The Grand Piano Notes

Doxa (Pre-harden’d Slabs)

Kit Robinson’s affably cavalier attitude toward memory (its gaps and inadequacies): “I’m telling you what I know. If it doesn’t add up, that’s too bad. Or rather, so much the better.” And, ending, reiterating:

In writing from memory, I suffer the persistent sense of hitting wrong notes. By perservering [sic, typo as lovely intentional-running-to-un- wrong note?] I hope to make it all come out right. And in not, tant pis. Or so much the better!

Robinson pulls together strands of what he recalls of several public doings (the piece carries the title, “Four Readings, Three Talks, and Two Interviews”) in a mesh loose enough to reveal both the flimsiness (also a kind of suppleness) of any memory’s construction, and something about Robinson himself (to himself)—public discomfort combined with easygoing unflappability in the run of contingencies and dilutions. That is to say, Robinson—one supposes—is never the ideologue. (He quotes a terrific thing a companion, Ahni, says: “Everything pure is weak.”)

Of note: the various later interpretations of what Barrett Watten’d had to say (in an early “talk”) about Robinson’s poem “In the American Tree.” Robinson himself recalling how Watten “spoke of my poetics, by way of analogy with James Dean, as being possessed of ‘cool’ and “he used the word ‘control’ to describe my relation to my materials.” And juxtaposing a schema and assessment of the poem’s origin:

“In the American Tree” was composed using randomly selected word cards, one per line. The words were taken from two books at hand, W. C. Williams’s In the American Grain and Antlers in the Treetops by Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch. [Oh to think the piece (and subsequent anthology) might’ve carry’d the title “In the American Treetops” (repeatedly mis-order’d by newly-appoint’d canopy studies profs) or “Antlers in the Grain”—how the whole post-Vietnam “era” ’d’ve look’d different! Not dullard pouty tree-lineage, but pure aspiring treetop-glee, or broken male pride antler-loss . . .] My feeling was that, if anything, the pre-set words reduced my control by introducing unpredictable elements into the poem, forcing me off my habitually beaten path. To me, the accommodation to information occurring outside my imagination, through an aleatory process, represented contingency not control.

Against Robinson’s recall is, first, companion Ahni’s (filter’d through Robinson’s “understanding” of what Watten’d said). Thus the piece becomes “a feat of coordination, the mark of an adept capacity to incorporate random events into a seemingly smooth, elaborate syntax.” Writer as athlete or dancer. An acceptable version to Robinson. Second—and tellingly introduced by the biblical “And so it came to pass . . .”—is report’d how “Barry pointed me to the text of his essay, which was reprinted, in a revised version, in Ron’s anthology In the American Tree, second edition (2002)” (that’s good mileage, no, for a “talk”? One senses nigh-palpably the movement of exploratory / improvisatory talk—born of that ferment so often point’d at in the autobiography—turning ineffably into doxa, writ hard). The Watten-squib Robinson then quotes (beginning with the schoolmarmish “What is the transformation in this poem?”) is, in fact, all about control. “Although,” Watten writes, trying to bend metaphor, of all things, to ’s will, “the landscape is mutating, the driver is always in control of the car.” And: “The transformation . . . is not the coming into being of the image but of something deeper—the perception of mind in control of its language.” To which Robinson replies: “my own experience was more like a restless sense of intimacy, as if the poem were speaking through me, and I not entirely sure what it was saying.”

Some lovely memories of Ted Berrigan. One of him, mid-reading at the Grand Piano, telling an audient “North Beach poet” who’d begun to finger the keys: “Move away from the piano, sport.” “‘I can compete with a lot of things,’ Ted explained, ‘But I can’t compete with music.’” Another of him “composing one of his spontaneous lists of put-downs” and including “Kit Robinson that half-baked lyric poet.” Which one’d think something like a “high laudable sufficiency” coming out of Berrigan, whom I think of as uncompromisingly against the agonies of the too-earnest, the too-serious, and pure and the “done.”

—

Breezed through Keith Alldritt’s The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting (Aurum, 1998). Only to spend inordinate (ongoing) sloughs of brainbox’d brine (whatever) “thinking” about a few lines:

Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design.

Ongoing. Design a matter of keeping all the balls in the air simultaneously.

Pleased to learn of Bunting’s “four words for D. H. Lawrence” (“He was a jerk.”) Pleased to read about the Bunting marginalia in ’s copy of Guide to Kulchur:

When Pound insists on the need for clear definition, Basil responds by writing that “Only a lack of understanding of what language is can make any[one] but [a] saboteur demand ‘definition.’”

Too, in a note about Pound, Bunting writes that “He bursts with American energy, part of it, I think, truly American, that is, almost objectless, but usually useful and pointed.”

“American Energy”

The Grand Piano Notes

“Sky Construct”

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requires.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Odious ammo. Ask any fascist, strong ass, ask again.
Necessary, though the fierce stink’s excruciating.

I mention’d it recently, how little I like homophonic translation “exercises.” (Another long-available number in the battery of amusements while someone makes a beer run, or for “limbering up”—provided one sees a writing “session” as kin to an athletic feat, a competitive something, like a marathon.) I find it somewhat alarming, then, the position Zukofsky’s Catullus begins to assume in the “histories.” Raise a hand (and keep it up, I’d like a count) if you ever read the whole thing through for any reason other than that you were writing a Zukofsky biography. Zukofsky’s own Catullus Carmina 85 goes:

O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that’s so re queries.
Nescience, say th’ fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.

The fact that nobody knows how Latin got pronounced—the (by me) forgotten convention of making all c’s “hard” like k’s (hence, “crookeder”)—makes it (Latin homonyming) a funny (suspect) industry. “In the ‘histories’”: in The Grand Piano 5, Bob Perelman says of the Zukofsky:

“O th’hate” is an intensely crumpled absurdist-literary rendering of “Odi et.” It’s fine if one takes Zukofsky as trickster, provocateur, hi-jinx specialist, far-seeing poetician. . . . But Catullus is also the work of a worshiper of Catullus’ Word who, to quote the introduction, “tries . . . to breathe the ‘literal’ meaning [of Catullus’ Latin] with him”—in this case to breathe it into a lofty (corny) rhyme: “I move love.”

Against which (in order to consider Pianist “disagreement”) he poses Watten’s “reading of Catullus” (in a 2004 formulation, hardly differing from Watten’s earlier (1974) argument in This 4). He quotes Watten:

In my reading of Catullus, Zukofsky precisely becomes a critic of the “author function,” and I would be as well. [“Quare” it is to note the precise echo of, gulp, Watten-nemesis Robert Duncan, in that utterly odd construction “I would be as well”, cf. “I would be a falcon and go free” in Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Falconress.”] What I saw Zukofsky doing was refunctioning the original text into a new language, not through identification with the author . . . Poetry becomes the site of a critical construction of that which precedes it, and there is no sense that this process could not continue.

To which Perelman replies: “I can’t help reading it as an extravaganza of “the author function”: Zukofsky proving to Pound that he, not cummings, is the real Catullus of the age (and a tremendous verbal virtuoso as well).” (Notable: how “extravagance” and “virtuosity”—normally negatives opposed to the goal of authorial invisibility (“plain speech”), here—still negative—get associated with a function of “making visible.”) The upshot of Perelman’s difference with Watten is: “I don’t want to continue arguing about Catullus. My point is that I have found this disagreement productive.” Howso, exactly, is less clear. Perelman notes “a poem that remains very important to my own sense of my work” call’d “A Literal Translation of Virgil’s 4th Eclogue” and how the piece start’d in the writing down of a son’s “pre-speech body as it was ‘speaking’” (toying with things, &c.) and emerged (a “decade later”) as “a serious disenactment . . . of the basic Western topos of the Book as truth. He provides a few lines:

. . . I’m translating literally;
in fact, not only are these

Virgil’s exact words, the sounds are identical
as well. Reading this, you are

reading the original Latin, a contingency
that I, Virgil, foresaw . . .

Funny enough, I suppose, if one’s carrying the right baggage.

Opposed to that intramural disagreement is—again—that of Robert Duncan’s interruption of Watten at the Zukofsky memorial in December 1978. And, while Perelman’s summary of the two’s differences—“Duncan’s Emersonian sense of the Poet as the only ground of poetry vs. Barry’s sense of writing as an ongoing material practice in history”—is evenhanded enough, it comes only after noting that “Duncan’s [interruption] was a serious spasm of malevolent violence.” The “othering” language of the barely human—as if a large and dangerous fish had flopped up to the stage. Distinct difference between disagreement within and without. According to Mark Scroggins in the Zukofsky biography, apparently drawing on a report by David Levi Strauss, what that “spasm” (disembody’d) spoke included: “I in no way believe . . . that there is such a thing as ‘just language,’ any more than there is ‘just footprints.’ I mean, it is human life that prints itself everywhere in it and that’s what we read when we’re really reading.” And what one writes when one is “really writing”—when, c’est à dire, the fiery godlet who is all humankind’s trace, esprit, and aspersion comes tanking down through the tender neural socketry so’s one becomes sheer vehicle of . . . you know how it goes, unspeakably, solar winds jamming the controls in the medulla oblongata, &c. Writing, not “constructing.” See William H. Gass:

It might at first seem difficult—to make a world of words—but actually nothing is easier. Think how Plato’s Demiurge did it or the Muse of Lucretius . . . not needing a syllable, only a little open space, a length or two of line, and perhaps a gentle push. We must try to be brave.

—

James Longenbach, reviewing a Mary Jo Salter book in the New York Times Book Review refers to Frost’s “snarky” metaphor for free verse—“playing tennis with the net down”—and points to Charles Wright’s “brilliant” rejoinder: “the high wire act without the net.” Which led me directly into a lost hour of gap-tooth’d idiocy—attempting to provide a bounty of similar assessments. One need only match number’d “tribes” with letter’d metaphors. Longenbach’s capsule history of the ’seventies (“when two tribes, the Language poets and the New Formalists, were sparring”) is laughably imprecise, even for the half-truth annals of a family newspaper—one hates to see two sub-atomic particles of completely differing densities and “charm” compared. I seriously doubt either groupuscule could even see the other on the other side of the mountainous middle (one that included Charles Wright). Later Longenbach writes: “the polemics associated with both the New Formalism and Language poetry feel dated, part of the niggling history of taste rather than the grand history of art.” That’s just silly (and evidence Longenbach didn’t read ’s Lyotard). Though silly the way a steamroller is silly, that gentle fatuity that’ll crush a truth. Which is probably argument (or not) for something like “who cares if the Connecticut masses (I love that notion, readers of the revolutionary stories of, say, John Cheever) read poetry, or read about poetry—the bigger rags’ll always get it wrong anyhow (because the Connecticut masses want “the grand history” and not no “niggling.”) Anyhow, “spent” hour irretrievable and gone—here be it’s meagre rewards:

1. Poetry of the Few Remaining “Out” Confessionalists (FROC)

2. Language poetry

3. Poetry of the New Myopics

4. Flarf

5. Poetry of the Ordinary Zany Obsequious Opportunists (OZOO)

6. Poetry of the Mountainous Middle

7. The New Formalism

8. Poetry poetry

9. Poetry of the New York School

10. Poetry of the Tenured Ironists tendance “Red” (TIRED)

11. “Official verse culture”

12. “L’École française de la prose-poésie lyrique abstraite”

—

a. Like landing an enormous largemouth’d bass without a net.

b. Like a mouse nibbling away to free a whinge-ing lion caught by a net.

c. Like St. Jerome’s “even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall in to the same nets twice.”

d. Like a product sold by net weight—“some settling of contents may’ve occur’d during shipping.”

e. Like Robert Lowell’s “the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten, / nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

f. Like a kid capturing a tiger swallowtail without a butterfly net.

g. Like W. S. Merwin’s “the ruth of approval, with its nets, kennels, and taxidermists.”

h. Like “net”-writing, “Whoa, Jack, that’s net writing!”

i. Like Frank O’Hara’s “a sordid harbor of squid-slipping tarpaulin strips.”

j. Like “Poetry? nah, Netflix!”

k. Like Basil Bunting’s “counsellors of patience / lie in wait for blood, / every man with a net.”

l. Like shopping without a “net.”

“Writers (Trying to be Brave)”

The Grand Piano Notes

A Wall (Not Fade Away)

Rae Armantrout, she’s a cipher. She writes the shortest pieces in The Grand Piano, vivid enough (“a pack of menacing dogs to be negotiated”) but—is it grace’s dog Restraint, or simply the foul complexities of memory (“There’s so much I don’t remember”)?—one’s left thinking, who is Rae Armantrout? She writes of her long-standing (“most of my life”) friendship with Ron Silliman, present’d very much as a writer’s friendship, one of regular correspondence, work exchange. Or is it exchange? The emphasis is surely on Armantrout’s looking for Silliman’s “opinion (approval)”—there is no suggestion that she serves a reciprocal role. The piece ends with an anecdote about “a poem now called ‘Own’ but then called ‘Hospital Notes’” begun during Armantrout’s recent stay in intensive care after surgery. She points to how Silliman’s judging the piece “inchoate, that it didn’t gel” seem’d “kinder” than what she pictures as the safely bland encouragements most others ’d offer her in her recovery-state.

Any writer (anywhere) figures out the terms (or rituals) of aesthetic necessity, and finds a way to proceed. As such, there’s no quarrel with practice possible. However, I remain intrigued by what turn’d “Hospital Notes” into “Own” (the title becomes rather ironic in the event)—and why, and what differences exist between the two versions. (Part of my curiosity derives out of reading Silliman’s occasional explications of Armantrout’s poems: nearly always completely foreign to my own readings.)

I keep mulling something brought up early in Maggie Nelson’s new book, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). In an introductory chapter, she talks about three of the women writers—Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles—’s “take on the vacillation between ‘caring’ and ‘not caring’ that characterizes so much New York School writing and attitude.” (Next to which the Language poets—and so many of “our” younger writers—seem absolutely stolid, ‘thar’ she blows’ lash’d to the deck citizens of the burgeoning Republic, divinely free of doubt, anything, sir, to advance, man, advance. Try, say, to picture Frank O’Hara participating in a Grand Piano: he’d be all hearsay and gossip and saber-sharp taunts and tweaks at any such treacle-y earnest whatsoever.) Nelson points to both Marjorie Perloff’s and David Lehman’s refusal to accept O’Hara’s nonchalant stance as genuine. If Perloff admits that he “refused to care in the conventional sense [and] would not fight for publication or scramble for prizes,” it is only to deliver home more determinedly her assessment that “he knew, all along, that we would indeed be looking.” Lehman, too, in Nelson’s words, argues “that this ‘not caring’ stance was primarily a put-on—that underneath it all, the New York School poets cared deeply about poetry, about fame, and about creating lasting and complex works of art that would rise to the top of the heap in posterity.” (As Lehman put it: “they did not confuse the new with the ephemeral.”) Here’s Maggie Nelson:

I think we lose something pivotal when an intense drive toward canonization leads us to discount O’Hara’s statement—“I don’t think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone’s state or social relation, nor am I for any particular technical development in the American language simply because I find it necessary”—as a simple fronting, evasion, or deception. Here I am more interested in the wavering between “caring” and “not caring”—about literary stature, about politics, about “good writing,” about posterity, about the role of the poet in the world, about P/poetry itself, about publication, about “bettering anyone’s social relation,” about the fate of the avant-garde, and so on—than on making an eventual decision between which stance is “code” and which “real.” In fact I would argue that it is precisely this wavering—with all its attendant skepticism, indecision, insubordination, and insouciance—which has helped make the New York School so attractive and useful to women poets writing in its wake, who found (and to some extent continue to find) themselves charged with navigating their way through a male-dominated literary scene and history which has never “cared” about their voices in the same way that it has about those of men.

“Caring,” like its complement “ambition,” is a notoriously difficult thing to measure. It splits out—into caring for one’s work, caring for one’s integrity, caring for one’s “career,” a slippery hydra-head’d beast. And “care” is never perfectly mirror’d by style. “A perfectly carefully-wrought messiness.” “A pared-down exacting bit of toss.” Somehow I think of Bernadette Mayer sending editor Paul Carroll a bag of shit—isn’t that the story?—after he reject’d her work for The Young American Poets, the “lost” anthology, ecumenical (it even featured Canadians!) and resolutely “representative” of a period now mostly forgotten—after the original Allen / Hall & Co. anthology wars, and before the return to animosities. Is Mayer’s act a sign of “ambition” or not? No particular conclusion. Is Armantrout’s public “stance” (glimpsed in the pages of The Grand Piano) any indicator of some discernable measure of “caring”? Probably not. Is there a sense of Armantrout’s manner of “navigating [her] way through a male-dominated literary scene and history”? Yes, barely perceptible. And maybe that’s where one begins to yearn for more noise. [Not read: Armantrout’s True.]

“Navigating a Way”

The Grand Piano Notes

A Wall (Revolver and Askance)

Bizarrerie sur bizarrerie. Ted Pearson, in a piece riffing off the word “session” (with a nod to being halfway through The Grand Piano’s project’d ten booklets—“this . . . might figure as the caesura of our project—much as, in the midst of a jam session, a collective momentary pause stops time, then unleashes another round of free and fierce improvisation”—heroic, that) defines what he calls “a community of practice” (“not without elements of clubbiness”), only to torque the story—astonishingly—into one of community under assault, community become victim. It is a fitting move, one supposes, and perhaps inevitable, in the Bush / Cheney political milieu of rev’d-up imaginary outside threats—to point to one’s tenacity and imply’d purity vis-à-vis some unnamed harm-wielding “other.” Pearson:

      “Of those who do me no harm, I ask that they do me no harm. Of those who harm me, I ask nothing.” These words by Antonio Porchia point to the juridical sense of “session” as a site of deliberation and judgment—and pointedly parse the agency and intent of those who judge. Concurrent with the emergence of Language poetry into the larger public sphere, there came detractors who sought to dismiss, if not silence, its claims and manifest accomplishments—a confirmation-by-negation (welcome to the Terrordome!) that Language poetry had arrived.
      I’m not referring here to the aesthetic disagreements, theoretical debates, and ideological conflicts that arise within and between communities. These are inevitable, at times productive, occasionally heated, but not intrinsically harmful. Rather, I refer to those whose critical judgments are suborned by willful misrepresentations of the work and by ad hominem attacks on the community. Such attacks, some obsessively prolonged, are the dark side of the historical record. They constitute its social pathology. Yet they, too, are influences, albeit malign, on the reception of the work and the professional lives of actual people.

One almost need only insert “hard-working American” into the final phrase—“the lives of actual hard-working American people”—to make a Bush speech defending, say, increased vigilance and security in the fight against terrorism. “Tearism.” Welcome to the Terrordome, indeed—“Move as a team / Never move alone” is how that song goes. Two things strike one here: how the historical reportage (“there came detractors”) shifts subtly into a present threat in the second paragraph. And, how sternly “othering” the lingo gets: “obsessive,” “dark,” “malign,” “pathology.” Nutters and crazies out there.

(One’d note, too, apropos Language poetry’s new doxologies, the Antonio Porchia aphorism that goes, “The chains that bind us the most closely are the ones we have broken.” How many more instances of the tired claim that Language poetry provided “a radically altered relationship between readers and texts” are forthcoming? As if the “imperative” of “active engagement in the production of meaning” ’d been “optional” in, say, Christopher Marlowe’s day. Hogwash.)

—

Steve Benson’s piece strikes anyone (who’s been following the bouncing ball of the Pianists’ song) by the near-complete absence in it of the psychological jargon that seem’d the prevalent mode of Benson’s earlier entries. Here, limn’d with tact and sensitivity (“by consensual memory”), is a fine sketch of some of the procedures and mechanics that led to things like the “brat guts” line. Too, one gets a sense of the mid-’seventies milieu that allow’d for such extend’d periods of goofing around. And, how newer technologies (photocopiers replacing clumsy stencils, cassettes replacing reel-to-reel) shaped some of the experimenting. Benson’s memory of two people typing (whilst one read aloud) in the jams with Robinson and Perelman contradicts the earlier scenario (two reading, one typing) in a useful way. (Meaning, I find it of some utility to think about the differences. And isn’t event—and its versions—the thing one turns to autobiography for?) I suspect a lot of that sort of goofing around occur’d in that period, limbering up exercises, collaborations, circling around a table cover’d with typewriters adding lines, writings “under” all sorts of substances. Or, I know a lot of it did. In Ithaca, most of it got toss’d out, or stuck in folders, or raid’d for other pieces. Nobody decided to make an aesthetic program out of it. That would’ve made it “serious”—a deathly thing, and kill’d off its attractions.

Benson’s story that—on first reading of “Not this,” the words that open Silliman’s Tjanting— he’d “simplemindedly first supposed a contrarian and possibly competitive reference to Barry’s magazine, This.”

Benson’s thinking about “the transcript” and where art itself finally resides:

The order of things seemed to present the transcript as the final index and virtual tombstone of work generated through impromptu improvised performance in public. The transcript as an imposter artwork reiterated in another valence the principle I understood in “Not this,” and it articulated the multiply-incarnate displaced nature of the art I felt most often then involved with.

Providing another reading (of several) of “Not this”—a string that runs through the reticule of Benson’s piece, drawing it up tight.

And Benson’s paean to letters and letter-writing (providing, too, a hint of the range of aesthetic—or merely social—contacts):

I first found intense involvement in writing and receiving letters, falling in love with persons and with writing through the mails, testing and finding verbal powers and invention I could not have imagined otherwise. Sending a letter was an immediate instance of publication to one who would certainly read, even avidly, my production, the dear reader anyone might seek. It was seduction and display . . .

Reading a Letter

The Grand Piano Notes

A Wall (Peeling Project)

In The Grand Piano 5, Barrett Watten examines friendship—“a necessary entailment of the art”—of all things, with all the theoretical artillery another’d point at, say, the theory of poetry as a faculty of expression. So that: after claiming some impact’d amount of time “spent attending to the details of friendship” (an odd, rather unnatural way to put it, a kind of “work”), he leaps into the (apparently less discomforting) void that allows talk like:

Two options result that one ought to avoid: to maintain coherence of self in denial of the other’s assault by projecting a totalizing unity outward, or to link identity with the other by reducing it to an element of the same. . . . An alternative, less controlling defense, more open to preserving the difference of what confronted one to begin with, would be to transform elements of alterity into a chain of identity that spreads outward and beyond.

Uh, I suppose. I suppose that’d go better in the human world than, say, an overweening desire simply to remain a “thinking stone.” Or the pushing of one’s mug into every stray passers-by’s physiognomy to growl out a “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.” Watten’s formula of attending to friendship as a “constant contact with the exteriority of being” comes complete with poetickal epigraph (“Walls break off / where I am met”). And that’s a curious “construction”—a kind of “passively for thee I await” or “think of the fun / if only you come to me.” Friendship as a territory (to be) penetrated, friendship as the beckonings of a tourist brochure for, oh, Jamaica?

Truth is, Watten prefers to talk about the “politics” of friendship, or—in the bland faintest wash (if posed against the world itself) of hand-me-down theory-speak—its “ethics” (“an alternative ethics—that sees the other as an unsettling moment of the self, rather than disavowing it in an overarching category as identity. This is neither nonidentity nor equivalence but an active destabilizing of the other as oneself. I could write a book about it . . .”) Please, no. Nothing’s so unfriendly as dogged empty prose. It is, apparently, a Watten poetic:

In my own work, I was increasingly interested in an effect suggested by, but different from, such elusive language [he’s talking about “excessively private” “materials”]: a nonsignifying, hybrid neutrality that could not be traced back to intention. I wanted sentences that would float in their nonsignification, that would be authorless, iterative, and language-centered. As well, they would be flat, with as little affect or emotional quality as possible.

Charming. “Authorless,” and full of authority. Also, petulant (“anyway, we were never friends”), defensive (“my appreciation is entirely voluntary”), bloat’d (“Nothing less that the entire relation of oneself to one’s friends—the fate of aesthetic community—was at stake”). Yow. (That last comment coming after the extraordinary remark that “Ray DiPalma artlessly forgot the conditions of friendship in his aesthetic community when he publicly accused its editors of stealing the logo of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E from him.” Watten seems to think that an aesthetic community’s “art,” in order it not be “suspect,” must not “trade on private judgment to regulate communities of taste.” Remarkable. And, more remarkably, en même temps he derides “Pound’s misconstrual of friendship as the fascism of an artist’s republic” and deems the pathos of the late Avedon photograph of Pound and Williams—“after years and much disagreement, even revulsion” between the two—“corrupt.”)

The piece is not entirely grim (begrimed) with dull specs on the “conditions” of friendship. I did find a spark of amusement in Watten’s report that the cover illustration used for Plasma / Parallels / “X”—“a small, meticulously executed watercolor collage of reordered modular swashes of sepia”—now sits “unobtrusively” on Watten’s “theory shelf.” “Theory shelf,” badabing. Good one. Why that makes me think of Frank O’Hara’s (with friend Larry Rivers) fine instruction (“How to Proceed in the Arts,” c. 1961) I do not know:

Do you feel that you are busy enough? Truly busy. If you have had time to think, this will not be a good painting. Try reversing all the relationships. This will tend to make holes where there were hills. At least that will be amusing, and amusement is the dawn of Genius.

Friend Project

The Grand Piano Notes

“Fog, Bank’d Up Against Its Minions”

My Monday night “social relations” put my ass in a sling, sitting for a couple of hours dumb-buttedly stuck to a gymnasium floor, waiting for the boy. Good thing I brang a book. And dodder’d myopically through the next section, Silliman’s. Funny thing, just the length of a blog note—as if suddenly nobody’s up to sustaining a piece longer, with more nuance, or complexity. Here’s what I put down, one thing that spiked up out of the Jurassic sludge: “Doubt may be pervasive, but it’s not because we’re unsure of our writing.” That’s cosy, in a tired way. I mean, to be sure of one’s writing—wouldn’t that be reason enough simply to forego it completely? So Ron Silliman in The Grand Piano 5 in a short sputter against the word “experiment” in the series subtitle: “An Experiment in Collective Autobiography.” Too, he niggles—whilst admitting that the “autobiography fits into a tradition . . . wrongly characterized as experimental”—that the term itself suggests “the scientistic ‘antennae of the race’ fallacy that has bedeviled poetry for two centuries.” (Nobody ever finishes the Pound line, “but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.” That split between individual delicacy and common thuggery.) Which hotch-potch (Silliman’s) of terms betrays both an inadequate comprehension of the scientific method, and a somewhat pre-modern—“bedeviled”?—irrational witchery regarding it. Silliman wants to oppose experimental science against “tradition” and “community,” saying: “Tradition is important, as community is important, far more so finally than as [sic] a pseudoscientific paradigm like the one that caused Zukofsky to foresee a day when there might exist ‘a scientific definition of poetry.’” Sloppy, comme on dit, thinking. Science proceeds precisely through the steadying rigors of tradition and community (with, for the Kuhnian showboaters impatient, occasional glorious jump-sequence paradigm shifts). Experiment begins in the prior literature, no hypothetical excursion gets bump’d up to flight status without reference to earlier similar attempts, &c. Experiment ends with further speculations—“pervasive doubt” and its sidekick “overbearing surety” got no nothing to do with it. Think if each poem pluck’d down its debts, precisely detail’d its procedures, total’d up its conclusions, critiqued its failings, and proposed directions for further research? That’d be “scientistic,” and communitarian. I, for one, don’t think one ought proceed so: preferring the rampant individual in momentary cahoots with the absolute, God-tongued, clubbed to smithereens (that is, “floor’d”) by a lingual propensity not one’s—or anybody’s—own. It doesn’t take a village to write a poem.

Silliman: “Striking out articles is the revision I’m most likely to make in my poems as well.” In a tiny note (in a fold-up fan of tiny notes) on Ginsberg’s revisions “in order to arrive at a more immediate notational style.” I wonder how that factoid integrates with the definition of “pseudo-formal” that Silliman offers up in one of the six definitions of “Language poetry, as a category” that bulks up—interminable rehash is my general “brat gut”-response to Silliman’s prose “project” after its continual, albeit dwindling (only stray droplets of actual thinking falls out of the Silliman heavens these days, lost amongst the feed-deliver’d fodders and inconclusive mash notes to the “other” arts), daily presence after five or so years . . . “Pseudo-formal,” he notes, “in that it presumes that form is limited solely to the text and not to the social relations in which the writing itself is produced.” Fault of the “just any old syntactical wreckage” purveyors. That syntactical wreckage would not be Language poetry; furthermore, it would be “trivial.” Unh. Does ridding a text of articles for notational immediacy change the social relations that produced it? Or not? And howso? What social relations are presumed by the man riding the bus writing down sights and sounds? Are they the same as those presumed by the same man rearranging those writings (and knocking out articles) for publication a year or more later? Another question: are the social relations in which Silliman’s blog-writing gets produced evident? What is the formal effect on that writing of a comment stream? Of a moderated comment stream? Does only a pseudo-formal text remain if all the comments in the stream are removed? If one is removed? What is the formal effect of one’s refusal to engage? Of high-minded silence (quietude) in the face of critical “interventions,” provocations, recklessnesses? (Late modus operandi for a whole beefy slab of the original Language poets, control criticism by refusing to brook it, or acknowledge it. The Sous Rature Gang.)

Kent Johnson, he of boundless good nature and quick wit, sent me a copy of the comment Silliman’d removed out of the comments stream here:

Reginald Shepherd wrote:

“Ron, Thanks for . . . listing me among the contributors to Poet’s Bookshelf II.”

Geezus, Reginald, do you have to RUB IT IN?!

Ron, I’ve been patient. You either put me on that list NOW, or I’m going to take back all the ink I’ve shed these past years for you, Barrett, and Charles.

And then I’ll call John Latta.

sous rature(ly),

Kent

(I like how “sous rature(ly)” echoes “good naturedly” to obvious friendly effect.) Too, Johnson report’d how he’d then ask’d Silliman in disbelief:

Ron,

Did you really delete my harmless, and funny, last comment? The one that refers to Reginald Shepherd’s comment?

Kent

And received the following Silliman counsel, reproof, and justification:

Yes, it went over the line from a legit complaint to inviting a flame war in the comments stream. So I didn’t think it was harmless. Your earlier comment made the point.

In actuality, I was typing quickly and didn’t think about editing you in or out when I put that list together.

Ron

To which Johnson reply’d (knockkneed, dumbfounded):

What is there in that comment that could ignite a flame war? I really don't see it.

And why on earth would you type in all those names when all you had to do is cut and paste a list that was readily available?

Really, I’m not upset by it. I just think it’s funny. And I was only trying to inject a bit of self-deprecating humor.

Kent

All rather minor, seemingly. Though: against a history of reception-control (there is one funny moment in Silliman’s number 5 Grand Piano utterance where he blurts “Context rules” as if he were a schoolkid with a black marker emblazoning a backpack), the scotching of the mildest joke is noteworthy. To the devotee of writing’s “social relations” that joke—by nature, humor is uncontrollable—pitches the “product”—here a list of contributors—into an uncontrollable space. It puts an unintended “spin” to it, a mockery, and so, must be quash’d. It’s as if I’d follow’d up on the somewhat tortuous (though inventive) reading of “Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts” Silliman indulges in (“It’s a sentence I think about often, one of my favorites in the whole history of poetry, certainly in the work of my own generation.”) with a crude (quick) mistyping: “Instead of Ann-Margret I saw Brad Pitt.”

Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts.
“Does this sentence look more like Bob, Steve, or Kit?”

The Grand Piano Notes

A Wall (Rust and Lichen)

Out of a newly-arrived short history of the “Talks” at 80 Langton Street circa 1975-1978, writ in a studiously confabulatory style by several of the “disgruntled first-to-leave”—the thing is call’d Amongst Yourselves: The War at Home with Langton’s Language Poets (and Others) (Poke Salat Press, 2008):

      Lyn Hejinian opened the bidding, posing questions. These were general, seeking to canvass group attitudes. They were parried in kind, by cross-fire generalities, at that end of the room. Tensions evolved, as they will. Harryman, feeling somewhat awash, bobbing between Hejinian and Rae Armantrout on the one side and Watten and the remaining Language poets on the other, sent a folded message across- and up-table to Tom Mandel, soliciting no reply. Mandel frowned, dragging on a long Sobranie, and made a few mnemonic notes. Bob Perelman slant-skidded his own wary, This opinions across the table to Grenier and Watten. Ted Pearson concurred with a dark babble of ablatives. Mandel, with a perspicacious glance vis-à-vis, advised Grenier to “relax, buddy.” Steve Benson fell out (predictably) with Kit Robinson over a minuscule comic detail while recalling a recent Robert Duncan “débâcle” (unfailingly did he pronounce both the e’s accent aigu and the a’s “petit chapeau,” the darling Sinologue!) The remaining Language poets ratified contentions at random, playing politics. Watten leaned toward the slightly older Silliman, who seemed elsewhere.
      Charles Bernstein arrived, to a lustily concerted welcome. The parvenu took his place; he preened, they preened. Dutiful bonhomie got the upper hand. Réchauffé “flashback” conversations ignited like wildfires all around the room, reinforcing communal delight (“Ensemble anamnesis like dropping a grand piano into a canyon” is how one “member” recalled it later.) A terrible appetite took hold. Silliman, voracious, gobbled down sunflower seeds by the scupperful. Watten, who never ate in public, watched with a Puritanical scolding eye, Mandel’s alarming manipulations of a pomegranate. Joviality, intellectually tempered to a tittering one-upmanship, burgeoned.
      Despite Watten’s outright interdict, Bernstein was besieged with admiration-glances. Harryman demanded to know whether Armantrout’s repeated, “feeling” pronouncements did not seem to the “disinterested audient” to contradict what Silliman and the remaining Language poets had prescribed for the current company. Robinson looked down and offered his opinion; “that Hejinian woman” hers. “How do you suddenly arrive at that—or THAT?” Watten interrupted, proceeding to outline the real solution (quo warranto quashing of metaphor, by armed force “if necessary”), while Benson, rearranging furniture aimlessly and attempting to press his sotto voce reservations upon Ted Pearson, was airily misunderstood. Bob Perelman concurred in a dark babble of ablatives. Mandel brooded the more. The talk itself continued amid a general rehash tutti of opinion disguised as information, habitual attitudes presented as discoveries, and idiosyncratic expressions flaunted.
      Silliman, between seed assaults, seemed to be mouthing silent oaths, though not in any protestation against the Watten rhetoric. His thoughts (were they thoughts or were they “sentences”?) fled all the while to a certain patiently-wrought manuscript which sagged at that moment unread in his bookbag. Bernstein’s talk went on and on, a ruminative bliss of talk requiring no “distressed audient” except itself. Silliman stirred, Silliman redoubled. In sudden zoom-focus he began, urging forth a metaphoric congruence between reticence and power, reticence and the police, reticence and his own “everlasting-oblivion-in-mendacious-memory!” He paused in a rare co-terminus of torturous analogy and guttural scream. Eyes were suddenly seen shifting in varying directions all around the room. Everyone seemed to be trying to look elsewhere. (Consequently, in the raw limits of the spatial “zone,” there were collisions.) Murmurs developed. There were yawns, scarcely stifled. Hejinian pressed Silliman to change the subject.

Completely stand-alone history it is, though likely better read with (and against) the standard history of the “era.” (I speak, of course, of the excellent Grand Piano series of booklets.) Of which, I see, one is “up to” numéro 5. If the Poke Salat volume carries the Vachel Lindsay epigraph, “Nothing is lost if one does not try to say the unsayable. For that which cannot be spoken is—unspeakably—contained in that which is said”—The Grand Piano 5, seemingly in answer, cries out: “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” Donna Haraway.

Tom Mandel—“damn that Haraway, and what the fuck is ‘the cyborg’ anyways?” he’s muttering—begins with a Hannah Arendt quote (“Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought”) moving directly to a Mandel-maybe-inaccurately-recall’d Rae Armantrout quote (“The best thing about being a writer is writing—doing it.”) And, comfy in my shirt with all that, whilst Mandel ruddles about gay San Francisco of the period, he plunks down another Arendtism, how “a hero is no more than someone free to act”—and I am suddenly thinking of how of late someone quoted a line by Denise Levertov (to Robert Duncan) regarding Frank O’Hara (“strikes me as extremely talented or whatever one calls it but fatally smart”) and how I reply’d, “O’Hara as ‘fatally smart’? That’s something to think about. What’s she mean by that?” and my correspondent wrote, brilliantly: “I’d hazard a guess that she’s using ‘smart’ the very same way people still use it—defensively, because to be smart means to be a) beholden to nothing but oneself and b) liable to burst into satire (or other amusement) at any moment.” Free to act, alors, the Arendt-inflect’d hero. Precisely the kind of thing the groupuscule—any groupuscule—insidiously thwarts.

Mandel’s piece comes with a rinse (drench) of nostalgia. Lovely images of the final days of Les Halles, the huge ironwork and glass central market in Paris, destroy’d in the early ’seventies (by 1973 when I first “got there,” a few skeletal iron frames stood, an enormous trou ’s in the making, the worker café’s were transforming into boutiques, gentry-life seedlings sprouting out of the conflagration). Mandel: “In the nineteenth century, the anemic were directed to Les Halles to drink buckets of blood. There were long lines every morning.” Nostalgia, too, in the form of sweet rememberances of “Marie France,” Mandel’s “diminutive penis”’d friend of the initial Grand Piano booklet. (I did briefly go afraid for Mandel—that he’d pull what I think of as a “Carolyn Forché” and call out across the pages of literature to the missing friend. Recall with a cringe if you will the final lines of Forché’s “As Children Together”: “If you read this poem, write to me. / I have been to Paris since we parted.”) The troublesome nostalgia, though, comes in Mandel’s claim that, for the Grand Pianists, a point occurred where “community turned into society.” That is, using Arendtian terms, “an ideal life of action,” a community “if not utopian . . . at least undisturbed . . . marginal, fascinating to those living in it, open, although also challenging, to those who wished to participate” is destroy’d by the “pollutant” of “social complications.” The upshot: “society describes individuals not by way of their actions but by assigning them roles.” A common enough originary fable, the non-hierarchical playground, all of us born heroes. I don’t believe it. The role intrudes, inevitably, in any congress. In lieu of that is the stance of Rae Armantrout, there, “doing it,” in the writing, is one—it is likely—“fatally happy.”

Towards the end of Mandels’ piece, he reports that “Elsewhere in these pages, Lyn reports Barry as asking to eliminate ‘like’ from the poetic lexicon.” Which asking, of course, sounds neither heroic, nor apt to open up possibilities for mutual heroics, but petty, circumscribing, blunt, bullying. And Mandel’s response is pointed and lovely:

But literature is like a great sailing ship. Although we writers may imagine ourselves manning her sails or even as the wind that fills them, I fear we must be content instead to be the waves she cuts across.

Eugène Atget, “Les Halles, Paris,” c. 1898

Three, Interrupt’d

Coleridgean

I keep poking around in Haroldo de Campos’s Novas: Selected Writings (Northwestern University Press, 2007), mostly in the second half, the essays. Here’s the full first paragraph of something call’d “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” nimbly cornering the thinking of one Albrecht Fabri:

In 1958, the essayist Albrecht Fabri, professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, wrote an article on the problem of artistic language for the journal Augenblick. In this article, which he entitled “Preliminary Notes to a Theory of Literature,” Fabri develops the thesis that “the essence of art is revealed by the fact that art is tautological, “ that works of art “do not mean but are.” In art, he says, “it is impossible to distinguish between what is representation and what is represented.” Then, turning to literature, he adds that what is unique to the language of a literary work is the “absolute phrase,” the phrase “which has no content other than its own structure” and “which only exists as its own instrument.” For this very reason, maintains Fabri, such an “absolute” or “perfect phrase” cannot be translated, because “translation begins with the possibility of separating word and meaning.” That is to say, translation is based on the “discrepancy between what is said and what is said.” For Fabri, then, translation represents the less perfect or the less absolute (or, it could be said, the less aesthetic) character of the phrase. It is in this sense that Fabri affirms that “all translation is criticism,” because translation “is born from the deficiency of the phrase,” from its insufficiency to be something by itself. “One does not translate what is language in a text, but what is not-language.” And, “both the possibility and the necessity of translation depend on the fact that sign and signified (signatum) may be separated and alienated from each other.”

—

Occluded the synaptic connectors, that did, for shortly thereafter I found myself drowsing off to the high camp misadventures of James McCourt’s 1975 Mawrdew Czgowchwz, “the diva of the moment.” Long week syndrome, most likely. In the McCourt, people say things like “His eyes, toots, are lupine-blue!” and are named things like “Halcyon Q. Paranoy.” It precedes its sequel, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey (Turtle Point, 2007), itself hung out with a subtitle full of the menace of openendedness: “Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano. Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein. Book One.” Oddly enough, what some of the writing calls up, is that of another ongoing onslaught, Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Is it simply the “writing (about) performance”? Or is it the underpinning of something like “cosmic reach” both endow music with? Here’s McCourt:

Czgowchwz soared in flames to B naturals full-voice. There were involuntary screams, shock upon shock, fresh denials from every tier, but Czgowchwz sped forza allegretto, waltzing in circles until there was to be seen but a single swirl of jet lace pinwheeling in dervish abandon. She tore off the baguettes and flung them to the floor like a wanton hysteric at the final “gioir.” There was laughter, a febrile, ghostly cascade of it, answering the echo of Stameglio’s sobbing “croce e delizia.” The final measures were upon her; the optional E flat hung fire. She rose higher and wider by turns. The voice seared, shooting out of the the whirling smoke of her consumptive waltz. “Il mio pensier . . . il mio pensier . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah!” For an instant there was no sound; then something unheard since the creation—a Czgowchwz fortissimo A natural above high C the color of the core of the sun.

Here’s a fairly random parallel incident out of Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Penguin soloing on alto saxophone:

He took a preacherly tack which made the most of the possibilities for chastisement the equation of Nazi with not see opened up. Refusing to see, as did looking the other way, came under fire. Tending less toward rhapsody than rant, he put uptown flair and good feeling aside. He harangued and exhorted and even opted at points for a screw-loose, loquacious plea for open eyes, a return to Kenny’s wide-eyed squint. It was Penguin to the limit—a bittersweet biting sound à la Jimmy Lyons without Jimmy’s trepidatious phrasing. Penguin went for the big mouthfilling phrase, staightahead but syntactically loose enough to point to particulars where the need arose. The Greensboro killings came up . . .

Probably the overall rhythm (structure) of minuscule focal shifts, attending to tiny (or large) variations in sequence, is what made me align the two. Mackey’s assured underheave riffing on larger political forces and, often coterminously, local surface worrying (anagrammatics, punning, and the like)—absent in McCourt. Mackey’s tendency to exfoliate, pack in and pump up, a relentless surge of information, while not lacking in McCourt, is temper’d by a blithe air traceable (au fond) a history of leisure, ease? One’d never see a paragraph in Mackey like:

The weather did this and that. They all leafed through magazines. They told one another lies.

—

Certain snide recusant layabouts is
A phrase lift’d out of
Its plumb jointure of contextual
Immediacy in order to say
Something sure to arrive in
The instance of its saying.
And does, exactly the way
One finds oneself discussing a
Bundle of aesthetic information just
Dropped off, its sempiternal unexchangeability,
A clumsy way to put
It, surely. What I mean
Is, there is no other
Way of saying it, plotted
Or plotz’d, snickering or dish’d,
The story mounts up to
The sky, the scumbled sky.

Son House

Ron Padgett’s Reverdy

“Translating Is Pulling at the Teats of Literature”

Here’s an experiment (I am an “experimental” poet, quand meme!) Back in my scuffling days I translated a tiny batch of poems by Pierre Reverdy. Execrable, my French. Lazy, my ass. I “did” an independent study with a man named Ephim Fogel, a large and rather off-putting man, though I couldn’t say exactly why, something fierce about him, intimidating, sour, though he did, after all, kindly agree to work with me. I think I barely discuss’d my shabby clutch of Reverdy’s (I stuck to the tiniest “cubist” lyrics, avoiding the prose). Expeditious, my ploy. (Undoubtedly I’d finagled the independent study to replace credits lost through failing another course, likely that Bloomsbury one with the overly punitive not to say S / M professor?) Renovating, my memory. Why Reverdy? Because Ron Padgett’d written a poem call’d “Reading Reverdy” and put it in Great Balls of Fire? Shit-eating, my grin. Is that it? What about Frank O’Hara’s “My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy”? Or is that “merely” the reason Ron Padgett commenced to reading Reverdy and wrote that poem?

Reading Reverdy

The wind that went through the head left it plural.
                    •
The half-erased words on the wall of bread.
                    •
Someone is grinding the color of ears.
She looks like and at her.
                    •
A child draws a man and the earth
Is covered with snow.
                    •
He comes down out of the night
When the hills fall.
                    •
The line part of you goes out to infinity.
                    •
I get up on top of an inhuman voice.

Not my prefer’d Padgett poem, I’d never say that. Though I liked the idea of writing “reading” and I liked the stringing (up) together of tiny units. Today something like “The half-erased words on the wall of bread” reminds me of Charles Simic of a couple of years later, or the knockoffs of that “era”’s Simic (and boy, there were plenty!) even later than that. Which is the kind of funny thing unperturb’d time “does,” screwing around with memory and sequence: no reading the same “Reading Reverdy” twice. Today I rather attune myself to the ricochet-syntax of “She looks like and at her.”

Anyhow, my experiment. I dug out my copy of Plupart du temps, I: 1915-1922, lovely little Poésie / Gallimard pocket-sized edition, manufactured prior to the turn to yellowish newsprint. It contains the Poèmes en Prose that Padgett’s work’d up in the new Prose Poems (Black Square Editions / The Brooklyn Rail, 2007), Pierre Reverdy’s first book. I translated two rapidly-select’d pieces without looking into the Padgett. Here’s one:

Bruits de Nuit

      Au moment où les chevaux passaient, la suspension trembla. Le plafond menaçait de se pencher à droite, contre nos têtes; mais les fenêtres restaient d’aplomb avec le ciel, et l’on voyait le paysage nocturne.
      Il n’y avait plus de hiboux dans les ruines, plus de rayon de lune parmi les arbres, mais une cheminée d’usine et—autour—des maisons dont les toits avaient l’air de grandir.
      Et les chevaux—dont on entendait les pas précipités—transportaient dans la nuit complice des fourgons de mort en métal.

—

Night Noise

      Just when the horses went by, the foundation shook. The ceiling threatened to lean right, right against our heads, but the windows stayed plumb against the sky, and we saw the nightscape.
      No more owls in the ruins, no more moonlight through the trees, only one factory smokestack and—around about—houses whose roofs seemed to grow bigger.
      And the horses—whose quick hoofbeats we heard—dragged along with the complicity of night the clanking carriers of the dead.

Here’s the other:

Nocturne

      La rue est toute noire et la saison n’a pas laissé de traces. J’aurais voulu sortir et l’on retient ma porte. Pourtant là-haut quelqu’un veille et la lampe est éteinte.
      Tandis que les becs de gaz ne sont plus que des ombres, les affiches se poursuivent le long des palissades. Écoute, l’on n’entend le pas d’aucun cheval. Cependant un cavalier géant court sur une danseuse et tout se perd en tournant derrière un terrain vague. La nuit seule connaît l’endroit où ils se réunissent. Dès le matin ils auront revêtu leurs couleurs éclatantes. A présent tout se tait. Le ciel cligne des yeux et la lune se cache entre les cheminées. Les agents muets et sans rien voir maintiennent l’ordre.

—

Nocturnal

      The street’s completely black and the season’s left no trace. I’d’ve liked to go out and someone slammed my door. Plus, someone up there’s doing surveillance and the light’s out.
      As long as the streetlights stay dark, the show posters’ll continue down the length of the fence. Listen: there’s not the hoofbeat of a single horse. Even so, an enormous cavalier runs off after a dancer and everything ends up pell-mell turning behind an empty lot. Only night knows the rendezvous spot. By morning they’ll’ be dressed again in the usual explosive colors. For now, everything stops. The sky shuts its eyes and the moon hides behind the chimneys. Mute cops who see nothing maintain order.

Okay. Rush’d, and larking a tinch. (Larking, my weakness.) Now to examine the Padgett translations:

Night Sounds

      Just as the horses went by, the ceiling lamp shook. The ceiling threatened to tilt to the right, against our heads, but the windows remained plumb with the sky and you saw the nocturnal countryside.
      There were no more owls in the ruins, no more moonbeams along the trees, but a factory chimney and—all around—the houses whose roofs seemed to get bigger.
      And the horses, whose quick hoofs were heard, were pulling the metal trailers for corpses through the conspiring night.

—

Nocturne

      The street is completely dark and the season has left no trace. I would have liked to have gone out and my door was held. Nevertheless up there someone is up late and the lamp is out.
      When the gas jets are just shadows, the posters follow each other along the fence. Listen, you hear not one horse. Nevertheless a giant horseman races along on a dancing woman and it’s all lost turning behind an empty lot. Only the night knows the place where they are reunited. First thing in the morning they will be dressed again in their bright colors. Right now everything is quiet. The sky blinks and the moon is hiding between the chimneys. The silent policemen maintain order and see nothing.

A couple of boners, natch. Scanning Padgett’s remarks about translating Reverdy, I note two things. He writes (encountering Reverdy’s work in France in 1965) “I loved its austerity, its spookiness, and what I imagined to be its cubism.”If there’s an obvious first failure to my experiment, it’s in choosing the spooky over the austere. (I like that “imagined to be its cubism.” For thirty years, say, I have heard people talk about Reverdy as a “cubist” poet, and for thirty years I have inwardly reject’d that as buncombe. Due to my total ability to fathom what it could possibly mean.) Too, Padgett notes (usefully) that “Reverdy was a modernist, but he was not one for giving effects.” So: “silent policemen,” not “mute cops.” So, the necessary humility of the translator. So, a note I made earlier in the evening—“Isn’t that what translating is for, to “get up on top of an inhuman voice”?—may need a dressing down.

Some participants of the first reading of Désir attrapé par la queue, Picasso’s theatrical farce. Standing, left to right: Jacques Lacan, Cécile Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Louise Leiris (Les Deux Toutous), Zanie Aubier (La Tarte), Picasso, Valentine Hugo, Simone de Beauvoir (La Cousine). Sitting: Sartre (Le Bout rond), Albert Camus (Director), Michel Leiris (Le Gros Pied), Jean Aubier (Les Rideaux) and Kazbek, Picasso’s Afghan hound.
(Photograph by Brassaï, 16 June 1944)

Murmurations

A Wall (Conglomerate and Cut)

One of Ezra Pound’s urban planning proposals (1928): “To the North side of the city is the great wind-wall, open in summer like the slats of a blind, closed in winter, made of some light vitreous matter, possibly enforced with steel fibre so some metallic filament giving it toughness.”

—

One reference to Spengler found in Pound, in “Murder by Capital” (1933): “Twenty-five years ago ‘one’ came to England to escape Ersatz; that is to say, whenever a British half-wit expressed an opinion, some American quarter-wit rehashed it in one of the ‘respectable’ American organs. Disease is more contagious that health. England may be growing American in the worst sense of that term. The flagrant example is that of receiving Spengler instead of Frobenius. I can’t conceive of Spengler’s being the faintest possible use in any constructive endeavour. Frobenius is a bitter pill for the Anglo Saxon. He believes that when a thing exists it probably has a cause.”

—

(My ‘respectable’ American organ.)

—

The kind of bumptious night of night’s conceit, its refusal to hand over the goods. One frets and fossicks, picking through the cast-off regalia of someone else’s life. Outisde the wind is mounting a misadventure against the hang of a shutter. Once slips fictively into a letter scrawl’d by an eight-year-old some thirty years back and bound haphazardly into a notebook, handsewn, bound in boards, used tympan paper off a Chandler & Price for covers, big muscular script, my friend Mary says you look like a cow. The remaining pages blank, color of vernix. I pull down the fat Roselli and type

Variazioni

May’s in me, conveniently mountainous. Sell everything—
A solid din prep’d against wind, twice-tetch’d and insular, richly
Deserved.

Which is just about all I can “take” of homonymic translation, it moves me not. I pour out Pound by the thimbleful, it, whole redundancies of Pound! (Think how megalomania—there are examples “extant” today—is oft-accompanied by a constant hammering, ideas (terminologies) bang’d like iron stakes into the froze-up earth, repeatedly, endlessly . . .) Yuh.

—

A man named Sibley Hoobler tells a story about Mozart’s starling:

Mozart’s starling picked up a phrase the composer had written but changed a G-natural to a G-sharp. Mozart wrote “Das war schön!” (That was beautiful!) in his notebook. The musical phrase appears at the beginning of the last movement of his Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453.

Flock’d, the term is “a murmuration of starlings” due to the constant off-key broken whittering, clucks, churrs, and fractures. Rusty gate noises. After Mozart’s starling expired, he wrote a poem beginning “Hier ruht ein lieber Narr, / Ein Vogel Staar . . .” (Here lies a darling fool, a starling . . .)

Ezra Pound, 1958
(Photographs by Richard Avedon)

With + Stand No. 1

A Wall (An Ear for Business)

Editor Dan Thomas-Glass sent me a copy of the first issue of With + Stand, a striking thing to pull out of an envelope, big format (eight-and-a-half by eleven) sheets with glare yellow covers (simple stencil and spatter in black), and bound with a double wrap of red DANGER tape, adhered with a solid cross of shiny black duct tape. My response: similar to seeing the first issue of No: A Journal of the Arts with (it, too) its stencil and X’s, its vibrancy and will’d mess (running, No did, directly counter its high dollar print and binding job). Staking one’s aesthetic to open defiance, rigorous refusal of the usual. (Or: puckering up to the Zeitgeist’s latest D.I.Y. embouchure, mouthing a rag-tag independent ditty: the bonus being, it’s a mighty cheap way to go.) I like it. I like how it is manufactured, the tape, by Empire. Writing bound up like criminal evidence, like a crime scene, that black tape with all the electrical insouciance of a bomb, a bomb’s “safety catch.”

Title page. One reads: “[Sys tem (noun): 1619, ‘the whole creation, the universe,’ from L.L. systema ‘an arrangement, system,’ from Gk. systema ‘organized whole, body,’ from syn- ‘together’, (sun- With) + root of histanai ‘cause to Stand’].” And, interpreting it all: “[ systems | poetics ]” And, one supposes, sighingly, that if one is no longer in the mechanical age—and one is not—one ought upgrade to a systemic way of thinking, and leave poor old Doc Williams out of it, though is there a big difference between the poem’s being “a small (or large) machine made of words” and being a “system”? Maybe. Williams’s insistence that “there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” and that it is “pruned to a perfect economy” bespeaks a kind of numeric of wholes, a simpler arithmetic. Opposed to an integral bounce and slough, post-Euclidean planar stretches, waste itself covet’d by the system’s “beaters.” That is to say, the “era” allows (calls forth) more slippage and mix, higher complexities begetting higher dross. Is Williams’s requirement that the writer only “make clear the complexities of his perceptions in the medium given to him by inheritance, chance, accident or whatever” no longer optimum dictum? Williams: “There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war . . . is continuous.” Dignity, disdain, snipped off the same rootstock. Just the way “system” itself used to be a dirty word, straits, channels, the draft, &c.

With + Stand No. 1’s contributors: Michael Scharf, Dan Thomas-Glass, Juliana Spahr, Derek Henderson, Megan Kaminski, Joshua Clover, Ben Lerner, Ange Mlinko, Christopher Nealon, Rodrigo Toscano, and Timothy Kreiner. Order’d according to stock market fluctuations off an assign’d alphabetical origin (I’d wager Michael Scharf got pegged to Microsoft). Systems. To attend to NASDAQ is to become NASDAQ. A little closer look at some of With + Stand’s “picks.”

Michael Scharf: a negligible mishmash of xerox’d debris—news clippings, mostly legible back-of-an-envelope scribbles (family history quotient fill’d), found snapshots (banal standard physiognomy input), language worksheet (“Full derivation with an opaque vowel”; “redundancy rules”).

Juliana Spahr: Readers of Spahr’s The Transformation’ll see a similarly gussy’d up frolic of gamine-eyed repetitions in what’s label’d “from The Tradition.” In lieu of “they,” one reads of “me” and a various “not really me”; in lieu of post-colonial gasp-adventures amongst the Hawaiians, one reads of chemical flurries and fallouts amongst the post-ecological multinationals. So:

With the grammatical error of me and not
really me I had entered into a relationship
with a not really me that was constantly
replenishing as me lies there, me with not
really me, there, not really me, drinking and
on me’s breast the curls of not really me . . .

moves with bland duty-trudge into a song (poetry is song) of—

            not
really me, the song that goes like Salutations
to brominated fire retardants of Koppers
Ind., goes like Salutations to water / oil
repellent paper coating of 3M, goes like
Salutations to wiper blades of Asahi, goes
like Salutations to bike chain lubricant of
Clariant International, goes like Salutations
to wire and cable insulation of Daikin, goes
like Salutations to pharmaceutical packaging
of Dupont . . .                                                            

The whole reminding one of a line out of Spengler, who speaks of how the “professional and inartistic sort of historical research . . . with its collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to little more than the giving of a cachet to the banal-incidental.”

Joshua Clover’s “City” is an ode render’d in pure irony, a mock-lyrical outburst with Eliotic echoes of the “Unreal City,” with Mike Davis chic sociological putterings, with Apollinairean zonal nods, with Situationist “memory of public space” nudges and murmurs, with pat-refs to Lil Wayne, to M.I.A. For all the goop of theory and branding, it reads oddly like a paean to spring break, that particular academic ritual:

O Opulent Spring just a week away!

Spring where we go out into the system of systems.

Go out into the nodes and the pathways and the sun-green sun.

Out into our city where we came to live in close contagion with beloveds and strangers and neighbors-who-art-a-drag and so finally became organic.

Into our downtown which at evening empties of people and becomes form without content.

We meditate on pure form it arouses the most poetic emotions which turn at once to become dry motes of content.

Unsustainable breathlessness.

Ben Lerner’s two pieces, each titled “Futurism Never Happened” (increasingly common ploy, or tic)—they, too, seemingly adapt a wonder-mannerism, the cataloguing (interminable) voice of the precocious kid:

And the buildings went on reflecting the weather. And reflecting the buildings reflecting the weather. And the elms held their place, the infected elms. And the distance, bitter at being visible. And the distance, centralized and rectilinear. As our walks went on without us. Our beach scenes and our kitchen scenes. Our launches and their lithographs. As stars fell and burrowed. As meat grew terribly dear. And the bombing went on without us, the bombs with their infantile appetite for color. And the workers displaced from the city center. And the center displaced from the city . . .

With a difference? Typing it, I begin to perceive a modulation to the voice, a more-attractive variance, hint of authentic weariness, how our lives go along with no blessing, no accord. Something to impinge against, pierce through the static of the period style.

Enough. Corrupt systems thrive (and count on) high noise to signal ratios—disinformation, glut, chatter, “anything to keep the populace distract’d, minds off the problems of the day.” What I fear—brought out by considering With + Stand’s first issue, in some ways an applaudable first—is that we ironists, chatterers, media hounds, collectors of civic debris and popular curios, we norteamericano poets of the relentless ever-burgeoning imperium—that we do no more than add noise into an already noise-stopped-up system.

With + Stand No. 1, Binding and Cover

             

Study of the tactile modes,
Tongue to palette ribbed like
A poulterer’s poultry, that kind
Of repetition that ends in
Farce, or a poulet farci,
A hen stuff’d with a
Clove-stuck onion, tiny Sputnik
Of the gorge getting up,
Mere futurity seeming to stick
In its craw. Do you
Collect anything? I didn’t think
So. It’s cumbersome to collect,
Think of Hölderlin in that
Small room overlooking the north-
Draining Neckar, fingering the slack
Keys of a noiseless piano,
Its strings cut with wire-
Cutters. He calls himself Mr.
Librarian, or Scardanelli—two names
Is not a collection. He
Makes a marginal human niche,
Weds blue to sugar, neo-
Parsimony to wind-sausage, concrete
Syntax to urine-turbidity, does
Sophocles in words color’d red.

Spengler, Walser, Middleton

Tilt and Continuum

Sunday with its twitches and misfires, a plenary, a ruse. It dribbles out inconsequentially, spent badly, exhaust’d to no end. What Sunday’s for: blowout of surplus time in denial of time’s pinch’d economy. (I hate that kind of talk.) One drifts in and out of Spengler all sunny morning:

For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives, without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He has time, but he knows nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists, in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the contrary, is a discovery, which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live.

And, there with the coverlets in a jumble, the dog sprawling, one tries to insert oneself into timelessness, a world of pure presence (coverlet, dog, sunny slat-work against the wall), a world of individual suspension in a crowd’d morass of the mythological. (Thinking of Spengler’s talk of culture funerary difference: the Greek tendency to torch the earthly remains et c’est tout, versus the Egyptian one of anchoring each deceased to a compleat and accurate and history-making chain, genealogy’s time-binding and boundary.) There’s such a welter and weave to The Decline of the West that it is difficult to pluck the adjudicable quote, disentangle the apparent argument, one reads in a shine (dimming here and there) of seeing, spellbound. One becomes willing—hard thing in a sneering maleficent time—to use a words like “destiny” and “soul.” Spengler, on the opposition between the Destiny Idea (demanding “life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect” and the Causality Principle (“the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning experience”):

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a necessity of the thinking consciousness and the basic form of its relation to the essence of things, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable necessity of life. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.”

And, later: “The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think.” Akin to how the poems require a trance and trust, the throwing of oneself on the mercy of one’s own brash physiognomic compass, sound-board and gut-guttural high-dudgeon. Or how a novel’ll bring history down out of the clouds with a punch, cleaning the clock. A bewitching, a stray walloping verity. Think of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, the runaway in school. How Spengleresque he seems!

I have sold my watch, so as to buy tobacco for cigarettes. I can live without a watch, but not without cigarettes, that is shameful, but a necessity. Somehow I must get some money or I shan’t have any clean clothes to wear. Clean collars are things I can’t do without. A person’s happiness depends, yet does not depend, on such things. Happiness? No. But one should be proper. Cleanliness alone is a joy. I’m just talking. How I hate all the right words! Today the Fräulein cried. Why? Halfway through the class, tears suddenly poured from her eyes. It strangely moves me. Anyway, I shall have to keep my eyes peeled. I like listening for something that doesn’t want to make a sound. I pay attention, and that makes life more beautiful, for if we don’t have to pay attention there really is no life.

The obverse (or parallel) of the dislike of “all the right words” is, Christopher Middleton notes, Jakob’s blithe (or radical) claim, “Sometimes I say things that surpass my own understanding!” And Walser translator Middleton himself, just to turn one back into history (there is nothing else), in a stunning short prose piece call’d “Life Force”—out of Crypto-Topographia: Stories of Secret Places (Enitharmon, 2002)—insists on history’s nigh-inescapable raptures (which, not unlike the scuba diver’s rapture of the deep, presents a possible world-terminus, a static “heavenly” thing, in denial of its constant becoming, tempting the swimmer to shed air-tanks in an act of joinery), mankind’s dream of entering—and being still’d by— history:

Life Force

Only once did erstwhile signals officer Weismann, from under a wave of white hair, tell of the ‘charcoal faces’, noses burned off, ears burned off, brought to the hospital ship from the torpedoed cruiser Princeton while the landing on one of those little Philippine islands went forward—feet blown off, men with splintered stump legs and arms, and the medicos busy with them, chopping and sawing, amazed by the erections, and a navy doctor stooped on the steel deck to stroke and stoke the big stiff penis of the gunner they’d laid out on a gurney, the most he could do for him now. Then silence. Fingers pulling at his underlip, near to sobbing, as if the comparison, an old afterthought of his, even while he spoke no longer glossed or blunted the pictures in his memory: No pleasure in that. It’s like the figures with erections on a Greek amphora: the satyrs dancing; no pleasure, but the rapture.

—

Typing that whilst the calculable storage bin in the brainbox is busy trying to adjust itself to the input: Robert Walser (1878-1956, he collapsed in the snow on the grounds of the asylum at Herisau (Switzerland) he’d enter’d in 1933—“I’m not here to write, but to be mad,” he told Swiss writer Carl Seelig) is a near-perfect contemporary of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955, he never went to Switzerland, or hardly anywhere else—but then, neither did Walser, who has a character somewhere saying: “I’m staying here. It’s nice, just to stay. Does nature go abroad? Do trees travel, to acquire greener leaves elsewhere and then to come back and show themselves off?”), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924, admirer of Walser’s work—first collection in 1904—even before he became Kafka). What would Kafka say to Stevens, or Stevens to Kafka, or Walser to either?

The Death of Robert Walser

John Tipton and Sophocles’s Ajax

A Wall (Pock and Barricado)

Still about Ajax, and translations, interpretive, “off,” traduced, “translucinated.” The man I neglect’d in yesterday’s tiny list: Pound. Isn’t that where such things begin? (Pour nous.) In a foreword to John Tipton’s version, Stanley Lombardo writes: “Aeschylus is famously reported to have said that Greek tragedy consisted of leftovers from the great banquet of Homer.” All day barbarity: to rehash that into something like “our twentieth century poetry in translation consists of storm debris of the hurricane named Ezra.” Think: even Robert Lowell had Imitations. Is it Pound, though, or the “American” character at work, that half-ass’d lingually dumb ox who plows deep, sows whatever’s “at hand,” and snorts at the critical barb? Edmund Wilson’s got an early sketch (1922) of Pound that puts him up as “incurable provincial . . . driven to Europe by a thirst for romance and color that he could scarcely have satisfied in America.” For Wilson, Pound is “tainted with an obsession . . . : the frantic desire to flee as far from Idaho as possible, the itching to prove to Main Street that he has extirpated it from his soul.” His deficiencies are those of “experience and feeling”; “it is all too often exclusively the Europe of books in which he finds himself forced to continue to live”; hence, the “continual recourse to translation.” And, there too, a “fatal inadequacy,” a “lameness.” And, one’d maintain: a permission. (“The point? Freedom.” Is what Clark Coolidge says.)

What John Tipton’s done with that permission he details in an afterword call’d “An Acounting”:

This translation uses a counted line. That is, the length of each line is determined by the number of words in the line. Further, I have constrained the number of words per line to match the number of metrical feet found in the Greek. . . . Consequently, in rendering the speeches, I use six words to the line. . . . The translation has as many lines as does the original . . . Essentially I have taken the play into English at an exchange rate of one English word for every metrical foot in the Greek.

Too, Tipton’s fuddled the Chorus “into a kind of disturbed unconscious to the play itself” by means of “two deliberate distortions”:

First, I eliminated any use of first person in the chorus to disembody it. And second, I exaggerated the psychological elements and distressed the syntax into a slightly disjointed raving. The result is a sinister, nagging voice that punctuates the action.

A random sample page or so, the “effete Menalaus” and Teucer, half-brother to Ajax and replacement after the latter’s suicide:

Menalaus: How will I break divine laws?

Teucer: If you don’t allow him burial.

Menalaus: No, he declared war against me.

Teucer: When did Ajax ever confront you?

Menalaus: You know we hated each other.

Teucer: You rigged a vote against him.

Menalaus: The voters rejected him, not me.

Teucer: You sure made it look legal.

Menalaus: You’re starting to piss me off.

Teucer: Oh, really?
                                      Welcome to the club.

Menalaus: I’ll say one thing: no burial.

Teucer: Hear this: he will be buried.

Menalaus: I once know a real loudmouth
who wanted to sail in winter.
When the weather started getting rough,
he didn’t seem quite so talkative
and was much easier to tolerate.
Your yammering reminds me of him.
We just need a little storm
to get some quiet around here.

Teucer: I once knew a fool myself
who enjoyed seeing other people hurt.
One day, somebody resembling me,
with a temper like mine, said,
“Don’t insult the dead, my friend,
if you do, you’ll regret it.”
Right to the unfortunate man’s face.
You remind me of that man
quite a bit.
                      You get it?

I like the up-tempo velocity here, hinting at blood-quickening, mounting anger, notable particularly in the two longer speeches. I think the six-word ploy is somewhat less exhilarating in the one-line banter—it’s got the effect at times of diminishing distinctions between the antagonists. Too, it’s difficult (with such a constraint) to maintain “register” in the diction: to my ear there’s a big difference between the lovely naturalness of “You’re starting to piss me off” and Menalaus’s subsequent, rather finicky “I’ll say one thing: no burial.” Quibbles, quite likely. (I did wonder about the possibility of assigning different word counts to the various characters—a way of turning the emphases.)

A tiny glimpse at the “Chorus of Sailors” (here, opening the second movement, just after Ajax’s self-inflict’d death):

hurt heaps hurt here
left right
left where it will
will it learn the place?
dropped it
dropped can’t find it be found
half a boat’s oars in sync
with what?
beach to the west is stippled
by tracks
that fade like sores fill eyes
when stares the sun so much
it’s plain what follows the man

Which is lovely, mysterious, stunned, groping. Tentative and sure à la fois. Sense of disembodied voices rising up out of blood-soak’d (Ajax’s madness is signal’d in the opening scene by him in a frenzy of slaughtering herds and herdsmen) darkness, the old order (“left right / left where it will”) completely sunder’d.

The cover photograph of a collection of freshly-butcher’d sheep heads mount’d against a white wall—by the Israeli Nadav Kander (“Severed Heads, Faroe Island,” 2006)—is formidable, mesmerizing, right. (A detail: inside the front flap is what looks like a towel, hung up too, shaped by accident or design to resemble another head, a haunting-comical touch.) Design by the inimitable Jeff Clark, who stretch’d down the j of the title-page Ajax to resemble a knife.

John Tipton

                 

Light’d a black conical bidi up, Monsieur Melmac Fungible did, answering
To some higher calling. Suppose the sanctimonious retrograde gauging this backwater
Port of no call didn’t kick in for once, would the
Fairways look any different? Or put the fumigatory hoses back atop
The plinths they got down off, negligent, sheer, platitudinously mouthing off
For the benefit of some corpus of lies, order to maintain.
Sans culottes repudiators. Stevedores impudiques. Sad havocs and vatics. Broils.
Two suddenly-gone-sour-on featurettes of early twenty-first century
Grunt kingdoms, hanging a ‘rhino’ construct’d out of a toaster oven
Off the gun-end of a tank. Hit man, my ass.
Lift’d a block’d comical bidet up, Mr. Melmoth Fungoball did, swearing.

—

Pestering (that is, plaguing) the question of what a cross between Ivy Compton-Burnett and Clark Coolidge’d look like. Not like that. I like Coolidge’s prefatory statement to On the Nameways, how in “an empty moment” when he’d begun to think he’d “run out and had no more to do” he “found lines coming” and follow’d then “into short poems, strange to see, indicating I know not.” I like the brash lack of intent. Though it intervenes, soon enough:

Eventually I began writing them while watching movies (from Hopalong Cassidy Enters to Last Year at Marienbad) on satellite TV, a practice reminding me of de Kooning drawing with his left hand, Guston pen in hand watching the Watergate coverage, and of course Kerouac scribing his Blues. The point? Freedom. An overcoming of the obstacles erected by any conceptions of the poem.

And Compton-Burnett? Trigger’d by a Guardian note how difficult it is to find the novels now in England. One of O’Hara’s oddballs. Novels of nothing but dialogue. A woman named Kay Dick in an interview prodding her:

      You catch your people terribly unawares, don’t you?

      Oh, I think one has to.

      There’s a lot of abandon in your people. They don’t mind what they say about themselves, do they?

      No, they don’t. If you’re writing in dialogue I think that’s necessary. If you cut the dialogue out there’s not much left.

That fierce catching “unawares” and in “abandon”: it’s there that Compton-Burnett and Coolidge marry. “Small analgesic membrane tocsins / one foot on the shore / we’ll have to go home now Brainy / the capes no longer open,” says Ivy. “The occasion of Ridley’s discomfiture is spoiled by its tragedy,” says Clark. Each more honest than the other.