Ashbery / Von Doderer

Heimito von Doderer, 1896-1966

Henry David Thoreau, quoted by Guy Davenport in “The Concord Sonata” (out of the Journal, 1 April 1860):

The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not fore-thought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.

Lines that—in Thoreau’s sheer effortlessness of contact and lack of “any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—seem akin to Keats’s vaunted (1817) “Negative Capability” (or—mieux—that terrific pointing toward poetry’s simple innate grace in Keat’s [1819] “vale of Soul-making” letter: “May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?”) Too, Thoreau’s note recalls John Ashbery’s recently-noted talk of how “poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.” Ashbery’s casual reference there to “Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons” fetched me up out of my torpor. Sure enough: von Doderer’s pure Ashbery:

For we are all of us stupid and ignorant in the face of life as it unrolls before us; we have no way of recognizing the prolongation or line of flight of any given set of circumstances. . . .
      And yet—in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. For the whole is contained in the smallest segment of anyone’s life-story; indeed, we may even say that it is contained in every single moment; start up your dredging machine and you take it all up, no matter whether ecstasy, despair, boredom, or triumph happens to fill the moving buckets on their endless chain of ticking seconds.

That out of the “Overture” to The Demons (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), translated by Richard and Clara Winston, a mere dozen or so pages fronting the onslaught of the thousand or so that make up von Doderer’s ambling, witty, and stunningly overlooked novel. Von Doderer is capable of perfectly Ashberyean dithyrambs avant la letter:

And in the final analysis real life stands upon very frail feet, and its ultimate supports—if we sweep away all the alleged and accumulated rubble that has floated up around—its taproots which it sinks deeply into the soil of a reality incomprehensible to us in its details, would bear odd and almost absurdly simple names, if we wanted to and could honestly specify what they are—certain names by no means high-toned or solemn: the after-image of a color in the dark inner eyelid; the smell of a freshly varnished play table in our old nursery; the run in a stocking stretched over the delicate shaping of an ankle.

And odd, rather Giorgio de Chirico’d pastoral architectonics:

But for me there rises, beyond the horizon of a narrow life too fettered to the ever-recurrent same things, troubles, questions—for me there rises beyond the foreground of this mass of trash and secondhand goods and beyond the immediate view of roof and gardens, a great way beyond the massive towers of the Romanesque church which already lay claim upon the empty sky, seizing it for themselves as their appropriate background—far, far away, over a landscape already iridescent and blurred by distance, beyond even the cathedral with its “finger pointing toward the sky”—no, rather against the farthest blue fringe of the heavens, I discern a gigantic hand. It is a human hand, immensely far away and yet sharply and distinctly delineated, its every curve revealed, its every vein plainly visible—a human hand the size of towers or hills against the blue, above the dwarfed towers of the church and the toy building-blocks of houses and gardens. And this hand points for me beyond the ridiculous boundaries of an individual life, and above all these husks and boundaries, points like the outstretched hand of a gigantic clock whose extension in space is like a shot and rolls like the boom of a cannon through all my chambers.

An easily-quota’d plethora of detached limbs seemingly pervades the book: there’s “Mary K., a widow who has lost a leg in a streetcar accident”—she’s found listed amongst other principal characters (including one “Dwight Williams, an American lepidopterist”) in the book’s opening pages. Or consider what the narrator calls “the kind of diffuse plankton that drifts through one’s brain when one sits alone in a bistro, eating goulash and drinking beer” (and, in the next phrase, “the thread-pulling of association”) after noting the Beisl proprietor’s one-leggedness:

He was a well-set-up figure of a man but had only one leg. Nevertheless, he was afraid of nothing and no one. I was present once when he flatly refused to hand out playing cards to three drunken rowdies—as rare a phenomenon in this part of Döbling as crawfish in the ornamental pools of a park . . . But then anything can happen anywhere, though perhaps only once. On Daponte Gasse I once actually found a little scorpion in the bathroom, in good condition and very much alive. I hailed it as an emissary from the south, from the lands of the classics, cajoled it into a box with air holes and let it free at a lonely spot in the Prater meadows. Incidentally, specimens of the praying mantis (Mantis religiosa L.), a preposterously large insect of southern Europe, are also found in, of all places, the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main. . . .

Von Doderer’s half-bemused, half-melancholy willingness to follow along the aimlessly inquisitive sentence’s own unfolding, its “fall ripe.” And humankind itself somehow akin to a donkey, affably saturnine. (“Once . . . change is accomplished, a light depression may well ensue when, between freshly painted walls and newly varnished floors, surrounded by a host of hitherto unknown practical comforts, our good friends find the same old donkey who would, if he were a cow, stand before all the new splendor bellowing with unhappiness, as that animal stands moodily before the barn door when it is first let out in the spring. But as it is a donkey, it only wags its long ears slightly.”)

“Werra roughish . . .”

A blustery Saturday, a lazy Sunday. I read—looking for something or other, unfound—“A few frayed nerves count for nothing is this swift world.” Guy Davenport writing to Jonathan Williams, 26 May 1966, in A Garden Carried in a Pocket, Guy Davenport / Jonathan Williams Letters 1964-1968, edited by Thomas Meyer (Green Shade, 2004). He’s assuaging Williams’s battered heart (who’s momentarily “on the outs” with Ronald Johnson):

You have entered into a Utopian idealistic millennial transcendental attempt to live like the blessèd angels—hoi makairioissi angkelloi, if the tongue of Iamblichos and Diodorus Sikulos will add a little honey to the Saxon vocables here—and until the Great Beast comes, with its rivers of light and forms perfected in the splendor of God’s Hand itself, you are going to squabble and bypass total happiness, in short, suffer, as do we all, from the mortal wound Adam left us for inheritance.
      The selfhood, said Master Blake, izza whore.

(I think of Krazy Kat hiding behind an enormous newspaper whilst Offissa Pupp marches Ignatz Mouse off to the slammer for attempting—again—to hit K. K. with a brick, and he, K. K., rather self-referentially reading: “Ooy, he’s saying something at you—ooy, it sims to be something in werra roughish, and werra uncootish lengwidge.”) Weekend bunged up by quotables, readables supped for some inchoate conglomerate nurture. Talking of Ronald Johnson (“I complained that Ronald Johnson was the vaguest human being I’d even met.”), Davenport once wrote (in Angle 5 “The Ronald Johnson Issue”): “The only mention of his sexuality was his telling me that as a boy in Kansas he had so loved his gym teacher that he broke into his house, stole his pyjamas from under his pillow, and ate them.” See, too, Emerson’s “Quotation and Originality”: “Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act . . .” The “selfhood” may well be a whore, but according to Emerson such “mischief is quickly punished”:

Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat,—an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among plants,—the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning on an original.

“There remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual.” Davenport, concerning Johnson’s invidious (individual) persistency:

To the lament that Ark isn’t autobiographical (that is, not sheepishly trendy), I can hear Ron saying, “Well, it’s my eye that saw it all, my reading and looking that found it.” The ringing paradox of art is that the artist disappears when the work of art is successful. The girl in the field, singing in Gaelic as she binds sheaves, is there, before us, the magician Wordsworth nowhere about. It is a sparrow, not Ronald Johnson, watching the sun rise at the beginning of Ark.

Pertinently (reading inevitably makes its own indefeasible pertinences), there’s Pound writing to Williams (c. October 21. 1908):

No art ever yet grew by looking into the eyes of the public ruthless or otherwise.
      You can obliterate yourself & mirror God, Nature, or Humanity, but if you try to mirror yourself in the eyes of the public woe be unto your art.

“Werra uncootish,” the playing to the crowd, the propensity to niggle the crowd’s negotiables, and return them to it (see “flarf”). Davenport again: “I once remarked to Ron that many sections of Ark read just as well backward as forward. This pleased him immensely. He then wrote a section that has to be read backward. He was ecstatic when I told him about Ernst Mach’s dream of a candle burning inside a beaker of water.” (Ernst Mach: “I saw in my laboratory a beaker filled with water, in which a candle was serenely burning. ‘Where does it get its oxygen from?’ I thought. ‘It is absorbed in the water,’ was the answer. ‘Where do the gases produced in the combustion go to?’ The bubbles from the flame mounted upwards in the water, and I was satisfied . . .” Sexual exchange comme continuum.)

I spent an unfructifying period looking into Ark in search of Davenport’s “section that has to be read backward” and concluded that he’d constructed a perfectly unverifiable vignette (rather like saying a “vignette” originally referred to “something that may be written on a vine-leaf”), the piece is hid amongst its models. Davenport in “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg” (beginning, in wily and imitant Walsersprache, “For a man who had seen a candle serenely burning inside a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles streaming upward from its flame, who had been present in Zürich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Dargomyzhsky’s In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon witt Manet’s Olympia speaking from a cheap print I’d thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as I had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuckles into her cheeks and scream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of the winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sands of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomenal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobia . . .”) writes, too, of Mach thus:

      It says in the pages of Mach that the mind is nothing but a continuity of consciousness. It is not itself a thing. It is its contents, like an eye and what it sees, a hand and what it holds. Mach’s continuity, like Heraklit’s river, defines itself by its flow.
. . .
      —It is so obvious, I persisted, once you have seen it. The mind is what it knows. It is nothing else at all, at all.

Izza, that is, whore.

George Herriman, “Krazy Kat,” April 4, 1922

1% Poetry

Rodrigo Toscano’s call for the hanging up of a slice of American poetry “by two pieces of string, like a mobile.”

“All it requires is a sharp X-acto knife, good aim, a sense of proportion, and a spark of artistic flare.”

“Sunk by an operatic greyhound . . .”

Charles Ives, 1874-1954

Thinking of Charles Ives’s splendid contempt for the institutional trappings* of art, how he muttered that “prizes are the badges of mediocrity” and gave away the five hundred dollar Pulitzer Prize in Music (awarded twenty or so years after he’d quit writing music): “Prizes are for boys. I’m grown up.” How Ives put together a volume called 114 Songs (1922), “privately printed and distributed without copyright and free of charge,” thinking maybe “the average person able to tinker a little at the keyboard” would play the songs. “No one was expected or allowed to pay for them. They were sent to libraries, music critics and musicians, and to anybody else who asked for them.” Out of the terrific postscript to 114 Songs:

Some have written a book for money; I have not. Some for fame; I have not. Some for love; I have not. Some for kindlings; I have not. I have not written a book for any of these reasons or for all of them together. In fact, gentle borrower, I have not written a book at all—I have merely cleaned a house. All that is left is out on the clothes line; but it’s good for a man’s vanity to have the neighbors see him—on the clothes line.

A housecleaning then. Or is it the work of a pragmatist? (Ives earlier suggests how he’d assumed the printing of the book “primarily in order to have a few clear copies that could be sent to friends who from time to time have been interested enough to ask for copies of some of the songs,” admitting, though: “the job has grown to something different; it contains plenty of songs which have not been and will not be asked for.”) Or is it something somewhat feistier, a challenge and a defiance?

For some such or different reasons, through some such or different process, this volume, this package of paper, uncollectable notes, marks of respect and expression, is now thrown, so to speak, at the music fraternity, who for this reason will feel free to dodge it on its way—perhaps to the paper basket . . .

Ives’s final harangue is a marvel, the song itself declaring its sovereignty, its refusal “to swallow ‘hook and bait’”—rejoice for all the demands licit and illicit of any art that girds up in its own duds and attempts to climb up in the American tree (a “lieu” routinely guarded by even the meagrest of its habitués, call it the American coop) . . .

Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, “in the leaf”—and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable. An excuse (if none of the above are good enough) for their existence which suggests itself at this point is that a song has a few rights, the same as other ordinary citizens. If it feels like walking along the left-hand side of the street, passing the door of physiology or sitting on the curb, why not let it? If it feels like kicking over an ash can, a poet’s castle, or the prosodic law, will you stop it? Must it always be a polite triad, a “breve gaudium,” a ribbon to match the voice? Should it not be free at times from the dominion of the thorax, the diaphragm, the ear, and other points of interest? If it wants to beat around in the park, should it not have immunity from a Nemesis, a Ramses, or a policeman? Should it not have a chance to sing to itself, if it can sing?—to enjoy itself without making a bow, if it can’t make a bow?—to swim around in any ocean, if it can swim, without having to swallow “hook and bait,” or being sunk by an operatic greyhound? If it happens to feel like trying to fly where humans cannot fly, to sing what cannot be sung, to walk in a cave on all fours, or to tighten up its girth in blind hope and faith and try to scale mountains that are not, who shall stop it?

—In short, must a song
always be a song!

*Ives: “If for every thousand dollar prize a potato field be substituted, so that these candidates of Clio can dig a little in real life, perchance dig up a natural inspiration, art’s air might be a little clearer—a little freer from certain traditional delusions: for instance . . . that atmosphere and diligence are synonymous. To quote Thoreau incorrectly: ‘When half-Gods talk, the Gods walk!’”

Roberto Bolaño’s Tres

That giddy delirium of the belly’s veriest reaches seemingly erupting through the mouth—maybe you know the sensation? Half-reversing oneself with pleasure, like a sock peeled off a narrow (though somewhat spatula-shaped) foot? I think I experienced it reading Joe Brainard’s collected I Remember (1975) in the original Full Court Press edition (“I remember the several rather unusual ways ‘Pouilly-Fuissé’ has come out of my mouth, trying to order a bottle of wine in restaurants . . .”) Maybe, too, with Edwin Denby’s 1975 Full Court Collected Poems (“The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig . . .” is a line still liable to make me un-torque with glee). Or there’s George Hitchcock’s Kayak-printed James Tate volume called Row with Your Hair (1969), with the Mel Fowler woodcuts. Yuri Olesha’s Envy (“A huge cloud with the outline of South America loomed over the city . . .”) Countless, the fevers. Is it, the unleashed bursting glee, the result of mounting admiration and undiminished anticipation warring with each other? One cannot read quickly enough to assuage a ravenous need. I sense something of that untamable and foolish cupidity—it is what makes poetry a dangerously fleet and uncompromising force—in opening Roberto Bolaño’s Tres (New Directions, 2011) and reading “around in” its final sequence, Un paseo por la literature (translated by Laura Healy as “A Stroll through Literature”):

. . .

9. I dreamt that Macedonio Fernández appeared in the sky over New York in the form of a cloud: a cloud without nose or ears, but with eyes and mouth.

. . .

18. I dreamt that Archibald MacLeish was crying—just three tears—on the terrace of a Cape Cod restaurant. It was after midnight and even though I didn’t know the way back we ended up drinking and toasting the indomitable New World.

. . .

25. I dreamt that Archilochus was crossing a desert of human bones. He was encouraging himself: “Come on, Archilochus, don’t falter, keep going, keep going.”

26. I dreamt I was fifteen and was going to Nicanor Parra’s house to say goodbye. I found him standing, leaning against a black wall. Where are you going, Bolaño? he said. Far from the Southern Hemisphere, I answered.

27. I dreamt I was fifteen and was, in fact, leaving the Southern Hemisphere. When I put the only book I had (Trilce by Vallejo) in my backpack, the pages went up in flames. It was seven p.m. and I chucked my scorched backpack out the window.

. . .

29. I dreamt I was translating Virgil with a stone. I was naked on a big basaltic flagstone and the sun, as fighter pilots say, hovered dangerously at 5 o’clock.

. . .

31. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron bench in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn.

. . .

36. I dreamt I was 69ing with Anaïs Nin on an enormous basaltic flagstone.

. . .

40. I dreamt that a storm of phantom numbers was the only thing left of human beings three billion years after Earth ceased to exist.

. . .

43. I dreamt I was a prisoner and Boethius was my cellmate. Look, Bolaño, he said extending his hand and his pen in the shadows: they’re not trembling! they’re not trembling! (After a while, he added in a calm voice: but they’ll tremble when the recognize that bastard Theodoric.)

44. I dreamt I was translating the Marquis de Sade with axe blows. I’d gone crazy and was living in the woods.

. . .

Excerpts, out of fifty-seven total (number of Heinz’s varieties of tomatoes, and isn’t there a scene in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) where Sen. John Yerkes Iselin spies at a catsup bottle and uses it for the number of “card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense”?). Bolaño’s piece is dated “Blanes, 1994.” “A Stroll through Literature” is, in some sense, written under the sign of Georges Perec (it begins: “1. I dreamt that Georges Perec was three years old and visiting my house. I was hugging him, kissing him, saying what a sweet boy he was.” And ends with Perec again, “three years old and crying inconsolably.” Formally, I suspect Bolaño’s riffing off Perec’s Je me souviens (that Perec took off Brainard, that may “explain” my initial outburst . . .) Bolaño’s “I dreamt” (Soñé que), compared with either of the Perec / Brainard confabs, is less quotidian in its riches, more literary in its thrust: it works to insert its writers into elemental, quasi-mythic landscapes; there’s a chilly godliness (and god-awfulness) behind the muttering humor of it all. I think of some of early Dylan: isn’t the rather sere rambunctiousness and primal insistence of “A Stroll through Literature” akin to both “And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers . . .” (“Desolation Row”) and “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ / I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ / I saw a white ladder all covered with water / I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken . . .” (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”)?

Tres contains two other early Bolaño pieces: the 1981 Prosa del otoño en Gerona (“Autumn Prose in Gerona”) and the 1993 poem Los neochilenos (“The Neochileans”), the narrative of a band (Pancho Relámpago y los Neochilenos becoming, mid-tour Pancho Misterio y los Neochilenos) relentlessly going north, playing small towns in Chile, into Peru, into—road doings left behind (“And dawn would find us / At a table in the back / Discussing the kilo and a half of gray matter / In the adult / Brain”) finally, Ecuador: “One happy day in January / We crossed / Like children of the Cold, / Of the Unstable Cold / Or of the Ecce Homo, / The border of Ecuador.” One notes here Bolaño’s mounting sense of capaciousness, writing’s pouch capable of stretching to contain anything, an ever-unconsummated and workable zone of resistance. In two of the pieces he writes the phrase nec spes nec metus (“without hope, without fear,” said to be Caravaggio’s motto). A woman’s perfume is called Carnicería fugaz (“Fleeting butcher shop”). Someone asks what the relationship is “Between Morpheus, god / Of Sleep / And morfar, slang / To eat?” I think of Bernadette Mayer’s often-quoted and rarely-heeded “Work your ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous,” and think of the twenty-eight year old Bolaño of “Autumn Prose in Gerona”—“a Chilean with permission to live in Spain, without working, for three more months”—writing, persistently, devilishly, foolishly writing:

It makes no sense to write poetry, old men speak of a new war and sometimes the recurrent dream comes back: author writing in dim lit room; faraway buzz of rival gangs fighting for a supermarket; rows of cars that will never run again.

Roberto Bolaño, 1953-2003

Williams / Ashbery

Reading William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography (1951)—a book that in one early manuscript version carried the punning title Dock: The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. And the epigraph:

The acanthus is a weed that signified for the Greeks neither fruit nor flower but was prized for another reason. Because of that they raised it to the head of their temple column. Dock with us is a comparable weed growing unheralded about the edges of the dung-heap. Of its roots the practical (and hungry) Chinese make a delicacy.

Williams’s love of the “weed,” meaning whatever is found “growing unheralded about the edges of the dung-heap.” The lovely lowly burdock, big-leaved and prickly. Think of the “muddy fields / brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen” Williams records along “the road to the contagious hospital” in Spring and All, that “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff . . .” I note some oddly similar lines out of Tolstoy’s Journal (1896):

Yesterday I walked through a twice ploughed, black-earth fallow field. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but black earth not one green blade of grass, and there on the edge of the dusty grey road there grew a bush of burdock. There were three off-shoots. One was broken and its white soiled flower hung; the other also broken, was bespattered with black dirt, its stem bent and soiled; the third shoot stuck out to the side, also black from dust, but still alive and red in the centre . . . It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other has asserted it.

George Steiner, in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959), partially quotes that to claim Tolstoy’s supposed “negations were axe-strokes to carve a clearing for the light.” Williamsesque: “the stark dignity of entrance . . .” Struck, reading the Autobiography, by Williams’s sense of the “underground stream” of poetry (released by thwart changeable vicissitudes of doctoring):

Forget writing, it’s a trivial matter. But day in day out, when the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with nothing more than a boil on his back is so caught off balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole community’s pathetic way of thought, a man is suddenly seized again with a desire to speak of the underground stream which for a moment has come up just under the surface. It is just a glimpse, an intimation of all that which the daily print misses or deliberately hides, but the excitement is intense and the rush to write is on again. It is then we see, by this constant feeling for a meaning, from the unselected nature of the material, just as it comes in over the phone or at the office door, that there is no better way to get an intimation of what is going on in the world.

“The unselected nature of the material”: the human stream akin to the lingo stream. I recall, too, oddly (I rarely think of Ashbery’s being aligned with Williams), John Ashbery’s remarks in an interview in the Paris Review:

. . . since I don’t have very much free time (poets seldom do, since they must somehow make a living), I’ve conditioned myself to write at almost any time. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up. (This is very well put in a passage that occurs early on in Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons, which I haven’t to hand at the moment.) It will be not dissimilar to what I have produced before because it is coming from the same source, but it will be dissimilar because of the different circumstances of the particular moment.

One’d like to think that “Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons” is some complicated Ashberyean in-joke. However, as is usually the case with Ashbery’s seeming arcana, one—investigating—is inevitably led straight to the thing one seemingly needs. Von Doderer (Austrian, 1896-1966) apparently proceeded with novel-writing under a sense that “the real” is a thing constructed—out of loose ends, circumstantial abutments, abrupt meanderings—by individual apperception—or “resistance to apperception” [Apperzeptionsverweigerung]. Right about where in the doddering cosmos of words one finds oneself now, here.

Heimito von Doderer, 1896-1966

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Making

Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Rudder”
(“We understand the world by imagining its edges.”)

Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Rudder,” 1999

One dilemma: my execrable scrawl and hapless hand. If I want to maintain a kind of record—a commonplace book, little daubs of meaning waylaid (ambuscaded) in my reading—the easier thing is to “type it up.” My sorry history with notebooks, despoiled by blots, disfigured by the high renegade elbow, the jouncing undercarriage, the pothole in the road. Abandoned a few pages “in.” So—out of the Thomas A. Clark-edited A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making (WAX366, 2009). Ian Hamilton Finlay (to Pierre Garnier, 17 September 1963):

I approve of Malevich’s statement, ‘Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and removed himself from the perfection of God’s creation. Having left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected objects, to be again embodied in the perfections of the absolute, non-thinking life . . .’ That is, it seems to me, to describe, approximately, my own need to make poems . . . though I don’t know what is meant by ‘God.’

And (to Gael Turnbull, 23 August c. 1964), regarding a “long sequence” Turnbull’d sent:

It’s still difficult for me to adjust to such forms. What we need is not one word ‘poetry,’ but 3 or 4 words? You use the poems to explore around in things—well, I understand that, too . . . The poem is like—the sequence—when you put your hand under a blanket to look for the hanky you’ve lost in the night, and you see the shape made by the hand searching about, and you see it on the blanket—do you know what I mean—that is how the poem works. And I myself do something else . . .

And (a solace, against the ravages of untoward clamp-jawed seriousness, what poetry-making’s clampdown twenty-first c. careerist demands demand of “us” each) Finlay’s remarks to Robert Creeley (Christmas Day, 1965):

. . . I think you should not worry about not writing poems, if you are still not. I know it is a misery when one feels like that, but you can remember against it, that you are very prolific when you do write, and that you already have a bulk of work that should satisfy anyone. Part of the problem . . . is that one would like (at such times) a kind of craft, to give each day a small satisfaction at least, and make sleep possible and food palatable . . . That was one reason I liked making toys—but that craft has rather vanished for me now, for, having ceased to amaze myself by my ability to cut a bit of wood with a fretsaw, I began to feel it as an art, and that is the end of pleasure . . . What we need is some simple craft at which we continually astonish ourselves by our extraordinary talent, while finding it mere child’s play, without judging it to be literally so (even if it is).

The glad import of amateurish “dabbling.” The constant longing to return to that root ludic compulsion. And (out of a 1967 letter to Ronald Johnson):

. . . I do like squares & rectangles; circles are right in real ponds but on the page they rather oppress me . . . Of course (re. THE UNFOLDINGS) the problem of all poems is one of form. It may SEEM that one can’t think of words, sentences, images, or whatever, but the truth of all such impasses is, that one has not found the form (the receptacle of the flow). But the form is not squares or circles, and it is folly (of which I would not hold you guilty) to suppose that one circle is like another, and that all are equally breast and sun.

Making one conjecture that Johnson’s “The Unfoldings” contained, in earlier typescript, a George Herbert-style circle? A Leeuwenhoek circle (microscopy’s enunciatory curve) with its “slow / ovals of animals” within? If so, it’d likely be at the point of Johnson’s perfect square of John Wilkins’s lines out of Of the Principle and Duties of Natural Religion (1675):

‘Whatever Natural doth by this Microscope appear adorned in all imaginable Elegance and Beauty: such inimitable Gildings and Embroideries in smallest seeds of Plants: in parts of Animals, the Head or Eye of a Fly; Such accurate Order and Symmetry in the frame of the most minute Creatures, a Louse or Mite, as no man were to conceive without seeing of them. Whereas the most curious Works of Art seem rude Work as if they had been done with Mattock or Trowel so vast a difference is there between the Skill of Nature and Imperfection of Art.’

The original by Wilkins reads:

Whatever is Natural doth by that appear adorned with all imaginable Elegance and Beauty. There are such inimitable Gildings and Embroideries in the smallest Seeds of Plants, but especially in the parts of Animals, in the Head or Eye of a small Fly: Such accurate Order and Symetry in the Frame of the most minute Creatures, a Louse or a Mite; as no Man were able to conceive without seeing of them. Whereas the most curious Works of Art, the sharpest finest Needle, doth appear as a blunt rough Bar of Iron coming from the Furnace or the Forge. The most accurate Engravings or Embossments, seem such rude bungling deformed Works, as if they had been done with a Mattock or a Trowel. So vast a difference is there betwixt the Skill of Nature, and the rudeness and imperfection of Art.

And (Findlay, again, to Michael Schmidt, 31 August 1980), a final complaint regarding “Detached Sentences” (what a sentence is, is a detachment—a parcel, a broken span):

Detached Sentences . . . I refuse to write present-day English, since this is secular and self-satisfied and instinctively believes that it has a basis in reality in a kind of total way. To me, language is both part of us and strange to us. Writing is an unnatural act. The world is exciting, facts are exciting; but reality can only be put down in ‘detached sentences’ (I borrow the phrase from Shenstone)—(he actually said Thoughts)—which acknowledge that they have spaces between them.

We understand the world by imagining its edges.
(Detached Sentences on This Cosmos)

William Shenstone, author of Poems on various occasions, written for the entertainment of the author (1737) and of Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764). Gardener of the Leasowes estate in Shropshire. Shenstone: “Art should never be allowed to set a foot in the province of nature, otherwise than clandestinely and by night. Whenever she is allowed to appear here, and men begin to compromise the difference: night, gothicism, confusion and absolute chaos are come again.”

And: “Variety appears to me to derive good part of its effect from novelty; as the eye, passing from one form or colour, to a form or colour of a different kind, finds a degree of novelty in its present object which affords immediate satisfaction.”

And: “Variety . . . may be carried to such excess as to lose its whole effect. I have observed ceilings so crammed with stucco-ornaments that, although of the most different kinds, they have produced an uniformity. A sufficient quantity of undecorated space is necessary to exhibit such decorations to advantage.”

So with sentences.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925-2006
(Photograph by Robin Gillanders)

Po-po Foundation?

Is the Poetry Foundation still pressing charges against poet and activist Stephanie Dunn for “disturbing the peace”?

Kent Johnson says: “Anyone who works for the Poetry Foundation, or is associated in some official capacity with the institution, should resign in shame.” D’accord.

It’d certainly behoove the Foundation to directly (immediately and publicly) clarify its doings and intent in the matter.

“Ceci n’est pas une critique . . .”

By fits returning. Prying up fittings interlocking. Seeking the relational core of things. The “Martiniquais writer and polemicist Edouard Glissant”—quoted in Caroline Bergvall’s Meddle English (Nightboat, 2011): “We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments.” Bergvall’s desire—to “cut transversally” through the structures of language—akin to Gordon Matta-Clark’s sawing through architectural leavings, what’s condemned and abandoned, akin to Robert Smithson’s “heap of language.” Bergvall:

What gets revealed is history and ground. Or rather, ground history, compost, history as compost. Temporariness and excavation. Volatility, weathering and renewal.

Principally, one discovers surprising varietals of soil, ancient yet compilable language bones, pressed word-fossils, collapsed layers, mineral toil, friable clays, dried pigments, decomposed fabric stretches, discontinuous tracings, and much unrecoverable matter. The top layers reveal a far larger extent of familiar elements, traceable glossary, well-defined graphemes, syllabic conduits, what looks like mud-encased capitalizations, gold-dust, systems of numerical sticks, animal feathers, and various types of tools. These trace up letter elements historically, and through the altogether confusing and inventive arche-logics of etymology. Language is its own midden ground.

Letters, sounds, words are discarded from a language during accidental breaks. Or dispensed with, like outmoded cooking utensils. Or pulled out, like teeth. Entire jawlines of these. Like the widely documented Runic and Old English voiceless fricative / Þ / thorn which after 1000 successful years as its own separate glyph disappears in the 14th century . . .

Midden: dump. A tumulus of discards, detritus relating to day-to-day human life. Laid down lingual plonk retrievable. Out of Bergvall’s “Shorter Chaucer Tales” (“The Host Tale,” beginning “The fruyt of every tale is for to seye”):

                                unkyndely
For dronkenesse is
            And dronkenesse is eek a foul record
A lecherous thyng is wyn
A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl.
            Hath wyn bireved me myn eyen sight?
Ye shul have digestyves
Of wormes, er y take youre laxatyves,
Of lawriol, centaure, and fumetere
Of herbe yve, growing in oure yeerd, ther mery is
Pekke hem up right as they grow, and ete heme yn!
            Til we ny the day bigan to sprynge.

One of Charles “Packy” Axton’s Memphis bands “The Martini’s” (c. 1965-1967): “Hung Over”

Bergvall (“Cat in the Throat”):

A lingual event is taking place, not in the voice but in the clearing of the throat.

Spitting out the most intimate and most irretrievable, the most naturalised source language, so-called mother tongue, is a dare, it is dangerous. It starts a whole process of re-embodying one’s language’s spaces.

The spittle can be resistant, unpleasant, potentially as well-aimed as a thrown shoe. Beckett’s traffic from English to French is an expectoration of the English language’s occupation on the colonised Irish body. His leitmotifs of speech loss, language stutter, assisted memory, gestural language all point to his fighting off one language with another language, transforming in the process both the spat-out source language and the adoptive language.

In French, to clear one’s throat is to have a cat in the throat, avoir un chat dans la gorge. One needs to spit out a cat to clear one’s throat. Literally, ‘un crachat’ is a spittle. One could also clear one’s throat and realise that one has spat out French slang, une chatte, a pussy. This adds and maintains a crucial libidinal and erotic bond . . .

Huddie William Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly (1888-1949): “Moanin’”

Bergvall again (“Croup,” out of “Cropper”):

This is how it happened—

She appeard to me frankly. Lifted me up from childhoods lipsings, showd me the field the dawn aurora thru the bursting green of the French valléy, all around the arbouring trees blind us w shards of verre in the light mounting silver birds slivering past. Voila she led me to the river, eau eau pressd me down lifted my long brass towards the seal of the summer sky, up-chemised my shirt peléd layers of cloth and peeling skin, couchd me safely profondly on this earth. Then placed a lump of saliva on my tongue and gave me language. Opnd to the port to the door, the bush of the mouth bled me made me bleed, blood is the first song, traveld across me trawld me w fever. Fired me up w language. A splendid exact luminescence to be sudnly awake in ones own language.

And in “Fried Tale (London Zoo)”—another of the “Shorter Chaucer Tales” (“In the words of Saint Simon, a tiny minority was enriched by the total ruin of all the rest of the people. // Are u utrly totly lunatyke? / Wot kynde horse brayne spoile our cheery meal . . .?”):

1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1
1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1

A page later:

It means the desire to have more, to have more than one’s share, to have it all. It speaks of a kind of mental instability, a terrible sickness that overtakes a person. Or a system.
Here endeth this grim detail.

“Like fistfuls of hair puld out of social fabrik . . .” (“The Greeks called this pleonexia . . .” Pleonexia, out of the Greek πλεονεξια: greediness, grasping selfishness, arrogant covetousness, “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.” Un peu partout ces jours-ci . . . Gagged by numéro uno-ism.)

“I don’t want no sugar in my coffee
It makes me mean, Lord, Lord, it makes me mean.”
Chain gang recorded by Alan Lomax

—

William Carlos Williams to Denise Levertov (30 August 1954): “I understand your whole indifference to the poem as it may at times appear to you. At times there’s nothing to do but finger exercises. Maybe that’s the end. You do it merely to keep supple. For what dreadful encounter? Nothing may happen, I hope it never does—but if it does, your only chance of doing some arresting writing, something that the world is really waiting for with open arms, is to be ready.”

Caroline Bergvall

“By claiming nothing . . .”

Roland Barthes, out of The Preparation of the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2011), talking of the epiphanic haiku-like “Incident,” an “instantly meaningful event (cf. Nietzsche, Will to Power: “There are no ‘facts-in-themselves,’ for a sense must always be projected into them before there can be ‘facts’”)” with

. . . no pretention to a general, systematic, doctrinal meaning → which is probably why there’s a refusal of discourse, a retreat into the “fold” (incident), the discontinuous fragment—cf. what Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, says about Epiphanies and their homogeneity with the modern Novel: a technique that’s “arrogant yet humble, it claims importance by claiming nothing.”

Barthes points to “the constraint of no-commentary; apropos of Joyce: the (epiphanic) technique “seeks a presentation so penetrating that any comment from the author would be an intrusion”:

→ Extreme difficulty (or bravery): not to provide the meaning, a meaning; deprived of all commentary, the inconsequentiality of the Incident is laid bare, and to stand by inconsequentiality is almost heroic.

Barthes:

Once again: in the West, we are overwhelmingly conditioned to furnish every reported fact with the alibi of an interpretation: culture of Priests; we interpret, we’re incapable of tolerating short forms of language (in the sense of ending abruptly, of “it’s a bit on the short side, young man”).

Subsequent talk of Joyce’s “failure and the transformation of this failure”—how he’d needed “to pour the Epiphanies into the Novel, to drown what we find intolerable about what’s brief, short in narrative: calming, reassuring mediation, elaboration of a grand meaning (Destiny).”

Two pieces out of Joyce’s Epiphanies (“written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .” –Ulysses). Ellmann writes: “In the years between 1901-02 and 1904 Joyce recorded crucial fragments of overheard dialogue or personal mediation. He carefully hoarded these fragments, and later—when he had determined their ‘spiritual’ significance—incorporated many of them into his fictions”—as if the bigger intent indubitably inhered in the quiddity of each incident . . . Joyce:

Two mourners push on through the crowd. The girl, one hand catching the woman’s skirt, runs in advance. The girl’s face is the face of a fish, discoloured and oblique-eyed; the woman’s face is small and square, the face of a bargainer. The girl, her mouth distorted, looks up at the woman to see if it is time to cry; the woman, settling a flat bonnet, hurries on towards the mortuary chapel.

And:

[Dublin: in the National Library]
Skeffington—I was sorry to hear of the death of your brother . . . sorry we didn’t know in time . . . to have been at the funeral . . .

Joyce—O, he was very young . . . a boy . . .

Skeffington—Still . . . it hurts . . .

James Joyce, c. 1915

Siegel-Schwall

“Wait a minute, babe, where did I go?
I was sitting around here whoop a minute ago . . .”

The Siegel-Schwall Band, “Angel Food Cake,” c. 1970

Merz Pause

Kurt Schwitters, “Merzbild 5 B (Bild rot Herz-Kirche = Picture Red Heart-Church),” 1919

Ceding to the demands of various fronts—in combo with an intended lurch “up north”—means scant writing hereabouts in the offing. I battle a recurrent malaise, being, briefly: why bother putting additional notes into the note-choked air? Why continue to agitate the existing notes with the persistence (without mollycoddle) of an amateur, that lover blind-sided by scrub jactancy of the pro? I think of Kurt Schwitters routinely carrying off the proof sheets and discards of Molling’s printers in Hannover, clenching a dog-eared sheaf under one arm, steering the bicycle with the other, scooting home to Merz away. The masturbatory relish of constructing a mountain of spunk (requiring the sawing of a hole up through to the deuxième étage). Merz growing like a coral reef, each new malleable polyp a con, a temporary brooch pinned to the white and dying substrate. Merzing “up” the banalities of commercial outrage, its refuse measured by inconsistency. Schwitters, in some Gestalt of Merz-banal, designing, too, an ad for Pelikan inks. “A consistent work of art can never refer to anything outside itself without loosening its ties to art.” Thinking one ought go dig a pit to sit in the bottom of. Cover it with deadwood and offal. Wait for the world to impinge (happily, it never will). Rereading Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses):

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
      I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true.

Isn’t it the sentimental desire of language to be the “thing itself” (happily, it cannot)? McCarthy: “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” A riot of impingement: what’s culled or discarded that one might claim a transient spell of “meaning.” (Or talk oneself into a nether patch, a region of imprecision and languor, mote-sized particulates, the duff of meaning ascending in sun-shafts “up” off the piney floor, oceanic noises descending “down” out of the branch-sway: a region of continuous exchange, the world’s circular breathing.) Eugène Delacroix (out of the Journal):

The precise quality that renders the sketch the highest expression of the idea is not the suppression of details, but their subordination to the great sweeping lines that come before everything else in making the impression. The greatest difficulty therefore, when it comes to tackling the picture, is this subordination of details which, nevertheless, make up the composition and are the very warp and weft of the picture itself.

My malaise: how obligingly and unexpunctably a note—a reading—makes itself sourly pertinent to the current “era.” Think of, say, Ron Silliman’s “sketch” for The Alphabet (that “sketch” being nothing, apparently, beyond that of the conventional sequence of the alphabet itself, Silliman noting only “what I knew was the sections would have to differ one from the other and fit into a larger intuitive logic” and that “there are no great diagrams hidden in the archives anywhere that shows the plot of the poem . . . I’m working it out as I go along”). So that, buttering my morning toast with the Journal juste à côté, I butter my own thumb at how aptly the nineteenth century Delacroix critiques (23 April 1854) Silliman’s project:

A picture built up bit by bit with pieces of patchwork, each separate piece carefully finished and neatly placed beside the rest, will look like a masterpiece and the very height of skill as long as it is unfinished; as long, that is to say, as the ground is not covered, for to painters who complete every detail as they place it on the canvas, finishing means covering the whole of that canvas. As you watch a work of this type proceeding so smoothly, and those details that seem all the more interesting because you have nothing else to admire, you involuntarily feel a rather empty astonishment, but when the last touch has been added, with the architect of this agglomeration of separate details has placed the topmost pinnacle of his motley edifice in position and has said his final word, you see nothing but blanks or overcrowding, an assemblage without order of any kind. The interest given to each separate object is lost in the general confusion, and an execution that seemed precise and suitable becomes dryness itself because of the total absence of sacrifices.

Endless accumulatory utterance, a kind of Merz. To Silliman’s credit: the rather late-emerging announcement that The Alphabet makes up only one part of some proposed larger structure, apparently called Ketjak (“a single poem or lifework”) seems to indicate Silliman’s own sense that mere end-stopped assemblage fails, and must needs be contrived as a “form of constancy,” the putting of endless notes “into the note-choked air.” Delacroix the next day (24 April 1854): “I here affirm my preference for short, concise books that do not tire the reader, because they have not tired their authors, etc.”

Kurt Schwitters, “Das Undbild (The And-Picture),” 1919

Kurt Schwitters, “Merz 163,” 1920

Kurt Schwitters, “Merz 133,” 1921

Kurt Schwitters, 1887-1948

Julian T. Brolaski’s gowanus atropolis

The other day I caught a YouTube’d Rahsaan Roland Kirk barking out a thing about making a sound, with, he says—the mischief of it palpably tongued—“climaxical (or maybe climaxiple) force.” Damn. Had to write that word out in its versions, and screw up my eyghen obtykes at that word. Had to work the very cud of that word like a ruminant undeterred by the bevy of green-bottled flies . . . and try it out every hwælch weg with my toongue. Ah, materiality, foist (meaning, d’abord), ought be that fun. Even though it border the fey. Or camps it up to the Nth. That’s the kind of thing I think looking at Julian T. Brolaski’s gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling, 2011). For there, forsooth, lines like “xe is my enemigma / & shall endure all my privlege // sconced hilt orr rod dilf / you may check me tomorrow” (out of “what ys my anatomie”) and “my present page             in l-l-livery // liminal             ack             posserity // divest by number” (out of “buried at sinrise”) and “todo el tiempo quelque new atrocity / met w/ flies” (“the pit of tutivillus”) and

wanton until noon
wel cd they speke englysshe

polymorphously, it’s the juice
n I stand by my ambivalent sidekick

beat up for being the wrong kind of pretty
outlander skeeters suck after
                        (“to be kush is not to be chronic”)

Beyond “materiality,” isn’t there, too, in Brolaski, an insistently inventing cusp of “homotextual” lingo? John Shoptaw’s slippery term, referring to texts liable to “‘behave’ differently, no matter what their subject.” Texts full of “distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities, and discontinuities.” Shoptaw points to Ashbery’s “trademark ‘it’ . . . as a neuter-gendered homotextual signpost.” I use it here to point, too, to Brolaski’s relentless neologick’d teasing of supposed grammatical certainties, a kind of continual on the fly making of new temporary structures. Brolaski (“what ys my anatomie”):

one ynvents a grammatical order
                (& haf done)

tromp loy ramshacklry

Look how that “ynventing” is both something one “haf”—long s reading, has done—and is—phonetic reading—half-done, never wholly completed. And how such “ramshacklry” is both deceiving, an illusory surface—“trompe l’œil”—and, French in its versions throwing off sparks, result of “wronging” the law (French, loi), a tromp’d down law. The fury of signifiance here, exfoliant in a phrase, is a direct result of Brolaski’s pliable, malleable lingo.

I recall, reading gowanus atropolis, days back in the hetero-norm of my youth, wondering at something like O’Hara’s “cold in the dull heavens, / drowned in flesh, / it’s the night like I love it all cruisy and nelly / finger fan of boskage fronds the white smile of sleeps” (“Easter”) or “when the Vitalità nell’ arte catalog came in the mail I laughed / thinking it was Perspectives USA but it wasn’t it / was vitality nellie arty ho ho that’s a joke pop” (“Biotherm”)—thinking I’d likely missed something there (like the joke). Danger of cleaving to the lordliness of one’s own idiolect, or milieu. Though I think of Robert Motherwell’s adages in a letter to O’Hara (18 August 1965):

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one’s feeling precisely?

It is the effort to respect one’s feelings, one’s integrity that leads to radical notions. No revolutionary was ever one for the hell of it: it is too painful a condition. But the pain is eased by its inevitability, given a real problem.

I think of O’Hara, too, in the way Brolaski is capable of high-speed register shifts, the sudden thrilling amp up to the blunt:

if s/o is making a mockery
& yew liable to get thwarted
one needs a quiet room
who hands out thir fucking pronoun paradigm at parties??!!
                        (“if s/one is mocking let it be tender”)

(Who said of O’Hara that he’d’ve likely found gay liberation “silly . . . but he would have loved the dances”?) Brolaski’s “pronoun paradigm”: a wholly unstable “crew” of available pronouns beyond the “usual”—xe, hir, xem, em, thir, es (one piece accuses the mercenary force now known as Xe Services: “blackwater stole my pronoun”: “one can be in a abîme, complete ruin / as jwlhyfer observd / once you start fucking in the bed / the relationship’s over”). Here’s Brolaski’s taut “Poetics” statement (at Elective Affinities):

My recent work explores etymology as a potential path to knowledge, whereby (to paraphrase Marx) to be radical is to go to the root of the problem. It is also partly an argument for a malleable lexicon: alternative spellings, macaronics, and third gender / gender neutral pronouns: xe, sie, ze, zie, e, ey, they (etc.) in English, li in French, ey in Spanish, etc. This is not wholly neologistic work, at least for English, which has always utilized a great many pronouns, but a way of articulating the legibility of trans & gender variant persons who might fall through the cracks of the binary. I would also consider this a queer poetics that privileges wandering over telos. My studies in linguistics, medieval literature and Apache song tradition also infiltrate my lyric which may manifest (typographically) as prose or verse but is always wanting to be capable of being sung.

That lovely awkwardness of “always wanting to be capable of being sung” evident in something like the opening to “gotham in arrears”:

since one immured is not forgot
I let a pansy wilt for rot

and vowed the banker’s misunderstood
what crowned the leafy bray of cottonwood
let all the trim gone daisies
be forgot. let bloodbaths
fill the dailies

Evidence both of Brolaski’s adhering to the contemporary (its works and days, its ways and disasters—one reads “tech support in tatters” and “awash in petrodollars” and “alphalegions to the max” and “you think it’s music but it’s like lilies when they fester / all ovular moonlight tusking the apparatus” and “the bees are up to their knees / in a noxious nectar” and, in a poem (“fin city”) “for Sludgie,” the minke whale calf that died in 2007, disoriented in Gowanus Bay, “these itinerant times / one’ yukked getting / toxicity”) and the casualness with which he’s capable of tossing down lyric swetes in unstudy’d English Lit. mimic mode (“last swan of avon”):

socalled swan of avon
n/t but a beaurocrat
buggering the buttercups
goy from the waist up

now soldiers’re the ones making offers
and fucking caravaggio posters . . .

A Brolaski poem complete, rather randomly plucked:

opticianry in yorkville

like the ramble
carl schurz park’s

famed for
buggery

trimmed by giuliani
not not getting some

the barber tells me
I dabble in opticianry

selly maillarde
blindies near the board

to the putch
hir shutterybuggery

millefeuille herm
& goat at the ends of mannahatta

pseudepigraphia
attributed to plutarch

who believes
in parallel lives

autobulus and ammonius
pithy delphic

all spyes for the metropolis
its edge

androgundd tompeepery
                  —suuu’eh! greekish-roman

Is it the hog-calling finale? Here it’s Guy Davenport I think of, the revved up vocab, the sex-hint indelibles. How one thinks he’d admire a solid Anglo-Saxon word like “putch”—no other (meaning, all other) meanings forthcoming. Putch (out of pitch), “to thrust a pointed instrument into or through (a solid body), to stab, run through, pierce.” Putch (out of pouch), “a small bag or sack used for carrying personal items, a (detachable) pocket worn outside a garment.” Putch (out of putsch), “an attempt to overthrow a government by violent means, an insurrection or coup d’état.” Climaxiple delights.

Julian T. Brolaski
(Photograph by Scott Hightower)

Glut and Rubble

Piles

Glut partout, with its outrider uneasiness, its chum loss of focus. Evening of pawing “at” one book after another, a dog discontented with its lot, the whole backyard filled up with chewed up and discarded bones.

“Fantômas.”
“What did you say?”
“I said: Fantômas.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Nothing. . . . Everything!”
“But what is it?”
“Nobody. . . . And yet, yes, it is somebody!”
“And what does the somebody do?
“Spreads terror!”

The whole history of the twenty-first century there in a brusque exchange of a century ago, opening salvo of the “two inspired hacks” (John Ashbery) Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas (1911). The empty signifier filling with the blood-stained gauze of the desire (fear) that obstructs the sight the eyes it intends to mend. (Ashbery, rather mystified by the success of the series—“The prose, the plots, the personages of what has come to be known as the geste de Fantômas were constructed of the requisite industrial-strength fustian”—points to a famous engraving by Félicien Rops, “Satan Sowing Tares,” suggesting that Gino Starace’s lurid cover for the initial Fantômas owed it a nod.) Agreed on both counts.

Severo Sarduy (Christ on the Rue Jacob) in the Beckett-echo (“Texts for Nothing”:

      Writing is useless. It does nothing to rescue those who are swept away by a sea of lava, who lie already beneath that stone.
      Writing and the rest. A lesson in the ephemeral for anyone who looks helplessly at those bodies covered with mud, shielded, asphyxiated by a scab that slowly hardens, marble-white hair, blood-drained faces. Vomited by the earth, the water, black with coal and ash, rises until it suffocates the pale praying mouth, their sex organs ripped off with one stroke.
      In the face of these passing images, a healthy divertissement is the diligent threading of words, aligning them precisely and rhythmically: absurd hobby of the idle, benign vice of the unemployed.
      Blink your eyes, string a phrase together, and an entire city has been buried, every sleeping citizen petrified, the children hugging their toys, their dogs: porous statues of larva.
      Writing presumes a lack of awareness, or slight irresponsibility, on the part of the one who forgets or wades while, caught in the magma, the precipitous shroud solidifying around her, a little girl asks her mother to pray.

(Beckett, out of “Texts for Nothing” #4: “The truth is he’s looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him, dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing it, I don’t know it, I know nothing. He protests he doesn’t reason and does nothing but reason, crooked, as if that could improve matters. He thinks words fail him, he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechlessness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s cleverness for you. He would like it to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that’s no reason for trying to foist one on me.”) Backhandedly akin to a squib of Rilke’s (“Memory”):

I repeat: I find it quite comprehensible that those who have to depend entirely upon themselves, upon their own life’s usefulness and bearableness, should feel a certain relief, if there is induced in them a spiritual nausea which enables them to rid themselves piece-wise of the misunderstandings and indigestible experiences of their childhood. But I? Am I not, indeed, born to form angels, things, animals, if need be, monsters, precisely in connexion with such experiences, which were beyond experiencing, were too big, too premature, too horrible?

How’d Clark Coolidge put it in “Arrangement,” propping the phenomenal smear up with Heraclitus? “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.” Or there’s Blake’s letter to the Reverend D. Trusler (23 August 1799):

I perceive that your Eye[s] is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, & Happiness is better than Mirth—I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World is a World of Imagination & Vision I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World.

“As a man is So he Sees.” So that one in the unforced perusal of the hardly abstruse, the pilings up and tossings down, one comes to think of James Tate’s 1979 “Goodtime Jesus” as being “in cahoots with” Gertrude Stein’s 1935 “Mark Twain Centenary”:

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

And:

Mark Twain Centenary

Mark Twain did a great many things and everything he did was all he did and he did make a dead man dead. I think he was the first man to ever do that and it was a great American thing to do.

Stein’s never at a loss for words. She says (“Emp Lace”): “Eight o’clock. / Rubbish.” She says: “Eight o’clock pussish. / Eight o’clock radish. / Eight o’clock and a lump.” A Heraclitean lump.

Félicien Rops, “Satan Sowing Tares,” 1906

Fantômas, 1911
(Cover by Gino Starace)

Reading Notes (The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955)

Grace Hartigan, “Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966,” 1966

Something Grace Hartigan copied down 11 November 1952 (out of The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955), a few lines of Frank O’Hara’s “essay” (Hartigan’s word—“a tremendous work & I’m not sure I deserve it”) called “Hartigan on Sunday, 1952”:

Do you remember in far December how the spokes glittered and wheeled and promised? I fainted near the door, knowing I was you and you disappeared in charge of the currency which had risen, had fallen, on your own sable brow. Could you have meant less, could you have trapped me and forgiven me, could you have relented and freed me? Is that the meaning of these faces in your eyes, the same faces though infinitely varied and colored and hung?

Writ, seemingly, between, say, “Day and Night in 1952” (“Grace may secretly distrust me but we are both so close to the abyss that we must see a lot of each other, grinning and carrying on as if it were a picnic given by somebody’s else’s church”) and “Hieronymus Bosch” (“So he has a funnel instead of a penis / and has put his mediaeval pianist’s hands / on the thighs of a contemporary romance / listening to Brubeck at Birdland. It’s just / too very very.”) Is “Hartigan on Sunday, 1952” lost? Not in Art Chronicles, 1954-1966. Not in What’s With Modern Art? Not in Standing Still and Walking in New York. Took by the fragmentary, its lyrical (nigh Tin Pan Alley lyrical in that remember / December ambuscade) pith. (Think of a scanty O’Hara, kin to how we know, say, Anakreon, or Sappho’s lover Alkaios of Mytilene, through some little picklings of Greek somebody copied out “for personal use only.”) I am “took,” too, by the itch for a lyric criticism (see, something like O’Hara’s hugger-muggery about “the 1958 series of gouaches” in “Growth and Guston,” how the “larger (in scale) and brighter forms . . . pose, stand indecisively, push each other and declaim: they are all purposefully directed and prepared to play subtle comic or mock-histrionic roles in scenes which may have the flooding delicacy of a light-jell or the density of a back-drop”).

Ah, morning becomes disjecta membra. My supposed recovery of an authentic O’Hara fragment a botch. Thumbing Poems Retrieved I find it is “merely” a speech—by “George,” that is, by Hartigan’s nom de brosse—out of O’Hara’s “Grace and George, An Eclogue.” Opening:

Grace and George are showing themselves some scenery and history. The Alps are rising under them like escalators and their blonde hair is tossing in the waves of an advancing sea of problems which, having been faced yesterday, seem only to have grown bolder. They have a very sweet attitude toward each other as if to say, “Well here we are,” which however you will never hear that pair say, not if you listen by the hundreds.

Phooey. I’d intended to patch O’Hara’s lyrical art writing against an early rare Robert Motherwell outburst (out of the 1949 “Preliminary Notice to Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism,” in the Collected Writings), after quoting Baudelaire (“The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies”):

A weakness of modernist painting nowadays, especially prevalent in the ‘constructivist’ tradition, is inherent in taking over or inventing ‘abstract' forms insufficiently rooted in the concrete, in the world of feeling where art originates . . .

And: “True painters disdain ‘literature’ in painting. It is an error to disdain literature itself. Plainly, painting’s structure is sufficiently expressive of feelings, of feelings far more subtle and ‘true’ to our being than those representing or reinforcing anecdotes; but true poetry is no more anecdotal than painting. Perhaps the ‘plasticity’ that we painters so admire is no less than the poetry of visual relations.” Whereat Motherwell, in seeming hommage to such a disclosure lighting up within, offers a kind of prose poem:

The miners’ graveyard. Beyond, the town’s ruins, burnt sienna, pink, yellow ochre—arid and clear in the distance, as the hill towns of Italy. Here silent monuments of the past rest, in white October sun, wind sweeping from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Crystal light! Vertical personages gaping, a broken grave. Here, too, in the midst of gold and silver, there were yearnings for the word, but what confusions! Jenny Lind, the Great Patti, Mark Twain, General Tom Thumb, Uncle Tom’s Cabin companies. As with French poets, desire for the sensuous “new.” Dragged up the mountains from California in eight-span wagons, wood, to construct French baroque mansions. Glass chandeliers from Vienna. But the desert air is white, Mallarmé’s swan.

(Writ, apparently, in Virginia City, Nevada, where Motherwell’d travelled to divorce the Mexican actress María Emilia Ferreira y Moyers: source of the motifs à l’ouest?)

Hartigan quoting O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” lines—“. . . and when the pressure asphyxiates and inflames, Grace destroys / the whirling faces in their dissonant gaiety where it’s anxious, / lifted nasally to the heavens which is a carrousel grinning / and spasmodically obliterated with loaves of greasy white paint / and this becomes like love to her, is what I desire / and what you, to be able to throw something away without yawning / ‘Oh Leaves of Grass! o Sylvette! oh Basket Weavers’ Conference!’ / and thus make good our promise to destroy something but not us.” Moving, in the context of Hartigan’s notes full of floundering, uncertainty, reworking. (She quotes, too, a comment of O’Hara’s regarding “the danger of painting from experience (or observation) instead of talent of style.”)

Some late entries (The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955):

I think what I feel for is the point where the paint seems to resist me, to come from the canvas outwards instead of being “layed on.” I work slowly until things seem to become inevitable, and then it all speeds up so fast I can hardly put it down. Perhaps my sphere of interest or “subject material” could be called “façade,” the empty gesture, the dead ritual, the costume, the mask. Painting is not putting on a mask but taking it off.

[Recalling O’Hara’s insistence at the end of “In Memory of My Feelings” regarding “the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses”: “which I myself and singly must now kill / and save the serpent in their midst”?]

I am reading Flaubert’s letters . . . The one to du Camp on success seems so acute—“‘To be known’—is not my chief concern—that can give complete gratification only to very mediocre vanities. Besides, is there ever any certainty about this? Even the most widespread fame leaves one longing for more, and seldom does anyone but a fool die sure of his own reputation. Fame, therefore, can no more serve you as a gauge of your own worth than obscurity.—

I am aiming at something better—to please myself. Success seems to me a result, not a goal.”

I have been dissatisfied with my work lately. Not only don’t I work enough, but the Daisy [Aldan] & Olga [Petroff] picture see to me to be thin, and not to have enough excess in it. Flaubert says some things about this in a letter to Louise Colet—“. . . you can judge the excellence of a book by the strength of its punches and the time it takes you to recover from them. And then the excesses of the great masters! They pursue an idea to its furthermost limits. In Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac that is a question of giving a man an enema, and a whole troop of actors carrying syringes pour down the aisles of the theatre. Michelangelo’s figures have cables rather than muscles; in Rubens’s bacchanalian scenes men piss on the ground;—I think that the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all, energy. Hence, what I detest most of all in the arts, what sets me on edge, is the ingenious, the clever. This is not at all the same as bad taste, which is a good quality gone wrong. In order to have what is called bad taste, you must have a sense for poetry; whereas cleverness, on the contrary, is incompatible with genuine poetry.”

Aug. 11 [1954, at Fairfield Porter’s house in Southampton]
Frank said to-day he thought we were the opposite of the previous generation who left the distractions of the city in order to be alone with themselves & their work in the country.

On the contrary there seem to be so many diversions out here, even to lying in the sun and turning over—I think I won’t get anything done until I return to NY. Nature, if you love her very much, is infinite in her diversions.

Dec. 7 [1954]
All through the ages artists have either been pulling art all apart or putting it back to-gether again. It seems as though we I have to put it to-gether—that makes us me a classicists, I guess. It’s a sometimes unfortunate position for one of a revolutionary temperament.

One of the reasons for Cézanne’s greatness is that he not only put art all to-gether again after the impressionists, but he gave all the clues for a future tearing apart—the cubists.

Feb 9th [1955]
To make a virtue out of mediocrity seems to me a most horrific kind of daring, like a beggar showing his sores for pity and profit.

Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara