The Grand Piano Notes

Out a Window

One amusement: determining the “theme” of the volume. Uncanny utterances répétés. (Armantrout): “Everything was more or less familiar, but the way things are familiar in a dream, a familiarity that is, paradoxically, ‘unheimlich.’” (Hejinian): “This is the heimlich (cozy) moment within and surrounding the unheimlich (frightening, uncanny, alien) moment of the romance—that of the self-contained, self-containing, potentially explosive American nuclear family, a thesis which the 50s tried to withhold from its antithesis.” (Hejinian adds: “The result is a muddle which is never superceded—an absolutely undialectical culture”—seemingly forgetting, for the moment, Charles Bernstein’s command: “Just don’t say it like you mean it.”) Ted Pearson—flogging another “Étude”—grabs the ball and runs with it:

If the alternation of lack and desire paces my approach to the space of writing, it is also recognizably the rhythm of my unheimlich Other: the one who, in the event, writes. From his perspective, the recognition of lack (of what is now accessible to language) arises concurrently with the desire to write as the prerequisite to writing.

Good to see Pearson and that “unheimlich Other” wearing le même jersey though, frankly, one’d appear there to be approaching that “muddle . . . never superceded.”

Pearson begins with preciosity: tableau grand écrivain. “First cigarette. Black coffee. Note on desk: ‘Begin étude.’ Mind replies, ‘And be done with it.’” (Just how precious becomes evident at the end: “Last cigarette. Islay malt.” Writer as one who strikes writerly poses.) A way to broach a vacillation between “anticipation of work to be done” (“work” here a marker for “writing”—bless us our Puritan forbears) and “its completion”—“what will have become the finished text.” The two anticipations, in Pearson’s world, “bracket the nonidentity of writing as process and as text.” Which sounds like the makings of a terribly bland sandwich: one slice desire, one slice relief, and no meat between. That “nonidentity of writing” apes (or is aped by—Pearson’s world’s a jungle of mimickry-deft, chest-pounding signifiers) the self’s own “nonidentity”:

      These polarities produce an alternating current of hope and despair: hope for a writing that will approach the horizon beyond one’s present location—and despair at the prospect of that journey. The resulting tension is the cost exacted by acute awareness of one’s nonidentity, not only with one’s writing self, but also with the world one presumes to engage through writing. That the world and the space of writing are at once familiar—and not—reveals the unheimlich dimension of practice.

As Gertrude (not that Gertrude) puts it: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Where’s any sense of the writing act with its bounty of particulars, unfinal nudges and smudge retrenchments, loft’d solos, bench-clearings, raptures and rifts in that rule-stickler Time? Pearson’s joyless summary’s caught in a pun: “writing surfaces”:

. . . in the interval of that encounter [between, apparently, “engagement and deferral” or “the haeccity of this, in its defining particularity, and the alterity of not this as what comes next”], where affect meditates percept (the notepad) and concept (the injunction to write), I imagine “writing surfaces.” In one sense, this refers to the surface we write on; in another, it asserts that writing surfaces when and whence it does. The former are empty, impassive, and promissory. The latter, an ontologically fraught fiction.

I liked better Ron Padgett’s version (c. 1969): “It is something deep and mysterious inside of a person that cannot be explained.”

Pearson declares himself “struck” by Hejinian’s phrase “autophobia as a form of internalized xenophobia” (along with “coherently structured but internally disparate”—fancy-Dan talk for a bag of what ends up belonging) and proceeds to pin it to a perceived “American” anti-intellectualism, claiming that “resistance to critical thinking [“a national trait”] . . . stems from an ingrained fear—of where such thinking might lead, what illusions it might shatter, and what impediments to ‘progress’ it might pose”:

Hence, “autophobia” might well refer to a fear of the self that thinks critically. More commonly, it refers to the fear of being alone, symptoms of which paradoxically include the fear of being ignored or unloved and a fear of outsiders. More strictly, however, autophobia refers to the irrational fear of oneself. What strikes me about this latter usage is that the autophobe recognizes itself as other—and is repulsed by that recognition.

Pearson’s rhetorical strategy here—that of making of the word autophobia itself a sack of un-belonging, and dishonestly (“might well,” “commonly,” “strictly” “What strikes me”—what’s here is hardly “critical thinking”) cramming it with disparates—attempts to condemn the solitary himself to some presumably ruinous kind of anti-intellectualism. Such is the moral high ground of the self-select’d “intellectual.”

One final note. Curious to see the addition of “motivated” to the usual unabash’d misnomer “experimentation”—kicking off a new ad campaign?

To the point is “what remains radical.” . . . Motivated experimentation remains as unpopular as ever, with the emphasis here on “motivated.” As John Cage usefully [though rather meaninglessly for an exploratory practice] insists: “One doesn’t make just any experiment, but does what must be done.” Which involves rather more than “anything goes” or (less ingenuously) striving to be seen at the so-called cutting edge (which, with too much honing, is rendered dull).

Sounds a little defensive. Only poorly made (stamp’d) knives go dull with honing—the older hand-forg’d steel ones re-sharpen again and again. And what about the goofing off of Perelman and Co.’s now-classic “instead of ant wort I saw brat guts”? Category of “motivated experimentation” or “doing what must be done”? Pearson ends with an odd admonishing:

      The insights afforded by “mistakes” and “accidents”; the complications introduced by contingency; the discontinuities of art and life, and the effects produced by improvisation, change, and procedural strategies—all count for little if the writer fails to recognize them in situ and turn them to account. . . . As Charlie Parker pointedly observed, “this music’s about more than wanting to.”

After all of Pearson’s talk of “desire,” oughtn’t he heed Parker’s point (a sharp one) himself?

“The recognition of lack . . . arises concurrently with the desire to write . . .”

The Grand Piano Notes

Out a Window

Lyn Hejinian offers the ninth part of The Grand Piano an essay call’d “What’s Missing from My Life,” a document of considerable use in reading that ever-ongoing and unfinish’d (inchoate by design) book, and one that concludes with its ninth section—“What memory is not a ‘gripping’ thought”—in a “2009 version,” expand’d to contain sixty-eight sentences. About the form of My Life (and its accrual):

According to the compositional rule I applied, the revisions could come only by way of addition. I was interested in the social (and socializing) force of language and the structuring force of memory, not of forgetting. I was attempting to write in the language of what had happened, or in the language that structured my take on what had happened. In the second version of the work, I wanted to build dialectically on an on-going process of understanding, without negating any of the materials that were its basis. One can change one’s mind but one can’t take back one’s past. That was my working hypothesis.

Hejinian recounts how, at the point of reprinting the original 1978 Burning Deck My Life (written by Hejinian at thirty-seven, containing “thirty-seven sections, each thirty-seven sentences long”) she decided to expand the original (resulting in the 1986 Sun & Moon My Life): “I wanted to signal that My Life was an incomplete work, a Bildungs-poem (or Bildungsgedicht) that cannot fully (or successful) account for itself. In addition, I wanted to suggest that incompleteness might, and maybe should, be an attribute of any text.” (A Poundian legacy, I’d wager, endless drub of fragments—“I cannot make it cohere.” Hejinian’s brilliant move: finding a form that so undeniably signals its coterminous (every life is unfinish’d) limit in advance and allows for such endogenous enrichment throughout. It is easily the most attend’d to (and significant) long poem of the “era.”

What Hejinian offers here—run-up to the new My Life ninth section—is a historical capsule of (mostly) California (Berkeley and environs) in 1950, 1950 being Hejinian’s ninth year. Hejinian quotes her own notational definition of avant-garde practice—“analytic, resistant, willfully fraught with social consciousness, dedicated to offering new ways of thinking (and, hopefully, new things to think about)”—and proceeds to “unpack” the “fraught” phrase: “avant-garde practice requires that one force oneself out of one’s comfort zone so as to better (hopefully much better) learn about the social and historical contexts and consequences of what one does (in one’s writing and otherwise).” Laudable enough, if rather vague. And when Hejinian gets to identifying “social contexts” for the various versions of My Life, the result is farfetch’d, stretching. Social contexts for 1978 version: “the Bay Area Language writing scene of 1977-78”: “A process of heterogeneity was unfolding—a collectively instigated production of difference. My Life is certainly a reflection of that, insofar as it is coherently structured but internally disparate.” End point. Something about the way the passive “was unfolding” wars with the “instigated production” bespeaks to the limit of such a remark. (To say nothing of the remarkably limit’d “heterogeneity” of the “scene” itself.) Social contexts for the 1986 version: “the same scene eight years late” (so much for forcing oneself “out of one’s comfort zone”):

The Carter-Mondale presidency had been replaced by that of Ronald Reagan, and in 1985, coinciding with the beginning of Reagan’s second term, a series of public attacks on Language writing had been launched in various publications (including Partisan Review and Poetry Flash). Some of the attacks were charged with the vehemence of personal vendetta; all of them manifested a particular strain of American xenophobia that regards intellectual work as alien, unfeeling, hostile, and ultimately un-American. Imagining, and cultivating fear of, the “enemy within” is not exclusively American of course, nor is the casting of that enemy as an intellectual.

Oddly unsubstantiated claims (particularly that of “xenophobia”)—I find the lines uncharacteristic and somewhat disheartening. The rhetorical ploy of aligning the attacks with the forces of Reagan’s right, or of rabid anti-Communist’s (“enemy within” lingo) is, I suspect, a result of Hejnian’s delving into the paranoiac Cold War milieu of the early ’fifties (in considering the larger context of “the putative period that is ‘covered’ by the poem”): it is, though, unseemly, “farfetch’d.” (Too, in thinking of the document’d xenophobia of the period—internment camps, loyalty oaths, the atomic bomb unleash’d—I find Hejinian’s claim of its turn to self-hatred unconvincing: “Also deeply troubling is the unconscious internalization of xenophobia into the very fabric of U.S. Culture—turning it into an obfuscating autophobia that impedes clear understanding at a cultural level of either other or self.”)

At sixty-eight sections of sixty-eight sentences each, My Life becomes a work of 4624 sentences (opposed to the 2025 sentences of the commonly known 1986 version). (Thank you, Ron Silliman.) Twenty or so additional years of memory-sentences more than doubles the number accumulated in one’s initial forty-five years. Memory explodes logarithmically with aging (is that the case? is there a need to rework the model?) Here—I discover’d the rampancy typing out the sentences (I had no idea there’d be such a wallop, though it’s the case, too, that Hejinian enjoys the (Henry) Jamesian sentence that ambles out leisurely, sniffing at itself here and there, turning about to look itself over, a bowline of a sentence, up out of the rabbit’s hole, around the tree, and back into the hole, a sailor’s knot, unslippable)—the “new” sentences of “What memory is not a ‘gripping’ thought” (with ellipses marking the placement of the existing (1986) sentences):

      Because of its length and the scope given to digression, Hillcrest Road makes a figure 2. One Sunday afternoon my father painted the front porch of our house a gentle gray, beginning at the bottom of the five steps leading up to it and painting back, from the left and then the right, until finally, opening the door, he painted from the threshold, stepped back, and closed us in. . . . Ambivalence has the force of comparison. . . . Time stood on the horizon, four-faced and staunch as a phallus, an as-yet unknown figure—or almost. Alone, I practiced paralysis. . . . Severed limbs are flung from houses leaving behind the gentle spirits of maimed men. . . . The book of Arthur Rackham Fairy Tales, printed on thick and pulpy paper, bound in a mournfully yellow cover, was illustrated with stark black silhouettes of contorted ogres and ghastly girls in twisted plight, from which my mother used to read to us now and then immobilizing stories which, in retrospect, seem to have had no plot. . . . I sat on a beige couch and drew a serpentine abstraction on a blank page in pencil behind my grandmother’s shopping list. . . . Why this should be so is social. Once I’ve formed an opinion it’s unlikely that I’ll keep it to myself. . . . Some nights I fell asleep while still imagining the precise processes of torture, but other nights I managed to stay awake and progress to the part in my narrative in which I withstood the pain, held out, betraying nothing and no one. . . . I shot a flaming arrow at the roof and the house burst into fire. . . . If the ulcer is to be cured, the patient must change his thinking about his employer, he must stop secreting the poison of resentment. . . . My mother and father had been added to my reading. . . . The next morning we discovered scratched into the newly painted surface of the front porch the crudely drawn message, Fuck You. . . . He stated that I am not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocated the overthrow of the Government by force or violence, and, though it would seem to contradict this he said too that I have no commitments in conflict with my responsibilities with respect to impartial scholarship and free pursuit of truth. . . . We each wanted to be the one to hand the toll to the toll collector in the uniform and booth, since doing so made us key to the event, so we argued over who would sit by the back window on the driver’s side (appealing to justice, “you did it last time,” or to power, “your arms aren’t long enough”), and the winner would hold the coin during the long excited approach to the bridge and then, as the car stopped, in sudden fear that the opportunity might be lost, frantically roll down the window, and, concentrating entirely on the large palm which had first reached toward the closed driver’s window and then swung toward the opening back window, empty the warm coin into it. Years later I came to be friends with a call girl who serviced rich and powerful bohemians on the fringes of a rural retreat, but I won’t name names. . . . There are aunties given to kitsch and aunties entirely eclipsed. My grandmother nervously waited for the fog to burn off, complaining already of migraine, while my grandfather arranged his barbecue tools beside the “pit” and my father wandered off with my mother. Each to his kind, he said, not meaning to be unkind and not saying what kind he was. I held my sister’s legs and let her be a wheelbarrow. . . . To bring us in from the dark on summer nights when we were playing “hide and seek,” she would call “olly-oxen-free,” laughing at the door. . . .

A darker palate. One question: does it finally obscure the earlier (sunnier? “Or haylike, and muzzy” reads one memory-sentence) perceiv’d ninth year? (The problem is that of all memoir: child p.o.v. succumbing to grown-up, see “Araby.”) Is there a recherché’d (note of the highly-intend’d) hum coming off some of the new sentences (or is that the upshot of reading Hejinian’s own social history of the milieu—talk of “containment” say, and the ’fifties “nuclear family” too obviously echo’d in the sentence about the father painting the porch, that “closed us in”?)

“A process of heterogeneity was unfolding . . .”

The Grand Piano Notes

Out a Window

Number nine of The Grand Piano’s come down the turnpike, implacably fat and grey. We’d better, I tell my stubborn mule, read the thing. Epigraph’d by Clark “I don’t like to see human beings run down” Coolidge (“Nothing more telling you than the storms of broken time” out of The Crystal Text). (I “picture”—reading that—the flat Illini voice of the dough-phizzog’d Carl Sandburg doing a gruff tremelo of “All I can bring you is broken-face gargoyles.”) That (epigraph) and (that of) the East German novelist Christa Wolf—she of the admonishing (in The Quest for Christa T.) to “leave what you know too well, leave what has ceased to be a challenge. Keep alive your curiosity about other ranges of experience. . . . Prefer the movement to the goal.” Here, annoyingly used to sweep off (disingenuous flourish of the reassuring lover who’s halfway out the door) a history of aggression to magnanimously unveil a seeming equanimity pre-parsed, something out of Wolf’s One Day a Year:

Perhaps reports like these can contribute to keeping opinions about what has happened in flux, examining prejudices once more, dissolving bitterness, recognizing personal experiences again and gaining more confidence in them, permitting foreign conditions to come somewhat nearer.

A mighty odd nudge in the context of language writing’s madding denial of the personal. A faux-naïve version of Rodney King’s “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Rae Armantrout is up. And bunts. A minimal story of returning, post-San Francisco, pregnant, to San Diego’s somewhat rundown (“I don’t really have a word for what it was”) Golden Hills. Story of a dwarf trying to push a way in through the door (“I never put that incident in a poem”). Story of Armantrout’s home town’s indefinable “familiarity . . . ‘unheimlich’”: “stimulating in a way . . . something I kept trying to think myself into or around.” The upshot: “I did write out of my sense of displacement . . . Displacement was my muse for quite awhile.” Story of Lyn Hejinian’s “saying she was struck . . . by my familiarity with the plants of San Diego”:

Of course, nothing is native here except chaparral and a few scrub oaks. The plants I grew up with were all from somewhere else. They were dependent on sprinklers. The most common were oleander, ice plant, juniper, jacaranda, Spanish pepper, Brazilian pepper, bougainvillea, hibiscus, lantana, and the ubiquitous, but usually ratty, bird-of-paradise. Do I name them to try to conjure up a sense of place?

It’s difficult to know what to make of Armantrout’s perennial reticence, lack of push, refusal to go beyond some level of mundane event, a kind of radical uncommittedness. At its worst: affectlessness (or maybe, like San Diego: “strangely empty and somehow illegible”). Likely, it’s largely a measure of temperament (the poems, too, depend on indistinct, or vacillating, vagaries of intent—see, say, in “Necromance,”—Armantrout quotes a San Diego stanza after remarking on neighborhood-identifying signs (“they’re there not so we know where we are but so we know that we’re somewhere”)—

Couples lounge
in slim, fenced yards
beside the roar
of a freeway. Huge pine
a quarter-mile off
floats. Hard to say where
this occurs.

—see, that is, how that “Hard to say” is finally adjudicated by waffling: “Emphasizing correct names / as if making amends” in the initial stanza becomes, toward the end of the piece, “Emphatic / precision / is revealed as / hostility.”

I think distractedly of a conversation with Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh that Anthony Cronin records in the memoir Dead as Doornails, the post-WWII Dublin of Brendan Behan and Myles na Gopaleen:

In one of the last conversations . . . we had he said he had ‘no lumber in his mind’. ‘That fellow Auden’, he said, ‘has a well-stocked mind. He has a lot of furniture, a lot of philosophy and psychology and that sort of thing. Of course it’s junk, but it does to make a blaze, it creates energy and a sort of warmth, and when you get the blaze going you might succeed in saying something. But I’ve read nothing and have no rubbish to burn. None at all, no philosophy, no nothing. And you can’t go on writing lyrics.’

Is that conflagratory furnishing (with its charge and load of ambition) what I sense lacking in Armantrout? I turn to pieces out of Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), randomly gleaning. Here, it’s as if she’s asking something of the same:

Wannabe

Impossibly teetering
is one way
to remain.

Half contemptuous, half
ravished

by vampire wannabes
maybe.

      *

A two-lane highway
between ghost-towns—

one of the clichés
you love

the memory, not
of events

but of continuity
itself.

      *

Who are you anyway?

Teetering in the continuity between, a fluid changeable state, hardly-defined. It is, perhaps, what makes Armantrout’s poems both so appealing to some (empty’d vessels, vessels “versed”—refillable with any old thing one desires) and so intangible, unmemorable, skittish. Here, another, a tiny one (they are all tiny):

Hey

      1

Sound
may be addressed
                  to you
or it may not.

      2

A receipt,
blown crazily
across the parking lot,
was, perhaps,
a moth.

Indecision works. (Or doesn’t: the allying of “receipt” and “moth” seeming, finally, metaphorically imprecise—paper debris, its flat crepitance caught sailing versus a perfectly soft hasp’s own unhingeing, and re-hingeing . . .)

“I did write out of my sense of displacement . . .”

Nuances of a Theme at the End of the Mind

A Wall

Slosh munificence, a house built out of water. Post-weekend focus-loss (mimicking the “pre-weekend nada-blither,” yo), the books all barking out in singular profane chorus, leveling, one differing another only in the size of its yap. Wallace Stevens, brushing off the seven question format, replying to a “State of American Writing, 1948” gum-up Delmore Schwartz put together for the Partisan Review:

      Experiment in language. Poetry is nothing if it is not experiment in language. A recent remark by de Rougemont,

“Le vrai superstitieux se moque des superstitions comme le vrai poète des sujets et des mots poétiques,”

explains this. The poet records his experience as poet in subjects and words which are part of that experience. He knows that nothing but the truth of that experience means anything to him or to anyone else. Experiment in respect to subjects and words is the effort on his part to record the truth of that experience.
      In this statement the experience is central and experiment is the struggle with the experience and here experiment, also, is central. But often there is little, even no, experience and here experiment is merely experiment. The opinion that, unlike the twenties, this is not a period of experiment seems to be right in respect to experience in both senses. In respect to central experiment, the experience of the poet as poet may be too much or too little for him to record as yet: too much and too immediate or too little and not near enough; and so it may never be recorded at all. In respect to experiment that is merely experiment, this seems, in the circumstances, to be a pastime proper for Nero’s children’s children.
      If these things are fluctuations of literary modes, what is the cause of the fluctuations? It may be simply our experience of life. To sum this up, central experiment is one of the constants of the spirit which is inherent in a true record of experience. But experiment for the sake of experiment has no such significance. Our present experience of life is too violent to be congenial to experiment in either sense. There is also the consideration that the present time succeeds a time of experiment. Theoretically a period of attempts at a world revolution should destroy or endanger all stationary poetic subjects and words and be favorable in the highest degree to the recording of fresh experience. But the vivification of reality has not yet occurred in spite of the excitement. Only the excitement has occurred and is occurring.
      Experiment in form. So, too, experiment in form is one of the constants of the spirit. Much of what has been said about subjects and words applies to form. There is, however, a usage with respect to form as if form in poetry was a derivative of plastic shape. The tendency to visualize form is illustrated by the way a reference to form becomes a reference to the appearance of the poem on the page as in the case of a poem in the shape of a pear, say, or a poem without any shape at all. Such trivialities show that the record of a man’s experience in the modern world is not a derivative of plastic shape. Modern poetry is not a privilege of heteroclites. Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem itself on means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today and most people concede that poetic form is not a question of literary mode.

Form unsolv’d by mere anomalous practices eccentrick by bowsers and stewards. Experiment that goes off without any sense of its necessary contact to “the vivification of reality”—experience (the French, closer to the Latin, refuses to make the two distinct: “Fr. expérience, ad. L. experientia, f. experient-em, pr. pple. of experīrī to try, put to the test” is how the etymological rigging—full of sailors mercilessly clambering about, trying out the ropes by use, putting one’s own activity to a proof—hangs off the O.E.D.’s “experience.”) One thinks of Williams’s insistence on “contact.” There’s the story Kenneth Burke tells, of a day, Williams in retirement, the two “walking slowly on a beach in Florida”:

A neighbor’s dog decided to accompany us, but was limping. I leaned down, aimlessly hoping to help the dog (which became suddenly frightened, and nearly bit me). Then Williams took the paw in his left hand (the right was now less agile) and started probing for the source of the trouble. It was a gesture at once expert and imaginative, something in which to have perfect confidence, as both the cur and I saw in a flash. Feeling between the toes lightly, quickly, and above all surely, he spotted a burr, removed it without the slightest cringe on the dog’s part—and the three of us were again on our way along the beach.

Burke (who later recalls, too, an incident where Williams, post-medical practice, “said explosively that he missed the opportunity to get his hand on things”):

I thought to myself (though not then clearly enough to say so): “And here I’ve learned one more thing about Williams’ doctrine of “contact.’” It concerned the “tactus eruditus,” and I quote words that he had tossed, as a line all by itself, into a somewhat rough-and-tumble outburst, “This is My Platform,” he had written in the twenties.

Odd to think of Stevens’s nod to Williams (“Nuances of a Theme by Williams”) with its epigraph a complete quoting of Williams’s poem “El Hombre” (out of the 1917 Al Que Queire!):

It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

                        i
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

                        ii
Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow’s bird
Or an old horse.

One senses that Stevens is making (out of Williams’s chora of a radical solitary, local fire) a rather standoffish poetics, a thing putting man, contra experientia, completely apart.

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

“Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom . . .”

Bicycle and Pipe

Pre-weekend nada-blither. Debung’d the boîte-cervaux and, hop-là, something flew out. Probably upshot direct of my reading of Patti Smith’s Just Kids: “My writing was shifting from the formality of French prose poetry to the bravado of Blaise Cendrars, Mayakovsky, and Gregory Corso. . . . I listened to recordings of the beat poets and Oscar Brown, Jr., and studied lyric poets like Vachel Lindsay and Art Carney.” Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. Something about the cross between the Drano-gulper and the self-proclaim’d “sewer connoisseur” sidekick of “Ralphie-boy” measures my mistrust: “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”

Wallace Stevens to Norman Holmes Pearson (June 24, 1937)—Pearson, with William Rose Benét, in the process of editing The Oxford Anthology of American Literature:

My intention in poetry is to write poetry: to reach and express that which, without any particular definition, everyone recognizes to be poetry and to do this because I feel the need of doing it.
      There is such complete freedom now-a-days in respect to technique that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free and can express myself freely. I don’t know of anything, respecting form, that makes much difference. The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. . . . I believe in freedom regardless of form.

Poised against William Carlos Williams’s March 9, 1938 jig in the essay “Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist”: “I’ve been writing a sentence, with all the art I can muster. Here it is: A work of art is important only as evidence, in its structure, of a new world which it has been created to affirm.” And:

The artist is to be understood not as occupying some outlying section of the field of action but the whole field, at a different level howbeit from that possessed by grosser modes. The artist is to be conceived as a universal man of action—restricted by circumstances to a field in which only he can remain alive, whole and effective. He is the most effective of all men, by test of time, in proving himself able to resist circumstances, and bring the load through.

I am wolfing around, trying to tear a chunk off here and there, searching for the (pressure) point—limp neck’d rabbit in the snow, the gorgeous red of the blood-blossom—where the new occurs. Williams again:

Jefferson said it. We should have a revolution of some sort in America every ten years. The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode. There has to be new poetry. But the thing is that the change, the greater material, the altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem, in it. Made of it. It must shine in the structural body of it.

And:

Think of a work of art—a poem—as a structure. A form is a structure consciously adopted for an effect. How then can a man seriously speak of order when the most that he is doing is to impose a structural character taken over from the habits of the past upon his content. This is sheer bastardy.

One begins to consider the possibility that all talk of form and structure is mumbo-jumbo—a feint for purveyors of the serious. Is structure merely local? Is a change of a word in a piece a structural change? (Surely it’s not “only” a change of “content”—its “effect” is going to ripple out in all directions, flooding the field. New fly in the spider’s netting, the whole thing trembles—that’s obvious enough.) Is a change of a word a formal change? What is the difference between structure and form? There’s something to admire in Stevens’s brash dismissal of the terms of the debate (“inclined to disregard form”). Reminiscent of a Stevensesque reply to an anthologist bent on notating (“I am sorry that I am not able to tell you offhand just what the meaning of ‘the much crumpled thing’ is, because I do not recall the line. The reading of the proofs of the book gave me such a horror of it that I have hardly looked at it since it was published, and I don’t think that the ‘thing’ was sex appeal. I am some hundreds of years behind other people and it is going to be a long time before I let a commercialism like sex appeal get any further than the front fence.”) Why, he sounds just like Emily Dickinson! To the anthologist (L. W. Payne, Jr.), too, regarding “Domination in Black”*:

I am sorry that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas at all, because its sole purpose is to fill the mind with the images & sounds that it contains. A mind that examines such a poem for its prose contents gets absolutely nothing from it.

Getting nowhere. What if I put (up against “Domination in Black”) a “new” thing, say, something out of Clark Coolidge’s Alien Tatters (Atelos, 2000)? Here:

These panels that tell settles, and the ever open troubles.
Rue up to them, please. This in full patch and evolvement.
I heard plural speech through that wall.

These tall nettles, why and what’s the reason for? See them
coming through but so low you don’t know to keep. In
aisles are summoned. Tiring though, through just sense.

Bulldog Drummond, another style of vitamin. Kept close
to the abdomen and pant. Bullyboy Diamond, I thought I
heard tell. Brack Aveline Kickstrew as the neighbor.

This guy Bum Gartner was actually a Kelly, a neophyte.
We raised them with all the lights in action. Treadle plates,
thought bites, levelers. And that I could have been so
proud and blind to what.

Than her friends, they froze them. Talking about it into
a lighter midnight. All thumbs on horse-drawn carriages.
The milder nights of no lights to come.

Nobody’s heart made out the light fiends to come. We
hovered over our experiences, tacky list at waste best. I had
a whole one all over us. I took a well-made stand.

Snipped out of it, at random, a “much crumpled thing.” Love, along with other things, the Dylanesque (“Who Killed Davey Moore?”) nod of “why and what’s the reason for?”** The trace elements of Coolidge’s “here to there to Endicott Square” advancement by rhyme (settles, nettles, summoned, Drummond, &c.) kin to Stevens’s “repeating themselves” doss-bag: the two pieces seem mutual pari-mutuel bets against the need for a poem to run any horse-race beyond the cheering stands of its “fill the mind” own track. That is to say, it simply gets going with its business (the dogs of commercialism perennially hamper’d, barking out beyond that front fence) in a place where there’s little call to examine any difference between the “tacky list at waste best” and the “well-made stand.” Making of all the essentialist appeals to the necessity of new form a distracting minor irritant: the work is here where some few individuals kick against the pricks and “bring the load through.”

*Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

** How odd—how fitting!—to find a report of Dylan’s patter about the song (pre-performance in 1964): “This is a song about a boxer . . . It’s got nothing to do with boxing, it’s just a song about a boxer really. And, uh, it’s not even having to do with a boxer, really. It’s got nothing to do with nothing. But I fit all these words together . . . that’s all . . . It’s taken directly from the newspapers. Nothing’s been changed . . . except for the words.”

Art Carney, 1918-2003

Vachel Lindsay, 1879-1931

Ryan Murphy’s The Redcoats

A Wall

Everywhere in Ryan Murphy’s The Redcoats (Krupskaya, 2010), things is bust’d, the imperium’s whupped, the ineffable tatter of self’s a nigh-speechless wreck. Thus, a paring down to the unplumb’d minimum, that and the barely retrievable detritus of the newfangled, relief of the odd provisional, what can be glean’d (out of the present and off history—that “last best hope,” for “I am gagging sometimes / too on the future”) for solace, for use. Here’s “Ringtide”:

Ambien, ringtide
black with rigging
Is sun in February, snowvolt
stunned to stillness with impending

To sit and wait is terrible.
Dumb is the ocean
Fucker

Combustible practices, to say nothing
of the birds in the fields,
the Rent-Stabilization Act of nineteen seventy something.

The bottom bottoms out
a fury, I’m thirty
I should be better by now.

Is three thousand dollars famous?
Just so you know.
If there is wreck in me

Something of the fatigue and petulance and aphasia of unabideable loss—“snowvolt / stunned” nearly worthy of Celan. Everything unfinish’d, unfinishable, stymied, ever-impending. If some unidentify’d personal loss is pervasive in the book—and it is (“A savagery sw- / Hollows me up”; “Morning comes / in its big white hearse”; “Hearts is ash”; “I can’t stop thinking of the nothing I want”; “I am some sad potatoes. / Which is also awful”—all out of individual lyric pieces)—what is remarkable is how that tintinnabulary of notes peals out to ring down its changes throughout the socius. So that: a sequence call’d “Poems for the American Revolution” (“Independence Day, come what may / Stupid lotsa / shiftless red blossoms,” Murphy writes, and “A wound bored is small daisy / into your shirt. // My dear wretch / we are ashuttle with flames”) seems echo and kin to a sequence call’d “Autumn Is for Bells” with its clipped bare articulations (“Oars plough wake: / Warn and victim we” and “That boy is dead”) hardly cosset’d by its letters to one unnamed:

Dear         ,

The benches are for the infirm and insane. I watch for a flash of pink on
Broadway, what you wore when you left, but the men on the benches zip
their jackets to their chins, read paperbacks through stacked pairs of glasses.
I thought you would pass on your way north. Or I chose the wrong route,
the wrong time, the wrong day.

Compare with “Ethan Allen & the Green Mountain Boys,” out of “Poems for the American Revolution”:

        “Where a goat can go, a man can go,
        where a man can go, he can drag a gun”
        —Major-General William Phillips at Mt. Defiance

Is it not enough to be loved
and repulsed?

Fenway—in your ashes
build a republic.

Silver battalions in green fog.

Sebastian, not a name
one should choose for oneself. Nameless
above Ticonderoga.

Lake Champlain
into the vowel of your open mouth
the water rushes in

(In the “Betsy Ross” of the series, Murphy writes: “I don’t care what they told you, / a stone is not the flower of winter. // O Delaware, / dear George. // Red ears / blue lips / splinters for kisses”—the very founders of the republic become source and origin of its damaged magnificence, its “starry blight / persuasions,” all that is convey’d by Greil Marcus’s “old weird America.”) Others in the Murphy pantheon: pitcher Dock Ellis, he of the lysergic acid diethylamide’d-up no-hitter (“The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. . . . I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate.”), John Glenn (“Congressional medal of honor. / A lawn chair festooned with balloons”), and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (“When we lost your head, / I’m sorry”).

Anselm Berrigan, blurbing, brings up the possibility that—reading The Redcoats—“you may lose yourself attempting to sort out the difference between image and instance.” Precisely right, and an audacious, if finally somewhat rhetorical (the donkey “instance” heaving along under the burden of the real whilst “image” darts here and there along the trail of its ever-shifitng perspicuity), distinction. Here’s a piece nigh-instanceless:

Await a Windfall

Try to mean differently,

and not throw up.

Sun spindles to its last

in the rusting hulk of sky,

stars sick as knives.

We are bound together

by their vague threats,

kindnesses,

teeth like sleeping dogs.

Or I pistil in heat, is summer sleep.

Bludgeon and unspool

Thunder-cloth like bad weather,

portent,

whistles up

Barely a tangible there there—a sun going down; stars pocking up; a “we” possibly couple’d, possibly imperial; a shift (“Or”) to half-sexual (“pistil in heat”), half-violent (“Bludgeon and unspool”) reverie; ominous ending. Unlocated and gripping, marvelous. “You tell me what it’s ‘about’”: that question is hardly one of the poem’s concerns. (In “The Gales,” Murphy writes, brilliantly using some obvious markers: “Once at the corner of Remington and Colt / The N train through an arbor of I-beams. / The air a frenzy of pollen / A cumulative effect like narrative.” That shifting “frenzy,” constellatory and accumulating triggering bits: isn’t that how Murphy’s poems work?) A permeable membrane barely slid and intervening between world and self (cautionary real and onslaught imaginary): in “Spillway”: “And the rain falls exactly / like rain only inside you.” Two, self-assured, random, uncomment’d:

Fifty Stars

To expect otherwise
in panicsoftly
corrosive—is to form dissent
Stanchion I pilloried to candidate the heartfelt:
“It’s hopeless, Spartacus.”
We are each on our own at least in this.
And, flowering in the still pond, concentric ripples
like secrets, gather and unique.
Meanwhile the tin sound of rain flecked with disappointment,
as the train exits the dark tunnel into the dark air.
From the catalogue of commemorative quarters: a very small owl,
an ivory tree, limb piercing a teapot,
a snowflake for her face (or some other constellation).

I have cannibalized other moments to invent this one.
Please retain this receipt for tax purposes.
Swanpiling             Steeplewedge
You flowers of autumn, you churning
plow, you archaic lamps.

And (one that I cannot read without thinking of Charles Ives):

Taps

A loss, having learned it,
opens to what is missed.

I feel better it is
Saturday pouring rain

in the season of scaffolds
and pharmaceuticals.

I get up at night to write down:
[illegible].

Now is the time for “Taps”
on the morning village green.

Ryan Murphy

Ray DiPalma’s Pensieri

A Twenty

One modality (I am tempt’d to say) of Ray DiPalma’s Pensieri (Echo Park Press, 2009) is a precise glut of Latinates (a sort of inverse-Doughty lingo), spelling it out:

Anything governed by luck proves
a suitable pastime requiring little evidence
of ingenuity or acknowledgement, not altering
but transposing—‘when decided’ the only formality—
truth of purpose secured by inversion lacking symbolic order
revealing a compromised inwardness aggressively
minimal like a barking dog
the axes of omen and mystery argued
out of efficacy into only imagined foreignness
or at the disposal of a charm of low purpose
deliberative modalities reduced to paradox
or regularly erased from sustained accounts

Such deliberate, insistent and sustain’d ideation is exceedingly rare nella poesia americana contemporanea—one measure is here: think back to how, reading, you clung to that “barking dog” stuck perfectly up (like an Indian arrowhead topping a stumpy post-pluvial hummock in a fresh-plow’d field) in the midst of the mild drubbing that arrives with the duty-bound markers of thinking’s august presumptuousness. (Yeah.) Think how that dog’s the bas relief—finger’d defiantly, reassuringly—on the coin tumbling up mid-toss (DiPalma’s ‘when decided’ another way of saying ‘call it in the air’) the way every pensiero must needs forego its singular integrity to provide a wolfish battery of choice. What I mean is, such finesse of thinking (without Dr. Williams’s “things”) is a rarity. Though: DiPalma’s making is, self-admittedly, “consistently architectural”—it is, too, a way of retrieving something of time’s bleak leavings, that “distance” that is in the distance itself. In the first piece (half-jocular, under a sub-titular “Agate Hub”): “Distance plus distance / over distance minus distance / making a rapid, controlled spin // A place / between the land / and the seas.” And, two fragments out of that initial gear-up: “ther is noon alyve here” and “hew—and cry.” Maker’s marks, DiPalma’s own Adamo me fecit chisel’d into the book: there is a persistent sense of fraught yearning here, of bare adequacy temper’d by something akin to the disjecta of defiance—

You are maladaptive but perfectly shaped—
what you mean by technique
is a pliant density of critical song
rotted down to accident—but still robust—
‘like-making’ encumbered by partially forgotten
melodies that it seems now only you can recall. . . .

—, the made thing banging up against indifference, that of its tools (“The page turns against the pen, / the binding encloses an abyss”), that of its place: “The name accompanied by its chant accumulates, / circulates its imperfect message unsounded, / steps out into the sequence confused and indifferent— / out into the snaring enticements and cunning dispatch of silence.”

Pensieri is dated “April-September, 2007” and some of its entries carry exact time-stamp’d style headings (“Dies Martis 7:08 PM 5/15/07”) “in measure of a temporal integrity.” As such, the book—notational, essaying, writing the everyday—joins DiPalma’s excellent book of books, The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks, 1998-2008 (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2009), though without that volume’s wonder-penetralia of drawings, &c. (There is a frontispiece in Pensieri: geometrickal clockwork mechanisms in overlay against the Rorschach’d physiognomy of a Kafka lookalike, half-menace, half-peril.) A couple of pieces:

Perturbation Theory and Preliminary
Approximations in Matter Categorical

                        after Ponge

I don’t use everything—
the stripes on the wall
the subdued light and shadows
the view from the balcony
of the 19th floor

No anecdotes relegated
to the separations, fretted arches,
perfumes—neither a capitulation
nor a quietus accorded its grimace
but a prosecution of moments of lookout

retrospective in their integrity
most difficult because acquisition
often resembles seizure—or sort
and conquering amount, accuracy derived
not from numbers but pause and noble assertion

beyond any intended remediation of complexity

Disregarding for a moment the Ponge reference, isn’t there something of Beckett mimicking Joyce to that title? (I discern Beckett, too, in “No anecdotes relegated / to the separations” and in another piece, “Torpid with Venom, Still Dependable,” DiPalma tips Beckett’s Molloy turnip-truck with its sideboard paint’d “no symbols where none intended” to declare: “some symbols where none intended,” the way writing (reading) insists, going its own way regardless. Regarding Ponge, a seemingly odd reference in the largely ideational flux, regarding Ponge (I find, marauding): Ponge tells Serge Gavronsky (who’s asking about P.’s “phenomenological disposition”):

It is true that I am sensitive to things . . . to things in themselves—but if . . . I confronted language with something neutral, something which had neither feelings nor ideas, I was doing it for man. If I placed language in front of something neutral, something which was not in itself poetic, it was simply to put it to the test. As simple as that. What interests me most is not so much . . . yes, I am sensitive to things, that’s clear. I believe that in order to be a writer or any sort of artist, in any discipline, one has got to be sensitive to the means of expression. My means of expression is language, and words the way they are, with their existence and their history, their semantical representation. And it is in order to revitalize language that I place myself before something neutral, which is not yet poetic in itself, and has not yet been “sentimentalized.” I try, in the verbal world, to do something which has as much concrete existence as the objects that I describe.

Of use, that, in thinking, too, about DiPalma’s language, largely a “neutral” language (“Falsified at heart / though in earnest expectation / language is not evidence” he writes in “Empathy’s Painted Cheek”) being put up against—in many cases—itself. Here’s “Parallel Universe III”:

The road ran north from Brindisi
to Naples and then on to Rome—
And that I, betrayed by a woman,
should live to see an outsider take over
my little farm—something I had never feared—
dispossessed, made to go—
A two year-old steer is brought to a specially
constructed hut with windows on all four sides,
facing North, East, South, and West. The animal
is then beaten to death and left to rot through
the spring. In the rotting carcass
a cluster of bees will be found.
Bougonia—restoration to the hive
and of the hive

A brilliant turnabout—restoring the hive of language. The story of the steer is apparently repeat’d in the introduction to Robert Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. (The Greek “bougonia” means, literally, something like “birth out of a steer.”) Virgil speaks of honeybees—resuscitating the fail’d hive—too in the Georgics. What I love: how DiPalma’s reinsertion of the ancient lore—align’d against (“parallel”) a tale typique of betrayal and dispossession, and against the saliences of the whole (“It’s not a matter of redefining language / but that of using language to redefine,” he writes in “Pretense Festive in the Plain Version”) makes for a sense of the whole language field “on” gratifyingly high alert. What more ought one ask? One more, sans commentaire:

Among the Builders

                        where the amorous and listening eye lifts its reproaches
                        —Frank O’Hara, ‘Poem,’ “The distinguished”

Short arias behind long narratives
bolster the state of the economy—
no compromises even if handmade and
effectively paralysing the attraction by
breaking off one of the wooden wings.
A lot of money and a sense of tradition are at stake.
They say the rain won’t let up until tomorrow.
So it’s a cantata and pushes us towards the white shores.

Tongue over stammer memorizing / extemporizing spitmusic equals
rebus plus persuasion spieling flamingo flamenco.
Tut, Thoth, tut, tut, tut. Arch guitar violations . . .
stremm, he wrote, strumm, stremming, Stimmung.
No apologies: spleen in the knowing manner—
You can always spot the veteran of Thermopylae.

Ray DiPalma

Cyrus Console’s OK Tony

A Door

Out of Cyrus Console’s chapbook OK Tony (The Song Cave, 2009)—the initial salvo of a dozen or so similarly shaped and lineated pieces, untitled, connect’d here tenuously, here obviously (through some—Tony in Covent Garden, Anthony in Providence—the smudge of a narrative is visible, something to lift off with a piece of Scotch tape and present—gummy and misalign’d—in lieu of any possible paraphrase or account):

Downrange, while I was smoothing out my pistol
Rustling, I heard some animal
Massive, cloaked about in tawny fell
Struggle, ridge horns coiled close against his skull
Knotted, there in the white honeysuckle
Grown unutterably beautiful

Downrange. Tony’s cover garment glowed
In the sun but he was messing with it
Like a guilty thing and had been made
Badly twice on the way to town.
Now one heard no traffic save the water
Passing consistently among the rushes

Downrange. Where this undermined the bank
There was the occasional plashing.
Tony didn’t know why we had come
He said. I didn’t really know for sure
Either. Then I saw that he was hurt.
We both cried and then we felt better

None (of the other pieces) ends with a full stop. None of the others deploy a stanzaic catchword like “Downrange.” No stanza (I think) slant-rhymes so voraciously as Console’s initial skull-lulling one does: though there is ample rhyming, the intentionally clumsy (“Thus one rhyme word telegraphed the next / Rhyme word, ruining the thing”) running the gamut to a kind plausibly finesse’d excess (“The elephant’s unmentionable scars // were all we ever talked about outdoors”). Faux-coyness (“Tony’s cover garment”) and a kind of jocularly-redeem’d embouchure of the archaic (“in tawny fell / Struggle”) do battle throughout with the awkward and blunt (“We both cried and then we felt better”). Blank verse reigns in sly comeback mode invidious (with variables). OK Tony seems, finally, all of a (somewhat jagged) piece.

If the earlier pieces of the sequence call forth Anthony (“The Tramp of Olneyville”), and, briefly, a woman call’d “Zero” amongst the planetary debris (“The goddamn moon / Settled her voluminous down mantle / Down by where we were brought up to take / No pay for doing”)—that is, too, the sad gummy (never gummed out) heritage of Romantic debris—the work opens rhetorically up and out to pursue the silver glint of American history in the form of the gauntlet of the West, there where big talk looms bigger and the paltry personal shrimps down greenhorn-negligible and unexpress’d (“I let the black shilling drop / Against the crazed badland of the tongue / And broke step with the real.”) Console:

Outstretched metal won the West but rail
Bypassed that claim as bypassing its own
Shiplike in the night. And though John Henry
Created Western Man John Moses Browning
Made him first among equals. The Johns
Sort of blend together for me now

Barren chambers spinning on a crane
Bondsmen contemplate beneath a market
Confusing to us all, who cast our stitch
In time, which we consider as a fabric
Not unlike chintz. Queues of cattle thread
The gimlets in our eyes. Cry, Milkmaid. Cry

Like you mean it though we can’t imagine
Milk at any price, unmoved by sighs
But by the motion of proverbial seas.
I cannot discover this oceanic
Feeling in myself. It is not easy
Scientifically to deal with being green

That combination of (nigh cruel) brusquerie (“Cry, Milkmaid”) and obvious awkwardnesses (the slot’d-in clichés, the little unalloy’d runs of Dexedrine-quick associations—stitch to fabric to chintz to thread)—that, combined with the “territory,” reminds me of some of Jack Spicer’s work (“Lady of the Lake I hate you”). Something out of The Holy Grail, say (“The Book of the Death of Arthur”):

“He who sells what isn’t hisn
Must pay it back or go to prison,”
Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, or some other imaginary
            American millionaire
—selling short.
The heart
Is short too
Beats at on and a quarter beats a second or something like that.
            Fools everyone.
I am king
Of a grey city in the history books called Camelot
The door, by no human hand,
Open.

That polymorphous ensconcing in and of all human foibles. Console: “when I broke my mind I shot myself / Mercifully permanent epistles / On temporary problems. Kind of sad.” (Or, as Spicer puts it: “I’ll teach you to love the Ranger Command / To hold a six-shooter and never to run / The brier and elm, not being human endure / The long walk down somebody’s half-dream. Terrible.”)
Console continues under a nigh biblical swell:

Some go feral. Some see prophets coming
Through the hail. Some refute the argument
From grief. Some swell with vowels, some with thorns
Ashes, ligatures and ampersands.
Some swear oaths, draw trousers on and stand
To meet the day. Some cup the air. Some stand

Strangely unmoved. Some find no explanation
Sufficient. Some being as good
As dead go lowing and stumbling down
By the banks of some dark mirror to orphan.
Some confuse white meat with medicine.
Some know troubles some have only drowned

Or believed themselves to be drowning.
Some Xtian names some stress positions some
Have known. Some build some human pyramids.
Some feel secure in second language since
Who mock at them in school have other reasons.
Gowned men set fire to cities of white birds

The preparatory and the veer apocalyptic. Console’s epigraph to OK Tony is out of a book about probability theory by E. T. Jaynes. It reads:

This universal, stable type of noise was called “grass” because that is what it looks like on an oscilloscope. To the ear, it sounds like a smooth hissing without any discernible pitch; today this is familiar to everyone because it is what we hear when a television receiver is tuned to an unused channel.

(Echoing—“television receiver” standing in for “radio”—out of Spicer’s terrific “Thing Language,” Aimlessly / It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No / One listens to poetry.”) Console—whose fearless and ferociously all-consuming capture of that “noise” is pecky and perfectly riddled with “discernible pitch,” a dissonant counter-current—ends OK Tony with defiant recognition and pugnacious rebuttal: “To this we are reduced, and more.” And: “Tell me if we weren’t made to walk the earth / Picking out our eyes we were not made.” We were not made to destroy ourselves so.

Cyrus Console

Un tas de choses

A Wall

The “radical novelty” of a quasi-lineated sentence’s being label’d a poem:

The after-black lies low along the hills
Like the trailed smoke of a steamer.

That’s by T. E. Hulme, found by a biographer in a notebook. Hugh Kenner (in A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers): “To call it a poem would have been preposterous as late as 1910.” That’s a mere one hundred years “back.” So that: “today” (in Rod Smith’s 1999 Protective Immediacy) one’s capable of reading an unlineated line like

There’s a humming-bird-size hawkmoth up here eating reporters

without “merely” rooting for the new. (There is, too, the sidelong bet that the “poetic” resides in something else: the “after-black,” the skew’d size differential. Smith writes, too:

my bee beheld egghead star demon stuff like usual

Damaging the expectant “like.”

One goes “off”—one is liable to return to the “era” of irony’s invert’d commas at the present breakneck speed—and comes back to a slithery indifference: the mark-up machine nearly broke down. (Patrick Swift call’d painting “making marks.” And, in a sensationally apt formula of the modest necessary (the everyday), claim’d:

My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

(Sideline tenet: “To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.”) I ought provide the stunning context of the prior line—applicable to each presumptuous screechy innovatrix amongst “us”:

It is not possible to be modern, that luxury was taken away from us years ago. The nature of the catastrophe is such that rhetorical images are superfluous in the awful days we are required to live through. Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picturemaking is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless—between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

And, applicable, too, Swift’s precautionary klaxons and alarums against the onslaught of the abstract (beyond its occasional use for shackle-shrug-off, a hand up out of whatever rut academickal or unroof’d one’s descend’d down into): “It will cut the artist off from life, and leave him for subject only his own plastic methods, he will become a ‘connoisseur of his own tricks.’ He becomes a purveyor of boredom under the name of pure art.” Compare William Carlos Williams’s outburst mid-Yes, Mrs. Williams, that montage of (literal) Muttersprache:

      I like Chopin because he was honest and good and he was a genius and he could play the profound, and tremendous states of being cannot exist here—that is the ultimate felicities of understanding, we rise to our occasions like starved trout to a flake of tobacco leaf, therefore, our staccato verse and fragmentary prose. To stay on a point or a plane is huge work not possible when one is inevitably opposed by many, the one must go down the scale to succeed or be content to touch understanding only by flashes. Mammie look at the little flowers they are growing. The greater swallows the rest: If my legs were tougher I’d play baseball tomorrow which proves that muscles are of no importance, but that weakness is excessively to the point. He did not know it, but he was born to be smothered in ammonia. I’ll bend the God damned parallels until they meet O elm before their bedroom windows blossoming.

Therein lies a refusal to conceal the unknown, the unchart’d, indifferently under a label. (Compare the ancient ruse of the lying cartographer: masking ignorance with a fine and belabouredly engraved cartouche—say, that compass rose and titling smack dab covering the marvels of the American hinterlands. We, too, witness “our” lying cartographers with the etiquettes jaunes. Shhhh.)

Out and about: I heard a man say, in all seriousness, that something “never hit that sweet spot story-wise”—and nearly disgorg’d my bagel. I read, interruptedly, with desultory impetus, Williams’s 1928 A Voyage to Pagany. Williams (seeing men in Italy tying up grapes with willow withes): “Always do the same thing, year after year. That’s work, work is worship.” (Cf. Patrick Swift: “To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.” ) And (Williams along the Arno): “If I were a peasant the river wouldn’t look so poetic, but it would look more god-like, more real. . . . You must begin with nothing, like a river in the morning and make, make new. . . . I make my way out of nothing using what I find by chance.” “Took,” too, in my meagre travels, by a painting by Honoré Sharrer, who, too, made of work itself a totemic quasi-religious thing. See her alterpiece-style triptych “Tribute to the American Working People.” That and that, and un tas de choses undigest’d, lying low in the after-black . . .

Honoré Sharrer, c. 1950
(Photograph by W. Eugene Smith)

Honoré Sharrer, “Tribute to the American Working People,” 1947-1951

Honoré Sharrer, Detail of “Tribute to the American Working People,” 1947-1951

Patrick Swift

A Fence

Dublin-born painter Patrick Swift, in a piece titled “The Artist Speaks” in Envoy, 1951—reprint’d in the Veronica Jane O’Mara-edit’d PS . . . of course: Patrick Swift, 1927-1983 (Gandon Books, 1993):

. . . the idea of technical progress has caused great confusion, especially among the young who imagine that they should take up where Picasso left off:

The several manners I have used in my work
must not be taken as an evolution or a step
towards an unknown ideal of painting
                  —Picasso

The fallacious idea that a painter ‘experiments’ is harmful to the simple-minded, who conceive painting to be a game in which one casts about in all directions in an effort to hit the jackpot. The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style:

What I seek above all in a picture is a man
and not a picture
                  —Zola

It is also a mistake to imagine that such a thing as the stupid genius exists, or did at any time. Good painting is not produced by any unintelligent following of inspiration or temperament. Every genius is a great intelligence:

Of inspiration, spontaneity,
temperament, I know
nothing
                  —Degas

You may know a good painter by his habit of work: a good painter works constantly.
      . . . everything written about art is profoundly unimportant; most of it, unfortunately, is also boring, except for the statements of a genius about his art, which always have interest because of his work. For this reason I may, I think, be excused the quotations. A last word from Degas: ‘Art is deceit’; and Van Gogh: ‘to be simply honest.’

And, writing under the pseudonym of James Mahon in the London quarterly X—edit’d by Swift and poet David Wright:

To-day it is not uncommon to hear art experts predict the next step in the history of painting. . . .
      A common recent claim of this kind, for instance, has been that America has ‘taken the lead’ from Paris, or Europe simply, and that certain American painters are making the sort of pictures which shall determine the next direction the art of painting will take (though it must be noticed that it is a plain fact such pictures are also being made in Japan, Bulgaria, Chile, etc.) These claims nearly always deal in large numbers of painters at once under the cover of ‘movements’. Any one with a small knowledge of history must realise how far the number of great painters involved in these movements exceeds that of the richest period ever recorded.
      A situation has occurred wherein a premium is put on any work qualifying for the term ‘progressive’.
      . . . The whole machinery of organised culture—museums , institutes, councils, societies for the spread of culture, etc., all compete to produce and to patronize ‘modern and progressive’ art.
      In fact we have now a new official art to the furtherance and protection of which the whole Establishment is committed. It is the new academicism and it is open to doubt whether in the end it is more amusing or desirable that the old.
      It has traditionally been the position of the modern artist that he has found outside the world of official encouragement. His art was unconventional, disturbing, etc., and he was driven to work out his salvation alone and apart.

And:

Those painters who to-day work under the banner or label of the Modern, the Progressive, can hardly accuse the public of not taking notice. They are the spoiled children (Baudelaire’s phrase in 1859 for the established) of a vast culture-loving audience. What they inherit is the enthusiasm which these people would have showered on the neglected masters had they but known, etc. Above all they inherit the developed taste for certain qualities in the art of painting. Particularly the appreciation of what everybody knows to be the sensual quality of paint. The phrase, alas, has not any obscene connotations, and the whole idea is thoroughly healthy, eminently acceptable in the suburbs.
      The suburbs are also thoroughly familiar with the postulates of the New Art.

That’s 1959. Apply in dollops to the current “era” in la poesía norteamericana. (For “sensual quality of paint” read “materiality of the signifier”; for “New Art” read “post-avant” or “hybrid”; for “spoiled children” read “spoiled children.” Etc.) Regarding the kind of hand-wringing and nervousness regarding some supposed “succession” one sees in Ron Silliman’s recent fool’s romp through generational “meanings”: “If there were such a thing as a direct and simple progression from the work of one generation to the next the historical difficulty of the Progressive Artist could not exist.” Swift:

For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

Shortly thereafter—in 1962—Swift settled in a small fishing village, Carvoeiro, in Portugal’s Algarve, where he remain’d painting (a single solo exhibit in Lisbon in 1974), dying in 1983.

—

Off out of the beloved hinterlands, and into some varying coastal ranges. Spit in the ocean, back in a week.

Patrick Swift, “Woodcock on Chair,” c. 1950

Patrick Swift, “Interior,” c. 1951

Patrick Swift, “Positano (Through a Window),” c. 1954

Patrick Swift, “Patrick Kavanagh,” 1960

Patrick Swift, “Olive Tree,” c. 1963

Patrick Swift, “Algarve Landscape,” c. 1970s

Patrick Swift, “Fig Tree with Figure,” c. 1970s

Patrick Swift, c. 1978
(Photograph by Tim Motion)

Clark Coolidge’s Mine: The One That Enters the Stories

Hay

Clark Coolidge, out of Mine: The One That Enters the Stories (The Figures, 1982 & 2004):

      I must tell you that in its entirety I cannot fill in the landscape of my own background. Great gulfs exist that I can plumb exactly with resonant pendula but cannot describe. Even the letters comprising my name seem to me divided by such gaps, each one at variance with the rest in its extent. Too, each letter is sounded differently, as if by different instruments, making up a klangfarbenmelodie. Each one of my works attempts to reproduce this nominal effect, but seen in such a glaring light they all must be taken as failures. Perhaps at the last I myself will more perfectly come to resemble my name.

Tilting, I am, a burnt rasher at that stew of incorruptibles, the stack of books. Coolidge, here—and, particularly, in lines out of the succeeding paragraph (“What shines more brilliantly than dogged failure in the annals of coincidence? To smoke a cigar in the darkened hallway, to be shot by a nervous cook”)—recalls Beckett (“A kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—he’s talking about the paintings of Jack Butler Yeats or Jean Antoine Watteau, or both (“JBY gets Watteauer & Watteauer” is what he tells Thomas McGreevy): “The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between.” The gaps and impenetrables, Coolidge’s haunting: “Left to me it is all done excepting me. I must now go forth unerringly to the still point.” Or: “Get a tight shot of the man’s hand just as it is about to gasp the knob. Approach the wall with a neutral intensity of focus, as if all the world were a periphery.” (That hand returns in a later section: “His mind was not on, but his hand was on the throttle.”) A pervasive sense of “witlessness,” automatism, hubbub: “Music had not yet been invented. Speech was felt to be the final solution.”

So I begin at the beginning and find—two sentences into the trees: “Lots of what you read seems to go to make up one big anonymous voice, it’s not really that you just can’t remember exactly who said anything. Something in writing makes me want to get up, avoid, and walk around to no purpose. Perhaps this will be a big book of very little definition.” And, soonest: “as Beckett says”—imploring my intuit. Though, in a wash of explicits, there’s Joyce evoked, too: “The time it takes for things set together to adhere.” And Kerouac (Coolidge still troubling the “site”—comme on dit—of the writing): “Did he keep stopping, and then did he pace? Or did he run it all off quick spontaneous as Kerouac says in a sluice. The muffin jars . . . I have to remember to listen slowly to my lines or pay the price of thinking them wrong.” What begins to accrue: how different Coolidge’s mayhem compared to the plod-predetermined eyeballing (more Ishmael Reed’s “reckless eyeballing,” say, than Emerson’s “all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing”) of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, that sense of a sensory apparatus collecting debris to fill in the blanks:

Rising after a long sleep, the terrible weight of the body causes the roughly 50 bones of each foot to settle, snapping and popping as they shift into place. Any single story house is more expensive to build, requiring as it does a maximum of foundation per square foot of living space. Ranch style flows white over the pale leaves of old lettuce. Traffic lights blinking signal a malfunction.

. . .

Optical dimultiplexer divides data packets via nonlinear loop mirror: minimize connotations per word. To ride a giant seahorse is to render the physical world by desire.

Incorporate your weekend home as a nonprofit. Catfood for catfish (they swarm to the surface, competing for each bite). Small, red berry clusters of Jack-in-the-pulpit line the walk.

Somewhere—on television—one sees daylight. A full night of holding these quilts aloft over my body, a night of sheer effort. FedEx it. Modem moans when you shut it off.

Curb appeal. I stand under the awning, arms akimbo, in the rain but not of it. The blue route. Geese against the gray sky. Fed exit.

That, randomly, out of “You.” How direct—beyond the methodical scattershot (to thwart syllogistics, if one attends to “The New Sentence” rhetoric)—Silliman’s array of (fairly pedestrian) observations appears when posed against the writerly fling (all “tools” at one’s disposal) of Coolidge (I think, too, of Williams’s A Novelette admonishing: “It takes writing such as unrelated passing on the street to rescue us for a design that alone affords conversation”—the block’d out in advance: ¡No pasarán!):

The light’s avenue must be meltless, or risk rouge damage definition in the bargain. Subheading: Spalls. Between the gates of writing it grows hard to see. That’s when we start the joke of the two-handed pens. And crane to see the brains begin. And loft the yellow anklet over the tarn, lots past to see. The imagination is brought, now I view. Enough tattered and I won’t swoon, over anything pictured cabbages huge on officialdom tar fire wall of recence in persiflage. The guy has got his door open and now he whistles rarely. Radio thoughtless provide backup of bebop harmonica. But why not then the clarinet? The meat marvels are cloistering buckle by vernal buckle.

There’s a cubist sense of constant re-adjustment—no static point of delivery (no eyeball: “The imagination is brought, now I view”), no adherence to pat “limiting of syllogistic movement” or any other kind of rulebook formalisms, “in the compositional throes, anything goes.” Cubist: think how constrictedly (energetically) one’s “stance” must re-adjust (“A sentence producing pronounced uneasiness”—Coolidge, later) in a sentence like, “The light’s avenue must be meltless, or risk rouge damage definition in the bargain.” “Light’s avenue”—a sun-shaft, streetlight down through leaves; “must”—a warning; “meltless”—unmelting, constant, fierce light of morning, or evening; “risk rouge”—redness of the dying day interrupting the “light’s avenue,” obliterating it; “rouge damage”—is the light glinting off a woman’s shiny face?; “rouge damage definition”—some spalling off of the defined—the sentence itself enacting it “in the bargain.” A sentence as a series of incompatible stands. (Coolidge, early: “Where was I? Standing here sitting.”)

Against (combined with) the cubist: the epic. Coolidge:

The term “epic length” is a formation of noncommunicating closets. Reverberations change the scale. Proportions are storable And the mind go on to the ends of the world? Reading is a drag because you want to have finished it yourself. I once said I wanted to write a novel that would be here today. Amend that to read, written already three thousand years. No, I’d rather write it than read it. Or at least get to the point of not knowing whether I was writing or reading.

The epic existing in the cubist the way the whole exists in the gaps and patches (Coolidge: “I think it all back to when in the middle I didn’t know a novel could be done. I thought it lasted and I was right but in patches. The top of the mountain mirrored in the snow of its neighbor. And everything comes pilfering, allaying, exacerbating down.”) Which sends one back—the way “not knowing whether I was writing or reading” does—to Beckett (“Words and Music”):

words: [disregarding, cold] Seen from above at such close quarters in that radiance so cold and faint with eyes so dimmed by . . . what bad passed, its quite . . . piercing beauty is a little . . .

[Pause.]

. . .

[Pause.]

. . . blunted. Some moments later however, such are the powers of recuperation at this age, the head is drawn back to a distance of two or three feet, the eyes widen to a stare and begin to feast again. [Pause.] What then is seen would have been better seen in the light of day, that is incontestable. But bow often has it not, in recent months, bow often, at all hours, under all angles, in cloud and shine, been seen, I mean. And there is, is there not, in that clarity of silver ... that clarity of silver ... is there not ... my Lord ... [Pause.] Now and then the rye, swayed by a light wind, casts and withdraws its shadow.

A pause and croak is heard to groan.

—

Sit a spell and consider how lovingly Marianne Moore thieved Hardy’s “Attack is more piquant than concord,” and insert’d it into the brilliantly syllabic “To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity” whose “mere” pacing—“I can but put my weapon up, and / Bow you out”—offers up a postpositive galore of thrills:

“Attack is more piquant than concord,” but when
      You tell me frankly that you would like to feel
            My flesh beneath your feet,
                  I’m all abroad; I can but put my weapon up, and
                        Bow you out.
Gesticulation—it is half the language.
      Let unsheathed gesticulation be the steel
            Your courtesy must meet,
                  Since in your hearing words are mute, which to my senses
                        Are a shout.

Completely disarming. Williams (Spring and All): “The incomprehension of her poems is witness to at what cost (she cleaves herself away) as it is also to the distance which the most are from a comprehension of the purpose of composition.”

Clark Coolidge
(Photograph by Kevin Killian)