Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project

Two Windows

READING MICHAEL HASLAM

Combined in indestructible harmony—
Sommelier, turnip, Coventry, bust.
Language is like that:
Extending out the one
Good arm to cup
Up a dipper out
Of the continuum of
Song, musicking up a
Green and compound spathe.
Or, under the blue
Lid of the welkin,
Beclapped in a deciduous
Zoo of local trees,
A discrepancy of thrushes—
In the binocular’d soft
Circle a hermit, rufous
Tail’d and quilping—a
Veery’s slurry wabble of
Amp’d electronica dousing one’s
Ear. Skew percept. Mute
Dissolve. Truth of it
Is—it hardly matters
A jot what rathe
Adjacency is made, or
What odd lot is
Pull’d up out of
The contemporaneous implacable muck
And dinge of streaming—
A sanderling goes by
And a stroller, a
Palatable sausage, a Quonset
Hut and a string—
And bang’d up into
A sideshow, a tacit
Peremptory Mirabeau of sound.
The human way is
To adjust, to quell
Difference, skimming particulars off
The bumpy saturate, or
Providing the stray twig
Or vernal fern clump
To the skimpy arrangement.
Baling twine, spirochete, Clytemnestra,
Djinn— the spoke-
Work of the radial
Engine spins by its
Honorific, its toss and
Tow, and makes of
Constancy a wobbling song.

—

Either push’d too hard (accidentals unveiling the way) or not push’d hard enough. A piece in a liminal state. Michael Haslam (author of Continual Song and The Music Laid Her Songs in Language). Purveyor of robust florilegia of song.

—

A weekend of cursing the mower, yanking my arm off trying to get it aroaring. New spark plug, new oil, new premium gas. Pampering it like a sentimentalist, hauling off and booting it. Nothing doing. That and reading Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project whilst the cold breezes slotted in (something like 33° F. around six a.m.), rife freshets. Toads in the neighboring pond keening. Hemon punctuated with jokes about Mujo (apparently a Bosnian Everyman, hapless witness to absurdity):

Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under a towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, You have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.

Against the Mujo shenanigans: two stories. One of the (historical, and seemingly unjustify’d) murder in 1908 by Chicago police chief George Shippy of a Jewish immigrant by the name of Lazarus Averbuch amidst a kind of post-Haymarket Square anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist hysteria. One of a Bosnian (living in Chicago) writer’s researching the life of Lazarus Averbuch (by returning to the Ukraine and other places eastern European places) for signs of the young man’s fatal trajectory. Implicit (and explicit) in the narrative of fear of the Other, immigrant as whipping boy for the reckless desire for ever-increasing power of the State (and as martyr for those who oppose it) is a slurry of post-9/11 parallels. Here’s “hobo doctor” Ben Reitman (1879-1942), lover of Emma Goldman, talking about Averbuch:

“For years . . . they have been maintaining the illusion that no social question exists in this country, that our republic has no place for the struggle of poor and rich. The voices of the deep, the cries of human misery and distress are silenced by the formula saying ‘we are all free and equal in this country.’ The empty cant of political liberty has been made to serve those in ruthless power. Those who dare to object to the farce of political freedom, those who resist the social and economic slavery are branded criminals.”
. . .
“Our brother Averbuch has fallen victim to the secret kings of the republic, . . . to the gendarmes and sheriffs of the possessing class. . . . They have left nothing undone to make him appear a low, vile creature, since it is necessary to lull this nation into the belief that only the basest of men could be guilty of discontent.”
. . .
“And how many martyrs do we need before we understand we must respond armed with our righteous wrath? The kings of the republic are summoning their baneful forces, writing new laws that would turn masses of people, millions of human beings, into criminals. We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people’s sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. . . .”

One irony, of course: how the whipped up animosity against “Jewish anarchists” of a mere one hundred years back is now so neatly turn’d against “Arab terrorists.”

Aleksandar Hemon

Johnson’s Bosnia

The Y in Ann Arbor (The Sinks)

‘LACK-WIT, & THE CLOCK’

I love that nutty
Persiflage and veering God-
Taunt’d verbiage that comes
Out of collaborating with
A French woman, bald-
Head’d, or a Russian
Name of Ninotchka or
Veruschka, some model W
For whoops just because
A man’s a clean-
Press’d uniform with snap
In its creases. Taunt’d
or taint’d—what is
That mess all down
The trousers? Or what
Is it makes me
Sally forth with red
Epaulettes squared, a fat
Blunt come dangerously close
To burning the quarter-
Sized patch of hair
That adorns my pendulous
Lip? I am Mr.
Gravity himself (“Garbo Laughs!”)
And I am yearning
Only to muscle quizzically
In on the feats
Of some other’s reckless
Yes in a rude
Trawling through sort of
Way, one way of
Making the minimal salience
Of a boundary my
Own, transfigured by longing.
I had better hurry—
Although nothing lasts longer
Whilst something never does.

—

Title cobbed off Coleridge, that nut. What a mess. Go away for a few days and see something of a world and it all wants to sidle up with the eyelashes doing a split-second rapidity thing, flirt city. Yesterday I perused (in Jacket) the mighty Kennan Ivanović’s “The Fountain Where One’s Name Is Changed: Notes from the Sarajevo Poetry Days Conference,” a terrific thing interspersed with excerpts out of Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues. Later—chance the dog that howls mournfully in the black’d ruins of my soul—I start’d Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. A cacophonous merger occur’d, a round of Bosnia scraps and scissorings. Stories recount’d between two puffs of a cigarette. Here’s Semezdin Mehmedinović (during the siege of Sarajevo):

THE CHETNIK POSITION

First a bulldozer came to dig trenches in the ground, then the truck hauling cement blocks to shore them up. Tanks are dug in with just the barrels peering out. And rocket launchers. Beyond the range of our rifles. Maybe you could even spend the winter in trenches like that. It’s August now: tobacco comes in from Nis and plum brandy from Prokuplje. I don’t know where the women come from, but I saw them too, through my binoculars. One of them put an air mattress down by the trench to sun herself in a bathing suit. She lies like that for hours. Then she gets up, goes to the rocket launcher, pulls the catch and lets a shell fly at random toward the city. She listens for a second, looking towards the source of the explosion: she stretches on the tips of her toes, innocently. Then she goes back, rubbing her body in suntan oil to fully give in to her own state of well-being.

Here’s Aleksandar Hemon:

There was a crazy guy in Sarajevo . . . who jogged all over the city under siege whenever the shooting slowed down. In an undershirt and red shorts he ran and ran, and people tried to catch him and save him, because the Chetniks never really stopped shooting, but nobody could catch him, he was pretty fast. He would stuff a plastic lemon in his mouth and when he didn’t have a lemon he would scream like the sheitan. If you asked him, he would say he was training for the Olympics. Then one day . . . he ran with a bunch of people across the airport tarmac as the UNPROFOR and the Chetniks shot at them. But they shot at the crowd, he was far ahead of them, the plastic lemon in his mouth, so he made it across. Then he ran all the way to Kiseljak. And now he is in Saint Louis . . .

“Chetniks”: slur-term for Serbian paramilitary gangs. “UNPROFOR”: the United Nation Protection Force. “Sheitan”: “Cara Bey! oof! he is a Sheitan, he is Satan, he is a black Yezidi, a worshipper of the devil!” Or here’s the redoubtable Kennan Ivanović (a.k.a. Kent Johnson) writing about meeting ’s translator, Elvis Mujanović, a “shy, melancholic young man”:

Now, drinking coffee in the hotel, overlooking the city, getting to know a bit about each other, he tells me of his family in the western town of Cazin, how during the war it was taken over by a break-away faction of the Bosnian forces and became the site of terrible intra-Muslim fighting. Imagine the desperation and shame we felt, and always the fear he says, that we would die for nothing. He tells me how his mother, a fan (it goes without saying) of Elvis Presley and a heavy smoker, would hoard all her cigarettes as currency to purchase basic provisions for the family, eating, of the little she could get, almost nothing herself. But he and his two sisters would steal one or two cigs from each pack and store them away to give to their mom to smoke when her depression would grow especially strong. The house gets hit by a shell one day, when they are, for some reason, not there. Relatives and friends die, as soldiers or bystanders. A rotting horse swells to the size of a hippo and bursts all over the road. Medieval buildings collapse into rubble. An old man, driven mad by grief, calmly walks a cat on a leash, as the firefight proceeds around him. Famished dogs snarl over the entrails of the maggot-covered horse. We are quiet for a while. Traffic sounds and school-kid laughter, shouts of daily commerce. And then he lights a cigarette, asks me about my own family, do my parents still live, am I married, do I have children, etc.

I love the size (and fleet bravado) of the stories. It is the mode of Hemingway in the untitled squibs that separate the stories of In Our Time, a mode mostly unpursued in American letters, or pursued mostly for comic effect. (I think of Diane Williams and Lydia Davis . . .) Here’s Hemingway:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired at the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

What I think of now as “Bosnian prose.”

Kent Johnson

Le signe assassiné

Bleeding Hearts

Signs talking to signs. Charles Peirce thought that “even plants make their living . . . by uttering signs” and sketch’d labyrinths of minuscule wavy lines shuddering with significance. So that: a morning of sleepy-eyed obfuscatory excrescences comes around with no fish in the sack and a vague tickle in the brainpan (or itch, it is constant, and unscratchable) regarding Ron Silliman’s latest exhibit of the guffawesque, that is, the “idea” that he is dealing out—out of the soil’d deck of cards (he’s missing some and never notices)—“ideas”:

I’ve been able to insert several relatively new ideas on my blog—post-avant, school of quietude, new western / Zen cowboy—some of which have taken on a life of their own, but I’ve done it by discussing the idea, not necessarily pinning it on a single book.

I’ve always suspect’d that Silliman’s “mind” ’s got render’d athwart by politics (which is, after all, mostly a game of dodgy manoeuvres to control the predominant signage). Never, though, did I think a man capable of rattling off without any irony (what one must now believe to be only a chestnut, a quackish nostrum)—“Poetry is the only art form that can make use of all the possible dimensions of language and one of its historic functions has been to make us aware of these domains of meaning, especially those that fall outside of the narrow band of denotation”—could, too, claim such lazy (and obvious) naming as falling into the realm of the “idea.” (Perhaps, to Silliman, an idea is something immanently graspable and fiat’d, something ever-repeatable, a club one might use nigh-endlessly, something precisely with that “narrow band of denotation” (so narrow it seemingly disappears, empty sign) poetry combats, something like the name one assigns to a dog: Here, School of Quietude, c’mon boy, here, School of Quietude.) (One oughtn’t repeat oneself, but: control the names, control the percepts—that’s an old Alexander Haig ambuscade, replacing the appellation “Contras”—leftover brigand-goons of Somoza—with “freedom fighters.” The controlling military junta’s unilateral decision to call Burma “Myanmar”—that’s another “idea” As is the “War on Terrorism.”) I like how Peirce categories three “universes” of signs:

. . . the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of the poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody’s Actually thinking them, saves their Reality.

A familiar item in Silliman’s precincts. Peirce continues:

The second Universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe—

All these Universes may work havoc (“and let slip the Dogges of Warre”) with Silliman’s late project (though the existence of innumerable alphabets—Amharic, Burmese, Khmer, Sinhala, Cyrillic—apparently put no skid into the dogged slow bulldozing accumulation of The Alphabet).

—comprises everything whose being consist[s] in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign—not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but so to speak, the Sign’s Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living constitution—a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social “movement.”

I am a sign. My consciousness is a sign. (Elsewhere Peirce talks of “the notion that consciousness, i.e., percepts, is not the real thing but only the sign of the thing.” But: “these signs are the very thing. Reals are signs. To try to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to peel an onion and get down to [the] onion itself . . . If not consciousness then sciousness, is the very being of things; and consciousness is their co-being . . .”) Which skedaddles off into realms, again, of aery futility and vapours “where” “I” “do” “not” “go.” But: beware the persistent namer in the midst. Beware the poet’s abuse of words.

The Idea of Ron Silliman

Birding, &c.

Redbud

Yesterday the annual jaunt to Point Pelee (whose point withdraws perceptibly every year—result, apparently, of breakwaters construct’d in front of Lake Erie condominiums interrupting the wave action that used to shift sand to the point). A good day of some sixty or so species. Black-bellied plovers and a ruddy turnstone in the black muck of the onion fields. A rusty blackbird turning leaves in the swampy woods. (A raccoon there, too, unconcernedly grubbing out one hole after another.) Warblers: Nashville, Blackburnian, bay-breasted, chestnut-sided, yellow, magnolia, Cape May, black-throated green, palm, black-and-white, redstart. One attends to (accounts for) what’s “coming through” (think of a migratory poetics). One remarks differences (compared to other years): higher numbers of orchard orioles, of Nashville warblers. Miss’d the Black-throated blue. Miss’d the scarlet tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak. Slight sunburn. Back, a longish wait at U.S. Custons. Two thuggish-looking “homeland” grunts (shaved heads, sunglasses, knee pads, arsenals of unspecify’d black weaponry strapped to belts) walk’d with the insouciant grace of the bully up and down the rows of vehicles waiting to go through: devotees, obviously, of random intimidation. (They’d suddenly choose a vehicle to interrogate and search, fling open doors and trunks, resume implacable pacing.) One traverses the Ambassador Bridge into a monstrous sandy pit of construction. A dozen or so cranes, innumerable bulldozed two-track service roads, flung about concrete barriers, insufficient (moronic) signage.

—

Return’d, read nearly to the end of The Disinherited. A (jobless, “I hear they’re hirin’ about one out of every fifty thousand that asts fer a job”) character’s quoting of a couple lines of Vachel Lindsay made me look it up:

THE LEADEN-EYED

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

I love that. That, and the story the immigrant (and Marx-reading) Hans tells about wasp-hollow’d pears:

When I was a boy in Germany . . . there was a nobleman’s estate close to our cottage. He had a splendid orchard, and we boys were always hungering for the fruit we never had at home. We used to steal over the high stone wall when the gardeners were busy elsewhere to eat our fill of the fruit and even fill our blouses to take home with us. We liked the pears best. They were huge and sweet as sugar. Sometimes we’d start to grasp one in a hurry and it would crumble between our fingers. Wasps had entered it through a tiny hole near the stem, a hole not evident to a casual eye, and eaten all away but the rind and seeds. Things that seem as solid as a rock may be fragile enough to collapse at a pinch. But you’ve got to pinch first.

Thinking that the detail of the pear tree is intend’d to remind one of Saint Augustine’s different (Christianly-complicated and apologist—“Even a rich thief will not tolerate a poor thief who is driven to theft by want”) story of thieving pears in Book II of The Confessions:

I had a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled to it by neither hunger nor poverty, but through a contempt for well-doing and a strong impulse to iniquity. For I pilfered something which I already had in sufficient measure, and of much better quality. I did not desire to enjoy what I stole, but only the theft and the sin itself.

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night—having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was—a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. . . . It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error—not that for which I erred but the error itself.

I do recall reading all that and thinking What a dweeb (though in Latin of course). All the self-lacerating hardly worthy the inconsiderable erring (and the “cauldron of lust” that ’s Carthage hardly register’d—seem’d second-hand braggart hogwash boys tell one another to prop themselves “up”).

—

To redeem Geoffrey Hill (for myself), the final (and perfectly uncivil) piece in A Treatise of Civil Power:

NACHWORT

Somehow, with a near-helpless cry, I sháll
wrench out of this. I don’t much have
the patience, now, of the artificer
that so enthralls itself, impels
mass, energy, deep, the stubborn line,
the line that is that quickens to delay.

                             —Urge to unmake
all wrought finalities, become a babbler
in the crowd’s face—

A cantankerous unviable naysayer after all! Reveller in the idiot bave and mess! Against the fine sterling industrious makers!

Blackburnian Warbler

Thy True Heritage

The Y in Ann Arbor (“Rathe to destroy”)

‘ANECDOTES NINE-TENTHS BOTCHED IN CONVEYANCE’

If I punch quick,
And short, and cadge
A big smoke off
What a man is
Reft of by insobriety,
Any discussing’ll be nil.
That wont to pump
Up one’s honor with
Stories of feral disobedience
In the big sticks
Bouncing off the bed
Of a truck, spread-
Eagled out against a
Green bruise of forty
Or so pot plants
Hanging out the tail-
Gate, just ripped out
Of a clearing dogged
By a full moon’s
Persistent industry poking out
Of insufficient cloud-cover,
Plant stems thick’s a
Skinny boy’s wrist. The
Mean one act’d like
A Romeo, the clownish
One the usual Boner
City goofiness, rather get
Fuck’d up than fuck’d,
Sweating out schnappes shooters
In the pizza joint,
Ending up plow’d in
The waterbed with two
Girls. Arranged for a
Confederate to pry out
A window and carry
Off a considerable collection
Of guns and ammo,
The insurance company paid
A couple of thousand,
Enough capital to run
A sizeable shipment up
Out of the city.

—

The title comes out of a Geoffrey Hill poem, “To the Lord Protector Cromwell,” in A Treatise of Civil Power. A skimpy thing I nosed into whilst my boy rummaged through the stock of a used-music emporium. Curious about a writer I am always curious about, always perturb’d by, laboring myself into disgruntlement. Here, baffled by Hill’s piece “After Reading Children of Albion (1969).” Sign of the difficulty of comprehending the “poetry wars” of another place. Children of Albion one of the anthologies (British version) arriving behind the locomotive of Allen’s New American Poetry, though Ginsberg’s 1965 Royal Albert Hall reading and world youth cacophony probably contributed just as much. Geoffrey Hill not included in its pages. And some of them that were: now forgot, grimping into the escaliers of the hardly noteworthy. Which makes the poem seem a little vicious:

1
Time-expired accusation, a tendresse
of news-hounds, a cave of judges, a judgment
confounded, a covenant of fuddled sleep.
Children of Albion now old men and women
compromised by the deeds they signed in Eden
forsaking dearth.

2
Kemp’s Jig was hard labour—London to Norwich.
I saw a man enact it for an hour
his stage about the space of a kitchenette.
Theatrical darkness, sound only, a hish,
a hisp, tissue of little bells. Then—bingo!—
lights! and a gold Albion uprearing
electric with a static declamation,
a stance-prancer to his motionless fingers’ ends.

3
The dancers, faces oblivious & grave,—
testing testing
the dancers face oblivion and the grave.

A note alerts one that the italics point to a line by John James. Any reading I manage here is probably not help’d by the fact that I first read “a covenant of fuddled sheep”—and the sense of contempt for the “Children” (then and now) resulting. Or is the piece meant to represent the tough old turd affectionately cuffing the clumsiness of youth? “Compromised” by juvenilia? (A mighty sad measure of esteem, I’d say.) The “Kemp’s Jig” stanza: meant to recall the paucity of means and meretriciousness of ends (in those days)? (In 1580 Will Kemp danced the eighty or so miles from London to Norwich in nine days, winning a bet he’d do it in under ten.) Though: the current means (“Then—bingo!— / lights!”) seem incredibly amateurish, just as clumsy. (As does the overly theatrical “testing testing” segue in the final part.) “We decide we do not like Geoffrey Hill.”

—

Reading Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, thinking of Jean Genet. The way improbably breath-upsucking images emerge out of a damnable quotidian rich with degradation and poverty. The Monkey Nest mine wherein Larry Donovan, fictional replica of Conroy himself, lost father and several brothers, is mined out and abandon’d:

      Then the tipple fell in a whirlwind, and the stiff legs stuck ludicrously in the air like those of an overturned wooden horse. Time has had its way with the Monkey Nest. In its quiet grottos crumbling rails and phosphorescent ties are sinking in pallid slime, while flabby fungi cling to the rotting timbers. Bats scream and fight. A venturesome boy climbed down the shaft, but fled in terror when he was covered from head to foot with pulsing, furry bodies before he could travel twenty feet into the main entry. It was lucky for him at that, because the black damp knocks you out without warning. A lamp flame will not live in it.
      To keep cows from falling in the open shaft, it was decided to fill it. The assorted urchins of a superannuated miner volunteered to perform this incredible feat, more stupendous than any storied Herculean labor. In casting about for a comparative peg on which to hang their undertaking, I must mention the persistent Mr. Beers of the poem, who, amidst this neighbor’s jeers, has been resolutely digging in his garden, with China as a goal, for forty-seven years. Think also of that prodigious rock in Svithjod land, a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. To it every thousand years comes a canary bird to whet its dainty beak. When that Gargantuan boulder shall have been worn to the level of the plain, preachers are fond of saying, it will be only breakfast time in Hell.

The boys manage the job with a “coaster wagon” wheel’d up and down full of “soapstone and slag”: “It took them a year to complete the job, but they were paid twenty-five dollars in cash, not in trade out of a company store.” That latter detail probably most astonishing of all. Where’d I read lately how Nadine Gordimer, confront’d with a trailer “park” whilst visiting these unequal States, ask’d who wrote the stories of its inhabitants. Maybe Russell Banks, married to an heiress. The way Conroy is able to plunge (zoom lens) in and out of focus—political against personal, huge economic forces against kids gleaning stray coal chunks—caught here in a lovely paragraph:

      Such a transaction as buying a ton of coal would have seemed incredible to us. We bagged it in gunny sacks from the tipple, shifting the load continually in a endeavor to ease our smarting backs with a flat-surfaced chunk. We sank puffing to the sward half way home, and the surrounding terrain detached itself from the general landscape as though under a microscope. Maybe a busy tumble-bug patiently trundling his malodorous pellet, or a tribe of ants bearing a dead grasshopper. One had only to smash down with a stick or stone to feel like God loosing an earthquake or a tidal wave. We halted by a decayed log and placed our mouths against the ground, chanting: “Doodle, up! Doodle, up! Doodle, up!” If we waited long enough a small black bug would squirm energetically out of the loam, and we were always sure that the doodlebug came in obedience to our command, though tardy.

The doodlebug, found by disturbing the sand of the tiny crater it lies in wait at the bottom of, is the larva of the ant lion. Unsuspecting ants (or one’s breath) moves a few grains of sand and the doodlebug emerges to pull the ant under. (Apparently doodlebugs dig bigger craters when the moon is full.) Worthy of Pound’s Pisan jig “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. . . . Learn of the green world what can be thy place / In scaled invention or true artistry.”

Ant Lion Larva (Doodlebug)

Doodlebug and Ants

My Compleyntes Defruct’d

Horn and Emblem

Some kind of thunderous monody of the bereft? Is that in the offing? My daily unpreparedness, the scandal of the tapped out barrel, the defruct’d bare tree. I did find words of Charles Sanders Peirce (“Nature’s too few startling indices” again leaps to the brainbox’s proscenium): “A rap on the door is an index. Anything which focuses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience. Thus a tremendous thunderbolt indicates that something considerable happened, though we may not know precisely what the event was. But it may be expected to connect itself with some other experience.” (Out of “Logic as Semiotic” though I found it anchoring Jonathan Morse’s piece call’d “The Startle Reflex: Some Episodes from the Lives of Ezra Pound’s Language” in Jacket.) Isn’t a metaphor a kind of index? (Boom and rattling panes of recognition.) Any hinge between items makes a correspondence, beginnings of a structure the mind (motile night creature like a lemur) is able to grimp along, ceaselessly extending. (See how I find myself in Madagascar with lemurs in lieu of with Peirce at Arisbe, the lovely house in Milford, Pa. near the Delaware Water Gap, its round stone foundations and woodwork’d eaves, stumbled into one autumn day driving to Stroudsburg. Gifford Pinchot, early forestry expert, had a place just down the way . . .) (Grimp and extend.) Or I did snap up a line of John Aubrey perfectly serviceable for a title, here, why not try it out?

‘AN EMPHATICALL OATH BY WAY OF EMPHASIS’

Dang it all, you
Whiners, class is about
The group—the individual
Animalcule making vague complaint
About a dirty diaper
Or a lost fishing
Lure isn’t a class
Question, no matter how
Perfidious the state, how
Defeatist the economic news.
Class is a blood-
Line, trumps the mawkish
Quotidian mump. Dig it.

(Out of my soonest-mended book—I got to “fix the endings” of some of the pieces—call’d Ending with ‘Dig It’ (Compleat). Fine vacillating here between the morose and the giddy. I did, after various mad-scramble excursions around town (rehearsals and performances glut the soup-printanier we swim in) put myself to reading a little of Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), looking to—out of Dos Passos—find something out about “proletarian literature”:

Expert miners thump the roof inquiringly with a pick handle before they venture into their “rooms” of a morning. They learn the meaning of a whole octave of sounds indicating the solidity or lack of solidity in the ceiling, but pot rocks slip out as though they were well greased. They give no warning rattle. And bell rocks spring like panthers, leaving a smooth cup-like cavity. Always the rocks hang overhead like the fabled Damoclean sword, except that the sword was not too wide to allow some chance of jumping from beneath it.

And cannot decide whether the clarity of the lines is pleasing, or the heft of knowledge so obviously practically-gain’d is it. One’d say “To the factories, comrades,” except for the fact that the factories die they NAFTA-stung death. “To the service occupations, comrades!” Where be the novels of the medical transcriptionists of today? The “personal appearance workers,” “the gaming surveillance officers,” the “pharmacy aides”?

Juliette and Charles S. Peirce at Arisbe (1907)

Running Cold

Flowering

BREACH AND SLURRY

Sinuous impetuosity is needling the breach:
Trying to pull back what slid
                off so brusque.

A boy croons an air by
Puccini, some virtuosic encore out of
                Gianni Schicchi, a

Standard heart-wrencher. The rain that
Descended late’s knock’d down the catkins,
                streak’d grainy debris

The color of Mountain Dew all
Across the shiny black hood of
                the car. Mallarmé

Says “Each soul is a melody”—
A complete idiocy. The Mallarmé who,
                busy pulling slippers

Out of a homburg, or flowers
Out of a trilby, with menacing
                peremptory glee maintains

“The marvel of transposing a fact
Of nature into its almost complete
                and vibratory disappearance”

Is achieved through “the play of
The word,” piling up the negatives,
                like a hat

One rashly puts one’s head into
In lieu of wearing. Perfect is
                the piece of

Writing that unveils a flower (with
Fit seizure of lack) nobody perceives
                missing: “the one

Absent every bouquet.” The boy is
Running up and down the A
                major scale, cascades

A long-bow’d gamut and slurry,
Marks off finicky triplets and quadruplets
                in staccato detachment.

A way of gainsaying emptiness, pouring
Out its claims against the contumacious
Abrupt, and the hole into it
                any word is.

—

Cold morning, cold night. Comforting the air that slides in under the raised window—I keep reading Dos Passos’s U.S.A., drifting off only to stir up late to lights blazing and a book akilter, dropped, smothering. Continuing lack of the prestidigitatory scuttle, no sense of finesse and jump. Smouldering doggedness, thy name is legion. Stray perturbs: what if Walter Benjamin’d got out of the mud of Port Bou and join’d Adorno &c. in Los Angeles? In Los Angeles?

Paul Gauguin, “Portrait de Stéphane Mallarmé,” 1891

Oily (Coleridge)

Flowering

FOR THE LEVELLERS

The May light makes
All things common, so
All beauty, resonance, integrity
Exist by a dumbfounded
Implacable levelling, a lingual
Mussing of high creep-
Speak with low paramecia’d
Saliences, pee-pockets of
Slangy impenetrables surrounded by
The rapt viscous peninsulas
Of straining motile desire,
A single cell becoming
Wholly mouth. Like language :
Unable to shut its
Trap, its gadabout patois
Enclosure-defiance, its impecunious
Free bunk. Dig it.

—

If one admits that one’s goofing off, pawing the backs of finely wrought (impenetrable) books of poetry, no chance of a “public coming to terms” with any of it—nabbing stray language-parries with impunity, on a kind of bender of oughts and noughts, snatching things recklessly:

Ten syllable Lines.—1. swift.     2. flaw.     3. drift.     4. law.     5. chime.     6. draw.     7. time.     8 clime.     8th. Alexandrine.

Thus Coleridge in October of 1804. Instructing himself. No evidence of the carrying out.

A flying cigar is the chimney swift:
A mash’d stump of Havana with the flaw
Of two jerky twittering wings: its drift
And glide’s against aerodynamic law.
That a common smoking implement’d chime
With a smoke-hole dwelling bird ought to draw
One to conclude that naming fits a time-
Scar’d kind of correspondence: man resembling ’s clime.

(Dogged hours of fitting the marquetry.) (Constraint become confinement.) (One supposes it possible to re-route the lingual neurons into a plush-geometry of tenners—that ’s the first heave.) (Continual mucking with the whole settlement of one’s musicking?) (What means “first heave compensating drawworks”?) (With oil topping $120 per barrel crude, is it high-scar’d time to learn its lingo?) (“Mud pump,” “hook load,” “rotary table,” “spiral-bevel ratio.”) (One skitters north through Michigan and sees lone pumps pocking the swampy center of the state: endlessly rocking.) (Large hens, pecking.) (Machinery’s inimical call—its leverage on the heartworks it mimicks.) (“The initial drilling is called ‘spudding in.’”) (“The oil cache.”) (“Oil spike,” “rig count,” “pipeline bombings.”)

Oil Pump

An Ypocrite

Flowering

Sure enough, unprepared, sty or eyelash making the ducts bleed a teary scratch anthem, morning through the watery blur just another blank whim of the day. Veblen talks about “the regulating norm of consumption” and how it feeds “conspicuous waste”—the consumer par excellence wanting only “to conform to established usage, to avoid unfavourable notice and comment, to live up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and effort.” Sounds like Blogland with its certifiably herd ruminancies, cud-chewers in the common wilderness of no (unnail’d down) extraneous desires, no? Veblen says a sense of “prescriptive usage is present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining force.” If you refuse to own a proper change of jeans . . . if you talk about extraneous books, veering off the scuttlebutt of the decorous (or the shill indecorous with they self-serving (self-servicing) pomp and romp). Dos Passos wonders: “Where was the forgotten man in all these meetings, the citizen of Hooverville, the down and out guy you find wherever you look for a second under the thinning veneer of comfort and the American standard?” Concessions everywhere is how I see it: conceding to become mere concessionaires (with the cock-eyed rough-nail’d hot dog stands in the mud of the beach, the oily smother of the boardwalk). It’s funny to see how the clever mock-Marx academics in the crowd, done with wringing the scrawny neck of the semester (le travail qui n’ose pas dire son nom?), get a chance just about now to foist off a few self-satisfy’d bon mots. Just yesterday I caught a squadron of crows taking turns dive-bombing a solitary raccoon who’d had the temerity to emerge mid-day for a look about. ¡No pasarán! ¡No pasarán! the crows squawk’d in thin little Mickey Mouse voices, the morally-corrupt’d voices of the “winners.” Yah, “An ypocrite is this, / A man which feigneth conscience.” Gower, John Gower. He’d probably know.

This world, which evere is in balance:
It stant noght in my sufficance
So grete thinges to compasse,
Bot I mot lete it overpasse
And treten upon othre thinges.
Forthi the Stile of my writinges
Fro this day forth I thenke change . . .

That finical scrupulous restlessness to move beyond the finenesses of one’s own quarter. Insufficiencies drubbed by teary-eyed insufficiences: the war, the war, the war. And my bombast against the bombast. Off to the lavatory: something’s got to paw that thing out of my eye.

John Gower, c. 1330-1408
(“I throw my darts and shoot my arrows at the world. But where there is a righteous man, no arrow strikes.”)

Dos Passos Notes, &c.

Flowering

Thinking that that recent rhyme and metric werke (howsoever sloppy and picayune it is) ’s jism’d up (um, defiled) my ear: some entirety of audients commandeer’d to a signal untoward end. Cannot ascertain the usual voices (with they glib basso profundo uproar), source and solace of my “art.” Or, maybe, skeptical of the mired (enforced) regularity of my chatter, they gone off sulking. Oddly, I note how Isola di Rifiuti is approaching Hotel Point’s longevity, its point and moment of collapse. Is there a threshold the brainmeat, rough and perishable, refuses? I doubt it. Every threshold’s deck’d out in its own foul particulars, its flounces and lies. One seeks only a vehicle with a vehicle’s paltry seriatim charms palpable: one hunky catcher with one big “mitt” ’ld suffice (think of Jack Spicer). That is to say: a misfit audience is necessary, a misfit is sufficient; I’d exchange the daily bleating at the forum for the quotidian sneak carte postale to some aficionado of my mess any day (“oh you would not!”) Everybody wants an immoderate breeze (gusty, hortatory, illimit’d) malleable in the hands that receive it, no? That is to say: muss’d hair recombable (if not the eggy top of the cranial dome knock’d off—“Yellow, yellow yellow, yellow!”—I know it is poetry if it’s like a yoke-color’d sun hot in a vat.) (Wherein I seemingly lost the “thread” of my seizure: telephone lines down all throughout Big Muddy, the ditch I call my own.) (Thinking of Emily Dickinson, I bloom’d and swerved into William Carlos Williams.) (Or Sergio Leone.)

—

Hot in a hat, out
Hoeing the bean row, aerating
The clayey particulate cake of
It, a summer of no

Rain, no rain in Tokyo.
Nothing to rinse the linen
In, no tub or barrel
Of rainwater off a downspout,

Dry it is in Riyadh.
We keep a lookout for
Signs of clouds, dashing out
With buckets if one skirts

By, quick clouds of Dunkirk.
A cloud in the sky’s
A sty in the eye
Is what the locals say,

Proverbial-tongued locals of Mumbai.
That’s a crowd’d place, how
Local’s local in a place
With a populace of fourteen

Million people? It makes Karachi
Look small. Is that hat
Helping any? That’s a lot
Of beans need’d, and rain.

—

Who reads Thorstein Veblen these days? Dos Passos’s portrait of him (“a hulking lad with a reputation for laziness and wit . . . Reading he was happy . . . he had a stinging tongue and was famous for the funny names he called people . . . he had a constitutional inability to say yes”) demands—against all the “plump flunkies” and yesmen (and they are everywhere, they flourish particularly in the scoff-coffers of the arts where one’s assumed allegiance to the nays camouflages a terrible thriving industry of village pleasers)--one investigate the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class. Dos Passos, in a beaut of a sentence, begins the acquaintance:

      Veblen,
      a greyfaced shambling man lolling resentful at his desk with his cheek on his hand, in a low sarcastic mumble of intricate phrases subtly paying out the logical inescapable rope of matteroffact for a society to hang itself by,
      dissecting out the century with a scalpel so keen, so comical, so exact that the professors and students ninetenths of the time didn’t know it was there, and the magnates and the respected windbags and the applauded loudspeakers never knew it was there.

“He was a man without small talk.” He translated the Laxdaelasaga. Carpenter’d tables and chairs, wrote “slowly at night in violet ink with a pen of his own designing.” “When he lectured he put his cheek on his hand and mumbled out his long spiral sentences, reiterative like the eddas. His language was a mixture of mechanics’ terms, scientific latinity, slang and Roget’s Thesaurus.” Vandyke beard and yellow teeth, women were always falling for him.

Thorstein Veblen, 1857-1929

Walter Benjamin’s Archive

Flowering

Walter Benjamin: “The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.)” Who says something somewhere about “Nature’s too few startling indices”? A world subsumed by a lexicon’ll fit in a box, one supposes, though one aches to say it. How apt that Benjamin, collector of cartes postales, sees an economy of the “scholarly” residing in boxes. It’s Nabokov who so implacably fills the index cards, the long boxes. Benjamin is mostly notebooks, scraps, lists, pages impeccably script’d and with margins left blank (a place for the inevitable late-beleaguer’d intrusions of futurity, or for the “de-forming agent” call’d imagination), in a minuscule hand micrographic, neatly single-lining out the errors. A new book call’d Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Verso, 2007). Translated by Esther Leslie. Edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla. Book of an exhibit (in 2006 in the Academy of Arts, Berlin), replete with notebook pages; clippings; postcards of toys (the Thingworld), of sybils out of the cathedral at Siena, of travels (San Gimignano, Volterra, Mallorca); logs of words and phrases (distorted, a “childish lexicon”) out of the mouth of Benjamin’s son Stefan; photographs (arcades, clutter); graphic constellations (lists spatially sort’d and align’d); riddles and puzzles, letters and quotables. Wholly, meanderingly, thumbable.

Toujours in Benjamin the processual tug of constant flux and ephemerality opposed to the impulse to stay that through collecting. “Thus the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.” The sour inevitability is: disorder surmounts order—in a line out of the preface: “the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried over the Pyrenees in September 1940 is lost.” Presumably disappear’d into the maw of the state.

License in Benjamin to snatch and hoard with a magpie’s bright indifference: “not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old—in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own, as the task of the collections that filled my drawer.” Assimilating the perdurable, or, make the perdurable out of what’s select’d to assimilate. Or is the collectable, like memory, endless? “He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside—that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.”

—

Odd combo of fatigue and restlessness proceeding. Flowering plants in successive waves, forsythia, magnolia, redbud, pears, the dogwoods beginning (greenly white), the catalpa one of the latest, just now with a little greenery amongst the clinging brown pods. The bird regulars getting interrupt’d by notes here and there of migrants. I am dizzy with intents one moment, sour and adamant in sloth the next. Kind of thing that makes for a dullard’s mayhem:

A Caliper to measure Fleas—
A compass, minuscule—
Can hardly reach to span the breach
Between two women gathering fuel

In vacant lots where winter is
A fit of emptiness
Against what—absent—presently
Hocks its copiousness.

“Hocks” as in spits, “hocks” as in dumps on the unsuspecting, pawns off. (Do I feel that thing—here in my relentlessness—that Benjamin says? “The scruples, sometimes disturbing even to me, with which I view the plan of some sort of “Collected Works” correspond to the archival precision with which I preserve and catalog everything of mine that has appeared in print. Furthermore, disregarding the economic side of being a writer, I can say that for me the few journals and small newspapers in which my work appears represent for me the anarchic structure of a private publishing house. The main objective of my promotional strategy, therefore, is to get everything I write—except for some diary entries—into print at all costs . . .” Maybe. Though I thrill to defiant insouciance too: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content. / I don’t have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone” sorts of things. Wouldn’t Benjamin, if he’d survived, be today an morosely riotous (downloading fever’d) assemblagist of pixels? No scrap unturn’d, no caustic mot forgot.

A Page of Benjamin’s Paris Address Book of the 1930s

Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940

Walt Whitman, Printer

Flowering

WITHOUT

Particularity’s a Shed
Without Shingles, a rain-
Swept Shack of Nothing to do:
It mocks an empty Plain

Like a House unguarded without,
No Rookery, no Tree, no Flue.
Nothing bigger anneals to it—
It borrows its Sun and Dew.

No General stops to water
A horse, or curry it
With a blandishing Brush or Comb.
Lonesome is its riot.

—

Walt Whitman looking back on “the whole modus of that initiation” into the mysteries and pleasures of type-setting and printing (he learn’d under an apprenticeship beginning at age twelve): “the half eager, half bashful beginning—the awkward holding of the stick—the type-box, or perhaps two or three old cases, put under his feet for the novice to stand on, to raise him high enough—the thumb in the stick—the compositor’s rule—the upper case almost out of reach—the lower case spread out handier before him—learning the boxes—the pleasing mystery of the different letters, and their divisions—the great ‘e’ box—the box for spaces right by the boy’s breast—the ‘a’ box, ‘i’ box, ‘o’ box, and all the rest—the box for quads away off in the right hand comer—the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line—its unlucky busting by the too nervous pressure of the thumb—the first experience in ‘pi,’ and the distributing thereof—all this, I say, what jour [journeyman] typo cannot go back in his own experience and easily realize.” That out of a little book by Ed Folsom titled Whitman Making Books, Books Making Whitman, catalog and commentary to a 2005 sesquicentennial exhibition of the 1855 (and subsequent) editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Folsom considers how Whitman’s direct participation in the design and printing of Leaves of Grass (to the point where it should be consider’d part of Whitman’s compositional strategy) result’d in not only numerous editions, but “multiple issues, often with different bindings, different paper size, different cover designs, and different configurations of contents.” Evidence is present’d of Whitman making changes mid-press-run. Whitman: “I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing . . . the way books are made—that always excite my curiosity: the way books are written—that only attracts me once in a great while.” And: “Having been a printer myself . . . I have what may be called an anticipatory eye—know pretty well as I write how a thing will turn up in the type—appear—take form.” I recall a proposal made not entirely jokingly by, I think, James McConkey at Cornell back in the early ’eighties with the first signs of dangerously saturate-levels of MFA were being observed (nobody getting jobs)—that the candidates be required to gain, too, some expertise in the printing trades, fine letterpress or commercial. A proposal scoff’d at, though I, having done both (though not then doing an MFA), rather liked it. So: pleased to read of Whitman’s suggesting to the young: “Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life—mechanical part as well as the rest. Learn to set type, learn to work at the ‘case,’ learn to be a practical printer, and whatever you do learn condensation.” (I jump’d to a brainmeat-strike of thinking maybe Pound’d got that “condensare” out of Whitman, forgetting how he owes it to Bunting (ABC of Reading): “I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense.’ . . . Dichten = Condensare.”)

Some lovely details in Folsom’s book. How the use of a line out of Emerson’s famous letter to Whitman (“I great you at the beginning of a great career.”—R. W. Emerson) on the (fat) spine of the second (1856) edition of Leaves of Grass invent’d the dastardly cover blurb. (That edition design’d purposefully by Whitman to “go into any reasonable pocket.”) Or how, after images of leaves and rootlets emerging out of the title’s words on the cover and title page in the early editions, Whitman turns to “spermatic imagery” for the third (1860) edition (which first includes both the “Calamus” and “Enfans d’Adam” poems (“Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice . . .”) The squiggles decorating the word “GRASS” on the title page mimic the “distinctive tails that had become familiar in medical textbooks of the time . . . and the period after the title is a perfect representation of a sperm cell.” Or how Whitman long’d to make “a Bible for American democracy that would reconfigure morality on radically democratic terms.” In a “working copy” of the 1860 edition, Whitman “carefully noted the number of words in the Bible (895,752), the number of words in the New Testament (212,000), and the number of words in the ‘Boston ed. Leaves of Grass’ (150,500). To this total, he added the words in his new book of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (33,000), giving him a total of 183,500, an impressive amount of verbiage, but still quite a ways from overtaking his ancient rival.”

The Walt Whitman Archive, something mount’d simultaneously with the exhibition and its catalog is here. Something nearly identical to the text of the catalog is here. Somewhere in its early pages is mention of two versions of the Whitman “rough” engraving: “bulging-crotch” and “flat-crotch.” A later edition crops the offending half of the body altogether (shades of Elvis film’d for the Ed Sullivan show waist up.)

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

Whitman’s Crotch (Flat and Bulged)

Bah!

Catkins

AERIAL

Asterisk of the sun-
Struck aerial pageantry, a
Single stationary helicopter dropping
A ladder descend’d by

A man in black
Tights with a knife.
Now he hangs like
A pupa, mouth clamp’d

To blade, turning lazily
Through a series of
Tiny manœuvres that diminish
Slowly and incompletely, a

Lack of finish being
One of the standard
Chores of art’s moment,
Prelude to a carnival

Of late succumbing humbuggery,
The way a fly
Inject’d with the paralytic
‘Spit’ of a minor

Arachnid contorts for all
It’s worth, seeking to
Attract a second dose,
Implacable revision, and gloss.

—

Cacaphonous bahs all around. It’s a lovely pure cold day, hoar-grimed and desultory, and I am with Emerson: “What a blessed world of snivelling nobodies we live in! There is no benefit like a war or a plague. The poor-smell has overpowered the rose & the aromatic fern. Oil of vitriol must be applied.” I, who’d like to stride out through the high pressure bulge in the hills and woods where the maples got they pale green catkins adangle, nothing to think about beyond thinking itself, that sliding unfixity (Emerson: “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”) Something other, outside the lax sour regions of the quotidian with its slogs and clogs. It isn’t boredom, it is ras le bolism, a species of terminal grinching fed-uppery with no particular target beyond the fripperies of the human race.

Robert Hooke’s Ant, or Pismire, c. 1665

Dos Passos Notes, &c.

Near Vero Beach

“SEQUENCE RAVELLED OUT OF SOUND”

Uncanny the way
The way is
Cadged by whatever

Trot (a text)
Or horse (riderless)
Marks it out

(Befouls its precincts)
With snort or
Verbiage (or dung),

Whatever raw bundle
Cacophonous is made,
Bereft of prior

Arrangement. So one
Parcels out or
Divvies up a

Squander lot of
Sequences, adjudging each
With tongue sparring

With teeth, ravelling
Sound portend’d syllables
Out of plash

Ratios, sough’d hinge-
Workings, fits of
Sibilants. Noise itself

Gearing down any
Too impalpable ratiocinatory
Rev, batting away

The barrel of
The gun-shy
Reach of concomitant

Significance in order
To adopt fracas
And brouhaha, moves

Echoing and associational
In which the
Free sounding of

Each is condition
For the free
Sounding of all.

—

Finish’d reading Dos Passos’s 1919 and moved into The Big Money. Just to nail it down, a couple of planks pull’d off the ramshackle shed of the thing. My squib earlier about the biographical sketches mention’d Paul Bunyan. Turns out Dos Passos is using the legendary lumberjack (a wholesome pancake-eating lug) to point at a wholly different logger, one Wesley Everest, a man near-completely bury’d by history. Ex-WWI soldier, “crack shot,” and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Everest got lynch’d in Centralia, Washington, by members of the American Legion after shooting in self-defense when the Legionnaires (lackeys of the lumber kings) attack’d the I.W.W. Union Hall. Dos Passos pulls no punches. A deft swatch of statistical brunt and catalogue juxtaposed to define the terms of the struggle:

      (Since the days of the homesteaders the western promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Washington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope with the result that:

      ten monopoly groups aggregating only one thousand eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand two hundred and eight billion, eight hundred million,
[1,208, 800,000,000]      square feet of standing timber, . . . enough standing timber . . . to yield the planks necessary [over and above the manufacturing wastage] to make a floating bridge more than two feet thick and more than five miles wide from New York to Liverpool;—

      wood for scaffolding , wood for jerrybuilding residential suburbs, billboards, wood for shacks and ships and shantytowns, pulp for tabloids, yellow journals, editorial pages, advertizing copy, mailorder catalogues, filingcards, army paperwork, handbills, flimsy.)

Against that is put a political Paul Bunyan who’s not a cartoon:

. . . the I.W.W. put the idea of industrial democracy in Paul Bunyan’s head; wobbly organizers said the forests ought to belong to the whole people, said Paul Bunyan ought to be paid in real money instead of in company scrip, ought to have a decent place to dry his clothes, wet from the sweat of a day’s work in zero weather and snow, an eight hour day, clean bunkhouses, wholesome grub; when Paul Bunyan came back from making Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four, he joined the lumberjack’s local to help make the Pacific slope safe for the workingstiffs. The wobblies were reds. . . .
      The timber owners, the sawmill and shinglekings were patriots; they’d won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as $1200 a thousand for spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps . . .

The bloody details belong not to Paul Bunyan, but the man Wesley Everest, and are nearly unendurable:

They took him off in a limousine to the Chehalis River bridge. As Wesley Everest lay stunned in the bottom of the car a Centralia business man cut his penis and testicles off with a razor. Wesley Everest gave a great scream of pain. Somebody has remembered that after a while he whispered, “For God’s sake, men, shoot me . . . don’t let me suffer like this.” Then they hanged him from the bridge in the glare of the headlights.

      The coroner at his inquest thought it was a great joke.
      He reported that Wesley Everest had broken out of jail and run to the Chehalis River bridge and tied a rope around his neck and jumped off, finding the rope too short he’d climbed back and fastened on a longer one, had jumped off again, broke his neck and shot himself full of holes.

John Dos Passos, 1896-1970

Wesley Everest, 1890-1919

Dos Passos Notes, &c.

City Flowers

A LONG GRADIENT

Another notch along the trail to summer’s here and here
I am still stuffing piles of leaves off the monstrous oak into tall bags to put
Out by the curb. Kerb is the British spelling, just as they talk of turf where we’d
Use lawn. Kerb recalls kern, a lovely word
Referring to any part of a letter that projects out beyond the block of type itself, the way
The tail of a capital Q does in some fonts, occasionally reaching out to fit
Under the u that generally accompanies it. Except in Qatar.
That’s a conversational duffer, who knows anything about Qatar? I recall
Out of my skinniest-ape days of middling philately—isn’t collecting tantamount to a failure
Of use?—that Qatar issued an inordinate number of stamps, triangular, emboss’d, shiny.
And some years back I inhabit’d a house with a number of other “young people,”
One of whom, a standoffish woman who seem’d to eat nothing except radishes, had a boyfriend
Working in Qatar. After she depart’d to join him, a Qatar blue aerogramme letter arrived address’d
To her. Out of malice no doubt for the way she’d refused to participate in the house’s
Recklessnesses, somebody steam’d it open: it contain’d a long testimony to the man in Qatar’s
Sexual insufficiency and made its readers bray (outwardly) whilst the needles of the individual
Conscience-galvanometers flick’d all the way into the red region
Mark’d shitty. Though nobody would’ve put it exactly so.
If morning comes around with its saucy airs a good thirty years later and one’s
Pickled by worries about car repair—isn’t that apt to derail whatever charge one seem’d
To be building? Out by the state college with its white trim and brick they’re tearing
Down the temporary grandstands, the boat-
Show of graduation day is done for another year, another bunch’s completed
Another of the tasks assign’d it, though who’s doing the assigning’s never said. I never
Want’d anything so stability-provoking as a career, and to the extent possible empty’d myself out
Of the ranks of those in pursuit of one, found my druthers in sideline mockery and catcalls,
Gadabout and gadfly to the earnest minions to the idea of success. Career out of
The French carrière meaning racecourse amongst other things, the way
Language chases its own tail, turning back to look itself up and see the thing that it is following
Is following it. That’d be one career, something publicly conspicuous, bouncing off the spry notion
Of advancement whilst remaining in a turning tangle of fur and fury, incisor and tail.
Everything comes to mean its opposite (careen, that species of dervish and instability,
Coming out of carena, an Italian word for keel, that evening
Stripe of a ship). The temple-sneerers enter the temple so long accustom’d
To sneering at the temple they continue to sneer within it, a mawkish sight (a mawk
Is a grub). Oh one goes along like a billowy white cloud, all puffery and adept, one little semi-
Circle of moisture-heavy air overlapping another the way the tumbler of bourbon used
To make intricate rings au zinc, the material the French used to surface bars with,
The “bastard” element according to Paracelsus, suspecting its impurity. I’d like
To find an etymological root merging purity and poverty, arguing for extraneity
And outness, or a bagged-up wealth of leaves and dirt.

—

Am I akimbo with that? I don’t know. I am in cahoots with the “idea” of it, though I suspect it must needs go along up a longer hill. Long enough to diminish the effect of its particulars and makes its ongoingness the thing. Obviously Schuylerist in tendency. Schuyler renews me every spring.

—

Errand-city weekend interrupt’d by smatters of Dos Passos. It’s entirely likely that I am over-enthused by such romantic revolutionist’s sentiments as character Richard Ellsworth Savage’s, here:

      All the time he was packing his books and other junk in his dufflebag and carrying it on his back up the quais to the Gare d’Orleans, Swinburne’s Song in Time of Order kept going through his head:

While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.

      By gum, he must write some verse: hat people needed was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compartment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems and manifestoes, calling young men to revolt against their butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses all over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by.

Let our flag run out straight in the wind
    The old red shall be floated again
When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned
    When the names that were twenty are ten

(The Gare d’Orleans becomes the Gare d’Austerlitz—state naming’s constant sop to imperialism—and Savage becomes one of the hangers-on around Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.) Is Thomas Pynchon one of the few inheritors of Dos Passos’s ambition? Character put second to historical scale, one’s ideological alliances up front.

Fairfield Porter, “Iced Coffee,” 1966

Shapes in the Dirt

Two Trees

What’s Ben Jonson going off about here where he says (in “A Fragment of Petronius Arbiter”—a name I rather like, rather like Son House’s John the Revelator, though I see some arbiter of things Petronius-esque notes that said Jonson’d fragment is “Not in fact by Petronius,” sort of like my inchoate piece titled “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Latta” that begins “The academy of the future is opening its doors,” the kind of talk ’at’ll land a knuckle sandwich smack in the kisser where I do my daily post-travail dipso-fret)—where, that is, he says: “Doing a filthy pleasure is, and short”? Is “filthy” a noun? Doing a filthy is pleasurable, “and short”? Or is “doing” one “member” of the tautology, “pleasure” the other? “Doing is a filthy pleasure” (as in “I did your mother.”) “And short.” Here’s the whole thing:

Doing a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport;
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and the heat decay.
But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,
Let us together closely lie, and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
The hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

One’d make pleasant unrepent’d sport out of making proof that what’s here is an early argument for the lolling processual mode, writing as a species of continual foreplay. That is, if one weren’t so wholly distract’d by the way Frank O’Hara’s “Song (Is it dirty)” so wholly partakes of the Jonson to reiterate the omni-chronological (“hath,” “doth,” “long will”) shifter’s “stance” (more dance than stance) of “beginning ever.” Here’s the O’Hara:

Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes

that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you

Of course, one’d avoid the error-prone infidelity of thinking O’Hara “short,” or “done,” too, simply by cataloging the ongoing “events” of “breathing” in the poems (“all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement / I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing”). Where Jonson puts the heavenly processual scripture down to a constant dalliance, O’Hara (“Love is not gentle, / like the dust of a room; / love is a thing that happens / in a room, and becomes dust. / I breathe it in. Is that poetry?”) greatly simplifies the matter—for the vale of love-making, he substitutes the “dirty” respiratory pump itself. (It may be the two “vehicles” are indistinguishable: see “Poem (Tempestuous breaths! we watch a girl)” with its “One breath, / heavier than the rest, is penetrating / the folds where her cool limbs join each other”), though, considering the “That’s / not like Frank!” nature of the lines—“cool limbs join”?—I suspect the piece is just another late intercollocation to the Collected by the dapper and dement’d Kenneth Koch.) (Corollary note to breathing = process, and obvious as a hot air balloon tied off and loft’d, um, “aloft”: closure = death, “The Day Lady Died,” “everyone and I stopped breathing”). As I look this over, it seems quite a batty way to give information about the poem . . .

—

SHAPELY

That magnolia hymns its ‘gawdyes’
So whitely, its slender tapers
Incandescing against night’s black
Backdrop, some splaying out with
Little slovenly reaches of fealty
To its own waxy light,
Or getting scrunts and scruples
Of rust in creases where
Its petals flop ungainly—tonal-
Loss an uncladding, the ground
About cover’d with mealy de-
Nudings—did a celestial flap
Open to deposit such a
Lewd and impudent thing here?
Publius Terentius, that’s stupid stuff,
The shapeliness of a tree
Is no Geschichte-monstrance to
Use to prod forth unintelligibles
About the via negativa or
Its feeder roads, that capillary
System that pulls ideas out
Of any execrable line-up
Of semi-porous words roster’d!
Up in Prout’s Neck, Maine
Winslow Homer is sandpapering off
A little of the pale
Gray wash he’d cover’d one-
Half of a sheet of
Arches with, a way of
Making light itself obtrude out
Of the fogbank, jarringly enough
A gallery-goer a century
Or so later’ll catch himself
Mid-gasp at the lascive
Plash of it, and troubled
By seeing, go plodding the
Hop-yards for a beer.

—

Uh, the kind of thing that emerges if one murderously squelches the noises coming through, trying to put the words into storage for the nonce, &c. A thicket, a jumble, a mad scrabble to out. I keep looking at magnolia trees largely because Christopher Brayshaw keeps making photographs of magnolia trees. I like Brayshaw’s photographs. I try to make a photograph of a magnolia tree and see the clutter and baggage of the ordinary surround: everything except the tree. And I think, what I see (selecting) is a tree’s shapeliness, that’s what I look to grab. What I ought to be looking for is the shapeliness of the photograph, the concise (or vagrant) collisions and overlaps of color and shape. Familiarity itself outstrips that seeing, precludes it. I’d rather pull the magnolia whole out of its nexus. So: the cropped, the backdrop’d. Voilà: mon explication de texte. Tree veil’d by the profuse verbiage of its “setting” (jeweler’s lingo). What obtrudes (what must obtrude) is language, that sexy thing. “All art is about seeing.” Winslow Homer’s light. On commence à baver . . .

Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You”

A Chord (With Notes)

Leaves (With Clouds)

IN THE ARBORETUM

Counterpoint, put up against
The supererogatory chordal bleat
Of the continuum: that’s
How the pale yellow
Greens of the first
Notes of the maples
Look, budding out of
A crisscross’d depository of
Grays, hill’d. Shill music,
Like how the shabby
And nondescript titmouse with
Its tuft point’d up
To heaven’s monotonous acres
Drills the available air
With sound the color
Of a sun-shaft
Piercing a radical dank.
Or a “peep-cranny”
(Coleridge) into “the merest
Contingencies in the plastic
Mind of the universe—
The Itch animalcule . . . Flies
That lay eggs uniformly
On the extruded anus
Of Horses, and become
Worms in the Horse’s
Intestines.” In the moot
Smear of being, with
All that is abrupt,
Or counter, or original
Or implacable trammel’d, or
Staved off, or smooth’d
Out, any specimen that
Impedes, or puts out
A commensurate foot (or
A big ass) harries
The unruly horse of
Seeing into a fly
Dependency, a dexterous bit,
A cutter, a brace.

—

A disappointment to find Walt Whitman, in Specimen Days, reiterating that thing A. R. Ammons liked to drawl out (with the kind of exaggeratedly emphatic indolence some Southerners long hawl’d north like to affect) about how a writer ought to keep himself “a little bit stupid”:

You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather’d, wooded, river or marine Nature generally. I repeat it—don’t want to know too exactly, or the reasons why. My own notes have been written off-hand in the latitude of middle New Jersey. Though they describe what I saw—what appear’d to me—I dare say the expert ornithologist, botanist, or entomologist will detect more than one slip in them.

I do recall an argument with G. who maintain’d one ruin’d the whole smear of things by naming. We stood in blackest night near a pond of spring peepers and my insistent nomenclature-mongering put the kibosh on any purest merger the landscape itself ’d intend’d—no sopping up possible. I found the Whitman in Campbell McGrath’s Seven Notebooks, a thing I keep bothering with out of my continuing search for formal means of making “a bag into which anything . . . dumped . . . ends up belonging.” McGrath says “I know the commonplace but hot the exotics” and, in prose descriptings suffers a kind of overkill of something like “precision without names.” So, of a sun coming up to color the eastern sky, he writes of “a low horizon of volcanic red shading to rose then a pencil mustache of backlit clouds, bark gray, then peach-flesh whitening through lemon candy to the now blue dome—barest, night-heaviest blue, weighty and necessary, like a cardiac surgeon donning a robe as she enters the operating theater” and the only seeable thing is that celestial quack, all the color-coordinating’s complete mud. I do note that McGrath scribbles into the Notebooks a supply of hokku. Here’s one, call’d “Dawn”:

5 a.m.: the frogs
ask what is it, what is it?
It is what it is.

Apt in its lack of specificity. What I find so—what? discouraging? unpropitious?—about hokku is the overwhelming earnestness that adheres there, a preciosity of earnestness. How refreshing to find (rarely) something like Bashō’s

How pleasant—
just once not to see
Fuji through mist.

That elbow-nudges the whole history of the form. Makes Bashō into a kind of puckish John Cage (recalling the story out of A Year from Monday that goes: “When I got the letter from Jack Arends / asking me to lecture at the Teachers / College, I wrote back and said I’d / be glad to, / that all he had to / do was let me know the date. / He did. / I then said to David Tudor, / ‘The lecture is so soon that I / don’t think I’ll be able to get all / ninety stories written, / in which case / now and then, / I’ll just keep my / trap shut.’ / He said, / ‘That’ll be a relief.’”)

Matsuo Bashō, 1644-1694