Rukeyser’s “Gibbs”

A Tree

The way notes fit so poorly into the unguard’d splay of the quotidian. (Or is it that my foreshorten’d—time-cramp’d—ruckus of compiling disallows a proper fulgency of means.) (Allows a roiling turgidity and “bounce.”) Poking around in Muriel Rukeyser’s work—a poem call’d “Gibbs” (curious what impel’d her to write the biography, Willard Gibbs)—reading:

It was much later in his life he rose
in the professors’ room, the frail bones rising
among that fume of mathematical meaning,
symbols, the language of symbols, literature . . . threw
air, simple life, in the dead lungs of their meeting,
said, “Mathematics is a language.”

. . .

There is no disorganization, for there is no passion.
Condense, he is thinking.       Concentrate, restrict.
This is the state permits the whole to stand,
the whole which is simpler than any of its parts.
And the mortars fired, the tent-lines, line of trains,
earthworks, breastwork of war, field-hospital,
Whitman forever saying, “Identify,”
Gibbs saying
                          “I wish to know systems.”

. . .

                                                        Years of driving
his sister’s coach in the city, knowing the
rose of direction loosing its petals down
atoms and galaxies.       Diffusion’s absolute.
Phases of matter!       The shouldering horses pass
turnings (snow, water, steam) echoing plotted curves,
statues of diagrams, the forms of schemes
to stand white on a table, real as phase,
or as the mountainous summer curves when he
under New Hampshire lay while shouldering night
came down upon him then with all its stars.
Gearing that power-spire to the wide air.

. . .

Withdrew.
                      It will be an age of experiment,
or mysticism, anyway vastest assumption.
He makes no experiments.       Impregnable retires.
Anyone having these desires will make these researches.
Laws are the gifts of their systems, and the man
in constant tension of experience drives
moments of coexistence into light.
It is the constitution of matter I must touch.

Deduction from deduction : entropy,
heat flowing down a gradient of nature,
perpetual glacier driving down the side
of the known world in an equilibrium tending
to uniformity . . .

. . .

                                                            He knew the composite
many-dimensioned spirit, the phases of its face,
found the tremendous level of the world,
Energy : Constant, but entropy, the spending,
tends toward a maximum—a “mixed-up-ness,”
and in this end of levels to which we drive
in isolation, to which all systems tend,
Withdraw, he said clearly.

. . .

                                                                    Withdrew, but in
his eager imperfect timidities, rose and dared
sever waterspouts, bring the great changing world
time makes more random, into its unity.

Typing what moves (tacking it down to the drying board). There’s a line about “a streak of brightness / bland on the quartz, light-blade on Iceland spar / doubled” that sent me off to Pynchon’s Against the Day (wherein Iceland spar’s associated with “bilocation”—a person’s ability to inhabit two places simultaneously, and where one of the Traverses (Kit) studies mathematics with Willard Gibbs). Too, I think, typing, of Ronald Johnson’s terrific Ark (beyond the “Gearing” of “that power-spire to the wide air,” Johnson’s way of seeing outs in the minuscule’s aping of the gigantesque, that “rose of direction loosing its petals down / atoms and galaxies,” or the way the “shouldering horses” turnings mimic “shouldering night” and its star-whorls.

“Gibbs” is part of a group of five “Lives” that appear’d in Rukeyser’s A Turning Wind (1939), the others being pieces about painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, labor organizer (in the New England textile mills) Ann Burlak, writer John Jay Chapman, and composer Charles Ives. Rukeyser wrote that the batch “is intended to stand with “The Book of the Dead” as part of a projected work, U. S. 1. The five people around whom it is written are Americans—New Englanders—whose value to our generation is very great and partly unacknowledged.” (Thus Rukeyser’s biography of Gibbs—publish’d in 1942—succeeds the poem.) Rukeyser—in the late ’thirties—is investigating the kind (Ryder, Ives) of individuals Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams (along with Johnson), amongst others, adopt (and extol) shortly thereafter: and there’s little (if any) mention made of Rukeyser. (Who reads Rukeyser? It’s entirely possible that my sense of that readership—or its lack—is “off.” The failure (and subsequent sense of Rukeyser’s being caught between partisans of the various warring “clumps”) may be my own.) Isn’t Rukeyser (particularly in “The Book of the Dead”) central to a whole documentary writing thrust that flourishes in the ’thirties and includes things like John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925)—follow’d by the terrific trilogy U.S.A. with The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), Charles Reznikoff’sTestimony (1934), and James Agee and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)?

Diminish’d “bounce” today.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1913-1980
(Photograph by Oscar White)

Niggling the Factitious

Some Clouds

Sun-shedding hours spent niggling Roethke’s line “Wren-song in trellis” (sonic-comparable to Keats’s “Hedge-crickets sing” to my ear, with the add’d pleasure of the spouting form of the trellis mimicking that of the wren’s hazardous up-bubbling spray) to no end (a daub of a piece that “gets to” Zeus falling down in the form of a miser’s pile of gold “eagles” into the lap of Danaë, you can see reason for its perennial squib-status, I suspect)—resulting (gulp) in a morning need (now) for the manufactory of “an outlandish garment of my own devising” (Melville, White-Jacket)—isn’t it ever so? For some days now, thinking, too, of Melville’s late (1888) prose-sliding-into-verse piece “John Marr” with its “lone-hearted mariner” stuck amongst an inland bunch—“hard-working endurers of the dispiriting malaria—men to whom a holiday never came—and they had too much of uprightness and no art at all or desire to affect what they did not really feel.” Marr’s attempts out there in the prairie (with its “long, green, graduated swells, smooth as those of ocean becalmed”) to recount a story (“to divert his own thoughts from sadness, and in some degree interest theirs, by adverting to aught removed from the crosses and trials of their personal surroundings”), to “slide into some marine story or picture”:

. . . would soon recoil upon himself and be silent, finding no encouragement to proceed. Upon one such occasion an elderly man—a blacksmith, and at Sunday gatherings an earnest exhorter—honestly said to him, “Friend, we know nothing of that here.”

And (what I keep thinking of):

Such unresponsiveness in one’s fellow-creatures set apart from factitious life, and by their vocation—in those days little helped by machinery—standing, as it were, next of kin to Nature; this, to John Marr, seemed of a piece with the apathy of Nature herself as envisaged to him here on a prairie where none but the perished mound-builders had as yet left a durable mark.

The “apathy of Nature”: my dog—lacking any robust sense of factitiousness—woofs no notice of any “garment of my own devising,” the trellis’d wren continues its insipid liquid song. (I think of Stein’s “I am I because my little dog knows me,” late dog-agency skint’d out of its original “What is a sentence for if I am I then my little dog knows me” (in How To Write, 1931), wherein—as Ulla Dydo’s noted—“the ‘I,’ not the dog, is the agent of recognition and identity.”) Dydo also quotes (in Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923-1934) lines out of Stein’s How Writing Is Written manuscript, talking about how “When the success began and it was a success I got completely lost”:

So many people knowing me I was I no longer and for the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was worse I could not worry about not writing and what was also worse I began to think about how my writing would sound to others, how could I make them understand, I who had always lived within myself and my writing.

Success itself—it, too, “lacking any robust sense of factitiousness”—become the agent of identity. Between the two, Melville’s word-annulling “apathy” and Stein’s success that “was a success”: mean row to hoe. Apropos: Bernadette Mayer’s endlessly repeatable admonishing (in these days of careerist-bleating): “Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.”

—

Alert’d by correspondent Robert Gibbons to the William White-edit’d three volumes of Whitman’s Daybooks and Notebooks print’d circa 1978 by New York University Press. Volume III’s full of Whitman’s notes about words (“Words,” “The Primer of Words,” “Other Notebooks, &c. on Words”—things glean’d off stray papers, lists of words, &c.) (Too, it prints a “Diary in Canada” and a few scant pages of “Autobiographical Notes.”) Out of “The Primer of Words”:

      In most instances A characteristic word once used in a poem, speech, or what not, is then exhausted;—he who thinks he is going to produce effects by piling freely using strong words, is but a ignorant of words.—A great true composition in words, is returns the human body, male or female—that is the most perfect composition, and shall be best-beloved by men and women, and shall last the longest, which slights no part of the body, and repeats no part of the body.—To make a good great perfect composition in words is more than to make the best building or machine, or any the best statue, or picture. . . .

Loud Whitmanic chord pound’d (elbows flung out to bang the keyboard). Within it a small reverberant note continuing (driving itself wedge-like) into Williams’s: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” I doubt Williams’d seen the note, though Horace Traubel’d printed the material in 1904 in An American Primer, by Walt Whitman, With Facsimiles of the Original Manuscript. Edition of 500. (City Lights reprint’d that in 1970.) Notable, too, lines out of Traubel’s Foreword, wherein he claims to quote Whitman (referring to the Primer material):

“This subject of language interests me—interests me: I never quite get it out of my mind. I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment—that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech—an American, a cosmopolitan (the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according—yes, what is more, they will have such a new tongue—will not be satisfied until it is evolved.”

“Language experiment.” Thus the hours, shed of the niggling sun, get spent.

Thomas Eakins, “Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey,” 1887

Marcia Roberts’s Autumn’s Slant and In the Bird’s Breath

Some Clouds (Ann Arbor)

The difficulty: to capture the nature of the amass’d, succeedingly add’d particulars (without simply redoing the whole). The book: Marcia Roberts’s Autumn’s Slant (Effing Press, 2009). Some random “captures”:

¡Así hagamos nos todos         justos y pecadores!

followers of el Cid learn to ride la jineta like the Moors
dropping heavy armour and raising stirrups

Estas son las nuevas         de mío Cid el Campeador

the one who carves notches in a coral plank sings

how in the heck can I wash my neck
if it ain’t gonna rain no more

. . .

the woman’s soft voice         west of Albuquerque
I am a tough old bird         a child of WNAX
                                        where land meets sky

in the cradle of the Tigris
oil is thicker than barbed wire

and on the plains         horses’ names begin
Baldy, Bobby, Babieca         and the blue roan

brothers ride bareback, dodging prickly pear and prairie dogs
damn, you got old, the deaf one says to the other

. . .

framing begins by shaping one’s hands then by making close-ups
of prickly pear blooms or rust splotches on rocks         because
of framing writing is difficult         however         watering dune
tansies is no longer prohibited

. . .

the earth shakes its anger on the ocean floor
9.0 and a tsunami         300,000 lost

it is winter
troops in Mosul die at their meal

the grotesque mouth on the spine of the Goya book moves
I look again         it’s the face and arm of the maja desnuda

Steve laughs about falling
I laugh too because it’s what we do
laugh until we cry and can’t breathe
then we laugh some more

. . .

Mother and I see JFK the day he dedicates the Oahe Dam. His
motorcade drives by the intersection where we wait to get on
the paved road. He stands in the Lincoln convertible and waves.

The day he is shot, mother breaks the news to Dad, who says,
“Why? That boy never hurt anyone.”

Something completely disarming about the voice here: a whole mix of registers—innocent, undaunt’d, discerning, opprobrious, funny—that allows a seamlessness to the “framing” (and makes the writing seem hardly “difficult” at all). Hence, the radiant combo of percepts personal and political, a diffusing of the all throughout (see Pound’s “All ages are contemporaneous” in The Spirit of Romance—Roberts’s book is construct’d of four cantos: a series of bags capable of being endlessly fill’d, or extend’d by new cantos: the fust imperator in me says: do it)—the words of El Cantar de M ío Cid entangling the anonymous ditty “It Ain't Gonna Rain No More,” exactly the way crying entangles laughter (or “prickly pear blooms” become interchangeable with “rust splotches,” the naked maja’s “face and mouth” transform into a “grotesque mouth.”) ¡Así hagamos nos todos         justos y pecadores! = So do we all       the just and the unjust! The echoes of El Cid throughout (Canto I carries the epigraph: “estas son las nuevas         these are the deeds”) make for a ready trajectory—the incidents of a life (in all its legendary meagernesses and / or horrifying public impingements) and, in Roberts’s case, provide a parallel / counterpoint to the vaquero-story’d place (“en este lugar . . . / there is no goodbye”)—the American West—of the piece.

A sense of endless lament—for the lost, the dying, the country’s old ways—pervades Roberts’s work (combat’d by: screwy humor). Effing Press’s Scott Pierce sent a copy, too, of Roberts’s In the Bird’s Breath (Effing Press, 2009), a sequence that’d seem “of a piece” with Autumn’s Slant, a sequence looking to find its place in a trajectory of one grand writing. In its final part—“(an epilogue)”—Roberts writes: “I may be the last of our kind. a field of goats, an uprooted tree, and Texas is green. André Gide said poets should never use therefore . . .” And, earlier: “one can grieve for a landscape, a day in Segovia, dinner at Viejo Leon. this grief is not staccato. it is lento and soft . . .” Against the quotidian anarchy and mischievous (serious) interrupt of:

read a little Tolstoy, read a little Berrigan
read a little . . . . watch out for dicks with guns

the army doesn’t want you
to have a tattoo
my advice: get out and get one fast

you ordinary citizen, you know
you can survive a shotgun blast

(And: wry counter to a “homeland”-secured epoch whence “ordinary citizen” seemingly equals “expendable, discard”: “a sign on the light pole tells us ‘Venom is more important that you.’ I am not disheartened by this missal because I’ve been told that I’m an ordinary citizen.”

A final note. That Marcia Roberts is unmistakably a woman writing (and the different “catch”—meaning what, entanglement, anchor, snag, acquisition?—of “woman writing,” of being caught in a succession of making women / made offspring) seems perfectly put in two couplets (out of Autumn’s Slant) present’d (pure unostentatious stripped-down joy, and deflating, marvelously retrograding grief) on facing pages:

the beauty of the daughter overwhelms her
she wants the child to be her art, herself

Against:

when the mother dies, the daughter is 54
she looks and feels twelve

Marcia Roberts

Rukeyser’s Darwin and the Writers

Some Clouds (Lake Michigan)

Read Muriel Rukeyser’s Darwin and the Writers, edit’d by Stefania Heim, a number (Series 1, Number 3) in the Lost & Found booklets of the Poetics Documents Initiative. Rukeyser attempts to disentangle the response of various writers to “the powerful and ramifying influence of Darwinism”—quoting largely. Thus, James Russell Lowell, of science: “I hate it as a savage hates writing, because I fear it will hurt me somehow,” and, of evolution, “Such a mush seems to me a poor substitute for the Rock of Ages—,” part of a sentence in a letter of September 12, 1879 (to one Grace Norton) that continues, “by which I understand a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid under their feet in all weather.” Rukeyser’s argument is that Darwin allow’d writers—beyond exemplary attendings and observational tact—a muster’d leaning toward a processual approach to the world and its writ authority: “Darwin turned loose the threat for those who could not let themselves see transformation as a preserver of form.” (Rukeyser asks emphatically: “What does inner security rest on? . . . Does it rest on dogma or transformation?” and makes it clear—a thing “of use” in the “era” of shouting loud dogmas today—that “If the answer is dogma, then every writer who wants to write with authority, to say This is the way things are, is threatened.”) So Whitman, who, according to Rukeyser’s reading, found Darwin’s “refusal to deal with ‘hopes and fears’”—“the omission of soul” in what one’d call Darwin’s objectivism—an incompleteness and a disappointment. Rukeyser:

In the superb passage, part of Specimen Days, where we find Whitman’s “Truth consists in the just relations of objects to each other,” he goes on to say that while Darwin—and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel and Kant—are indispensable “to the erudition of America’s future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights of the old prophets and exaltés, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands, (as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is, something lacking—something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions of the soul—a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the old exaltés, and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers so far do not.”

Which may be Whitman’s version of being content with (seeing the necessity for) “half knowledge”—those “lightning flashes and flights” akin to any “fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery.” (Darwin’s own “poetic” stance is caught in the story—possibly apocryphal—of the gardener who, ask’d of Darwin’s health, reportedly reply’d: “Poor man, he just stands and stares at a yellow flower for minutes at a time. He would be better off with something to do.”)

Rukeyser’s essay is fleet, sparing of connective tissue (and full of similarly skint remarks—she quotes George Bernard Shaw’s preface to Man and Superman : “Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto,” and adds, leaping with utmost faith, “The juxtaposition of Darwin, Job, and Handel is a fertile one: we are back at “the rare union.” (The essay, found in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection archives, went unpublish’d, reject’d by The Nation in 1959—editor Heim suggests in an excellent “Afterword” that Rukeyser’s onus and “failure” is the result of “the way she mixed fields and registers”—she wrote a biography of the reclusive, little known mathematician and “father of physical chemistry” Willard Gibbs, only to see it disparaged—by Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Nation (1943): “A climax of absurdity seems to be reached in the fifth chapter from the last, which is entitled Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs, and in which, by implication at least, we seem to be asked to see the relation between the second law of thermodynamics and the White Whale”—to which Heim retorts: “Ironically, Krutch put his finger on one of the most radical, important, and, here, relevant aspects of Rukeyser’s book . . . the articulation of a “meeting-place” between scientific and literary imaginations.”) It is, as Heim reiterates out of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (1949), “the dialogue of separation which begets separation.” Applicable to the internecine fronts, too.

Rukeyser ends—rather inconsequently, I’d think, though it allows her to say “The poet is a scientist, a doctor”—by quoting Williams’s mention of Darwin in “Asphodel That Greeny Flower”:

. . . There is no power
                  so great as love
                                    which is a sea,
which is a garden—
                  as enduring
                                    as the verses
of that blind old man
                  destined to live
                                    forever.
Few men believe that
                  nor in the games of children.
                                    They believe rather
in the bomb
                  and shall die by
                                    the bomb.
Compare Darwin’s voyage of The Beagle,
                  a voyage of discovery if there ever was one
                                    to the death
incommunicado
                  in the electric chair
                                    of the Rosenbergs.
It is the mark of the times
                  that though we condemn
                                    what they stood for
we admire their fortitude.
                  But Darwin
                                    opened our eyes
to the garden of the world
                  as they closed them . . .

I turn’d to Lorine Niedecker’s late and terrific “Darwin” that begins:

His holy
                  slowly
                                    mulled over
      matter
not all “delirium
                  of delight”
                                    as were the forests
      of Brazil

“Species are not
                  (it is like confessing
                                    a murder)
      immutable”

And ends:

I remember, he said
                  those tropical nights at sea—
                  we sat and talked
      on the booms

Tierra del Fuego’s
                  shining glaciers translucent
                                    blue clear down
      (almost) to the indigo sea

(By the way Carlyle
                  thought it most ridiculous
                                    that anyone should care
      whether a glacier

moved a little quicker
                  or a little slower
                                    or moved at all)
      Darwin

sailed out
                  of Good Success Bay
                                    to carcsss-
      conclusions—

the universe
                  not built by brute force
                                    but designed by laws
      The details left

to the working of chance
                  “Let each man hope
                                    and believe
      what he can”

Niedecker’s stripping out the verbiage of Darwin’s May 22, 1860 letter to Asa Gray:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars . . . On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. . . .

Hence Whitman’s disappointment. Hence, too, the flux Rukeyser sees. Heim: “As Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry, ‘Growth is the security of organic life. The security of the imagination lies in calling, all our lives for more liberty, more rebellion, more belief.’”

Muriel Rukeyser, c. 1945
(Photograph by Imogen Cunningham)

Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley

A Wall

I don’t know: continue with the manner’d scraps and evidences of my massy white solvency, its high billow and sway? (“Cloud in trousers” motif.) Roiling heaps of achingly white cumulonimbus clouds—“with the shape of an anvil extending to great heights”—what’s reap’d of the post-tornado weather morning (one spiral’d down just after 2 a.m. near Dundee)—that’s how it is. Drove hunch’d and knuckled through a car-cladding passel of hard rain a couple hours earlier between Kalamazoo and Jackson with the radio hemorrhaging the screwy old school bruitages électroniques (think Mother Mallard with Moog synth) every few minutes for another National Weather Service update (spieling off the names of places where one’d be advised—a tournevis is a screwdriver, a tournesol is a helioptropic yellow flower—to seek shelter in an “interior room”) before returning to the Percy Sledge song (“Dark End of the Street”) interrupt’d. Shelter sought in a brain-box.

Reading Jeremy M. Davies’s splendidly-wrought Rose Alley (Counterpath, 2009). A book of sentences and hypotheses. Here’s a sentence (of a “shark, raised by winch out of the ocean”): “Its leering mouth, squished open like a toppled drunk’s, was biting the ground with sea-tarnished teeth, each incisor long and wide enough to copy Johnson’s Dictionary onto if you started at the tip and went in a spiral to the gum.” Here’s another (of one Abelard Pantry in a photograph—“the new century’s vogue for verisimilitude made . . . prettifying déclassé, so posterity is free to see him wincing in every shot”): “Under a magnifying glass we can make out Abelard’s baby-face, twisted to a point like stirred pudding.” Here’s a hypothetical spat (or spate), caught up out of the characteristics of one “ambidextrous” Raoul Foche—lighting-cameraman “with his spring-driven 8mm Bolex” in post-événements 1968 Paris, where he, along with the majority of others in the novel, is attempting to put together a film recounting the “Rose Alley ambuscade” wherein hirelings of the libertine rake and satirist John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, assault’d (“beat him with cudgels”) John Dryden on the suspicion of the latter’s having assisted John Sheffield, third Earl of Mulgrave in a passage in Sheffield’s Essay on Satire that reflect’d poorly on Rochester’s “want of wit”—oh dear—(“neither his hands nor his brain knew right from left, and as a kid he’d inverted the order of letters and sentences to such a degree that he was functionally illiterate into his teens, reading and writing an almost-accurate patois based on shape and pattern recognition—living only on the surface of words, their similarities as pictograms, eventually as sounds, rather than their corresponding, representational content”):

This peculiarity extended beyond literacy: having learned to organize his thoughts according to broad categories and correspondences—the shapes of ideas, filed according to his own idiosyncratic method of cataloging—Raoul would interrupt a story involving—say—a stray dog with a broken and dragging leg, seen drinking from a sewer in Oran at dawn, to begin six other stories concerning dogs or legs, fusty water, curbs, cites, the qualities of morning sunlight in North Africa, the tune he’d whistled as he walked, and so forth. If a listener interrupted to ask for the point or punchline of the initial yarn, Raoul lost his train of thought entirely, looking as confused and affronted as someone sidetracked by a rude non sequitur.

And I half want to say, that’s rather how the novel proceeds, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d thought that at several other moments (one of Davies’s epigraphs—by Robert Pinget—reads: “We’ll get there in the end, with a little method.”) For example, early we learn of a film—by Myrna Krause and Selwyn Wexler (“their first and only film to date”), collaborators, too, on the Rose Alley project, “the twenty-minute short Muzeum”:

This was a collection of miniatures, thirteen still lifes in thirteen continuous shots, ninety seconds in duration each. An elaborate system of eleven predetermined categories, subcategories, and corresponding lists of objects matching each classification—either likely, unlikely, invented, or inconceivable—was coauthored by Krause and Wexler and used to determine which subjects were to be filmed.

(Naturally, a turn to the list of Rose Alley’s chapters shows they number thirteen.) I’m tempt’d to argue—being a measly reader for the specifics of plot—that a novel’s simply a vehicle for delivering (terrific) sentences. Or may be. (See Shklovsky’s “plotless prose,” the Tristram Shandy, &c., &c.) I see, too, where, Robert Alter, in a chapter call’d “Style in America”—in Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton University Press, 2010)—calls for increased attention to, precisely, the evident and indeliquescent style of sentence-ry:

Novels are famously, or perhaps notoriously, translatable. That very translatability poses a challenge to anyone who thinks, as I do, that lexical nuances and patterns of sound and subtleties of syntax are crucial to the sense of reality articulated in novels. There is something scandalous . . . about the manifest translatability of the novel.

And he points to Flaubert—“a novelist fanatically devoted to stylistic refinements, aspiring to a prose, as he says in one of his letters, that will perform the high function in literary culture that was once the domain of poetry.” Susan Sontag works the prose / poetry split in an essay call’d “A Poet’s Prose” in Where the Stress Falls, quoting (amongst many) Mandelstam:

“Instruction is the nerve of prose,” Mandelstam wrote in an early essay, so that “what may be meaningful to the prose writer or essayist, the poet finds absolutely meaningless.” While prose writers are obliged to address themselves to the concrete audience of their contemporaries, poetry as a whole has a more or less distant, unknown addressee, says Mandelstam: “Exchanging signals with the planet Mars . . . is a task worthy of a lyric poet.”

(And somewhere Davies remarks how somebody is “gay as three grapes”—a puzzling—and excellent in its perplex—utterance—and, it seems, one Jonathan Williams—connoisseur of the outlandish—once used for Jack Spicer.)

Jeremy M. Davies

“A mean dispersal undeplor’d . . .”

At the Piano

Editor Claudia Moreno Pisano’s Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters, 1959-1960, the Lost & Found booklet, returns one to David Southern’s piece in the Dorn “American Heretic” issue of Chicago Review, “Forensics in the Provinces: Collecting the Correspondence of Edward Dorn.” Southern, attach’d to the ongoing printing of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, writes:

Thomas Carlyle and Ed Dorn have more than a little in common. Exceedingly bright, both were born into ordinary families of impoverished means and rural settings. Alert teachers—John Johnston in Scotland and Ray Obermayr in Illinois [who provided Dorn with the $300 that allow’d him to go to Black Mountain], noticed their talents and guided each toward a college where they might flourish. Once there—the University of Edinburgh for Carlyle, Black Mountain College for Dorn—special library privileges complemented their autodidactic curiosities. In their journeyman days, each would receive a career boost from an older writer—Carlyle from Goethe; Dorn from Charles Olson. Both would establish early a unique voice that would be received as unusually animated and conspicuous in originality. As they matured as writers, each would experience a lessening among their early enthusiasts. Their increasingly astringent opinions, as in Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and Dorn’s Abhorrences, reaped increasingly critical scorn. Both writers read widely, constantly; both enjoyed good talk but “would not suffer fools”; both wrote letters almost daily. Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus is, as Jane Carlyle wryly remarked in her notebook, a “philosophy of clothes.” Ed Dorn, too, had great sense of style—his selections, including those from thrift stores, were elegant. The comparison can be extended, though irrelevant coincidences might intervene.

Southern roughly (though plausibly) guesses at the numbers of Dorn letters (“If Dorn wrote three letters a day or fewer, say 1,000 a year on average, that would imply a body of about 50,000 letters. If he wrote half that many, and if half of that smaller sum is lost, the remainder is still comparable with the extent of the existing Carlyle holdings [clock’d in excess of 14,000 letters]”) and calls for an “Office of Dorn Letters,” arguing convincingly that the range of Dorn’s correspondence (“astute and timeless social criticism . . . combined with news and gossip”) and correspondents (mention is made of “incoming mail from more than 200 correspondents”―Tom Clark, Tom Raworth, Jeremy Prynne, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Dan Rice, Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker, Gael Turnbull, Kenneth Hansen, Donald Allen, Ken Irby, Robert Kelly, Elsa Dorfman, Lucia Berlin, Douglas Woolf, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, among others) would make of the letters a kind of “database of an epoch.” (One reads in the Lost & Found Dorn / Baraka booklet that the Paterson Society―recall O’Hara’s assiduously-refusing-naïvete non-statement―“I can’t think of any more than one poem at a time, so I would end up with a ‘poetics’ based on one of my poems which any other poem of mine would completely contradict”―was “Dorfman alone”:

The Paterson Society was ME. I arranged poetry readings in 1959 and 1960 and into say 64 for a variety of writers. And I took a percentage of the money and published some books, namely The Newly Fallen by Ed Dorn and Dutiful Son by Joel Oppenheimer. Actually I gave the money to Leroy, Amiri, and he published them. Those were the days when there were no poetry readings to speak of . . . and I set up tours, etc. I started because I was a secretary at Grove Press and did it to ostensibly have fun and publicize the writers in Evergreen Review.

Dorfman now known for splendid large-scale (20 by 24 inch) Polaroid photographs.)

(If the Carlyle / Dorn parallel appears inept or far-fetch’d, consider, put a couple spear’d moments of each up against one another. Carlyle (out of Sartor Resartus), whose Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is

. . . one of those who consider Society, properly so called, to be as good as extinct; and that only the gregarious feelings, and old inherited habitudes, at this juncture, hold us from Dispersion, and universal national, civil, domestic and personal war! He says expressly: “For the last three centuries, above all for the last three quarters of a century, that same Pericardial Nervous Tissue (as we named it) of Religion, where lies the Life-essence of Society, has been smote at and perforated, needfully and needlessly; till now it is quite rent into shreds; and Society, long pining, diabetic, consumptive, can be regarded as defunct; for those spasmodic, galvanic sprawlings are not life; neither indeed will they endure, galvanize as you may, beyond two days.”
      “Call ye that a Society,” cries he again, “where there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common over-crowded Lodging-house? Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbor, turned against his neighbor, clutches what he can get, and cries ‘Mine!’ and calls it Peace, because, in the cut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has become an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has no tongue but for plate-licking: and your high Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez faire; Leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than darkness; eat you your wages, and sleep!

Up against Dorn (out of Abhorrences: A Chronicle of the Eighties):

                                                                                4 July, 1986
Ode on the Facelifting of the “statue” of Liberty

America is inconceivable without drugs
and always has been. One of the first acts
was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished
the mansions of Virginia was tobacco,
a drug now in much disrepute.
Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for
and they dealt it by the bale altho it
was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire—
people were so simple in those days.
The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine
making amputation a pleasure and making
the block of wood between the teeth,
which was no drug, obsolete. Morphinism
was soon widespread among doctors and patients.
At this date interns, the reports tell us,
are among the premier drug ab/users
of said moralistic nation. “Rock” stars
(who notoriously “have” doctors)
consume drugs by the metric ton
even as they urge teenagers to Say No.
The undercurrent of American history
has been the running aches and pains
of the worn path to the door of the apothecary
to fetch cannabis and cocaine elixirs
by the gallon. It has been all prone
all seeking Florida, Ponce de León
was just the beginning of a statistical curve
whose only satisfaction would be total vertigo.
His eager search for youth has become our
frantic tilt with death and boredom,
in fact we are farming death in Florida
with far greater profit than we are
farming food in Iowa—elixirs are as multiform
as the life-style frauds we implore,
a cultural patchwork fit for a fool
in the only country in the world
with a shop called the Drug Store.

“Multiform / as the life-style frauds we implore.”)

A mean dispersal undeplor’d—so endeth the week. Tool’d around Ypsilanti yesterday in the late slanting cream-color’d light looking to make some photographs, and did. And read Douglas Woolf in the car.

Elsa Dorfman, “Bob Creeley Talking to Harry Rand,” c. 1969

Elsa Dorfman, “Jorge Luis Borges at the Midget Restaurant,” c. 1971

Elsa Dorfman, “Al Calienes and Mummenschanz,” 1995

Elsa Dorfman, “Me and My Camera,” 1986

Dorn’s Woolf / Percy’s Kafka

Parts

Dorn, in By the Sound, mining the speech of “transients,” its “abstract urgency,” meaning that “sidewise way they had of bringing up the most trivial issue, like how many miles away a town was, and endlessly tilting information until, no matter how plain, it had been made to show all its surfaces”:

Hey, you’re somking Dukes Mixture, let’s see the label. Yes I did hear that was named after Doris Duke, but I doubt if she smokes it. She might, she might, might roll ’er own, there’re some weird people, wear old cloths just like bums, fuck around in all sort of places you wouldn’t expect ’em to. You wouldn’t even know they were there. Well you sure as hell wouldn’t, every time I ever see you you got your eye on the sidewalk lookin for butts. Ya, well I wasn’t lookin for your goddamn clapped-up butt! I been keepin an eye out for Doris Duke’s butt. Well I’ll be damned, you think she ain’t got clap Maybe, maybe. If she has she got it someplace they sure as hell wouldn’t let you in, Christ! They’d throw your ass out of a place like that so fast what little brains you got left would arrive tomorrow on the slow freight, the conductor’d throw ’em off with his sandwich wrappers, shit! The depot flunky’d be out there with his broom and dustpan sweepin’ that mess up before you uncrossed your eyes and took your finger outa your ass . . .

What Dorn calls “the endless coprolalia” and the “wild accuracy of that foul, vented speech.” (Thinking how little of that is liable to accumulate in “our” post- i hate speech roarings, and where is one without that texture of nigh-preordain’d (rule-bound) hard-sass speech of the ones the system itself’s trash’d and abandon’d? Dylan’s line about how “a pounding on the walls” must be “Don Pasquale makin’ a two a.m. booty call” intercedes—lingo largely in absentia in the rarefy’d world of la poesía norteamericana.) Of the transients in By the Sound, Dorn notes, too, “the sturdiness of their resignations,” admitting that “it had a quieting effect on him because there was a deadly sophistication about it, he thought of them as pure scientists inspecting their own isolated condition. It was a ritual for them to explain to themselves with an antiseptic sense of duty every one of the reasons they should not accept a job just offered before they took it”:

You know, we’re gonna get out there and that bastard’s not gonna be ready to start whatever pissy-assed little chore he wants us to do and you know he’s not gonna pay until the minute we start, and when he does he’s gonna give us some phony personal check he wrote out with a stubby little pencil he licked he looks that stingy and they ain’t gonna wanta cash it at the Baseball, unless you’re lucky enough to have a tab to pay off then they’ll take it even if it’s bad those greedy sonsabitches.

Pre-sullen bowing to the chore, the inevitable bravado, that irrepressible shine of defiance and self-worth caught up (expulsed) in reckless speech. It admits a range (of experience, and of community) hardly approach’d by the self-appoint’d adjudicators of communitas (and its delinquents) in the rarefy’d world of &c. (Continuing—one guesses—an argument for less formal “triviality and meanness” (the squinch’d off poverty of style the post-language get-go’s got going) and more “real language” (recall Dorn’s lines in Yellow Lola: “Listen, if anybody out there’s / saying, you know, there’s / something new, and something / else or other’s not, well, / they should look it up.”)

I see Dorn—in “The New Frontier,” the early (1963) note regarding Douglas Woolf’s work—quotes “one of the few commentary passages” out of Hypocritic Days (1955)—that title’s out of Emerson’s “Days”:

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

—the day’s dervishings routing one’s unadorn’d wishes, and with scorn!—:

Loneliness is like the common cold, a contagious disease which we catch in public places and suffer in privacy. We turn from a man’s loneliness as instinctively as we turn from his sneeze, but his germ overtakes us easily. We carry it home and doctor it with old remedies, all patently useless: there is no known cure for loneliness. The best we can do is to give it to someone else. Just as soon as we observe our symptoms in another, our own become less severe. Now let him look for someone else to pass his to, for we have developed an immunity. In a week we’ll be feeling fit again, and an old man will die of unknown cause in Buffalo.

Recalling, somewhat—that mooting of severity caused by witness, that is, by “reading”—Walker Percy’s claim in “The Man on the Train” (in the 1975 The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other) “There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train . . . The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is!—which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation.” Or, in Woolf’s 1971 novel Ya!—reprint’d in Ya! and John-Juan (Dalkey Archive, 2002), the dolorous affirmatory chant of trucker Joe Day, “settling down”:

“I’m going to buy me a little house. I’ve already got her picked out. Ninety-nine dollars down and ninety-nine dollars a month. I’m going to buy me a colored telyvision, twenty-nine dollars down and twenty-nine dollars a month. I already have me four radios. I’m going to buy me a hi-fi and stereous console with FM. I’m going to buy me a family-room suite. I’m going to buy me a bedyroom suite. I’m going to buy me a kitchen suite. I’m going to buy me dishes and silverware with my monygrammy on them: J.D. Then I’m going to marry me the sweetest little girl in the world. I’ve already got her picked out. I’ve already bought the engagement ring, four ninety-nine down and four ninety-nine a month. When I marry that girl I’m going to swear to be true. No more chasing slash for this man. My wife is going to know she married a true man when she marries Joe Day. When I go to Seattle, I’m going to Seattle, know what I mean?”

Of course: it’s the story of stories here (still) in the misbegotten West, no book need’d. Dorn: “An open ear is the most valuable instrument a man can have out here.” And Percy: “It is related that when Kafka read his work aloud to his friends, they would all roar with laughter until tears came to their eyes. . . . To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word.”

Walker Percy, 1916-1990

Ed Dorn’s Douglas Woolf

A Tree

Overload’d circuitry, and a stormy morning advancing. I read off, etching some serpentine line through shallows soon effaced by the wavelets of my subsequent reading. (That’s what reading is: though one returns to the splashings, vaguely cognizant of each crepitant rip and rush of that same audacious water through narrows newly out-sculpt’d.) Ed Dorn, in the “Preface” to Douglas Woolf’s Hypocritic Days and Other Tales (Black Sparrow, 1993), talks about―he’s diagramming “western space” and “speed” (“speed overcomes space until it just turns into it”)—how a man ’d show up suddenly with “a couple of quarts of blackberries . . . picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away”—that, against the way “glaciers move a foot a day”—and concludes that here “is an energy flow over which post-modern critical theory can have no destructive control―any attempt to replicate this system results in immediate prophylaxis of the syntax.” The unsung replica: reading itself. Dorn, with outlandish verve (range-savvy of the omnivore) sees (in Woolf) that the writer’s (reader’s) “most radical and projective stylistic device was to embody ‘what is not there’ and to echo ‘what is not said’―the reading mind is arced across the gaps in the mental terrain―the spiritual imago of abandonment, the late-modern holocaustic onslaught on humanity and its animal relatives. For the race of live readers, these linguistic chasms switch on the enterokinase and the whole tryptic cognizance between the text and the story.” A claim that earns its duodenal appendage: “It’s the record.”

Jumpcut the ratiocinatory vignette. (Or, append’d: “Jumpcut the ratiocinatory vignette, Al.”) I got “to” Dorn’s Woolf by way of the Claudia Moreno Pisano-edit’d Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters, 1959-1960, the first number’d (Series 1, Number 1) booklet in the ambitious and excellent archival research and recovery “poetics document initiative” (point’d largely at “extra-poetic work . . . correspondence, journals, critical prose, and transcripts of talks” of, loosely, writers of the “New American” poetries) call’d Lost & Found, direct’d by Ammiel Alcalay. There’s a lovely exchange between Baraka (“how come we always argue about lowly prose writers, anyway”) and Dorn arguing the merits of Woolf against the Western novels of William Eastlake. Baraka (“[Mar ? 1960]”):

                                                            I just remember now you said “Woolf at Eastlake’s expense” or something? I liked Bronc People. . . also a story that was in a few Evergreens ago 3 Heroes And A Clown. But I did really dig those things of his a great deal. Also, a story I read long time ago called Little Joe. I haven’t read Woolf’s Fade Out, but I have liked the stories I’ve read (all you western cats hung up on “bureaucracy,” the hideousness of? As Woolf in “Cougher,” “Bank Day,” &c. seems to come back to that. Which, I’m aware, is valid. And probably you can see no heavy foot stance in Eastlake??

Dorn (“[Undated]”):

Mr. Jones—it’s that Eastlake in those novels does have a heavy foot down—the fucking pseudo-myth of the Indian translated talk—it’s a little “Old Testament” no? Besides I dig his stories too. And besides we’re not always arguing abt “lovely” prose writers. We—you & me, talk of lots of other things & besides, I agree w/ everything you say, almost.

Marvelous, the half-sneer of that “lovely.” Notes admit that Dorn wrote a piece call’d “The New Frontier” about Woolf (print’d in Kulchur in 1963). And that Creeley’d print’d Woolf’s The Hypocritic Days in Mallorca in 1955. Enough to trigger the readerly mouth-juices that connect directly to enzymatic enterokinase. Dorn’s later (1993) Woolf-piece (with an epigraph out of Melville’s The Confidence Man: “. . . where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase”) is full of Dorn’s own wolfishness, that sorely-lacking refusal of all the viciously boost’d gizmos of progress and advancement, and all the game kowtowing that allows its minions to persist. He writes:

      In the widely comic survey Douglas Woolf did of the outback west, its arresting simplicities, its provocative dangers, its fearsomely selfish embarrassments, its desperate resistance to the regimented and poisonous cloud of acculturation lying on the horizon, we have a deposition which will stand in rebuke and correction to the boosteristic waves of development forever enveloping the great hemispheric far high west. From Alaska to Patagonia, nobody who likes thin air will ever forgive them.

And if, for Woolf, “the whole struggling stratum” is mostly “amusing”—Dorn labels him “the nicest ironist since Swift”—Dorn’s own rage is eloquent in crescendo:

      “America” is a smug, hardhearted, unforgiving nation of jackals, which forever slaps itself on its back over how generous, selfless and idealistic it is. It is the most preposterous propaganda barrage since Goebbels ran an office, in bloodier and more interesting times.
      You go to the window. You look out at the immense night. You see the plow, you see the dipper, you see the fish and you see the net. Every thing blood and bone ever needed is shown and displayed in the sky. You can hunker down and pay the mortgage, and save yourself a lot of trouble, or you can see the show. There actually isn’t any other choice. For a mere traveller has no access to the haunts.

Woolf’s west, Dorn concludes, is “underlaid with genetic proto-temps, the outwash of the Great Depression.” (Surely Dorn count’d himself therein.) Woolf, who, no “mere traveller,” rang’d widely in nigh-constant mobility, working odd jobs, migrant farm work to stadium beer-hawking, living in makeshift shelters (“under blankets spread over tree branches”) and ghost towns, wrote: “I’m naturally devoted to the written word. It's the one thing man has that other animals do not. Parrots can talk, flies can fly, monkeys can drop things, technicians can copy them all. If there were only one reader left in the world, I would write to that one as lovingly as I do now.” There’s a terrific humility in that “naturally devoted” (and that “lovingly”)—it rejects all the sour jousting solicitude of the ready-ambitious, the rank implacable anxiety of the recently-arrived, the ubiquity of careerist mayhem un peu partout. It makes a plausible stance of pure calm indifference to all things beyond the immediate human scale: this word here and then that word there, “every thing blood and bone ever needed.” Here’s that glorious tar-black storm now.

Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

“What War?”

Barrier and Spout

Days off, without “the necessity of bestirring myself to procure my yams” (Melville of so-and-so in Mardi), I hover and drift, dandling my own soul, all self-dunning and excursus. I nap. I pander. I dally. Melville (in Pierre): “Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own every-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.” In an abrupt bout of mad agreeableness for the scant-wrought doings of my own long-hair’d self (circa 1972 or so), I typed “up” yesterday a piece out of Rubbing Torsos pertinent to the day whitewash’d by glory faux, and then left it unpost’d, a malediction. (What teenager’d recently ask’d, with some plaintive querulousness at history’s pre-plump’d succouring comport: “When someone says ‘the war,’ what war’s usually being refer’d to?”):

Memorial Day

You arrive like General Custer, outlaw this gunslinger
and buckle some infidel pact
to my shoulder blades as if it were football Saturday.

It isn’t and the helmet I am carrying is a fishbowl
full of stasis, a deliberate kitty of knots.
Here, strap it on. If you didn’t jerk so, they

wouldn’t call you Whiplash. Each morning
I set cream on you porch and some malingering tomcat
licks it clean as a new bayonet. A recruit’s

thin smile. The sky is a fish belly up, love is
like this or that, the war isn’t over. They’ll never
design a commemorative stamp big enough to patch it.

One endless war transport’d to different terrains, a way of revivifying the sodden (bloody) imperium. A way of adjusting to the fact of the big end unidentify’d and out there waiting. I thumb through a copy of Charles Wright’s newish Sestets (2009), looking for signs of war, “the war.” It’s all twilight and diversion, the tumble into the abyss, consolations of sundown (or, variously, the “staircase . . . / up into the Into”), with sidelights of memory’s leader tangled up like a rat’s nest in the alders, the inevitable snarl: “Pretty nice, but that was then, / when our hearts were meat on the grill.” Though, too, there is (war’s unflagging tin-authority made tuck in the asylum and clemency of speech) the piece call’d “Nothing Is Written”:

In a couple of hours, it will start all over again,
The stars will lean down and stare from their faceless spaces,
And the moon will boot up on the black screen of the sky,
                                                                humping toward God-knows-what,

And we, with our pinched mouths and pinched eyes, the next morning
Will see its footprint like a slice of snow
                                                                          torn off over Caribou,
Looking for somewhere else to be born.

A whole star-fleet of drones—that facelessness, see the “black screen of the sky”—with only the moon boot’d up and humping off, or in. Wright, in Italy, after the aftermath of WWII, notes (in “Remembering Bergamo Alto”) a “postapocalyptic poetry” that “starts with a dog bite / And featherless birds in the ruined trees, / People nowhere to be found.” The piece, wholly depopulated (“empty boulevards, / Chairs in the public parks with no one to sit in them”) veers off into a tiny punctilium of soundings immiscible (the “natural” prick’d by the human unseen), a Chekhovian move: “Mostly it’s wind in vacant spaces, / and piano chords from a high window.”

Williams, to Horace Gregory—May 9, 1944—“art is a transference—for psychic relief—from the actual to the formal, and if this can only be achieved by invention, by rediscovery, by reassertion by the intelligence and the emotions in any and every age—and if the grand aspect of this living drive is, when it occurs, a culture, then, I say, our chief occupation as artists, singly and jointly, should be the clarification of form, new alignments, in our own language and culture.” Note how quickly Williams’s “living drive” gets transform’d into war lingo (infiltrator of a culture’s subconscious): “We cannot go back because then the form becomes empty, we must move into the field of action and go into combat there on the new ground.” And: “We here about New York are most fortunate in having such a difficult ground and such a history, so beset by the enemy.” Is “the actual to the formal” a thing one’s able to reify out of the arch substrate of theory-talk? I don’t know. Days like these—the sky one whole cloud, the wars everywhere continuing (“on the condition of anonymity”)—I doubt the any form beyond that of the supplier of “the cunning alphabet” with its endless rub of variance, that “kingdom of minutiae” (Wright). The clouds not “piled like Armageddon / . . . intent on incursion,” the sunlight not “sealing—stretched like Saran Wrap— / The world as we know it, / keeping it fresh-flamed should tomorrow arrive” (Wright). Acrimony “at” lingo’s own “pre-plump’d succouring comport.”

Charles Wright
(Photograph by Holly Wright)

Grasshopper-y

“Stay Out!”

To trust Providence for provender―the kind of thing that outs in the aftermath of a bird’s nailing one with an ammoniac splat whilst bicycling to work. So Linnaeus (reporting the journey to Gotland of 1741):

Grasshoppers were chirping in the meadows, and we caught one. . . . The female draws out her tail like a long sword. The male is entirely green and has four teeth in his tail and two claws between his thighs; in the wings, which lie on top of one another, there is a round hole the size of a vetch-seed and covered with a thin membrane. When the grasshopper serenades his beloved he rubs his wings together and the taut membrane produces the sound; thus his song comes from his wings, not from his mouth. The female has no such instrument in her wings and is obliged to remain silent. . . .
      The mouth of both male and female consists of two pairs of jaws, the upper provided with a number of sharp teeth but the lower having none. . . . When the farmers have warts on their hands they take one of these grasshoppers and put the wart to its mouth. The grasshopper bites and injects a black corrosive liquid which removes the wart.

Make correspondings of Providence’s rude own with like: how I love that “hole the size of a vetch-seed”—its implacable and apt “to hand’dness.” (I doubt the efficacy of the grasshopper’s tobacco juice, though the milk of the milkweed smear’d with no stinginess against like excrescences protuberant causes the necessary dehiscence.) (Northern Michigan summer days, me in a tatter’d T-shirt and runt jeans trying endlessly to capture a flying Carolina grasshopper: sand-color’d, it’d land in the sandy track of the logging road, and clack noisily up at approach.) Lorine Niedecker, who says things “worth sticking to,” in a letter to Cid Corman (January 30, 1968), says of George Oppen (after a somewhat begrudging “yes, there’s something intriguing there”), that “there are times I’ve felt he’s down in the grass as an insect (singing from his knees), all angular, a kind of constipated grasshopper.” Is the sine qua non of grasshopper-y foolishness Socrates’s story in Plato’s Phaedrus?

A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them—they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking . . .

(Which’d make Niedecker’s Oppen-remark rather less condemning.) Too, Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (in lieu of the hedge-crickets): “The poetry of earth is never dead: / When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, / And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run / From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; / That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead / In summer luxury,—he has never done / With his delights . . .” Against Pound’s (Canto LII):

                Month of the longest days
Life and death are now equal
                Strife is between light and darkness
Wise man stays in his house
                Stag droppeth antlers
Grasshopper is loud,
               leave no fire open to southward.

Or the lovely (stunning by being so notably imprecise) line in Canto XVII: “Sunset like the grasshopper flying.” It’s Williams (in the second book of Paterson, the “Sunday in the Park” walk through Garret Mountain Park—“Outside / outside myself / there is a world”) whose grasshopper provenders my own:

            The file-sharp grass       .
　　　
When! from before his feet, half tripping,
picking a way, there starts           .
                          a flight of empurpled wings!
─invisibly created (their
jackets dust-grey) from the dust kindled
to sudden ardor!
　
                  They fly away, churring! until
their strength spent they plunge
to the coarse cover again and disappear
─but leave, livening the mind, a flashing
of wings and a churring song       .
　
AND a grasshopper of red basalt, boot-long,
tumbles from the core of his mind,
a rubble-bank disintegrating beneath a
tropic downpour
　
Chapultepec! grasshopper hill!

─a matt stone solicitously instructed
to bear away some rumor
of the living presence that has preceded
it, out-precedented its breath       .

These wings do not unfold for flight─
no need!
the weight (to the hand) finding
a counter-weight or counter buoyancy
by the mind’s wings       .

Chapoltepēc meaning “place of grasshoppers” in Nahuatl (see the Mexican word for grasshopper, chapulín). Of Cummings’s banally disjoint “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” there is little to say.

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Robert Walser’s Microscripts

Meter and Grindstone

Paul Valéry says somewhere: “Thinking is an indefinite deletion.” And Walter Benjamin recalls Robert Walser’s “admission that he never corrected a single line” (“We do not have to believe this, but would be well advised to do so. For we can set our minds at rest by realizing that to write yet never correct what has been written implies both the absence of intention and the most fully considered intentionality.”) Benjamin, in a lovely phrase, calls it “neglect of style,” and claims that it—paradoxically—“makes use of every conceivable form . . . with a single exception”: “namely, one in which only content and nothing else counts.” Thus: “Walser is so little concerned with the way in which he writes that everything other than what he has to say recedes into the background.” So, in Walser’s 1909 Jakob von Gunten (translated by Christopher Middleton):

To be robust means not spending time on thought but quickly and quietly entering into what has to be done. To be wet with the rains of exertion, hard and strong from the knocks and rubs of what necessity demands. I hate such clever turns of phrase. I was intending to think of something quite different.

As if writing itself, its minor adjustments and flourishes, saddled a rambunctious (and pure) intent with some monstrous material burden inassimilable because incompletely seized, never wholly on nor off. (Thinking demur—and hid—in the crosshairs of the sight point’d “at” it.) Here’s the beginning of Walser’s “New Year’s Page”—a piece out of the new (and sumptuously-made selection of Walser’s Microscripts, translated and with a fine introduction by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions / Christine Burgin, 2010):

Year rhymes with hear, appear. Someone tapped at my door, I shouted “come in” and then hid in the wardrobe, and the one arriving no doubt stood listening , waiting for quite some time. Many a novel has begun in a promising way. Last night in a dream, my hands were transformed into rotten, crumbling towers. A ruin, I mean to say an aging millionairess, once bequeathed to me one hundred thousand francs, which in short order I squandered. What a beguiling memory! Back then, when I would step out of a place of entertainment into the fresh air of the street, the perspectives had a fairy-tale quality to them. There’s no doubt something happy-making about spending money. I hope I shall soon succeed in penning a story that ought to be written as though a mandolin were being plucked. In the aforementioned dream my hands bellowed soundlessly for help. A bearlike groan shaggily lumbering from my lips awakened me, and I thought of a girl who had prophesied during my hundred thousand franc period that a time would come when I would be given the opportunity to heave deep sighs. Might I already have begun to approach a turning point of this sort? I am of good cheer in this regard, and shall come once more to speak of the dream whose events seemed intent on grinding me beneath their feet. Leafing through a newspaper as a young boy, I one day caught sight of an illustration depicting the chastisement of a slave. I’m being tapped on the shoulder by the question of whether I am at present writing quietly or loudly; by the same token I ask myself whether the present sketch sounds pointy or dull. In my opinion it sounds as if it were being dreamed up by a virtuous, reliable lout . . .

There’s something affably clumsy about that. Writing unrestrain’d, unconcern’d with its own propriety (blunt, brash, skittery—any number of lines’d serve a novel “begun in a promising way”) and completely a “chastisement” of itself (“quietly or loudly,” “pointy or dull,” &c.) “Written in December 1928 or January 1929 on the business card of a gentleman who specialized in importing English fabrics.” Walser’s work is democratic in its refusal to discriminate between objects—all (“hands,” “groan,” “question”) immediately vivify’d (bellowing soundlessly, shaggily lumbering, &c.) at merest ordinary meeting. (I am thinking of photographer Christopher Brayshaw’s remark that he seeks to make pictures of “a kind of vernacular realism, which I understand as a methodology that doesn’t discriminate between subjects on the basis of their place in a preexisting social hierarchy. Democratic attention to the phenomenal world is the goal of any truly critical representational practice.” I am thinking, too, of James Schuyler’s radical democracy of attention:

                                                                . . . Once, when I was young, I
Awoke at first light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun
Come up beyond the houses across the street. Another time I stood
At the cables of a liner and watched the wake turning and
Turning upon itself. Another time I woke up and in a bottle
On a chest of drawers the thoughtful doctor had left my tonsils. I
Didn’t keep them. The turning of the globe is not so real to us
As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray
—The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down
The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. . . .

. . .

                                         . . . May leans in my window, offering hornets.
To them too I give leave to go about their business, which is not
Nesting in my books. The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath
Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture
Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry. May
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
Chain saw. . . .

Out of Schuyler’s marvelous “Hymn to Life.” Lines not unlike Walser’s.)

Walser in a 1927 letter to Max Rychner, editor of the journal Neue Schweizer Rundschau, regarding the source and raison d’être of the curious and late-adopt’d (Walser’s earlier handwriting look’d to be “sprinting across the page . . . ornamental, calligraphic and painterly”) microscript technique (explain’d by Bernofsky as “a radically miniaturized Kurrent script, the form of handwriting favored in German-speaking countries until the mid-twentieth century . . . medieval in its origins, all up-and-down slanting angles . . . an e is represented by a simple pair of vertical ticks like a quotation mark, an s by a mere slash”):

When I referred before to the concept brouillon [draft], I was actually revealing to you an entire creative and life history, for you should know, sir, that approximately ten years ago I began to first shyly and reverentially sketch out in pencil everything I produced, which naturally imparted a sluggishness and slowness to the writing process that assumed practically colossal proportions. This pencil system, which is inseparable from a logically consistent, office-like copying system, has caused me real torments, but this torment taught me patience, such that I now have mastered the art of being patient.

Walser, after noting “a swoon, a cramp, a stupor” associated with pen-use, and a “period of disruption” reflect’d in “my handwriting and its disintegration,” reports: “I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil . . . and when I copied out the texts from this pencil assignment, I learned again, like a little boy, to write.” Ah, the reverie of the seethe-scrambling thousands: that one’d—by dint of a utensil—return to first principles, gumptious and clean! (I think of lines quoted out of John Cotton’s 1641 A Way of Life in the Boyd Nielson-edit’d A Thing Terrible to Publick Traytors (Property Press, 2010):

You may have a land-flood run downe a channel, or a plain gravell that makes a great noiſe, and carries all before it, but a deep river runs more ſlowly, and makes leſſe noise . . . the greateſt worldly sorrow is but a torrent, it makes a great noise, but it wants a ſpring in the bottome, and will in time decay . . .

To go “ſlowly,” “contentedly,” in indefinite persistence.)

Some Microscripts

Robert Walser, 1878-1956

“Seethe the Day”

“No Tresspassing”

Up for the quotidian cough-up of the sun, its chorus of dislodging, light a kind of sputaminous drivel and clot (William Hazlitt: “‘Poets have such seething brains,’ that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all.”) My habitual unpreparedness: cummerbund’d by a bloat of possibility. Hazlitt (who loves to quote himself), repeats the charge in the essay “On Paradox and Common-Place,” and adds:

They make bad philosophers and worse politicians. They live, for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be as well if they were confined to it. Their flights and fancies are delightful to themselves and to everybody else: but they make strange work with matter of fact; and if they were allowed to act in public affairs, would soon turn the world the wrong side out. They indulge only their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and make idols or bugbears of whatever they please, caring as little for history or particular facts as for general reasoning. They are dangerous leaders and treacherous followers. Their inordinate vanity runs them into all sorts of extravagances; and their habitual effeminacy gets them out of them at any price. Always pampering their own appetite for excitement, and wishing to astonish others, their whole aim is to produce a dramatic effect, one way or other—to shock or delight the observers; and they are apparently as indifferent to the consequences of what they write as if the world were merely a stage for them to play their fantastic tricks on, and to make their admirers weep. Not less romantic in their servility than their independence, and equally importunate candidates for fame or infamy, they require only to be distinguished, and are not scrupulous as to the means of distinction. Jacobins or Anti-Jacobins—outrageous advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, or flaming apostles of political persecution—always violent and vulgar in their opinions, they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion, from one absurdity to another, and expiate the follies of youth by the heartless vices of advancing age.

Citing, with an admonitory nudge, Southey and Wordsworth. Hardly tenable with the dud-trumpeting of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators” (mitigated somewhat by the lesser-beknownst “hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration” or “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”) or the surd-reverie of political efficacy of the avant-garde. (I see where Brenda Hillman’s claiming that it’s the fuck’d-up weather that is the source, burden, and requirement of “our” writing “funny”: “Weather taught / you to write funny. When it stops / being wrecked, we’ll write normally.” And, in an interview: “I sometimes think sentences have to be screwed up in exactly the same way as we’ve screwed up the weather.”* No, apparently, seething brain there.) (Interrupts—clunk—smother the train.) I think of B. S. Johnson’s self-portrait in Albert Angelo (1964):

He is orable for one thing for a nother he is a nosens
His face is like a back of a bus.
He is to big for his boots.
He is a bit of a film Star he acted the part of Carula.
He walks like a firy elelphant.
We all call him puw long of the elephant.
He has got hire like a goly-wog
All the clouth he wers are from the rag shop
I wouldnot say wot I think of him in publick

A thing located somewhere between the ding’d litany of Ashbery’s early “He”—“He is unforgettable as a shooting star. / He is known as ‘Liverlips.’ / He will tell you he has had a bad time of it. / He will try to pretend his pressagent is a temptress.”—and the preternatural itch unconfined of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno: “Let Nebuchadnezzar bless with the Grashopper—the pomp and vanities of the world are as the herb of the field, but the glory of the Lord increaseth for ever. / Let Naboth bless with the Canker-worm—envy is cruel and killeth and preyeth upon that which God has given to aspire and bear fruit. / Let Lud bless with the Elk, the strenuous asserter of his liberty, and the maintainer of his ground. / Let Obadiah with the Palmer-worm bless God for the remnant that is left.” (Joel 1:4: “That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten.”) An approach reaching a hard-weather’d apotheosis in the straight pomp seething (and tomfoolery) of Ronald Johnson in Ark (“Beam 12, The Musics”):

Let the craters of Mercury trumpet first and last things from C to shining C.

Let The Magellanic Clouds be shot through with glissandi of migrations of great whales.

Let twin amoebae discombobulate The Leonids hairsbreadth twists.

Let spectroscopic polyrhythmics of cricket play taps on deep fields of stalactite.

Let the hooffall of buffalo be heard again, in the land.

Let the idea of man’s split brain be a grace note among the silvery Pleiades.

(John 12: 45-46: “And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me. I am come a light into the world . . .”) One thinks of a common root for see and seethe, some smouldering vaporous stew of seeing. And there’s the sun—in the raggedy “clouth he wers.”

* Quoted in the Sarah Rosenthal edit’d A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010).

Ronald Johnson, 1935–1998