Phillip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag

Two Tulips

A YEAR

CXLII
Here (doubtless passéiste sloganeering)
is my bullying counter-
command apropos of loud-
speakers: that you refuse
to allow any (agreeable,
benign, simpatico, or just)
to speak for you.
Authority (and hierarchy) loves
a designee, a mouth-
piece, and a glare,
whereas ‘a smattering of
prebends rends Scripture itself.’
(In unlit medieval Paris
anybody out at night
had to identify himself
by carrying a light.)
Bachelard: ‘The lonely dreamer
who sees himself being
watch’d begins to watch
the watcher. Hiding one’s
own lantern exposes the
lantern of the other.’
Ah, the brute whelm
of dispersal, the hang-
dog intimacy of base
surveillance! (Melville instruct’d Hawthorne:
‘go to the Soup
Societies.’) What I mean
is, be one who
unendingly disembarks, one who
mans a spectre-boat
in a loudening gay
flotilla, keeping the security
apparatus and engine nervous
(with its uncanny representations
of men), ‘a process of counter-
surveillance trigger’d everywhere a
surveillance lantern is lit.’

—

Splay and angst (a general condition). I paw the pristine (invariably, it is a book), trying to consume it. The balance, the tidy of it, compels and mocks: how-lock’d down and impeccable it is! How nail-bit and distract’d am I! Counter-clock’d cart-wheeling eye activity unleash’d on cue. Wood rasp roughing up the oily brain-lobes. A palsy and wobble of thinking loos’d like the belt-slipping squeak-chatter of a chipmunk, who finally streaks off with its tail stuck straight up, a one-idea man, like a man with a sandwich-sign.

Reading (finally, cavalcade and uproar of fidgeting subsiding) a little of Phillip Lopate’s new Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), inaugural number of a series of “Writers on Writers.” The sufferance of the essayist in a (compensatory) world of novelists:

I, who revere the art of essay writing, and who can never regard literary nonfiction as even a fraction inferior to fiction, find puzzling Sontag’s need to be thought primarily a novelist. But not unusual: postwar American writing featured a number of writers arguably better at nonfiction who preferred to be thought of as novelists: James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Novels were considered the Big Game, essays the minor pursuit.

(And poetry? Only the foolish hunt the “queenly” poem—its reward is cachet, that majestic seal, pizzazz, what, one supposes, we now call “cultural capital.” One suspects the poet who “turns” novelist of some baser grub-instinct.) What Lopate’s book allows (in its notational, digressive way): a way of looking at Sontag’s contradictory moves. In “Thirty Years Later . . .,” a piece reconsidering her own 1966 classic, Against Interpretation that she publish’d in The Threepenny Review in 1996, she says “My idea of a writer: someone who is interested in everything,” and (as Lopate notes) “rues what she sees as the present moment, as ‘age of nihilism.’” Lopate: “while loyal to the Sixties, her honesty forces her to consider that its irreverence may have planted the seeds for the undermining of seriousness, while ‘the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions.’” Not that Sontag is assuming blame. She says:

Writing about new work I admired, I took the canonical treasures of the past for granted. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos. The new work I praised (and used as a platform to relaunch my ideas about art-making and consciousness) didn’t detract from the glories of what I admired far more.

And, later: “To call for an ‘erotics of art’ did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to, then, as ‘popular’ culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its burden of seriousness, of depth.” Which sayings inevitably require that I thump a little at “the age” (as I am wont, for at heart, “at heart I am an American moralist and I have no guilt,” as Patti Smith nearly said . . .) in its shallower manifestations (see the maximum gagas of FlarfCo® and company), recalling how, even in the original pages of “Against Interpretation,” even with its puckish Wildean epigraph “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” Sontag is clear: art’s job is refusal, the refusal to be buffalo’d by sheer consumptive ardor, mere fatting up on hilarity like medieval grotesques:

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. . . .What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

As Lopate puts it: “style as morality” is one of Sontag’s recurring concerns. As Sontag says in “On Style”:

All great art induces contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. However much the reader or listener or operator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction—so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art—must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval.

That, against excess, formal or contentual. Lopate, recalling how Sontag’d approvingly quoted Jean Genet’s line that if his works arouse readers sexually, “they’re badly written, because the poetic emotion should be so strong that no reader is moved sexually. Insofar as my books are pornographic, I don’t reject them. I simply say that I lacked grace,” insists that

. . . grace is all, in Sontag’s cult of art. Sontag remains on some level a classicist, an Apollonian, embracing balance and harmony. Perhaps there is no contradiction here, like the teacher who writes on the blackboard in Godard’s Bande à Part, “Classique = moderne.”

—

Steve Evans is putting up the 2008 Attention Span. Select’d books that dogged or compell’d somehow, territorial marks of the preceding year or so with a clinging whiff. I stuck to poetry.

Phillip Lopate

Opera (Aperta)

Red Palm

A YEAR

CXLI
How about some operatic mewling:
how the completely feasible—cost-
efficacy a must—dry storage
and continual delivery of sheer
gaseousness awaits its Edison, though
compression canister-bombs en forme
de l’écriture « post-Idlewildienne » allow
a limit’d work-around. Like
changing one’s name for art!
van de Beeck to Torrentius!
Every affair develops on two
planes (and ends up in
an airport lounge, surround’d by
a forest of giant bamboos
mold’d out of recycled truck
tire Ho Chi Minh sandals).
Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey. I
think you know the story
of the feeble Dutch medical
student by the name of
Jan Swammerdam with the mania
for insect life. Bee-stung
lips, veins crawling with ants,
he shat out black beady
heaps of Coleoptera. There is
no end of human folly.
How I loved seeing brick
factories—so artisanal!—in Mexico.
“And then we towel’d each
other off and dash’d out
nakedly, into the green rain.”

—

Hunh? Off I went hier soir to see mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent do (record’d “live in HD”) of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, a version of the Cinderella story, liking particularly the broad comedic moves (think of Art Carney) and impeccable timing of Alessandro Corbelli (who play’d Don Magnifico), irreparably addled by the ongoing reverie of marrying off one of the two haughty daughters—gawky, horse-faced Clorinda (Rachelle Durkin) and Tisbe of the pinch’d snout (Patricia Risley)—to the princely Don Ramiro (Lawrence Brownlee). Garanča: mischievous, exquisite, and capable of singing tremendous soaring runs and flights of notes nigh-effortlessly, without any sign of temperamental vanity, recalcitrance, or any of the freights of the prima donna-ish. One question (ask’d in mighty and resonant basso profundo): how come the tenor always ends up with the girl?

Alessandro Corbelli in the Rôle of Don Magnifico in Rossini’s La Cenerentola

Elīna Garanča

Chris Nealon’s Plummet (II)

Some Clouds

A YEAR

CXL
Isn’t Frank O’Hara’s “minute bibliographies of disappointment” akin to
Pound’s “dim lands of peace,” that abstract genitive
Superfluous and dulling, spooning off adequacy? Though I think
O’Hara’s putting it to Ezra’s patootie a little when he says in “Personism”
How “the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of
The infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines
An attitude towards degree of abstraction.” I think he’s harrumphing
Out with a little malicious glee there, something he did with the ease
Of a gasp. When he plow’d through Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio
Medici (juggling a tumbler of gin and a Camel cigarette, sunk down
Slouch’d in a canvas butterfly chair) and noted “when I
Survey the occurrences of my life and call into account the finger of God,
I can perceive nothing but an abyss and mass of mercies,” he leap’d
Up like a rodomontade knocking the philodendron alee to write
That thing about the “natural object” of church Sundays and The
Finger.

—

Truth is, in my own “parade / of a generalized intuition” (how I “judge” the poetry-beasts that trundle down the thoroughfares dropping hot steaming turds of a maniacal variety of inconsistency), Chris Nealon’s Plummet is nigh-terrific. He works a supple long line (“I know prose is a mighty instrument but still I feel that plein-air lyric need to capture horses moving” he writes in “Poem (I know prose . . .)”) and, in a world seemingly divided between the jaunty and the raunchy (and no Mark Twain mete enough to refuse it all), Nealon chooses both (“Your job? Just keep cracking Demeter up” slides uneasily into “At the gates of Arabic I enter, illiterately // Actually I know two words // shaheed / habibi // I watch depictions of electrocution under bright fluorescent lighting with a slightly elevated heartbeat” into “Do I have an astral body or a tapeworm?”), and provides the humor himself. Nealon’s got verve and wit, and it regulates (without throttling) the underlying political rage of the book. Here’s “Sunrise,” one of the longer pieces in Plummet:

—and the felt-tip pen of the spider etches a message on the wall

message in oxygen and light         a hand gropes past me—

it says, nothing you read will help you now

not the pig-poetic snuffling behind the image
not the trampled earth behind the sun

helicopter buzzsaw bicycle bell
ignition—

slammed door footfall schoolkids
jets—

the war is on

*

why does universal
matter peddle itself in packets when
we could take it harder?

slight convexity that used to be
the flat screen,

disturbing
flatness that was once
a curved screen,

pleated fabric
on the walls and the movie so unmagical

not the moving image
not the immanent translation

not the hem who touched the hem

*

so noon is when the spoken
and the written touch

in chants, in shouts—

and the ease in your voices
and the glottal struggle in your voices
and the cryptogrammatic slur

all touch—

glyph of the beautiful
Molotov-thrower
throwing a bouquet

glyph of the black flag
held aloft in schools

*

now into walls of fortresses

across the strange black vinyl of the shitting-stalls

on the lenses of the egrets poised above the freeway

with the edge of an Xacto

they carve SUNRISE

a shaft of it in shopping carts
the motes of it around their ears

matter itself now hauled in plastic bags to the Federal Building and mixed there
        with water and a little food dye

by the scrawl on the sidewalk that reads Go Ahead Honey Touch It

*

we’re here to puke in many colors—

elf-puke, witch-puke, giant-puke

disco puke and punk puke

vomit on the apron of the government
vomit on the boots of the police

it’s January 17, 1991
it’s March 20, 2003

It’s morning
Puke and sing

(The dates, obviously, of the beginnings of “our” two illegal and preemptive incursions—wars—against the sovereign state of Iraq.) If the piece begins in medias res and in writing (“felt-tip pen”), that never-casual and unceasing thing, it also begins with a terrible helplessness, the minuscule “spider.” (Recall “new forms of compositional helplessness”—the writer in / against the state is equivalent to “pig-poetic snuffling,” air, and theory.) I like how quickly human and local the cacophony of noises becomes: “helicopters” to “bicycle bells” to “schoolkids”—the beginning of the war’s got all the everyday nonchalance of an ice cream truck toodling by, against which—is it the academical self who’s indict’d?—“nothing you read will help you now.”

In the second section of “Sunrise”: a tiny jagged essay on the varieties of screening (screening off, screening in order to see) by way of television and movie screen shapes and sizes. “Packets” of “matter” (that hardly matters), only its shrinking (and our distance) makes any difference (“we could take it harder,” a lament for the simulacral ease that allows such farce). “Peddle”: the sale of the war, its image made palatable to the public by (or through?) “immanent translation”—that stupid inward glow of the nightly news, its acceptable drone, no hem (of stage curtain, of actress’s skirt): we’ve not even the chamber’d proximity of “live” theatre.

Three. Is “noon” akin to “high noon,” that old Western confrontational convention? If Nealon’s writing (partly) about the efficacy of the written word versus what, mobilization of bodies? the protesting crowds of the manif? speech? is it here that some rejection of writing occurs? Why “your voices”—that distance? Still: the physical world—the “cryptogrammatic slur // all touch—” fails, too, and becomes mere “glyph” (and glyphs out of a rather Hollywoodish, popular imaginary, “Molotov” and “black flag” cartoonishly dispelling even the “ease”-reality of any crowd).

Four. Another parable of writing. Sunrise itself turn’d to writing of a particularly vivid and rather gruesome kind. That “Xacto” recalling, one supposes, the “box cutters” of the “shahid” (martyr, witness; plural, apparently, šuhadā) of September 11. Writing become a kind of vandalism (“shitting-stalls”), not even the natural world (“egrets”) exempt, the “all touch—” tiny dream of communitas reduced to a slovenly plea: “Go Ahead Honey Touch It,” whilst something slightly ominous and “Federal” is done to the war “matter” (plastic bags evoking body bags?)

The paroxysms of puke in the final section occur, then, against a backdrop of the uselessly writ, the ineffectual—(I want to say the consciousness itself colonized by image-production, glyph’d-out). Against such helplessness, writing reduced to crude “carvings,” thwart’d and contain’d: illness and refusal, and the bodily joy of rebellion. Puke-music. Is it a form of infantilism? Probably. I did find some remarks that Nealon made about “Sunrise,” apparently for a class of Brenda Hillman’s. He refers to it as “that embarrassing thing, a political poem,” and continues:

—or, worse, a “topical” poem, involved in the recent war; in particular, it’s a poem trying to understand what kinds of writing and speech war generates, or captures. Basically I found myself, in March, thrown unexpectedly, in my political anger, into a kind of glyphic mode of seeing and reading: back in March, things—like events, and actors, as well as material objects—for a while things seemed both legible and conceptual to me, on the one hand, and like blunt, brute stuff, on the other. And somehow this seemed like the effect of the political situation.
        So I thought I’d test out, from the vantage of witnessing mostly, what it meant to live through a moment glyphically, to stumble between the articulate and the inarticulate facets of outrage and hope. One way of thinking about how the “form” of the poem tries to do this, then, is to think of the five sections as offering different approaches or occasions for this glyphic outlook. First, as a kind of epiphany; second, in a humbling recognition that the distribution of images or narrative (I’m at the movies in this stanza I guess) is off-kilter; third, in the realization that sometimes the way to grasp both aspects of the glyph is in a “moment”: in a chance: when things congeal: as when people’s togetherness, all at once, works. The fourth section presses on that a bit, to imagine the activity of politics-as-“writing” as distributed across space, not just trapped in that one flash-place where a political demonstration is taking place; and the last section, with the “we,” imagines grappling with political meaning as a comic mismatch between the articulate and the inarticulate, in vomit, that un-formal thing.

One final piece, sans commentaire, because I admire it, its variable antics and celebratory / consolatory swagger / limp:

Caressed

The body is amazing

You could just decide, I want really strong ankles

Various plastic and rubber devices can be used to train it

A movement of the limbs can say, this is how much space there is in business for
        charisma

        Leather Nikes in the 90’s, signifying triumph over technical obstacles

“It also has that wet look”

Depending on your nationality, your body can be “packed in ice and wrapped
        in cellophane”

I may or may not be able to find it

        Packed dance floors in slow motion / everybody on their cell

The body “has been announced so many times that it cannot occur”

        But it comes to life in carnival situations
        It is capable of feelings incommensurate with personhood

From the pagan version it has gone from being sculpture to being vector, but for what

        Dashed hopes in the little Parthenon
        Karaoke glory and “a touch of the gai savoir”

When the body goes limp so limps the world

        Soft as the slug’s antenna

Though my hair turn white I will not harden against it

Chris Nealon’s Plummet
(Cover by Liliane Lijn, “Waveguide: a counterpoint in 15 parts,” 1977-78)
(Design’d by Justin Sirois)

Chris Nealon’s Plummet (I)

Bounty Offer’d

Disconcerting—and possibly “wrong,” though I only detail a trajectory—to open Chris Nealon’s Plummet (Edge, 2009) and see its epigraph (“—yet leave the tower”) and be swell’d momentarily along some populist gamut by lines (in the first piece, “Jackhammer Namaskar”) like: “I want to send a message to the multitude / I want to spread beatitude but the animals are afraid of me.” One readjusts for “tone” and (eventually) figures out that Nealon’s “plummet” is less a rejecting of the long-chided ivory tower with its fickle scholiasts, than it is Hart Crane’s “plummet heart” out of “Recitative” (with all the declamatory ambivalence toward the ordinary that poet employ’d, and that title recalls). Crane:

                                                            Then watch
While darkness, like an ape's face, falls away,
And gradually white buildings answer day.

Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us—
Alike suspend us from atrocious sums
Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant
The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.

The highest tower,—let her ribs palisade
Wrenched gold of Nineveh;—yet leave the tower.
The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;
A wind abides the ensign of your will . . .

In alternating bells have you not heard
All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
Forgive me for an echo of these things,
And let us walk through time with equal pride.

I want to read it—Plummet in general—as a struggle to talk sensibly about “the age” to “the masses”—or somebody “like” them, I use the word, a terribly weight’d one, unadvisedly, though Nealon himself is prone to touches of revolutionary chic: “glyph of the beautiful / Molotov-thrower / throwing a bouquet // glyph of the black flag”—(for it is inform’d through and through by recent and abominable U. S. history and it keeps nodding in the direction of the radical impossibility of doing so—that is, talking sensibly—without a complexity of register-shifts, both self and “project”-deprecating.) That is to say: Plummet is smart and smart-alecky and fun: it is, too, beleaguer’d precisely by the “nameless gulf” of “no way to say it.” See it in the opening lines of “As If to Say”:

So I’m digging these new forms of compositional helplessness

“I bring to this project an immense wind”

I try to write descriptively,

But it all comes out a calligram: check-mark inanition: flicked wrist of creation

        the gaming movement of vowel sounds
        chorus and apostrophe

Only your prettiness is keeping you free

The trouble with such clever knowingness is that it threatens to become mere snottiness (later, the comedy-club Stevensesquerie “I seriously have a mind of winter” is follow’d by “I don’t know         it was spring”). It is poetry of the sleight-of-hand man, “pretty,” charged with audacity, and, for all its pump’d brave admittings of “inanition,” rather inane, and so (heartbreakingly, for one dreams of a poetry efficacious enough to make change) “free.”

“As If to Say” is not the only example. The preceding piece, “Headless,” reads, in part:

—I read your poem as a record of thirst, yes,
but also as a glass of water carried wobbling on a tray the length of the party

I experience your poem as learning to make do with its placement in a super-
      organized and mercilessly chaotic arrangement of contracts

I think your poem is hot

. . .

All the jottings in my notebook bore me

But there’s something touching in your little letterpress of capitals and stars
There’s an un-appalling touch of universal truth in watching how you almost
      come unbound

So I read your poem as a fumbling virtuoso throwing up of hands

There is no flag for its emotion but it has songs

That natural sass and fluidity of line recalls O’Hara (Nealon: “You pray: // I want / To be O’Hara / Lord, but it’s / Duncan where / We’re headed”—though one encounters none of Duncan’s pinch’d-to-fit esoterica here, or tendency to bombast). If the poetry loudly doubts its own efficacy, it does so with a wink and a nudge, wisecracking and promiscuous (I want to make a claim that it “falls” to something akin to “keeping the coterie amused”). (Not a quarrel with coterie-poetics, a quarrel with the dispatch of, say, the Iraq war to coterie-inflect’d ironies. See something like “Period Piece,” with lines like “the letter is the form in which the literary can still smile” or “I tried to write you sonnets but they sounded courtly” or “For your sake now I ignore the war, though I hope you will teach me the Latin for torture,” and ending—too knowingly caustic—with “Continue to love me. Send us your army.”) Fiddling whilst Rome burns? At its worst, it partakes of the empty-hand’d gaming of the clown-troupe FlarfCo® product. In poems like “Events and Happenings” (“The system was breaking down and we were lost in the maelstrom / The system was breaking down (which the mathematical theory says must happen) // They still weren’t acknowledging the system was breaking down, not to mention screwing people over and having them banned for life on LIVE, look it up!”), and “A Piece of It” (“The closing passages include Jake’s crisis of pure despair / Nine inches of pure despair // Wrenched into pure despair by a cowering husband, by a duplicitous, vile God, and not being able to afford £30+ for the so-called miracle moisturizers”), and “‘Most Gracious Channel’” (running similar basic data-mining moves on the phrase “this song” and pruning the imprudent—or impugning the impudent, or seeding the insedulous—out of what results), the borrow’d form itself mires down each piece. How quickly the Google-sculpt’d poem’s become an empty form, a shrug unreadable beyond itself, not unlike how WCW noted of the sonnet (though only after some several centuries) that every sonnet says “I am a sonnet”—every Google-sculpt says Google-sculpt. (Williams also noted how “Forcing twentieth century American into a sonnet” is “like putting a crab into a square box,” cutting off the legs to make it fit—a kind of fit image of the parsimonious low slapstick shtick that is FlarfCo®.)

“Janus-faced.” It’s in “Recitative” (“Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced, /
As double as the hands that twist this glass.”) And, too, I am thinking of O’Hara’s lines (out of the 1950 “L’Amour Avait Passé Par Là”):

a candle held to the window has two flames
and perhaps a horde of followers in the rain of youth
as under the arch you find a heart of lipstick or a condom
left by the parade
of a generalized intuition
it is the great period of Italian art when everyone imitates Picasso
afraid to mean anything
as the second flame in its happy reflecting ignores the candle and the wind

Unsuccessfully ignoring the brazen voice of Elton John calling out of that final line and mucking up the O’Hara, I am trying to say that tomorrow a different savage parade’ll go by. And it’s banner’ll likely read: “What I Like about Chris Nealon’s Plummet.”

Chris Nealon

A YEAR

CXXXIX
Diaphanous the light
propellant against cranny
and cave. It

dispels drear, rousts
it out like
speech: ‘Who heareth,

seeth not form /
But is led
by its emanation.’

Pound. A shapeliness
sprung of wavelets
slapping a tympanum,

forg’d in that
sanctum wherein pound
hammer and anvil.

Form is musical
or it is
nothing, a sidelong

look, changeable, shredding,
like a loop
of yarn nail’d

up and undoing
itself somewhere within
a distant nook.

A Mechanical Grunt (Sur la beauté)

Gaping, Yellow

A YEAR

CXXXVIII
Ephemeral, like the caddis-
fly that emerges up
out of its debris-
cover’d sac. Attach’d with
spittle to some down-
river side of rock,
its larval cairn marks
the imago’s hatch, synchronous
and en masse, design’d
for maximum sexual provender.
Oh the social ditties
of the formicary, apiary,
honeycomb, dewy and meagre—
it adds up nothing,
one isn’t the color
of the wood louse
roll’d up the size
of birdshot, one isn’t
the shrike-hung mouse
in the hawthorn tree.
Down in the dead
oak leaves, matted, under-
runnel’d with millipede holes,
the mayapples upthrust, provide
a sudden interrogatory green.
What is the point
of the ongoing cycle,
the abiding render’d stoic
by loss, the prissy
pure convert’d to God-
teeming morbid excess by
loss? The shaky crapulent
hand in the margin
is appraisal and testament.

—

The stretch’d out weekend, reading Larry Heinemann’s 1977 Close Quarters in between bouts with the Goncourt’s Journals. (I like my juxtaposings fatuous.) And dabbled in Daniel Kane’s new thing, We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2009), with chapters on Kenneth Anger / Robert Duncan, Stan Brakhage / Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara / Alfred Leslie, and John Ashbery / Rudy Burckhardt, amongst others. Out of it is Stan Brakhage replying to the question “What’s your response to the postmodern aesthetic that seeks to break down the boundary between art and pop culture—in essence, that anything can be art?”

Hogwash.

With the addendum:

Created by a lot of lazy people who want to have their childhood kicks and have it sanctified as it was something tremendously serious. It’s not church-worthy. And they have infiltrated the colleges to an enormous extent where they’re even more pernicious because they know perfectly well that how to become a popular professor is to give all their student the sense that they can have all their easy movies, where they can escape and bug out, while at the same time having a profound art experience. The students lap it up, and both them of serve each other, sitting in lazy land. You know art is a hard pleasure, and that’s the beautiful thing about it. The appreciators are as hard-working as the maker to comprehend and unravel the enigmas and the complexities of a poetic cinema.

(Ah, all that whoop’d up Poundian struggle, the drawstring of the Beardsley line to Yeats that is work’d into the hem of the Cantos, “So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.” Pound:

Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur étrange,
                  said Monsieur Whoosis, de la beauté

La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
          when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
          or at least not Burne-Jones
          and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
          make his hit quickly

The Beardsley who perish’d of tuberculosis at age twenty-five, who aver’d: “I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.”) That’s one thing I think, and parry Brakhage’s thrust to make of any art a religion. (Kane himself initially counters the Brakhage with lines out of O’Hara’s “mock manifesto ‘Personism’”—“Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies,” seemingly putting O’Hara in the “popular culture” camp—a move that may not adequately read the ferocity of O’Hara’s contempt for the assumption of any need to make the distinction.

The other thing I think: how Brakhage’s lines might well apply to the Flarf / Conceptualist drill squad (whose only discipline, “sitting in lazy land,” is point’d toward the maintenance of tight ranks). Surely the “kicks” available there, if not exactly matching those of one’s childhood, mimic precisely—fatuous juxtaposings front and center again—those of the childhood of the “art.” What if one were to bring the Goncourts into play?—“There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable. Beauty is what my mistress and my housekeeper instinctively regard as appalling.” Is that a difficult beauty, or a class’d beauty? One is, I suppose, caught between rejecting the taint of religiosity, puritanical, the gnash’d teeth art-struggle, and rejecting the hoydens of gaping boorish “humor” at all cost (with its meretricious claims to profundity or “the age.”) Where turn? Nowhere. Vietnam novels. Who cares about beauty anyway? Edmund Burke says “Beauty is . . . some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses.” Ah, these robotical clods . . . Why are you reading this anyhow?

Strips out of Stan Brakhage’s 1963 Film, “Mothlight”

Stan Brakhage, 1933-2003

The Goncourt Journals

The Tolls

A YEAR

CXXXIV
According to the Goncourts,
to whom he shout’d
it whole one day
‘in a stentorian voice,’
Flaubert’s early novel, Fragments
of Unremarkable Style, concern’d
the autochthonous melancholy of
youth unassuaged, even by
an ‘ideal whore.’ Later,
after a plausibly indifferent
meal, one unremark’d in
the Journal, the hermit
of Croisset pull’d out
“oriental trappings,” hoist’d a
red Turkish tarboosh, look’d
with morosity and tenderness
at leather breeches worn
in Egypt: ‘a snake
contemplating skin it’d shed.’
What any writing is.
If the soul of
any other is so
monstrously dark, what hilarity
we muster is a
dodge. So we gird
up repute with stupefying
feints and rent residuals,
sluice convulsedly through howler
unabash’d and wisdom infecund
alike, dropping a word
here, hoisting one up
for assay or proof
there. And out walking,
dog at heel unbid,
recall the imponderabilia of
‘this worldes transmutacioun,’ how
that other, too—the
one jotting cuff-notes
mid-ruckus—’d ‘seyn it
chaungen up and doun.’

—

Books invariably pointing to books, ganglionary knots of convergence and divergence: that’s how I end up prancing like a Firbank through the Journals of the brothers Goncourt, Edmond and Jules (in the 1962 Robert Baldick translation and selection, recently reissued, call’d Pages from the Goncourt Journals). Edmond, who lived long after Jules succumb’d to syphilis, prefaces one volume (in 1872) by claiming it “the confession of two twin spirits, two minds receiving from the contact of men and things impressions so alike, so identical, so homogeneous, that the confession may be considered as the effusion of a single ego, of a single I.” Which I find terribly refreshing after all the late twentieth century hoopla and avalanche of the shifting, discursive, unstable, “positioning” self, the common cant of it. “I am half an I.”

The fun, though, is in the snips of table-talk, the literary sightings. Here’s Baudelaire à table in October 1857 (a couple of months after being fined 300 francs for offending public morals with Les Fleurs du Mal, and having six poems therein suppress’d) at the Café Riche (which “seems to be on the way to becoming the headquarters of those men of letters who wear gloves,” where “none of the guttersnipes of literature would venture”—rather like, say, oh, the Kelly Writers House today—one learns how one “Murger . . . is rejecting Bohemia and passing over bag and baggage to the side of the gentlemen of letters . . .”):

Baudelaire had supper at the next table to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds. He denies, with some obstinacy and a certain harsh anger, that he has offended morality with his verse.

(The Journals rather casually note how, at a dinner “with Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, and Alphonse Daudet” at the same café in 1874, “We began with a long discussion on the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhoea,” which, it occurs, may possibly prove a distinction at least as useful as Ron Silliman’s two scat-heaps of “post-avant” and “quietist.”) (Too, one notes Turgenev’s remark about the limits of the French language: “an instrument from which its inventors expected only clarity, logic, crude and approximate definition, whereas today it so happens that this instrument is being handled by the most highly strung and sensitive of writers, and the least likely to be satisfied with approximations.” Ah, for the days of concerns about precision and intent, about the “reach” of one’s, gulp, lingual tool, something more than the squabbled-up offal of mere “attitude” . . .)

Talk with Flaubert and the literary critic Sainte-Beuve about copyright, Sainte-Beuve reacting to someone’s call for “perpetuity of rights”:

Sainte-Beuve protested violently: ‘You are paid by the smoke and noise you stir up. You ought to say, every writer ought to say: “Take it all: you’re welcome to it!”’ Flaubert, going to the opposite extreme, exclaimed: ‘If I had invented the railways I shouldn’t want anybody to travel on them without my permission!’ Thoroughly roused, Sainte-Beuve retorted: ‘No more literary property than any other property. There should be no property at all. Everything should be regularly renewed, so that everybody can take his turn.’

And the Goncourts (aristos non placables) subsequently see in Sainte-Beuve “the fanatical revolutionary bachelor”: “he seemed at the moment to have the character and almost the appearance of one of the levellers of the Convention. I saw the basic destructive urge in that man who, rubbing shoulders with society, money, and power, had conceived a secret hatred for them, a bitter jealousy which extended to everything . . .” Usual tiresome ploy of the “made” to upstart sneerers, wholly disbelieving that one might not aspire to “making.”

—

Off to remake myself into a half-man (half-biscuit). À Lundi.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
(Photograph by Félix Nadar)

The Gape of Class

Red, Gaping

A YEAR

CXXXIII
Nodding yeses anent the particulars
collars a few victuals, collard
greens in a vinegary heap,
a blimp’d-up snout-color’d
sausage, makes a low cant
meal of wordy attrition unmouthable.
Say it with flowers, is
what René Daumal suggest’d, imbibing
ether in the form of
carbon tetrachloride, the lepidopterist’s killing
solution, attempting to see beyond.
Isn’t that what the lingo
itself’s for? A brash cantilevering
out into the nay-saying
void unending of a hungry
new world without torpor or
mimic? So that if one
makes a bold consumptive termagant
to snatch a periwig off
a gent, there’s no particular
anent to yes to, no?
In ornery-proper reverie I
reproach my parasitic lollard life
of making things up where
there’s none: all tenets of
use and necessity fiasco’d like
a shatter’d flask, the writer’s
parity with the usurer. Bacon:
“Places where men urine commonly,
have some smell of violets.”

—

Two things. (One is so “took” by one’s own fiasco that one is inseparably stuck to it, or admiringly, and, hence, unprepared.) Lazing through Lyn Hejinian’s remarks to Manuel Brito (in The Language of Inquiry), how Proust’s “astonishing style is a representation of the tension between momentum and lingering that a mind, wanting to be conscious it’s alive, experiences.” A lovely pairing, though putting the brainbox on high alert like that results, too, in circular inanities (dumb ditties about a bear and a mountain, say, or spastic grass, alas jingoes), no? And if one attempts to ambuscade the mind’s unsightly doings by suddenly “turning” one’s “attention” to it: one finds nothing, only the undertow and wake of the turning itself, a bit of ruffled foolishness and wide-eyed “hey, where’d everybody go?” If “we” invent’d sentences to resemble the mind’s minding activity: they are nothing like it, and likely cannot be. I’d forgotten, though, how Hejinian points to a phrase of Proust as source of “the opening pre-text of My Life (“A pause, a rose, something on paper”). Some “description of an approach to Combray, which the narrator sees emerging from the distance, bit by bit suffused with what he knows: the plain, the spire, a radiance anticipating the color of the streets.” (Interject and obsess in impatience. Looking for a badly-recall’d aphoristical utterance of Nietzsche that any mental picture of “plain with spire” instills. I finally locate two, that I persist in collocating:

In parting.—Not how one soul comes close to another but how it moves away shows me their kinship and how much they belong together.

When taking leave is needed.—From what you would know and measure, you must take leave, at least for a time. Only after having left town, you see how high its towers rise above the houses.

End of interject.) What Hejinian says: “Proust’s style of accretion, of accumulation, meditation, and release (release into consciousness and as such into the book) was and is inspiring to me.” And one senses a nearly mechanical pleasure (“machine made of words”) in assembling and fitting, the mind hovering nearby in half-abeyance, half-torpor, ready to alight. And (because Hejinian is stretching out, doing the very manœuvres she is so percipiently discussing)—she appends:

By the way, Proust’s early literary work (maybe even his first) was a translation of John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, and it was under the influence of Ruskin’s prose style that Proust developed his own. Ruskin’s prose is the result and complex reflection of an obsession with particulars and the ramifications of particulars. This was not solely a Victorian interest in things but an epistemological one, and from it he developed his radical (and some would say eccentric) social politics, one that coincide at many points with Marx’s. The prose style that we find in Ruskin and subsequently in Proust is sometimes taken as a sign of privilege; this is a serious misunderstanding.

(A terrific density to Hejinian’s thinking here, likely to spin me off-course—as if I hold to a course. Turning to Stein, she notes how Stein’s “phenomenology,” a “rejection of memory as a medium for perception,” vitally contradicts Proust’s working through what he calls “the vast structure of recollection”) But that “sign of privilege”—so readily (and unconvincingly) dismiss’d by Hejinian, that rather stalls one. After all, Stein, Ruskin, Proust, (would one add Hejinian?)—hardly hoi polloi. How not identify the writing with the privilege? In Thomas Stearns Eliot, the little 1931 study Beckett’s pal Thomas McGreevy wrote, he points (wonderfully) to Eliot’s general sourness as result of the burdensome excesses of “gentility”:

One need not be a vulgarian to find something to write gratefully about. Dante did, and Shakespeare and Ronsard and Keats. Mr. Eliot scarcely ever does.
      It would be wrong, however, to accuse him of living wilfully in sadness. He is not like Cocteau, who after writing Thomas l’Imposteur, the prettiest trifle that the Great War produced, turns out drawings that are merely indifferent echoes of the authentic macabre that that very great artist Pablo Picasso is sometimes driven by his genius to produce. . . . In the same way Mr. Joyce who, in Ulysses, showed himself as a master of the macabre can be gay on ‘a happy-go-gusty ides of April morning,’ and with an Anna Livia Plurabelle who is like a nymph on a sunlit mountain, and in a thousand other lovelinesses. If we have got to live through a woeful world, at least we ought to be grateful for the odd shelters from the woefulness that we come upon, and be willing to hang up our crutches for the time being. Mr. Eliot’s gaiety so far has been rather perverse, a scoring off of life. But I think we may put it down to the over-long youthfulness that is imposed on educated Americans by New England gentility.

Even whilst being a congenital sourpuss, I find that rather refreshing, and instructive. “Say it with flowers,” indeed.

Thomas MacGreevy, 1893-1967

Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium

Hyacinthine

Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium (Graywolf, 2008) ends with a quote out of Sir Thomas Browne: “Thus there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us though indeed it hath no history what it was before us and cannot tell how it entered into us.” A terrific curtailing of the usual human vanity. And though Yang’s epigraph opening the book (by Paul Valéry) may deliver the customary news of writerly world-making, it, too, succumbs to the ferocity and somnolence of a seemingly oceanic aquarium, its all-consuming theater a poor stage for man’s inventions. Valéry:

My pen was creating myths; they flowed from my expectant self, while my mind, hardly seeing what my hand was inventing right before it, wandered like a sleepwalker among the dark imaginary walls and submarine theaters of the aquarium.

Between Valéry and Browne, a bestiary of the sea, alphabetical (“Abalone” to “Google” to “Rexroth” to “Zooxanthellae”) and wayward, comic and modest. What I find enthralling: Yang’s restraint (a form of caring, of respect), the near absence of the usual clamoring self, I-identify’d or not. (In “White Whale” one reads “Round and round we wheel / . . . / till self’s freed from ego.”) In its place: taut arrays of (predominantly) fact (“Nature describes its own design.”) intertwined with myth and (mostly point’d) human history, “a felicity of association.” Sense of no padding, the lovely leanness of the notational. Here’s two somewhat randomly select’d:

Aristotle

Aristotle thought eels
“the entrails of the earth.”
If “eels” were replaced with
“politicians” this image
would be a guide-
way to a sign. Instead,
it’s an instance of
converting Metaphors
into Proprieties. And so Browne
doubted Aristotle’s leap
into Euripus.
For not understanding tide’s
motion, Aristotle recognized
the “imbecility” of reason.

Euripus: the straits between mainland Greece and Euboea, with tremendously strong tidal currents that reverse directions a half dozen times a day. One story’s got it that Aristotle drown’d there, attempting to ascertain the reason for the push and pull of the currents. And:

Barnacle

The barnacle settles forever
upside down in its small volcano.
On rock, whale, ship, log—it is
happy anywhere there’s current.
The barnacle has the longest penis
of any animal in proportion
to its body size. Happiness
and proportion:
never be ashamed of evolution.

Deftly observed, funny, just. With a marvelous shrug of assent at the world’s providings. What I like is Yang’s willingness to work so unaffectedly a vein of poetry as knowledge (including “book-learning”): I think only of Eliot Weinberger (who blurbs the book, hurrahing its “musical icthyographics” among other things) who is doing anything similar. In “Foraminifera,” Yang, after nodding at Oppen’s “sincerity, clarity, respect” and Zukofsky’s test of poetry in “the range of pleasure / it affords as sight, sound, and intellection,” concludes:

In a dream
Vishnu visited Appakavi
who received the secret of
Nannaya’s grammar: Poetry
is the ultimate learning.

Like Weinberger, too, Yang is a fierce cultural internationalist in the tradition of Rexroth and Pound (a guideway nigh-completely abandon’d by the presumed inheritors of the lineage, the mostly myopic and homegrown Language writers), capable of drawing on Chinese, Arabic, Mexican, Hawai’ian (see the poem about “Hawaii’s native triggerfish,” the humuhumunukunukuapua’a), Indian, and Old Norse, beyond the usual European and “Classical” sources. Too, Yang’s able to move adroitly between a rather chisel’d discursive mode and one of the condensary. See how “Oarfish” proceeds by sound and citation:

Oar Old Norse Ar
fisc Midgard Jörmungandr
ourobouros oarfish Elihu
Vedder’s sleeping serpent
a sleep of the heavens suggestive of thunder.
God’s mystery at once center
and circumference
Sor Juana induces Todas las cosas
salen de Dios. . . . But the oarfish?
One rare sighting
in the Sargasso Sea (weed
tar clumps, Euripized
plastic): “flat as a knife blade
snakelike head capped
by a rooster’s coxcomb.”
Echoes Lawrence at the Anapo:
look, look at him!
With his head up, steering like a bird!
He’s a rare one, but he belongs. . . .
Oor Oort Cloud sphere
oarismos amor gentle sweetness
pillow whisperings: omnia
uincet Amor: et nos cedamus Amori
other shore oared, angled
spar, silver
skin coruscates
rhombic crystals of guanine.

Which, in it’s temporary alignments (the hypothetical Oort cloud’s sphere of billions of comets up against that ubiquitous Augustinianism regarding God, among other things) renders a whole world of marvels and mysteries. Yang’s impulse, too, is ecological: things worth tending, and attending to. In the longest (and final) piece, “Zooanthellae,” he writes in numbing detail of the early U.S. atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, including the bomb Bravo, “detonated on the ground . . . ‘for minimal fallout,’” whose “nuclear cloud reached a peak of 21.6 miles tall” with a “yield” “‘estimated to be near 20 megatons, or the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs.’” Against which is put the official cynicism, the disrupt’d lives of the people: “They left the people with 4 words: ‘Don’t drink the water.’” And, the discovery of the coral algae “zooxanthellae”: “a dinoflagellate that lives symbiotically with the coral, supplying it with oxygen and nutrients thru photosynthesis while transforming calcium ions from the ocean into calcium carbonate the coral uses to grow.” Mutualism (elsewhere “Kropotkin’s mutual trust and support” is mention’d), the ordinary and the rare, and that nearly completely missing element in contemporary poésie wisdom imbue the pieces in An Aquarium. Yang’s constructing workable models out of disparate parts, making for a way out of dystopic tomfoolery. As he writes in “Google”: “Information / is originally nothing but difference.” And: “knowledge purifies.”

Jeffrey Yang
(Photograph by Nina Subin)

A YEAR

CXXXII
Oh the doghole boys huff opinionatedly, sole carriers of wit in the dis-
Eased cyber districts. They pin badges one to another, and shriek. Down
By the mill pond I am reading Swift’s Directions to the Cook. If
The bicyclist with the fez divvies up the macaronicks rightly, I intend
To conduce a ditty hither. Arschloch. Putain. Baldricker. The kind of
Dunce-holy things slung common out, talking it up, gripping the bat a little
Tighter. A straw man perch’d up against a lectern, or a dugout. If only I could
Write it down without the humid buffings up, sec et net. The police take care
Of that, pulling down the contaminating scrim of language, formal, in squads. One
Day reading a newspaper aloud out by the gazebo, my pockets stuff’d
With prog’d vittles, hams and oranges, I look’d like a Flaubert ours,
Bounty-tinged and shouting at the barren tenacity of rude sentence-ry, its
Tendency to insert itself into rhythmic tediums, it sentimental predilects, its
Cozy illimitable drive. The grizzled snout fit to fit the Kodiak kodachromatick’d
That day in April up in Alaska, though I doubt that meaning ought be so
Mean.

In the Offing

Crabapples

A YEAR

CXXXI
Up in the range
of throaty nuance is
found the wreck of
who we used to
be. That’s what every
song says now. Salvation’s
cue-ball didn’t never
drop in no pocket
without no help. Scratch
that. The chimney swifts
chitter and sail, stiff-
wingedly chopping the air
with the stumpy heroics
of sheer compensatory aerodynamics,
constant correct and exert.
Drop into a red-
brick’d towering roost hole
like a rag. It’s
so primitive to say,
throw my body down
there where the earth-
worm chews the loam.
Isn’t it pure sack’d
out complacency that spurs
the inconstant rotor, spooks
the song, notorious and
big, up and out?
I fly, I fly.

—

Hiatus: “A break in the continuity of a material object; a gaping chasm; an opening or aperture; hiation.” Thomas Browne: “The continuall hiation, or holding open its mouth [on the part of the chameleon], which men observing conceive the intention thereof to receive the aliment of air.” Which is the problem of the hiatus: who’s able to receive only “the aliment of air”? I am perceiving, of late, a tendency to swivel on the miasma stool, mildew’d, fingering the gunk in the air, slow slobbery and drooling, the “edge” gone. So I daily consider it, emptying myself into the mould of a “break.” Woodshedding, that lovely term. Off to practice by oneself. And fossicking through the tangibles, I find:

From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a compline service, a program tonight of plainsong in English, forays now and then into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macaronic from the fifteenth century, attributed to Heinrich Suso:

In dulci jubilo
Nun singet und seid froh!
Unsers Herzens Wonne
Leit in praesipio,
Leuchtet vor die Sonne
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es et O.

With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought by years of woodshedding up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette, who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man’s presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s doing. . . .

Pynchon, of course. Out of Gravity’s Rainbow. “The dreamless version of the real”—isn’t it precisely in attempt to combat that, and the way it smudges out everything that one writes? Now sing and be happy!

Thomas Pynchon, c. 1955

The Age of Beeps

Sign

A YEAR

CXXVIII
If the push
                  of modernity with
its constant buck-

up of newly
                  deliver’d things, its
machinery and mayhem,

its gaud surge-
                  and-splurge turbulence,
all of it

seemingly guaranteed by
                  the buttery sun-
realms of intractable

earnest and querulous
                  precedent, up to
unforeseeable heights chugging—

and thenceforth unpitiably
                  (with Godly intent)
dash’d to earth

in a feverish
                  mania of unmaking,
in track’d plunge

obsolescing into vestige
                  like a rollercoaster
or a coupon:

if everything remain’d
                  unprogress’d, all goods
unexchanged, commodity replacement

schemes fail’d completely,
                  brand clearance adjustments
unrecompensed, chits chuck’d,

debts dump’d, stocks
                  stint’d and stow’d,
its—the age’s—

recompense’d rot irredeemably
                  and legibility itself’d
offer a look

undevised, a fissure
                  in the catastrophe,
like a book.

—

Baudelaire addressing the poetical / critical gulf, its bridging (out of “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris”):

To find a critic turning into a poet would be an entirely new event in the history of the arts, a reversal of all the psychical laws, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets naturally and fatally become critics. I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Thinking aloud: is becoming a critic (out of the uncontainable ebullience of the done-deed teleology that is the poetical lot) a leg up and proceeding along the path to becoming a “man of the world”? For Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” ’d seem to dismiss the mere “artist” (interchangeably, “poet”?) calling him “a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil.” In Baudelaire’s nimble invect: “it must be admitted that the majority of artists are no more than highly skilled animals, pure artisans, village intellects, cottage brains. Their conversation, which is necessarily limited to the narrowest of circles, becomes very quickly unbearable to the man of the world, to the spiritual citizen of the universe.” (Is “village intellects” unsuspecting “source” for Stein’s smackdown of Pound as “village explainer”? I doubt it.) (Is Baudelaire’s thesis the reason why we poets clump up so—like curds—in narrow, impenetrable and sheltering “scenes” that resemble gated communities? Could be.) How Baudelaire’s “man of the world” differs: “the mainspring of his genius is curiosity.”

Baudelaire’s exemplary “man” is Constantin Guys, draughtsman for the Illustrated London News. Guys (out of the Journals of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt):

A little man with an animated face, a grey moustache, looking like an old soldier; hobbling along, constantly hitching up his sleeves on his bony arms with a sharp slap of the hand, diffuse, exuberant with parentheses, zigzagging from idea to idea, going off at tangents and getting lost, but retrieving himself and regaining your attention with a metaphor from the gutter, a word from the vocabulary of the German philosophers, a technical term from art or industry, and always holding you under the thrall of his highly-coloured, almost visible utterance.

Or, Guys painting (in Baudelaire’s words): “So now, at a time when others are asleep, Monsieur G. is bending over his table, darting on to a sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago he was directing towards external things, skirmishing with his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing his glass of water up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, in a ferment of violent activity, as though afraid that the image might escape him, cantankerous though alone, elbowing himself on.” (Think of Philip Guston saying: “Frank [O’Hara] was in his most non-stop way of talking, saying that the pictures put him in mind of Tiepolo. Certain cupola frescoes. Suddenly I was working in an ancient building, a warehouse facing the Giudecca. The loft over the firehouse was transformed. It was filled with light reflected from the canal.”) (Think of O’Hara’s “Cavallon Paints a Picture,” with its radical rejection of any locus classicus ideal or overweening “truth,” its hymn to the most ephemeral of temporaries, whatever’s “of use”: “Insofar as we are thinking of painting, its interpretation depends on use. . . . Techniques of painting have been explored so thoroughly in recent years that their usages now seem to have evolved almost symbolic weights and meanings, not as absolutes, but as stances.”)

The challenge of Baudelaire is to pull beauty out of modernity’s mayhem (a stance that rejects wild blind lazy appropriating of “the inappropriate” equally with any finicky pre-modern snubbing of the age):

. . . for it is much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element may be. By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. . . . This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss
of an abstract and indeterminate beauty . . .

Impromptu assignment: where put the following lines out of Chelsey Minnis’s Poemland (Wave Books, 2009)?

This is a slow dance wherein you look at each other hatefully . . .

And it needs to be all-glistening . . .

Like a gravy boat full of pain-killers . . .


It is a very humanly amoral poem . . .

But this is the soft version of the thing . . .

The “This,” and “this,” and “this” that dominate the lines throughout the book; the candy-ass surreal (“This can be humorous like a crotch sparkle . . .” it says elsewhere); the tone constant of toss-off, a kind of dismissive hauteur-ironique; if one registers the all in terms completely fugitive and contingent, is there anything left to anchor what’s immutable? Nothing beyond the UPC barcodes embedded throughout the book: poem as trade product placement (complete with tracking device for inventory “feed outs”). Scanned, they beep.

Charles Baudelaire, c. 1856
(Photograph by Nadar)

Flâneurie

Tulip

A YEAR

CXXVII
‘In the unseemly work of
the new glamourists, sheen mops

the brow of what is
precisely call’d makeshiftedness, the neologism’s

awkwardness spelling out the barely
prehensile lurches catastrophic (see John

Milton) of the underlying body
itself. These are clumsy girls.’

‘Do I recall the days
of art pre-look, that

is, when a fresh-mill’d
stack of sweet-smelling pine

boards’d make a contraption simple
as a coffin? You bet.’

‘The neutral, the unadorn’d, the
plain, the lagniappe of good measure:

it’s art-scat one puts
down (like a dying dog),

a carcass tether’d and suspend’d
in a Utah lake, simple

wavelets (in little point’d caps)
(carrying slosh-cups) reclaim it

piece by piece (blanch’d, unspooling
gunk) for nature’s never spurious

use.’ ‘(Like a dying Cub
Scout,) art’s capacity is limit’d—

fever-blisters and provincial schisms,
the now tragically invisible moppers-

upper’ll rue the day. Rue?
I meant to say rule.’

—

Read John Yau’s essay about Frank O’Hara’s art criticism, “Passionate Spectator”—the epithet out of Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” wherein he unsettles the term flâneur (literally, stroller, loiterer, drifter, dawdler, saunterer—I think of Thoreau’s marvelous lines of bastard etymological conjecture out of “Walking”—

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre”—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer,” a saunterer—a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea . . .

—one of a tiny wash of connectings). Here’s some of the Baudelaire (somewhat beyond what Yau quotes):

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. . . . Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I,’ at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is
always unstable and fugitive.

Now, Yau’s argument (a good one) is that O’Hara’s “stance” is precisely that of the flâneur, that is, one of no fixity at all (“Instead of approaching art with a theory, whose primary purpose is to aid the critic in establishing a hierarchy of verifiable values, he lived as a flâneur, which means he tried to live in the now as completely as possible. It is not that O’Hara ignored or rejected the past or that he didn’t have values. Rather, he didn’t contextualize the present according to a preestablished framework.” And: “To be a flâneur is to reject a vantage point and any trace of omniscience in favor of being open.”). (Some of “our” most highly visible critic-exhortators, particularly those seemingly wholly “improvident without slots” ought to look to O’Hara for exemplary attendings abiertos, no?) What struck me, though, reading Baudelaire’s script’d “flâneurie”—how it sounds like it descends out of a hotch-potch of St. Augustine bump’d up (or down) by Pascal (“Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.” And: “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” Pensées, 1670.), or by Emerson (“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” “Circles,” 1841.) And, with Baudelaire’s “crowd” as “an immense reservoir of electrical energy,” I think of Whitman’s “body electric” or the lines out of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, the enclosured quahog versus the terribly exposed, vulnerably open:

To be in any form, what is that?
If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Is this then a touch? . . . . quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning, to strike what is hardly different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip . . .

No conclusions. A swoll’d up blister of thinking in the form of interconnectednesses likely mischievous and ill-wrought. A note to range my Appaloosa in alongside the dandy Baudelaire’s black Arabian and see what he’s reading. Yau notes, too, one of Wallace Stevens’s “Adagia”: “To live in the world but outside existing conceptions of it.” To work, attendant.

John Yau
(Photograph by Charles Bernstein)

The Feck of My Days

Blue

A YEAR

CXXVI
Trompe l’oeil of
                        a low proscenium
arch, its pterodactyloid
squat and hunch,

banal artifice of
                        a mark’d threshold
into artifice. A
journalist says some

unintelligible words, how
                        art’s meaning’s now
encumber’d by its
own post-participatory

forms of looking
                        at itself being
look’d at. Ordures
of looking. In

one city I
                        witness’d a man,
aerosol bomb egregious,
strafing the greenery

with 2,4-D. The
                        next morning I
found a long-
tail’d ichneumon fly

contracting wildly, peristaltic
                        in its throes,
deposed and undeposit’d.
Negativity unassuaged, I

intend’d to punch
                        the fuck bloody
for stupidity, for
the sheer bombast

of that tiny
                        tort and perish.
Tel quel vulgarity
of “the natural.”

Of course I
                        relent’d, bent down
to gingerly pitch
the fly up

into a tangle
                        of lilacs. Unspeakable
numbskull. The human
plinth is cruel.

—

Yah. Sort of mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita there, no? I like how Beckett begins the lecture “Le Concentrisme”:

Vous êtes le premier à vous intéresser à cet imbécile. Voici tout ce que j’en sais: j’ai fait sa connaissance ou, plus exactement, il m’a imposé cette incommodité, la veille de sa mort, à Marseille. Il s’est cramponné à moi dans un sombre bistrot où, à cette époque, j’avais l’excellente habitude d’aller me soûler deux fois par semaine. « Vous avez l’air » me dit-il « suffisamment idiot pour m’inspirer une confiance extrême. Enfin » poursuivit-il—(je ne change rien à ses logogriphes)—« enfin et pour la première fois je tombe sur un animal qui, si j’ose en croire mes yeux, est totalement et idéalement dépourvu d’intelligence, plongé dans une divine et parfaite nullité. »

Roughly:

You’re the first to notice the imbecile. Here’s all that I know about him: I got to know him, or more precisely, he imposed that inconvenience on me, the day before his death, in Marseille. He clamp’d himself to me in a dark bar where, at the time, I’d the excellent habit of going twice a week to get drunk. “You’ve got a look,” he told me. “sufficiently idiotic to inspire extreme confidence. At last,” he continued—(I’m not changing one word of the way he riddled)—“At last and for the first time I come across an animal who, if I dare believe my eyes, is completely and perfectly devoid of intelligence, plunged into a divine and perfect nullity.”

“Le Concentrisme” is Beckett’s prank, c. 1929 or 1930, inventing the French poet Jean de Chas, “né . . . un peu avant midi le 13 avril 1906” (Beckett’s own birthdate).

On 13 April 1927, he writes in a notebook: “Here I am come of age, and in spite of myself and in spite of everything,” and later: “These unmotivated miracles aren’t at all to my liking.” The notes of the day end up with a sentence crossed out so violently that the paper’s torn. I succeeded in reconstructing its second half. Here it is: “and one’s mother ought to be beaten while she is young.” The diary abounds in these strange interjections. He stops in the middle of trivial and private details to write, within parentheses and in all caps: “the elephants are contagious.” Another time it’s: “I came, I sat down, I left” or “the priests are always afraid” or “to employ one’s rope by hanging oneself” or “to throw to the demons only the angels.”

Bah. Enough idiotic niggling. Jean de Chas’s premier slogan of disgust, angst, ras-le-bolism: va t’embêter ailleurs. (I’d like to find a way of making “beastly” part of any translation of that.) (In Beckett’s version: “Feck off.”)

“Crap’d Out”

Beckett’s Letters

Some Oranges

A YEAR

CXXV
Ab initio I
thunder it: oh
my ahistorical angels

stark and marble-
white, leaning like
wheat sheaves bound

up and tousled
into a vague
unknotting assembly, muster’d

at the terminus
awaiting the festoons
of some late

arrival. Here they
come with wooden
broadswords and paper

hats, inviolable &
harrying, keen to
sniff the air.

There’s Sammy Rosenstock
peering up out
of a Duesenberg

Phaeton, making a
stab at social
mobility. Like any

abandon’d son, he’s
a talkative shit
and a daredevil.

And there’s Aegiale,
Aegle and Aetheria,
the three sisters

with the amber
tears, tsking it
up, dangling yellow

poplar leaves, shudder
and sob. We
all fall down.

—

Sheer scramble of late, the demands various, the nights short. I did poke a beleaguer’d snoot into The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (hence “talkative shit”—Beckett’s epithet for Jacob Bronowski, who edit’d, a l’époque, along with Samuel Putnam and others The European Caravan—perhaps unsurprisingly then, Bronowski is now likely known for narrating the 1973 TV documentary “The Ascent of Man”). One is tempt’d simply to collect Beckett’s brilliant stingers, “the arrow that flieth by day.” On Proust (whose Du côté de chez Swann he finds “strangely uneven”):

Some of his metaphors light up a whole page like a bright explosion, and others seem ground out in the dullest desperation. He has every kind of subtle equilibrium, charming trembling equilibrium and then suddenly a stasis, the arms of the balance wedged in a perfect horizontal line, more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst, with primos and secundos echoing to each complacently and reechoing. His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore’s but no less profuse, a maudlin false-teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. He drank too much tilleul.

(In the same 1929 letter—to Thomas McGreevy—Beckett notes finishing François Mauriac’s 1925 Le Désert de l'amour, “which I most decidedly do not like”: “A patient tenuous snivel that one longs to see projected noisily into a handkerchief.”)

One wonders at (in the sense of “questions”) the copiousness of the notes—is this the untoward result of the ease of info-bupkes retrieval? If, say, Beckett mentions a night out drinking (“Pelorson collapsed spontaneously on the banquette” and Beckett observing “a terrible silence that will never be forgiven”) and mentions, too, that “the exquisite Thèrive,” present too, “left without paying for his beer,” is it wholly utile to read in agate that “André Thèrive (né Roger Puthoste [other pseuds: Candidus d’Isaurie, Romain Motier, Zadoc Monteil], 1891-1967) was a conservative and influential critic for the French newspaper Le Temps (1861-1942); he wrote on the crisis of the postwar novel, criticizing the tendency toward aestheticism, hermeticism, and snobbery . . .”? I mean, I like a niggling factoid much as any sub-sub-sub librarian, and maybe I’d not hoot so if the book didn’t weigh something equal to a muscleman’s dumbbell, and the Beckett bits didn’t float wide-eyed and wan amidst gobble-gobbles of the stuff. I like to lie completely supinated under a book when I read it, and without requiring an assistant to spot for me, or extricate me in case of mishap.

Samuel Beckett, Lessness VI
A one page manuscript setting forth the sentence order by numbers.
(Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library)

Diffuse Nebula, Unresolv’d

Some Clouds

A YEAR

CXXIV
To plumb the downing reaches
of one’s own cavernous fastnesses,

down where the rock plummets
endlessly after the splash, violent

or sly, of entering, still
plummeting whilst the spray-droplets

mount up towards the sun
to reach a shining aerial

apex, loosely white and radiant,
only to pause, feckless &

scatter’d, half-insouciant to begin
the drenching descent. And though

nobody in the ruckus of
thinking (it’s a little like

the endless felicitous ricochet of
a congress of mirrors) knows

where that thinking is (it’s
rather like a confederacy or

a relay, it’s high pucker’d
astringency sapped and curdling up

into a series of clots
evading and freely sequencing), one

tends to the taut pull
of trajectory, line and bob.

—

And there’s Lisa Robertson in “After Trees” (out of Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip):

What about the data of trees before
Virgil? The day comes out of the earth like
an animal and it goes. A suite of
shadow follows. Some of you don’t have to
like it. Absence is a sauce licked up, a
little peplum of fat and lint flung
off. For today only
I’ll accomplish novelty’s capaciousness

So long
Figtree
Especially.

To juxtapose against what Walter Pater saith (The Renaissance):

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.

Permis de conduire’d forth and back in a general tizzy. Finish’d Michael Herr’s completely audacious and terrific Dispatches. Wrote numbers CXXI, CXXII, and CXXIII. A negligible series of chores. The bite of spring, &c.

—

To read about “Careerist dissembling. Kowtowing. Pollyannaish refusals to make distinctions (somewhat related to the refusal to examine one’s dismissals—both provoked by an inability to do any hard justificatory work). See the rise of the non-category of ‘hybridity.’”—go here. Just a squib in response (along with a number of others) to Kent Johnson’s masterly letter about “practices of reviewing in the poetic field.” All in the premier issue of Mayday.

Edward Halbert, inventor of a flying machine, holding a kite in Chicago, 1908.