Twa Trauriges Hurries

Target and Ramp

TWA CORBIES BOOGIE

Coleridge’s “ague fit of Love”’s
A kind of carnal palsy,
The body’s meat unstringing itself
With a high desperado whine
Chronicled nowhere, unordain’d by measure.
The Child Ballad line “In
Argument I chanced to hear
A Carnal and a Crane”
Is put into the brain’s
Rack and its joints slowly
Ratchet’d into dislocation: that’s a
Different carnal, a folk bastard
Meaning crow. See corneille, French
For crow. See, too, corbeau
For the bigger and gruffer
Raven, “an Unkindness of Ravens.”
The Twa Corbies is another
(Scottish) variant of a Child
Ballad, with the refrain “Where
Sall we gang and dine
To-day,” precisely what the body’s
Meat wants, done with shuddering.

—

Sign of what the tired body in its o’erreaching dawn-sport, um, reaches. (“Falstaff: Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o’erreaching as this? Am I ridden with a Welsh goat too? shall I have a coxcomb of frieze? ’Tis time I were choked with a piece of toasted cheese.”) Yesterday, sitting in the sun, bench’d, read another hundred or so pages of 1919. It gallops. Two killdeer flying aimlessly and shrieking in the setting sun, Dopplering one another. Dos Passos’s word traurig. (Sie hat ein trauriges Gesicht.) Thinking how I didn’t know precisely what “freesia” is, or looks like. Choked with a piece of toast’d freesia, ’tis time, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.

Arthur Rackham, “The Twa Corbies,” c. 1919

Culling Losses

A Red Cap

A MOON, BEGOT

That moon’s just a smudge-
Pot in its lower wane-
Regions, all porcine bloat unmarred
Up top. I think it
Looks like Truman Capote, just
To toss out a fat
Monicker, an irredeemable social utterance
That goes wholly against my
Begrudging solitary “nature.” A soupçon
Of yellow tints that moon,
A urine-stain pouring down
To wash the world, rinsing
The wild forsythia shoots, speckling
The helmet of the white-
Throat’d sparrow that is irritably
Ransacking the oak leaf litter
With both feet, looking for
Insects. Is my wont to
Swerve unendingly through the ruck
Of combustibles erring? That is,
To see a fiery crow
Turning to cinder sailing down
Out of the sky, flames
Skirling out behind it like
The flourish of a paraph
Append’d to a signature against
Its inevitable counterfeiting, or forgery?
To ache after the real
And ignore the feral contorts
Of the calling—that is
Discordancy of form, a hampering,
And a douse. That moon’s
Snout noses into the garbage
Of the horizon’s edge where
Houses and trees lack any
Backing of earth and its
Inebriates, a furlong away, a
Walk down a wobbly furrow
The length of the commons.

—

A doubtful thing. Is every poem “about” its own waywardness, its own caustic lye-in-the-face careening? Or is it a measure of the distractions withstood, the way it wobbles here and there, and not a “function” of its own “desire” at all? “I” “don’t” “really” “know.”

—

Dos Passos in the biographical sketch of John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) puts down a rhythm against which the “factoids” of Reed’s trajectory (made heroic-lyrical) get play’d: “Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said.” Calling up Ed Dorn, amongst others. The heroic-lyrical:

      The Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico to write up Pancho Villa.
      Pancho Villa taught him to write and the skeleton mountains and the tall organ cactus and the armored trains and the bands playing in little plazas full of dark girls in blue scarfs
      and the bloody dust and the ping of rifleshots
      in the enormous night of the desert, and the brown quietvoiced peons dying starving killing for liberty
      for land for water for schools.
      Mexico taught him to write.

Against which, out of the recesses (call them “holes”) in my brainbox, I cull a remark report’d somewhere of Marjorie Perloff saying “I like to pick winners.” Which excresces an annoying amount of gall—at her own self-satisfy’d high self-regard as a canon-maker, among other things. Which seems wholly antithetical to a robust critical temper that aligns itself with the underdog, the outcast, the throwaway, positions “assumed” by the historical avant-garde. Sort of like saying “I am a Republican,” or “I root for the Yankees.” If the “new avant-garde” (or the post-perp, or howsoever one labels it) is busy preening itself amongst the “winners,” count me unabashedly out.

John Reed, 1887-1920

For the Journals

Palm and Wires

TWO POEMS FOR JOGLARS


1. A WALNUT

Candidly feculent
Hole abrupt dig watt
Razor mute fern.
Perp knack licorice knell
Taw ref rosin prep
Cull’d serf gin did.


2. BOILED CABBAGE

Glancingly if fluvial cup protuberous conic plat
Oceanic rev puckish tab nag butter uvular nick
Constant brow salve paler wan tub against verst.

—

THREE POEMS FOR A HOLOGRAPH’D FASCICLE SEWN


1

The gangly Ape—conspicuous
So wrenchingly attuned—
Unvex’d by myriad Attempts
To gussy up its run—

Is devious in Congruity—
Shines back—a feral Gaze
To poke one’s Plexus—soulfully—
And back out of the Maze.


2

A Mannerist in tendency—
Ironist by Degrees—
I keep mes Faiblesses gaud’d up—
Impenetrably free.

My Weakness is my Fealty—
Armor’d with Iron duds—
Amours I cancel willingly
To random with the Rudes.


3

The Rumble in my Brainbox—is
Ordnance well forgot—
Ammo for a Gaillard’s Air
When Musick’s gone to pot.

I keep a Biretta handy—
A Derringer or two—
To plug a Hole—unhasp a lid—
Sheer Noisiness unloose.

—

TWO POEMS FOR J


1

The impertinent constabulary. Sores on the tongue.
A phoneme is a rock. The gull cuts the air
Of the wharf, mis-
Shaped
By human vocabulary. You bastard gull.
A phoneme is a rock thrown at the ocean and is
Swallowed up. Oceanic is the heart’s surge. It is
As scarring as syntax. A scorned impertinence,
And syntax. Of.
Long grasses in the canyon, long grasses
Against the sheer rock of the canyon.
Sheer, un-
Sure.


2

Stingy singing, mother-
Fucker. A string up into the air that hangs there.
One string for Orpheus the
Mover, lover.
Three in a measurable zone of concomitants.
Red Rover, Red Rover, send
Marcel Duchamp right over.
A string is a natural and covers
Any curve.
Coloratura break-
Through.

—

Doinking around all weekend, with only little red worms left in the bait tin, no lunkers land’d, none hook’d. So, Mr. Vonnegut used to say, it goes. Snatch’d off a few lines, minor conjuncts, imitants. Who’d I write to lately, noting how I’d now entirely stopped (apparemmant) all the glee and grue trappings of the literary life, the sending pieces “out,” that unstoppable round (musical) of submit and accept, re-submit the duds elsewhere, or can the duds, a lot of postal hubbub (what I liked most: getting back the self-address’d, stamp’d envelopes—I made a point of adhering the finer commemoratives to the corner, the dumping of said envelopes in a corrugated cardboard box a way of collecting, philately without the compleatist’s fuss, or book)? The prim goddess Electronica’s put a stop to all that (lovely) ritual, and the ease of the ways of the bonny natives here on Dumpster Island—they welcome my juiciest whims, well: why bother with the busy-work of all that? (The affable crank Bill Knott got there first, PDF’ing up an oeuvre monstreux, sundering ties with that fleet strong-arm maestro Nostalgia, bennie-stuff’d non-stop talker-upper of the book “trade.”) Isn’t, though, there still something insubstantial and niggling about a poem (say, note how coy that “say” is!) existing only as pixels configurable, even if at command ready, even if at command ready, that is, of the least viable Hoosier, or the most rapacious Connecticutter? Is it for that—nous sommes tous les Objectivists—that one still lifts plonk for a book? Something to hoist up against the blue vault to blot the sun, recumbent under the apple tree, a lacewing alighting in the russet sheen of one’s hair? Oh, maybe, though to rush into that, to make that an end in itself may be the very buckboard against which one finds oneself thrown, and stop’d, when one’s out for full-throttle inadmissibles aroaring out along the apple tree studded country roads, in the Bearcat, gin-flask in hand. William Carlos Williams: “I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself” and “(If an error is noted here pay no attention to it.)”

Finish’d The 42nd Parallel, volume the first of U.S.A. and took out in a sweat after volume the twoth, 1919. Dos Passos in one of the parts call’d “The Camera Eye,” aboard the Espagne mid-WWI en route to Bordeaux—for a sense of the fierce and savagely point’d humor:

everybody was very brave except for Colonel and Mrs. Knowlton of the American Red Cross who had waterproof coldproof submarineproof suits like eskimosuits and they wore them and they sat up on deck with the suits all blown up and only their faces showing and there were firstaid kits in the pockets and in the belt there was a waterproof container with milkchocolate and crackers and maltedmilk tablets
      and in the morning you’d walk round the deck and there would be Mr. Knowlton blowing up Mrs. Knowlton
      or Mrs. Knowlton blowing up Mr. Knowlton
      the Roosevelt boys were very brave in stiff visored new American army caps and sharpshooter medals in the khaki whipcord and they talked all day about We must come in We must come in
      as if the war were a swimming pool . . .

And talking about Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, one of “the little group of willful men expressing no opinion but their own.”

William Carlos Williams, c. 1955

Dos Passos Notes

Lamp-post and Palm

A MOMENT’S NOTICE

The moment, pre-sun-
Up, when the under-
Belly of clouds is
Umber’d and the scurvy-
Color of the marsh
Reminds one of Mark
Catesby hoisting a flint-
Lock to bring down
A limpkin lifting smartly
Out of the saw-
Grass, hummock’d and sere.
An ought clumsy way
Of writing, one bulbous
With rain, or lop-
Sided like a crab
Reaching out with one
Big claw, the other
Vestigial, mock, exercising dumbly
In faultless air. A
Menu in a cafeteria
Lists John Marzetti, green
Beans, canned Bartlett pears
In syrup, and milk.
A poster for BAREFOOT
IN SEVILLE (or SARDINIA)
With burnt sienna hills
Pinned up against a
Citified domain of yellow,
The cardstock itself, making
Urban the norm against
Which the natural’s imposed.
And the moment’s fat
Coagulant pull busts up
Under its own glom
Kleptography, writing it down
To snatch it in,
Benignly thieving time’s constant
Off-loading, asks itself
Who’s John Marzetti? recalls
A viably nondescript casserole,
Pre-dominant in mid-
Western grade schools, named
For a janitor, named
For a moment sack’d.

—

Continuing curiosity about John Dos Passos, who sign’d letters “Jack,” who near Verdun in 1917, in a war he calls “utter damn nonsense,” writes in a diary about using a garden for a makeshift dugout against German shells:

It is just the sort of garden a pensive little French boy with large brown eyes & premature scepticisms should play in, a garden full of such plaisance with its white roses and its fat-juiced pears and its white blotches of phlox-flowers among evergreens that it makes one hate still more all the foolishnesses with which men try to disturb the rich ease of life—The soul of it is in the faint breath of box, musty with generations of tranquil closes, shutting out the turbid asininity of life about of us, or of death & dullness.
      Death, that should come tranquilly, like the dropping of an over ripe pear, brimming with sweetness, why should it come in the evil shriek of a shell? And what’s it for, what’s it for? Governments are only makeshifts—like patent toothpaste—less important perhaps—and who would die for toothpaste, or kill for it.
      The gas waves of stupidity!

The clumsy blurt and dash of it—that’s some of what keeps reminding me of William Carlos Williams. (See remarks on “style” in a 1918 letter to Rumsey Marvin, pure WCW: “About style—I think that reading people in order to get ‘style’ from them is rather soft-headed. Your style is like the color of your hair or the cut of your pants—half-accident, half act of God—to take thought to change or improve it results usually in rank affectation.” O’Hara’s blithe “common sense” of pants “tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” is a step away from Dos Passos’s equally blithe—and funny—“half act of God.”)

Dos Passos, immediately following the ditty quoted, makes an odd complaint considering the bold romp of the farrago preceding—the longing to “write verses”: “I cant concentrate my mind enough on any one rhythm or mood—My ideas come in little hesitant showers, like flower petals when a wind blows after rain.” (Predicting exactly the farouche splash and change-up to come in U.S.A., most wildly “poetic” of novels, intersplicing newsreel headlines and semi-garbled (that is, in a helter-skelter present, unfilter’d by retrospect’s sort and meaning-assignment) historical narratives with biographical sketches (Eugene V. Debs, Randolph Bourne, “The House of Morgan,” Paul Bunyan) with individual character-trajectory (aimless, interwove, inconclusive as any life) with parts call’d “The Camera Eye” wherein Dos Passos deposits in Joycean running (smeary) ruminant patches all “the subjective” impulses, vaguely tracing and recording a life of pure sensation, all, according to Dos Passos, a planned means of keeping such a contaminant (the self) out of the remainder of the novel.

(Reading some early prose to comrades Dos Passos reports: “their sum of criticism was that things are too jerky, not elaborated enough and that too much is left unsaid, so that the unfortunate reader wallows desperately in a slough of constant misunderstandings. My retort was that happenings meant nothing in themselves, anyway—and that I tried to give that impression, by the recurrence of words & phrases etc—”) And everywhere the argument for the free life of the individual (“our natural American easygoingness”), the rejection of the instituted and organized (“Organization kills” and “The world as it is at present hardening into organization seems to be a worse place for humanity than it has almost ever been before”), coupled with a recognition and lament for the stupid inadequacy of such a stance, how it allows power (any power) its viciousness, it cudgel, offers itself as prey (“How damnable is the vast complacency of people about the world” and “I suppose one should do something conspicuous if possible—I hate conspicuousness—We have so much to do—it will take generations to leaven the great stupid mass of America . . .”)

Too, one finds in the young Dos Passos a kind of gusto and ferocity gone out the precincts of so much of the present’s fat conformity, the self-satisfy’d cultural consumers, phlegmy consumptives of the one keyboard stroke global zupping. To Rumsey Marvin (1918):

Like you I believe in frugal living, unwasteful—Like you I abhor the puppyish lying about of college life, the basking in the sun with a full belly. Life is too gorgeous to waste a second of it in drabness or open-mouthed stupidity. One must work and riot and throw oneself into the whirl. Boredom and denseness are the two unforgivable sins. We’ll have plenty of time to be bored when the little white worms crawl about our bones in the crescent putrifying earth. While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket. Let’s have no smelly smouldering.

O’Hara’s admonition and exhortation clatters forth in agreement: “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.”

John Dos Passos, “Still Life with Plants and Apples in a Basket,” c. 1964

John Dos Passos, 1896-1970

A Minimal (Compleat) Maximum

One Man Working

Watch’d with some prevaricant itchiness Ron Silliman’s self-orchestrated hoopla—here and here and here and apparently to be continued in a sort of Horatio Alger dime novel of poetic adversity’s makeover into opportunity—(compleat with self-justificatory nods to becloud the irony of ’s participating in one of “Official Verse Culture”’s own most cherish’d and empty annual ceremonies) in advance of the Poetry Society of America’s granting of the Silliman-select’d William Carlos Williams Award to Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling, 2007). And subsequently read with some astonishment the Silliman-script’d “citation” for the book with its fraught lineage constructs and misappropriations of history:

The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake . . .

A “scandal”? Aram Saroyan’s first book, titled Aram Saroyan, released by Random House, a major New York trade outfit, in 1968, a “scandal”? Maybe (to those canny responsibles) a novelty item—hardly a scandal. Follow’d immediately the next year (1969)—cashing in, milking whatever stir—though it’s hard to figure who exactly bought the thing—I recall reading it in its meagre entirety upstairs in the old Marshall’s bookstore in Ann Arbor, standing next to its rows of semi-lurid paperbacks (made lurid probably more by the rumor that the gray-paint’d brick building with its creaking wooden sag floors ’d housed a brothel in some bygone, presumably simpler, year)—by Saroyan’s Pages. The books just the sort of thing semi-“literary” high school kids of the “era”—potheads, smart, terminally bored, fetching about for anything with a whiff of nosethumbing the “establishment” to it—’d glom to. I recall how, in a Pioneer High literary magazine call’d Overtones, that year I print’d a piece that went something like:

A man stands
On his head.

Then he sits down.

All different.

That’s how I recall it. I did a little India ink sketch, man standing, man sitting, to accompany it. Submit’d, if I recall rightly, by Ken Burns’s older brother, the red-head. When we’d accept’d it, he’d ask’d that we print it under the name of Dharma Juhdi, or Dharma Jhudi. Too late I read the Saroyan version:

a man stands
on his
head one
minute—

then he
sit
down all
different

We print’d another little story by Dharma Juhdi (or Dharma Jhudi) in the issue, something about a man trying to bury an elephant in the backyard. That one turn’d out to’ve migrated whole out of Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn. The scandalous Mr. Brautigan.

What Silliman attempts to argue by making the re-publication of Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems akin to that of Williams’s Kora in Hell and Spring & All is that each of the works define a kind of “originary moment” (a funny thing for a partisan of the “social text” to admit), each, Silliman says, is “foretelling.” I’ve made the argument before—ironically, then, using Saroyan’s work—amongst others—to put the kibosh to Silliman’s overly extravagant claims for ’s pal Robert Grenier’s work (“great works that would eventually make up Sentences . . . one of the crowning achievements of 20th century poetry”). Opportune extravagances and exaggerations—or, as princely Steve Katz says (another 1968 book), “exagggerations”—or why do I suddenly recall Silliman’s self-mythologizing story of reading all of Ketjak in Hallidie Plaza in 1978? Because the “tint” of the current tale is similar—heroic (“I spend the next several weeks reading, reading, reading”), interminable (“I dragged another small bookcase down to my office and shelved the books from the other two stacks there (with the exception of those where I already owned copies, which I put instead into a separate pile from which I donate periodically to Kelly Writers House)”), full of nudge-provocations (“the Poetry Society of America has not lived up to the stewardship of this award”), marvelously full of the torchbearer’s high import, the apostle’s impartiality (“two or three of the books represented a kind of poetry that I’m not certain William Carlos Williams would have approved of, were he still alive”).

—

CHAPTERS OF A MINIMALIST


I went off
by myself and
so did she.

*

Cadged a
smoke off
a codger
run amok.

*

Odd do for a ralpher.

*

Implacable ticket scalper’s rad tech kit offer.

*

High William’s skivvies in the gaillardias.

*

Rent. Rent.

*

Senility’s lens unleash
’d.

*

Door bang-
ing in
wind, rude.

One Man Working
(Ron Silliman Reading “Ketjak,” Hallidie Plaza, San Francisco, September 16, 1978)

Chord to Plunge

Tree, Michigan

AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY

And so one long’d for
A tragedy-stain’d youth, smudge
Sullying its raw patina, the
Way a coronal splash of
Red wine, a greasy thumb-
Print, the billowing umber cloud
Of five centuries of insouciant
Handling, the cachet stamp of
Some cabinet de curiosités or
Ambrosia-odor’d biblioteca or cloister
Ripe with the sour renegade
Sweat of abstemious monks, or
The way dirt rubbed slowly
Into creases now uncreased marks
The sketchbook page detached by
The unscrupulous dealer in art’s
Ephemera and effluvia, sludge drawn
Down the unprovenanced river of Old
Masters, the drawings of three
Overlapping human parts, two muscular
Thighs, one hand cupping a
Poppy, wilt’d. That thigh, the
Pristine placard indicates, study for
That of the larger work
Depicting the minor goddess that
Comes next, the one with
The haywire mammaries uphanging, or
Cock’d sideways like curious birds,
Result more of the tradition
That allow’d only young men
To model than of any
Shallow or vacillant failure of
The august hand to see
Rightly what’s so palpably there.

—

Return’d up out of palm and balm (and lateral jut to New York for Anne Sophie Mutter at Carnegie Hall) with a slack sack (“nothing in the hopper”), and restless. Read Dos Passos in the various “terminals,” slung the camera around to point and bestill. “No nouns in nature.” Probably a little huff-puffery and gab-garrulity in the intervening, whilst my fingers flop about seeking a chord to plunge into.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man and Bust of a Child

Architect and Loop

Willow and Pond

Nothing in the hopper, “pretty vacant,” foul play suspect’d with my good intent. That kind of morning, and wet. Vague accetta uprisings in the brainstem region. (That’s Italian for hatchet, or for urp up. Some kind of unsettlement catapulting forth all kinds of untenables.) I read, I think, not four words last night, squib’d fewer.

—

John Dos Passos, in a fierce introductory brief for a 1932 Modern Library edition of Three Soldiers, after having pinch’d off the false buds of many a reason to write (“A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy icecream or aspirin or gin”), most succinctly with “Writing for money is as silly as writing for selfexpression”:

I think there is such a thing as straight writing. A cabinet maker enjoys cutting a dovetail because he’s a cabinet maker, every type of work has its own vigor inherent in it. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

Considering, did William Carlos Williams read Dos Passos? (Another reason to read novelists: possibility that the vigorous beasts’d arrive at things in advance of some of us poor trepidatious and fey poet-types with our comminuted bits of high-preciosity?) Dos Passos continues:

What I’m trying to get out is the difference in kind between the work of James Joyce, say, and that of any current dispenser of daydreams. It’s not that Joyce produces for the highbrow and the other for the lowbrow trade, it’s that Joyce is working with speech straight and so dominating the machine of production, while the daydream artist is merely feeding the machine, like a girl in a sausage factory shoving hunks of meat into the hopper. Whoever can run the machine runs it for all of us. Working with speech straight is vigorous absorbing devastating hopeless work, work that no man need be ashamed of.

Which’s got all the “manly” trademarks of the era, and with trace of Marxist theory. Against accusations of Joyce’s tendency to draw “literary snobs,” and how the work’s “a luxury product like limited editions, without influence on the mass of ordinary newspaper readers,” Dos Passos says, “The power of writing is more likely to be exercised vertically through a century than horizontally over a year’s sales.” And, in a move that may predict the late swing to rabid conservatism of Dos Passos’s late (post U.S.A.) writing, he notes the twin racehorses, Current Chaos and Classic Verities and hints at that prime right-wing-trigger the fear of loss of control (“years of confusion, when everything has to be relabeled and catchwords lose their meaning from week to week”):

None of this would need saying if we didn’t happen to belong to a country and an epoch of peculiar confusion, when the average man’s susceptibility to print has been first enflamed by the misty sentimentality of school and college English teachers who substitute “good modern books” for the classics, and then atrophied by the bawling of publishers’ barkers over every new piece of rubbish dished up between boards. We write today for the first American generation not brought up on the Bible, and nothing as yet has taken its place as a literary discipline.

Insert to-be-assembled speculations and innuendoes (based on examinations of control needs as evidenced by public doings and statements) as to what writers of the current “crop” ’ll age badly à la Dos Passos, drifting ever right.

—

A line stumbled on in a Campbell McGrath poem about “tourists with digital camcorders / pre-editing their memories.” Choosing in advance what’ll be recall’d: why do I find that terribly spooky, viscerally so?

—

APOTHEOSIS OF THE BLADE

Je commençais d’écrire une Ode à la Police
et une Apothéose du couperet.
                          —Albert Camus, La Chute

The way the chopper descends
With initial hesitant vibratory rattle
Mimicks imperfectly the tousle of
Sand accelerating into a liquid
Stream out of its particulate
Solid insusceptibility and inertia to
Rush down through the narrows
Of the hourglass: that is one
Beauty of the blade hoist’d
Up high above the hole
Wherein one’s head is stuff’d
Brusquely as a cabbage, and
Kept still with a yoke,
Final burden, leaving one free
To listen for the rattle
And, inevitably, the rancid thump
(Moldy worm-infest’d wheel of
Cheese) of that head, hearing
Itself hit the basket provided.

—

Off into hinterlands south, east, a vagary big loop. Jusqu’à mercredi, mes potes.

Tina Modotti, “John Dos Passos,” 1926

“Dos Passos traveled to Mexico in late 1926 to research articles for the radical magazine, New Masses, which espoused political and social views Modotti ardently shared. It was sometime during this visit that she took this snapshot, later identifying Dos Passos by name on the front of the photograph.”

Duncan / Levertov Notes

A Wall (Helmet and Badge)

ODE TO THE POLICE

Je commençais d’écrire une Ode à la Police
et une Apothéose du couperet.
                          —Albert Camus, La Chute

Control presumes a list deviance
Off of makes one just
Liable to be declared clubbable
In a muddy fit of
Ligature gone to the dogs
That, train’d to attack by
Means of a fat quilt
Of raw material, a protective
Sleeve for the arm, launch
Fur and fury forth, all
Teeth, against whosoever dodges or
Dogs it, or declines with
Mock-amble smart-ass slouch
And smirk the bark’d hurry
Up, motherfucker of the officer
Who’d like to nudge that
Rubber baton that fits a
Fist used to fitting, up
Straight into the prevaricator’s nuts,
Hard, exaltingly, like an ode.

—

Back into the Duncan / Levertov letters with intensity undiminish’d. Duncan proves often a canny, petulant character, impulsive, capable of a tantrum. Mid-letter insert: “[[At which point I became so frustrated with this new misbehaving Parker pen that I hitchhiked into San Francisco to have it adjusted. And am sitting here at the Parker office to give the new adjustment its test.]]” (He’s in idyllic-sounding Stinson Beach with Jess Collins, getting by with who knows what money—though there is ample talk between the writers regarding what magazines pay, what presses offer what royalties, and, later, Duncan seeming goes with “slimy Rosset” of Grove Press for The Opening of the Field (1960) at least partly for a higher percent therein.) (Is there something rather puritanical about Levertov’s and Duncan’s continual complaint and admonishment of the direction of Rosset’s Evergreen and Grove? How it is “definitely aimed, with pornography and sensationalism, at a special public, with the idea of making money”?) The story of the Parker: another technology (most of the letters of both Duncan and Levertov hand-scrawl’d, the typewriter kept for the copying of poems). Struck by the energy and commitment of the letters: in a word to Levertov who’s become angry at, suspicious of Creeley (“When one reads Creeley’s letter to all & sundry one feels they are like form letters”), Duncan suggests: “If you could write him about why you haven’t been writing, would that at least restore the communication? The only important thing for us is our correspondence—and that becomes empty if it [does] not carry disappointment, anger, outrage as well as our appointments and joy.”

Duncan’s percipient art criticism, a terrific exposition of how la mode (the mob) recuperates any striking “original impetus.” Here, about Clyfford Still:

He is personally hostile and paints against the history of painting (and more distressing, paints against previous beauties in the art). . . . As a man, Still seems to do everything to prevent one’s arriving at this state of rapt satisfaction—of being “charmed,” and . . . he would himself hate this state, this end as charm or composed contemplation. & wants his paintings to be acts in themselves.

Duncan’s reception (after first seeing Still’s paintings in 1950) seems a miniature version of a general reception of the new (in spite of its self-critical perception of that in the letter):

It was not to be until five years later that I ever saw a canvas of Still’s as an instance of the beautiful [and these in painting are rare enuf], but what was clear then was that this was authentic, a command within the spiritual history of art that involved more than painting—as uncharming, as hedious in strength as revolt is; it had or I gave it authority. Not to be like it, but to take my place in a world where such painting must be a definition of the real.
      Withal I no longer think of that iconoclastic expressionism as the crux of the matter these days. All we have left here are modish derivatives, and the betrayal of the original impetus is the more striking in that the direction had been angry and all but stultified in its opposition to mode. There might be an irony in the fact that striking against the Beautiful—an artist is in danger of securing the chic. Even where his art is beautiful, Still’s work is grandiose, megalomaniac: he is incapable of the intimate. And the force of his egotism makes it impossible for me to think of him as heroic. Heroism for me has something to do with the engagement with and for the Beautiful.

A complex and possibly somewhat contradictory “set.” (Considering the letter Duncan jamming.) Nowadays, of course, there is no “opposition to mode”; there is only the ubiquitous rabid mêlée aim’d precisely at “securing the chic.” Blame a general herd mentality, fault of increased “communication.” Blame an unwholesome lack of independence, integrity, the fie in defiance. Duncan notes (talking against “programmatic sensationalism”): “W.C.W. said ‘Nothing is beyond poetry’ but in the same note warns that: ‘every school which seeks to seclude itself and build up a glamour of scholarship or whatever it be, a mist, that is. . . .’”—and quits. I’d like to retrieve the remains of that sentence.

—

Tomorrow: “Apotheosis of the Blade”

Clyfford Still, “1947-J,” 1947

Clyfford Still, “1947-R-No. 1,” 1947

Spleen and Idea

Arrangement with Straw

In an unending period of torn attention and shoddy goods slapped together out of perishables, a period of shot memory, the cake dunk’d in tepid coffee “with slightly sour cream” only to dissolve completely, any act of attending, the murtherous slow mechanical seeing of something bestuck in all its surround is consolatory, dunning the age itself, an ethos. The Cooper’s hawk kek-kek-ing in the oak canopy, hid. The dog’s uneasy 4:30 a.m. pawing, distant ten-pin thunder, brief white room lightning, onrush and scurry of rain running up into position, the biggest drops first. Out under the “single gory punctum” of Venus and a Maxfield Parrish sky, tromping the spatter’d dropcloth of earth.

—

AN ETHOS


Out under the “single gory punctum”
Of Venus and a Maxfield Parrish

Sky, tromping the spatter’d dropcloth of
Earth. The Cooper’s hawk kek-kek-

Kek in the oak canopy, hid.
The dog’s uneasy 4:30 a.m. pawing,

Distant ten-pin thunder, brief white
Room lightning, onrush and scurry of

Rain running up into position, biggest
Drops first. In an unending period

Of torn attention and shoddy goods
Slapped together out of perishables, a

Period of shot memory, the cake
Dunk’d in tepid coffee “with slightly

Sour cream” only to dissolve completely,
Any act of attending, the murtherous

Slow mechanical seeing of a thing
Bestuck in all its surround is

Consolatory, dunning of the age itself.

—

Lazy morning, unsustainable. Out of nowhere it occurs that O’Hara’s line “At last you are tired of being single” echoes Apollinaire’s “Zone”-buckler: À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien, how obvious and predatory, sheer concubinage! Doubt-bitten shrieks that do not befit the day. Nose in a book:

      Whenever he read about anything he went down cellar and tried it out.
      When he was twelve he needed money to buy books and chemicals; he got a concession as newsbutcher on the daily train from Detroit to Port Huron. In Detroit there was a public library and he read it.
      He rigged up a laboratory on the train and whenever he read about anything he tried it out. He rigged up a printing press and printed a paper called The Herald, when the Civil War broke out he organized a newsservice and cashed in on the big battles. Then he dropped a stick of phosphorus and set the car on fire and was thrown off the train.
      By that time he had considerable fame in the country as the boy editor of the first newspaper to be published on a moving train. The London Times wrote him up.

That’s Edison in John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, a thing I scoop’d up recently thinking: what about Dos Passos? I don’t know if anybody reads Dos Passos these days or not. Somehow the speed of delivery here elided with the slight pitch of hysteria and slapstick reminds me of something like Daniil Kharms, or, later, and less so, the prose poems of Russell Edson. I’d think, browsing, one’d read Dos Passos for formal (“stylistic”) reasons just as much as Big Historical ones.

—

In the light of the bad historical innuendoes of some “spokespersons” here and there, that—on the one hand (mark’d “one of the tenets of my imagination”), “all famous writers already knew one another, must secretly hang out together, having fabulous gabfests, the ‘deep gossip’ we associate with poetry,” and on the other (general suspicious whipping post quietudinous shit), there exist’d distinct warring camps separate and unequal—it is instructive to note Levertov and Duncan’s discussing Robert Bly, Duncan writing to Bly, &c. One assigns those who construct history to meet such tawdry delimiting territorial needs to the dustbin, eventually, no? “Fabulous gabfests”? Is that David Bowie talk?

(My weekly spleen.)

—

Carcinology is the study of crabs.
Cinereous, grey tinged with black, “the color of ashes.”

David Bowie

Oppen’s Daybooks

Earth’s Debris and Nourriture

THINKING OF WILLIAM JAMES

Like a piece of congoleum beginning to curl up in the nigh-
Tropical heat of the Keys, something a boy with a cowlick’d
Like to pry up off the plywood with a kitchen knife and use
For a pretend Hindustani sleigh ride over the palmetto grass,

I am thinking of you in Brazil, standing in a port dump with
A terribly dark beard, clotted up with a motherfucker bunch of
Barely form’d ideas, trying to keep the binomials straight, the
Different fishes of the saltwater estuary that’s long as the whole

State of Connecticut. There’s the hill upstate named Connecticut,
Some professorial rambler claim’d a cloudless day’d allow one to see
The state itself if one climb’d it. I love the nineteenth century walkers
Putting the nomenclature down in neat manly scripts in leather-

Cover’d notebooks. The money’d story’d is what I say. Mid-
Twentieth century I spent one whole morning tramping Connecticut
Hill trying to locate a black-throated blue, a peevish flitting thing just
Out of reach in the scrap deciduous understory. A bird with

A rich cream-color’d lozenge stuck like a label to its wing. Or
A bookmark. There’s a man without money who hides during the day
In the library to sleep, who carries a stout bent walking cane he’s
Cover’d the end of with layer after layer of shiny duct tape

So that it’s the size of a boot. To beat off attacks by blackguards
Or spooks. He’s got a fine white beard he washes daily
In the public lavatory, keeping the cane nearby. He writes
A circular monotonous script that completely covers scraps of paper,

None of it decipherable for all its rhythmic preciosity. And James,
Wholly bewilder’d by tropical profusion and the “erratic drift” of the world,
Writes to Henry (dateline Original Seat of Garden of Eden) he’s capable
Only of “savage inarticulate cries to express the loveliness”: Houp la la!

—

How difficult it seems—thumbing, skimming—to enter into Oppen’s Daybooks. (In the Stephen Cope edited George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (University of California Press, 2007)). Too few the particulars. Too obvious the leanings up against the big statement: “A totally objective art, an art of caprice which means to say nothing of oneself or one’s situation, an art of pure construction.” Or:

The fact is, we are hopelessly caught in phenomena.
The mind’s inherent sense of logic is a phenomenon.

I keep looking for a miss’d smudge of humor, some sloppy tomfoolery. Assuaged only a little by the merest hint of a world, some physical thing: “fields of the mock-sage” or even “the big dumb form of the moon” What’s odd it how one argument Oppen makes for the poem is that it point, that it be nothing more that instructions to look:

The poem (narrative) depends for its “argument” on vividness—One might regard it as incoherent in the way that a man may seem incoherent whose argument consists finally in repeating—“But look, But look—!”

      incoherent in the manner of a man who repeats “but look, but look”—coherent and convincing enuf to those who will or can look—

Or, later, points to “images” themselves as “small narratives with the poem.” Which reminds me—thinking of the use of images—of an admission Duncan makes to Levertov (c. 1959) after receiving Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems from a Floating World, saying: “I did think the insistence on image a healthy one. Especially since my work right now seems to be getting more and more didactive ‘opinionated’—” Is there another variable function to put into play besides speech / music, namely sensual (imaged) / ratiocinatory (declared)? (Is there another integral between “brutality” and “preciousness”? See Oppen’s: “Brutality is a beginning: preciousness in an end.” Which is precious enough to my ear.)

(Is it totally accidental that I keep coming across what seem like thinly-veil’d admonitions to the young? Who’d lend sympathy—or buoyant goodwill—to someone who’d write: “you men may wish ‘to write poetry’ At 55, my desires are more specific”?) Though one’s mounting blank indifference is ruffled up somewhat by learning of Oppen’s “Pipe-Stem Daybook,” being “papers bound by Oppen into a small makeshift book by means of pipe-stem cleaners (ca. 1966).” Or one is intrigued by a note appended to the word “prosody”:

The line of poetry appears as a single foot which
centers around some point in the line”

The poem made of lines fitted one into another like gather’d stones uncut, the task being the finding of the “set” of each line, its heft and weight and bulge.

Admittedly, a wholly mischievous way to read, bouncing around, like chasing after the mucker’s truck (celery farm), stooping for gleanings, meaning whatever’s tumbled off. Is there a continual tug in Oppen between demanding the poem be a “process of thought” and longing for a “systematic aesthetics,” a stilling point? Everywhere signs of it: “The final look of things” and “form       the completed act of the intellect” versus say, “OBJECT in the poem: its function is to burst” or “Perhaps it has no form, we move thru it / ‘An indeterminate medium . . . / Empty of value’”

Noting how, regardless the lessons of Pound and Williams—“a breaking of conventional forms, a releasing of speech”—the young’ll turn “eventually to a reappraisal of Stevens and Eliot of the Quartets”: “For Pound and Williams are without intellectual interest” Confirming a swift-running thoughtlet that raced briefly around the brainbox, how Oppen’s tiny remarks remind’d one most of Wallace Stevens’s Adagia, the kind of vaporous niggles like “Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential” that one drifts erratically away out of reach of, trusting the old codger’ll not notice the audience gone. Too, there’s Oppen’s rejection of the poseur—“I dislike most of all the theatrical ethic, the ethics of posture. The English gentleman, the fiery Latin, the Boulevardier or the hermit”—missing the surly aphorist. As if perception might declare itself unshaped by any maker, he warns against even “grace”—oddly enough in words, judging by the strikethroughs, that clearly didn’t spring full-bust’d out of some Zeusify’d brow:

Williams is wrong, merely wrong, wheren he destroys or does not achieve the form of thought the form of language, of perception, and ^for^ the sake of grace, of manner.

George Oppen, 1908-1984

Hob and Burner

Grasses, Uncover’d

MY ENGLISH DAYS

A lob is a bumpkin
Reeling under the sun’s haw
Unharnass’d. Hath not the tongue.
A yob is urban-knuckled
And tattoo’d, brassy with defiance
Rude. Thus asymptotically a language’s
Rout’d out unwaveringly, and one’s
Preciosity gets ratchet’d down though
Never to expire finally, ô
Beau Geste! Something rather ta-
Ta, governor about the smell
Of carbolic soap in passageways,
About the jodhpur shape of
The hedges outside the rectory.
Only the American robin working
The massive grounds for earthworms,
Cock’d head and scurry, says
Buddy, we ain’t in Bristol.
A taw is a shooter
The thumb fires off a
Crook’d index finger to knock
A foe’s—Is foe short
For foreign?—marble out, down
Crouch, bent knee, short pants.

—

The sun rambunct’d, the tree buds bulged fat, the cussèd crocuses popped forth, the dog snuffled up interminable inter-fraught traceries of smells. I lick’d the pencil’s lead and apply’d it to 1040s, punching veritable holes in the newsprint with my splendid industry. A model citizen, vowing to withhold it all if the bastards sortie’d out to bomb the Fertile Crescent. Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia, words of my tender emphatic youth. Do not fat rolls of stark color lithography’d maps hang in history classrooms any longer? Do not teachers hoist they britches-slipping trousers and unclot they phlegmy-vocal tubes in the process of slapping a pointer (satisfying muffle-thudagainst an orange-color’d wedge): “Mesopotamia, call’d the Cradle of Civilization.” And one’d likely thrill a little to the way it echo’d Potowatomi, the local Indian monicker, so that one’d make always an untoward connection, peopling the beech and oak and maple forests of southeastern Michigan with ur-Iranians, Persians in moccasins.

—

Read most—the Duncan / Levertov letters thrust temporarily to the back “hob”—“A hob is a burner”—of a little book titled The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography, entirely unfinish’d (though not at all fragment’d as it stands) at Thomas’s death at the battle of Arras in 1917 at the age of 39. Terrifically writ early smudges of memory, of two “avoided” kids in “the lowest class of a large suburban board school”:

One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of “Lizzie”; the other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull.

Which so emphatically introduces out of one of the stage-wings of my brainbox the poorest and foul-smellingest member of my own elementary school class in northern Michigan, I sincerely believe her name to’ve been Wilhelmina, a dirty-blonde waif who wet herself in the middle of some quiet activity, urine pooling yellow under her chair. I think she got call’d “Willie,” though she seem’d to have no friends whatsoever, only those who didn’t pester her versus those who, cruelly, did. Thomas’s piece of autobiography is full of deftly-put ineffables:

A mad dog had run into one of the narrow front garden and lay just inside the railings; a man on the other side with a pickaxe was about to kill the dog; and a small crowd had collected in the roadway. I do not know that I saw the blow struck, but the idea of sharp heavy steel piercing the shaggy hair, flesh and bone of a living creature has remained horrible and ineffaceable ever since.

Et puis, sure sign of a writer, Thomas’s seeing words as particular and chewable as stalks of timothy glean’d in the fields (to use a mundane norteamericano metaphor):

Part of the pleasure of a book was still, I think, the strangeness of words as well as things. Thus I was arrested by the quaintness of Isaak Walton’s spelling, as in ‘pearch’ for perch, of his archaic names, such as ‘luce’ for pike, of unfamiliar personal names like those of the travelers Speke and Grant, as well as by the nasty horror of Africans eating fat torn from a live human body in Sir Samuel Baker’s book.

And accurate regarding the wrong sorts of hoo-hah award’d the classics—here, the Æneid and Shakespeare:

To me they remained prose rendered obscure and tedious, in the one case by foreign language, and in the other by archaisms, inversions, and other unfamiliar and as yet impotent forms. Often there were worse than obscure. The passages that stuck fast in the rut which they wore in our brains were bandied about for their comicality. ‘All became silent’, ‘The strawberry grows beneath the nettle’, ‘By thinking on the frosty Caucasus,’ ‘Tennis balls, my liege,’ and other phrases had to be uttered with a grin and received with a grin. . . . Blank verse I regarded as a form of prose, licentious in construction and divided wantonly into lines as if it were poetry.

Probably the kind of misapprehension that imparts a sly new proficiency, a turn’d diligence and occasions bravado. Thomas wrote something like one hundred and forty poems in barely two years, with a late beginning and untimely end. I love the 1915 lines:

But these things also are Spring’s—
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;

The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass: chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:

All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,

While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

Loved largely for its evidence of acquaintance with the tiny, with how everything begins so whitely, and ends so. And of a man who in boyhood wrote “in the worst possible Latin on the flyleaf of my algebra book: ‘I love birds more than books’”—cause of contemptuous smiles. Whose “wrists and hands and arms were always decorated with scratches during the bird-nesting season”—following the turn-of-the-century naturalist mania for egg collecting. Who liked nothing better than a ramble: “Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark. Students we were not: nothing was pursued to the uttermost.” To be partisan and devotee to that.

Edward Thomas, 1878-1917

One Night Every Thousand

Woodlot and Field

Coleridge (Notebooks, c. 1801): “A man illiterate but of good parts by constant reading of the Bible will naturally contract a more winning and commanding Rhetoric than those that are learned, the intermixture of Tongues & of artificial phrases debasing their style.” Tending to color the Lyrical Ballads Preface-entreaty for using “a selection of language really used by men” in the wan tints of anti-intellectualism, contra-alterity. Peut-être, one adds, wholly “unwinningly.” In an entry wherein, too, Coleridge notes some valiant meteorological reasoning of Paracelsus: “That the absence of the Sun is not the cause of Night, forasmuch as his light is so great that it may illuminate the earth all over at once; but that Night is brought on by the influence of dark Stars that ray out darkness and obscurity upon the Earth, as the sun does light.—” Though immediately revising the equation: “That Stars are Plants, & that the Lightnings without Thunder are as it were the deciduous flowers of the Æstival Stars—” Recurrent forms and forkings. I’d love to see “dark Stars that ray out darkness,” inhabit a world kin to a photographic negative. (Odd to think how digital photography stymies the negative, eventually it’ll become invisible to common fancy, no? Think of the shuddery thrill of squinting through old C-41 color reversed strips—faded, awry—the greens gone to magenta, the red lips complementarily and crazily cyan’d.) The stars, the stars: for weeks now I keep thinking of Emerson’s revelatory: “If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” A way to prime one’s board’d up well-shaft, get the pump-handle moving without that god-awful screech, just to (Preface, again) “Throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way,” meaning look at the present marvels with a little alacrity, bub.

—

Out across the snow-tamp’d fields, mat’d down grasses all mute yellows, a spurious number of grays, lovable grays, the buckthorn stubble chop’d back, shirt-sleeved. Grackles back north, hocking up the gutturals, dragging they big tails. Red wing’d blackbirds around the pond, reedy deep trills, wary, keeping a distance. Two mallards push off out of beneath the thicket overhang and stream out two trailing V’s to the other side, the dog pretending unconcern. Aimless finicks of sentry crows, off rookery duty. Tangles of red osiers and snow patches in the undergrowth. A flock of robins scouring the bare soil of the community garden plots. I love how Coleridge fills several pages of the Notebook with lists of plants, energies of hand-scripture making memory dents. Sampling:

      Adders Tongue. Alder. Ale-hoof. All-good. All-heal. Allisander. Alkanet. Anise. Agrimony. Archangel. Arrow-grass. Arrow-head. Arsmart. Ash-weed. Asp. Asphodel. Awl-wort.
      Balm. Bane-berries. Bank-cresses. Balm. Basil. Barbery. Barley. Bast. Bastard-Cress. Bastard-parsley. Bastard-pellitory. Bawd-money. Bear-berries. Bears-foot. Bee-flower. Beet. Bell-flower. Bent. Bethlem-star. Betony. Bilberries. Bird’s eye. Bird’s foot. Bird’s nest. Bistort. Bitter-cresses. Bitter-sweet. Black-berried Heath. Black berry. Black thorn. Bladder-Campion. Bladder-nut-tree. Bladders’ snout. Blea-berries. Blinks. Blite. Blood-wort. Blue bottle. Bog-moss. Bog-rush. Borage. Bottle moss. Box. Brakes. Bramble. Branks. Breakstone. Bromegrass. Brook lime. Brook weed. Broom. Broomrape. Bruisewort. Bryony. Buckbean. Bucks horn. Sea buck thorn. Buck-wheat. Buddle. Bugle. . . .

I linger, thinking if names I know correspond at the cusp of eighteenth-nineteenth century Britain to plants pushing forth up out of the woodlots and mown fields of twenty-first century Michigan. Is “Bucks horn” my buckthorn? Or is “Sea buck thorn”? Or, why’s “Bladder-nut-tree”—“constantly amalgamating disparate experience”—make me think of Ashbery’s “Fantasia on ‘The Nut Brown Maid’”—“loops of reading”? Or, why’d the line “the husbandry of blinks” begin a feral dominance of the early morning mid-shower oscultating of the voices “barking” in the brainbox?

—

Loops of reading. Think of Edward Thomas making natural history “field notes” in 1917 near Arras, France. “Snowdrops at foot of peartrees by Decanville Railway.” “Magpies over No Man’s Land in pairs.” “Larks, partridges, hedge-sparrows, magpies by O. P.” “Chaffinches and partridges, moles working on surface.” All drop’d in hallucinatory interspersal in amongst lines like “Tea at 244 after seeing 2 of our planes down, one on fire with both burnt to death after alighting.” “Fired 100 rounds from 12-1:30.” “Fired 600 rounds and got tired eyes and ears.”

—

LINES SNATCH’D IN PERUSAL

Crazily cyan’d the sky, blue
Minion to the sea below
In a kind of reversal
Whereby accuracy unaccountably flaunts whatever’s
Thrown over it for accounting.
—Henry ain’t here. Henry’s out
Gathering a bouquet of bawd-
Money someone’d announce and it’d
Bramble up the mystery of
Language’s husbandry of itself. For
It, too, flowers and forks,
Branches up out of loam
Or horizon like lightning, mete
With its own severe mettle.
Never bastard, never brakes, it
Is arse-smart and radical,
Raying out of the earth,
Grackle-black and guttural, launching
Itself up into the high
Reach of willow dragging its
Big boat of a tail.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Mr. Kirkland, c. 1815
(“that there may be sent by the Bearer three ounces of Laudanum—(in the accompanying bottle—or whatever quantity it may hold) half an oz of crude opium (if there be none purified)—& two ounces of the Tincture of Cardomum”)

Duncan / Levertov Notes

The Use of Green

I plait together an argument I cotton to by half and barely trust: that language toute seule—rev’d up and fired off into the distance—eventually’ll come back in a fever, lap itself and continue of its own accord. That is, pursuant to no rational codex. Which is a kind of mystificatory pap and smear, a pitiable lay religiosity run amok. For surely, even with brainbox sunder’d by inebriants (mine isn’t, though there were those years of addled experimentalism with the obligatory barrage of substances, all attempts to reach, as René Daumal put it, “the beyond,” that momentary placement in the big scheme of things wherefrom one’d be pure receiver only), one is sentinel to even the most asyntactical lingual romps. If language is “coming through” (Spicer), it is doing so under some auspice, though there it is: one’s up in the divine tree again, squawking like an auspex. Trouble is, it’s found in all the reports and you, even you, recall finding things seemingly writ by the boot-tracks of a posse of tiny godlets, a snowfield mark’d by a traveling army, an unidentifiably warm breath still raising the neck-hairs. (A moment of blessèd writerly automatism, so rare it becomes all one talks about.)

Funny to see—just days after reading in one of the obituaries a report how Jonathan Williams’d turn’d down Howl (the verdict being: all for the better, if Jargon’d done it, it might ’ve sold “300 copies”)—Robert Duncan’s counter-stylings of Williams’s response to Howl, how he’d “written disparagingly of it,” a sign of “just being petty.” Duncan: “I think it exceptionally petty of J. to say ‘. . . might titillate Poetry Lovers at an Intimate Reading’ . . . ‘fortissimo’ . . . etc. That little boy at heart likes a nice tidy little artwork I suspect and no loose ends. I’m going to tell him too.” Ah poetry and its interchangeable minions. Too, there’s Duncan’s “civic scorn” for the historically much-vaunt’d notion of poetic community. It outs in talk of the Poetry Center job—Assistant Director—and how it “gnaws away at my freshness.” Duncan proceeds to admit that “essentially the concept of a civic activity I cannot stand by. At very point I am liable to betray my contempt. . . . I am revolted by all this promotion of, cultivation of Poetry, until one craves a colossal scorn that would put it all down.” Is that all part of the hid obverse to the spendable coin of Duncan’s manic exhilaration? It is liable to go sourer—two months later he’s calling it a “nightmare . . . where I must see the fact of poetry exploited and promoted until I sicken on the vine”—and more pointedly (individually, malignly) aim’d. (In one single letter of 12 February 1958 Duncan says about the barrage of readings: “discrimination or discretion is a paramount emotional necessity. Tolerance is fatal—” and attacks Jack Spicer’s work with rather savage vehemence: “it is a poetry used for inflicting miseries that proliferate from masturbation fantasies (the more painful because he projects now a poetry of the wet-dream).” Ah poetry and its interchangeable &c. And Levertov, though mostly kinder (her frets and burdens and worries follow predictably more “gender’d” paths—meaning, lopsided division of labor, with concerns possibly incomprehensible to even the empathy-mind’d duo of the Duncan / Collins household), does, and swiftly, accurately, read her contemporaries. She writes about Allen Ginsberg’s “letter he wrote me from N. Y. describing his ‘planned rape of the city’ e.g. seeing Laughlin, Grove Press, ed. of Mlle., etc etc, but everybody—in a word, hustling like mad.” Plus ça change city: who be the Ginsbergs of the contemporary “set”?

—

Sense of attending to too many things better drop’d. Or of simple breathlessness after a couple of long draughts (of reading). If I paw out Edward Dahlberg’s book of incidental prose, Samuel Beckett’s Wake, and learn at a page-turn that Horace claim’d poets “belong to the most irascible tribe of men” or that Pound “had the scantiest regard for the caitiff illiterates of the arts, demanding that a poet be a vigorous reader,” is it enough to make me fling aside the quill and toss my rumpled self down for a stretch of perusal (or sleep) under the apple tree fat with buds? No. First I need to look for evidence of Duncan in Dahlberg’s book. (Duncan spends a large part of one year in the ’fifties trying to write a review of Dahlberg’s Sorrows of Priapus.) None. A piece about Majorca, a sentence or two about Raymond Duncan. “He wore a Greekish clout, and sandals, and was a poseur of Hellenic civilization which he affected in order to hide a Stygian parsimony.” Kay Boyle, “drudging as a saleslady” work’d in the shop he had in Paris. (More rummaging about. Brainbox recalls Raymond Duncan being brother of Isadora, recalls G. showing me the shop in Paris, c. 1973, rue de Seine or rue Bonaparte, one of the narrow streets running down off the boulevard St. Germain to the river. Recalls photographs of Duncan in the window, impossibly handsome, did Dahlberg say he look’d like Carl Sandburg? tunic’d, imperious. Or sewing equipage in the window, a treadle spinning wheel? Brainbox is shot, I cling to the raw undyed dangling strings of memory.) Caitiff illiterate I be, lacking vigor in my reading. Skimming the Kay Boyle / Robert McAlmon Being Geniuses Together for some kind of verification not forthcoming.

—

In the mailbag, John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop admits to posting “a poem, partly in response to your question regarding typing v. ‘word-processing’ v. longhand v. typesetting” and Brian Salchert notes that “the way I’ve been using the computer / erases the past, unless that past is also in longhand somewhere or in offline space or in a manila folder.” Elsewhere: Seismicity Vaudevillean Allyssa Wolf is writing here.

—

FOR RIMBAUD

Just another amatory retard is
I (thank you, Art) running
Abaft the yipping dog pack
In a crouch of spleen
Protectives, prophylactic as a milk
Machine. I lob a brown
Canister of lachrymose distent into
A cricket match, into a
Briary thicket, into a hedge
Breach’d by no fundable gull.
I sing with my knees.
Which is enough canvas-sleeved
Mannerism for anybody to accrue
To, taxes being nearly “due.”

Raymond Duncan (1874–1966), Ensemble, c. 1920

Duncan / Levertov Notes

Branch and Spatter

Robert Duncan: “I find I am willing to falsify. It is only when the voice in writing lifts into the language itself speaking that the truth of the made thing presides. The feeling of what is false for me is the evident use of language to persuade.” I read that and think it admits to something like a willingness to use rhetorical ploys (necessary primitive constructs) in order to get aloft the big pontoon’d seaplane of language up off the still mountain lake (in which is reflect’d itself and itself only) and into a flying state stratospheric wherein it is able (“made thing”) to look askance, anew. That is, all writing exists only to increase the odds of flight, of primal lyric necessity, language declaring itself unaid’d and bursting. (The misapprehension of the wilderness arrived at by such means is exactly what leads the present moment’s constructivists to wearifying denunciations of the plausibility of such outbursts. One is remind’d of someone who, having never “achieved” love’s orgasmic rout—the very fact of considering it an “achievement” is telling—decides the ischemic amassing of a fat portfolio’ll serve equally well. Constructivism, by definition, disallowing the uncanny spastic gait of language jerking out of its own accord, muscular, contract’d by no one but itself.) It is, I suspect, what Olson meant in calling a poem or two of Levertov’s “measured, ‘made’”—a disappointment that something be abandon’d prematurely, disallow’d its flight, pieced out of tenuous thread, or thicken’d with flour—to harry the metaphors into a little frenzy—to make the “sauce.” (The Basque ligado or pil pil wherein a slow cooking of salt cod, olive oil, and garlic, sliding the pan in ceaseless easy circles, arrives at “a creamy, opaque, ivory-colored sauce” out of some alchemy of the fats in the skin of the cod—that’s what one’s writing must be capable of, whatever the initial “ingredients.”)

I get away. Some tonsorial need to trim down the Duncan reading with a little of the Kurlansky book about the Basques “just before sleep” asserts itself. “It quarrels with the tune of things,” as Duncan’d say. Everywhere in the letters the sense of ridding oneself of, shrugging off, the “approach” with all its ratiocinatory binds and boundaries. Duncan, whilst “balking at the submissiveness of learning,” claiming it “necessary to yield so to the language—not to use but to be used.” Levertov, echoing, quotes something out of one of R. H. Blyth’s volumes of haiku, the rather koanic “the aim of the explanation . . . is to make itself unnecessary. . . . the indispensible must be got rid of in order that the truth must emerge.” Duncan pointing to a Ginsberg poem’s failure: “the earlier ‘Xbalba’ that appeard in Evergreen: with the proposition ‘No construction—let the mind fall down.’ My sense that there could be a poem is whetted. But then there is no dis-construction in it—only lazy lines, loose talk that get looser and soon he’s asking ‘what love in the cafes of God’ which is both exalted and gassy.” Or, talking about “two days struggling with ‘Sometimes I Am Permitted . . .’ [with all the irony of the reference in the poem to the grace of writing at all],” and admitting “I mistrust the rationalizing mind that comes to the fore, and must suffer thru . . . draft after draft to exhaust the likely and reach the tone in myself where intuition begins to move. It comes sure enuf then, the hand’s feel that ‘this’ is what must be done.”

There’s talk about Zukofsky (who’d come, summer of 1958, to do a poet-in-residence / workshop in San Francisco, apparently Ebbe Borregaard attend’d, whose imprecisions and expansions Zukofsky “attempted to curb”) Interesting how Duncan points to Zukofsky’s mistrust of Pound’s “only emotion endures,” mistrust of “mythos, aesthetic fervors rather than reason” and failure to comprehend what Duncan calls “the governance of desire.” Duncan: “It robs a long work like A-1-12 of emotional proportion and hence of epiphany.” In a lovely phrase, Duncan notes how he finds in Zukofsky’s work “an area of sympathetic contrary.” “He is always puzzled by my allowance for dramatic rhetoric . . . and the pursuit of the fantasmal . . .”

—

In the mailbag, part of a conversation with Bobby Baird, who quoted some of yesterday’s gabble back—

It’s stunning (to me) to conclude (suddenly, revelatory) how a whole monkey’s offspring of poets norteamericanos never had to retype a whole page in order to change a single word. That kind of busywork’ll cut into one’s certainty and spill in a hurry, make for a jive consider’d gel, and not no whippet-thin dribble. (A corollary: how, in the age of ransackable “fonts,” the experience of seeing one’s work suddenly dignify’d by variable spacing (in a magazine, or book) is no longer available. One sees final product thrown indefatigably up against the flat screen soon’s the get-go, no chewable moment of transformation (introspection and regret) allow’d. Duncan: “I do love the solid print. One sees again, meets the poem anew (as if the typescripts then are suddenly freshend too—a book springs to the imagination)—”)

—not a word of which had I to retype, and noted—

This is obviously right for a wide swath of said poetas norteamericanos, but I do think there’s a fair number of youngish poets who do recognize the virtues of the busywork you mention in yr first point. I couldn’t name them offhand, but I’ve heard of people who grew up on computers reverting to typewriters for just that purpose. When I write poetry I do it longhand, to preserve / create some semblance of viscosity in the writing process. Not true for my fiction, which I more often compose by the paragraph than by the word or sentence, though I do sometimes fear that I’m losing a valuable step. My justification for using the computer so freely is that it makes it so easy to save multiple hundreds of versions of the same document, draft after draft after draft. But perhaps that’s missing the point: maybe it’s better to put all the mental / creative effort into the gap between draft 1 and draft 2 than it is to dilute that effort over a dozen drafts. Dunno.

And on your corollary point: when I do write on the computer I do it all in Verdana or some other ugly font in order to achieve just the effect you mention. I’d guess I’m not alone in this, but I’d be curious to know if you get other responses along these lines.

To which I reply’d in part—

That’s interesting, the ugly font, the saving multiple drafts on the computer (something that never occur’d to me), the possibility of retrieving old typewriters for that purpose. I think what initially made me think about typing in the letters is the repeat’d “I’ll send you my new poems soon’s I get a chance to type copies for you” on the part of both Duncan and Levertov. Which led to thinking about friends of mine in the seventies, typing draft after draft of things. (I was never very persistent with revisions, I’d scribble a bit on a good copy, type it again and be satisfy’d.) But it’s also true that once I got a computer (mid-nineties, in order to “put together” my dissertation), I start’d composing in longhand, whereas before I’d mostly work’d straight into the typewriter. Now I do a little of both, though mostly straight out New Times Romaning everything so the flaws are unspottable!

And part of Baird’s reply—

The ugly font trick was something that Annie Dillard taught me, and I think it works well. After working to make something as good as you can get it, you get that little extra “bump” just from the letters all fitting together so nicely in print. She’s also convinced that the computer has ruined the contemporary novel . . . and so has tried to convince all of her former students (of which coterie I’m a sort of ersatz member) to get themselves legal pads and start there. Again, who knows . . .

. . . I would be curious to hear if what others say, if anything, on the matter. I count myself as one of those people who’s always checking out other writers’ material writing arrangements, the arranging of which obviously has so little to do directly with the putting of pen to paper or finger to key but which also provides a kind of psychological balm, the necessity of which is never to be underreckoned.

I used—in the days of hand-setting books for letterpress at Ithaca House, lifting each single letter of a piece into the job stick like some uncertain Isidore Isou—to argue that that speed of assembly drew attention to a poem’s faults better than any other I knew. That it ought to be required work for poets. I would get halfway through the setting and printing of a book and begin to suffer huge doubts about its worth. (I did the typesetting, if I recall rightly, for only a few of the poems in the Ithaca House print’d Rubbing Torsos—off in France for most of that—and I don’t recall any particular spot revisions in doing so, though I recall thinking about it. Probably my sense of its being already not mine (the way books become) ’d kick’d in.) Anecdotal way of saying I’d entertain public “thots” on such issues should you want to write.

Denise Levertov

Duncan / Levertov Notes

Tangle and Pond

One thing one is astound’d by in the Duncan / Levertov correspondence: the amount of typing and copying and re-typing that’s done. I suspect there’s a whole “study” there, how, freed of the constraints of the era of smudgy carbon paper, freed to Xerox, effortlessly, or “print out” copies—the poets norteamericanos got down to uninterrupt’d sheer overwhelm of producing nonstop a glut and battery of work. It’s stunning (to me) to conclude (suddenly, revelatory) how a whole monkey’s offspring of poets norteamericanos never had to retype a whole page in order to change a single word. That kind of busywork’ll cut into one’s certainty and spill in a hurry, make for a jive consider’d gel, and not no whippet-thin dribble. (A corollary: how, in the age of ransackable “fonts,” the experience of seeing one’s work suddenly dignify’d by variable spacing (in a magazine, or book) is no longer available. One sees final product thrown indefatigably up against the flat screen soon’s the get-go, no chewable moment of transformation (introspection and regret) allow’d. Duncan: “I do love the solid print. One sees again, meets the poem anew (as if the typescripts then are suddenly freshend too—a book springs to the imagination)—”)

One thing that makes the book—The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford University Press, 2004)—tug so utterly (again, up too late pulling off long swathes of its prose) is Duncan’s capacity and range—for self-inspecting, certainly, though, too, for going against impulse, against allegiance. He is not stingy, not astringent. Duncan’s own comparison of himself to Coleridge seems apt (he’s in Bañalbufar, Majorca, c. 1955, completely itchy for “talk”):

My notebooks are becoming deformd by the “ideas” which ordinarily I throw away into talk, invaluable talk for a head like mine that no wastebasket could keep clear for a poem. I can more than understand dear old Coleridge who grew up to be a boring machine of talk; I can fear for my own poor soul. And, isolated from the city of idle chatter, here, my head fills up, painfully, with insistent IMPORTANT things-to-say. I toss at night, spring out of bed to sit for hours, crouchd over a candle writing out—ideas, ideas, ideas. . . . Nor does my reading matter help—I have deserted Cocteau for a while because his ratiocination was perhaps the contagion; and the Zohar which irritates the cerebral automatism.

And, maybe more to “today’s” point, here in the miasma of a period style “set” (as concrete does) by the rampant perspicacity that accompanies our watchdog socius and our unleash’d panoptic technology, is Duncan’s fight with the “modern” day’s expectations:

Calling up too conflicts of poetry or too—impulses toward extravagant fantasy, my attempt to reawaken the “romantic” allegiances in myself—to Poe, or Coleridge, or Blake—are inhibited by “modern” conscience; I grow appalld at the diffusion of the concrete. It’s I suppose an impatience with my inabilities more than a conflict. The hardest struggle is to give up achievement . . . The desire to have imagination freed again, with the preconceptions from the ways it was free before. It’s to give that up, to be willing not to have the power and to explore then, powerless to be willing to work.

Which, in an “era” of “projects” and mutual aid writing assignments and constant tatting up of the rags and scraps of one’s “achievements”—is refreshing indeed. A month later Duncan is defending the writing of ballads (“for Helen Adam who herself writes nothing but ballads which horrify all aesthetic sense and subvert because they appeal to something just long enuf ago to have preceded values”):

I do not know why we are ashamed of fancy. Has imagination really won the battle? So: there was another determination in yielding to these pseudo-ballads, for the freedom itself from my own technical pride. Yet there is no pure invalidity possible. And both ballads in spite of my concept return like crows to the corpse of some experience. My sense for it is anyway to let the writing loose from its moorings if need be but to allow range; and now where it might happen above or below, nobly or ignobly to disrupt the personal. When you ask why I am writing that way or is it the right direction that all belongs to the me who is shaped, impelld, made as I make the poem. But the words and the poem are also all other and less or more than what we use them for or how we are used by them. The Ballads are no more nor less than a nurse reading by a fireside, a simple minded bogey rime. Almost immoral when we are lined up in the Armageddon of verse against form or poetry. But I don’t believe in this battle of the species. It is not a question of “no matter what” any more than any interest is; and it is the interest in, not the faith, that I wld. take as my clue.

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible” is another way of getting there. As is a certain contempt for (distrust of) “style” itself:

Style is certainly a part of the whole act—not the whole. Style whatever it may be, may be also so general as to transcend identity. The particular of style that gives signature or value, I think courage might disregard and even, outgrow. You know, the Olson-thing; or the Duncan-thing or the Levertov-thing. We can certainly and do if we are passionately moved confound aesthetics.

Funny moment of Duncan referring to Olson as a “horse” (brought to the water of Levertov’s poems, water, apparently, by Olson, undrunk—he discount’d some as “measured, ‘made’” (meaning, lacking the vatic “blow”). Funny to see Duncan and Levertov looking at Ginsberg amd Corso as “the young.” Levertov—after a visit made by Ginsberg, Corso, and the Orlovsky brothers to her in Mexico—noting how “they cultivate loneliness & all else, till qualities lose their original wild robust character; lose their scent as some flowers do when gardenbred.” She sees a kind of collective fetishing of experience itself: “And then, the making of a mystique out of what they (individually & collectively) are; that seems to me adolescent. One wants to relate one experience to another, to perceive one’s experience [so] that it fulfills its weight & meaning—but they go beyond that & make every experience have more importance than it can carry.” Persistent feature of groupuscular behavior. Funny to read Duncan’s term (pick’d up, no doubt, in Majorca) for the overflow of poets in San Francisco: “a muchedumbre of poets.” Meaning, simply, a multitude, though obviously cleaving to something akin to idiocy in its anglicized shape. (Of all Duncan’s orthographic irregularities and tics—and I am a connoisseur and purveyour of such—the only one that “bothers” me is the insistence on writing “thought” as thot as if it rhymed with snot.)

Robert Duncan, c. 1962