Rapports de rapports . . .

Sign for Tobacco

Bah. Marianne Moore, to William Carlos Williams—January 26, 1934—on the receipt of Williams’s Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (The Objectivist Press, 1934):

Dear William,
      The catnip that art is, or ignis fatuus, or drop on the cactus, does seem worth the martyrdom of pursuit, I feel. If the value is valuable enough to one, one achieves it. So bless the collective wheelbarrow; with Wallace Stevens beside it like a Chinese beside a huge pair of oxen; also “Birds and Flowers”—the one instance, to my mind, of a love poem where the message would stand some chance of advancing the motive.
      “His writing has been about evenly divided between prose and verse.” I wish I had said it.

Referring to Wallace Stevens’s accompanying piece titled “Williams” (Premier paragraph: “The slightly tobaccoy odor of autumn is perceptible in these pages. Williams is past fifty.”) Some of it (after labeling Williams “a romantic poet,” and adding “This will horrify him”:

      The man has spent his life in rejecting the accepted sense of things. In that, most of all, his romantic temperament appears. But it is not enough merely to reject: what matters is the reason for rejection. The reason is that Williams has a romantic of his own. His strong spirit makes its own demands and delights to try its strength.
      . . . In order to understand Williams at all, it is necessary to say at once that he has a sentimental side. . . . Sentiment has such an abhorrent name that one hesitates. But if what vitalizes Williams has an abhorrent name, its obviously generative function in his case may help to change its reputation. What Williams gives, on the whole, is not sentiment but the reaction from sentiment, or, rather, a little sentiment, very little, together with acute reaction.
      His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit’s cure. He needs it as a naked man needs shelter or as an animal needs salt. To a man with a sentimental side the anti-poetic is that truth, that reality to which all of us are forever fleeing.
      The anti-poetic has many aspects. The aspect to which a poet is addicted is a test of his validity. Its merely rhetorical aspect is valueless. As an affectation it is a commonplace. As a scourge it has a little more meaning. But as a phase of a man’s spirit, as a source of salvation, now, in the midst of a baffled generation, as one looks out of the window at Rutherford or Passaic, or as one walks the streets of New York, the anti-poetic acquires an extraordinary potency, especially if one’s nature possesses that side so attractive to the Furies.
      Something of the unreal is necessary to fecundate the real; something of the sentimental is necessary to fecundate the anti-poetic. William, by nature, is more of a realist that is commonly true in the case of a poet. . . .

And how not apply Stevens’s remarks on “the anti-poetic” (“Its merely rhetorical aspect is valueless. As an affectation it is a commonplace.”)—to our own Flarf-gewgaw’d “era”? Everywhere that warning: against the mechanical, against mere “organization”—procedure only for its own loud presumptuousness, its noisy self-assertings. In Williams’s 1932 piece call’d “Marianne Moore,” he writes “Work such as Miss Moore’s holds its bloom today not by using slang, not by its moral abandon or puritanical steadfastness, but by the aesthetic pleasure engendered where pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” And:

. . . to organize into a pattern is also, true enough, to “approach the conditions of a ritual.” But here I would again go slow. I see only escape from the conditions of ritual in Miss Moore’s work: a rush through wind if not toward some patent “end” at least away from pursuit, a pursuit perhaps by ritual. If from such a flight a ritual results it is more the care of those who follow than of the one who leads. “Ritual,” too often to suit my ear, connotes a stereotyped mode of procedure from which pleasure has passed, whereas the poetry to which my attention clings, if it ever knew those conditions, is distinguished only as it leaves them behind.

So one skirts (or gathers in one’s skirt) the old warnings, unblinking. Moore, herself, in “Feeling and Precision”—a piece capable of producing a nitrous oxide-fuel’d giddiness in me—says: “Fear of insufficiency is synonymous with insufficiency and fear of incorrectness makes for rigidity. Indeed, any concern about how well one’s work is going to be received seems to mildew effectiveness.” And “excess is the common substitute for energy.”

So saith the wraith, battling through a week of interrupt and (trop de) gab. (I managed, I swear, to thumb two pages of some old newspaper column about Foucault (“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face”) before dropping down into the Lethean sub-clarity of the “drop on the cactus,” that discourse vortex. In lieu of exposing the “rapports de force” (or the Marxist “rapports de production”)—the cagey-matrices of power relations—I found myself busy propping up a study of “rapports de rapports.” Carryings back. Carrying’s back. Bah.

William Carlos Williams reclining on the roof of Passaic Central Hospital, c. 1936
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

“The Waning of Affect,” or, Everybody’s Rhetoricity

Junk’d

A cloud-cuckoo-land of minor impenetrables. “These lozenges are nailed-up lattices.” Meaning, I suppose, that I am flying the biplane by the rivets that peg my Levi’s together, trying to scoop up something out of the clouds with a bucket. I find it “unreasonable” that Thomas McGreevy ought to’ve had a sterling correspondence both with Wallace Stevens and with Samuel Beckett. (Stevens “esteem’d” the correspondence: even when, circa 1948, letter-writing “with friends has been in a bad way,” Stevens writes: “I enjoy your letters so much that I can take no further chances.”) Look how expertly Stevens assesses the flabby biomorphic forms of “John Arp” to the incipient director of the National Gallery of Ireland (letter of January 27, 1949):

Abstract sculptors, like abstract painters, should be totally abstract, not half so. Arp is only half so. Moreover, Arp is fastidious not forceful. His forms will never constitute a “visionary language”. Unlike the things of Brancusi they never intimidate one with their possibilities.

Which is perfect for the watery second-stringer Arp. Stevens nails the post-WWII diluting-effekt:

Somehow modern art is coming to seem much less modern than used to be the case. One feels that a good many people are practicing modernism and therefore that it no longer remains valid. It is odd how quickly the experimental becomes routine: because, I suppose, the experimental requires so much effort and is mostly unsuccessful while routine is an indulgence and in the case of an expert always comes off.

Directly apropos to the schools of routinely-indulgent “experts” of the current “era”? Yass’m. A few months later (March 11, 1949), Stevens is illustrating the note with a McGreevy-supply’d line (“J’ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques,” being the initial line of “La Vie Antérieure”) by Baudelaire:

Chevalier:
      Your quotation from Baudelaire made me run through the poems again. I am afraid that B. is beginning to date. Would anyone read him quite naturally today? The poems seem unrelated to anything actual or perhaps it is only that they are so unlike the actuality of this earliest spring weather in Hartford. Thus your line which at first is so evocative soon becomes

      I lived a long time in a porchéd vastness

or something equally rhetorical.
      The demand for reality in poetry brings one sooner or later to a point where it becomes almost impossible since a real poetry, that is to say, a poetry that is not poetical or that is not merely the notation of objects in themselves poetic is a poetry divested of poetry. That is what I am trying to get at at the moment. Perhaps I am not young enough for it, or old enough, or should think about it only when Sagittarius is in jeopardy. The bare idea makes every else seem false and verbose and even ugly. It is from that point of view that

      J’ai longtemps habité etc.

becomes repulsive. Alas that such lovely things can become repulsive from any point of view. Perhaps I should have my point of view extracted and roam like a member of the Russian ballet under these vast porches.

Somehow I am remind’d of how—randoming a bookshop of late, I hoist’d up a dog-ear’d copy of Barrett Watten’s 1985 Progress and read:

Relax,
        stand at attention, and.
        Purple snake stands out on
        Porcelain tiles. The idea
    Is the thing. Skewed by design . . . .

One way contradictory use is to
        Specify empty.
                              Basis, its
        Cover operates under insists on,
Delineate. Stalin as a linguist . . . .

I trust replication.
                              Gives
        Surface. Lights string
        The court reporter, distances.
    That only depth is perfect . . . .

White, to each of these cancels
        Shadow,
                  fog. Collapses self,
        And invading enemy wins.
        The argument itself, disassembling . . . .

And how what may (or may not) ’ve one day seem’d to “intimidate . . . with . . . possibilities” (or figured itself a “poetry divested of poetry”) cry’d out in the “porchéd vastness” as pure irrefragable rhetoric shimmed by datedness “and.” No longer a poem but the idea of a poem—though it is entirely possible, too, that, here, “one” did not exactly “have” a poem to begin with, but “merely the notation of objects in themselves poetic” (“fog. Collapses self,” &c.). Or a chaos of diluting-effekt: a symbolic order infest’d by (mostly) theory-speak. Yass’m.

Jean (Hans) Arp, “Configuration,” 1951

Jean (Hans) Arp, “En songe,” 1937

Jean (Hans) Arp, 1887-1966

Williams’s “Bastardy”

A Wall

Skimpy the things hereabouts in the offing (to wring syntax for what it’s worth): I am fetter’d by “duteous visitacyon”—or something like that. After a weekend of hurry-scurry, one catches one’s “look”—like the most skiouros (shadow-tail’d, Greek) squirrel of all: feinting with its ass to block out the sudden glare of Monday’s sun. One ponderable: what to make of Williams’s (I’ll quote the whole thing) “11 / 1” “entry” (call’d “Introduction”) mid-revel in “The Descent of Winter,” the thing Williams’d begun on board the S. S. Pennland returning to the United States in 1927:

in almost all verse you read, mine or anybody’s else, the figures used and the general impression of the things spoken of is vague “you could say it better in prose” especially good prose, say the prose of Hemingway. The truth of the object is somehow hazed over, dulled. So nobody would go to see a play in verse if

      the salvias, the rusty hydrangeas, the ragged
                  cannas

there’s too often no observation in it, in poetry. It is a soft second light of dreaming. The sagas were not like that, they seem to have been made on the spot. The little Greek I have read—and in translation—is not like that, Marlow, Chaucer, el Cid, Shakespeare where he is homely, uncultured, a shrewd guesser is not like that. Where he puts it over about some woman he knows or a prince or Falstaff. The good poetry is where the vividness comes up “true” like in prose but better. That’s poetry. Dante was wrestling with Italian, his vividness comes from his escape from Latin. Don Quixote. I don’t know about the Russians or the French.

            and the late high flowing red rose
                        it is their time
of a small garden

poetry should strive for nothing else, this vividness alone, per se, for itself. The realization of this has its own internal fire that is “like” nothing. Therefore the bastardy of the simile. That thing, the vividness which is poetry by itself, makes the poem. There is no need to explain or compare. Make it and it is a poem. This is modern, not the saga. There are no sagas—only trees now, animals, engines: There’s that.

There’s that. Though, too, there’s the document refer’d to in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (2003), titled “The Book of Prosody,” or what (two pages) remains of it, sent to L. Z. in March of 1937:

      As an example of the use of information in poetry as contrasted with prose, take the last movement of Zukowsky’s [sic] ‘A’ in which many statements and quotations are placed in juxtaposition one after the other for 41 pages in all: The writing of it is not put down for the literal meaning of the individual items or their particular truth (though it is understood that they must be true to be used) but for their sensual qualities—sensed at a stroke by the mind—not dwelt on as in a consecutive and developing prose discourse. in which meaning is supported on either side by its logical relationship to other meanings. So by repeated sensual impacts one after the other and using new materials each time a conviction is born that this and this and this being true and being related in meaning the truth of each one of them is separately affirmed. This is purely a sensual matter related to art. It has nothing to do with logic but arrives irresistably [sic] by conviction. It is interesting and depends on the obvious tactile acceptance of each item as true or made of the truth. And so each item must be very judiciously studied not to fly out of line by false emphasis or feeling but need only to be true: nothing must interfere with that or the whole structure will fall.
      This has nothing to do with the value per se of the information imparted. That naturally is of primary importance. All that is touched upon above is the manner chosen for imparting that knowledge whether prose or poetry and if poetry how it has been in this case and what effect may be expected from such treatment.
      A further definition of what is and what is not sensual is invited by the sort of material used. It should be noted that in this poem the principle of the simile is used rather than metaphor. What is being said is that all these things are alike and so each one gains in potential rather than direct meaning. This is the basic function of poetry, by use of form to impose a further meaning upon the literal significance. of the words So it seems that here by a thoroughly academic procedure modified to an enlarged use (the simile) an orthodox effect of poetry is obtained in a new way. Thus, the segments of information are to be understood to have a sensual quality rather than a logical one.
      This is important for it again enlarges the poetic means—we see the same differently used in Pound’s Cantos where bits of “prose” are used among conventionally moulded poetic lines—Added to the usual use of figures, the rose, the melody we must perhaps add the idea but the idea treated as a sensual object.

“The idea treated as a sensual object”—seemingly an initial poke at what becomes—in 1942, in an early version of “A Sort of a Song” (call’d “A Possible Sort of Song” in the Norman Macleod-edit’d The Old Line dated April 1943)—“no ideas but it things.” “A Possible Sort of Song”:

—through metaphor to reconcile
(compose)
the people and the stones. Compose
(no ideas but in things)
invent!

Saxifrage is my flower, that splits
the rocks—
and harlequin and columbine.
Let the snake wait under
his weed

for flies and spiders and the writing
be of words,
slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait
sleepless.

Whittled down and rearranged, of course, to:

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

I write down all that out of “The Book of Prosody,” largely to see how Williams recants (mostly) the claim of simile’s “bastardy”—that untenable “no need to explain or compare.” What Williams is seeing is how Poundian juxtapositions can be apply’d to various units. The statement goes, too, a long ways, meseems, in showing just how derivative—and belated, some forty years later—the bumptious claims of Ron Silliman’s “The New Sentence” be.

William Carlos Williams, c. 1928

Degrees and Kinds of Order

Junk’d

Twenty-two degrees, snow-shoveling, &c. Charting the shifts. Thinking of Charles Burchfield’s lack of the human. Pound (in The Spirit of Romance) says a kind of humanism arrives “after the Trecento”: “as the art is carried northward we have Chaucer and Shakespeare (Jacques-père). Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the flowing.” Burchfield’s paintings oddly rhyming with Pound’s sense of “the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive.” Pound, of a pre-human state, “the body as pure mechanism”:

Our kinship to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us: but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and, because this is less obvious—and possibly more interesting—we forget it.

Burchfield’s modernism found less in twentieth-century particle physics than in some recover’d nigh-seamless identificatory with the universe, its singular order’d flux. Pound:

Man is—the sensitive physical part of him—a mechanism . . . rather like an electric appliance, switches, wires, etc. Chemically speaking, he is ut credo, a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf. As to his consciousness, the consciousness of some seems to rest, or to have its center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosms. And with certain others their consciousness is “germinal.” Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth.

The ècrivain-miroir, skeletal soap-bubble on the verge of breaking up, he who spits back willy-nilly the surround epistemological versus the ècrivain-graine, the ècrivain des semences, seed’d with history, ontological. Somehow I make a parallel between the two approaches to a distinction found in Pound’s 1937 “The Jefferson-Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument.” Referring to Dante’s line “in una parte piú e meno altrove” (out of the beginning of the Paradiso: La gloria di colui che tutto move / per l’universo penetra, e risplende / in una parte piú e meno altrove—“The glory of Him who moves everything penetrates through the universe, and is resplendent in one part more and in another less”), Pound writes:

Which detached phrase I had best translate by explaining that I take it to mean a sense of gradations. Things neither perfect nor utterly wrong, but arranged in a cosmos, an order, stratified, having relation one with another.

Against which—against that arrangement of a (Aquinian) universe wherein “the grades of divine intelligence and / or goodness or goodwill present in graduated degrees throughout,” give the thinker “something to measure by,” the man-handled system alphabetickal:—“It is typical of a bewildered society that it should erect a pathology into a system.” “What was lost or mislaid in the succeeding centuries”: “most certainly was the habit of thinking of things in general as set in an orderly universe.” In Pound’s version—Encyclopedists up to Jefferson—complaint is rife (“they all have an order to criticise”). Still: “They go over the accepted Aquinian universe with a set of measuring tools, reductio ad absurdum etc. The multifarious nature of cognizance remains, but they have only the Alphabet for a filing system.” Pound’s complaint is akin to my sometimes snarly defense of metaphor against those who’d claim it mere ornament (or worse, obfusc to the “thing” itself):

. . . the idea and / or habit of gradations of value, and the infinitely more vital custom of digging down into principles gradually fade out of the picture. The degrees of light and motion, the whole metaphoric richness begin to perish. From a musical concept of man they dwindle down to a mathematical concept.

Two days of thinking about Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Light       clarity       avocado salad in the morning)” on the heels of reading some lines (quoted by Pound) out of “Guilhem d’Autpol’s Alba to the Virgin, ‘Esperanza de totz ferms esperans’” with its ending phrase of “light and clarity and dawn.” (In the two stanzas Pound offers, one ends, “Sojourn of friends, true delight without turmoil, / Of Paradise the light and clarity and dawn”; the other, “Descended the fruit that destroyeth our death, / Dry twig giving fruit without seed, / Door of heaven, way of salvation, / Of all the faithful, the light, and clarity, and dawn.”) Obvious triggers to recalling the O’Hara (and obviously insignificant—the conjunct of “light” and “clarity” hardly a rarity). Though: O’Hara’s poem, too, is a kind of bastard alba, an aubade of the lover departing at dawn (though who’s departing whom is rather smudged—one possible reading says the “I” is returning to the beloved after a “misspent” night elsewhere—“terrible things I do”—though there’s departing too—“though a block away you feel distant”). Here’s the piece:

Poem

Light       clarity       avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

The Guilhem d’Autpol alba is full of “nothing can ever go wrong” imagery (Virgin = haven) kin to O’Hara’s “strange quiet excitement / I am sure of nothing but this”: “Consolation of the disconsolate faithful, / Fruit of whole joy, security of peace, / Port without peril . . .” Suddenly I wonder if I am being unduly tugged by Marjorie Perloff’s silly-in-spots reading of “Joe’s Jacket,” writing (after quoting the end of the poem—“it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on / many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech / a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved / it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens”—which is similar to the expansive cheeky hyperventilating of “how amazing it is / to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness / since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love” in “Poem”):

Only now do we understand the title of the poem. “Joe’s Jacket” is the talisman that protects Frank from daily misfortunes; as a synecdoche, it stands, of course, for Joe’s love. But Frank also resents its protection (“a precaution I loathe”), and in a second, ironic sense, Joe’s jacket is his straitjacket: “Entraining” with Vincent, he ultimately returns to Joe. The jacket is, then, an ordering principle which the poet alternately needs and resents.

Which is put so dutifully—see: “ordering principle”—one’d think poor Frank never had a moment’s fun out of life, or Joe, or anybody.

Frank O’Hara, c. 1965
(Photograph by Renate Ponsold)

Charles Burchfield

Junk’d

Inevitably, with the glut and variousness of the items rattling the judgment box, a fiasco’s in the making. Stephen Vincent recently alert’d me to the existence of the enormous book of watercolorist Charles Burchfield’s journals—edit’d by J. Benjamin Townsend, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place (1993). That made me dig out my copy of Charles Burchfield’s Seasons (1994) with its essay by Guy Davenport, something I’d neglect’d to read in my thumbing through the paintings. Davenport sees the journals, which “record fifty-six years of excursions and meditations”—those surviving “number ten thousand pages”—as nearly accomplish’d as the paintings: therein, “he takes his place among American writers.” He writes:

A thorough study of Burchfield will have the record of the journal as a resource for iconography and the artist’s theorizing. One must tread warily here: words are not paintings. Two orders of the imagination seem to lie parallel until we realize that Burchfield the writer is different from Burchfield the painter. They crisscross each other in ways that demonstrate the complex unity of this imagination. In 1916—in the first period of his visionary watercolors—he painted Ghost Plants (Corn and Sunflowers) (1916). Twenty-six years later, in 1942, he recorded a dream about a garden in which all the flowers were white (“huge sunflowers, the leaves and stalks pale gray green . . . gigantic white carnations . . . white gladiolas”). And in the dream was Shakespeare, who told Burchfield that these last were Crescent Moon gladiolas, “his special pride” (implying that Shakespeare was the gardener). The crescent moon itself was in this sweet dream, from which Burchfield awoke “with the smell of mignonette in [his] nostrils.” Shakespeare does not mention Crescent Moon gladiolas; they do not exist.

Charles Burchfield, “Ghost Plants (Corn and Sunflowers),” 1916

Davenport’s essay is oddly unfocus’d and in one detail, wrong. Of one painting, call’d Golden Dream (1959), he writes that it is “of an imaginary tree on which monarch butterflies hang, like blossoms.” A lovely idea, but even casual inspection of the work shows the butterflies to be a species of swallowtail. The corresponding lines out of the journal (dated, ten years earlier, July 14, 1949):

Countless butterflies sipping honey—the “butterfly dance” come true. Great tiger swallowtails (I counted them, never less than eight or more than 14). Monarchs, on[e] black swallowtail, & countless silver-spots, bees, and one hummingbird hawk-moth. Every so often the silverspots and more rarely the others would all fly up and chase each other furiously in small circles. The swallow-tails kept to themselves, usually at one end of the patch. Once I saw five on one plant. The odor of the flowers was too sweet to be borne long.

Two days earlier: “In the night, it suddenly came to me that a picture of countless butterflies dancing in hot sunlight would be worthwhile.” The Journals identifies the resulting piece as Butterfly Festival (1949-56).

Charles Burchfield, “Golden Dream,” 1959

Burchfield’s journals full of insects, and insect noises. “Tinny pin-point cleeking of crickets.” He paints Cricket Chorus in the Arbor (1917) and The Insect Chorus (also 1917, a kind of annus mirabilis for Burchfield), and it’s as if he’s attempting to make a calligraphy of energy, or sound waves. (Of a later work, Oncoming Spring (1954), Davenport notes how “Subatomic particles had left their traces in physicists’ cloud chambers when this painting was done. Light under the scrutiny of Niels Bohr and Einstein had become a fifth element.”) And, after pointing to the paucity of identifiable influence for Burchfield’s early “original Expressionist manner”—“We can point to Van Gogh’s whorls of light around stars and to his writhing trees. We can remember Samuel Palmer and Blake”—suggests comic-strip techniques as another possible source:

In many paintings Burchfield uses cartoon-strip squiggles (agitrons, cartoonists call them) to indicate movement or vibrancy. From the cartoonist’s vocabulary he also took squeans and blurgits to indicate shafts of sunlight and sounds of crickets.

He’s right, though I half suspect Davenport of showing off a little, trotting out some terms he’d probably cobb’d off Hugh Kenner, who wrote a book about legendary animator and cartoon artist Chuck Jones (1912-2002), inventor of Pepe LePew, the Road Runner, and Wile E. Coyote.

Charles Burchfield, “The Insect Chorus,” 1917

Charles Burchfield, “Oncoming Spring,” 1954

J. Benjamin Townsend’s arranged Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place by themes, probably a good decision—the book’s over seven hundred pages, roughly folio-sized. A couple samples, randomly pluck’d:

Salem
August 1, 1914

      All at once the air became musical with the quavering cry of bluebirds. Looking up I beheld a scattering flock flying north. Some of them settled in the trees around me. The males had lost most of their blue. I noticed male & female pursued each other at times. That cry is a remote one and seems born out of the wind. It is one of the first spring notes. When we first hear it we are in doubt. Looking skyward we see nothing. It seems like a lost voice. Heard at this season it still [seems] a vagrancy of the wind. It was as if the wind had found a voice of its own, tired of using the trees, reeds & grasses as its vocal chords, and was timidly trying it out, half afraid of its own temerity.

—

Gardenville
October 9, 1926

      p.m. to Gowanda Hills—sketching—
      After eating, I put my cap under my head and stretched out on the ground. The warm sun was delicious & warmed me till I became drowsy & lay half-asleep. I amused myself by half opening my eyes and stealing a look at the distant hills, which look blue-white to my eyes. Then I discovered that my left eye saw everything yellow and my right blue. The contrast was so vivid that I wondered that I never saw it before. Then I wondered if it was the sun. My right eye was turned sun-ward. So I reversed my position, and lay a while and then experimented. The blue & yellow were just reversed now.

—

Gardenville
February 8, 1938

      When I look at the sketch I worked on Saturday& yesterday, and note how I achieved a certain sort of freedom in it, former nature studies seem inhibited; and even this one is perhaps a little too self-contained—I think, oh, when [over “My God” erased] will I ever really let myself go and express the tremendous force of nature, or will I die at last without having done so? But the vital force must be within me.
      I like to think of myself—as an artist—as being in a nondescript swamp, alone, up to my knees in mire, painting the vital beauty I see there, in my own way, not caring a damn about tradition, or anyone’s opinion.

—

Gardenville
February 15, 1961

      The path to mediocrity, which so many writers and artists travel, is not hard to trace—An artist’s first taste of potential success and fame comes from work that has grown out of his daily life and the environment in which he grew up. With the financial returns from this initial success, he immediately leaves (and rejects) the very things that gave his work its originality & character, and establishes himself in some place near to New York, Paris or Rome.
      From then on he produces work that has little or no character—and wide-eyed, he wonders what has happened. He has successfully escaped from what he deemed uncongenial surroundings, but has left his art behind him.

Okay, avoid’d the other hobble-gobble (Arnaut Daniel, Dante, O’Hara). For tomorrow (though there’ll undoubtedly be “new items” in the interval).

Charles Burchfield, “Freight Cars Under a Bridge,” 1933

Charles Burchfield, Design for wallpaper call’d “September,” c. 1925

Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967

Pound’s Spirit of Romance

Junk’d

Terrific (a solace, the recognizable) how the usual (necessary) distinctions get made by Pound in The Spirit of Romance: the pared down, restrain’d (decorous) “classic” versus the exfoliating, copious, and rife (ornament’d) “romance” (Pound calls it—it being the brash fulgent “excessive” style in Latin, primary exemplar being the “scurrilous, bejeweled prose” of Apuleius—“unclassical,” only to add, “from which certain qualities in ‘romance’ literature may be derived”—meaning, natch, il miglior fabbro Arnaut Daniel, the bird-talker). Of the work of Apuleius: “Restraint, which drives the master toward intensity and the tyro toward aridity, has been abandoned. The charm of neatness has lost its power; the barbaric and the Gothic mind alike delight in profusion.” Par contra, the “classical” metamorphoses of Ovid (“the sophisticated Naso” in the 1910 edition), “urbane, sceptical, a Roman of the city,” who “writes, not in a florid prose, but in a verse which has the clarity of French scientific prose”:

      “Convenit esse deos et ergo esse credemus.”
      “It is convenient to have Gods, and therefore we believe they exist”; and with all pretence of scientific accuracy he ushers in his gods, demigods, monsters and transformations. His mind, trained to the system of empire, demands the definite. The sceptical age hungers after the definite, after something it can pretend to believe. The marvellous thing is made plausible, the gods are humanized, their annals are written as if copied from a parish register; the heroes might have been acquaintances of the author’s father.

(See, in “our” current imperium, the unwavering demands for “the definite,” nose in the dirt Objectivism on the left, farm-boy plain-speech on the right.) According to Pound, Ovid’s flights are ground’d—note, he says, how “in witness of Daedalus’ skill as a mechanic . . . observing the backbone of a fish, he . . . invented the first saw.”

The point: to resurrect Arnaut Daniel, he whom Dante allows (“the subtlest compliment”)—Pound notes—to talk (in the Purgatorio, at the end of Canto 26) “not in Italian, but in his own tongue; an honour paid to no one else in the Commedia.” The complaint against Daniel—bugaboo of the “classic” writers (of any “era”): difficulty. Pound:

The sum of the charges against Daniel [“whom everyone admits to have a finer technique than any other Troubadour”—thus reads a line in the 1910 edition, later expunged] seems to be that he is difficult to read; but a careful examination of the text shows that this is due not so much to obscurities of style, or to such as are caused by the constraints of complicated form, and exigency of scarce rimes, but mainly to his refusal to use the “journalese” of his day, and to his aversion from an obvious, familiar vocabulary. He is not content with conventional phrase, or with words which do not convey his exact meaning; and his words are therefore harder to find in the dictionaries.

Donc, the story of all donkey excess. See, par example, the “difficult” Mr. Ashbery’s “Uptick” (out of Planisphere), how it hints that the “brilliant moisture” of poetry is some precious deposit caught between the minutes, (thinking, tout à coup and unfathomably of Apollinaire’s lovely line in “Cortège,” “Rien n’est mort que ce qui n’existe pas encore”—and isn’t there, somewhere, an Orphic Apollinairean line I like to sassily translate as—“I tick’d off my years and they fled”?) a “precious” “waste”? Ashbery:

We were sitting there, and
I made a joke about how
it doesn’t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

Caught in the apprehensive (apprehend’d by) the shine of (glare?) “a painting, looking like it was seen”—or a poetry that reads us (and necessarily writes us): time itself turning back at each instant to look itself over, move on. (Flailing, with a grappling hook made of “brilliant moisture” I am. I love how Pound refers to the sestina—“invented by Arnaut Daniel”—as “a form like a thin sheet of flame folding and infolding upon itself.”)

I ought to add to yesterday’s conjunct of Dante’s scent of panther “everywhere and nowhere” and Pound’s river of art “independent” of its bed, the Coleridge (quoted by Pound in The Spirit of Romance—some niggling idjit in my own sieve of a judgment box is saying somebody recently call’d the same to my attention of late): “Our genuine admiration of a great poet is for a continuous undercurrent of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere a separate excitement.” Oddly enough, Pound, bulldozing a little, follows the Coleridge with: “Another test of the poetic art is the single line.” Workshop miasma talk: “Good line!” And, seeing’s “we” ’ve begun that particularly mundane descent—how apropos Pound’s report of one poor troubadour’s “razo,” a kind of “author’s note” apparently—Pound calls it—vaguely—a “prose preface,” though to what isn’t precisely clear. Pound:

      The artless razo, with its apparent lack of cohesion, often gives a great deal of information in few words. [The 1910 edition adds: “To me it would seem rivalled only by the Hebrew and the Anglo-Saxon chronicles: presumably this terseness is given to those who use the quill with difficulty.”]
      Perhaps that on Daude de Pradas, Canon of Magalona, who knew full well the nature of birds of prey, may be taken as a model of adequate speech: it summarizes his poetic career: “And he made canzoni because he had a will to make canzoni and not because love moved him to it; and nobody thought much of him or of his songs either.”

Plus ça change . . . same old bag of fish.

The other addition to yesterday: I note that Noel Stock, in an introduction to Pound’s 1960 Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization writes: “So far as I know there has been no serious discussion regarding the influence of the De Vulgari Eloquio on Pound’s prose—as regards style, that is—quite apart from the fact that it was in this book that Pound received severe instruction in the use of language and discovered the term directio voluntatis, link between Confucius and the best of medieval Europe.”

Arnaut Daniel, fl. 1180–1200
(Bibliothèque Nationale)

Ieu sui Arnaut qu’amas l’aura
E chatz le lebre ab lo bou
E nadi contra suberna

I am Arnaut who gathers up the wind,
And chases the hare with the ox,
And swims against the torrent.

[Pound, though, reads qu’amas as “who loves”]

Pound / Williams Letters

Junk’d

Mighty tiresome go the mid-’thirties Pound harangues to “Billyum Bullyums” (along with the orthographical bird talk—“Waaaal ole Wokunkus the Wombatt//” and cryptoid blanking—“Is a hoos defeated for leaving thistles for clover?”). (None of it is help’d by editor Hugh Witemeyer’s decision to sic “[sic]”s on seemingly each and every typographical inversion in lieu of merely silently correcting the obvious fautes. Too, the prodigious notes: surfeit and overkill—something I complain’d about with the Beckett letters lately, too—isn’t anybody reading a man’s letters likely to come to the job equip’d with a knowledge of milieu? Witemeyer exacerbates an onerous slog by combining footnotes a goodly number of repeat offender “Biographical Notes” append’d. I do, though, note Williams’s tough reply to Pound’s nagging him about some supposedly nativist form of sentimentality, connect’d—in Pound’s judgment box—to “soft spots etc/ in yr/ poems.” (The whole thing identical in some of its particulars to the gaseousness of, say, the New Yorker who sees the bulging midriff of the country—and its products—somehow not quite up to the iron-bent will and savvy for art.) Williams:

For the luv of God snap out of it. I’m no more sentimental about “murika” than Li Po was about China or Shakespeare about Yingland or any damned Frog about Paris. I know as well as you do that there’s nothing sacred about any land. But I also know (as you do also) that there’s no taboo effective against any land and wher I live is no more a “province” than I make it. To hell with youse. I ain’t trying to be an international figure. All I care about is to write.

And, admitting later: “writing the way I do, soft spots must occur. I cannot stop for them. . . . In the end I’ve got to get over the bad slips but I can only get over them by writing, chucking up the diamonds with the marl. If I didn’t do it this way I’d be hamstrung, nutted, sunk in two minutes.”

(Is it worth cribbing Pounds “Manifesto” title “The Functions of Criticism” in an age of meekness and sycophancy? Three points:

1. The best type of critic actually causes an improvement in the art he criticizes.

2. The next best critic is the one who most focuses attention on the best work.

3. The pestilence pretending to criticism distracts attention from the best work, either to work of secondary value or to tosh or even to wobbly essays on criticism.

Which is oddly flabby for Pound: “improvement”? O’Hara’s lines sing out like a reprimand: “you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical . . . how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what?” Did O’Hara ever cop to reading Pound? Is the remark that “the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction” making a monkey of Pound’s dud “dim lands of peace”?)

Last night I jettison’d the Pound / Williams thing and hoist’d The Spirit of Romance. Immediately took by Pound’s self-proclaim’d “violation” of “one canon of modern prose” in the “Præfatio ad Lectorem Electum,” the making of a “florid and metaphorical comparison”:

Art is a fluid moving above or over the minds of men. . . . Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river.

I am struck—reading Richard Sieburth’s short introduction to The Spirit of Romance wherein he quotes Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia—by how completely Pound’s metaphor mimicks a Dantean sense of vernacular language (and an Augustinian sense of God) in an image of a “mythical panther, whose fragrance hovers everywhere but whose presence lies nowhere.” Sieburth spells it out:

According to Dante, the three major vernacular Romance languages (French, Provençal, and Italian) constitute a single supra-national, supra-individual medium. Though they may differ locally (say, according to whether the word “yes” is pronounced oc, oïl, or si), their spirit remains the same (Dante notes that the word of “love,” namely amor, is significantly identical in all three). “Proper to no one city,” “the property of none,” “this single yet plural language of the Romance vernaculars is likened by Dante to “the mythical panther, whose fragrance hovers everywhere but whose presence lies nowhere.”

The whole, I note, fishing about, including the particular clumping of quotes out of De vulgari eloquentia, is highly dependent on Marianne Shapiro’s introduction to the 1990 De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s book of exile. Rather essentialist thinking, not surprisingly, but with a fine finish and back-story to it. And not surprising that Pound’d cotton to a notion that strips away the local—he is, he announces, tired of “burdening himself with the rags of morphology, epigrraphy, privatleben and the kindred delights of the archaeological or ‘scholarly’ mind.” He’d just (1910) finish’d with the dogged particulars and philological trappings of “literachoor” in the American university.

Ezra Pound, c. 1971
(Photograph by Karl-Heinz Bast)

A Miscellany

Junk’d

Odd it is to find myself so implacably without the duty (or, damnably or blessedly, calling?) of the “A Year” daily production schedule. Though, truth is, I spent (am spending) some days filling a couple of dozen “gaps”—some existing in an execrable hand in a tiny notebook, some only in the form of a couple of notes, some, upchuck of taciturnity, not at all. Do I nudge these strays into the shape of structural clothespins capable of holding the whole baggy “apparatus” up? No, I do not. My sense of the shape of the thing: larval, inchoate, diffident, a series containing series, onslaughts of mere ongoingness punctuated by daily detritus. Like life! (Ignoring, for the nonce, the Hejinian-thief’d epigraph: “Form subjugates every experience.”) One big smeary piece of evidence of my diviner’s refusal to do more than grab the prongs of the witch hazel stick and amble aimlessly about the yard (or “field”). An intent to “return” now to properly tiny—and titled, how I’ve miss’d titles!—lyrics, those little carts dragged forth by god-sent drivers—titles arrive unbeckon’d like a slough—verbiage beckoning to verbiage.

Reading (without writing, without making notes, without the rangy impetus—or impertinence—of the “community input” in the form of viddying the daily blog-rushes, that trapline I usually walk, snowshoe’d and carrying my jar of spoil’d squirrel meat for bait)—reading, it carouses, quickens around a thing, lags and retreats. Did I pursue Daniel Tiffany’s Infidel Poetics with all good intent? No, I did not. I dawdled with the Pound / Williams letters. WCW’s remark concerning Henry Adams—“much of what he said is . . . pure style: never to be understood”—plunged me off into Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres with its argument (amongst others) that the words and idioms of mediaeval French (Molz pelerins qui vunt al Munt / Enquierent molt e grant dreit unt / Comment l’igliese fut fundee / Premierement et estoree) are “more English than French”:

Any one who attacks them boldly will find that the ‘vers romieus’ run along like a ballad, singing their own meaning, and troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is exact or not. One’s translation is sure to be full of gross blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling. If translate one must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that it matters not a straw whether we succeed. Twelfth-century art was not precise; still less ‘précieuse,’ like Moliere’s famous seventeenth-century prudes.

Which is brashly put and invigorating even today. As is:

Simple human beings like rhyme better than prose, though both may say the same thing, as they like a curved line better than a straight one, or a blue better than a grey; but, apart from the sensual appetite, they chose rhyme in creating their literature for the practical reason that they remembered it better than prose. Men had to carry their libraries in their heads.

I begin to wonder, reading that, if Guy Davenport didn’t learn something about prose styling off Adams. Mid-read, pitch’d by something (say Li buef les vaches vunt muant, meaning “The beeves and the cows go mooing”) off the Adams only to land among Lola and Yunior and Oscar himself in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Díaz capable of a beauteous rubbishy demotic transcripting worthy of Pynchon, plus the novel proceeds with a historical complexity hardly hint’d at in the reviews I gander’d. A chance bookshop perusal got me skimming the Mediterranean traceries of Odysseus in Ernle Bradford’s 1963 Ulysses Found. It plausibly argues for locating the voyages recount’d in The Odyssey in a mappable geography of the Mediterranean, is writ with a sailor’s eye and acumen. Bradford:

I spent most of the years between 1950 and 1960 sailing the Mediterranean, the largest vessel I owned being an old 20-ton cutter and the smallest a 7-ton sloop. For one period of two-and-a-half-years while sailing in the central and eastern Mediterranean I only slept ashore on five nights. I grew to know this sea, and in doing so I also grew to know the Odyssey almost as thoroughly as the charts that led me through the Messina strait, or across the Ionian to the islands and to Ithaca. In the course of my wandering I came to a number of conclusions about Homeric geography and the navigations of Ulysses.

Too, compleat’d Brian Lynch’s novel of mad scribe of devotionals William Cowper call’d The Winner of Sorrow (Dalkey Archive, 2009), a brilliantly writ piece of work. Of it, Lynch—also a filmmaker—writes (the ploy is Bergmanesque):

Works of visual art are used throughout the book, mainly, but not always, to set scenes . . . Some works are inventions: the illustrated letter by William Blake is plainly so; Mrs Unwin running toward Weston Hall at night brandishing a knife is also invented, after the manner of the great Portuguese painter Paula Rego. Many of the images are anachronistic: for instance, the giraffe that weeps in Holborn is based on a painting by the 20th century Georgian primitive Pirosmani.

And:

The Winner of Sorrow is a novel, not a biography. The extent of the fiction may be exemplified by Susanna Unwin’s attribution of the neologism ‘unusuality’ to a tax-gatherer in Huntingdon, though it is actually the coinage of Mr Charlie McCreevy, until 2004 Minister for Finance in the Irish government.

Of that illustrated Blake letter, written to Lynch’s Cowper “in the first dark days of the new century”:

      The most of the letter was filled with a drawing of a robed and frowning ancient with a forked beard, like two woolly triangles blown sideways by the wind, all done in rust-brown inks and washes of watercolour. The writing, forming an arch, ran around the image with a large, confident awkward childishness. It said,

Thou art the Son of Albion in the Evening of his Decay. I know this, Dear Sir, but dost thou? I see You Alone have creeped into the Bosom of the Abraham limned Here and Hid There. Oh! would that could follow thee! But I met with Mr Hayley and he said you were afraid. Why are you afraid? You are hid where No One Other dares go and therefore are Not an Electrical Machine, which is Hayley’s Mental Downfall, or a Steam Engine in a Mill, which is England’s fate, and besides, in your refuge of Madness, which is Poetic Health, which is to see as the Risen One does, you are Free from Isaac Newton. I am, Sir, Your Friend in Milton,

                                                      William Blake

      This man, Cowper thought, is obviously a revolutionary, or an agent for theggovernment , or a plain lunatic, or all thre ; and he hid the letter in an old copy of The Monthly Review.

Blake, who wrote: “I am hid.”

William Cowper, 1731-1800
(Drawing by George Romney, 1792)

Tony Towle, expert student of all things O’Haraesque, responding to my recent remarks about David Schubert, report’d the following gem:

The tone of the opening of Frank O’Hara’s 1959 “To the Film Industry in Crisis” is virtually identical, it seems to me, to that of David Schubert’s “The Happy Traveller.” Frank’s poem to Schubert was written three years later but I think the above-mentioned similarity indicates that he knew Schubert’s work well before that. In 1964, Frank strongly urged me to pick up a copy of Initial A, readily available then, which I am happy to say I did. I didn’t notice this parallel, however, until it was too late to ask Frank about it.

“To the Film Industry in Crisis” (dated November 15, 1955) begins:

Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!

Schubert’s “The Happy Traveller”:

Farewell, O zinnias, tall as teetotalers,
And thou, proud petunias, pastel windows of joy,
Also to you, noble tree trunks, by name
Elm, with your dark bark in the dark rain, couchant
Like comfortable elephants. And you
Mailbox colored robin’s egg blue on the poor
House, shy, set back (a poor gentleman but
Irreproachable), with your shutters robin’s egg
Green. You, street, striated with rain like a new penny,
And houses planted by arbor-vitae trees,
By miniature pines that lean against you for
Support—Hail and farewell!

Project: locate where and when “The Happy Traveller” first appear’d. Buoy’d by Towle’s report, I scanned Initial A and O’Hara’s Collected for signs. And imagined I’d glean’d another parallel in O’Hara’s opening lines out of “Two Variations” (dated February 1953):

Suddenly that body appears: in my smoke
while someone’s heavily describing Greece,
that famous monotonous line feels white
against the tensile gloom of life
and I seem intimate with what I merely touch.

Isn’t that, I convinced myself, reminiscent of Schubert’s opening to “Victor Record Catalog”?:

Most unexpectedly it happens, just
As you don’t know what you say till you
Say it. Sleighbells in the winter of
My discontent.

Or is it equally likely that one, or both, echo Archibald MacLeish’s “The End of the World” (“Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot / The armless ambidextrian was lighting / A match between his great and second toe . . .”) with its “black pall / Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.” Ah, the iterations of self-doubt on the heels of earnest procedure. As T. S. Eliot puts it—in “Fragment of an Agon”—“Hoo / Hoo / Hoo”—though who’s to say that Eliot wasn’t, as all of us must, merely fighting with himself?

Paula Rego, “Dog Woman,” 1994

Paula Rego, “The Shakespeare Room,” 2005

Paula Rego, “The Maids,” 1987

Peter Riley’s Greek Passages

A Wall

A YEAR

CCCLVI
Homely and local
is the belly-
aching of the
abject, the phony
dicta of its
thin self-adherence
grabs a man’s
hat and means
nothing by it.
A surfeit of
human sass, implicitly
French’d. So that:
the fragility of
self, its routine
machinations of identity-
upheaval get dump’d,
and a mean
perseverance of offal
and toxins is
hoist’d up bell-
wether style, and
a marvelous propinquity
of the helplessly
inane is summon’d.
Yowser. I am
a moron, m’lord.
Up against the
mortal pitch I
sing “with weight
and urgency / unheeded”
my rude and
klaxon-calamitous song,
pocky and oppugning
the inconsequential wrongs
of the maw’d
superfluous sawyers who
stump for the
limit’d wallop of
opportune carnage under
the sign of
the untorn self,
kidding like a
goat, a legend,
a faux-monnayeur.

—

“That’s either iris or maize said the urban poet to himself on the way to Chicago.” Zukofsky-script’d postcard to Williams, 1930. Retchy impasse of the morning, my dud-vibrancy lighting up. The hell with it. Reading Peter Riley, a swath out of Greek Passages (Shearsman, 2009):

Kefalari. The water bursts out at the foot of the hill / which shall wash away these stories / Churches, and a lollipop kiosk, claim the place. Coachloads arrive wanting to buy something / something redemptive, though it might not last. / / Up in the windy hills the rain / marginalizes us, serving / every cell of the landscape.

•

The King of Asine has gone / Seferis too has gone. / The citadel, a boss of rock above the sea, the caravan park, and the massed hotels along the coast. / King, poet, a vertical thrust through all that horizontal continuity and steady cash. A clearing, a void, a cry across commerce, remembering honour, a citadel / with about enough grass among its stones to graze a donkey for a week as the sea diamonds shoot overhead / / Come, little donkey, I’ll hire you, for a year and a day / and you shall bear patiently a collection of CDs of rembetiko, demotika and Byzantine chant / in two wooden boxes along the coast road and across the vegetable field 15km / to a semi-ruined stone house in from Iría which when we get there proves to have no electricity / But we know the tunes by heart, and sit in former time like little waves against cyclopean walls. Ten thousand years, drinking of the wine / Old poets, remembering the oceanic tones of a just peace.

•

Justice that survives in the tales while the actuality lies ten feet down a shaft grave. There was no justice. Tyrins, a fortress of privilege guarding the end of the bay and every advantage structure to be had. / Again the split brain advances, at someone’s cost / The King so frightened he leapt into a large storage jar / / Excavations under the summit palace, left partly open, reveal a Bronze Age circular structure divided into segments, the guide / was maybe drunk, didn’t have much English and kept saying, “It is the marigold, you know, that little flower, it is the marigold.”

Adamant the question (“millipedes curled up on the walls like question marks”): “Money, what have you done?” And: “It is not nature / that needs guarding / it is us.” Achingly humble, tender, honorable work. I’ll leave it at that for now. Off to recharge, finish up “A Year,” read without the glean-reaper’s countenance and bag, dally, walk, and scrimp. À la prochaine.

Peter Riley, c. 2005
(Photograph by Michael Hohensee)

Pound / Williams Letters

A Wall

A YEAR

CCCLV
Fatal is my uncanny
engine like that of
any of the slow-
draw super-apes who
form copulatory swarms high
up in the air,
and go at it
with antic haywire irregularity
up to the point
of the new-sprout’d
wings dropping off, sailing
effortlessly down to earth
like the petiole-shrivel’d
leaves of any autumnal
sport. Now it is
winter. The large symmetrical
expansions of the body
diminish and commit. Ground’d
ape-tedium exordiums commence
in the formicary fever-
dens. In a shallow
batch of magnify’d pond
water a smallish copepod
spins like something electro-
magnetic, and a hydra,
salt’d by a boy
biologist, explodes into ass-
galaxy nothingness. The north
star dips low behind
a hill and I
walk straight west out
into the acrobatickal protozoan
soup: a way of
keeping the humanoid monotone
down by shouting like
an animalcule, Leeuwenhoek! Leeuwenhoek!

—

A sloth-weekend, albeit peripatetic. Which’d “fit” the “requirements” (none, beyond a certain instep-crush’d insect sonic militance and “gush”) of an opening line of one a several “missing” numéros of “A Year.” (Figures that at the point of its rip-snorter of a concluding—“thud shut of a Webster’s”—the boîte-cerveau ought be so butter’d and muttering, loathe to engineer the thing compleat.) In the brave stray beams of cold sunlight un-occluded by capital’s apes struck by tyranny-bouts of shopping (boue de la saison), I sang through some of Pound / Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (New Directions, 1996), edit’d by Hugh Witemeyer. Things to love: lines out of the “Prologue”—whence Silliman’s original opening to “The New Sentence” (Williams: “The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched.” Silliman: “The sole precedent I can find for the new sentence is Kora in Hell: Improvisations and that one far-fetched.”) to WCW’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) against the smug knowing (signpost’d) conventionality of the city, here, Pound’s London: “I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the signposts are clearly marked . . . But confine them in hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.” Excellent the diagnosis of city-provincial paralysis with usual attendant symptoms of gawker-style fame-calibrating. What’s of use: the private formal push. WCW to “Liebes Ezrachen” (1922): “Just finished Ulysses. I am satisfied to put it away for the moment. Yes, I’ll risk one comment: It encourages me to champion my own particular form of stupidity—or knowledge or intelligence or lackknowledge. It is the first of the return from the desert.” And later, même feuille: “I have always wanted a book of prose things, some place to appear without the necessity of assenting to the editorial nod of some lunar sheet’s boss.” How Williams ’d’ve “took” to the sweet unattend’d attenuations of blogging, ripping out memos unfetter’d between patients!

Need’d reminders of Pound’s limits in calling “winners” in the form of retrospect-duds like “expatriate American poet”—and Pound protégé—“Ralph Cheever Dunning (1878-1930).” Out of Witemeyer’s notes:

Thirteen poems by Dunning appeared in Poetry for April 1925 under the general title “The Four Winds.” EP’s essay on “Mr. Dunning’s Poetry” was published in Poetry for September 1925, and Dunning was awarded Poetry’s Helen Haire Nevinson Prize. In an undated letter to WCW, EP asks, “Wotcher think of the Dunning that you have seen? And are you ready to look thru whole mss. Pussnly I think that inability to find something in a poem like Cheever’s ‘Shadows’ shows distinct limitation. Inability to get past the language and to the meaning.”

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway calls Dunning “a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat.” “When he was smoking too much he could only drink milk and he wrote in terza rima which endeared him to Ezra who also found fine qualities in his poetry.” At one point, prior to Pound’s leaving Paris for Rapallo, he provides Hemingway with a “large cold-cream jar” full of raw opium, and tells him “give it to Dunning only when he needs it”—“Ezra had brought from an Indian chief he said, on the avenue de l’Opéra . . .” And Williams’s nail’d down wry reply:

      To me it seems that Dunning has proven, by a route none of the others of us has taken, that it is still impossible to write work of first excellence in a demoded form. We abandoned the form, he used it well. He used it superlatively well and now, by his excellence, proves the failure. He could have proved nothing by sloppy work. After reading him I still find the form he uses so well, intolerable. It accords, however, with his stale content: AN EXCELLENCE.
      Thus the quandary increases, for the thing nobody can decide is, what excellence in most excellent. Should he be most admired who adds most to the means of expression with his art or should he be admired who shows that there is no need for additions.

And, noting rather sardonically how Dunning’s is “the old thrill of excellent craftsmanship,” WCW suggests that “here is an excellent fellow with nothing much to say who by dint of fine perception, hard work and great patience has after long hours hit upon the one dead mode which fits him. Doing this over and over he has come at last to the distinction of making something precious which fits all the rules of fine practice in his art without stretching them or caring to know where they may be departed from or amended.” Which is the sopping excellence, too, of “our” truculently know-nothing era with its mimick modernisms, and its pre-decreed readings Poundesque. (Here’s Williams complaining about Pound’s smudging of everything into whatever the current categorical itch be: “All I ever asked, even of you, is that you SEE me and not through glasses guaranteed and specially fabricated to miscolor and distort everything they come against. I do object to that. Look if you have any eyes at all—and forget for a moment what happens to be itching you at the time. It may for a moment permit you to get a little pleasure without aching to make me something that I ain’t.” Williams, out of that “Prologue”:

The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me this is the gist of the whole matter. . . . But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. . . . The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when he cleaned the Augean stables.

My argument is that that going “from one thing to another” is less sequential than relative. Not the surface array of sentence after sentence, detail after detail, but a series of relations (one thing carry’d over by dint of that “one-thousandth part of a quality in common” to the next).

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Table Talk

Two Chains

A YEAR

CCCLI
That gamut’s kaput. So
out I go rummaging
blurb-verbiage like an
involuntary canary singing mark-
edly off-key, nakedly.
Say I got stucco
up in my cornrows,
say I tiptoe my
mighty ass nightly up
the jam-ambassador’s stairs
to sack out with
Jack the cuspidor-keeper,
or sleep it off
in incongruous clothes, tree-
green. Here’s my port-
a-john now. He’s
tuck’d himself up with
a picnic basket red-
and-white checker’d thing
like a nance-chancellor
of the exchequer. Très
rococo. C’est rigolo, that
cocorico’d mot juste-rooster
noise. He annoys the
ditzy citizenry with nitpicky
riffs that mock the
clamor for glamorous standards.
The pud’s a dud.

—

Coleridge (out of the Table Talk for June 9, 1832):

Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was, as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a superfetation upon and not an ingredient in, the national character. With the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to the Latin Muse.

So one might identify—“a superfetation upon and not an ingredient in”—the late effects of any style (and all “style” is “late”—that is the meaning of style.) Fœtor of the post-confessionalist infallibly popping—between thumb- and fingernails—every lousy louse pick’d off the human monkey, long’s it’s a louse, with no sense of selecting or inventing; fœtor of the post-language boy or girl aimlessly “sampling” and “torque-ing,” gussying up with indifferently screwball swerves (what FO’H didn’t say—“Just go on with your swerves”), a compleat failure of ear and relation, ideational or objective; fœtor of the “rage to fragment” crowd; fœtor of the stand-up horse-laughers (of the Dean Collins “right” and of the Flarfster “left”); fœtor of the serialists (numerical and alphabetical) who think such sectional pinpricks’ll sew anything up sufficiently tight; fœtor of the monkey-brain’d conceptualists dully putting pegs in holes. All the odor-eater replacement “scents” to cover up the foul-smelling stew of the self left bubbling in its own juices. (Now we’re cookin’.)

Coleridge’s is an odd national fret, and historical, and highly Romantic: arguing against any dependence off (or on) the world’s—the other’s—unavoidable Überstench, that influenza, a hectoring for the “ingredient in.” Ah, sweet self. Or is it simply the unabash’d and unabidable constant perspicacity of the opportunist Coleridge damns, all “tuning itself to an after-effort” and no “own music”? Ah sweet self, forgive us each and every one; come back. (Cf. talk lately of “an anti-aesthetic that is suddenly all over the place”—neo-confessionalist and its aping “identification”—in a memoir age, is we, yes, launch’d back along that silvery railroad line with its illusory bounty out there in the moonlight where the two tracks—mine and yours—meet? Whatever, brave citizenry, hap’d with “fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on”? I do recall some reportage somewhere along the lines of “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1957) circa early ’eighties that went “Will Having Kids End Language Writing?” Call it the Ecclesiastes Effect (“turn, turn, turn”) in the Dynamics of Literary Change.)

That same night—the menu lists spring lamb with fresh garden peas, a fennel’d céleri rémoulade, parsnips up out of the cellar, mint jelly—Coleridge says:

A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself—as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States, and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if the United State got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.

Lack of constraints = “The pure products of America / go crazy . . . It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off . . .” Apply that like a mustard pack to the face you crane forth with each day.

I love the moment that inevitably arrives when I no longer know’st whither I goeth—as Holofernes says, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in pedant-mockery, with a “turgid and destitute” slap-down add’d in—“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument”—: “It insinuateth me of insanie.” I like the “frisson” (Ina gadda da vida sun-harumphing in el estómago) of seeking a way out of my “increment.” Here’s one. Something I “gave off” nigh some thirty-five years ago, out of a sense inchoate (larval) of the effect of the seeming boundlessness of American “space,” how it educed violence, the only measurable thing. (Is that what I meant? I don’t know. I vacillate between virulent bad-mouthing and jokery, contumacious nay-saying and heartbreak—fact is, I’d insist I had supreme affection for you all.) Here’s the piece, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”:

American History

A scythe of sectile
Retelling.

An axhead
Hones the stump of truth like
Nerve ends spuriously

Cat-o’-nine-tailing
A horse—

Anything so volatile—
Over and over
Imagination’s brink.

We relish the infinite
And pin it like a butterfly
To a stretch board

Of mnemonics
Balsa wood works well or
White pine.
For cooking outdoors—
Use oak.

This is where science
Metes out credence
Heat not languor
Razes valence:
Violence we can measure.

Better to boil bad water and
Learn to cow ourselves
Into abilty.

Huge white Conestogas
Drift in and out
Of our conjunctival vision

So we work for a living
Stay drunk with
The fruit of
Two hundred years of national pride:

Lost destiny—
A continent slowly leaking into the swell . . .

—

Off domani. Ci vediamo lunedi.

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

La tribu

Some Reeds (Bruis’d by Light)

A YEAR

CCCL
A muff’d and X’d out
pencil sketch in the libro
di desegni of two magnificently
slender angels with the camp
naughty-in-the-privy looks
of critics, what Voltaire call’d
“insects of a single day.”
Who needs two critics? I
like the stupor of desire,
how plausibly the deferential skirting
of its spiel tallies with
the cattiness of its point’d
vulgarity, the way pleats tuck
excess up under style or
an X delineates a hub
and a quadrant. One begins—
hookah and chaise longue made
of wickerwork—to see nothing
beyond seeing, Leonardo da Vinci
painting through the unappeasable stench
of green lizards and crickets
in several states of decay.
Thorough and monumental writing’s disdain
for the parcel’d-out dead,
the pre-pucker’d astringency of
angels, that renegade stock brood.
Le superflu, chose si nécessaire
is what Voltaire calls it,
that fierce need to lap
up runoff, make light sustain
its exorbitant accrual of light.

—

Limber-leg’d and yawning, synaptical dragons snapping up and down the spine, up too early, too cold the bicycling in the unpitch’d light. Unladle the books out of the sack. Mephisto to Faust: “Yes, gracious lord, it is a pleasure.” And, Faust exit’d, continuing: “A fool in lub doan gibbons puff / And, yest to dive into ze darlink’s muff / He’d make ze sonne und moone und stars go woof.” Mallarmé, in “Music and Literature,” according to Daniel Tiffany—out of Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2009)—a book I find (glancing) rather turgid and destitute (foot now wedged severely in mouth, I’d better read it)—: “the disinterested poet, eschewing all virtuosity and bravado, must project his vision of the world and use the language of the school, home and market place, which seems most fitting to that purpose. The poetry will be lifted to some frightening, wavering, ecstatic pitch. . . . Wherever you find it, you must deny the ineffable; for somehow it will speak.” (Which zings me back into the arms of Wittgenstein’s lovely: “When one does not force himself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed”—wherein I’d likely do well to remain . . .)

Tiffany, though, ’s primping up Mallarmé against himself, in order (I think) to dizzify and rout rec’d interpretations (preeminently Eliot: accus’d of “advancing a poetics of verbal sublimation, or rarefaction, which yields a substance of lyric purity—a substance in contrast to the unrefined ‘words of the tribe.’” See, as Tiffany notes, “Little Gidding”: “Since our concern was speech and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.” Clearly Eliot didn’t get what “NO compromise with the public” Pound’d meant when he’d blue-pencil’d the slack and “pure” line “When Lil’s husband was coming back out of the Transport Corps” in the ur-Waste Land and replaced it with “When Lil’s husband got demobbed”) of Mallarmé’s famous insistence that the poet is “l’ange / Donner un sense plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (Tiffany: “the angel / Giving a purer sense to the words of tribe”). He offers Mallarmé’s call for demotic / domestic language (above) against both the “purifying” angel-figure and the indifferent, removed, “uncommon” mass-snubbing figure: “Whenever the masses are being herded indiscriminately toward self-interest, amusement, or convenience, it is essential that a very few disinterested persons should adopt an attitude of respectful indifference toward those common motivations.” Snub they masses, thieve they lingo, as Philip Levine might’ve put it, they-feed-they-lionishly. Sounds rather Flarfish, experts.

(Talk about turgid and destitute.) I’d rather be watery, limpid, and disconsolate. Reading, in my drifty manner, some of the remembrances of David Schubert in Works and Days, I see Theodore Weiss’s:

Once, most brotherly, and bitterly too, he said to me: “Ted, I beg of you, stay out of poetry. But if you have to write, find one way of looking and saying, one gimmick, and stick with that, hammer it in again and again. That way you’ll get yourself known.”

As poor dead Archie Ammons ’s prone to say, counseling, too, against poetry (in the manner it’s “pursu’d” in these States): “What a fuckin’ racket.” Ah, the blithe savagery of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses careerism: “The age has demanded or seemed to demand in the past fifteen years the concept book: poems with a plot, or at least books with some discussable and therefore promotable ‘hook,’ concept, or master form. The poetry collection as such has become antiquated, territory ceded to Quietism.” Sounds—and it’s rampant, if not allus so unguard’dly prop’d—rather like prepping for some fuckin’ excursus militaire.

Édouard Manet, “Stéphane Mallarmé,” 1876
(Musee d'Orsay)