Niedecker’s Dahlberg and Read

Edward Dahlberg, 1900-1977
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Propelled into the 1961 Edward Dahlberg / Herbert Read epistolary bouts of Truth Is More Sacred: A Critical Exchange on Modern Literature by Niedecker’s talk of it, and sumptuous quotings (Niedecker, understatedly, of Dahlberg: “tho rarely speaking well of anyone . . . he knows words—earthy, wonderful, rich words—“cormorant” words!!”) to Zukofsky in a letter “dated by LZ: July 7/61”:

Dahlberg:

—“Poetry today has been sacked by pleasure and novelty just as Troy was by Helen.”

—“English is dead, and not even the cormorant or the bat sits upon its Babylonian wastes. No rivers flow through the language, though Homer is said to have composed the Iliad by the stream Meles. The teal and the widgeon have disappeared from our books; and every plant and animal, the source of symbols and pure speech, have died in modern literature.”

—“When the flour is well milled and the wagon sturdily wrought, the language of the people is plain and strong.”

The odd Poundian echo in Dahlberg’s claim here wholly rebuffed by the venomous fierce dudgeon in the book, wherein Dahlberg calls Pound’s Cantos “the greatest hoax in the history of literature . . . a muck-heap of allusions, names, legends, that the author is unfamiliar with, and has not himself absorbed.” And adds: “In Ecclesiasticus it is written: ‘All bread is sweet to the whoremonger.’” Herbert Read, without exactly disagreeing, summons Kurt Schwitters in defense of Pound’s “muck-heap” method, noting, too, how “tesserae need their aggregation, their multitudinous setting”: “Each canto is a Merzbild . . . and each element in the composition may be a piece of trash, a bill of lading, a scrap of Greek or Italian, a prayer, an imprecation, a row of statistics, a Chinese edict, a letter from Jefferson—nothing from the seething cauldron of memory is excluded.”

Dahlberg’s bumptious negativity is a kind of colonic (the metaphor is unavoidable, Dahlberg’s shit-spattered lingo compels it, see reference to Ulysses as “the feculent droppings of the Yahoos,” or Pound’s “latrine humor, that amuses those musty, wry boys, who never become men”). So, he writes:

I am rough and feral, and am likely to bite the tradesmen of letters . . . I prefer a virile negation to a comfortable, flaccid yea.
      I abhor venal authors as well as the poet who is solely concerned with his dithyrambs and iambics, and who gives all his thoughts to words, without thinking about justice, affection and hope. His verses are the stibium pot of the harlot, or the hair-dye of the Colchian Medea. Though the external work be as white as the marble sepulchre, it is corrupt within. Sokrates prayed to Pan asking that the inward and the outward man.

(That preceding the Niedecker-quoted line about today’s poetry being “sacked by pleasure and novelty.”) Pertinent, too, to “today”—fifty years changing nothing—Dahlberg’s skewering of the “the eavesdropping criticism of Polonius,” that arras-draped timidity of the crowd-hound, nose plunged into the common “rank” mephitic:

Polonius will never praise an audacious book by an obscure poet, except behind the arras, nor will he attack a renowned bad poet. If one assails a famous malefactor of the beauty-arts he not only incurs his venom, but raises up a sodality of foes. There is the bodkin of the poltroon, Silence: he won’t bury a book in open battle or in or in the whoring book-review columns, but shuffles the book into limbo by not mentioning it. The tyranny of Silence has brought about a censorship of books.

And, one grimly adds, other writerly “forums” . . .

In the neo-confessional age (the studied abject versus the grandstanding narcissist) that seems to be dropping its dirty drawers all about “us” (again), Dahlberg’s words point longingly to some gone bookish Arcadia (“I am not ill, or insane, or niggard, but deprive me of the Iliads, or The Compleat Angler, or Blake’s Jerusalem, and I am the ululant brute in the wilderness . . .”) and refuse to concede the turf to “witlings and dunderheads”:

What our age lacks most of all is sense and health. There can be no just words well arranged without vigor. “I swear upon my virility,” testifies Francois Villon. That a great deal of modern verse is senseless, and belongs in the spital-house, only an enervated fool will deny. Few are strong enough to eschew a diseased book. Plato tells of a certain Leontius who knew that there were some corpses on the outside of the wall, which he wanted very much to see although he knew he would be disgusted if he looked at them. Unable to resist his impulse, he ran up to the cadavers, saying to his eyes, “Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair sight.”
      The longing to be senseless or ignorant is the delirium of the multitude, and it is as strong in men as the craving in swine for dirt, or in mullets for turbid water. To spend one’s life in the sty without books is the misery in Erebus . . .

(The trumpeting line quoting Villon is lacking in Dahlberg’s original, printed in The Black Mountain Review in 1957.) Herbert Read’s sensible reply turns Dahlberg’s disgusted looking to “uncorrupted vision”:

In your use of the word (and elsewhere of the word “health”) I seem to detect ethical overtones. You seem to be calling on the poet to purify men’s hearts. I would say that that is the business of the priest or the philosopher, and that it is the poet’s business to purify their eyes. We cannot feel aright unless we see aright. The whole function of art is cathartic, not didactic. One might even say, with Confucius and Dante, that poetry is a purifying process, an effort to keep the language clean, to avoid distortion of meaning. But before the word can be exact, the vision must be clear. That is what T. E. Hulme insisted on so strongly, and I think our poets have been good poets to the degree that they have followed his advice. “The test for poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection”—that is our friend Zukofsky’s measuring-rod, and I know of no better, and you will see he places sight first. It is a test that rightly leaves Homer and Shakespeare the first of poets, and yet plays havoc with our fashionable reputations. Yet it has in it nothing of moral judgment. Do not place too much reliance on the word “intellection,” for I think Zukofsky means no more by it than the lively movement of the mind.

(Dahlberg is particularly cutting regarding “fashionable” lingo: “The clodpates of all factions wallow in the most purulent vernacular. Poor Penny Judgment of polite literature has no more sense than Better Social Feelings, both imagining that every brand-new word minted by the voracious philisters of trade must be included in the modern lexicon to show that they are familiars of the times . . .” And: “There is such a great scarcity of country English nowadays that Dr. Small Knowledge of our academies of learned nonsense is ignorant of centaury, fenugreek or drupe . . .” It’s Dahlberg’s own blustery “vernacular” that gains him a corner of Niedecker’s “immortal cupboard”—“with LZ (especially the short poems), Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, John Muir, bits from Santayana, D. H. Lawrence . . . William Carlos Williams, and haiku.”)

Lorine Niedecker / Marguerite Young

Marguerite Young, 1908-1995

“Night signs off: / a killdeer’s / thin shrieks / tilting its / black pastures.” Sonic construct of the morning: composed with the bicycle cutting through the newly black (daylight shifted) hour, the said killdeer high up and plaintive. Marguerite Young (out of the 1945 essay “The Midwest of Everywhere”): “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.” And:

I am told by commentators both cynical and wistful, those who have never inhabited my regionless region, that we of the Middle West have no Main Stream, no focus, no elite. “True,” I would answer, “the Middle West, though it may have a hidden Gulf Steam, has no Main Stream because it is oceanic”—that is, touching on all shores and limitless. There are no boundaries I know of. I have seen, on the grassy ocean, many a lurching ancient mariner—and once, in an Indiana cornfield, a dead whale in a boxcar.
      I once saw a dwarf driving a team of huge, sweating Percherons. The Middle West breeds, in fact, just such incongruities as dwarfs and Percherons. I once saw a Ford car in which there was an old sow at the steering wheel and fourteen hairless baby pigs as passengers—stalled without gasoline, I have no doubt . . .

“There are no boundaries I know of.” I think of Lorine Niedecker’s lines in the calendar-writ “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous”: “If you circle / the habit of / your meaning, / it’s fact and / no harm / done.” Or, too: “Summer— / I don’t hum / the least of my / resistance, / I give it a fly.” Or: “Van Gogh’s ‘Bar’— / In all free states / the selves un- / mix and walk / the table’s / length.” Or, too: “That’s sweet / on a target— / nobody’d know / the ham line. / Holes are too / late nowa- / days. One / freak ass to / wire.” Marguerite Young, born in Indianapolis in 1908. Lorine Niedecker, born near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin in 1903. Later in Young’s essay: “Under the veil of routine living and thinking, what uninhibited dramas will never be resolved by any easy formula, ready answer, or slogan! There is no whole, but there are fragments joining and disjoining—a mentality which escapes mentality, a mental reality which escapes our mental description.” Niedecker, in New Goose (1946):

A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. What
is it the sign
of? The sign of
an owl.

Jenny Penberthy, in the excellent “Notes” to Niedecker’s Collected Works, writes of “A monster owl”:

An early version can be reconstructed from LZ’s letter to LN, March 9, 1938:

A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. Now
what’s it the sign
of? The sign of
an owl I guess.

LN adopts LZ’s revisions for NG.

Zukofsky’s parings away heighten the piece’s music at speech’s expense, and put the shrug of uncertainty (“I guess”) out the door. The prim preciosity of “What / is it the sign / of?” versus the stretch and half-japery of “Now / what’s it the sign / of?” Loss of the easy flux and ready possibility of “a mental reality which escapes our mental description.” A narrowing, loss of any sense of conversational setting. The piece under Zukofsky’s tutelage become a mere semiotic equation, musically “tight” and rather unhumanly sterile. Certain, bordering smug. Whereas it is doubt—“a raucous comedy in it all”—that defines the Middle West according to Young: “Even our Middle Western humor has been colored by a profound doubt.” Young’s owl story:

      Recently, a mammoth hoot owl was seen flying around in different parts of Hoophole Township, New Harmony, Indiana—according to Charlie Chaffin, who operates a thriving notions store and is besides a philosopher, a poet, a historian. Charlie is just naturally what he is—six feet tall in his stocking feet. The owl, according to Charlie, was so large that some of the boys claimed it was equipped with a motor. It had a wingspread of about nine feet, three horns, was covered with a hard shell instead of feathers, carried a four-inch spur on each leg, had round green eyes, made a noise like a flat tire while flying and had a bell around its neck.

(Oddly enough, Young’s “Hoophole” ought to read “Hoop-pole,” a township in Posey County, Indiana named for its pliable saplings used in barrel-making . . .)

Niedecker (Stray Notes)

Lorine Niedecker, c. 1969
(Photograph by Gail Roub)

Sun-slashed Sunday. Birds, alerted, working the cheerier registers. (“Woodcock peenting at Legg Park.”) Chores and a too meagre flop-down of reading, interrupted by a nap. Lorine Niedecker writing Gail Roub (20 June 1967), in a late puzzlement and ebullience of style-change, seeking a way beyond the clarity of the merely tangible, form’s radical stasis. Weighing:

how to define a way of writing poetry which is not Imagist nor Objectivist fundamentally nor Surrealism alone [. . .] I loosely called it “reflections” or as I think it over now, reflective, maybe. The basis is direct and clear—what has been seen or heard, etc . . . —but something gets in, overlays all that to make a state of consciousness [ . . .] The visual form is there in the background, and the words convey what the visual form gives off after it’s felt in the mind. A heat that is generated and takes in the whole world of the poem. A light, a motion, inherent in the whole. Not surprising since modern poetry and old poetry if it’s good, proceeds not from one point to the next linearly but in a circle. The tone of the thing. And awareness of everything influencing everything. Early in life I looked back of our buildings to the lake and said, “I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me—those woods have made me . . . . . .”         I used to feel that I was goofing off unless I held only to the hard, clear image, the thing you could put your hand on but now I dare do this reflection. For instance, Origin will have a thin narrow, longish poem, sensuous, begins “My life / in water” and ends “of the soft / and serious— / Water”.

That “awareness of everything influencing everything” present in the opening of the “Lake Superior” sequence in North Central:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock

•

Iron the common element of earth
in rocks and freighters

And in the lovely line “Beauty: impurities in the rock”—exchange of “stuff” and diffusory meander the source of it all. That line expanded in a handmade booklet Niedecker put together following a 1966 circle tour of Lake Superior with Al Millen:

Lorine: “One could say that impurities in the language make the beauty just as impurities in the rock cause the beauty of color there. And speaking of language, how does Sault ever become Soo?”

Al: “Yes, well, help me read the road signs, they’re so small in Canada—and greenish, they melt into the forest.”

Lorine: “What signs?”

Niedecker’s late nigh-transcendent push sensed in a letter to Zukofsky (“dated by LZ: 2/7/64”): “There is sumpn in moving to a new place and now when I go back home this summer maybe it will seem new to me. I’m trembling on the verge of something, a form of poetic thinking that depends maybe too much on readers’ imagination but we’ll see. I don’t know if it’s called metaphysical or not, not necessarily, I guess, but anyhow this has been in me from the beginning and somehow it’s got to come out.” Or see the 15 December 1966 letter to Cid Corman, reveling in mystery and ambivalence:

Am I the American indeed—I can’t be entirely content, it seems, without some puzzlement, some sharpness, a bit a bit of word-play, a kind of rhythm and music in however small a way (all this only leads me into confusion, no doubt).

And she proceeds to recount how she’s lately sensed “something like subliminals coming on—dream, mind at rest, automatic writing etc. . . . reverting to my youth (my interest in the 1930’s) so I let it come! I love it but the spring is not quite so fresh and jet-fast as it was back then and you keep wondering if this pristine stuff is complete—funny thing, tho, when you get used to it, it does seem to be enough. Perhaps by spring I’ll have something—don’t count on it—” Gorgeously vacillatory. Isn’t it in the pieces of “Subliminal” (out of Harpsichord & Salt Fish) that one sees the kind of quizzical fracturing and intersplice of memory and presence (often in the form of lingual retrievings) that Rae Armantrout works so consistently now?

                  Sleep’s dream
the nerve-flash in the blood

                  The sense
of what’s seen

                  “I took cold
on my nerves”—my mother

                  tall, tormented
darkinfested

Or:

Illustrated night clock’s
              constellations
and the booming
                                star-ticks

Soon I rise
              to give the universe
                                my flicks

As Niedecker puts it in the epigraph to “Traces of Living Things”—quoting Fulcrum Press’s Stuart Montgomery, the fragments offer a “strange feeling of sequence.” (“Traces of Living Things” is full of transcendent (category-defying) insistence, that light “inherent in the whole”: “A man // bends to inspect / a shell / Himself // part coral / and mud / clam”.)

Lorine Niedecker to Gail Roub, 20 June 1967
(Hoard Historical Museum, Gail Roub Collection)

“Bibbler and dub . . .”

Eugene Jolas, “Proclamation,” (transition, 16/17, 1929)

Fatigue. Incipient sloth. Snow, again, minimally festooning the streets. “Up” at four thirty to inspecific anxiety and restlessness. Zukofsky: “Condensation is more than half of composition. . . .” My cutting out work thus cut out for me, who’s voluble as a goose. Or I could hereby load my brushes with significantly less paint . . . Thinking of how Stevens, “bawd of euphony,” quotes—in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (1944)—William James’s letter to Bergson regarding some Bergson book or other: “You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing Madame Bovary, such a flavor of persistent euphony.” The ramped-up synaesthesia covering unintelligibility or something vasty and indifferent like remorse? Music the procuress of what’s available by no other means. In a letter to Williams (12 July 1962) thanking him for “the hand-attested copy of” Pictures from Brueghel Kenneth Burke quotes himself (out of a story called “Prince Llan”*)—“Ampersand placing the germs into the blood through the sucking of lice not affable skulls whom the madam lay with the man so aloof from us as he stood on stiles that passing dogs stopped to befoul them”—with the comment: “But after that effort, I collapsed.” Burke is using the syntactical plasticity of the sentence to point admiringly to the logic-thwarting ending of Williams’s “The Corn Harvest”:

under a tree

whose shade
carelessly
he does not share the

resting
center of
their workaday world

“He does not share” goes first of all with “shade,” then shades off indeterminately into “the resting center.” The more closely you watch such, the more it maketh to be dizzy.

And, looking hard at early work of Lorine Niedecker, I nearly lament the loss of that moment of James Joyce seizing the hinterlands of America, gussying up the native (pre-commodity) surreal (though Niedecker is likely reading—through Zukofsky—the Eugene Jolas-edited transition with its “work in progress” Finnegans Wake excerpts and 1929 “Proclamation on the Revolution of the Word”). The end of the seven-part “Progression”:

To jesticulate in the rainacular or novembrood
in the sunconscious . . . as though there were fs
and no ings, freighter of geese without wings.
I know an ill for closing in, a detriment to tie-ups.
They pop practical in a greyfold, bibbler and dub—
one atmospheric pressure for the thick of us.
Hurry, godunk, we have an effort to wilt.
I shall put everything away, some day,
get me a murmurous contention, and rest.

Circa 1933. Niedecker, writing to Harriet Monroe (31 January 1933): “Poetry to have greatest reason for existing must be illogical. An idea, a rumination such as more or less constantly roams the mind, meets external object or situation by illogical association. Memory, if made up of objects at all, retains those objects which were at the time of first perception and still are the most strikingly unrecognizable. In my own experience sentences have appeared full-blown in the first moments of waking from sleep. It is a system of thought replacements, the most remote the most significant or irrational; a thousand variations of the basic tension; an attempt at not hard clear images but absorption of these. Intelligibility or reader’s recognition of sincerity of force lies in a sense of basic color, sound, rhythm.” Some pertinent “points” out of Jolas’s “Proclamation”:

. . .

6. THE LITERARY CREATOR HAS THE RIGHT TO DISINTEGRATE THE PRIMAL MATTER OF WORDS IMPOSED ON HIM BY THE TEXT-BOOKS AND DICTIONARIES.

(The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom . . . Blake)

7. HE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE WORDS OF HIS OWN FASHIONING AND TO DISREGARD EXISTING GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTICAL LAWS.

(The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction . . . Blake)

8. THE “LITANY OF WORDS” IS ADMITTED AS AN INDEPENDEDNT UNIT.

. . .

*The 1924 printing of “Prince Llan” in the Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg-edited little magazine Broom resulted in the issue’s seizure by the U. S. postal service for obscenity. Burke’s story contained the word “breasts”: “Their breasts were tight up beneath their shoulders. Their breasts, they stood out firm like pegs.”

Niedecker (Stray Notes)

Lorine Niedecker, c. 1969
(Photograph by Gail Roub)

Duncan, out of “From a Notebook,” Black Mountain Review 5 (1955), replying to Olson’s “Against Wisdom as Such”:

This is . . . the radical disagreement that Olson has with me. In a sense he is so keen upon the virtu of reality that he rejects my “wisdom” not as it might seem at first glance because “wisdom” is a vice; but because my wisdom is not real wisdom. He suspects, and rightly, that I indulge myself in pretentious fictions. I, however, at this point take enuf delight in the available glamor that I do not stop to trouble the cheapness of such stuff. I mean that it is, for a man of rigor, an inexpensive irony to play with puns on pretending and pretension. I like rigor and even clarity as a quality of a work—that is, as I like muddle and floaty vagaries. It is the intensity of conception that moves me.

Niedecker reporting it to Zukofsky (14 August 1955): “Duncan says he likes intensity even if it’s an intense muddle.” (See, too, Niedecker’s “to be beautifully lost for a time and to me that’s poetry.”)

—

Niedecker to Zukofsky (LZ’s date: “Rcd Feb 14/52”) reporting how Alice James

. . . made an entry in her journal only a couple of weeks before her death, about Emily Dickinson: “It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate—they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle. Her being sicklied o’er with T. W. Higginson makes one quake lest there be a latent flaw which escapes one’s vision.” This was in 1891 or beginning of 1892.

—

The sly Dickinsonesque humor of (particularly) the opening of Niedecker’s 1931 poem “When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient”:

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight’s end or flight’s beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It’s the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

Sly humor: Niedecker writing to Zukofsky (LZ’s date: “May 23/48”) regarding the signed epigraph to Zukofsky’s “Light 4”—“These are not my sentiments, / Only sometimes does one feel that intimate. // God, LL. D.”—with a conspiratorial snigger: “God, LL. D. (wish Emily Di. could see that) . . .”

—

Five pages of Dickinson notes, handwritten, undated, by Niedecker:

1
On Emily Dickinson

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
called her verses
versicles!
“Miss Dickinson’s versicles
have a queerness and a
quaintness that have stirred
a momentary curiosity in
emotional bosoms. Oblivion
lingers in the immediate
neighborhood.”

2
                Mary Jordan:
Her Letters:
E.D. She defines genius as
the ignition of the affections,
& it seems likely in her case
to be true.
                —
Mary Jordan: quotes her re-
marks to Higginson in 1862:
“I had a terror since Sep-
tember I could tell no one;
and so I sing as the boy
does of the burying ground,
because I am afraid.”
Bliss Carman: “The event of
meeting another was too ex-
quisite and portentous to
be borne. For there are
some natures so shy and

3
quick, so undulled by the
life of the senses, that they
never quite acquire the
easy part of the world. You
will hear of them shunning
the most delightful acquain-
tance, turning a corner
sharply to avoid an en-
counter, hesitating at the very
threshold of welcome, out
of some dim, inherited, instinctive
dread of casual inter-
course.” [likely to be unhappy
if they enter the world’s work—
might end in disaster]. “But
in Emily Dickinson's case,
the stray health of genius
came to the support of this
hermit’s instinct, and pre-

4
served her to the end of life
sweet and blithe and con-
tented in the innocent
nun-like existence in which
she chose to be immured.”
                —
          Carman:
“she certainly had the most
sensitive and exquisite
organization”
                —
Martha Hale Shackford:
“Passionate fortitude was
hers, and this is, and
this is the greatest contribution
her poetry makes to the
reading world. It is not ex-
pressed precisely in single
poems, but rather is present
in all . . .”
                —

5
ED: Of someone dull—
“He has the facts, but not
the phosphorescence of
learning”
                —
ED: “If I feel physically as
if the top of my head were taken
off, I know that is poetry.”
                —
Harold Monro:
Percy Lubbock: “Acute
sensibility of feeling, swift
audacity of mind.”
                —

Notes toward a work, or identificatory props, verifying one’s own practice? Some of the original sources: Mary Augusta Jordan, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Nation 59 [December 13, 1894], 446-47. Bliss Carman, “A Note on Emily Dickinson,” Boston Evening Transcript, Nov. 21, 1896. Martha Hale Shackford, “The Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” The Atlantic Monthly Volume 11, No. 1 [January 1913], 93-97.

—

Jenny Penberthy, in Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 (1993):

A letter to Kenneth Cox (February 2, 1970) describes her method of research for “Thomas Jefferson”:

My Thomas Jefferson written and sent out. Up very early mornings—nearly killed myself—and all that reading beforehand (until I realized what am I doing?— writing a biography or history?? No, all I could do is fill the subconscious and let it lie and fish up later). The hard part is to keep some quotes but not too many.

Penberthy reports, too, how Niedecker, after reading Charles Anderson’s 1960 Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise, sent Zukofsky “a page of notes.” Included: “[Dickinson’s] poetry came out of language—language the inspiration and creator” and “If the creative writer pushes far enough into language he finds himself in the embrace of thought.”

—

Putting together A Test of Poetry (1948), Zukofsky refused to pay the $25 required to reprint the intended three poems by Emily Dickinson—“To fill a Gap” (#546), “It was not Saint” (#1092), and “Revolution is the Pod” (#1082). Thus, A Test of Poetry contains only two poems by women: Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” and Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose fragment “There’s a better shine”:

There’s a better shine
on the pendulum
than is on my hair
and many times
            .     .         .     .
I’ve seen it there.

(A third woman, From Ritual to Romance author Jesse L. Weston delivers a translation of the c. 1300 piece Alysoun. Zukofsky, without irony, in a note regarding the poem’s language of Early Middle English: “There is only one surprising difference from modern English: the word he in Alysoun denotes she.”) According to Penberthy, Zukofsky somewhere suggested that “Dickinson’s presence in Niedecker’s poem, ‘There’s a better shine’ would suffice.”

Lorine Niedecker’s “On Emily Dickinson”
(Hoard Historical Museum, Gail Roub Collection)

Niedecker: “To be beautifully lost . . .”

Lorine Niedecker, c. 1910

Jonathan Williams: “I have turned more and more away from the High Art of the city and settled for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass . . .” And Lorine Niedecker:

I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I’d never get anywhere
because I’d never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehashed radio barbs—
more barbarous among hirelings . . .

Matter-of-factly reporting the world’s comeuppance, casually delivered and undeserved. A dismissal of it, with impertinence, but little contempt. An easy shrug: “Expect the long-stemmed blue / speedwell to renew / itself . . .” My habit of going to Niedecker for repair and sustenance. (Some odd connect of late: Niedecker’s “My Friend Tree”—“My friend tree / I sawed you down / but I must attend / an older friend / the sun” and lines out of the old Jefferson Airplane song “Eskimo Blue Day” (1969): “The reason I come, and I go, is the same / Animal game for me / You call it rain / But the human name / Doesn’t mean shit to a tree . . .”) There’s a lovely statement by Niedecker—quoted in Margot Peters’s Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). She’s corresponding with Clayton Eshleman (3 February 1968) regarding “Wintergreen Ridge” and a sense of untethered release, replacing usual coherences in the piece with: “movement, gist, vibrations, a sense of floating. . . . I was afraid probably of losing myself—you know we want to lose ourselves and we don’t want to . . . I figured after 40 years of more or less precise writing, I cd. afford to let go.” Niedecker:

It’s in the province of natural history that imagination in the protoplasm of the mind is limited by actual experience, but it has the innate impulse to cross barriers. It is the nature of protoplasm in the cerebral cortex never to be satisfied but always to want more. (I take from science just what I want, like Bible readers taking only what they want from there) I begin to wonder if it isn’t reality—natural—to be beautifully lost for a time and to me that’s poetry.

Nature surpassing itself in uncertainty, seeking other means, other forms: the natural pushing and swelling into the preternatural, no contra naturam here . . . Of course:

Effort lay in us
before religions
        at pond bottom
                All things move toward
the light

except those
that freely work down
        to oceans’ black depths
                In us an impulse tests
the unknown

(Out of “Paean to Place.”)

Jefferson Airplane, “Eskimo Blue Day,” 1969

Keith Tuma’s On Leave

Keith Tuma
(Photograph by Diane Tuma)

Near the beginning of On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes (Salt, 2011), Keith Tuma quotes André Breton in Nadja (1928):

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in Salammbô was to “give the impression of the color yellow,” and in Madame Bovary “to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice,” and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Exegesis by means of image, explanation carried forth by anecdotage, the offhand “extra-literary” marking style, making argument. Tuma writes: “An anecdotal criticism might be a more poetic criticism.” And: “The thing about the best anecdotal criticism is that it cannot be reduced to method or system. It values style above argument, allows impression equal footing with knowledge.” Tuma’s chief exemplary: Hugh Kenner. (Thumbing a recent book of criticism, George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions, 2011), one notes a pervasive language of anecdotage without its storied content: “As early as 1869 the young Mallarmé, in the grip of an epiphanic revelation, sought to break the determinant barriers of language and to liberate syntax from the shopworn linear despotism of logic.” Story of an agon without tangibles . . .) If Kenner (“greatest anecdotalist”—see The Pound Era, whose marvelous texture exposes itself immediately in its opening sentence—“Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things”) offers one model, Tuma, with easygoing confidence, quickly asserts another: he’s looking for something to occupy himself with during a proposed academic leave (2007-8), a doable writing contract of sorts:

I thought the brevity and more or less self-contained nature of the anecdote would allow me to set modest goals for writing during my leave . . . and to stick with them: I’d try to bang out one anecdote at each sitting. It soon occurred to me that it was likely that I didn’t have a sufficient supply of anecdotes, or anyway not of anecdotes I wanted to preserve, to keep me occupied for the whole year. I also thought I would need some way of organizing the anecdotes in a book. So I decided to keep a daybook that would follow the year and allow me to write about some of what was happening during my year on leave, as it happened.

Introducing by retrospect, the way one does. One perennial daybook-style item in Tuma’s book: a lump sum paragraph of recent news details juxtaposed with more personal data, tranche de vie observations, cringe-making puns, &c.—a cross between the collocations of, say, Harper’s “Weekly Review” and the sweeps of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet:

Cubs off for the day; talk of recession follows talk of housing slump. Gonzales quits. A white bag of finch food hanging out back blows in the wind. One can’t be bewildered forever: eventually you’re just a clod of unknowing. Books and CD pile up as my eyesight and hearing fade—only work can make us happy? The people rage and the heathen imagine a vain thing? It is yourself that is the source of this disgust, though its objects are not of your making. Michael Vick, gone to the dogs, finds Jesus. War criminals run the government. Love endures, incapacitating us. Alice Notley’s book about dead women,Alma, is oversized, awkward to pick up and hold, impossible to read.

Tuma lists Hannah Weiner’s Weeks and Peter Manson’s Adjunct: An Undigest as foreseen prompts: “not daybooks exactly, to be sure, certainly not daybooks much interested in meditative prose, but instead works of experimental writing heavily invested in fact and event.” Finally, though, it’s the unforeseeable that seems to structure On Leave: the unexpected death of Tuma’s mother turns the book to elegy and lament, and throwing its other deaths into starker relief. One reads a detail like that of Notley’s “dead women” differently. One reads of the deaths of Lorenzo Thomas, and Michael Donaghy, and John Wieners, and some different meaning to the word “leave” begins to assert itself. Tuma:

“Dead is dead,” Tom Raworth wrote me once, after the loss of one of his many writer friends. It wasn’t Ed Dorn—someone else. I’m not sure what he meant. Perhaps it was that, with a loved one’s death, and with the possibility of real conversation with that person gone, the books—as it were—are closed. You can write in the book, you continue to write in the book, but it’s not the same. At the same time there is no closure, no end really. Already the tenses blur . . .

If one aim of Tuma’s book of anecdotes—I see I am skinting here, On Leave is filled with anecdotage, terrific and oddly “weighted” glimpses of things, say, the one about Ed Dorn “across the table in a restaurant out on the water in Bar Harbor, talking about yuppies walking their cougars on the devil strips of Boulder,” or the one about Frank Bidart reading a new long poem called “The First Hour of the Night” and running directly to a front-row sitting Richard Howard “to ask him what he thought of it, as if Howard’s is the only opinion in the room that matters”—if one aim is to determine what anecdotage is, and how it informs critical work—I skint, too, if I fail to mention Tuma’s several deft readings of selected works herein, of Rae Armantrout’s, of Raworth’s, of Maurice Scully’s, of John Wilkinson’s—what Tuma arrives at, it, too, seems somewhat “tainted” by the trajectory of Tuma’s year. Toward the end he writes:

I want to say that the anecdote is like the corpse primped up, cotton in its cheeks, fooling nobody it’s true to life. But somehow that seems fake, forced, “literary.” There is little that is or should be literary about the anecdote. Too much self-consciousness about style is as out of place in the genre as analysis and argument. And yet, as Alain Badiou points out in his fine book on Saint Paul, the gospels are mostly anecdotes cobbled together, while Saint Paul’s epistles are something else—militant declarations of a paradigm shift to be recognized by all who would be faithful to the “event.” The anecdote is story, the other manifesto framing story. That seems right, I guess. I am all for story but must admit that, for me, anecdote will never be enough. Anyway there is too little seen here, too little understood, and what is understood was understood too late to be of much use. But there’s always too little time.

Jot and run. Spiel and retreat. Put it all down. Some days I’d argue the “literary” compels itself, is its own unavoidable constraint and obligation. Shapes made without intent. Tuma ends with a story of driving a wet road, and a bird “landing ten yards in front of me in the middle of the road.” Thumped by the car’s underbelly. “Sure enough, the bird is bouncing on its back on the road behind, dead as a nail. You don’t do it over.” Anecdote or manifesto?

Fecundity’s Blank

Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941

Three days unthinking, trammeled by the roar of a transient’s mayhem. Days of thinking it’s enough: enough adding to the human glut. Desire to pare down, to cease the frenzy of constantly “marring the sweet and simple field with tents”—and next decamping. “Frenyse quhilk bytis his auen membris vitht his techt.” (Against such avid and endless selecting, with its prosaic narrowing, Charles Olson, quoting Whitehead: “Measurement is / most possible throughout the system.” Pursuant to: “I reject nothing. I accept it all . . .”) Reading, in off moments, dilatory and stunned, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Its impious thrashing of the damnable profusions of Victorian “damp”—

. . . for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork—sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one morning ‘all about nothing’ he screwed the lid of his inkpot and went for a turn in his garden. Soon he found himself involved in the shrubbery. Innumerable leaves creaked and glistened above his head. He seemed to himself “to crush the mould of a million more under his feet.” Thick smoke exuded from a damp bonfire at the end of the garden. He reflected that no fire on earth could ever hope to consume that vast vegetable encumbrance. Wherever he looked, vegetation was rampant. Cucumbers “came scrolloping across the grass to his feet.” Giant cauliflowers towered deck above deck till they rivalled, to his disordered imagination, the elm trees themselves. Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint. Then, remembering with a sigh his own fecundity and his poor wife Jane, now in the throes of her fifteenth confinement indoors, how, he asked himself, could he blame the fowls? He looked upwards into the sky. Winter or summer, year in year out, the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales, he pondered, or elephants rather; but no, there was no escaping the simile which was pressed upon him from a thousand airy acres; the whole sky itself as it spread wide above the British Isles was nothing but a vast feather bed; and the undistinguished fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost was copied there. He went indoors, wrote the passage quoted above, laid his head in a gas oven, and when they found him later he was past revival.

Lovely, that “scrolloping,” apparently Woolf’s own coinage. “Hens laid incessantly eggs of no special tint.” One reads that against the current “era”—its clamorous negligibility. And against one’s own ordinary frets and flourishes. Too, there’s Woolf’s complicated joke regarding the poetry of the commonest verbiage:

. . . it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.

Followed, assuredly, by a “great blank.”

Timothy Thornton’s Jocund Day

Timothy Thornton’s Jocund Day (Mountain Press, 2011)

Incessant the retrieval and re-launch of the old jittery particulars, incessant the fatigue of doing so. I believe the current “period”—and its “pieces”—to be identical to that period whence my retrieval began, and then, suddenly, am wholly disabused of that notion by seeming waywardness and infidelity, the gone-off rotting impermanent smell of the clamorous new. Teach me how to read that, I say, teach me how to read and I shall withdraw my incipient perusal smackdown, my dysphoria made of insolvency . . . I used to cotton to utter syntactical resilience and the possibility of a single fierce truth caught by merest sentence-ry—now the rubrics bleed me skeptical . . . I keep reading and re-reading pieces out of Timothy Thornton’s Jocund Day (Mountain Press, 2011), suckered by the musicking, quasi-unconvinced by the pith. Here’s one:

Bull Canvas

Without knowing it it is

hours after rowers and the sawmill

hum etc., and about your slavishness-

smith shoulders the finch gantry oh
quickens, a flurry of gold through any
              and all actual shutters

is an asphalt stemming thirst, mouths
open, cupped to grout us the whole
              outside sea. When

a liquid rises about a leg the rifling is
absolute, and in / this case: tasked ah

senator me in will you, delegate us up
over filament bridges
                                          hard and crow crow crow do
be so YES stupid: as to
                                          this you rafter me

back your entire gull body newly
                                                              turned, fully grown to arching
            alabaster smack and mobile like a fucking
awesome bracketing you
                                              sky all of you down again / and landing
breathing so assuredly on me on the bed here, so
is my strand of wholly sincere herringbone glances
              valid and dovetailing yourself the greased, annealed grid
you let us
                  drip O almost to the hooves, sweating like gone off
ham (like shiny ham like on a credit card) and complete as
granite and easily as quickly
                                                      endorsed. You are (pleasingly) quite
arson and I do have this
                                              structural tongue brief slick cadet.

              Now lie and hear these for the sake
              of example orange jackets doing their
              bitingly legitimate gravel thing / well,
              meniscus piss boot man, whoever
              that is hissing ambassador by their
              hellish other confederates expects mm a
              fungus stem to creak me out, of your
              birch calves, to this, suddenly not quite
              sanctuary, as it was: and is right, at

last, about how to burn the tar summer
thru with fuck and vassalage and drink.

How to read “Bull Canvas”? Is knowing that some of the pieces in Jocund Day were previously printed in Cambridge Literary Review 1 (2009) and Hot Gun! 2 (2011) any help? Lineage markers pointing vaguely at the recently burgeoning crowd “around” J. H. Prynne. How is something like (the noun pile-up in) Thornton’s “You are (pleasingly) quite / arson and I do have this / structural tongue brief slick cadet” related to (something like) Prynne’s “Fluting awash previous sure to find on the margin affront no big thing offset intercepted for fluid introits. Did frequently gallivant splint tongue flicker spring of air well glad” (out of Kazoo Dreamboats or, On What There Is)? Is it (at least partly) the case that I tend viscerally to reject the work of (perceived, even if misperceived) idolatry? Perhaps pertinent here: Keith Tuma in the direct and likeable On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes (Salt, 2011) talking about Prynne’s own rejecting of “the cult of personality and whatever it is about poetry that sometimes makes poets out to be gurus”: “Prynne’s correspondent Charles Olson arguably accepted this role late in his life, apparently to Prynne’s regret.” Tuma then suggests that Prynne’s own “brilliance as a teacher and . . . reputation as a forward-looking poet, the leader of an English avant-garde” have, predictably enough, “made him a kind of guru, whether he likes it or not.”

Resisting a coterie or resisting a poem? Truth is, through all the noise in the signal, Thornton’s piece delivers a lyric punch. (Or is it because of the noise in the signal—is “bitingly legitimate gravel thing” noise or signal? and what about “meniscus piss boot man”? Arguably, a “single fierce” (or damped down) definition of the lyric is: “noisy I-saying.” Endlessly unrepeated ways to say one thing: I am here. I love. I hate. I am uncontainable. Etc.) Pertinently, the epigraph of Jocund Day reads (wonderfully):

Ô but wherefore should soe faire a face, retaine a heart soe cruell?
Then dispare, dispaire aspiring thoughtes, to gaine so rare a iewell.
            O but when I cull, & clip, & kisse,
            mee thinkes there hidden treasure is,
            Which whispers in myne eares all this,
Loue’s flames require more fuell.

            Thomas Campion (?)
            in Giles Earle His Booke, British Library Add. MS. 24,665

Is the history of the lyric that: “Loue’s flames require more fuell”? The uncontainable lyric I requiring a burgeoning syntactical impropriety (“not quite / sanctuary”) to momentarily “stay” it? I recall Hugh Kenner somewhere noting how some feelings “can not survive a demand that we define our terms.” “Note too,” he writes, “that orderly syntax detracts from feeling, insisting as it does on what Swift, defining “style,” called “proper words in proper places.” “Proper,” naturally enough, changes. And what’s “improper” becomes “proper” with inconceivable velocity. (My inkling and discomfort: Prynne’s “improper” is now “proper” to an increasingly identifiable “Cambridgean” groupuscule. Menace of the pre-placed container, the contrary lyric I become mere “receivable.” Prynne, in Kazoo Dreamboats: “Zest for the contrary is mostly a style appetite . . .” Cautionary advice?)

All my ruminant guff may or may not “read” Thornton’s work with any justice. I remain intrigued by the “ear” (only Michael Haslam’s work, of what newer British work I know, would seem to provide equally exciting music), I like the way Thornton’s lines erupt unaccountably into iambics (or maintain Eliot’s “ghost of some simple metre . . . behind the arras,” though without the coy Eliotic peek-a-boo—“advance menacingly as we doze,” &c.) See, say, the lines in “Chamber Aubade”:

the tincture glitch the tax the lid I love I lark the
all I love encircling you in rifled white, we wick
              the birds alight: amid: ashore:

injured, will ramify slick hindrance, veering ayres
this light their pale machine: sleep on, my
              kiln, my rest, my zero point.

I like, too, the small yelps and grunts writ big (“ah,” “uh,” “mm,” &c.), lingual overflow, supplement and remainder. Here’s another (shorter) piece out of Thornton’s Jocund Day (one of several with the title):

[Tattoo]

Snap lockdown to

that night I left

Venn diagrams in the sand
(moonlit, etc.), and

              yes, I wept
more than the tide.
All lay: / unremarkable,

              how we had
erred and well the world
was as you slept

broken, resting slanted and

redundant. It
drew parallels. At least

through all of it
your (in such stifling

quite) noisy inhale/exhale held

how I read and how you

would be read.

Cold Sun

Clarence John Laughlin, “The Mirror of Nothingness,” 1957

Oddly interrupted week, its tethers and commandments. The cold sun, custard-colored, drills its way into the room only to find it empty. (“Dear Professor James, I am sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” Gertrude Stein, naturally.) Or, in a demeanor of glut and “numerosity,” there’s the other James, out of The American Scene:

It is more than a comfort to him, truly, in all the conditions, this accepted vision of the too-defiant scale of numerosity and quantity—the effect of which is so to multiply the possibilities, so to open, by the million, contingent doors and windows: he rests in it at last as an absolute luxury, converting it even into a substitute, into the constant substitute, for many luxuries that are absent. He doesn’t know, he can’t say, before the facts, and he doesn’t even want to know or to say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word. The illegible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language, and it is under this convenient ensign that he travels and considers and contemplates; and to the best of his ability, enjoys. The interesting point, in the connection, is moreover that this particular effect of the scale of things is the only effect that, throughout the land, is not directly adverse to joy.

Clarence John Laughlin, “The Head in the Wall,” 1945
(“I feel convinced that whole new worlds lie about us, sheathed in what we call the ‘commonplaceness’ of reality.”)

Clarence John Laughlin, “The Masks Grow to Us,” 1947
(Jonathan Williams: “He is the Master of Ignored Ghastliness, of the Eldritch, the Psychopompous, the Metamorphic, the Mephitic, the Fearsome, and now and then of Trumpery and the Fulsome.”)

Hunh?

Henri Rousseau, “Rendezvous in the Forest,” 1889

You’d think, after a couple of days unharrowed (or un-discharged) by writing, a glut would out, some gleaming undulant pile of percepts and particulars, a cat-ejected tapeworm on the patio. No. Ardency cooled by remittance. Testimony tweaked by partiality. Some splendid bouts of reading, that sweat-equity, against an excess of hardy scriptural chores . . .

The indomitable Marianne Moore, in “The Ways Our Poets Have Taken in Fifteen Years Since the War,” a review of The New American Poetry: 1945-1960:

In his “Statement on Poetics,” Mr. Olson advocates open form or “composition by field,” projective or field composition being offered as an improvement on inherited or “non-projective” form. Inherited non-projective form can be projective, I would say, and projective form may be weedy and colorless like suckers from an un-sunned tuber. Kenneth Burke’s observation in Counter-Statement, it seems to me, applies both to the “field” and to the “library”: “a work may be said to have form in so far as one part leads a reader to anticipate another part and be gratified by the result.” Elsewhere, “Great artists feel as opportunity what others feel as a menace. This ability does not, I believe, derive from exceptional strength; it probably arises purely from professional interest the artist may take in his difficulties.” As a composer’s directions influence the performer’s interpretation, punctuation aids precision, and precision is the glory of the craftsman; syntax being equivalent to the staff in music, without which interpretation would sure overtax the performer. (Intentional ambiguity and inadvertent ambiguity, need it be said, are not the same, the perfect analogy for intentional ambiguity being Rousseau’s “Rendezvous in the Forest,” in which the illusion is the more precise by the fact that the adjoining horses—the dapple and the black—are so merged as to be almost indistinguishable.)

Precision and restraint against the seemingly resent-fueled huffing and puffing of Olson (see, in a letter to Creeley dated 5 May 1952, mid-complaint about “the lie in Stevens”—“however much the pleasure in his the play of words, is his language, that, it is without rhythm because it is without passion which is person (not personae, that further device against mass)”—how Olson veers off into helpless innuendo and taunt—

                   It gets so goddamned neat instead of a matter of insight by way of the sounds as well as the petit point
                                                                        (even this cult of M. Moore, this Brooklyn sappho they all sit on their hands over: that spinner, their last penelope, that the brightness is lighting a la La Fountain . . .

Creeley’s reply—unknowingly designed to illustrate Moore’s fastidiously derisive remark made later in the review regarding expletive as “earmark of incompetence”: “Slater once wrote me how this same Sappho of Brooklyn used to nag at Hart Cane, on all the things he sent to the Dial, etc., etc. Isn’t this word too strong, isn’t that adjective too strange, isn’t this line weak, isn’t that not what you mean, isn’t—fuck it. Fuck it UTTERLY.” Boys, boys . . .)

Randall Jarrell (in “Her Shield”), even whilst applauding Moore’s restraint, would seem to insert doubt in the very catalogue of what’s lacking:

Her restraint, her lack—her wonderful lack—of arbitrary intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of sociological significance, and so on, made her unattractive both to some of the conservative readers of our age and to some of the advanced ones. Miss Moore was for a longtime (in her own phrase about something else) “Like Henry James ‘damned by the public for decorum,’ / not decorum but restraint.”

That coming after Jarrell’s warm-up list of the poems’ “almost ostentatious lack of transitions and explanations, the absence of romance and rhetoric, of acceptedly Poetic airs and properties . . .”

Is it Moore’s canny projecting of Olson’s declaredly rumbustious and world-beating “composition by field” (Olson: “If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use”) back into, too, the “library” that recalls Virginia Woolf’s rather sassy remark in Orlando: “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.” A provocatory not unlike Moore’s own. Or there’s Orlando, exploring his lineage (“he would take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that”) going into paroxysms of potentiality, only to abandon “the cardinal labour” for reading:

“Whose hand was it?” he went on to ask. “The right or the left? The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? Had it―” but here either his invention failed him or, what is more likely, provided him with so many instances of what a hand can do that he shrank, as his wont was, from the cardinal labour of composition, which is excision, and he put it with the other bones, thinking how there was a writer called Thomas Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy amazingly.

“Its relation to a dozen others . . .”

Robert Duncan, “Self-Portrait,” 1939

From the absolution by a black-stoled Benedictine with aspergillum and censer (te supplices exoramus pro anima famuli tut Ezra) four gondoliers in their Sunday best brought the coffin through the Palladian doors of San Giorgio Maggiore where it had lain before the altar in a solemnity of Gregorian chant and Monteverdi and set it with tricky skill among heaps of flowers in a black gondola from the stern of which thirty-five fat coral roses rode in high solitary splendor as it moved across the laguna, nodding and dipping their red into the Adriatic.

Guy Davenport at the funeral of Ezra Pound. The “tricky skill” of the humor-buttressed high solemn mode: sign of enduring love. Yesterday a long roundabout at the wheel of the Vibe, through some “weather.” The usual zig-zag of reverie made flat by the need to attend to the road itself. A short hard sleep. Up to some inches of wet snow pulling at all the earth’s ascendants. A striped skunk dolphining through it, arch and dive, arch and dive. Rousing up the degree of vigilance during the six a.m. dog outing, “nervous in the snow.” Duncan “After Reading Barely and Widely”:

Poetry, that must touch the string
for music’s service
is of violence and obedience a delicate balancing.

Sexual, that délicatesse: avid restraint aiming to cousin with stretched-taut abandonment. (Davenport talks of Pound keeping an eye on “the sources of energy, guiding us to the neglected ones, guarding them from contamination.” The “strain” of contraries.) I recall Duncan’s talk of Virginia Woolf in The H.D. Book:

Somewhere, working on Mrs. Dalloway or on The Waves, Virginia Woolf had the sensation of digging out a space in which her characters had their existence. “Whenever I make a mark,” she says of working on The Waves, “I have to think of its relation to a dozen others.” These are the rudiments of a projective-feeling in writing, of composition by field. August 30th, 1923, she writes of Mrs. Dalloway in progress: “The Hours and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight in the present moment.” Monday, October 15th: “It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it . . . One feels about in a state of misery—indeed, I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—and then one touches the hidden spring.”

Tunneling into daylight. Think of Woolf’s short story called “Kew Gardens” (1919)—Woolf’s snail a harbinger of the ant-centaur of Pound’s Canto LXXXI (“Learn of the green world what can be thy place / In scaled invention or true artistry”):

. . . the snail . . . now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high-stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennae trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

The audacity of Woolf’s p.o.v. (Akin, isn’t it, to that of Albert York in the uncannily unmediated “Three Red Tulips in a Landscape with Horse and Rider”? Looking at York’s painting directly triggered my recall of the Woolf story.)

Albert York, “Three Red Tulips in a Landscape with Horse and Rider,” 1982

A concentratio that can only mock the “irregular and aimless movement” of the human passersby (“Pull down thy vanity”). In one letter (2 July 1959) to Robin Blaser, Duncan recalls “Pound’s hope that we might practice concentratio versus the dogmatic ravings.” (Isn’t dogma a purely human pitfall: “< ancient Greek δογματ- , δόγμα that which seems to someone, opinion, belief, doctrine, decree . . .”?) Truth is, I love the post-absence roiling vacuity slowly vivifying the zero-groundedness of the snowy reaches, that striped skunk bounding up out of the gutter, sheer impropriety arriving without notice to make itself at home. Duncan again in the balance, domestic and wild:

Today the spirit jumps up; there’s too much to do! We spent part of the morning cleaning house, and I spent a couple of hours sorting glass preparatory to the new window for James. With my mind still thronging with impulses to work there—hence perhaps the sharpening of the eye to be questioned by friend rose. I want a flowering without representing flowers. Newly opening and upthrusting artichoke plants ask a question of design too. There are studies growths, and then, an oriental poppy in bloom amidst scattered Californias, urges an almost careless, well—an abandond beauty.

(Letter to Robin Blaser, dated 6 August 1958.)

Duncan’s Stevens

Robert Duncan, 1919–1988

Robert Duncan (The H.D. Book) quoting Williams quoting Stevens: “‘One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors,’ Stevens writes to Williams after Al Que Quiere in 1920, ‘in old walls, wood-work and so on. Your place is

                            —among children
Leaping around a dead dog.’”

Part of Duncan’s insistence that Stevens remains “within the rational imagination” (as opposed to the Poundian “generative imagination” Duncan credits H. D., Williams, and Pound himself with, those who “saw literature as a text of the soul in its search for fulfillment in life and took the imagination as a primary instinctual authority.”) Stevens’s original letter unfound, one turns to Williams’s lengthy excerpting of it in Kora In Hell: Improvisations. It follows a somewhat confused argument Williams makes for “the inventive imagination” (Williams veers between “The attention has been held too rigid on the one plane instead of following a more flexible, jagged resort. It is to loosen the attention, my attention since I occupy part of the field, that I write these improvisations” and “. . . 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”). Regarding Stevens’s letter, Williams reports: “It begins with a postscript in the upper left hand corner: ‘I think, after all, I should rather send this than not, although it is quarrelsomely full of my own ideas of discipline.’” The letter is dated only “April 9”:

My dear Williams:
.     .     .     .     .     .     .
      What strikes me most about the poems themselves is their casual character. . . . Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. It is one of the reasons I do not bother about a book myself. . . .
      . . . My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it; . . . Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.
      (This sounds like Sir Roger de Coverley)
                                                                                                                                        A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is that fresh thing . . . etc.
      One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors in old walls, wood-work and so on.
      Your place is
                                              —among children
                  Leaping around a dead dog.
A book of that would feed the hungry . . .
      Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair.
I am only objecting that a book that contains your particular quality should contain anything else and suggesting that if the quality were carried to a communicable extreme, in intensity and volume, etc. . . . I see it all over the book, in your landscapes and portraits, but dissipated and obscured. Bouquets for brides and Spencerian compliments for poets . . . There are a very few men who have anything native in them or for whose work I’d give a Bolshevik ruble. . . . But I think your tantrums not half mad enough.

Odd argument: who’s madder, one singularly besieged by some scourge of a focus unremitting, or one ever-fidgety and enamored by a series of flounces? (Madder music: is that the history of poesy? One thinks of currently obvious attempts to outdo all other odds by sheer freak-reaching and eccentricity . . .) Somewhere in The H. D. Book Duncan opposes Williams’s (and Pound’s) modes of “the bold-face emphatic, the rant, the caricature of voice, the contentious mode” to Stevens’s (and Eliot’s) refusals of “such disturbances of mode” (“They preserve throughout a melodious poetic respectability, eminently sane in their restriction of poetic meaning to the bounds of the literary, of symbol and metaphor, but at the cost of avoiding facts and ideas that might disturb.”) Isn’t Stevens capable of a blurts of unearthly music and radical silliness (I think offhandedly of a phrase like “Castratos of moon-mash” in “Men Made Out of Words”)? What of the mounting hysteria in something like “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”?

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Stevens’s “the process of adjustment is a world in flux” recalls Duncan’s own early response to H.D.’s “Fruit cannot drop / through this thick air . . .”:

I felt I must be, the world must be, something more various and full, having more of flux and experience than the immediate terms of achievement around me disclosed. Let me not come into my fulfillment until the end of all things, so the soul secretly resolved.

Duncan’s sudden canny apprehending of how the poem “had something to do with keeping open and unfulfilled the urgencies of life.” (I think again of “Men Made Out of Words”: “The human // Revery is a solitude, in which / We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, // By the terrible incantations of defeats / And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one. // The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”

Robert Duncan’s Locomotive

R. B. Kitaj, “Robert Duncan,” c. 1978
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Reading, serendipitously, one of Williams’s fugitive pieces, an essay called “The Present Relationship of Prose to Verse” (out of 7 Arts [1953])—on the heels of a Hugh Kenner toss-off titled “1680 Words on Duncan’s Words” (out of the Duncan Ironwood [1983]), I am struck by the alignment of Williams’s final (rather unconvincing) paragraph (he is arguing against the ongoing prevalence of “the iambus”—and musters a series of ancient complaints against it, including that of “Gascoyne, in his ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction,’ [who, in 1575] writes of it; ‘Commonly now a days in english rimes we use none other order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevated or made long . . .the iambus.’ ‘And surely I can lament’—he adds—‘that wee are fallen into such a playne and simple way of wryting, that there is none other foote to use’”)—Williams still niggling what Pound’d attempted to dismiss whole hog (“to break the pentameter, that was the first heave” in Canto LXXXI and “as for those who deform thought with iambics” in Canto XCVIII)—

      We are a new age, speaking a new (in sound) language but we have no clear way of dealing with it in an exact manner, except to think that when we want to represent the sound of a locomotive approaching on the track we have to imitate a locomotive approaching. We cannot break our old habits.

Which imitating, limited and egregiously dopey though it may be, is what Kenner’d claim Duncan did. Kenner (Is it here that the kernel of what becomes—in 1987—The Mechanic Muse—with its chatper called “Pound Typing”—is formed? Kenner is clearly thinking about machinery, and using it to count the 1680 words. In Kenner’s contributor’s note one reads how the “Duncan essay arrived in one piece: a ten foot scroll direct from the word processor”):

      “Give a poet a machine,” Duncan said in delight, “and he’ll use it.” Pound, his point was, had found a poetic use for every character on the typewriter keyboard, not excluding / and @, two symbols which also remind us of what typewriters were “meant” for: business letters. Men of letters of course use them too, but by habit never stray from the keys that spell words (one reason to say “men of letters”). So used, the typewriter is a mechanized quill, introducing no new possibility save perhaps the carbon copy. But Pound—it’s as if he’d recognized a keyboard instrument left lying around by inattention, and thought to find out what tunes it might be made to play.

And then what made me sit a little straighter when I subsequently read of Williams’s “sound of a locomotive approaching”:

      That’s a model for thinking about some of Duncan’s playfulness, as when he noticed the word “locomotive” lying around and started taking it to pieces:

loco-co co moto mo mo
locomomo cotivecomo

mocolotive
motocolive

moco lomo motive lomo
co co co co co como co momo
lo mo como lo mo tomo

At Lake Como we saw mountains.

Though published among the “Imitations of Gertrude Stein,” that poem derives from her only the jaunty non-sequitur it uses to end with, Lake Como. For the rest, it’s intent on four queer syllables: not, in Stein’s way, undergoing their hypnosis, but in a tinkerer’s way, undoing screws, refastening. And out of bit and pieces of the word “locomotive” it contrives an acceptable imitation of how trains can sound, which is no more what the word was meant for than the Remington was meant for writing Cantos.
      We may even want to reconsider “non-sequitur.” The mountains, at any rate, follow form “co co co co co como co momo,” where the train is surely laboring up-hill.”

The sorrow and irony of it all: the “acceptable imitation” still falls largely into the abyss of the iambus.

—

Too, there’s Duncan writing (15 June 1957) rather confusedly regarding “Xs of Harmony and Disharmony”—“with its pastiche of Whitehead and Wallace Stevens”—to Robin Blaser:

In form I wanted to let go as far as I could bring myself of any thematic development . . . and to stress a serial composition. We got the complete Webern. In which have been revelling—and what an impeccable ear he has for possible inner structures in a passage of a poem being set. “Poetry is not an art” Robert Graves said at tea: “I told Pound that poetry is not an art.” I look up again the passage in Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry “How far, he would ask, could literature be considerd an art? Writers lackd conscience; they lackd objectivity, they did not treat words as painters treat paint . . . . . ‘that everything must come out of the matière of his prose and not out of the ideas and emotions he describes.’ Writers were moralists; they were propagandists and ‘propaganda shuts off the contemplative penetration of life before it has found the finer shades of significance. It simplifies too much.’” Virginia Woolf comments: “He lookd at the carpet from the wrong side.” The aesthetician does in seeing it as a product look “from the wrong side” and give only a clew in what he sees as to the process. Yes, it’s sadly clear that poetry is not necessarily an Art, any more than man is necessarily a Man. “An idiosyncracy magnified to the highest degree” Freud calls the constitutional intolerance of an aesthetic; and proudly claims for himself such an intolerance.

As Woolf says of Fry, one could say of Duncan: “He enjoyed his irresponsibility. It left him free to indulge his speculative genius unfettered.” The passage Duncan’s quoting:

. . . So he would be perverse and he would be disparaging. How far, he would ask, could literature be considered an art? Writers lacked conscience; they lacked objectivity, they did not treat words as painters treat paint. “Gerald Brenan is almost the only writer who has the same sort of ideas about writing as we have about painting. I mean he believes that everything must come out of the matière of his prose and not out of the ideas and emotions he describes.” Most English novels he read very few were on a par with Frith’s “Derby Day.” Writers were moralists; they were propagandists and “propaganda . . . shuts off the contemplative penetration of life before it has found the finer shades of significance. It simplifies too much.” Defoe’s simplicity delighted him; Henry James’s complexity satisfied him. But in between, what a waste, what a confusion, what a jumble of mixed motives and impure desires!
      As a critic of literature, then, he was not what is called a safe guide. He looked at the carpet from the wrong side; but he made it for that very reason display unexpected patterns.

Making rather willful Duncan’s simply assigning Fry the “aesthetician” a mere bias for art as product. (Some research into Gerald Brenan—poet, novelist, Hispanist, Bloomsbury cohort, married to American poet Gamel Woolsey, lover of painter Dora Carrington—would seem to apply . . .) Duncan’s “Robert Graves said at tea” would appear to refer to Graves’s “November 5th Address” of circa 1928 wherein he claims:

Poetry is not an art. It does not even begin as words. What happens is that there is a sudden meeting in the poet’s mind of certain incognizable, unrelated and unpersonified forces; of which meeting comes a new creature—the still formless poem. The poet feels this happening at the back of his mind as an expectance, a concentration which will persist until it is removed. First, he objectifies it by writing it in such a way that it has a general, not merely personal, context; then removes it as far as possible by putting it into circulation.

Poem as contagion. Which sounds, once made a thing to which one is constitutionally intolerant, somewhat like Freud’s “idiosyncracy magnified to the highest degree.” Oddly enough, that phrase, as used by Freud, refers not to “an aesthetic,” but to war. See Freud’s 1932 letter to Einstein: “Now war is in the crassest opposition to the psychical attitude imposed on us by the process of civilization; and for that reason we are bound to rebel against it; we simply cannot any longer put up with it. This is not merely an intellectual and emotional repudiation; we pacifists have a constitutional intolerance of war, an idiosyncrasy magnified, as it were to the highest degree. It seems indeed, as though the lowering of aesthetic standards in war plays a scarcely smaller part in our rebellion than do its cruelties . . .” Ah, Duncan. “Give a poet a quote, and he’ll misuse it.”