“Haply . . .”

Albert Einstein’s Desk at Princeton

A dense, granular inch or so of snow. Sleeplessness. Coleridge (out of a letter to Joseph Cottle, early April 1797): “I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician—I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend 10 years—the next 5 to the composition of the poem—and the last 5 to the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and rightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty mind of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering.” (Odd how assuredly all the earnest preparatory diligence is junked at the moment of the writing, and how coyly—“haply not unhearing”—Coleridge welcomes that “divine . . . voice” with its “predestinated garlands.”) I think of the heroics of Gustave Flaubert writing Bouvard et Pécuchet. with its Flaubert’s quip of a supposed subtitle: “On the lack of method in the sciences.” He writes to Madame Roger des Genettes (24 January 1880): “Do you know how many volumes I’ve had to absorb for my two characters? More than fifteen hundred! My pile of notes is eight inches thick. This superabundance of documents has enabled me to be free of pedantry: of that I’m sure.” “A sort of “school thyself, pedant” approach—“that thy unflawed soul make soonest speak.” (Later in the letter Flaubert admits what may be—for him—the prime raison d’être for socking oneself away in an extended bout of study, “collecting materials”: “I’ve spent two and a half months absolutely alone, like a bear in its cave, and have come through perfectly well even though seeing no one: I’ve heard no stupid remarks. Inability to tolerate human stupidity has become a sickness with me, and that word is weak.”) I recall Tim Reynolds (mid-’eighties) pointedly conjecturing what Flaubert-with-a-computer would have achieved in Bouvard et Pécuchet. Likely a “pile of notes . . . eighty inches thick” is what I think. And with the same complaint: “riddled with doubts and utterly exhausted.” (Kenneth Goldsmith, in either case, would simply bind up the notes and smugly pronounce the book complete.) William Carlos Williams, in a letter to Kenneth Burke (25 February 1947), arguing the primacy of instinct (the secularist’s “divine”):

      I do not believe you think Virgil formulated any such preliminary plan as this before beginning composition in the Aeneid. He was an alert and intelligent citizen of his times and besides a gifted poet; he saw a need (he also saw words) and must have felt a tremendous pleasure of anticipation. In composing the poem he felt an undoubted pleasure—of various sorts: sensual, sociological, historical identification, and so forth. He may, at an outside guess have indulged in a bit of logical philandering—if he found the time for it in a dull moment! But that he set down a primary scheme and followed it I can’t for a moment believe.

Brilliant, that “logical philandering”—reducing logic to the object of casual off-hours flirting, hardly serious. Williams: “The nascent instincts are the feelers into new territory—even Einstein has recently acknowledged or stated that. Deductive reasoning is in the main useless to us today or if not useless at least secondary in value.” Out of Williams’s rather giddy 1921 “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils” (a poem considerably revised some fifteen years later):

April Einstein
through the blossomy waters
rebellious, laughing
under liberty’s dead arm
has come among the daffodils
shouting
that flowers and men
were created
relatively equal.
Oldfashioned knowledge is
dead under the blossoming peachtrees.

Einstein in Berlin, in 1929, replying to a query by one George Sylvester Viereck—poet, journalist, Nazi apologist, friend of Nikola Tesla, and father of U. S. poet and Conservative nobodaddy Peter Viereck—regarding the fons et origo of Einstein’s theories, Viereck asking “How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?” Einstein:

Both. I sometimes feel I am right, but do not know it. When two expeditions of scientists went to test my theory I was convinced they would confirm my theory. I wasn’t surprised when the results confirmed my intuition, but I would have been surprised had I been wrong. I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

A bromide? Or a bromide only in any other setting? I think of Williams’s lines (Spring and All), that reverie of—

      A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent—moving at will from one thing to another—as he pleases, unbound—complete

      and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth—at least one small part of them.

Forces assuredly akin to “that divine and rightly-whispering voice” offering up, detached, its “starry and unwithering” world.

Zero = Cipher (“Noteth a place, and no thing availith . . .”)

Franz Kafka, c. 1915

Two days go “by” and any sense of an emergent arc of intent: vamoosed. Back to zero, thumbing the memory-schmutz’d Baedeker of my own godless geniza, my too-dandled word-hoard, my trappings and impingements. (Gazing at the red and white spine of An Anthology of New York Poets (1970) I recall, not Ashbery’s Audenesque “On the secret map the assassins / Cloistered . . .” nor O’Hara’s Swank-published (in a Seymour Krim-edited colloquy called “The Swinging Modern Scene”) “Ave Maria” (“sheer gravy”), but lowly Ed Sanders’s immemorial “Elm Fuck Poem”:

      in to the oily crotch
                    place dick

Et, like the scholiasts say, cetera. Undoubtedly my acquiring and reading said livre at the age of sixteen tamped down that particular piece of wadding “in to” the brain’s unfired pan . . .) Is memory, too, like Kafka’s pen, “only a seismographic pencil for the heart”? (Out of Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, newly re-released by New Directions.) Kafka (in Janouch’s hand) capable of comic book wars with God (or whatever one calls the primordial gist—“Heaven captured in a drop of water . . . distorted and blurred by our slightest movement”), that thing unnamable, apprehended only through being—a kind of perennially interrupted agon—itself. Kafka:

The fact, to which we give different names, and which we try to apprehend by various processes of thought, pervades our veins, our nerves, our senses. It is within us. For that reason perhaps it’s invisible. What we can really grasp is the darkness. God dwells in it. And this is a good thing, because without the protecting darkness we should try to overcome God. That is man’s nature. The Son dethrones the Father. So God must remain hidden in darkness. And because man cannot reach him, he attacks at least the darkness which surrounds the divine. He throws burning brands into the icy night. But the night is elastic like rubber. It throws them back. And by doing so it endures. The only darkness which passes away is that of the human spirit—the light and shadow of the drop of water.

I think of bug-eyed Tom Veitch, tongue thrust out in an adamantly “madcap” pose for the photographer (see Veitch’s biographical note in An Anthology of New York Poets: “Lately in San Francisco undergoing various love torments and the painful emergence of God in his flesh. Hi folks”)—art’s own skew ways of throwing “burning brands into the icy night.” I probably didn’t, aged sixteen, read Veitch’s tiny piece of (I assumed) faux-naïveté called “The Finest Thing”:

The finest thing in the world
Is God and his works
Oh how I marvel at them,
Oh how I cry when I
think of dying and going into
heaven and God and becoming
part of it all. Oh how
marvelous, how
nice, how lovely to be
part of all this.

Tonal fuzz in the crosshairs? Truth is, I find I do not know how to read that. And, as a result, I do not know how to read Janouch’s Kafka. Or, as a result of reading Kafka, I do not know how to read Veitch. Isn’t Kafka’s rubbery “night” sign of a temperament capable, like General Custer, of roaring with laughter, at one’s own imminent slaughter? (Making torturous the connectivum. Tom Veitch and Ron Padgett wrote a novel titled Antlers in the Treetops (1970) that begins:

Custer was the last man in his regiment to die. The story goes that, on his knees, wounded in a dozen places, his yellow curls flying in the wind, he roared with laughter. A small Indian boy bent over the dying hero, eyes wide with wonder. We watched from a distance as the boy’s steel knife flashed in the hot afternoon sun. Crimson, the flow from the scalp as it separates from the skull . . .

You must search for the loveliness of America; it is not obvious; it is scattered; but when you find it, it touches you and binds you and makes you take a great, silent oath . . .

On the back cover of Antlers in the Treetops, unsigned, presumably tongue-in-cheek: “Imagine an almost complete trace of meaning.” Read next to Kafka’s brand-deflecting night, isn’t that as good a definition of the divinity’s inexact whelming as any?) How would Kafka read something like the series of imperatives André Breton and Paul Éluard assemble under the title “The Original Judgment” in The Immaculate Conception (1930)?

      Don’t read. Look at the designs created by the spaces between the words of several lines in a book and draw inspiration from them.
      Give your hand to the others to keep.
      Don’t lie down on the ramparts.
      Take back the armor that you took off when you reached the age of discretion.
      Put order in is place, disturb the stones of the road.
. . .
      What you find belongs to you only as long as you hold out your hand.
      Lie as you bite the judges’ ermine.
      You are the pruner of your life.
. . .
      Learn to wait, with your feet in front of you. That’s the way you will soon go out, all covered up.
      Light up the perspectives of fatigue.
. . .
      When they ask to see the inside of you hand, show them the veiled planets in the sky.
. . .
      Adjust your gait to that of the storms.
      Never kill a night-bird.
      Look at the convolvulus blossom: it does not allow one to hear.
. . .
      Argue that your head, unlike a horse-chestnut, is absolutely weightless since it has not yet fallen.
      Gild with the spark the otherwise black pill of the anvil.
      Without wincing, imagine swallows.
      Write the imperishable in sand.
. . .
      Do you want to own the smallest and the most alarming book in the world? Have the stamps on your love letters bound and then weep—you have good reason to in spite of it all.
      Never wait for yourself.
      Look closely at those two houses: in one you are dead in the other you are dead.

(Translated by John Ashbery. Out of the Kenneth Koch-edited “Collaborations” issue of Locus Solus.) Sounds like Kafka. Perhaps Kafka’s pull is that of a magnet, aligning all other writing to it, invading the roundabout, leveling the field. (I think of Janouch’s reported glimpse of a Kafka drawing “covered with strange minute sketches, in which only the abstraction of movement was empathized, of tiny men running, fighting and crawling, and kneeling on the ground.”

Against Arrangement (O’Hara)

Jackson Pollock, “Blue Poles [Number 11, 1952]”

“To arrange is to fail” is what Fairfield Porter says somewhere. I keep returning to O’Hara’s line in “[Notes on Second Avenue]” insisting that the “verbal elements . . . are intended to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious”—thinking it’s wrong somehow, that “high and dry” stills the fury and slurry of making and, howsoever imprecisely, arranges a macular and “consequential” thing. It seemingly contradicts O’Hara’s earlier remark that, “To put it very gently, I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one’s ‘reward’ for this endeavor (a minor one, at that) is illness both from the inside and outside.” Put “gently”—meaning a kind of Everyman’s paraphrase of the fiercer “Second Avenue” lines O’Hara quotes just preceding:

This thoroughness whose traditions have become so reflective,
your distinction is merely a quill at the bottom of the sea
tracing forever the fabulous alarms of the mute
so that in the limpid tosses of your violet dinginess
a pus appears and lingers like a groan from the collar
of a reproachful tree whose needles are tired of howling.

Subsequent line (unquoted): “One distinguishes merely the newspapers of a sediment . . .” Containing that phrase I never fail to read as “the sentiments of the newspapers”—O’Hara cocking a fist at how thoroughly trade in the “distinct” (“a dealable-with system”) misrepresents the whole watery (flux-churned) world (that quill attempting its “precise” writing under miles of water, is it mock-styled after Eliot’s “ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”?) (“Sentiment implied, but denied”—see O’Hara’s line regarding Pollack’s Blue Poles: “It contains everything within itself, begging no quarter: a world of sentiment implied, but denied; a map of sensual freedom, fenced; a careening licentiousness, guarded by eight totems native to its origins.” Akin to what O’Hara concludes in the “Notes”: “Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words), and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it.” A refusal of demarcation beyond that enforced (“fenced”) by the word itself . . .)

O’Hara’s great predecessor Williams (“only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies”) put it thus (“Against the Weather”): “Formal patterns of all sorts represent arrests of the truth in some particular phase of its mutations, and immediately thereafter, unless they change, become mutilations.” (New Sentence recidivists, nigh two score years down the road, probably ought to heed the good Doctor.) Elsewhere (“The Basis of Faith in Art”) Williams called poetry “a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas”—without seeing the need to specify, too, the tiresome self-replicating that gets fobbed off in these States, file under “career.” O’Hara sees clearly the danger of such complacency, how it betrays the very meaning of the work itself. Writing of Franz Kline:

He personally held at bay all possibilities of self-importance, pomposity, mysticism, and cant which might have otherwise interfered with the very direct and personal relation he had to his paintings and their content. He kept himself from being publicly engulfed by his own meaning and the meanings he so well intuited in the life around him. He did not tame his work, but he thus tamed the role which he suspected so correctly society would, if allowed, impose upon him as it had on the unsuspected Pollock. One of the lessons of our own society, often as opposed to that of Europe in the very recent past, is that for the artist to keep working after initial recognition he must adopt the cleverest devices of Dickens’s Artful Dodger. Kline worked publicly to retain his studio privacy. No matter how helplessly he and those around him dissolved in laughter at one of his fantastic anecdotes, underlying it was a nostalgia and longing which reminded one of the early “idealistic” anarchists, and a melancholy recognition of mutability, self-irony singling out the irony of the specific tale.

The Artful Dodger at work: to begin a poem: “Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours, / celebrate diced excesses and sardonic, mixing pleasures, / as if proximity were staring at the margin of a plea . . .” That, and the “melancholy recognition of mutability” doused with self-irony:

You are lean, achieved, ravished, acute, light, tan,
waving, stolen, lissome in whispering, salivary in intent,
similar to the sole support of a love affair, so artful,
and loyal only to faults. I found myself equal to every . . .

Excess expenditure and squandering (opposing the vendable “astringency,” austerity being one way of “making distinct”). Williams again, niggling the fastidious Mr. Eliot with gusto and self-irony (“The Poem as a Field of Action”):

Stop a minute to emphasize our own position: It is not that of Mr. Eliot. We are making a modern bolus: That is our somewhat undistinguished burden; profusion, as, we must add in all fairness, against his distinction. His is a few poems beautifully phrased—in his longest effort thirty-five quotations in seven languages. We, let us say, are the Sermons of Launcelot Andrewes from which (in time) some selector will pick one phrase. Or say, the Upanishad that will contribute a single word!

Bolus a medicinal term, a dose, a “ball” injected to boost levels of some particular compound in the blood. Shooting up the body poetic—the bolus initially going unabsorbed, making a lump under the skin. Williams’s call for Rabelaisian profusion, unfinished—“as against a limited output”—“we Americans . . . need to build up a mass, a conglomerate maybe, containing few gems but bits of them—Brazilian brilliants—that shine of themselves, uncut as they are.” In O’Hara’s version (“Second Avenue”): “Accuracy has never envisaged itself as occurring; rather a / negligence, royal in retreating upwards of the characteristics of multitudes.”

O’Hara Notes

Frank O’Hara, c. 1961
(Photograph by John Jonas Gruen)

Still fossicking the O’Hara bibliography. To Barbara Guest, poetry editor of Partisan Review, who’d recently accepted “Ode to Joy”—with its plaintive refrain “No more dying” and its extended argument for the sheer imaginary excess “that love may live”—

the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
      under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
      like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
      who’s self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulchre at last
      that love may live

—for the upcoming issue, O’Hara’s writes (9 March 1958):

. . . I traded Mike Goldberg three poems for a painting-on-paper (“Ode to Joy,” “Ode on Lust,” and “Ode on Necrophilia”) with the agreement that he owned the originals just as I own the painting, and if one were printed it would be acknowledged, just as if I loaned the painting. Can we acknowledge this without seeming silly? . . . If the painting were borrowed by an institution similar to PR, say [the Museum of Modern Art], it would be “Lent by Frank O’Hara, NY, NY.” What could we use for the poem? “Courtesy of Michael Goldberg”? . . . It becomes quite laughable, doesn’t it? But I think it is a nice thing for us poets that someone recognize a poem’s tangibility in terms of value and would like to do it if we can. Perhaps we will some day see the chance to walk into Sidney Janis with a long poem and say, “Here you are Sidney, 550 lines and I’ll take Gorky’s The Calendars” . . . Anyhow, Larry [Rivers] (whose original idea it was) has also traded me a drawing for two poems, so we may as well get it set now. I’m quite a horse-trader, eh?

(Three years later Gorky’s The Calendars, owned by Nelson Rockefeller, is destroyed by fire in the Executive Mansion at Albany.)

Frank O’Hara, in “Helen Frankenthaler”:

One of her strengths is this very ability to risk everything on inspiration, but one feels that the work is judged afterward by a very keen and even erudite intelligence. Headlong as her moments of creation would appear to be, one also senses behind the apparent disregard for the “look” of anyone else’s painting a profound awareness of pertinent elements (to absorb or to avoid) . . .

And talk of “whether to ‘make the picture’ or ‘let it happen’”: “Each has its pitfall, the one dry formalism, the other a complete mess. I do not know that one area of risk is greater than another, and doubtless the strong temperament finds that no decision can be made . . .” Which sounds like O’Hara’s own headlong and stymied vacillatory frieze: “I am guarding it from mess and measure.” Turns out O’Hara’s writing the Frankenthaler piece with difficulty, puts it off and writes “Hôtel Transylvanie”—dated 12 December 1959, and, incredibly enough, included in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (indicating the unsettled pitch and flux of that volume’s contents)—sending it, too, along to Frankenthaler in a letter dated 18 December 1959: “Here is a footnote to your catalog—I wrote it out of frustration at not being able to get on with the piece about you, while listening to Manon, too . . . Most of it comes from the gambling scene in the 4th act (and apparently a few other things on my mind too) . . .” Isn’t some of O’Hara’s thinking about Frankenthaler leaking into “Hôtel Transylvanie” itself?

          you will always live in a jealous society of accident
you will never know how beautiful you are or how beautiful
the other is, you will continue to refuse to die for yourself
and they will know as they listen with excessive pleasure that you’re dead
and they will not mind that they have let you entertain
at the expense of the only thing you want in the world/you are amusing
as a game is amusing when someone is forced to lose as in a game I must

Summarily diffident, “lyrical to a fault.” O’Hara in “the throes of certainty” (to attempt a figure oxymoronickal and sharp). See: “you know that I am not here to fool around, that I must win or die / I expect you to do everything because it is of no consequence . . .” Or the fierce jocularity of the ending:

                                                                  I will sell the hotel and commit
an uninteresting suicide in Louisiana where it will take them a long time
to know who I am / why I came there / what and why I am and made to happen

The odd double-barrelled zeugma of “what and why I am and made to happen”—being becoming fate by means of sheer syntax.

In a letter to Ashbery dated 13 October 1959 regarding “In Favor of One’s Time” (originally carrying the convict movie monicker “Outbreak in Favor of One’s Time”), O’Hara writes:

. . . suppose I drop the “Outbreak” in the title, which I found rather melodramatic and which tends to make the gentleness of the closing anticlimactic and call it “In Favor of One’s Own Time,” or should it be simply “In Favor of One’s Time”? I tend to like One’s for some reason, but am often wrong—as you remember, Kenneth [Koch] had to talk me out of Meditations on an Emergency and into Meditations in an Emergency. Then further: suppose I make the last line [“]and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights[”] or and [same line, without “his garden.”] I like the latter less perhaps, because it is Marvell’s we are living outside and hence the poem is in favor of our own time rather than his, nicher? (as Hans Hofmann says). Or do you think the whole idea of keeping Marvell’s garden in that poem is too conceited even though it is what gave me the lines in question?

Repeating info retrievable out of the “Notes” in O’Hara’s Collected. Though, oddly, Allen quotes the Koch editorial line verbatim, identifying its source as “FOH to John Ashbery, February 1, 1961.” That O’Hara repeated the story: not impossible, not likely. (One recalls—deflatedly—how the piece originally carried the title “Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions.”) O’Hara’s “marvellous” poem:

In Favor of One’s Time

The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous
life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it’s more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it’s also pretty hard to remember life’s marvellous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it’s practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least something’s going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat

an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings
and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that’s the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we’re off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming the consciousness of itself
as sky over all, medium of finding and founding
not just resemblance but the magnetic otherness
that that that stands erect in the spirit’s glare
and waits for the joining of an opposite force’s breath

so come the winds into our lives and last
longer than despair’s sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvellous is not just a poet’s greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in our tempestuous rights

O’Hara’s undaunted “thrust”: “however exaggerated at least something’s going on.” Marvell’s “The Garden” begins: “How vainly men themselves amaze / To win the palm . . .” (O’Hara’s “athlete loves the tape”) and sees, too, how “The gods who mortal beauty chase, / Still in a tree did end their race.” O’Hara’s full tilt “tempestuous” refusal of the mind’s sere reductions (Marvell’s “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade”), every force conjoined / opposed by its windy counterforce.

Arshile Gorky, “The Calendars,” 1946-7

O’Hara’s Reverdy

Pierre Reverdy, 1889-1960

O’Hara and Reverdy. “My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” And: “I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it.” Lines that likely pushed any number of O’Hara devotees off in search of the work of the poet who wrote “le poète est bien l’homme le plus englué de tous ceux qui peuvent être sur la terre, dans la pâte épaisse de la vie” (roughly: “the poet, of all earth’s beings, is the one most stuck in the thick slurry of life”). See O’Hara’s somewhat balder, and eventually squelched “Poetry is life to me.” After O’Hara’s death, a few rather diffident-acting translations (of works by René Char, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Rilke—along with Reverdy) appeared here and there. I seem to recall some announcement of an eventual volume of O’Hara’s “translations and collaborations” (though where, or by whom, I do not know). It isn’t exactly clear what audience O’Hara himself sought for the works. In a letter to Poetry magazine editor Karl Shapiro (13 August 1954) he writes:

I wonder if these poems seem to have that “translation” quality you remarked to me about in the past? During the last year I’ve spent a lot of time translating in an attempt to clarify my ideas of specifically American diction so that I’d be sure that what I sound like would be what I think the English language is, but who knows? Maybe I just confused things further. —But I have some translations from Hölderlin, Pierre Reverdy, René Char and Jean Genet, if you’re interested in them.

Countering the offhand offer to Shapiro: in a letter to Mortimer Guiney (19 February 1962) O’Hara suggests—regarding the translations of Reverdy in particular—that he “only did them to get close to the poems rather than to put them into English.” In that letter, too, he points to Reverdy’s origin and pull:

John Ashbery drew my attention to Reverdy’s poetry about ten years ago—we were both very excited by his work and I, at least, very influenced by it . . . You will find, though, in a poem written later [“A Step Away from Them”] a reference to how important this was to me . . . It seems to me . . . that . . . I at least for a time was taken over by that lovely quality of walking-along-the-street-conscious-of-moment-by-moment, in some of Reverdy’s poems . . .

Here’s O’Hara’s rendering of Reverdy’s “Pour le moment”—out of the Bill Berkson-edited Best & Company (1969):

Just for Now

Life it’s simple it’s great
The clear sun rings a sweet noise
The song of the bells has died away
The morning passes the light all through
My head is a re-flooded shell
And the chamber I inhabit is finally cleared

A lone ray suffices
A single peal of laughter
My joy which shakes the house
Restrains those who wish to die
With the very notes of its song

I sing false
Ah but isn’t it droll
My mouth wide to all the winds
Launches everywhere its mad notes
Which depart I don’t know how
To fly towards the ears of others

Listen I’m not crazy
I’m laughing at the foot of the stairway
Before the great wide open door
In the squandered sunshine
At the wall midst the vines the greens
And my arms are stretched towards you

It’s today that I love you

The original:

Pour le moment

La vie est simple et gaie
Le soleil clair tinte avec un bruit doux
Le son des cloches s’est calmé
Ce matin la lumière traverse tout
Ma tête est une rampe allumée
Et la chambre où j’habite est enfin éclairée

Un seul rayon suffit
Un seul éclat de rire
Ma joie qui secoue la maison
Retient ceux qui voudraient mourir
Par les notes de sa chanson

Je chante faux
Ah que c’est drôle
Ma bouche ouverte à tous les vents
Lance partout des notes folles
Qui sortent je ne sais comment
Pour voler vers d’autres oreilles
Entendez je ne suis pas fou
Je ris au bas de l’escalier
Devant la porte grande ouverte
Dans le soleil éparpillé
Au mur parmi la vigne verte
Et mes bras sont tendus vers vous

C’est aujourd’hui que je vous aime

Some odd choices (“a re-flooded shell” for “une rampe allumée” [literally, “a lit ramp”]) and some awkwardnesses (“I sing false” sings a little falsely—the French likely points to simple tunelessness—and “At the wall midst the vines the greens” sounds “off”—the archaic “midst” troubling the attempt at “specifically American diction”). Some felicities: “My mouth wide to all the winds / Launches everywhere its mad notes” is perfect, its momentary velocity mimicking Reverdy (who’s long seemed to me to scuttle and pause, pause and scoot, making difficult any rendering). And: “the squandered sunshine” for “le soleil éparpillé.” Literally, éparpillé points to dispersal, scattering, without the defeated moralism of squandering’s expenditure. I’d argue, here, for squandering’s rage toward restraint (“Retient ceux qui voudraient mourir”): that necessity for momentary joy, “just for now.” Another O’Hara Reverdy, out of the Chicago Review (XXVI / 1, 1974):

Outside

Mask that weeps between two tree branches
A carnival evening is quenching
tears that were streaming from its stony eyelids
tears from laughing and from bitterness and from regrets

Midnight
it’s all retouched
A new day begins
A drunkard comes to
Tells his story to the doorways on the street
Sad story
With him a morning light

It’s raining and your eyelids glitter
The sneezing trees sprinkle the pavement
And by the caves of your nose I watch the moon pass over

The streak of clouds races on the faded sky
To all those who cling against lamp posts
The illusion will be sweet

And dear your austere face
Mask
Smiles thinking of the dismal morrow

Passing along the clacking pavement
Avoiding the street where shadows grow thick
High up a light gleams
It’s so tranquil
The lodging that draws you on and awaits you where it is
The night doesn’t care about anything
          But the sky
Perhaps it’s an empty apartment for you

In Reverdy’s “Bloc-Notes et Agenda” one finds the sentence: “Le mépris de la mort ne va pas sans quelque mépris de la vie” (roughly: “Contempt of death is not without some contempt for life”). Reverdy saying yes. Recall O’Hara’s “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” And its overlooked sequel ensuing: “It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.”

Frank O’Hara’s “Favorite Painting in the Metropolitan”

Giovanni Bellini, “Young Woman at Her Toilet,” 1515
(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)*

Out of the John Ashbery-edited Locus Solus III-IV (1962), the “New Poetry” number, Frank O’Hara’s “Favorite Painting in the Metropolitan”:

“these are the stairs in Funny Face”

but I would like to see
the three Zenobius bits
before I die of the heat
or you die of the denim
or we fight it out without
lances in the obscure public


“I don’t think Houdon does the trick”

and I could walk through ex-
changing with you through the
exchanging universe tears
of regretless interest tears of
fun and everything being temporary
right where it seems so permanent


“when I saw you coming I forgot all
about Breughel”

no we love us still hanging
around the paintings Richard Burton
waves through de Kooning the
Wild West rides up out of the Pollock
and a Fragonard smiles no pinker
than your left ear, no bigger either


“let’s go by my place before the
movies”

I don’t really care
if I have a standard or not
or a backless coat of mail
since I never intend to back
up or out of this
whether not is something


“but I think there’s a lot of sin
going on”

a long wait in the lists
and the full Courbets like
snow falling over piles of shit
such sadness, you love all
the Annunciations you are feeling
very Sunday take axe to palm


“they weren’t just Madonnas, they
were skies!”

so if we take it all down
and put it all up again differently
it will be the same elsewhere
changed as, if we changed we would
hate each other so we don’t change
each other or others would love us


“oh shit! a run”

I see the Bellini mirror and this
time you follow me seeing me in it
first, the perfect image of my
existence with the sky above
me which has never frowned on me
in any dream of your knowledge

Minor differences occur in the version printed in O’Hara’s Collected Poems (1971)—some evening-up of line lengths in the quoted material, a couple of nonsensical capitalizations (“But” in “but I would like” and “If” in “If I have a standard”). Donald Allen notes: “Dated July 31, 1961, in MS x107, from which the line divisions have been restored. First published in Locus Solus 3-4, winter 1962.” Of note, then, the (unabashedly and extendedly complaining) lines out of O’Hara’s 11 April 1962 letter to John Ashbery quoted by compiler Alexander Smith, Jr. in Frank O’Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1979):

. . . how come you set up [the poem] like that, since it would obviously have fit correctly on the page with the simultaneous arrangement of stanzas and quotes, which is the way it’s supposed to read, if you just split the quotes into two lines (as I had already done for some of them in the ms.)? . . . putting the quotes between the stanzas is embarrassingly banal and precisely what I did not mean by having them in the poem at all, besides which the whole order of the stanzas is completely fucked up so the poem hardly means anything at all except like imagined connectives as in subway-john reading. For instance, stanza 1 is now stanza 4—accidentally the last stanza is still the last stanza but it is now connected with “oh shit! a run” which is hardly the same thing as having the poem end that we are going back to his place before the movies and / or / because we both feel so enthusiastic about his always having imagined my childhood as being like the infant in that Bellini—not that I might not have wanted the effects that do occur accidentally on some other occasion, but I didn’t want them here. Okay, end of complaint, I’m sure that it was the typesetter’s fault—it’s just that I don’t really mind mistakes because anyone can usually tell they are mistakes and get the right thing anyway, but in this case it seems as if someone just decided they liked the stanzas better that way than the way I intended and went ahead and did them that way . . .

(I detect a hint of Stein-talk eking in . . .) The “Favorite Painting in the Metropolitan” manuscript (reproduced in Frank O’Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography) makes O’Hara’s two-column design and intent unmistakable: simultaneity and feint, the sparring reciprocity of exchange, the grand impermanence of everything.

Frank O’Hara’s Manuscript of “Favorite Painting in the Metropolitan”

Is it here that Ashbery’s own “Litany” (“The two columns of ‘Litany’ are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues”) finds its beginnings? Undoubtedly a ready hazard lies in the pursuit of any ghost, and O’Hara’s lithe protean slip is nigh ubiquitous in some “environs.” Thumbing the pages of Ashbery’s “Litany” though, isn’t a fleeting O’Hara caught just there where one of the monologists pauses, so that one is able to tune in to the second, saying clearly:

No one said it would turn out this way
But of course, no one knew, and now most of them
Are dead.
                    One, however, still looms,
Billboard-size in the picaresque
Night sky of eleven years ago. And whose
Hand is it, placed comically against your throat,
Emerging from a checkered cuff? Because a long time ago
You were promised safe-conduct
From a brief, mild agony
To these not-uninteresting pangs of birth
And so, and so, a landscape always seen through black lace
Became this institution
For you, inflected, as we shall see,
From time to time by discreet nautical allusions
And shreds of decor, to amount
To these handfuls and no other: a reminder
To keep it soft and straight forever as long
As no other pick up your ringing phone.

The “eleven years” (Ashbery likely wrote “Litany” c. 1977—he performed part of it with Ann Lauterbach in Cincinnati in 1978—O’Hara died 25 July 1966), the Pasternakian “safe-conduct,” the “nautical allusions,” the ringing telephone. The world shimmers with any ghost pursued.

* Though Bellini’s terrific “Young Woman at Her Toilet” might seem to fit O’Hara’s “Bellini mirror” reference, I can’t with any certainty put it “at” the Metropolitan mid-summer 1961. Meaning I remain wholly in ignorance regarding the identity of O’Hara’s “Favorite Painting in the Metropolitan.”

O’Hara Bibliography (Stray Notes)

Larry Rivers, “O’Hara Nude with Boots,” 1954

“. . . allowing for lies and exaggerations . . .”

The original of the “Statement” for The New American Poetry: 1945-1960—the one beginning “I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it”—opened with a rare O’Hara clunker: “Poetry is life to me.” Whether editor Donald Allen suggested the cut, or O’Hara recovered a momentary loss of sense: aucune idée.


“. . . the wings of an extraordinary liberty”

O’Hara, editor. Donald Allen noted (in a letter to Alexander Smith, Jr., compiler of Frank O’Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography, dated 18 July 1977): “. . . Frank was responsible for including Edward Field, whom he had known in the early and middle fifties . . . [and he] also suggested certain poems, “Fresh Air” [by Kenneth Koch] for example. One Sunday morning in the winter of [1959-60], he dropped by while I was pasting up the final dummy . . . I was thinking of cutting some poems to reduce what seemed like an enormous size, including his ‘Ode to Mike G[oldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)]’; but he declared that it was his ‘greatest’ poem and I’ve been very glad even since that I left it in.”


“. . . strolling through the noisy splintered glare . . .”

Frank O’Hara to Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books (18 September 1964) regarding Lunch Poems: “What color is lunch? Maybe some sort of lipsticky red? (My favorite colors are actually orange and blue.)”


“. . . long before the ubiquity of ‘provisional’ . . .”

O’Hara, procrastinator. John Bernard Myers (writing to Smith, 24 August 1976) regarding the assembling of Love Poems (Tentative Title) (Tibor de Nagy, 1965): “I waited for these poems for three or four years; Frank could never get himself to type them up. When he did give them to me I couldn’t induce him to arrange them in their proper sequence nor give me a title. I wrote ‘Love Poems (Tentative Title)’ on the first page, then arranged them so that the sequence would show the beginning of a new love, its middle period of floundering, the collapse of the affair with its attendant sadness and regret. Frank liked the arrangement and my ‘tentative’ title. And that was that. The edition was sold out within a year.” Four hundred and eighty copies.


“. . . never argue with the movies”

O’Hara, procrastinator. Writing to Ferlinghetti (8 September 1964) regarding Lunch Poems: “. . . I really admire the way you ‘put things together’ and would prefer it if you did it, with only the suggestion that maybe it should end with something like ‘Rhapsody’ or maybe something lunchy like ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour etc.’ . . . I don’t care about the chronological arrangement, though I think maybe the day of the year after each might be useful, as it is in Allen [Ginsberg]’s Reality Sandwiches . . .” Lunch Poems ends with “Fantasy.”


“. . . chatty withal . . .”

O’Hara to Henry Rago, editor of Poetry (21 October 1959): “. . . I did nine odes and they are being published by Tiber Press with silk-screen color prints by Michael Goldberg (called Odes, simply enough) in a limited edition . . . The format looks terrific and all the artists did superb prints, though I haven’t seen any of the finished copy as it won’t appear till early 1960. I am, for better or worse, quite proud of the odes and happy that they will appear together, and with Mike Goldberg’s prints since he has influenced me a lot and they will perhaps emphasize an abstract quality in my poems which is usually not noticed (because I am so chatty withal!)” Reading some of the odes at Buffalo (25 September 1964), O’Hara remarked: “I don’t exactly know why, but I wrote a series of odes . . . in 1959, because, partially, I had never dared write an ode, because I thought it was so formidable a thing to write. So then I decided that I should just write some poems and call them odes, and with a little luck it would all work out.”


A Byzantine Place

O’Hara’s Hopwood-winning manuscript of 1951. Judges: Karl Shapiro, Louis Untermeyer, Peter Viereck. O’Hara submitted it under the (required) pseudonym of “Pablo Pasternak.” Writing to Jane Freilicher (8 March 1951) amid the assembling: “I have had to go over all my oeuvre for the contest to compile a musculature for them to look at (this sentence is based on the criticism of Edith Sitwell), and a shitty site [sic] (I can’t help this, I must be going crazy with all these Schoenberg records forever dinning dinning dinning in my ears!) it looks to me. Unfortunately for my peace of mind I thought haphazardly of dividing the mess into three sections; serious poems, light poems, and plays. But alas! the three sections are all irrelevant to any concern of my own for myself, and the light poems are the most truthful, so there you are.”


The Tiny Boat of the Self Dashed by a Bigger Wave

O’Hara subsumed by history. Regarding the smallish 1953 poems—

Love

A whispering far away
heard by the poet in a bower
of flesh his limbs stir

is it sadness or the perfection
of eyes that clutches him?

And a parade of lamenting
draws near a wave of angels
he is drowning in the word

and—

Poem

Water flow strongly O clouds
O heavy coursing of my blood
which is like a powerful intellectuality
of words lost in the sea’s crashing

And then faster and faster
the saline gushes of knowledge

To be alone
is the meaning of meaning O sand
the single mouth howling
its simple moonlike pain
until it too is crushed and filled
with the all-encompassing passions
which know everything

O’Hara wrote to Larry Rivers (27 June 1953): “I was listening to a Chopin Nocturne when I woke up and suddenly I felt so unalterably great just by the contact with it that I swear I must have thought I was Homer at the edge of the sea and I suddenly thought of how words in one’s head boom and crash like the sea and do, corny as it sounds, keep ebbing before one ‘gets’ them. The most one can seize is merely a splinter of some magnificent edifice one had just apprehended, like that famous submerged cathedral. And it doesn’t matter, because one gets something at least that one didn’t have, just as the poems are slight, but mean a great deal to me.” Another way of saying: “Poetry is life to me.”

Making Do

Paul Valéry, 1871-1945

Unrelentingly, the days pour down out of the sky’s enormous ewer, ormolu’d by the sun. Oh, yeah. Days of nausea-inducing regularity, and cups. (Gratuitous insert out of Macbeth—“Two truths are told, / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme”—though prospects for theme-waxing look dim and the imperium’s caustic bloat rankles its citizenry . . .) How I love—against each conspicuous lurch of the evident, or the summary—to repeat Paul Valéry’s Je suis l’instable. It is a way of “making do.” Valéry, too, says: “Literature is the instrument neither of a whole thought nor of an organized thought.” Rather too cannily put, the most apt and lively paradox liable to turn to bromide. Compare Anselm Berrigan’s wonderful lines about walking through a former neighborhood and

              feeling as if
some gnawing vitality
is sheathed in plexiglas
around me, and there’s
the possibility of seeing
some neon reflecting
off the sheaths that
have a passing contour
similar to dust on a
contact lens mixing with
bastardized specks of light
pretending to signal an
acid recidivism, but that’s
about as far as it gets, “it”
being my impulse to be
in some state of intensity
or drive that’s rarely ever
been a true encasement
for my measure.

Out of Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011). Isn’t Berrigan’s jaunty and only quasi-tongue-in-cheek report of “inhaling a little deep / ash in order to faze / the process of clipping / sentences from my latest / variation on retuning / the old consciousness” kin to Valéry’s insisting on continual flux and variance, a poetry without ceasing? Valéry:

      The habit of long labor at poetry has accustomed me to consider all speech and all writing as work in progress that can always be taken up again and altered; and I consider work itself as having its own value, generally much superior to that which the crowd attaches only to the product. . . .
      A work is never necessarily finished, for he who made it is never complete, and the power and agility he has drawn from it confer on him just the power to improve it, and so on . . . He draws from it what is needed to efface and remake it. This is how a free artist, at least, should regard things. And he ends by considering as satisfactory only those works which have taught him something more.

And, too (did A. R. Ammons, who decreed a poem ought “keep himself stupid” read Valéry?): “Stupidity and poetry. There are subtle relations between these two categories. The category of stupidity and that of poetry.”

Edith Sitwell Notes

Edith Sitwell, c. 1927
(Photograph by Cecil Beaton)

One oughtn’t, apparently, go athwart Dame Edith. If critic F. R. Leavis, in the wake of Sitwell’s 1930 Collected Poems, hinted that “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than of poetry,” Sitwell herself seemingly kept up a retaliatory poking at Leavis for the next thirty-odd years. In the 1964 “Preface” to Sitwell’s autobiography Taken Care Of, when she talks of “the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters,” Sitwell makes certain the harangue occurs in the vicinity of Leavis’s name. More needling in the autobiography’s pages:

      It is both instructive and pleasurable to study the works of those living critics whose ears, long as they may be, seem not to have been constructed for the hearing of poetry.
      Dr. F. R. Leavis’s pronouncements are a constant pleasure to one. For one thing, he has a transcendental gift, even when he is writing sense, of making it appear to be nonsense. With this, he has a genuine, natural and cultivated gift for wincing—which, from time to time, makes him resemble a ruthless, yet graciously antiseptic young dentist discovering the root of the trouble and explaining it to the patient.

And there’s the question of Leavis’s Milton:

      But happiest of all is the moment when we read Dr. Leavis on the subject of Milton, whom he decided to show up in his magazine Scrutiny. He has decided that there is very little of interest to be found in Milton. The sound of a great deal of Milton’s poetry, too, affects Dr. Leavis much as the sound of a motor bicycle affects my less sensitive nervous system. “We find ourselves . . . flinching from the foreseen thud that comes so inevitably, and, at last, irresistibly; for reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting, of standing up against the verse-movement, or subduing it into something tolerable like sensitiveness, and in the end our resistance is worn down, we surrender at last to the inexplicable monotony of the ritual.”
      This thunderbolt is followed by a lot of the usual wincing and whimpering about “sensitiveness” and by an analysis of the following passage:

            The hasty multitude
Admiring enter’d, and the wórk some praise
And some the Architect: his hand was known
In Heav’n by many a Towred structure high,
Where Scéptr’d Angels held their résidence,
And sat as Princes . . .

      It is sad to see Milton’s great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis’s mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels.

(That line about camels dating back to a 1933 letter to Geoffrey Gorer: “Scrutiny is still affording me some innocent joy. It is all that mincing about which pleases me so much, together with the camel-like bobbing about rhythmically with which Fr. Leavis endows Milton. He makes Milton’s lines move just like a fleet of camels.”) To love, too: the indexical entry for Dr. Leavis found in Sitwell’s Selected Letters (1970):

Leavis, F. R.: makes Milton move like camels, 46; E. S. accused of plagiarizing, 47-9; as Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 48; not important enough for blurb, 168; Russian lunatic promises to bother, 185; eccentric referred to, 194; E. S. must stop teasing, 203

Odd charging of seeing with auditory heft in Sitwell, as if visibility spoke (sound like “a fleet of camels”). She quotes Bacon’s Naturall History (is it simply the “Beames” that recall Ronald Johnson?):

      “The Species of Visibles,” wrote my collateral ancestor Francis Bacon, in his Naturall History, “seem to be Emissions of Beames from the Object seen, almost like Odours, save that they are more Incorporate.”

Sitwell’s comment: “So should be the sound of poetry. And from my earliest age, these Emissions of Beames came to me from all the objects I saw.” And quotes a line out of Chaucer (“Wyf of Bathe”): “Al was this land fulfild of faëry.” As if seeing’d become a matter of capturing auditory emissaries. So, too, when quoting some several echoing lines out of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”:

Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,
Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of gold.
Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin, glitt’ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dyes,
While ev’ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene’er they wave their Wings . . .

Sitwell’s comment would seem to locate all the world’s animating force in sound: “The changes in the movement are caused . . . by an incredibly subtle and ever varying arrangement of alliteration and of vowel-schemes, these latter stretching the line, making it wave in the air, heightening it or letting it sink.” Sitwell, quoting St. Bernard:

      “The Word,” wrote St. Bernard (Cantico, Sermon 74), “has sprung in me more than once: if It has entered frequently, I have not always been conscious of Its arrival. But I have felt even the forerunning of Its entry.
      “Whence did It enter my soul? Whence did It return on leaving me? What is the place of Its entry? . . . It does not enter through the eyes, for It is not a colour; nor through the ears, for It is not a sound.”

Here Sitwell adds a drily pertinent note: “Here the experience of the saint and the poet differs. The Word, for a poet, does come as a sound. But one from far away.”

Ronald Johnson’s “Six, Alas!”

Edith Sitwell, 1887-1964

Lately alerted to Ronald Johnson’s “Six, Alas!”—a circa 1990 Chicago Review-published “toast to six women writers, hardly unknown but alike disregarded at present by fashion”—with its deftly considered applaudissements. For Edith Sitwell (“in England I was prepared for many an incomprehension, but the blank wall set up against Edith I always wanted to leap over and set up a ruckus of quotation”), Edna St. Vincent Millay (“No other poet I recall has been so acclaimed then so eclipsed. Within a decade Eliot had made her old hat”), Louise Bogan (Johnson quotes Bogan’s clipped and pertinent verdict regarding “the practice of lyric poetry”: “The chances of getting away with pure fakery within it are very small. One cannot fib—it shows, one cannot manipulate—it spoils. One cannot apply decoration from the outside; or pretend that non-feeling is feeling; or indulge in any of the lower-grade emotions, such as self-pity”), Stevie Smith (“As to technique, she was as unselfconscious as Blake about jarring sense into song. For those who never heard her, the poems can seem ungainly on the page, though when she read aloud they could stick in the ear like Tin Pan Alley”), and Lorine Niedecker (“We admired each other’s poems, though we never met. Shy, she liked it that way, for most attention, other than letters, made her too self-conscious and awkward, she was so unused to it. She’s likened by her readers to Emily Dickinson, not only for this, but for her plain wry dignity with every word.”) The sixth “alas”—Johnson’s opening is a remarkable paean to the way we lose things, alas—some unjustly, others not so—and the need for looking, and selecting:

We all like to believe, as readers, the sands of time might part to show landmark authors, shining a new horizon. It is part of our myth that straw for the bricks of Modernism might be threshed from things like Pound’s exasperation with Sordello, his fascination with Provençal poets’ reiteration of sounds, from Eliot refurbishing Donne for the pantheon, and the unwrapping of fragments of pure Sappho, forgotten, from minor Egyptian mummies. Though every time has its winds—in truth there is not an Ozimandias under every dune.

The sixth “alas” is Elizabeth Bowen, allowing Johnson both to quote the terrific opening to Death of the Heart (“That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam”—Johnson’s remark: “Indelible, that “down which swans in slow indignation swam”—a frieze with all the swans’ neck s’s held in rhythm’s sway”—critical sentence-ry mimicking what it addresses) and to defend the capacity of prose, too, to “make the stone stoney” (Shklovsky). Johnson:

Our first read-through of Shakespeare makes any defined border between poetry and prose a quicksand. Later, we might make the distinction that whereas poetry is always visible, like stepping stones on a page, prose is more like water you swim through. First from Flaubert and Joyce, then Henry James, I began to see prose might be also word by word, and phrase after phrase, actually physically enjoyable as poetry, something to read and re-read for itself. And that this might include many before and in between Sir Thomas Browne and Elizabeth Bowen.

One begins to comprehend how Johnson’s own work ranges so effortlessly along genres, visual poetry’s distinct markers to “watery” prose poems. And, noting the humble incisings of Johnson’s criticism, the deft grace of its modesty—oughtn’t “the age” have demanded more of it?

Johnson’s “Six, Alas!” sends me off to the derided (F. R. Leavis apparently opined: “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than of poetry”—a remark probably more apt for some of “our” own current Twittering marketeers) Sitwell’s “Some Notes on My Own Poetry”—Johnson calls it “a text to shove alongside Charles Olson’s Projective Verse and Louis Zukofsky’s anthology A Test of Poetry.” A sample:

      At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
      Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
      The great architect, Monsieur Le Corbusier, said that, as the result of the Machine Age, 'new organs awake in us, another diapason, a new vision.’ He said of persons listening to the sound of certain machinery that ‘the noise was so round that one believed a change in the acoustic functions was taking place.’ It was therefore necessary to find rhythmical expressions for the heightened speed of our time. . . .
      There was a great deal of opposition to the revivification of rhythmic patterns. But even the greatest of all rhythmic patterns, those not made by the hand of Man, have been misapprehended. The otherwise great mind of Bishop Burnet, who died in 1715, was so seriously disturbed by the unsymmetrical arrangement of the stars that he rebuked the Creator for His lack of technique. ‘What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made,’ he exclaimed, ‘if they had been placed in rank and order; if they had all been disposed in regular figures . . . all finished and made up into one fair piece, or great composition, according to the rules of art and symmetry.’
      We must not complain, therefore, if the patterns in the humble works of Man are not perceived immediately by the unobservant.
      Therefore, to rebukes and protests, I returned the answer, ‘God comfort thy capacity,’ and went on my way.

(“A ruckus of quotation.”) Devilishly sly stuff.

Omnidirectional Unpreparedness

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, 1783-1840

Two days of conducting myself out and back across the snowy reaches like a projectile in the night, sucking down the long skittish and cock-eyed slants of my own lights, their coldly inebriant draughts making reverie itself word-bound and prevaricatory (Williams: “Though the eye / turns inward, the mind / has spread its embrace—in / a wind that / roughs the stiff petals—”). Meaning: unpreparedness, no penny in the slot. So I am stuck here about to deliver myself up to another unconsidered round of what Kenneth Burke somewhere calls “versificationally primping”—that nowhere junket. (Horace Walpole, in a letter dated 28 June 1760, writes to cousin Henry Seymour Conway: “Now you have a whole summer to yourself, and you are as junkettaceous as my lady Northumberland. Pray, what horse-race do you go to next?”) Horse-race after horse-race. One thinks of the rabid and omnidirectional energies of the nineteenth c. naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. I love the candle-bearing beetle episode reported by John James Audubon. The violin-destroying collecting method. Out of the Ornithological Biography):

      It was summer, and the heat was so great that the windows were all open. The light of the candles attracted many insects, among which was observed a large species of Scarabæus. I caught one, and, aware of his inclination to believe only what he should himself see, I shewed him the insect, and assured him it was so strong that it would crawl on the table with the candlestick on its back. “I should like to see the experiment made, Mr. Audubon,” he replied. It was accordingly made, and the insect moved about, dragging its burden so as to make the candlestick change its position as if by magic, until coming upon the edge of the table, it dropped on the floor, took to wing, and made its escape.
      When it waxed late, I shewed him to the apartment intended for him during his stay, and endeavoured to render him comfortable, leaving him writing materials in abundance. I was indeed heartily glad to have a naturalist under my roof. We had all retired to rest. Every person I imagined was in deep slumber save myself, when of a sudden I heard a great uproar in the naturalist’s room. I got up, reached the place in a few moments, and opened the door, when, to my astonishment, I saw my guest running about the room naked, holding the handle of my favourite violin, the body of which he had battered to pieces against the walls in attempting to kill the bats which had entered by the open window, probably attracted by the insects flying around his candle. I stood amazed, but he continued jumping and running round and round, until he was fairly exhausted, when he begged me to procure one of the animals for him, as he felt convinced they belonged to “a new species.” Although I was convinced of the contrary, I took up the bow of my demolished Cremona, and administering a smart tap to each of the bats as it came up, soon got specimens enough . . .

By my lights, offertory enough to saddle up (or wing out), and make my escape.

“In pulses, in strokes . . .”

George Santayana, 1863-1952

Doodling. Somewhere William Gass says “and” is a “sunderer”: any conjunct a wedge keeping distinct the objects it attempts to join. “And then went down to the ship”: Pound beginning the Cantos with a temporal rip. Pulling the long adhesive strip of the poem down off the expanses of confusio, that ongoing continuum of aimless voicings. (Some found within.) “Þerfor was clepid þe name of it Babel, for þer was confoundid þe lypp of all erþ.” Out of the Wycliffe Bible. “The lip of all earth.” Lip meaning “language”—recall the idiom of the sass police: “don’t give me any of your lip!”Williams’s Babel being the Great Falls of the Passaic: “The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking and my search, as I looked about, became to struggle to interpret and use this language. This is the substance of the poem.” And:

(What common language to unravel?
.     .     combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock’s
lip.)

And:

                                              I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself—
comb out the language—or succumb . . .

Hardly doodling. There’s a reply (dated “Grand Hotel, Rome, 4, I, 1941”) by George Santayana to a letter by Ezra Pound (reproduced in Machine Art and Other Writings) that may be apt. Santayana, after dismissing Pound’s doodle-covered verbiage (“vide diagram”) with a rebuke gently put for being, I suspect, merely honest (“I can’t reply to your suggestions and diagrams because I don’t understand them”) writes:

Existence comes in pulses, in strokes. I see no reason for not stopping, or for stopping, anywhere in that flux. Existence has as many centres as it happens to have, as many moments[,] feelings, assumptions, questions—all in the air and with no power over one another. But if we have time and patience to study a natural world, posited as the source and common continuum in all this existence, we assume that it has dynamic unity: otherwise from one point in it we could never justly infer or posit any other point in it. This is my argument for materialism.

One recalls, in Paterson, the “tabular account of the specimens” found in the “Artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson” that Williams places directly en face excerpts of a hectoring and condescending letter sent by Pound (“Enny how there must be / one hundred books (not / that one) that you need to / read fer yr/ mind’s sake. . . . & nif you want a readin / list ask papa—but don’t / go rushin to read a book / just cause it is mentioned / eng passang—is fraugs.”) Williams’s counter list. In manuscript, Williams specified that the excerpts “occupy a full page, as it stands—facing the page following,” that lovely “description of materials”—“Fine quicksand, reddish . . . Pyrites . . . Sandy rock, under quicksand . . . Dark red sandstone,” &c.—confronted at various depths by those doing the boring of the substratum for the well. “Existence comes in pulses, in strokes.” And Williams (adducing energies beyond the mantric usual “No ideas but in things”):

                        I see things,             .             .


—the water at this stage no lullaby but a piston,
cohabitous, scouring the stones           .

And Gass: “‘And’ is produced initially with an open mouth, the breath flowing out, but then that breath is driven up against the roof, toward the nose, even invading it before the sound is stoppered by the tongue against the teeth.”

Williams’s Stray Essays, &c.

Williams Carlos Williams, c. 1951
(Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

In the Williams number of Perspective (1953) is notice of “two new books by William Carlos Williams in 1954”:

      Mr. Williams has just signed a contract with Random House to print a 50-page book of his latest poems. This book is scheduled for early next year.
      Next summer a volume of his collected prose will be published. Its probable title: “Essays, Addresses, Criticism, Reviews—The Shorter Prose Pieces of W.C.W.”

Intent evidently narrowed (or notice inflated): Random House releases Williams’s Selected Essays in 1954, hardly a “collected prose.” In 1985, New Directions prints the James E.B. Breslin-edited Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, labeling it the initial volume in the “William Carlos Williams archive series.” Even a casual leaf-through of Emily Mitchell Wallace’s 1968 Bibliography of William Carlos Williams uncovers a goodly number of uncollected prose pieces, some nigh-entirely fugitive (see the 1937 essay called “The So-Called So-Called” in The Patroon, a magazine out of Teaneck, N.J., accompanying a “demonstration” poem titled “The Girl (With Big Breasts)”), some traceable with little difficulty (see Williams’s Villon note in the Anthony Bonner-translated Bantam paperback edition of The Complete Works of François Villon—“Published February, 1960, at 50¢; 80,000 copies printed.”) Isn’t a complete “collected prose” of Williams long overdue? Here’s one item—not scarce, but somewhat overlooked, Williams continuing the attempt to define “objective”—out of the William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson-edited Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1938):

A Note on Poetry

      The American writer, insofar as he is child of the Anglo Saxon tradition, uses a language which stems largely from Elizabethan England but which has been modified by time and the accidents of place to acquire a character differing greatly from that of present day english. For the appreciation of American poetry it is necessary that the English reader accept this language difference from the beginning.
      Its effects are discernible in many ways. Pace is one of the most important of its manifestations. This is particularly significant in versification since it is the direct forerunner of poetic form. It is by paying attention to the character of the spoken language that form is detected in its beginnings and later refined for exact use.
      By listening to the language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of his imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. Thus anything that the poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material. Anything. The commonplace, the tawdry, the sordid all have their poetic uses if the imagination can lighten them. This broadening of the choice in the materials of poetry has great modern significance; there is an older parallel to it in painting, where by dwelling upon light itself the artist has often drawn many otherwise unsightly objects into his works.
      Emotion clusters about common things, the pathetic often stimulates the imagination to new patterns—but the job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic. In my own work it has always sufficed that the object of my attention be presented without further comment. This in general might be termed the objective method. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain; it presents.
      But an image is not a poem, for that would leave the language and the form of the poem at loose ends. A poem is a whole, an object in itself, a ‘word’ with a particular meaning old or new. The whole poem, image and form, that is, constitutes a single meaning. This is the full meaning of the term ‘objective’ as I employ it.
      Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the spoken, the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination, depriving us of its greatest benefits. In the forms of new poems will lie embedded the essences of future enlightenment.

Accompanied by the poems “Peace on Earth,” “The Bull,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “The Sea-Elephant,” “Rain,” “The Botticellian Trees,” “Nantucket,” “The Red Lily,” “This Is Just to Say,” “The Yachts,” and “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper.”

Dogged

Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535-c. 475 BCE
(Painting by Johannes Moreelse, c. 1603-1634)

“Dogs, too, bark at what they do not know.” That according to Heraclitus (according to Plutarch). Crows blacking up the tree’s reaches, iniquitous flowers of the damned, refusing to bloom. Tourniquets in the limbs. Cawing foolishly. Making dog noises. (Plutarch assigned to Heraclitus, too, a remark about “the Sibyl with raving mouth” who “utters things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed,” and whose “voice carries through a thousand years because of the god [who speaks through her].” One commentary reads in part: “just as the Sibyl’s power comes not from herself but from the god, so Heraclitus’ authority is derived not from his own person or opinions but from the cosmic logos in whose name he speaks: “listen not to me but to the logos.” Jack Spicer city. The breakdown: “The point is that words are not something which in themselves are anything but Lowghosts, instead of the Logos. Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else’s head, just as memories are, various other pieces of furniture in this room that this Martian has to put the clues in . . .”

Kenneth Burke, writing to William Carlos Williams in a letter dated 14 February 1947 (opening, “Dawlink, be my valentine”): “Some years ago, I suffered from a most damnable symptom. When I read certain words, I would ‘hear’ totally different words. I recognized the word as it was, but at the same time I ‘heard’ this other one. And apparently this outlaw word would always be the same. (Though I know I had something here, I was really too frightened to encourage the dislocation by taking notes on it. Rather ‘waste’ it, I thought, and try to kill it, than ‘cultivate’ it, perhaps to my permanent confusion. But I do, in spite of my resolve, remember one such outlawry, such dissociate association: every time, in the newspaper, I read ‘industry,’ along with this word, I heard ‘insanity,’ just as clearly as though it had symptoms of the same sort: I would wake up in the night, for instance with the suddenness of a shot; some word had been spoken, and this word awoke me. And then something would occur which I can best suggest by calling it a zigzag flash of lightning. For of a sudden, spontaneously, I would remember a whole series of ‘connected’ things (things that I had never before thought of as connected, or often things I had not remembered at all, but that seemed ‘connected’ from the standpoint of this ‘key’ word that had awakened me). The zigzag might connect, for instance, something that had happened yesterday, something I had written in a review, something I had said in an argument or as a wisecrack, some hitherto unexplained response to another person, something out of my novel, something out of my childhood, etc. On these, too, I started to take notes; and then I quit because the symptom was increasing—so for months I resolutely refused to take a single note that thus occurred to me spontaneously . . .”

Out of Spicer’s “A Textbook of Poetry” (“It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, ‘The public be damned,’ by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them . . .”):

6.

      The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.

      Seeking experience for specific instances, drawing upon the pulp of the brain and the legs and the arms and the motion of the poet, making him see things that can be conveyed though their words.

      Or disbelief too. Seeking experience for specific instances. And in the gradual lack of the beautiful, the lock of the door before him, a new Eurydice, stepping up to him, punning her way through his hell.

      They won’t come through. Nothing comes through. The death

      Of every poem in every line

      The argument con-
                                          tinues.

Stupendous gaffe of the Martian commandant: “. . . things that can be conveyed though their words.” Triggering the oscillatory ruse: “conveyed through their words” and “conveyed though they’re words” in alternant survey and exam. “Define ghosts as an India-rubber eraser created to erase their own past . . .”

Incessant Flux

Great Falls, Paterson, New Jersey
(Photograph by Mark Hillringhouse)

Tired of scratching at the midden-
heap to pull out some ready
bit of usable debris or delectable
chunk of supposed commonality, I chop
green cilantro ‘coarsely’ and throw it
into a pot of canned cannellini
beans and cumin-smeared chicken, ‘expert
in home-cosmography.’ I am surrounded
by books, relics of the incessant
flux of novelty into the world,
useless imperturbables of the sweet constant
juddering . . .

The beginnings of something. Maybe. Riding along a wave of sluggardly dilatoriness and deferral, doing anything but. Reading Paterson

                                    in which a falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls—and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
                                                      unabated

—“rumor / unabated” being precisely what is found in books, hearsay crudely limned, snatches and forays “at” the world, little anticipatory nothings, din subsumed by itself. (I think of Roman Jakobson’s line in “On Realism and Art” (1921): “verisimilitude in a verbal expression or in a literary description obviously makes no sense whatever.”) Recent tendency to long to shove words—unfixed, petulant words; foot-dragging adherents to “meaning”—its obstinacy and inflexibility; suborned words; loosely clumped and vasty words—aimlessly about against the dull torrent of sense. Paterson:

      Texts mount and complicate them-
selves, lead to further texts and those
to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it.
Until the words break loose or—sadly
hold, unshaken. Unshaken! So be it. For
the made-arch holds, the water piles up debris
against it but it is unshaken.

A line out of Langland’s Piers Plowman: “The erthe quook and quashte • as hit quyke were . . .” The seemingness and pretence of making a word “break loose”—shucking off its verisimilous “quyke”—not unlike the juddering of the “erthe.” Paterson:

“The 7th December, this year, (1737) at night, was a large shock of an earthquake, accompanied with a remarkable rumbling noise; people waked in their beds, the doors flew open, bricks fell from the chimneys; the consternation was serious, but happily no great damage ensued.”

Or (out of the Marcia Nardi letter): “living (unsafe living, I mean) isn’t something one just sits back and decides about. It happens to one, in a small way, like measles; or in a big way, like a leaking boat or an earthquake . . .” Williams’s sense of the earth: source and rumor-monger, immovable movable ongoing, ceaseless (futile?) chatterer against the “din”:

And standing, shrouded there, in that din,
Earth, the chatterer, father of all
speech     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

That at the end of Book One, succeeded only by the late-added note (out of John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets) concerning the “deformed and mutilated verses . . . called Χωλίμβοι or ἴαμβοι σχάζοντεσ (lame or limping iambics)”: “Deformed verse . . . suited to deformed morality.”

“Speech is the fountain . . .”

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003
(“I am the last man alive to have heard Ezra Pound’s impersonation of Henry James.”)

Shreds of fog low to the ground. The weekend’s snow in messy retreat. A distinct sense of “nothing to say.” Or “nothing left to say.” The overweening high timbrel of the thinking helmet busted off. (Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid: “The portratour of armes was mysknaw, / All war bot Grekis tymbrallis at thai saw.”) Took by Kay Boyle’s remark c. 1932 concerning form, its lack. Reported by Williams in a letter to Boyle:

You say: “Some kind of poetic form has to be found or I’ll go crazy. I can’t go on taking what you (and others) make possible and beautiful. I think I’ve got lots to say in poetry and no, no, no form. Lousy—loose—no punch—no shape—no agony of line like the back-side or a lovely thigh or whatnot.”

Williams’s initial reply: “Precisely.” With, somewhat predictably, renewed call for a turn toward speech: “there can no longer be serious work in poetry written in ‘poetic’ diction. It is a contortion of speech to conform to a rigidity of line. It is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists undiscovered. To go back is to deny the first opportunity for invention which exists. Speech is the fountain of the line into which the pollutions of a poetic manner and inverted phrasing should never again be permitted to drain.”

Stasis and fallowness eighty years down the road. (Or, say, forty years along, measuring off the exceedingly contra-Williams oomph of Robert Grenier’s 1971 “I HATE SPEECH” declaration, breach-mark of what adherents love to call “the turn to language”—mannerist sclerosis in the making . . .) My sense of form in the current period: oddly, a thing hardly considered, viewed as inapplicable, hardly a cumbrance or a concern, simply a non-issue. The available mish-mash—organic form’s slovenly offspring stepping out with the gauds and baubles of worn-out New Sentence accessories—that’ll do. (That’ll have to do.) Lack of formal investigatory means or desires. Form second fiddling to content: replaced by evacuatory gush dependent on mere excess, replete with a newly codified abject. Isn’t there every sign of a mostly form-vacuous neo-confessionalism at work un peu partout? See, say, Ariana Reines’s tawdry narcissisms.

Williams, out of The Great American Novel (1923), that irascible and undainty spoof, earnest in its spoofing:

Bah. Words are words. Fog of words. The car runs through it. The words take up the smell of the car. Petrol. Face powder, arm pits, food-grease in the hair, foul breath, clean musk. Words. Words cannot progress. There cannot be a novel. Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them—Awu tsst grang splith gra pragh og bm—Yes, one can break them. One can make words. Progress? If I make a word I make myself into a word. Such is progress. I shall make myself into a word. One big word. One big union. Such is progress. It is a novel. I begin small and make myself into a big splurging word: I take life and make it into one big blurb. I begin at my childhood. I begin at the beginning and make one big–Bah.

Geoffrey Grigson, in a 1952 review in Poetry, called Williams’s work “poetry of the incessant ticker-tape.” (One wonders if Philip Whalen’s formulation of the poem as a “picture or graph of the mind moving” or as “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines” owes anything to Grigson’s offhand metaphor?) Williams himself, writing to Kenneth Burke (in a letter marked “Rome, March 26, 1924”), admits (and protests): “Yes, my Gr. Amer. Novel never found a beginning. It was that I must have wanted to say. And that’s how you get me, one of the ones with that in him that I am after. It’s got to be said to be read. I am trying to speak. To tell it in the only way possible, but I do want to say what there is. It is not for me merely to arrange things prettily. Oh purple anemones! (you get what I mean? I mean ‘Shit.’ But I’m through with that now. No more “shits.” It is dead, that kind of slang.)”

Williams’s enormous doubt, and doubt’s vacillatory burdensomeness. Hugh Kenner—in 1953, in “A Note on ‘The Great American Novel’”—notes how “the American language, or the part of it that interests Williams, is distinguished by a sort of amnesia:

Though their colloquial vocabularies are restricted, their syntax simple, and their speech-rhythms the reverse of Ciceronian, Americans don’t utter a gelatinous Basic English. They have rhythmic and idiomatic means of concentrating meaning in these counters, shifting the burden of the sentence with a certain laconic grace from word to word, which falsifies the unthinking novelist’s assumption that the way to extract the unuttered meanings of American experience is to assist these pidgin gropings with the fuller cadences of European prose. European prose, when it attempts to grapple with American material, yields nothing but suave cliché.

Kenner quotes the “European voice” at the beginning of Chapter XI:

      Eh bien mon vieux coco, this stuff that you have been writing today, do you mean that you are attempting to set down the American background? You will go mad. Why? Because you are trying to do nothing at all. The American background? It is Europe. It can be nothing else . . .

Kenner’s argument: “This mind”—the European one—“thinks in phrases, not in words: the upward lilt between its punctuation marks is the signature of a habit of apprehension shaped by Latin prose. A European would have imparted a more elegant rhythm to the answering sentence, which comes with Williams’ own unmistakable flatness: As far as I have gone it is accurate.”

Small fogs in retreat. “Pretense to integrity an empty shell.” Bah. A cur’s defiant intent (“nothing to say”) to avoid, at least, inaccuracy.