Machinery

“It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room.”
(Out of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships . . ., London, 1726)

One degree morning. Thinking machine’s lubricant nigh-solidified. One obvious point de repère. Williams, The Wedge (1944):

To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.
      Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

There’s Williams, too, “An Approach to the Poem” (1947), refining the note: “. . . it is a small (or large) mechanism or engine, as Saintsbury said, composed of words to do a certain job.” And adding, “as a forewarning”:

. . . it is an engine that needs continual redesigning in each period of the world so as to increase its capacity in order to refresh the world (if possible) in each period by conceiving the world anew . . .

(Hard to figure exactly what particular, if any, Saintsbury reference Williams is recalling. In a 20 June 1947 letter to Kenneth Burke, prior to attending a writers’ conference in Salt Lake City, Williams reported “reading Saintsbury’s Manual of English Prosody in preparation for bouts with [Allan] Tate who will be also at Utah—so’s not to be caught with my pants too far down on technical matters.” Saintsbury’s usage of “engine” seems mostly to mean “device”: “certainly that powerful and dangerous engine, the pause, comes into play here,” “Pope’s other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology,” &c.)

—

Machined. That ongoing reverie of some “Contrivance” by means of which “the most ignorant Person . . . with a little bodily Labour, might write Books in Philosophy, Poetry . . . without the least Assistance from Genius or Study . . .” Donc, Jonathan Swift’s writing machine in Gulliver’s Travels:

It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.

Operated: “Pupils . . . took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed . . . Six and Thirty of the Lads . . . read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes . . .”

—

Pound, out of “Machine Art” (1927-1930):

The Form

      The necessity is to keep one’s different ideas from barging into each other.
      In looking at any machine one must sort out the essential parts from the parts that merely happen to be there and which keep an assemblage of machines in more or less fortuitous relation to each other. . . .

Objections to Machines

      Objection to machines has probably disappeared from all, save a few belated crania. No machine ever interfered with a man’s personality or damaged his liberty. Machines were made to eliminate work and produce leisure. Overcrowding, bad placing, bad ventilation of work rooms, all these results of greed and ineradicable human stupidity may have done harm, but can not be blamed on the machine. Machine products have been ugly but even the parochial aesthetic knows by now that this is due to human stupidity and not to machines; the same result has occurred in handwork, painting, music, whenever the worker or artist has gone in for flummydiddle instead of proportion.

—

Beckett, out of Molloy (French, 1951 / English, 1955):

. . . I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? . . . It was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen . . .

—

Gunk in the gearing. Williams (“An Approach to the Poem”):

When the form has been completed, when it has at last flowered, it begins at once to become sclerotic and has to be broken down once more to the elements—elements, as when English first differed from Latin and Greek, as when Italian grew from Latin and Dante adopted it . . . The elements were new—opening new realms of feeling unknown to the earlier languages.
      Everything has to be broken down, not cynically, not without a deep sense of its old dignity, to get at the essential: the formal unit in its purity (that has been tied into now partially meaningless configurations by old languages) . . .

Alan Halsey’s Even if only out of

Alan Halsey, c. 2006
(Photograph by Peter Griffiths)

The initial piece—untitled, suddenly there—in Alan Halsey’s Even if only out of (Veer Books, 2011) reads:

      white persimmon
pianissimo
                white persimmon
        pianissimo
            without permission
      pianissimo
                    pianissimo
                white persimmon
    without permission
                              pianissimo
                without permission
                        pianissimo

Pure relishing of plosives and sibilants severally arrayed. Lip stretches and ear exercises for the goofy heck of it. Somewhere out beyond Gertrude Stein territory, aimless tonguing of a virelangue “without permission.” I think of Ashbery’s remark about O’Hara’s poem called “Poem” that begins “At night Chinamen jump / On Asia with a thump”—how O’Hara, “in the academic atmosphere of the late 1940s” is “amusing himself, another highly suspect activity”—and concede that the current “atmosphere”—caught among the aggressive fatuousness and terminal ironies of flarf’s knowing “humor,” a hybridity all self-consciously a-bristle with the worn-out marks of “experimentalist” doxology, and the determined excesses of Cambridge-sycophancy gibberish (to point to only three areas of earnest) may, it too, warrant the “activity.” Anything for a—O’Hara again—“sign that people do not totally regret life.” Here, in Halsey’s work, a ludic sensibility is combined with a nuanced sense of literary history, an easy-in-its-skin bookishness without idolatry, what Halsey himself calls the work of a “logoclast”—to break the too-serious word, to twit the dogmatic:

A Logoclast’s Lost Weekend

A live ideal dead
vade mecum or linger,
singer: disappointment’s
only one of the reasons

to feel discouraged.
‘He wrote against’
that is
he opposed both manner

and matter and expressed
as much in the margin.
Another showed
‘adequate charisma’

but it was after all
October. Just as
limousines to
limestone are but

vacuums to a beach
the wide sum denoting
misprinted wisdom
is less roused

than Rousseau’d.
Just as also and
without less love
his dearest said

‘Your prodigious
knowledge of
books is
incidental.’

Adherence to the trappings of the bibliographic—or faux-bibliographic. See the wonderful “Mercurialis the Younger: Fragments translated from the ‘Fortunatus’ Codex with an Exegesis” with its scholarly apparatus intact: one sequence of fragments reads:

IV

[                               ] anticipates—
[                               ] antiquates—


V

stinks of Black Sea herbs—chants
from a Thessalian hymnbook—
spends all day at the gym
watching that wrestler with the moustache—
cheeks the colour of pistachio—
the same Sibylla I [                  ]


VI

‘the One which inclines toward the One
is the One without before or after’—
Posthumus’ new treatise
comes free with a bottle of Avernus water—

The corresponding exegetical notes:

IV. The most corrupt fragment in this codex. Does it suggest that knowledge of the future would give the present the status of the distant past? M was rarely so philosophic and would have been no admirer of the Four Quartets.
V. The last words have been knifed from the MS. Would anybody censor a phrase such as ‘once loved’? An obscenity seems the likelier provocation. The ‘Black Sea herbs’ and ‘Thessalian hymnbook’ imply that Sibylla hoped to win her wrestler by spells. Perhaps these also required ‘pistachio’ make-up but there is an ambiguity: the complexion is possibly the wrestler’s.
VI. A fragment so obscure it must speak for itself. There are references in the Annales Anticyrae to Posthumus’ Lectures on Plotinus but no text survives.

Against the (presumably) invented works of Mercurialis the Younger, see Halsey’s reworkings of Martial in “Some Versions of Martial.” Gists and piths. Here’s one:

[1.3]

Go, little book.
To read your dirty bits
in Bohn’s edition
London 1860
if they don’t know Latin
the English will teach
themselves Italian.

That expertly parsing what Walter C. A. Ker renders thus:

Would you rather dwell in the shops of the Potters’ Field although, small volume, my bookcase stands empty for you? You don’t know, alas, you don’t know the superciliousness of Mistress Rome; believe me, the crowd of Mars is too clever for you. Nowhere are heard louder sneers; young men and old, even boys, have noses tilted like a rhinoceros. When you have heard a deep “Bravo,” when you are throwing kisses, up you will go, shot heavenward from a jerked blanket. But you, to avoid your master’s constant erasures, and the scoring of your playfulness by his critical pen, are eager, wanton one, to flit through the airs of heaven. Go! fly! yet you might have been safer at home.

Or see how Halsey reduces nine lines of Martial [4.89]—cringingly rendered by Ker—“Ho, there! Ho, there! . . . enough, my little book. We have now come to the very end: you still want to go on further and continue . . . &c.”—to:

Stuff it, little book. Self-love
won’t prolong your shelf-life.

Succeeding in shelving the “literary” (along with its “Ho, there!” littérateurs) right up there next to the grocery’s can of corn. (See, too, Halsey’s deft limning of the seventieth epigram of Martial’s Book X: “I’ll tell you why I’ve written so little / this year, Potitus: I spent a whole / day at a literature festival.”) A final Martial, without commentary, too tempting to relent:

[11.16]

Even Bohn translates this one
but in pussyfooting prose. I didn’t say
the gent had his ‘desires aroused’
I said he had his hand in his fly.
The girl was certainly ‘not without emotion’:
her knickers were wet. But Lucretia
did hide my book when Brutus came in
and picked it up again when Brutus went out.

Included, too, amongst much, in Halsey’s Even if only out of: ten additional pieces for the terrific Lives of the Poets. St Robert Southwell, John Aubrey, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, Laetitia Pilkington, Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood, George Meredith (“I may take strange leaps and eyeing the English public / be a Dd. Dd. Dd. difficult Box Hill donkey”), Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. Here’s the one for memoirist Laetitia Pilkington (c. 1709-1750), erstwhile wife of the Church of Ireland priest and poet Matthew Pilkington (Jonathan Swift’s report: “a little young poetical parson, who has a littler young poetical wife”):

Laetitia Pilkington

pretty pert Highness of Lillyput always a-breeding
She was taken in the fact by her own Husband
Dear Worry I could pluck the holy Furr from off his Back
I had every Day some new Story invented of me
in Poetical Stock-jobbing a distrest Noun Substantive
frolicksome Farce of no Fortune but my pen
barebit and gnawn Madam Pill-Kill-Tongue
under all the Rubbish of her Misfortune
would as soon write against as for herself

Pertinent lines out of Pilkington’s Memoirs:

      These Facts are so publickly known, that for the Evidence of them I could produce even a Cloud of Witnesses, were it necessary.
      And yet, who that beheld this Man, clad in holy Vesture at the
Altar, appearing like white-robed Innocence, with Eyes up-turned to Heaven, could believe him capable of all Manner of Crimes;

Perjury, Perjury in the highest Degree!
Cruelty, Cruelty in the sternest Degree.

He may, indeed, like Richard III prove himself by these to be a Man; who, when his Mother upbraids him with his manifold Acts of savage Tyranny, she says,

No Beast so fierce, but knows some Touch of Pity.
Rich. But I know none, and therefore am no Beast.

And, indeed Mr. Pilkington may again say with him, that he has nothing

But the plain Devil, and dissembling Looks
To back his Cause.

Oh that Ithuriel’s heav’nly temper’d Spear
Would make the Fiend in his own Shape appear,

Or pluck the holy Furr from off his Back, and let the World, for once see what the Inside of a wicked Priest is made of.

Extraordinary concocting of disparates there, nigh akin to Halsey’s own. Pound’s adage regarding “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective” keeps imposing itself in my thinking about Halsey’s work, its carefully appointed assemblings and alignings. Done with humility and empathy for the grand range of human foibles (even those of the overly-ambitious, the earnest, the corrupt) So that another Pound extract comes to importune my reading of Halsey, aptly asserting its “forméd trace”: “nothing matters but the quality / of the affection— / in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind” (Canto LXXVI). Palpable in Even if only out of.

Neologisms in America (Stray Notes)

John Ashbery, c. 2010
(Photograph by David Shankbone)

All my thinking about neologisms seems invariably to return to John Ashbery matter-of-factly reporting (in a poem titled “Qualm”) that “Warren G. Harding invented the word ‘normalcy,’ / And the lesser known ‘bloviate,’ meaning, one imagines, / To spout, to spew aimless verbiage.” Claims devilishly (humorously) inflated into likelihood, but apparently untrue. According to the OED, citing a Norwalk, Ohio newspaper, one Peter P. Low, Esq., planned to bloviate “with open throat” regarding farm taxes, that in 1845, roughly twenty years prior to poor Warren’s earthly arrival. (Though Harding did, in 1920, pluck the term “normalcy” out of mathematics—or, more likely, butcher the customary mot “normality” in announcing America’s “present need”: “not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.” Spewing, that is, “aimless verbiage” like any politico.)

I suspect that such baldly self-assured “spewing” is likely how any number of new words arrive, honking forth unanticipated, up out of the edges of sense, or of use. (When Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day makes one of the Chums of Chance say: “Think, bloviators, think!”—I like to think he’s not only regaling the lavish miasma of the American lingo in all its sempiternal “chaunge and mutabilitye,” but that he’s nodding, too, in Ashbery’s direction, if not Harding’s.)

Ashbery, with a particular ear for slang, demotic root of the new, says, too, of Harding: “He wasn’t a bad egg.” Ashbery’s 1975 poem “Mixed Feelings” is listed in the OED as a source for the lovely resurrected ’thirties slang word “nerts”: “Aw nerts, / One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.” And sure enough, in a wholly annoyed 1935 letter to Ezra Pound—who’s beginning to spout the insupportable verbiage that’ll put him in detention in St. Elizabeths—William Carlos Williams writes: “Nerts to you.”

Is it Benjamin Franklin who offers a model for American writers regarding neologisms? In a letter to David Hume (dated 27 September 1760), he seems to vacillate between nodding agreeably to some dubious Old World standard of clarity (and class) and defending a feisty New World demand for new forms:

I thank you for your friendly Admonition relating to some unusual Words in the Pamphlet. It will be of Service to me. The perjorate, and the colonize, since they are not in common use here, I give up as bad; for certainly in Writings intended for Persuasion and for general Information, one cannot be too clear, and every Expression in the least obscure is a Fault. The unshakeable too, tho’ clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new Words where we are already possss’d of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong, as it tends to change the Language; yet at the same time I cannot but wish the Usage of our Tongue permitted making new Words when we want them, by Composition of old ones whose Meanings are already well understood.

Franklin points to German and Latin precedents for compounding, and offers a terrific example: “For instance, the word inaccessible, tho’ long in use among us, is not yet, I dare say, so universally understood by our People as the Word uncomeatable would immediately be, which we are not allow’d to write.” Sign of the slipperiness of the emergent neologism: Franklin’s uncomeatable (out of William Congreve’s 1694 comedy The Double-Dealer: “My Honour is infallible and uncomatible.”) is unlisted in both Dr. Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary and the considerably revised 1773 edition, though somewhere Johnson opines that it is “a low, corrupt word.” One begins to think new words, like new styles of dress, begin with the lowly, the homely, the disjecta, and ascend. (I was once instructed to observe the odd dress and accessory quirks of the commoner prostitutes along the rue St. Denis in Paris if I deigned predict what the haute couture houses would offer the next season . . .)

Henry David Thoreau, inventor of the sound-mimicking honk (an amateur ornithologist, he added to the written record, too, the bird names veery—“A North American thrush . . . also called tawny and Wilson’s thrush” reads the OED, though every Peterson’s field guide uses Thoreau’s term—and flicker—a species of North American woodpecker)—Thoreau, too, insists on the homely origin of words in a Journal entry dated 16 October 1859. Beginning with the claim “the roots of letters are things” (predicting Williams’s later formula of “No ideas but in things”) Thoreau writes:

Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as “Americanisms.” It is the old error, which the church, the state, the school ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to tradition. A more intimate knowledge, a deeper experience, will surely originate a word. When I really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimack, shall I continue to describe it by referring to some other river no older than itself which is like it, and call it a meander? It is no more meandering than the Meander is musketaquidding. As well sing of the nightingale here as the Meander. What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufacturers? Have we not the genius to coin our own?

Thoreau’s tongue is only half in cheek. The Musketaquid being the indigenous name of the Concord, the “grass-grown” river, whence Thoreau descended toward the Merrimack and heard—and named, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)—the bloviate-loud flicker: “The wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the citizen, and when the flicker’s cackle is heard in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought little change here.”

How timid Thoreau’s call for “home manufacturers” seems, put next to William Carlos Williams’s later (1936) brash sense of America’s unstoppable lingual destiny. Reviewing a late edition of Mencken’s The American Language, he notes “the unrelenting warfare between England and the United States over a language which had burst the bounds of a narrow world and was spreading helter-skelter over a vast new continent.”

Paterson Notes 2

William Carlos Williams on Garret Mountain, Paterson, New Jersey, 1957
(Photograph by Eve Arnold)

Guy Davenport, quoting Thomas Kyd’s The Housholders Philosophie in a piece titled “The Nuclear Venus: Dr. Williams’ Attack upon Usura”:

So that offending Nature we immediately offende God, and he that offendeth arte offendeth God touching the hurt or annoyaunce of Nature; but the Vsurer offendeth Nature, for it is not naturall that money should beget or bring forth money without corruption, since Nature willeth that the corruption of one bee the generation of another; and it offendeth God because it doth not exercise the arte according as God commaunded the first man, when he saide, in the sweate of thy face thou shalt eate thy bread; and it is not artificiall that money shoulde bring forth money, as the Vsurers wold have it, which putteth the vse in the thing.

(And I think immediately of the usury of the current conceptualist charlatans, most aptly Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, who “putteth” no “vse in the thing”: it is not “artificiall” that text unworked should bring forth text . . .) I am thinking, though, of Williams’s Pound-boxing in Paterson. The lines early in the poem (Book I, 3) wherein Williams makes retort against a Poundian slight (or sally):

P. Your interest is in the bloody loam but what
I’m after is the finished product.

I. Leadership passes into empire; empire begets in-
solence; insolence brings ruin.

Editor Christopher MacGowan noting: “In a notebook in which he began the notes for his Autobiography WCW records: “Pound’s story of my being interested in the loam whereas he wanted the finished product.” Williams turns Poundian certainty against itself, points to the hazards inherent in “finish”: orthodoxy, arrogance, recklessness, contempt. Rehashing in two lines one reading of Pound’s own trajectory. I read Williams’s “I” as making argument, too, against the eventual “produce” of any literary movement, no matter what idealism accompanied its beginning. (One thinks of Jefferson’s letter of 13 November 1789 to William Stephens Smith wherein he cautions, “God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.” And, earlier, warns against the unfettered insolence of imperial control: “Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.”)

In Paterson (Book Two) Williams turns Pound’s certainty in the “finished product” against itself by rehashing Pound’s litany against usury (Canto LXV) in terms of invention, rather awkwardly mimicking its rhythms:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channel of the old swale,
the small foot-prints
of the mice under the overhanging
tufts of the bunch-grass will not
appear: without invention the line
will never again take on its ancient
divisions when the word, a supple word,
lived in it, crumbled now to chalk.

The “all / but spent” soil where “the alder does not grow” recalling the “bloody loam” of Pound’s taunt. (Williams’s talk of a “new line” making one read Pound’s “with usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear demarcation” somewhat differently—beyond mere plasticity.) Williams’s rewrite of Pound’s “With Usura” in terms of inventio registers no quarrel with Pound’s damning of usurious practices—see Williams’s interjected excerpts in Paterson of various Social Credit materials:

      The Federal Reserve System is a private enterprise . . . a private monopoly . . . (with power) . . . given to it by a spineless Congress . . . to issue and regulate all our money.

      They create money from nothing and lend it to private business (the same money over and over again at a high rate of interest), and also to the Government whenever it needs money in war and peace; for which we, the people, representing the Government (in this instance at any rate) must pay interest to the banks in the form of high taxes.

And:

      In other words, the Federal Reserve Banks constitute a Legalized National Usury System, whose Customer No. 1 is our Government, the richest country in the world. Every one of us is paying tribute to the money racketeers on every dollar we earn through hard work.

It’s hard not to see Williams’s quarrel with Pound’s glib brusqueries and traveled unerringnesses continued in the subsequent lyric plaint (at the end of Book II, 2):

Why should I move from this place
where I was born? knowing
how futile would be the search
for you in the multiplicity
of your debacle. The world spreads
for me like a flower opening—and
will close for me as might a rose—

wither and fall to the ground
and rot and be drawn up
into a flower again. But you
never wither—but blossom
all about me . . .

Or, in the live portrait of Williams working of a Sunday—

        all of a piece, alone
        in a wind that does not move the others—
        in that way: a way to spend
        a Sunday afternoon while the green bush shakes.


.         .       a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
                                                triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress

That’s Poundian lingo (“clarify / and compress”), unbegrudged, took, and of use to Williams, there indefatigably working the loam, there to “exercise the arte” honestly.

Paterson Notes 1

Plate 8, out of George Frederick Kunz’s Gems and Precious Stones of North America. (1890).
A     Pearl from common clam [Venus Mercenaria], Long Island Sound, [twice natural size].
B     “Queen Pearl,” natural size, found in 1857, near Paterson, New Jersey.
C     Right valve of mother-of-pearl shell enclosing parasitic fish [oligocottus], Coast of Western Mexico.
D     Curious pearl from Unio from Cumberland River, Tennessee.
E     Pearl showing concentric rings [magnified four diameters], from Little Miami River, Ohio.

William Carlos Williams, early in Paterson:

            Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair
            spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into
            the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run
            and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.

      In February 1857, David Hower, a poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, collected a lot of mussels from Notch Brook near the City of Paterson. He found in eating them many hard substances. At first he threw them away but at last submitted some of them to a jeweler who gave him twenty-five to thirty dollars for the lot. Later he found others. One pearl of fine lustre was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to the Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known thenceforth as the “Queen Pearl,” the finest of its sort in the world today.
      News of this sale created such excitement that search for the pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios (mussels) at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains which would have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Editor Christopher MacGowan, in notes to the 1992 revised edition, writes of the prose:

No source found. To judge by an article in the Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society of November 1956, pp. 38-39, 44, this prose conflates two stories. Jacob and John Quackenbush found and sold to Tiffany what became known as the “Queen Pearl.” The article cites The Paterson Guardian of May 1, 1857. The article goes on to tell the story of “a South Paterson citizen . . . One account names him as a poor shoemaker . . . one David Hower. Another source names him as Daniel Howell, carpenter.” Hower / Howell brought home mussels for dinner, found them tough and fried them, and while subsequently eating them bit into the 400-grain pearl—which had been ruined by “too much cooking. . . . it was, by far, the largest pearl ever found in fresh water mussels.”

Scouting about for sources, one uncovers an essentially verbatim version of Williams’s second paragraph in George Frederick Kunz’s 1890 Gems and Precious Stones of North America. Kunz:

Large and valuable Unio pearls have been obtained in New Jersey. In 1857 a pearl of fine lustre, weighing 93 grains, was found at Notch Brook, near Paterson. It became known as the “Queen Pearl,” and was sold by Tiffany & Co. to the Empress Eugenie of France for $2,500; it is to-day worth four times that amount. (See Colored Plate No. 8.) The news of this sale created such an excitement that search for pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed, often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains, which would doubtless have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Kunz’s book makes no mention of Hower / Howard. Kunz apparently presented some material out of the chapter (“Pearls”) at the 1893 meeting of the American Fisheries Society in a paper titled “On the Occurrence of Pearls in the United States, and Shall We Legislate to Preserve the Fisheries.” (The lines quoted out of Gems and Precious Stones appear in the annual Transactions of the American Fisheries Society with the added note that the “Queen Pearl” is “finer than any pearl shown at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition.”

Sleuthing in a rush. Everything in a rush. Williams (out of the “Preface”):

                              In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.

                                          (The multiple seed,
packed tight with detail, soured,
is lost in the flux and the mind,
distracted, floats off in the same
scum)

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with
numbers.

                              It is the ignorant sun
rising in the slot of
hollow suns risen, so that never in this
world will a man live well in his body
save dying—and not know himself
dying; yet that is
the design. Renews himself
thereby, in addition and subtraction,
walking up and down.

Sun up out of its usual slot. MacGowan quotes, too, cut (in the galleys) lines out of Dahlberg letter that ends the second part of Book I:

I have always abhorred busy people, being too busy to talk, to be able to sit down a few minutes the way the Brahma or the Sacred Cow sits, to put together a letter, which is a way of arranging the pieces of one’s spirit, it is just a hoax, and you ought to know that, and if you don’t you ought to spend some time finding it out, even, if you have to damn me for pointing it out to you.
      Frankly, I don’t know what you are saying when you put the past into a frozen theorem, separate and apart from the present. I know of no such past or present; I only know of Nero, of Abraham sitting underneath the terebinth, or Modigliani painting glandular physiognomies, or Socrates prattling in the Symposium, or Sherwood Anderson walking through one of those blighted and noisesome downtown sections, and answering me, as I said to him, ‘Consider with what malice this city must have been conceived.’ ‘Oh, it just happened,’ as of one kind of human continuum. Time to me is an infant’s conception, which Heraclitus so detested. Time is something you mention when you have sick nerves and cannot stand still or sit in quiet either to paint, or smile or talk or listen to somebody else. It’s an occidental fraud, in the main, and there are no people in the world so concerned as the American, who positively has no time, with the clock. It always appeared to me that it was no accident that the glum little Swiss were clock-makers, and that the inhabitants of Königsberg set their watches soon as they saw the apriori Immanuel Kant. The hatred, by the way, of the past, all human lore and poetry, is best illustrated by the modern state which always commemorates and canonizes its own murder-uses by starting a year one for the people. But enough.

A sobering tincture, like so much of Dahlberg. MacGowan reports, too, how, though Dahlberg admired WCW’s In the American Grain, he was no fan of Paterson, writing to Robert McAlmon in 1953: ‘I think his Paterson. . . is a fraud. The man is very spongy, and imagines by repeating the word rock about a hundred and thirty-five times that he can become hard or give the effect of having ophidian intellect.’” A hard judgment to expel, at points, in reading it.

Dérive, Bookish

Gustave Doré, “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” 1855

Skiff of snow, barely enough to shovel. Acceding to the earth’s usual demands. “I deryve, or bringe one thynge out of another, as water is brought whan it is brought from the spring, je deriue. Out of Lesclarcissement de la langue Francoyse (1530). How little I write “To my Contemporaries” of late. Sign of incipient laziness, pitfall of the long avid. (See Marianne Moore: “Advertising is . . . arduous, and whereas derogation has the attraction of not being extorted, devising testimonials is not so simple.”) Sign of disgruntlement thwarted by my newly burdensome politesse. (There’s rarely much to cheer in the whipping thickets of ambition. One notes only the careering ambition itself.)

Moore again: “I seem to myself an observer, an interested hack rather than an author, but am an extremist with regard to exact statement; am quoted as having said, “I write exercises in composition”; perhaps said, “I look on my verse as exercises in composition.” Too, Moore routinely quoted Pound’s Confucian ethics (out of The Great Digest): “If there be a knife of resentment in the heart or enduring rancor, the mind will not attain precision; under suspicion and fear it will not form sound judgment, nor will it, dazzled by love’s delight, nor in sorrow and anxiety, come to precisions.” Which just about covers the whole contemporary “field of cultural production,” the way mutual alliances and denials bend it into whatever shape it assumes (“precisions” thus the result of social gum . . .) Just the kind of thing that makes me haul down my Hopkins, to amble rather aimlessly through the letters to Robert Bridges:

                                                                                                            Roehampton, 10 June 1882

Dearest Bridges,—It was a needless and tedious frenzy (no, the phrase is not like Flatman’s ‘serene and rapturous joys’ to which poor Purcell had to drudge the music):* another train came up on that train’s tail, and indeed it was a dull duncery that overhung us both not to see that its being Ascot day ensured countless more trains and not fewer. There was a lovely and passionate scene (for about the space of the last trump) between me and a tallish gentleman (I daresay he was a cardsharper) in your carriage who was by way of being you; I smiled, I murmured with my lips at him, I waved farewells, but he would not give in, till with burning shame (though the whole thing was, as I say, like the duels of archangels) I saw suddenly what I was doing . . .

One soaks in the affability of taunt (“no, the phrase is not like Flatman’s”); in the way Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another”—

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading . . .

(is that, too, “about” the “field of cultural production”?) is called forth in some silly and pertinent way by “another train came up on that train’s tail”; one admires the thud irrevocability of faux-doom—dunned out by that succession of dull short u’s—in “drudge the music” and “a dull duncery . . . overhung us”—Hopkins’s friend is departing; one notes the mock erotics of the mute exertions between Hopkins and the unresponding “cardsharper,” mimicking Bridges; one applauds the shame-assuaging lightheartedness of “the duels of archangels” (another metaphor for the “field”?), Hopkins’s recovery effected by intangible alliances . . . So, the dérive, chance, bookish, avoiding, out of the contours of the now, with its untoward lolling** and insapient matchlessnesses.

* In 1684 Purcell composed an ode or song of welcome entitled On the King’s return to White-hall after his Summer’s Progress. The words are by Thomas Flatman:

From these serene and rapturous joys
A country life alone can give,
Exempt from tumult and from noise,
Where Kings forget the trouble of their reigns,
And are almost as happy as their humble swains,
        By feeling that they live . . .

** Lolling: meaning both “resting at one’s ease, lounging” and “thrusting out (the tongue).” It’s conceivable I mean lalling (“baby-speech”) . . .

“Furiously laboring at random . . .”

Marianne Moore, 1887-1972
(Photograph by Esther Bubley)

Prevaricatory in the slant fuzzy way of the sleep-boondoggled. Hours expended in the examining of sentence-ry. Marianne Moore, in a nudge against the overtly recherché (“It is true that ‘peculiar style must precede peculiar expression’ and that literary fastidiousness is for the most part, implicit in precise, brilliant thinking”): “Suggesting conversation and strengthened by etymology there is a kind of effortless compactness which precludes ornateness, a ‘fearful felicity,’ in which like the pig in the churn, imagination seems to provide its own propulsiveness.” And, in order to precisely roister the intricacy of such a stance, Moore turns to Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici wherein is promoted a kind of ineffable admirableness of restraint (“There are no Grotesques in Nature”) in the design of “Bees, Ants, and Spiders”: “Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of Nature, Whales, Elephants, Dromidaries and Camels; these, I confess, are the Colossus and majestick pieces of her hand: but in these narrow Engines there is more curious Mathematicks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth Wisdom of their Maker.” Moore’s note recalling William Carlos Williams’s remark (out of the “Introduction” to The Complete Works of Francois Villon) that “if there were the faintest feeling that Villon ever wrote to be effective, it would have destroyed the validity of what he had to say.” Williams:

Le mot juste is the ready word—it has no other significance. This is fundamental. In literature there can be no seeking for words. For a writer to so indulge himself is to tread dangerous ground.

Pertinent in a period of increasing decorousness, “daring” larks of mere vocabulary contrivance. (Making distinct: the unforeseen floody wash or exorbitant pummeling of words beyond ken versus the collector’s ostentatory ruse and hustle. I think of Bill Berkson—among others—copping precisely to such anomalous onslaughts of the unknown word:

Sometimes a word shows up in my critical prose and sometimes in poetry too: a big word that somehow shows up in the writing. I may look askance at it, unsure of what it means but certain that I’ve never used the word before, in either speech or writing. I look it up in the dictionary and, damn!, it’s just right, le mot juste. Now how did that happen? There must be an inner vocabulary monitor that knew it; I didn’t know it, except by osmosis.

One inclines toward the willing receipt part of the Keatsian bargain: not the “irritable reaching” of those seeking to pony up against possible loss, but the due welcoming of any “fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium.”) Moore: “These ‘things that are stated without being said’ are the most valuable . . . A poem is not a poem, surely, unless there is a margin of undidactic implication,—an area which the reader can make his own.” And, in reply to received huzzahs for Ezra Pound’s “intuitive mind” (“a mind that moves back and forth like sea-weed”): “We confessed to admiring instinctiveness, concentration, and tentativeness; to realizing that gusto is not incompatible with learning, and to favoring opulence in asceticism.”

Bah. I am likely beginning to offend my own clutter-y with my excess clutter. Think of Pound writing Moore, 23 November 1931: “The idea of civilization includes an occasional exchange of knowledge . . . I dont quite see you as the girl gunman holding up N. Y. licherary iniquity / but I believe you cd. be of distinctly more use . . .” I do too. I do too. Though isn’t every artist—as Williams cheekily proposes (“The Basis of Faith in Art”)—just another “rudderless nonentity furiously laboring at random whims, from among whose works, with time, a public takes the initiative to select its equally haphazard choices?”

Walking, &c.

A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001

A morning (dog walked under a sketchy Orion, bicycle slicing through the fraudulent blue-blacking of dawn) of juggling several distended anomalies. One is Coleridge’s noticing (in the Biographia) how poetry “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment, ever awake, and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement . . .” A. R. Ammons repeats the initial line in the 1967 talk “A Poem Is a Walk.” And, a couple paragraphs prior to quoting it, in the midst of a Cagean opening gambit (“I don’t know whether I can sustain myself for thirty minutes of saying I know nothing—or that I need to try, since I might prove no more than you already suspect, or, even worse, persuade you of the fact . . .”), writes:

Nothingness contains no images to focus and brighten the mind, no contrarieties to build up muscular tension: it has no place for argumentation and persuasion, comparison and contrast, classification, analysis. As nothingness is more perfectly realized, there is increasingly less (if that isn’t contradictory) to realize, less to say, less need to say. Only silence perfects silence. Only nothingness contributes to nothingness.

That “contrarieties . . . build up muscular tension” points to Blake’s proverb out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” Dialectical tension, focus and blur, accretion and wince. A whole rhythm of balances measurably unbalanced. Like walking, its regular consequent fall and catch. (Ammons: “I’m not, of course, interested in walks as such but in clarification or intensification by distraction, seeing one thing better by looking at something else.”) Focus through its lack, the spray off the wave’s curling (disintegrating, foamy) top slapped down into its trough.

William Carlos Williams, in a piece called “Speech Rhythm” (found “uncatalogued among the Viola Baxter Jordan papers” by Mike Weaver and quoted by him in the 1971 William Carlos Williams: The American Background) talks of such: “Each piece of work, rhythmic in whole, is . . . in essence an assembly of tides, waves, ripples—in short, of greater and lesser rhythmic particles regularly repeated or destroyed . . .” And: “The one thing essential to rhythm is not sound but motion, of the two kinds: forward and up and down, rapidity of motion and quality of motion.” A poem is a walk. Weaver points to the rhythmically repeated word “Walking     —” toward the end of the “Sunday in the Park” sequence in Book Two of Paterson:

Walking     —

                Thickets gather about groups of squat sand-pine,
                all but from bare rock         .         .

                —a scattering of man-high cedars (sharp cones),
                antlered sumac         .

                —roots, for the most part, writhing
                upon the surface
                                              (so close are we to ruin every
                day!)
                          searching the punk-dry rot

Walking     —

      The body is tilted slightly forward from the basic standing
      position and the weight thrown on the ball of the foot,
      while the other thigh is lifted and the leg and opposite
      arm are swung forward (fig. 6B). Various muscles, aided     .

Weaver locates the lines “The body is tilted . . .” in an article by one Beckett Howorth called “Dynamic Posture” in the 24 August 1946 number of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He quotes pertinent lines therein: “Alternating contraction and relaxation with balanced timing produce rhythm in movement and increase the capacity for sustained action . . .” And: “Correct walking is done with a smooth rhythm, the muscles contracting gently with a brief wavelike action and relaxing in the interval.” And: “The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up or down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm . . .” That recurrent “Walking     —”: six fermata’d notes, sign of a pulse, hold and proceed.

I think, too—thinking of the walk, and writing, and silence—of Kandinsky’s remarks in the 1925 Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane): “The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement—specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs.” Walking out of “the intense self-contained repose of the point.” Out of the settled, the assumed, the writ. Ammons (working off Creeley’s “Form is never more than an extension of content”?): “Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.” Somewhere in Paterson (Book Three) Williams writes:

We walk into a dream, from certainty to the unascertained, in time to see           .           from the roseate past           .           a ribbed tail deploying

                  Tra la la la la la la la la
                  La tra tra tra tra tra tra

Movement into origin, lalling, a beginning. Ammons again: “A work of art creates a world of both and many, a world of definition and indefinition. Why should we be surprised that the work of art, which over-reaches and reconciles logical paradox, is inaccessible to the methods of logical exposition? A world comes into being about which any statement, however revelatory, is a lessening.”

Michelle Disler’s [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography

Michelle Disler

Thumbing through the Sara Crangle-edited Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive, 2011), I am struck by the giddy conceptualism of “All the Laughs in One Short Story by McAlmon”:

, and crackled a laugh that came out in sharp hard spurts
      of metallic sound.
Yoland laughed harshly disdainful.
And she smiled her glistening
mechanically glamorous smile into his eyes
                  was laughing her unlubricated
laugh, steadily now – – – –
The jeer and taunt in her weird laugh – – –
                  She laughed a warmer rusty
chortle now
                  She smiled sphinxly
, and they shrilly shrieked laughter
                  – – voice was higher and more abandoned than usual. It shirieked, but rustily mechanical rather than human.
                  Their jokes could not be heard
because of the laughter,
She gave an inebriated rasp of laughter
– – caused the other girls to shriek their shrill hyena laughter again.
. . .
                 , and she merely rattled her machine laugh,
                  again to chortle dry rattling laughter
                  “I love her laugh.”
                  Her laugh is cleared of emotions.

A roughly two-page piece (here truncated by about half), put, by Crangle, into the “Essays and Commentary” section of the book. Of it, she writes:

McAlmon wrote many short stories that could be the unnamed focus of “All the laughs,” but in terms of its content, Loy’s piece bears a distinct resemblance to “The Laughing Funeral” of Post-Adolescence. “All the laughs” has a title page in Loy’s hand. Although it appears to start in medias res, this speculation is complicated by Loy’s use of a comma at the outset of the occasional line throughout. The handwritten text is formatted like a prose poem; in spite of the vagaries of Loy’s margins, every attempt has been made to preserve the integrity of her lineation.

“Giddy conceptualism” (that is, a thing designed to amuse and reveal—unlike the ennui-burdened work of the recent brute copyists): I read the piece as a kind of pointed sampling of the McAlmon story. A laughter chart. It’s likely that I am “attuned” to read it thus by my reading of Michelle Disler’s recent book, [Bond, James]: Alphabet, Anatomy, [Auto]biography (Counterpath, 2012). A book that seemingly runs Ian Fleming’s Bond novels through a series of mock-mathematical dismantlings, attempts to “solve” Bond’s overall “linear equation” by listing possible variables, and their values. See something like “Y Solve for Unnamed Variables [Bond, James]”:

y = double agent (lure) z, n
y = trees (bloody) l, k
y = red telephone (top secret) z, x
y = “Was he getting serious about this girl?” (express train) p, w
y = “We’ll get plenty of sleep in the grave” (Vegas) z, b
y = champagne (too much, not enough) z, w

Formulaic reductions. Core sampling. Closer to Loy’s stripping the laughs out of a Robert McAlmon story—a kind of Shklovskian “laying bare the device” (obnazenie priema)—is Disler’s cataloguing: “Dislikes [Bond, James]” begins

hates, displays aversion to     double-agent girlfriend     ALSO     dirty jobs, women drivers, women spies, poisonous fish, poisonous insects, poisonous plants, egomaniacs     ALSO     villains who touch his gun, sodden guns, hired guns     ALSO     peace, panic, henchmen, genital mutilation, losing at cards, restraint, flowers     ALSO     crying in double bourbons, in airport bars, cheaters, prudes, liars     ALSO     helpless women, women of privilege, women who are overly made up, unattractive women     ALSO     Barracudas     ALSO     being held hostage, vague death threats . . .

And, later: “boredom, sediment, long seductions, “pimping for England”     ALSO     kidnapping, kimonos . . .” Bond’s character found in the juxtapositions generated by the list-making. Elsewhere Disler assembles indices (“Unspecified [Bond, James]” is labeled “absurd categories, an index of” and includes such items as “Bond’s Best Most Meditative and Introspective Moment. See also Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed” and “Worst Bond. See also Best Girl; Most Ridiculous Utterance by a Girl in Bed . . .”), multiple choice problems (“1. Bond’s heart                     at the sight of her. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold / 2. Bond’s heart                     at the thought of sporting with the villain at golf. / a. hammered b. lifted c. sang d. warmed e. went cold . . .”), and ferociously revealing (of “[Bond, James],” of Ian Fleming’s writerly mannerisms, and of something of Disler’s own discerning eye) accounts:

Approximate Number of Times [Bond, James]

not quite exact, ballpark       takes cold shower 10; takes ice-cold shower 1; takes sizzling cold shower 1; takes hot shower followed by cold 2; takes hot or cold bath 2; orders Bourbon 6; orders martini 10; is drunk, hung over 2; smokes 70 cigarettes per day 1; admits doesn’t like killing in cold blood 7; smiles grimly [17?]; is in villain’s employ 3; admits he has no plan, no way out of serious trouble 2; doubts ability to defeat villain [4?]; pumps round from gun into hotel bed or other furniture [5?]; dreams 5; sleeps dreamlessly [8?]; sleeps the “shallow sleep of ghosts and demons and screams” 1; proposes to needle villain 2; proposes 2; needles villain 3; is needled by villain [6?]; is offered a woman in marriage 1; bluffs villain [56?]; appreciates villain as a worthy adversary 6; speculates villain is completely insane [8?]; shoves gun into trouser waistband 9; says breakfast is favorite meal 3; contemplates animal beauty [taut breasts, etc.] of girl [89?] . . .

Etc. A bruising kind of lark amongst the stripped down particulars. Disler’s “ballparking” allows some likely less-than-fortuitous alignments, that “[89?]” count for “contemplates animal beauty” gets assigned, too, to “loses consciousness.” One at random (for the copyists amongst us). (Disler’s epigraph reads, cheekily, after all: “‘No escape. There was only bluff.’ Ian Fleming.") And then, mid-alphabet, the contextualizing move puts Disler precisely in Bond’s own boots:

Epigraph [Bond, James]

“Bond peered through the slits in his mask. Yes, by God! Two of the thugs were standing beside the ticket man watching the throng with deadly concentration. On the far side of the road stood the black Mercedes, petrol vapour curling up from its exhaust. No escape. There was only bluff. Bond put his arm round Tracy’s neck and whispered, ‘Kiss me all the way past the ticket-table. They’re there, but I think we can make it.’
      She flung an arm over his shoulder and drew him to her. ‘How did you know that that’s what I've been waiting for?’”

“Fork Lift for Hell!”
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ian Fleming 1963

Or another:

Forgetting [BOND, James]

contingent, like acts of mastery, on           beauty, champagne, empty magazine, loaded magazine, rare blood type, her broken nose, killing in cold blood, license to kill, limits to a man’s courage     ON TOP OF     death-cure, voodoo curse, vomiting on the beach, violet hour, velvet dress drawn tightly across the breasts, the saying of unpleasant things     AS WELL AS     shark repellent, sleep of dreams, small curling waves inside the reef on a foreign shore, slight tingling of the scalp, scent in the nose of a clean sea, nightmares, non-essential parts of the body, bamboo shade along the sweltering banks, beach sand littered with bullets     ADDED TO     holiday in the sun, hypocrisy toward her, hot silence, hard sand too warm for sleep, “Why do they hate us so much,” sweeping waves of sleep, “Would you like me in white with pale blue birds flying over me,” phantom memories, manacled wrists, memory of pain, illusion of power, “pair of queens kiss[ing] the green cloth,” her glittering body, her body torn lifeless from the churning sea     OVER AND ABOVE     swirl of movement in dark glass, sass, soft mission, standing transfixed, slight flush at the temples, “the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes,” too much champagne, too many cold showers, too much blood, a terribly exciting girl, colored glass, gone soft on account of poisoned fruit, gone pale     WITH     clenched teeth, cruel eyes, unnamed curses, gun-sight ground into the coccyx, grated egg with caviar, skeleton grip, imagination above everything else     PLUS     empty window frames, expensive pine-bath essences, questions as easy as possible, the vital purpose of evil, peccadilloes, “privileged to emerge better and more virtuous men”

There is emergent here, one thinks, “after all, a place for the genuine.”

Essai sans but

Alfred Stieglitz, “Self-portrait,” 1890

Bloated yellow moon hanging cheekish and low making the pre-dawn sky look green. A car horn’s sudden low chortle, distantly unlocked. Wind-made tremolos all along the viaduct. Tremolos of tremolos. To connect beyond with. “Withness”: a William James-invented word. In 1904, predating imagism’s codified joinery: “This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation of withness between some parts of the sum total of experience and other parts.” And (1907): “The lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness.”

—

Samuel Johnson (Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides): ‘I remember I was once on a visit at the house of a lady for whom I had a high respect. There was a good deal of company in the room. When they were gone, I said to this lady, “What foolish talking have we had!” “Yes,” said she, “but while they talked, you said nothing.” I was struck with reproof. How much better is the man who does nothing. Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.’ (Partially quoted by Guy Davenport, epigraph for Every Force Evolves a Form.)

—

Stéphane Mallarmé, out of the Preface to Un Coup de Dés (1897), translated by Henry Winkfield: “The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking; versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centered: I don’t transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the intent they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude.”

—

Henri Michaux, out of “Cannabis Indica” (Light Through Darkness), talking about the hemp-seized phenomenon of proliferating words (“explaining themselves in commentaries and in commentaries of commentaries”) he calls “neotenic thinking”: “Before a thought has fulfilled itself and matured, it gives birth to a new one, and this one, scarcely born, incompletely formed, brings still another into the world, a litter of others which similarly respond to one another by means of unexpected and unseizable references, which I have not so far succeeded in rendering.” (Quoted by Jed Rasula in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (2009). Neoteny: “Through the process of neoteny a whole slew of new traits may be introduced very rapidly, thereby increasing the variation available for natural selection.”)

—

Leo Bersani: “Immediacy is an ontological error; the immediacy of sense perverts the nature of thought. The opposite of such immediacy is not ‘profound’ or non-contingent sense, but rather the moving sense of a thought continuously proposing supplements to the objects abolished by its attention.” (Quoted by Rasula.)

—

William Carlos Williams (out of the 1939 essay “Federico García Lorca”): “‘I proceed,’ Unamuno says still in the twentieth century, ‘by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without documentation, without proof, outside of modern European logic, disdainful of its methods.” A line likely gleaned out of the final “A Funeral in Madrid” chapter of John Dos Passos’s 1922 travel book, Rosinante to the Road Again): “Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the lash of strong wine have made people’s minds ingrow into the hereafter, where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying angel.” Dos Passos quotes Unamuno out of “an essay in one of the volumes published by the Residencia de Estudiantes,” adding, too, Unamuno’s

“. . . I want no other method than that of passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come as they come.

“We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls, casuists and all that.

“I’ve heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence.”

The last Dos Passos quote of Unamuno thrust by Williams, too, into the Lorca essay.

—

Williams (out of the 1947 talk, “An Approach to the Poem”): “To be men today we must emulate the past (we need not exceed it), we must take the elements, the particulars (which exist today as they existed then) and combine them today in a manner similar to the work of the past—but completely different in form—we must make anew! of old particulars.
      “And if we cannot do work comparable to theirs, in its differences as in its comprehensiveness, then we cannot say that we, as they were, are alive. Our world is not real to us.
      “But imagine what we are if we only copy them! Imagine what we are if we are so bound in our minds that we are obsessed by poetry and make no poems comparable to those of the past. If we cannot invent anew.
      “Alfred Stieglitz used to tell an effective story about this. He would say, ‘If there were two doors and over one was written, “This way to see God” and over the other, “This way to hear a lecture about God,” everyone would rush toward the second door—for the implication inherent in entering the first door would be so overwhelming that no one would dare to face them.’

—

Davenport (“Every Force Evolves a Form”): “An osprey, swooping and crying with a ‘barbaric yawp’ (both words referring to sound, speech that is not Greek and seems to be bar bar over and over, yawp, a word as old as English poetry itself for the strident or hoarse call of a bird) seemed to Walt Whitman to be daimon upbraiding him for the ‘gab and loitering.’”

“Catches in the reticulum . . .”

Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

Friday, the customary day for “vaguer gleanings.” To browse and crosshatch. To see what, unsought by thesis and specified by whim, catches in the reticulum. Grid city conjunctures, and blessures. (Wounds without stigma.) All week under the plotz’d black sky of six a.m. I toy with a sentence about how “the mind, singularly adept in its suasions and curvatures, is nevertheless like a coastline, or a cauliflower, allowing sweet mimickry tenancy in its reductions, and its accretions.” Fractal goulash. Or I finick (“to mince, to affect airs”) with a negligible “piece” under the self-defeating (though accurate) title of “Beginning with Unh,” oblivious in the vocable-rampant lurch:

Unh is one way, grunting
out the putative residue of
a minimal thinkable, a monaural
nudge at meaning. Another is
to spar with the routine
lingual faineance by using two
red leather boxing gloves, ass-
fat, to punch a way
out of the usual cul-
de-sac made by heaps
of used-up words. Unh.
Unh-unh. The two approaches
commingle to make efficacy of
any mere contingency, the clean
uppercut subsumed by a flurry
of random fisticuffs, the punch-
drunk yatter of the amnesiac
annulled by deep Okeanos steering
‘all things through all things.’
Loss itself is thus regained
by its own preternatural gain-
saying, irregular, predetermined, and lit.
Thus the nights go by.
Thus one is pitched into
the light of rebuke’s ordinary
smoldering book, discursive as Vesuvius.

No wonder my seriousness quotient is so low. (Mimic here the obligatory sass-sincerity—a difficult “strain” to reach, or repeat—of O’Hara’s lines about “wondering whether you are any good or not / and the only decision you can make is that you did it . . .”) Somewhere Marianne Moore quotes Edith Sitwell’s lovely pourquoi écrire remark: “The behaviour of the world affects our beliefs and incites the mind to tumult to speak as a Cassandra or as an elegist.” Only to follow it with Robert Frost’s “It is what every poem is about—how the spirit is to surmount the pressure upon us of the material world.” (Elsewhere Moore says Frost labels it: “—the triumph of the spirit over the materialism by which we are being smothered.”) A way of puncturing (incite, incisor) the usual massy continuum (I think of a cloud, shapeless, wholly blotting) and its way of dopily effacing—what? one’s own preternatural, heroic way of attending to it?

One style: grunt avoidance. Blasé word fervors. Vocab shrug. Skint verbal rigidity of the merely petered out. Or of the defiantly pruned. Tomas Tranströmer (in the memoir sketch Memories Look at Me (New Directions, 2011), a piece culled out of the Robin Fulton-translated The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems) talks about drawing, on rolls of brown paper, cartoon strips “consumed only by myself”—though he’d taught himself to write “at the age of five”:

But it was too slow a process. My imagination needed some speedier means of expression. I didn’t even have enough patience to draw properly. I developed a kind of shorthand sketching method with figures in violent movement: breakneck drama yet no details.

Another style: denaturing glut. See Edward Dorn’s remarks in the 1977 talk “Strumming Language”:

      To a certain extent my interest in the extreme heterogenous vocabularies of English is fanatical. I “think” I need a large rush of data coming in all the time. I like the media in that respect. I spend a lot of the day monitoring the flow of news and so forth, watching how the language is being used. But the way in which these contexts fold in on themselves and overlap and disappear at the margins and so forth is interesting, and since I myself don’t have those classical kinds of habits of writing, which have always been said to be precise times of day and constancy, I tend to float until the pressure says I have something I want to say badly enough to stop monitoring the news.

And, later (“two approaches / commingle”): “. . . one of the consequences of paying attention, perhaps inordinate attention, to the ebb and flow of language is that . . . the language tends to disappear, because that behavior, that attitude, that relationship to the language, tends to reduce the language. It’s a refining process, it tends to make the language granular, and for me recently it’s resulted in shorter and shorter piece of expression . . .” Elegy out of tumult. The fork-tongued snakes of Apollo’s temple cleaning out Cassandra’s ears (licked clean by rampant utterance itself) that she may speak, riddling disconnectedly (“breakneck drama yet no details”) of the past, of the future. Ineluctable merger of means. “Unh. / Unh-unh.”

The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Abjuring hacks and sniffles. Some notes out of The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, edited by Barry Ahearn (Wesleyan, 2003). Williams (29 January 1943), regarding the work of the “surrealistus” (here, Alain Bosquet):

He seems wordy, wanders on as I imagine most surrealistus are bound to. If you give yourself over to the unconscious you know as well as I that it’s going to be repetitious . . . Maybe a nugget will be turned up . . . We’re to suppose that the poet is born perfect—if only he can loosen the neck of his bladder and piss it out.

Later, in a 22 December 1944 letter, Williams talks of reading a piece by André Breton, “one of those rarities—something simple coming out of an insensate complexity of method”—making something of an oxymoron attempt to do the dialectical work of defining. It’s a practiced move for Williams. I am thinking of how he works to nail down the shiny mercurial blob of the writerly “fit” (socked-in and stuck like a peg in a hole and sliding off into the vacuum-hatch of its own continual departure, motility’s grease) in the essay, “The Work of Gertrude Stein”:

      Either, we have been taught to think, the mind moves in a logical sequence to a definite end which is its goal, or it will embrace movement without goal other than movement itself for an end and hail “transition” only as supreme.
      Take your choice, both resorts are an improper description of the mind in fullest play.
      If the attention could envision the whole of writing, let us say, at one time, moving over it in swift and accurate pursuit of the modern imperative at the instant when it is most to the fore, something of what actually takes place under an optimum of intelligence could be observed. It is an alertness not to let go of a possibility of movement in our fearful bedazzlement with some concrete and fixed present.

That movement stilled still moving, the present held forth in its hurtling between what’s gone and what’s arriving. It is precisely there where Williams repeatedly locates himself (hence the warnings against ga-ga experimentalism). Think of how, in “The American Background,” he writes, of the early American settlers, how “two divergent forces were steadily at work, one drawing the inhabitants back to the accustomed with its appeals to loyalty and the love of comfort, the other prodding them to face very often the tortures of the damned, working a new way into a doubtful future, calling for faith, courage and carelessness of spirit.” So Williams’s own “inner tension” and “cultural dilemma”—that of the “conflict between present reliance on the prevalent conditions of place and the overriding of an unrelated authority.” So the animus against any sign of “a cut-off and imposed culture from Europe. See Williams’s vexatious and somewhat amusing report (3 February 1943) of a patient, “a ponderous, 65 year old Englishman”:

You’ve got to hand it to them. He actually sacred me—like my father. A big, big fisted, slow speaking, red faced, H dropping Englishman from Birmingham—the town where my father was born. He came in as if the world were really his and he was destined to be tolerant of it, completely sure of himself, a bit out of breath, very polite but one of God’s own chillen. Had been a [guard] on an armored truck that takes money from one bank to another. Absolutely trustworthy, would die on the spot rather than have a penny lost. The ribs of the Empire. [Jesus!] what am I beside that magnificence. All you can do or could do would be to fuck it. I can now understand why Englishmen are buggers by nature, there’s [absolutely] nothing else to do but take out a 3 ft tool and shove it up the man’s ass. It would be like a crown on one’s head to have been connected with so much empire.

Scribbled pre-American imperium: the thing rings differently seventy years of largely immoral post-WWII adventurism along . . . Is Williams’s essential humility what is lacking in the present “age”? (22 December 1944: “It really takes a lifetime not only to do anything worth while but even to find what we want in others—one is so unsure, so tentative because of lack of [opportunity] to observe. And any decent intelligence is humble at core, too humble to want to make [too] brash an assertion in a fluid world. Finally a small amount of positive statement is possible.” Recalling, somewhat, Marianne Moore’s rarely attenuated regard for the occasion: see, say, “The Steeple-Jack”—“it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.”)

Zukofsky (5 April 1941) brooding about the writerly “demarcation between imposition and necessity” seems to preen a little toward the necessitous (pissing): “Sometime after several years—as the other day—I look thru a batch of poems and make some revisions, and then the next day maybe only one or two revisions stand up. Usually the original—if worth keeping—is the final choice. I think that’s true of most work in which a guy is not merely a writer but saying something. . .”

Williams (“[April 1943]”), revising The Wedge (“I cut the book by about twenty three pages and that is final”), obtaining fortitude and grace in chance local conditions: “I had almost to get a fever to do it—in fact I was helped by an article on gardening which said that the victory [gardeners] next year, it is hoped, will profit by their errors next year. That if you plant too much and have not the hardihood to weed out what you cannot use or that you have not the place for, the overabundance of no matter what you have growing is a WEED! Tear it up.”

Zukofsky’s odd aping of Williams (15 April 1960). After Williams suggests he “can’t do it any more”: “And as for stopping to write, I am really waiting for a time when—and that’s not hard to imagine having gone thru what we have—life, and that is the poem, will be no poorer even when poetry is not being written. Because that’s when it’s written and even literally gets written down.” Or, out of an unsent letter regarding “A” dated “Thanksgiving Day 1957”—Zukofsky echoing Williams’s “cleanliness” of technique (think of, say, Williams’s 1925 remarks on Marianne Moore’s pleasure in “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts”). Zukofsky:

      I was moved by your grasp of its poetic means: what I always want to be its means, if I have done well. That is: the clean statement—no matter what one’s personal interests, leanings, refinements, excesses, abstentions, historic subjects, and so on are at any time—that does not impose a lie on the incontrovertible fact that because the statement is clean it compels only thru the construction in its music. In this sense, I do not have to tell you, the poem has no subject but the poem.

Or, replying to Williams’s poem “Mounted as an Amazon”—originally titled “The Swivelhipped Amazon”—

She rides her hips as
it were a horse
such women

tickle me a pat answer
to philosophy
or high heels would

put them on their
cans if fol-
lowed up most women

are more pliant
come of
a far different race

—Zukofsky writes (21 May 1958):

What’s “The Swivel hipped Amazon” a preview from? Do you want it back? Gives both C. & me a good laugh. And, by the way, it’s a good clue to reading Bottom in Black Mtn. Rev.—if you read it as the product of a pliant breed not forcing any thing on one, but presenting, as much as it can, everything around a thing, without, if possible, cluttering: instead of a pat answer to philosophy, to show up how swivelhipped it is. So I proceed in prose as I do in “A”: I show & come back to it, & show something related, & come back to both . . . always (I hope) saying it’s neither the pat answer nor philosophy that makes or sees anything solid-like.

A little stretched, isn’t that, like foisting off into a hardly suspecting or appropriate comment box the besiegement of one’s own momentary obsess? Cough, snort . . .

Some Accounting

William Carlos Williams, c. 1954
(Photograph by Lisa Larsen)

Muriel Rukeyser (out of the Wendell Willkie biography / documentary poem, One Life): “All is leaf. This simplicity makes possible the greatest diversity.” Recalling Pound’s “leaf over leaf” or “ply over ply” (the base accumulating construct in all its repeatables) or the loud nod at the “Oirishman” Scotus Erigena in Canto LXXIV:

“sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
                                            “OMNIA,
all things that are are lights”

(Browsing around The Cantos, I note the final line of Canto LXXX—“sunset grand couturier”—and mutter vaguely how it nods at that of Apollinaire’s “Zone”—“soleil cou coupé”—though rather mockingly, inserting the latest finickings of “style” into Apollinaire’s primeval bloody sun-slaughter . . .) All that making me think of the work of “gussying up” versus that of “stripping down.” Bill Berkson, in reply to Bernadette Mayer’s query “Is elegance opposed to innovation?” (What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?) says, elegantly enough: “Pretty iffy.” And:

Can we name a single innovator whose innovations are of value whose work at any point lacks elegance? Well, early Cézanne (before he innovated) and a lot of Williams has no elegance whatever. In music, a lot of raw music is more elegant (country blues or Cajun) than the refined versions of the same material. Innovation being a reaction against dull flatness or vulgarized mechanical “cheap imitation” style is always the revelation of furthered elegance.

What “age” is the present? One of predominant gussying up—heaped up audacities of the unslung vocable, exfoliant empirics gerrymandered up against the presumed “dull flatness” of the empire’s previous experiments, so soon become ready-mades? (Is there exemplary poverty in the overloading of the query itself?) Is what is needed now a flinging off of such obesity of means? I keep returning to Williams’s (Berkson points to Williams’s “raw awkward flatness” with the proviso and rejoinder that “it wasn’t dull”) warning against any penchant to merely “play tiddlywinks with the syllables”:

      Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of the younger writers have forgotten that writing doesn’t mean just inventing new ways to say “So’s your Old Man.” I swear I myself can’t make out for the life of me what many of them are talking about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not find in many another.

Williams aged roughly forty-seven (c. 1930) at that salvo. He’s warning against dallyings with freighted substancelessness: “Technique is a part of it—new technique; technique is itself substance, as all artists must know; but it is the substance under that, forming that, giving it its reason for existence which must be the final answer and source of reliance.” Twenty-five or so years later: still the inaccrochable doubt, writing to Louis Zukofsky (1 April 1956): “I firmly believe that with the nutty experimentation due before long to have evaporated from our systems (necessary as it was to break down stodginess) a great dawn in soon to burst above American letters.” See, too, Berkson’s seeming fatigue (c. 1981, in a letter to Mayer) at mere rampant industry repeating the new doxy’s foibles: “I do feel my attentions need to be tricked to a new alert state for, in & then back out of writing . . . Like you once said, the accumulation method is dog-tired (I know you didn’t say dog-tired) & likewise the ‘popcorn / snapdragon’ jabber voice.” Isn’t that fatigue, too, what’s displayed in Berkson’s lines out of the “Gimme a Swig” section of “For Jim Gustafson” (Fugue State)?

There must have been a saturation of enchantment
at some point before the crafty badgers
dismantled their catch, the Actual, for
meathead determinism, pestilence futures, sub-
dular glitches, et alia. You had plenty to read,
a river slipping, sliding gently though it
every day, the first pineapple.

One is, I think long gone beyond what Williams calls—speaking of Marianne Moore’s work—“a swiftness that passes without repugnance from thing to thing.” A sense of “the Actual” beleaguered (in the present “age”) by overdetermining glut, excess harrying the clean fit (“cloud over cloud” or “steel over steel”—the muzziness of the particulars offers no quandary) of percept. Williams : “The goal is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.”

(Accounting: the new year’s offertory must needs consider at the outset one’s own likely insolvency of means.)