Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium

Hyacinthine

Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium (Graywolf, 2008) ends with a quote out of Sir Thomas Browne: “Thus there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us though indeed it hath no history what it was before us and cannot tell how it entered into us.” A terrific curtailing of the usual human vanity. And though Yang’s epigraph opening the book (by Paul Valéry) may deliver the customary news of writerly world-making, it, too, succumbs to the ferocity and somnolence of a seemingly oceanic aquarium, its all-consuming theater a poor stage for man’s inventions. Valéry:

My pen was creating myths; they flowed from my expectant self, while my mind, hardly seeing what my hand was inventing right before it, wandered like a sleepwalker among the dark imaginary walls and submarine theaters of the aquarium.

Between Valéry and Browne, a bestiary of the sea, alphabetical (“Abalone” to “Google” to “Rexroth” to “Zooxanthellae”) and wayward, comic and modest. What I find enthralling: Yang’s restraint (a form of caring, of respect), the near absence of the usual clamoring self, I-identify’d or not. (In “White Whale” one reads “Round and round we wheel / . . . / till self’s freed from ego.”) In its place: taut arrays of (predominantly) fact (“Nature describes its own design.”) intertwined with myth and (mostly point’d) human history, “a felicity of association.” Sense of no padding, the lovely leanness of the notational. Here’s two somewhat randomly select’d:

Aristotle

Aristotle thought eels
“the entrails of the earth.”
If “eels” were replaced with
“politicians” this image
would be a guide-
way to a sign. Instead,
it’s an instance of
converting Metaphors
into Proprieties. And so Browne
doubted Aristotle’s leap
into Euripus.
For not understanding tide’s
motion, Aristotle recognized
the “imbecility” of reason.

Euripus: the straits between mainland Greece and Euboea, with tremendously strong tidal currents that reverse directions a half dozen times a day. One story’s got it that Aristotle drown’d there, attempting to ascertain the reason for the push and pull of the currents. And:

Barnacle

The barnacle settles forever
upside down in its small volcano.
On rock, whale, ship, log—it is
happy anywhere there’s current.
The barnacle has the longest penis
of any animal in proportion
to its body size. Happiness
and proportion:
never be ashamed of evolution.

Deftly observed, funny, just. With a marvelous shrug of assent at the world’s providings. What I like is Yang’s willingness to work so unaffectedly a vein of poetry as knowledge (including “book-learning”): I think only of Eliot Weinberger (who blurbs the book, hurrahing its “musical icthyographics” among other things) who is doing anything similar. In “Foraminifera,” Yang, after nodding at Oppen’s “sincerity, clarity, respect” and Zukofsky’s test of poetry in “the range of pleasure / it affords as sight, sound, and intellection,” concludes:

In a dream
Vishnu visited Appakavi
who received the secret of
Nannaya’s grammar: Poetry
is the ultimate learning.

Like Weinberger, too, Yang is a fierce cultural internationalist in the tradition of Rexroth and Pound (a guideway nigh-completely abandon’d by the presumed inheritors of the lineage, the mostly myopic and homegrown Language writers), capable of drawing on Chinese, Arabic, Mexican, Hawai’ian (see the poem about “Hawaii’s native triggerfish,” the humuhumunukunukuapua’a), Indian, and Old Norse, beyond the usual European and “Classical” sources. Too, Yang’s able to move adroitly between a rather chisel’d discursive mode and one of the condensary. See how “Oarfish” proceeds by sound and citation:

Oar Old Norse Ar
fisc Midgard Jörmungandr
ourobouros oarfish Elihu
Vedder’s sleeping serpent
a sleep of the heavens suggestive of thunder.
God’s mystery at once center
and circumference
Sor Juana induces Todas las cosas
salen de Dios. . . . But the oarfish?
One rare sighting
in the Sargasso Sea (weed
tar clumps, Euripized
plastic): “flat as a knife blade
snakelike head capped
by a rooster’s coxcomb.”
Echoes Lawrence at the Anapo:
look, look at him!
With his head up, steering like a bird!
He’s a rare one, but he belongs. . . .
Oor Oort Cloud sphere
oarismos amor gentle sweetness
pillow whisperings: omnia
uincet Amor: et nos cedamus Amori
other shore oared, angled
spar, silver
skin coruscates
rhombic crystals of guanine.

Which, in it’s temporary alignments (the hypothetical Oort cloud’s sphere of billions of comets up against that ubiquitous Augustinianism regarding God, among other things) renders a whole world of marvels and mysteries. Yang’s impulse, too, is ecological: things worth tending, and attending to. In the longest (and final) piece, “Zooanthellae,” he writes in numbing detail of the early U.S. atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, including the bomb Bravo, “detonated on the ground . . . ‘for minimal fallout,’” whose “nuclear cloud reached a peak of 21.6 miles tall” with a “yield” “‘estimated to be near 20 megatons, or the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs.’” Against which is put the official cynicism, the disrupt’d lives of the people: “They left the people with 4 words: ‘Don’t drink the water.’” And, the discovery of the coral algae “zooxanthellae”: “a dinoflagellate that lives symbiotically with the coral, supplying it with oxygen and nutrients thru photosynthesis while transforming calcium ions from the ocean into calcium carbonate the coral uses to grow.” Mutualism (elsewhere “Kropotkin’s mutual trust and support” is mention’d), the ordinary and the rare, and that nearly completely missing element in contemporary poésie wisdom imbue the pieces in An Aquarium. Yang’s constructing workable models out of disparate parts, making for a way out of dystopic tomfoolery. As he writes in “Google”: “Information / is originally nothing but difference.” And: “knowledge purifies.”

Jeffrey Yang
(Photograph by Nina Subin)

A YEAR

CXXXII
Oh the doghole boys huff opinionatedly, sole carriers of wit in the dis-
Eased cyber districts. They pin badges one to another, and shriek. Down
By the mill pond I am reading Swift’s Directions to the Cook. If
The bicyclist with the fez divvies up the macaronicks rightly, I intend
To conduce a ditty hither. Arschloch. Putain. Baldricker. The kind of
Dunce-holy things slung common out, talking it up, gripping the bat a little
Tighter. A straw man perch’d up against a lectern, or a dugout. If only I could
Write it down without the humid buffings up, sec et net. The police take care
Of that, pulling down the contaminating scrim of language, formal, in squads. One
Day reading a newspaper aloud out by the gazebo, my pockets stuff’d
With prog’d vittles, hams and oranges, I look’d like a Flaubert ours,
Bounty-tinged and shouting at the barren tenacity of rude sentence-ry, its
Tendency to insert itself into rhythmic tediums, it sentimental predilects, its
Cozy illimitable drive. The grizzled snout fit to fit the Kodiak kodachromatick’d
That day in April up in Alaska, though I doubt that meaning ought be so
Mean.

In the Offing

Crabapples

A YEAR

CXXXI
Up in the range
of throaty nuance is
found the wreck of
who we used to
be. That’s what every
song says now. Salvation’s
cue-ball didn’t never
drop in no pocket
without no help. Scratch
that. The chimney swifts
chitter and sail, stiff-
wingedly chopping the air
with the stumpy heroics
of sheer compensatory aerodynamics,
constant correct and exert.
Drop into a red-
brick’d towering roost hole
like a rag. It’s
so primitive to say,
throw my body down
there where the earth-
worm chews the loam.
Isn’t it pure sack’d
out complacency that spurs
the inconstant rotor, spooks
the song, notorious and
big, up and out?
I fly, I fly.

—

Hiatus: “A break in the continuity of a material object; a gaping chasm; an opening or aperture; hiation.” Thomas Browne: “The continuall hiation, or holding open its mouth [on the part of the chameleon], which men observing conceive the intention thereof to receive the aliment of air.” Which is the problem of the hiatus: who’s able to receive only “the aliment of air”? I am perceiving, of late, a tendency to swivel on the miasma stool, mildew’d, fingering the gunk in the air, slow slobbery and drooling, the “edge” gone. So I daily consider it, emptying myself into the mould of a “break.” Woodshedding, that lovely term. Off to practice by oneself. And fossicking through the tangibles, I find:

From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a compline service, a program tonight of plainsong in English, forays now and then into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macaronic from the fifteenth century, attributed to Heinrich Suso:

In dulci jubilo
Nun singet und seid froh!
Unsers Herzens Wonne
Leit in praesipio,
Leuchtet vor die Sonne
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es et O.

With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought by years of woodshedding up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette, who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man’s presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s doing. . . .

Pynchon, of course. Out of Gravity’s Rainbow. “The dreamless version of the real”—isn’t it precisely in attempt to combat that, and the way it smudges out everything that one writes? Now sing and be happy!

Thomas Pynchon, c. 1955

The Age of Beeps

Sign

A YEAR

CXXVIII
If the push
                  of modernity with
its constant buck-

up of newly
                  deliver’d things, its
machinery and mayhem,

its gaud surge-
                  and-splurge turbulence,
all of it

seemingly guaranteed by
                  the buttery sun-
realms of intractable

earnest and querulous
                  precedent, up to
unforeseeable heights chugging—

and thenceforth unpitiably
                  (with Godly intent)
dash’d to earth

in a feverish
                  mania of unmaking,
in track’d plunge

obsolescing into vestige
                  like a rollercoaster
or a coupon:

if everything remain’d
                  unprogress’d, all goods
unexchanged, commodity replacement

schemes fail’d completely,
                  brand clearance adjustments
unrecompensed, chits chuck’d,

debts dump’d, stocks
                  stint’d and stow’d,
its—the age’s—

recompense’d rot irredeemably
                  and legibility itself’d
offer a look

undevised, a fissure
                  in the catastrophe,
like a book.

—

Baudelaire addressing the poetical / critical gulf, its bridging (out of “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris”):

To find a critic turning into a poet would be an entirely new event in the history of the arts, a reversal of all the psychical laws, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets naturally and fatally become critics. I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Thinking aloud: is becoming a critic (out of the uncontainable ebullience of the done-deed teleology that is the poetical lot) a leg up and proceeding along the path to becoming a “man of the world”? For Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” ’d seem to dismiss the mere “artist” (interchangeably, “poet”?) calling him “a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil.” In Baudelaire’s nimble invect: “it must be admitted that the majority of artists are no more than highly skilled animals, pure artisans, village intellects, cottage brains. Their conversation, which is necessarily limited to the narrowest of circles, becomes very quickly unbearable to the man of the world, to the spiritual citizen of the universe.” (Is “village intellects” unsuspecting “source” for Stein’s smackdown of Pound as “village explainer”? I doubt it.) (Is Baudelaire’s thesis the reason why we poets clump up so—like curds—in narrow, impenetrable and sheltering “scenes” that resemble gated communities? Could be.) How Baudelaire’s “man of the world” differs: “the mainspring of his genius is curiosity.”

Baudelaire’s exemplary “man” is Constantin Guys, draughtsman for the Illustrated London News. Guys (out of the Journals of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt):

A little man with an animated face, a grey moustache, looking like an old soldier; hobbling along, constantly hitching up his sleeves on his bony arms with a sharp slap of the hand, diffuse, exuberant with parentheses, zigzagging from idea to idea, going off at tangents and getting lost, but retrieving himself and regaining your attention with a metaphor from the gutter, a word from the vocabulary of the German philosophers, a technical term from art or industry, and always holding you under the thrall of his highly-coloured, almost visible utterance.

Or, Guys painting (in Baudelaire’s words): “So now, at a time when others are asleep, Monsieur G. is bending over his table, darting on to a sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago he was directing towards external things, skirmishing with his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing his glass of water up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, in a ferment of violent activity, as though afraid that the image might escape him, cantankerous though alone, elbowing himself on.” (Think of Philip Guston saying: “Frank [O’Hara] was in his most non-stop way of talking, saying that the pictures put him in mind of Tiepolo. Certain cupola frescoes. Suddenly I was working in an ancient building, a warehouse facing the Giudecca. The loft over the firehouse was transformed. It was filled with light reflected from the canal.”) (Think of O’Hara’s “Cavallon Paints a Picture,” with its radical rejection of any locus classicus ideal or overweening “truth,” its hymn to the most ephemeral of temporaries, whatever’s “of use”: “Insofar as we are thinking of painting, its interpretation depends on use. . . . Techniques of painting have been explored so thoroughly in recent years that their usages now seem to have evolved almost symbolic weights and meanings, not as absolutes, but as stances.”)

The challenge of Baudelaire is to pull beauty out of modernity’s mayhem (a stance that rejects wild blind lazy appropriating of “the inappropriate” equally with any finicky pre-modern snubbing of the age):

. . . for it is much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element may be. By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. . . . This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss
of an abstract and indeterminate beauty . . .

Impromptu assignment: where put the following lines out of Chelsey Minnis’s Poemland (Wave Books, 2009)?

This is a slow dance wherein you look at each other hatefully . . .

And it needs to be all-glistening . . .

Like a gravy boat full of pain-killers . . .


It is a very humanly amoral poem . . .

But this is the soft version of the thing . . .

The “This,” and “this,” and “this” that dominate the lines throughout the book; the candy-ass surreal (“This can be humorous like a crotch sparkle . . .” it says elsewhere); the tone constant of toss-off, a kind of dismissive hauteur-ironique; if one registers the all in terms completely fugitive and contingent, is there anything left to anchor what’s immutable? Nothing beyond the UPC barcodes embedded throughout the book: poem as trade product placement (complete with tracking device for inventory “feed outs”). Scanned, they beep.

Charles Baudelaire, c. 1856
(Photograph by Nadar)

Flâneurie

Tulip

A YEAR

CXXVII
‘In the unseemly work of
the new glamourists, sheen mops

the brow of what is
precisely call’d makeshiftedness, the neologism’s

awkwardness spelling out the barely
prehensile lurches catastrophic (see John

Milton) of the underlying body
itself. These are clumsy girls.’

‘Do I recall the days
of art pre-look, that

is, when a fresh-mill’d
stack of sweet-smelling pine

boards’d make a contraption simple
as a coffin? You bet.’

‘The neutral, the unadorn’d, the
plain, the lagniappe of good measure:

it’s art-scat one puts
down (like a dying dog),

a carcass tether’d and suspend’d
in a Utah lake, simple

wavelets (in little point’d caps)
(carrying slosh-cups) reclaim it

piece by piece (blanch’d, unspooling
gunk) for nature’s never spurious

use.’ ‘(Like a dying Cub
Scout,) art’s capacity is limit’d—

fever-blisters and provincial schisms,
the now tragically invisible moppers-

upper’ll rue the day. Rue?
I meant to say rule.’

—

Read John Yau’s essay about Frank O’Hara’s art criticism, “Passionate Spectator”—the epithet out of Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” wherein he unsettles the term flâneur (literally, stroller, loiterer, drifter, dawdler, saunterer—I think of Thoreau’s marvelous lines of bastard etymological conjecture out of “Walking”—

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre”—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer,” a saunterer—a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea . . .

—one of a tiny wash of connectings). Here’s some of the Baudelaire (somewhat beyond what Yau quotes):

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. . . . Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I,’ at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is
always unstable and fugitive.

Now, Yau’s argument (a good one) is that O’Hara’s “stance” is precisely that of the flâneur, that is, one of no fixity at all (“Instead of approaching art with a theory, whose primary purpose is to aid the critic in establishing a hierarchy of verifiable values, he lived as a flâneur, which means he tried to live in the now as completely as possible. It is not that O’Hara ignored or rejected the past or that he didn’t have values. Rather, he didn’t contextualize the present according to a preestablished framework.” And: “To be a flâneur is to reject a vantage point and any trace of omniscience in favor of being open.”). (Some of “our” most highly visible critic-exhortators, particularly those seemingly wholly “improvident without slots” ought to look to O’Hara for exemplary attendings abiertos, no?) What struck me, though, reading Baudelaire’s script’d “flâneurie”—how it sounds like it descends out of a hotch-potch of St. Augustine bump’d up (or down) by Pascal (“Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.” And: “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” Pensées, 1670.), or by Emerson (“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” “Circles,” 1841.) And, with Baudelaire’s “crowd” as “an immense reservoir of electrical energy,” I think of Whitman’s “body electric” or the lines out of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, the enclosured quahog versus the terribly exposed, vulnerably open:

To be in any form, what is that?
If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Is this then a touch? . . . . quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning, to strike what is hardly different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip . . .

No conclusions. A swoll’d up blister of thinking in the form of interconnectednesses likely mischievous and ill-wrought. A note to range my Appaloosa in alongside the dandy Baudelaire’s black Arabian and see what he’s reading. Yau notes, too, one of Wallace Stevens’s “Adagia”: “To live in the world but outside existing conceptions of it.” To work, attendant.

John Yau
(Photograph by Charles Bernstein)

The Feck of My Days

Blue

A YEAR

CXXVI
Trompe l’oeil of
                        a low proscenium
arch, its pterodactyloid
squat and hunch,

banal artifice of
                        a mark’d threshold
into artifice. A
journalist says some

unintelligible words, how
                        art’s meaning’s now
encumber’d by its
own post-participatory

forms of looking
                        at itself being
look’d at. Ordures
of looking. In

one city I
                        witness’d a man,
aerosol bomb egregious,
strafing the greenery

with 2,4-D. The
                        next morning I
found a long-
tail’d ichneumon fly

contracting wildly, peristaltic
                        in its throes,
deposed and undeposit’d.
Negativity unassuaged, I

intend’d to punch
                        the fuck bloody
for stupidity, for
the sheer bombast

of that tiny
                        tort and perish.
Tel quel vulgarity
of “the natural.”

Of course I
                        relent’d, bent down
to gingerly pitch
the fly up

into a tangle
                        of lilacs. Unspeakable
numbskull. The human
plinth is cruel.

—

Yah. Sort of mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita there, no? I like how Beckett begins the lecture “Le Concentrisme”:

Vous êtes le premier à vous intéresser à cet imbécile. Voici tout ce que j’en sais: j’ai fait sa connaissance ou, plus exactement, il m’a imposé cette incommodité, la veille de sa mort, à Marseille. Il s’est cramponné à moi dans un sombre bistrot où, à cette époque, j’avais l’excellente habitude d’aller me soûler deux fois par semaine. « Vous avez l’air » me dit-il « suffisamment idiot pour m’inspirer une confiance extrême. Enfin » poursuivit-il—(je ne change rien à ses logogriphes)—« enfin et pour la première fois je tombe sur un animal qui, si j’ose en croire mes yeux, est totalement et idéalement dépourvu d’intelligence, plongé dans une divine et parfaite nullité. »

Roughly:

You’re the first to notice the imbecile. Here’s all that I know about him: I got to know him, or more precisely, he imposed that inconvenience on me, the day before his death, in Marseille. He clamp’d himself to me in a dark bar where, at the time, I’d the excellent habit of going twice a week to get drunk. “You’ve got a look,” he told me. “sufficiently idiotic to inspire extreme confidence. At last,” he continued—(I’m not changing one word of the way he riddled)—“At last and for the first time I come across an animal who, if I dare believe my eyes, is completely and perfectly devoid of intelligence, plunged into a divine and perfect nullity.”

“Le Concentrisme” is Beckett’s prank, c. 1929 or 1930, inventing the French poet Jean de Chas, “né . . . un peu avant midi le 13 avril 1906” (Beckett’s own birthdate).

On 13 April 1927, he writes in a notebook: “Here I am come of age, and in spite of myself and in spite of everything,” and later: “These unmotivated miracles aren’t at all to my liking.” The notes of the day end up with a sentence crossed out so violently that the paper’s torn. I succeeded in reconstructing its second half. Here it is: “and one’s mother ought to be beaten while she is young.” The diary abounds in these strange interjections. He stops in the middle of trivial and private details to write, within parentheses and in all caps: “the elephants are contagious.” Another time it’s: “I came, I sat down, I left” or “the priests are always afraid” or “to employ one’s rope by hanging oneself” or “to throw to the demons only the angels.”

Bah. Enough idiotic niggling. Jean de Chas’s premier slogan of disgust, angst, ras-le-bolism: va t’embêter ailleurs. (I’d like to find a way of making “beastly” part of any translation of that.) (In Beckett’s version: “Feck off.”)

“Crap’d Out”

Beckett’s Letters

Some Oranges

A YEAR

CXXV
Ab initio I
thunder it: oh
my ahistorical angels

stark and marble-
white, leaning like
wheat sheaves bound

up and tousled
into a vague
unknotting assembly, muster’d

at the terminus
awaiting the festoons
of some late

arrival. Here they
come with wooden
broadswords and paper

hats, inviolable &
harrying, keen to
sniff the air.

There’s Sammy Rosenstock
peering up out
of a Duesenberg

Phaeton, making a
stab at social
mobility. Like any

abandon’d son, he’s
a talkative shit
and a daredevil.

And there’s Aegiale,
Aegle and Aetheria,
the three sisters

with the amber
tears, tsking it
up, dangling yellow

poplar leaves, shudder
and sob. We
all fall down.

—

Sheer scramble of late, the demands various, the nights short. I did poke a beleaguer’d snoot into The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (hence “talkative shit”—Beckett’s epithet for Jacob Bronowski, who edit’d, a l’époque, along with Samuel Putnam and others The European Caravan—perhaps unsurprisingly then, Bronowski is now likely known for narrating the 1973 TV documentary “The Ascent of Man”). One is tempt’d simply to collect Beckett’s brilliant stingers, “the arrow that flieth by day.” On Proust (whose Du côté de chez Swann he finds “strangely uneven”):

Some of his metaphors light up a whole page like a bright explosion, and others seem ground out in the dullest desperation. He has every kind of subtle equilibrium, charming trembling equilibrium and then suddenly a stasis, the arms of the balance wedged in a perfect horizontal line, more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst, with primos and secundos echoing to each complacently and reechoing. His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore’s but no less profuse, a maudlin false-teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. He drank too much tilleul.

(In the same 1929 letter—to Thomas McGreevy—Beckett notes finishing François Mauriac’s 1925 Le Désert de l'amour, “which I most decidedly do not like”: “A patient tenuous snivel that one longs to see projected noisily into a handkerchief.”)

One wonders at (in the sense of “questions”) the copiousness of the notes—is this the untoward result of the ease of info-bupkes retrieval? If, say, Beckett mentions a night out drinking (“Pelorson collapsed spontaneously on the banquette” and Beckett observing “a terrible silence that will never be forgiven”) and mentions, too, that “the exquisite Thèrive,” present too, “left without paying for his beer,” is it wholly utile to read in agate that “André Thèrive (né Roger Puthoste [other pseuds: Candidus d’Isaurie, Romain Motier, Zadoc Monteil], 1891-1967) was a conservative and influential critic for the French newspaper Le Temps (1861-1942); he wrote on the crisis of the postwar novel, criticizing the tendency toward aestheticism, hermeticism, and snobbery . . .”? I mean, I like a niggling factoid much as any sub-sub-sub librarian, and maybe I’d not hoot so if the book didn’t weigh something equal to a muscleman’s dumbbell, and the Beckett bits didn’t float wide-eyed and wan amidst gobble-gobbles of the stuff. I like to lie completely supinated under a book when I read it, and without requiring an assistant to spot for me, or extricate me in case of mishap.

Samuel Beckett, Lessness VI
A one page manuscript setting forth the sentence order by numbers.
(Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library)

Diffuse Nebula, Unresolv’d

Some Clouds

A YEAR

CXXIV
To plumb the downing reaches
of one’s own cavernous fastnesses,

down where the rock plummets
endlessly after the splash, violent

or sly, of entering, still
plummeting whilst the spray-droplets

mount up towards the sun
to reach a shining aerial

apex, loosely white and radiant,
only to pause, feckless &

scatter’d, half-insouciant to begin
the drenching descent. And though

nobody in the ruckus of
thinking (it’s a little like

the endless felicitous ricochet of
a congress of mirrors) knows

where that thinking is (it’s
rather like a confederacy or

a relay, it’s high pucker’d
astringency sapped and curdling up

into a series of clots
evading and freely sequencing), one

tends to the taut pull
of trajectory, line and bob.

—

And there’s Lisa Robertson in “After Trees” (out of Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip):

What about the data of trees before
Virgil? The day comes out of the earth like
an animal and it goes. A suite of
shadow follows. Some of you don’t have to
like it. Absence is a sauce licked up, a
little peplum of fat and lint flung
off. For today only
I’ll accomplish novelty’s capaciousness

So long
Figtree
Especially.

To juxtapose against what Walter Pater saith (The Renaissance):

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.

Permis de conduire’d forth and back in a general tizzy. Finish’d Michael Herr’s completely audacious and terrific Dispatches. Wrote numbers CXXI, CXXII, and CXXIII. A negligible series of chores. The bite of spring, &c.

—

To read about “Careerist dissembling. Kowtowing. Pollyannaish refusals to make distinctions (somewhat related to the refusal to examine one’s dismissals—both provoked by an inability to do any hard justificatory work). See the rise of the non-category of ‘hybridity.’”—go here. Just a squib in response (along with a number of others) to Kent Johnson’s masterly letter about “practices of reviewing in the poetic field.” All in the premier issue of Mayday.

Edward Halbert, inventor of a flying machine, holding a kite in Chicago, 1908.

Drone Writing

Magnolia, Morning Light

A YEAR

CXX
Yank the ramp out of the back of the truck and use it to determine
Where the thing ought to be park’d. Who talks about the breath
Of a whole company of men downing Dexedrine smelling like a jar
Of dead snakes? Nobody sweats the smaller indignities mid-firefight.
Melville claim’d what’s spat out in heat: ‘that thing unsays itself.’
I am not so sure. Everywhere excrescent flowering exotica, import’d
Ornamentals jagging up old fields, all the mullein with its flannel’d
Leaves and high javelin stalks plow’d under, TruGreen’d out. Need
To go a county or two west where a mob of birders is keeping ‘all
Available glass’ point’d into a flock of longspurs, reportedly containing
Some Smith’s. What is it Wallace Stevens means when he writes: “To chop
The sullen psaltery = to write poetry with difficulty, because of the excess
Realism in life”? I’d like the song of my days to resemble that
Of the longspur, its dry mechanical ratch of winding a two dollar
Watch.

—

Michael Herr (Dispatches):

There was the terrible possibility that a search for information . . . could become so exhausting that the exhaustion itself became the information. Overload was such a real danger, not as obvious as shrapnel or blunt like a 2,000-foot drop, maybe it couldn’t kill you, but it could bend your aerial for you and land you on your hip. Levels of information were levels of dread, once it’s out it won’t go back in, you can’t just blink it away or run the film backward out of consciousness. How many of those levels did you really want to hump yourself through, which plateau would you reach before you shorted out and started sending the messages back unopened?

Why’s that seem utterly apt? Thirty years later and all we bent-aerial’d writers ever appear capable of doing is “sending the messages back unopened”? If Dr. Williams stress’d “contact”—that requirement of any bold empiricism—how come “we” find ourselves so why so all-niggardly pixel’d, bent only to the screen? Epicurus didn’t say stuff it to the hilt, big ass, or y’all catch a deaths of pleasure: he shoo’d off the divine interventionists, he Luddite-clobber’d the computer screens with a handy malleolus (little hammer). (Illi inter sese multa vi brachia tollunt / In numerum, versantque tenaci forcipe massam. = They, keeping time, one by one raise their arms with mighty force, and turn the iron lump with the biting tongs. Virgil, talking about the Cyclops.) Didn’t one used to see TV refer’d to as a “one-eyed monster”? If the century’s mind rots in a jar, oughtn’t one choose Tennesseelessness, and stop hoo-ing to the slick trombone? (Wallace Stevens says that means “making Bing Crosby,” though I think he means “making like Bing Crosby,” all oleaginous suavity, a social charm quark.) Ah, Der Bingle. I recall doing a passable vibrato on “We All Have a Song in Our Hearts” one crowd’d hot noisy night in the Palms, and nobody—nobody—heard it. “New form as an addition to nature,” c’est moi. Oh, I don’t know. The defeatist’s sigh after the excoriation. Which does not mean “to tear out the heart of,” but “to flay, to strip off the rind or bark.” Dr. Johnson: “I was punished with artificial excoriations in hopes of gaining new graces with a new skin.” (He’s not talking Web-lingo.) “The cosmetick science was exhausted upon me; but who can repair the ruins of nature? My mother was forced to give me rest at last, and abandon me to the fate of a fallen toast . . .” (“New form as an addition to nature,” ce n’est pas lui.) In a world without “contact,” what becomes the information is no longer the exhaustion of its search, it is its terrifying ease. The world located in the itch of one’s fingers so lightly and indifferently padding out and back across the old familiar keyboard, that veritable stockade and asylum. (Herr: “The moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit. It was soft and saffron-misted when you looked up at it, but its light over the sandbags and into the jungle was harsh and bright. We were all rubbing Army-issue nightfighter cosmetic under our eyes to cut the glare and the terrible things it made you see.”) No such “cosmetick science” need’d here in “our” new skins. “A suspected U.S. drone fired missiles at a house in Pakistan’s tribal region Wednesday, killing at least six people.” Drone: “A continued deep monotonous sound of humming or buzzing,” “a pilotless aircraft or missile directed by remote control,” “A non-worker, lazy idler, a sluggard.” (Les drones, c’est nous.) “The Spike, an advanced top-attack missile, is what gives the French drone its killing power.” “The number of my daily hits spiked after I post’d my pictures of the moon: nasty and full, a fat moist piece.” Herr:

You know how it is, you want to look and you don’t want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war photographs in Life, the ones that showed dead people or a lot of dead people lying close together in a field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other. Even when the picture was sharp and cleanly defined, something wasn’t clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn't have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world.

Contact. All the contacts in the world. Contact if any of the usual contingencies fail.

—

The usual jaunt tomorrow. Monday.

Michael Herr

The Pierre Reverdy Recovery

Forsythia

A YEAR

CXIX
The heart, nobody
bothers with what
the heart with
its four valves
mitral and aortic,
pulmonary and tricuspid,
and its million
barrels of blood
pump’d and repump’d
bawls out, unsubmitting,
criminal and vehement.
It’s nothing, it’s
‘a pitous soun’
no sentry’d deign
mark registry of
in the book
of gummings-up,
works of purulence
and night. Better
to keep all
the channels running
clear, cleansed of
rot and unclouded,
no ‘conniption at
the sight of
poor Snap’ fits,
nothing to clot
up—or cleave
to—the adherent
sore machinery of
the plangent utterance.

—

Here’s the original of Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara’s “Reverdy” as it is print’d in Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (Owl Press, 2001):

Reverdy is not like Chopin. He is a long city street with small musical houses on it.

There is a word, rédacteur, in French, of which I cannot recall the meaning.

Here are two cups, a Keats, a comb and a brush, four packs of cigarettes, an ashtray labeled “Chance,” two boxes of matches, a rope, Always Love a Stranger, a wire brush and a carved piece of wood, which I cannot understand. This is where Reverdy still lives, inexplicable as ever.

What strikes the eye hurts, what one hears is a lie. What is written struggles through, and then has struggled through and is white. The snow lasts because of the sun. Never letters, always messages.

Here we are, getting ideas like the French, yippee!

We discovered many years ago that in French you can say anything . . . Except certain things which Eliot, Valéry, Claudel, Béranger and others have said. Yippee!

Reverdy is not a cubist. Who ever was? One hundred Americans a day are accused of cubism. “The pubic area of the male is not a thing of beauty.” “The public area of the female is not a thing of beauty.” (These are two American sayings showing a lack of Reverdy.)

Picasso is fire, Reverdy is flint. In America flint is used for arrowheads as well as tinderboxes. Do you like to hunt for what you eat? Are you a cannibal? Is there order outside of insanity or just a maelstrom of velleities and mistakes?

Je suis las de vivre dans le pays natal. When you get to the maelstrom let me know. If you have to pick the ashes off your cigarette, you are born to any given work of modern art. We no longer know what wires are wrapped around us than what air we breathe. We no longer care who is next door; we know how they feel about us. One drinks more than one thinks. There is no sense in coming home “early.” We are already in the maelstrom which is why we don’t “know” it. I want to get up “early.”

In America there is only one other poet beside Reverdy: William Carlos Williams.

They are both alone. How do you feel about titles like They Are Both Alone, Wake Up and Die, You Die with Your Eyes Open Don’t You?, Chair Vive, Poem?

We have made ourselves cretins for Reverdy’s sake.

We must all pretend to feel fine or get shot like a horse.

Berkson adds the note that “John [Ashbery] agreed to translate what we wrote into French” for the “issue of Mercure de France honoring Pierre Reverdy who had died of a heart attack, July 17, 1960” and that “You Die with Your Eyes Open Don’t You and Wake Up and Die were two of the working titles for a Horace McCoy-type low-life novel Joe LeSueur was working on at the time.” What I find odd about the Ashbery translation is how elegantly it puts some of the boyish collaborative tomfooleries of Berkson and O’Hara. (According to a 1988 Berkson letter in City Poet, the piece was written in Paris “during what was probably the peak of our friendship”; the return flight produced “Flight 115: a play, or Pas de Fumer sur la Piste” with its hijinks and slap-happy sass: “Who do you take me for, Eckermann? Ciassime di suo modo, right? I do agree that tea is terribly messy when you consider the glissance of sherry.”) In some places, the Berkson / O’Hara original seems written in a kind of intentionally clumsy mock-translatorese—“ a word . . . in French, of which I cannot recall the meaning.” Or: “These are two American sayings showing a lack of Reverdy. (Both Ashbery’s “mot . . . dont je ne peux pas arriver à connaître la signification” with its fuss to arrive, and “Ce sont deux maximes américaines qui prouvent l’absence de Reverdy” seem measurably “natural” in comparison. Too, there exist some ameliorations in the Ashbery: the hang-jaw (and funny) “We have made ourselves cretins for Reverdy’s sake” becomes “Nous sommes dans le maëlstrom à cause de Reverdy” (which wrongly makes of the maelstrom a nigh-transcendent figure). Ashbery completely drops the sentence: “I want to get up ‘early’” and changes the enigmatic “lasts” to “brille [shines, gleams]” in “The snow lasts because of the sun.” (Cusp of a statement about processual writing there in “What is written struggles through, and then has struggled through and is white” and we do know (don’t we?) the import of the sun’s “messages” (and of getting up “early”) to O’Hara.) (I suspect there’s some sense here of Ashbery attending to audience: after all, the Mercure de France volume is a combo of homage and hagiography, peculiarly (meaning, seriously) French. No American japery allow’d. Ashbery changes—interprets—the “inexplicable,” referring to Reverdy, to “inexplicablement,” referring to where Reverdy “still lives.”)

Rereading Ashbery’s “A Note on Pierre Reverdy” (collect’d in Selected Prose, though originally print’d in the Evergreen Review of January-February 1960, that is to say, undoubtedly something Berkson and O’Hara’d read), it’s odd to note how a line Ashbery quotes therein (out of Reverdy’s Self-Defense)—“The beautiful does not emerge from the artist’s hands, but what emerges from the artist’s hands becomes the beautiful”—while possibly hint’d at by Berkson / O’Hara’s “What is written struggles through, and then has struggled through and is white,” seems to echo the Reverdy in Ashbery’s version: “Ce qui s’écrit lutter pour émerger puis émerge, tout blanc.” Ashbery deftly homes in to delineate how Reverdy’s syntactically-poised work differs considerably from that of the stock Surrealist automatists, who “were careful to observe the conventions of grammar and syntax” and quotes Breton’s nagging to “Take care, . . . I know the meaning of each of my words and I observe syntax naturally: syntax is not a discipline, as certain oafs believe.” (Ashbery: “Automatic writing as practiced by the Surrealists seems to have been merely a euphemism for extreme haste.”) (In “the other American Reverdian” Kenneth Rexroth’s assessment, Reverdy’s syntax seems to receive less emphasis, as if differences were more a matter of scale: “in Apollinaire’s “Zone,” the elements, the primary data of the poetic construction, are narrative or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction.”)

In the 1962 Mercure de France volume of memoirs and testimonies, there’s a lovely report by one Alain Lapy of how Reverdy composed poems: “To compose, for him, was hardly a matter of patience and reworkings. He wasn’t one who crossed out words and syllables. When he set to work, at times for long periods, the poems’d come one after another unstoppingly on narrow sheets of paper that he’d toss on the floor. When he’d a sizeable pile, he’d shove them in a drawer, to age, like a good wine. Several months later, if not years, he’d “faire le tri” of sorting and selecting, rejecting some mercilessly and burning the ones that, according to him, didn’t make the grade. He’d say: ‘A good poem emerges wholly made. Reworking a piece is something of a happy accident, and if it isn’t done right, it risks spoiling the whole thing.’” (Which all sounds rather Frank O’Hara-esque to me.) And Laby quotes Reverdy (out of a preface for Georges Herment’s Déluges): “The poet’s torment is not that he carries an enormous burden of thoughts, the thing that makes the foreheads of those who have so much to say seem to topple ever forward, but the opposite—that of having nothing particular to say to anybody, that combined with only being able to convince oneself of one’s own reality by writing. And he’s got nothing else to express but himself. Nothing interests him but himself: the movement of waves that things holding forth exteriorly to him mimic in him. Out of that sonorous abyss, he must shout out an echo. Which is why the poet must needs write furiously, in the quick of it, like one firing off a gunshot.” (Which version is likely infelicitous and wrong. I like to fire off shots of translation as a means to think. None of that bulbous forehead toppling for me; mine’s the opposite dilemma: so little “front-matter” (empty-brainbox syndrome) my head tends to tilt “back” of its own accord. I am perennially caught gazing vacantly at the sky.)

John Ashbery

The Pierre Reverdy Breakdown

Some Clouds

A YEAR

CXVIII
A hat in a joint like that:
tic awkward, smacks of vie entirely extérieur.

‘Hips architecturally protuberant in sharp diagonal’
is the unlikely maraschino to the thing—

Oh I ‘repeyreth home fro worldly vanitee.’
That is to say: I think if

I need to snout-mount a leaf
blower, or Boy Scout-rig a toaster

with wire to a long pole, out
in front of my tank to trigger

IEDs, I probably ain’t welcome in Baghdad
‘et ses environs’ crude oil-garland’d, Toto.

Here magnolias that exploded prematurely in a
weekend hot spell look lop-ear’d and

ruin’d. A single blood-smudge of rose-
bud undoes itself in a cloud. One

dud miasma is enough. ‘Suffise unto thy
thing,’ I say, and ‘hoord hath hate.’

A hat that comes down out of
the sky clobbers me like a house.

—

Exhibit pointing to the various stress-fractures likely to result in forcing a piece.

—

I uncover’d a copy of the 1962 Mercure de France volume titled Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), the one with the Ashbery essay, “Reverdy en Amérique”—looking for other O’Hara / “Reverdian” poems (“Do you think Naphtha is sort of Reverdian?” O’Hara’d ask’d), or any other American Reverdy’s. Rien du tout. Except for the Bill Berkson / O’Hara collaboration I’d rather forgot about—it’s print’d in the terrific Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (Owl Press, 2001)—call’d “Reverdy” put into French by Ashbery:

Reverdy n’est pas comme Chopin. Il est une longue rue dans une ville avec de petites maisons musicales qui la bordent.

Il y a en français le mot « rédacteur » dont je ne peux pas arriver à connaître la signification.

Voici deux tasses, un Keats, un peigne et une brosse, quatre paquets de cigarettes, un cendrier marqué « Chance », deux boîtes d’allumettes, une corde, Always Love a Stranger, une brosse en fil de fer et un morceau de bois sculpté que je ne peux comprendre. C’est ici que Reverdy habite encore, inexplicablement comme toujours.

Ce qui frappe l’œil fait mal, ce qu’on entend est mensonge. Ce qui s’écrit lutter pour émerger puis émerge, tout blanc. La neige brille à cause du soleil. Jamais de lettres, toujours des messages.

Maintenant nous commençons à avoir des idées comme les Français. Yipee!

Nous décovrîmes il y a bien des années qu’en français vous pouvez vraiment dire n’importe quoi . . . sauf certaines choses qu’ont dit Eliot, Valéry, Claudel, Béranger et d’autres. Yipee!

Reverdy n’est pas cubiste. Qui l’a jamais l’été. Cent Américains par jour sont accusés d’être cubistes. « L’endroit pubique de l’homme n’est pas une chose belle. » « L’endroit public de la femme n’est pas une chose belle. » (Ce sont deux maximes américaines qui prouvent l’absence de Reverdy.)

Picasso est feu, Reverdy est silex. En Amérique on se sert du silex pour faire des têtes de flêches aussi bien que pour les boîtes d’amadou. Est-ce que vous aimez chasser ce que vous mangez? Etes-vous cannibale? Y a-t-il un ordre en dehors de la folie ou seulement un maëlstrom d’erreurs et de velléités?

« Je suis las de vivre au pays natal. » Quand vous arriverez au maëlstrom, faites-le moi savoir. Si vous devez enlever la cendre de votre cigarette, vous êtes né pour n’import quelle œuvre d’art moderne, Nous ne savons pas quels fils nous lient plus que l’air que nous respirons. Ça nous est égal qui habite à côté; nous savons ce qu’ils pensent de nous. On boit plus qu’on ne croit. Il n’y a aucun sens à rentrer « tot ». Nous sommes déjà dans le maëlstrom et c’est pour cela que nous ne le « savons » pas.

En Amérique il n’y a qu’un seul autre poète à part Reverdy: William Carlos Williams.

Ils sont seuls tous le deux. Que pensez-vous de titres comme « Il sont seuls tous les deux », « Leve-toi et meurs », « Tu meurs les yeux ouverts, n’est-ce pas? », « Chair vive », « Poème ».

Nous sommes dans le maëlstrom à cause de Reverdy.

Nous devons tous faire semblant d’aller bien ou on nous achèvera avec des balles, comme les chevaux.

Translated (one assumes by Ashbery, though the Mercure de France volume reads, simply: “Traduit de l’Américan”) out of what is mark’d “Written for the French of John Ashbery, Paris, 1961.”

—

Inchoate. Drubbed by rain today and tardy. My “self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world,” my “only felicity and achieved so seldom” (Murphy) mean (among other things) leaving home without a necessary book. The usually unflappable gone dégingandé, bereft, and insufficient. (As O’Hara says: “as they say in the Café Flore, it's better to tas gueule.”) Murphy, again: “If his mind had been on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts, then no doubt the suppression of these would have seemed a deprivation. But since it was not, since what he called his mind functioned not as an instrument but as a place, from whose unique delights precisely those current facts withheld him, was it not most natural that he would welcome their suppression, as of gyves?” Gyves? Fetters, shackles, chains. The notorious gyves of the factual. The brainbox drubbed by the shackles of factoidal remonstrance. Bah.

Pierre Reverdy, 1889-1960

Nothing in the Hopper III

“Such a Jocund Company”

A YEAR

CXVII
Of opera Morton Feldman
liked to joke that

the overture is what
one composes while waiting

for the libretto sostenuto
to arrive. (He wait’d

for Beckett’s, who detest’d
opera.) So one examines

the dottles of rain
for ‘intelligible pitch relationships’

or dumps a scoop
of words, collect’d out

of the common bucket,
out to riffle cursorily

through, running abruptly out
in front of whatever

self is spoiling for
a sketch today. Of

tomorrow’s muck we know
not lots, a pout

is not an attitude.
To find by chance

a gait of sorts
out of sorts thrown—

‘to and fro’ we
human containers unattainably go.

—

I added that “sostenuto”—“I needed a word.” “It’s a place-holder.” Feldman liked, too, to repeat a line of Charles Péguy’s: “Everything begins as a mystique and ends in politics.” That longing to shunt oneself back to first impulse, whatever eddy and vortex of forces ’d brought one to the point of making a mark in all innocence against the impossibly pure slate of the page. Hein? Of course one only allows that as a half-belief tuck’d away like a model ship in a bottle, with some banal rationale (“I had excess time on my hands”), although: there is a period, and golden it is, God knows, before one’s blessèd aesthetic struggle all-consuming and divine becomes “merely” another ingredient in the larger political struggle of art. (That Hemingway line like a fly—am I trying to say shit-detector?—bombards the tipsy scenario: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”) Feldman (talking to Robert Ashley in a 1964 interview in Kulchur):

It seems that about ten or fifteen years after something new and original is done and has its first impact, that impact becomes a political one. That is to say, by the time the young composer gets in touch with a particular work, it is already in a power struggle with other works and other ideas. The intention, the aesthetic of the work may be a complete mystery to this young composer, but in the form of politics it is not a mystery. It is very concrete. So what the young composer does is to become a revisionist. We know from history that it is the revisionist who takes things from the mysterious region of originality and gives those things a man-made rationale. . . . . I mean that the human comes in and makes a synthesis which he can work with comfortably—a concrete synthesis. And so what happens is that the original—that which was pure, that which was like nature, that which didn’t seem to reflect a ‘human’ point of view—is cast aside or rather, to be more precise, is incorporated by the revisionist mind.

Certain rumblings of where Feldman’s “revisionist” fits into Pound’s collapsible scheme of inventors (“discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode and process”—inventors, one notes, like God, are not always “discoverable”); masters (those “able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions”—which “co-ordination” sounds suspiciously political and revisionist to me); and diluters (dragging forth items of “lower intensity”). One tends to forget the unnamed other three items of Pound’s list, the awkwardly put “men who do more or less good work in the more or less good style of a period” (defined by the lovely pooter: “Ils n’existent pas, leur ambiance leur confert une existence”—“They hardly exist at all, only their being spotted full in their own milieu confers any existence”); the rather vague “Belles Lettres” (“who can hardly be said to have originated a form, but who have nevertheless brought some mode to a very high development”); and “the starters of crazes . . . whose wave of fashion flows over writing for a few centuries or a few decades, and then subsides, leaving things as they were” (note the tremendous leeway—“centuries”—built in to the definition, and yet, as Beckett says somewhere, “What truth has not its ballcock?”—fashion, if anything is, is a self-regulating system.) Oddly enough, there’s something almost a little naïve about Pound’s list—as if Poundian “men” were somehow purely “aesthetical” and didn’t cotton to art’s political machinations and struggles. Feldman is perfectly clear. Talking about chance procedures in the hands of late interlopers like Stockhausen and Boulez, he says:

Remember that the revisionists do not see chance as an aesthetic. They see it as a process that they must ‘humanize’ and present only in a very portentous technical fashion. This, of course, is done without any aesthetic goal in mind. What the revisionist wants to do is to make a political impact. The revisionist wants power. It is in the nature of a revisionist to want power. It is in the nature of a revisionist to start a ‘school.’ It is the nature of a revisionist to want to convert. . . . The revisionists are fanatics. But what they are fanatics about is always amazing to me, because they have created nothing new.

Whose special-pleading imploratory attempts to ‘humanize’ (providing voice for the chat-room subaltern) more than the flarf groupuscule rehashers? For the portentous combined rollickingly with the beseechingly human, look here (Kenneth Goldsmith talking to Marjorie Perloff):

Solioquy presents speech at its most raw, its most brutal and in its most gorgeously disjunctive form. When we look at ‘real’ speech in Soliloquy, we find that our normative speech patterns are avant-garde! It strikes me odd that what modernism worked so hard to get at for the past 100 years has always been right under our noses!
      In terms of the social aspects of the piece, it’s very complicated. I have lost many friends over this work. I do feel bad that their feelings have been hurt but I still cannot apologize for having done the piece.

Ugh.

Philip Guston, “Friend—To M. F.,” 1978

Nothing in the Hopper II

Magnolia, Late Afternoon

A YEAR

CXIV
What’s unaccount’d for—
                the long intransigent
periods of infinitesimal
flux and nodding

between fits of
                petulant industry. New-
dug potatoes extract’d
out of common

fields black-rotting
                in floody cellars.
Skeins of yarn
tangled into inutile

matting, cat-urined.
                The pitchfork’d dog.
The cloy of
sorghum expung’d too

Late. Scuff of dire
                proximity, neighbors going
at it with
occasional cries uninterpretable.

Hepzibah’s delusional slumgullion,
                undeliverable pixels, m’aider
signals poorly angliciz’d,
too much lunch.

Like the pitch-
                men say—all
that, and more!
Scoot’d inscrutably by

against legendary diligence,
                uninscribed. Light dazzles
the daily insatiate
with epicurean pudeur.

—

Nepenthe, Naphtha, Lethe, “with a likeness burst in the memory.” How’d that accumbrous cloud begin? In the raw morning, bit by all that dribbled through my hands, lost like money in the night (or, as Beckett puts it, in Murphy: “It is so easy to lose personal freshness”), I found myself perusing a 1971 issue of David Morice’s Gum, a tiny Iowa City thing (25¢), reading Darrell Gray’s “Nepenthe”:

The many senses like little open doors
Into one huge room full of colored fumes
Speeding across the sky
My hand touches yours
Yours mine
A spine-tingling actuality
Born and raised on a pin-head
In the fraction of time it takes
Gloom to glisten
The faucet to drip
As you enter the room and are seized
By the information

And I try’d to remember how Frank O’Hara’s “Naphtha” went, certain that a connection exist’d between the two, composedly ignorant that “Naphtha” is not “Nepenthe,” &c. And all I recall’d: “Ah Jean Dubuffet” and something about doing military service in the Eiffel Tower, and Iroquois ironworkers and that lovely “with a likeness burst in the memory” line. (And then, in the Gray poem, I got distract’d into thinking whether or not “A spine-tingling actuality / Born and raised on a pin-head”—which incited its own pricklinesses of delight—might’ve been a “source” for the brief blast of “Actualists” in Iowa City and San Francisco, that groupuscular seizure young men (mostly) and old seem particularly “prone” to.) Where along the bicyclist’s swift trajectory did he begin to accustom himself to the sneaky-Pete apprehension of a mistake? Nepenthe is “the one that chases away sorrow” [ne = not, penthos = grief], particularly, one adds, thinking of poor Darrell Gray, in the form of “straight, no chaser.” And Naphtha, root of naphthalene, “moth balls,” and (according to the O.E.D.) “Liquid petroleum, particularly of a thin, volatile kind.” O’Hara: “there is a parable of speed / somewhere behind the Indians’ eyes.” (There is an O’Hara letter of 1 February 1961 to John Ashbery—who’s putting together a group of works possibly under the spell of Reverdy for an issue of Mercure de France—wherein O’Hara asks “Do you think Naphtha is sort of Reverdian?” And if one thinks of Reverdy’s speed, which is cubism’s speed, of shifting p.o.v., cinematically adroit, and sees how O’Hara fidgets with looks at “the gaited Iroquois on the girders / fierce and unflinching-footed / nude as they should be / slightly empty / like a Sonia Delaunay” and into the speed “behind the eyes” and telescoping back “out” to how “they invented the century with their horses / and their fragile backs / which are dark,” one thinks, yes, Reverdy. Is a Sonia Delaunay “slightly empty” because it is lacking the penile Tour Eiffel that husband Robert Delaunay characteristically insert’d into paintings? “Stop that.”) And, returning, Lethe’s simply a Greek tagalong bum steer, cross-fouling the “burst in memory,” that river in Hades where the water made one forget. Here’s the poem:

Naphtha

Ah Jean Dubuffet
when you think of him
doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower
as a meteorologist
in 1922
you know how wonderful the 20th Century
can be
and the gaited Iroquois on the girders
fierce and unflinching-footed
nude as they should be
slightly empty
like a Sonia Delaunay
there is a parable of speed
somewhere behind the Indians’ eyes
they invented the century with their horses
and their fragile backs
which are dark

we owe a debt to the Iroquois
and to Duke Ellington
for playing in the buildings when they are built
we don’t do much ourselves
but fuck and think
of the haunting Métro
and the one who didn’t show up there
while we were waiting to become part of our century
just as you can’t make a hat out of steel
and still wear it
who wears hats anyway
it is our tribe’s custom
to beguile

how are you feeling in ancient September
I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway
how can you
you were made in the image of god
I was not
I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver
and Jean Dubuffet painting his cows
“with a likeness burst in the memory”
apart from love (don’t say it)
I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile

Which deposits me back at the feet of Darrell Gray’s poem where the “room” is akin to the “century” in “Naphtha,” isn’t it? Again the sense of irrevocable speed, again the primordial acceptance of the actual: “you enter the room and are seized / By the information.”

—

The daily Adorno. “The category of the new produced a conflict . . . a conflict between the new and duration. Artworks were always meant to endure; it is related to their concept, that of objectivation. Through duration art protests against death; the paradoxically transient eternity of artworks is the allegory of an eternity bare of semblance. Art is the semblance of what is beyond death’s reach. It is not only reactionary rancor that provokes horror over the fact that the longing for the new represses duration. The effort to create enduring masterpieces has been undermined. What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place.” The nonsensicalness of an avant-garde tradition. Is it in keeping with Adorno here, too, to declare that artworks of overweening and blatant ambition (the “monumental,” the imperturbably and self-satisfy’dly “grand”) by definition conflict with the primer of the new? (I admit it: I am thinking of the conscious grandiosity of my bête noire Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, how it so evidently is playing for keeps, staking—les jeux sont faits—it all on something like Pound’s antiquated view of things, recall Pound’s image of the conservation of “great literature” under the dross of critical response “heaped up and conserved round about them in the proportion: one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes.”) Somewhat later Adorno writes: “As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them.” The answer (there is no answer): “the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks . . . the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away.”

Darrell Gray, Berkeley, 1984
(Photograph by Alastair Johnston)

Nothing in the Hopper I

Red Wall

A YEAR

CXIII
In Holy Dying Jeremy Taylor repeats the story of clean-
Head Aeschylus and how he perish’d, hit in the rock-
Like cranium by an oyster dropped by a high-
Flying eagle. A rather good story, though I’ve only heard tell of herring
Gulls and the bigger black-backeds behaving that way. And some
Say a tortoise mortify’d the guy. I do like a story so
Eagerly malleable in its particulars. Thoreau, who distrust’d any gussying
Up, and long’d to make an art out of radical attunement to incremental
Local changes, buoy’d up by all that’s ‘simple, cheap and homely,’ wrote
Of style: ‘If one’s got anything to say, it drops from him simply, directly, just
As a stone falls to the ground.’ Too, he claim’d the mechanics of
Composition simple, compared it to ‘the discharge of a bullet from a rifle.’
Ah, that lean inhabit’d ease of the nineteenth century, A so impeccably
And routinely striking B, and B making C pertinent, it just kills
Me.

—

Wholly “unprepared,” every morning of late I am unprepared, nothing in the hamper, the red-check’d tablecloth unfurl’d in the saw grass, here come the ants for no block of cheese standing monumental, no cutlets, no sop. A sappy way to commence anything, though goofing along, just waiting for the “higher” (and I don’t mean soprano) voices to begin, does allow time to catch its breath, slows its high-footing hurtling: there it comes now, dragging along its apish arms, mouth-breathing, slack-jaw’d. I did worry the “dialectical method” a little in the apricot-tint’d morning light: decided that its beauty is in the way it allows (requires) one to vacillate between thetical and antithetical, nimble as a goat. One is doggedly, strychnine-convulsedly earnest; one is weakly namby-pamby with a velleity-scent’d handkerchief. In the pragmatic version norteamericano (F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up”), one’d say something like: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” (Functionality, comme on dit, being a thing lowdown amongst my hath not th’advantages. I do recall well a mean-drunk veerage through go-to-work morning streets of the French capital, sneering up into the faces of any suspect’d of jeune cadre’d propriety and diligence: “Et vous, Monsieur, vous êtes functionnaire? with spitting contempt.) In the earlier, poetickal version (without the rigor of either the “dialectic” or the “method”): “several things dovetailed in my mind . . . I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” It’s Adorno’s turns and disavowals and counter-arguments (in talking about Baudelaire: “The new is akin to death” and, some sentences along, “The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction with its promise of undiminished plentitude”) that tug one into such cloudy vagaries. And what of a clammy sense that some part of Adorno’s become a critical commonplace, that is, somehow diffused into the everyday by osmosis. I stumbled into the following in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others:

The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of values. “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be,” proclaimed André Breton. He called this aesthetic ideal “surrealist,” but in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.

And Adorno:

Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants. Antitraditional energy becomes a voracious vortex. . . . Given that the category of the new was the result of a historic process that began by destroying a specific tradition and then destroyed tradition as such, modern art cannot be an aberration susceptible to correction by returning to foundations that no longer do or should exist; this is, paradoxically, the foundation of the modern and normative for it.

Isn’t that “voracious vortex” akin to capitalism itself? One begins to sense two trains full-throttling along two parallel tracks. So one’s obliged to combat the attention-getters (the marketeering groupuscules) with same-old same-old shock-ruses with the same vehemence that one refuses to participate in the society of functionnaires. One counters the outbursts of “shock” with the everyday, the consider’d, the incremental; one counters capitalism’s demands by refusing its calls to “splurge,” its crass insinuations to improvement through mere spending. “Less stuff.”

Ron Silliman asks what it is “about surrealism that permits softness to uproot it from its avant-garde heritage” at the same “moment” that he is gropingly trying to offer what can only be perceived as a seal of approval to some “third way” emergent “hybridity.” (Long’s it’s got a name, it’s okay in Silliman’s book. One’s able henceforth to shuck it off unread in some corner, without articulating with any conviction one’s reasons why.) I’d argue that “hybridity” is exactly the same “softness” that is in the process of uprooting Language poetry from its cherish’d avant-garde heritage. That is, just a few minor “scars of damage and disruption” willfully plaster’d to whatever served as base period-style prior. That’s a cynical reading of a captious product made for a gullible time.

André Breton, c. 1930
(Photograph by Man Ray)

Bubbles and Means

On the Road

A YEAR

CXII
So the pencil’d
Up page exudes
A diffuse reticulated

Spell that cuts
Like a chasm,
Pulls the ordinary

Heart’s muck down-
River, splays out
And fans it

Into shallower rivulets,
Sandy-bank’d delta
Streams criss-crossing

One against another,
Absorber and combiner,
Illimitable and indirect.

Whitman claim’d ‘words
Become vitaliz’d,
And stand for

Things,’ and loved
How the word
Monongahela roll’d across

The tongue ‘with
Venison richness,’ caught
‘The flup of

The pike leaping
Out,’ unrestrict’d. Like
The teeming metropolis

With its exult
Vibrancy of slang,
Its unbook’d words,

Its tongue-plunging
Vulgar scrawl deliverable
Up against that

‘Certain perennial rankness
And protestantism’ that
Is American speech.

—

Found tuck’d into the back of Beckett’s Disjecta the abort’d play call’d “Human Wishes,” the one ostensibly about Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, neither of whom make entry in the piece, though the cat Hodge (“sleeping—if possible”) is written in. Much about death, much hilarity about death and decay and its surrounding politesse ripe to bursting. Three women, each innocuously occupy’d (“meditating” and “knitting” and “reading”) engaged in rather vicious baiting and complaining and scurrility. (One says: “Be seated; and let your scurrility be the recumbent scurrility of polite society.” Another, slyly, to “Mrs Williams,” who claims to be “dying of a pituitous defluxion” and is demanding loudly to know what book the other is reading: “The peevishness of decay is not provoking.”) The book, it turns out, is Jeremy Taylor’s (“the Shakespeare of divines”) The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, and the reader (“Miss Carmichael”) reads (with irascible and inconclusive interruptions: “How do you suppose death enters in by a hair, Miss Carmichael?” “Perhaps a horse-hair is meant, Madam.”) out of it how:

Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument, and in all chances and enters in at many doors; by violence and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist; by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour; by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen into the hardness and sharpness of a dagger, or water thawed into the floods of a river; by a hair or a raisin; by violent motion or sitting still; by severity or dissolution; by God’s mercy or God’s anger; by everything in providence and everything in manners; by everything in nature and everything in chance.

What I marvel at here (and elsewhere in Taylor) is the finery of the prose. It occurs in the very first section of Holy Dying, call’d “Consideration of the Vanity and Shortness of Man’s Life” and is, in a sense, a pooling up following the wild giddiness of Taylor’s opening where, asserting that “A man is a bubble . . . all the world is a storm,” he seemingly enacts the claim in a froth and buffeting of prose, saying:

. . . men rise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and, being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing that it was before. . . . But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a dove’s neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour.

How Beckettian, that “no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die.” (Adorno: “The force of the old presses toward the new, without which the old cannot be fulfilled.” Virgil made Homer Homer. Dante made Virgil Virgil.) (Beckett, in the Human Wishes fragment, includes an exchange regarding the fact that “the dear doctor’s debt to nature is discharged these seven years.” When Miss Carmichael queries—“His debt to nature?”—she is answer’d by Mrs Williams: “She means the wretched man is dead.” That bluntness against the florid (and social) euphemisms that Beckett found anathema.)

—

I do, continually, evenings, launch the vessel of my eye out into the oceanic wellings and troughs of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, with a combo of unabash’d bravado and sheer exhilarant breathlessness. I begin to think of it kin to Pound’s Cantos, something one could “dip into,” though I am reading it conventionally, chopping along in my dinghy, against the prevailing wave-motion here, push’d along in a fury there. I come no closer to defining the reasons for my adjudicature by means strictly metaphorical: I cannot “argue” with the book, I can only be swept along by it. Like a poem. So: pointing. Look, here:

If in accord with its model, the fetish character of the commodity, the new becomes a fetish, this is to be criticized in the work itself, not externally simply because it became a fetish; usually the problem is a discrepancy between new means and old ends. If a possibility for innovation is exhausted, if innovation is mechanically pursued in a direction that has already been tried, the direction of innovation must be changed and sought in another dimension. The abstractly new can stagnate and fall back into the ever-same. Fetishization expresses the paradox of all art that is no longer self-evident to itself: the paradox that something made exists for its own sake; precisely this paradox is the vital nerve of new art. By exigency, the new must be something willed; as what is other, however it could not be what was willed.

As my homeboys like to say, making the loud protestations of the flightless bird: “Awkward!” That “discrepancy between new means and old ends” we see plenty of. Flyboys preening in the museums. Tactical re-1910 mishmashes. Will’d ineptitude and dumb-cluckery at the service of the academickal what and wattage.

Jeremy Taylor, 1613–1667