Notebook (Robert Hass, George Oppen, &c.)

Robert Hass

Fog, and the resultant banality of the surround. Quashed particulars. Crows in their customary muster, with its hoarse swells, its regular diminuendos. Renegade appeasements. René Char: “It is right for poetry to be indistinguishable from what is foreseen but not yet formulated.” Or Williams (The Embodiment of Knowledge): “The field of postponement is removed. To know is everywhere, teeming, at once, in anything. And it is all here in any life. Criminal perhaps, but present. Even the jazzy present has this virtue that, low as it is, it is a prediction of a new order of knowing.” “The jazzy present”: here in the wild immediacy, poking out with one’s tiny fists at the dumb carnal void. How to begin. (Or there’s Williams’s plainer Keats: “Man must give himself without complete knowledge in the world—or he will not give himself at all. That is to say he will know—in his body—nothing at all.”)

—

Dawdled through some of Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (2012). A miscellany, seemingly without the generous bravado of Hass’s 1984 Twentieth Century Pleasures. (Recall something like the opening paragraph to “Listening and Making”:

      I told a friend I was going to try to write something about prosody and he said, “Oh great.” The two-beat phrase is a very American form of terminal irony. A guy in a bar in Charlottesville turned to me once and said, loudly but confidentially, “Ahmo find me a woman and fuck her twenty ways till Sunday.” That’s also a characteristic rhythm: ahmo FIND ME a WOman / and FUCK her TWENty WAYS till SUNday. Three beats and then a more emphatic four. A woman down the bar doubled the two-beat put-down. She said, “Good luck, asshole.” Rhythms and rhythmic play make texture in our lives but they are hard to talk about and besides people don’t like them to be talked about. Another friend wrote to me about an essay of mine in which I commented at some point on a “metrical inversion” in a line from a poem by Robert Lowell. He said he liked the piece well enough, but that one phrase—that finical tic of the educated mind—had filled him with rage. I think I understand why.

The loudness of the unlettered moment quashing the “finical tic” of lettered doubt—allowing Hass to assert the “revolutionary ground” of rhythm itself, “the place where the organic rises to abolish the mechanical and where energy announces the abolition of tradition. New rhythms are new perceptions.” There’s a distrust in Hass of whatever—theoretical navel-gazing in particular—refuses to accede to desire, its immediacy, its “speech.”)

—

Out of a 1985 piece called “George Oppen: His Art” (“delivered as a talk among other talks”), a pertinent parallel, worrying an era wherein “the issue of the noun has become very difficult”:*

The work of the language poets, particularly some of the essays of Ron Silliman, has suggested a profound distrust of the mimetic idea that there is a connection between word and thing; they have suggested, in fact, that the connection between word and thing has become a sort of conspiracy among the writer, the reader, and the merchant to convince themselves that the objects of desire are real. And that the light given off by them is not a property of the mind but a property of their obtainability and that the practice of mimetic art at all is to repeat the lie of capitalist economics. Which is a profound charge, and a very similar charge is made by Robert Pinsky in his Situation of Poetry [1976] which argues that the passion of modernist poetry has turned out to be the passion of Romantic poetry, to possess the particular by using words which are always general, so that language is trying intensely to do what language doesn’t do, and that modernism has failed as a project in the way that Romanticism failed as a project by necessarily producing a body of poetry whose subject is passionate disappointment.

Which is a kind of prose redux of what is proposed in Hass’s widely known (and admired) poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” (c. 1979), with its opening: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking. / The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea . . .” and its prying at the notion, “that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Delivered—Hass is essentially an elegist, a connoisseur of regret (see the hunger for its plaint in that “thin wire of grief,” its fining tendency; see the homiletic contentment at loss in lines like “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances”)—in a tone, precisely, of “passionate disappointment.” Hass quotes the fifth poem in “Of Being Numerous,” claiming that therein one “can actually watch, as the words are laid down on the page, the process from which the perception of the thing gets born into its numinous quality as a word, an abstraction out of the thing”:

The great stone
Above the river
In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight
In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,
Which loves itself.

A noun (Hass: “The noun here is ‘1875’”) wholly without desire.

* Hass quotes (with large unmarked elisions) some of Oppen’s 25 April 1968 remarks to L. S. Dembo regarding nouns. In the original (Oppen is referring to the title of the 1934 book Discrete Series: “A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. I was attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements”):

Q.   Each imagist statement being essentially discrete from the statement that followed or preceded it?
A.   Yes, that meaning is also implicit in the word “discrete.” The poems are a series, yet each is separate, and it’s true that they are discrete in that sense; but I had in mind specifically the meaning to the mathematician—a series of empirically true terms.
Q.   In any case, the “discrete” aspect seems to be reminiscent of the cubist approach, if I’m not being farfetched—hard, sharp fragments of theme or experience joined mosaically rather than integrated organically.
A.   I’m really not sure what troubles the cubists had, but I had trouble with syntax in this undertaking and, as a matter of fact, I still have trouble with verbs. It’s not exactly trouble; I just didn’t want to put it too pretentiously. I’m really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject-matter in order to make a comment about it. It is still a principle with me, of more than poetry, to notice, to state, to lay down the substantive for its own sake. I don’t know whether that’s clear.
Q.   Please go on.
A.   A statement can be made in which the subject plays a very little part, except for argumentation; one hangs a predicate on it that is one’s comment about it. This is an approximate quotation from Hegel, who added (I like the quote very much): “Disagreement marks where the subject-matter ends. It is what the subject-matter is not.” The important thing is that if we are talking about the nature of reality, then we are not really talking about our comment about it; we are talking about the apprehension of some thing, whether it is or not, whether one can make a thing of it or not. Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.
      I realize the possibility of attacking many of the things I’m saying and I say them as a sort of act of faith. The little words that I like so much, like “tree,” “hill,” and so on, are I suppose just as much a taxonomy as the more elaborate words; they’re categories, classes, concepts, things we invent for ourselves. Nevertheless, there are certain ones without which we really are unable to exist, including the concept of humanity.
      I’m trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of whether one’s thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of experiences . . . whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid, something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word.

(What Hass used is in italics.)

Notebook (Robert Duncan, Stéphane Mallarmé, &c.)

Robert Duncan, 1919-1988

Robert Duncan to Charles Olson (Bañalbufar, Mallorca, 14 August 1955), admitting that it’s “Stevens and back of him the shadowy Mallarmé that seems to haunt my work, Keres from his world scuttering in to attend the séance of each poem.” And: “The poem anyway being not only made but heard, so that one is listening, the line comes to one, as much as one is inventing.” Scutter: To go hastily with much fuss and bustle, as from excitement or timidity. Keres: Tenebrae, the death-inflected daughters of Erebus (or Erebos, Greek Ἔρεβος, “deep darkness, shadow”) and Nyx. Duncan: out of the end of “An Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry” (1955):

                                    The joy
is a great scuttering of feathers words
                                    a whirl
up words into an airy sentence where
                                    reader
by reader accepts his mixd whether
                                    of love
face by face in his poem’s crackt mirror.

This is an owl as he flies out of himself
into the heart that reflects all owl.

Who gives his hoot of joy as he flies.

                                    Alights.

In a letter to Ellen and Warren Tallman (21 March 1961), Duncan talks (of the “Structure of Rime” series) as being composed “in the shamanistic genre, of psychic double-talk (hence, as in Egyptian texts—the importance of puns)—an art of dreaming.” And: “my medium has to be not the astral light but the languages—to let the language speak thru me) (send myself out into the language).” (See: “accepts his mixd.”) And, listing some source material: “Charles Henri Ford’s Little Anthology of the Poem in Prose, items p. 338 Mallarmé’s Demon of Analogy . . . The Mallarmé . . . most crucial.” Out of the Ford anthology (found in the 1953 New Directions in Prose & Poetry #14), the Mallarmé (with its deft positing of languge as a kind of “god-step at the margins of thought”—“Des paroles inconnues chanterent-elles sur vos levres, lambeaux maudits d’une phrase absurde?”), translated by Wallace Fowlie:

The Demon of Analogy

      Have your lips sung unknown words, plaguing bits of a ridiculous sentence?
      I left my apartment with the precise sensation of a wing gliding over the strings of an instrument, slowly moving and light, which was replaced by a voice speaking in descending tones the words “The Penultimate is dead,” in such a manner that
                                                                                                                                            The Penultimate
ended the line and
                                      Is dead
                                                      was detached most uselessly from the prophetic suspension in the void of meaning. I walked a few steps in the street and recognized in the sound nul the taut string of the musical instrument, which was forgotten and which glorious memory had beyond doubt just visited with its wing or with a palm, and touching the artfulness of mystery, I smiled and implored a different speculation from intellectual prayer. The phrase returned, powerful, released from a former fall of feather or branch, henceforth through the heard voice, until at last it was spoken alone, alive, in its own personality. (No longer satisfied with a perception), I continued reading it as the end of a line, and once, as a test, adapting it to my speech; soon pronouncing it with a silence after “Penultimate” in which I found a painful pleasure: “The Penultimate” then the string of the instrument, so taut in the oblivion over the sound nul, broke doubtless and I added in form of a prayer: “Is dead.” I didn’t cease continuing to attempt a return to favorite thoughts, alleging, for my peace of mind, that certainly penultimate is the dictionary term meaning next-to-the-last syllable of a word, and its apparition, the ill-relinquished remainder of a linguistic labor by which my noble poetic faculty daily sobs at being interrupted: the very sound and air of mendacity assumed by the haste of facile affirmation were a cause of torment. Harassed, I determined to allow words of a melancholy state to wander by themselves over my mouth, and I continued murmuring with tender intonation of sympathy: “The Penultimate is dead, is dead, is really dead, the despairing Penultimate,” believing therewith to satisfy my worry, and not without the secret hope of submerging it in the steady increase of my chant when, O terror!—with an easily deducible and nervous magic—I felt that I had, with my hand, reflected in a shop window, making the gesture of a caress descending over something, the voice itself (the first which had undoubtedly been one voice).
      But where the undeniable intervention of the supernatural is established, and the beginning of the anguish which tortures my mind, once a lord, is when I saw, raising my eyes, in the street of antiquarians where I walked instinctively, that I was in front of the shop of a lute maker, seller of old instruments hanging on the wall, and, on the floor, yellow palms and wings of ancient birds buried in the dark. I fled, a strange figure condemned probably to wear the mourning garb of the inexplicable Penultimate.

Isn’t there something to be aligned between something like Duncan’s resolve (“The Truth and Life of Myth”)—“Often I must force myself to remain responsible to the error that sticks in pride’s craw; not to erase it, but to bring it forward, to work with it, even if this flaw mar a hoped for success . . .” and Mallarmé’s determining “to allow words of a melancholy state to wander by themselves over my mouth”? Inchoate notes.

—

Marianne Moore’s quoting of Kenneth Burke (out of the 1931 Counter-Statement)—“a work may be said to have form in so far as one part leads a reader to anticipate another part and be gratified by the result”—against Charles Olson’s “projective or field composition” seems somewhat counter to Olson’s own words in “Projective Verse.” (The original remark differs slightly in Burke, and is decapitated by Moore: “Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.”) Isn’t it precisely that anticipatory sense that Olson is calling “a whole series of new recognitions”? Olson: “From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.” Or, see, too, Duncan (out of the c. 1971 “Iconographical Extensions: On Jess”), its sense of agglutinant interactings, of active gratifactory moments sustained and released:

A rhyme is a member in whose force of identity we remark—remember or anticipate—the presence of another member. In composition by field, a color does not glow in itself or grow dim, but has its glow by rhyme—a resonance that arises in the total field of the painting as it comes into that totality. The “completion” of the painting is the realization of its elements as “puns” or “rhymes.” The painter works not to conclude the elements of the painting but to set them into motion, not to bind the colors but to free them, to release the force of their interrelationships.

Inchoate notes bis.

Notebook (John Wieners, Marianne Moore, &c.)

John Wieners, c. 1997
(Photograph by Jim Dunn)

“No sign, albeit” nothing. Yesterday’s impertinence regarding John Wieners’s note to Marianne Moore (“a striving after pitch”) regarding Measure, and Moore’s apparent failure to reply—I needed only to read along a little in “the sea under the house”: The Selected Correspondence of John Wieners and Charles Olson. Wieners to Olson (27 August 1957):

Then came home & there was a letter from Marianne More: & I quote
from it for you.
                                    “I really benefit by:
                                                                                                    handwritten
                                    I have no longer any excuse       (Charles Olson)
                                    for envy. My life

                                    has been given its orders; the seasons
                                    seize

                                    the soul and the body and make mock
                                    of any dispersed effort.
also:   Spring: we salute you
            season of no bungling* (without capitals at the first of the line.”

        (she goes on)
“A (moral) sea-roll in the gait is better for seamen than for poets but I
like:   “Put crumbs on the outside of the window
                     Let them
handwritten
(Jack Spicer)           come outside.”

In any case, I enclose a dollar for a copy of the next issue.”

                                                                                                etc

(Then Ps)
      “I think (I think
        spring bungles more than any other season; but the concept is
sound.)

(The stray asterisk in the note, admittedly harried by its transcribing, apparently pertains to naught, is unattached.) Moore is pointing to Olson’s “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele” with its lovely lines (out of the second part, titled “The Charge”):

With spring one knows today to see
that in the morning each thing

is separate but by noon
they have melted into each other

and by night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill

and us, are busy. We are busy
if we can get by that whiskered bird,

that nightjar, and get across, the moon
is our conversation, she will say

what soul
isn’t in default?

can you afford not to make
the magical study

which happiness is? do you hear
the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,

that you shall have no envy, that your life
has its orders, that the seasons

seize you too, that no body and soul are one
if they are not wrought

in this retort? that otherwise efforts
are efforts? And that the hour of your flight

will be the hour of your death?

(Is Moore’s seemingly tautly lineated and precise version a paraphrase—or is the piece thusly printed in Measure?) The “season of no bungling” is out of the third part (“Spring”), at the end of the piece: “In the roar of spring, / transmutations. Envy // drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul / —that they are not one— // the matutinal cock clangs / and singleness: we salute you // season of no bungling.” The Jack Spicer lines Moore selects out of the lengthy “Song for Bird and Myself” (beginning “I am dissatisfied with my poetry. / I am dissatisfied with my sex life. / I am dissatisfied with the angels I believe in. / Neo-classical like Bird, / Distrusting the reality / Of every note.”):

Neo-classical like Bird.
Once two birds got into the Rare Book Room.
Miss Swift said,
“Don’t
Call a custodian
Put crumbs on the outside of the window
Let them
Come outside.”
                            Neo-classical
The soft line strains
Not to be neo-classical.
But Miss Swift went to lunch. They
Called a custodian.
Four came.
Armed like Myrmidons, they
Killed the birds.
Miss Munsterberg
Who was the first American translator of Rilke
Said
“Suppose one of them
Had been the Holy Ghost.”
Miss Swift,
Who was back from lunch,
Said
“Which.”

One notes the “bird-witted”-ness of each of Moore’s choices. And one recalls, too, Moore’s subsequent review—mostly avoiding the prevalent hysteria that greeted the book, though she did, toward the end, talk rather shudderingly of the anthology’s “content”—“Good content, as Samuel Butler said, is usually matched by good treatment, and poets specializing in ‘organs and feelings’—severed from culture and literature, dogged by redundance and stench—have a stiff task. By comparison with the vocabularies of science, which are creative, in fact enthralling, exhibitionistic content—invaded by the diction of drug-vendors and victims, sex addicts and civic parasites—becomes poetically inoperative . . .”—of The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. Of Spicer, Moore writes: “not indifferent to T. S. Eliot and . . . not hackneyed.” Of Olson’s “projective or field composition”: “Inherited non-projective form can be projective, I would say, and projective form may be weedy and colorless like suckers from an un-sunned tuber.” And quotes Kenneth Burke (Counter-Statement): “a work may be said to have form in so far as one part leads a reader to anticipate another part and be gratified by the result.” Of Wieners: nothing.

(As Wieners says at one point in the letter: “Well, enough quote job.”)

Notebook (John Wieners, Charles Olson, &c.)

John Wieners, 1934-2002

Cold air loosely damping down the fatidic earth in its clot and unexpelled disclosure, like the stabbing abscess of a pleurisy under the bent ribs of the sky. (Shakespeare, out of Hamlet: “For goodnes growing to a plurisie, / Dies in his owne too much.”) Thus the remedy of cloud-riffling incoherency, shouting out a wholly indifferent morning song in order to charge the day with some kind of writerly velocity, words without inventory, un-parceled, inimical, aloof. (Somewhere Poe writes, justly punning: “The dogmatic bow-wow of this man is the most amusing thing imaginable. I do believe that out of every ten matters which he gives to the public as fact, eight, at least, are downright lies, while the other two may be classed either as ‘doubtful’ or ‘rigmarole.’”)

—

A pertinent letter, plaintive and defiant by turns, John Wieners to Charles Olson, out of the Michael Seth Stewart-edited Lost & Found pamphlet “the sea under the house”: The Selected Correspondence of John Wieners and Charles Olson. Wieners recalling Black Mountain days, and gearing up to edit Measure (initially intended to be titled “BOSTON: a blast from — etc., the contributors listed below that. ‘The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the city.’”--Measure itself dug out of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: “All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap. / Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth . . .”):

                                                                                                                                May 16 [1957]
Dear Charles:

      Just wanted to get this off to you. How this whole ‘culture’ wears on one (me). If I did not have the knowledge of me at BM, could entertain the fantasy of shoving it all and going off to ‘the fabulous island’ (Tiamat?)* For even that sheepdip (BM’s) cant do it. We come soiled & needy, from our mothers the white living rooms and it is piled on before our eyes /
                                                                                                        are open, turned into consumers, customers at a bad bargain basement. And of course, Measure means a kind of personal whip at it and me. Now this sds. guilt-ridden etc. but not so—its that
                                                                                                                                  when the talisman comes under the hand / then one see the past filth of things of full ears & ‘entertainment’. Too much lying back in the silk cushions. And only when one is shook to see the struggle / just what’s up and how most of the time we aint up at it. Spend the day in a frenzy of waste. [. . .]

              And the law you’re under / or were maybe gone now per Blaser’s letter. Only I think often of where you can go and as you do, others take their lead. Let that be stated. I take the lead from footprints. Now anyways. That is why what you do this year will be a lead for many—what a burden you don’t want but such it is—MEASURE, a true wedge for us all to beat our space on- hobnail boots. Well, we do go on. And that’s the wonder that each month seems to be greener, a new bush, than the last.
                                                                                                                            Yours,
                                                                                                                            John

Olson’s reply both wary of being defined and amiably shrugging off the mentoring (“Please write instantly what you mean by / ‘And the law you’re under / or were maybe some how per Blaser’s letter’ / please expatiate. Wld like very much (wld help) to / know what you think I was on, & the other statement ‘where you can go’ ?? WOW. Tell me. I’m—lookin’!”) Wieners’s “instant reply” humors the obvious (“SO DAD, take it as you will”), and explains:

. . . Blaser showed me your letter (there was no one else to) and one has to share that kind, no? He even photo’d it to keep the pink paper in the house. Per it, I knew thou to be free. No more chain on the chain on the eagleleg. This is what I meant. And where shall he roost?
          And the statement: ‘where you can go’     really a question. For it has been with me, this where?—I entertain daydreams. nightdreams. Gloucester in the hand to give you! Last night, you in a gray silk suit, sitting, very long legs, and someone on my right (smiling, encourage, Duncan?) as I climbed onto your knee Danny Boy. Now that is the most embarrassing six words I have ever had to write . . .

A kind of reckless joy in sheer dispersal and otherness evident, bonds forged in refusal of the post-WWII consumerist glut and imperium. Wieners, in the excitement of deciding to do Measure (“300 copies . . . for $163”) is brash and pure and “wide open, and that don’t mean ‘deviated’!” (letter of 8 February 1957): “I have no reputation to lose, nor none to make. And I am ignorant which is good.” And: “I fit here, this use of energy, and feel behind me all the little creeps who sat down and decided they would publish a little magazine. No matter what, I have their strengths.” Uncommonly refreshing that stance, in an era of rampant opportunism and routinely made measurements of potential cultural capital. Among the “kinds of excitements potential” Wieners is witnessed in a letter dated “August 19 [1957]” planning for Measure III—“a striving after pitch” (what I’d call “reach”):

Start off with a city ‘survey’
                                                          From Kyoto, from Fairbanks, from Mexico city, from seattle, San Fran, Boston (me & marshall who I kept out of Two for this reason) Toronto (souster?) London (Turnbull) NY? more than the pansy voice, I want.
                    Namely a striving after pitch, I even wrote M Moore this AM asking if she’d write a walk back from Grocery Store, for her pitch, I am hooked that bad . . .

Astounding. No sign, albeit, of Marianne Moore’s reply (nothing in the 1997 Selected Letters).

—

A poem, seemingly uncollected, Wieners sent to Olson in the 8 February 1957 letter, subsequently (with minor changes) printed in The Floating Bear #10, a number filled with Wieners’s early poems. (Di Prima says she gathered the work “from manuscripts that he had left around at different people’s houses where he had stayed at one time or another. The really early stuff, from his Black Mountain days and right after, he had left at Frank O’Hara’s house years and years ago. Frank just laid the manuscript on me. John also stayed at LeRoi’s and left stuff there, and when I came out to the West Coast, I was given poems that he had left at Wallace Berman’s pad when he’d been living with him on Scott Street in San Francisco (period of The Hotel Wentley Poems). There’s a huge stack of unpublished John Wieners floating around somewhere . . .”):

On January 20th the Snows Began to Melt

I saw a woman stagger on the train
With orange flowers in her hand
And I could not make up my mind
To be the woman or: orange flowers

carried underground on this
                suddenly before me a boy
came on
                and he held in one hand
a bed,
                my mother
                would say,
of red
                gladiolas
a blur of carnations and yellow

A color to soak the black off death
& I knew
                dying or dead
                women who receive these
                                                            see
blinds slashed,

like me in the tunnel under Charles St.
hot as a bee is, seized on their smell.

* Stewart’s footnote reads: “Tiamat was the primordial dragon of chaos of Sumerian mythology, slain by Marduk, the god of order, in the creation myth laid out in the Enûma Eliš.”

Notebook (Harriet Monroe, Kent Johnson, &c.)

Harriet Monroe, c. 1906
(“Dressed in costume for the Streets of Paris performance at the Coliseum”)

Drenching rain, crows meager and complaining, the blood drive signs dehiscing off the kiosk. The weekend: a black man in Chicago satisfactorily announcing to nobody in particular: “got that Romney bullshit done with.” The usual chores and interrupts. John Ashbery, preparatory (c. 1973) to remarks concerning John Wheelwright and A. R. Ammons:

The pure products of America don’t always go crazy: Dr. Williams himself is a demonstration of this. But the effort of remaining both pure and American can make them seem odd and harassed—a lopsided look characteristic of much major American poetry, whose fructifying mainstream sometimes seems to be peopled mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens), while certified major poets (Frost, Eliot) somehow end up on the sidelines.

Warning to all of you—rampant, teeming and tangible—who would seek certificatory ease, that friable temporal certainty, by bowing to the various sacramental smuts (legion and irreproachable in “our” careering unholy era). (Under the plus ça change allotment, recall Wheelwright’s succinct mot regarding the 1916 visit of “Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse,” to a meeting of the New England Poetry Club—how she “instructed us in our poetic duties,” after which “few found courage to read verses.”) (Recall, too, Ammons’s sting and piquancy in guise of a shrug: “one with no / community has / only the world”.)

—

Kent Johnson’s talk, in A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara, of David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology turned my perennially glaucous (“like the ‘bloom’ on a grape”) eye toward Lawrence Weschler’s excellent little book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995). Momentary clarity of intent: isn’t “wonder” itself, with its the tautly splaying light of contingent and the rescissory, its capacity for welcoming doubt unblemished (James Gleick “nailing down” Richard Feynman’s credo: “he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing”) at the rosy heart of Johnson’s conjectural dalliance with O’Hara’s poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”? Weschler, with high etymological pertinence:

Those earliest museums, the ur-collections back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were sometimes called Wunderkammern, wonder-cabinets, and it occurs to me that the Museum of Jurassic Technology truly is their worthy heir in as much as wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,” David once told me, “is to reintegrate people to wonder.”) But it’s a special kind of wonder, and it’s metastable. The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.

Or see Weschler’s summary of art critic Ralph Rugoff’s assessment of the Museum:

. . . it deploys all the traditional signs of a museum’s institutional authority—meticulous presentation, exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-of-the-art technical armature—all to subvert the very notion of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum. The Jurassic infects its visitor with doubts—little curlicues of misgiving—that proceed to infest all his other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct.

A way, of course, to critique and extol the cultural finery and bosh both. (And I do recall—thinking of curlicues and their swarms—how “during one period in the late ’nineties I suspected a whole slew of rather ordinary people of being somehow ‘projections’ of Kent Johnson—Kazim Ali, Patrick McManus, Paul Murphy, Ron Silliman, Jacques Debrot, Jeffrey Jullich, Jordan Davis, Geoffrey Gatza, Millie Niss, Eliza McGrand, Mikhail Epstein, and innumerable fleeting ‘others’ . . .”) To keep the dull purveyors of any detached and suppliant method (as opposed to “mess and message”—or “mess and measure”) at bay, one wields to excess their own canny accoutrements. Weschler quotes Stephen Greenblatt—out of Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991)—calling wonder “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World”:

Nil admirari, the ancient maxim taught. But, in the presence of the New World, the classical model of mature, balanced detachment seemed at once inappropriate and impossible.

Nil admirari. To be excited by nothing whatsoever. Equanimity’s drab sinecure. It is the current moment’s “maxim taught” too. We hie to no marvel, no prodigy, no portent or divinatory bent. Perhaps it is that subvertiginous (why not?) capacity to dazzle and provoke a wonderment of doubt that makes Johnson’s Question Mark shimmer so. As shimmer it doth.

Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun

Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch

1.   Reading / re-reading Kent Johnson’s lively romp / serious inquiry A Question Mark Above the Sun. Subtitled: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara (Starcherone Books, 2012). Being a reprint—with a heft-and-a-half of additional material—of the original limited edition (one hundred copies, by subscription only) impeccably produced by Richard Owens’s fearless and feisty Punch Press in 2010, against concerted attempts to thwart its publication. Subsequently made a “Book of the Year”—poet and critic Jeremy Noel-Tod called it “an extraordinary work of detective criticism” and publicly scolded “the poets who forced its redaction and suppression”—in The Times Literary Supplement (London).

2.   The poem in question: “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”—Frank O’Hara’s reworking of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “A Most Extraordinary Adventure That Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Summer, at the Rumyantzov Cottage, Mount Akula, Pushkino, on the Yaroslavl Railway.” It begins:

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are
only the second poet I’ve ever chosen
to speak to personally
                                          so why
aren’t you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I can’t hang around
here all day.”

And ends:

                              “. . . Go back to sleep now
Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem
in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake
at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling
me.”
          “Who are they?”
                                           Rising he said “Some
day you’ll know. They’re calling to you
too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

3.   The mystery: “that ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’ may in fact have been authored . . . by Kenneth Koch”—“in a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love”—“soon following O’Hara’s death on July 25, 1966.” Johnson:

Koch, in an act now immortalized in American-poetry history, read the poem to a stunned audience at a memorial gathering, eight weeks after O’Hara’s fatal accident—an accident that had taken place only a short stroll from where the strange premonitory masterpiece had supposedly been written, in the same month of eight years prior. There is no record of anyone knowing or hearing of the text’s existence before Koch’s spectacular revelation of it.

4.   The “redaction and suppression.” Novelist Ted Pelton, editor and publisher of Starcherone Books, in a “Note on Quoted Materials”—after noting the book’s “numerous redactions, implying the refusal of those who own the rights to these texts to grant permissions”—writes:

Indeed, permissions were denied by both the Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara estates for use of these quotations in the previous edition of this book; I quote from a letter to Richard Owens of Punch Press, dated October 12, 2010, from Bette Graber, Director, Copyright & Permissions Department, Random House, Inc.:

As you are well aware, the O’Hara Estate is not interested in cooperating with your publication and, accordingly, any request for permission to use material from Mr. O’Hara’s poems is hereby denied. I trust that you will not include any of Mr. O’Hara’s copyrighted material in your work. . . . Please confirm that Mr. Johnson is aware that no copyrighted material from Mr. O’Hara’s works will appear in his book.

The present edition has followed Johnson’s decision to feature elaborate redaction statements that create a type of symbolic commentary on Random House’s and the Koch and O’Hara Estates’ decision. Simultaneously, other parts of this second edition feature critical texts that make “fair use” of literary quotations in their commentaries . . .

Pelton quotes applicable copyright law (17 USC § 107) specifying precisely how “fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment . . . , teaching . . . , scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Bluster and bullying by Random House, with the consent (or at the urging of) the Estates, and poets Bill Berkson, Tony Towle, Ron Padgett, and Jordan Davis ganging up to lend their misplaced righteousness as cosignatories to an attempt to quash Johnson’s intrepid and loving look at the poem’s oddly catalectic history and its premonitory gist: is there a stranger story in recent literary history, or one less bruited about, particularly by those principals who might be expected to reply to Johnson’s singular offering with fervors untempered by the usual corporate-model clutch and own pettinesses? (And, still, one awaits a reply to Johnson’s overwhelming question . . .)

5.   Overlooked in the hubbub regarding the attempted suppression: the sheer brilliance of Johnson’s critical proposals. Beyond the serious query regarding the possibly troubled provenance of O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” is a gentle and sly assault against the narrowness of the usual critical ploys, objectivist, undesiring, plain. If one of criticism’s raisons d’etre is to place the reader repeatedly into the wild vicinity of the original work itself, to make it undeniably loud and humming with its unstained and unstinting own-ness, isn’t any maneuver that proceeds to do just that welcome? (Who, reading A Question Mark Above the Sun, isn’t finally inhabited by O’Hara’s poem, as if by a haunt—a remarkable thing considering the forcibly excised quotes—and in a way no mere close reading could possibly contrive.) Johnson works out some of the details of an expanded critical strut in the book’s midriff, the “unfinished critical novella” called “Corroded by Symbolysme,”* a serial review (originally printed in Chicago Review in 2007-8) of books by Andrew Duncan (Savage Survivals: amid modern suavity), J. H. Prynne (To Pollen), Tim Atkins (Horace), and Martin Corless-Smith (Nota and Swallows). Fueled by orthographic and typographical hijinks, by coincidences run amok (it’s giddy-making in a decidedly juvenile way how routinely sweat is noted to “pour off” each antagonist’s “sideburnians” at each climatic moment), and by a stubbornly-confected mystery (replete with several members of the burgeoning British avant-garde seen sporting a certain style of “large, whyte opal ring” and defiantly keeping mum—with threats and casual sudden violence—regarding “some dark secret related to the poetry of O’Hara”), Johnson therein posits (amid their wild enactment) some tenets for a new critical largesse. Asking, in a glorious prose accelerando:

Why is it that the reviewing of poetry is always more or less about the reviewer? That is, why is the review always about the view of the “reviewer,” as if what he or she had to say were more interesting or useful than the view of the author himself or herself? Why shouldn’t the poet who is the subject be the one to primarilie speak about his or her own work, be a protagonist, even, within the review’s fictitious world, the reviewer acting more as a kind of semi-amanuensis, a supporting actore, limited, in the modesty of his or her position as attendant (admiring or not), to telling a few Boswelllike stories here and there, adding a few supplementarie opinyons in the process, fusing at certain transgressive or luminous moments with the Poet’s Voice, but never losing sight of his or her Johnny-come-latelie fluctuating position? Would such an approach not be a salutary one, insofar as it might help gently unfasten the buckles and straps of a genre long bound by customs of epistemological presumption and claim, customs that render, in ritualized fashion, interior scenes or landscapes whose convincing, life-like, but decidedly simulacral critycal effects are fashioned by means of perspectival tricks carefully plotted out by the reviewer from whose eyes unseen lynes of axiology converge in multiple vanishing points that are, when one thinks about it, akin to tiny coagulations of ideology (inasmuch as the expectations of evaluation’s productive mode and relations of exchange are ideological through and through)? I mean, that’s a terribly long sentence, but really, what is the literary field, populated as it is by Authores, be they Poets or Critycs, if not a vast space of tinie bodies orbiting and crashing and disappearing in the vicinity of a great central Black Holum?

And, with a nod toward Nicanor Parra’s Anti-Poetry, Johnson wonders: “might some similar idiosyncratic formal gesture within the genre of reviewing—a sort of Anti-Reviewyng—provide for some refreshingly uncommon things to happen, such as the eruption into “evaluation” of auto-biographical, even fantastickal material? Material, that is to say, beyond the reviewere’s scripted and panoramic command, enacting a sort of drama that bears forthe, in a reverse Brechtian fashion, the basal artifice, arbitrariness, and hubris of the genre’s nature?” Potent, pertinent, exhilarating and smart: Johnson here joins a long line of poets willing to apply needed shocks to their era’s moribund critical beast, to make it march with brio and magniloquence equal to its “material” in the ongoing literary parade sauvage. One suspects the critical stomping ground is now forever changed.

6.   Johnson’s radical ambivalence: against his own excoriating wit and instinctual apprehending of effluvia, against the very excesses of his own deft critical outcries a counterforce of love and sympathy for the foibles and poignancies of humankind (precisely what allows Johnson to see both fealty and love in Koch’s supposed writing—“a spectacular, radical act of mourning and tribute”) and a searing self-deprecatory humor. So that: in reviewing J. H. Prynne’s To Pollen the increasingly pointed and brilliant Johnsonian monologue regarding the nature of Prynne’s work—I must needs repeat it—

. . . there does seem to be a move toward a kind of depurated, fractal rigor, like in Chinese prosody, actually, where one has a complex grid of semantic couplings, aural interlockings, intertextual allusions, and so forth, and the reader moves around and wanders, guided not so much by syntagmatic sequence as by attention to the multiplicity of non-linear textuyres that the excisions of normative grammar afforde. The controlling code gets smashed, information flows go a bit crazey, discursive frames bleed each into each and out beyond what we would have them mean when within the mirage of our controle. I mean in your recent work it’s as if what you wish to show, againe and againe, is two major things, and they seem to me perhaps somewhat contradictory, really: A) Language is a huge weather system of variegated pattern and effect, autonomous and self-reproducing beyond the conscious intentions of authore or reader, and B) that it is the responsibility of the poet to nail this overwhelming motherfuckere down, to get a handle on the ideological hail and fog and numbing cold and deadening heat we walk within and breathe; I mean, you seem to want to expose the imbricated otherness of these weathers through a sampling and splicing at phrasal dimensions of discursive micro-climates and to do so as a means of analytic counter-discourse to the simulacral phantasms of the cultural surround—a kind of display as the Language poets used to say, of “a mind in control of its language”. . .

—ends with Prynne, “chinum” sunk to “chestum,” in an indifferent snooze. He’s completely missed Johnson’s own stormy weather, the lyrical / critical outburst of precisely how “these avant-garde formalist / analytic gestures are getting openly, eroticallye . . . sucked right into the archive and shackled away in the Museum at ever increasing rates of speede.” As if all the razzmatazz and dazzle of our historical moment—and its meaning—were reduced to a napping interlocutor, and all our brilliant talk a vain fillip in a frankly fictitious tale.

7.   At some point—talking of visiting, with Tim Atkins, David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and recounting some of the “fantastickal collections in that small, darke wunderkammer of a place**—Johnson stops with a half-admonitory “one easily gets carryed away in the pleasure of naming.” And isn’t it there in that “carryed away”—boundarylessness and excess deployed—that Johnson’s genius exerts itself, though seemingly without ardor, and with a goodly portion of humor. See, say, the casual impropriety of Johnson’s report in “Corroded by Symbolysme” of bumping into Stephen Rodefer and Mark Nowak “by the wyne cooler” at a conference in Cambridge, England:

The day before, Stephen had said something insultynge to me and I had grabbed him by the collar and pinned him against the wall; Mark, who had once been my good friend when we were grad students in the famouse and prestigious Creative Writyng Program at Bowling Green State Universitie in northwestern Ohio, had been studiously avoiding me all weekend, though I could not blame hime, I suppose, since I had stolen two of his essays on Experimentale Poetry and Trade Unionisme verbatym and published them as my own in my dissertatione.

The obviously puffed-up descriptors “famouse and prestigious” lend a fictitious credence to the tale of the stolen “essays . . . verbatym” that keeps some vaguely immeasurable truth-quotient high (even if there’s little or no truth to the story). (One of the notes Johnson “excitedlie” jotted down while reading Martin Corless-Smith’s work reads: “—A dissolution of attribution and agency throughout the work to the point of almost hearing Beckett’s question, ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’” And another: “. . . it is hard to tell where the author, Martin Corless-Smith, begins and leaves off, where the branch of his identity in the bookum stops and all these othernesses begin branching and flowering. Not petals on a wet, black bough, as it were, but petals scattered and drowned in a flowing stream . . . . Why this prosody, if prosody is the word? Why this writing of oneself into utter dispersal?”) A large part of the Tim Atkins chapter of “Corroded by Symbolysme” is fueled by a giddy sense of the limitlessness of translation—

If we can have the works of, say, both Brahms and Cage understood as music, the art of both Watteau and Duchamp understood as painting, the writing of both Tennyson and Mac Low understood as Poetry, why can’t we imagine that the task of Translation might extend, for the sake of certain purposes, beyond the relatively stable protocols and boundaries that currently “define” the practice.

A giddiness that is “both incomparably thrilling and potentiallie grave”: “And in asking these things, of course, we right away encounter other shimmering boundaryes—ethical boundaryes—ones that are, again, innere and outere, inside us and outside us, and at the core of translation, in all its multiple expressions, from the get-go. For translation is, and I think it is one thing I’d allow myself a bit of certitude on, a bringing of Otherness—that most mysterious and wavy of matters into new beinge.” Certitude, that complacency. It’s as if that’s what Kent Johnson—in all his provocatory wonder and indefatigable vigor for sheer possibility—is constant in combatting. It is the gadfly’s realm, and the artist’s. It damns all those who’d merely desire a cozy stall in the current big barn, there to placidly cud-chew and flick the whisks of their brittle tails at such flies . . . As David Shapiro puts it in the appended “Correspondence,” addressing all comers: “Certainty of which Whitehead said: there can be false precisions. Don’t ask me how I know your E-flat is terribly sharp.” And, turning to the purported matter of the book, Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”: “Let’s find out everything about the poem, particularly if it leaves us loving the poem that much more and seeing its qualities. . . . We shouldn’t be like Berenson and make authorship seem like a good financial transaction.”

* The title—a phrase by the eighteenth century impostor George Psalmanazar, who concocted “a full-blowne ethnography, a detailed cultural study of the land of Formosa, by which he meant Japan, and this included, even, analysis of its language, which he himself invented, a full-blown lexicography and grammare”—is pertinently interpreted in the novella thus:

. . . the avant-garde thinks it intervenes through art into a world whose codes it can read and understand and thus foil and subvert. It is deconstructive in push and aim, but its target is a picture it falsely takes to be the Real. And this is why the Culture Industry always wins . . . The avant-garde, always-already aestheticized, through and through, down to its analytical smirk and cool, gets sucked into a symbolic canvas that ideology has primed—it becomes part of the scenery, and what is History, if not corroded scenery?

** See:

. . . the Megaloponera foetens, the stink ant of the Cameroon; the anthropological studies of Maston and Griffith of the Deprong Mori of the Tripiscum Plateau; the anonymous Fruit Stone Carving upon which a vast theological landscape unfolds; the seventeenth-century horn from the head of Mary Davis of Saughall . . . the bizarre Delani / Sonnabend Halls, with their dream-like discursions on memory and its tricks; the barely believable studies of bees and their psychic capacities, by the eccentric but genius bacteriologist Alexander Fleming; the Garden of Eden on Wheels collection, magical detritus from LA trailer parks, old and modern; the Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay; the memorabilia and history of the Dog Heroes of the Soviet space program; the Floral Stereoradiographs of Albert G. Richards; the Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian . . .

Notebook (Ted Berrigan, A. R. Ammons, &c.)

Ted Berrigan, c. 1982
(Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark)

Or the morning arrives—regularly of late—dragging its empty gunny sack, no unwashed potatoes to dump out here, no offering for the implacable quotidian gods. Dud mephitics of the daily rout. Aimlessness in the deserted quarry, tracing the scarifying loops of the dirt bikes. (A dumb way to talk about improvisatory distress.) John Wieners, in a letter to Joanne Kyger: “I’m really a very simple person, and only trying to build up a myth about myself.” And, that Kyger might accompany him to Spoleto: “I will carry you between pages of my favorite book.”

—

Intuit and lurch with certitude, its unerring music made of the compactly concussant. A cosmology of one. Or ferret out the latent asininity of formulaic mischief, and apply its rouge. “Just talk.” Ted Berrigan:

Rouge

      “it”       means       “this”.
                            I myself now
              “know”
                                    that. so,
                                  “it” is true.
i.e., as a matter of course, all
                knowing
      being
self-evident:
                          (knowledge):
      “it”       and       “that”,
                                                    here & there &
                                                        vice-versa
                constellate reality.
It made, all systems
                                        “Go”.
                                                          Just talk.

A piece originally called “‘AND’” (“The title should just be ‘AND,’ in capital letters in quotes.”) And is that final sentence a gentle command or the shrug of a summary? Or both. And there’s Clark Coolidge, talking about the piece with Berrigan—that hound Quasi-Coherency dogging their trail:

CC:   [laughs] I like that ending.

TB:   It just, like, disappears. It comes to a point in the middle of the page and then kind of fades out. But, I think a lot about “it,” “that” and space. “It” being myself, kind of. And “that” being everything else. And “it” and “that” are everything. That is, they constellate reality, given a particular meaning which one has to take into consideration or else nothing exists.

CC:   Do you differentiate “it” and “this” at all?

TB:   Well, “this” is “it” being talked about. And one doesn’t know exactly where it’s being talked about. It’s just like another dimension. Even to say the word “from” is a funny thing. But “this,” on the other hand, puts the other-dimensional voice, or the other-dimensional “it,” right next to it. So, “this” is like “it” pointing to itself, or handing itself to you.

CC:   Because “it” is the enigma, right? I mean, “it” is “it.” You can’t do anything with “it.”

TB:   But “this” puts “it” right . . .

Out of the genial wash of talk, its suds and temporary occlusions, grit in the ebullient. How an integrity inheres irreproachably to itself whilst the gab (“just talk”) goes excepting and kablooey in the august surround. (A dumb way to talk about improvisatory mayhem.) Recalling, oddly enough, talk of A. R. Ammons (in a 1984 interview called “The Unassimilable Fact Lead Us On . . .”):

. . . things that people say are not always consistent. . . . You wake up one morning and you’re sort of in the northwest part of your mind, where you have one nexus or one cluster of associations, in which a certain thing seems right. But a week later you may have moved over to the southwest or somewhere and you have a slightly different perspective. This is not to say that somewhere there isn’t a consistent center of thinking—there is—but statements have to be looked at as a certain kind of information. That is to say, it’s a discursive or explanatory mode and, consequently, it can never stop. You just go on explaining forever. But the poem is able to become silent, to stop, and it contains within itself the truth that has not been turned into statement, but into a kind of standing, a kind of completion, a theme-like disposition. It’s a disposition, a poem is, rather than an exposition. It has a kind of structural integrity that once that’s complete then the poem just stands there. It may be made out of words but it’s no longer saying anything. It’s just complete. Whereas things we then say about that poem, or things we then say about the poet, we can go on saying forever. And they will be more or less true, but they won’t represent as nearly the whole truth as this non-statement thing that’s taking place in the poem or in the person . . .

“That motion should orient itself around stillness”—the nonverbal core. “You can’t do anything with ‘it.’” And Berrigan, later in the conversation with Coolidge: “You can say any fucking thing you want . . . language is just a toy.”

Notebook (Denise Riley, George Stanley, &c.)

John Wieners and Joanne Kyger, c. 1967
(Photograph by Jerome Mallmann)

The tender chaos of a momentary lingual void: speechlessness gumming up the works. Or is it the residual glossolalia of the century itself, its tumult of colliding voices, unsorted, inept, mercurial. Cuttings, unculled, relentlessly bunching up, merging into cranial array only to disperse, no agglutinant rare enough to hold, no grease fine enough to prevent seepage. Rendering gone to slop and fandango: “The rendring reid vhilk bouis with euerie blast.” Saith Frank O’Hara, likely thinking of the impish provocateur Rimbaud: “Art is not your life, it is someone else’s.” Thus peremptorily ditching both the self-savvy accumulatory number-cruncher within and the dully feral and “renegade” joiner without, and tout d’un coup. Saith Ammons, in conjunct: “The solemn, the pompous, the terribly earnest are all boring.”

—

If I pause for a moment, improvident and awry (anagrammatickly rescripted: “wary”), a selfless rupture in the rapturous constancy, its cacophony of sutures merely readjusts, sewing up the hole, any evasiveness dubbed invasive. The ongoing hubbub unstymied. Think of Denise Riley’s “A Misremembered Lyric”:

A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song
whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart
tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after
presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no
shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.
I don’t want absence to be this beautiful.
It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while
‘everything that consoles is false’ is off the point—
you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s
dead: or something never had gotten hold of
your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.
Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.
There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it—
and once the falling rain starts on the upturned
leaves and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure
what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to
go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let
me know. Looking for a brand new start. Oh and never
notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t.

A piece nigh-joyously grubby with its surround, sly in its reconnoiterings, the tearing voices, a musical “express.”

—

Out of “Communication is essential” / Joanne Kyger: Letters To & From, edited by Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger,* one of the new and terrific batch of Lost & Found pamphlets, jagged (ellipses seemingly in original) lines of a letter, George Stanley (“I don’t know why the fuck I am here” in New York) to Kyger (15 July 1960):

Part of this is an aesthetic problem . . . my idle mind &c . . . or what do you call it, aesthetic, when it relates to what is happening & abt. to happen . . . I don’t mean critical . . . but I’d begun to take Ron Loewinsohn’s anger at metaphor seriously . . . are ivory towers available & where do we crawl, up? . . . tortuous inner passage. Anyway more of that’s in perspective now & it doesn’t boil down to a straight disjunction . . . as no doubt any of us know in our right minds. What comes is the poem & its rules, the hip reader’s distrust is o.k. . . . it may show wherein the poem has too vainly insisted . . . whether by elaboration, shortcut (metaphor) . . . or false particulars. I mean there is no prior rule (like a constitution)—all easy to say. What I’m writing now is pages of trash . . . aiming only at size / length / inclusion . . . so as to lay myself open to what may come . . . but I don’t want to get on top of my poem & ride it, throwing flags here & there to divert all “casual strangers to the poem”—illustrators wear expensive shirts & carry pencils of all colors in celluloid . . . &C&C.

“Casual strangers to the poem” out of Spicer’s “Dillinger” (it, too, invaded by voices): “The human voices put the angels / Pretty far away. The sleigh-bells / In the distance go / As if we had never seen snow. / Pray for the right of the thing of the universe / The knot which is unknotted by something other than our hands / We, ghosts, lovers, and casual strangers to the poem. / Me, the ghost says.” A piece out of “Homage to Creeley / Explanatory Notes” (The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, 1960) with its “note” reading:

      Not anything real. The snowflakes are equidistant from themselves and fall slowly. Almost impossibly.

      There is nothing left of it. Not even the water its crystals puddle into. These persons know reality for what they are.

In the letter Stanley (after a report of lunching with O’Hara*) reprises the “colors” motif, using it to posit a New York that is, nearly, “not anything real,” schematic, yielding to the map of its intent:***

      The subway is the real fact of New York . . . it means in a way there is no city, only some kind of a diagram printed in 4 colors & available everywhere . . . you have a sense of certain places to go, work, a bar, museum, friends’ apartments, & red or green lines connecting these . . . so that you really don’t have any sense, say of the river you see from your window as being a river that flows from somewhere else (& in fact they change its name in the middle) . . .

The nigh-metaphorical city . . .

—

Two newish prose pieces here.

* Two astounding photographs appear in the pamphlet. One the 1967 double portrait of John Wieners and Joanne Kyger by Jerome Mallmann, the other of Wieners reading at a benefit for the Chicago Seven at the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston, in 1970, made by the then teen-aged Alcalay himself.

** Stanley (referring, seemingly, to O’Hara’s “Les Luths”—“Ah nuts! It’s boring reading French newspapers / in New York as if I were a Colonial waiting for my gin / somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a sketch of the sky / where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine / stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch / while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him / not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets”):

I saw Gary’s name mentioned in some poem or other of Frank O’Hara’s. Want to read more of his poetry. I met Frank abt. a week ago . . . he reminds me of Wieners & says everyone says that to him . . . but he also has Duncan’s gift of talking about 5 or 6 things at once but somehow abt. a single thing . . . beyond the material . . . & in intimate ways. We had lunch and he told me abt. New York, bars, Irishmen, Richard Eberhart (& an award he won in the form of an ugly gold rose), W. C. Williams sitting alone on the steps of a library after all the society & professor people had left for tea, paintings, cheeseburgers, ale, subways, &c.

*** Philadelphia, too, gets its comeuppance: “. . . Was in your home town of Philadelphia, it is like a little old lady with her hands folded & dress splotched with ketchup & mud.”

Notebook (A. R. Ammons, Frank O’Hara, &c.)

A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001

Piecemeal and ineffectual be the worldly captures, and dubious the churnings “out.” Retrieval’s zone is littered with breakage, and clarity, that low-hanging fruit, is but a roseate stand-in for doxy without gumption, a parent to appearance’s simpler sway. So the out-lying rough spurs up a slackening, and the hawsers droop in their tethering, grips go listless, fists unclench and drag useless in the abluent. Thus we “hold to / a majesty sense only manages to blemish,” rhetorically big, a little stand-offish in the flail and outreach of our roaring.

—

A. R. Ammons, in a letter (6 July 1966), out of Epoch (52:3), “This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons”: “A writer is a spiritual whore: he begins writing because he simply loves sex—that’s the innocence. Then the public enters, appreciates his love-making, wants to watch: or detests it, and wants him to hide. In any case, he can no longer proceed by innocent instinct. If he is to last as a spiritual whore, he must take up the role, consciously, deliberately; he must feel himself up, as one who is watched and, maybe, blessed—different. He must get out the paint and the bright phony flowers and carry away into sublimity by pure nerve the emergent whore. He must be contemptuous and vain, fretful and flamboyant: most of all, he must maintain that the notice he has gained is the most valuable thing this world affords.”

—

Out of an interview with Shelby Stephenson (1985), Pembroke Magazine (#18): “I feel that the crunch and tension in the dynamics of poetry come from the confrontation of opposites: energy and restraint, focus and comprehensiveness, one and many, abstract and concrete, balance and imbalance. These giants yielding nothing one to the other generate vast storms.” And: “I feel deeply religious but in a naturalistic way. I feel that from the plentitude of events and places, from the occurrences and recurrences of actions, we make assimilations and go on up through higher and higher assimilations holding onto facts and to feelings of accuracy and compliance for correction. These ‘ways’ things work are the high ways for me, philosophy’s jet-streams that finally add up to the great containment of silence and stillness.”

—

Containment uncontained. Refusal’s hold refused (holding’s refusal unleashed). Motility’s succinct versatility teasing out the edges of the phenomenal smear, extending the rut. Out of a letter to John Logan, begun as journal entry (14 January 1958), in Epoch: “The other night I wrote—just like that—my greatest poem, reducible into nothing but itself . . . ‘The mountains said they were.’ I am an actamist. That is an imagist of acts, not images. I build the behavior true, Oh Lord, and let the reader transform the actions into his own ideas. I can’t stand the naked statement of an unclothed, unbodied idea. It hasn’t reached the level where the poet works: transformingly transforming. I must have made a note somewhere: poetry is but about change.” Out of a letter to an unidentified recipient (21 September 1954): “It is not enough to write One Good Poem in this life, but to live constantly in the rich mental landscape capable of writing the One Good Poem—here lies the poor poet’s reward.”

—

Out of Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), a book stippled with arbitrary, stanzaic boxes demarcating no thing, complacent markers in the stream, energy slaloming against its own formal nod:

                                                                               I don’t want shape:
I’ll have water muscles bending streams (recurrences of

curvature): wind sheets erect, traveling: lips accommodating
muscle glides: identity in me’s a black, clear bead: I’ve
strongboxed and sunk it, musseled and barnacled with locks,

                                                      78
but it’s breathing in there, a dumb eager little botch: I aim
absolutes at it so blasting, recoil and strike unnerve my
stability: (from so small a thing, what distant orbits I’ve

taken into residence) but it’s not now form against that form:
it’s motion: the renunciation of boxes . . .

And, with some lines intervening:

                                                                                            though I
have a bunch of potential any mush of which could sharpen

into cutting blooms, I sometimes lose definition tendencies
by looking out: look out: the tiny invites attention:
outward concentrations: (the poem reaches a stillness

                                                      80
which is its form): crush a bug and the universe goes hollow
with hereafter . . .

Against any fining down of the grease, that palpable insistency to “lose definition tendencies”: Ammon’s own “batty way to give information about the poem.” (I am thinking of O’Hara’s line at the end of “[Notes on Second Avenue]”—how he insists “the verbal elements . . . are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious”—surely a similar tendency to Ammons’s ranging refusals, opposing metaphors notwithstanding . . .) (Somewhere Ammons admits “I’m afraid I still am entranced by the ‘accuracy’ with which water laps the lakeshore more than by the words from the lips of men”—a kind of retort to O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” amiable sass “I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life . . . 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.” Note, though, the Ammonsesque quality of O’Hara’s next sentence, regarding the need “to affirm the least sincere”: “the clouds get enough attention as it is . . .”)

—

Ammons, on reading (Pembroke): “I’m a writer, not a reader. I have, I suppose, brushed up against a good many texts, usually to get a clue how the writer is doing things. I’ve never been interested enough in another writer to read him thoroughly for his subject matter. I don’t care what his is. I read the world, the world I see, and I say what I see. I know of Paterson, Cantos, Maximus . . . but I could not maintain that I know very much about them, neither that I am very much interested in learning anything further about them. I have a row to hoe and have a hoe.” And: “I don’t even read Ashbery, much as I admire him, much. I admire him for throwing readymade, empty answers into confusion and calling on everyman’s theoretical resources to turn the indefinable definable again.”

A. R. Ammons, “Pecker’s Peak,” 1976
(“When ’tis long / ’tis not long / long but shortly / short but, ah, / when ’tis short / ’tis long ere / ’tis long again.” Called, too, “Pecker’s Peak; or Piker’s Pique.”)

Dirt

Advertisement for Hudson’s Soap, c. 1912

glory nestles into a little dirt, and
dirt slickens as fine as ecstasy: well, Ι

suppose some polar opposite is spread apart
there to arrange the coming together of things

        —A. R. Ammons, out of “Scat Scan” (Glare, 1998)

—

Wit is the only barrier between ourselves and them.
“Fifty four forty or fight,” we say holding a gun-barrell in our
          teeth.
There is still a landscape I live on. Trees
Growing where trees shouldn’t be. No trees growing where
          trees are. A mess
Of nature. Inconvenient
To the pigs and groins and cows
Of all these settlers.
Settling itself down
In a dirt solution . . .

        —Jack Spicer, out of “Seven Poems for the Vancouver Festival”
        (Book of Magazine Verse, 1965)

—

Tuba booms. A slope filled with soldiers sifting through the large charred green debris, explosion of a helicopter. Primal soup. Red sky above a dry land. Forms from nouns are known. Red dirt hills. Pineapple slices.

        —Ron Silliman, out of “Ketjak” (The Age of Huts (compleat), 2007)

—

Oregano, stout. Loud voices though only on album.
The blood cells were repeated, as the trees the sky.
No erasures, no nothing pending. Entrance through
the hoarding, the penciling betrayal of stiffness.
Monkeys under the limit, the ground full of dirts.
Blank face, black avenue.

        —Clark Coolidge, out of The Crystal Text (1986)

—

                                                      . . . it’s a struggle
To create both staminate and pistillate in the same
Inflorescence of cluster, I feel a great impatience,
All the people in my family have sensuous lips
I say like a man or woman who does head home
With all that dirt under my nails
                                                                I know nothing
But the lassitude of love . . .

        —Bernadette Mayer, out of Midwinter Day (1982)

—

And as the plant grows older it realizes it will never be a tree,

Will probably always be haunted by a bee
And cultivates stupid impressions
So as not to become part of the dirt. The dirt
Is mounting like a sea. And we say goodbye

Shaking hands in front of the crashing of the waves
That give our words lonesomeness, and make these flabby hands seem ours— . . .

        —John Ashbery, out of “‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit
        the Divine Sepulcher . . .’” (The Tennis Court Oath, 1962)

—

I have made

      The little dish, dirt brown, mulberry
      White, powder blue or oceanic green—is half human and any
      Thing peacock is “divine.”

to read

      the little dishes, brown, mulberry
      or sea green are half human and waiving the matter of artistry,
      anything which can not be reproduced, is “divine.”

        —Marianne Moore, out of a 9 January 1919 letter to Ezra Pound
        (The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, 1997)

—

These Days

whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

                        just to make clear
                        where they came from

        —Charles Olson, out of Archaeologist of Morning (1970)

—

If I think of my element, it is not of fire,
of ember and ash, but of earth,
nor of man’s travail and burden
to work in the dirt, but of the abundance,
the verdant rhetorical. Servant of the green,
the Gardener of the Hesperides . . .

        —Robert Duncan, out of “Returning to the Rhetoric of an Early Mode”
        (Roots and Branches, 1964)

—

                            “Why, this is hell.” Out of the death breeding
Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle
Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt
And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats
Have cropped to barrenness. . . .

        —James Schuyler, out of “Hymn to Life” (Hymn to Life, 1974)

—

                                                                                We
waver between chords of symmetry, unable
                                                                to pin down the beat.
Of all we survey, how often are we
distracted by the least substantial—the ditch
gaping like a grave for the tower,
catfish heads scattered in the dirt, and
                                                                ditchwater dull as resin.

        —Forrest Gander, out of “The Broken Tower” (Eye Against Eye, 2005)

—

Anson Dart pierced the forest,
                                                          fell upon wild strawberries.
Frosts, fires, land speculation, comet.
                                                                      Corn to be planted.
How to keep the strawberries?—
                                                          Indians’ sugar full of dirt.
How to keep the earth.

        —Lorine Niedecker, out of “Pioneers” (New Goose, 2002)

—

286   I do not forget you,
287   I am just gone out for to-night,
288   The Royal Stag is abroad,
289   I am gone out hunting,
290   The leaves have lit by the moon.
291   Even in their dirt, the Angles like Angels
                        are fair,
292   Brooks Nash, for instance, faisant un petit
                        bruit, mais très net,
293   Saying, He who is afraid to do that should
                        be denied the privilege,
294   And where the automobile roads with the
                        gasoline shine,
295   Appropriately the katydid—
296   Ka-ty did   .   .   .   .   Ka-ty didn’t   .   .   .   .

        —Louis Zukofsky, out of “Poem Beginning ‘The’”
          (Anew: Complete Shorter Poetry, 2011)

—

I never swept the sand from where I was going to sit down. Was also a friend, one point breaking close. The postman became a mailman. Moving to some harder way to see without blocking what’s to see. Top time—with a finger and a stretch of smooth sand. Dust is hairy dirt, furry dirt. I laugh as if my pots were clean, in good spirits, well-rested, humming a nameless, a tuneless, tune. The degree to which you’re sucked in, you soak it up. One looks out windows at windows, nose in a book.

        —Lyn Hejinian, out of My Life (1980)
        “If there’s nothing / out the windows / look at books”

—

I feel the earth pulsing against my heart.
They call me The Dirt Eater.

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “To the Mountains in New York”
        (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 1971)

—

Eggs
scooters
a shed
dirt

The Atlantic fleet.

        —Ted Berrigan, out of “Isolate” (The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, 2005)

—

Enfold me wherever
night brought pinpoint
cyclone candlelight
arrays the stars

                •

summon fled field
monster after monster
a Voyage fantastic
the very dirt alert

                •

Imperil Utopia
where upon pure leap
power to umpteenth
no won Erewhon

        —Ronald Johnson, out of “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid” (1996)

—

And then to take hold of semblance and call it
Nothing as dirt is zapped through
With habit and lacking a better verb I promote
This inauthenticity and the earth is a tipping dish
Where chance wears its messed up items
Entirely apart from intention.

        —Lisa Robertson, out of “First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant”
        (Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, 2009)

—

To echo
is to hold
aloft?

Then take any word
and split it,

make it soil itself
to seem fertile.

So nasturtiums
are the dirt’s
lips.

Fecund. Cunning. (Cunt)

        —Rae Armantrout, out of “My Associates” (The Pretext, 2001)

—

Moon, cloud, tower, a patch of the battistero
                                                all of a whiteness,
dirt pile as per the Del Cossa inset
think not that you wd/ gain if their least caress
were faded from my mind
I had not loved thee half so well
Loved I not womankind . . .

        —Ezra Pound, out of “Canto LXXIX” (The Pisan Cantos, 1948)

—

The vetch has turned purple. But where is the bride?
It is easy to say to those bidden—But where,

Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller,
Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust,

For which more than any words cries deeplier?
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

Of dirt. . . It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

        —Wallace Stevens, out of “Ghosts as Cocoons”
        (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954)

—

And so,
the smell of earth
being upon you too—
I pretend

there is something
temptingly foreign
some subtle difference,
one last amour

to be divided for
our death-necklaces, when
I would merely lie
hand in hand in the dirt with you.

        —William Carlos Williams, out of “Spring Song”
        (The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939, 1986)

—

And what does it come to, Pilgrim,
This walking to and fro on the earth, knowing
That nothing changes, or everything;
And only, to tell it, these sad marks,
Phrases half-parsed, ellipses and scratches across the dirt?
It comes to a point. It comes and it goes.

        —Charles Wright, out of “Skins” (Bloodlines, 1975)

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