Michelle Disler’s [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography

Michelle Disler

Thumbing through the Sara Crangle-edited Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive, 2011), I am struck by the giddy conceptualism of “All the Laughs in One Short Story by McAlmon”:

, and crackled a laugh that came out in sharp hard spurts
      of metallic sound.
Yoland laughed harshly disdainful.
And she smiled her glistening
mechanically glamorous smile into his eyes
                  was laughing her unlubricated
laugh, steadily now – – – –
The jeer and taunt in her weird laugh – – –
                  She laughed a warmer rusty
chortle now
                  She smiled sphinxly
, and they shrilly shrieked laughter
                  – – voice was higher and more abandoned than usual. It shirieked, but rustily mechanical rather than human.
                  Their jokes could not be heard
because of the laughter,
She gave an inebriated rasp of laughter
– – caused the other girls to shriek their shrill hyena laughter again.
. . .
                 , and she merely rattled her machine laugh,
                  again to chortle dry rattling laughter
                  “I love her laugh.”
                  Her laugh is cleared of emotions.

A roughly two-page piece (here truncated by about half), put, by Crangle, into the “Essays and Commentary” section of the book. Of it, she writes:

McAlmon wrote many short stories that could be the unnamed focus of “All the laughs,” but in terms of its content, Loy’s piece bears a distinct resemblance to “The Laughing Funeral” of Post-Adolescence. “All the laughs” has a title page in Loy’s hand. Although it appears to start in medias res, this speculation is complicated by Loy’s use of a comma at the outset of the occasional line throughout. The handwritten text is formatted like a prose poem; in spite of the vagaries of Loy’s margins, every attempt has been made to preserve the integrity of her lineation.

“Giddy conceptualism” (that is, a thing designed to amuse and reveal—unlike the ennui-burdened work of the recent brute copyists): I read the piece as a kind of pointed sampling of the McAlmon story. A laughter chart. It’s likely that I am “attuned” to read it thus by my reading of Michelle Disler’s recent book, [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography (Counterpath, 2012). A book that seemingly runs Ian Fleming’s Bond novels through a series of mock-mathematical dismantlings, attempts to “solve” Bond’s overall “linear equation” by listing possible variables, and their values. See something like “Y Solve for Unnamed Variables [Bond, James]”:

y = double agent (lure) z, n
y = trees (bloody) l, k
y = red telephone (top secret) z, x
y = “Was he getting serious about this girl?” (express train) p, w
y = “We’ll get plenty of sleep in the grave” (Vegas) z, b
y = champagne (too much, not enough) z, w

Formulaic reductions. Core sampling. Closer to Loy’s stripping the laughs out of a Robert McAlmon story—a kind of Shklovskian “laying bare the device” (obnazenie priema)—is Disler’s cataloguing: “Dislikes [Bond, James]” begins

hates, displays aversion to     double-agent girlfriend     ALSO     dirty jobs, women drivers, women spies, poisonous fish, poisonous insects, poisonous plants, egomaniacs     ALSO     villains who touch his gun, sodden guns, hired guns     ALSO     peace, panic, henchmen, genital mutilation, losing at cards, restraint, flowers     ALSO     crying in double bourbons, in airport bars, cheaters, prudes, liars     ALSO     helpless women, women of privilege, women who are overly made up, unattractive women     ALSO     Barracudas     ALSO     being held hostage, vague death threats . . .

And, later: “boredom, sediment, long seductions, “pimping for England”     ALSO     kidnapping, kimonos . . .” Bond’s character found in the juxtapositions generated by the list-making. Elsewhere Disler assembles indices (“Unspecified [Bond, James]” is labeled “absurd categories, an index of” and includes such items as “Bond’s Best Most Meditative and Introspective Moment. See also Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed” and “Worst Bond. See also Best Girl; Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed . . .”), multiple choice problems (“1. Bond’s heart                     at the sight of her. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold / 2. Bond’s heart                     at the thought of sporting with the villain at golf. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold . . .”), and ferociously revealing (of “[Bond, James],” of Ian Fleming’s writerly mannerisms, and of something of Disler’s own discerning eye) accounts:

Approximate Number of Times [Bond, James]

not quite exact, ballpark       takes cold shower 10; takes ice-cold shower 1; takes sizzling cold shower 1; takes hot shower followed by cold 2; takes hot or cold bath 2; orders Bourbon 6; orders martini 10; is drunk, hung over 2; smokes 70 cigarettes per day 1; admits doesn’t like killing in cold blood 7; smiles grimly [17?]; is in villain’s employ 3; admits he has no plan, no way out of serious trouble 2; doubts ability to defeat villain [4?]; pumps round from gun into hotel bed or other furniture [5?]; dreams 5; sleeps dreamlessly [8?]; sleeps the “shallow sleep of ghosts and demons and screams” 1; proposes to needle villain 2; proposes 2; needles villain 3; is needled by villain [6?]; is offered a woman in marriage 1; bluffs villain [56?]; appreciates villain as a worthy adversary 6; speculates villain is completely insane [8?]; shoves gun into trouser waistband 9; says breakfast is favorite meal 3; contemplates animal beauty [taut breasts, etc.] of girl [89?] . . .

Etc. A bruising kind of lark amongst the stripped down particulars. Disler’s “ballparking” allows some likely less-than-fortuitous alignments, that “[89?]” count for “contemplates animal beauty” gets assigned, too, to “loses consciousness.” One at random (for the copyists amongst us). (Disler’s epigraph reads, cheekily, after all: “‘No escape. There was only bluff.’ Ian Fleming.") And then, mid-alphabet, the contextualizing move puts Disler precisely in Bond’s own boots:

Epigraph [Bond, James]

“Bond peered through the slits in his mask. Yes, by God! Two of the thugs were standing beside the ticket man watching the throng with deadly concentration. On the far side of the road stood the black Mercedes, petrol vapour curling up from its exhaust. No escape. There was only bluff. Bond put his arm round Tracy’s neck and whispered, ‘Kiss me all the way past the ticket-table. They’re there, but I think we can make it.’
      She flung an arm over his shoulder and drew him to her. ‘How did you know that that’s what I've been waiting for?’”

“Fork Lift for Hell!”
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ian Fleming 1963

Or another:

Forgetting [BOND, James]

contingent, like acts of mastery, on           beauty, champagne, empty magazine, loaded magazine, rare blood type, her broken nose, killing in cold blood, license to kill, limits to a man’s courage     ON TOP OF     death-cure, voodoo curse, vomiting on the beach, violet hour, velvet dress drawn tightly across the breasts, the saying of unpleasant things     AS WELL AS     shark repellent, sleep of dreams, small curling waves inside the reef on a foreign shore, slight tingling of the scalp, scent in the nose of a clean sea, nightmares, non-essential parts of the body, bamboo shade along the sweltering banks, beach sand littered with bullets     ADDED TO     holiday in the sun, hypocrisy toward her, hot silence, hard sand too warm for sleep, “Why do they hate us so much,” sweeping waves of sleep, “Would you like me in white with pale blue birds flying over me,” phantom memories, manacled wrists, memory of pain, illusion of power, “pair of queens kiss[ing] the green cloth,” her glittering body, her body torn lifeless from the churning sea     OVER AND ABOVE     swirl of movement in dark glass, sass, soft mission, standing transfixed, slight flush at the temples, “the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes,” too much champagne, too many cold showers, too much blood, a terribly exciting girl, colored glass, gone soft on account of poisoned fruit, gone pale     WITH     clenched teeth, cruel eyes, unnamed curses, gun-sight ground into the coccyx, grated egg with caviar, skeleton grip, imagination above everything else     PLUS     empty window frames, expensive pine-bath essences, questions as easy as possible, the vital purpose of evil, peccadilloes, “privileged to emerge better and more virtuous men”

There is emergent here, one thinks, “after all, a place for the genuine.”

Essai sans but

Alfred Stieglitz, “Self-portrait,” 1890

Bloated yellow moon hanging cheekish and low making the pre-dawn sky look green. A car horn’s sudden low chortle, distantly unlocked. Wind-made tremolos all along the viaduct. Tremolos of tremolos. To connect beyond with. “Withness”: a William James-invented word. In 1904, predating imagism’s codified joinery: “This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation of withness between some parts of the sum total of experience and other parts.” And (1907): “The lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness.”

—

Samuel Johnson (Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides): ‘I remember I was once on a visit at the house of a lady for whom I had a high respect. There was a good deal of company in the room. When they were gone, I said to this lady, “What foolish talking have we had!” “Yes,” said she, “but while they talked, you said nothing.” I was struck with reproof. How much better is the man who does nothing. Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.’ (Partially quoted by Guy Davenport, epigraph for Every Force Evolves a Form.)

—

Stéphane Mallarmé, out of the Preface to Un Coup de Dés (1897), translated by Henry Winkfield: “The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking; versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centered: I don’t transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the intent they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude.”

—

Henri Michaux, out of “Cannabis Indica” (Light Through Darkness), talking about the hemp-seized phenomenon of proliferating words (“explaining themselves in commentaries and in commentaries of commentaries”) he calls “neotenic thinking”: “Before a thought has fulfilled itself and matured, it gives birth to a new one, and this one, scarcely born, incompletely formed, brings still another into the world, a litter of others which similarly respond to one another by means of unexpected and unseizable references, which I have not so far succeeded in rendering.” (Quoted by Jed Rasula in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (2009). Neoteny: “Through the process of neoteny a whole slew of new traits may be introduced very rapidly, thereby increasing the variation available for natural selection.”)

—

Leo Bersani: “Immediacy is an ontological error; the immediacy of sense perverts the nature of thought. The opposite of such immediacy is not ‘profound’ or non-contingent sense, but rather the moving sense of a thought continuously proposing supplements to the objects abolished by its attention.” (Quoted by Rasula.)

—

William Carlos Williams (out of the 1939 essay “Federico García Lorca”): “‘I proceed,’ Unamuno says still in the twentieth century, ‘by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without documentation, without proof, outside of modern European logic, disdainful of its methods.” A line likely gleaned out of the final “A Funeral in Madrid” chapter of John Dos Passos’s 1922 travel book, Rosinante to the Road Again): “Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the lash of strong wine have made people’s minds ingrow into the hereafter, where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying angel.” Dos Passos quotes Unamuno out of “an essay in one of the volumes published by the Residencia de Estudiantes,” adding, too, Unamuno’s

“. . . I want no other method than that of passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come as they come.

“We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls, casuists and all that.

“I’ve heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence.”

The last Dos Passos quote of Unamuno thrust by Williams, too, into the Lorca essay.

—

Williams (out of the 1947 talk, “An Approach to the Poem”): “To be men today we must emulate the past (we need not exceed it), we must take the elements, the particulars (which exist today as they existed then) and combine them today in a manner similar to the work of the past—but completely different in form—we must make anew! of old particulars.
      “And if we cannot do work comparable to theirs, in its differences as in its comprehensiveness, then we cannot say that we, as they were, are alive. Our world is not real to us.
      “But imagine what we are if we only copy them! Imagine what we are if we are so bound in our minds that we are obsessed by poetry and make no poems comparable to those of the past. If we cannot invent anew.
      “Alfred Stieglitz used to tell an effective story about this. He would say, ‘If there were two doors and over one was written, “This way to see God” and over the other, “This way to hear a lecture about God,” everyone would rush toward the second door—for the implication inherent in entering the first door would be so overwhelming that no one would dare to face them.’

—

Davenport (“Every Force Evolves a Form”): “An osprey, swooping and crying with a ‘barbaric yawp’ (both words referring to sound, speech that is not Greek and seems to be bar bar over and over, yawp, a word as old as English poetry itself for the strident or hoarse call of a bird) seemed to Walt Whitman to be daimon upbraiding him for the ‘gab and loitering.’”

“Catches in the reticulum . . .”

Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

Friday, the customary day for “vaguer gleanings.” To browse and crosshatch. To see what, unsought by thesis and specified by whim, catches in the reticulum. Grid city conjunctures, and blessures. (Wounds without stigma.) All week under the plotz’d black sky of six a.m. I toy with a sentence about how “the mind, singularly adept in its suasions and curvatures, is nevertheless like a coastline, or a cauliflower, allowing sweet mimickry tenancy in its reductions, and its accretions.” Fractal goulash. Or I finick (“to mince, to affect airs”) with a negligible “piece” under the self-defeating (though accurate) title of “Beginning with Unh,” oblivious in the vocable-rampant lurch:

Unh is one way, grunting
out the putative residue of
a minimal thinkable, a monaural
nudge at meaning. Another is
to spar with the routine
lingual faineance by using two
red leather boxing gloves, ass-
fat, to punch a way
out of the usual cul-
de-sac made by heaps
of used-up words. Unh.
Unh-unh. The two approaches
commingle to make efficacy of
any mere contingency, the clean
uppercut subsumed by a flurry
of random fisticuffs, the punch-
drunk yatter of the amnesiac
annulled by deep Okeanos steering
‘all things through all things.’
Loss itself is thus regained
by its own preternatural gain-
saying, irregular, predetermined, and lit.
Thus the nights go by.
Thus one is pitched into
the light of rebuke’s ordinary
smoldering book, discursive as Vesuvius.

No wonder my seriousness quotient is so low. (Mimic here the obligatory sass-sincerity—a difficult “strain” to reach, or repeat—of O’Hara’s lines about “wondering whether you are any good or not / and the only decision you can make is that you did it . . .”) Somewhere Marianne Moore quotes Edith Sitwell’s lovely pourquoi écrire remark: “The behaviour of the world affects our beliefs and incites the mind to tumult to speak as a Cassandra or as an elegist.” Only to follow it with Robert Frost’s “It is what every poem is about—how the spirit is to surmount the pressure upon us of the material world.” (Elsewhere Moore says Frost labels it: “—the triumph of the spirit over the materialism by which we are being smothered.”) A way of puncturing (incite, incisor) the usual massy continuum (I think of a cloud, shapeless, wholly blotting) and its way of dopily effacing—what? one’s own preternatural, heroic way of attending to it?

One style: grunt avoidance. Blasé word fervors. Vocab shrug. Skint verbal rigidity of the merely petered out. Or of the defiantly pruned. Tomas Tranströmer (in the memoir sketch Memories Look at Me (New Directions, 2011), a piece culled out of the Robin Fulton-translated The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems) talks about drawing, on rolls of brown paper, cartoon strips “consumed only by myself”—though he’d taught himself to write “at the age of five”:

But it was too slow a process. My imagination needed some speedier means of expression. I didn’t even have enough patience to draw properly. I developed a kind of shorthand sketching method with figures in violent movement: breakneck drama yet no details.

Another style: denaturing glut. See Edward Dorn’s remarks in the 1977 talk “Strumming Language”:

      To a certain extent my interest in the extreme heterogenous vocabularies of English is fanatical. I “think” I need a large rush of data coming in all the time. I like the media in that respect. I spend a lot of the day monitoring the flow of news and so forth, watching how the language is being used. But the way in which these contexts fold in on themselves and overlap and disappear at the margins and so forth is interesting, and since I myself don’t have those classical kinds of habits of writing, which have always been said to be precise times of day and constancy, I tend to float until the pressure says I have something I want to say badly enough to stop monitoring the news.

And, later (“two approaches / commingle”): “. . . one of the consequences of paying attention, perhaps inordinate attention, to the ebb and flow of language is that . . . the language tends to disappear, because that behavior, that attitude, that relationship to the language, tends to reduce the language. It’s a refining process, it tends to make the language granular, and for me recently it’s resulted in shorter and shorter piece of expression . . .” Elegy out of tumult. The fork-tongued snakes of Apollo’s temple cleaning out Cassandra’s ears (licked clean by rampant utterance itself) that she may speak, riddling disconnectedly (“breakneck drama yet no details”) of the past, of the future. Ineluctable merger of means. “Unh. / Unh-unh.”

The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Abjuring hacks and sniffles. Some notes out of The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, edited by Barry Ahearn (Wesleyan, 2003). Williams (29 January 1943), regarding the work of the “surrealistus” (here, Alain Bosquet):

He seems wordy, wanders on as I imagine most surrealistus are bound to. If you give yourself over to the unconscious you know as well as I that it’s going to be repetitious . . . Maybe a nugget will be turned up . . . We’re to suppose that the poet is born perfect—if only he can loosen the neck of his bladder and piss it out.

Later, in a 22 December 1944 letter, Williams talks of reading a piece by André Breton, “one of those rarities—something simple coming out of an insensate complexity of method”—making something of an oxymoron attempt to do the dialectical work of defining. It’s a practiced move for Williams. I am thinking of how he works to nail down the shiny mercurial blob of the writerly “fit” (socked-in and stuck like a peg in a hole and sliding off into the vacuum-hatch of its own continual departure, motility’s grease) in the essay, “The Work of Gertrude Stein”:

      Either, we have been taught to think, the mind moves in a logical sequence to a definite end which is its goal, or it will embrace movement without goal other than movement itself for an end and hail “transition” only as supreme.
      Take your choice, both resorts are an improper description of the mind in fullest play.
      If the attention could envision the whole of writing, let us say, at one time, moving over it in swift and accurate pursuit of the modern imperative at the instant when it is most to the fore, something of what actually takes place under an optimum of intelligence could be observed. It is an alertness not to let go of a possibility of movement in our fearful bedazzlement with some concrete and fixed present.

That movement stilled still moving, the present held forth in its hurtling between what’s gone and what’s arriving. It is precisely there where Williams repeatedly locates himself (hence the warnings against ga-ga experimentalism). Think of how, in “The American Background,” he writes, of the early American settlers, how “two divergent forces were steadily at work, one drawing the inhabitants back to the accustomed with its appeals to loyalty and the love of comfort, the other prodding them to face very often the tortures of the damned, working a new way into a doubtful future, calling for faith, courage and carelessness of spirit.” So Williams’s own “inner tension” and “cultural dilemma”—that of the “conflict between present reliance on the prevalent conditions of place and the overriding of an unrelated authority.” So the animus against any sign of “a cut-off and imposed culture from Europe. See Williams’s vexatious and somewhat amusing report (3 February 1943) of a patient, “a ponderous, 65 year old Englishman”:

You’ve got to hand it to them. He actually sacred me—like my father. A big, big fisted, slow speaking, red faced, H dropping Englishman from Birmingham—the town where my father was born. He came in as if the world were really his and he was destined to be tolerant of it, completely sure of himself, a bit out of breath, very polite but one of God’s own chillen. Had been a [guard] on an armored truck that takes money from one bank to another. Absolutely trustworthy, would die on the spot rather than have a penny lost. The ribs of the Empire. [Jesus!] what am I beside that magnificence. All you can do or could do would be to fuck it. I can now understand why Englishmen are buggers by nature, there’s [absolutely] nothing else to do but take out a 3 ft tool and shove it up the man’s ass. It would be like a crown on one’s head to have been connected with so much empire.

Scribbled pre-American imperium: the thing rings differently seventy years of largely immoral post-WWII adventurism along . . . Is Williams’s essential humility what is lacking in the present “age”? (22 December 1944: “It really takes a lifetime not only to do anything worth while but even to find what we want in others—one is so unsure, so tentative because of lack of [opportunity] to observe. And any decent intelligence is humble at core, too humble to want to make [too] brash an assertion in a fluid world. Finally a small amount of positive statement is possible.” Recalling, somewhat, Marianne Moore’s rarely attenuated regard for the occasion: see, say, “The Steeple-Jack”—“it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.”)

Zukofsky (5 April 1941) brooding about the writerly “demarcation between imposition and necessity” seems to preen a little toward the necessitous (pissing): “Sometime after several years—as the other day—I look thru a batch of poems and make some revisions, and then the next day maybe only one or two revisions stand up. Usually the original—if worth keeping—is the final choice. I think that’s true of most work in which a guy is not merely a writer but saying something. . .”

Williams (“[April 1943]”), revising The Wedge (“I cut the book by about twenty three pages and that is final”), obtaining fortitude and grace in chance local conditions: “I had almost to get a fever to do it—in fact I was helped by an article on gardening which said that the victory [gardeners] next year, it is hoped, will profit by their errors next year. That if you plant too much and have not the hardihood to weed out what you cannot use or that you have not the place for, the overabundance of no matter what you have growing is a WEED! Tear it up.”

Zukofsky’s odd aping of Williams (15 April 1960). After Williams suggests he “can’t do it any more”: “And as for stopping to write, I am really waiting for a time when—and that’s not hard to imagine having gone thru what we have—life, and that is the poem, will be no poorer even when poetry is not being written. Because that’s when it’s written and even literally gets written down.” Or, out of an unsent letter regarding “A” dated “Thanksgiving Day 1957”—Zukofsky echoing Williams’s “cleanliness” of technique (think of, say, Williams’s 1925 remarks on Marianne Moore’s pleasure in “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts”). Zukofsky:

      I was moved by your grasp of its poetic means: what I always want to be its means, if I have done well. That is: the clean statement—no matter what one’s personal interests, leanings, refinements, excesses, abstentions, historic subjects, and so on are at any time—that does not impose a lie on the incontrovertible fact that because the statement is clean it compels only thru the construction in its music. In this sense, I do not have to tell you, the poem has no subject but the poem.

Or, replying to Williams’s poem “Mounted as an Amazon”—originally titled “The Swivelhipped Amazon”—

She rides her hips as
it were a horse
such women

tickle me a pat answer
to philosophy
or high heels would

put them on their
cans if fol-
lowed up most women

are more pliant
come of
a far different race

—Zukofsky writes (21 May 1958):

What’s “The Swivel hipped Amazon” a preview from? Do you want it back? Gives both C. & me a good laugh. And, by the way, it’s a good clue to reading Bottom in Black Mtn. Rev.—if you read it as the product of a pliant breed not forcing any thing on one, but presenting, as much as it can, everything around a thing, without, if possible, cluttering: instead of a pat answer to philosophy, to show up how swivelhipped it is. So I proceed in prose as I do in “A”: I show & come back to it, & show something related, & come back to both . . . always (I hope) saying it’s neither the pat answer nor philosophy that makes or sees anything solid-like.

A little stretched, isn’t that, like foisting off into a hardly suspecting or appropriate comment box the besiegement of one’s own momentary obsess? Cough, snort . . .

Some Accounting

William Carlos Williams, c. 1954
(Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

Muriel Rukeyser (out of the Wendell Willkie biography / documentary poem, One Life): “All is leaf. This simplicity makes possible the greatest diversity.” Recalling Pound’s “leaf over leaf” or “ply over ply” (the base accumulating construct in all its repeatables) or the loud nod at the “Oirishman” Scotus Erigena in Canto LXXIV:

“sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
                                            “OMNIA,
all things that are are lights”

(Browsing around The Cantos, I note the final line of Canto LXXX—“sunset grand couturier”—and mutter vaguely how it nods at that of Apollinaire’s “Zone”—“soleil cou coupé”—though rather mockingly, inserting the latest finickings of “style” into Apollinaire’s primeval bloody sun-slaughter . . .) All that making me think of the work of “gussying up” versus that of “stripping down.” Bill Berkson, in reply to Bernadette Mayer’s query “Is elegance opposed to innovation?” (What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?) says, elegantly enough: “Pretty iffy.” And:

Can we name a single innovator whose innovations are of value whose work at any point lacks elegance? Well, early Cézanne (before he innovated) and a lot of Williams has no elegance whatever. In music, a lot of raw music is more elegant (country blues or Cajun) than the refined versions of the same material. Innovation being a reaction against dull flatness or vulgarized mechanical “cheap imitation” style is always the revelation of furthered elegance.

What “age” is the present? One of predominant gussying up—heaped up audacities of the unslung vocable, exfoliant empirics gerrymandered up against the presumed “dull flatness” of the empire’s previous experiments, so soon become ready-mades? (Is there exemplary poverty in the overloading of the query itself?) Is what is needed now a flinging off of such obesity of means? I keep returning to Williams’s (Berkson points to Williams’s “raw awkward flatness” with the proviso and rejoinder that “it wasn’t dull”) warning against any penchant to merely “play tiddlywinks with the syllables”:

      Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of the younger writers have forgotten that writing doesn’t mean just inventing new ways to say “So’s your Old Man.” I swear I myself can’t make out for the life of me what many of them are talking about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not find in many another.

Williams aged roughly forty-seven (c. 1930) at that salvo. He’s warning against dallyings with freighted substancelessness: “Technique is a part of it—new technique; technique is itself substance, as all artists must know; but it is the substance under that, forming that, giving it its reason for existence which must be the final answer and source of reliance.” Twenty-five or so years later: still the inaccrochable doubt, writing to Louis Zukofsky (1 April 1956): “I firmly believe that with the nutty experimentation due before long to have evaporated from our systems (necessary as it was to break down stodginess) a great dawn in soon to burst above American letters.” See, too, Berkson’s seeming fatigue (c. 1981, in a letter to Mayer) at mere rampant industry repeating the new doxy’s foibles: “I do feel my attentions need to be tricked to a new alert state for, in & then back out of writing . . . Like you once said, the accumulation method is dog-tired (I know you didn’t say dog-tired) & likewise the ‘popcorn / snapdragon’ jabber voice.” Isn’t that fatigue, too, what’s displayed in Berkson’s lines out of the “Gimme a Swig” section of “For Jim Gustafson” (Fugue State)?

There must have been a saturation of enchantment
at some point before the crafty badgers
dismantled their catch, the Actual, for
meathead determinism, pestilence futures, sub-
dular glitches, et alia. You had plenty to read,
a river slipping, sliding gently though it
every day, the first pineapple.

One is, I think long gone beyond what Williams calls—speaking of Marianne Moore’s work—“a swiftness that passes without repugnance from thing to thing.” A sense of “the Actual” beleaguered (in the present “age”) by overdetermining glut, excess harrying the clean fit (“cloud over cloud” or “steel over steel”—the muzziness of the particulars offers no quandary) of percept. Williams : “The goal is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.”

(Accounting: the new year’s offertory must needs consider at the outset one’s own likely insolvency of means.)

Bernadette Mayer / Emily Dickinson

Bernadette Mayer

Cold again. The usual doubts and furies. (The usual dawdling and prevaricatory page-turning.) “Using self in the hermetic tradition, that is, against the ceiling of everything, to include all.” A lovely way of putting it—Bernadette Mayer’s, out of What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? (Tuumba, 2006). Rather like Emily Dickinson declaring to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” Think of Marianne Moore’s undaunted prickly precision regarding Dickinson’s—and by extension, Mayer’s—supposed “vanity”:

A certain buoyancy that creates an effect of inconsequent bravado—a sense of drama with which we may not be quite at home—was for her a part of that expansion of breath necessary to existence, and unless it is conceited for the hummingbird or the osprey to not behave like a chicken, one does not find her conceited.

Or see Moore’s entirely apt claim that “the behavior of an ear that lives on sound is as sudden as the rush of the canoe toward the rapid” against something like Mayer’s “Perfect Berry Architecture”—out of Indigo Bunting (Zasterle, 2004):

polyglot company disinters her
ossuaries engulf recidividists everywhere
now we are in alphabet creek perfect tense
so far every loner with us—would she begin
to risk her identity, a beginner
to fall down that wave, witness this: who
gets whom into troubler, troublest waters female

good news! a marble cat is on the prowl
a wolverine in laos, i am a user i use you
interminable until walked-out nights
become sepulchral, lacustrine & crepuscular
there’s a rainbow in the same part of the sky
it’s always in except when it’s in the forest
where there cant be any light, red rock

Dim fluid wash of “the gloaming” in the soft-mouthed acrobacy of that “sepulchral, lacustrine & crepuscular”—a sequence whose “prequel” is “ossuaries engulf.” That “red rock” summoning up a Niedecker-inflected wintergreen berry, its shy perfect architecture in the wax-colored light. Moore talks of Dickinson’s ability “to make words convey ‘more than the sum of their meanings laid end to end’; and to attain splendor of implication without prefatory statement”—one’s concision found “at” the exact same extremity or extension as one’s largesse. (See Mayer’s reply to Bill Berkson’s query, What is the distance between word and referent in your poems?:

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””” my “””””” I don’t understand what distance means.

Probably a sidelong peckish reference to John Ashbery’s “Idaho” with its freighted story of Carol and Biff’s “small hand-assemblies”—and the giddy quandaries of its punctuational voluptuousnesses: “Exactly what kind of perfection??????????????????????????????????????????????????” and “Every tendril of thought,,,,,,,,,) Is it pertinent to demand of largesse that it expand not into excess? (Dickinson’s pert reply: “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—”) Is excess a kind of panic? Mayer:

Panic is essentially a sexual activity . . . Panic I think brings the whole body a lift & reorganizes in a necessary way . . . it’s not a crazy response, it’s the response of a person who wants pleasure & not its opposite. It’s chaotic though . . .

And, to Berkson’s question, Do you think panic is necessary to change the scenery or what?

Yes . . . change the whole scenery, change the body & mind though panic still is associated with death so it’s not a pleasant method at the moment but it prevents the more desolate pain of boredom & reminds you that you have strong feelings all the time. Panic, though, oddly ’s not attractive & one has an image of the completely self-composed man or woman. I hid my panic in my eyes.

See the etymology: panic out of the French panique (adjective) (of fear) sudden, wild (1534 in Rabelais in terreur Panice), of or relating to the god Pan (1546 in Rabelais) < Hellenistic Greek πανικός (adjective) of or for Pan, (of fear) groundless, also πανικόν panic terror. With a note: “Pan was thought to frequent mountains, caves, and lonely places, and sounds heard or fears experienced in such places came to be attributed to him.” (“I hid my panic in my eyes”: highly Dickinsonian in the sly obviousness of its evident concealment. Sign of Mayer’s blunt “recidividists” lack of any overly compunctious “cut” to her style—somewhere she says: “I’m afraid of having a style that’s easy for me to write in without any risks or cutlery.” Or, as Dickinson put it: “I was thinking, today—as I noticed, that the “Supernatural,” was only the Natural, disclosed—

Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes—”

And Emily Dickinson, though she famously reported to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid,” seemingly never used the word panic.)

—

Off a week or so—for “seasonal adjustments.”

Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s Vaudeville

Geoffrey Hilsabeck

Received and read tout de suite: Geoffrey Hilsabeck’s Vaudeville (The Song Cave, 2011). It begins (epigraph by Buster Keaton: “I don’t act anyway”):

We are left with the word vaudeville and little more than that, the word itself a kind of elegy. Vaudeville. We are left only with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, and what survives in early Hollywood, the anarchic Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Buster’s great stone face, which he learned on vaudeville where deadpan was king. Pan was slang for face: the comic puts on a dead face, like a death mask, that plaster cast made soon after someone died in the days before photography, and walks among the living. He learned as a kid that there is something hilarious about that. He wears a mask, like the actors in Greek theater, Noh theater, Commedia dell’arte where the clown was born. It is rather an archaic thing to do. It lets silence back into life.

Beyond the initial nod to the Robert Hass iteration of the “notion that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies” (“Meditation at Lagunitas”), Hilsabeck deposits all of vaudeville itself, under the “deadpan” of Buster Keaton, some elegiac blank waiting to be filled. (Hilsabeck: “Such common feelings, so everyday—our monotonous sublime—we find written across Buster’s blank face.”) Vaudeville is up and down memoir, a way of revivifying both what Hilsabeck calls “a mongrel feeling,” that is America “at the butt end of Thoreau’s ‘restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century’,” and a particular: Hilsabeck’s vaudeville-loving grandfather. The two merge (along with numerous vaudevillians: John Carl, who played the banjo and sang “a song called ‘The Lively Flea’: Feeding where no life may be, / a dainty old chap is the lively flea . . .” only to “stop suddenly and recite Shakespeare, Shakespeare both straight and in burlesque”; “A dancer called Fleury in a long cape, tossing the cape up so that it settles on his head like a turban, revealing nipples painted to resemble large eyes, a painted nose over his stomach, and a bellybutton done up like puckered lips”; or Eva Tanguay, “The Evangelist of Joy,” who “moved, constantly . . . had wild, unruly hair and wore . . . a skimpy dress with pennies glued to it, a chandelier-like hat, . . . a thing with feathers . . . Reviewers described her voice as ‘a hairshirt to the nerves’ and compared her dancing to ‘a mad dog fleeing a mob of small boys’”—the details mount and collide . . . Hilsabeck’s text performing its claim: “An improvisatory, vernacular spirit ran like a current through vaudeville, kept alive by interruption . . . giving the show its air of . . . instability, even menace, the menace of things breaking down.”) Out of elegy, energy, as Hilsabeck puts it, and, in lovely adjectival pile-ups, those gestural Whitmanesqueries (“Vaudeville. Irrelevant, unpredictable, an ad-hoc hodgepodge, rude, stretching its long arms across the wide country, sounding its barbaric yawp . . .”), makes it central to the “blood-soaked American landscape,” pointing to its origin in racial mimicry:

A white man smears burnt cork on his face to mimic one of two types of black men, neither of whom exist: the lazy field hand and the foolish dandy with a watermelon grin. A white dance troop performs a cakewalk . . .

But the cakewalk started not in Africa but on plantations in America, a burlesque of the ballroom dances performed by white bosses at the big house. Whites came down to watch blacks do their funny dance, not realizing that the black dance lampooned the white, and then they started doing it on stage for an audience: whites spoofing blacks spoofing whites. Forms of popular entertainment based on stereotypes and misconceptions, mistaken identities, fantasies based on fantasies, acts that can only be traced back to other acts. A match is a fire to start another fire.

Hilsabeck’s (I assume) fire, the contemporary interrupting / underpinning the historical:

A vaudevillean monologue: I am so wild, furious, rabid, savage, and violent right now about the miserable state of interior decorating and the soil generally I could scream. I did, in the shower, the whole time. Bristol Palin is not Bristol Palin! But you knew that. This world is a world not of the old weapons—lance, arbalest, and spontoon—but the new—pistol, wire, and drone. Not of the old words—Antipathy and Revulsion, Animus—but the new—Nail. Gut. Rabbit. And so and thus I screamed and screamed and I soaped up my hairy ass and armpits and between the fingers and all those toes, all those areas are really clean right now, pal. So don’t even think about shouting out the answers because I’m super at-home in the questions.

Against the manic, the calmly-conferred quotidian veering off into something “archaic,” a kind of near-mystic sense of system, all couched in “deadpan” matter-of-fact:

I am writing a memoir. I use my grandfather’s books. They stretch down into the 19th century: American Vaudeville; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845; books on the Indian in America with titles like The Great Father and The Long Death; a book on water. The rotten voice of my memoir is America, and so is the sweet mystery of its face. It won’t sell. It begins and ends in Iowa, Iowa from the French word for the Bah Kho Je tribe. It begins with the wild canary and the wild rose and the geode and ends with the guttural muttery grunt of a hog. Each chapter has its color—brick, sand, daisy, wax. After green comes black, a black scarf we tie around the mailbox. And we long for the open piano. The grass grows stranger. Some creeks, some rivers—a weedy affability inhabits the edges, but we cannot bury our dead there: it is too close to the water. I pass them on foot, only myself. I drink from them and know only a fraction of what I taste and become.

One likely origin for the term vaudeville: out of “the French voix de ville, voice of the city.” One of the pleasures of Hilsabeck’s writing here: the sense of a multiplicity of competing, converging voix. See Keaton’s The Playhouse. Wherein Keaton “finds himself watching himself. Conducting and consulting and telling jokes to himself. . . . Buster playing an audience member says to himself playing the wife of that audience member after scanning the program, this fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.”

George Stanley (Some Notes)

George Stanley
(Photograph by Star Black)

Somewhere George Stanley uses a line by Czesław Miłosz (out of “Reconciliation”) for an epigraph—“The poet: one who constantly thinks of something else.”

Stanley’s sense of the world’s distant ongoingness (somewhere beyond, colliding only briefly with one’s words, or, rarely, providing one with one’s words). Out of Vancouver: A Poem (New Star Books, 2008):

This is being written just after noon on September 22, 1999 — probably the last day of this gentle, warm late summer that followed a cold, rainy August. I’m perched on a welded steel stool leaning on the steel counter of a pomo coffee shop which I guess is called Trees Organic Coffee Co. (at least that’s what it says on my coffee cup — dark Sumatra coffee — the image — the image of the map — of Indonesia — from the Globe & Mail & the BBC on-line — in mind) — east side of Granville just north of Pender — this soft bright sunlight off the young maples on the Mall — light & shadow sharply delineated on the pavement — to right, Sinclair Centre — the old Post Office — where the 1938 demonstration / police riot still goes on, black-coated arm upraised coming down on the men running away escaping down the short flight of steps at the entrance on Hastings St., now Plaza Escada — dress shop — so are we (tuna sandwiches) now at lunch time seated at round tables with red & yellow chessboards on them & painted scalloped edges in two shades of green, behind a low ornamental steel railing — & people walking the Mall, two men stopping to talk between the potted plants, one wearing a madras jacket, hand on hip to indicate midmorning ennui — bicycles, buses . . . I really don’t know what I’m doing — this is not the world. It’s just my take. My lucky take. My sunny day September take.

After the focus and precision of the “take”: a toss-off and denial. A plunge back into. See, too: “And know that these words were so strong / I could live in the world they made. / But that I had made the words myself / to build a world — a world we could talk about, / using the words. To forget it was just raw longing / not to be alone.” (A few lines subsequent, Stanley posits being “better / off now, without any common language” and that “Words have to come out of the / world (like ‘gold ink’). There’s no good / flopping around like a fish . . .” I am entirely “took” by the dilemma. In “The Set”— out of A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems, 1957-2000 (Qua Books, 2003)—Stanley talks of missing “That sense that there was a world & meaning / outside your mind.” And briefly becomes, late in the piece, “a steel ball in a Bally machine”—banging around like a pinball, such the vacillatory glee / want of the poet. Here’s the whole terrific thing:

The Set

Remembering how it felt
working on the Grape
in ’72, doing layout
in a grey former grocery
on Powell — we’d take a break
at suppertime & head for the pub,
knock back six or eight drafts,
a package or two of chips,
maybe a pickled sausage,
& tell the waiter,
“Take one for yourself.”

We were a part of history
in our mental spotlight, drinking beer
with trade unionists from the ’30s,
in that battered pub (soon to be closed,
renovated & turned into a fern bar).
They told us tales
of struggles of the past.

We’d troop back, half-lit
through snowy darkness or summer shadow
to that grey, dingy, dimly lit
former grocery, to finish our layout.
There was never enough liner
or blades for the X-Acto knives & the
typeset “corrections” always came late
from the Peak & had to be pasted
in by hand, but the beer in our heads
kept us going past midnight — also the link
with the old union guys — with the dirty ’30s —
we were for real — & we were dirty.

Do you miss all that? Do you miss the dirty ’70s?
That sense that there was a world & meaning
outside your mind? Tho sceptic Ed Dorn
said “the set,” you could account
not just for the world but for nature itself:
the trees that leafed in the spring on Powell St.,
the stars — for you thought,
why would there be stars if there were
no world for them to shine on?

& by the third or fourth draft
your hangover would lift
& there’d be the sacred streets, in long
purple & orange stripes of sunset
to the eternal horizon,

& you called yourself a cadre,
a little yeast cell, making
tiny, correct changes in people’s
consciousness, getting the paper out
on the streets. Miss all that?

I shot up to Rupert for no reason
like a steel ball in a Bally machine,
banging around the pink bumpers,
racking up point for god knows who or what.

I came almost to a stop, poised at the entrance
to one of those long, gently raked, steel alleys
you can roll down for years, decades, & still
be far from the flippers. Then I missed the world,
the beery romance of politics,
(the whiskey romance of poetry),
the set.

Fighting the romance, that “mental spotlight,” and succumbing. Is it the loss of that X-Acto knife’d world of print tangibles that makes the piece sting so sweetly? World interspliced with “set” so there’s no telling where the act ends and the work begins: a kind of definition of youth.

“Meaning outside your mind.” There’s Stanley talking (interviewed by Brook Houglum and Jenny Penberthy in excellent George Stanley issue of The Capilano Reiew) about “Aboutism”:

      Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”
      Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that’s a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can’t do that.” It’s not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn’t go away.

That lovely moment in Vancouver where Stanley admits: “I’ve been doing, no, writing, this so long — / nothing wrong.” And counters it with simple relief, that humble marvel of writing itself:

Now the words tell of something so obvious
as to see the air in front of you
but not to have known it was something
to see.

“Writing — to see what turns up, or to keep going.”

Cod and Stravaig

Pyrrho of Elis, c. 360–c. 270

Dopey notelets. En miettes. My habit of manhandling the superficies. Palping a book with unstudied intent, trying to dope out its requisites and indispensables. Rather like running a stumpy thumb along a knife blade, ascertaining nothing, with no particular prospect. Compiling the detritus of my own waywardness, thus. Out of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956, a reply (dated 18 December 1953) to a lost query (by one Patricia Hutchins) regarding Pound:

The only time I remember having met Pound was one evening at dinner with the Joyces in the Trianons, place de Rennes. He was having great trouble with a fond d’artichaud and was very aggressive and disdainful.

In a footnote:

SB told Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) that he had met Ezra Pound in 1929 while at dinner with James Joyce. In a letter to Kenner, SB recalls: “My memory is of the Trianon restaurant and I can still see the artichoke’s heart evading his fork while he inquired cuttingly what epic I was engaged on at the moment” . . . As told by Kenner [in The Pound Era], Pound “came upon Joyce holding court and was enraged by what he took to be a climate of sycophancy. Of one slim youth he enquired, in withering tones, whether he might be writing an Iliad, or would it be a Divina Commedia.” Kenner added: “One should not say such a humiliating thing to anyone . . . but it is especially regrettable that he should have said it to Sam Beckett.”

Kenner calls it Pound’s “needless irascibility.” (Isn’t one sign of aging the begrudging of youth its youth, meaning its sheer ungainly possibility. Hence, I suspect, Pound’s momentary fork-fingered loss of motor control. One routinely sees it in the petulant fierce occludings of the “arrived” . . .)

Beckett to Grove Press’s Barney Rosset (11 February 1954):

I thought myself of trying again in English, but it’s only evading the issue like everything else I try. If there was a head and a rock I’d rather beat that against this than start the old fake stravaguing again. It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation. . . . At the moment I have a “man” crawling along a corridor in the rock in the dark, but he’s due to vanish any day now. Of course there’s no reason why it would start now or ever for that matter. I’m horribly tired and stupefied, but not yet tired and stupefied enough. To write is impossible but not yet impossible enough. That’s how I cod myself these days.

Stravague, or stravaig. To wander about aimlessly. Chiefly Scottish, northern dialect, and Irish. Aphetic form of extravage < medieval Latin extrāvagārī.

In Guy Davenport’s Trois Caprices, in the story of “Pyrrhon of Elis,” “an agnostic who withheld his opinion of every matter”:

He denied that anything was good or bad, right or wrong. He doubted that anything exists, said that habits and custom dictate our actions, and would not allow that a thing is either more this than that on its own.
      He thus went out of his way for nothing, leaving all to chance, and was wholly incautious with encounters, whether with carts in the street, cliffs toward which he was walking, or dogs. He said he had no reason to believe that his solicitude for his welfare was wiser than the results of an accident. Antigonos of Karystos tells us that his friends followed him about to keep him from falling into rivers, wells, and ditches. He lived for ninety years.

Amongst Pyrrhon’s teachings: “A thing can be known in relation to something else, therefore nothing can be known in itself . . . To confirm one thing by another, as we always must, is to move in a futile circle.” I think of Dana Ward in “Typing ‘Wild Speech’” (This Can’t Be Life, why so determinedly piecemeal my reading thereof?) writing: “Stephanie has a line—‘the real sickness of comparing unalike things’. I squirm as I ring my variations on this illness. All I ask of promiscuous affinity is that it cross the valediction of their bodies.” Or the Pyrrhonesque in Ward’s lines:

I used to see ‘being a poet’ as an intoxicating costume that was just over there & if I could inch ever closer to it I’d be contaminated fully & mixed with its essence forever. Often times I have nothing to add to this confusion beyond the lightning storm of my own political depravations, for which my poetry is an endless sea of waiting metal rods. So there’s the face of a part of my trouble. Thus, as a ‘poet’, I must drink, must smoke, must travel, must dodge employ as much as possible. I guard these aspects jealously as I’ve allowed their presence to assume a causal life inextricably linked to my production as a poet. A sort of Fordist assemblage of romantic clichés that when operating in consort give me access to a consciousness that floods the factory backwards, destroying it, & that’s called a poem. Then its ruins in their sentience gather back together & the whole fucking thing starts again.

Kin, surely, in its tough and tender command of its “stance”—amidst wild uncertainty—to O’Hara’s “Personism”: “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.” So Davenport’s Pyrrhon of Elis inhabits a world made grace by means of its welter of particulars, nothing “like” any other thing, nothing “either more this than that,” all detritus, waywardness, extravagaria, the artichoke sliding off the plate:

So for ninety years Pyrrhon, the son of Pleistarkhos, lived . . . in the charming town of Elis, with its horse-breeding citizens; and Olympic coaches and umpires; its swarm of splendid athletes and spectators every four years; its shady streets with sleeping hogs and their nursing litters; yellow dogs running in packs; choruses of Spartan trumpeters; fleets of Corinthian girl companions with raccoon eyes, pink frills and Asiatic embroidery from shoulder to heel and gaits as if to the flutes of Lydia; goats in a mist of flies; eloquent sculptors talking style in the wine shops; long-haired painters jibbering over onion stew in the ordinaries; mathematicians playing chess under the chinaberry trees; children tossing knucklebones in the parks under the gaze of Gorgon nannies; ladies of the Sodality of Hera rolling though the avenues in donkey carts, demure under parasols; grizzled philosophers and their raunchy boyfriends tumbling naked in the palaistra . . . a sad Gaul who was writing a book about the moon; acrobats; priests of every mystery you could think of, Eleusinian, Delian, Sabazian, Dodonian, what have you, even a brown Egyptian who ran a temple of Isis and Osiris down near the tanning yard (much heckled by the stable boys); in short, a fine round world of people and things, seasons and years and rumors of other worlds as far away as the Indus and the Nile, the Thames forever hidden by fog and the Danube said to be as blue as a Doric eye; but was honestly uncertain that he did, and would never admit to any of it.

“That’s how I cod myself these days.”

Haniel Long / William Carlos Williams

Haniel Long, 1888-1956
(Oil portrait by Agnes Tait)

Miles of bare trees, colossal the variance within a band, gray, or the grays interrupted in the low shrubby foreground by the reds and ochres of osiers. (Reverie whilst conducting the Vibe across the gelid plant under yesterday’s storm of yellow sunlight.) Some initial desultory reading of Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935) makes me wonder if William Carlos Williams read it. Something Paterson-esque to its way of accreting and juxtaposing anecdote. Here’s a chunk, beginning with Henry Clay Frick, barely two weeks after Alexander Berkmann attempted to assassinate him (23 July 1892) in revenge for the murders, by Frick-hired Pinkerton detectives, of seven steelworkers at the Homestead strike (Long: “Berkmann told about it later: ‘Carnegie selected Frick, bloody Frick of the coke regions, to carry the program into execution. Must the oppressed forever submit? Human life is indeed sacred, but to remove a tyrant is the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people . . On and on rushes the engine . . “Pittsburgh! Pittsburgh!” the harsh cry of the conductor startles me . . .”), only to be subdued:

August fifth Frick walked alone across his lawn, stepped upon an open trolley car, entered his office at the stroke of eight, and rang for the morning’s mail. “If an honest American cannot live in his own home without a bodyguard, it is time to quit,” he told the reporters.

Out at Homestead it kept on, about the worst affair ever for strikers and their wives and children.

Ben Butler wanted Carnegie extradited for murder.

General Grosvenor called him the arch-sneak of this age.

A London paper said: “Here we have this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for His self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.”

A St. Louis paper said: “Say what you will of Frick, he is a brave man. Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward. And gods and men hate cowards.”

But Gladstone wrote Carnegie: “. . . simply to say . . . that no one who knows you will be prompted by unfortunate occurrences across the water, of which manifestly we cannot know the exact merits, to qualify in the slightest degree either his confidence in your generous views or his admiration of the great and good work you have done. Wealth is at present like a monster threatening to swallow up the moral life of man you, by precept and example, have been teaching him to disgorge. . Very faithfully yours . .”

A form recalling, in its jagged contours, what Williams called, in the 1927 ur-“Paterson”: the “divisions and imbalances” of the “whole concept, made small by pity / and desire . . . no ideas beside the facts—” (Long himself, in a lovely phrase, admits to putting form to work in a sort of accuracy-taming manner, counter to the wild plethora of “versions.” A paragraph detailing Berkmann’s attack reads:

Colonel Harvey told about it later (everyone told about it but Frick): “The first bullet passed through the neck near the base of the skull and down between the shoulders; the second bullet passed through the right side of the neck. Mr. Frick, in a low voice . . ‘Don’t kill him—let the law take its course; but raise his head and let me see his face . .’ The Sheriff, following the direction indicated by Mr. Prick's index finger, saw that Berkmann had a capsule between his teeth. ‘Remove that capsule.’ It contained fulminate of mercury,* enough to blow all in the room to bits.”

Long’s footnote: “The capsule of fulminate of mercury mentioned by Col Harvey and Winkler does not appear in Berkmann’s detailed account. I had arranged the cadences of my page before I noticed the discrepancy.” See Williams’s own lines at the beginning to the “Preface” to Paterson: “To make a start, / out of particulars / and make them general, rolling / up the sum, by defective means—”)

It’s resemblant cadences though—Williams to Long—that I mostly note. Out of Paterson:

A false language. A true. A false language pouring—a
language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without
dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear. At least
it settled it for her. Patch too, as a matter of fact. He
became a national hero in ’28, ’29 and toured the country
diving from cliffs and masts, rocks and bridges—to prove his
thesis: Some things can be done as well as others.

THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that
old time Jersey Patriot
N .   F .   P A T E R S O N !
(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short)
“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.

      So far everything had gone smoothly. The pulley and ropes were securely fastened on each side of the chasm, and everything made in readiness to pull the clumsy bridge into position. It was a wooden structure boarded up on both sides, and a roof. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon and a large crowd had gathered—a large crowd for that time, as the town only numbered about four thousand—to watch the bridge placed in position.
      That day was a great day for old Paterson. It being Saturday, the mills were shut down, so to give the people a chance to celebrate. Among those who came in for a good part of the celebration was Sam Patch, then a resident in Paterson, who was a boss over cotton spinners in one of the mills. He was my boss, and many a time he gave me a cuff over the ears.
      Well, this day the constables were on the look for Patch, because they thought he would be on a spree and cause trouble. Patch had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.

Out of Williams’s letter dated 31 May 1951: “I have no recollection when it was that I first began thinking of writing a long poem upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” And: “The thing was to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him.” And Long, toward the end of Pittsburgh Memoranda: “A city finds life when a human being / finds life, when he learns how to walk between / forgetting and remembering the self.”

Colt and Trial Horse

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1874-1927

Two measly fragments: Dana Ward’s reference to a “reverential feeling for art that moves on colt’s legs” in “Typing Wild Speech”—out of This Can’t Be Life (Edge, 2011)—that tenderness for the ungainly, the awkward, the uncoaxed geomancy of totting the earth by merely advancing. That, and William Carlos Williams’s play Many Loves (put together c. 1941), constructed of three single-act pieces. Initial title: Trial Horse No. 1. A trial horse being one put up as opponent for a champion in trial competitions or exhibitions, or for workouts. Williams in the figure of Hubert (“a poet—and dramatist in the making”) argues precisely for all the gawky grace and unfouled exuberance of any raw push to “enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter . . .” Against the derisive and skeptical Peter (“a man of considerable wealth”) who brings only brute rapacity (meaning formulaic, reliable, certain, adult) to art (“Trial, yes. The theater is a trial, / truly. It’s not a plaything. But / in the theater to kill you’ve got / to kill! With a hammer if need be . . . / Or they’ll walk out on you. . . .”) Williams:

Hubert:
                  I have a play, mature
      enough to suit you, which has been sketched
      scene for scene, act for act.
      But lacking experience, as you know,
      I have adopted this method
      of a trial-horse to approach it.
      And were it not for the bitterness
      which . . .

Alise:
      Go on, Hubert.

Hubert:
      I say: when we see,
      on the stage, what we expect to see—
      I’m not speaking of circuses
      but something to turn our minds a little
      to the light—it should project
      above the coarseness of the materials . . .
      something else, in the words themselves,
      tragic without vulgarity. Seen—
      in the mind! The mind itself . . . today,
      without firearms and other claptrap,
      in its own tragic situation. We can’t
      do this at once but must restudy
      the means. If I wish to present love,
      dramatically today . . .

Peter:
                                    Yes.

Alise:
                                          Yes.

Hubert:
      I might do it—with a coalscuttle.

Peter
      How?

Hubert:
      By spitting in it.

Peter’s only reply, a negligible, vacuous attempted dismissal: “Puh!” (Williams’s “coalscuttle” inevitably recalls the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. See the report of Margaret Anderson in My Thirty Years’ War: “She wore a trailing blue-green dress and a peacock fan. One side of her face was decorated with a canceled postage stamp (two-cent American, pink). Her lips were painted black, her face powder was yellow. She wore the top of a coal scuttle for a hat, strapped on under her chin like a helmet. Two mustard spoons at the side gave the effect of feathers.”) Williams (writing c. 1939 about Kenneth Patchen’s work, though the words apply directly to Williams’s own, too, and to Ward’s wild and restlessly memorious prose and poetry—I think of Pound’s “nothing matters but the quality / of the affection— / in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind . . .”)—Williams identifies the “great theme”:

Love . . . divine and human, and, un-winking, what our life has done to it. To this he brings a structural device filling the page at its best for what he wants to say—scattered, jagged, irregular, with long explanatory titles—burdened with uncertainty.

“Sentences as a refreshment . . .”

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Smallish winter itches, though the approaching day is balmy. Disconcerted by the immodesty of its jut. (A sentence that only decided itself in its delivery—disconcerted largely by its empty reach, it latched itself to an innuendo’d salient, somewhat hurriedly, somewhat embarrassedly.) I think of what Gary Lutz says:

I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs. The paragraphs, to me, are nervous little cliques or sororities of like-natured outcasts who put up with each other despite the friction.

Akin to what I maintain is my reading style: making prose plotless by the adamancy of my atomizing, that is, weighing each book sentence by singular sentence. (See Sir Philip Sidney’s “not speaking table talke fashion, or like men in a dreame, words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peasing each sillable of eache word by just proportion”—early demand to “recontour their casings.”) Peasing out of peise, v. < Anglo-Norman paiser, peiser, peisser, Anglo-Norman and Middle French peser (c1050 in Old French; French peser) to burden, oppress, grieve (a person) (c1050), to weigh (an object) (late 12th cent.), to consider, ponder, examine attentively (a person or thing) (end of the 12th cent.), to have a specified weight (c1170), to be heavy (c1200) < classical Latin pēnsāre to weigh, ponder, consider. A terrific word: it makes thinking itself material, something like a coin tumbling down into the slot of the mouth, burnished and tongue-palpable. Ought I ponder whether or not Lutz is slyly aping Gertrude Stein’s insistence that “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are”? Stein:

I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.
      I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.

And I try to make my ears encumber that aberrantly loud knock of dog’s tongue against water, its final lingual materiality, its brusque affability. Gertrude Stein in How to Write (1931): “I return to sentences as a refreshment.” And:

      Grammar is restless and earned.
      Walking in can field a dance grammar is restless and earned.
. . .
      Is simplicity conviction or grammar and is simplicity more than put in.
      How whatever.
      Grammar is intense in dried again there and then.
      The question is if you have a vocabulary have you any need of grammar except for explanation that is the question, communication and direction repetition and intuition that is the question. Returned for grammar.

Grammar is intense in dried again there and then. Repetition syndrome. I think of Laura Riding’s complaint regarding “corruption of the reasons of poetry” in remarks “To the Reader” prefacing the Collected Poems (1938):

In poem-writing and poem-reading the stirring up of the poetic faculties has been a greater preoccupation than their proper use; the excitement of feeling oneself in a poetic mood has come to be regarded as adequate fulfillment both for the reader and the poet. Hence the frequent vulgarism ‘What is this poem about?’—when the reader feels that there is an element in a poem beyond that designed to evoke in him the flattering sensation of understanding more than he knows . . .

Isn’t one counterpoise to that “design” (prevalent hereabouts, a glut of the “era”) the kind of sentence-myopia that Lutz so intrepidatiously (and slowly) executes, all remnant sardony watered with joy? Against the “how whatever” sprints of mere grammar. “Smallish winter finches approach the day’s balm. Concerted in the modesty of their route.”

Bill Berkson / J. H. Prynne

Bill Berkson

In the Roland Pease-edited annual (deplorably now suspended) of “poems, translations & interviews,” Zoland Poetry No. 5 (2011), a lively interview with Bill Berkson, conducted by Thomas Devaney. In it, Berkson talks about “The Waste Land,” the use he made of it, and how it provided a serious initial point de départ and point de repère both (“I followed the notes to “The Waste Land.” So that gave me John Donne and Dante, Jessie Weston, The Golden Bough, John Webster, Ovid, and so on.”) Berkson, offering a plausible (and rarely so put, Eliot’s suasion amongst the avant-garde so spalled off by Williams’s constant bombardments, see Berkson’s own story of how, shortly after the appearance of “The Skaters” he remarked to Ashbery how it recalled “The Four Quartets, and he [Ashbery] said he’d always meant to read them, and probably would”) lineage:

One of the critics called it a “cinematographic” way of composing. So that business of one line put next to the other, phrases from diverse sources—I now realize how that persists with me. Frank O’Hara once introduced me at a reading at NYU by saying that I was the only young American poet making an interesting use of T. S. Eliot. How he figured that out I’ll never know. There’s a funny connection, too, between that brief phase of Eliot and what is loosely called Cubist poetry, “Lundi rue Christine” by Apollinaire or certain poems of Reverdy, the really adventurous French poets Eliot seems to have had no interest in. But then on to “Europe”: from “The Waste Land” to John Ashbery’s “Europe” seemed like a simple step.

Devaney’s query a simple “Simple?” And Berkson again:

No, but clear to me. “Europe” was, in those terms immediately comprehensible. Both “The Waste Land” and “Europe”—and this is, I think, key—allowed for a sense of format. Which is to say, whether it was Coolidge or Padgett, Dick Gallup or Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo—those of us inspired by what John Ashbery was doing in the poems of The Tennis Court Oath, particularly “Europe,” each poet responded in his own way. Format was the handy aspect there. Ashbery was taking apart his native language, which had, because he was living a French life in Paris, become distant to him, his relation to language being already aslant with irony, as it is. The so-called “pulverized” language of “Europe” and those other poems was different from ours in that ours would not or had not yet composed itself. For myself, a nonsyntactical grid of words and phrases—or one where the syntax is slippery—allowed for a way of locating what I had. For the poems, or some of them, early on, all I had was a feeling for how to lay them out, some of which came from print culture generally, some from how “Europe” looked on the page, and otherwise from visual art and music. . . .

That “grid” and its “way of locating what I had”—largely because of late I keep turning to (making a feeble considered ruckus in) J. H. Prynne’s work—triggers a furtive reconnoitering of likes. It commenced with my reading of Berkson’s poem—quoted by Devaney, who notes its “unflagging sense of forward momentum”—“By Halves”:

do limits build
both sweet and cruel
or over to you off at
your compass studies,
visor at odd angles perforated,
plumb to sky
to service mouthful signage in pearly
cantina load where squawks from a ceiling,
headed down the demon slopes
for work place, total their sheer
carbon feed on an average night
that at any guardrail slick nails the morphological in bins?
Thus backup wealth lifts an ancient spume, glowering with grammar
whose joined bronze gives pause,
erect lapse paging glory, when wing is rag

Isn’t that of the untroubled ilk and near kin to something like:

At late stage the defect of scale scrapes off
the felt lining to slight down the huff, displaced
into wrong water. Split finish by large numbers
will cruise to punish the knife, in common rite
cuffed and bled to moral ennui, each wave mortal
with rapt digression. Who doesn’t count won’t
matter, leaf cover shimmers to greet day-care


blips on the cycle, citrus screened, doing a turn
on borrowed wheelskates. In the avertive cleft
of ‘an arithmetical curiosity’ a link itself blisters
to foil up front treatment, choosing up against
warded splines. Mis-timed by equity trap points
to run and run like colour all down the blade,
this scant fuel thins to vapour in vacant air.

Being a part of Prynne’s sequence Unanswering Rational Shore (Object Permanence, 2001). (The minor echo of Eliot’s “gathering fuel in vacant lots” entirely unanticipated, that is, unintended in my rather random selecting, noted only in the typing. Lo mismo’s salient upthrust.) Berkson, in the interview, recalls “trying to short-circuit any kind of anticipated meaning, to defeat the reader’s habitual expectations at all costs. I thought I wanted to write poems that didn’t mean anything.” And, later:

Then again, I came to this sort of joyful, but also scary realization that meaning is unavoidable—you have to watch your language, what it might be saying. I got more interested in poems with a presence of meaning, or in which meaning is a sort of felt presence—sometimes you feel you could get it, grasp and define it, and sometimes not, but you feel an impingement, an atmosphere where shifting connotations appear almost graspable. . . . With that came this other realization, that the scatter all fits, whether one intervenes or not, to make it so. As Beckett says, the mess gets accommodated.

Think of that—attending to what arranged language “might be saying,” that “presence of meaning”—against Prynne’s sense (spelled out in the 2008 talk “Difficulties in the Translation of ‘Difficult’ Poems”) of constructing the poem as a semantic field with “not meaning determining its pattern of expression, so much as pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning—or perhaps we should call this ‘meaning’, in some second-order sense.” Prynne’s version of Berkson’s aim of short-circuitry: “When links in text-cohesion are violated or cut off, when extreme ambiguity displaces recognisable topic-focus, when discourse levels and fields of reference are switched abruptly and without sign-posts, these features may begin to comprise a second-order strategy of pattern-making in a new way.” Oddly, both Prynne and Berkson provide what I read as warnings / distinctions against such disruptings become “style” or mere “playfulness”—just another means in a supposed arsenal of techniques. Berkson compares the shiftings (“multiple meanings thicken the plot”) to Cubist doings and notes how Cubism’s successors Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky “took Cubism as design, a design style”:

It wasn’t composition like it was for Braque and Picasso, or even Gleizes and the other Parisian Cubists. Shifting planes—“planometrics,” they called it in midcentury art classes, when Cubism had become an easy teaching tool—for Gorky and Davis was a format into which you could plug whatever meaningful matter you were carrying.

(Nota bene, would-be Prynne acolytes.) Prynne’s own distinction puts enormous weight on claims of authorial intent. Of “pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning,” he says: “I don’t think this is equivalent to post-modernist playfulness, where meaning is allowed to skim across a surface in a deliberately arbitrary way, because the use of difficulty as a method of poetic thought is different both in intention and effect from difficulty as a playground or a funfair.” Or, as Prynne’s lines seem to suggest in Kazoo Dreamboats or, On What There Is (Critical Documents, 2011), “phrasal turmoil in cap position” may offer one possible means to assay (“purchase grind on”) the lingual “scam of scams”:

I saw too by links of redaction in fluency, not yet perfect because by nature self-mutable even the bounds transient each to alter in replacement through pair logic overlay, in otherhood unfinished bearing phrasal turmoil in cap position, limit across rotation the corridor not self-invaded by sweetness each time in momentary batch flavour. Equalised to run its surplus attached to overdrive each word capsule clamped at reward issue upper to lower jaw purchase grind on this scam of scams.