Ted Berrigan’s Dear Sandy, Hello

Barn and Silo

Ted Berrigan, writing about The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (out of Dear Sandy, Hello):

The final literary matter I wanted to talk about was the Grove Press anthology. . . . I thought I’d tell you some of the writers in the book that I liked most. Robert Creeley’s short poems seem very interesting to me. He often says very good things in a very good way. Brother Antoninus writes very good poetry, I think. I like Ginsberg’s poem called “A Supermarket in California,” and his other things too. I like Gregory Corso some of the time, and some of the poems he has in here, like “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” I like a lot. I like Barbara Guest a little, and of course Koch and O’Hara and Ashbery very much. I like Gary Snyder’s work, too. I like some of Michael McClure’s work, but like his books better than selected poems from his books. I think that John Wieners is very good, and sometimes I like Ron Loewinsohn and Dave Meltzer. Personally, I think I can write better than many poets in the book, but I can’t write well enough to satisfy myself yet.

Bravado of the up and coming. Lacking (one obvious hole): Olson. (Though one notes, too, Berrigan’s own sense of what Olson call’d a “saturation job”—“It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa”—:

I’ve always found that to sustain myself in any project it was important that I talk about it, write about it, make voluminous notes, even if I discarded them all later. But the discipline of forcing oneself to study one subject consistently, for a certain amount of time every day, is great. It gives you a realization both of how much can be accomplished through reason and discipline, and of how much cannot be accomplished that way, but rather must be blundered into.

Echoing O’Hara’s cautionary note regarding Olson’s “sometimes rather cold” approach. See O’Hara’s conversations with Edward Lucie-Smith, particularly the succinctly measured cut of: “Olson is—a great spirit. I don’t think that he is willing to be as delicate as his sensibility may be emotionally and he’s extremely conscious of the Pound heritage and of saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time.”) (O’Hara’s remark made in 1965, Berrigan’s sense of what “must be blundered into” is found in a letter dated March 25, 1962. He reports a card in reply to the letter he’d sent O’Hara—“Dear Ted Berrigan: Boy you certainly know how to cheer a person up . . .”—though the two’ve still to meet. Evidence of parallel sensibility.)

Seeing Berrigan read in Ann Arbor in the late ’sixties—two things (piously / impiously referenced): Pepsi and cowboy movies. (Or three: pills.) “The Code of the West.” I read Berrigan’s notes about seeing The Gunfighter (“Gregory Peck played Jimmy Ringo, once one of the “fastest guns in the West.” He made an attempt to quit gunfighting but too many kids wanted to get famous by gunning down the great Jimmy Ringo”) and think (first) of Dylan’s terrific “Brownsville Girl” (co-writ with Sam Shepard—“Well, there was this movie I seen one time / About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck / He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself . . .”) and (second, reading Berrigan’s assessment of Jimmy Ringo: “the legendary American hero, tough, competent, heart of gold, nerves of steel, doomed to die, but living resignedly and heroically while alive”) of both of Berrigan’s own defiantly resigned death and of O’Hara’s con-temper’d sense of any cowboy high noon standoff (see “Yesterday Down at the Canal”—“can I borrow your forty-five / I only need one bullet preferably silver / if you can’t be interesting at least you can be a legend / (but I hate all that crap)”.) (Berrigan, too, mocks the ploy, see—in “Tambourine Life” under “the code of the west”—“1. Sob when you read ‘Black Beauty.’ / 2. The true test of a man is a bunt. . . .”) Berrigan calls The Gunfighter (1950) “one of the best examples of Sabi I’ve ever seen.” Whereat one returns to an earlier letter for Berrigan’s definition of “Sabi”:

Sabi is a Japanese word for which there is really no English equivalent. It is a feeling one gets at times for a kind of life where everything is like it seems to be when we think of the “good old days” which of course never really existed. It is a kind of nostalgia for a life which is called to mind when you think of trains speeding in the night, and great American names of cites and towns, and old cars, and October in the “Railroad Earth.” Thomas Wolfe is full of it, and so are old cowboy movies, and even old gangster movies, and poems by Frank O’Hara sometimes and many many other things . . .

Berrigan presumably glean’d the term off Kerouac, and Kerouac’s 1959 “Blues and Haikus” recordings (accompany’d by saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn). Bittersweet lonely, of an everyday Sapphic intensity. Camaraderie with the wrung-out, the hard-heal’d dings in things.

—

Casual noting. Is John Ashbery’s “Qualm” (in the 1981 Shadow Train), with its wonderful Warren G. Harding curios—“Warren G. Harding invented the word ‘normalcy,’ / And the lesser-known ‘bloviate’ . . .”—a nod and reply to Frank O’Hara’s 1960 “Poem (That’s not a cross look it’s a sign of life)” with its yawning tepidity towards “elephantine history”—“I can’t think of one interesting thing Warren G. / Harding did”? O’Hara:

Poem

That’s not a cross look it’s a sign of life
but I’m glad you care how I look at you
this morning (after I got up) I was thinking
of President Warren G. Harding and Horace S.
Warren, father of the little blonde girl
across the street and another blonde Agnes
Hedlund (this was in the 6th grade!)     what

now the day has begun in a soft gray way
with elephantine traffic trudging along Fifth
and two packages of Camels in my pocket
I can’t think of one interesting thing Warren G.
Harding did, I guess I was passing notes
to Sally and Agnes at the time he came up
in our elephantine history course everything

seems slow suddenly and boring except
for my insatiable thinking towards you
as you lie asleep completely plotzed and
gracious as a hillock in the mist from one
small window, sunless and only slightly open
as is your mouth and presently your quiet eyes
your breathing is like that history lesson

And Ashbery:

Qualm

Warren G. Harding invented the word “normalcy,”
And the lesser-known “bloviate,” meaning, one imagines,
To spout, to spew aimless verbiage. He never wanted to be president.
The “Ohio Gang” made him. He died in the Palace

Hotel in San Francisco, coming back from Alaska,
As his wife was reading to him, about him,
From The Saturday Evening Post. Poor Warren. He wasn’t a bad egg,
Just weak. He loved women and Ohio.

This protected summer of high, white clouds, a new golf star
Flashes like confetti across the intoxicating early part
Of summer, almost to the end of August. The crowd is hysterical:
Fickle as always, they follow him to the edge

Of the inferno. But the fall is, deliciously, only his.
They shall communicate this and that and compute
Fixed names like “doorstep in the wind.” The agony is permanent
Rather than eternal. He’d have noticed it. Poor Warren.

Is “doorstep in the wind” a minor chord echo of “hillock in the mist”? Why, reaching “the fall is, deliciously, only his,” do I think of O’Hara’s fragment “He falls; but even in falling / he is higher than those who / fly into the ordinary sun,” and end up reading “The agony is permanent / Rather than eternal. He’d have noticed it” as an assessment (pointedly turn’d away) of Ashbery’s own grief at the loss of O’Hara, the attendant, the observant, the noticer.

Ted Berrigan, 1934-1983

Kinks

Some Clouds

The rogue-sapient (unman’d) rudderlessness of reading here and there—“It makes our thinking Pink” says Emily Dickinson in thrall to a “prime temps” thaw. Fatigue does that too: diffuses its tender proses incarnadine and bloody out into the vasty seas of mere longing, gone. Or unplainly compromises a mountebank’s tensile vivacity, showing only the whiteness of the shill’s toothy smile when the mark goes down. Bolaño says the gauchos “do strictly that: strum, without playing any song in particular, in accordance with the country way.” (We are all secretly gauchos ourselves.) (There is, too, the gaucho sense of time itself: “They could adapt to a forty-day month without any major headaches. Or to a four-hundred-and-forty day year.”) (Says Emerson of Thoreau: “Henry avoids commonplace, & talks birch bark to all comers, & reduces them all to the same insignificance.”) Think of a democracy of prose, all tangent and whimsy and tumble unrebuff’d, a “prose without depth.” (Ted Berrigan, in Dear Sandy, Hello, says of Jean Dubuffet: “He is Paul Klee as King Kong, kind of.” And notes how one “scraped” canvas, “looks like a rock surface”: “It is called ‘Lesson to be learned from the earth.’”) (Though, eorþe, uncertayn and myriad be thy lessons: “Sum hurlit to þe hard yerth.”) (One measure of Berrigan’s New York (c. 1962): “I wrote to O’Hara last night, and sent him five poems and asked him if he’d like to go have a beer somewhere.” Peripatetic, unanchor’d, ambulatory days, sleeping on sofas, a ripe beneficent leisure:

Dick [Gallup] is still asleep, Joe [Brainard] is working on his collages. Bill McCollum is lying on the floor reading [Józef Maria] Bochenski’s Contemporary European Philosophy. The sun is shining brilliantly outside, and it is warm again in New York. I’m drinking a Pepsi. In a few minutes I’m going to wake up Dick, for sport, I guess, and we’ll go over to Anne’s to see what the detectives have been up to. The walk down through the Village is one of the best things about New York.

And pooling what little dough there is (“Joe got money in the mail today, so tonight we all go to the movies, to see the Marx Brothers in The Big Store. We are all secretly the Marx Brothers ourselves.”) Something intangibly awry, a mete difference between there and here. “Here” being the way the commonplace itself is partout and encyclopedic, a constant onslaught: there is nothing that is not commonplace, even the minor arcanum obvious as a finger’s itch. Stravinsky says: “Every age is an historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either / or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing.” Meaning something like: Ron Silliman’s work’ll always resemble that of Sharon Olds more than either’s’ll come to seem like Pound’s. Or there’s Bolaño again, telling the story (“Jim,” in The Insufferable Gaucho) of “the saddest North American I’ve ever come across” (echo of the depth-charg’d opening sentence to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard”—though, there, too, just the way the unman’d earth’ll knock one up against it—“hurlit to þe hard”—one must needs approach such “deep” front-loading circumspectly, suspectingly . . .) Bolaño’s Jim:

The Mexican street kids used to ask him, what’s poetry made of, Jim? Listening to them, Jim would stare at the clouds and then he’d start throwing up.

And of course there’s more—“Vocabulary, eloquence, the search for truth. Epiphany. Like when you have a vision of the Virgin. He was mugged several times in Central America, which is surprising, because he’d been a Marine and fought in Vietnam. No more fighting, Jim used to say. I’m a poet now, searching for the extraordinary, trying to express in ordinary, everyday words. So you think there are ordinary, everyday words? I think there are, Jim used to say.” And Ted Berrigan’d agree. He’d say:

Kinks

I am kinks.

Or he’d say:

Wind

Every day when the sun comes up
The angels emerge from the rivers
Drily happy & all wet. Easy going
But hard to keep my place. Easy
On the avenue underneath my face.
Difficult alone trying to get true.
Difficult inside alone with you.
The rivers’ blackness flowing just sits
Orange & reds blaze up inside the sky
I sit here & I’ve been thinking this
Red, blue, yellow, green, & white.

Open tuning, strumming “without playing any song in particular.” One way of playing a simultaneity of songs.

—

Nota bene: At The Chagall Position—here—Edmond Caldwell’s put down a marvelous heap of language regarding the strong-arm tactics of The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, in cahoots with cosignatory poets Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Tony Towle, against Richard Owens’s Punch Press printing of Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara. Why there’s essentially no evidence of outrage forthcoming out the mouths of any of “our” “major” post-avant “playas” at such thuggery and attempt to censor: aucune idée. Toff pedigree of the careerist self-satisfy’d swell, one suspects. These days swoll’n—like a magpie—beyond all honor.

Alex Katz, “Ted Berrigan,” 1967

Compleynte Ending with Bullying

Some Trees

Usual half-ass’d weekend with its Monday extender serving naught to rebuff the onslaught of, oh, something big in the cabbages, something like death’s inevitably torn-talon’d raptor, caught, young, by barb’d wire. I wrote a skinny thing call’d “To Clouds” (“Benignity’s a funny word” is how it begins) and hammer’d away at something call’d “To Romanticism” (Stevens co-piloting: “Dezembrum’s puckish arias, sunk deep in red / plush under the un-girder’d vault of sky—”) That’s about where I bagged it—something about Romanticism’s way of “girding up Fancy” with mountainous huffing and puffing of ethereal fluff—in lieu of, say, the sturdy Objectivist I-beam of “a girder, still itself,” that minim in the ditch. Make that (Romanticism’s retort): “a girdle, still itself.” You see why I bagged it.

Read: some Bolaño, some Ashbery, some humdrum bits of Faulkner’s The Mansion (a falling off), some few pages out of the new Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan (Coffee House, 2010), and Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay (Faux / Other, 2010). Return’d the latter pronto accelerando to the library in order to quell my annoyance: only in America, only in these spoilt and hideous States is a poet likely to spend more pages discussing some fucking make of shoe (worn by John Lindsay and Andy Warhol, and our hapless hack of a hero) than whatever “poetics” the cohort (a predictable bunch, Charles Bernstein as brow-beater and work-shirker, Bruce Andrews as passersby-harassing bookstall-barker)’s allow’d him to indulge himself (with no end of infelicitous whining) in. Yow. If not shoes, one’s hound’d by the New Yorker’s usual perennial sujet de méditation—“space,” a thing fraught with envy, rivalry, gloat, regret (“the apartment that got away”), &c. A strange fail’d “promises unkept” pervades Gottlieb’s memoir, the wrong turn made for art kind of thing. Dickinson (in a letter): “I think Persons dont talk about ‘Summer stopping’ this time o’ year, unless they are inclement themselves.”

Elsewhere in New York, news is that The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate is “unambiguously” threatening some (apparently) unspecify’d “legal action” against the incipient publication of Kent Johnson’s collection of speculations and hypotheses (with the unfinish’d critical novella “Corroded by Symbolysme”) call’d A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara. The certify’d letter turn’d up at Richard Owens’s Punch Press, with a boisterous battery of what seem to be, essentially, co-signers, though I suspect mere mention of being “strongly convinced” is the gimpiest of legal legs for anybody to plant anywhere. The poets in the bunch—Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Tony Towle—assent, prejudicially, sight incompleatly seen, to A Question Mark’s being “a malicious hoax, one that denigrates Kenneth Koch’s character and dishonors his work.” What an odd thing for any poet to cop: a plea for the malignity of hoaxing. I think of Hardy’s Jude (the Obscure), “who imagined that Greek was only a different pronunciation of English,” and wonder if—poetry’s default being “the real”—the fictional arena’s become just so much alien fizz? (See Koch, Kenneth: “Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop, / Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning?”) I comprehend perfectly allegiances, particularly to teachers, particularly to the dead, the uncomplaining inalterable dead stuck like flies in amber, with a label and a drawer, indefensibly at the mercy of their various minions, those who garner lustre by keeping lustre shining in a particular honorary bent. That’s natural enough. Too, I comprehend perfectly how that light inevitably bends at the (later) approach of those who never knew the dead, those whose own dead go defiled by baleful strangers (See Koch, Kenneth: “Here is the Strangler dressed in a cowboy suit / Leaping from his horse to annihilate the student of myth!”) or semi-prominent inventors of myths. There’s a curious love to making a public figure (Kenneth Koch is a public figure) the receptacle of one’s desires (what fictioneering is). (Here one recalls Paul Goodman’s percipient use of Goethe in arguing—in “Advance-Guard Writing 1900-1950,” a document tout’d by Frank O’Hara in particular—that the highest order of poetry is “occasional”: “it gives the most real and detailed subject-matter, it is closest in its effect on the audience, and it poses the enormous problem of being plausible to the actuality and yet creatively imagining something, finding something unlooked-for.” Which sounds rather pertinent to the parts—incompleat—I’ve seen of Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark.) And how forget the burning pathos of Johnson’s bittersweet epigram call’d “Kenneth Koch”?:

Thanks to his poem about a garbage can
lid being smashed into a likeness of King
George the Third’s face, my sixteen year old
son is now writing poetry. This activity has
recently led him into drinking alcohol and
experimenting with drugs, which makes
it difficult for me to say, but I’ll say it
anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch,
for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.

How forget seeing Kenneth Koch read, circa 1980, at the American Cultural Center, rue du Dragon, Paris, and pooh-poohing just a little the poem call’d “Fate” with its lines like “And John said Um hum and hum and hum I / Don’t remember the words Frank said Un hun / Jane said An han and Larry if he / Was there said Boobledyboop so always said Larry or almost and I said / Aix-en-Provence . . .,” thinking what a boner, or “onus,” such a title is, even with that flurry of stylish gruntings (“An han”) there to mock it. And then there at the rue du Dragon centre, Kenneth Koch, dapper and smiling and impeccably clothed in a several hundred dollar suit, surround’d by willowy long-hair’d women d’un certain âge, and stern little (presumably French, the American government support’d the place) commissars of just that kind of button’d-down and import’d cultural franchise and I, standing there feeling “like a pair of pants” want’d to ask Kenneth Koch to tell me everything he knew about poor dead Frank O’Hara, though I likely hadn’t bath’d in a week, though my mouth stank, fill’d with Gauloise-black’d teeth, so I skinny’d out, petulant and morose. And of course it weren’t “quite like that” (the malignity, “or malice,” is my own, and the upright and perfect Kenneth encowl’d by curls in the center of a bouquet—or stranglehold?—of women is, too, my own) but—and here I swear by the lost sons—or suns?—of hasoismo that I speak the truth—leaving the rue du Dragon I bang’d the door open and shout’d:

Sun out! perhaps there is a reason for the lack of poetry
In these ill-contented sorts, perhaps they need air!

Knowing only that one day in America, land of fresh air and guffaws, some small crew of poets—standing butt-to-butt in a perfect square, decidedly trampling a tiny piece of turf (chanting, “where’s Giorgio Finogle when we need him?”), the pitchforks of companionable desperation point’d out against all newcomers, all dreamers—would must needs hear those words again.

The work—that rue du Dragon hyposthesis—of a good-natured fabulist (with love unconceal’d for the principals and they offspring), certes. Work, though, implacably against the misapprehendings and misdeeds of the Gang of Four—Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Tony Towle—who ought to be ashamed for participating in what amounts to a preemptive strike, a threat without hearing, and bullying.

Kenneth Koch, 1925-2002

Update: Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark

A Rather Stunning Update on A Question Mark above the Sun

On 9/4/10, Richard Owens, poet and publisher of Punch Press, soon to release A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara, received a certified letter from The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. The letter unambiguously threatens “legal action” against the book.

The letter states, in part, that “Alfred A. Knopf (publisher of both Koch and O’Hara), Maureen Granville-Smith, executor of the Frank O’Hara Estate, and poets Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Tony Towle [ . . . ] all are strongly convinced that this publication is a malicious hoax, one that denigrates Kenneth Koch’s character and dishonors his work.”

Those named above are also listed in a “Copies” note at the bottom of the letter.
I was going to write a lengthy post here at Isola di Rifiuti, discussing some fairly evident things concerning 1) the very lamentable implications of this development, 2) the utter misrepresentation of the book’s nature (in the quote above), and 3) why the listed poets, if they are indeed some kind of party to this letter, should hide their faces in shame.

But I’m going to just let the book speak, at this point.

The fine-press, limited edition of A Question Mark above the Sun will appear in a few weeks. It will be shortly followed by a substantially larger trade edition.

—Kent Johnson

“A Measly Dud Rain”

Some Boats

Crows cawing out malapropisms in the oaks under a measly dud rain. A dud measly rain. Empty plate. Bare table, empty plate. Mallarmé (Brise marine) writes: “The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.” (La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.) Which must be where Wallace Stevens got that assy-mouth’d (“Gubbinal”) “The world is ugly, / And the people are sad.” (Though he knew that kind of buttery glee nay-saying drips down its sides like a syrup. He says, too (“The Weeping Burgher”): “It is with a strange malice / That I distort the world.” Ah, the useless cruelty of one’s “belle design / Of foppish line.”) The Mallarmé line*: snip’d out of a passage in Roberto Bolaño’s newest, The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions, 2010). A half dozen stories and two essays—“Literature + Illness = Illness” and “The Myths of Cthulhu”—translated by Chris Andrews. Epigraph’d by the tubercular Franz Kafka, the heartbreakingly laconic: “So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all.” Bolaño, in “Literature + Illness = Illness”:

How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t last even a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one every finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Book are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when he desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many thing I’ve forgotten with help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books.

A breezy oceanic reading, surely, the long, slow swells of Mallarme’s domesticity (like Stevens’s) vying with the frothy self-destructing breakers of Bolaño’s own poetics. Homebody Stevens construct’d a poetics of the green feral imagination in recompense? (“The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade”: “There is no pith in music / Except in something false.”) (Or “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”: “A too-fluent green / Suggested malice in the dry machine / Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.”) Crows gawping. One opens its beak to reveal a black lozenge. Attempts to unhinge itself, or heave its rachitic black self up, disgorging a dry keck-keck Rain slough’d off to slow-wit’d dampishness. That plate: wash’d. At the end of “Literature + Illness = Illness” Bolaño’s back to Kafka, and uncertainty, the mechanicals of oceanic (or atmospheric, or imaginal) systems (“method”), getting no more attention than the light-scuttled moon (Stevens’d say “bijou of Atlas” or “cricket-impresario”) or the way that crow’s turn’d over a formidable leaf, grubbing for something palatably mash’d. Bolaño:

Elias Canetti, in his book on the twentieth century’s greatest writer, says that Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and that nothing could come between him and writing the day he spat blood for the first time. What do I mean when I say that nothing could come between him and his writing? To be honest, I don’t really know. I guess I mean that Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be—a book, an expression, a misplaced object—in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the new, which has been there all along.

Nerve-channeling all the writerly ganglions into the lingual thickets. “(Pages of illustrations.)”

* The compleat piece:

The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.
Oh to escape—to get away! Birds look
as though they’re drunk for unknown spray and skies.
No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea—
not my lamp’s desolate luminosity
nor the blank paper guarded by its white
nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!
I’m off! You steamer with your swaying helm,
raise anchor for some more exotic realm!
Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies
on handkerchief’s definitive goodbyes!
Is this the kind of squall-inviting mast
that storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast
away—no mast, no islets flourishing? . . .
Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!

Translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore in Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Roberto Bolaño’s The Insufferable Gaucho

Jeff Hilson’s In The Assarts

Some Weeds

Petulant in lieu of industrious, that’s how it is. Henceforth, I dress in the clothes of the common reader, that snipe! (See, hunting of.) I keep thinking lately how the whole New York School’s up and redock’d its schooner somewhere London-ish. Jeff Hilson, in In The Assarts (Veer Books, 2010) is writing things like:

27

Lichen-hung I come to you
in hillbilly armour
hic & nunc
it’s massive my invasion front with
white trash moats.
I mean my geographic tongue.
It’s called a love wave &
travels slowly ahead of leaky hearts.
He fixes atmospheric.
He travels with a typical owl.
(think of the man I fancy I
can’t get off his Norman face
& glow-in-the-dark arms
coming to me in the terrible terrible assarts

And:

41

& so on what a waste it’s typical
O open field & me
not turning no way I was
MADE IN ENGLAND
on the floor
I just go up & down
because my neighbour said
& with this hedgebote I’ll thee wed.
Once I was a land girl now I didn’t open
on my medieval holiday
I’m just a hundred percent weeds.
Fine fine for the hoar thorn but
your neighbour is a violet copper & a spar
She have or she haven’t gone too far.

“Hedgebote” = “haybote” = an English law term for wood allow’d to a tenant for repairing hedges or fences (Lease lingo: “Lessees may take housebutt, henbutt, firebutt, hedgebutt and ploughbutt.”) Two pieces for the cadences, skittish, veering and haul ass by turns. A sequence of roughly seventy sonnets (a couple couple’d). The front matter offers sterling OED copy for “assart”:

[a. AF. assart, OF. essart:—late L. exartum = *exsartum, pa. pple. (sc. arvum land) of *exsar(r)īre, f. ex out + sar(r)īre to hoe, weed: see prec. The n. might also have been formed in Fr. directly on the vb. (cf. regarder, regard), whence probably sense 2 arose. See also essart, after Fr., used by modern historians.]

1. A piece of forest land converted into arable by grubbing up the trees and brushwood; a clearing in a forest.

2. The action of grubbing up the trees and bushes in a forest, so as to turn it into arable land.

Poem = grub’d up clearing in the commons of language. And, too, (prima material) stylish permit (that “made place”) with some pertinent resource-nudges for the common reader, that snipe! The sterling epigraphs:

“When, with habitual knack in versifying or with superstitious shunning of all but conventional thoughts or notions, a poet comes across with ‘perfect’ sonnet after ‘perfect’ sonnet for any length of time, a sonnet sequence is a bore.”
                        —John Wheelwright

“Weeds I don’t mind much, although I actually prefer pavements and sidewalks. Well, I like the countryside too, but there are a lot of bugs in it, I must say.”
                        —Ted Berrigan

“Farewell, Love, and all thy lawns forever.”
                        —Sir Thomas Wyatt

If Ted Berrigan (“American Ted” Hilson calls him at one point) and Sir Thomas Wyatt (“When I was Sir Thomas Wyatt / & I dream’d I shot arrows in my / Anne Boleyn bra”) serve for tutelary chieftains here, countless others emerge. Texture of “Early Modern English” (invent’d things like “I ought to be a purley-man” or “Sally-my-obscurely”—the lovely phrase, too, of “historic leaf-litter”) bumping up against ’seventies England (“me humming Tubular Bells / . . . / there’s one he plays grand piano / on side one side two is rubbish”), colliding in turn with the inevitably poke-self occasion of the present (“Hey we’re still in In The Assarts! / Not The Assarts or From The Assarts— / In The Assarts! / I’m always reading it out loud at readings. / It’s a romance.”) Made palpable by lingo, time’s own rearrangeable blocks spelling itself within its own din of contradictories: “it’s not the fucking 1360s” (or the Berriganesque counter-nod, “black dots ate my readers / wives Dear Deirdre hello it’s 1360 AD”). So one encounters (amongst the scurrying literati) Wyatt butt’d up against WCW (“X & Y I flee from / what they did I don’t have to be in the Middle / Ages / . . . / I done my sums / & I need more plums”). Or Stein-dub (“a forest there where under repair”) in a hard-boil’d piece (“The black notley is all about”) that ends by admitting “I was captured by Americans / the lovely things.” Or Jack Spicer meets Tim Atkins (“No one listens to Petrarch. / People are rowing away from other people / every oar crying: ‘I want to touch you but I can’t!’”) (It’s likely that the sniping common reader—myself—is savvy to few of the nods and jokes in In The Assarts: if the Bee Gees show up, with mocking, in Tim Atkins’s Petrarch and Jeff Hilson writes of one “feast of Steven” spent missing “Robin Gibb CBE who fucked his housekeeper / deep & crisp & even” and ending “when I looked out the Bee Gees stole my phone”—the cutting up is tangible and raucously funny, even if not compleatly comprehend’d.)

Echoes on echoes, the “assarts” teem: I hear Pound’s “Hang it all, Robert Browning” in the opening line, “Not you again Jeremy Irons.” I hear Dr. Williams in “O Rodefer I only meant to say” (continuing “it’s so easy to / made an error / . . . / I hate squares” and ending “In the assarts I pulled it off / O Rodefer I only meant to say / whip it on me Jim in thin array / just like Thomas Wyatt said.”) I hear a hoot at (insular, cloudy, “like modern Borneo”) Langpo here (the whole thing’s need’d):

62

I’m not home I’m a homeowner
nobody noticed the two of us
who loved thy American tree.
Don’t kill me like modern Borneo.
That beautiful language is worn
that beautiful language is.
I’m glad I’m talking in.
In Borneo I’m home
“talking in Borneo in my room”
I don’t understand my home sometimes
when you enter the room
I don’t understand in Borneo anything
my home is in thy American tree
(language realism poesie)

One, randomly, to go off with. Ownership versus the commons.

3

These parts of thee I heard a man say
they could have, with their serpentine lakes.
But now I am in an oxgang.
It gets me along.
Lady, I am wrecked.
I go round and round
on the best historic leaf-litter.
But who did not write books?
I never writ.
But who did not set out in straight lines?
I never
but heads it would be over before Roman roads
it’s tails &
here I am among pedunculate oak shaking.

“Oxgang” = A measure of land (formerly used in parts of northern England and Scotland) equivalent to an eighth of a carucate. A carucate: the amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of eight oxen in a year.

Ted Berrigan and Sir Thomas Wyatt

Jeff Hilson’s In The Assarts
(Cover by Jeff Hilson)

Unintend’d

Beach’d

To hell with intent, the bollix’d up theses certifiably suck’d down the drain by ratiocinatory glorying, isn’t it sweeter to cadge whatever light there is off the rips open’d by one’s falling? Édouard Glissant (out of Poetic Intention, though my “to hell with intent” ’d do mostly with how Petrarch, foco per foco non si spense—fire by fire itself never subdue’d—and some sooty history of Petrarchanism, league’d up to dutch my little war—dolce mia guerrera—yesterday. Oimè. “Reuben, dunna tae Les Gommes to town.” “Caoutchouc,” says M. Robbe-Grillet. Whereat a wag inevitably retorts: “Gesundheit.” How writing must needs splash forth, like a sneeze.) Édouard Glissant (Barthean mode):

I am trying to order my “presences,” I don’t press them to the fixity of parlance. It is parlance, on the contrary, deaf and ingrate, that untangles itself from the present, scurries there, to fail or to live . . . To watch the world roll, drunken boat, and keep its logbook,—from there, by force, like a vocation of nothingness (of the unrooted) or of disturbance (of the unfixed), like an appetite for transcendence that will find satisfaction in no œuvre, like a delectation of Being, led from little by little to the only dwelling that it well elect, eternal and stable—comes parlance. “I will take up my course to the Numides, along the inalienable sea.” Where to, if not “a great poem born of nothing,” “a great delible poem,” and which way?—“Numerous are the ways, and our dwelling is uncertain . . .” Here is the universal world: conductor of the lay. Let it be said: here the universe exists so that the poem may be.

Echoing, bobbing in the wake of Rimbaud, presumably, Flaubert (that subtle chide that “we believe a little too readily that the sun’s got no other aim down here beyond making the cabbages sprout”—“On croit un peu trop généralement que le soleil n’a d’autre but ici-bas que de faire pousser les choux”) and Mallarmé (that nubby reprehensible, “everything in the world exists to end up in a book”—“tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre”). By chance—loud hammering in the ears—one opens a book to John Ashbery’s laconic and “corny” American advice (Jamesian mode): “I guess it amounts to not planning the poem in advance but letting it take its own way: of living in a state of alert and being ready to change your mind if the occasion seems to require it. I hate to repeat Henry James’s corny old advice, ‘Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost,’ but it is eminently practical and I see no other way to be.” And so the hammering stops, by entering into the occasion of its remaking. Ashbery, too, tossing the two misfits John Clare and Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Death’s Jest-Book) into the air: “I find both kinds of poetry necessary. My own has swung on its own I might add, always between the poles of Clare’s lumpy poetry of mud and muck and Beddoes’s perfumed and poisonous artifice.” So Clare out in the “Farmers Gardens about the village” of Helpston (in one of the “Autobiographical Fragments”): “. . . poetry was a troublsome but pleasant companion anoying and cheering me at my toils       I coud not stop my thoughts and often faild to keep them till night so when I fancyd I had hit upon a good image or natural description I usd to steal into a corner of the garden and clap it down but the appearance of my employers often put my fancys to flight and made me loose the thought and the muse together or I always felt anxous to consceal my scribbling and woud as leave have confessd to be a robber as a ryhmer       . . . I usd to drop down behind a hedge bush or dyke and write down my things upon the crown of my hat and when I was more in a hip for thinking then usual I usd to stop later at nights to make up my lost time in the day . . .” So Beddoes—capable of ditsy Stevensesqueries like “Old Adam, the carrion crow, / The old crow of Cairo; / He sat in the shower, and let it flow” or “Tell me how many beads there are / In a silver chain / Of evening rain, / Unraveled from the tumbling main, / And threading the eye of a yellow star . . .”—capable, too, of writing (to, apparently, a “reviser”), “Say what you will—I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow—no creeper into worm-holes—no reviser even—however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold.” And (intent rearing up its canny): “Again, even as a dramatist, I cannot help thinking that the study of anatʸ, physiol-, psych-, & anthropol-ogy applied to and illustrated by history, biography and works of imagination is that wch is most likely to assist one in producing correct and masterly delineation of the passions: great light wd be thrown on Shakespeare by the commentaries of a person so educated. The studies then of the dramatist & physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied; the application alone is different . . .” And: “Apollo has been barbarously separated by the moderns: I would endeavour to unite him.”

Glissant (surround’d by the whiteness of the page):

“(‘Man flees suffocation.’)”

Édouard Glissant
(On the Glissantean propos, “Rien n’est vrai, tout est vivant”: “Le niveau le plus élémentaire de cette affirmation est qu’il faut passer de l’“idéologie” à la “pulsation,” passer de l’idée systématique à l’intuition. La pulsation et l’intuition, c’est le vivant. L’idéologie, c’est le vrai, non pas au sens d’une vérité particulière mais de ce Vrai absolu (et sectaire) qui a été très souvent à l’origine de la recherche de la connaissance (et de la puissance), particulièrement en Occident. Dans “Rien n’est vrai, tout est vivant,” le vivant signifie l’inattendu, l’imprévu, souvent le non-rationnel, mais aussi l’ultrarationnel, sans fixité aucune . . . ”)

Tim Atkins’s Petrarch (Crater #6)

Dune Grasses

I hardly know a thing about Petrarch. Laura, &c. Canzoniere. The sixth of April, thirteen hundred and twenty-seven, hora matutina in the Church of Santa Chiara in Avignon: kaboom. Follow’d by thirty-seven years of dopey formal singing. Here’s a sonnet, number’d cccx:

Zephiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena,
e i fiori et l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia,
et garrir Progne et pianger Philomena,
et primavera candida et vermiglia.

Ridono i prati, e ’l ciel si rasserena;
Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia;
l’aria et l’acqua et la terra è d’amor piena;
ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia.

Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piú gravi
sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge
quella ch’al ciel se ne portò le chiavi;

et cantar augelletti, et fiorir piagge,
e ’n belle donne honeste atti soavi
sono un deserto, et fere aspre et selvagge.

Here’s Tim Atkins’s version (out of the recently print’d Crater #6, edit’d by Richard Parker—the entire letterpress’d, French-fold’d, and sewn issue is made up of fourteen of Atkins’s Petrarchs, with a George Herriman Krazy Kat cover):

It was the golden age of homosexuality
Chairman Mao taking the buffaloes for a stroll
        in the tea-oil camellia groves by banana
        leaf-shade ponds between Heathrow & Slough
Creatures of the sun-loving world       vs
        the pale less resistant ones
Avatars of insufficient definition or
        relation     dressed in animal bird or cowboy forms
Head filled with poem until it was almost
        impossible not to trip over them     for example
Petrarch’s shift between       need to write
        fame       and singular woman
Alas!     My   Place   Is
With
This     Fuck in this life
Surprise is all I have
I never learned
To turn quickly enough from
All that burns
Feeling each other up and liking each other
        terrifically all the way home from the Odeon

Scat-hazardous and buoyant, with all the zip and sass of a Heathrow-unslough’d O’Hara. Not, decidedly, the programmatic constructivist plodding of routine translation homophonickal, not, apparently, translation exactly at all (though I suspect a rather deftly salacious argument’d carry for ’l bel tempo rimena’s being auscultated as “the golden age of homosexuality,” like running a forefinger around a goblet to make it sing . . .) I spent some no few moments attempting to determine how Atkins arrived at what he arrived at—he’s similarly rework’d a number of Horatian odes in the terrific collection Horace (O Books, 2007)—leaning hard against a book call’d Petrarch in England, subtitled “An Anthology of Parallel Texts from Wyatt to Milton, edit’d by one Jack d’Amico. Therein, unearthing a (somewhat tamper’d with) crib:

Zephyrus returns, and brings clear weather,
and flowers and grasses, the whole sweet family,
and Procne’s quarrelsome call, and Philomel’s weeping,
and spring’s white and vermilion.
The meadows exult and the skies turn serene,
Jove’s happy to see daughter Venus,
air and water and earth, all full of love,
every animal reconciles itself again to loving.
For me, though, alas! the weightiest sighs
return, drawing up out of my heart’s deeps
the one who’d owned the keys to heaven.
And singing of little birds and flowering fields,
the pretty girls act perfectly disgraceful
like in a desert, like bitter and savage beasts.

Petrarch in England clumps up subsequent sonnets that’d appear to siphon energy off Petrarch’s cccx, making for a small, and agreeable, continuum of borrowings and nods. So Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, writes:

The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,
With grene hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she singes;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Somer is come, for euery spray nowe springes:
The hart hath hong his old hed on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter cote he flings;
The fishes flete with newe repairèd scale.
The adder all her sloughe awaye she slinges;
The swift swallow pursueth the flyes smale;
The busy bee her honye now she minges;
Winter is worne, that was the flowers bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant thinges
Eche care decayes, and yet my sorow springes.

“Minges” = recalls. All renew’d sauf l’amour. One “R. L. Gentleman” offer’d up in the 1600 anthology England’s Helicon a “constanter” version:

ZEPHIRUS brings the time that sweetly senteth
with flowers and hearbs, which Winters frost exileth:
Progne now chirpeth, Philomel lamenteth,
Flora the Garland white and red compileth:
Fields doo rejoyce, the frowning skie relenteth,
Jove to behold his dearest daughter smileth:
The ayre, the water, the earth to joy consenteth,
each creature now to love him reconcileth.
But with me wretch, the stormes of woe persever,
and heavie sighs which from my hart she straineth
That tooke the key thereof to heaven for ever,
so that singing of birds and spring-times flowring:
And Ladies love that mens affection gaineth,
Are like a Desert, and cruel beasts devouring.

Thus Atkins’s strangulated “Alas!     My   Place   Is / With / This     Fuck in this life” runs wonderfully parallel to “with me wretch, the stormes of woe persever”—entering a long line of possibles. Here’s another “version,” by William Drummond of Hawthornden, add’d for the Petrarchan ending:

With floming Hornes the Bull now brings the Yeare,
Melt doe the horride Mountaines Helmes of Snow,
The silver Flouds in pearlie Channells flow,
The late-bare Woods greene Anadeams doe weare.
The Nightingall forgetting Winters Woe,
Calls up the lazie Morne her Notes to heare,
Those Flowrs are spred which Names of Princes beare,
Some red, some azure, white, and golden grow.
Here lowes a Heifer, there bea-wailing strayes
A harmless Lambe, not farre a Stag rebounds,
The Sheepe-heards sing to grazing Flockes sweet Layes,
And all about the Ecchoing Aire resounds.
      Hills, Dales, Woods, Flouds, and every thing doth change,
      But shee in Rigour, I in Love am strange.

“Anadeam” = anadem = garland, crown. One of my favor’d lines in Atkins’s Petrarch: “I won the Eurovision poetry prize in 1341” (“Sonnet 321”), referring undoubtedly to Petrarch’s being crown’d with the laurel wreath in Rome, 17 April 1341, for a prize poem (one said to be unfinish’d). Here’s another Atkins version:

Sonnet 5

How to be happy Volume 3
States that sticking it in gives more pleasure going
        in than coming out but that staying in = stuck
& when standing in front of the Elgin Marbles
        & all creeping things go & outside there is snow
On WH & WB     TS WCW ee & HD
I have PMS in my sestina which is       gnawed
        & angry from the erosion of civil liberties
        a wanker’s book incompetent beasts
        & impossible union
In love with life but not living
Chewing the little pages in order to wad
        up the gums so they can’t protest love
Resigned in this lifetime to being resigned
        intimidated by the English summer with its
Melopœia Festival Enema & Chakra Stall
        Oasis Writing Schools & un-
Free Jazz Steam Toasted Cheese Bhaji Dixieland
        Kleptomaniac White getup & Bunting
When I awoke I discovered that it wasn’t all a dream
Succhi me catzo Dante
The face that I am sitting on is my own
But you can’t
Translate that

It’s the O’Hara of “Biotherm” I hear here mostly. The literary initials “WH & WB     TS WCW ee & HD” correspond wonderfully to Petrarch’s un-subtle spelling out of Laura’s name in the original—“LAUdando s’incomincia udir di fore / il suon de’ primi dolci accenti suoi. // Vostro stato REal, &c. Beyond the furious play, a melancholy: “In love with life but not living.” Retrieved again in Atkins’s “Final Sonnet 366” (as is the lovely disconnect of “standing in front of the Elgin Marbles”):

The boys are singing to drive away the noxious birds
Before women it is useful to practice on statues
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things—
        there where I ripped it
That her eyes couldn’t have been more beautiful—
        I just thought they were
Driving my utopian car over the dystopian roads
I go over and look at myself
& look surprised
Because living is one of the best things       I go over
I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass
My horn a crumpled dream
Earthlings! Comrades! ¡Adiós!
Work out your salvation with diligence
As if everything were still possible

“As if everything were still possible”—ending with all the heartbreaking candor of the O’Hara poem that begins “Instant coffee with slightly sour cream” and ends: “my life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others, their and my impossibilities. / Is this love, now that the first love / has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?”

Tim Atkins’s Petrarch (Crater #6)

Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374
(Drawing by Altichiero da Zevio)

Alfred Leslie’s 100 Views Along the Road

Books

Serendipity, the poniard of the fit percept, ready for its muscular lunge. How explain how, dutifully (drowsily) scanning the shelves of the used book emporium the other day, ticking off the usual absences (legion), Alfred Leslie’s 100 Views Along the Road (Timken, 1988) ’d pop up into the optics-slurring “field,” there for a fiver’s dispersal? I drug it home. The grisaille series, begun when Leslie rent’d a “bay-front cottage in Easthampton, Long Island, to make some landscape watercolor studies for The Killing Cycle,” the artist’s lament heroick for the death of Frank O’Hara, had, after thirty or so paintings’d got made, “emerged so strongly” it’d begun to compete with the work of The Killing Cycle itself for Leslie’s attention. (Lovely, Leslie’s sense, in the introductory piece he writes call’d “Our Luminous Paradise,” of the preternatural demands of one’s work, how it and its gods make sudden outlandish claims and denials, spell-determinant.) Ten years later, in 1978, driving a Ford van east out of California at the end of a winter’s (seemingly thwart’d, dogged by failure) trials of painting (“daily foot-slogging burdened with the gear of an itinerant scene painter”) landscapes around Santa Barbara, Leslie had “just outside Laguna, New Mexico” along U.S. 40, a kind of skew’d nigh-religious moment—one of two—that’d point him back to the Long Island watercolors:

      I was regretting the whole trip when a singular pile of colossal stones came into view. Gargantuan stones lying helter-skelter as if they had been casually crumpled by Goya’s mad mammoth just before he began to stuff those screaming babies into his mouth. At the base of the rocks were scattered a few trailers. All this was backlit with a pellucid light in the manner of an epiphany. This sublime western scene hit me hard and interested me more than anything I had just painted in California. I knew I could rescue my trip from failure by drawing it.
      The gods were definitely in control, and they had left a drawing pad and 4b pencil clearly visible in the jumbled mess behind the seat. I pulled off the road again, this time to draw a series of four rectangles on a page one under the other like a vertical cartoon on about twenty sheets. I turned back about five miles and made another run at the site. This time as I approached I didn’t stop. Instead, I pressed my knees against the bottom of the steering wheel and began to draw. I managed a few hasty scribbles and filled in one of the long rectangular boxes with a landscape that was really a succession of views. Since I was not drawing from any fixed position, the landscape sketch became a composite of many angles. They would all merge, making the final drawing a compound of individual sightings. Instead of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a painted sequence of stop-motion images all on one canvas, I had condensed a hundred separate percepts into one view. Landscape as myth.

Alfred Leslie, “Trailers Outside Laguna, New Mexico,” c. 1978

Leslie continues making “driving drawings”—the unavoidable parallel to “driving writings,” scrawl’d nigh-illegibles of the roil’d up hazards of the brain-box’s mete fervency unleash’d, what’s uncover’d under the full sun and cranny-licking breezes of that box’s (rag-top toss’d off) exposure to the road, Merrill Gilfillan’s wonderful phrase “drive an intelligent mile” meaning a way of connecting to that particular word-hoard, though any focus’d manual labor’d do it, even, say, walking—all the way east to home in Massachusetts and then, inexplicably, abandons the project. Two years later: a second coagulant moment.

I had gone for a ride in my old Volvo. I wasn’t going anywhere specific, I just wanted to saunter on wheels, to clear my head, to think. But I didn’t go very far and parked at the local Stop & Shop in Hadley. It was about 3 a. m. by now and there was a thin sliver of moon crisply stated in the sky. On impulse I sat in a small square of grass in the middle of the asphalt parking lot where a tree was planted. Looking up, I noticed an Exxon sign poised high on a tall mast, like another moon. I thought how similar all this was to the scene outside Laguna with the trailers parked underneath those gigantic ancient rocks. Then as now, everything seemed timeless, steeped in calm, without people and faintly doomed.

(David Shapiro relates the early—Killing Cycle—watercolors in the series to “the cinematic desire in Leslie for the ‘long shot,’ as if a too-detailed sense of the figure would be unbearable. The beach is scrutinized, almost scientifically, as the scene of contingency. Many of these studies show the sensuous delight in the ocean and its almost erotic contours. This indulgence in the sensuous surface of the real keeps the studies from being any kind of morbid or resentful encyclopedia.”) Leslie’s review of “the formal basis of the watercolors, starting with the white band that was at the bottom of every picture”:

I had discovered the band accidentally, after removing the tape I used to mask off sections of paper. When I saw the band for the first time I realized that the white unpainted section of the paper not only looked beautiful, but also provided a simultaneous second reading of the picture. It told the viewer that the painted sky above the white band was paint and nothing more. In this seeming subversion of pictorial realism and naturalness, the white band also functioned as a signifier, signing the wholeness of nature. Its role was similar to the fast gradation of intense blue at the very top of Japanese prints that indicates sky directly overhead, which you cannot see without looking up but you know is there as you are looking straight ahead at the horizon. As that intense blue signifies sky out of sight, my white band stands for earth not in view but as a given. The ground you know you are standing on as you look ahead. Earth as ground, ground as ground, base, surface of the paper. Its conceptual function, though, began with an entirely eyeball pleasure. I liked it, identified it, asked what it might mean, and kept it. The white band both signifies and is.

Kin of sorts (in my current rambunct / conjunct of reading) to some of John Ashbery’s lines out of “For John Clare”: “Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. . . . There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. . . . ¶ There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier.” All that marvelous noble chicanery about the percept, what enters the ground “starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.” What Leslie’s white band makes clear: how routinely ground—in Angus Fletcher’s words (A New Theory for American Poetry)—is “an unexamined given, claiming without skepticism to be original, to be immemorial, to be archetypal, and natural” (Fletcher’s arguing for Clare’s—and Ashbery’s—ability to regularly unveil an “experienced ground”—“The term means earth—where lightning finds one dissipative home for its deadly force and beauty, or ground in another sense, when the hunted animal ‘goes to ground.’ These are the ‘earth to earth’ from which we come, to which we adhere.” Other senses of ground (unevenly applicable to Leslie, Clare, and Ashbery): freely and unselfishly inherit’d clichés of the age (“like a good song writer, he uses them”); the blithe standing free of “any uncritical, obsessive, usually resentful desire to get rid of foundations” (signal properties of the self-proclaim’d “avant-gardes”); “innate capacity for philosophy” in face of the Heraclitean “ever, onrushing flux.” I teeter along a stretch’d rope between painting and poetry: is it possible to claim the unmark’d page ground? For the sparse figure / negligible grammar of a simple array? Finding myself writing things like:

      milk’d reveries of       a Camberwell youth

            “big as the bowels of Vesuvius”

          Campo Santo             “signifies and is”

      scoria array’d       dud       beetles in the weeds

        beyond scurrility       prayer busts       septic & flush’d

      wan sober meat of hickory       art-dub       hello, actually

      pokeweed in the reticent field of       mole-color’d gauze

              a fit exegesis / digesteth yron       uncanny / tyranny

                  up out of the diurnal fever like an asterisk

      August / angst               some brackish tannin’d spillway

      la Saltpêtrière             black jelly adherent         glib

        seethe of meniscus                   gulp of dying

            “their dusky backs upheav’d”       boon to descant

    dumb hour       hard quotidian snip         a throw-

                    down song

“To break up the sentence, that ’s the first heave.” Leslie—like my fragment’d nota?—is using “black as a color”:

The white band was also the natural yield of my thoughts about making the sketches with a monochromatic palette limited to black thinned with water. My grisaille would stand for all color. Continuing my past work, I used black as a color, not its absence; black as the carrier of light not its executioner. My strictures: no color but a single black, one size paper, one brush. Simple materials that would not blur the idea of the pictures. For most people reality is the confirmation of their expectations. These pictures would offer alternatives. Minimal means and probity would link the mind and the eye. . . . I would eliminate all esthetic choices in favor or pure information. I would resist meaning and interpretation. I would paint with nature rather than from nature. I would be nature.
      Nature and process, then, were the formal imperatives for the watercolors. But I was helped further in the definition of these ideas by the fortuitous discovery of the Japanese concept of nōtan, in a Chinese library on Essex Street in New York City. The concept is based on the belief that there can be an eternal unchanging response to the certain beauty of just so much white to just so much black. Nōtan has no counterpart in English and was brought into the vocabulary of English-speaking artists by the painter Arthur Dow in his book Composition, published in 1899. The word is both descriptive and judgmental, bespeaking both style and quality. It is a noun and an adjective.

Though refusing white in severest palette, Leslie’s call’d the original Long Island sketches nōtans. The resultant pieces—large—“I worked up to a sheet that was four by six feet”—become depictings condensery (kin, again, to John Clare’s “experienced ground,” that territory so work’d ’s to become one’s “nature”—Leslie’s “I would be nature”):

I wanted the larger drawings to capture all the transcendent weather and light moments I had ever experienced but not recorded. I wanted to put those sensations into the larger watercolors. For many of these I started less with a drawing of a place than with an overall atmospheric effect. I had to set the paint into motion toward the idea of a snowstorm and catch it, instantly, while working. I had to follow the washes, to enter them physically. The Chinese painting masters call this ink play, jazz masters call it improvisation, Harold Rosenberg termed it action painting. The idea is to set a structured theme into motion and ride it, using precision and skill.

And: “The light I paint is paint, not light.” To translate that into the “wan meat” of the word’d construct.

Alfred Leslie, “Heading for Gallup, New Mexico”

Alfred Leslie, “Bridge, Mill Creek, Youngstown, Ohio”

Alfred Leslie, “Rocky Beach, Santa Barbara, California”

Alfred Leslie, “Rocky Beach, Santa Barbara, California”

Alfred Leslie, ““Rocky Beach, Santa Barbara, California”

Alfred Leslie

Uncenter’d, Circling

Tree and Sunflowers

Conduct’d the faintly film noirish Vibe, all sprezzatura’d-up with new brake-work, out (Wednesday) toward Jackson (“hotter ’n a pepper sprout”), across the placid St. Joseph to snip off the corner (befoul’d, see Gary) of Indiana, and scoot through the “city of big shoulders” (Chicago): end of summer voyage to see violinist Leila Josefowicz (with pianist John Novacek, who bang’d and jump’d and bent morendo down to see off the little dying notes, and made lovely monkey-mouths, indéchiffrable comme un grimoire.) Poetics adage: always identify with the sidekick (see its etymological boots in criminal slang: “Pockets range between ‘side kicks’ and ‘double insiders’), not the hero. Josefowicz play’d Brahms’s 1906 Scherzo in C minor (composed for one Joseph Joachim—a violinist whose “musical motto: F A E” stood for Frei aber einsam—“free but alone”), Shostakovich’s single violin sonata (“unyielding in its modernity, shifting between tonal passages and freely atonal segments” that had the blazer and khaki’d model dottering Republican in front of me in a childish fury), Stravinsky’s 1932 Duo concernante (trigger’d, one notes, by a passage in Charles Albert Cingria’s book Petrarca—“Lyricism cannot exist without rules, and it is essential that they should be strict. Otherwise there is only a faculty for lyricism, and that exists everywhere. What does not exist everywhere is lyrical expression and composition. To achieve that, apprenticeship to a trade is necessary.”) (Out of Stravinsky’s Autobiography. He (Stravinsky, therein) also approvingly quotes Tchaikovsky (in a letter): “Since I began to compose I have made it my object to be, in my craft, what the most illustrious masters were in theirs; that is to say, I wanted to be, like them, an artisan, just as a shoemaker is. . . . (They) composed their immortal works exactly as a shoemaker makes shoes; that is to say, day in, day out, and for the most part to order.” Contra the fit mystical, the abrupt descent (sun-shaft and hearkening voice) of the angelic blow. Though who’s to say it isn’t that diurnal rut that beckons such?) Josefowicz and Novocek perform’d, too, a piece by the Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür, Conversio (1994)—with a whole midriff of violin and piano seemingly caught in a stutter-y combat regarding the manner of proceeding (or ending), a kind of furious stasis. Tüür, who found’d and perform’d with the rock bank In Spe:

My work as a composer is entirely concerned with the relation between emotional and intellectual energies and the way in which they can be channeled, accumulated, liquidated and re-accumulated. My pieces are abstract dramas in sound, with characters and an extremely dynamic chain of events; they unfold in a space that is constantly shifting, expanding and contracting, not so much like a mosaic, but rather in the manner of a block of sculpture. I have been interested in a combination of opposites—tonality versus atonality, regular repetitive rhythms versus irregular complex rhythms, tranquil meditativeness versus explosive force . . .

Josefowicz end’d with Franz Schubert’s Rondo brillant in B minor, predictably soothing the Republican beast.

To conduct the faintly film noirish Vibe is to find oneself at the center of an advancing circle (I am stuck, of late, re-encountering it in Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry—Iain Sinclair makes it central to Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex,’ too), with the lovely Clare report (found in the autobiographical writings) of going toward the (motile, receding) reaches of the horizon—seeking what the Greek Anaximander call’d “the unlimited”—the origin of the cosmos. Clare (in Clare’s orthography):

I loved this solitary disposition from a boy and felt a curosity to wander about spots where I had never been before         I remember one incident of this feeling when I was very young         it cost my parents some anxiety         it was in summer and I started off in the morning to get rotten sticks from the woods but I had a feeling to wander about the fields and I indulgd it         I had often seen the large heath calld Emmonsales stretching its yellow furze from my eye into unknown solitudes when I went with the mere openers and my curosity urgd me to steal an oppertunity to explore it that morning         I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it         so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures and discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water         so I eagerly wanderd on and rambled among the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me and I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys         the very sun seemd to be a new one and shining in a different quarter of the sky         still I felt no fear         my wonder seeking happiness had no room for it         I was finding new wonders every minute and was walking in a new world often wondering to my self that I had not found the end of the old one       the sky still touchd the ground in the distance as usual and my childish wisdoms was puzzld in perplexitys . . .

I like the way the “incident of this feeling” is a fell one, liable, apt, unconstrain’d, nigh “fit mystical.” I like, too, the “got out of my knowledge”—moving beyond the quotidian circle into unsuspect’d (fecund) knowings. (Though only by dint of daily practice: that gleaning routine, “off in the morning to get rotten sticks from the woods.”) Rummaging idly in Nathalie Stephens’s new translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetic Intention (Nightboat Books, 2010), I uncover’d: “For the key to the cosmic secret, writes Hans Urs von Balthazar in his Cosmic Liturgy is still motion, or more precisely, it is the study of the relationship between rest and motion, whose balance is what defines the essence of finite being.” Territory I usually light out of, intrepid around the cosmic (to say nothing of the liturgic, though I find Clare’s “orison” a perfect incidence of misspelling). What I keep thinking: how devise a way of writing it? Writing a still center (in a circle continually and impetuously displac’d). Fletcher turns briefly to Emerson’s “Circles”—“circular wave of circumstance”—pointing out how he (Emerson) follow’d “formal master” Montaigne’s “The shape of my library is round with only sufficient flat wall for my table and chair; as it curves about, it offers me at a glance all my books arranged in five rows of shelves all around.” (Draw that. The necessity of a “flat wall” ’d seem to sideline Montaigne, and why the need for a flat area if one only puts one’s back to it?) At the impasse thus deliver’d (“back against the wall”), turn to the lexicographic. Fletcher: “Since ideas and form are lexically the same—idea being translated into the Latin form—it follows that the history of ideas is actually the history of forms and these in turn belong as much to poets—who manipulate form, arguing against the Platonic absolute—as to the ‘theory of ideas,’ which by its nature must fixate and hypostatize each idea.” O.E.D-city-breakdown: “idea, noun. a. late L. idea (in Platonic sense), a. Gr. ιδέα, look, semblance, form, configuration, species, kind, class, sort, nature, (in Platonic philosophy) a general or ideal form, type, model, f. root ίδ-, ίδεῖν, to see: the word being thus analogous in derivation and original sense to L. species from spec-ĕre to see, behold.” No ideas but in form.

John Clare, 1793-1864
(Painting by William Hilton, 1820)

Alfred Leslie’s The Killing Cycle

Some Flowers

Chop’d the cilantro straight off the rubber-band’d “bunch” into the white beans, mash’d it down in the stock with the white chunks of poulet rôti, the marvelous little pearls of oignons sautée’d, and the green chili peppers dump’d out the ruptured tin—oh hell, the whole gastronomic topos barely stirs a muscle in my imaginary. At loose ends, I’d rather do anything besides make a meal. For several months now one routine is the pulling down off the shelf of a monograph call’d Alfred Leslie: The Killing Cycle by Judith Stein and David Shapiro, a thing uncover’d somewhere near Chicago, reporting a 1991 exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum. (“The artist recalls that his first sketch for the painting was done in the middle of a January night in 1967 in New York. Visible on the drawing, the title The Death of Frank O’Hara, . . . was almost immediately changed to The Killing of Frank O’Hara.”) I read a little and return it to the shelf, hamper’d by something, some tourbillonnant vividry, its rose-color’d end-papers loud’s a schoolgirl’s jupe, the shreds of my reading inklings of some metastasis of a whole new rubric of despair. (Next to it a paperback of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, the “vigor and frankness” of its garish cover, blitzkrieg-fiery sky behind the soot’d tenements: “neither of the Rougiers”—a couple who sold cartes postales, seal’d up like French pornography, of the Loire’s innumerable chateaux—“had taken off their clothes for four years.”) A kind of incipient pervasive anomie, down to the tints and hues. The usual keep.

One of the subtitles Frank O’Hara wrote for Al Leslie’s film The Last Clean Shirt (1964): “I have the other idea about guilt. It’s not in us, it’s in the situation. You don’t say the victim is responsible for a concentration camp or a Mack truck. Maybe if we were all flowers, and someone stepped on us—someone, even God, might say—That’s too bad.” So block’d in, under a scene, repeat’d, of a man and woman in a convertible, driving through a city, just moments after a gunshot is heard. Is it Richard Howard, in an early assessment of O’Hara’s work, who warns so precipitously (that is, helplessly) against reading prophecy into nigh every word of the poet: “A man, in particular that emblematic man a poet, who by his surrogate office must stand, in particulars, for the generality—a man who dies at forty is at every moment of his life, we say, a-man-who-has-died-at-forty . . . and retrospectively we glean, in the course of a broken-off existence, the seeds of a destiny which, planted perhaps only by ourselves and cultivated however arbitrarily by our hunger for the inevitable, will bestow upon the blasted biography this flowering: a more grateful contour, an acceptable outline. We say, he was death-ridden, doom-haunted, and that he belonged to the race—as Thomas Mann said of Cocteau—which dies in the emergency ward.” And Howard (helplessly) provides the slings and arrows of O’Hara’s prophetic (and mock-heroic) “stance”:

                                                            I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of American death
                        “Rhapsody”

And:

I am really an Indian at heart, knowing it is all
over but my own ceaseless going
                        “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”

And:

                                                                        Ah!
To be at vespers with Mediterranean
heroes!
                        “The Argonauts”

And:

The ancient world knew these things (Be not obedient of the excellent, do not prize the silly) and I am unable to convey as well as those poets the simplicity of things, the bland and amused stare of garages and banks, the hysterical bark of a dying dog. . . . I do not want to be the victim of the ability to enthuse myself. . . . Most of my thoughts are blue with miles of figures and chariots and nudes on paths of primrose, going down the drain of modern times like a rhymed heroic tragedienne.
                        “Day and Night in 1952”

And (in an essay on Jackson Pollock):

Our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which well may be non-existent, in a last effort of recognition which is the justification of being.

And:

                            I run! closer always move,
crying my name in fields of dead I love.
                        “A City Winter”

Back to leafing through the Leslie monograph. Picture of a jeep hanging outside a second-floor window (in 1972, he’d convinced Amherst—where he taught that year—to provide him with a studio and a Willys). By 1966, Leslie’d lost three friends to car crashes: Jackson Pollock in 1956, sculptor David Smith in 1965, and O’Hara. Following O’Hara’s death, he’d attempt’d to add material—Willem De Kooning and Patsy Southgate talking about O’Hara—to an earlier film call’d Messy Lives (1962-1963) in homage. The seventh of October of that year: Leslie’s studio destroy’d by fire. Twelve firefighters kill’d. All Leslie’s art work, films, and personal possessions lost. “When my studio burned, I gave up filmmaking altogether and merged all my ideas into . . . painted stories. This metastasis of ideas was not unusual for me except for its suddenness. It was not possible to reconstruct all of my working situations after the disaster.” The Killing Cycle: “The Narrator” (1973), “The Cocktail Party” (1967-1978), “The Accident” (1969-1970), “The Telephone Call” (1971-1972), “The Loading Pier” (1975). Leslie:

The Killing Cycle is not primarily about any one thing. Not only about death or Frank O’Hara or about the loss of American innocence or about the defiling of the seashore or about the brutality of the automobile or a lecture to the avant garde or the demise of a hero or the depiction of a single instant in time or multiple figure painting or the loss of my work by fire . . . or . . . or . . . What this work is really about I can’t say, except that formally it is meant to be multi-leveled with its implied meanings focused enough that they are all fighting for ascendancy. And that these jostling meanings seek out the viewers perceptions to combine and recombine with each person so that no one interpretation succeeds.

Is there a tiny echo of O’Hara’s own “batty way to give information about the poem” in the splendid non-notes (contra-Eliotic) of “[Notes on Second Avenue]”? That “the verbal elements are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious. Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it”? Ongoing here, that “batty way to give information.” One thing Leslie argues for: “a desire to restore narrative subjects to the practice and intellectual life of painting and painters, and to establish story as a formal element and process . . .” And of course, he succeeds by painting in a “cinematic” style (even the initial study sketch includes five notes, a kind of filmic sequence):

1—First see the beautiful sky—
2—Terrific landscape—
3—car lights—
4—Frank being run down—
5—other car—

Leslie’s research for the series, done “intermittently over a period of fourteen years from 1966 to 1980”: interviewing J. J Mitchell [Mitchell, with Virgil Thomson and Morris Golde’d been out at a night spot with O’Hara that night—Mitchell and O’Hara stay’d late, “well past two in the morning”]. Judith Stein:

Leslie felt impelled to visit the actual site of the accident. He wanted to examine the physical layout of the beach on Fire Island and see the location of the dunes and the houses in relation to it. Leslie decided to stay there all day and night. Late in the afternoon he experienced the peculiar driving etiquette practiced on the island. As he lay on the sand close to the water, watching a young child playing near its mother, he saw a beach taxi moving in his direction at a steady clip. He was astonished that it never slowed its pace, and that people on the beach just jumped out of its way. He saw the woman near him run to pick up her child directly from the path of the vehicle, which never altered it speed as it passed right by . . .

When he returned to Manhattan he called the Coast Guard and the Weather Bureau to learn the prevailing weather, the tide, and the position of the moon on the night that O’Hara was struck. Although he did not know exactly how he would use these facts, he was comforted to have descriptions of the authentic conditions at his disposal. But his concern for verisimilitude did not endure: “In the end, I discarded it all. But it was important to me to assimilate it and have it all in my hand and then put it all aside and treat it as a picture, which is what I did . . .

Each picture becomes (note the Poundian “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” echo) “the depiction of a specific instant in time,” a frame (though the question of verisimilitude’s need and employ seems one Leslie never fully solved):

In a couple of the drawings and in one of the paintings I actually made it look like Frank. Then I thought it was a mistake. The important thing was to have an authentic picture of a person. At one point in time I thought it was very important that it looked like Frank. At other points in time I thought it was less important. That had to do with the very powerful shift in what I thought really should be happening with the picture. At the very beginning I had decided that the single most important issue in contemporary American painting was the depiction of a specific instance in time. So that in painting this picture of an accident it just could not be a general view of somebody being killed. It had to be a particular person.

Beans done?

Alfred Leslie, Two Drawings Call’d “On the Sand,” c. 1968
Frank O’Hara as Edouard Manet’s “The Dead Toreador” (1864)
The lines read: “He lay on the sand—on his back—one hand on his chest—he looked like he was asleep.” J. J. Mitchell’s words.

Alfred Leslie, “The Cocktail Party,” 1967-1978

Alfred Leslie, “The Accident,” 1969-1970

Alfred Leslie, “The Telephone Call,” 1971-1972

Alfred Leslie, “The Loading Pier,” 1975

Alfred Leslie, “Alfred Leslie,” 1966-1967

—

A couple pertinent addenda here. I am off for a couple days.