FlarfCo® Pro

“Deals”

Age of info, info spurious and supreme, info’s Golden Age, a glut and carnage of info. Against which: a counter-rational hysteria, trump card of the thwart’d and incommensurate: attempts to hijack info’s demeanor. Attempts—smarmy, flaunting, with the grease-coagulating calculatedness of a cold-eyed killer—to turn info against itself by plagiary: debased info is info one need no longer heed. A lazy (and popular) way of reckoning. So: a kind of madness and enfeeblement, a counter-opulent sloth in the camps (see Latin campus, plain, field, akin to Old High German hamf, crippled, Greek kampē, bend), miserly thinking accompany’d by onslaughts of re-released disjecta, imprudent, unspurn’d, urban. A kind of rural-spurning prurient bedlam insisting that any contemplatory slackness—“to walk leisurely into the city”—or metaphysical accountancy, double-entry or not, is starry-eyed and wholly alien. So: miles of smiles today in our high jocular greenback-imprint’d (or word-imprint’d—c’est plus la même chose) three-piece suit (sans chausettes, sign of a “tol’able” hoi polloi affinity, up to the point of seeing one “own” words fed back into the loop . . . that brings a scowl into the usual complacent void of the conceptualist’s phiz.) Scowl away.

“Anton Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism, believed that the universe was filled with a mystical fluid which permeated everything and was the conduit of the influence of the stars—an alchemical connexion between the Shakers’ effluvium and the modern notion that our bodies are made of stardust.” So that’s where we be.

Or: “The fin de siècle had produced new prophetesses, women such as Elspeth Buchan, a contemporary of Ann Lee who claimed that God’s power ‘wrought such a wonderful change’ that she was able to live without food for many weeks. She too employed holy breath, decried marriage as ‘the bondage of the law,’ and bid her Buchanites sleep on heather bundles in a barn. She would stand in a circle of young men and touch each with her palm, at which they would swoon away and lie about her like some human crop circle, springing upright when touched again. She also set a date for the Second Coming in July 1786, when her followers, their heads shaved save for tufts by which angels could pluck them up, waited on a wooden platform built on a nearby hill—only instead of the Lord a wind arrived and sent them crashing to the ground.” (Philip Hoare’s England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia)

Or: “The very sign of its energy is that it doesn’t believe in itself; it fails to succeed, even at a cost of millions, in persuading you that it does. Its mission would appear to be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps.” (Henry James’s The American Scene, talking about New York, and “newness.”)

Or:

“The Leduc brothers, real little snakes in the grass; if you weren’t careful, before you knew it they’d be at your throat.”
      The inventors of the miniature fish-tank disasters were to follow diverging paths. Shortly after Guderian and Kleist’s panzer divisions broke through the front, Alphonse went out into the street and put a bullet through his head. In fact, during the Phoney War, that is, from October 1939 to April 1940, he had threatened to kill himself dozens of times. When did he not act on those threats? Perhaps because the situation was not yet sufficiently desperate to make him pull the trigger. His twin brother tried to dissuade him but knew deep down that whatever he said, Alphonse would not be deterred. In 1947, Charles Leduc was able to board a ship bound for Buenos Aires, where, as in Paris, his fish tanks were completely ignored by the public. From then on his life was one long, slow migration, with halts that sometimes lasted longer than he would have liked, toward the magnetic, icy, tranquil north. He spent his last years in Vancouver, dealing in furniture and antiquarian books.

(Robert Bolaño, in Monsieur Pain, demobbing the Leduc twins, artist-conceptualists: “On the bottom, resting on a layer of very fine sand, were miniature boats, trains, and planes arranged to depict calamities, disasters simultaneously frozen in an artificial moment, over which indifferent goldfish were swimming back and forth.”)

“Portraits”—one’d say—of some of the Conceptualist playas. Funny stuff encounter’d of late in the aftermath of the professional circus that is the AWP, its “reports” (by its clowns and clown-aspirants). One of the funniest: a photograph of the earnest and besuit’d panelists presenting “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry”—what Kent Johnson’s call’d reminiscent of an “obscure archival shot from the 23rd Plenary Session of the Korean Workers’ Party in Pyongyang.” (“Forward, Brave Avant-Garde of the Academy!”) (How quickly the orange haz-mat suit is exchanged for the non-toxic wearables of the pro!) (“Genius, like truth,” says Edward Dahlberg, “has a shabby and neglected mien.” “And Miguel de Unamuno tells us: ‘It is time to call a fool a fool, a liar a liar, and a thief a thief.’”) Below, a report of another silencing (“Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence . . .”) written by Kent Johnson:

Pusillanimous Conceptual Poets?

Whither, forsooth, the brave poets of the Conceptual / Flarf United Front?

Kenny Goldsmith claims that Conceptual poetry is all about engendering thought and discussion around Ideas. He proposes, in his criticism and appropriated work, that these ideas have no ultimate Authorial location or purview, that Conceptual writing leaves traditional notions of property and control in the dust. Ideas unmoored in the digital realm are the new thing and everything, says he.

Except, apparently, when an Idea has been placed under Signature of a Conceptual or Flarf poet, in which case the text in question is no longer open to question insofar as its proper property is concerned. The function of Authorship and its paratextual rituals, it seems, are sacrosanct, beyond the bounds of direct conceptual dare.

For example, Goldsmith has not, to this day (if you’ll forgive the bad pun), and despite considerable discussion elsewhere, said a word about the conceptual reframing of his book DAY by this and this. Christian Bök is the only one among the Conceptual / Flarf front to have acknowledged it, twitting on Twitter that I am a “troll” with the temerity to “rip-off Goldsmith’s book.” This being a tweet by the same writer who has prodigiously extolled the virtues of “theft” in literature . . .

I promise that this collective reaction from the Conceptual / Flarf front does not piss me off. In fact, I promise it was exactly what I was hoping the reaction would be.

On Saturday, April 17th, I posted the following informational, gently tweaking comment at Kasey Silem Mohammad’s blog, Lime Tree, under a post announcing and describing a new course (“Writing 399: Conceptual Writing”) that Mohammad will be teaching in the fall. It was the first time I’d sent a comment his way in close to three years.

The comment appeared (as Dale Smith is my witness!) and was then deleted by Mohammad, less than five minutes following.

Of course and true, it’s merely one more lost remark in another poetry blog comment box. But I thought I’d make note here of the little, pathetic affair. But why, you ask, if little and pathetic it be? Well, I will say why: Because such sadly defensive policing, such timorous posture towards real-time written challenge of their work seems more and more the adopted mode for the members of this “subversive” wing of the post-avant, even as such clamp-down behavior brazenly flies in the face of everything these “libertarians” of the Word claim to uphold . . . And even as they’ve attained more and more position and capital inside institutions like the AWP, MLA, the Poetry Foundation, and so forth . . .

I promise, also, that this process of legitimation does not piss me off. In fact, it is exactly what I suspected the outcome would be.

Maybe the last “even as” above sort of begs the question, actually. Recuperation is, after all, the deep plot of the game. And Strategic Silence, as the game moves on, becomes the preferred norm, when it comes to facing down critique. Their now Pulitzered and Ivy Leagued Language mothers and fathers have taught them well. In any case, this instance is but the latest in a venerable string of blog erasures and Mum’s-the-Word dodges by this brave new Po-Pop brood of “delinquents.” They are guided, one might say, by their sub-cultural genes.

Here, for the record, is the comment that was deleted. The links are to the announcement of “my” DAY and to the production video of that book by Geoffrey Gatza (the latter being indisputably—though some are obviously displeased by the fact—perhaps the most sublime Conceptual gesture of the current century [One, one’d note, wholly missing in the archives of the Ubu, the Ubu Roi’s self-gratifying greed and gluttony—see Jarry—apparently stopping at any hint of Ubu-mockery . . . JL]):

Kasey,

Any chance you could assign this, too? Trying to move some books . . .

And this, as well, contained on the above page?

Thanks,

Kent

FlarfCo® Pro: Katie Degentesh, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, K. Silem Mohammad, Mel Nichols, and Mathew Timmons
(Photograph by Lisa Howe)

The Grand Piano Notes

“Deals”

“A previous version of this essay appeared in Chain 7, memoir / anti-memoir, ed. Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr (Summer 2000)” is how an unnumber’d footnote append’d to Kit Robinson’s “Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Time” goeth. Dang, like pulling teeth, getting new material out of that “collective.” Rehash’d exploratory writing. (One notes, too, two other versions of the meditation, in audio format—one record’d at a reading at Buffalo, 10 November 1999. What appears in booklet nine is bulk’d up, the way strongman Time likes to bulk up, not always heeding strict alimentary requirements.) Thus, my prefer’d paragraph mustn’t be included there, in Chain:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics say that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. What’s more, the laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or quantum mechanics—would work equally well if time ran backward. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Garner’d out of, Robinson notes, a popular science magazine dated June 2007. (Unless . . . nah. . . )

Robinson, rather like a good team captain batting at the end of the line-up puts in a good word (model’d after Robert Duncan’s “Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond”?) for each and every Grand Pianist (“Carla—that state of mind you were in thirty years ago, did you succeed in getting control of it in order to write?”) Too, and naturally enough, Pianists populate the Brainard-inflect’d miniatures of the piece: “I remember discussing Wittgenstein with Erica Hunt at the neighborhood bar at 18th & Connecticut. Tom came in and said, “Every time I see you two you’re always discussing Vladimir Propp!” And, in a lovely acknowledgment of memory’s placeholders: “I remember once when Ted Berrigan, Steve, and I were walking back to my place from Winchell’s Donuts on Alcatraz & Shattuck. Passing an iron-barred and boarded-up window on Alcatraz, Ted stopped to point out that one bar was a little longer than the rest, so it stuck out at the bottom. Now every time I drive by that window I think of Ted.” I like, too, Robinson’s sense of what some countable strictures of form do (he’s seeing Zukofsky’s propensity of count words-per-line mimick’d in lines out of “November Ease”):

A referring back, always back, that draws
one forward in anticipation, as one person’s
past becomes another’s future, seems to
be what some of the fuss about
reading is all about. In this way
we become more than one. For example . . .

And Robinson notes, with just the right combo of restraint and grandiloquence: “Counting in real time, whether by word, breath, or beat, anchors us in the present moment, while our mind drifts out over land, meeting our destiny through a series of problems to be solved, expanding to the ends of the earth.” (Caught, now, tout à coup, in an odd premonitory connect here: some jointure between time and color, how, for the French priest and philosopher William of Auvergne (c. 1180/90-1249), green, because it “lies between white, which dilates the eye, and black, which causes it to contract,” provides the most “sensible pleasure” (et, donc, beauty “in itself”—per seipsum) of all the colors. Is the unlikely and wildly flailing conjectural one sign of fatigue with the green and bounteous present? It’s only likely.)

Robinson: “What would you take back, undo, fix, elide, reverse, or change?” Why not just keep piling it up, dilating the stories, making it whiter and whiter, filling in with blanks? Ah, memoir. Robinson quotes Anne Tardos in I Am You (2008), who “quotes Nietzsche as cited in Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text”: “Nietzsche said that a tree is a new thing at every instant. We affirm the form because we do not seize the subtlety of an absolute moment.” Fenollosa’s “no nouns in nature.” Memoir’s like that irrupting mercurial flock of evening grosbeaks in the buckthorns backyard of a house (Delaware Ave., Ithaca, N.Y., c. 1974), like time, like color, like the way repeating it makes it so: superfluous and absolute.

“The Grand Piano Notes” (compleat): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75.

“Counting in real time . . . anchors us in the present moment, while our mind drifts out over land, meeting our destiny . . .”

The Grand Piano Notes

Woods, Pennsylvania

One sense of Bob Perelman: too jittery for dogmatism. Easily distract’d, out of a highly alert demeanor rather than out of the usual low attention threshold. He, too, in The Grand Piano nine, writes of David Bromige, of, particularly, the “fraught” comedy of “My Poetry” in My Poetry (The Figures, 1980). Somehow, writing about the details of the poem (and the book) provides a scrim for Perelman’s memory (in earlier “volumes” admittedly “impeded by my mild but genuine phobia about my objectified past”) to slip through unhamper’d, without the truculence of the genial anti-memoirist. Donc one garners a fine sense of “the charmed time that the book was written in, the late 70s” and its affable scat-work, tomfoolery without pretence:

. . . with David so clearly enjoying the variety of his impulses and the vocabulary that was newly available, malleable—“Form is Nevermore to be perched upon the pallid bust of Pallas” as we might have said, then. That I’m making up now, but do remember (dimly) (but very fondly) our verbal volleys, especially a long one about identity that ended up with one of us saying that you could go into a bank and when asked for ID you could show the teller a bust of yourself. Truly hilarious, if you were us, then. (We meant you brought your bust in, not that one was already there.) (Brought one in in what? A bowling-ball bag might be good . . .) Back in those days the dope was grown by amateurs so we weren’t that high, but it was a habit and continual pleasure, stoned or not, to try to outdraw our own powers of verbal recognition.

Giddy riffing and mutual goofing for its own end, without a “project” in sight: that sounds about right. (And would seem to be what Bromige, rara avis, maintain’d against the “earnest” ravages of the years—and comrades who decidedly didn’t, getting “took up” with they own selfs in some heinous and unabash’d writ of apostolic succession.) (I like how Perelman, unabash’d enough I guess to send Louis Zukofsky a copy of ’s first book, Braille sees clearly enough now to note the “plain white postcard” reply’s “dry, determinedly impersonal . . . hyper-Eliotic” tone: “Welcome to your reflection in the funhouse mirror of public authorship, thought I, though not in those words.”) (It’s Perelman’s sending Bromige a copy of that book, “before we had met,” that triggers a reply—“two typed pages of friendly open interest . . . [and how] he looked to books by younger writers as evidence for where things were going, that by being younger I was that much closer to the future . . . the opposite of pulling rank.”)

Determinedly off-balance. Affably reactive contrariety. Even that reeks of a ploy, a “stance.” I’m trying to think about why Bromige—in Perelman’s sketch (and Perelman himself, by association)—seems “right.” Perelman, wondering at “My Poetry”:

Was he demonstrating that only the fluidity of the present moment of writing this sentence, this phrase, this sound, has validity, and that all rigidly conserved facts of reputation, reception, mappings of the literary field, careers in the arts are risible? But then why were parts of the prose and some of the poems emphatically silly? Why were the names of the poets and critics real (already a charged fact, given the aggressiveness or oddness of what was said about them or what they were quoted as having written), while one also encountered the poet “Jay Gutz”?

Elsewhere: “‘My Poetry’ is not open so much as contradictory, self-canceling, unrecognizable.” One result of Perelman’s reading of “My Poetry” is a terrific few lines of, what, skepticism and doubt? Recognition that here “we” are—thirty years along—hands so successfully tied behind our own backs we don’t even know it? Perelman’s replying to a chunk of Bromige’s “My Poetry”—about two of Bromige’s own poems (“they’re great”) and style (“my tendency to write over-elaborated series of possibilities which become arid & abstract”) that reads, the Bromige, in part:

My poetry is ‘curiouser & curiouser’ as it makes a descent into the rabbit-hole where descent becomes the subject of the poem’s concern: a dazzling dimwittedness that makes sense of it mackerel-textured absence. A respectful abstinence from knowing what I’m doing? Therefore, my style seems to have fallen apart, deteriorated in the three-year interim between books; some kind of decadence has set in; it has become problematical, not to say impossible, because if it limits itself to the traditional language & form of literature it misses the basic truths about itself, while if it attempts to tell those truths it abolishes itself as literature. Chiastic sentence: not true, make it new, caps, has always been the case, it’s what literature means, should mean.

Perelman’s reply:

The materiality of the text; the heterogeneity of the self; the absence of final linguistic reference—these have been the subject of lessons often taught and widely learned over the last few decades. However, as abstract payoffs for reading, they are no more interesting than any doxology. So while at the local level “My Poetry” continually distorts, détournes, decontexualizes, undoes definitive statement, it seems insufficient to say, as I just did, that meaning is destabilized and leave it at that, i.e., to emphasize the negative action of the writing.

A “reactive formation” straight out of Barthes’s Roland Barthes (“I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek for a new paradox”) perhaps, but rare enough in the unfraught (rigid) world of “our” poetics.

“. . . it was a habit and continual pleasure, stoned or not, to try to outdraw our own powers of verbal recognition . . .”

The Grand Piano Notes

Porch and Bottle

Back to The Grand Piano, the unfinish’d (dragging) ninth booklet with its industrial-zone gray cover. Barrett Watten is “shoveling snow”: “it improves the prospect of space . . . to see some underlying brick.” Watten announces (and offers up some sprightly modicums of—“Violence is the nature of free-floating desire as a self-regulated momentum . . . The people heed the lure of the unvoiced, plaintiveness in all its obviousness”) a poem call’d “Zone” (unabashedly: “my modern epic”):

It will address the mode of production in its spatial articulation, not the fantasy of continuous productivity that attends the individual career. [Thinking: A Lincoln to a Jackson what Watten’s suffering is what we unhistorick’d hicks call “writer’s block.”] That fantasy, however much it leads to horizons elsewhere and beyond—as the surrealists would like—is at the same time redundant, both unhistorical and undialectical. . . .
      I seek not the gold of time, but the currency of history. Williams, master of the modern epic and its horizon shifts as well, precedes me in my task. [Thinking: Isn’t a friend (or a groupuscule) supposed to nudge a man if he’s about to make a bumptious public fool of himself?] To construct the initial core of Zone, I followed a set of sampling procedures based on his epic poem Paterson as a zone of poetry in mid-century modernism that reimagines modern life. Subdividing each book into sixty individual samples, I used chance procedures to randomly access them and rewrite their particularity at a level of argument I would infer in the poem’s total form [Thinking: Less and less promising, this.] . . . Other rules and constraints give me the number of lines I must use to rewrite the particular, as well as the frequency of each duration of revision. [Thinking: What if “the nature of free-floating desire as a self-regulated momentum” isn’t violent? What if parsimony and unrelenting control in situ (even at what Watten calls—magnificent sign of alienated labor—“the metalevel of the mode of production”) is merely mimick-industry to the impeccably refined control-tools of late capitalism’s industrial dynamo?] The text that results . . . will be subjected to further procedures, no doubt; it is dialectical in that sense. The poem will be refunctioned in a zone I cannot entirely predict, whose additional materials and strategies have yet to be identified or disclosed. It is “in production,” as I am. [Thinking: Cue the c. WWII vocoder singing Frank Zappa’s “Help, I’m a Rock”: “Bar•ry, you just got to town, / And we’ve been in•ter•est•ed, we’ve been in•ter•est•ed / In your de•vel•op•ment . . .”]

Turns out, “Bar•ry” is, too. “I was a radical, an extremist,” he reports—again—plaintiveness all too-clearly voiced. “Now I am a Left academic, the tenured radical même”: how is that possible, some forty years subsequent to one-upping Robert Creeley with the position that “poets had a moral duty not to teach” in the political climate of the era of the Vietnam War? (Creeley’s report’d awestruck reply, cut with white-boy-in-the-trenches-speak: “Man, that’s about the most extreme thing I’ve ever heard . . . I’ve just been on an arts panel with Maoists in Cleveland, guys from the black community, and even they wouldn’t say that.”) What Watten attempts (with a kind of self-regulated violence: “I accept no compromise with memory and contemplate my renew attack. I am this attack on the blank screen”), then, is to figure out: “How I came to be other to myself.” He quotes Nietzsche (“the philosopher N   ”—oddly and consistently, Watten uses the very convention he’s used in prior volumes to disguise lovers and confederates) out of Ecce Homo regarding writing “involuntarily . . . as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity,” &c., the usual possess’d by the gods (or Martians) stuff (“On every metaphor you ride to every truth”), and says: “I have been the poet who has produced writing in this state . . . On certain dates, in various locations. The evidence is visible and will remain . . .” And though one’s not entirely convinced (baffled by the pleading), and ponders just how the outburst jibes with that poem that’s up for getting “refunctioned in a zone,” one’s tempt’d to “agree” with a remark like “Writing is produced in a state of dissociation and nonknowledge as its positive claim,” even whilst (because?) it bobbles its syntax. Or: “The poet is plural and thus abandoned in himself to another.”

Abandonment versus will. React or attack. Watten randoms through a number of incidents and poses—one highly suspects he’s toying with image and event (“Zone”: “Madness equals music as a form of speech, by which we locate an original. There is no moral necessity for the literature of fact.”) (Tellingly, Watten points to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, begun following N   ’s nearly choking “on a fishbone in Nice,” as the “work that may most resemble my project here.” And fitting with a two-bit Nietzschean regimen, Watten later dismisses him as: “irresponsibly radical and extreme, but still revelatory; now, of course, he is exceptionally funny. His self-conscious refusal to admit his monumental purposes seems like a virtual slapstick of an ethics.”) One learns: “My highschool science project, “Radioactivity in Oakland’s Waters,” measured the radioactive fallout after a series of nuclear tests in China. . . . The scientists were in error.” (Here’s a man who nigh-unconscionably early discover’d the drums of genius throbbing so loudly within.) Against the prolific “attack” mannerisms (“To be a case-hardened, armor-piercing, depleted-uranium-coated antitank missile set against the hardened positions that confront one”) Watten lends credence, too, vacillating, to a sour fatedness:

There is nothing we could do . . . Our teachers could do nothing . . . For this reason, Robert Grenier seemed the perfect mentor—in his refusal to do anything but react. Disconnected bursts of non sequiturs would return us to our senses, in the face of everything else going on. A projectivist poetics coming undone between “attack” and “record.” An intuitive response to unthinkable circumstances was to disconnect language from the event. . . . A poetics inculcating the negative was the result.

Negativity, à la Watten: “the absence or lack congealed in any representation.” (Brat poetics: if I can’t do it all, I’ll screw up what little I can do.) Hence the fractious “record” here.

One learns: of Watten’s (feign’d—one trusts) obsession with Michael Douglas movies (“Michael Douglas is all anyone needs to know about the academic tendency known as the New Historicism”—and a report of somebody—the redoubtable “B   ”—thinking Watten’d “channeled Wonder Boys [2000], which I had not yet seen” at a reading in 2001.) See, too: “Michael Douglas wants to have it both ways, but he cannot.” And: “Clever N   : he wants to have it both ways. He wants to go beyond the capacity of a single individual and yet preserve the multiplicity of himself as the center of philosophical inquiry.” (Watten’s will’d miasma: kin to “Disconnected bursts of non sequiturs.”)

One learns: of Watten’s lack of prowess at identifying even the commonest forms of what he calls “urbanized wildlife.” See: “Hedghogs [sic] crop grass on the shoulder of Telegraph Road.” (In the New World, the nearest kin to the hedgehog is the porcupine, hardly a grass-“cropper.” What Watten sees is undoubtedly a woodchuck, or groundhog.) An odd dismissal of the natural world—lack of curiosity—permeates Watten’s work: in “Zone”: “One day walking in the Sierras, I picked up a rock. A red rock: it was good enough.” Too, see the confusion between doves and pigeons (“The dove is an albino pigeon” &c.)

One learns that Watten (“Left academic”) drives twenty-two miles to work (in downtown Detroit). Though: “There is no such thing as a suburb, at least from where I sit.” One learns that Watten considers himself a humorist (“I am so pleased with my new citation database software from Dysintegral Systems.”) One learns that Watten—victim, more than once, of what he mysteriously refers to as “social death”—considers his poetic career to’ve been hamper’d by his “unregenerate Leftism”: “Given the negative personal implications of these attacks, and of my unregenerate Leftism at Cold War’s end, my reception as poet was heading nowhere.” One learns of Watten’s odd perception of Ron Silliman’s works, their “legitimacy”:

From outside authorizing institutions, he constructs his capacious works in a series that seems to suspend any appeal to legitimacy, producing it entirely by themselves. . . . This declaimer of legitimacy appears as a return to mere existence, foundational for his poetry’s expansive attempt to include everything within its orders. A form of poetic sovereignty emerges as a result, a politics of representation in which you are in my world only insofar as I say so.

And here I’d suffer’d under the notion that one job of every piece of writing is to “produce” its own legitimacy. (The Herr Commadant-inflect’d version of Silliman’s “politics of representation” applies most concretely to Silliman’s link-proclivities, their way of routinely excluding anything that displeases him and cohort.) One learns, too, of signs of an unsuspect’d object-fetish in the renegade Watten: news that he “took delivery” “just the other day” of “several Williams editions,” the Williams he is, with the proposed “Zone,” so clumsily attempting to align himself with. It is no accident, one imagines, that Watten’s thirty-five or so pages here, all to the drift of repeating “I am a poet” (and a professor), echo—“unhistorically”?—Williams own plaints (in “The Desert Music” and elsewhere):

                                                                            I am a poet, I
am.       I am.       I am a poet I reaffirmed, ashamed

The difference: the pugnacious Watten’s magnitude’s much, much lower, and he knows no shame.

“A poetics inculcating the negative was the result . . .”

Impromptu (Ex tempore)

Vent

A morning coalescence, abrupt, impromptu. There’s the terrific epigraph William Fuller puts forth in Avoid Activity (Rubba Ducky, 2003), quoting Marsilio Ficino to Francesco Musano: “You asked me yesterday to transcribe for you that maxim of mine that is inscribed around the walls of the Academy. Receive it. ‘All things are directed from goodness to goodness. Rejoice in the present; set no value on property, seek no honours. Avoid excess; avoid activity. Rejoice in the present.’” (How different—though one ought admit, there is a difference between discipline and “activity”—is Dahlberg’s claim in the Confessions: “Delay is an impostume in the soul. He who does not whet his will every hour perishes of velleity . . . He who does nothing kills the sprouting bubbling plants; his foot is dead and his neck is froward.”) There’s the fire-up to Roy Fisher’s A Furnace (Oxford University Press, 1986) in that book’s “Preface”: “A Furnace is an engine devised, like a cauldron, or a still, or a blast-furnace, to invoke and assist natural processes of change; to persuade obstinate substances to alter their condition and show relativities which would otherwise remain hidden by their concreteness; its fire is Heraclitean, and will not give off much Gothic smoke.” And there’s the brown creeper I study’d, working an ash in Winnetka, repeatedly spiraling up the trunk, “felicitously probing the interstices,” only to launch itself out in a straight dive toward earth, and, with a floppy recovery, showing its whitish belly, re-attach itself to the trunk and recommence. That’s the very ash I did find myself sitting under—in the middle of writing “The Everyday”—several months back:

An ash in Winnetka, next
To a splay of inky
Caps in the process of
Decomposition, blacking up the grass
With greasy spore-offal. Cutthroat
Teens in SUVs, spawn of
The shitless rich, gun by
Shouting the few obscenities they
Know . . .

Thus a momentary fusing of inimitables calls forth the giddy levity of counter-finger’d time, tumbles into the ditch of its own protean swath (think of how Dahlberg combat’d the tendency of any critical nudge to “embalm the figure in the aural incoherencies of the period and insert him in a historical socket”) . . . Meaning, one supposes, that a strenuously-maintain’d solitude abets a madness akin to timelessness (Roberto Bolaño says, somewhere in Monsieur Pain (New Directions, 2010) that solitude is “perhaps the subtlest or at least the most lucid of the forms that madness can take”). With no exterior “markers,” anamnesis—that simple calling back of “matter” (“obstinate substances,” though they exist only in the banal quivery “chambers” of the brain-box, furtive and undeployable)—becomes a continuum, an unvariegated slurry. Bolaño’s Jack Spicer radio is evident in Monsieur Pain too, who is assail’d by “a private radio station,” who seemingly becomes its sole and “fortuitous receptor”: “The demented radio drama assailing me was no doubt an anticipation of hell: a hell of voices connecting and disconnecting in a buzz of a static . . . forming duos, trios, quartets and entire choruses . . .” End of impromptu. End of probing and jointure. Tomorrow, neck “froward,” another “straight dive toward earth.” Clean, or troubled by “Gothic smoke.”

Brown Creeper (Certhia americana)

Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp

Red Ear’d Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans)

Reading Roberto Bolaño’s smallish Antwerp (New Directions, 2010), translated by Natasha Wimmer. It’s a dandy pocket-sized black hardback’d thing, with a boldly stamp’d cover: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” Bolaño himself. Written—“just loose pages I reread and tinkered with, convinced I had no time”—in 1980—“for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.” (Time, “that consummate joker,” the way it so irretrievably misplaces its things—“Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences” is one of Bolaño’s terrible concerns.) Bolaño:

My sickness, back then, was pride, rage, and violence. Those things (rage, violence) are exhausting and I spent my days uselessly tired. I worked at night. During the day I wrote and read. I never slept. To keep awake, I drank coffee and smoked. . . . The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was great, though only a little greater than my scorn for marginal literature. But I believed in literature: or rather, I didn’t believe in arrivisme or opportunism or the whispering of sycophants. I did believe in vain gestures, I did believe in fate.

That’s out of a statement call’d “Total Anarchy” (“Tacked up over my bed was piece of paper on which I’d asked friend from Poland to write, in Polish, Total Anarchy.”) Bolaño wrote in 2002 to accompany the original printing of the book in Spain. Who he read (“certain science fiction writers and certain pornographers, sometimes antithetical authors, as if the cave and the electric light were mutually exclusive”): “Norman Spinrad, James Tiptree, Jr. (whose real name was Alice Sheldon), Restif de la Bretonne, and de Sade. . . . Cervantes and the archaic Greek poets. When I got sick I read Manrique.” The book is construct’d of fifty or so number’d pieces, each of a page or two, vignettes, prose poems, fragments of narrative geste. A kind of cubist prose—I think of Pierre Reverdy’s unanchor’d individuals caught in odd self-animating landscapes, and what Ron Padgett calls Reverdy’s “austerity” and “spookiness.” Reverdy (out of “Under the Stars”):

      Insults fly out of the window and I withdraw.
      So, not far outside of town, on the edge of a river and a wood. I found a door. A simple gate with no lock. I got behind it and, beneath the night that has no windows but does have large curtains, between the forest and the river that protected me, I was able to sleep.

Bolaño:

. . . There aren’t any police stations. To name is to praise, said the girl, laughing. The same passion, taken to infinity. Cars stop between potholes and garbage cans. Doors that open and then close for no apparent reason. Engines, streetlights, the ambulance reverses away. The hour swells, bursts. I guess it was a monkey at the top of a tree.

“Cubist,” too, in Bolaño’s means of making slight reassessment of bits of information by reconfiguring and, rephrasing sentences: the beginning of what’s quoted here (out of “A Monkey,” the ninth chapter of Antwerp) reads: “To name is to praise, said the girl (eighteen, a poet, long hair). The hour of the ambulance parked in the alley.” Such reiterating with variance occurs across parts, too: beyond some stray (not wholly explicable) characters—a hunchback, a nameless girl, “the medic,” “the Englishman,” “Roberto Bolaño,” &c.—the novel is punctuated by, for example, recurrent parenthetical mentions of applause: “(Applause.),” “(Applause and laughter.),” “(Someone applauds.),” “(Someone applauds. The hallway is full of people who open their mouths without a sound.),” “(Miles from here people are applauding . . .),” “(A stifled attempt at applause.),” &c. Here’s a part, number’d twenty-three, titled “Perfection”:

Hamlet and La Vita Nuova, in both works there’s a youthful breathing. For innocence, says the Englishman, read immaturity. On the screen there’s only laughter, silent laughter that startles the spectator as if he were hearing his own last gasps. “Anyone can die” means something different than “Anyone would die.” A callow breathing in which it’s still possible to discover wonder, play, perversion, purity. “Words are empty” . . . “If you put that gun away we might be able to negotiate” . . . On a average of three hours’ sleep a night the author writes these threats by the side of a pool at the beginning of the month of October. Innocence almost like the image of Lola Muriel that I’d like to destroy. (But you can’t destroy what you don’t possess.) An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something that detectives call perfection. Dead-end street. A basement whose only virtue is its cleanliness. And yet who has been here if not La Vita Nuova and Hamlet. “I write by the pool at the campground, it’s October, there are more and more flies now and fewer and fewer people; by the time we’re halfway through the month there’ll be no one left and the cleaning service will stop coming; the flies will take over until the end of the month, maybe.”

There’s a terrific leveling here: perversion and purity, Hamlet and Lola Muriel, flies and humans, laughter and “last gasps.” Is a refusal of the conventional narrative arc a way of defeating plot’s way of insinuating a (temporary, provisional) hierarchy into the world? Elsewhere Bolaño writes (of a writer confessing the difficulty of writing): “All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences.” (And quickly abuts it with—hindering any snap enlistment of Bolaño into anything like New Sentence-ry: “Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback. ‘All right, take him away’ . . .”) At the end, number’d like any other “chapter,” a “Postscript”:

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I’m at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

(Biga—a French poet, b. 1940—is just one of several nods to the biographical “real” in Antwerp. Another is mention of news of “Sophie Podolski . . . kaput in Belgium”—legendary author (1953-1974) of the hand-scrawl’d works of Le pays où tout est permis.) Such genre-smearing is another way of leveling, and akin to making the human “daily availability” of writing undifferentiated from “the divine,” the courage-girding ineffables. Why “Antwerp”? A minuscule anecdote in a book of broken stories (with the disembody’d voices—choral, see “the archaic Greek poets”—erupting):

In Antwerp a man was killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs. Lots of the pigs died too when the truck overturned, others had to be put out of their misery by the side of the road, and others took off as fast as they could . . . “That’s right, honey, he’s dead, the pigs ran right over him” . . . “At night, on the dark highways of Belgium or Catalonia” . . . “We talked for hours in a bar on Las Ramblas, it was summer and she talked as if she hadn’t talked for a long time” . . . “When she was done, she felt my face like a blind woman” . . . “The pigs squealed” . . . “She said I want to be alone and even though I was drunk I understood” . . . “I don’t know, it’s something like the full moon, girls who are really like flies, though that’s not what I mean” . . . “Pigs howling in the middle of the highway, wounded or rushing away from the smashed-up truck” . . . “Every word is useless, every sentence, every phone conversation” . . . “She said she wanted to be alone” . . . I wanted to be alone too. In Antwerp or Barcelona. The moon. Animals fleeing. Highway accident. Fear.

To note: that pig story (or story of a man) abuts (or is “set” like a magnificent jewel) against some of Bolaño’s usual human piggery (“He was face down and you could see the bullet holes in his back, in his brown sweater. They emptied a machine gun into him, said a dwarf who was standing to the left of the sergeant . . .” and “So the cop turned out the light and unzipped his fly. The girl closed her eyes when he turned her face down. She felt his pants against her buttocks and the metallic cold of the belt buckle . . .”) Just so’s not to make only a benign and humdrum “literary” reading of “Every word is useless, every sentence . . .” Bolaño’s friend and literary executor Ignacio Echevarría apparently call’d Antwerp the “Big Bang” of Bolaño’s fiction, all its elements highly compress’d, a source and origin. I read it, too, as the most ambitiously radical of Bolaño’s works.

Roberto Bolaño, 1953-2003

Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp

Edward Dahlberg / Charles Olson Letters

American Toad (Bufo americanus)

Out and back, a memory-soluble journey up through the maple-clad hills of Pennsylvania, interspray of early redbuds marking the high reach of spring. (In the bottoms it’s tarry’d and succumb’d: the magnolia peak’d and gone slovenly, throwing its rust-color’d whites down in wry post-coital petulance.) I addled my pate, I walk’d the grape hyacinth-blast’d streets, I study’d the mating trills of toads. A big-head belt’d kingfisher ratchet’d its way, tree-limb to tree-limb, along a sputtering creek. I read a little, wrote nothing (Melville to Hawthorne: “I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.”) Mostly, off moments: the Edward Dahlberg / Charles Olson correspondence (the 1990 Paul Christensen edit’d In Love, In Sorrow), trying, bluntly, to figure out who’s zooming whom, and concluding Olson probably spends himself mostly trotting back Dahlberg’s mots, and wrongly. Dahlberg in 1950 is begging Olson:

. . . you nimble-fingered Autolycus, that when you pilfer from me, that you do so with more exactness. Heraclitus did not say what you aver he said. It was Empedokles who said it, and he wrote it quite differently. Let me sharpen that Mind of yours. “The blood around the heart is the thought of men.” Your own garbling of this remarkable line is not bad, not at all; it is quite good. Now if you can mutilate another writer’s text with as much skill, you are likely to turn out to be a very talented man, almost as great and blunt as Anak himself. But I confess, you steal as only a Genius can, and who should know better than I?

Dahlberg’s got, admittedly, some plugs he repeatedly jams in leak-holes, too—the thief Autolycus is one. Regarding thievery, editor Christensen points to a muddle: of Dahlberg’s Can These Bones Live (1941), he writes: “it bears the marks of his collaboration with Olson on the ur-Call Me Ishmael, the version that Dahlberg denounced as too imitative and derivative of his own writing.” Adds: “the complexities of a literary relationship are bound up in the circumstances of these two books: the one aborted, put aside for five years, rewritten in blind haste over a few months in 1945, and published in 1947, the other formed partly out of the experience of Olson’s struggle and early failure to complete a study on the same subject, but which Olson apparently had gone over with his own editorial pencil, as he later remarks in a letter to Dahlberg.”

The other stirrings in the tangled grasses: hints of Olson’s “Projective Verse.” (The Empedocles line itself is apt here, too: blood-thinking, that whole body-emphasis the “lineage-boys” of Language writing continually abjure.) Here’s Dahlberg in 1940, claiming Shakespeare’s “Lines are . . . unfettered by phrasings, prepositions . . . articles,” pointing to a spleen of “Pure Epithet: Reechy, drenched, murky, without a clinging Substantive.” He warns Olson:

You overburden your perception with obstructive words that add nothing to seeing, hearing, breathing. The Verb, as Huysmans said, is the central force of the sentence; and the power of the sentence lies in its Crisis. One begins a line to finish it with a Cry, a Moan, to get to the End. The thing, above all, is to Finish.

Writing, it, too, with its the post-coital “finish” and mess. Too, in 1948, Dahlberg writes: “the path to perception is perception . . . all else is waste, Dead Sea prose.” (Cf. Olson’s “one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” and “always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.”) Or see Olson’s (nigh-simultaneous with “Projective Verse” ’s printing in Poetry New York) rather muddled 1950 note to Dahlberg regarding “the ‘heroic’ vs the ‘ethic’”: “One of the first reasons why your narratives are of first importance is, that you have broken the lyric ‘I’ and the egotist ‘I’ and the rational ‘I’ completely. You have, therefore, made it possible for your own ‘I’ to take on the force of the ‘Hero’. Thus ethic is disposed of—which has fed on the mediocrity of life as it is. You allow in (fr the Ixion wheel image, on) a multiple man . . .” That particular fatuousness—that “multiple man” might “dispose of” ethics (still “with us”—see the monstrous mechanical borrowings of the Flarf gringos, “ethical” because the ego’s undeploy’d?—being sort’d “elsewhere” in a slovenly “sortes Googleanae”?)—succumbs in Olson’s essay to an equally muddled formulation of “objectism”:

. . .a word to be taken to stand or the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it.

Unh-huh. Handy, indomitably so. Next sentence: “Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object . . .” Etc. That’s exactly the kind of abstruse uselessness Dahlberg wars against with lyric relish:

i, too, am one of the stupid, drowsy oxen, having fed on asphodels for some years in God’s Meadowland, and now having nothing in me but mountain and bare tree stupidity; i am a sere trunk, not as tall as Anak, but more stolid and statuesquely clownish. i also have that blood-unwillingness to explain what you could misinterpret more profoundly. i am only laughing a little, but not really, remember that sokrates went to the poets to ask them to interpret their images and they did not know how. there is something in our river and glebe and sheep inceptions that forbids us to explain what we wrote, we [do] not know how. and, honestly, i would feel a little showy, gaudy, doing some balaam braying, feigning moloch soothsaying in the secret groves, were it in dead earnest (and the earnest in this manner are surely dead) to give you a scholia, a piece of fatuous exegetics; it would not be blood-sport as it is in making a book or a trull or a fine my lady the doxy, and you would be bored, and most uninstructed, and i should be by caitiff premeditation a fat oiled fool.

A sterling recovery in the age of fatuous exegetics and fat oil’d fools. Look, too, at Olson’s crabbedly syntactical bumf and gull regarding the “LAW OF THE LINE” (that use of “LAW” is telling): “Do not tenses, must they not also be kicked around anew, in order that time, that other governing absolute, may be kept, as must the space-tensions of a poem, immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem?” Isn’t that vacuity itself merely burden’d with some combo of dig-vernacular (“kicked around”) and laughable pseud-speak (“the acting-on-you”) pretence straight out of a dog-ear’d lexicon of earnest-German sophisms? I’d rather read Dahlberg’s jaunt (March 17, 1949) regarding “the knotty and baffling perplexity of prose or verse”:

Should the line be an Afric leopard, a water-hog of the Nile, or just a mild Pythagorean bee. Should we write humbly or fiercely or plainly? I know I have been too obscure; what right has man to be as darksome as a god in his lore? Ay, who will tell me anything? Meanwhile, my ruminative cud are bitumen and asphalt. And I walk alone thinking as best I can, but these miserable peripatetic exercises are in only a small way purgative, because there are neither gods in Hades nor mortals here for company.

Oddly, it’s Frank O’Hara one recalls in Dahlberg’s lines (“darksome as a god”—did O’Hara, who seemingly read everything, read Dahlberg?)—think of the O’Hara of “Ode to Joy” (“make me distant and imaginative / make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons”). And that combo of insolence and doubt—isn’t Dahlberg’s line about the writerly “trajectory” (“the little American cycle: first the writer is a young, acerb Timon, but as soon as he gets into comfortable, pragmatical relations with his environment, he is a pickthank friend of the national culture he once abhorred”)—isn’t that akin to O’Hara’s “A Young Poet”—“full of passion and giggles / . . . exhausted by / the insight which comes as a kiss / and follows as a curse”?

Ah, some uninflect’d Dahlberg-mots, a chrestomathy:

Nobody knows how to make a book; even after it has been written, and one or two or three human beings say yea to it, can the owner of the vision be sure he is not a lazar, a pickpocket, a lewd churl. How often can one read the most amazing line one has made without draining gall and hyssop? How long was Shakespeare able to stomach HAMLET? It was a spewing forth to begin with.

And: “We are always writing another book because the preceding one is a failure.” And:

the book, you say, should be a comfort . . . tell me, what is it to make a book, ay, fine and quick for the soul to make, and when it is made, a sin, and a folly and a disgrace, for how can you make a book out of virtue, which no one possesses but liars and soup and money hacks, so we’ve made a book, why then miserable toad, adder, and summer croaking frog, go and make another folly, sin and disgrace for another book. i have no solace in books, nor can i say with aughte else but tombstone laughter that a book finished is just a cold ague, to be printed and misread . . .

And: “I find nothing so hard as to write one good sentence. How much skill can one ever acquire. If you write very plainly you may be empty, or if you take the hazards that I do, foolish, bathetic, tumid. Longinus is far more satisfied with those writers who take great chances than with those who avoid all risks.” And: “I do not believe in Jesus as you know; I hardly think he was more than a hurt and wandering Word, as the Gnostics conceived him to be. . .”

Edward Dahlberg and Charles Olson, c. 1947
(Photograph by Sam Rosenberg)

Alan Bernheimer’s The Spoonlight Institute

Water Tanks

Where’d I see it? Some gruff verbosity positing—settling the matter—that light cannot be mere subject. A light is a verb, and predicatory clamor that seem’d high-hand’d for both the ineffability and the obviousness of its one-note song. (See Fenellosa’s “no nouns in nature.”) That’s what I think leaning into the smeary lit sprays of water in the cover photograph of Alan Bernheimer’s The Spoonlight Institute (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). Fountain, green metal chairs, plane trees: I suspect Paris. I suspect the le Jardin du Luxembourg. (Fun to say that. Makes the light bounce around in my mouth.) Qui sais? I like the way one’s seemingly off in the sempiternal shade here—looking in, as if into a cave of light. I like the splotchy pointillism of the leaves, the reiterating broken verbs of the light-saturated spray, stopped and globular. What a “spoonlight institute” is: aucune idée. (I think of “spoonerism”—one of the endlessly look’d-up malaprops: ah, yes, the transposing initials: “the guns of Navarone” : “the nuns of Gaborone”—something like that.) I am (obviously) spinning wheels, revving. Here’s the initial piece:

The Opposite of Proust

Old families last not three oaks
but stave off elimination
with endless paper and unmatched shoes

seeing film stars everywhere
set big machinery in motion

and never know what to do
in the presence of heartbreak

Could success amount to nothing
more than showing off
particles of the world?

Swaps, caps, floors, and costless collars—
they’re not real
and too many eggs in that basket
are not performing

Errors approach infinite sparseness
as the Lord raptures your hand
and the way up is rounded and slow

with small lamps at the clearance points
for the unknown relation between objects and beings

I construct a reading that counters a nineteenth century slow-mo temporality (“three oaks”) with its contemporary ersatz rendering (“film stars everywhere,” “big machinery”). Unsettled ways of measurement (“endless paper”), inadequacy of social manners (“never know what to do”). Dystopia and breakdown—nothing coheres. (The marvelous lines—smack in the middle—“Could success amount to nothing / more than showing off / particles of the world?”—recalls Ron Silliman’s poetics of mere accumulation, things heap’d up, carefully—though meaninglessly—distributed throughout a system, A to Z. Are they, the letters, the “small lamps at the clearance points”?) Exemplary: “Swaps, caps, floors, and costless collars”—a list wherein every item seems a category error. (The category keeps shifting—“Swaps” is related to “caps” sonically, say, but the relation between “caps” and “floors” is object-orient’d, hardly sonic. The programming term isn’t entirely accidental: one thinks of “ad hoc polymorphism”—one thinks how “everything is an object.”) Is the moment when “Errors approach infinite sparseness” the precise point where language sloughs away (replaced by body, replaced by inchoate wordless fervors—“the Lord raptures”)? The “unknown relation between objects and beings” isn’t exactly that between signifiant and signifié, though in the realm of the “unmatched” and the arbitrary collocations, such echoes seems unavoidable. Turn the page. There’s Charles Peirce in an epigraph to “As You May Know”: “Every man’s senses cue his observatory.” Again, a body (“Language writing neglects the body”) glimpse, caught up in a concern for “system.”

If I can provide something “in the guise of” a reading for “The Opposite of Proust”—and find some delight in the way its gears mesh and shift, varying speeds, offering scenery—it’s not the case throughout. One common experience: a sense that the poem is a flat rabble of half-surreal (“The peripheral beckons / like a mouse on fire” or “lunar gaffes of benzedrine proportions”), half merely goofy (“floozies with Uzis” or “whose heart’s gone / trouting in a newspaper boat”), and largely semi-somnolent roar. Meaning (out of “Amarillo”):

. . . far back behind the groceries
a passion for optics

diamondback terrapin in it day
took care of the afternoon
tandem red brick diagonals
wound up on an arm of the sea

get results in person
gas is more hedgy
where the hero is arch
room approaching body

temperature instead of intelligence
architecture shadows this man’s world,
delicate in its feathered coinage
and ornamental hermits

close calls are their specialty
mustering hairline watermarks
whose incandescent dewpoint
furnishes the mirage . . .

The sameness—line lengths, fragment’d, three or four beats per line, lack of punctuation, no idea, no fierce Anglo-Saxon’d poke, a sheer monotony of undifferentiated lingual “units”—overwhelms: the eyes merely register the words unstirred. Nothing focuses, nothing resolves. (The style is somewhat of use in some of the shorter pieces, where suddenly a tangible’ll poke up out of the slurry: in “Kiosk”: “Stop casting porosity / with a body of meaning.”)

It’s difficult to know (not being an “adept” of Bernheimer’s writing) the chronology of the poems. Acknowledgments thank editors of earlier books, defunct magazines, &c. A play, “Particle Arms,” originally perform’d in 1982, concludes the volume. A tiny section of “State Lounge” (title of a chapbook Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba print’d in 1981) is included. The Spoonlight Institute’d appear to be a “select’d”—though it’s not identify’d thus. One wonders what to make, then, of something like the ekphrastic “Storm at Sea” (referring to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s c. 1568 painting Der Seesturm):

Here and in the distance
a whole fleet of
shoe-shaped ships

driven through the
brown whipped waves
one leaves

a wake of lime
sunlight another
pitches through

towards port
where clear skies beckon
on the horizon

flukes dwarf the ships
again earth-colored clouds
gulls veer in the wind

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Storm at Sea,” c. 1568

That’d seem to concern itself with a whole different “project” and history (Auden’s Brueghel piece comes inevitably “up”)—adequate in its way (I like the epithet “shoe-shaped,” and, too, “flukes dwarf”), though hardly exploratory, or “new.” Too, one finds a dandy prose poem in the form of a letter—titled “Letter” with a dateline “Marseilles”—a persona piece in the voice of Arthur Rimbaud (beginning “This brilliant artificial knee, spring-hinged with small birds’ bones, is too late,” and ending, “I sleep no more than an insect.”)

In some ways, I find “Particle Arms,” Bernheimer’s play—it appears, too, in the Killian and Brazil-edit’d Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985--of greatest note. What I like: the tension and interplay between the ongoing broken-English’d talk in each scene and the comments Bernheimer’s provided in the append’d “Particle Arms (Story Map).” (In the Kenning Anthology, the “story map” is lacking. In a note there, quoting “a handbill printed for the occasion” of a 2008 “revivifying” of Poets Theater works, Bernstein writes:

I pictured a stage, with play characters on it, not real people. I was hearing theatrical characters say those lines as I read them back and forth to myself. What was the dramatic tension between the characters, the situation that developed in the lines?—is what I paid attention to, not any premeditated scheme of plot. And eventually a plot did develop. Or a possible plot, but I kept pushing it down below the surface, which was to be maintained and constructed of words, not “speech” (although the characters do have a weakness for giving speeches.)

Whence, then, one wonders, the perceived need for the map? I like, though, to correlate the differences (testing some idle Scott Fitzgeraldean “ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time”). Here’s the map of the opening scene:

(Night, a city street.) Bunker, dressed for travel and carrying luggage, is attempting to slip out of town, but is intercepted under a streetlamp by his friend Karp, with whom he drinks several toasts. Karp tries to prevent his departure, and Bunker, a man of few words, tarries long enough to be surprised by Nyla, the last person he wants to see. It appears Bunker and Nyla have a history, whose recent events are not happy. Karp interjects facetious asides into their heated exchange. Despite Nyla’s arguments, Bunker has made his decision and takes his leave.

Note the (intentional?) clichés (“a man of few words,” “have a history,” “takes his leave”)—I’m suddenly remind’d of the banality of soap opera listings (not entirely happy to be so remind’d). Here’s part of the corresponding play—beginning just after Nyla’s entering:

Bunker: You’re talking with your mouth open.

Nyla: I merely wanted to take you on the wing.

Karp: If I could do cartwheels I would.

Bunker: If you have something to say, lower your voice and smile.

Nyla: Don’t look so injudicious. I always get the point of jokes. The directions are based on material prepared by Uncle Sam. Life has a good effect on me.

Karp: And it does its tricks.

Bunker: The name’s familiar, like putting your pants on. But they don’t make that kind of time on watches. Peculiar risk of harm masks the clench.

Nyla: Don’t hurt yourself to change the subject.

Karp: He thinks I’m from National Geographic. My work here has always been volunteer work. Cash is mere bouquet.

Nyla: Money is the sex of arithmetic.

Bunker: The illusion is that everything is the same. Heavy machinery in the backwash of the Milky Way. It’s not my country. It isn’t even luxury.

Karp: Suit yourself. Assuage the turbulence of rational awareness.

Nyla: My personality does not evaporate. There are times I need a ballad, but the feeling is not for your amusement. Someone your shape shouldn’t wear those shades. I’m having a hard enough time with underlings without contributions from the bemused. Minerals thrive on benevolent neglect, while biology sheds a tear for the uninvited. You opted for a limited scenario. On-the-job habits become dream metaphors. Now you spend nights touching up days, a little twist here and there, up and down the chain of command.

Karp: I’m having vicissitudes right now.

Bunker: Don’t mention it. . . .

I suspect the bon mot here and there, particularly the self-referential kind—“Don’t hurt yourself to change the subject” after the mouth-work of “Peculiar risk of harm masks the clench,” or “You opted for a limited scenario,” or Nyla’s line in Scene 4, “Do you just talk that way, or does it take theories?”—I suspect these provide some necessary minor hoots in production.

Alan Bernheimer

Alan Bernheimer’s The Spoonlight Institute
(Cover photograph by Alan Bernheimer. Oddly, the lettering here differs, serif’d and ink’d in green, probably a mock-up. In the final copy, titling in white is center’d in the foliage, name in green in the sand.)

Off a few days. Mid-week, next.

“Not inextricable in any sort of statement of itself . . .”

A Wall

Oh, grubby-finger’d Time—that fidgety kid—’s push’d an index up into its nostril and sneezed forth a high-pressure nasal wind, dislodging a tiny ficus of snot. (That’s no way to begin.) (I am talking to myself.) Work undone is work undone: one finds oneself in the morning light with light making havoc of one’s hands. Here’s a 1988 sentence by Henry James (Hugh Kenner notes how it—tiny ficus—“somehow splats down with the word ‘dullness’”):

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honor, are not times of development—are times, possibly even, a little of dullness.

“Possibly even.” In the same book (The Elsewhere Community), Kenner tells a story he’d related, too, in the “Preface” to The Poetry of Ezra Pound, a story of a similar digital emunction, projectile land where it will:

      The Bollingen fuss appalled me. What was chiefly appalling was that the United States literati, including the distinguished jurors who’d awarded the prize, were all busy defending the integrity of the awards process. No one at all was defending Pound. Supposing I had nothing to lose, and in fact too naïve to realize I was risking my entire future, I decided that if no one would speak up for him, I would.
      In the summer of 1948, on a picnic table overlooking Lake Chemong near Peterborough, on a little borrowed Corona portable typewriter that lacked a right-hand margin stop, I put in six-hour workdays, mid-July through August. I fetched books from the University of Toronto library ninety miles away—books I needed, because, as it turned out, the best guide to Pond’s poetry was his prose, a fact that seemed not to have been noticed before. The result was the 308 typed pages of The Poetry of Ezra Pound, published in 1951 by Pound’s British publisher and also his American one.

Is it the “picnic table” there that thrills me so? (In The Poetry of Ezra Pound it’s “a trestle table under pines.” There’s, too, the lovely workmanlike detail: “Using a system I’d picked up from Marshall [McLuhan, with whom Kenner’d visit’d Pound at St. Elizabeths], I gisted quotation onto little slips, let their affinities prompt the pile they went into, and derived chapters from the piles.” (To gist: to parcel out cattle to pasture “at so much per head.”) Et puis, by the grand hazardry of the fell library—its way of provender accordant to one’s industry: Edward Dahlberg to Charles Olson (dedicatory) in Can These Bones Live:

My dear Charles: Literature, we know, is the art of ripening ourselves by conversation; and originality is but high-born stealth. How much of our talks have yeasted and bloomed this little Herman Melville loaf; and how I have played the cutpurse Autolycus, making my thefts as invisible as possible, you and my blushes best know. But here is my hand with Mephistopheles’ orison: When your own polestar Truths surge upon the whited page, may “God’s Spies” put the same vermilion Guilt upon your face!

Conversation. That’s Dahlberg c. 1940. In Olson’s 1947 Call Me Ishmael, there’s a Dahlberg reference: “Melville’s reading is a gauge of him, at all points of his life. He was a skald, and knew how to appropriate the work of others. He read to write. Highborn stealth, Edward Dahlberg calls originality, the act of a cut purse Autolycus who makes his thefts as invisible as possible. Melville’s books batten on other men’s books.” (Autolycus: skill’d in thievery and song, “surpass’d men in theft and oath.”) Isn’t Dahlberg admitting a kind of yeasty complicity—mutual Autolycus choruses—in the Melville talk? Olson, though, transforms the remark to Melville’s own sonorous thievery. Hiding, the “hid,” the illicit, the borrow’d—it’s all through Dahlberg’s own American saturnalia (in the chapter “Woman,” section “‘I Was Naked; and I Hid’”):

      From the Old Testament the Hebraical Puritan took a garbled Jahweh, added to it an inclement, Atlantic Christ and a Devil, and of these made witchcraft New England—the allegory of Adam, Eve, the Serpent and Cotton Mather. Satan’s Bible, Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, was the fountainhead of Puritan diabolism . . .
      All of the Puritan fantasies were unholy, libidinous quests for the wonders of the invisible world, the wicked spermaceti, the sexual Scarlet Letter. Hid within the carnal-hued Letter was the concupiscent wonder of the Privy Teat, escutcheon of Cotton Mather’s witch.
      . . . Melville shaped an antichrist Ahab, who roamed blasphemous, upboiling seas in pursuit of a Mephisto-Lamb, Moby Dick. Ahab spat into the sacramental silver calabash, uttering in final profanation a mock Lord’s Prayer in Latin:

Ego non baptiso te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.

Melville broiled in ejaculatory blasphemies; of Ezekiel’s Vision and Cotton Maher’s Shade, he composed spermaceti Angels; of a Satanic brute, Moby Dick, he made a leering monstrance, transubstantiating creamy foams and breakers of brit and squid. Leviathan’s Mead, into a wine and wafer supper.
      Yet none could speak: Hawthorne could scarce mention carnal embrace; Poe had uttered in vain, “And Sorrow shall be no more, and Eros all”; Melville made vasty, inverted oaths.

Quashing temptation to continue through Dahlberg’s delights in what he sees as Melville’s “epithalamium to the Seed”—how “Of sea grass, drear wave-plaited oceans, he wove a nuptial bed for copulating whales.” (“Morning light making havoc of one’s hands.”) Ah, talk, its unfinal pointlessnesses, its high agility, its sweats like a romp! Dahlberg (in 1966), c’est moi: “I propose to go along as I always have done, sowing dragon’s teeth when necessary, and seeding affections in the souls of my unknown readers if I can.” And: “As for myself, I’m a medievalist, a horse and buggy American, a barbarian, anything, that can bring me back to the communal song of labor, sky, star, field, love.” Time’s pull’d its black-moon’d fingertip out of its nostril now—I’d better off “to work.”

Charles Olson Reading Pound’s Cantos, at Black Mountain, c. 1949

Kenneth Irby’s The Intent On

A Wall

Coldish sun-slanting late March six o’clock amongst a folderol of bookish tumulus, burial “mounds.” That is, the books stack up against perennial shelflessness, lost in knee-high tightly snug’d piles. Filling a narrow corridor between the shelf itself and the table. De temps en temps I shift and uncover: redistributing, trying to determine and guide my own upcoming enthusiasms and intents. Or my dour indifferences. I keep dipping into the monstrous (glorious) anchor (or sky hook) of one pile—Kenneth Irby’s The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006, edit’d by Kyle Waugh and Cyrus Console (North Atlantic Books, 2009). My remarks here inchoate, wing’d, desultory, though hardly tepid. Like all Kansas, it is something unruffled and wholly inhabitable: not a page without its magnificent thing:

Hölderlin called the lyric
“the continuous metaphor of a feeling”
the epic, “the metaphor
of an intellectual point of view”
this is the discontinuous
dendritic narrative of a journey
metaphor of pasture, anabasis and return
pastoral in that
“sluicing” meaning the juice
runs down over the head
and puddles off the fingers

That’s out of a piece call’d “Jed Smith and the Way,” though one of the things one sees with floody (oceanic, grassy) immediacy in Irby is how a writerly continuum pulls flat the fences. Is that Kansas again? Ronald Johnson construct’d an ARK out of prairie. Edward Dahlberg of Kansas City once readily recognized that Flaubert’d “said once that an artist should look long and intently at an object until he could discover some shadow or line in it that had not been seen by any other one before reproducing it”—is that “the intent on”? (There is, one hears tell, the makings of a “soi-disant Topeka School” including Ben Lerner—who begins a piece “For the distances collapsed” and editor Cyrus Console—who ends a piece “Huge, empty, he could not progress but with drifting, but in a way he had won. The air, trapped by its own weight, pushed the blimp higher into the sky.”)

In Irby, the usual markings—of poem, of part, of book—cease to matter (that diamond-point-delineated piece of “Jed Smith and the Way” is part of something bigger call’d Berkeley, itself part of a book call’d Catalpa). A dendriform (tree-shaped) continuum—I see that, the garden of forking paths is the yellow brick road up to a plethora of cities, emeraldine, smaragdine—“smaragdus, first recorded in Herodotus,” cities effervescing, regaling, transforming. See lines out of Irby’s prose poem “Narrative”:

Two cubes intersect, the intersection looks onto a sunlit meadow at the edge of which, off to the left, the dark mass of a redwood forest stands, abrupt and as great a change from the grassland as the view through the cubes is from the cubes. The pasture crowns a rounded hill, and to the West, the ocean changes color. It is early summer, mid-June, the grasses are freshly gold, in a few places near the redwoods still faintly green, kept by late rains from the transmutation uncertain wandering has carefully brought us here for.

      ♦

All earlier accounts of this country were made by nautical expeditions which landed in only one or two places, did not venture far inland, and were even completely out of sight of the coast most of the time. Already we have discovered a great bay ringed by hills which earlier explorers never found at all. We were North, we thought, of that now. What ring the seasons make in this clime, we have yet to learn. We must be North, with the ocean to the West, but as many days as that seemed certain, there were as many other days when nothing could be seen from these hummocked hills but fog, and the sun itself did not reassure us, and rose contrary to our earlier fixes if it showed at all. Of ‘greate and stynkynge fogghes’ the English cleric had written. But we were, it was clear, in another layer of this new continent than that pious man had visited. He had not mentioned the trees, and through them is one entrance. Or if he knew of this, he remained silent—perhaps proof he did know, for he does mention a native reference to ‘entrance through living wood . . . I would not discount.’ But that is only the first, or simply one of many. Also of water, and of rocks. And now these tremblings as of heat waves, from hilltop and grass, gold grass, gold gold grass become—the transmutation in the air, of gold to airy thinness beaten, to float, ourselves made to float, the portion of us floated that keeps seeking change, that rests its instability on the seasons, that trembles to go forth and join with another. The poppies will be our earrings to reach for Far Pacific.

      ♦

Five days before solstice we have come to this spot, far North we think, accessible only by several days’ slow travel through densely thicketed stream ravines, choked with blackberry vines in flower, beginning to bear fruit, we took as sign to stay most open to the sun. And when we ascended this high hill and promenaded the meadowed platform summit, the vista was clear in every direction only excepting South, where the big trees rise. And the sighting to the West, or whatever direction it is here the sun sets into, is straight, unfettered, gated in the hills, the notch deepest in this coast range, showing a clear V of ocean, precisely, we are confident, at the point on the horizon of midsummer sunset—these five days, we are to make ready, it is clear to us we were brought here now, to make ready, for that exact moment, of entrance.

That, too, seemingly drawing off the California mountain man Jedediah Strong Smith. One recalls Duncan’s meadow (“permitted to return to”) therein, that “made place”—the “sign to stay most open to the sun” a declared fealty akin to Duncan’s “given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos”; Irby’s “transmutation uncertain wandering has carefully brought us here for,” omen, too, to itself. The other big thing: Olson. Hefting The Intent On’s nearly seven hundred pages, some of it out of “the Land of the Hermetic Learning,” some of it riffs of American vernacular—“Oh Sweetie I’m going off on a dustdevil this evening for the big time,” some of it taking the æonic pulse (“the geologic history of rise and fall / inundation and explosion Mt Mazama’s / blast in recent Pleistocene rocking / even these distant oceantided streams”), some charting heavenly jointures (“that is, to join cosmology and continental geography”)—one recalls (inevitably) Olson’s claim (in Call Me Ishmael):

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. . . . Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.

And Irby, one thinks, in a sod house, dug in and mount’d, traversing (“uncertain wandering”) the oceanic prairie.

There’s a grandiosity of seeing here, obsessing, reiterative. The poppy earrings, say, or the uncertainty (and what largesse it allows). Here’s a couple sections of “Point Reyes Poem”:

There are only two ways onto the beach or back up
one down a stream’s gully, steps cut, boards back up
the other through a blow hole, another stream’s fall to
                                                                                                    caught us
ankle deep coming through from the sea side
tide up, wave backed
up the pants, sopped and socks squished in the boots

we stopped over the cliff rise to wring the socks out
poppies like earrings in the grass, over the cliff’s edge toward China

♦

The trail back is a road left over from the dairy farms, so gradual
no rise is felt at all, through bay trees showing
eucalyptus on the hills showing the sky in scattered patches white beyond

As we turn into the first of meadows in a string before the trail’s end
a boy and girl rise from the roadside and start on ahead of us
Debussy’s Syrinx playing on her radio
our dog in gazelled leaps chases deer along the hills above them

having come to the last meadow
        seven deer in three families move contrarywise in short directions grazing

having come to this meadow
        there is only the uncertainty of all purpose

Having claim’d a Kansas, one is “permitted” California (“all architectures”—the local springs the widest propinquity) California with its “Frozen seafoam, petrified jellyfish / purpose but to wander, too rarely here, too often / mind in, locked gaze out / onto the splendiferous.”

One thing to note: the model way the editors’ve included the apparatuses of previous books: dedications, epigraphs (one terrific Osip Mandelstam line graces Cicada Woods—“A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada.”), statements, acknowledgments, drawings. A whole contextual history that more routinely gets stripped out of the pristine collected, or shuck’d into a corner. So: one reads Ed Dorn’s 1974 note prefacing To Max Douglas:

. . . what does it “mean” to be from Kansas. Not grass roots. That’s the broken wing dragging across the cowpiles of the republican party. Aerial roots? Yes, if the mind has aerial roots, having been in the air so long.

There is no placement but fixation in Kansas.

And, later: “Fixation. Irby has bisontine habits. No matter how far his body wanders, He never wanders. It is the endless rumination of the Big Vegetarians. It is this vaster length of service to the best earth ideas which gives nobility to the vegetarian. The habit is integral: the waving carpet of grass and the volition to movement are the same.” And, a lovely line (Irby’s “form”): “I like the long line best, but the tightest work has been done with a derringer.”

Nothing’s enough. The book’s a landmine of notational wonders. One hints and feints. A couple of parts of the stunning “Delius”:

2.

Only a sensualist could so
trap the pain of parting
the endlessness of the moment of leaving
this world, this onlyworld, for nothingness

the scent of a hopeless black pomade
on the wind, the curl
of left foam on a beer mug
along the terrace
                                      yet he
haunts me, beyond his music, from
another realm than he believed in
sentient

“human life is like a day in the existence of the world”

. . .

8.

A band of seduction, about to fall off the continent
certainly not the East getting home
beyond Sacramento is the essential roughage of the Western edge
unsettling a magnetic intestinal pole track
bloodred in the sky as the Spider Woman of the North and South
fades away, sustained in the, only in the
what man has matured as a creature of, ice
the Climatology of Attention is not the Extension of Empire
an Elephant palm we might say, nursing its dying with a nuzzling trunk to reach
    the stars
Deneb in the Swan over Bolinas the umbrella of an unquenchable reach
the drunken Strangers of the Earth stumbling into each other’s arms
falling off the road to find their way back to that barely remember home

in the hills the Leader of the Wind holds up a painted hand
pecked like a petroglyph into the rock
the Entry Sign upon the fallen shelf
down the stream bed of all many-colored rocks
leading the Wind that holds Direction

“to find a new vocabulary”
the Moki feather cloak
“hovering on the verge”

“so we must look not at the mound underfoot, but at the starry horizon”

for “the soul knows itself, and would live its own life”

That, Blakean and rhapsodic and bleak, pulling native California (Moki—whose cloaks were construct’d of California condor feathers) story up, it, too, into the “Climatology of Attention”—is how the piece ends. Earlier (English composer Frederick Delius briefly managed a grapefruit plantation in Florida, and wrote compositions with African-American musical echoes—“Percy Grainger was the first to say / he heard in Ellington likenesses to Delius / outraging England”):

“In Florida, through sitting and gazing at Nature, I gradually
        learnt the way in which I should eventually find myself
but it was not until
        years after I had settled at Grez
that I really found myself
        Nobody could help me
Contemplation, like composition
        cannot be taught”

And:

“A sense of flow is the main thing
        and it doesn’t matter how you do it
so long as you master it”

Like Delius, Kenneth Irby, too: “intent / upon a current in the world.”

Kenneth Irby, c. 2005
(Photograph by Robert Amory)

Kenneth Irby’s The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006
Painting by Thorpe Feidt, Red Earth: The Ambiguities 334, to Sam Feinstein and Barbara Crawford, 1998-2004