Koichi K. O’Hara?

Some Gulls (Millennium Park)

Rummaging through the initial issue of Art and Literature (1964), the magazine that John Ashbery edit’d (along with Anne Dunn, Rodrigo Moynihan, and, briefly, Sonia Orwell), work nearly overlapping with Locus Solus, whose final issue is seemingly undated, petering out (planned obsolescence) circa 1963-4 (Locus Solus edit’d by, too, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews and James Schuyler, each of the four doing a number, Koch doing the second, all collaborations, Ashbery a double issue—III-IV—call’d “New Poetry,” Schuyler editing numéro I—with Ebbe Borregaard pieces and Robin Blaser’s “Cups” amongst its contents, leaving number V—lacking apparatus—presumably to Mathews), I stumble again up against a story by one Richard Fields call’d “The Wind Sneezes Many a Lost Baboon,” a thing that’s long pique’d my curiosity. The opening (seemingly couch’d in the veriest heart of an implacable in medias res):

      The rest was easy and he sneezed. Dozing on the front stairs he listened to the wind whistling around the corner of the house. Not that he had ever been able to believe that it was whistling to him. But water was boiling somewhere . . . somewhere where tea kettles and locomotives lived a life of their own. Like the time the kettle turned on the gas under itself—aluminium it melted gracefully, just the wood handle caught on fire and stank.
      He preferred not to wake up this way, but it always happened so. I don’t know why I never seem to be able to do anything worth-while, he thought. I could have caught nightwalkers last night and gone fishing this morning.
      He caught the light coming through the trees in a funny way and asked the sun: “And what are you looking at?” The sun said: “Whatever made you think I was looking at you, or, for that matter, whatever made you think anybody is bothering to look through the trees in a funny way?”
      He knew the sun really hadn’t said anything . . .

Et cetera, aimlessly prevaricating, a lackadaisical surreal punctured by moments of lyricism, moments of violence. What I found curious: the contributor’s note:

RICHARD FIELDS is the pseudonym of two American writers, Richard Elliott and Walter Grutchfield. Elliott’s story “Nine Elaborations for 26 Characters” appeared in Locus Solus.

Why that “American” emphasis (with words like “aluminium” and “nightwalkers”—Briticisms, no?)—and why the gut punch that says Richard Elliott and Walter Grutchfield, in the absence of add’d info, they, too, “sound like” a couple of pseudonyms? What is that “talking to the sun” routine? So I look up Richard Fields’s “Nine Elaborations for 26 Characters” in Locus Solus. Of little use. Aimlessness under the sign of the alphabet, violence, the too easy surreal:

      Could it be by accident that I encountered B. again tonight? On the path of a circular park, in a bright orange gown, she poised on tiptoes. Savagely, by vigilant hysteria, she split herself in two, one half running round the right of the park, the other around the left . . .

No clue (another Briticism—“flats”—though the story’s rather elastic setting is mostly New York City environs: “a notorious café located in a suburb of New Jersey,” the Brooklyn Navy Yard, &c.), no contributor’s note. Back to other back issues of Art and Literature, scanning contents pages for Fields or Elliott or Grutchfield, or other unlikely sounding names (thinking: here’s a coterie rife with collaborating, pseudonyming, &c. not unlike “our” own . . .) I see something call’d “Serious Fish and Old Straw Hat” in Art and Literature 4 by one W. W. Winkworth—turns out it’s legit: William Wilberforce Winkworth, collector of Japanese art, writing about collecting (“Fish cannot be a serious subject for a picture or for any work of art.”) In numéro 8 (Spring 1966), though, an oddity. Two poems (“Phone to the Poets in Moscow” and “Isolation at 9 p.m.”) by one Koichi K. O’Hara. What ho! Momento, citoyens! Here:

Phone to the Poets in Moscow

My friends, Soviet Poets in Moscow, yet covering
Your flute of Muse, thought of soul, by the heavy deep snow,
Tell me,
When your flute of Muse will be coming to laugh
With gladly song escaping
From your gloomy dark song-winter-exile.
Reading
A book, yesterday afternoon,
Of world Poet-lame-cyclops young Mayakovsky,
Translated by young interesting Jewish girl,
In my office, at University Columbia, in New York,
Remembering
My troubled thoughtful time in Moscow University,
From 1958 to 1961,
When I could touch to the soul of Russian Muse-simple-people,
Decided I, called on you from my office, from University, N.Y., U.S.A.

Operator,
It’s a personal call, to Moscow from New York, U.N. 54000, x, 3291.
My name is K. K. O’Hara, Irish name but Japanese Poet.
What’s the matter? Moscow now asleep? Wake up! Individuals!
Chort-znaaet! O my goodness!
Wake up my generation’s Poets in Moscow!
Wake up my friends Poets, Tvardovsky-Chorkin-Bashimachikin,
Evtyshenko, caught by a fishing net, and his friends young Poets,
Also caught in network,
And wake up Poet Union in Moscow!

Hey! Hello!
Is this Moscow’s Poet Club?
Are you living good anyhow?
Listen!
I’m a Poet in a cafeteria at New York, K. K. O’Hara, Remember me?
Yes, this is that O’Hara.
Don’t you want to come to Paris-painting-town in this summer?
I will take with me American Poet Kenneth Koch from here.
Let us open and invite to our Poet World Conference in Paris
French Poets-skillful also.
Let us talk, what we Poets must do, now!

Now,
When Moscow’s girl students already try to go to the moon,
Want to escape from Moscow’s bad room condition, with her boy friends,
When New York’s girl students already try to go to the cosmos,
Want to escape from New York’s dark small room-unsunlightful,
With her boy friends,
Why young Poets in the world, you and I and we, must sign gloomy song
Yet?
About depressed black dark wintersky? And
About poor network of fisher-politicians-unskillful in the world?
Killing is killing as skinny is skinny.
But yet some politicians continue to think unskillfully,
That political machine is the technique,
How man kills man,
How to find and make enemy
Between men and women, mankind and womankind,
Between allkind and everykind,
Forgetting,
From the time of Cain, filled enough by the man’s blood,
Already our small earth, shaking her body, becomes red.

Could I meet to that day,
When every politician put on its base of policy a law,
That nobody ever kills anybody on our earth?
Let us remember Aristotle’s words:
Every state is an association of persons,
Formed with a view to some good purpose . . . ,
Even though he recognized a war against animal-man.

Listen!
Now, what we Poets must do?
Poet must stop a turning somersault-himself?!?
Poet-philosophy must be practical!?
Poets-we now must stand higher than Aristotle!?
I think, as a poet of the cafeteria,
As a King from muttering retreat
Of people,
Must ask and request of politicians,
With all our voice of powerful powerless Muse,
Could they?
Could they do it?
Repairing, changing, rebuilding already old machine-political?

May be?
How do you think?
Humankind always changed machine, old to new.
Why could you not now?
Why could you not change to new machine, from old one-political?
From old ideology, psychology, sociology, zoology,
From old animalology (i.e. Politicoanimalman-economicalology),
From old stomachology,
To new one?

Let us invite
To our World Conference of Young Generation’s Poets in Paris,
Ghosts and goats, dying and living, good and bad of politicians,
Including in it, all leaders of big and small, past’s and present’s
Nations.
And ask them
With a smile as a Poet, as a King from muttering people-cafeteria,
Could they promise on our earth, no more, nobody kills anybody?

Laugh! Smile!
Kiss me! Kiss us-Poets!
Muses-my-young-girls of our cafeteria in N.Y. and in Moscow!
Kiss me! Kiss us-Poets!
Muses-our-girls-friends of Moscow’s and N.Y.’s simple people!
Say, that’s O-Kay!
Look!
This is the bill!
They promised, pledged!
Now politicians in the world become just technicians,
Only making, repairing, rebuilding, reconstructing earth to green!
Now we, Poets-firemen, punished-vagabonds, at last put out
All the politician’s head’s fires!
Forever and ever!

Hello!
Hello!
Do you agree?
Hello!
Moscow!
Answer!
It’s New York!

Something obviously fishy here. The contributor’s note for O’Hara reads: “KOICHI K. O’HARA is a Japanese poet and critic in the field of literature and Russian problems. He graduated from the University of Tokyo and later studied Russian literature at Moscow University. From 1964 to 1965 he was visiting scholar at the Russian Institute at Columbia University.” (“Isolation at 9 p.m.” continues with the somewhat tedious mock-pidgin jawing—“If you want to know, what is America, / Come to our cafeteria, on the Broadway, / At 96th St., at 9 p.m. / Our company waits for you / . . . I am an American, Becoming American is / Not from nature, but ideal . . .”) What be these things? Possibilities: a thinly-veil’d collaboratory mess by O’Hara and Koch. Doubtful: the tone is neither various nor disrupt’d, there’s no O’Hara finesse. A one-author piece by a scene hanger-on / admirer of Koch and O’Hara. Dubiety locks its jaws against the “black dark wintersky”: no sign of “other” voicings (sauf Eliot’s “muttering retreat”). My sense is that the piece’s full of Koch’s own parodic earmarks: the japonerie of the earlier “Ko, or A Season on Earth,” the butcher’d foreign English (see something like the “young Swedish nurse” Ingelil’s speeches in “The Merry Stones”—“Lay down and be slumbering” or “I am a laziness that comes from a nuttier country; I see to not understand your flailing indecrepitude”), the endless exclamatory outbursts, &c. The reference to the “world Poet-lame-cyclops young Mayakovsky” is possibly of note to compadres audibly wondering at the provenance of O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island.” Possibly not. For my part I intend to read all of The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch (Coffee House, 2005), looking—vainly, I suspect, seeing now a story call’d “At The Silver Rail” in New Directions 20 (1968) by Walter Grutchfield—for stylistic signs of the Richards—Fields and / or Elliott—or of Grutchfield himself. (The art of the possible: to turn one back to the work.) It’s a world full of lovely and mysterious signs.

Alex Katz, “Portrait of a Poet: Kenneth Koch,” 1970

Ashbery / Dylan

Some Clouds

Coldish, the blank sky cloud-scum’d, the season of insecurity and witlessness, talking to oneself (“He Do the Police in Different Voices,” just like Sloppy), any sign for a raffle or giveaway liable to stop one cold. Reading—desultory, amoeboid (Beckett: “The amoeba’s neck is not easily broken”)—Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America, an uneven thing. I like the report of Dylan composing lyrics “in bursts of wordplay, including little narratives and collage-like experiments.” Mention made of a sort of Ashberyesque “Litany”-piece (discard’d) including “a pair of couplets set off in alternating lines, one on the left about getting his monkey to do the dog atop a lumberjack log, the other on the right, about joining Ingmar Bergman in singing ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ written out as if each couplet was coming in from a different side of a set of earphones” (so I allow a couple of Dylan’s voices to sing a little Ashbery, the late ragged claw scuttling one doing “For someone like me / The simple things / Like having toast. . .” and the Nashville Skyline syrupy crooner one doing “So this must be a hole / Of cloud / Mandate or trap . . .”) I recall talking about some Dylan / Ashbery two-man horse a couple years back—“Popping Dylan into the box, thinking about how he, like Ashbery, pulls down the oddball American demotic off the airwaves: ‘If you don’t believe it you can follow your nose . . .’”—without any fervent hie-ing off in high pursuit of it, preferring—like today, a tuck’d-up fœtal lalling in lieu of grit-argument—think of Beckett in Hamburg (same letter, dated 14 November 1936 to Mary Manning Howe in Cambridge) saying that he dreams “with the help of black coffee, of a lap the size of the fifteen acres, with all appurtenances strictly to scale, all to myself in my present deformity. Beauty is a blank wall with Paste No Bills. I am tired of dashing my skull against it.” Think of that. Ashbery, too—toss that “New York School” monicker in the ditch—is both (like Dylan) wary of the posturing new (“made to substitute for genuine passion and inventiveness”) and liable to attempt a sloughing-off of whatever skin one wants to pickle him in. Ashbery, gently mocking the faddish new (in Reported Sightings) talks about “the prevalent notion, which has only recently begun to be disputed, that only one type of art can be exhibited and taken in during a given period.” Hence hybridity (when some slower bunch of partisans begins its migratory climb up the quickly erect’d bulwarks of new). Ashbery with some anti-innovatory sass (writing in 1974): “In 1966—remember?—Minimal Art had suddenly expanded to fill all the available gallery space and the space in people’s heads. Three years later everyone was having trenches dug in Utah.” (Too, in a lovely aside: “There was once a Mutt and Jeff strip in which Jeff went into business selling honey with a dead bee in each jar as proof of genuineness, and frantic brushwork is often the dead bee in Abstract Expressionist painting.” The way, for some, paratactical New Sentence-ry is a dead bee, or torque, or Google-sculpting or, in a twist, adipose leaking performativity itself.) (Marianne Moore’s 1921 “Poetry”: “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” Not the genuine itself, “a place” for it.) Increasingly I read Ashbery’s concern in “The Invisible Avant-Garde” (1968) as being that of the individual dodging invidious groupuscular tenets (and “acceptance”). After Ashbery’s talk about the avant-garde tradition (“it is safest to experiment”), the “danger of substituting one conformity for another” (“Is there nothing then between the extremes of Levittown and Haight-Ashbury, between an avant-garde which has become a tradition and a tradition which is no longer one? In other words, has tradition finally managed to absorb the individual talent?”), he suggests:

      Perhaps the answer is not to reject what one has done, nor to be forced into a retrograde position, but merely to take into account that if one’s work automatically finds acceptance, there may be a possibility that it could be improved. The Midas-like position into which our present acceptance-world forces the avant-garde is actually a disguised blessing which previous artists have not been able to enjoy, because it points the way out of the predicament it sets up—that, is, toward an attitude which neither accepts nor rejects acceptance but is independent of it. . . .
      Today the avant-garde has come full circle—the artist who wants to experiment is again faced with what seems like a dead end, except that instead of creating in a vacuum he is now at the center of a cheering mob. Neither climate is exactly ideal for discovery . . .

What effrontery, to make discovery prefer’d to acceptance. Amiable avoidance and indifference. None of that stealing into favor (Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well: “He will steale himselfe into a mans fauour, and for a weeke escape a great deale of discoueries, but when you finde him out, you haue him euer after.”) Or Joyce: “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.” Doing the voices: witless and inert. Dylan: “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere / It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Ashbery: “I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.”

John Ashbery

Bob Dylan

Spicer / Davenport

Some Clouds

Balmy, somehow “shapely” breezes (the smooth’d and globular dimensions of their approach), the moon (just beginning to deflate) descending into the torn-off westerly edge of the planet, there where the black trees fork off into unremedy’d nothingness. Bedraggled finitude, honey-parch’d, to connect is to bump up against a dispersal, blue. Spicer: “We make up a different language for poetry / And for the heart—ungrammatical.” Blaser (“The Practice of Outside,” out of the 2006 The Fire: Collected Essays) calls that language “unsituated” / “primary.” Thinking about Spicer and “correspondences” (Baudelaire’s word). Blaser writes of Spicer’s love of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see”), that (or any) romp of “language always at the edge of a meaning” (that being—“naturally” enough—language’s “unsituated” or “primary” state.) Drawing it out: Spicer’s liking of “St. Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as a ‘verbum visible’” (see, in one of the letters to Lorca, the desire “to make things visible rather than to make picture of them”—“Live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits. The poem is a collage of the real”), the way “Jack ‘no longer speaks of identity but of correspondence’” (Blaser’s faulty quoting / interpreting of lines out of After Lorca: “Things do not connect, they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time”), the lovely line out of Poe’s Marginalia that Spicer riffs off in “Improvisations on a Sentence by Poe”:

“Indefiniteness is an element of the true music.”
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.

Isn’t the “grand concord” akin to what Guy Davenport (in Every Force Evolves a Form) calls “a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible”—articulate = utter distinctly, array in a series—that is, “a work of art”? What if Spicer’d bother’d with Fourier? “La série distribue les harmonies. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées.” Snip out a single item in Davenport’s “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier”—out of Da Vinci’s Bicycle and witness series within series, real lemons:

Wasps in an Ohio orchard, fat black bees in an English garden, butterflies at Fiesole. Wasps drunk on nectar grabble into a yellow umble licorice and lavender, bourrée and gigue. Ant tells the poppy when to bloom, and sleeping lions make mimosa spread.

Grabble, umble, bourrée and gigue: true musicking. (Consider, too, Coleridge’s remark in a 7 March 1815 letter to Joseph Cottle: “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is to convert a series into a whole.” Signs of a demeanor, a common measure, that of grabblers amongst yellow stalky umbels, honey-seekers, never diffident.) (Recall Spicer’s “love of Virgil’s 4th Georgic (Orpheus and bee-keeping) which he willfully confused [according to Blaser] with Ovid’s Art of Love, book I, on the basis of a single phrase, “et e medio flumine mella petat,” and let him seek honey in the middle of a river, turned by Jack in an early poem, which plays on the name of a young man, into “Mela, Mela peto / In medio flumine,” I seek honey in the middle of a river . . .”) Another of Davenport’s Mandelbrotian miniatures (series mimicking series) lifts its mead-color’d eyes:

Goldenest smile, earliest pubic hair, nautch in the innominata,
largest number of warts, longest period between the frumps, slickest kiss, keenest whistle, worst joke, roundest behind, highest pisser, brightest glow from a dandelion under the chin.

And (explicatory with series imbed’d):

The series distributes the harmonies. Linnaeus died when he was six, Buffon when he was sixteen, Cuvier was his contemporary. Swedenborg died the week before he was born. All searched out the harmonies, the affinities, the kinship of the orders of nature.

. . .

All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras’ numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a fish, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the concerto, the all.

Davenport talking about Fourier in an interview in The Paris Review:

The whole world, he said, is a correspondence. And everything comes in a chord. The chord contains eight items. The center of the chord is the pivot. At one end of the chord is the avant-garde, and at the other end is the arrière-garde. In a fruit chord, let’s say, you have at one end the ripest golden pear, and at the other end is the quince, which never ripens. It remains as hard as a rock. And all of these corresponded with personalities (I’ve know plenty of quinces).

And, after remarking that “Fourier had a wonderful sense that the world was designed by some great poet, that it was full of rhymes, or affinities . . . I’ve always liked that,” the interviewer asks a “philosophical question”: “Does one create these rhymes, these affinities, or uncover them?” Davenport’s honey of a mordant (honest) reply: “I probably make them up.” And there’s Spicer at the end of “Graphemics”: “Love is not mocked whatever use you put to it. Words are also / not mocked.” Isn’t some jut-modicum of my sense of a Davenport / Spicer correspondence the unblunt’d solitariness of each? Spicer: “Wit is the only barrier between ourselves and them.” Spicer’s “collage of the real”—its way of ducking off into inconsequence. Its way of bumping up against a dispersal. “Fifteen False Propositions Against God”:

Beauty is so rare a th—
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card.

A tiny series. What a card. (My way of ducking off—in medio flumine—into inconsequence . . .)

Jack Spicer, 1925-1965

Michaux / Pound

Some Clouds

Pondering (in lieu of, in advance of, thieving) a line Zukofsky used (epigraph) out of Psalm 16: The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. Seemingly “about” land measures—surveying marks and boundaries—and not a literary “catch”—or cache—at all. So go the bounteous feints and leakages of one’s comprehension. The other Zukofsky line of note in yesterday’s perusal (of the 1956 Some Time): “a good sprag memory.” (A Shakespeare thievery, out of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare seemingly misspelling “sprack” a West Midlands dialect term meaning “smart, clever, alert.”) (Naturally—leakage, &c.—I initially record the line wrongly, “a good scrag memory,”—“scrag” = “lean”—“the scrag-end of my days,” soundings Eliotesque and invading.) Or I recall Merrill Gilfillan in an early piece—“In Memory of Albert Ayler” saying “The spirit opens / by complete surprise because it’s muscle”—and see, looking, how he proceeds to rout about in “any streetcorner quantum / and absinthe wherever it is” for something so undefined that its decree’d lack and monstrance looms up tangibly, like a Cadillac, or a yacht. Riffing around a sinecure, or a cicatrix, fleshy and bejowl’d.) Michaux, reportedly: “I write in order to reveal a person whose existence no one would ever have expected from looking at me.” (Ammons, dress’d in unremarkable professorial drab-clothes, loudening up against some fatuous-showy poet-garb: “I’m so fuckin’ crazy, I don’t need to costume myself.”) Michaux’s statement used in lieu of a photograph (Michaux’s refusal of being photograph’d): “A man and his face, it’s a little as if they were constantly devouring each other.” (William Matthew’s lines out of “In Memory of W. H. Auden”: “My friend said Auden died / because his face / invaded his body.” And how he—Matthews—veers off into Romantic pre-process’d pablum (in the duds of “myth”): “Under the joke is a myth— / we invent our faces: / the best suffer most and it shows.” A sere carmen perpetuum of connectings—the way the mind wholly unsuffering cans and dispenses its veriest niggling, that is companying. “She’d Pawn her Cloaths for a nigling Bout.” (Looking into Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, the original print’d by Gallimard in 1933, here translated by Sylvia Beach and print’d by New Directions in 1947, I idly wonder why its opening lines—“I know some twenty capitals. Bah! ¶ But then there is Calcutta. Calcutta, the most crowded city in the Universe”—so oddly echo the opening of Pound’s c. 1908 “Cino” with its rubric of “Italian Campagna 1309, the open road” “Bah! I have sung women in three cities, / But it is all the same; / And I will sing of the sun.”) Is that Pound-inflect’d by Beach, or is the evidence of Michaux’s attending to Pound? Pound’s Michaux. I see that Richard Sieburth’s report’d (in Signs in Action: Pound / Michaux and Of Language) one connect:

In his obituary memoir of Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport notes that during his final years in Venice il miglior fabbro, having abandoned his Cantos as a colossal botch, having edged further and further into silence, was nevertheless contemplating a translation of Henri Michaux’s Idéogrammes en Chine. Pound’s health was failing, as was his confidence in the word, and apparently after a few false starts the project was set aside. It was left to a younger American poet, Gustaf Sobin, to complete the task—with the result the Michaux’s Ideograms in China was finally made available to English-speaking readers in 1984, published, appropriately enough, under the Poundian imprint of New Directions as a latterday complement (so the blurb reads) to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.

Michaux’s Pound? Untraced. Michaux’s references to Chinese language begin with a love of its spoken form:

      Compared with this language all others are pedantic, burdened with a thousand ridiculous things, laughable in their monotony—languages for soldiers. . . .
      Now the Chinese language was not made like the others, forced by a jostling and controlling syntax. The words in it were not constructed harshly, with authority, method, redundancy, in a conglomeration of resounding syllables, nor along etymological lines. No, just words of one syllable, and that syllable of uncertain resonance. The Chinese sentence resembles weak exclamations. A word rarely contains more than three letters. Often a drowning consonant (the n or the g) envelops it in the sound of a gong.
      Finally, in order to be still closer to nature, this language is sung. . . .

“Veers off into Romantic, &c.” Michaux continues with the “four singing tones”: “The singing is discreet. A kind of breeze, or birds’ language. A language so moderate and affectionate that one could hear it all one’s life without getting bored . . .” Of Chinese poetry Michaux writes that it “is so very delicate that it never meets an idea (in the European sense of the word)”:

A Chinese poem cannot be translated. Neither in painting, nor in poetry, nor in the drama, has the Chinese that warm, thick voluptuousness of the Europeans. In a poem, he indicates, and the points indicated are not even the most important ones, their evidence is not hallucinating, they are avoided, they are not even suggested, as it is often said, but rather the landscape and its atmosphere are deduced from them.

And he offers a few lines of Li Po, render’d, one thinks, in proof of the contention of its untranslatability—“Blue is the water and clear the moon of autumn. / We pluck in the lake the South some white lilies. / They seem to sigh with love / filling with melancholy the heart of the man in the boat.” And proceeds to point to something like Fenollosa’s “visible hieroglyphics,” what he calls a “verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye”:

      After all, what do these four lines of Li Po contain in French? A scene.
      But in Chinese, they contain thirty or so; it is a bazaar, it is a cinema, it is a great picture. Each word is a landscape, a group of signs, the elements of which, even in the briefest poem, combine with endless allusions. A Chinese poem is always too long, such is its superabundance, but it really excites one, it is bristling with comparisons.

Is that somewhat distant kin to Fenollosa’s “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them. . . .”? Wo bu zhi dao I say in bird language. Somewhere Michaux writes: “Madness is an endless hoax, in which the alienated subject is ceaselessly transcended.” And, in A Barbarian in Asia: “What the Chinaman knows best is the art of escaping.” (The lingual prestidigitatory slip—see “riffing around a sinecure”: “In the [character for] ‘blue,’ there is the sign of chopping wood and that of water, not to mention silk.”) Bah! Back to Zukofsky, for rooting:

So frail is judgment
It must light up, an overseer
With some truckling in hell,
A song that lovers heads
Ear to, and on ear foretell.

Henri Michaux, 1899-1984

“The New American Poetry and Us”

Some Clouds

Writing that begins “merely” as stubbornly donned otherness (why we all write throughout our prolong’d adolescences): “I understood, dimly, that the poems I was writing weren’t so much aesthetic accomplishments as declarations of dissidence—cognitive and cultural. They were my way of getting beyond adolescence without buying into the Darwinian mercantilism I was hemmed in by, and a perpetually renewed reminder that I needed to get the hell out of town.” That’s Brian Fawcett in a short piece call’d “Robin and Me”—out of Robin Blaser, (New Star Books, 2010), a book that includes, too, a essay / memoir by Stan Persky call’d “Reading Robin Blaser” and a terrific slew of photographs of Blaser. I mostly sought out the book to read Fawcett’s complaint “The New American Poetry and Us”—mostly, it turns out, about the dubious (in Fawcett’s eye) achievements of Charles Olson—after reading Don Share’s talk of it. Though he study’d with Blaser (he’s present at Blaser’s initial teaching job at Simon Fraser University in 1966, a job intend’d for Spicer—and he includes a rather moving list of what he learn’d off Blaser including both how “the pursuit of elegance . . . is always worth the trouble” and that “open curiosity is the civilizing instrument of all human enterprise . . . corrupted when harnessed to ideology or other forms of excessive certainty”), “The New American Poetry” turns out to mean, for Fawcett, “Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, in roughly that order of importance, with Olson’s influence notably larger than that of the others.” It is Olson mostly—or some imperial half of Olson—that Fawcett rejects (along with the writing of poetry). Fawcett: “When I stopped publishing verse in 1983 and stopped calling myself a poet and stopped thinking of myself as one, I did so with a sense of having been hustled by The New American Poetry, if not quite betrayed.” Perhaps Fawcett’s primary complaint: “Like Pound, Olson hadn’t bothered to note that imperialism and epic are often indistinguishable . . .” Against Olson’s initial (and primary) ground’d sense of place—Gloucester, the “local and particular”—Fawcett sees a diminuendo, energy increasingly spun up into the airy nothings of the rhetor: Olson become “part-maniac, part-angelic orator and demagogue.” What begins in a proposal (“Projective Verse”) for a poetry that rejects “the Aristotelian toolbox—logic and classification as the means of establishing ‘reality’” (elsewhere Fawcett calls it “a protest against the excesses and limitations of ratiocination” and, too, claims that Olson “was always more interested in the conditions of knowledge than in art: how we know things and if it can be communicated accurately and without toxic warping”), a poetry of “precise local knowledge”—ends up declaring itself “epical” (meaning here, one senses, heroic, empty, obsessive):

Even more than Pound before him, Olson possessed the temperament of a “village explainer.” The difference was that Olson had a real world village—Gloucester, Massachusetts—to talk to and about. Perhaps a more important and exact similarity was that like Pound, Olson was capable of grinding philosophy, anthropology and high-level linguistic theory into the heart of poetry as if to do so was no more complicated than making a haystack after scything the grass in a meadow. Like Pound, Olson delivered cosmology as if it was him-and-you-and-the-gods. But Olson’s delivery was the stronger one: he got in your face, he bullied you whether you were friend or foe, and he believed, with a manic locomotion unmatched by Pound or any of his own contemporaries, that his obsessions were everyone’s and so were his agonies and woes. Everything about Olson moved to or within the epical: his vast intellectual range, the rhapsodic delivery, the dactyl and spondee-loaded rhythms, and the man himself.

That lovely image of the haystack no doubt drawn out of the photographs of Olson haying in Keene, Virginia c. 1945. Recalling, too, the method of “heaping up” whatever sundry particulars be reap’d—à la Ron Silliman (“our” Olson, though less capable, I’d suggest, of intellectual “grinding”) in The Alphabet. I am entirely “took” by trying to think through the epic and empire connect. Is the endless onslaught (attempt to be everything) of The Alphabet imperialist? Setting aside Silliman’s originary tale of reading Anselm Hollo’s line in Corvus (“alphabet ends universe begins”), how do “we” respond to a monstrous-in-its-conceit poem call’d “Universe”?

Interestingly, Fawcett opposes Spicer (“a circus of contradiction: a theory-loving linguist immersed in, and comfortable with, working-class popular culture; a frequently out-of-control alcoholic who could be attentive to and charming with small children; a libidinous homosexual who was socially shy and quick to take offense”) to Olson, calling Spicer’s poetry “more accessible and ostensibly profane that that of virtually any poet in the New American Poetry”—ignoring O’Hara and Schuyler, for two. Fawcett claims Spicer opposes the “shouting” push (all that all caps nonsense, “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION . . . MOVE, INSTANTER,” &c.) and “polemic by rhetoric” of “Projective Verse” (1950) in the imaginary letters to García Lorca in After Lorca (1957) wherein he “sought to reestablish the primacy of image in poetry, and sidestepped the dogmatics in Olson’s ‘epic’ concerns” by positing a more moderate notion that because human experience is serial and co-respondent rather than epical and dogmatic, the narrative structure of verse could and maybe should proceed by other strategies.” Regarding Spicer’s “poetic dictation,” the spooks, the Martians, the radio: Fawcett puts it, too, in service to a “rejiggling” of Olsonian focus:

Spicer’s quasi-mystical notion of dictation, which supposed, sometimes ironically and sometimes literally, that the sources of poetry derived from outside human personality—spooks or archetypes or cultural libido—was a less fraught compositional frame than Olson’s Pax Americana drive to epic. It was also a fairly profound rejiggling of his “composition by field” as a means of getting the self out as fuel for poetry.

“The New American Poetry and Us” provokes and troubles (Fawcett’s own stance shifts between denying and admitting unresolved Oedipal anger)—some of it’s hardly convincing (see reference, say, to the “slightly bizarre cornpone routine Pound likely invented to peckerspray the Brits he was living amidst and to insist on his masculine Americanness”). It does, though, undo the feint’d marvels and commonplaces of the category-makers, the partisans of the limit’d purview, any who’d routinely lump together a range of (competing) practices under a single monicker, pejorative or adulatory. “The New American Poetry”—forebear and rector to so many, though hardly a monolithic thing—seems ripe for untangling.

Charles Olson, 1910-1970

Ashbery / Michaux

Some Clouds

Ashbery quoting Henri Michaux (Reported Sightings):

      I began painting in the mid-1930s partly as a result of a Klee show I saw, partly because of my trip to the Orient. I once asked a prostitute for directions in Osaka and she did a lovely drawing to show me. Everybody draws in the Orient.
. . .
      I had always thought there would be another form of expression for me—but I never thought it would be painting. But then, I’m always wrong about myself. I always wanted to be a sailor when I was young, and I tried it for a while, but I simply didn’t have the physical strength necessary. I had always thought I didn’t want to write, either. C’est excellent, il faut se tromper un peu.
      Then the cuisine of painting annoyed me. Artists are such prima donnas—they take themselves so seriously, and they have all that cuisine—canvas, easel, tubes of paint. If I could, I would still prefer to be a composer. But you have to study. If there were only some way to enter directly into a keyboard. . . . Music hatches my dissatisfaction. My large ink drawings are already nothing but rhythm. Poetry doesn’t satisfy me as much as painting—but other forms are possible.

“Nothing but rhythm”—that sempiternal greeny itch. Isn’t that precisely what the quotidian itch of writing is? The prothonotary sun recording its cloud-penetrancy, its way of worming up piecemeal and sinuous through the murky impingements, a daily articulary jaunt unsayable, a need simply to move “comminglingly.” Michaux makes distinct poetry’s attempt “to express some non-logical truth” against painting’s curt refusal of any stoop (I need to say it: “down into any such jarring metaphysical stupors”): “Painting is different—there is no question of truth. I make rhythms in paintings just as I would dance. This is not a vérité.” So that the “problem”—if it is a problem (maybe it’s a fructifying mandate, or a solar injunct) is to allow oneself—la grande permission—the fervent idiocy of the day, its plangency and must. (Up early, I note Orion stretch’d and pinned like a pelt to the southerly sky. Wormings of word-turnings, unabidingly beginning: me sock-foot’d and all pre-prehensile gapery, rhythms of registry beginning . . .) Michaux: “You enjoy listening to peoples voices in the street, but they don’t solve your problem for you. When something is good it distracts you from your problem.” (See Ashbery’s own “managed chance” approach.) One of Michaux’s methods of distracting: mescaline. “Mescaline gives you more attention for everything—for details, for terribly rapid successions.” The resultant rhythmic gush preternatural akin to what writing (receptor mode) is like: uncanny, pitch’d, a ransacking. Michaux:

The speed was even greater. . . . A hand two hundred times more agile than the human hand would not have sufficed to follow the accelerated course of that unquenchable spectacle. And there was no question of anything but following. You cannot seize a thought, a term, a figure, to work them over, get inspiration from them, improvise on them. All power is lost on them. This is the price of their speed, their independence.

A detachable daily teeming. (See Ashbery, un peu partout.) Duty turn’d (repeatedly) to the “once” in “once upon a time . . .” See “Märchenbilder”:

Es war einmal . . . No, it’s too heavy
To be said. Besides, you aren’t paying attention any more.
How shall I put it?
“The rain thundered upon the uneven red flagstones.

The steadfast tin soldier gazed beyond the drops
Remembering the hat-shaped paper boat, that soon . . .”
That’s not it either.
Think about the long summer evenings of the past, the queen anne’s lace.

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

Pomp of flowers, decorations
Junked next day. . . .

“Junked next day.” Rhythm of the ellipses. Who says that thing about the grit and minutiae of the past, how it’d overwhelm and bury the present if we’d let it? Daily structures made to be swept off, disengaged, cannibalized for parts. I think of Evan S. Connell’s outburst at the beginning of “Ancient Musick” (Lost in Uttar Pradesh):

Herodotus vowed to record all matters of interest on earth. Aye!
Wonders he admired. Two years he loitered in Egypt gazing at mummies,
crocodiles, and people who kneaded dough with their feet
and wrote their language from right to left,
but I have seen as much. O yea! Twenty times more.
I have encountered men eating the flesh of their god in biscuits
and watched Poseidon gather up clouds with one hand,
so I think there must be no end to marvels.

I have chased knowledge across five continents.
I know why the agitated spirit vomits tumultuous speech,
why that anchorite suffered palsy at sight of a woman,
why Albategnius perceived a ship descending upon his deathbed.
I understand how our world revolves, as Galileo demonstrates
with his Fourth Dialogue, why decrepit old men have hollow brains
commanding them to see and hear what is not. Why our forefathers
heard Cerberus bark. Why those that squint through red glass
think the universe red. Why that Greek yclept Pythagoras
deciphered messages on the moon. Why we believe what we want,
like Antipheron marveling at reflections of himself
wherever he looked. Truly, much of this world
I understand, but how men are corrupted
I would not presume to say. . . .

Transience and rot and the intervening “tumultuous speech.” The rhythmic soothe. (Forsooth.)

Henri Michaux, “Ink,” 1961

Henri Michaux, 1899-1984

Edmund Wilson’s The Twenties

A Tree

“The summer hung close and dull.” An entry out of Edmund Wilson’s The Twenties that clatters forth with the too early day. A weekend of travail in “obscure and meaty regions,” a trajectory belly’d up and out and haul’d back down. (The book rescue’d off the dollar shelf of some rapinous emporium in a mall: I love such seismic serendipity, f. Serendip, being a former name for Sri Lanka, the word serendipity being coin’d (1754) by Horace Walpole, after noting how the heroes of the fairy-tale “Three Princes of Serendip” “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of . . .”) Somewhere Wilson calls an ex-Follies girl “pretty as green paint.” The Twenties being largely notebook and diary squibs. Lovely story’d one-liners record’d, off the cuff: “—Anecdote about Henry Ford getting smuggled into his factory in a basket, so that he could spy on his employees.” Or:

Djuna Barnes. When Mary [Blair: Provincetown Players actress and Wilson’s wife] admired a nightgown she had bought in Paris: “Yes: I spent all summer looking for a night to go with that nightgown.”

And odd lists (industry lingo study sheets):

Cook’s Linoleum Rugs
Mill and Factory Supplies
National Pneumatic Co.
Gatto and Cogno
Cut herringbone gears
Hobbed Worm Wheels
International Automobile Body Corporation
American Metal Moulding Co.
American Platinum Works
Federal Steel Tubing—Light steel gauge tubing
Rhoad’s Tannate Belt
H. W. Schrimpf: structural and ornamental ironwork
The Crucible Steel Company of America
Derricks and Pile-Drivers
Bab and Bidelow
Smelting and refining
Calendar-embossing machinery
The Aeroplane Ultimate Typewriter Ribbon
The Goerke-Kirche Co.
The American Steel Barrel Corporation
Automotive Parts
Hyatt Roller Bearing Company
Oschwald Brick Works
Simmons Pipe-Bending Works
Encaustic Tiling Co.
Mucilage and Asbestos
Manufacturers of doll voices (and condoms)

Veering, curious, wanton. Or into the philologick grunt-work:

Eleventh-century text of Homer. Brown ink against yellow, traced over darker where someone had tried to restore the effacements; greasy, worm-eaten and soiled; its λ’s, κ’s, and ξ’s like wormholes and conveying no more than wormholes to the monks in whose hands it was found—a formidable forest tangled and bristling with loops and dots and barbs; written in three different hands, with great holes and stains on the pages (of vellum, membranaceus); a caricature, as of a human heavy-jowled dog with huge paw; scrawled with schoolboy drawings and scribbled letters; glossed here and there in the margins,; thick heavy brown cover.

Oddly enough, rather how I think of Wilson himself (in later years)—“human heavy-jowled dog” (though rather wanly, daintily “pawed”). Poignant literary gossip retail’d unerringly. Here, Jean Cocteau’s assessment of Dada (precise, unendingly precise for any groupuscule whose “humor” is hitch’d to a program): how Cocteau “scoffed at the idea that their nonsense was perpetrated in a genuine spirit of fun: ‘Ils sont tous des petits Nietzsches!’” (Or reporting Djuna Barnes’s injunct to Pound: “Be simple, Ezra, be simple!”) (Or Dos Passos’s asserting that “painting was in a very bad way . . . in painting there were certain fundamental difficulties that had to be overcome—whereas anybody could go in for literature—you didn’t even have to be able to write, because you could dictate” (or, nowadays, “sample,” “write-through,” and “construct”). Wilson’s vacillatory cumber: the lyric delicacy of “June. The Chinese white of daisies” up against the obvious thrall of the grinding American underbelly, its speech (Myrtle, a New Orleans whore with a “rebellious, mulish, scornful look” hassling a drunk who “couldn’t do anything” and so want’d a “refund”—“Charity-ass, eh?” and “Want your ass again?—When you jazz last?”) And, too, in The Twenties, raw literary gobbets of the graphomane (even “about” such “rudimentary habitual twitchings” of the notebook-fillers):

      The great writer’s notes, carefully preserved and published after his death (Baudelaire, Chekhov, Butler), though they may have been merely mechanical and meaningless jottings, the products of an instinct to write in its most rudimentary habitual twitchings, like the instinctive defensive or predatory gestures of the lowest forms of life.

      How books carry the stamp of the barbarous ages which produced them: the gallows and the flogging block in Pope and in Swift.

Or the mechanical drone and the force-meat excesses of conglomerate binging: stamp of our own barbarity.

Edmund Wilson, 1895-1972

High-tailing It

Some Clouds

End of the week. Nothing preoccupying me beyond the way that chipmunk high-tail’d it into the shrubbery. High-tail, colloq. (orig. U.S.): “‘High-tail’ comes straight out of the plains where a mustang, when startled, erects its tail in a sudden, quick gesture and runs like the wind . . .” Earliest O.E.D citing: 1925. The chipmunk’s: up stiff like a pencil. Charles Peirce, noting how perceiving is a (I’d say, with irony, an “imperceptible”) whole:

. . . perception is a two-sided consciousness in which the percept appears as forcibly acting upon us, so that in perception the consciousness of an active object and of a subject acted on are as indivisible as, in making a muscular effort, the sense of exertion is one with and inseparable from the sense of resistance.

(Peirce’s regimen of lifting weights.) That gaudy lime-green rebound Penguin Winstanley there: I am trying to sense its way of assaulting my optics, or is it resisting my noticing of it? (Either way, it’s a guilty dog yapping, is what Peirce’d say.) Joan Retellack, out of “N Plus Zero” (a thwart’d nod at one of Oulipo’s stratagems) in Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d / (Roof, 2010):

Why use procedures when one can simply note the succession of things that “naturally” come to mind? “Act so that there is no use in a centre,” said Gertrude Stein. Good advice, particularly if the center is “self” without the benefit of centrifugal artifice.

. . .

Strange concept, self; not strange enough. Hence, the “natural” fallacy. Procedural artifice is a form of authorial agency which nonetheless brings a tonic otherness to a composition: deflecting single point perspective, opening the field to dialogic alterity, alter-texts, if not egos, in equally disadvantaged conversation. Hence the necessity of humor.

The question is whether such devices are useful for our self-absorbed species, accumulating endless wants and highly evolved needs in what seems to be a geometric progression of consumption-targeted quests for increasingly improbable satisfaction whose most cherished image is found in the mirror. A literature of reciprocal alterity, if such a thing is possible, can’t fix this culture-wide entanglement with short-sighted narcissism but it may present significantly alternative sites for making meaning.

Straying. The Stein line occurs at the beginning of “Rooms” (Tender Buttons), preceding: “A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing.” Stein isn’t exactly saying “Act as if there is no use in a centre”: isn’t she arguing for a processual (lack of) stance, that is, a proceeding unfetter’d by preps (or props)? “A preparation is given to the ones preparing” reads like something out of Peter Elbow’s “freewriting” composition theory: keep moving. There’s a strange shift in Retallack’s patter here. There’s, one, a perceived need for a self’s “deflecting” its own limit’d pointedness by means of (pointlessly) “flying off”—no Poundian “unwobbling pivot” here—into the alter-textual gleanings of procedural artifice, thus bringing in, willy-nilly, the muscular other, “opening the field.” Two, there’s “our self-absorbed species, accumulating endless wants and highly evolved needs in what seems to be a geometric progression of consumption-targeted quests for increasingly improbable satisfaction”—a similar kind of willy-nilly “flying off” into the cumulus’d up and massy hinterlands of perceived “need.” Who’s to say the gleanings intend’d to deflecting “authorial agency” won’t become the gobblings of mere consumption? A heap’d up pile of “alter-texts, if not egos.” Stamps in a tourist’s passport. Part of me is thinking here of the smugness, insobriety and imperialist provocations of Lara Glenum’s statement call’d “A Note on American Poetic Excess,” wherein she troublingly writes:

Poetry in America is widely perceived to be utterly useless, even by the poets themselves. It’s barely commodifiable. Non-productive and degenerate. Not even a valid form of social protest. Bilge and dredge, poetry is the excrement of civic life.

These are perfectly fine circumstances.

Museums and publishing houses are an attempt to curate our various diseases. Diseases that can’t and won’t be managed. Teach us to shut up.

Wholly deplorable (and infantile, and snotty), that. Though I’d wager one origin of such glee-soak’d unmanageability (and “short-sighted narcissism”) is the “culture-wide entanglement”—at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Michel Foucault—of the self as “mere” effect of social relations and practices. I think of Violet Gibson (“the woman who shot Mussolini”), saying, “There is such a thing as a moral atmosphere.” I think of Lissa Wolsak saying, in Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Station Hill, 2010): “I vehemently see no reason to dumb-down the sheer and useful beauty of language. . . . I know what to write because language lightens itself to reveal the pan-psychic shock / sleep of being alive, anatomies of collectivity / possibility, juste-milieu . . . the lucre of subjectivity.” At the end of the week I grip my own upright pencil, responsibly, stiffly.

Joan Retallack

Emily Greenley’s Knowledge

Some Clouds

Rain, furious half the night, with a brief lightning extravaganza around 3 a.m. spooking the dog into a three-corner’d whine and circuit, room to room to room, taper’d off by dawn—as is rain’s wont—to a mere drizzle nigh-conceal’d by the canopy’s mild leaf-caught unleashings. So I biked, slicker-zipped against a reprise. Skunk’d-up air along the flank of Allmendinger Park, the bicylcle’s wheels cutting a fine cursive in the wet. Nothing pre-prepared: thinking—beyond the sensual mess—zilch. Green screen. (Or blue nowadays.) What “sensual mess”—I mean, I suppose, a kind of pre-lingual gaping, the lingual feat—that act of scorifying the sheer smear (though it could be rock, a whole mountain) of the world reducing it to the slag of vocables—put into abeyance (or, throttle stuck, overdrive) by the way that world’s constantly inputting, so’s language must needs cannibalize itself just to keep “up”—what sensual mess’d provoke a thing like this:

Anatomy of Sadness

Now it’s my image of you
In my head and sometimes in life:

Once I saw you walking, once running,
In a typically red garment,

With a ruler on your brow,
And a look of bold hesitation.

You must have felt like a boy or a dog,
Or dead, transparent, ten feet high,

Wearing that map of difference
Across your physiognomy.

Awkwardnesses (“In my head and sometimes in life”), the adamantly mysterious (“a boy or a dog, / Or dead”), odd register shifts (“physiognomy”), and a piece utterly strange and convincing. (Why—in my “pre-lingual gaping”—do I read “With a ruler on your brow” and think of Jack Spicer using lines out of the (originally) Brazilian folk song “Meu limão, meu limoeiro” in one of the “Six Poems for Poetry Chicago”: “Limon tree very pretty / And the limon flower is sweet / But the fruit of the poor lemon / Is impossible to eat”? Something of Spicer’s “Vain words / . . . / Of good / And impossible / Dimensions” to the brash inconsequentiality of the act, its “bold hesitation”? The poem is by Emily Greenley (1968-1990), who kill’d herself at twenty-three. Out of Knowledge (Vital Habit, n.d.), a side-stapled book of seventy or so pages, cover a painting by Grace Hartigan call’d “Summer Street.” (A mite sub rosa, the book’s origin according to its own data: Vital Habit’s address is print’d as “9 rue Gît-le-Cœur / Paris”—an address some’ll identify as that of the nameless Latin Quarter joint call’d, c. 1957 or so, “the Beat Hotel.”) Larry Fagin sent me a copy, and call’d Greenley’s work to my attention. Here’s the initial piece:

Loved

Loved by woman nor man
I can’t such as I am

In a forest of reference
love is a nothing world

Maybe I drive myself out,
resting in a blank bed

Or I tell my whole history
to get to the end of me.

“World” not “word.” In “Size Problem” Greenley says “the size of the universe / became something like my head’s”—that ancient irrefragable sensation of sprawl and oneness, measure extend’d illimitably to fit the circumstance. (The entirely marvelous—and terrifying—intent to “tell my whole history / to get to the end of me” is something of a temporal rendering of the same.) Another:

Culture

The unbelievably pretty ladies
had a good bit of luck

That were born with a body
that would accommodate fucks:

Some have a catalogue of scents
or a cache of gems

Visible to cultured men,
and the hair of a kitten,
and the smooth lips of a blue dolphin.

That searing ability to swerve somewhere unexpect’d: the suddenness accommodated (here) by lackadaisical and “crude” (in two senses) rhyme, and the matter-of-fact conversational tone. Something unstudy’d (like Clare). Not all the collect’d pieces wholly wow (though most contain a fulgent moment or two—see, say, in “Sitting by a Beauty,” how “my mouth reddened graciously as I told it the sanguine tale / of a box in a well shaped country / filling itself from a blank sea . . .”; or, in “Gray Girl,” how “I am nine, and my name is B / I once hit my head on a stump / Everyone likes to see a girl in pain / Provided there’s no mark”; or, in “Desire,” the lines “Who is it who is in me / shutting up indelicately? // before it I had not tried it / and after I chased it down, // my mouth round its neck I drained it / like a fox a chicken”): Greenley’s is the book of a talent bit off, thwart’d. One (of several) prose poems:

Confessions of a Student Writer

        On the subject of egotism: I have always acted in the way that will bring me most notice, and I think that is most healthy for anyone, even a non-writer. Of course writers thrive on being written about. It is obvious to me that the better-looking one is, the better writer one will make. Sometimes this has worked even in the case of a good-looking non-writer who suddenly publishes his autobiography. A writer’s autobiography—a good-looking writer’s autobiography—really sells, especially after he dies. Because of this it may be advantageous to appear to have died, after which “event” one can continue writing and publishing “posthumously” until actual death intervenes.
        On manners: they are unnecessary for some people! It is clear to me that a few genuinely rude writers will not only be excused by those who know them, but will make any group undertaking much more amusing for everyone.
        When I am introduced to someone, I usually look away quickly after saying hello. (This comes from fear, but occasionally has the effect of making me seem “disdainful”!) The tools, then, of a successful writer: disdain and tactlessness. These qualities are sometimes really charming.
        And in particular I think it is best to reveal as many secrets as possible. It doesn’t matter if the person you are telling is sympathetic, or even discreet. When you reveal secrets, you are disseminating information which may turn into gossip, which may then proliferate in several varieties until no one knows exactly what you are about!
        Secrets should also be coaxed from anyone you spend time with. Especially interesting are stories about pathetic sexual experiences. It doesn’t actually matter if you keep these secrets, because the people who tell them are probably hoping you will tell others.
        Someone else’s secret may become a great book in your hands!

“Disseminating,” leakage, bravado, pathos, gossip, tactlessness, catharsis (“secret”-sharing): largely earmarks of the gurlesque avant la lettre. Though, here, of course, imbue’d with irony—unwittingly parodying Adorno’s category of the grotesque as “a parody of catharsis.”—and elsewhere (see, say, in “Anniversary”—“We came through / a rack of dead creatures // That sun shot through / your eye, it struck my head”) permeated with an un-complacent (unstudy’d) strangeness that’s foreign to the efforts of most current gurlesqueries. Authenticity unbow’d by marketry. One final poem:

The Mamselle

At recess time a field of children
who lost track of their virginities
fell to picking teams for a game of opposites.

It was an allocation of talent.

                        *

specifically a portion of your face
engages my eye, giving it unaccountable looks

                        *

Let’s go into the vast holiness of that plain
where suffering is the occupation,
and to be distressed in the spirit.

                        *

A lady I saw on your mind
came by a few weeks since
bearing all that innocent money

You had said it was to be a ransom for that time
between an introduction and a mamselle striding out over the lake

Grace Hartigan, “Summer Street,” 1956

Approach Without Words

Some Clouds

Merrill Gilfillan, in “The Mississippi to Hannibal” (Rivers and Birds), talking about the intent to parallel some miles of the big river, to make it, briefly, the unreasonable accompaniment of one’s days:

I felt a need to start the occasion a more formal way, to approach the river in more cognizant fashion, and to look at it in a slightly more organized way—if nothing more, then as a stubborn adherent to the theory that the poetical, as Plato suggested for the political, is not cumulative, is not automatically transmitted from generation to generation; that each new wave must learn anew and look again at the world, its own cup to fill.

Talking nigh-biblically by the end. (I am remind’d of Robert Hass’s formulation in “Meditation at Lagunitas” that “each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk / of that black birch is, by his presence, / some tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light.”) And somewhere Robin Blaser talks about, broadly, the Hermetic tradition, and its “continuous activity of direct participation in the divine—the old sacred of the world that did not objectify reality or leave personal experience to a lonely, singular subjectivity.” He quotes Mary Butts (out of the 1932 Traps for Unbelievers):

Magic has not yet been properly defined. In its practice it is, of course, very largely primitive science, misunderstandings by false analogy of the way things work, of natural law. But behind that there seems to remain a very peculiar kind of awareness, an awareness modified and sometimes lost by people whose life has been passed in towns. It is most difficult to describe. It has something to do with a sense of the invisible, the non-existent in a scientific sense, relations between things of a different order: the moon and a stone, the sea and a piece of wood, women and fish.

Or a man and a cheese. Or a man and the song of the hermit thrush (“often considered the premier avian vocalization on earth”). Gilfillan (lightly, affably, genial and pragmatic in any too certain approach to the divine, in the manner of any naturalist):

      At a certain age, it is not so difficult to imagine a decision to gauge the accumulative valence of one’s being by the number of moments passed near singing thrushes, as well as with cheeses of character and beside the breaking of surf. . . .
      . . . the key to the hermit’s brilliance line in the remarkable formality of its structure—the opening single note, the setting of the stage—and then the almost casual, heroic toss-off and virtuoso world-weariness of its bright finale.
      Each year it is a further test of metaphor. . . .

Mary Butts’s “false analogy of the way things work,” those “misunderstandings”: how that becomes a thing one attends profitably to, the ongoing mergers of like and unlike. (Gilfillan reports: “Antonin Dvorak walked the river woods near Spillville, hearing the American birds. A local scarlet tanager made it into a passage in the Quartet No.12, opus 96.” And is waylaid hiking—such impedances and intercepts being one sure means of analogy-transfer—by “inadvertent thoughts of the decades-old car bodies rusting among the plum thickets at the foot of a steep cliff in a lower canyon, a place where the MacGillivray’s warblers will be singing.”) I think of John Clare’s sense of the natural world’s seizure and subsuming of human detritus, making it its own:

there is a pair of harrows painted red standing on end against the thorn hedge and in another ground an old plough stands on its beam ends against a dotterel tree       sometime we see a roll lying in on one corner and broken trays and an old gate off the hooks waiting to be repaired till repairs are useless—even these rustic implements and appendages of husbandry blend with nature and look pleasing in the fields

Merger and swerve. My aimless nature, informal, a mite oblivious, courseless, conjecturing, stubbornly lost. Ashbery (“Litany”): “In my diary / I have noted down all kinds of exceptional / Things to go with the rest / As one who naps beside a chasm / Swollen with the hellish sound of wind / And torrents, and never chooses / To play back the tape.”) Attentions modify’d and lost in towns. Or whole glut’d towns of words, seemingly inescapable words. To see without. To return to un-initial’d, unword’d and wordless seeing . . .

Merrill Gilfillan’s Rivers and Birds
Cover: “Black-crowned Night-Heron,” by Stuart Gentling and Scott Gentling, out of Of Birds and Texas (University of Texas Press, 2001)

Roy Fisher’s Standard Midland

Some Clouds

Restraint merg’d with a nigh-offhandedness, and impeccable detail: Merrill Gilfillan (Rivers and Birds, 2003) says (of a report of ancient Chinese explorers in North America—“at Medicine Bow Peak they note with great interest an animal that looks like a rabbit but with a crow’s bill, an owl’s eyes, and a serpent’s tail, which feigns sleep at the approach of a man”—an opossum no doubt):

      There are, of course, readers who consider those classic account strictly exercises for the well-heeled courtly imagination.
      Not that all those potent mountains and rivers couldn’t hold such a light-footed actual thing.

Next paragraph: “What a sweet little apple and what a high, thin-blue sky. . . .” Skittish reverie. (Elsewhere Gilfillan talks about how, under an enormously contrail’d sky (“I counted fifteen . . . fishtailing hither and yon”), a flock of meadowlarks bursts up (“two dozen . . . suddenly milling about, loosing an unfamiliar, aggregate sort of song. A babble or jabber song . . . a confused but enthusiastic choric inertia.”) The kind of thing one begins one’s day with, chomping at the lingual bit. I read a little out of Roy Fisher’s new Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010): restraint. See the syntactical hitch (no free rein) and taut swing of the sentence-ry in here in “The Run to Brough”:

As if it might still be perilous to leave the limestone cap and go
gradually into the other holding,
the other stone, the road
unhitches itself by an offset crossing
from the stark highway on the rise
and slips down into a dishevelled
basin of land and ragged purposes
with to one side shale slipped off the cliffs
and grassed over and to the other
villages sealed out of sight
under the ridge. Swing and
follow the waters down into the gullet
where the cut gorge sides hang trees
against the sky, the ground changes at the Grey Ditch

and out into Bradwell, mineral village, not old,
clambering over itself up the hillsides
at all angles, a medieval town with
every house a message. The run
to Brough goes straighter than the river,
slurry lagoons in the woods
the disquiets left behind
or accumulated
for what Brough can do with them
or for anybody.

A “basin of land and ragged purposes”! “The disquiets left behind”—perfect aside-making line-break—“or accumulated”! Is it Fisher’s undaunting ability to read a whole landscape in a swatch that makes me connect him to Gilfillan? (Gilfillan’s capable of reading, too, time’s own hunker’d down and dilatory raptures—the hours “car-dawdling along a dusty back road” or “basking in the lee of the great iambic-tetrameter noun Inconsequentiality”: “A set of finely etched Hours like a deck of diminutive hand-colored ‘Creeks and Rivers’ trading cards. At optimistic moments they—those hours—glint as a kind of tortoise-versus-hare-karmic pollen-pelf.”) Reading Fisher’s Standard Midland I think, too, of A. R. Ammons’s landscapes. Though the need to make a concluding statement is fiercer in Ammons (even if that statement concerns the constant flux’s way of foundering permanence: “I allow myself eddies of meaning: / yield to a direction of significance / running / like a stream through the geography of my work: / you can find / in my sayings / swerves of action / like the inlet’s cutting edge:” or “Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events / I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting / beyond the account:” or “there is no finality of vision, / . . . I have perceived nothing completely, / . . . tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.”) Here’s another piece by Fisher:

At Brough-on-Noe

What’s good
is the way there seem to be
more waters than there are, poured
out of the rows of hills
to the valley bottom. There seem
to be more side lanes and alleys
than there ever were. What feels
like a village is no more than a road junction
mounted on a wandering confluence
and twisted to fit.

And the mismatch
chops up appearances
so that each part, each house,
row of trees, block of viewless
buildings marked grey on the map
as ‘works’ settled askew,
has to announce itself
as newly created. It moves
and stays put. There’s
no single place to be
at Brough.

(See, per contra, how Ammons niggles the perceiving self directly into the landscape, vociferous and desiring: end of “Cascadilla Falls”: “oh / I do / not know where I am going / that I can live my life / by this single creek.”) There’s something cagey and subverting about Fisher’s work, a strong desire to slip free the reins of what’s expect’d. He quotes Basil Bunting’s dictum “Adjectives drain nouns” and proceeds to write a piece made solely of adjectives. In the title piece, he talks about talking to himself: “The monologue’s so stupid / I do it in farting Mockney / or worse, mincing / Estuarian: none of it worth / the touch of my own Standard Midland.” In a poem in three smallish parts titled “Of the Qualities” Fisher writes:

3     Definitive

‘Presence. Unerring swing. Sober melancholy.’

—a passing remark on the constant in Louis Armstrong.

The third of these.

(In another piece, “Little Jazz,” Fisher, a jazz pianist himself, notes—with approbatory nod—of swing trumpet giant Roy Eldridge, how “Even when no sound came out / you could still tell what he meant.”) A paring down audacious in its effects. Consider Fisher’s “On Hearing I’d Outlived My Son the Linguist”:

Two days since I heard you were gone
suddenly in your forties and me still not quite eighty

and hour by hour today with no whole word all
the emptied patterns of your talk come crowding
into my brain for shelter:
bustling, warm, exact. You’d be interested.

A level of modesty and restraint that’s simply terrifying, that wobbly juste-milieu of “interest” a stand-in for “no whole word” unspeakability. News is that Roy Fisher’s Selected Poems, edited by August Kleinzahler, is upcoming soonish out of Flood Editions. Too, two books by Merrill Gilfillan, The Warbler Road (essays) and The Bark of the Dog (poetry).

Roy Fisher, c. 2006

Ashbery’s Eccentric

Some Clouds

Out with the dog into the morning’s pre-rinse of light, the sky’s puncture-holes (to the beyond) caulk’d and smooth’d and daub’d, only the gashes of one or two planets left evident for the easterly roseate seepage begun. Hammer’d at half the night by semi-public reveries of long tramps and concordances, buff’d and neutral. Rimbaud: La musique savante manque à notre désir. Desire’s lack of intelligible music. The impish sun in its fiery swaddling clothes, about to tip the madly rocking cradle. Reading, at some stray moment unbefoul’d by chores, a short essay (in the Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery-edit’d The Grand Eccentrics) by Ashbery call’d “The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour” (the title off a Giorgio de Chirico painting). Ashbery quotes “de Chirico’s definition of art” (out of an early essay, “Meditations of a Painter”):

A truly immortal work of art can only be born through revelation. Schopenhauer has, perhaps, best defined and also (why not) explained such a moment when in Parerga and Paralipomena he says, ‘To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.’ If, instead of the birth of original, extraordinary, immortal ideas, you imagine the birth of a work of art (painting or sculpture) in an artist’s mind, you will have the principle of revelation in painting.

Ashbery’s essay is about the German “eccentric” Max Klinger “(born 1857 in Leipzig; died 1920 at Grossjena, near Naumburg)”—one of the few artists de Chirico included in what Ashbery (“Metaphysics makes strange bedfellows”) calls “the bizarre cenacle” to whom he (de Chirico) “paid written homage” (others being Raphael, Courbet, and Böcklin). (One’s remind’d of Ashbery’s own cénacle—and love of eccentrics—the various and singular ones he call’d in Other Traditions“a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down”— John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. Ashbery quotes, too, de Chirico’s prose homage to Klinger:

What is this romanticism of modern life? . . . It is the breath of yearning that flows over the capitals of cities, over the geometry of suburban factories, over the apartment houses that rise like cement or stone cubes, over the sea of houses and buildings, compressing within their hard flanks the sorrows and hopes of insipid daily life. It is the pretentious private residence in the breathless torpor of a springtime morning or the moonlit calm of a summer night, with all the shutters closed behind the garden trees and the wrought-iron gates. It is the nostalgia of railroad stations, of arrivals and departures, the anxiety of seaports where ships, their hawsers loosened, sail into the black waters of the night, their lights aglitter as in cities on a holiday.

Which sounds a little like some of Ashbery’s prose in Three Poems, with its own considerations of yearning and pretence, and the force of quotidian residual nostalgia intrudes (gorgeously). (See, say, out of “The System”: “There wasn’t too much of any one thing. The feelings never wandered off into a private song or tried to present the procession of straightforward facts as something like a pageant: the gorgeous was still unknown. There was, however, a residue, a kind of fiction that developed parallel to the classic truths of daily life (as it was in that heroic but commonplace age) as they unfolded with the foreseeable majesty of a holocaust, an unfrightening one, and went unrecognized, drawing force and grandeur from this like the illegitimate offspring of a king. It is this ‘other tradition’ which we propose to explore.” Donc, Other Traditions) Formal pageantry versus “private song”: isn’t that a manœuvre somehow akin to Ashbery’s famous (and nonchalant) remark in “The New Spirit”—“I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.” Is it the jocular (off-hand) note of extremity (“all”) that one “ought” to attend to in Ashbery’s line as opposed to the posit’d (and decidedly impracticable) formal choices? Out of de Chirico’s Klinger essay: “The pictorial question did not matter, because his entire creation was based on the enormous possibilities of his exceptional mind—the mind of a poet, philosopher, observer, dreamer and psychologist.” Ashbery’s puts the emphases here:

“The pictorial question did not matter . . .” Klinger is one of those artists who transcend the restrictions of the pictorial question and therefore of criticism. Appearances to the contrary, he is a colleague of such artists as Duchamp, Mondrian or de Chirico himself. In each of these cases, the “meaning” of art is offstage either (as with de Chirico and Klinger) buried so deep inside the work that no one can find it; or (as with Mondrian) somehow adjacent to the work but out of sight; or (as with Duchamp) just absent. Thus, if we accept Klinger at all as an artist (and probably, in the absence of any case for the prosecution, we shall have to admit de Chirico’s virtuoso defense), we must forget about “the pictorial question” . . .

Is form necessary? If—one doodles—desire’s music is essentially unintelligible, isn’t the slapdash capture of “mere” revelation—“original, extraordinary, immortal”— enough? Schopenhauer’s lines (and The Grand Eccentrics itself) hint that it is the unconnect’d isolato, he “not acknowledging the common continent of men” (Melville) who attains the previously unreveal’d. Rimbaud: Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute. Cela m’est évident: j’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute: je lance un coup d’archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d’un bond sur la scène. (In Wyatt Mason’s Modern Library version: “For I is someone else. If the brass awakes as horn, it can’t be to blame. This much is clear: I’m around for the hatching of my thought: I watch it: I listen to it: I release a stroke from the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully-formed onto the stage.”)

Max Klinger, “A Glove (Desires),” 1881

Max Klinger, “A Glove (Rescue),” 1881

Max Klinger, “A Glove (Abduction),” 1881

Giorgio de Chirico, “Le Chant d'amour,” 1914

Giorgio de Chirico, 1888-1978

Berrigan’s Reading

Some Clouds

Sense, preternatural, premonitory, that today’s writing’ll turn out all wash. A morning cold and uncrow’d. Minuscule black flowers of mold lining the coffee cup. Ted Berrigan (Dear Sandy, Hello): “The purity and loveliness of language is one of the few things that is not for sale these days.” (He’s just quoted Stevens: “This somnolence and rattapallax / Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being, / As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves / While they went seaward to the sea mouths.”) (Whence cometh “rattapallax”? I suspect Stevens reach’d that grinch’d irrepressible half-glossolalick’d joy-state of the pure grunting vocable, lieu beyond lingo—see, too, the poet in “Mozart, 1935” “seated at the piano” with Stevens’s commanding : “Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cachinnation.”) I keep trying to find evidence (in Berrigan’s Collected Poems) of some of the pieces he writes about. One—O’Hara, to whom Berrigan sent it along with four others, refers to it approvingly in the return postcard—ends up in The Sonnets:

Poem in the Traditional Manner

Whenever Richard Gallup is dissevered,
Fathers and teachers, and daemons down under the sea,
Audenesque Epithalamiums! She
Sends her driver home and she stays with me.

Match-Game etcetera! Bootleggers
Barrel-assing chevrolets grow bold. I summon
To myself sad silent thoughts,
Opulent, sinister, and cold.

Shall it be male or female in the tub?
And grawk go under, and grackle disappear,
And high upon the Brooklyn Bridge alone,
An ugly ogre masturbates by ear:

Of my darling, my darling, my pipe and my slippers,
Something there is is benzedrine in bed:
And so, so Asiatic, Richard Gallup
Goes home, and gets his gat, and plugs his dad.

A poem Berrigan mentions sending to Ashbery & Cie.’s Locus Solus in Paris (who evidently declined it). Whacks evident at Edwin Arlington Robinson (“Richard Corey”) and Robert Frost (“Mending Wall”), though I’d argue Stevens as the presiding king of the ghosts here. (A companion piece—“Poem in the Modern Manner”—ends with the cachinnatory: “Bring me red demented rooms, / warm and delicate words! Swollen as if new-out-of-bed / Huitzilopochtli goes his dithyrambic way, / quick-shot, resuscitate, all roar!”)

Somewhere in Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan, Berrigan’s quoted as saying: “I like to know all the groups, because that way is the most fun, and the most interesting.” Large-heart’d, that kind of stance against (today’s seemingly mandatory pincers of) side-choosing and parochialism. Early in the letters Berrigan reports that “at the library” he’s “checked out Imitations by Robert Lowell” (along with “a long philosophical poem called The Dragon and the Unicorn by Kenneth Rexroth”). Imitations seems key. A couple of weeks along, Berrigan’s sending Sandy a copy of a draft call’d “The Lament”:

It is not an attempt to write Garcia Lorca’s poem in American. It is an attempt to write a poem like Lorca’s, in American, using whatever of his that fits, in the voice of Ted Berrigan. With credit to Lorca for whatever taken. What is most important is that it is an attempt to write in Lorca’s tone of voice with me as the speaker. The poem is meant to stand by itself without reference to Lorca’s poem. Wherever the literal meaning differs from Lorca’s, I know it, it is deliberate. Etc. Etc. Etc.

THE LAMENT

I am closing my widow.
I don’t want to hear the weeping.
But from out of the shadowy darkness
nothing may be heard but the weeping.

I hear no angels singing
and no dogs crying.
The sound of violins
may never find me.

For the weeping is a terrible animal
and the weeping is a terrible angel
and the weeping is a terrible sound

Tears silence the wind

Nothing is heard but the weeping.

after Garcia Lorca / 7 Apr 62

Compare Lowell’s introductory note in Imitations: “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment. I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America.” And, referring to the Rimbaud poem Berrigan’ll shortly tackle: “About a third of ‘The Drunken Boat’ has been left out.” A licensing. (One, of course, that Pound’d earlier point’d at—stripping “The Seafarer” of lines he consider’d later—Christian—addenda, &c.) García Lorca’s original:

Casida del Llanto

He cerrado mi balcón
porque no quiero oír el llanto
pero por detrás de los grises muros
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.
Hay muy pocos ángeles que canten,
hay muy pocos perros que ladren,
mil violines caben en la palma de la mano.

Pero el llanto es un perro inmenso,
el llanto es un ángel inmenso,
el llanto es un violín inmenso,
las lágrimas amordazan al viento,
no se oye otra cosa que el llanto.

I suspect Berrigan’s cribbing off Steven Spender and J. L. Gili’s version of the poem found in the Selected Poems, edit’d by Francisco García Lorca and Donald M. Allen and publish’d by New Directions in 1955 (paperback, 1962). Reading:

Casida of the Lament

I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls,
nothing else is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of my hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping.

Casida = qasida, originally an Arabic form, torque’d here by the Andalusian. I admire Berrigan’s untruckled persistence, a kind of glee’d voraciousness about writing (particularly amidst troublesomeness, and hurt):

Shall I quote Henry Miller? To write is to love again. Or William Saroyan. Art will not help, but if it seems like a good idea to look at things carefully, then do so. . . .
      I write because I feel like it. It makes me feel—no not “good” or “bad” but—alive. It make me feel as I feel when I see the sun in the morning, or hit a home run, or something. It does not take away pain nor give pain. W. H. Auden says “Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives, a way of happening, a mouth, / it survives in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper / it flows south from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs / Raw towns that we believe and die in. /”
      I like to talk. I write to talk, to you, to whomever my poem is addressed to, to anyone who wants to listen, mostly I suppose to myself. Nothing changes from this, except that I grow. And there are so many et ceteras to add here.

Getting the Auden a little topsy-turvy, revving memory for a run, nervy and going all out. Not for sale.

Ted Berrigan, 1934-1983