Asterisk’d

Some Clouds (Lake Champlain)

Peter Schjeldahl says that “taste” is the “sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else’s” and claims, too, that, “If you don’t consent to understand a little, on its own terms, what you dislike, your love loses muscle tone.” *

Jeni Olin says: “I personally am a fan of form & ruin. / Drawing connections at the same time / decrying them.” And, Homeric and metaphorical: “As an insomniac compulsively flips a pillow / to cool the cheek, I turn you over again & again / & again in my mind when I need the cold side / of the said affair to rail against / ‘the ruinous work of nostalgia.’” **

Maurice Blanchot says: “I must admit I have read many books. When I disappear, all those volumes will change imperceptibly; the margins will become wider, the thought more cowardly.” And: “Sometimes a vast solitude opened in my head and the entire world disappeared inside it, but came out again intact, without a scratch, with nothing missing.” ***

Merrill Gilfillan says:

The Art of the Manifesto

      The first time you see one running across the water you simply stand and gawp. It makes you think of an outboard roadrunner from the arid Southwest walking on water. Then you recognize it as a Purple Gallinule, cousin of the coot and the English moorhen, and you know it’s stepping on lily pads most of the time, but.
      The next time you feel one roaming across the water and you stand and talk. It makes you think of an outboard roadrunner from the arid Southwest waltzing on water. Then you recognize it as a perfect yellow mule, cousin of the goat in the English morning, and what a morning, stepping on lily pads most of the time. Your butt.
      viva la causa ****

Roberto Calasso says: “The power of the abstract begins as a rejection of that epic encyclopedism where every element, whether it be a comment on the power of the gods or instructions on how to fix the axles to a cart, has the same importance, the same impact on the mosaic surface of the narrative. Anaximander and Heraclitus aimed for the opposite: sentences that subsumed whole cycles of reality and almost eclipsed them, dazzling the reader with their own light. The lógos, when it appears, annihilates the particular, the accumulation of detritus typical of every experience, that obligation to repeat every detail. Like the cipher, like the arrow of Abaris, the logos transfixes in the merest atom of time what the rhapsodies had strung together and repeated over and over for night after smoky night.” *****

Hugh Kenner, regarding “Pound’s conception of what the poet’s job is”: “The rendering, without deformation, of something, within him or without, which he has clearly apprehended and seized in his mind:

as the sculptor sees the form in the air
            before he sets hand to mallet,
and as he sees the in, and the through,
                                          the four sides . . . ******

Ralph Waldo Emerson says: “Poet sees the stars, because he makes them. Perception makes. We can only see what we make, all our desires are procreant. Perception has a destiny.” *******

Robert Bly says (in “Some Thoughts on Lorca and René Char”): “Even the Imagists were misnamed: they did not write in images from the unconscious, as Lorca or Neruda, but in simple pictures, such as ‘petals on a wet black bough,’ and Pound . . . continues to write in pictures, writing as great a poetry as is possible . . . using nothing but pictures, but still, pictures are not images. And without these true images, this water from the unconscious, the language continues to dry up.” And: “In all men there is a struggle between the reason and the unconscious. In Eliot and Pound the mind won over the unconscious without too much struggle—the old Puritan victory. What they needed to balance their Puritanism is what France needed to balance her puritanism—namely, poems in which the unconscious wins out over the mind consistently, and that is precisely, of course, what ‘surrealism’ is.” ********

—

Some reverie of perfect limpidity soil’d and sully’d—my temptation is to conclude with a few lines of Julien Gracq (out of The Narrow Waters): “Only Chinese painting (Song Dynasty landscapes in particular) has been haunted by the humble theme of a solitary rowboat moving through a wooded gorge. Clearly the great charm of such an image derives from the contrast between the sheer physical effort evoked by the steep slopes and the level, incredible ease of the river flowing eternally between peaks: the jubilant feeling born, in the dreamer’s consciousness, of the discovery of an effortless solution to contradictions here becomes fixed in reality . . . one abandons oneself to the water which, unfailingly, cuts a passage . . .” *********

Isn’t the perennial argument—writing—precisely that of that necessary (though not itself sufficient) abandonment? Writing on the verge of some radical loss of control, efflorescent and mimsy’d, a kind of pre-intelligible lalling half-thwarting the brainbox’s sturdier minions. Isn’t the truly “ruinous” work (I, too, “a fan of form & ruin”) that that arrives just when the “unconscious wins out over the mind consistently”: one goes on autopilot amidst the greeny asphodel (Bly says: “As Lorca says, ‘Green, green, go deeper, green’”) or see, too, Williams’s own version of Spicerean Martian talk—or Keatsian “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—”—any of the ways (constant, reiterant) we talk about what is essentially an ecstatic blur and piecemeal holding up of the world for examination, that writing:

I have forgot         .
                and yet I see clearly enough
                                something
central to the sky
        which ranges round it.

Or (Williams again, in “The Desert Music”): “as in the mind a vague apprehension speaks / and the music rouses.” Inchoate messiness unbeleaguer’d by sense, a “perfect yellow mule.” (The weekend a wash.)

* Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, 2008)

** Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems (Hanging Loose, 2010)

*** The Madness of the Day, translated by Lydia Davis, (Station Hill, 1981)

**** Doones, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1971), edited by Ray DiPalma

***** The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated by Tim Parks (Vintage, 1994)

****** The Translations of Ezra Pound, with an Introduction by Hugh Kenner, (New Directions. 19—)

******* Selected Journals, 1841-1877 (Library of America, 2010)

******** The Fifties: A Magazine of Poetry and General Opinion, No. 3 (1959), edited by William Duffy and Robert Bly

********* The Narrow Waters, translated by Ingeborg M. Kohn, (Turtle Point, 2003)

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
(Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library)

Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun

Announcing, out of Richard Owens’s terrific Punch Press, Kent Johnson’s forthcoming book, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara. Some few of its possibly dangerous documents originally appear’d here at Isola di Rifiuti.

“Kent Johnson’s basic claims about Kenneth Koch’s relation to “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” are completely fascinating—and at least convincing enough to make me take seriously the element of doubt he introduces about the poem. Without taking sides, I find the gaps and questions worth thinking about . . . And I find the idea of Koch having done something as extreme and inventive as what Johnson suggests to be quite enthralling, even if the hypothesis turns out to be wrong.”

—Lytle Shaw, author of Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (University of Iowa Press, 2006)

—

Contents

I.               Introduction: A Case for Reasonable Doubt

II.             Corroded by Symbolysme: An Unfinished Novella
1.       The First Ring
2.       The Garden of Pembroke
3.       In the Wunderkammer
4.       The Bloody Plum Tree

III.           Appendix
1.       Tape-essay
2.       Letter to Tony Towle
3.       Correspondence from David Shapiro
4.       Notes on an O’Hara Document

A Question Mark Above the Sun, roughly 140 pages in length, is to be print’d in a limit’d edition of 100 copies, at $20 ($30 overseas). Subscribe here.

The Daily Gnin-gnin

Thirteenth Lake

Fatigue undoes its boots whilst a thunderstorm (currently adjusting its suspenders and harrumphing loudly in Jackson Co., moving easterly at an amateur bicyclist’s top velocity) approaches: “a temporally evolving, nonlinear system that is descriptively noncompressible and subject to pattern bounded unpredictability . . . a thing mark’d by the rubric ‘deterministic chaos’” (paraphrasing Joan Retallack). One local unpredictability: what the book—splay’d out in a fell hebetude like a “half-clad reeling whiskerando” (Melville)—is going to offer up against the rump disorder of the brainpan with its unsung policy of a commensurable containment, ouch. Or “arch.” Emerson says, “Every new writer is only a new crater of an old volcano,” so likely one oughtn’t so readily go mercantile and avid to fire up the angelic multitudes of the “new” regarding the daily gnin-gnin. Or “nyah-nyah.” It’s likely clear “by now” that—here, soldiering forth (art’s own little mercenary—or “contractor”—comme tout le monde) I got little in my kit bag, a sock without a mate, a breeze off the Adriatic, a pouch of dirty rice, a book, a bust’d blues harp, key of C. (Everything of need—or “use”—lies in the book.) Somewhere Klee hints that “only the transitory remains”—that is, the world is the subject, just not the visible world. Georges Perec, out of Species of Spaces / Espèces d’espaces (1974), a piece beginning with “The Page”—and Henri Michaux’s epigraph, “I write in order to peruse myself”—and ending with “Space” (“Since 1984, small planet No 2817 (1982 UJ) has borne the name of Georges Perec”):

To see something in reality that had long been an image in an old dictionary: a geyser, a waterfall, the Bay of Naples, the spot where Gavrilo Princip was standing when he shot at Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria and Duchess Sophia of Hohenberg, on the corner of Franz-Josef Street and the Appel Quay in Sarajevo, just opposite the Simic Brothers’ bar on 28 June 1914, at 11:15 a.m.

. . .

To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: . . . a covered gallery in the souk at Sfax, a tiny dam across a Scottish loch, the hairpin bends of a road near Corvol-l’Orgueilleux. And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade . . . but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.

And how is it (the thunderstorm pass’d, now off east finicking its damp and roil’d skirts) that—gaze falling here and there (damn’d post-geographic vacancy), in a desert of thinking, I’d pull down Peter Russell’s The Elegies of Quintilius (vaguely wondering if Peter Russell’s kin to the Peter Russell Javier Marías model’d ex-MI5—or MI6, or both—Sir Peter Wheeler “on”) and read (Russell’s appending a note regarding the words oleo foetido coci: “Mr Robert Graves informs me that the coconut palm was not introduced into North Africa until the 7th or even 8th century, that is after the Islamic conquest. He is of course absolutely right: the text has oleo foetido coci—which, with the clamorous ‘ground-nuts scandal’ of the Socialist Government in Britannia in 1948 / 9 in mind, but considering ‘ground-nuts’ or ‘monkey-nuts’ beneath the dignity of the sublime style of Quintilius, I anachronistically chose to substitute “coconut palm” (for which as far as I can tell there is no word in either Classical Latin or Greek—for Cocos nucifera is definitely post-Linnaean)—the coconut seeming apt in this case for its overtones of Quintilian buffoonery.” Excellent high satire à la Alexandra Papaditsas and Kent Johnson’s The Miseries of Poetry. One expects a Marx Brothers reference at any moment.) A page or so along:

On the other hand it is equally possible that Q. by a lapse of his pen, or of his at times defective memory (especially during the residence at Sfax—vide infra), had in mind oleum coci, for oleum coqui—a vernacular misspelling common enough among slaves and the baser sort—and so simply meaning inferior cooking oil. That it was foetidum, that is rancid, tends to bear out this theory, particularly since the occasion is called forth in the plebeian and marcescent city of Sfax.

Ah, congruity and efflorescence! Oughtn’t that pensée pascalienne read: “When I consider the brief span of the night and its morning, my life absorb’d by writing—the small space I occupy swallow’d up in the immensity of spaces, I am alarm’d and astound’d at writing this rather than that: there is no reason for writing this thing rather than some other thing. Why did I do it?”

Georges Perec, 1936-1982

Bruce Serafin’s “Avant-Garde Mentalities”

Some Flowers

Out of a short essay call’d “Avant-Garde Mentalities” in Bruce Serafin’s Stardust (New Star Books, 2007)—commentary dogging the heels of a quote by Steve McCaffery (out of an interview included in North of Intention) that reads “I’ve personally come to see humor as a useful tonal-ideological destabilizer, an agent of relativization, dispersal and inversion (similar to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalization of literature). Humor tends to operate as a visceral, or tactile investment upon the level of the verbal order; it is not entirely ‘of’ language.” Serafin:

        This is practically self-parody; but what really interests me here is the stolidity of McCaffery’s response, the unblinking assurance, the complete reliance on a kind of “secured” vocabulary. Here you see the house style not only of the avant-garde, but of any large government corporation, a style whose chief purpose is to mask the individual writer and give him a kind of group sensibility.
        At bottom, it is an unfree style. In prose, at least, you get across the sense of a freely speaking voice by using dramatic arrhythmia—digressions, questions, changes in register, the interruption of a mass of complex sentences with a short declarative one. But almost none of this linguistic drama appears in McCaffery. Instead he uses a colleague’s sentence—long, impersonal, jargon-ridden—that imposes its rhythm on the work to the exclusion of any other. This effectively masks McCaffery as an individual, while making him stand out as a heroic representative of a project and program of work.

That “colleague’s sentence”—see the enforced bonhomie in the buoyant smarm of the “current” groupusculars—means, too: dutiful prose of the “collegial sensibility”—the kind favor’d—then (the piece appear’d in Books in Canada in 1990 under the title of “Colonial Mentalities”) and now—by academics of any stripe: “Like an astronaut, or a tenured sociologist, he is a colleague, someone involved in a project that he develops in a “responsible” manner for others who are similarly involved. His writing is determined and given shape by an extremely strong sense of solidarity . . . he writes for a group, a group to which he is wedded, right down to the style of his prose.” (Regarding the “colonial mentality” of the former title, see Serafin’s apt-to-a-whole-generation-or-two-of-criticules-norteamericanos remark that labels McCaffery’s work “as colonial—as work that mimics a body of ‘master texts’ originating elsewhere. Seen in this way, McCaffery resembles those early Canadian poets who wrote in the style of Swinburne or Tennyson: as with them, the chief thing you notice in his work is an unconscious pathos, the pathos of whatever is derivative or second-hand without meaning to be so.”) (In a rebuttal, McCaffery writes—in apparent innocence of the way he replicates the original charge—“Well, what is jargon? It is the necessary vocabulary of a skill determined by factors of linguistic economy that intersect with the exigencies of specific expertise.” Yow.)

I repeat all that not out of any particular animus or besmirch towards McCaffery. I recall reading through—nigh twenty years back—North of Intention with some assent. I wrote a piece (originally call’d something like “A McCaffery Sandwich”) that Dagwoods in several layers of gussy’d-up malarkey between two slices of a McCaffery sentence (one that reminds me a little of Duncan’s law of the “the”—that inevitable a diminuendo to vanishing death in grammar, each word in succession in a sentence delimiting the possibilities for the next.) Here: handy enough (out of Breeze):

Readerly

I read “Grammatically realized meaning is a postponed reward . . .”
And think how rewarding a scoop or even larger helping of vanilla
Ice cream can be after the loud and long rain delays and postponements of a broadcast
Double-header, Sunday afternoon, a little lazy, the tiny rug of grass, all dew-

Besmirch and ringlet, cut in a few idle minutes this morning, cut
By starting at one corner (call it A) of the rectangle and moving to the one adjacent (B)
And pivoting the roaring mower ninety degrees
To proceed to corners C and D with the practiced indifferent maneuvers of a man

Who knows the book he is reading begins on page one and proceeds
Step by pleasant step through a tangle of signifiers, each
Shorn by the blades of vision and usual procedure, the clippings collected in the grass-
Stained bag of ratiocination (a reassurance), though not reasonably sorted

Are they, but kept unkempt just as he keeps to a comfortable stride
Marking a pattern, a ziggurat in the yard, cornering
Well, making boxes within boxes in order to finish before the game starts
Because the game offers its own rewards, like a pitcher who discusses with the baseball

The baseball’s incipient trajectory, where it should arrive
Being where it desires arriving,
Though in practice (that is, in the real game
Being played out there now on the rain-soaked diamond) it

(The baseball) will always miss by a few gaping inches, that gap
Being where the batter swings and misses with a sheer undifferentiated
Discharge of energy (accompanied by a grunt) just north of
Intention, just south of where the ball thwacks the mitt

Of the hunkering untalkative catcher who knows nothing anymore of desire now
Because that strikeout (a kind of erasure) ends the game
And he is easeful in loping to the dugout, to the showers, thinking
How terrific a scoop of ice cream is, or how a book

A woman—a red-haired fan in short shorts and halter top—had one day
Read to him seemed then like everything in the world, just as she did,
And later like only what (and not, he thinks, much it was) had been “. . .attained
By arrival at the end of a horizontal, linearized sequence of words.”

Too, I recall attending a reading and screening of some pieces McCaffery’d made using TV techniques, words slowly rolling “up” end-of-movie credits style: works that seem’d to mimic the way TV commercial writers, attempting to combat the boom in remote control devices with “mute” buttons, were just then cluttering ads with words. (Remind’d of that by Serafin’s aside—genius resides in the aside, that residue, that excess: “A lot could be said about the language poets for instance, especially about their relationship to mass media such as radio and TV; but it simply won’t get said unless a genuine tension exists between the critic and the writer being discussed.” Sad lack of that tension un peu partout in the current “era”—effect of the wholesale balkanization of la poesía norteamericana . . .)

I suspect (largely through reading some of the other essays in Starburst) that an enormous commitment to the local and a stubborn d.i.y. mentality (Serafin help’d found and edit the Vancouver Review) accounts for some of the thinking here. (Too, there may be a niggling matter of turf: McCaffery’s Barthes is Barthes the structuralist, assured and public—the Barthes Serafin prefers is the late Barthes of Roland Barthes, the “insecure” and personal and novel-writing Barthes.) Serafin work’d some years as a mail-handler in Vancouver’s Postal Station J, and writes fondly of the people there. I think the split that exists between the language that daily surrounds one and the discourse of books, &c. is one that needs be harness’d, an energy source akin to that “genuine tension” between critic and writer. Two (or more) audiences: that’s what keeps one balanced, “in the world.” And two (or more) word-hoards (enough of that “I HATE SPEECH” nonsense). Serafin puts it down with excellent, wisdom unlock’d, clarity:

. . . Where is the audience? Is it the audience that knows the same jingles you know? Or is it the audience that shares your ideas?
        This question is particularly hard for intellectuals. Again and again they find a gap between the discourse they hear around them and the discourse they turn to in books to keep them stimulated. For them, the temptation to give up on the local or even national scene, and hence to give up on its language, can be overwhelming—as overwhelming as the complementary temptation to join forces with a like-minded group.
        So a paradox arises: seeking the largest language, the language that seems most international, most part of an over-arching intellectual project, the critic ends up writing for fewer and fewer people. Wanting to be significant, he first of all loses his “place,” then his sense of proportion, his ease with his native speech, and finally his pleasure in the use of words.
        The loss of speech: one keeps coming back to that. The pathos in McCaffery’s work is the pathos of baffled effort, of a voice muffled by a kind of plate glass of borrowed styles. His texts are as misshapen as they are because he has lost the writer’s intense connection to his own language. And I believe that this is a function of writing for a group. Do that—write for a group—and you gain security. Your writing becomes protected: you no longer know the anxiety of writing “blind,” of wondering whether your work will be entertaining, or read. And without that anxiety the work turns bad. Intensity drains away: your writing becomes tedious, right-minded. You go to books for your ideas; you learn what you are supposed to say. Ultimately, you become unfree.

Bruce Serafin’s Stardust
(Cover design’d by Clint Hutzulak)

Bruce Serafin, 1950-2007

Essaying

Some Flowers

Tempt’d by a little essay of nothing, a larking in the street going nowhere. That’s how the grand puffy apricot-color’d clouds tailing off to Mandelbrot-hump’d cloudlets, some nearly roseate peach-tint’d where the sun’s backlash is hitting—that’s how that is. Though it isn’t that at all. What’s here is a festering, a made intelligibility, a fire consuming the fire of its making. Rhetoric mounting the stump of rhetoric, forever “about to speak.” A way of making the day itself. (Paul Klee says (in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918): “Human animal, timepiece built of blood.” And, too: “One eye sees, the other feels.” Though I’d revise that: “One eye sees, the other essays its own frolicsome extravagant gibberish.” Probably what Frank O’Hara, juddering (with flagging intensity) through a dictionary, meant in saying: “Mon ange, tu as un œil qui dit zut à l’autre.”) Klee, too, worrying the availing provender:

        Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the smallest detail.
        Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

Isn’t the fetch’d particular found precisely in the onslaught and slurry? Joan Retallack (in “Wager as Essay”) talks of the essay’s (the writing’s) need “to approach the liminal spectrum of near-unintelligibility—immediate experience complicating what we thought we knew.” One never gets there piecemeal, by constructivist tatting and hammering, no? Isn’t the aim precisely the hell-bent garrulity of the fuddler? Thus the commonplace of the writer who drinks and yammers in lieu of writing—a fine and lacerating substitute, see Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice):

A substitute shines brightly as a king,
Until a king be by; and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters.

Retallack quotes Samuel Johnson’s definition of “essay”: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” And Addison’s remark concerning “the Wildness of those Compositions that go by the Names of Essays.” (Calling up Kerouac’s “wild form”—that outburst in a letter to John Clellon Holmes—“What I’m beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story . . . into realms of revealed Picture . . . wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only form holds what I have to say—my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory. . . . I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know.” That garrulity—like Faulkner’s “writing on the verge of losing control.”) It (irregular, undigest’d) need not be large, it need only be all. See O’Hara’s Klee squib (out of the Bill Berkson-compiled and edit’d What’s with Modern Art?) where he asserts that Klee “is fortunate in never having done a major work.” In lieu of prodigality: “each individual thought as it comes to us trembling with wit and sensibility seems to be all of him. . . . Some of them are beautiful and amusing, others are phlegmatic and puerile.” And: Klee’s “constant nagging at the attention by petty and often vapid titles is a sign of his own nervousness and of a documentation which is perhaps too thorough . . .” Extravagant minims. Jots of the trembling hymeneal chorister, joining thing to thing with a nudge! See William Carlos Williams’s satyr-wing’d outburst (Paterson) “leading to the rout of the vocables / in the writings / of Gertrude / Stein”:

                                you cannot be
an artist
                by mere ineptitude
The dream
                is in pursuit!
The neat figures of
                Paul Klee
                                fill the canvas
but that
                is not the work
                                of a child       .
the cure began, perhaps
                with the abstraction
                                of Arabic art
Dürer
                with his Melancholy
                                was aware of it—
the shattered masonry. Leonardo
                saw it,
                                the obsession,
and ridiculed it
                in La Gioconda.
                                Bosch’s
congeries of tortured souls and devils
                who prey on them
                                fish
swallowing
                their own entrails

The essaying swallows its own entrails: one ends up tatting, making a doily for the day, a parasol cover. Is it the result of the contemporary means—info à go-go—that data-plethora with its siren song calling? (One ought return to the hand-scrawl’d notebook, hunker’d between hills, the sun finally “up” and the peach-color’d light gone stellar and vapid . . .) Retallack:

Forms that move the imagination out of bounds toward pungent transgressions piquant unintelligibilities intrude into our tangible surroundings. They maintain an irritating presence, pleasurable or not, as radically unfinished thought. They give the reader real work to do. If the essay is a worthwhile wager, it is about startling the mind into action when much is at stake and intelligibility is poor.

The other question. Is anything at stake here? (No, nothing is at stake here.)

Paul Klee, “Pfeil im Garten (Arrow in the Garden),” 1929

Joan Retallack

Chris Daniels’s porous, nomadic

Some Clouds

Translator and poet Chris Daniels, in porous, nomadic or, para encontrar o acontecimento impalávrel: (Airfoil, 2010), a chapbook who’s Portuguese sub-title renders subtle homage to Daniels’s own work, and means, roughly (I think, with brio unswooning, unforswunk) “to meet the thing unpalaver’d”:

* The Sake *

Teenage Bernini tried to sculpt living flames in marble. That his failure resulted in near-parodic representation of martyrdom by fire in no way diminishes the beauty of his rejection of impossibility. I realized fairly recently that this has always mirrored my rejection of the grand social impossibilities trumpeted by demagogues. What I do is tiny. But I wouldn’t want to be without it. Language, our million-year collective endeavor.

I didn’t know how to say it for the longest time, but while the Baroque inhabits my many nomad mansions, I believe it was Lippi who painted the Nativity which impolitely forces my eye stage left, where a peasant, at play with his dog, is missing the whole millenary event. Sometimes I imagine that peasant to be Remédios Varo, or Franz Marc, Lygia Clark or John Heartfield, among others, especially you—is that strange, do you think?—it’s just that we love to experience beauty together. It’s for our sake: the realest beauty is always among others.

Triggering, by turns, in the typing: stray inklings of V. N. Vološinov’ s “stream of speech”—how one’s own tiny impossibility abrades into that murmurous runnel with nary a ripple or knot; a hint of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” obligatory (“not an important failure”) nod at Brueghel’s Icarus reconfigured here to point away (and thus “impolitely” renounce, or condemn) “the whole millenary event”; and Ashbery, marvelously, too: that direct address of “is that strange, do you think?” (see “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”—“The poem is you.”)—the way it draws the reader right up, tenderly close, so that the final admission pierces right in, a living flame: “the realest beauty is always among others.” I recall, too, recently reading Ron “The Namer” Silliman’s claim that “language poetry would be more accurately called ‘social formalism’” and wonder, who’s zooming whom? Where in the “corpus” of that self-proclaim’d “movement” (il ne bouge guère), a moment so daringly humble (“What I do is tiny”) and moving and direct and conceivably answerable to all?

Daniels’s porous, nomadic (the title page upends the usual map of the Americas, making the U. S. an appendage to a dominant southern continent—in “Other Sources,” Daniels notes: “Brazil is bigger than Australia, yet in planetary terms, writing Portuguese is more or less the same as keeping quiet (Leminski)”) seems to ask by its arrangement that every piece be read equally—“Other Sources” is print’d mid-chap, along with “Acknowledgements” and the finely-paced “* Dedicatory *”:

when we’re dead and gone
then may our children’s
children’s children
—however long—
translate our ash

that we reside at last
where once technocrats
weave baskets and all

master the changes
on harmonica, the family of viols
and the categorical imperative
of cleaning our own toilets
however long it takes

No division of labor (even in the structural integrity of the book). So that: one reads the pages titled “Epigraphs” (the half-title page offers its own several lines of Attila Jószef—“What reader would I most want to have / but you who understand your friend through love . . .”) in the manner of a poem, its select’d utterances arranged in a manner radical in its intent, without any smarm or condescending smirking, for maximum semantic pop:

Epigraphs

An animal is in the world like water is in water.
                        —Bataille, Theory of Religion

When a boat reaches a certain speed, water becomes as hard as marble.
                        —Deleuze, The Fold

If water has been metaphorized into crystal, crystal will appear as softly solid water.
                        —Sarduy, Written on a Body

Only the difficult stimulates; only challenging resistance can raise our eyebrows, provoke and maintain our powers of knowing, for in reality ¿what is the difficult?, ¿the submerged, so solo, in the maternal waters of the dark?, ¿the originary without causality, antithesis or logos?
                        —Lezama, Américan Expression

But however much professional poets may be shocked by such carelessness, I consider it an advantage, since our brood of epigonous poets have nothing left but formal polish.
                        —Marx, Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle

This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with skepticism, and with all the other forms of spiritual collapse.
                        —Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

“Who do you write for?” means in the first place: “Do you know who you write for?” It next means: “Do the social consequences of your writing correspond to the intentions that animate you while writing?” And for this reason I think that we must maintain and tirelessly repeat the question: “Who do you write for?”; we must even respond in the place of those who don’t themselves respond.
                        —Georges Politzer, speech to Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires

The present, due to its staggering complexity, is almost as conjectural as the past.
                        —George Jackson

I aspire to a poetry that amid suffering and helplessness has the power to generate light, any light neither given us nor come down from heaven, but a light born of the hands and spirit of people.
                        —Ferreira Gullar (paraphrased)

By thinking in images the artist cognizes the world in order to change it.
                        —Frederick Choate on A. K. Voronsky

. . . not for a seat upon the dais,
but at the common table.
                        —Reznikoff, Te Deum

The fright of change, not readiness. Instead
Inside our wall we will today pursue
The man we call the alien, take his print,
Give him a taste of the thing from which he fled,
Suspicion him. And again we fail.
                        —Genevieve Taggard, Ode in Time of Crisis

Domenico: What kind of a world is this if a madman has to tell you to be ashamed of yourselves?
                        —Tarkovsky, Nostalghia

This irreducible refusal of unlived poetry.
                        —Vinícius de Moraes, O Haver

I yearn for a love split away from power.
                        —Murat Nemat-Nejat, Eleven Septembers Later

no gesture without a past
no face without the other
                        —Josely Vianna Baptista, Corpografia

it starts when you say We
and know who you mean
                        —Marge Piercy, The Low Road

Your voice slays doubt,
Takes heart.
                        —Hafiz, trans. Ken Bullock

A terrific assemblage, drawn out of no mechanized Google-hoohah—rather, a commit’d subfusc of regular reading, exchange, and examination. The book—it includes a lovely bit of doggerel “for use” call’d “The Birth of a Pejorative” (“We are beginning and end and / you are just the latest ampersand,
/ for one day we’ll learn again . . . we’ll stop thinking like solitary wankers—
/ and on that day we’ll take back what we’ve made, you fucking BANKERS”)— offers up its history under the imprimatur of:

NOTHING HUMAN
IS ALIEN TO ME



Berkeley—Curitiba—Florianópolis—Portland
Primeiro de Maio—São Paulo
2000-2010

Read it.

Chris Daniels

“In murmurous runnels . . .”

Milkweed

Hadn’t I shy’d off the late Faulkner of the Snopes trilogy, caught by some incorrigible hint of inferiority, a diminuendo snag’d off what airwaves of post-literary gossip, the kind that goes about untend’d and extreme, opinions bouncing up off the grand barrier reef of œuvres unexamined, illegible to the everyday breezes of discourse—usually put: he had a falling off? And hadn’t I always fail’d to discern the roots of “el boom” (magical realism cadre) in Faulkner? Entraining to Schenectady, New York so that I could—with no surcease of motility—volte-face in mid-decay industrial and resume trajectory behind the wheel of the Vibe, point’d, though, into the opposing westerly (and soon-to-be sinking) sun (long story), I read Faulkner’s The Hamlet (1940), with bec bouché, meaning (I doubt) stupefy’d by its excellence. The idiot-boy Isaac Snopes and the stolen cow he so inescapably loves walking into the westering sun, caught by rain (writing on the verge of losing control):

That afternoon it rained. It came without warning and it did not last long. He watched it for some time and without alarm, wanton and random and indecisive before it finally developed, concentrated, drooping in narrow unperpendicular bands in two or three different places at one time, about the horizon, like gauzy umbilical loops from the bellied cumulae, the sun-belled ewes of summer grazing up the wind from the south-west It was as if the rain were actually seeking the two of them, hunting them out where they stood amid the shade, finding them finally in a bright intransigeant fury. The pine-snoring wind dropped, then gathered; in an anticlimax of complete vacuum the shaggy pelt of earth became overblown like that of a receptive mare for the rampant crash, the furious brief fecundation which, still rampant, seeded itself in flash and glare of noise and fury and then was gone, vanished; then the actual rain, from a sky already breaking as if of its own rich over-fertile weight, running in a wild lateral turmoil among the unrecovered leaves, not in drops but in needles of fiery ice which seemed to be not trying to fall but, immune to gravity, earthless, were merely trying to keep pace with the windy uproar which had begotten and foaled them, striking in thin brittle strokes through his hair and shirt and against his lifted face, each brief lance already filled with the glittering promise of its imminent cessation like the brief bright saltless tears of a young girl over a lost flower; then gone too, fled north and eastward beyond the chromatic arch of its own insubstantial armistice, leaving behind it the spent confetti of its carnival to gather and drip leaf by leaf and twig by twig then blade by blade of grass, to gather in murmurous runnels, releasing in mirrored repetition the sky which, glint by glint of fallen gold and blue, the falling drops had prisoned.

A final sentence wherein the storm-mimicking rhythm of the whole proves likely of more mean pertinence unreproof’d than the particulars of its sayings. Regarding what the various South Americans mark’d, see, say, the bay horse the canny trader Stamper dyes black and inflates (“it even put its feet down like it couldn’t even feel them”) in order to sell it back to its original owners with the premonitory nudge compleatly miss’d: “‘Sho now . . . That horse will surprise you.” A rainstorm (“we rode in it for two hours, hunched under the croker sacks”) rinses out the color: “Then there was a sound like a nail jabbed into a big bicycle tire. It went whish-hhhhhhhh and then the rest of that shiny fat black horse . . . vanished.” Eventually a “bicycle pump valve” is found “under its hide just inside the nigh fore shoulder.” See, too, the figure of Ratliff, “the sewing machine agent” and news-purveyor, who travels a four county area in a buckboard “drawn by a pair of shaggy ponies as wild and active-looking as mountain goats and almost as small”:

To the rear of it was attached a sheet-iron box the size and shape of a dog-kennel and painted to resemble a house, in each painted window of which a painted woman’s face simpered above a painted sewing-machine . . .

Something of the meretriciousness thereof hints of the marvelous wares of the annual gypsy peddler Melquíades in the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. Or see the recipe provided to cure a man of “stock-diddling”:

“You take and beef the critter the fellow has done formed the habit with, and cook a piece of it and let him eat it. It’s got to be a authentic piece of the same cow or sheep or whatever it is, and the fellow has got to know that’s what he is eating; he cant be tricked nor forced to eating it, and a substitute wont work. Then he’ll be all right again and wont want to chase nothing but human women . . .”

Isn’t something of the story of the House of Atreus (Atreus tricking Thyestes into eating the cook’d flesh of ’s own sons) hovering nearby? If one reads for sentences (and I do, for varietals and fervencies and those all out of composure and echoes), one marvels. One that begins somewhere in King Lear and ends with Emily Dickinson:

He would lie amid the waking instant of earth’s teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn’s rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the lowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and plopping suck of each deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal choristers.

Or (anchor’d by the biblical “pismires”):

What he felt was outrage at the waste, the useless squandering; at a situation intrinsically and inherently whirring by any economy, like building a log dead-fall and baiting it with a freshened heifer to catch a rat; or no, worse: as though the gods themselves had funneled all the concentrated bright wet-slanted unparadised June onto a dug-heap, breeding pismires.

Or the way “a tiny machine-made black bow which snapped together at the back with a metal fastener”—the absurdly inutile bowtie (“ceremonial heterodoxy raised to its tenth power”) interloper and storekeeper Flem Snopes takes to wearing daily is call’d “a tiny viciously depthless cryptically balanced splash like an enigmatic punctuation symbol against the expanse of white shirt.” Uncomprehending I am, of that curious breed of poet—particularly the sentence-writer, “new” or old—who scorns the novel (or any word-made thing): always there is that combo, incombustible and unblast’d, a tiny blastula of words making a wild-eyed circumambient music, something to cling to . . .

William Faulkner, 1897-1962
(Photograph by Carl Mydans)

Jean Frémon’s The Real Life of Shadows

A Wall

Who’s got that line about Gerard Manley Hopkins “tonguing some irrevocable Rodney”? That’s what the sloth of summer brings, mischievous rabbitings on, chortles to oneself. I read the Cole Swenson-translated The Real Life of Shadows by Jean Frémon (The Post-Apollo Press, 2009). Frémon, novelist and art critic, is author, too, of the terrific Island of the Dead (Green Integer, 2003), and of The Botanical Garden (forthcoming out of Green Integer, see an excerpt here), translated by Brian Evenson. In The Real Life of Shadows Frémon, deftly and sparingly retells a number of stories of artists (painters and others). Out of “Giotto’s O”:

It was said that Giotto, always a clown, had once painted a fly on the nose of a portrait that Cimabue was working on. The master, returning to his painting and simply thinking that the fly had been attracted by the egg in the tempera, tried several times to brush it away before he realized the trick.

Frémon relates the story (out of Vasari) of Giotto’s response to a papal messenger’s request for a drawing demonstrating the artist’s skill: how he drew, in red paint, a perfect circle. Frémon’s veering final paragraph: “‘Rounder than Giotto’s O’ became the term for a dullard who could be easily duped. In Tuscan, the same word is used to indicate both a circle and a limited mind.”

In “Anthea,” Frémon tells the story of a couple who, in Italy, taxi out “to Capodimonte for the sole reason of looking one more time at a full-length portrait of an unknown young woman.” Returning, they dine (“sea bream done in wild water and a bottle of Greco di Tufo”) and argue a little, made restless by the inescapable memory of the portrait. That “wild water”—“They call cooking water wild when they’ve added sparkling Asti wine and a good dose of aromatic herbs—parsley, basil, oregano, fennel, and minced garlic”—is made counterpoint to “the uncanny gift of the fixed image . . . ubiquity, the paradox of a double nature.” Frémon:

Who was she? What was she to him, the painter from Parma, carried off by his love of the alchemical? We would have liked to know. Of what crime she’d been accused that made her, with her hand poised low on her chest, so silently protest her innocence as she looks you straight in the eye. And how this arm, just slightly completely out of proportion as it starts to come forward, makes her so close, as if the image had been startled out of itself, out of its two dimensions, to take on a body and almost reach us.

Parmigianino, “Antea,” c. 1531–34

Oddly, though there’s a number of pieces included that are out of it, Swenson’s The Real Life of Shadows is not a translation of Frémon’s La Vraie nature des ombres (P.O.L., 2000), a book about twice the length—including the long piece call’d “Proustiennes” [I see now that Proustiennes, translated, too, by Brian Evanson, is an announced title for Fence’s La Presse Books collection]—and append’d with both a list of “livres cités” and an index, the latter a lovely measure of Frémon’s range of reading and writing. See (randomly):

Ptolémée, 79.
Baronne Putbus, 258.
Raimu, 194.
Alexandre Ramanovitch Louria, 183.
Ricardo Reiss, 93.
Rembrandt, 155.
Joshua Reynolds, 134, 135.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 276.
Arthur Rimbaud, 199.
Jean-Paul Riopelle, 166.
Colonel de la Roque, 277.
Noël Roquevert, 277.
Barney Rosset, 166.
Joseph Roth, 97.
Mark Rothko, 164.
Jacques Roubaud, 98, 183.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 127, 128, 182.
Raymond Roussel, 178, 179, 182.
Claude Royet-Journoud, 130, 158, 203, 266, 267, 272, 278.

And so forth, with Keith Waldrop preceding Robert Walser and the whole ending with Zo. (Too, one notes that “Anthea” and at least one other story, “Hapax and Apocatastasis,” are not available in the French collection, though some paragraphs of the latter appear to be rehearsed in its “Proustiennes.”) The paragraphs point to a secondary note that recurs in Frémon’s work—a postmodern (“Borges, who defined himself as baroque (baroque to me, he said, is the final stage of any art during which it displays and squanders its means), is perhaps the first postmodern writer”) concern for originality, permutation and repetition:

While Hieron was the tyrant of Syracuse, Archimedes astounded the prince’s court by claiming that, though considerable, all the grains of sand found on all the shores of all the seas are not innumerable. He went on to say that if one can establish the number of grains of sand, it is then easy to imagine a number larger, for example that of all the books that could be written by assembling all the words that can be formed with all the letters of the alphabet submitted to all the permutations conceivable by logic. As this number is finite, it follows that if the human race lasts long enough (and without this optimistic postulate, the whole argument collapses), a moment will come when almost all the propositions that can be stated have been stated, and we’ll need to start repeating them in order to continue to give ourselves the illusion of thinking, which will prove Terence’s prediction that nothing is ever said that has not already been said.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who loved the combinatory art as Uccello did the perspectival, established that if the alphabet had 100 letters rather than 26, the number of all their possible arrangements, both sensible and not, would amount to a 1 followed by 7,300,000,000,000 zeros—a number that’s rather long to write out entirely; it would take 20,000 writers 37 years of work if each produced 1,000 pages every year with 10,000 zeros on every page—a tedious job, but in no way impossible in the era, now past, of the accountant-scrivener.

Lovely assemblagist monkeying. (A “hapax” or “hapax legomenon” is a word occurring only once in either the written record of a language, or the works of an author, or in a single text.) That repeating necessary to “continue to give ourselves the illusion of thinking” gets its (partial, stall’d) comeuppance in a lovely piece call’d “The Words of Others”:

Despite the rationalizations that he managed to construct, the analogies with portraiture and other flimsy theories invented for the occasion, he couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty for taking recourse in the words of others, the phrases of others, the paragraphs of others—for sometimes it went as far as that—to shore up his inventions, those ordinary situations and characters, more or less similar to the ones that you encounter every day, but constituted of words. A weakness he put down to a lack of talent, a lack of inspiration (which, they say, doesn’t visit the lazy), a lack of application, or simply a lack of patience. And above all, a lack of courage. To an impulse to gain time by stealing material here and there rather than nurturing them. At the same time, he reassured himself, why not? One might as well shamelessly use whatever is at hand. When Picasso picked up a toy car to make a monkey’s muzzle, a cake mold for the chignon of the nurse pushing her baby carriage, or the seat and handlebars of a bicycle to create a bull’s head, what else was he doing? One could even claim that material found, selected, and blatantly borrowed is more powerful because it’s less labored, more virgin. This didn’t keep him from endlessly giving himself grief for lack of imagination and willpower, not to mention ethical feeling. Although he said to himself that a group of words is not, anymore than a single word is, the property of the one who uses it. That all words are by nature the words of others because if they weren’t we wouldn’t be able to learn them, and even if we could learn them, they would be useless because no one else would understand them. Words are what we have in common, and it must be admitted that it’s not with ideas, but with words, that one writes. But these elegant arguments weren’t enough to assuage his guilt. He still felt like a thief acting dishonorably, even though only he knew.

The sort of thing one ought put in a place of reminder, up where one sees it, next to one’s tack’d up calligraphy of durable speech (xìn, 信). That “tonguing some irrevocable Rodney”—I think the previous line is “kneeling between semis”—I’ll quit the “who’s got” goofing: I wrote that.

Jean Frémon

“Indurable Speech”: Kent Johnson on Ron Silliman’s Prevaricant Cant

Some Clouds

On That Alphabet Thing: Being A Few Further Poetical A-Musings

“Eliot Weinberger is an ultra-leftist with a touch of Pat Buchanan.”
—Ron Silliman

Come to think of it, I can imagine someone objecting to what I wrote here Monday, 7/12 [“A Rather Ugly Juncture in The Alphabet”], in something like the following way:

Those are all quoted materials from conversations I heard . . . Likewise interesting that you automatically assign every statement in the work directly to me in such an instrumentalist fashion . . . My intent in quoting those originally was just to note the incredible cattiness of the poetry world . . . Nothing you ascribe to those lines appears anywhere but in your head.

To which I could imagine the following, if longwinded riposte (I quote from Boswell):

This is poppycock, Sir, as my stern Mme Thrale so enjoys putting it. And how very convenient and most disingenuous, this, your plea of defense by recourse to quotation’s indifference: That you, forsooth, a legend of cattiness in our lyrical world, would blithely presume to proffer this unmarked “quotation” in such dark measure—you who evoke violent death upon another by name, I do mean, and for whose person you have yourself most infamously displayed such open and virulent displease in times past—and then yet proceed so earnestly of protest, when you be upbraided on the topick: that such black view in your Book, you remonstrate, is but animus of nameless others, that of course you neither mean nor feel any such objectionable thing as the tribunal of good and obvious sense would impugn, nor that, mercy be, your paratactik choice to enter such nominal suggestion has any thing [sic] to do with the ubiquitous records of your “affections” . . . Why this, Sir, is most disingenuous indeed. [The grossly overweight and profusely sweating Johnson pauses here to savagely cough and draw labored breath, then continues, hoarsely] “O, No, no,” protesteth you, our Most Innocent Poet: “My hands are clean and beyond reproach, for these are not my words . . .”

Truly, Sir, do you not see that your poetick appears, by all lights, to be the poetick politick of “I don’t mean anything I say, except when I mean it”?

You should be Ashamed, Sir! Now, may I trouble you to pass the relish and the brandy, both, for their taste does please me greatly.

Be such fancy as it may, I’d say it is also worth asking:

To what extent has a flippant and self-serving attitude towards the materials one “collects” come to inflect, let us say infect, a good chunk of current avant aesthetic, vacating it of any discernible sense of ethic or moral claim?

Think Flarf, for example.

(And please, if I may anticipate, spare me any dumb, irrelevant complaint about Yasusada.)

Actually, I should come clean: The passage in bold above is constituted of direct quotes from another person, from messages he’s sent me today, 7/13. Is it wrong for me to share them? Perhaps. But I’ve chosen to do so in the casual poaching spirit that seems to rule the day. It’s a free-for-all, catty comrades; it is the new dispensation.

Ah, that old-fashioned Pound, whom I’d recalled, without whose troubled poetics the notion of the “New Sentence” would never have been conceived (and how he loved to quote others!) Here he is, on the visualization of the ideogram for Truth:

“Man standing by his word.”

Now that’s a quote the dissembling Mr. Silliman should enter into the second edition of The Alphabet.

—Kent Johnson

Durable Speech (xìn, 信): man (rén, 人) standing by word (yán, 言)

New Poetry 1963

Tiger Lily

After my few remarks about David Schaff’s 1971 Four Seasons Foundation book, The Moon by Day, Ray DiPalma call’d my attention to Schaff’s editorship of an issue of The Yale Literary Magazine (titled New Poetry 1963) with work by—so the cover lists—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, John Wieners, John Hollander, LeRoi Jones, and Robert Duncan. (A list seemingly akin to a snappy aptitude test question: mark the “odd” item in the series—though Hollander’s poem, “How to Remember the Summer,” rather raffishly begins: “Freeze. Judge. Disconnect.”—making a run for New American Poetry-ville—before getting to—ai-yi-yi, cringe-city, putting a foot in it—“Those yvory winters . . .”: i kid you not.) Others (apparently not cover-worthy): David Meltzer, Gary Snyder, Allen Katzman, Paul Blackburn, Carol Bergé, Edward Dorn, William S. Burroughs, and a tiny brave raft of (I assume) student works (Gab Dzuroz, Eric Nightingale). Schaff writes an introduction titled “Some Statements on Projective Verse.” Evidently hewing to Allen’s line in The New American Poetry, 1945-1960—Olson’s preeminence unquery’d—the piece is of note largely for the way it attempts to account for the new. After a rehearsal of Olsonian edicts (“the poem is energy,” “field composition,” “form is never more than the natural extension of content,” “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” &c.): “So much for the dialectic. One wonders immediately, however, where the poem stops. Olson is weak on closure.” Or, applauding the “sterner language . . . concrete and direct” (and joining in the poetry wars):

. . . real vision can be lost by ‘watering it down.’ A poet—Robert Lowell, for example—may dilute his material so much that he loses what he wants to say. The resulting poems become long and dull, monotonous, because the poet will not—perhaps cannot—cut away extraneous matter to reach the essence of what he writes. Such a trend, that of overt obliqueness, began with the sonorous rhetoric of T. S. Eliot. In modified form, Eliot’s ambiguity and obscurity, used not half so well, that is, tired out, carry over in many magazine with an in-groupness and cross reference of the poets that kills content, if there is . . . any. (Schaff’s ellipsis.)

Which remark—with a few minor changes—’d serve, too, the present “era” (the codify’d gestural monotony of Silliman’s juxtapositions out of the live sonorities of Pound, say, or the “concrete irrelevance” contentlessness of the paratactic gibberish hoe’d up out of Google—or Daniel Deronda, or Mardi, or The Tuesday Weld Story!—by Flarf-commandos and / or the timid mimic-hybridists in the wake of the Language boys . . .) That old story: the listlessness and endless rehash of the “period.”

Some of Schaff’s assessments. “Ashbery [three poems in the issue: “Maintenance,” “The Adirondacks,” and “The Thousand Islands”] stands over against Olson. Where Olson’s vision is social, Ashbery’s is extremely personal; Olson follows a line, Ashbery’s poetry is full of fantastic surprises. . . . Sometimes I wonder if his extreme faithfulness to personal perception doesn’t leave the reader out.” Schaff calls Duncan [“Sonnet I,” “Sonnet II,” “Sonnet III For Robin Blaser”] “the most literary of these writers” and notes how “opulence in tone can become garish.” Snyder [“Four at Sea,” “The Levels”] “is The New Poets tentative link with Robert Frost.” Schaff differentiates between Frost’s concern “with regional New England and an ironic honesty inherent in its soil,” and Snyder’s “view of the world . . . in which man and nature work as co-ordinate, not opposing”: “In . . . doing something, not just thinking about it—Snyder predicts ‘highest perfect enlightenment,’ a peace and satisfaction.” (See, too, Schaff’s earlier claim that “the name Action Poets [is] sometimes used for this group.”) Regarding Wieners [“Juvenilia”—a lovely poem that is later print’d (Selected Poems, 1958-1984) as part of “Autumn in New York” and titled “Tuesday 7:00 PM”]: “He does not possess the fine rhetoric of Duncan, or the humour and balance of Whalen; yet, more than any other poet mentioned so far, Wieners has a delicacy combined with what Richard Sewall has called ‘the tragic vision of life.’ . . . He does not deceive and his work has a lovely humility and simplicity.” In Schaff’s The Moon by Day one of the “Dedications” reads Wieneresquely thus:

                        for John Wieners

If sex were the lure
of these unhappy streets alone
I’d leave them laughing.
You haven’t been anywhere but desire’s
one-legged messenger
hops after you to hit
you and you alone with his
flowered crutch. The Lure
pulls the devil into heaven,
will it pull us into life?
And what lure,
if Christ is only a catchword
you and I and others
go fishing from and for
an abyss filled with miners’ lights.
The diamond
is what we are seeking
more often than not, love seeks us
and we will have none of it.
A bunch of funky Persians
bearing books and tasty-cakes
come to a delicatessen
and there you are
asking the animals of the forest
to come join your banquet.
But none leave
their contentment for your longing
And why should they?
You draw closer to
disappearing than the veil
meadowlarks in hell
drawn between flesh and what would crush it.
Where you linger
unnetted stars gather rain into
a runic lightfall.
For there’s but one like you in bliss
and few again in wisdom.
Pressure does not lift
curves from your reasoning,
flowers from your mouth.

                        20 May 1969

Echo of one of O’Hara’s elegies for James Dean there at the end—and looking for its precise wording I find a rather amusing letter to the editors of LIFE magazine in the March 4, 1957 issue:

Sirs:
      The James Dean necrophilia has penetrated even the upper levels of culture. Poetry includes in its March 1956 issue “For James Dean,” by Frank O’Hara. In concludes thus:

Men cry from the grave while they still live
and now I am this dead man’s voice,
stammering, a little in the earth.
I take up
the nourishment of his pale green eyes,
out of which I shall prevent
flowers from growing, your flowers.

                                          Turner Cassity
Jackson, Miss.

The Dorn poem included in New Poetry 1963 is one not found in the 1975 Collected Poems, 1956-1974—it, too, ending with a terrific swell:

The Mountains

                        (for the painter, Raymond Obermayr)

Like a distant rumble of undeclared war
the wind shakes all things on our ears
and it’s like the water treatment
or a willful cat how the nerves
don’t anymore fend for themselves.

The base of the mountains
are blue and flecks of moving brown
are there like a lingering image.
But above that base
comes the magenta higher mountains,
steps to green, a rise the eye
can only take, where again lingers yellow
and all runs to a high atmospheric orange
but cut
the deep black blue of
full day.

I know men have perished her
there and all around.

Thus in a cut of all of it
there is the inferno we forget,
descends to the only red of fire.
To go down there is the whole
tension of its mystery.

All lingers. All passes in those hills.

One tempts the perfect
with suggested birds and men
suggested toil, one is reckless
enough to say they are there and forget.
And enough to leave all growth aside.
There is no frame for blue
but blue, but this is a late time
after blue was made.

And the earth herself
lets no such recessions loose.
You can move in the shadows, in that
wild blue, small towns
like specks flourish and go out
there is no coming back from the space
you make.

And, while I’m copying things down, here’s one of Snyder’s pieces (the pleasures of clarity and work and the unhamper’d—unwinch’d up by rhetoric—world):

Four at Sea

over the mindanao deep

scrap brass
          dropped off the fantail
falling six miles

hideharu-maru

spray drips on the cargo booms

a fresh-chipped winch
                    spotted with red-lead

young fir
soaked in summer rain

metal

marble, wine, oil           O
          tattering leather, oars slapping
          bronze buckle biting the soft belly flesh

once only

almost at the equator
almost at the equinox
exactly at midnight
from a ship
        the full moon
in the center of the sky

(Sappa Creek, March 20, 1958, near Singapore)

That, too, I find in no Snyder collection.

Gary Snyder, c. 2007

Kent Johnson on Ron Silliman’s “Obsidian Desires”

Lichens

Kent Johnson ask’d that I post the sterling complaint and accusal below—I stand behind it fully. As Silliman notes—rather confusedly—in the same section of The Alphabet (“Non”): “Anger augers altered ego.” To two-handedly bore a hole in wood is hardly the equivalent of prophetic skill, but some word-usages be wholly inexcusable. JL

—

A Rather Ugly Juncture in The Alphabet

I realize it’s an unusual question, but did Ezra Pound, vengeful and mean as he could be, ever express a longing in his poetry for the death by defenestration of an extant human being of his acquaintance? Could be I missed it, but I don’t think he ever did. Not even in Canto XLV . . .

Believe it or not, Ron Silliman does precisely that, in The Alphabet. On page 348:

                                    if only Eliot Weinberger
                                    had married Carl Andre

                  How do you say “asshole” in Dutch?

I had come across this passage some while back. I knew of Silliman’s long held animosity towards Weinberger. And I was well aware, to be sure, of how easily mere poetic divergences often mutate into personal vendettas within the avant-garde realm. It’s part of the scenery, as we all know. Silliman’s own personal attacks on other poets are fairly legion (in Leningrad, a book he co-authored with other Language writers back in 1991, he refers to me as a “cockroach,” for one example).

Thus, at the time, as I recall, I dismissed the “asshole” slur as unfortunate in its sophomoric ring, chalked it up as a clumsily satirical moment of score-settling, and kept going. But the full, startling point of the passage had escaped me at first blush. A few days ago, after seeing it quoted in the conclusion to an essay by Jason Harmon (“Looking from A to A: Altazor and The Alphabet,” Jacket #40), the full sense of it finally came plain to me. And so, feeling increasingly perturbed by the intimation, I wrote Silliman the following email (as yet unanswered):

You know, Ron, I just have to say:

Reading that passage again from The Alphabet (quoted by Jason Harmon at the end of his essay in Jacket), I was struck by how creepy it really is. Somewhat shameful, really, in its atavistic insinuations. And I’m not talking about the dumb use of “asshole” in reference to EW, which is neither here nor there.

Though I’m aware of numerous digs you take at other people in the collection (and nothing wrong with that, in principle!), this meanness really crosses a line, not just in what it bizarrely implies about your wishes for Weinberger, but also in that it callously makes play with Mendieta’s memory.

A sad point in your work!

Here is some brief background context for Silliman’s passage: Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American artist, whose breathtaking conceptual / earth-body / performance work has had a significant impact on the art world since the 1970s and 80s. She is now generally esteemed as one of the visionary feminist artists of the period. She was married to Carl Andre, a sculptor and leading figure in Minimalist art circles. In 1985, as she and Andre were having a violent argument, Mendieta died, falling from the window of their New York apartment. At the time Silliman composed the above entry in The Alphabet, it was widely believed Andre had murdered her, and it’s clear from the passage that Silliman shares the suspicion. After a sensational trial, Andre was acquitted, but questions still hang over the circumstances of Mendieta’s death.

The disturbing implication of Silliman’s passage is clear; and it’s quite clear, too, that any sense of “humor” does not leaven the dark suggestion:

Too bad Eliot Weinberger, the asshole, wasn’t thrown from the window instead.

It is quite unbelievable, when one stops to think about it: A poet candidly wishing, in a poem, that a violent death befall another writer. In fact, I challenge anyone reading this to point to an American poem of the last one hundred years (make that two hundred) that so openly proffers a fancy for the decease—and by murder, at that!—of a fellow contemporaneous figure.

What would lead Silliman to make such a reprehensible suggestion? Perhaps he can add some information that would help us understand. But certainly nothing Weinberger had written about him at the time (or since!) would justify it. True, Weinberger had pointedly criticized Silliman’s Language Poetry anthology, In the American Tree, for its parochial, nationalistic focus—a notable departure, at the time, from the principled internationalism of the historical avant-garde. And he had written some things criticizing what appeared to him to be a relative lack of interest, among the Language poets, in foreign literature and translation. In Sulfur magazine he’d also raised, in advance of similar ones posed by Fredric Jameson around that time, some thoughtful questions about the Language aesthetic and its possible unacknowledged imbrications with the cultural dynamics of late capitalism. But a review of the record shows nothing personal or particularly nasty at all coming from Weinberger towards Silliman. Apparently, though, Weinberger’s measured early critiques were enough to suggest that not only was Weinberger an “asshole,” but that his life should best be terminated. Whether or not others in the Language circle shared—or still share—such obsidian desires, I can’t say. One hopes not.

But I can say that the time has come for Ron Silliman to own up to this utterly ill and revolting passage. It is contained in an important book that is the compendium of half a life’s labor, and its ugly presence will certainly be noted in future studies. And it will be noted, no doubt, that the passage is made even more obscene by the manner its viciousness is cloaked in flippant allusion and paratactic “cleverness.”

Does he still stand by it? Or not? If he does not, will he extend an apology to Weinberger, who, incidentally, since the time Silliman penned his death desire, has gone on to achieve international renown and respect through his work as a translator, editor, essayist, anti-war writer, and human rights polemicist?

I think it behooves him to, and that he should do so publicly and soon. And in the process, he might also offer a heartfelt apology to the family of Ana Mendieta, for so tactlessly using her tragedy as trope for such thuggish assault. We need, as I’ve said before, more satire in our poetry, yes, but we can certainly have that without undue odium that channels a fatwā-like spirit.

—Kent Johnson

Ron Silliman, c. 1976

Niedecker / Berryman’s Pound

A Field (Milkweed)

Humidity’s drench and distract, off-load’d air. Spent innumerable hours yesterday trying to determine what—sheer velocity, syntactical gyp, the taut hints of loss, the handwriting itself—makes Lorine Niedecker’s “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous” (the twenty-seven pieces writ c. 1934 in the pages of a small desk calendar ending with the ecstatic “Jesus, I’m / going out / and throw / my arms / around” and including things like “If you circle / the habit of / your meaning, / it’s fact and / no harm / done” and “That’s sweet / on a target— / nobody’d know / the ham line. / Holes are too / late nowa- / days. One / freak ass to wire”) so nervy and implacable. Try it yourself (I try’d it myself): “To de-ice / all that’d gone / ‘wintry, Cal- / vinist, & capitalist’ / required a suds / bucket, a min- / now bucket.” Or: “I balk at the / stoppage of / that limb’s / rescinding / pull.” Items seemingly wrought with hand-wringing, commemorative of a studiousness Niedecker’s lack. (See: “Summer— / I don’t hum / the least of my / resistance, / I give it a fly.”) Composing query: did Niedecker write “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous” in a flurry—the title’d seem to suggest it—having prepared the calendar in advance by gluing white slips to its existing homily-rid pages? Is part of its meaning the improvisatory? (Jenny Penberthy notes of the piece—“Dated by LZ ‘Xmas 1934’” and reports it “found by the editor” in Zukofsky’s papers in Austin. “The calendar’s original text is only just legible bearing platitudes such as ‘True bravery is / shown by performing / without witness what / one might be capable / of doing before all the / world’ (Jan. 13-26).”) Some duds do occur. I’d wager that the way the end of “Dali’s ‘Archeological / Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus’ / Strike a thrall. / Bring an ear- / drum up to a / laughing order / at spittle point. / For tipped aurals / and aluminum / casticulars” veers off into throwaway neologism signals a sense of failure (the way an engraver’ll scratch out a spoil’d plate). Or is “casticulars”—the scratch-out—related to something like chastity or chastisement—aluminum the most chaste of metals—by way of “castical” or “castigable”? I don’t know. Certainly the Dali—and the Millet—configure something of the stark brittleness of distant devotion.

Salvador Dalí, “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus,” 1933-1935

Jean-François Millet, “L'Angélus,” 1857–59

Seeing the figures in the paintings pushes “at” the sequence in new ways: the Dickinsonian “The satisfactory / emphasis is on / revolving. / Don’t send / steadily; after / you know me / I’ll be no one” and the initially neutral “To give / heat is within / the control of / every human / being” become admonitory, severer. Even that “laughing order / at spittle point” seems suddenly less a spasm of Niedecker’s (earlier) surrealism and more of a possible reprimand. Another “dud”—“The monster died / of his last breath, / ate a honey and / grew waxen”—is so, one suspects, because of its easy narrative surreal—versus something like “I talk at the top / of my white / resignment”—where a syntactical feint (“resignment”) disables the mounting semantic expectancy (“top of my lungs,” “white heat”) with a blinding kind of truth (see Dickinson again).

—

Enough of that. Prodding at something I wholly love—Niedecker’s “common dealtout food”—“no better reading / than keeps us destitute.” I’d intend’d to ramble off about Berryman and Pound, or, precisely, Berryman’s piece call’d “The Poetry of Ezra Pound” (written originally for James Laughlin as an introduction for a Pound Selected Poems—according to John Haffenden in The Life of John Berryman (1982), “Laughlin thought it too profound to inveigle students and the general public. When Berryman denied the point, calling his work ‘deliberately SIMPLE-MINDED,’ Laughlin skirted an argument by proposing that the piece be used to introduce a separate issue of Personae.” Eventually Laughlin drop’d the piece and Berryman print’d it in the April 1949 Partisan Review.) Berryman, therein:

All the ambitious poetry of the last six hundred years is much less “original” than any but a few of its readers ever realize. A staggering quantity of it has direct sources, even verbal sources, in other poetry, history, philosophy, theology, prose of all kinds. Even the word “original” in this sense we find first in Dryden, and the sense was not normalized till the midcentury following. . . . Poetry is a palimpsest. . . . but our literary criticism, if at its best it knows all this well enough, even at its best is inclined to forget it and to act as if originality were not regularly a matter of degree in works where it is worth assessing at all. A difficulty is that modern critics spend much of their time in the perusal of writing that really is more or less original, and negligible.

What Berryman attempts, is to argue that Pound’s subject is largely himself. Of the critical reaction to the Pisan Cantos—so “personal”—Berryman writes: “The Cantos have always been personal, only the persona increasingly adopted, as the Poet’s fate clarifies, is Pound himself.” (Ammo or permission of sorts, one supposes, for Berryman’s own Dream Songs with persona “Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.”

Lorine Niedecker, 1903-1970