Ronald Johnson / Erik Satie

Erik Satie, “La Pêche,” 1914

Put, Sunday, air in the bicycle tires, worked the incipient rust out of the chain with some squirts of oil, swabbed it all down with a rag. Hence the morning’s cambered bolt through drizzle in, refusing to cancel the shakedown. Hence the rain-occluded thrusting through streets, repeating: “The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; & when separated / From Imagination and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio / Of the Things of Memory. It thence frames Laws & Moralities / To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars . . .” Allowing the impetuous sensory its tactility and wash. Exerting the body to rouse its slumbering vestigia dei.

—

Ronald Johnson, out of Sports and Divertissments (Wild Hawthorn Press, 1965):

Fishing

Clear
river
water.

A fish,
another—
three.

A fisher
throws
a line.

Clear
river
water.

Being a re-working of Erik Satie’s incidental (and rather perfunctorily deposited) verbal notes accompanying the tiny composition “La Pêche” (out of the 1925 portfolio Sports et Divertissements):

Murmures de l’eau dans un lit de rivière.
Venue d’un poisson, d’un autre, de deux autres.
—Qu’y a-t-il?
—C’est un pêcheur, un pauvre pêcheur.
—Merci.
Chacun retourne chez soi, même le pêcheur.
Murmures de l’eau dans un lit de rivière.

Roughly: “Murmurs of water in a riverbed. Arrival of a fish, of another, of two others. —What’s up? —It’s a fisherman, a poor fisherman. —Thanks. Everyone goes home, even the fisherman. Murmurs of water in a riverbed.” Against the minor comedy of alarm Satie’s music is marked “Calme”—“Calmly.” Johnson eshews the whimsy and Disneyesquerie of talking fish (too, he avoids the watery music of “murmures”), and offers in its lieu a tiny ode to incident and continuity, natural and human worlds each interchangeably removed, remote. The occurrence of a non-occurrence there in the “lit de rivière” (the anthropomorphic “bed,” it, too, repressed by Johnson).

—

Johnson, in the Vort interview (conducted 13 August 1974), asked if he regards Sports and Divertissments “a collaboration with Erik Satie”:

It’s more an elaboration of Satie. When I was young I played Satie but didn’t pay attention to words till I found an English translation of them Jonathan Williams had . . . a carbon copy of the notes to Sports and Divertissements. Suddenly I realized that they could be poems. I’d already a sense of Poundian translations and tried to make a music of them on the page.

Asked if he considers the pieces “found poetry”: “The spirit was found, the forms were invented.”

—

Satie’s “Préface” to Sports et Divertissements:

      Cette publication est constituée de deux éléments artistiques: dessin, musique.
      La partie dessin est figurée par des traits—des traits d’esprit; la partie musicale est representée par des points—des points noirs. Ces deux parties réunies—en un seul volume—forment un tout: un album. Je conseille de feuilleter, ce livre, d’un doigt amiable & souriant ; car c’est ici une œuvre de fantaisie. Que l’on n’y voie pas autre chose.
      Pour les “Recoquevillés” & les “Abêtis”, j’ai écrit un choral grave & convenable. Ce choral est une sorte de préambule amer, une manière d’introduction austère & infivole.
      J’y ai mis tout ce que je connais sur l’Ennui.
      Je dédie ce choral à ceux qui ne m’aiment pas.
      Je me retire.

Roughly (out of the Dover edition of Erik Satie’s Sports et Divertissements called Twenty Short Pieces for Piano, with a few changes):

      This publication consists of two artistic elements: drawing, music.
      The drawing part is composed of lines—witty lines [a pun: trait d’esprit = “witty remark”]; the musical part is represented by dots—black dots [another pun: points noirs = “blackheads”]. These two parts combined—in a single volume—form a whole: an album. My advice is to leaf through this book with a kindly & smiling finger, for it is a work of imagination. Don’t look for anything else in it.
      For the “Shriveled Up” & the “Stupefied” I have written a serious & proper chorale. This chorale is a sort of bitter preamble, a kind of austere & unfrivolous introduction.
      I have put into it all I know about Boredom.
      I dedicate this chorale to those who don’t like me.
      I withdraw.

Thence several measures of chorale—labeled “Choral inappétissant”—with a tiny onslaught of musical directions: “Grave . . . rébarbatif & hargneux . . . hypocritement . . . ralentir . . .” Dated 15 Mai 1914.

—

Another of Johnson’s pieces:

The Hunt

Rabbits warble
& nightingales burrow,

        the owlet’s at nurse
        at a suckling

                              boar’s wedding!
                              More-


over I’m shooting
nuts

off a tree.

Satie:

La Chasse

Entendez-vous le lapin qui chante?
Quelle voix!
Le rossignol est dans son terrier.
Le hibou allaite ses enfants.
Le marcassin va se marier.
Moi, j’abats des noix à coups de fusil.

Roughly: “Do you hear the rabbit singing? What a voice! The nightingale is in its burrow. The owl is nursing its young. The wild boar is going to get married. And me, I’m knocking down nuts with rifle shots.” Fleeter, and somewhat odder in Johnson’s rendering (the overreaching “warble” determining the tone). Is Johnson’s excellent “suckling boar”—for marcassin, precisely, a young wild boar—a presentiment of the subsequent cookbooks?

Nail

Philip Guston, “Untitled (Nail),” c. 1969

Even as one heat another heat expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out another,
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a newer object quite forgotten.

        —William Shakespeare, out of Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590)

—

A broken mirror nailed up over a chipped enamel basin, whose turgid waters
Reflect the fly-specked calendar—with ecstatic Dutch girl clasping tulips—
On the far wall. Hanging from one nail, an old velvet hat with a tattered bit
        of veiling—last remnant of former finery.
The bed well made. The whole place scrupulously clean, but cold and damp.

All this, wedged into a pyramidal ray of light, is my own invention.

        —John Ashbery, out of “The Skaters” (Rivers and Mountains, 1966)

—

dangle Scaffold
dread hammered nail
and hang by a thread
my daily bread

        —Ronald Johnson, out of “Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid” (1996)

—

God is an animal figure
Clearly headless.
He bewitches his quarry
with ambiguous wounds
The wolf or poor ass
had only stolen straw.

O sullen Silence
Nail two sticks together
and tell resurrection stories.

        —Susan Howe, out of “Chanting at the Crystal Sea”
        (Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-1979, 1996)

—

Necessitation and contingency. Fad to have your ears cropped. That content does not intrude. Everything written according to the rule of the infield fly. Troll bridge. Neon arrow posit. Residue of sinus condition. Nails hats to the wall. Eventually the scratches become scabs. Inverted nipple. Random sample.

        —Ron Silliman, out of Ketjak (1978)

—

Kaytshitl, to write
Keitseh-kaytsah, writing
Keitselh, paper, letter, book
Keitsetsos, a writing-table
Klah-klah-pukkah, to hammer a nail
Klah-pukmah, a nail
Kleekqushin, boots

        —Tom Clark, out of “Words invented since their contact with White Men (Sproat, 1868)”
        (Empire Of Skin, 1997)

—

O kona pepeiaohao hookahi, ma ka nuku, oia kona haokela; oia hoi kona mea kaua aku i ka Liona, a me ka Elepani, a me ka Tiga, a me na ilio e ae. No kona ikaika loa, e hiki no ia ia ke hou aku i ka laau nui a puka no i kela aoao, e like me ka hou ana o ke kui laau iloko o ka uwala.

[As for that single hard protuberance upon his snout, that is his great horn; it is the weapon with which he battles the Lion, the Elephant, the Tiger, and other four-legged animals. Because of his great strength, he is able to pierce a large piece of wood clean through, like a nail poking through a sweet potato.]

        —Eliot Weinberger, out of “The Rhinoceros” (An Elemental Thing, 2007)

—

          . . . hold that door for the Cassius of Bar None
a raw turf for old coots the whole country tied in ropes
and gets shot through the pants like some gumption not yet
can drive a nail at twenty paces a bandanna full of doubt
walks off a good ways hollering riders
up to their necks in hot bacon
ready to draw down on this whole tar nation
and I hear Cassidy’s waiting

        —Clark Coolidge, out of “Besides Being Overheard” (2000)

—

I hid the loot there, and had a secret dusty airforce made of cross-beam sticks with crude nail landing gears and a tail all hid in the old coal bin, ready for pubertical war (in case I got tired of the Black Thief) and so—I had a light dimly shining down (a flashlight through a cloth of black and blue, thunder) . . .

        —Jack Kerouac, out of Doctor Sax (1959)

—

Thing is to find something simple
As for example Pa Stadtvolk;
Hooks to hang gutters on roofs,
A spike and half-circle, patented ’em and then made ’em;
Worth a good million, not a book in the place;
Got a horse about twenty years after, seen him
                        Of a Saturday afternoon
When they’d taken down an old fence,
Ole Pa out there knockin the nails out
(To save ’em). I hear he smoked good cigars.

        —Ezra Pound, out of “Canto XXVIII” (A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1930)

—

                                                                                                        . . . The
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
In the grass? May is not a flowering month so much as shades
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
The lilac leaves. The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there.

        —James Schuyler, out of “Hymn To Life” (Hymn to Life, 1974)

—

Is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?
Anything could happen
A boy in the sun drives nails into a fruit a sign (cloud) in the wind swings
A woman descends a ladder into mud it gives way
But today’s thought is different
Better to presuppose late
We eat with relief from our formlessness
Each day is drawn to its scene or scene to its day the image already under way and formed to
      proceed
Perhaps happiness is what we volunteer

        —Lyn Hejinian, out of Happily (2000)

—

                                Dignity is
fragrant & looks like a little
brown nail. The leaves
of hidden worth are deeply cut;
a 19th century American
artist & inventor. Sir
Thomas Campion blooms in July
pinkly with notched petals.

        —Alice Notley, out of “Flowers of the Foothills & Mountain Valleys”
        (Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005, 2005)

—

Not an example is a loose nail here
One I caught my sleeve on
But I’ve moved
Up to the floor all in blue
And the décor is stunning in its vacuity
As if the air were suddenly sucked out

        —Ron Padgett, out of “Mister Horse” (Great Balls of Fire, 1969)

—

                                                Nailed up in a box,
Nailed up in a pen, nailed up in a room
That once enclosed you amiably, you write,
“Finished. No more. The end,” signing your name,
Frantic, but proud of penmanship.

        —Weldon Kees, out of “Xantha Street” (The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, 1962)

—

      . . . I am racing towards the fear that kills
them off, friends and lovers, hast’ning through tears
like alcohol high in the throat of hills
and hills of night, alluring! their black cheers
falling upon my ears like nails. And there
the bars grow thick with onanists and camps
and bivouacs of bears with clubs . . .

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “A City Winter” (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 1971)

—

      I have a knife held by two nails flat to the casing of my kitchen china closet. It has a blade about 8 inches long, of high-grade steel, joined to an ebony handle by a collar of brass—trade-marked Encore, Thomas Turner, Cutler to His Majesty—bought in Oxford in 1911 for cutting bread and cheese . . .

        —Marianne Moore, out of “The Knife” (The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, 1986)

—

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings . . .

        —Wallace Stevens, out of “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
        (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954)

—

And that thin cry, like a needle piercing the ear, the insistent cicada,
And the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas,
The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter,
The shriek of nails as old shingles are ripped from the top of a roof . . .

        —Theodore Roethke, out of “The Rose” (The Far Field, 1964)

—

                cloud tatters—wavering gaps
                of tearing sails—birds flung
                on hurling air—wind grappled foam—
                wave skelters—nails of rain—
                a clutch of scurried hail

all breath away—
a sound of hammered nails

        —Gael Turnbul, out of “Residues: Down the Sluice of Time” (While Breath Persist, 1992)

—

               . . . I couldn’t deliver. Even to emerge arch and eccentric, ready for the evening chat and sherry—no, I certainly couldn’t. I had mad thoughts and insoluble anguish, begged to survive intact without the grace of wit, without the freedom to please, without this landscape disease. The ditty I listened for in the forge would make a scorpion stammer. Read Gorki’s childhood again, drove a nail through my own.

        —James Tate, out of “Daydreaming in the Forge” (Riven Doggeries, 1979)

—

Hamm and Clov and Nagg and Nell. Hamm for hammer; and Clov and Nagg and Nell deform clou and Nagel and nail, what a hammer smites in French and German and English. One hammer, then, three nails: just the needful equipment, Guy Davenport once remarked, for the event we remember on Good Friday, the crucifixion.

        —Hugh Kenner, out of “Lisping in Numbers” (Historical Fictions, 1990)

—

The self, Hugo said, is the body. Our knowledge of what’s other is a knowledge of our body. My seeing a Monet is a knowledge of my own eye, which is both an obstruction between me and the Monet and the medium by which I see it at all. If my eye is healthy and keen I can forget it. We do not watch our hand, nor yet the hammer, when driving a nail. We watch the nail. Reading, we see Robinson Crusoe with his parrot on his shoulder, yellow sands, green ocean, three goats on a knoll.

        —Guy Davenport, out of “Wo es war, soll ich werden”
        (The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, 1990)

—

Welcome brutal possessor
of the memory cards,
on the wall under wainscoting
a nail holds the thread.

Allegories ranged invisibly
variances of touch
lapses in speech
the urn burial containing ashes
of belonging to lightning.

        —Barbara Guest, out of “The Thread” (Fair Realism, 1995)

—

. . . that a Candle out of a Musket will pierce through an Inch-board, or an urinal force a nail through a Plank; yet can few or none believe thus much without a visible experiment . . .

        —Sir Thomas Browne, out of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquries into Very Many Received
        Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths, 1658)

—

            I,         of this                

            acquit myself

           . . . . draw my eyes off

           . subtle up

so as to bear a nail

hold more than

one benefice and

comparative mysticism

        —Lissa Wolsak, out of “Pen Chants, or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences”
        (Squeezed Light: Collected Poems, 1994-2005 (2010)

—

The nail is lost. Perhaps the shoe;
horse and rider, kingdom, too.

        —Charles Reznikoff, out of Inscriptions, 1944-1956 (1959)

—

only the number
remains
∙ 2 ∙

on an oval disc
of celluloid
tacked

to the white-enameled
woodwork
with

two bright nails
like stars
beside

the moon

        —William Carlos Williams, out of “9/29” (The Descent of Winter, 1928)

—

For the oil dozing
With one eye open
In its bottle, for
The cleft-footed garlic
Hung by a nail, for
The salt and pepper
Weighing the house down
Against the storms . . .

        —Charles Simic, out of “Artichokes” (Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, 1974)

—

No blanch witloof handbound dry
heart to racks a comb
lion’s-teeth thistlehead golden-hair earth nail
flower-clock up-by-pace dandle lion won’t
dwarf lamb closes night season
its long year dumble-dor bumbles
cure wine blowball black fall’s-berry
madding sun mixen seeded rebus

        —Louis Zukofsky, “Dandelion” (80 Flowers, 1978)

—

                                            So our virtues
Lie in the interpretation of the time:
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
To extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;
Rights by rights founder, strengths by strengths do fail.

        —William Shakespeare, out of Coriolanus (c. 1605)

“The Invaders”: Uncollected Ronald Johnson

Ronald Johnson, c. 1963

Ronald Johnson, at the end of detailing the contents of ARK in the autobiographical sketch “Up Till Now,” writes:

      By 99 I had everything on board, and take off—it should have been foreshadowed—on a spaceship. Off to explore the universe with enough of the old blooming buzzy earth to get on with under alien skies.

“ARK 99, Arches XXXIII” (and the book itself) ending thus “Aship” under “skies indigo, gold moon” in a barrage of language, triumph-tempered, anthemic, utopian and grand:

. . .
Dawn in Erewhon
corporeal cornucopia

one being, surround in bloom
flow essential seed
portal system Milky Way

as Unmoved Mover under orders
axis mundi, ascend scale
organism omnipotent

poised in flesh,
awake horns psaltery
Fanfare for the Common Man

mind set razor an edge,
blood fulfill final ablution
fire purity baton

Oompapah! to lead the band
anystray orchestra
knows who destination

core of the universe
(so rings redwood of eons)
gospel sentience

Lo! allegro non troppo
remake mankind,
a joyous noise into the void

“from going to and fro
in the earth, and from walking
up and down in it”

as speech arc Simulacrum, O
chorus us Homo Sapiens
in a major key!

tools, consonant & vowel
to fashion a voice
commensurate wheel of time

Origins great aorta
leaved from the wrist up, but
yet to attain the skies

all arrowed a rainbow midair,
ad astra per aspera
countdown for Lift Off

A ship tightly packed (“enough of the old blooming buzzy earth”): with Samuel Butler, Charles Doughty, Wyndham Lewis and Guy Davenport (“Dawn in Erewhon”), Aaron Copland (“Fanfare for the Common Man”), The Book of Job (“And the Lord said vnto Satan, Whence commest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and sayde, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking vp and downe in it.”), the Latin saying writ across the Great Seal of Kansas (“ad astra per aspera,” roughly, “through strife to the stars”), and the Aristotelian “Unmoved Mover” (here become a kind of combo of Poundian “Unwobbling Pivot” and phallic “omnipotent / poised in flesh”) . . .

Turns out Johnson’s “interplanetary turn”—that yearning for far-flung and tender accuracies small and large—dates back considerably. In the 1969 paperback Holding Your Eight Hands: An Anthology of Science Fiction Verse, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, one finds an uncollected Ronald Johnson piece called “The Invaders.” (Lucie-Smith, in the “Introduction” points to the seventeenth-century poet “Samuel Butler’s satire ‘The Elephant in the Moon’”—early sci-fi—and quotes a few lines presumably spoken by “one of the deluded virtuosi of the Royal Society” who’s peering through a telescope:

Quoth he,—Th’ Inhabitants o’ th’ Moon,
Who, when the Sun shines hot at Noon,
Do live in Cellars under ground
Of eight Miles deep, and eighty round,
(In which at once they fortify
Against the Sun, and th’ Enemy),
Which they count Towns and Cities there,
Because their People’s civiler
Than those rude Peasants, that are found
To live upon the upper Ground,
Call’d Privolvans, with whom they are
Perpetually in open War;
And now both Armies, highly ’nrag’d,
Are in a bloody Fight engag’d,
And many fall on both Sides slain,
As by the Glass ’tis clear, and plain.

Not the Erewhon Butler.) Here’s the Johnson piece:

The Invaders

E. A. Poe

disappeared
with a melodious twang,
&

in binary eyes—an indigo dwarf,
a saffron giant

—was circled by grassy satellites . . .

a bed of Iris beyond

Orion.


Palmer plucks
moons,

clandestinely, in our orchards—


while Smart walks
the Arctic
wrapped in the dog-star,

a scintillant

fur.


There are no flying saucers:

only luminous
particles

of Albert Pinkham
Ryder,
over

Arizona.


And Mahler is a nova of
virus
invading us

in our sleeps.


*   *   *

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

*   *   *   *   *   *

(Above are the stars
written

by extra-terrestrials on the tombstone

of Rimbaud.)


Whitman
was a Martian.


Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake:

descends in mystic
7’s
the stairs

from Quasar to Orange to Atom—


with the delicacy, & the stealth, of the ghost, of a flea.

Poe, Samuel Palmer, Christopher Smart, Pinkham Ryder, Mahler and the others—Johnson’s usual band and cohort. Against Jack Spicer’s sense of the work’s being merely “dictated by” Martians, Johnson posits a fully charged (and laconic, and half-kidding) Martian / extra-terrestrial identity itself to a range of writers and artists. Johnson, quoted by Lucie-Smith:

“We live now,” as Thoreau said, “between a microscopic and a telescopic world,” and where our sight leaves off our imaginations begin. Quasars and oranges are equally mysterious, and both the inward and the extra-terrestrial beckon us at the limits of vision. The cosmos is kaleidoscopic at either end, and, like a Möbius strip, it leads us backward and forward in time—at the same time. When science is no longer seeing it is fiction, or poetry, and makes its own solutions with intuition as stepping stones. Science-fiction is literature typical of our time, for in it we realize that where we are going and what is to come may not be at all the same thing. Let us be star-grazers rather than star-gazers.

(Some others included in the anthology: Michael Benedikt, Asa Benveniste, Thomas M. Disch, Kenneth Koch, Jeff Nuttall, Kenneth Patchen, Tom Raworth, Peter Redgrove, Jonathan Williams. Williams’s piece:

Everybody’s Homesick Soldier Boy

no cannibal, come
                                down from Mars, makes it, so
sweetly:
            “O, do you see that little fly,
                                                              climbing up the wall?
            waltzing
                          so’s not to get his ashes hauled . . .”
our aspirations collapse,
                                          curiously,
like in a letter,
                        a cisalpine American, pining:
            “Ah, let me see again
                                                a sweeping wheel of real, good, genuine
            Kansas-type Space . . .
                                                  just so, silencing,
                                                                                blue-idling . . .
            and wander into town, wanting
            to get my head all busted up, worrying little
            re/ background radiation,
                                                          or the rats,
            who sing, sort of crazed-like,
                                                                loudly in the darkened fields,
            below the lolling, silver
                                                      Space-Platform,
                                                                                  at Abilene

Sounding, with that “sweeping” Kansan prairie “blue-idling” by that “pining” American, rather like Ronald Johnson. Though Williams claims it “written for the writer Fielding Dawson while I was at Black Mountain College in 1955.”)

The “Vingt lignes . . .” Routine

Harry Mathews
(Photograph by Sigrid Estrada)

William Carlos Williams, commencing Spring and All (1923): “If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.”

Harry Mathews, out of 20 Lines a Day (1988): “Four years ago I was reminded of an injunction Stendhal gave himself early in life: Vingt lignes par jour, génie ou pas (Twenty lines a day, genius or not). Stendhal was thinking about getting a book done. I deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page.”

C’est où ça? Stendhal, out of Vie de Henri Brulard (written c. 1835-6): “Si j’eusse parlé vers 1795 de mon projet d’écrire, quelque homme sensé m’eût dit : ‘Ecrivez tous les jours pendant deux heures, génie ou non.’ Ce mot m’eût fait employer dix ans de ma vie dépensés niaisement à attendre le génie.” Translated by John Sturrock: “Had I spoken around 1795 of my intention of writing, some man of good sense would have told me: ‘Write for two hours every day, genius or no.’ A remark that would have led to my making use of ten years of my life fatuously spent waiting for genius.”

Numbering in order to thwart any usual thrust toward shapeliness, or numbering in order to impose an fatuous structural regimen where none is.

Kerouac, out of “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957): “Not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang!”

“Natural” details—the horn-shaped moon hanging in the maple, the expellant caw of a crow—impinge as mere quotidian inadvertencies, putting a rougher nap to the slippery surface of the day. (John Skelton, out of Magnyfycence (c. 1530): “Whan the noppe is rughe it wolde be shorne.”)

Language as atomizer, to reduce the experiential flow of the world to a fine spray, a mist, a cover, scenting the surround with its necessary and unutterable deceit. Each sentence a sign of entropy, a tendency to some final silent zero core.

Peter Weiss: “Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses. When our breathing stops, when the blood clots in the veins, the heart fails, then our weariness has settled in the organism, and we react with our whole person as a unit, as a natural process, react definitively to a situation that can no longer be dealt with rationally.”

Emerson, in the guise of “a certain poet”: “Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place . . .”

In the medieval period, an atom referred to “the smallest unit of time, of which there are 376 in a minute and 22,560 in an hour.” An ounce equaled 47 atoms. All measure is haywire.

Routinely thrown up against Williams’s reverie (Spring and All): “A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself . . .”

Notebook (Ezra Pound, Donald Justice, &c.)

Donald Justice, 1925-2004

In, si vous voulez, a tizzy of irrepentant half-vacancy, the moon beginning to cup out of half into its concavity, the cold just cold. Stuck amid junctures half-formed, going corpulent with reading’s sweet roughage and indisciplinarity. Djuna Barnes, out of The Antiphon:

See how the bind-weed hauls against the ground
And on the winch of autumn puts out hooks,
To clamber greatness down. How like the vine,
The female-vetch, that low perfidious crawl,
That winding thief with estuary mouth
That nibbles at the root, and topples boys,
And thinks by climbing to the privet of the head
To be the glory that she fattens on.

Yow. I keep thinking about rhythm, its ability to carry distress. Or closure. Or rootlessness. Gaiety, impercipience; glee, sloth. Donald Justice, in “The Invention of Free Verse” (“I mean by the invention of free verse only its invention in the twentieth century and in English. It had been invented in the nineteenth century in English by Whitman, in French by Laforgue (I would argue), and here and there even earlier in Western culture by apparent accident. But before our time free verse had not taken hold and swept the world before it . . .”), claims that invention, succinctly, rather defiantly, for Pound, deftly positing an originary moment “in—unlikeliest of places—Crawfordsville, Indiana” in 1907. Justice:

The poet was more or less improvising, we may suppose, in the character of one of the old poets whom he had recently studied with such fondness and aptitude.

Bah! I have sung women in three cities,
But it is all the same;
And I will sing of the sun.

Free verse has perhaps already been invented in these opening lines, but it is hard to be certain. Whatever is happening remains as yet undefined and indefinite. And it is at just this point that the poet, still in the assumed character of Cino, contrives an unmistakable little rhythmical motif, scarcely if ever heard before in English verse. (See end note.*)

Lips, words, and you snare them,

Note the two stresses brought together. This is the main point of the motif, after which comes the pair of slack syllables, as contrast perhaps or balance. What this arrangement of stressed and slack syllables resembles is the so-called ionic or double foot, as described by Ransom, among others, but it is not really quite the same, as Pound will prove only a moment later by way of variations played upon this base, variations extraordinarily difficult or impossible to arrange for in traditional practice, in anything outside of Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, for that matter—and Hopkins’s manuscripts were not to be published for yet another decade. No doubt that a cadence has here been found, beyond Tennyson, beyond Henley and Symons and Dowson, beyond Yeats. It may be taken as a test case of sorts. The proof will lie in whether the effect can be produced again, thus demonstrating that what has just taken place was not by chance.

Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels.

In theory it could be done; in practice it now has been done. The rest is mere elaboration and confirmation. For Pound himself the experience must have been like what the scientist undergoes in his laboratory, not altogether sure yet what he has or whether he has anything at all. The retorts, in any case, are bubbling. What joy in continuing, quite rapidly now, as I imagine.

Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, nights, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.

And if two stresses could be brought together, why not three? From “Ravens, nights, allurement” only let the slack syllables be dropped.

Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes.
Being upon the road once more,
They are not.

The extension of “Lips, words” into “Eyes, dreams, lips” comes as the final confirmation that something has indeed happened.
      After the brilliance of this passage the poem lapses into a more typical early Pound pastiche, mannered and just barely post-nineties. The moment is finished. On the other hand, as we can see now, it was only a beginning.

Skimmed, in an old “Homage to Ezra Pound” copy of The Iowa Review, whilst I downed my oatmeal. Put with the palpably astringent means of the Barnes, I sense a diffuse sluggardly negligence (the “era”’s): who attends so to precise rhythmic contrivance? And walked to work in an exemplary fury of experiment: “crows sailing bedraggledly off in undisciplined squads” become “crows sailing off bedraggledly in squads” become “unkempt crows sailing off bedraggledly in squads” become “crows sail off in squads, unkempt and bedraggledly” . . . Rhythmic blahs currying the tizzy. Pound: “A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable.”

* End note: Other passages for comparison.

Break, break, break,
      On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
        —Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break,” c. 1833.

Hush, the Dead March wails in the people’s ears:
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears:
The black earth yawns: the mortal disappears;
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
He is gone who seem’d so great.
        —Tennyson, “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” 1852.

The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.
        —Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 1876 [published 1918].

Shoulders and loins
Ache—!
Ache, and the mattress,
Run into bolders and hummocks,
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes—
Tumbling, importunate, daft—
Ramble and roll. . . .
        —Henley, “In Hospital,” 1888.

Wilt thóu glíde on the blue Pacific, and rest.
        —Bridges, “A Passer-by,” 1890. [The accent marks are the poet’s.]

A song of collisions and cries,
Rumbling wheels, hoof-beats, bells,
Welcomes, farewells, love-calls, final moans,
Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair.
        —S. Crane, 1899.

It has been said of the Tennyson passages that they echo the funeral march from Handel’s Saul, and it is certainly possible that the source of the cadence in Tennyson is somehow musical. It appears to connect for him with emotions associated with death and loss. For Pound, too, a specific musical source is at least possible, though less likely, I think, and any local emotional associations are clearly different for him than for Tennyson. Music is worth mentioning in this connection because of Auden’s suggestion that keeping to the rhythms of specific musical texts can lead to metrical freshness and innovation. And it may be worth speculating about the emotional associations of a particular rhythmical motif, since links between emotion and rhythm often come up in theory. [“I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed.”—Pound.]

The Henley passage is for one instant virtually identical in movement to the Pound motif (lines 2 and 3 above), and is the closest parallel I have been able to turn up. It hardly seems a serious source, all the same, for Pound’s invention.

As for Stephen Crane’s poems, they would probably be printed now as prose poems. So far as I can see, they have no bearing on the history of versification except for standing outside it.

Notebook (Ronald Johnson, Edith Sitwell, &c.)

Ronald Johnson, 1935-1998

Fourteen degrees. The light coming up noticeably earlier: walking to work, I see the crows leaving their roosts, sailing bedraggledly off in undisciplined squads. A weekend of reading around and about Djuna Barnes, lethargic, cold. “Here’s a rip in nature . . .” And Ronald Johnson: “From the ape at my shoulderblade I see angels. Our embryo dreamt the fishes’ sleep, became a ripple, leapfrogged itself, and later a mammal: perception is a slingshot drawn back to first plasm . . .” And Edith Sitwell, whose “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” Johnson called “a text to shove alongside Charles Olson’s Projective Verse and Louis Zukofsky’s anthology A Test of Poetry.” Sitwell:

      Seeing the immense design of the world, one image of wonder mirrored by another image of wonder—the pattern of fern and of feather echoed by the frost of the windowpane, the six rays of the snowflake mirrored by the rock crystal’s six-rayed eternity—I asked myself, were those shapes molded by blindness? Are not these the ‘correspondences,’ to quote a phrase of Swedenborg, ‘whereby we may speak with angels?’
      It was said that the images in these poems were strange. This was partly the result of condensement—partly because, where the language of one sense was insufficient to cover the meaning, the sensation, I used the language of another, and by this means attempted to pierce down to the essence of the thing seen, by discovering in it attributes which at first sight appear alien but which are acutely related—by producing its quintessential color (sharper, brighter than that seen by an eye grown stale) and by stripping it of all unessential details . . .

See Johnson’s call (out of “Hurrah for Euphony”) for a poetry that is “A jamboree of the senses jarring us into naming our own circus, perimeters . . .” See, too, the “correspondences . . . whereby we may speak with angels” of ARK, a book made of correspondences, the colossal aligned against the minute: “The human eye, a sphere of waters and tissue, absorbs an energy that has come ninety-three million miles from another sphere, the sun. The eye may be said to be the sun in another form.” Or, see Johnson’s Christopher Smart-inflected lines in ARK (with orthographic oddities intact):

BEAM 6, The Musics

Let flick his tail, the darkling Lion, down to the primal
            huddle fiddling DNA.

Let the Elephant ruffle the elements in The Great Looped
            Nebula with his uplift trunk.

Let the Binary, orange, emerald, and blue, in the foot of
            Andromeda run awhisker with Mouse.

Let the Dickcissel, in Cock’s-foot, Foxtail, & Tottering,
            ring one molecular ornamentation on tau Ceti.

Let the Switch Snake lilt bluegrass back and forth be-
            tween pelucid cells.

Let Porcupine rattle quill, in a Casseopia of Hollyhock.

Let the whinny of Pigeons’ wings trigger similar strains
            from elm to Triangulum.

Let a score for matter’s staccato to cornstalk be touted to
            stars clustering The Archer’s wrist.

Let the stripes of Zebra be in time with the imaginary
            House of Mozart, on Jupiter.

Johnson’s work begins in the moot iterable conveyances of the translated. There’s a lovely couple of paragraphs in “Up Till Now” wherein Johnson details a trajectory of use and re-use, assembling’s flux, Johnson learning “how to make spare but tasty stews in the French manner; how to be elastic as to servings and able to turn out a lovely omelet for a famished poet or painter, wherever kitchened; how to end a meal with a sprightly cheese . . .” concurrently with learning how to write:

      My first salvageable poems date from about this time—my translations into poems of Satie’s notes to Sports and Divertissments. The first selections were printed in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., and several years later Ian Finlay suggested I complete the series . . . I also translated the notes Le Facteur Cheval and Raymond Isidore left into poems. These are kind of Urstones from the building of ARK. I take Pound’s experiments in translation to be the ideal. All of mine were just notes which I shaped into a poem. The act of real translation has always escaped me. I attempted Jules Supervielle since his feel for words was similar to mine, but after trying for years I gave up, especially on lines such as “Le soleil sur Vénus se lève.”* It was he who taught me not to fear being “too much” in such lines as “Cellophane in cellophane of salamander slid within the flame,”** as well as the cocky banter of Wallace Stevens’s “chief Iffucan of caftan in tan, in henna hackles, halt!”*** Or Edith Sitwell reading “Façade,” as well as her explanation of poetics in the introduction to her collected poems: Canticle of the Rose.
      Through Thoreau I was seduced into cosmology as reflected in nature, on all levels. From Ives I learned how collage could be used to effect. From Stan Brakhage I learned the virtues of cutting for speed, and from the painter Jess how to reconstruct a puzzle so the seams became the seen (and vice-versa). From R. B. Kitaj, that anything might happen in the way of connections. From Duncan I learned to see the angels in Rilke, and to trust them. For years I was highly influenced by Guy Davenport’s sprightly prose, and through decades of correspondence in which his lively wit sparkled unendingly . . .

Language got un peu partout and put together new. Out of “ARK 52, Fountain III”:

tall talk
viz.
“barnstorm, boom, boost, bulldoze,
pan out, splurge”
speaking as new-sawn boards
rung upon rung
nailed pile
pinwheel parent’s span
pure guts

And in H. L. Mencken’s 1945 Supplement to The American Language, under the title “The Hallmarks of American,” one reads:

“The characteristic American word,” said the New York Times in 1944, “must be something short, sinewy, native to the soil of American life—creek, pone, squaw, or something in the rudely fantastic line, like calaboose or gerrymander. The most un-American words, in theory, would be the long bookish, Latin polysyllables.” Almost precisely a year before, Dr. Jacques Barzun of Columbia had taken a diametrically opposite line in the Saturday Review of Literature. “Once upon a time,” he said, “American speech was known for its racy, colloquial creations—barnstorm, boom, boost, bulldoze, pan out, splurge, and so on. Now it is the flaccid polysyllable that expresses the country’s mind. Pioneer has yielded to pedant, and one begins to wonder whether the German word-order had better not be adopted to complete the system.”

* Supervielle’s poem, out of Gravitations (1925):

Le soleil sur Vénus se lève;
Sur la planète un petit bruit.
Est-ce une barque qui traverse
Sans rameur un lac endormi,
Est-ce un souvenir de la Terre
Venu gauchement jusqu’ici,
Une fleur tournant sur sa tige
Son visage vers la lumière
Parmi ces roseaux sans oiseaux
Piquant l’inhumaine atmosphere?

“Parmi ces roseaux sans oiseaux / Piquant l’inhumaine atmosphere”—literally, “Among these reeds without birds / Stinging the inhuman atmosphere” being rather equal in sonic density to Johnson’s exemplary “cellophane in cellophane of salamander slid within a flame . . .”

** “BEAM 14” of ARK, beginning with the Sitwellian line “Eden, glossolalia of light” (“language of one sense . . . insufficient to cover the meaning”) includes, too:

(As Bohm posited:   at zeropoint
of energy
a cubic centimeter of space = 10,000,000,000 tons

uranium) underneathunder

unutterrable number

an intricate quiet
centripetal

FIAT

he who
obsessed by light,
possessed by sight:

cellophane in cellophane of salamander slid within a flame

(to pin to the shimmer a name)

Beauty is easy . . .

*** Johnson, working without a library. Stevens’s own “too much” lines, out of “Bantams in Pine-Woods”: “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt! // Damned universal cock, as if the sun / Was blackmoor to bear your blazing tail . . .”

Frank O’Hara’s “O the Dangers of Daily Living”

Larry Rivers, “Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara,” c. 1954

Uncollected prose juvenilia of Frank O’Hara. A piece first published in The Harvard Advocate, March 1948, and subsequently included in the Howard Moss-edited The Poet’s Story (1973):

O the Dangers of Daily Living

      George, I said, I hope never to see you again, and with that strode into the thickening dusk. It was April and the smoke of early twilight wreathed slowly around caretakers finishing up their grooming jobs for the day. Sad piles of refuse—papers, weeds, leaves, twigs, rotted blossoms—lay, dotting the park with malignance, putting a period to the day. I was glad of the approaching night. If anyone had asked me two months ago who the oddest person I knew was I would have said Morris Morgan; I would have been wrong, it is George Rose. I shall never forget the night I met him.

      Miriam: Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Oh! Hello.
      Me: Hello, Miriam. How nice of you to call me up. I could not get here sooner as I was in Florida with a cold. Who’s here?
      Miriam: Everybody. Just everybody. I don’t know what Jake and I are going to do for liquor if they keep coming in. These throngs of people. I know I didn’t invite them all.
      Me: You invited me, Miriam.
      Miriam: Yes, dear, I know.
      George: I live upstairs. May I have a drink?
      Jake: Oh. I remember you. You’re Lucius Maby, the diamond expert.
      George: Yes I am. How do you do. How do you do. How do you do.
      Me: You have terribly strong hands.
      George: Haha. Haha. Ha.
      Miriam: I’m locking this door.
      George: Just in time, wasn’t I?
      Miriam: No, you weren’t, as a matter of fact.
      Jake: Have you met Fabian Dugan? Hello, Fabian.
      Me: No, I haven’t. Hello, Fabian.
      Miriam: Hello, Fabian. How are you?
      Fabian: OK, Mimi. Just a touch of strep, but I’ve been gargling all day.
      George: I had a friend once who died.
      Agnes: Bobo! I haven’t seen you since last Christmas when you were drunk at my birthday party.
      Me: Sweet! You remembered.
      Agnes: I was so in love with you when I was twelve.
      Me: Me, too.
      Agnes: Fate tricked us, dear. Too young for sex, too old for friendship.
      Jake: This is Annabelle Leach. Say hello, Annabelle.
      Annabelle: Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
      Miriam: How is your grandmother, dear?
      Annabelle: She died a week ago.
      Miriam: Oh.
      Jake: Another drink?
      Miriam: Do you mean we have one or would I like one?
      George: I have lots of liquor at my place. I have bitters and menthe and grenadine and kummel.
      Jake: Let’s go up to your place.
      George: I’d really love to have you but let me go up first for a minute, and then you come up. In five minutes. What time do you have?
      Jake: Oh, we’ll find it all right.
      Miriam: He’s the nicest man. Isn’t he the nicest man, Bobo?
      Me: No, he is not. Morris Morgan is.
      Morris: Hello, Bobo.
      Me: Hello, Morris.
      Morris: Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
      Agnes: So your name is Morris. I thought it was Lud.
      Morris: Lud? Oh, no. Oh, no.
      Agnes: I could have sworn it was.
      Morris: Oh, no. It’s Morris.
      Agnes: How nice.
      Miriam: Are the five minutes up?
      Jake: Yes. Let’s go.
      Felice: Let me come, too. My husband never takes me anywhere.
      Morris: I think I’ll come, too. And you won’t mind if I bring my secretary, Knute Lipsk?
      Knute: Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
      Morris: He’s sort of a business associate.
      Jake: I didn’t know you were in business.
      Morris: These stairs are terribly dark.
      Felice: I just saw something. It brushed past me.
      Miriam: His apartment has a purple door. The maid said he must be artistic.
      Jake: Oh, he is. Terribly.
      Agnes: What’s your name again?
      Knute: Knute.
      Agnes: Oh. Mine’s Agnes. I always used to say newt.
      Knute: No. It’s knute.
      Agnes: Yes. Isn’t it.
      Felice: Do you supposed we’ll ever get there? I’m scared. Frightened, I mean.
      Jake: Why?
      Felice: Ladies never get scared. They get frightened.
      Me: I saw a wonderful painting once. It was called Lady in a Frightened Lavatory. Vermeer. Or somebody.
      Morris: I had an aunt once who slept with him. He was dull.
      Miriam: He paints divinely.
      Morris: My aunt didn’t think so. She just would say Vermeer is a dull tool from one end of the day to the other. She was jaded.
      Felice: My father knew your aunt. They met in Venice.
      Morris: How nice.
      Felice: What was your aunt’s last name?
      Morris: Abercrinch. Boost-Abercrinch.
      Felice: What Boost-Abercrinch?
      Morris: Agatha.
      Felice: Oh.
      Morris: This reminds me of The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
      Knute: Why, Morris?
      Morris: Now don’t copy this down. Because I always think of sex on stairs.
      Felice: How difficult.
      Me: You’re so odd, Morris.
      Felice: Who made that noise?
      Jake: It was a what.
      Felice: A what?
      Jake: I didn’t see it.
      Miriam: Have you been to Fishby’s lately?
      Me: No. I imagine you asked that for a purpose. You think I am breaking up their home. I am not. I like their children better than I do them. Platonically. Julius Fishby is a boor. Mitzi is a sweet girl when she’s been resting. The two children, Hrothgar and Bob, are very athletic. I had wished they might be brought up more normally. But I never once, not once, butted in. I minded my own business. They were not my children. Julius drank a good deal and Mitzi took to burlesque, but they were not my children. Afterward, when the house burned down, I did my best. I bedded them in the garden house for three years. But Julietta wanted to give teas there. She began to suspect me of having an affair with Mitzi and took to staying in the hedges all night to watch the garden house. Something had to be done. I did it. Mitzi and Julius are very happy now even though the children are miserable. I have minded my own business and Julietta no longer watches the garden house. I resent your questioning me.
      Jake: You might make an effort to be more polite, Bobo.
      Me: You are all against me.
      Felice: I felt something. Near my groin.
      Miriam: After all, Bobo, what good is a friend if you can’t ask him questions?
      Agnes: Some women are such cats.
      Morris: Now girls.
      Knute: Miss Janine Poisson once told me that stairs did things to her.
      Jake: Then or once?
      Knute: I don’t remember. Then, I think.
      Felice: OHH!
      Jake: Was it a what?
      Felice: No. It was a who.
      Miriam: How odd.
      Jake: I wonder what the stairs did to her.
      Knute: I didn’t know her very well.
      Annabelle: I’ve been thinking.
      Miriam: Oh. We thought you’d stayed downstairs.
      Annabelle: No. I’ve been thinking. There is something peculiar about this landing. I don’t think the stairs are leading anywhere. Does anyone know where we are? Wait till I’m finished. I’ve been thinking. Who ever heard of a purple door? This is an illusion. I studied them in college. I have known for the past two flights that Felice is really Janine Poisson. I went to school with them both. She is feeling nothing. It is just her fixation.
      Morris: Oh no it isn’t.
      Knute: Morris!
      Me: I think you are all perfect beasts. I am going home.
      Felice: OHH!

      And so it was that when George Rose came up to me in the park that April evening and asked me what time it was, I did not so much as look at my watch, but fled into what was soon to be the night.

High styling with the social codes awry. Conventions subtly mocked by ruthless excess. Is it the “locked in a room” motif of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (1944)—“l’enfer, c’est les autres”—that underwrites the seeming reverse katabasis of the endless ascent of the stairs?

Notebook (Ronald Johnson, William Carlos Williams, &c.)

Ronald Johnson, 1935-1998

The incipient doddering-stage continues, with its minimal contiguity, its foetid airs, its rote human protuberance mistook for a salient, ah! A late common idiocy to level with, a way of paring down what’s been scaled back, reduction (in some quarters) averred a sign of (gulp) wisdom. Or why not point to the snow’s aimless and continual sifting down out of the sky and say its maleficent presence lingers in the way it makes every detail succumb to its own “big, cold, dramatic gesture”—“like a purple ‘Okay to Eat’ on a rump of beef” (James Schuyler)? Why not that? You needn’t be rigorous and personal about it. You can look forward to assembling a little anthology of whatever’s sprung loose by the March floods, a mash-up of yellowed monocotyledonous debris (“snow-tamp’d grasses”) and green sprigs of skunk cabbage or ailanthus (anything but “the usual fescue”). Rescue in the offing. See William Carlos Williams 25 July 1945 letter to Norman MacLeod:

. . . all I can do (growing old) is to compose. It is the only recourse, the only intellectual recourse for an artist, to make, to make, to make and to go on making—never to reply in kind to their strictures. It is his doing, I mean, his only doing to compose: in a sort of night, in a sort of dumb philosophic stupor—except to himself where, within, there burns a fiery light, too fiery for logical statement . . .

Thus the tussle—“through the changes of the night”—with doubt with all its renegade fevers, its orders to stop.

—

Out of Ronald Johnson’s marvelous autobiographical (“I was born bawling with red hair, November 25, 1935, smack dab in the dustbowl: Sun, Moon, and Jupiter in Sagittarius, and Aries rising. All direction and fire . . .”) ledger “Up Till Now”:

      The Ramparts [in ARK] are arches illuminating, through the changes of the night, all that went before. I found my inspiration upon finally visiting Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. I spent quite a few visits in L.A. trying to convince someone to take me there, but every one put their hands up in horror of visiting Watts—the scene of the famous riots. But I finally found a couple of friends who didn’t mind. I knew from photographs the major towers and some of the mosaic work, but I was not prepared for the majesty of the actual. I had several hours to simply look, look, look. The walls surrounding the spires were a bricolage of broken tiles, colored glass and mirror, broken crockery set in a mosaic arch after arch, an intricate trash in patterns like a Persian carpet . . .
      My arches were formed the same way: bits and pieces of life, words and phrases picked up along the way. They are printed as they came, night after night. The first lines present a theme and I try to keep up the tempi and meaning. Some of these take a text for inspiration, like Van Gogh’s letters, or Thoreau’s notebooks, for the possibility of finding another range of vocabulary and experience. One begins with a waking dream: “Riddle iota sublime,” which later swept up most of America the Beautiful . . .*

Johnson, out of “ARK 76, Arches X:

riddle iota sublime,
and know no more
than when cast forth garden

a city built caught straws
if clay hold up,
millefleur to the shore

scrutiny, full honeycomb
many thousands feet thru rock
beg quest thereon

towers cliff ad finitum
capstone continent,
sea stretch from last species

amongst a summer’s rose,
leaf round leaf face inner core
move source target

unto last sheaf reaped
cairn for the dead,
spread many-colored a carpet

magnetic congeries of genes
made-up of answers
meanwhile flinging new question

bareass us barreling nowhere, now
inevitably believable
yet having whale of a time . . .

Or: “to make, to make, to make and to go on making . . . in a sort of night, in a sort of dumb philosophic stupor.”

* Johnson’s report of that particular “waking dream” out of “Hurrah for Euphony”:

I wake every morning either with a song in my head, or a phrase. These I hum and ponder until they seem worked (or played) out. One morning it was “riddle iota sublime.” Obviously meant as a direction for my next Spire, and I puzzled it out (one Anglo-Saxon word, one Greek, one Latin) an edict for either scientist or poet: render radiant sense from smallest thing. When you are thrown a line like that you’ve got to live up to it. So I added the lines “and know no more / than when cast forth garden.” The rest came, night by night, via “America the Beautiful,” to the end of bells from the Sunken Cathedral “set in great hymnal font.”

Notebook (John Bulwer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, &c.)

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

The usual blue hour (of writing) expended shoveling out the five or so inches of new snow. Tuckered out. Or reeling in a kind of pleasant post-exerting idiocy. Out of the thirteenth chapter of John Bulwer’s 1648 Philocophus: or, The Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend, a chapter whose argument reads “That the motions of the parts of the Mouth in Speech are so remarkable, that some have (not without successe) attempted to imitate them by Mathematicall motions”—a lovely foray—“for curioſity or ſtrangeneſſe ſake”—into man’s endless reverie for a “natural language”:

      Svch Sagacious Æmulators and audacious Inquisitours of Nature there hath been, who without naturall vertues, by Mathematicall Magique only, having borrowed the influences of the Heavens, produce workes like to those of Nature, as speaking Bodies, which are not endued with animall vertues; for, Mercurius writeth that the Ægyptians by a most inutterable art, made the Images of their Gods (especially of Mercury) so, that they uttered an articulate voyce. And we have a hint of encouragement to ſuch a Deſigne, from the Grand Augmentor of Sciences. There is found, ſaith he, a ſimilitude, between the ſound that is made by inanimate Bodyes, or by Animate Bodies that have no voyce articulate; and divers Letters of articulate voyces: and commonly men have given ſuch names to thoſe ſounds, as doe allude unto the articulate Letters. As trembling of water hath reſemblance with the Letter L. quenching of hot mettals with the Letter Z, ſnarling of Dogs with the letter R, the noyſe of ſcreetch-owles with the letter ſh. voyce of Cats with the Dipthongue eu. voyce of Cuckoes with the Dipthongue ou; Sounds of ſtrings with the Letters ng. So that if a man (for curioſity or ſtrangeneſſe ſake) would make a Puppet or other dead Body, to pronounce a word; Let him conſider on the one part, the motion of the Inſtruments of the voyce; and on the other part the like ſounds made in inanimate Bodies; and what conformity there is that cauſeth the ſimilitude of ſounds; and by that he may minister light to that effect.

Recall Gerard Manley Hopkins’s insistence that sound indubitably tempered meaning, onomatopoesis running its tiniest minuscule tendrils out to minister the light of whole batteries of words:

      Flick, fillip, flip, fleck, flake.
      Flick means to touch or strike lightly as with the end of a whip, a finger etc. To fleck is the next tone above flick, still meaning to touch or strike lightly (and leave a mark of the touch or stroke) but in a broader less slight manner. Hence substantively a fleck is a piece of light, colour, substance etc. looking as though shaped or produced by such touches. Flake is a broad and decided fleck, a thin plate of something, the tone above it. Their connection is more clearly seen in the applications of the words to natural objects than in explanations. It would seem that fillip generally pronounced flip is a variation of flick, which however seem connected with fly, flee, flit, meaning to make fly off. Key to meaning of flick, fleck and flake is that of striking or cutting off the surface of a thing; in flick (as to flick off a fly) something little or light from the surface, while flake is a thin scale of surface. Flayis therefore connected, perhaps flitch. . .

Another “Sagacious Æmulator”—one admires the unflagging plethora (a medical word originally, for an overabundance of humours, “where all the humours, beynge superfluousely increased, fylleth and extendeth the receptories of the body, as the stomake, the vaynes, and bowels . . . most properly callid fulnesse, in greke Plethora . . .”) of it . . .

—

Elsewhere, Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), in a sweet dither of chiding:

      Enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing. We hear it complained of some works of genius, that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range. We should consider that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any declivity in its channel. The river flows because it runs down hill, and flows the faster the faster it descends. The reader who expects to float down stream for the whole voyage may well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea when his frail shore-craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser streams to it. But if we would appreciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves. There is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream sucking under a causeway; and when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse, Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt beside them. Their long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency that they naturally flow and run together. They read as if written for military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch in them. Compared with these, the grave thinkers and philosophers seem not to have got their swaddling clothes off; they are slower than a Roman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped last night . . .

Enough. (Thoreau: “A perfectly healthy sentence . . . is extremely rare.”)

Notebook (Williams, O’Hara, Hopkins, &c.)

William Carlos Williams, c. 1949
(Photograph by Musya Sheeler)

Snow in the offing and no pre-processed offertory in the hopper. The moot galoot at the controls. I think of Williams’s “A Sort of a Song”: “Let the snake wait under / his weed / and the writing / be of words, slow and quick, sharp / to strike, quiet to wait, / sleepless . . .” The allowable polyphonic fugue of the slow repartee, its itch to continue. Williams again (Paterson):

      It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence.

      Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.

Fastidiousness duped by insouciance (“Tra la la la la la la la la / La tra tra tra tra tra tra”). Or I think of O’Hara’s “A Hill” (with its plausibly emphatic yesses buoyed by a single querulous no) and its quarrel with the prepossessed, that kind of control:

Yes, it’s disgusting
when you lose
control, but my
wilderness is love

of a kind, no?
And the purity
of my confusion is
there, it’s poetry

in love with you
along with me,
both of us love you
in the same “My!”

Yes, but don’t be
scared; poetry
is intangible and
there’s no purity

in me
outside of love,
which you can easily wreck
and I can lose.

Clouds pass in
my notorious eye
but you, through
all, I see.

Feral ingenuity. Isn’t it in the late piece “Should We Legalize Abortion?” that O’Hara’s radical sass stages its supreme WTF? moment (and nails it, in all caps)?

                                            So stop thinking about how
badly you’re hurt . . . Stop coddling yourself. You can
do something about all this and I’m here to help
you do it! I’ll start by getting your clothes off . . .

What the . . .
                          THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!
                                                                                                        Forget
we ever met.

Feverish errantry yclepted errancy. The impossibility of a permanent druthers. So, too, Gerard Manley Hopkins, out of a journal entry (24 September 1863), “horning in” at a wild etymology (“the corn become a black smut”):

Horn.
      The various lights under which a horn may be looked at have given rise to a vast number of words in language. It may be regarded as a projection, a climax, a badge of strength, power or vigour, a tapering body, a spiral, a wavy object, a bow, a vessel to hold withal or to drink from, a smooth hard material not brittle, stony, metallic or wooden, something sprouting up, something to thrust or push with, a sign of honour or pride, an instrument of music, etc. From the shape, kernel and granum, grain, corn. From the curve of the horn, κορωνις,* corona, crown. From the spiral crinis, meaning ringlets, locks. From its being the highest point comes our crown perhaps, in the sense of the top of the head, and the Greek κέρας, horn, and κάρα, head, were evidently identical; then for its sprouting up and growing, compare keren, cornu, κέρας, horn with grow, cresco, grandis, grass, great, groot. For its curving, curvus is probably from the root horn in one of its forms. κορωνη in Greek and corvus, cornix in Latin and crow (perhaps also raven, which may have been craven originally) in English bear a striking resemblance to cornu, curvus. So also γέρανος, crane, heron, herne. Why these birds should derive their names from horn I cannot presume to say . . .

Hopkins, wildly burgeoning, in a tangle like a foliant rose (“nothing that is not green will survive”). Uncontrollable as a neuroses. The Hopkins who’d write, too (in April of 1864):

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that no one can reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet from time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms.

* κορωνις is the name for the flourish at the end of a book, and also for the mark over a crasis, shaped thus ’. (G. M. H.’s note.)

Notebook (eccolinguistics, Place Holder, &c.)

Place Holder

Saturday’s sign: a flock of twenty or so robins, fussy and implacable in the snow. Usual chores and rereading Dana Ward’s “Typing ‘Wild Speech’”: “The ruin of the frivolous disables all potential.” (How it recalls sans aucune raison Shelley’s lines out of “To a Skylark”: “. . . That from heaven or near it / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art . . .”) I like the kind of presumptuous copiousness and “gush” (“Middle English gosshe, gusche—as the word is wanting in Old English and the other Germanic languages, there is nothing to forbid the supposition that it originated onomatopoeically in Middle English”) a word like “frivolity” unfetters. Hats off Romanticism. Clark Coolidge, in a note “On Jimmy Schuyler’s Poems” writes: “A lot of unalloyed nouns . . .” And:

Weather, as all strata in a possible day.
Words, all articulate shifts of a possible sky.

Recalling (Hendrix at Woodstock: “you can leave if you want to, we’re just jamming, that’s all”) Willem de Kooning, out of the Robert Snyder movie Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans (1960): “Everything is already in art, like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you.” (See, too, John Ashbery in the Paris Review interview (c. 1983): “. . . on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.”)

—

Of note. Out of the new Jared Shickling-edited newsletter eccolinguistics (#2.1), a many-pronged poke between the narrow steel bars of the Conceptualist hoosegow by the mysterious and ineffably-named Place Holder:

Evaluation: “Uncreative Writing 101”

“I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!”
—Frank O’Hara, “Lines for the Fortune Cookies”

1. This was the most boring class I ever took.
2. I signed up for poetry and the teacher if you will call him that spend the term laughing at it.
3. This was a totally original class. I loved it.
4. Everything we turned in had to be stolen.
5. It was so boring that when the guy next to me passed me some pills I swallowed them no questions.
6. The train is still sitting in the institution. You only dreamed it was in motion.
7. So I’m from Watts. And you white folk are clueless.
8. It’s as simple as this: They treat you like a child, and you store up some insults to use later on.
9. Once I asked if we could get in academia trouble by the Plagiarizing. He just looked at me funny and said Stick close to me kid, I’ll take the Rap.
10. WTF??? This class is a waste!
11. So I just copied stuff and that was all I had to do.
12. When I was younger, I was always getting these ideas.
13. This class met once a week on Mondays, and for the whole semester I looked forward to Mondays.
14. He wouldn’t even write comments on papers and I doubt he even did look.
15. Everything came back as “Nice job, Travis!”
16. Why the President invited this clown to the White House is a joke I can’t process.
17. As my Sorority sister said, “With celebrity poets like these, the country is in some serious shit.”
18. I really liked the teacher he’s unusuel and lade back.
19. I think it’s sorta funny he read Whitman to children there when children just like those are getting whacked in Afghanistan and stuff.
20. Little red places on the limb suddenly turn white, then bud forth with something green.
21. If my parents knew they were paying money for this they’d go ballistic.
22. Does one have to be Caucasian to be Conceptual? Just asking.
23. To tell you the truth, I’d get a lot of pleasure going a few rounds with this aesthete in an Ultimate Fighting cage.
24. I came into this class as a very insecure person. Now I have a hole new perspective about life and feel empowerd.
25. Nobody else on the lacrosse team will ever take this class, that’s for sure.
26. I emerge from this experience with a deeper understanding of the conceptual homologies informing the Fraternity and Poetry subcultures.
27. If you have a person you want to submerge in boiling lambs and lobsters, recommend this class to him / her.
28. I have one question: Is just copying stuff what I really came to the University of Pennsylvania for?
29. And I have this question: How would you theorize Conceptual Poetry in relation to the Greek far-Left?
30. The teacher is a nerd, but in a loveable way.
31. Plus, with his inch-long fingernails, he looks like an ivory tower crack addict.
32. For the life of me, I don’t see what’s avant-garde about fifty-year old recycled quasi-Pop.
33. Professor Rocks!!
34. Flarf is dead and Conceptual poetry should be too. I’m sorry, but I’ve had it.
35. But how late to be regretting all this, even bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
36. I used to be bipolar; because of this course, I am now a 17 mile-long tapeworm.
37. His voice reminds me of the sound of an unmanned drone circling overhead, which survivors have reported as a kind of techno-pop back beat from the heavens, right before the flash.
38. One Richard Prince is quite enough, thank you.
39. Orpheus realized this and didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven after the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven half out of their minds by his concepts, what they were doing to them.
40. I loved this class, it was easy and I learned a lot.
41. I’d go on automatic pilot when he’d start talking about Duchamp for the ten thousandth time and just think about my girlfriend’s pussy.
42. I didn’t learn anything from this class, except that I’m the Author of the Inferno.
43. The sweet peas grip the fence; the beans hang hidden by the leaves.
44. I want my tuition back, plus damages.
45. This class has changed my life.
46. To quote the immortal Robert Frost: Tennis with the net down is for those who can’t.
47. With Mr. Filreis, at least your opinion is respected, but in this course, you might as well be wearing a saddle and halter.
48. What’s with the Halloween bow ties and hats?
49. This class got me to thinking: What is “Art”? I still don’t know, but one day I hope to ride forth and find out.
50. I was insulted to have to read the literal defense testimony of rapists and pimps.
51. Just to give you an example, I know I only got a B+ because I said I liked Kent Johnson’s DAY.
52. The teacher praised me for my scanning and reformatting of the entire two-volume anthology of William Cullen Bryant’s A New Library of Poetry and Song, and I appreciated that.
53. If I hear Marjorie Perloff mentioned one more time I will chug a giant bottle of Lysol.
54. I kept asking the Professor about Language Poetry, and it seemed like he always got nervous and had a different answer every time.
55. The wind has stopped, but the magnolia blossoms still fall with a plop onto the dry, spongy earth.
56. He seems to like the Foundational of Poetry a whole lot, for some reason.
57. To be honest, I’ve met scores of gang members in prison more in tune with the world than this petit-bourgeois scrivener.
58. Administrators, please listen to me: I know what I’m talking about because I share a strange machine with them.
59. The pimp is busted. I shall have to get him fixed.
60. This class was pretty cool. I’m a Marketing major, but now I know I can be a poet, too.

“The ruin of the frivolous disables all potential.” One thinks precisely of the Conceptualist disabling of the frivolous, its cut and dry, its smirk and smarm. Frivolity, with its unquashed weightlessness and trumpery, its unreliable trifling and fickle dunning of the unsteady heart’s own potential, its sheer unapologetic excess runs—must needs run—catty-corner and outré to any mere conceptual bluff configured in advance, and the earnest studiousness of Conceptualism’s always already tired joke.

Notebook (George Bowering, Charles Olson, &c.)

George Bowering, c. 1970
(Photograph by Sheldon Grimson)

Gritty snow flailing down, liable, they say, to “turn” to rain. Reading in lurches, writing some God-awful truck (“There’s a kind of automatism / That relegates casuistry to a side- / Pocket, dumps the eight ball in / With no posturing, no gait of / The soldat making a method of / The body’s own taut hindrance, its / Poise. You’re barely a speck now, / Moving across the plain with no / Visible evidence pertaining to the engine / Of your going. Like a lunatic / Marinating a jawbone in a soup, / Like a semi-detached rearview mirror, / Like a stiff pollen-made honey / Gucking up the cake batter, like / A pertinacity of finches thieving sun- / Flower seeds . . .”) A little pocket of things slung loose, as is my late wont, of the harness of thinking . . .

—

Out of chief contrarian George Bowering’s Words, Words, Words: Essays and Memoirs (New Star, 2012), the wily onslaught of a piece called “On First Opening Nichol’s Chaucer”:

      Canterbury Tales, it’s a long poem that incorporates—that’s a good word, with the gross corp, the body in it, the fart wheel, the big peckers and pants full of shit or a lusty woman with a gap between her front teeth, the church on one horse, the bawd on another—and I remember that Anselm Hollo in 1966, a year before bp started on his lifetime’s epic, wrote naughty words in the gleaming pigeon poop on a bridge in Hyde Park, poetry gone contrary on the whited sepulchre.
      So also does Charles Olson’s own pilgrimage, celebrating or detailing a Massachusetts fishing town older than USAmerican history—lately filled with Italians instead of Adamses—make the most recent great Amerk poem, out of the narrative of a giant smoking man’s breath, necessarily oppositional, a form of love that “is form, and cannot be without / important substance,” one substance being the “gurry of it” that the speaker, so we have been taught to call him, is covered with, so that this big human mammal boasts the holes in his clothes, “my fly / gaping, me out / at the elbows”—the funniest misdirection in midcentury poetry, but is it really misdirecting? Someone he purports to be quoting says that in the face of sweetness a poet should

piss
and go
sing,

thus going “contrary.”

—

Olson, out of “The Songs of Maximus”:

Song 1

                colored pictures
of all things to eat: dirty
postcards
                    And words, words, words
all over everything
                                        No eyes or ears left
to do their own doings (all

invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses

including the mind, that worker on what is
                                                                                    And that other sense
made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched,
that consolation (greased
                                                  lulled
even the street-cars

song


Song 2

            all
wrong
              And I am asked—ask myself (I, too, covered
with the gurry of it) where
shall we go from here, what can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
            how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
                                  how get out of anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves?

And (out of Song 3):

              “In the midst of plenty, walk
                as close to
                bare
                          In the face of sweetness,
                piss
                            In the time of goodness,
                go side, go
                smashing, beat them, go as
                (as near as you can

                tear

                In the land of plenty, have
                nothing to do with it
                                                          take the way of
                the lowest,
                including
                your legs, go
                contrary, go

                sing

—

Out of “Poetry Summer,” Bowering’s diary notes made during the period of Olson’s teaching (“Big man reaching down to shake my hand. Impossible to register . . .”) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1963:

Monday, August 5, 1963, 3:53 p.m.
      Today for the first time I went to Olson’s seminar, and I got one specific (and there seems to be a dearth of them). The reason he goes to the root of a word becomes clear when you know that root is not a historical (fake) thing from which the word evolved; but rather the ROOT that is still there, feeding the branches we eat. That is, in 2100 AD we speak the same organic language(s) we spoke in 2100 BC, and there is no reason to fix that false historical date on it . . .

—

Out of Clark Coolidge’s “Notes Taken in Classes Conducted by Charles Olson at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, August 1963” (Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, No. 4 / 1975):

[August 12, 1963]

“no need to go to school anymore
          the literacy lies in Indo-European language”
                                                                              2100 B.C.
                                            that has come down to us recently
                                                                opened up
                                                      thru Hesiod (Greek)
                                                              & Homer

see 85th Canto
      “Ez hit it there
            best thrust”
      “a conception applied to a poem
                              a mantra”
      “85th strings itself in a planar vertical”
        experiential (of ideogram)

“what is called ‘The Wisdom of The East’ is just something
      which was in the Indo-European 2100 B.C. language
                                                                      to begin with”

And:

“we’re not interested any longer in what a poem is
                                              but what it can do!”

      mouth is organ of creation (heart & tongue)
      language is heritage & invention of man
                                                        (not science)
                        “before 2100 B.C. you were not allowed
                                      to speak, if the word sounds
                                      were not used in sacred sense
                                                                  (excitations)”

                        tongue (word sound) first found in Pleistocene
                                    (Whalen’s sense of “Interglacial Age”?)

                “tongue has been attacked & driven out—the mutes
                                                                                                are now
                        (SCIENCE = SILENCE)                             upon the earth”

And:

“write the words you know”
                                                    “there’s a moment when you feel
                                                            oh man, I did
                                                                            get hold
                                                                            of a word”

Peter Auxier: “language is something you have to get into
                            rather than something that’s in you, to be got out”

                “self expression is not enough”

David Tudor—“greatest living pianist”
                Tudor told O: “just read the words
                                                                          you
                                                                              wrote”

        “take the meanest little possibility
                                                                rather than
                                                                      the grandest”

“don’t grab too quickly”

                “Duncan’s shaping the word with the hand—there is something
                                                                                                                in that”

“don’t say schizophrenia—but name it as this
                                                                                    & this
                                                                                          & this
                                                                                                & this
                                                                              like a continuous ribbon”

“get soused in language—strictly without any attitude from
                                                                                                outside”
                                                                    “no help at all”
      Duncan says: the language comes in & gets you

                  Olson: “you’ll never hear me use the word ‘magic’”

—

The apt Poundian brief, one of the “functions” of criticism limned in “Date Line”:

      Theoretically it tries to forerun composition, to serve as gun-sight, though there is, I believe, no recorded instance of the foresight having EVER been of the slightest use save to actual composers. I mean the man who formulates any forward reach of co-ordinating principle is the man who produces the demonstration.
      The others who use the principle learn usually from the example, and in most cases merely dim and dilute it.
      I think it will usually be found that the work outruns the formulated or at any rate the published equation, or at most they proceed as two feet of one biped . . .

The way it refutes its own formula, denying saying’s intent beyond the unprompted occasion of its saying.