Notebook (James Schuyler Letter, &c.)

Fairfield Porter, “Jimmy and Liz,” 1963

Distal itch of the weekend’s usual leisures unfeignedly forsook. “Juddering here and there in the flivver.” Long haul pre-dawn delivery vehicle. Piety of a rain-shiny road at night. Reading, between trajectory, Roberto Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink (2009), a book beginning with a sentence pregnant with all too common pertinences: “What happened with Tiepolo was the same thing that was to happen with certain imposing and mysterious ancient objects like the Shang bronzes: those aspects that resisted interpretation were considered decorative, while those too charged with meaning were labeled ornamental.” How the anxieties of the simple keep complexity in abeyance by shilling supposed verities of “style.” Thus Tiepolo is, for a period, scorned:

      There were years in which English-speaking travelers visited Venice and did not see Tiepolo. The 1860 Murray’s Guide observes that the Palazzo Labia was in poor condition, but does not mention the frescoes. Ruskin ignored Tiepolo. lf he mentions him, it is only to criticize him. On seeing The Flagellation and The Crowning with Thorns in Sant’ Alvise, he decreed: Tiepolo is “virtually the beginner of Modernism: these two pictures of his are exactly like what a first-rate Parisian Academy student would do, setting himself to conceive the sentiment of Christ’s flagellation, after having read unlimited quantities of George Sand and Dumas.” A profound irony of the times: the word modernism, which throughout the twentieth century would become the emblem of all avant-garde movements, is here applied to the most hackneyed academic painting, which in its turn could allegedly be traced back to Tiepolo. Yet now that the clamor of the avant-garde has passed, saying that Tiepolo had something to do with modernism makes sense once more, at least in the sense that Baudelaire attached to the term.

—

An uncollected James Schuyler letter to Fairfield Porter. Schuyler is proposing logistics for travel to Maine, to join the Porters at Great Spruce Head Island. Three weeks later (1 August 1955) Porter, in a letter to Frank O’Hara writes: “Jimmy is writing a new novel, and sometimes I hear him typing and often I hear a woodpecker and think it is he . . .”) Schuyler:

                                                                                                            Friday, July 8, 1955
Dear Fairfield,
      There are two buses that go from New York to Camden. The one I shall take leaves New York at 3.15 a.m. and gets to Camden at 6.22 p.m. Is that all right, or does it stretch the definition of ‘afternoon’ too far? (in the South, they start saying evening right after lunch). The other bus leaves here at the same hour in the afternoon, and gets there—Camden—at 6.22 in the morning. For myself, I would prefer not to take it, because it would mean traveling in the dark through country I have never seen. On the other hand, if it would suit your convenience better for me to arrive in the morning, that’s a very minor point. Unless I hear otherwise from you, I look to see you a week from today, on Friday, July 15th, at 6.22 PM in Camden, Main, at the yacht club.
      I’m glad you liked my translation.* Trying to translate Leopardi at times is discouraging: you can see for miles from his mountain top, but it’s also windy, cold and dizzying. Besides, as Bickersteth says, ‘no poet in the literature of the world has ever devoted more time and thought than Leopardi to . . . the principles that should govern poetic composition, or been more learned than he was in all that appertains to the art of poetry as practiced in every age and tongue,’ and I sometimes feel like an 18th century traveler coming back from Segesta with an album of water-colors.
      Dante, who did not suffer from modesty, real or false, would, I imagine, have felt that his big Florentine nose had been distinctly put out of joint if he had heard an admirer say the Divine Comedy was too good to be literature. He thought it was the greatest. But I think what Sonnabend said is the hooey side of religion, as though all literature were not directly concerned with the Truth. I think that if Blake is more satisfactory than Shelley it is not because he is about the Truth in some sense that Shelley is not, but because he gave us his view of it more vividly, with greater clarity, and more concentratedly; and did so because he had a view of the Truth that was as systematic, as elaborated, as clear to himself as Dante’s Aquinian view was to him. Shelley is decidedly a smokey lamp to see by, but the light does flash out. Anyway, all that I meant to say is that I feel very je m’en fiche about the idea that there is a difference in kind between Dante and, say, Hawthorne. Dante may be a whole country, and Hawthorne a small and rocky pasture, but wild roses and hawkweed can grow in either.
      I giggled a fraternal giggle at your epithets for your two new pictures, ‘a Marquet’ and a ‘compulsive elaborate detail.’ To me, it sounds like me talking about my poems. As a friend, I hope you’ll allow me the liberty to read ‘spontaneous’ in place of ‘compulsive.’
      Speaking of which reminds me: Donny Windham, who was here the night before last for dinner, delighted me by spontaneously liking the painting you gave me much the most of any here. Nor was this in the context of a Fondranesque distaste for Leonid and Eugene Berman (he had already handed out several stars to the latter’s painting of the Rialto). I was especially delighted because Donny’s eye has always, so to speak, had me at his feet. It was he who first introduced to me the work of several artists that I am most fond of, such as that of Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, and when I look at paintings he likes and I don’t with him (when he first came to New York in his teens he was drawn into the orbit of the dread Lincoln), I am able to get something where, unaided, I would not. So, you see, I was pleased.
      What a bore magazines are, sending back one’s work. After all the trouble of making them, it seems a shame to have to hawk one’s own pots. No wonder the profession of literary agent is so lucrative. Entre nous, Howard Moss is a dope and writes with his feet; though I don’t know how I dare even think it: he has my August poem right now.
      John has written a new longish (one single-space page plus a little) poem which at one hasty reading seems to me very beautiful. If I can persuade him to the typewriter keys, I hope to get a copy of it, and of course will bring it with me. He is in a quandary about the title of his book, and Yale, which declines ‘Poems,’ is putting on the heat. The one he keeps coming back to is ‘Some Trees,’ which I agree is the best of those he’s thought of, though not really adequate. We’re planning to spend this evening quibbling about it.
      Would you like me to sit for you while I’m there? I would like to if you would like me to.
      I am alarmed by what you tell me of the first effect of Maine. Do you suppose I will be able to stay awake long enough to eat a meal?
      What a long letter. Well, when I get there we won’t have to waste any time talking and can devote ourselves single-mindedly to making life a little lovelier for others.
      My love to Anne and Kitty and Jerry and you.
                                                                              love,
                                                                                      [signed] Jimmy

* Schuyler translated Leopardi’s “Il tramonto della Luna” (“The Setting of the Moon”) and “A se stesso” (“To Himself”), both pieces included in Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems (2010). “Bickersteth” is “Geoffrey Langdale Bickersteth, translator of The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1923). Here the reference is to “The Setting of the Moon.” In the William Corbett-edited Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991, one finds in a 2 July 1955 letter to Porter:

      Here is the new translation. Now that it’s had a week to cool off, I’m not so altogether pleased as I was; or rather, I see some things I would like to make better, if I can, later. Particularly the last stanza, which is written in a way that suits Italian very well, with its marvelous vocabulary of “splendid” or Miltonic words, that sound in it so natural—though I imagine Leopardi is one of the few poets who satisfactorily tamed that part of the language; to modern ears anyway (what do you think a modern ear looks like? a Juan Gris? a Soutine?) And I would like to find another word than “hides” for the beginning of the 14th line: “obscures” would translate the Italian, but I think it stretches the English usage too much; “masks” would sound right, but I don’t want a metaphoric word; so I settled for “hides,” but I think the long i sound spoils the effect of “blind” in the next line. Do you know a small, heavy, darkly-colored word that would suit? Do I sound terribly silly?

The lovely quest for “a small, heavy, darkly-colored word” recalling Sidney’s “peyzing each sillable,” and marking its “quantitie.” Schuyler’s “The Setting of the Moon”:

As, in lone night,
above silvered fields and water,
when a breeze plays,
and distant shadows make
a thousand vague aspects
and deceptive objects
among calm waves
and branches and hedges and small hills and houses,
arrived at the confine of the sky,
behind the Apennines or the Alps or into the infinite
breast of the Tyrrhenian Sea,
the moon sets; and the world grows colorless;
shadows vanish, and the dark
hides mountain and valley;
blind rests the night,
and singing, with a sad melody,
a wagon driver salutes the last ray
of the fled light
which before had led him on his way:

so is taken, so
from mortal years, goes
youth. In flight
are the shadows and shapes
of delighting illusions; and less often come
the far-off hopes
that prop a mortal nature.
Life is left
wretched, darkened. Casting his gaze before him,
in vain the confused traveler searches
the long road which he must take
for goal or reason; and finds
that the place of humankind
from him, as he from it, is truly estranged.

Too happy and gay
Our miserable lot
seemed there above, if youth,
in which each good is of a thousand pains, the fruit
should last the whole of life.
Too kind decree,
which sentences each animal to death,
unless, first, half the way were bound
over to labor,
yet harder than terrible death itself.
Worthy of immortal minds . . .

Anne Ryan, “No. 538,” 1953

Anne Ryan, “No. 74,” 1948/1954

Two O’Hara Letters and a Translation

Fairfield Porter, “Frank O’Hara,” 1957

Frank O’Hara, writing to Fairfield Porter:

                                                                                                            June 25, 1954*

Dear Fairfield,

      How are you weathering it alone? If I were less heedless I would have like to wish Anne good adventure on her trip, but I realize that she must by now have departed. I simply, in such a heat, cannot type you René Char’s great long and questionable lyric Exploit du Cylindre à Vapeur but I have collated the promised A*** and hasten to add another gem:

                                    L’Amour

                              Etre
                              Le premier venu.

                                          *

which I translate as follows:

                              To be
                              The first comer.

                                                            Do you agree with my interpretation? This poet, you will certainly agree, is far more fun to do into English than the loquacious Mallarmé. In addition when I see you I will have a sumptuous divertissement by Jean Genet Un Chant d’Amour (it’s easy to see what’s on our minds these dog-days) which JA has pronounced one of my best works—I hope this doesn’t mean that it’s a terrible translation, but can’t figure out what else it could mean. There you are, he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other.
      There is supposed to be an enchanting movie The Holiday of M. Hulot which the gang saw recently but I haven’t yet. Edwin and Rudy recommend it too so it must be our dish. I came rather late to the party (back from dinner) but it was fun at Grace’s ne’ertheless; I’m sorry you didn’t either come earlier or stay longer. My activities lately indicate that soon JA will be forced to give over the title Larry assigned him “Last of the Gay Blades” to me—but then John should rest this summer anyway. Baudelaire had the funds to be a dandy but the most I can manage is to be a petit boulevardier.
      What do you make of Joan Mitchell? Really, I found her rather grumpy that night at Grace’s though she kept announcing how friendly she was feeling. At other times I have found her charming when she was terribly self-announced-depressed and had everyone else fleeing in droves. I guess it’s not her, then. Mike and I are having dinner tonight but it’s so hot I rather think we should forget it. Maybe we’ll just eat Ice Cream. I always eat that on Friday because of my upbringing.
      Is the eldest of your sons, I mean Lawrence, that is, at home yet? And if so will you present my compliments? I saw a copy of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin which John has in the bathroom and I must say it is more disgusting almost than the McCarthy hearings, complete with a photo of Lyon Phelps at Hazens with two Radcliffe admirers. It must be wonderful to be an elder poet at 29, with all of the pretentions and none of the mistakes. (As you see, my spleen is fresh as a daisy and cool as a cucumber.) JA received a note from Jimmy which was sweet and had that I-really-should-be-working tone common all to all us pros so I guess he is digging in without much trouble.
      This letter started out of the vain desire to write you a letter, but I don’t dare keep it up having just reread it.

      Call when you get in and give my love to Katy.
                                                                                                [signed] Frank

“The promised A***” (with O’Hara’s translation campily misattributed):

                                    A***

Te es mon amour depuis tant d’années,
Mon vertige devant tant d’attente,
Que rien ne peut vieillir, froidir
Même ce qui attendait notre mort,
Même ce qui nous est étranger,
Et mes éclipses et mes retours.

Fermée comme un volet de buis
Une extrême chance compacte
Est notre chaîne de montagnes,
Notre comprimante splendeur.

Je dis chance, ô ma martelée;
Chacun de nous peut recevoir
La part de mystère de l’autre
Sans en répandre le secret;
Et la douleur qui vient d’ailleurs
Trouve enfin sa séparation
Dans la chair de notre unité,
Trouve enfin sa route solaire
Au centre de notre nuée
Qu’elle déchire et recommence.

Je dis chance comme je le sens.
Tu as élevé le sommet
Que devra franchir mon attente
Quand demain disparaîtra.

                                                          René Char. Inédit. 1950.

                                    To . . .

You’re my love for so many years,
My dizziness in the face of so much waiting,
That nothing can age, can chill,
Not even what’s awaiting our death,
Not even what’s alien to us,
And my eclipses and my returns.

An extremely compact chance
Closed like a boxwood shutter
Is our chain of mountains,
Our compressed magnificence.

I say chance, O my hammered one;
Each of us can receive
The mysterious part of the other
Without spilling the secret;
And the grief that comes along with it
Finally finds its parting
In the flesh of our unity,
Finally finds its solar route
At the center of our cloud
Which it tears and begins again.

I say chance as I feel it.
You have raised the summit
Which my waiting must surmount
When tomorrow has disappeared.

                                                          (Trans. by Franz Liszt)

Fairfield Porter’s undated reply:

Dear Frank: I just got your letter this afternoon, and read it while walking to the station with Katie (her choice) and Anne was packing for herself, Kitty, Jerry, and Grace. Laurence is at home and working at Schur’s. At the station a drunk made friendly passes at Kate, showing me that there are always new problems and that little girls must be protected without causing them alarm. When I came back I found a sarcastic note from Anne in the typewriter about the cracker barrel touch system motto in the typewriter, “It is work that gives flavor to life.” Anne will leave about Thursday with Katie and Jerry, leaving L and me.

I felt as you did about Joan Mitchell. She seemed unfriendly to me, but then I expect painters often to be mad at me, so I mistakenly took it to myself alone.

It is typical of JA to give and take at once. Thank you for remembering To ****, which seems a prefect translation, but which I prefer in your English, I suppose that is a compliment to the strength of the original. As to L’Amour, it contains the open secret of my feared and attained failures.

We had a beautiful note from Jimmy, whose sweetness follows from the fact that his politeness directly expresses his true feelings, and is never a cover but the outward expression of exactly what he thinks. We also had a heart-warming letter from Janice.

The picture of Kitty is done. The portrait of John is a good likeness. I hope it does not stiffen up. He has to pose again. He seems to have made up his mind to endure a certain amount of boredom. Maybe if he doesn’t come out next weekend, he will come under your chaperonage later.

I will telephone when I come in town. I did very much enjoy the other day with you.

                                              [signed] Fairfield

O’Hara (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) to Anne and Fairfield Porter:

                                                                                                            January 26, 1956

Dear Anne and Fairfield,
      I was happy to get Kitty’s note, especially the day it came as I had been reading her poems the day before and off and on since I got here and was wondering how the prettiest poet in America is.

      It has seemed very odd to be here but now I am fairly well adapted to it. There has been snow on the ground and replenishing flurries ever since I arrived, which I like, and I have a room quite large with eaves, on the third floor of Molly Howe’s house. She is in the theatre des poètes and also is the one who adapted FINNEGANS WAKE for their production. She is nice and amusing and rather Irish and thinks I’m even Irisher than she is (which is doubtful since she acted in the Abbey Theatre and has a great appreciation of the mournful interpretation of trivial things—she compliments people in the following general form, for instance: “Isn’t it a shame! Bunny was so wonderful on stage last night, and she just doesn’t do anything serious with it, she doesn’t act enough!”). She told Bunny after a reading I gave with Roger Shattuck, without saying a word to me about it though I see her every day, “Frank is the real thing, all right, but he has the terrible affliction of the Irish—he doesn’t trust his heart.” About John’s play, THE COMPROMISE, which I brought up, she said in her written comment: “Wonderful, it’s obviously one of the best things we’ve had a chance to do—but a joke that lasts three acts makes me so nervous. Of course, it may be the American IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST.” Now don’t you think she’s more pessimistic and therefore more Irish, than I am? She’s very nice anyhow.

      Anne, before I forget, did you ever finish the translation of Supervielle’s LA BELLE AU BOIS (does au have an x?)? If you did nor plan to, I know The Poets’ Theatre would be interested in seeing it and probably giving a reading of it, if not a full production. I’ve read several scripts of the pile they have submitted to them and so many of them tend to be heavily formalized, rhetorical, full of verse and empty of poetry, with an insight every 75 lines, as if most of the poets had just gobbled up a History of the English Drama that ended in 1850. I think it would be of enormous benefit to the people who choose plays for production (a board of about 8) as well as the other writers here, to have the Supervielle brought to their attention both as a beautiful work and as a kind of play which is more poetry than those filled with verse that limps along about incest or the impossibility of communication. Richard Eberhart has several pieces here which have terribly expert versification but are two-thirds taken up with long speeches by the author to the audience about how the theatre is more real than life; or is not as real; and how hard the author is striving to find a new form. The form he is striving to find, of course, is the didactic poem, and there is no reason for it to be read in a theatre, it seems to me.

      I met Lawrence, who I take it is called Larry now, when I was having lunch with Roger Shattuck at Dunster House on Tuesday. He looked very well but a little pale with studying for exams. Roger is his tutor in French and likes him very much. Roger is very nice with a quiet, pleasant manner and an apparently vast knowledge of the Dada period—his special loves seem to be Apollinaire, Jarry and Char; in some poems he showed me done recently he seems to be influenced by Eluard quite a bit in a very nice way. His wife Nora is a great beauty and Patricia Wilde’s sister and she teaches dancing classes here and a lot of his poems are about how much he loves her, the best ones I’ve seen are, anyway.

      The Poets’ Theatre itself is quite small, about the size of Julian Beck’s place at 100th and Broadway, but prettier and more comfortable. It seats about 80 people and there is a gallery on the same floor to which people go at intermission. Next door there is the studio of a charming old man who looks like someone in Dickens and is a painter. His name is Morris Pancoast and he used to be a theatrical cartoonist (Otis Skinner in KISMET, he says, and Ethel Barrymore). His paintings are very sweet Impressionist things in the manner of the American-Franco-Impressionists, sort of solidly sensitive with a hint here and there of the indigenous buck-eye. He says they were all done “in the 20s”—he painted in Paris, I think he was there before the 1st World War, but maybe not—and he loved Paris above all things, apparently. A couple of years ago his wife died but he never moves any of her things and his place has heaps of atmosphere. Everybody adores him and he goes to all the plays and readings with gentle enthusiasm and the actors go over to his place and chat with him when they’re off stage. Then afterwards he goes out with them to a bar and drinks gin-and-tonics. Everyone is always trying to get everyone else to buy one of his paintings. He often hangs the best ones on the brick wall of the alley leading to his studio and if it rains, it rains. The first one, a nice blue-ish landscape, I saw while it was snowing. He likes ART NEWS very much, especially because they printed a letter of protest he wrote about a year ago, but I forget what it was about. It seemed very reasonable, though, and he is very humorous. He told me abstract painting seemed a little too simple, to him.

      Since getting here I’ve written one poem** and a little play in 3 scenes called “The Moon Also Rises”—do you think that title is too sappy? It’s about the slightest play ever written but unaccountably lasts for 20 pages. I thought of calling it “The Oriental Weekend” because all the characters get rather nutty over this Japanese translation that’s read to them by their host, does that sound better? It’s a comedy, and Bunny’s the only one that read it and she was lukewarm. But then she read it when she was supposed to be here having a drink with two other people and I realized later she didn’t even keep track of who was saying what, so her reaction wasn’t much use. I’m afraid it’s more like “The Houses at Falling Hanging” than “Mourning Becomes Electra,” and the latter is, I suspect, what THEY up here would like to get, only in verse—ugh! Diary entry: “My art shall be wrought of my own essential frivolity, insincerity and superficiality.” No matter how much I try to be like a Russian genius, it always turns out I’m a French nitwit. What is that gleaming on the horizon? It must be the Indies! Smell that grass? And an albatross just flew by with a poet in its beak.***

      How is your work going? Are you all ready for your show? Why don’t you both send me poems to keep warm here-in-the-snow by? Write soon!

                              Love to you both and to Kitty,
                                                                                        [signed] Frank

PS   I’ll enclose the mimeographed sheet they did for the reading. I think you know the two poems I have on it, Harbormaster and Invincibility, but the Shattuck will be new—the two French things he read aloud and then translated.

* According to a note in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara “Meditations in an Emergency” is “Dated June 25, 1954” with “the earlier title: ‘Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions.’”

** Likely “Cambridge” (“The hot plate works, / it is the sole heat on earth . . .” and “I may freeze to death / before I can get out into the white rain. I could have left / the window closed last night? But that’s where health / comes from! His breath from the Urals, drawing me into flame / like a forgotten cigarette. Burn! this is not negligible, / being poetic, and not feeble, since it’s sponsored by the greatest living Russian poet at incalculable cost.”)

*** The mock-Columbus / Coleridge lines “What is that gleaming on the horizon? It must be the Indies! Smell that grass? And an albatross just flew by with a poet in its beak . . .”—though veering quickly off into humor—re-sounding the high chthonic bravado note of “In Memory of My Feelings” (or its 17 June 1955-dated ur-text): “I am an Indian / sleeping on a scalp / and my pony is stamping in the birches, / and I’ve just caught sight of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. / What land is this, so free?”

Mutt

Alfred Stieglitz, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain,” 1917

                      And in between the marvelous,
call them pieces, call them works, of
this great museum with its sun strengthening
toward February and an unseasonably hot
pleasant day effervescing for miles
and miles of what, in a better world, we
would call surf, stroll the boxers, the
beagles, an Afghan hound and a schipperke,
and a lame man with his cane and mutt.
And the sea’s insatiable ease keeps moaning
its smoky morning-in-a-roundhouse message
of relaxation and contempt, and pain.

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “Southampton Variations”
        (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 1971)

—

Over to picaresque puttering,
cut off from channel of dubbed-in choice.
Cut-off point is what I do,
down to amuse through trapdoor,
flea circus in muffin (interior buzz)
to which add chortles at the portholes,
glutted bubble-dancers glaring out,
lip-read answers wearing thin,
folderol about mutt bumblebees
zonked on cold mums,
bone orchard mums cat’s night out.

        —Kenward Elmslie, out of “Communications Equipment”
        (Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems & Lyrics 1960-1998, 1998)

—

Blasted on the silver root
Chewing numbing passing fluid
Stars and stripes forever eyes

Pinned to your lavish lapels
Starry-eyed Mutt and Jeff
Writing just a shot away

        —Jim Brodey, out of “Samuel Coleridge” (Heart of the Breath: Poems 1979-1992, 1996)

—

A watchdog performed and they triumphed
The day was bleak—ice had replaced air
The sigh of the children to former music
Supplanting the mutt’s yelps.
This was as far as she would go—
A tavern with plants.

        —John Ashbery, out of “The New Realism” (The Tennis Court Oath, 1962)

—

Music everywhere bench with Betty
On it.
Paris of ragged sighs! Oh love
The boat. Anchorage. Sweetness. Cordwood. And banana
Sin tree sun tea marrying time
Egypt, interest. As in Havana
It as is as, sweet cigars and swift comment.

“Nary a one can go into the coo
Key clock.” I live, I limp. She
Is has and does.
And there anything knows
Mutt; they whistle
“Science and basketball.” Prey, parcels
When they “have freed” me.
Tonight. Goodbye. A lantern. Straight top hat.

        —Kenneth Koch, out of “In the Ashes of June” (Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952-1954, 2012)

—

Socrates was a mutt, this is generally not known
But understood at some hilarious fork
For a few years! oh
Then watch the ducks peck at gunpowder on the dental walks
Where we pace so as not to upset the tipping lake

        —Ron Padgett, out of “Tone Arm” (Great Balls of Fire, 1969)

—

                                        Nineteen sixty-
eight: what a lovely name
to give a year. Even better
than the dogs’: Wert
(“. . . bird thou never . . .”)
and Woofy. Personally
I am going to call
the New Year, Mutt.

        —James Schuyler, out of “Empathy and New Year” (The Crystal Lithium, 1972)

—

The mutt we got
we called Some Zeitgeist.
You begin every day
with that kind of
knowledge pushing at you
like a mountain with
a fat stripe of
clouds skirting it, or
with a bonus outcropping
shaped like a carbuncle
just where the tree-
line peters out, and
see how quodlibet innocence
itself becomes a grunt
heterodoxy.

        —John Latta, out of “A Year (CCCVII)” (2009)

—

. . . good morning young man anger I have been in woods and wild mutt you shoulda seen me big crossed he was Z Nothing socks shirt or underwear Friday namely . . .

        —Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, out of “Boils” (Bean Spasms, 1967)

—

Its accuracy, its comicality, the poet’s democratic identification with a mutt among birds . . .

        —Kenneth Burke, out of a 7 November 1955 letter to William Carlos Williams,
        of Williams’s poem “The Sparrow” (The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters
        of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, 2003)

Frank O’Hara’s “Radio” (Stray Notes)

Willem de Kooning, “Summer Couch,” 1943

Frank O’Hara:

Radio

Why do you play such dreary music
on Saturday afternoon, when tired
mortally tired I long for a little
reminder of immortal energy?
                                                            All
week long while I trudge fatiguingly
from desk to desk in the museum
you spill your miracles of Grieg
and Honegger on shut-ins.
                                                    Am I not
shut in too, and after a week
of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to. I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

—

With Donald Allen’s note (out of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara):

Dated December 3, 1955 . . . Kenneth Koch wrote: “RADIO is perfect. I was in the Cedar Tavern last night and Bill de Kooning was there, so I asked him if he’d seen your poem about his picture. He said, Yeah, is that right? He said, Yeah, but how can you be sure it’s about my picture, is it just about a picture? I quoted him ‘I have my beautiful de Kooning / to aspire to. I think it has an orange / bed in it . . .’ He said, ‘It’s a couch. But then it really is my picture, that’s wonderful.’ Then he told me how he had always been interested in mattresses because they were pulled together at certain points and puffed out at others, ‘like the earth.’” (KK to FOH, March 22, 1956.) First published in Poetry, March 1956.

—

James Schuyler, in a letter dated 27 March 1956 (out of The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara):

      This nonsense is only to tell you I love your poems in Poetry; as always, in that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli, they’re as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like “Radio,” where you seem to say, “I know you won’t think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can’t help it: I feel like this,” so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.

—

Brad Gooch, in the O’Hara biography City Poet, quoting a 16 February 1956 letter to Michael Goldberg, seems (wrongly) to suggest that “Radio” was composed in Cambridge during O’Hara’s unhappy few months there with a playwright-in-residence fellowship at the Poets Theatre:

“Some times it seems to me that I’m operating myself by remote control from a broom closet in the Empire State Building but I guess I really am here . . . Before this there were a couple weeks of foul depression, gnashing teeth, pacing and boredom, when I felt that I would never, NEVER (like in those moves about concert pianists who’ve been in an accident) be able to play the typewriter again. But the presence of this Steinway you all gave me has finally asserted itself, and I now stagger from bed, stride to the desk, and begin my scales each morning, or almost each.” O’Hara’s sense of place was ameliorated by pasting to the wall a photograph of James Dean as well as by hanging a small de Kooning painting of a couch lent him by Fairfield Porter that had hung at East Forty-ninth Street. The painting appeared in “Radio,” published in Poetry in March . . .

—

O’Hara’s “Radio” is a plaintive thing, decidedly minor and likeable, oddly dated in the age of retrievable music forthwith. A slender contingency of radios runs through the O’Hara oeuvre: “I am sad / I better hurry up and finish this / before your 3rd goes off the radio / or I won’t know what I’m feeling” is how “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday #158” rather amusingly begins (worrying loss even in its initial impetus). Or there’s the nod to immediacy (and its confrere regret) in the lines in “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”:

and now there is a Glazunov symphony on the radio and I think of our
        friends who are not here, of John and the nuptial quality
        of his verses (he is always marrying the whole world). . .

Or there’s the mock-venerable radio, the instantly gratifying salvable “click” of it (out of “Ode (To Joseph LeSueur) on the Arrow That Flieth by Day”):

To humble yourself before a radio on Sunday
it’s amusing, like dying after a party
“click” / and you’re dead from fall-out, hang-over
                                or something hyphenated

Or there’s the genial / ironic outburst in “A Rant”: “To hell with the radio / let it rot!” There’s likely, too, some perfectly fetching argument to be made regarding O’Hara’s hierarchical nudging of painting’s visual “oomph” up to the heavens (think, say, of the lines “‘How closer than Frank to the cosmic bone / comes the bold painting of Fernand Léger’!” out of “A Sonnet for Jane Freilicher” or the faux-stagey parenthetical “(sometimes I think I’m ‘in love’ with painting)” out of “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul”)—heavens higher than what the mere aural fastnesses of “the ear can hold.” That’s its own dreary music though.

Notebook (Guy Davenport, Ed Dorn, &c.)

R. B. Kitaj, “Ed Dorn,” 1966

Nearly a half century back now, Guy Davenport making a summary of “The Visual Arts 1955-1965”:

      The visual arts in the decade past have been gaudy, sassy, and pleasantly raucous. It may be that the avant garde is, as the Bryn Mawr girl said, passé; what she meant is that a loop has come full circle and the fumigations and épatements, of half a century back seem worth doing over. The scholars are already comparing the spliced bits of the loop. Kurt Schwitters, hero of the Merzbild, is now the father of the quoted comic-book page, since it turns out he was on to Pop when Roy Lichtenstein, the current master, was in rompers.
      Thus a great deal of the decade’s energy is a discovery by the young that there was a revolution in the arts around 1906 that did not become Cubism or academic Surrealism. . . . The young turn back to the quaquaversal Francis Picabia (unknown to the Luce papers and fine arts departments and therefore still in fatigues and with smoking revolver), to the inscrutable Marcel Duchamp, and to that spirit among the Italian Futuristi and the German and Russian experimenters just before the First World War who saw in advertising, folk art, and the commercial ubiquity of groceries and hardware the symbols they could isolate and make eloquent.

And, of, particularly, the Pop effutiators: “They have done well to restage 1906, these pedantic reinnovators; even their studied parorexia pays into their account, for redolent vulgarity is their subject.” (All in a run-up to an extraordinary paean to Stan Brakhage: “American art has had four great masterpieces: Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.”) What’s striking: how apt Davenport’s skepticism at the retread is now, too, in the Golden Age of Pedantic Reinnovators. See the endless rote variations on a theme of the dysgnosiac conceptualists, senselessly shuffling the glut.

—

Read the Lindsey M. Freer-edited Lost & Found pamphlet Charles Olson Memorial Lectures: Edward Dorn, offering two (of three) of Dorn’s grandly unrehearsed 1981 talks in Buffalo. Freer, in an excellent preface, writes:

Dorn speaks slowly and deliberately throughout these recordings, not only because he is largely speaking off the cuff (only the beginning of the first lecture is openly indicated as having been written in advance of the event), and often reading from external sources, but because he is attempting, over the course of these lectures, to synthesize a set of tools through which an engaged audience can navigate their immediate poetic futures. Dorn’s Olson Memorial Lectures aren’t simply attempting to curate the recent past in order to promote a certain perspective on late twentieth century poetics, but are doing so in order to openly intervene in then-present-day conversations.

Thus, circa 1981, in the fatigue of the prevalent confessionalist manner run amok, Dorn points to lines out of one of Olson’s final lectures (out of Charles Olson in Connecticut: Last Lectures). Dorn:

. . . the greatest thing he says in here, the thing that I think applies stringently to the present, is a little piece of advice which is almost terminal, and—it’s like a warning. And I can’t find it, but I remember it, and it goes, “Don’t write your own poetry. Write poetry.”* Don’t write your own poetry. Write poetry. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t opt for self-expression. Who cares? You’re nobody. Write poetry. That’s something. And if you’re not remembered, then that just means your name’s not Homer.

Pertinent words in an “era” of mounting neo-confessionalism, with abjectedness at a premium, and narcissism banging at the door . . . Of note, too, in Dorn’s initial lecture: a large excerpt out of a 22 February 1981 letter J. H. Prynne writes to Dorn, replying, in part, to Dorn’s interview of Tom Clark (in Little Caesar No. 11, 1980).** Prynne, presumably in homage to the Caesar reference, begins:

Amicus curiae salve!
      Good to have your communiqué and some news and reviews. I must say I did find the Tom Clark rundown an interesting piece, I like his clarity and direct address to the matter, and I even begin to have a sense of how what I’ve mostly seen as vacuous could be used to define a significant vacuum. As with the Romans themselves, a secular state which made success a state religion must always be vulnerable to cults from the periphery, especially where some gnosis turns defeat into higher conquest, and claims distance from the forum as the index of counter-force.

A sentence referring, indubitably, to any and all claimants to any sort of ideological purity whatsoever, particularly that of the “edge.” Or the “bottom.” And, after confessing to “having speculated about cult & anti-cult as faces of a complementary opportunism” (every Official Verse Culture needs its Bernstein, every Bernstein needs its purported officialdom), Prynne writes:

But the commitment to opposition finally makes sense at such a level only with the gloss relating to power. Of course in the Jeffersonian ideal the informed and cultivated individual, well read in history and with an active mind, claimed influence and the influence was to be allowed a due power: to sway the consideration of thoughtful men. But because first Whitman and then even more Pound made such a deep misapplication of this idea the whole U. S. aftermath has taken a parody version in lieu, with the poet going for influence in such an excluded circuit as to make the claim to power a most peculiar joke, restricted mostly to a clientele of teenagers. Or that’s how it strikes an outsider. Grabbing at wisdom in the paranoid rip-off style the result freelance poetry activist sooner or later sets up his personal temple of culture and bids for his first zombie, or chela;*** . . . the relation can only be cultic, even when the PR is otherwise, because the rhetorical pressure of the product demands for the consumer a too-engrossed attention . . .

Of Olson, Prynne notes: “Olson is the prime instance of a man who saw Pound’s mistake and then pushed right on and made it. When I belatedly did meet him you know how shocked I was at the vulgar bullying deafness to reality he brandished, and his hook into what he wanted.” Prynne—now himself seemingly the object of sycophantic obsequiousness, and cultic fancy—claims a way out of such pretense and grab in “My own habits of skeptical sideways disinclination [that] thus veer over to the pyrrhonic, not so much in principle as in the day-by-day.” Recalling somehow, in its refusal of the usual perquisitum, the defiant counter-slogan of Bernadette Mayer: “Work your ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous.”

* A note in the Lost & Found pamphlet points to Olson’s lines in the final lecture (11 November 1969): “It isn’t so much yr own poetry that counts / it’s poetry that counts . . . / it’s man’s     practically / You yrself are a scribe.”

** And, indirectly, to Clark’s 1980 The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Prynne: “It is odd in retrospect that I never did lay hands on the Poetry Wars tome, it must have slid too fast into some other tomb . . .”

*** Here, reading the letter, Dorn inserts the explicatory “‘Chela’ being an Indic word for house slave.”

Notebook (Lisa Robertson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, &c.)

Lisa Robertson

How sketch the commonplace marvels of a single “line” of thinking, with all its gaps and mergers, its temporary triumphs sunk in the miasma of its continuous unreeling? (If I had a cigarette, and the brash wherewithal again to smoke, here’s where I’d light it “up,” pull down a wit-scattering brazen plume and, expelling it, begin.) Lisa Robertson (out of “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding”):

The history of scaffolding has been dismantled. We can’t write this history because there are so few documents—only a slim sheaf of photographs. So we study the construction of the present and form theories. We use the alphabet as a ladder.
      Scaffolding, from scalado, to storm by mounting a wall by ladders . . .

A barbarous (mischievous, fitting) etymology. Skaffaldyng, scafaldynge, scaffating, scaffalding, scauffaulding, skaffeltein, skalfatting, scaffolding. “See the Old French eschafauder.” Sense of a mere means to an end, of impermanence haunting its bâtiment, a lingual sinecure: “alphabet as a ladder.” (In the 1622 piece The Virgin Martir, “written by Phillip Messenger and Thomas Deker,” one reads: “The sight of whips, rackes, gibbets, axes, fires / Are scaffoldings, by which my soule climbes vp / To an Eternall habitation.”) We moderns—culling planks and sizing plimsolls for each airy piecework, each malleable rhapsody to the routinely quitting flesh—never make it there. Robertson:

A scaffold sketches a body letting go of proprietary expectation, or habit, in order to be questioned by change. A scaffold is almost a catastrophe. Its topography cathects with the desire to release identity and dissolve into material, which is the style of resistance we prefer. And like a wave also, scaffolding, or falsework, is not specific to a structure . . .

Daily falsework, the writing. Working the alphabetical bejeezus, making it holler and relent, the alphabetical scaffolding “a mobile currency that accretes and dissolves and shifts according to the secret rhythms of the [writer’s] renaissance and decay.” As Robertson adds: “It seems somewhat hysterical.”

—

“Accretes and dissolves and shifts.” Hence the necessity of the diurnal writerly flex, frotting up against the alphabetical ascenders and stems, the finials and spines, letters keen for relief, for the processual march and volte-face. There is no end. Only a continuous gibbering in the night and momentary unendurable stoppages. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s schoolboy Platonic dialogue “On the Origin of Beauty”:

“. . . Do not painters speak of balancing mass by mass in the composition of their pictures?”
      “They do.”
      “If they balance mass by mass, the mass in one part of a picture must be unbalanced until that in another part is put in.”
      “Of course.”
      “If unbalanced then, the picture is unbeautiful.”
      “Yes, in that respect.”
      “Now suppose when the picture was finished with two masses balanced, a copy were made fr. it, and one mass put in, not the one that was put in the first in the original picture but the other, and then the copying stopped; the picture wd. then be unbalanced as before, would it not?”
      “Just as the first picture was, yes.”
      “And it wd. be unbeautiful, wd. it not?”
      “Yes.”
      “But the finished picture was beautiful.”
      “Yes.”
      “The picture that had only one mass put in was unbeautiful: now as it was to be beautiful when both masses were put in, we might suppose the beauty must lie all in that mass wh. was yet to come: when however we in our second picture, anxious to have our beauty as soon as possible, put the second mass in first, pregnant as it is was with graces, lo and behold! the result was as uninteresting as when we had the first mass alone put in. What are we to say then? The beauty does not lie in this mass or in that, but in what? In this mass as supported by that, and in that as supported by this. Is it so?”
      “Exactly.”
      “And artists call this composition. Does not then the beauty lie in the relation between the masses?”
      “It seems it does.”
      “Beauty then is a relation.”
      “I suppose it is.”
      “And things wh. have relation are near enough to have rela something in common, but not near enough to be one and the same, are they not?”
      “And to perceive the likeness and difference of things, or their relation, we must compare them, must we not?”
      “Beauty therefore is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison. The sense of beauty in fact is a comparison, is it not?”
      “So it wd. appear.”

—

Another plank dropped in the miasma, Henry James to bang the thing shut (in Robertson’s lovely line: “When we awake near a scaffold the frieze of men is calling numbers into the morning . . .”): “One’s work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty; but all the while—apart from one’s inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing positive beauty—how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and installed it may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path!” No scaffolding left “up,” there (beyond, that is, that of the tortuous “muddlement” of the bâtiment-seeking verbiage itself).

Notebook (Charles Wright, Wallace Stevens, &c.)

John Constable, “Cloud Study,” 1822

Empty and fretting in the morning. I fossick the books under a black sky, ornery and abrupt, thinking agreeably of Henry David Thoreau’s forlorn lines: “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied / By a chance bond together . . .” Or Charles Wright’s (out of Littlefoot):

Struck by the paucity of my imagination
To winnow the meadow from anything that it is,
I watch the yellow-tail hawk
                                                        cruising its edges, the willows
Along the creek’s course,
Low down and lethal, then up like a slung lariat
To circle and telescope,
Eventually to noose back down
And crumble,
                           only to rise, big wings pumping, back to the west.

Beside me, the shadow of the wind chime’s bamboo drag
Turns like a fish on a string
Noiselessly in the still waters of morning’s sunlight.
A pack train of white and off-white clouds
Works east where the hawk had been.
                                                                        Almost noon, the meadow
Waiting for someone to change it into an other. Not me.

Refusal in a fit of obeisance to the tenor of things, that hawk both “telescope” and “noose,” pointing to the way metaphor offers up both proximity and squelch. The “cold copulars” whence “forth the particulars of rapture come” of Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” seem apt here, how “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another . . . the imagined on the real.” Stevens: “This is the origin of change.” And Wright:

The cloud poets of ancient China
Saw what they saw and recorded it,
                                                                     diviners of what wasn’t there,
Prestidigitators of nothingness.
                                                            Let me be one of them.

“Prestidigitators of nothingness” a phrase worthy of Stevens. Sky now an unstable and tawdry blue, with Constable clouds. “Let me be one of them.”

John Constable, “Cloud Study,” 1821

John Constable, “Cloud Study,” 1822

John Constable, “Cloud Study,” 1822

John Constable, “Seascape Study with Rain Cloud,” 1827

John Ashbery’s Quick Question (Stray Notes)

John Ashbery
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

I love the dawdling hour, late afternoon, riffling through books newly acquired or “drug” home out of the library stacks, broken-spined, spavined, soiled in ways permissible and not, the duff of previous readers showering out (or, worse, adhering), reading a stravaiging about into wild prevaricant regions (“fingers formed into a gripe or scratching posture”), unlikely ever to make a home, or make “it” home. That sentence itself a result of the riffling. (See Henry James, out of the preface to The Ambassadors: “The philosophy imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have been then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the artless craft of comedy has it, “led up” to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated.” Meaning deployed by means of a sheared-off rhythmic measure, and little else.) Toying, I was, with the possibility of cento-ing the new Ashbery, Quick Question, when I turned to (“fell to”) the James and announced to no one in particular: “why, half of Ashbery is James.” Or is it simply that, emerging “down out” of the empyrean Ashberyean realms, everything, meaning every word (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte”) looks Ashbery-tetched, flickering with fires “teachy as any wasp.”* So: Quick Question. (Why, incidentally, the recent mini-glut of demotic lingual debris repurposed for titles? I am thinking, too, of Rae Armantrout’s Just Saying.) A sample, dipping the tiny coathanger-made minnow net into the waters of the creek in question, plucking sentences randomly out of the quick of it:**

Likely Reimbursement

The sky was sweet and plain. Some angels
seemed to teeter on the wooden fence.
That rascal, he jumped over the fence.
We’ve all pointed to similar occurrences:
the person’s melodious rage, talking back . . .
A lecture out of control. Fringed with decay all along,
it was, and if who knew better than our selves’ somber
asides they wouldn’t bet on it. It amounts to self importance.
Pretty strong stuff. I told you all would become supple,
with large, clear type and purposeful
vignettes. It can’t be anything too obvious, like a procession
of cars that doesn’t know it’s a procession,
or a paint job among many that’s rented
from a theatrical properties company. Plethoras
to be announced, etc. But you knew that.
Where are you now, homeless heart? Therein
lies our strength, alas,

and we can no more contemplate bigness than we can avoid knowledge
of the minute, that leaves a trail of goo across our sunken steps.
I tell myself I am a minimalist. I think I’ll just be off.
I’m heading for a clean-named place
like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o’-lantern, will get there
without help and nosy proclivities. That’s a map of Paris on the fender,
if that’s a fender.

Any book of Ashbery unavoidably containing, by such a method, Raymond Queneau’s “cent mille milliards de poèmes” in indefatigable combinatory. And isn’t it right to submit Ashbery’s pieces to such fluidity and re-conjunct? Recall Ashbery’s remarks in the Paris Review interview:

I’ve conditioned myself to write at almost any time. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up. . . . It will be not dissimilar to what I have produced before because it is coming from the same source, but it will be dissimilar because of the different circumstances of the particular moment.

Thus, cento-ing Ashbery is merely a re-sourcing of material under “different circumstances” imposed by the reader. A second cento:***

Madder, and Madder Still

We live in a museum of helpful objects,
leaning toward the accomplishment of a small,
complicated task, like sailors in rigging.
So you people in the front,
leave. I don’t know how I feel.
No one expects life to be a single adventure,
yet conversely, one is surprised when it turns disappointing,
as tales so often do when the telling doth outpace
the situation. You could say, “It stinks,” but the mirror tells another story,
freckled, noted, wisps of ash traveling in all rightness
to defend the mob, all day in the streets’ shifting gutters,
alien to truth’s slobber. Perturbing elements
listen in the wings, which are coming apart at the seams.
It was always supposed to be like this.
Otherwise there’s not much to get excited about.
Minus vibrato. Cue bugle and castanets. More brass,
less hubris. No, I meant it, plangently, like small waves rubbing
against a reef, or the sighing of mice behind a grill.
Every murk is a key.

And one discovers, selecting “randomly,” or at least “with undue rapidity,” attempting to thwart the gods of story, the onslaught nevertheless of what James calls “the major propriety” (he’s talking about the serial appearance of The Ambassadors in the North American Review during 1903):

I had been open from far back to any pleasant provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one’s actively adopting—so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional law—recurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude jolts—having found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every question of form and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the major propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed; that of employing but one centre and keeping it all within my hero’s compass.

Which is, that “propriety,” one supposes, akin to Ashbery’s own admitting: “It will be not dissimilar to what I have produced before because it is coming from the same source . . .” “One centre” outs regardless.

* Pertinent, perhaps, being a primer to that particular pump, these lines out of Roberto Calasso’s La Folie Baudelaire (2012) regarding, in essence, the state of high alert reading (or “seeing”) plunges the writer into:

The writing of a book gets under way when the writer discovers that he is magnetized in a certain direction, toward a certain arc of the circumference, which is sometimes minimal, delimitable within a few degrees. Then everything he comes across—even a poster or a sign or a newspaper headline or words heard by chance in a café or in a dream—is deposited in a protected area like material waiting to be elaborated. This was the effect of the Salons on Baudelaire. Every time, they were a pretext for making the unmistakable chords of his prose in formation ring out—and of his poetry, too.

** Sentences, in order, dipped up out of these pieces: “Words to That Effect,” “Quick Question,” “The Short Answer,” “Cross Island,” “The Allegations,” “Recent History,” “A Voice from the Fireplace,” “The New Crowd,” “In a Lonely Place,” “Unlike the Camelopard,” “Resisting Arrest,” “Who Were Those People,” “Homeless Heart,” “Auburn-Tinted Fences,” “Northeast Building,” “Etudes Second Series,” “Puff Piece,” and “Mabuse’s Afternoon.” The title is out of “Card of Thanks.”

*** Sentences out of “Not Beyond All Conjecture,” “Instead of Losing,” “Laundry List,” “The Future of the Dance,” “Bacon Grabbers,” “Postlude and Prequel,” “[Untitled],” “Never Two Without Three,” “The Return of Frank James,” “Marine Shadow,” “Palmy,” “Feel Free,” and “Bell II.” Title out of “This Economy.”

Notebook (Roberto Calasso, Ronald Johnson, &c.)

Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso (out of La Folie Baudelaire):

“Great poetry is essentially bête, it believes, and this is what makes its glory and strength”: Baudelaire, 1846. “Masterpieces are bêtes. They have a tranquil air like the very productions of nature, such as big animals and mountains”: Flaubert, 1852. At a distance of six years, one in a review, the other in a letter, and obviously unaware of each other, the two bards of the bêtise wrote similar phrases . . . It is not a matter of pure “foolishness,” as other languages are obliged to translate bêtise. But of something in which there lingers an obscure animal background, as if, on reaching its apex, art rediscovered something beautiful in nature, but veiled by an opaque film, impenetrable, and loath to take intelligence into account . . .

Recalling a number of American insistences regarding the necessity of stupidity, of lack of any comprising intelligence. See, say, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson-writ mot: “Knowledge, the contaminant.” Or A. R. Ammons saying: “I think a poet ought to keep himself just a little stupid.” Or see Ronald Johnson talking (out of the 1995 interview with Peter O’Leary) about Charles Ives (and Simon Rodia):

Ives is not that different from the Watts Towers. He was like me—he knew a lot about music, but he wanted to appear a naïf, to get back to where you don’t know anything about art. And then you construct something. I was trying to forget about music and then start all over again. Or you try to remember everything . . .

That split between the concomitant stances of “you don’t know anything” and “you try to remember everything” seeming to echo John Ashbery’s beginning lines to “The New Spirit”:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

      clean-washed sea
                                                                                                                              The flowers were.

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but—yourself. It is you who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on

                                                                                                                                    to divide all.

Is the Baudelaire / Flaubert temporal conjunct of bêtises the mark of a shift: the New World become fons et origo for European modernity? Calasso quotes Baudelaire calling Poe “the writer of nerves” (and one idly wonders if Frank O’Hara knew of that when he wrote “You just go on your nerve” in “Personism,” another instance of tranquility and “beastliness.”) Too, Calasso quotes Madame de Staël’s discriminating mot: “The bêtise and the sottise differ essentially in this, that bêtes submit willingly to nature and sots always delight in the idea that they dominate society.” (A difference that one is tempted to apply to writerly constructs and manners too: the processual bêtes of organic form versus the sots of the preconceit, of received form.)

—

SHADOW

cumulatively
illuminating

Being the second item in Ronald Johnson’s collaboratory “gilding of the Buddha” with Peter O’Leary (see O’Leary’s moving memoir “Gilding the Buddha: My Apprenticeship with Ronald Johnson” in the 2008 volume, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works.) O’Leary writes that Johnson’s “‘cumulatively / illuminating’ gilding glimmers with poesis I could see, feel. Besides its luxurious syllables and homophonies, ‘Shadow’ consisted of two even words, such that ‘illuminating’ falls perfectly within the shadow cast by ‘cumulatively’ in the poem.” Isn’t the piece, too, a kind of ecliptic-flipping omaggio to Giuseppe Ungaretti’s tiny (and all-containing, all emptying) “Mattina”? Here it is:

MATTINA

M’illumino
d’immenso

In Littlefoot, Charles Wright translates it thus: “I empty myself with light / Until I become morning.” The sense of accumulating and voiding in high conjunct nigh inexpressibly put. (I think of Wittgenstein’s “When one does not force himself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed,” quoted by Czesław Miłosz in Unattainable Earth. And, again, of Ashbery’s “put it all down” shadowed by “leave all out” . . .) In a letter to O’Leary, Johnson thanks O’Leary “for our mutual lustration of the Big Bhu” and puts the moniker “Compression & Radiation” to the now-completed course of apprenticeship. Accumulate immensity. Hoard and spark. It’s a new day.

—

Four newish poems to be found in the recently-launched Blackbox Manifold, here.

Brief Leaving

Guillaume Apollinaire, c. 1910

“To make my smale trippe.” It being incipient, I bluff incontinently, and go blank. Sense of some unfettered calm in the offing. A clearing, a vent, a momentary cleansing, what a city uncannily allows the walker, in its rifer zones. (O’Hara: “isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of / strangers my most tender feelings / writhe and / bear the fruit of screaming . . .”) Julien Gracq, out of The Shape of a City:

      Apollinaire was the first poet to notice that a sudden clearing in the weather creates a microclimate that can cleanse and illuminate a nondescript street, create an unexpected flash of happiness just by showing how a façade of houses can capture the new day’s sun at ten o’clock in the morning . . .

And Gracq proceeds to quote “Zone”: “J’ai vu ce matin une jolie rue dont j’ai oublié le nom / Neuve et propre du soleil elle était le clairon” (“This morning I saw a pretty street whose name I have forgotten / Shining and clean it was the sun’s bugle” in Roger Shattuck’s rendering). To be suddenly heralded by the brassy (sun-colored) call of the crowded moment itself. Chaucer:

And bid him bring / his clarioun
That is ful dyuers / of his soun
And hyt cleped / clere laude
With which he wonde is / to hiraude
Hem that me list / preised be

Clarioun éclaircissement. Sight accommodating (providing a lodging for) sound, sound reeving (pushing its rope through the eye of) the general dawdle and complacency. Or there’s Ronald Johnson—tongue, too, a kind of rope, language a hoarding hid:

Root in the tongue itself—the language—and pith the heart for meaning, the flower its outcome. Absorption to core of things puts forth whorl to seed. There, the thrush might sing Vivaldi (for one who had ear) and Scarlatti time lark to heart-beat.

In Bunting’s A thrush in the syringa sings . . . language is integral to vowel with consonant: a consonance, a ‘sounding together’.

Hopkins:   “on ear and ear two noises too old to end”

Zukofsky:   “eyes’ blue iris splicing them”

Bunting:   “red against privet stems as a mazurka . . .”

“to thread, lithe and alert, Schoenberg’s maze.” First, thrush harpsichords syringa along its song. The melody is of motions familiar things make to bird now balancing in Bunting’s brain: death’s thrust hawkbeak, slung stone, neck twist by weasel. Thunder counterpoints random gusts of wind through branch-flex. The final chord (as Charles Ives’ instructions for playing The Fourth of July—“all the wrong notes are right.”):

“O gay thrush!”

In travel, too: “all the wrong notes . . . right.” The “motions familiar things make” pulled out of alignment, the orbitals gone sloppy, the optic nerve pinched off and needling through in microtonal poise and diminuendo, the I flummoxed by a wonder, the slunk-down cornfield fox and the city’s cataractous dash and wobble . . . In Johnson’s memorial note “L.Z.” he writes of how words (in “our first delight”) “hopscotch sequential noise.” And quotes Zukofsky (out of “Chloride of Lime and Charcoal”):

Homer’s Argos hearing
Handel’s Largo as
The car goes.

—

Thanks for reading. À l’année prochaine.

Notebook (Frank O’Hara, Max Beckmann, &c.)

Max Beckmann, “Großes Fischstillleben,” 1927

Rereading early O’Hara, the impersonal pieces wherein the dogmatism of hard surreal is tempered by loose and veering syntax, thinking of two pieces called “Elegy,” each—according to Allen’s notes---“Dated New York, April 1952,” and each, too(“‘Beckmann still life with fish’ written below” and “‘Klee fish still life’ written below” according to the notes), coming out of O’Hara’s looking at paintings. One:

Elegy

Ecstatic and in anguish over lost days
we thrust ourselves upon all poor fish
who came drifting into our starry net
and cost them the supreme price of love

mercilessly, while the sun went out
and the moon sank into a bathos, the
music of the spheres, the deafness of
the heavens we look to for a breather.

Accept, o almighty Dead, the tribute
of our kicks, in the impassioned loosenesses
of your gravel sarongs, and accept
the multifarious timidities of the youthful

whose eating has not yet crystallized
into the compunction of the verdant skies.
Accept the salt seas flowing from our own
precious organs, the whirling notes

which may seem savage to your supine
majesties yet is the fugal diadem
of your dirty virginities. We were lovely.
Now lay for your upon sidereal simplicities.

The high anthemic exhortatory voice of “Accept the salt seas flowing from our own / precious organs . . . savage to your supine / majesties yet is the fugal diadem / of your dirty virginities” premonitory of O’Hara’s 1955 “For James Dean” (“Welcome me, if you will, / as the ambassador of a hatred / who knows its cause / and does not envy you your whim / of ending him”). Is the Max Beckmann painting the 1927 Großes Fischstillleben (for its “savagery”) or the 1944 Stillleben mit Fisch (for its “heavens”) or neither?

Max Beckmann, “Stillleben mit Fischen,” 1944

Seemingly no unmistakable cue in the writing itself. (If the painting is incidental to the writing, why O’Hara’s identifying note “written below”?) In 1955 O’Hara wrote a short review for Art News of a Max Beckmann exhibit (reprinted in the Bill Berkson-edited What’s with Modern Art?), therein noting “the grandeur and intensity with which [Beckmann] looked upon occasional subjects, landscapes, portraits, equal to that of the better appreciated mythological pieces” and suggesting that Beckmann’s sensibility is “seen to great advantage” in just such pieces, “without distraction of a literary nature.” Pertinent to O’Hara’s early pieces here, their unabashed “thrust” and “loosenesses.” (Sense of O’Hara’s unfettered lack of compunct: he isn’t to be concerned with “the supreme price of love”—literary propriety a kind of debt owed—he’s going for the “sidereal simplicities” of something audacious beyond all that, hence “the tribute / of our kicks . . .”) Two:

Elegy

Salt water. and faces dying
everywhere into forms of fish.
Be unseen by the abandoned flying
machine near the jetty by the bird’s
wrist on the empty cliff crying!

From beyond the Atlantic beyond
the sand dunes’ leonine crouch
not a mast thrusts up its nose
on the sky’s pillow. The mean slouch
of fishermen wakes the falling vagabond.

And our love. it follows them
heaved like dung by tridents on
the ocean floor, our famous men!
and breaks our heart the ascension
to the sea’s ferocious surface! then

escaping never into that realm
of shining, the perfect configurations
the Bear of desire! Could we o’erwhelm
all earth with our heroes these lacerations
still, these waves, gnaw down our helm.

Avoid all grand posturing, it is for naught. Astounding to read—to accompany the rereading of early O’Hara in all its brash tenuity—O’Hara’s 1954 note regarding Klee (What’s with Modern Art?):

Paul Klee . . . is fortunate in never having done a major work; each individual thought as it comes to us trembling with wit and sensibility seems to be all of him. Almost. What a show of this variety (small pictures 1915-1940 in mediums ranging from oil to ink) makes one feel is the longing for one complex work: the pictures themselves seem to have gathered together from the ends of the earth to assemble a more complete memorial to their creator’s psyche, like dutiful children on an anniversary. When they go away again they will be individuals, but for now their family resemblance is very strong. Some of them are beautiful and amusing, others are phlegmatic and puerile. Despite the diversity of technique and whimsy in his work, Klee had only one expression: his most brilliant insights are never stunts, but they are the same in quality as the truism and the over-relaxed platitudes of the bad pictures—it is just that they know more and are not weakened by overstatement or restatement. His constant nagging at the attention by petty and often vapid titles is a sign of his own nervousness and of a documentation which is perhaps too thorough; he had made himself too accessible.

(And one thinks of O’Hara’s refusal: all the poems he called “Poem.” And of how, reading the early works, one notes the lack of “one complex work,” not, arguably, to arrive before “Easter” with its fecundity invading the very heavens: “to be pelted by the shit of the stars at last in flood / like a breath.”) Again, “Elegy (Salt water. and faces dying)” escapes its painting (“escaping never into that realm / of shining”). Is it possibly referring Klee’s 1925 “Fish Magic” or the 1926 “Around the Fish” or (again) neither? The exterior scenes (“abandoned flying / machine near the jetty”) put it beyond the usual thrall of the Stillleben. And again the starry yearnings out—“the perfect configurations / the Bear of desire!”—referring undoubtedly to Ursa Major, the Big Dipper—countering the “mean slouch” of earthly humdrum.

Paul Klee, “Around the Fish,” 1926

Paul Klee, “Fish Magic,” 1925

Notebook (Ronald Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, &c.)

Ronald Johnson, c. 1965
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Ronald Johnson, out of A Line of Poetry, a Row of Trees (1964):

Wild Apples

                                                                  with ‘bow-arrow tang’

cows or birds or Johnny Appleseed
planted,
New England westward.

Whole orchards, boughs knotted
with fruits of coral & gold—to be eaten, Thoreau believed,
in the wind.

                        Whose ‘bloom’ rubs off in pockets

like wild horses
broken in, harnessed
to plow.


                Neither orchards of the east, in lichened
                walls, or west
                hedged in eucalyptus—

                bounded only by slopes of oak
                & of maple,
                the woods-apple comes sweet from the hills, both spring

                nights & autumn:
                a wildflower sharpness, an earthy

                cider.


                            Domestics
                            shape
                            for hand,

                            & tint
                            of ‘apple
                            color’
                                      —but wild may brindle

                            as a cow,
                            may rust like
                            rock.

And Thoreau, out of “Wild Apples”:

      I have seen no account of these among the “Fruits and Fruit-Trees of America,” though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess, when October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that “they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.”

And:

The Saunterer’s* Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. . . .
      These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.
      To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields . . . What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

And, under Thoreau’s rubric “Their Beauty”:

. . . some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike,—some with the faintest pink blush imaginable,—some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground,—some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet,—and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground . . .

The mysteriousness of Johnson’s “rust like / rock” somewhat dispelled by Thoreau’s making that rust lichenaceous. The sense of something indubitably Hopkinsesque about Johnson’s “brindle” goes, though, un-dislodged by seeing its source in Thoreau: is it because Hopkins’s line “skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow” (“Pied Beauty”) seems to provide Johnson with the lovely “tint / of ‘apple / color’,” too (‘apple color’ unfound in Thoreau)? A final gleaning of Thoreau (found whilst looking for a trigger to Johnson’s sequence “Whose ‘bloom’ rubs off in pockets // like wild horses / broken in . . .”):

I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself,—a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery’s mouldy cellar**), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.

Thoreau’s wry humor, a “harnessed” humor. Too, there’s Thoreau’s sense of natural intransigence: “When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it.” Possible source of the horse.

* Like Johnson constructing something new out of some stray “gripples” of Thoreau (see: “the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them”), in “Walking” Thoreau offers a found (see Guy Davenport’s insistence, writing of Johnson, that “Invention . . . means finding”) definition of sauntering:

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

Out of the 1827 edition of the Encyclopaedia Londinensis:

To SAUNTER, v. n.   [aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity under pretence of going, à la sainte terre, to the holy land; or sans terre, as having no settled home.]   To wander about idly; to loiter, to linger.—The cormorant is still sauntering by the sea-side to see if he can find any of his brass cast up. L’Estrange.

** Wild apple-seeking made kin to manuscript hunting (Davenport, of Johnson: “The knowledge he likes to teach us is indeed knowledge all but lost . . .”). Curzon: Thoreau owned a copy of A Visit to Monasteries in the Levant (1849), by the English traveler, diplomat and manuscript collector Robert Curzon (1810-1873). In the “oil-cellar” of the monastery of Souriani, Curzon reports fossicking through “a small closet vaulted with stone which was filled to the depth of two feet or more with the loose leaves of . . . Syriac manuscripts:

Here I remained for some time turning over the leaves and digging into the mass of loose vellum pages; by which exertions I raised such a cloud of fine pungent dust that the monks relieved each other in holding our only candle at the door, while the dust made us sneeze incessantly as we turned over the scattered leaves of vellum. I had extracted four books, the only ones I could find which seemed to be tolerably perfect, when two monks who were struggling in the corner pulled out a great big manuscript of a brown and musty appearance and of prodigious weight, which was tied together with a cord . . .

Cartoon cormorancy.