” Raworth talks of a “total feeling of open mind (with Ed, Holbrook and Michael) . . . there needed to be not even the minutest break between thought and language—and even beyond language; gesture . . . a finger movement would communicate.” And London, of Holbrook Teter’s “insistence . . . in maintaining their project as a process of discovery, not presumption”: “authenticity, by definition, cannot be predicted: If something is prefabricated, it’s not authentic.” And, that: “authenticity . . . was related to the idea of poverty; you can’t claim to possess anything, not even yourself . . .” (O’Hara’s “you can't plan on the heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open” an apt stickler here.)

Aimlessness under the glare of destiny (its lack) makes one number things. Thus (out of “The Numbering”—unrestrain’d seriality in a Poundian surrounding box):

No. 1

A yellow slicker, a cut
Against a fiduciary earning neither
Here nor there. The main
Thing is ongoingness, with its
Pre-certify’d breaks and regimens,
Or those that blow up
Out of the hard yellow
Kernels of the fatidic musts.
Money, like rhetoric, is nothing
Beyond a specie of trust.
Current and inveigler for the
Many who line its banks.


No. 2

‘If a man cannot say
What is wont in twelve
Lines—better leave it unsaid.’
Pound, sort of. The re-
Uptake inhibitor’s gone slushy, every
Inept grunt and common utterance
Is being record’d, every B
Movie’s agog with its empyrean,
Its murmur, its sweat. Empty
Yellow Valvoline containers bob up
Seriatim in waves: no more
Cudgel-wrought songs of yore.

. . .


No. 9

The insubstantial ways of unbrief’d
Causality never mark’d the snow
I march’d along, indecorous fusilier
With a blunderbuss, a red
Canvas musette bag fill’d with
Trifles. Weather, temporary sovereign of
The heights, talk’d it up
With its own plaintive commissariat
Raw tedium, made a new
Agreement, and descend’d. Balm. We
Know not what we ought.
We ought not know it.

A few jigs. How the inspecific trundling off works to gainsay my perennial attending. As James Brown’d put it: “I got to get on the good foot.”

Michael Myers, “Zephyrus Image”

Michael Myers, Cover detail of Ed Dorn’s Recollections of Gran Apachería, 1974
(Drawing used subsequently for Dorn’s 2007 Way More West: New and Selected Poems)

The Rejection Group’s 5 Works

Tree

How odd, what oddity, how fervently and alarmingly odd, that just at the point of terminal brain-buggery, fatigue’d by the miasmic vide of all things “scriptural” (that’s you, poet-dumpling!) and disgust’d by the seemingly wholesale celebratory hoo-hah surrounding the murder and dumping of a man (“any man’s death diminishes . . .”), I ought to read, back to back, two inimical (and complementary) indices of la poésie comme but rébarbatif? Qua? Hein? Okay. Poking around in The Little Review-editor Margaret Anderson’s 1930 autobiography (My Thirty Years’ War), I find, toward the end, Anderson talking about the changes writers undergo in putting themselves into books: “I’d give all of Ulysses for the letters Joyce wrote the Swiss government when he lost his luggage in that country. Interesting letters. Joyce really wanted his luggage.” A judgment mounting (by a trail of celestial fire) to the story of the “tall Englishman” A. E. Orage’s monumental (“And then he added the five words that have changed my outlook upon life”) remark:

Act, said Orage, don’t be acted upon.

Leading to the shutdown of The Little Review (“The artist organism is preëminently the acted-upon organism”) and the bold “farewell editorial” call’d “Lost: A Renaissance” written by co-editor Jane Heap. Excerpt’d:

      No doubt, all so-called thinking people hoped for a new order after the war. This hope was linked with the fallacy that men learn from experience. Facts prove that we learn no more from our experiences than from our dreams.
      For years we offered the Little Review as a trial-track for racers. We hoped to find artists who could run with the great artists of the past or men who could make new records. But you can’t get race horses from mules. I do not believe that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us masterpieces. Masterpieces are not made from chaos. If there is confusion of life there will be confusion of art. This is in no way a criticism of the men who are working in the arts. They can only express what is here to express.
      We have given space in the Little Review to 23 new systems of art (all now dead), representing 19 countries. In all of this we have not brought forward anything approaching a masterpiece except the “Ulysses” of Mr. Joyce . . .
      Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.
      . . . The actual situation of art today is not a very important or adult concern (Art is not the highest aim of man); it is interesting only as a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society.

Damnable stuff, and percipient. Heaved then I one tremendous sigh and turn’d to the curious object call’d 5 Works, by The Rejection Group (Habenicht Press, 2011). Only to read, in a tiny and franticly anecdotal piece call’d “A Life of Wasted Philosophy” (skimming no little satiric cream off Ashbery’s “My Philosophy of Life”—“Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough / for another thought in my head, I had this great idea— / call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly, / it involved living the way philosophers live, / according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?”—that one.) Excerpt’d:

Just when I went to read “My Philosophy of Life,” by John Ashbery, to jam its minerals down into my thought, there was a newsflash, on TV, or what do they it, Special Report, you know. To boot: that a new work by Wittgenstein had been found, post-Investigations, an old-fashioned set of principles by which to live a life, a work, that is, that renounces the path of Philosophy. Is that great or what?
. . .
Might there be an outward structure of astonishment, as a rain forest is the structure of a long, geologic pattern of climate? asked Wittgenstein, for no apparent reason, as was his custom. Well, let’s consider this and work our way up, said Russell, sniffing, feeling a thought coming on. For instance, take the sentence, My perambulator is inflected with dice throws and swans. To what outward condition might this correspond? Oh come off it, Russell, said the portly Moore, with not a little irritation, hitching up his trousers, that is perfectly absurd. Absurd! No, not quite, Moore, said Wittgenstein. It is not quite absurd: It depends on what we mean by inflect, don’t you see. One could say, for example: I jam the Poetry down the sorrowful throats of my swans. Now, you might furrow your brow; but what if Poetry were the name of the lubricated pellets with which I fatten my fowl for Christmastime?
. . .
And later that night, weeping with embarrassment and sorrow in his rooms, Wittgenstein realized that Philosophy was over, that it was no better than poetry, beyond logical remedy; now it was time to find the principles by which a simple and good life could be lived. Yes, he had wasted most of his life. But what is done is done, as his terrible, glowering father, the great Steel Emperor of Vienna, was in the habit of saying. And so he closed his eyes, and resolved to write the lost book.

“Is that great or what?” (In my twitter-mimic.) Odium and disgrubblement at the ubiquity a poetry that merely serves to fatten the goose that is Poetry (“that’s you, poet-dumpling!”) See, in “Welcome Back,” the repeat’d direct addresses to the “Poets”:

We’ve had it with your strutting and grovel, your refusals to wipe the habiliments after use; we’ve grown weary of your wet seductive wear, your affected grunts and awful smells, not to mention all the wedding parties in chunks on the passes of the Kush—they never quite made it into your experiments, it seems. That is why we are closing the whole area for cleaning and remodeling. Sometimes one just has to start from scratch.

Come back in fourteen billion years.

A completely annihilatory position in direct reaction to the murderous tendency of so many of “our” (“seductive” “affected” “awful”) “experiments” to be no more “a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society.” Damnable stuff. How’s that Ammons poem go? “Spit the pit in the pit / I told the cherry eater . . . but / if you come to impossible / productions on / absent trees, get out the / bulldozer and shove the / whole thing over smooth.” (“High Surreal”) In “Coronita de Rimas, Or: The A-Effect”:

                                                                                                Now, unfazed

By betters, oblivious to keener ears, sometimes we sing just to show
We are bright than other people. When we do, we can’t really know

What we are singing, and everyone is very glad when we stop!
Think: Do the birds sing to show they are brighter? No, they do not.

And in The Rejection Group’s “Fable” (“a translation from a translation by John Ashbery of Arthur Rimbaud”), the final line “Wise music is missing from our desire” gets render’d:

O, poets, you in your playhouse palaces of clouds, we speak as the most guilty amongst your kind:

There can be no sovereign music for your prefab amps and your cautious pride.

I detect an echo of O’Hara’s great exordium to the gods in “For James Dean” “Welcome me, if you will, / as the ambassador of a hatred / who knows its cause / and does not envy you your whim / of ending him.” Here, too, there is—in the pronoun chicanery—a cool undaunt’d admitting that “I speak as one whose filth / is like his own . . .” No shunning the culpa. “Act . . . don’t be acted upon.”

Conjecture regarding The Rejection Group identity. Eliciting an involuntary snore. And redoublement of the actual. “Joyce really wanted his luggage.” The usual tom-toms of the frontier electronick’d say the noted cons Bök and Goldsmith and Place join’d up with flarf-daddy Mohammad and engineer of the fickle (and moralist) Johnson, an inimical consort, and dubious. Though: in a stark notice append’d to the pamphlet (“The Printer to the Reader”) is writ how one “Master C. B. . . . hath cunningly discharged himself of any responsibilitie for this texte”; how “a message from K. G. . . . doth with no lesse clerkly cunning seeke to perswade the printer, that he (also) had no hande in its making”; and how—in the printer’s (presumably David Hadbawnik) terms—“I am not privie to any declaratione at this date from K. S. M., nor from V. P., nor K. J.,” whom he decries as “most notorious persons, too” and “assumed in some quarters as the Authores.” The printer does (rather pugnaciously, I’d say) point to something “the venerable C. D. hath recently informed us, namely”:

’Tis come a time when affixing one’s signature to an alien text be in no wise remarkable, and we fain to arrive at the next frontier of proprietie, when the institutions of poetry shall be agonized by scriptores conceptiones signing for others under texts the which themselves have not written.

A statement with alarming propinquity to that found in one of the end-notes to Craig Dworkin’s “The Fate of Echo” (being an introduction to the anthology of “conceptual writing” Against Expression): “Signing a text that one hasn’t written will surely become less remarkable, and the next frontier of propriety will materialize when conceptual writing antagonizes the institutions of poetry by signing for others under texts that they have not written.” Alors,who’s zooming whom? The reader decides. (If there’s one thing language writing’s zip’d up into our compunct, it’s this: the reader decides.) So: “. . . as the venomous spider will sucke poison out of the most holesome herbe, and the industrious Bee can gather hony out of the most stinking weede: Even so the discrete reader may take a happie example by the most vicious verses, although the captious and harebrained heads can neither be encoraged by the good, nor forewarned by the bad.” (“The Printer to the Reader”) A sentence with ominous proximity to that found in a printer’s remarks prefacing George Gascoigne’s 1573 A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F. J.:

And as the venomous spider wilt suck poison out of the most wholesome herb, and the industrious Bee can gather honey out of the most stinking weed, even so the discrete reader may take a happy example by the most lascivious histories, although the captious and harebrain’d heads can neither be encouraged by the good nor forewarned by the bad.

5 Works: a veritable tourbillon of identities, introducing “23 new systems of art (all now dead), representing 19 “writers.”

Margaret Anderson, 1886-1973
(Photograph by Berenice Abbott)

Jane Heap, c. 1927
(Photograph by Berenice Abbott)

5 Works
(Cover by Carrie Kaser)

“Big Glob”

Magnolia

Spindrift or spendthrift? Against the clarity of the morning’s rose-breast’d grosbeak, operatic in a maple: a tizzy of misappropriation and tunelessness. Wrong songs. Inspecific tort and mayhem in the brain-box. Kind of thing makes one “turn to” books. “Live long thou happie tree, I say, / that on the brinck doth stand.” (Reading’s radical solace: the way it sops up the loose offal of the brain-pan, or, put differently, aligns the stray iron filings into discernible rows and curves of a right complexity . . .) Hendrix, mid-“Voodoo Child” at Woodstock, all mouth-gapery and clench, suddenly: “You can leave if you want to, we’re just jammin’ that’s all . . .” Or, out of “The Ten Thousand Things”:

. . . the eye / Extracts a progress from almost anything.
—John Ashbery

                   Norman Rockwell’s work for Jell-O

        dizzy hoi polloi        & Ford         a haibun magpie

    “the copyist tendency”         tender’d obliquely

    a wharf, complacently cloudy        j’étends les bras Georgia

        forg’d, fomenting, skeptical        the city of Merv

    an adherency of the rook’d        venereal sanctuary

        Stimmung-hanker’d        sky        a painter’s shack

tolerable in its aqua ambush         cigarillo

    quiz’d unerringly the dubious         dying cinder

casuistry’s equidistance        a model of        insincerity

        bees nuzzling the cornflowers         that dirty yellow

unstinting Hoovering         took by the veriest

ordinary strictures         tiny white briefs        a spotter

            where the Argo sails        scullcap’d & turban-wound

        “the nacreous sands of the Guadalquiver”

                big glob of mayonnaise

Oh, one book sighs, “When cankred craftie Iuno came / with Venus (Nurce of Love) / And Pallas eke . . .” Eek, indeed. Looking at Pound’s early Chinoiserie, pre-Cathay, redoings of lines out of Herbert A. Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature (1901). How Pound took Giles’s version of a Han dynasty emperor Liu Ch’e (B.C. 156-87) piece, and made “Liu Ch’e”:

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Isn’t there a gaffe there in that furry and familiar “scurry”? What kind of puppie is a leaf? Trouble reconciling the animal’d romp with that “wet leaf.” A question of unity: “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Complexity no apologia for antithesis. The Giles reads:

The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door. . . .
For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.

Is Pound’s “discontinued” mercantile and clumsy next to “stilled”? Is “rejoicer of the heart” a “dim lands of peace” (“natural object is always the adequate symbol”)? Isn’t Pound’s putting the “rejoicer” “beneath” the leaves slightly awkward, if not gruesome? Here’s Arthur Waley’s version—call’d “Li Fu-ren”—out of the 1918 One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems:

The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
          Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

Putting the leaves against the door, closed. (Pound’s “threshold” brings the door in, but the heaps of leaves seem nowhere near it: leaves “scurry” into corners, not doorways . . .) Waley’s “skirt” seems a nigh-mechanical thing, all that clip’d verbiage: “sound,” “silk,” “skirt,” “stopped.” Amy Lowell (apparently working with Florence Ayscough who explain’d the original “character by character) offer’d a version bizarrely call’d “To the Air: ‘The Fallen Leaves and the Plaintive Cicada’” in the 1921 Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese:

There is no rustle of silken sleeves,
Dust gathers in the Jade Courtyard.
The empty houses are cold, still, without sound.
The leaves fall and lie upon the bars of doorway after doorway.
I long for the Most Beautiful One; how can I attain my desire?
Pain bursts my heart. There is no peace.

That ending is, one must admit, “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective”—if one considers feelings a “thing.” Compared to Pound’s veering off into the slant metaphorick’d particular. Rifling the Giles, wondering that Pound didn’t redo the piece Giles himself call’d “Amari Aliquid” ( medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat (Lucretius) = “out of the center of a fountain of delights arises something bitter that chokes us in our flowering”) with its Poundian opening:

The autumn blast drives the white scud in the sky,
Leaves fade, and wild geese sweeping south meet the eye;
The scent of late flowers fills the soft air above,
My heart full of thoughts of the lady I love.
In the river the barges for revel-carouse
Are lined by white waves which break over their bows;
Their oarsmen keep time to the piping and drumming. . . .
          Yet joy is naught
          Alloyed by the thought
That youth slips away and that old age is coming.

Liu Ch’e apparently introduced copper coins to China. Too: “Greek music took the place of the old native art, and the calendar was scientifically reformed.” A Poundian sort. (“I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time / I’ll give it right back one of these days . . .”)

Ezra Pound, 1885-1972

Herbert A. Giles, 1845-1935

“One Gap Against Another”

Along a Fence

Immediacy, that indeterminant fons et origo. What sends the shuttlecock flying. The whoops of the titmouse in the yard. The book open’d at random to a page of William Bartram’s:

In planting and distributing the several parts of the Garden have care to appose one to another, as a wood to a Parterre or bowling green & not to place all the Wood on one side & the Parterre the other nor set a bowling green apossite a Bason for this would be one Gap against another which should allways be avoided, by setting a full against a void & the raised work against a flat to cause a contrast & variety       This diversity should be always kept in view in the general design as well as in each distinct piece.

The fluttering of the night reverie’s drapes being push’d belatedly open, tousling the sleeper who’s in the midst of some lingering prehensile identity reach, that of a mold-cover’d Roma tomato with a copper coin greenly oxidizing: “one Gap against another.” (One thinks, oddly, though consequently, of A. R. Ammon’s short poem call’d “Their Sex Life”:

One failure on
Top of another.

Nigh language writing-inflect’d that is, with its slight smarm at the resituating of an idiom. Is it in the roundabout precincts of avoidance—or in the ravening jut of excess and that one comes a cropper?) There’s, too—too?—Jean Frémon, talking about The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman: “Because poetry does not exist in some sort of poetic language, but in that which exceeds it. It is that which mysteriously remains—sometimes—when one is systematically striving to push away all that which resembles it.” (Sounding a little like that grog-pot adage of Robert Frost’s: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”) One strives to translate Ryman’s “painting without paint”—or its variant, “paint without painting”—into a demonstrable act of writing. Stuck with the continual defiant prosthesis of the word. The unprepossessing right failure of any attempt at intelligible wordlessness . . . I suppose, being one of the raffish and rife “tendency,” one in cahoots with the undiminish’d exfoliance of the rose, preterite of the gussy’d-up—I suppose a limit’d vocab, a spare nigh-cipher truncated vocables ought run counter to my “aim” (my aimlessness). Reading (lately, intermittently) Helen Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists the repeat’d calls (against the blowzy obfusc and plenarty of late Victoriana) for a stripping down. Here’s Rebecca West in 1913 in Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman (predecessor of The Egoist), puffing the imagistes (and seeing Taylorism in Poundian efficiency):

Poetry should be burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white with rains of affliction: the poet should love nakedness and the thought of the skeleton under the flesh. But because the public will not pay for poetry it has become the occupation of learned persons, given to soft living among veiled things and unaccustomed to being sacked for talking too much. That is why from the beautiful stark bride of Blake it has become the idle hussy hung with ornament kept by Lord Tennyson . . . and now supported . . . by the Georgian school. But there has arisen a little band who desire the poet to be as disciplined and efficient at his job as the stevedore. Just as Taylor and Gilbreth want to introduce scientific management into industry so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion . . .

West prints “poems written by Mr. Ezra Pound since he became an imagiste.” Including the wholly pertinent “Salutation”:

O generation of the thoroughly smug
                and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen the fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
                and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
                and do not even own clothing.

Is “we” there now? Is there flab again? Is the poetic body groaning under its imperial corpulence? I suspect so. One recalls the early (22 October 1912) letter to Harriet Monroe, hinting at the immorality of sloppy verbiage, how any lie is bad art. (And “we”: surround’d by lies.) Pound:

      Until someone is honest we get nothing clear. The good work is obscured, hidden in the bad. I go about this London hunting for the real. I find paper after paper, person after person, mildly affirming the opinion of someone who hasn’t cared enough about the art to tell what he actually believes.
      It’s only when a few men who know, get together and disagree that any sort of criticism is born . . . I can give you my honest opinion from the firing line, from “the inside.” I’m the kind of ass that believes in the public intelligence. I believe your “big business men” would rather hear a specialist’s opinion, even if it’s wrong, than hear a rumor, a dilutation. My own belief is that the public is sick of lukewarm praise of the mediocre . . .
      It isn’t as if I were set in a groove. I read any number of masters, and recognize any number of kinds of excellence. But I’m sick to loathing of people who don’t care for the master-work, who set out as artists with no intention of producing it, who make no effort toward the best, who are content with publicity and the praise of reviewers. I think the worst betrayal you could make is to pretend for a moment that you are content with a parochial standard. You’re subsidized, you don’t have to placate the public at once . . .

That latter couple of sentences aim’d at Poetry, the magazine, and just as pertinent now as in 1912. Though I’d like to think the “you” of “the worst betrayal you could make is to pretend for a moment that you are content with a parochial standard” is aim’d, too, at “us.” Comfortably inured to a sensibility of excess, of “victory” acquired without exertion. Complacent with regard to shabby goods vaunt’d. At ungodly perennial ease with our own depredatory insouciance and publick deceits.

Harriet Monroe, c. 1922

C. D. Wright’s One With Others

Bramble in Straw

Rain. Endless rain. Williams: “a flash of juncos in the field of grey locust saplings with a white sun powdery upon them and a large rusty can wedged in the crotch of one of them, for the winter, human fruit, and on the polished straws of the dead grass a scroll of crimson paper—not yet rained on”—being one of three fragments with the date “10 / 28” in “The Descent of Winter.” Why, daffy with sleeplessness, or—conversely—alert, shrewd, impitoyable (“I will make a big, serious portrait of my time”), do I turn so frequently to Williams? “Human fruit” is one answer. I am floor’d by the human fruit in C. D. Wright’s recent One With Others (Copper Canyon, 2010), so full-blown, exuberant and rumbustiously common in its truly unruly human singing (and its heed-dirge accompaniments), it makes the brassier remnants of the Google’d florilegium and art-market crowd look like tripe. A big, serious portrait of one white woman call’d “V”—Wright identifying her in the notes as Margaret Kaelin McHugh: “Our gaggle of unsolicited student acolytes began to call her ‘V” when she was reading Pynchon while our heads were still rooting among the novels she swallowed whole as a solitary child. Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage [at a critical moment] and genius [of accident and design], though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance.” Report of V’s participating (“To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing”) in the August 1969 March Against Fear through the Arkansas delta, Memphis to Little Rock. A couple of hints of its delivery, random pages:

      THIS IS ONE OF THE THINGS I HEAR HAPPENED: She has just folded herself over to brush off the brown leaves covering her coleus. She has been stacking wood. She has on the work glove. She is going back inside to clean up; she bends from the waist to make a quick pass at the leaves that she might still enjoy the tart color of on her coleus a bit longer. She feels a quick sting, thinks it’s a wasp or a hornet and goes inside [the light at the sink is better]. As soon as the glove is off and she grabs the baking soda to put on the spot, she notes the rapid swelling in the webbing between her thumb and index [her hands her best feature, better than her legs even], the throb, already throbbing, and steps back outside to check if it was a hornet or wasp and glimpses as she peers into the coleus the dusty reddish thing, the sickening hourglasses along its thick length as it creeps soundlessly into the foliage, and it passes through her mind as her body is passing out that Southerners sympathizing with the North were called Copperheads.

      AND, vacuuming the rag rug, listening to Nina Simone: The record had a catch in it. Always starting over at “Old Jim Crow is dead.” When the phone rang, and she shut off the vacuum cleaner, not the record player, and the caller said Hunter [expletive] Crumb is dead.

And:

      V, deep down, she may have been as sad as a cover band. She might have felt drier than a codld of Arkasa dirt. Lonely lonely lonel, like th hunter green sutiacas that hadn’t been sued since hre honey moon.

      Some honeymoon, she later told Gert, with that off-color smile, she almost had to rape him. She said this near death. As her executive organs were shutting down and she was finishing the NYT crossword, September 2, in ballpoint:

      What is a suffix of book

      ish

      Who is a major exporter of coconut oil

      Samoa

      A colorless liquid

      ouzo

      A defeatist’s words

      I [nospace] lose

      The artist of the etching and aquatint, el sueño de la razón produce monstruos.

That final Goya title (out of Los Caprichos) one of several repeat’d phrases in One With Others. A Poundian strategy, the notational detail limn’d subsequent to its dispersal within story, recalling that story’s plenitude:

      Not the sound but the shape of the sound

      Not the clouds rucked up over the clothesline

      The copperhead in the coleus

      Not the air hung with malathion

      . . .

      The world is not ineluctably finished


      though the watchfires have been doused

Williams swerved into Wright (not my “intent”). I am remind’d of Martha Graham’s insisting that movement be “significant” (in a lazy and facile “era” that succumbs with a kind of murderous glee to its facility, terminal irony propping up its ironic legs . . .) Graham, recalling beginning to teach at the Eastman School c. 1923:

The first morning I went into class I thought, I won’t teach anything I know. I was through with character dancing. I wanted to begin, not with characters, or ideas, but with movement. So I started with the simplest—walking, running, skipping, leaping—and went on from there. By correcting what looked false, I soon began creating. I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge. I wanted to lose the facile quality . . .

(V, living in Hell’s Kitchen, writing—next to the dates for Cheops and Hesiod and Herodotus, amongst others—“It’s handy. It settles a lot of arguments . . .”—on the wall “in soft pencil, next to the sill overlooking the scraggly barren pear”: “Unless a proposition is necessary it is meaningless with meaning approaching zero.”) And Graham again:

The puritanical concept of life has always ignored the fact that the nervous system and the body as well as the mind are always involved in experience . . . In life, heightened nerve sensitivity produces that concentration on the instant which is true living . . . Perhaps what we have always called intuition is merely a nervous system organized by training to perceive.

One thing underlying One With Others: the morality of the body’s demands. Against foot-dragging razón. Wright:

      Langston’s word was fester.


      King’s was thingification. The thingification of our humanity.


      What the King called nobodiness.


      Festina lente, with all deliberate speed, make haste slowly. Voluntary gradualism, glacial time.

And (V’s reply):

      To feel in conjunction with the changes


      of my time. The most alive I’ve ever been.


      My body lifted itself from the chair


      it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.


      To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.

(“You have your life // until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know // or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.”) Amen.

C. D. Wright

Clark Coolidge’s This Time We Are Both

A Wall

Rain. Bicycle tire flat. “Genial denial.” Clark Coolidge: “So must have it that / the art hang in dirt strips / a black sulfur liner nightmare at the lost steps . . .” One thinks vaguely of a morning without. Walking in the downpour: only the drench’d starlings continue the twees. And a chipping sparrow, its dry trill. Coolidge: “Stub he / it’s gone / and the air is marked with a question point . . .” Bags of peat moss and topsoil under tarps in the parking lot at Jack’s, is it Jack’s? Next to the sushi joint. Where the gas station-turn’d pizza delivery shack tacks down the acute angle made by the forking street, bi-approachability a plus. Coolidge:

Horse clops should come with these trolley joint torques
a viable leaning in the morning tin is to wait by it, not for it
jump across tunnels in the darkening air, the steel of a sort of
clam it seems, I look under arm to catch what swings . . .

I like how pliably apropos Coolidge’s phrasals be, in the grand re-purposing. How, like any “sound” particular, they get under the general sonic backdrop, and bleat impermeably. Indelible noise: the definition of “voice.” (What Pound says in “A Retrospect”: “There is . . . in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.”) I am just browsing through This Time We Are Both (Ugly Duckling, 2010), notes and sequences made following “the itinerary of the Rova Saxophone Quartet tour of November 1989: Leningrad, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Tartu, and Moscow.” Epigraph’d (below the Marker and the Lautréamont) by Ashbery (“The Preludes”): “Over near somewhere else there is the problem of the difficulty.” A line that manages the same sort of vacillating signal that Rimbaud’s Je est un autre clangs out into the languorous instability: here direct’d into the distance where difficulty “lies.” Coolidge:

Just do
one pair of the many thing
or end up let to
the further place where pulse and choice do go
the openers put their own limits
then if you can get beyond
fine, the materials go

I’d love to get beyond fine
to frame all this in its zone of force free
no
these the Impedimenta of Protected Scratch . . .

Rimbaud’s “Too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin” is probably pertinent. Getting beyond the openers (that “put their own limits”—the constantly narrowing syntactical trap of sentence-ry): even the obligatory jump-cut bouleversement and cabriole that lands one “off” never suffices for long . . . Coolidge’s repeat’d attempts to dodge the knowing that cannot “stop being here”: “We go, so it’s not here / we left much of an else to the road, going / up to this it goes off with us . . .” Or:

I know the lines
I just can’t sign to this ceiling
a tin vintner and rubber syrups, miraculous
how much blowing can stop, I signed myself out
the way of the rusted soups, the marriage of whole fields
to a can of beans, for example needed trial
then siphoned camphor into a glare, but do I know
enough to stop being here?

The answer of music (“blowing”). The answer of naming (the vaguely Eliotic incursion of “Streets, these that lose to dazedly open space? / made up however to someone else’s measure . . .”), that perennial demiurge, reliably prevaricate. So one learns of “Liar Farm” and “the Centrifugal Ball of the Fire Berries,” of a place call’d “Doubt in Full” and one call’d “The Silicone and Graphite Hotel,” of “the Sound of Ragout Reveal” and “Uncle Ink” and “Parenthesis Vodka.” Here, to end, a fleet Kerouack’d bop prosodic beginning with a sort of eked out Buddhist correspondence (with its “linchpin severity” of gull and stocking), going through the utopic jazz nod (what concord’s unison begat), and outing with some possibly “misunderapprehended / Time Was” (an Emily Post ostranenie moment):

Gull drawn in
red wheels
dawn beyond
hung stockings

Seize you in hours, thigh zone gauze complete
street about the car start, a dense trance Baluga
or a Moriarty extent committing
something something expendable
this nodule boot bucket chance of barest Russia

What you had been thinking about a whistle blew shrilly
where the western hem line is a lettuce signal
got a trade without a sample
mule jumped on veins in your screening permit
signed, Thorstein Veblen
signed, Henry Threadgill

There is no space, there is nothing
but
old stone towers, spacings of windows in walls
just
dug samples of harm on the average, horn in
thoughts to buy
at Braxton’s Thump, where I thought the red line jumped back
where I thought of the union of throttle union and throttle unison
sat in his room and thought about his trees
up above his thoughts bebop, salt
and what could have been the thought lesson for this grace?
before the attitudes came down, before the paper town lasting
thoughts that know not but the joy of case
bummers in strings that his ace travels well
in case in keeping
these thoughts I hoped
I hadn’t misunderapprehended
Time Was

Some tables
prepared to look away
from all angles, some tables
prepared to listen to
themselves then yell, no doubt
some mostly don’t, these tables tasks
for a supper prepared as if on Mars

I love that “thoughts that know not but the joy of case / . . . / in case in keeping . . .” The dub impossibility of inflect’d lingual blowing (against the sweet vagaries of the uninflect’d earth). So blow one must.

Clark Coolidge

Early Faunal Stage

Fence

Williams (“The Wind Increases”) calling a poet “a man / whose words will / bite / their way / home—being actual / having the form / of motion . . .” A horse biting itself is likely suffering a form of stereotypy (“a repeat’d and perseverant act by an animal, serving no obvious purpose”) call’d “flank-biting.” So poets go. So the fog cloaks the sopping earth, so the deep carboniferous beds release a cloacal fish scent, out-sourcing. One plows through the puddles, spokes a-hum, repeating the “faunal stages” of the early Pennsylvanian period: Kinderscoutian, Marsdenian, Yeadonian, Cheremshanskian, Langsettian, Melekesskian, Duckmantian . . . Half-rabid flank-biting behavior. Butting at what lists. Ben Jonson (quoting Plutarch’s De Garrulitate) says that to guard against a “licentious and wandering” tongue, “a wall, or parapet of teeth” is “set in our mouth to restrain the petulancy of our words.” And Williams: “We batter at our / unsatisfactory / brilliance— // There is no end / to desire—” Reading through, of late, Pound’s Literary Essays, I am struck by Pound’s repeat’d call for “efficiency”—a Taylorist for the high moderns. In “How to Read” (1928) saying how it’s “as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandage.” Worrying in “The Serious Artist” (1913) how “desire often overshoots the power of efficient presentation” and calling for “something like ‘maximum efficiency of expression.’” In “Date Line” (1934) calling language the “most efficient registering material” for “knowledge of the human consciousness.” The repeat’d insistence that such-and-such “saved me a great deal of time.” Pound: “Language is not a mere cabinet curio or museum exhibit.” Though, reading Lissa Wolsak’s terrific Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Station Hill, 2010) some months back, I did begin to think just that, with its array’d vocables, goodly odd-stuffs to peer at:

and after,

istle, finnochio, ixia

“rich in apples”

they,   for   emissive

lips   cooled forth

chilled persimmon sheathes,

disinterest in the speech of

ill-lit,     rigor-like

ink   flows on top of   milk

untroubled and smiling an

Engai   cuts the tail

from a living lion




humectant       dusk

orchid-orange   wasp       swimmy...

gate and pear

by trading subtly

mores for mores

a mound-owner

stoops to dig a root




halve for me

the wind-beads

halve for me

my space-grasp

That out of Wolsak’s “Pen Chants, or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences.” So that, encumber’d by the syntactical tightness of my own lines, a moment for the rehearsals of sprawl and flocculence did arrive. I intend’d a piece call’d “The Ten Thousand Things”—leaning up against Thomas Sprat’s reverie of a perfectly efficient lingual Arcadia: “a constant Resolution to reject all Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style; to return back to the primitive Purity and Shortness, when Men deliver’d so many Things, almost in an equal Number of Words.” That, and Cecil—not Frederick—Taylor’s audaciously seeing in “each note . . . a continent, a world in itself.” Abandon’d after roughly twelve hundred or so words / things. Here’s two:

                                                  orison

            a fork’d succulent                     progg’d by the cesspool

      Crane’s pie pantry         primitivist’s eye             at widdershins

    wrench’d out of obligado           scop             a refuge, a confinement

  inventory of the portable self             each containment’s hundred

savage candor           “peeled bits of straw”           glean’d the beyond

circumflect’d sun gone watery               Leslie’s road grisaille walk’d

the humdrum                     John Clare                     “the cowslip pips”

getting out to pee     Volvo in the turnabout         the Epping grimoire

  wobbles                                               /                                             warbles

          sable lettering brush             extrapictorial naming refus’d

            “serv’d no prenticeship”             the fens               canny spells

              dip of the goldfinch     the Chinese call’d it “ink play”

                    A bowing           of / to           the horizontal

—

          milk’d reveries of         a Camberwell youth

                  “big as the bowels of Vesuvius”

      Campo Santo             “signifies and is”

  scoria array’d                 dud     beetles in the weeds

      beyond scurrility           prayer busts         septic & flush’d

wan sober meat of hickory           art-dub           hello, actually

      pokeweed in the reticent field of     mole-color’d gauze

            a fit exegesis / digesteth yron                   uncanny / tyranny

                    up out of the diurnal fever like an asterisk

        August / angst                 some brackish tannin’d spillway

la Saltpêtrière     black jelly adherent             glib

      seethe of meniscus                 gulp of dying

      “their dusky backs upheav’d”        boon to descant

  dumb hour         hard quotidian snip         a throw-

                      down song

Lissa Wolsak

Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3

A Wall

Out and about, scissoring off a stretch of high orchards, rolling between Paw Paw, Michigan and Hammond, Indiana, with repeat’d intermittent wheelings. Sandhill cranes flying. A redtail in a scrubby elm, Dutch’d to a stick. Collect’d debris of the road pull’d like hosiery up and across the bumps and knots of the weekend, sheer, to fit. Like a nail bang’d into an ice-block: making a potable by mere insistence. Read: Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3 (Dalkey Archive, 2009), translated by Jane Kuntz. One story repeat’d thrice under three titles, besmatter’d each with a pertinent lingo: “The Coconut Palm,” “The Cargo Ship,” “The Centaur.” Story of one Ti-Jus—son of African immigrants, inhabitant of a housing project in Ris-Orangis, south of Paris, mother (Bessie) cashier in a big-box supermarché, father (Celestin) stunned by melancholy or wholly cancel’d out and unmanned by destiny—who murders one Madame Fenerolo, manager of the SUMABA supermarket. I think briefly of Meursault shooting the Arab under the unbearable sun that day. Gavarry’s title’s out of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera:

In that noonday heat there’ll be a hush round the harbour
As they ask which has got to die.
And you’ll hear me as I softly answer: the lot!
And as the first head rolls I’ll say: hoppla!

Polly Peachum singing the song of “Pirate Jenny” with its threat of vengeance against all constraint. (As Frank O’Hara puts it: “Those / were intricate days.”) The heart-stopping restraint of Gavarry’s prose, its way of gathering up a billowy white cumulus against threat. Here, out of the middle of “The Cargo Ship”:

      Paris, like the suburbs, had experienced its moment of hail. Right from the first few seconds, it sounded as though icy machine-gun pellets were going to shoot through car hoods, shatter windshields and glass canopies, rip through awnings. Cars all came to a halt, and when unable to find haven in the scant space of some bus shelter, or else take refuge in the metro, pedestrians huddled under porch canopies and cornices, as stunned by the sudden strangeness of the urban landscape around them as they were by the frenetic humming of the hailstones.
      The sky having changed back to a less solid state, traffic resumed. Shelters emptied out. Once again, the city resounded with its usual driving, walking, rush hour garrulousness. One street, however, or a section of street, in the Quinze-Vingts neighborhood, was slow to return to normal. No vehicles were crowding the road, except for the ones that were parallel parked; no engines were revving up for departure . . . Nevertheless, from anonymous bystander to anonymous bystander, there soon manifested a desire for contact. Looks were exchanged, signifying “So you noticed it, too?” . . . Smiles of denied anxiety began to show through their worried looks: a fleeting phenomenon, as though the usual inertia slowing all urban hustle and bustle to an irritable crawl had now solidified entirely, bringing people to a complete halt . . . The question “What’s going on?” was now displayed on every face, made manifest by every body. Left unanswered, the question evolved into “Is there something brewing?,” then “Will it be something serious?,” and then “Where will it come from?” They watched the skies, as though fearful it might rain down acid or salt, corrupting the waters of the earth. Ears pricked up in expectation of the unlikeliest sounds from neighboring streets: weeping and wailing, mooing, crying and croaking, all of which would reach a pitch testifying to the most unspeakable agonies, or even an overall regression of the species itself . . . Chirring clouds of locust, then blue-black bolts of venomous bluebottle flies, and anopheles mosquitoes, were all going to pour out of the darkening sky, invading everything, devouring everything, poisoning everything; or perhaps, out of sight, millions of killer bacteria were already at work on people’s flesh . . . No one moved.

The arrival, so pointedly prepared, is of Ti-Jus and three friends: “They took up the entire breadth of the street.” Impeccable sense of how racially alarming the European “street” itself finds the physical ease of the boys. And the odd impenetrable lingo, here render’d in “cargo ship” terminology: “They shortened boatswain into bosun or into simply bos . . . They spoke of lining the windlass, of stowing and slackening the hawser. . . . ‘All scuppers open! . . .’” (So, too, in “The Coconut Palm,” the boys interject with words like Nucifera and spadices and “the coir of a drupe”—coconut argot, botanically inflect’d. A way of “making strange.”) There’s a terrific paragraph or so wherein Gavarry connects the rampant physical, the animal, with the hoppla! blurt and jactancy of language-making. Here:

      We hear it, we alone, a muffled stirring in the body’s prison, an utterance anxious for release from our flesh, but that we retain, captive, for although we’d like to believe it belongs to us, or is part of ourselves, we suspect it to have been implanted deep within us by some malign force—a force that has always reigned there, supreme, or else, via some ruse, which has insinuated itself gradually, and now rules incognito. Should this utterance happen to escape, suddenly inhabiting the open air, resounding in our own voice, we would fail to recognize it, would grow afraid, feel ashamed, as though we had forgotten how to use language; or else, if we were able to puzzle out the meaning of those sounds, we would find that we had been reproducing the very same words that reveal us to be rough beasts, compounding our shame—and the fear that would soon moisten our skin and make our hair sticky would indeed bring out our most animal odors.
      This is why we keep quiet, why we endure the visceral dilations and constrictions, the spasms, the feelings of stifling, and, in general, all the varied frustrations occasioned by suppressed speech; why we identify not with the animals that speak, but rather with our own muteness, as well as with certain sensations and sounds: the blowing of the wind around our male bodies, the sharp, hurried hammering of our steps beneath us, the eruption of our urine, its drumming against the metallic flooring or doormats.

One recalls Artaud’s uninhibit’d theater of animal noises, grunts, yells, rough vocalics assuming the fail’d place of language. One recalls the way one is tempt’d, writing, to burst into sheer noise—think of Williams’s “Wheeeeee / clacka tacka tacka / tacka tacka / wha ha ha ha ha / ha ha ha” in “The Trees” or Eliot’s twit twit jug jug tereu bandying. Urge to roar and slur against the tongue’s own finicky.

Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3

Gérard Gavarry

“Defects Inherent”

A Wall

Meteoric shoots of forsythia suckering up into the reaches whilst the groundling daffodils dodge the cut-purses, and ooh and ahh predictably, one-penny marks. “Nothing in that drawer.” Pound’s “Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.” (That—out of Guide to Kulchur—coming hard behind Pound’s note concerning “the defects or disadvantages of my Cantos.” Being only: “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.” So that “defect” becomes a kind of cupidity, unremitting.) Isn’t that the thing lacking in the constructivist messes? All that seamlessness of making—or seaminess—all sutures, rough-join’d, in plain sight à la New Sentence-ry with its pre-planned aporias, the somnolent regularity of its sentence by sentence deferrals. Fix’d in its niggling, it “inheres” to no man, no particular man. The contending (if it exists) is merely between particulars: no longer is it—Pound’s model—between maker and emergent form. A pertinence (out of the new issue* of Paul Vangelisti’s OR), a terrific piece by Martha Ronk:

The Factual Nature

After a while so much has happened there are no more words
or it’s hard to force them or the mismatch more entirely obvious as
off in the distance someone is ringing the doorbell and ought to be let in
or the furnace switches on as the nights grow cold as slippery water
slips in its pipes and what this is taken together, which is how it comes,
lacks the sort of organizational lexicon necessary to the faint at heart.
The lists Homer made of trees, the catalog of ships, seem crucibles
in which the factual nature of things burns us and more and more
it makes sense to make lists of battles and their dates,
to memorize the names of those gone, each photographed with a cigarette,
staring off into the dust and the queer yellow light reflected off it
so that the term “unreal” becomes a necessary ploy
to dull the shocks that flesh is heir to.

The “ploy” of a “term” or the “organizational lexicon” of the “list”—devices thrown up as barricades against the world’s onslaught and drubbing. Better to work under the signs of “ex tempore” and “pro re nata” undaunt’d, untrammel’d by the pre-regulatory lean of a method beyond the dodge one of the winsomely fleet. Pound points to technique’s being “the test of a man’s sincerity” and calls for “the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures the determination of the law, or the precise rendering of the impulse.” I’d argue that includes one’s own predetermined sortie. Isn’t that O’Hara’s oomph in “Biotherm”? “I am guarding it from mess and measure”—balancing a tightrope between the “how it comes” and (here) Williams’s sense of “measure”—particularly that at the end of Paterson, Book Five:

The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,
                        a choice among the measures   .   .
                                            the measured dance
“unless the scent of a rose
                        startle us anew”
.   .   .
          Yo ho! ta ho!
We know nothing and can know nothing   .
                            but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
          Satyrically, the tragic foot.

It is that ending (with its ellipsis’d out midriff—quoted thus by Hugh Kenner at the end of a review of Williams’s Paterson, Book Five and I Wanted to Write a Poem in the May 1959 Poetry that I suspect O’Hara’s mocking with the later “Biotherm” lines:

“measure shmeasure know shknew
unless the material rattle us around
pretty rose preserved in biotherm
and yet the y bothers us when we dance
                                                                  the pussy pout”

O’Hara’s poem for Bill Berkson is dated “August 26, 1961-January 23, 1962.” The May 1959 Poetry includes, too, Kenneth Koch’s “Thank You” and “You Were Wearing.”

*OR #6: Work by George Albon, Vincente Aleixandre, Luigi Ballerini, Art Beck, Guy Bennett, Kevin Casey, Rebecca Chamlee, Neeli Cherkovski, Ray DiPalma, Johanna Drucker (reviewing Alan Loney’s The Books to Come), Mark DuCharme, Gilad Elbom, Courtney Gregg, Dale Herd, Ernst Jandl, John King, John Latta, Eugenia Matt, Douglas Messerli, Jude Luciano Mezetta, Bill Mohr (reviewing books by Gail Wronsky, Maggie Nelson and Stephen Ratcliffe), Béatrice Mousli, Christopher Mulrooney, C. Natale Peditto, Dennis Phillips, Antonio Porta, Francis Raven, Andrea Rexilius, Gianluca Rizzo, Martha Ronk, Alice Rose, Donna Sprujit-Metz, Sarah Suzor, Paul Vangelisti, Emilio Villa, and Silas Zobal.

Martha Ronk

TO ANXIETY

Puttering, I put things
off with a semi-
valiant intent to do
what needs doing with-
out delay, practical, vett’d,
sober. Or I pull
a “big umbrella” rain
hat off the rack,
march with the square-
jaw’d constructivists, pulling no
necessary punches, withholding no
cry against the hazards
of a state security
apparatus newly equip’d with
mambo Darth Vader trappings,
insane riot-adducing gear
for the routine crowd
control, domestic, of post-
fútbol Saturday night barrio
toots, or the hotel
workers local’s measly picket
line with its hand-
letter’d signs and nigh
unintelligibly bullhorn’d chorus of
demands. A regular pawn-
shop hero I am,
all illegitimacy and hope
pared down to despair.
I think of Kierkegaard
who says, “The doubter
is like a lash’d
top. He remains upright
only whilst the throttling
continues, and is unable
to stand erect without
it.” Or the enormous
fib of Kafka: that
necessity for “a goal
one makes one’s way
towards by undergoing every
kind of unhappiness.” Anxiety
lies in the hock
shop retrieval, itching among
heap’d up arrangements of
hockey skates and Nancy
Drew books, the piety-
inflict’d owner yakking it
up about Agamemnon, presumably
the cat who’s extending
one lazy orange paw
out of the nether
regions of a hutch. Who
snatches it back at
the noise of my
sneeze. Anxious, out of
angere, to choke. I
am choking, I am
choking off all gum-
shoe affability and making
for the border south
where rage isn’t just
another uneasy commodity when
the pinch is in.

The H.D. Book Notes 6

A Wall

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

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

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

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

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

John Dewey, 1859-1952

“Resort to sports . . .”

Chionodoxa

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

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

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

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

Hence the gibbering.

—

TO INCONSISTENCY

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

Edmund Wilson, 1895–1972

The Unobstruct’d

In a Garden

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

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

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

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

                        water from the hoof

“hurt another and hurt yourself most”

                        to live worthily
                                all things you accomplish

                                                              accomplish
[. . .]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustaf Sobin, 1935-2005