Roberto Bolaño / William Faulkner

Dunes (Lake Michigan)

Roberto Bolaño again (Amulet): “. . . either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let’s say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass . . .” A tremor unleashing the whatness of the world’s sly ongoingness, its arbitrary brusque ahem. One goes off for a spell of slack-brain’d gapery, or slim readings of the book of nature—the lovely fringed gentian’s tiny-fang’d piercing blue, with cream in its throat, the Pitcher’s thistle stupefy’d sprawl of a “stance,” the ghostly corral of point’d cedar stumps angling out of the sparse grass-plait’d dunes—and comes back a cartoon, moveable, feisty, struggling to bend—with its stick-skinny arms—the black frame that contains him, jettison it and its ready continuum. There’s Walter Benjamin’s curious fragment of 1919:

The currently effective messianic elements of the work of art manifest themselves as its content; the retarding elements, as its form. Content makes its way toward us. Form holds back, permits us to approach. The retarding (formal) elements of music probably dwell in the memory, where listening forms an accumulation. In any case, art of every kind and every work of art contain something that causes perception to accumulate, and this is the essence of the artwork’s form.

Time itself become a (spurious) bag of containing, with its unstoppering button showing openly like a cat’s. And, too, in Bolaño’s Amulet (New Directions, 2006), translated by Chris Andrews, a fable (told by the Uruguayan Auxilio Lacouture, she who—in 1968—defend’d the autonomy (against the illegal occupying riot police) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the “last redoubt” of the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature—Amulet a reprise, expand’d, of a story out of The Savage Detectives) of the perennially “non-existent avant-garde,” any avant-garde’s being so sunk in the self-entrancement of its presumptuous singularity’s to see nothing other. Auxilio L., in the can:

. . . a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions. And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spine, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.

Put up against the story—and its antecedents, Auxilio L. recalls both the “chubby little guy,” one day “intent on pulling the rug out” under the establish’d poets, “or undermining the fertile field on which they were grazing like statues,” who’s now “become a greasy fat, obsequious man (as poets are prone to do)” and “the Peasant Poets, who were more and more comfortably ensconced in the administrative and literary bureaucracy (but what am I saying: they were lodged there, bolted down, deeply rooted from the very start)”—of another sort of “black rhombus,” another clamoring sort of non-existence, Auxilio Lacouture’s story (by way of José Emilio Pacheco):

. . . if Rubén Darío hadn’t died so young, before reaching the age of fifty, Huidobro would certainly have got to know him, much as Ezra Pound got to know W. B. Yeats. Imagine it: Huidobro working as Darío’s secretary. But the young poets were too young to be able to grasp how important the encounter between the old Yeats and the young Pound had been for poetry in English (and, in fact, for poetry all around the world), so they didn’t realize how important the hypothetical encounter and the potential friendship between Darío and Huidobro might have been; they had no sense of the range of missed opportunities for poetry in our language. Because Darío, I dare say, would have taught Huidobro a great deal, but Huidobro would also have taught Darío a thing or two. That’s how the relationship between master and disciple works: it is not only the disciple who learns. And since we’re speculating, I believe, and so did Pacheco (with an innocent enthusiasm that is one of his great qualities), that, of the two, Darío would have learned more; he would have been able to bring Hispanic modernism to a close and begin something new, not the avant-garde as such, but an island, say, between modernism and the avant-garde, what we might now call the non-existent island, an island of words that never were, and could only have come into being (granted that this were even possible) after the imaginary encounter between Darío and Huidobro; and Huidobro himself, after his fruitful encounter with Darío, would have been able to found an even more vigorous avant-garde, what we might name the non-existent avant-garde, which, had it existed, would have transformed us and changed our lives.

As if to ask, where’d la poesía norteamericana ’ve gone if, say, any of the self-satisfy’d bull-roarers (those stubborn and presumptuous singularities of the language –center’d writing set) demurred to a disciple’s secretariat with, say, A. R. Ammons, circa 1975? What range of miss’d lingual feats resides in the rabid clannish fealty that props the avant-garde stance?

There’s that (Monday morning mop-up), and the untongue’d days of late northern summer slowly slipping into the unsound’d swell. A several-hundred-yard lazy slosh out through knee-deep water to reach a depth amenable to one’s awkward crawl or high-bobbing breaststroke. The night lightning storms, the rain-pock’d sand, the tiny yellow pontoon’d aeroplane tow’d by a gigantic tug. The scolding pish-pish of the chickadees. The days of reading Faulkner’s 1957 The Town (continuing with the Snopeses), wondering if Faulkner’d perused Nabokov’s Lolita (a best-seller of sorts even in its 1955 Olympia Press edition, though its G.P. Putnam’s Sons American edition only appear’d in 1958) in the midst of writing it: see the sixteen-year-old Miss Linda Snopes, obsess’d of by the approaching-forty Gavin Stevens, her self-possession (“tall, like a heron out of a moil of frogs and tadpoles”), her diet of soda-fountain Cokes and sundaes (“monstrous synthetic paradoxes”), her girlish clumsy inviolability (“innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent.”) (Turns out, late in the volume, that one of the narrators, one V. K. Ratliff, is named Vladimir Kyrilytch something or other—“Not Ratliff.” A nod to the Russian? Peut-être. There’s, too, Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, with Carroll Baker, screenplay by Tennessee Williams. Things in the air.)

Roberto Bolaño, 1953-2003

What’s Up with Silliman? The Mystery Builds

Kent Johnson, self-admittedly “like a dog with a bone” regarding the loss and damage to the scholarly community—poesía norteamericana, “post-avant” branch in particular—resulting out of the so-call’d “default” sinking of innumerable publicly-made-in-good-faith comments in the comment boxes of Ron Silliman’s eponymous blog, ask’d me to post the following. One is somewhat shock’d by the tepidity of response to what amounts to a smithereen’d archive, particularly amongst younger scholars. One admits, even, to finding the whole scan­dale de Sil­li­man “com­pletely pointless” (meaning, I assume, “inconsequential”? “of no present or future scholarly import”? I beg to differ.) I sincerely thank Johnson for the rabid (and absolutely necessary) concern. JL

—

What’s Up with Silliman? The Mystery Builds

Allow me to begin, for sake of context, with a comment I sent to John Gallaher, some days back, under a post by him on the much-discussed decision by Ron Silliman to close comments at his blog:

From what I understand, it’s possible to disable the comment function at a blog without erasing *all prior comments* from public view. Isn’t this so? I think your post misses something important about what Silliman seems (in absence of clarification to the contrary) to have decided—something potentially much more significant, from an ethical point of view, than his perfectly legitimate choice to stop allowing comments from this time forward. It’s perplexing to me that no one else seems to have raised a question about the apparent vamooshing of a whole archive (one from which a number of critical books and essays of past few years have already cited material, for example). Here is what I sent to Jessica Smith’s blog yesterday on the matter:

Michael Robbins, a prolific and often insightful contributor to many comment boxes, makes a sweeping, dismissive remark above about the comments archive at Silliman’s blog. He’s correct, of course, that a lot of fluff and drivel was to be found there, among the many thousands of contributions. But it’s also the case that a good many thoughtful, good-faith comments and exchanges (some of them quite rich and lengthy) had appeared under numerous of the posts—often with participation of serious poets and critics and often in eloquent challenge to Silliman’s own partisan readings and critical assumptions.

I put the above in past tense because it would *appear* that Silliman has not only decided to deactivate the comments function of his blog (something he clearly has a right to do), but also to conceal from view every single one of the thousands of comments appearing there over the past eight years (a different matter altogether). And *if* a massive textual disappearance of this kind is his intent, I wonder how people here would regard such a move, in context of this post by Jessica about writers being “silenced.”

Hopefully, the cancellation of the record there is only a temporary glitch and that archive will shortly be restored to direct access, now and for possible future readers who may wish to consider it, for whatever reasons they may. One wants to believe (I wrote Silliman to ask him about it, though without reply) that it *is* only a temporary erasure: because it seems inconceivable that someone would void, at a stroke, a secondary but voluminous archive that is very much a part of the life of recent American poetry—even if that archive is, legally, at his disposal.

We’ll see what happens. As a friend wrote to me this morning, the deletion of that public record, with all its good and bad both, would be nothing short of—from an ethical and literary standpoint—a stunning instance of malfeasance.

Some people took issue with the term “malfeasance,” including Silliman himself, who wrote to assure me that the sudden disappearance of all past comments was simply a result of Blogger’s “default setting,” implying that there was nothing he could have done otherwise in the blocking of future comments. In fact, in a post yesterday, he repeats the claim, in a note beneath one of my back-channels to him, which he posts, within a sort of general mailbag, without attribution.

But Silliman’s pleas of innocence now look to be quite misleading. And from them, one can only conclude—if the information that follows is correct—that he is either 1) ignorant of the technical features Blogger makes available (something that would be quite remarkable, given that he has had a long career both in the blogging avocation and in the computer-industry profession), or 2) that he is being slyly disingenuous, wishing readers to assume that a global setting for deleting the comments function—one that indeed would hide the archive of comments by default—was the only choice available to him. (And many of his readers do seem to have accepted that “explanation.”)

Was it his only choice? As best I can determine, it decidedly was not.

In the past few days, I have heard from four people who use Blogger, and each has told me it is perfectly possible—and quite simple—to deactivate the commenting function forward from a particular date while still keeping the total record of past discussion intact and in normal view. John Gallaher, in fact, has written me with the following snippet taken directly from instructions provided by Blogger to its users:

“Note: Selecting ‘Hide’ does not delete existing comments. You can show them at any time by re-selecting ‘Show.’”

In addition, another blogger I heard from, Dale Smith, whose URL ends in “blogspot.com” just like Silliman’s, responded within ten minutes with quite clear evidence of such: After receiving my email of query, he’d gone into his new blog, The Urge, to tinker with the clearly marked settings and voilà: You can see it here: The comment function for current and future posts is voided and past comments are still present. According to Smith, “On the ‘Comments Settings’ page the first thing it asks is whether you want to ‘show’ or ‘hide’ comments. This does not delete previous comments. It just hides them. Scrolling further down there is a way to set up the blog so that all past comments can be seen but future ones are hidden.”

The question I’ve posed then about the ethics of Silliman’s erasure of a massive amount of text by others remains open—assuming, again, his action is not the blameless result of a computer industry expert and long-time blogger not yet having a handle on the machinery: Why, without a word of regret, would he take out, in one hit, a huge record and resource—in many instances containing material of potential value to future readers—from unmediated critical access and use? As I said in a prior remark on all this, that collection of commentary is a big beast, full of all kinds of things: from lots of garbage, to insightful analysis, to furtive bibliographic data, to revealing polemic, to surprising anecdote, to humorous (or not) performance, to widely engaged debate. It’s a messy lot, and some might, from close distance, dismiss it for that. But the fact is that sometimes rich, valuable stuff can come out of archives that have been lowly regarded, even long forgotten. Indeed, it’s precisely through encounter with lowly regarded repositories that unsuspected, valuable things often emerge.

Still, one might fairly ask: Is it really all gone? Even if disappeared at the blog, couldn’t the archive still be found, integrally preserved somewhere on the web?

Silliman, to be sure, in the post of yesterday that I reference above, ends by noting, with quote from the owner of Pathologos blog the following:

NB: The following note from Jessica Smith’s
comment stream would seem to answer questions
about the preservation of comments
for those who imagine them to have been
“a major poetry archive”.
RS

The Way Back Machine can be used to recover old states of many webpages. you can also use google’s cache function … . just search for the url you need on google, and click “cache” under the desired result. for the most part, nothing on the internet every really disappears, even if the content publisher deletes it (which is probably just as scary to some people as the idea that some content can be lost forever).

on the other hand, Silliman has no responsibility to archive comments on his own blog. it’s a little hard for me to see why anyone would assume that someone else has the obligation to archive something you want to keep. you would archive a letter that you sent to someone. you would never send the original (and only) copies of your poems to a publisher under the assumption that they’d keep track of it for you. anyone who wants conversations that happen on the internet to be saved needs to be archiving for themselves, and then backing them all up somewhere else.

really, we should be writing to blogger (the blogging service Silliman uses) asking them to introduce a function where individual users can archive their own comments. many sites offer this function,
blogger does not.

Let me highlight two important things here.

First of all, and most immediately, we are urged to believe by the quote (and Silliman’s obvious endorsement of it) that the Silliman comment archives are safe and sound, a few clicks away, in “Cached” form: Six of one or half a dozen of the other, so to speak.

And yet, if one checks the comments sections at both the Pathologos and Jessica Smith blogs, it becomes clear that the person making the claim quickly goes into retreat: The “Way Back Machine,” it would seem, is markedly incomplete and unreliable as an archiving instrument, and the Google “Cache” pages, to which Silliman seems to want to consign the storing of the thousands of comments sent his way, have a very limited shelf life. Indeed, the owner of the Pathologos blog, to whom Silliman gives last word, reiterated his somewhat embarrassed qualifications a couple days ago, when I pressed him on the matter at Jessica Smith’s blog.

It could be I’m still missing something, and I’d welcome anyone who is more technically knowledgeable than I to step in and confirm that “Cached” records on the web are as long-lived and complete as the auto-records of blogs proper, preserved as they are for the course of the virtual lives of their platforms. But from what I can gather, that seems not to be the case. If it’s not the case, one again must be surprised that a web-savvy figure like Silliman would be in the dark about it.

The second thing to highlight in regards Silliman’s endorsement of the Pathologos comment involves something a good deal more startling and disturbing. For the suggestion is made there that Silliman really has no responsibility to preserve the materials offered by others to his blog—that, instead, all those comments should have been industriously copied and saved in personal files by each of the people making them. Then, one supposes, we would happily have a decade’s worth of thousands of disarticulated comments sent to Silliman’s blog floating safely out there in personal files! Such a suggestion—apparently seriously proffered—is so dumb and completely oblivious to the nature and meaning of an unfolding, collective, and organically interrelated document of exchange that one hardly knows what to say. And that Silliman himself would hold up such a clueless, irrelevant remark in positive light, as some kind of “answer” to the concerns that have been expressed, is truly astounding.

After all the brouhaha over whether Silliman should ban further commenting at his blog (a secondary, somewhat uninteresting issue—and the supposed trigger for it, that poets’ “feelings” have been “hurt” by sharp criticism is somewhat humorous, in light of the tonnage of needling, sometimes vicious, aggression Silliman has parceled out on numerous writers over the past eight years, directly in his comments or indirectly via his prolific links) the real matter remains: What about the extant, vast record of conversation, debate, and anecdotal and bibliographic information those archives provide? What of that? Not just the potential interest of its discrete parts, but the part the broader sweep of that record might play (however modest the promise we might currently presume it to hold) in helping to illuminate this moment in American poetry’s “post-avant” history? Supposedly, the “post-avant” is an important thing for Ron Silliman. Is it for him, really, to nonchalantly decide, as the case begins to seem, that this collectively developed material is so unworthy and disposable? Because a minute portion of its contents are annoying to him? Even if he “owns” those contributions others have, in the overwhelming main, sincerely made?¹

Apparently so . . . For in another back-channel e-mail to me the other day, he blithely responded to my concern about the safekeeping of the record in question with the following remark:

“I haven’t thought about saving it.”

As my title says, the mystery builds.

—Kent Johnson

¹ I suppose Silliman might say he had to delete all record of comments so that “Comment Field Bullies,” or CFB’s, as the acronym du jour goes, wouldn’t raid his past comment boxes with objectionable remarks. But really, how many numbskulls would take the effort to do that in now antique, dormant threads? And if a few did, it would certainly not take much to delete the occasional one. Furthermore, as Nicholas Liu points out, himself a past user of Blogger, it is a simple maneuver to close any old thread without hiding existing comments.

The Chairmen

Roberto Bolaño’s The Return

Some Flowers

Somewhere in Roberto Bolaño’s 1976 “first infrarealist manifesto” call’d “GIVE IT ALL UP AGAIN” (translated here by Tim Pilcher) the somewhat contradictory line (every good manifesto demands exposure within itself of the very implements of its own subverting in order to avoid the anyways-inevitable “process of individual musemification”), the line: “Rimbaud, come home!” Thinking of Bolaño’s Rimbaud (isn’t the “savage” of The Savage Detectives lift’d straight up out of Rimbaud’s line—ending the prose poem titled “Parade”—J’ai seul la clé de cette parade sauvage, roughly, “Only I hold the key to the savage sideshow”?) whilst reading of the Bolaño sidekick and doppelgänger Arturo Belano “lost in Africa,” in a village “forsaken by god and abandoned by the human race,” an African village “whose inhabitants have all fled or been killed” (Belano is “looking up at the sky through which three clouds are floating, like three signs in a blue field, the field of conjectures or the field of mystical doctrines, amazed by the elegance of the clouds and their unspeakably slow procession”—the whole story is construct’d of a single sentence, one dips into and out of it volontiers, that is to say—the manifesto again—“Tenderness is an exercise in speed.”) What Arturo Belano is doing (between cloud-conjectures):

. . . leafing through a sort of photo album in which Francophone poetry celebrates itself, sons of bitches, he thinks, sitting on the ground, a ground of red clay, or something like that, but it’s not clay, not even clayey, though it is red, or rather coppery in color, or reddish, except at midday when it’s yellow, the book lying between his legs, a fat book, nine hundred and thirty pages, so close enough to a thousand pages long, a hardback, La poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945, edited by Serge Brindeau, published by Bordas, a compendium of little texts about all the poets writing in French around the world, be it in France or Belgium, Canada or North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East . . .

That’s in the story titled “Photos” in Bolaño’s The Return (New Directions, 2010), translated by Chris Andrews. There’s something terribly sorry and right about the way Belano truckles through the pages of the book, naming and noting, examining the author photos, collecting, judging, voraciously flirting and savagely dismissing, la poésie itself nowhere in evidence:

. . . here we have Patrice Cauda, who looks like he hits his wife—what am I saying, his wife, I mean his girlfriend—and Jean Dubacq, who looks like he works in a bank, like a sad bank clerk whit little hope left, a Catholic, and Jacques Arnold, who looks like the manager of the bank that employs the unfortunate Dubacq, and Janine Mitaud, large mouth, sparkling eyes, a middle-aged woman with short hair, a slim neck and, to judge from her expression, a subtle sense of humor, and Philippe Jaccottet (whom he has read), who’s thin and has a kind-looking face, though maybe, thinks Belano, it’s one of those kind-looking faces you should never trust, and Claude de Burine, the incarnation of Little Orphan Annie—even her dress, or what the photo shows of her dress, is identical to Little Orphan Annie’s—but how is this Claude de Burine, Belano asks himself aloud . . . Claude de Burine, he reads, was born in Saint-Léger-des Vignes (Nièvre), in 1931, and she is the author of Lettres à l’enfance (Rougerie, 1957), La Gardienne (Le soleil dans la tête—good name for a publishing house—1960), L’allumeur de réverbères (Rougerie, 1963) and Hanches (Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1969), and that’s all the biographical information there is, as if at the age of thirty-eight, after the publication of Hanches, Little Orphan Annie had disappeared, although the author of the introductory note says: Claude de Burine, avant toute autre chose, dit l’amour, l’amour inépuisable, and when Belano reads that, it all makes sense in his overheated brain: someone who dit l’amour could perfectly well disappear at the age of thirty-eight, especially, especially if that person is the double of Little Orphan Annie, with the same round eyes, the same hair, the eyebrows of someone who has seen the inside of a foundling hospital, an expression of perplexity and pain, a pain alleviated to some degree by caricature, but it’s pain all the same . . .

Which phrase likely captures something of Bolaño’s quasi-documentary “method”—“La poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945, edited by Serge Brindeau,” exists, naturally, ditto Claude de Burine, (one rather happily finds, too, Bolaño’s mention of “Nicole Brossard, a girl with straight hair, with a part in the middle, big eyes, a square jaw, pretty, . . .”) and its proffer’d details seemingly correspond. Bolano’s engaging in a kind of sociology of a literary moment, the literary moment (one endlessly repeat’d—every anthology is full of Claude de Burine’s, who did, anyhow, continue to write—her Le Pilleur d’Étoiles (Gallimard, 1997) took the Prix Georges Perros in 1998, she died in 2005). In “GIVE IT ALL UP AGAIN”—thinking of documentary sources and the blowback it offers: “The painter adapts to a society that is every day more of a “painter” than he is, and there he finds himself disarmed and registers as a clown.” (To the registry, Flarfists!) And, too, he includes a point’d story:

At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we (Mario Santiago and some of us) heard laughter coming from the penthouse of a 9-story building. They didn’t stop, they kept laughing and laughing while below we slept propped up in various phone booths. There came a moment when only Mario was still paying attention to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something and Darío Galicia had told us that it’s always watched by the cops). We made phone calls but our coins turned into water. The laughter continued. After we left that neighborhood Mario told me that actually no one had been laughing, that it was recorded laughter, and up there in that penthouse, some stragglers or maybe a single homosexual had silently listened to that record and made us listen to it.

—The death of the swan, the swan song, the last song of the black swan, is not in the Bolshoi but in the intolerable pain and beauty of the streets.

Ah, art and its daily convulsions. Too, I loved Bolaño’s huge sympathy for the young, the ineffably-stuck-with-the-writerly-curse, those moronic-beatific enough not to covey up, nor to suck up to the bigger, sunnier cloudlets, those remaining behind, darkly scudding with tenuous aim, amassing a terrible, explosive rain . . . Out of “Meeting with Enrique Lihn”:

I’m talking about 1981 or 1982, when I was living like a recluse in a house outside Gerona, with no money and no prospect of ever having any, and literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me, and any false move could have been fatal. It’s like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment—nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.

—

Up north for a week or ten days.

Roberto Bolaño, 1953-2003

William Wylie’s Route 36

Vetch

With William Wylie’s Route 36 (Flood Editions, 2010), Devin Johnston and Michael O’Leary up the Flood Editions ante by offering a book of photographs—impeccably design’d, richly print’d, with a compendium of endlessly examinable pleasures, stark and sleek and—like the ubiquitous cottonwood of the Kansas prairies, with its adz-handle thick rivulets of bark—repeatable.

William Wylie, “Near Scandia, Kansas,” 2006

Merrill Gilfillan provides a foreword, terse and prophetic, noting the road’s “insouciant, ‘There but for the grace of God,’ shunpike bearing”:

      Route 36 remains one of the more dignified means of crossing the mid-continent. The stretch from Last Chance, Colorado, almost to St. Joseph, Missouri, is an unfettered, open enough artery to finally attain the rhythm and syntax of, say, a river. But it is, of course, a line, a human beeline with daffodils and homefries, laughter and subtle wreckage at its edges.

Route 36 runs along the northern border of Kansas, missing the geographical center of the coterminous states near Lebanon, Kansas by a mere couple of miles. (Wylie: “A small park, obelisk, and defunct hotel mark the location. In homage I liked to climb up on the eight-foot-tall monument and survey the cornfield for miles around.”) According to Gilfillan, the usual “aggressive hucksterism” of the American road’s slunk off south to harry the newer throughway, Route 70, leaving the old route a place where one might “drive an intelligent mile”:

Those high plains, the côtes above the would-be river, remain a classical locus for vast exhalation and contemplative sway: the impeccable straightaways and the hawks overhead. The prairie cottonwoods, many times the wildest creatures in sight, carry the ensign of vertical life: twisted and tongue-tied, both blind and curious, always with the appearance of trying to pull up roots and hobble away. Even the dullest reaches of merciless corporate agriculture can be put to good use sizing the cloud realm, or practicing bird sounds at the wheel, in the grand tradition of Li Po’s “One of us calls out in partridge song.”

So, through some few summers, Wylie travels across the roughly 375 miles—through Home, Kansas and Joes, Colorado, and other Kansan towns—Blakeman, Axtell, Bird City, Stuttgart, McDonald, Beattie, Agra, St. Francis: “I stopped in every town along the route to see Main Street, sample homemade café pies, and visit the silos. Back out on the highway I’d stop and walk a mile or so along each accessible creek or river. One late afternoon on Sappa Creek near Oberlin I heard the calls of migrating cranes and looked up to see hundreds of them slowly circling high overhead.” There’s a lovely sense of fulsome abandonment to the photographs: one longs to enter the works to soak up a kind of plenitude of disuse. To stand a while in full prairie light utterly reft of humankind (though its traces remain, its feints and wrecks, the telephone pole, the boards nail’d to the tree). One thinks: here the light hitting a silo’s corrugated Quonset ridges resembles a Paul Strand,

William Wylie, “Bird City, Kansas,” 2007

William Wylie, “St. Francis, Kansas,” 2005

or here a row of scraggly trees stretch’d out along a horizon, each attended by a black Angus and a black shadow (the two merging) nods at works by Art Sinsabaugh, minus the elongating panoramic-style cropping. Not a “wrong” approach, though one rather limit’d by its fetish for lineage. One that disallows the blunt affection evidenced here for the way the solitary human story asserts itself: who nail’d up the boards, who so exiguously apply’d the tape to that storefront window?

William Wylie, “Near Washington, Kansas,” 2008

Some sense of that happy miasma one’s caught in in the photographs—between the roaring of something like high-frequency continental amplitude and the sudden niggle of a brief and tawdry human moment, found perhaps in Wylie’s remark that “I recall one July day in Marysville they were playing Christmas carols while the bank sign flashed 105 degrees. With no one in sight, this felt strangely apocalyptic.” And: “Walking the hills on a hot summer day, with grasshoppers flying in every direction and a thunderhead building on the horizon, my experience of time became at once more immediate and more vast. And the rare possibility of finding a rusted Gooch’s Feed sign on the back of an abandoned grain silo was pure archeology to me.” (Rather like O’Hara’s pronouncement: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”)

If one thinks of Flood Editions—and one inevitably does—as modeling itself largely along the excellent terms and standards of Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society, one’d align Wylie’s book with Jargon’s 1964 Six Mid-American Chants, combining Sherwood Anderson’s “chants” with Sinsabaugh’s giant “banquet” camera prints—made off 12 x 20-inch negatives—of Midwestern landscapes. Less lavish, lavish enough. (Wylie’s photograph here compare poorly with the book’s prints, the blacks blacker, leaf and grass and other details sharper, a nigh-tangible morass to plunge into.) I think, too, looking through Route 36 of Flood’s “history” with Kansas, how it pounced forth fully-made with Ronald Johnson’s The Shrubberies. Ashland, Kansas, is south, close up to the Oklahoma border (I check’d a map). I pull’d Johnson’s ARK off the shelf, and it fell open to Kansas, mid-book, apt:

ARK 47, Plow Spire
                                                                    for Ashland, Kansas

Line up all around the block, inscribe
dry red Kansas, country empty, even ‘Great American Desert’
no mapped puddle skipped a pebble, but Flood,
Flood parted ahead, let stack up time,
fast blood put out to pasture
our large argosy:

food head to foot for acrobat thought
bounce planed planned plank
handstand more split images than you could shake a stick at
‘step it up a round’
vast curtain drawn, in the wings
transparent corner cut as old as dance itself,

as if body twirled by a finger, prowess
such as seed put earth tap out tumultuous sun ‘succeed’, who
land upright, incarnate
inaccurate curves rebounded, redoubled errand
tombed solely new
simply of everything else.

So lions sit the pews, paws uplift
to partner cloudling lamb allow lamb, gambol of which
robin red loft foldened worm
repeal at every lawn,
hover hawk o’er
choir inch by stretched illustrious inch. . . .

And, later: “Upon the very leaves veined time writ large.” A kind of epigraph for Wylie’s Kansas photographs.

William Wylie
(Photograph by Tom Cogill)

Koch / OHara Letters

“Wild Peas”

Terminal mugginess, mosquito-bother’d air, my dilatory ways. The dog drags itself through the streets, “looking for a mongrel bitch.” “I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” (Or: “A private life is the long thick tree and the private life is the life for me.”) How is it that the little impenetrables line up so rippingly? The way, say, that Delacroix’s 1 March 1831 lines to the editor of L’Artiste—

Sir, talent does not submit. It delights in difficulties, but only in those it has itself chosen. Talent is like a mettlesome steed that will not offer its back to the casual rider, and refuses to fight save under the master that it loves. Not that talent lets itself by carried away by its own caprice without due choice and restraint; not that it shuns the yoke of reason; proportion and reason are, in a word, the essence of all that talent produces when it is truly inspired; but it needs that inspiration, and it can no longer be held responsible for what it may produce when that is lacking . . .

—nudges up against the environs of Kenneth Koch’s (out of “Ko, or A Season on Earth”) Byronesqueries (deuxième canto):

                                            Past the campo santo,
The drugstore, and the county airport, in
Great haste the milkman rides, begins to pant, “Oh,
How shall I ever paint in time to win
The bottle picture contest, which, it’s true,
Is sponsored by the Cincinnati Zoo,

A corollary of the summer opera
And much more modern. . . .” What strange man is this?
You talk to him, and meanwhile I will pop a-
Round in the back and see what images
Upon the glass containers’ sides in tempera
Or oil or water color he with bliss
Of inspiration that he might win fame
Has etched. Look here! They’re lovely, all the same!

Delacroix is resisting “the necessity of submitting to the ruthless sifting of a public competition, of being lined up in front of an audience like a troop of gladiators, vying with one another for its impertinent approval and reveling in mutual slaughter in the arena.” (One complaint: “In a competition, natural charm appears insipid when set beside the contortions of a rhetorical talent; true audacity seems exaggeration, beside some narrow and unimaginative production . . .”) Is Koch suddenly nosing into muggy consciousness out of my perusal of some pages of the Josh Schneiderman edit’d “this pertains to me which means to me you”: The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O’Hara, 1955-1956? (The title is that of a “typescript packet” of poems O’Hara present’d to Koch following O’Hara’s apparently rather difficult and unproductive playwright-in-residence stint at the Poets Theatre in Cambridge during the early months of 1956.) Schneiderman provides a detail’d and canny introduction to the letters, focusing on O’Hara’s various retorts, print’d and unprint’d, to Harry Roskolenko’s damning dismissal (“Mr. Koch, it seems, has a rare combination of words rattling about in this skull, but it is difficult to call any of his word combinations the bric-a-brac of poetry. He is precious and puerile . . .”) of Koch’s 1953 Poems in the pages of Poetry. And, too, on how the episode likely fired Koch’s early Dunciad, the satirical screed “Fresh Air” (“Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, / Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, / They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, / Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, / Oh what worms they are! they wish to perfect their form.”) and how O’Hara’s push and encouragement (“It does seem a shame not to have those poems in the public domain, don’t you think? And I think where [“Fresh Air”] might be lost, as we discussed in ; [John Bernard Myer’s Semi-Colon] or [Daisy Aldan’s] Folder, it who be okay here, since they have presented people like Agee, Goodman, Tillich . . . And if you didn’t have lots of pearls I wouldn’t suggest that you cast some.”) led to the piece’s printing the Cambridge magazine, i. e. (Schneiderman calls it “a powder keg of a magazine.”) The i. e. issue (including work, too, by O’Hara, and Ashbery, along with drawings by Jackson Pollock, “who had died a few months earlier and was probably at the height of fame”) mark’d a kind of New York School inaugural: “As a result of O’Hara’s intercession, the three poets were featured together as a group in publication outside of New York . . .” One measure of the fun in the letters: O’Hara’s epistolary japes, parodying various editors (one purporting to be by “Henry Rago, Editor, Poetry” wonderfully ends, “Please send us any minor little bagatelle you have which you are not embarrassed to see printed in our wretched but earnest little sheet.”) Here’s one:

Dear Kenneth Koch,
      It gives me a modicum of pleasure to join in the almost universal praise being rather heaped upon your lovely lyric THE HISTORY OF JAZZ. I commend your industry in assaying this ungovernable and perhaps partially unrewarding subject, which to my knowledge has been hitherto neglected by our authors. I was fortunate enough to know Madeleine Reierbacher intimately (how well I remember our four teas together that last summer in St. Louis!), and it gave me a deep and spontaneous feeling of warmth, not entirely unmixed with diffidence as must our tenderest areas so often be, to fine her justly celebrated in your little ode. In discussing your poem with my dear friend Justice Douglas during his recent visit to London, I did not point out to him your graceful reference to Menander (part 2, line 7) for fear that it would put him “off” in these days of ardent national concern. He was delighted, and a friendly senator will read it into the Congressional Record when he returns to the States. At that time perhaps a footnote would be helpful? Of course, I shall await your discretion on the matter and meanwhile, may I assure you, the pleasure which this poem has given me is of such vividness that I rather think I shall not have to read it again.
                      Yours in the polite remembrance of shared pleasures,
                      / s / T. S. Eliot
                      Helmsford-on-Hemp, Hants. G. B.

Naturally, “Madeleine Reierbacher” exists only as “the horn-playing protagonist of Koch’s ‘The History of Jazz.’” The seventh line of the second part of the poem is, “Here and there a red chalk line interlaced with the others.” The Greek dramatist Menander (ca. 342–291 BC), routine prize-winner at the festival of Lenaia, competed with the more popular Philemon, and, according to Attic Nights compiler Aulus Gellius, used to ask Philemon: “Don’t you feel ashamed whenever you gain a victory over me?” Ah, for such forthright braggadocio! One of the most frequent insults used by Menander is skatophagos (σκατοϕάγος), literally “shit-eater.” He is, too, apparently at the origin of the Latin Alea iacta est, “the die is toss’d.”

Kenneth Koch, c. 1958
O’Hara: “You are rather like the divine Guillaume, you know, so big and tall and always in uniform.” And Josh Schneiderman notes: “In reference to Koch’s style of dress in the late 1950s, Larry Rivers writes, ‘Kenneth considered my costume hopeless alongside his own wardrobe, which lock, stock, sock, and jock came off the rack at Brooks Brothers.’”

“He that gathereth togither nothing . . .”

“A Breeze in the Greenery”

He that continually wipeth the face to make it cleane,
may chafe of the ʃkinne and diʃfigure it more. Therefore
I may well like the man whiche at no time ceaʃeth too rebuke,
too a peʃtilente whilewinde, that gathereth togither nothing
but cloudes, and driues all the duʃt in the ʃtreetes on a heape;
or to a Rauen, whoʃe propertie is euer to ʃeaze vppon
carrion; or to the Sow, that is euer wrooting among
weedes.

Apparently, it’s the dog days of August at the Poetry Foundation. Yesterday the news desk clerk at the Lilly-swaddled word-emporium found it necessary to offer up a second notice concerning the “Silliman Comment Shutdown,” complete with testimonials (particularly moving: the express’d longing of one doyenne, that “all the intelligent, kind, well-read poets who care more about poetics than their own dicks, agendas & axes to grind had spoken up more”). Says Harriet: “a few are rankled, others nonplussed”—not for a minute, it seems, entertaining the possibility that Silliman’s closure is hardly newsworthy (though, naturally, vindicatory ammo in Harriet’s own saga of policing the comment “bullies” by forfeiting the social free-for-all of the commons). Or maybe it is newsworthy. Sign of a minor sea change, wind bellying out to fill a fat mainsail running (careering) forth, that of the newest elect of the unmark’d case.

Recall “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry,” the Social Text-print’d “group manifesto” of 1988, with its robust claim that “our work denies the centrality of the individual artist . . . The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing.” Sign’d by Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten. Marjorie Perloff hail’d it. “The demise of the transcendental ego, of the authentic self, of the poet as lonely genius, of a unique artistic style: these . . . are now taken as something of a given.” Chapter closed. Closed? Look for a moment at Silliman’s lingo of the solitary heroicks of one Ron Silliman in the piece he post’d to justify the comment box nix:

If I had missed the coverage of the Howl trial in the local media when I was 11, I had certainly seen the coverage of the various court cases of Lenny Bruce, so was hardly surprised when the San Francisco police in 1966 attempted to prosecute both Michael McClure’s The Beard & Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book for obscenity. Since a standard defense of any artwork from an obscenity prosecution in those days—a vestige of the Ulysses trial decades before—was the value of the art involved, I dropped a note to the San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that The Love Book represented an important opportunity to defend the right of a mediocre work to use the same four-letter words. Soon enough, I had the opportunity to watch Robert Duncan (whom, at that point, I barely knew) denounce my reactionary failure to recognize the “new language of love” that Kandel had pioneered, both at a large rally at San Francisco State & on KQED TV.

Young Silliman’s heroic literary acumen damning the dreary Love Book in advance of posterity itself! Quel mec! Later he’s “squirrelled” off “in the library’s poetry & rare book collections” tout seul reading Black Mountain Review with “Robert Creeley’s furious denunciations” of something or other, or (later) he’s “in the library where I read on microfilm the complete, unedited letters of Ezra Pound.” Not only heroic, a compleatist. Such is Silliman’s (perennial) saga. “Social text” is a rubric of limit’d utility in making self-myth, and nearly inutile in quashing dissent. (About Silliman’s post, too: one wonders if he is seriously identifying himself in the comment box complaint with, say, Pound’s quarrel with the U. S. government, or the way Ginsberg got hound’d out of Czechoslovakia post-Kraj Majales crowning?) One notes a flagging sense of proportion in the endless self-flattery . . .

The gods and goddesses, who attend to the spurious and foolish (and all the accompanying Narcissus-fuel’d antics)’d probably conclude Jessica Smith and Ron Silliman a match made at heaven’s gate, that glory-portal to exaggeration and deceit. (Like Dylan’s Desolation Row, nobody knows if the aim’s to enter or exit.) Smith, sounding the alarums: “poetry’s youth is being trampled, discouraged and undermined with a potential long-term detrimental effect on Poetry.” Or: “If a talented young poet like Massey is turned off of writing for even a few days or weeks as a result of being skewered by a few robotic-hearted cyberbullies, even that brief interlude is a loss for Poetry.” (Great wringing of hands, tearing out hair, &c. in a maenad frenzy for Poetry.) I suspect that high-mind’d rhetorical claptrap’s a direct descendent of Silliman’s own “tactical” excesses—just how many extravagant claims’s he made? (Something I entirely suspect’s a disservice particularly to younger poets, stymieing or stultifying one at some “minimal” point (de repère) rather than spurring one onwards.) Statements like Silliman’s “I routinely reject a half dozen comments every day that are sexist, homophobic or anti-Semitic. Moderating the comments stream at times makes me want to take a shower” smack of the kind of “unverifiable” governments routinely use to prop up security arguments. (Silliman’s odd brand of “govspeak” is evident, too, in awkward phrases like “gender rebalancing” and “the self-destructive credo of the poet-as-addict.”)

Kent Johnson’s complaint—that an archive of Silliman comment box public conversations, claims and counter-claims, goes missing (for now) in the “shutdown”—is perfectly right and justify’d. Surely a solution that doesn’t nail the archive’s doors shut indefinitely ought to be found. There’s something hardly bona fide about asking in guests (and publicly marveling at the numbers) and, rude ejecting done, so compleatly expunging any sign of the visits. There are (obviously) no comment boxes here at Isola di Rifiuti. I write publicly in order to write, to work out a daily regimen of attending to things (weather, scents, the odd verbal-succors of my mopishness, &c.), to make a record of what reading I do. I am hardly a social person. (The social bedlam of the networking gizmos registers naught here. I doubt that twit’d zingers and / or a marketeer’s gabble of one-upmanship a literature makes. I defriend’d my own smart-alecky self long ago.) My sense of audience is inchoate, larval, unsustain’d, shifting. I argue with what seems arguable or reprehensible (and I fully expect any counter-arguments’ll find a place without my assistance). I praise what pleases me. I am convinced that that “highly suspect activity” (Ashbery call’d it) of amusing oneself is, again, in terribly short supply, or, (as they say) “no longer valorized.” So it goes.

Ron Silliman Caught Stowing Public Comments in a Bag

Jack Tworkov’s The Extreme of the Middle

Some Clouds

Jack Tworkov: “I don’t try to accumulate the picture bit by bit—like pennies in a piggy bank.” And, in a c. 1959 note, out of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, edit’d by Mira Schor (Yale University Press, 2009):

      I have practically no need for esthetic experience, for the worship of beauty or the nuances of fine feeling. I envy the real world, the world in which real things are made. I mourn the fact that I am a stranger to real voyages, to factories, to the modern mysteries of machines, science and mathematics, warfare, all the things that make the world, hard, deep, impenetrable, and as a matter of fact, cruel. I am a foreigner to all these enormous energies.
      My painting represents me in my chagrin, my alienation, my laziness, my impotence. To have to paint with a brush instead of with horsepower. The world of the ordinary man expands with the speed of light. Every schoolboy travels in space. The painter’s fate deals with square feet. No wonder we are a vanishing race.

Weighing Tworkov’s mots in my sleeplessness. That untrammel’d sense of the picayune, the futility of art—how terribly limit’d its means and effects when opposed to the shrillness of the claims made on its behalf. Tworkov, too, insistent in a belief that richness lies in the overlap, the point of commingling, systems interfering with systems (“walking the hedge-row” in the ornithologist’s lingo, or “torn between the calligraphic and the structural”) and adamantly opposed to the way personality itself’s become a commodity in the arts (“If one wants to preserve integrity one must hide ones personality behind a bushel”). How refreshing Tworkov’s plain sense of trying to make an art uncorrupt’d and honest. He writes (in a journal begun 21 January 1947 with the astoundingly self-possess’d line: “Style is the effect of pressure”):

      What is material integrity?
      It is an integrity about things. To use one material not as an adulterate of another but as a quality in itself. Example: Steel is neither a substitute nor an adulterate of wood. If it is used as a quality it enriches, if it is used as an adulterate it cheapens and degrades. The city is a monument to the lack of integrity about things—it kills and deforms where it should stimulate and prefect. A thing not loved is a thing for trade.

(Directly applicable in the current “era” of whole-hog borrowings: is that appropriating of court-records or Google-voices a cheap substitute for some lack, something unavail’d out of limit’d means or eschew’d for its paltry? Or is the material allow’d its ownness?) (Tworkov extends integrity to a realm he calls “spiritual”: “To regard phenomena only in the light of what they contribute to the evolution of a happy mankind. . . . Implicit is the belief that life itself is the chief good—that man is an end and not a means.”)

Tworkov’s quietly refuting of the heroicks of art (in the midst of American art’s “heroic age”—see Life magazine’s four-page document (8 August 1949) pointing to Jackson Pollock, and asking: “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”): Journal entry of 24 October 1951 (beginning with the extraordinary question: “Did it ever occur to Sophocles to write a play about himself?”):

Everyone who is an artist does it at the expense of being a hero. When the artist conceives himself a hero, he ceases to be an artist and proceeds to destroy himself. . . .

I like Tworkov’s sense of testing the “original impulse”—painting, opposed to constructing, or accumulating “bit by bit,” lines that follow the opening sentence:

Whenever in the course of the painting the picture arrives at some concept I submit it to random unrelated activity, to chance, to the opposite of itself. I submit the picture to a bettering and if something of the original impulse survives all that, then it stands. Often all I’ve got out of months of painting is what one would salvage from a shipwreck. Not perfection but the nearly inevitable consequence of having preferred a certain kind of action to another. . . .
      Why all that? Out of less than satisfaction with one’s self, to spring open the limits of self. . . . To get out. The opposite of integration—to break open and out.

Sounding a little like the ever-restless Dr. Williams.

Jack Tworkov, “Untitled,” 1954

Jack Tworkov, “Day’s End,” 1958-59

Jack Tworkov, “Crossfield I,” 1968

Jack Tworkov, “Indian Red Series I,” 1979

Jack Tworkov, 1900-1982
(Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt)
“My hope is to confront the picture without a ready technique or prepared attitude—a condition which is nevertheless never completely attainable; to have no program and, necessarily then, no preconceived style. To paint no Tworkovs.” Journal, 3 March 1958

TO HISTORY

Morton Feldman and John Cage play’d a lot
of cards in the period Cage conduct’d a
Model A Ford to Fulton Street to meet
Robert Rauschenberg. Feldman call’d Philip Guston the arch
crank. History’s peril is the way it gets
stuck in its terms: a “strange simplicity” dogs
it, like a note stretch’d beyond a measure,
or the foot of a sleeper hack’d off
to fit a Procrustean bed. Jack Tworkov says
Diane Di Prima (c. 1960) try’d to look
prim and severe and nonchalant pronouncing the words
cunt and fuck and shit. Is history’s fuck
everywhere its own equivalent, sprawl’d on a standard
mattress like the continual music of a century’s
worth of B flats, each indistinguishable? Or is
it like a color apply’d by two contending
painters, Picasso’s blue is not Pollock’s. The mock-
heroic Pollock who claim’d “insecurity is crucial to
painting” and pour’d humility’s black offal out of
an enormous hollow’d fist, mud and sand humping
up the work he stood within, never “so
attuned to process he mistook it for life.”

Aorder’s Content (and Discontent)

Some Clouds

Morning’s high chop and froth of clouds off in the lemony east. A bird making a noise like “hyacinth, hyacinth” again and again, like a tiny cutlass slicing the air. Found in a note: “To stop pretending that it’s the word that thwarts the poet’s delivery of pure poetry.” Reading Cage (the 1961 “Lecture on Commitment”):

Now we come to the subject of discontinuity in relation to commitment. Say I’m committed. Say somebody interrupts me while I’m working. If I let him . . . then I get discontinuity. I can of course say: No, don’t bother me, thereby losing the opportunity of renaissance.

Akin to Ashbery’s peremptorily loose commitment—that anticipatory-rehash-of-some-upcoming-salient sort of thing—in league with the damnably thwart-the-contemplatory “era” (he’s talking—in Michael Palmer’s Code of Signals—about the “clash of the voices” in the two-column poem “Litany” and the resultant loss of “enormous amounts of the text”): “I think we’re constantly in the middle of a conversation where we never finish our thoughts, or our sentences.” Intermittent signal, perennially disrupt’d. (Ashbery admits to writing “best when there are a lot of distractions around just because that seems to be the situation of life. I always answer the telephone when I’m writing, and it very often helps me with what I happen to be writing.”) The sitch. Commitment to that. (Cage uses the word “aorder.”) Fine for a mimesis, for a way of weathering the extravagant weather of the “era”: what if, though, some prairie-jerkwater sees anomie and dyspepsia in the hurry-scurry clip of distracts? What if utopia lies in constancy? What if one longs for a life “tranquilly Titicaca” (Williams), for the long cold slake of thinking untorque’d by the random disconcerting niggles of the actual? (Williams: “Life’s processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious.”) What if one longs, repeatedly, to avoid the repetitious, to allow the formulaic renaissance monkey its run unleash’d, somewhere out beyond the usual frenetic cavortings there in the “zoo of the new” (Plath)? The “hyacinth” bird of the morning newsreel’s quit. Neighbors gun truck-engines and shout. Olson, in The Special View of History (1956), culling statements to get Hegel’s “picture of Dialectic”:

                                      “the extreme of one state of action suddenly
shifting into its opposite”
                                          “it is the dynamic which lies at the root of
every natural process, and, as it were, forces nature out of itself.”

A final phrase that I find, frankly, creepy. Retro-dominant. (Olson, too: “If order is not the world . . . then order is man.”) In Pound’s versions of Rémy de Gourmont’s 1915 Poudre aux Moineaux, a lovely thing:

In the near-arctic, the pale oblique sun and the whitish unanimity of the landscape either suppress shadows almost altogether, or give them excessive value. The gods of Scandinavian mythology may have for origin these colossal figures, fantastic, disproportioned, which the early Norsemen saw before them in the indefinite perspective of the snowscape.

(“Poudre aux moineaux”—powder sparrows—is used largely in a phrase meaning to spend recklessly to no end, vainly, uselessly, profusely. Rather like writing poetry.) What I love: the blankness of the world vacillant with the sudden colossal excess, the self mere vehicle for plenitude’s delivery. Another de Gourmont (evidence of the world’s order):

There are insects whose life is more logically proportioned than ours: one act for eating, one for sleep, one for l’amour. For the first act they have a sort of repugnance; for the second they fold up, seem oldish, become dry as one’s boot soles, but for the third they put on their finest raiment, and having supressed the horrors of digestion, they can hardly be persuaded to suck the honey from flowers to keep from dying of thirst.

Full up sun newly invent’d, a caustic pour’d over a dime. Or pour’d to cauterize a bleeding wound in the sky (Apollinaire’s “Soleil cou coupé”). Or in the ground: a flower springing up out of the dark blood of Hyacinthus slain, its petals mark’d with grief-script’d letters: aïe, aïe. Hardly even a word, it is.

John Cage, 1912-1992

Rosa Alcalá’s Undocumentaries

A Tree

Williams (Spring and All): “and that ‘beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.” And a poem by Rosa Alcalá—out of the “American Recycler” section of Undocumentaries (Shearsman, 2010):

Exchange

A burden stirs this economy. This business
we call “me.” An endless travesty of goods beneath the skin

of the poorest embrace. Salt stirs there, an admirable mineral
at a miserable price. Too, a faint reminder of coal,

of industrial custom. The rest is stock eulogy,
a paycheck clean of union dues.

Marvelously dumbfound’d at that. How completely Alcalá merges personal and public economies (“This business / we call “me.”) “Endless travesty of goods beneath the skin” somehow manages to call forth something akin to Samarkand, and funny Europeans insipidly clothed in newly-bought silks along the medieval trade routes. Scents inhabit the piece nigh-undetect’d (“a faint reminder of coal”) and the emptying out (“stock eulogy”) that occurs is a wholly ambivalent cleansing (like the “admirable mineral / at a miserable price”—meaning finesse’d by sound—“a paycheck clean of union dues” is a compromised thing). (Williams enters into Alcalá’s Undocumentaries in a poem call’d “Deformation”: “The foot inherently / was to Dr. Williams / of more interest / who knew in the uneven gait / the hip / would jostle the mind / to set fire / first / to the archive.”) (In defiance of Anne Waldman’s backcover blurb-assessment that “Alcalá’s Undocumentaries is Archive made Poetry,” I’d maintain that she seeks foremost to trouble that capital-A Archive’s sovereignty by expanding it—“Remembering is a trucking / yourself in”—if not “set fire” to it.)

A sense of unbelonging, of the imperfect, of the temporary (the ardors of play-acting, of double consciousness) pervades Alcalá’s work. Here’s “What It Means to Be Civilized”:

Such guilt. Such pandering to antiquity. These Colima dogs wear our faces, but for them nothing is worth translating from the Latin. That we’ve invented forms for the epic means we depend on the largesse of plaster and paint to mask our own pitiless story. What we translate into is a heroic suffering, always a hexameter wide from ear to eye. These dogs look to a place that expands, and we will clutch to them in our graves, reciting the conditions of our exile. They will leave as our bones pile up around them, proudly for a room full of still lives, somewhere far from Europe.

Or one finds oneself “Among weeds, among variants of native crab grasses” (“Everybody’s Authenticity”), or noting that “Somewhere out there / a bail bondsman and meat flipper lie profligate / in a bed of divided territories, / confident the fence will hold against / recessive traits” (“National Affair”). It may be of use to recall Williams’s reminder—“The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in himself crushing humiliation [sic] unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination.” Lines that arrive directly following the adage “for everything / and nothing / are synonymous / when // energy in vacuo / has the power / of confusion // which only to / have done nothing / can make / perfect,” a sort of retort to the “Let be be finale of seem” citizenry for the sloppy and ungovernable. Alcalá, too, makes distinct the restless unendingness of constant struggle and the “brighter but stiller” work of the “archive”:

Documentary: The lyric of unrehearsed chemicals
acts out the tensions of progress
into a brighter but stiller image
called fact or archive

Undocumentary: The man who joined
old world industries of textile
to dirt trucked in from the Ramapos
is not a video
to behold
                  (“Undocumentary”)

And, ending the same poem, talking about “the roundabout mess” of “this type of architecture”—that is, one provisional, off-kilter, unlovely:

There is no retelling the desire to be pulled into a condemned building by a man who will soon live in exile, or the nest of baby swallows in the handicap stall of a public bathroom in Mesilla. You offer it and everyone’s a little uncomfortable with this type of architecture. The night we took the train to Newark to eat rabbit there was nothing anyone could do about the rain. We were subject to families greater than nature, yet there it was every time we left New York. From the PATH station to the restaurant, the houses tried to tell you about me, but even now the details distill to a fringe of dented aluminum. So all this roundabout mess of trying to describe a machine that never shuts down, a father standing in two inches of water or sitting on a wooden stool, a racket of heat, is proof of nothing, except the drive of what can’t be told, a screen pushing off the pile up of bodies.

That Alcalá persists in telling “what can’t be told” (think of Williams’s lines, “Somehow / it seems to destroy us // It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off // No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”—the thump and dare of the one-word lines, “Somehow . . . something”—and look to Alcalá’s plaintive outburst (in “Child Interpreters”):

Have you ever seen the common nude?
Nude taxi drivers? Nude subway striker
and strikees? The bagel guy nude in his ambulant deli?
Or the uncommon: someone riding out
their dying year—nude? We think beauty
a rabble, so we organize clubs against and for it.
The doughy shirtless bang tensions
from the skin of a drum,
a suffragist lesions a remarkable ass
or a portrait of Henry James.

One final piece, uncomment’d:

Paraphernalia

This here is the paraphernalia called valediction, or
to validate speech (what we speak now, what our dead
can’t understand), we must place on the table
the noise-makers and the cork, let out the evils, the gasses,
turn sea-change into grip of land. This here
is the mime running the show, this holiday we throw
sand against it and the sound is gradual
losses, the right level of water
to rice. A spit-salve for rashes.

We count backwards until all is gone with a bang.
At least sleep is interchangeable, we shed
into the other with little discernment. These are the sheets
forgotten to a trunk, the music of a girl’s future
chamber. We tuck her name beneath our
chins and carve her recipes deep into muscle. Off we go,
the bed pulls into harbor. But our hands
grown big on corns translate her intuitions
of salt poorly.

Rosa Alcalá

Tom Clark Notes (II)

Lichens

Out of Tom Clark’s elegiac Feeling for the Ground (BlazeVox, 2010):

Remnant

Two gospel hummingbirds
I thought I saw in the rainsoaked redwood
Microworld dollhouse spaces weren’t

They were mere remnant hummingbird memories
Cold green heaven perpetuum mobile dreams
Zipping among the fogshroud needle masses

Some kind of thought process husks
Containing the liquidated thought dust
Of long since vaporized summers

That nigh perfect four-square spondaic pile-up of “rainsoaked redwood / Microworld dollhouse” (adjectival city breakdown) delivers a terrific sense of diminishing spaces, Russian doll-style. Popped shut by the dud “weren’t” (abrupt cut-off to expectancy), the “gospel hummingbirds” turn out to exist only as memory expunged (“thought process husks”—a thing less than memory). If I say “expunged” it is because the cyberworld invades the piece (“redwood” next to “Microworld” calls forth the unstoppable incursions of that “space” into the quotidian), just as the remnants of old-style “gospel” religion do. I begin to think of Clark as the poet of the various luminal empires—borderlands between wakefulness and sleep, the present and what’s gone, bardo’d reveries of ascent (or—in the case of the American empire) descent. Here’s “Night Shift”:

The moon coming through the curtains
makes geometrical patterns in bars
a calligraphic grid through which pass
the ever vigilant ones
the souls of “my” dead though of
course they’re no one’s
not even their own any more merely
messengers of the mirror negative
dispatched from a mute past
to efface a haunted present

Slightly caustic intimations of a world wherein even the core fleetingness of the gone world (and its messengers) goes barely announced. Compare Clark’s ineffectual defeat’d dead—“no one’s / not even their own”—with Pound’s Homeric heroicisms:

Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead . . .

Some measure of a sense of decline. Everywhere in Clark’s Feeling for the Ground hints of human agency and license gone: a “post-natural” robotic world in charge:

Southeast Wind

Nobody’s home, but the For Sale sign
speaks of a collapsed urban economy
and parked just down the block
in an undelivered future
is an abandoned car
with idiotic beeps emanating from it
messages to the past
from the absence where we are
the wind setting off mechanized alarms
an animated bedlam
in the night

Stuck (“undelivered future”) here in the purgatory world of early twenty-first century, in a kind of asylum (“bedlam”) of our own making, compleat stasis reach’d in the ceaselessly klaxoning night. Look, too, to the brilliant “We Can Take This Moment and Freeze It”:

When X reached out, earnest, intense, bewildered,
To extend a helping if trembling hand
To Y, lost in the reified nightstreet void,
Prefiguring the data thicket plunge

Of everything into Total Recall
Where nothing that’s living is remembered
Because in the instant life turns into
Information it dies, stays forever dead—

Eyes red and burning with radiation shimmer,
One’s failing sense of self in wigged out trade winds
Shifting minute by minute to a sense of everyone
As blind automata, compelled by need and drive—

The street preachers argue among themselves
About the Rapture, the when and how, not the why.

I don’t think anybody’s writing with such severe condemnatory demeanor as Clark in “freeze it” mode, like some Isaiah of the “reified nightstreet void.” To write “the instant life turns into / Information it dies, stays forever dead” in the vacant heart of the “Information Age” is to snarl out a warning. I think (“One’s failing sense of self . . . / . . . a sense of everyone / As blind automata, compelled by need and drive”) of D. H. Lawrence’s note of the American sense of “masterlessness”:

      They came largely to get away—that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That’s why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.
      “Henceforth be masterless.”
      Which is all very well, but it isn’t freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not.

Clark refuses to acquit himself, or absolve even the morning mania for writing (another kind of “info”)—making, he hints, is not being. “Opus” begins: “Sacrificing to the limiting demands of the opus / is no way to start your day. The opus / itself is like a kind of canvas, with what / has not really been lived through, only idly imagined, / splattered more or less randomly / upon it . . .” (That mock highbrow’d use of “opus” suggests, too, that making a career is not being either—“far from it!”—as Frank O’Hara’d say.)

Not all of the pieces in Feeling for the Ground are so unabash’dly lyrical, or deftly notational. A fine prose piece call’d “Market” (“only the one line is open on a Saturday night and the line has stopped moving”) churns the resultant mayhem through one enormously long sentence (I think of some of Robert Walser’s miniatures) to end: “the night is long, here comes the night, here it comes.” And moments of grace do emerge. Here’s one:

Some Late Johnsoniana

September 12 1783
Anna Williams was buried
who’d sat up blind to
drink tea with him
in the small hours
mournful conversation
“I do not know
that I have anything
to forgive you
I have set my house in
order”
113 sq. inches

*

hot sleepless
disturbed at night
got up & slept in a chair

*

was dejected
prostrate mind
opium lassitude
but remembered
the Latin word
for gooseberries

Liminal worlds, a sweet merging of Dr. Johnson and Clark himself (who is it that “got up & slept in a chair”?) Somehow that remembering of “the Latin word / for gooseberries” is a perfect victory, dispelling by a little of the oblique (and explicit) violence of the “era.”

Tom Clark

Tom Clark’s Feeling for the Ground
(Photograph: Cristina Bozzoli, “Tunnel,” 2009)

The Usual Fruitless Ruckus to Avoid the Unexpungeable Acquittal

Some Clouds (Thirteenth Lake)

Sense of a lag, unfocus’d. A buoyant refusal to offer the usual distill’d critical sour mash, the unconfound’d debris of a moment’s “literary” acquittal. That “sedulous as I have been to trace / How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair, / And made me love them” (Tintern Abbey meets Tin Pan Alley) kind of pre-finger’d squeeze-box ditty repeatable: no thanks. I am certain the precinct news is of use, I am sure its use is limit’d. So I throw casuistry to the breezes, dun my own persistence with a sneer. Shimmy blackly-expectorant in sloppy nihilist light. Some days one’d rather read—in the Notebooks of Henry James—nothing beyond the interspersed lists of names, skipping the ham-hand’d vulgarity of plot, numbering the exorbitances of the world mark by mark, pixil by pixil:

Names. Dedrick—Emerick—Bauker—Flickerbridge—Marsock—Sandbeach—Chirk—Rivory—Reever—Dirling—Catchmere—Catchmore—Cashmore—Pewbury (place)—Gallery—Mitchett—Mitcher—Stilmore (place)—Tribe—Pinthorpe (place)—Cutsome.

Such implacable data-jotting, the remaining pages largely fill’d with skinny summary, dopey “treatment”: “There is no harm in him save that he’s an ass and a snob. His wife is really much more of a person, clever, independent, whimsical and easily-bored. She tires of him, and of his platitude, and of that of the world they live in, and takes a lover. She has already had 2 children. She commits herself, is compromised, discovered and divorced. The lover is an homme sérieux, he marries her. Change of scene and situation. She becomes a serious ‘earnest’ woman—deploring the levity of her 1st husband, the way he brings up their children, whom he has been able to keep. He marries again and has another child—as she has. 2d wife a goose but ‘good.’ She dies.” How is it that one who’s capable of writing that percolates up like light (floody with promptitude) could render such unconstrain’d mawk? Perhaps the story of a “goose” is akin to the fourteen lines of a sonnet—a canned plan, trigger and constraint. James: “We may traverse acres of pretended exhibitory prose from which the touch that directly evokes and finely presents, the touch that operates for closeness and charm, for conviction and illusion, for communication in a word, is unsurpassably absent. All of which but means of course that the reader is, in the common phrase, ‘sold’—even when, poor passive spirit, systematically bewildered and bamboozled on the article of his dues, he may be but dimly aware of it.” That, in a curious “Preface” to The Golden Bowl in the 1909 New York edition. (How routinely it occurs “today,” one hundred years down the unswerving road—that one be “systematically bewildered and bamboozled” by exactly such “unsurpassably absent” prose. The patchwork unreadable, the merely concoct’d, the modishly gull’d, the poindexter’d up . . . So little evidence of lurch and retrieval, of blunt propulsory thrash through brack and sustenance undwindling: one settles for the little, the inane, the clever, the tidy, the glean’d . . .)

Another Jamesian sheaf:

It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of ‘poetry’—to apply that term in its largest literary sense—hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to vivâ-voce treatment. We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, as incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded. Let it reward as much as it will and can the soundless, the ‘quiet’ reading, it still deplorably ‘muffs’ its chance and its success, still trifles with the roused appetite to which it can never honestly be indifferent, by not having so arranged itself as to owe the flower of its effect to the act and process of apprehension that so beautifully asks most from it. It then infallibly, and not less beautifully, most responds; for I have nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests—that is on its being, for very pity and shame, but skimmed and scanted, shuffled and mumbled. Gustave Flaubert has somewhere in this connexion an excellent word—to the effect that any imaged prose that fails to be richly rewarding in return for a competent utterance ranks itself as wrong through not being ‘in the conditions of life.’

And so one is shunt’d off to the bear (“I am a bear and want to remain a bear in my den”) of Croisset’s nights of striding, endlessly voicing an imperfect sentence into the Seine-lull’d air, running it up against the permutatory of sound itself, growling it down to an acceptable mean registry. James calling for sounding against the morass of the quotidian belittlers, constructors of the usual myopic dull. (I love the finessed casualness of that sentence: “I have nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests”—with no hesitancy one’d suggest it apt to Ron Silliman’s minable (Fr.) maunderings attempting to prop “up” the “New Precisionists”—some “withholdings” being conceived not in liberty, but in deficiency, lack, or dire complacent competency . . .)

Oh dear. “Chirk—Rivory—Reever—Cachegrief . . .”

Henry James, 1843-1916
(Photograph by William M. Vander Weyde)