Notebook (Will Alexander, Lissa Wolsak, J. H. Prynne, &c.)

J. H. Prynne

Three statements, a neap congeries for the boundless illimitable, the involuntary lingual reaches summoning the capacious world. Out of Will Alexander’s Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews and a Lecture 1991-2007 (Essay Press, 2012):

Taking Issue with Ubiquitous Reduction

      To be forbidden one’s volcanisms, one’s quarrels, in favor of the dust of a plainspoken warren, is to exist in terms of ubiquitous reduction. Language in its purest state exists as primal capacity, and the challenge of such capacity is to engulf delimitation, to advance the circumstance which completely alters the common mean. And by the common mean, motion is understood as digressive utterance, always in keeping with quarterly reports, with scheduled breaks, with logs which replicate preplanned proceedings. To such perspective I remain extreme, being no more to the civil eye than a cave fish, or a cephalopod, or the strangeness of an owl combined within the remnants of an ice bear. I utter sound, but it is not prone to the same template as the work bench, as the written thoughts from the paymaster’s dungeon. I say this because as poet I owe my utterance to other saturations, to other exhibits of sonority. As if I were a hawk shunted aside, as if my singular utterance sprung from indigenous Malay. Perhaps my English is the parallel of indigenous lorikeet or Malay. Perhaps it is a network of glass scattered by sonorous visibility, where the Sun proclaims a different hue, where the dawn rises backwards, where the sea enacts its weather from a parallel momentum other than the moon.

—

Lissa Wolsak—in “shared electro-epistolary plane” conversation with Pete Smith—out of Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Station Hill, 2010):

I vehemently see no reason to dumb-down the sheer and useful beauty of language. What ~ of cultivating an ability to see in, pre-positionally through, of, with, the space between atoms, space less tyrannized. I know what to write because language lightens itself to reveal the pan-psychic shock / sleep of being alive, anatomies of collectivity / possibility, juste-milieu . . . the lucre of subjectivity.

And:

I have an antipathy toward flatland embrittlements within normative sentence making because I have not often enough experienced the truth of their / my constructions. Moreover, the mind is non-local and undermines my smooth to the eye approaches. I choose, rather, to activate consciousness, and to keep a loose hold on the smoky, beguiling and sometime fatuous muse of controlled meaning, but not to exclude the genuinely intended or navigable. I am more a receiver of shape and form than an architect of same. By its very fracture, I write to surprise myself.

—

J. H. Prynne, in a letter—out of the Helmut Bonheim and Raymond Federman-edited Mica 5 (1962):

      . . . I am prompted by my present isolation from people and books to offer a few vague, unsupported and highly compressed reflections about the kind of work you are printing, much of which seems to be in the mode most prevalent among a section of the more interesting American writers. Briefly, my viewpoint is this: current American writing doesn’t seem to have gone much further than the basic Imagist resolution at the beginning of the century—the breakthrough of Pound and Williams. Not only do few writers seem to wish to go any further—or advance in any other direction—but hardly any of the current endeavor at new experiment seems aimed at developing technical means for a change of attitude or approach.
      The implicit anti-intellectualism of the current short lyric—its explicit dogma is the pre-occupation with Zen and derived vatic utterance—leads to the capture of the small moment of contact between humans; but more often of the instantaneous insight by the percipient into a landscape or environment not containing other beings that we can conceive of as living—over days and weeks—their own, various lives. The area of complete, fused success is that (generally) of momentary perception, mostly a sensitive refraction of what is seen and heard. We are not, really and in fact, far from Pater, though infinitely more poised and well-disciplined into the tentative casualness of mood that is so much more seriously outward than ever Pater was. And the sense of urgent concern, the voice speaking from the center, is there; but working always through the small, amenable event, the personal image. The writer’s total involvement opens out the relevance of this experience to infinite dimensions, fills the horizon, and genuinely. This is a vast achievement, especially in view of the deliberately small aims and over-developed musculature of most English writers of verse, sheltering with provincial timidity behind the irony inherited from Eliot. It stimulates in a way that American verse has never done before, and English not (perhaps) for over 150 years: but there is seldom evidence of equipment or intention to control and shape that stimulation, which often remains a near-vicious indulgence (I overstate, this I realise). But a lot of American poems now being written are opiate, offering substitutes for experience instead of modes of access. Once we enter the world of these short poems, we may move at will over a wide plain, shape the course of our progress through it according to a personal choice. The real concern behind the writing is enough to exclude the outer world and provide the motive power for movement; yet the precise direction is our own.
      Hence perhaps the importance of the journey itself as an image, especially in longer poems; the motif of action without sufficient motive; the conscious arbitrariness with which the small event becomes the occasion for serious writing; the general rebuttal of the will as an element in human experience. Hence perhaps the way so many poems need the pool of silent reflection that follows their close, into which the strong concerns not shaped into final relevance by the last line can lose themselves in free contemplation. For the concern must have a fully articulated object (so I believe); the object should not be the poet’s anterior experience (Eliot’s fundamental error), but the poem’s achieved shape. This is not only the words as isolated monads, but their ordering; the grammar of feeling; the movement forward speeded or checked by the adverbs, bent, inverted or split by the conjunctions, maintained always by the constant verb. And this is not simply the imitative verse-movement of the Augustans, but a unity on a much deeper level. It is the mind at work, directing the convictions or importance to what is in fact important, working every preposition into the final contours of the poem and the shape of its own defining.*

Signed: “J. H. Prynne, Outer Hebrides.”

* Larry Eigner’s reply—reprinted under the title “Like a Dog Bark in Music” in the Benjamin Friedlander-edited Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989 (Roof Books, 1989)—out of Mica 6 (1962):

      J.H. Prynne’s comments seem penetrating, but I wouldn’t know exactly, being so fragmented myself that I can’t take a survey (can’t see much into the verse of Prynne himself, for instance). But the object he says the concern must have, if not the “strong concerns” which he pleads be “shaped into a final relevance,” doesn’t it, or don’t they, lie beyond poetry or certain poems, which are pieces of language, nodes of language risen in thought out of the general continuum to prompt or orient us? Objects beyond the action of language? One idea may be that a poem should gain a reality capable of being renewed always, or an illusion of reality, by evoking, dragging in, or referring to something beyond the poem, so to have it less isolate, since isolation of any appreciable degree, in more or less time diminishes the real, a part being taken for the whole, while on the other hand too many things are too real nowadays, and to consider another side, daydreaming or whatever is crowded out and life is exhausted. Right now John Glenn is eating the Waldorf. Empathy must have moderation, otherwise it dissolves distance and does away with itself. Everything should be taken for itself, but not too much, otherwise it is lost.
      Then how does the extrinsic turn intrinsic at times, the extraneous become digested? “A poem is a machine made of words”? Anyway, the dragging in of things from beyond the poem can’t be carried out very thoroughly. In a sense everything has to come of itself, unexpectedly, and has to be faced.

In Mica, Eigner’s letter is dated “February 28.” Seemingly stretching into the next day: “John Glenn . . . eating the Waldorf” undoubtedly referring to the unnavigable excess and spectacle of the ticker-tape parade in New York following Glenn’s earth-orbiting Friendship 7 space flight.

“. . . the voice of the city never grows hoarse . . .”

Notebook (Roberto Bolaño, Ted Berrigan, &c.)

Roberto Bolaño, c. 1979

Enrique Vila-Matas, recalling first meeting Roberto Bolaño—“21 November 1996, in Blanes, at the Bar Novo, a Catalan-style tearoom, one of these cafés . . . notable for their immaculate milk-white decoration, places that are actually as horrible as they are supposedly hygienic.” Out of Vila-Matas’s “Blanes or the Writers of Yore” (Archivo Bolaño 1977-2003):

I don’t think I’m fooling myself if I say that, in the Bar Novo that day, it took me no time at all to see or recognise in Bolaño a lunatic hermit or, better said, “a writer of yore,” one of these characters I by then considered were unfindable because I believed that they belonged to a world I’d glimpsed in my youth but that was now forever lost; the kind of writer who never forgets that literature, more than anything else, is a dangerous calling; someone who is not only valiant and who refuses to concede one iota to the prevailing vulgarity but who also displays emphatic authenticity and who fuses life and literature with total naturalness; an incredible survivor of an endangered species; this surprising kind of writer who proudly belongs to a caste of loony, obsessive, manic people who are disturbed in the best sense of the word; obstinate individuals, very obstinate types who already know that everything is false and that, in addition, everything, absolutely everything is finished (and I think that when one is in this situation of fathoming the dimensions of what is false and of the end of everything, then and only then, can obstinacy help, for it can push one to keep pacing round and round the cell so as not to miss the only tiny instant—because this instant does exist—that can save one); individuals who are truly more desperate than the famous revolution, which somehow makes them indirect heirs of the world’s hopeless misanthropes of long ago.
      These hopeless characters lived in times when writers were like gods, dwelling in the mountains as desperate hermits or loopy aristocrats. In those days they wrote with the sole purpose of communicating with the dead, had never heard of the market, were mysterious and solitary and breathed the air of the sacred realms of literature. The “writers of yore” are certainly heirs of the enigmatic, misanthropic, desperate hermits of long ago. They are like the shadiest tough guys in the most hazardous dead-end alley and, of course—I say this to add a touch of humour in keeping with the long laughter of all these years—they have nothing in common with the competent grey writers who in their day proliferated so abundantly in the so-called “new Spanish fiction.” The “writers of yore” are in quest of a very personal way of expressing themselves and are not unaware that in this way there might still be—after the end of the old, great prose and after the almost definitive demise of literature—a path, perhaps the last path to be taken.

Something of Vila-Matas’s barrage, its demand for a kind of defiant (and reckless) purity, recalling Ted Berrigan. (See Berrigan’s lines: “Purity means that you have something up / Your sleeve besides a right or a left arm. My / Arms are shot but my something is not.”) Out of Bolaño’s The Unknown University (2013), “Un Soneto,” translated by Laura Healy:

A Sonnet

16 years ago Ted Berrigan published
his Sonnets. Mario passed the book around
the leprosaria of Paris. Now Mario
is in Mexico and The Sonnets on
a bookshelf I built with my own
hands. I think I found the wood
near Montealegre nursing home
and I built the shelf with Lola. In
the winter of ’78, in Barcelona, when
I still lived with Lola! And now it’s been 16 years
since Ted Berrigan published his book
and maybe 17 or 18 since he wrote it
and some mornings, some afternoons,
lost in a local theatre I try reading it,
when the film ends and they turn on the light.

And, pertinently, in “our” time of increasingly fatuous gabble:

Horde

Poets from Spain and Latin America, literature’s most
Infamous, surged like rats from the depths of my dream
And strung their squeaks together in a chorus of minim voices:
Don’t worry, Roberto, they said, we’ll make sure
You disappear, neither your immaculate bones
Nor your writings which we spit out and ably plagiarize
Will surface from the shipwreck. Neither your eyes, nor your balls,
Will be saved from this dress rehearsal of sinking. And I saw
Their satisfied little faces, solemn cultural attache’s and rosy
Editors-in-chief, manuscript readers and poor
Copy editors, poets of the Spanish language, who go by the name of
Horde, the best, the pestilent rats, well versed
In the cold art of surviving in exchange for excrement,
Of public terror maneuvers, mass market Neruda
And Octavio Paz, cold swine, an apse
Or scratch on the Great Building of Power.
Horde holding title to the adolescent’s dream and to writing.
My God! Under this fat greasy sun that kills
And belittles us.

Notebook (Will Alexander, Wallace Stevens, &c.)

Will Alexander
(Photograph by Ramon Rao)

A tiny alignment of likes (similars), a congeries, minuscule, scintillant, proposed. Out of Jules Renard’s Journal, a completely satisfying phrase, complexly vacillating: Une inexactitude scrupuleuse. “A scrupulous inexactness.” (See, too, the somewhat pinched Beckettian humor in the lines: “A fly alighting on the sheet of white paper was excuse enough for him to give himself the right to be idle. He did not write, for fear of disturbing the fly.” Or: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word ‘nothing.’”)

—

Out of Will Alexander’s astounding Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews and a Lecture 1991-2007 (Essay Press, 2012):

Exactitude

      Not didactic addition, or superimposed forensics hoisted upon a psychic limestone slab, but exactitude, as a state, over and above the blizzard of static. A static made up of integers, and forms of integers, empowered across its field by exoteric procreation.
      Fact at the level of popular cerebral exhibit, can never organically respirate as poetic neural balance. The latter experiences itself as auric exploration, which inevitably accrues from auric harmonics. Again, right balance, So sums at this level are akin to Daumal’s savor, where essences intermingle, where the facts of the world then partake of the zone of tintinnabulation.

“Daumal’s savor”: “The savor is essentially a cognition, ‘shining with its own evidence,’ thus immediate . . . It is ‘simple, like the taste of a complex dish’ . . . It is not an object existing before being perceived “like a pitcher . . . illumined with a lamp”; it exists to the degree that it has been savored.” (Out of René Daumal’s 1941 Les Cahiers du Sud essay “To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art,” found in the Daumal compendium Rasa, or, Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies. Daumal is quoting out of the Natya Śastra.)

—

Wallace Stevens:

Man Carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

Originally in Stevens’s 1947 volume, Transport to Summer. A few pages previous, out of “Esthétique du Mal”: “The tongue caresses these exacerbations. / They press it as epicure, distinguishing / Themselves from its essential savor, / Like hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.” Exactitude, its “bright obvious” versus its accruing perceptual freight, its cumber and instability, its “static.”

Notebook (William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, &c.)

William Faulkner, c. 1962
(Photograph by Carl Mydans)

The tuneless reprimand of four a.m. Black maw of night, aimless and rhythmic saw of katydid, reverie’s tawdry presumptuousness. Its vain scribbled urgencies. William Faulkner, out of Intruder in the Dust (1948): “. . . he marveled again at the paucity, the really almost standardised meagreness not of individual vocabularies but of Vocabulary itself . . .” I love how Faulkner—eschewing all preliminaries—begins a speech accepting the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction (for A Fable):

      By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommerciable ones of the human spirit; who has tried to carve, no matter how crudely, on the wall of that final oblivion beyond which he will have to pass, in the tongue of the human spirit ‘Kilroy was here.’
      That is primarily, and I think in its essence, all that we ever really tried to do. And I believe we will all agree that we failed. That what we made never quite matched and never will match the shape, the dream of perfection which we inherited and which drove us and will continue to drive us, even after each failure, until anguish frees us and the hand falls still at last.
      Maybe it’s just as well that we are doomed to fail, since, as long as we do fail and the hand continues to hold blood, we will try again; where, if we ever did attain the dream, match the shape, scale that ultimate peak of perfection, nothing would remain but to jump off the other side of it into suicide. Which would not only deprive us of our American right to existence, not only inalienable but harmless too, since by our standards, in our culture, the pursuit of art is a peaceful hobby like breeding Dalmations, it would leave refuse in the form of, at best indigence and at worst downright crime resulting from unexhausted energy, to be scavenged and removed and disposed of. While this way, constantly and steadily occupied by, obsessed with, immersed in trying to do the impossible, faced always with the failure which we decline to recognize and accept, we stay out of trouble, keep out of the way of the practical and busy people who carry the burden of America.
      So all are happy—the giants of industry and commerce, and the manipulators for profit or power of the mass emotions called government, who carry the tremendous load of geopolitical solvency, the two of which conjoined are America; and the harmless breeders of the spotted dogs (unharmed too, protected, immune in the inalienable right to exhibit our dogs to one another for acclaim, and even to the public too; defended in our right to collect from them at the rate of five or ten dollars for the special signed editions, and even at the rate of thousands to special fanciers named Picasso or Matisse).

Slyly making of art a peccadillo, something of the “least and best of human vanities . . .” Continuing with the ambling reassurance that “even failure is worth while and admirable, provided only that the failure is splendid enough, the dream splendid enough, unattainable enough yet forever valuable enough, since it was of perfection,” and with the admonitory pinch that “one of the things wrong with our country is success. That there is too much success in it. Success is too easy. In our country a young man can gain it with no more than a little industry. He can gain it so quickly and easily that he has not had time to learn the humility to handle it with, or even to discover, realise, that he will need humility . . .” One thinks of the clipped magnificence of Samuel Beckett’s antic laboring (“From now say for be missaid”) in Worstward Ho (1983):

      All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Or of the lovely Beckettian strictures of what Faulkner might term “significantless speciosity”:

      Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less. Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse. Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.

Beckett, too, coining anew against perceived vocabular austerity (“Not to know what they say. Not to know what it is the words it says say . . .”) and athwart the void, the “Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void . . .”:

      Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they. Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say.

“Standardised meagerness.” Words as nigh vacancies, untenanted markers, voids tossed up against the void.

Notebook (William Faulkner, Guy Davenport, &c.)

William Faulkner, c. 1931

William Faulkner, out of an 18 February 1946 letter to Malcolm Cowley, parsing the writerly categorical difference between fact and truth:

I dont care much for facts, you cant stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction. But in truth, though maybe what I mean by truth is humility and maybe what I think is humility is really immitigable pride. I would have preferred nothing at all prior to the instant I began to write, as though Faulkner and Typewriter were concomitant, coadjutant and without past on the moment they first faced each other at the suitable (nameless) table.

Monstrously shrewd capture of the way the daubs and fancies of the world itself must needs fall away under the all-eschewing onslaught of writing. (Recalling, too, Keats’s “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .” and the chiding of Coleridge who “would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge . . .”)

—

That careeringest onslaught, galloping nigh out of control, its wild verges and convergences, its dash improprieties. Here’s Faulkner, “immitigable,” talking about man’s “enslavement to the demonic progeny of his own mechanical curiosity,” out of A Fable (1954):

He has already begun to put wheels under his patio his terrace and his front veranda; even at my age I may see the day when what was once his house has become a storage-place for his bed and stove and razor and spare clothing; you with your youth could (remember that bird) see the day when he will have invented his own private climate and moved it stove bathroom bed clothing kitchen and all into his automobile and what he once called home will have vanished from human lexicon: so that he wont dismount from his automobile at all because he wont need to: the entire earth one unbroken machined de-mountained dis-rivered expanse of concrete paving protuberanceless by tree or bush or house or anything which might constitute a corner or a threat to visibility, and man in his terrapin myriads enclosed clothesless from birth in his individual wheeled and glovelike envelope, with pipes and hoses leading upward from underground reservoirs to charge him with one composite squirt which at one mutual instant will fuel his mobility, pander his lusts, sate his appetites and fire his dreams; peripatetic, unceasing and long since no longer countable, to die at last at the click of an automatic circuit-breaker on a speedometer dial, and, long since freed of bone and organ and gut, leaving nothing for communal scavenging but a rusting and odorless shell—the shell which he does not get out of because he does not need to but which presently for a time he will not emerge from because he does not dare because the shell will be his only protection from the hail-like iron refuse from his wars . . .

(Recalling Guy Davenport’s fierce contempt for the automobile, “the mechanical cockroach that has eaten our cities.” And: “the machine that stole the city’s rationale for being.” “A man in an automobile is as active as a sloth.”)

—

“The cold-blooded ruses of the yelping sophists fill the crowds with contempt.” Four newish pieces (out of the clumsily monickered manuscript, Arrangements and Tendencies) here, in Aidan Semmens’s recently resurrected Molly Bloom.

Bill Berkson’s “Frank O’Hara File” in Larry Fagin’s Sal Mimeo

Jane Freilicher, “Untitled (Frank O’Hara in Landscape),” c. 1967

Larry Fagin—surely one of poetry’s premiere worker-angels, largely unsung of late in the batty clamor of the temporary contemporary, that narrow of narrows—U. S. mail’d me a copy of what looks to be the final number (#10) of the redoubtable magazine Sal Mimeo, its final side-stapled 8½ x 11 sheet offering the blunt particulars: Sal Mimeo / 1999-2013. With contributors Edwin Denby (a 1943 Modern Music- printed essay called “About Words for Singing”), Bernadette Mayer (“yes it’s your eighth thought out / Of an infinity of utopian giggles humming / In the background of the empire city . . .”), Emily Greenley, Charles North (“No / profile in peril, only occasionally the confusing view above the East River, / lurching but undeniably smitten . . .”), Jim Brodey (“to suit / The whims of a self-satisfied community / Of posthumous snobs & plain ole zombies // Not good enough to lick my stanzas . . .”), Clark Coolidge (“I’d need a new bra for that sort of scene . . .”), Joanne Kyger, John Godfrey, Jean Day (“The roughneck likewise / sniffs up his sleeve / at monsieur le docteur Ralph / out for an optimistic stroll / and a gull gulls Gogo to go fight / Estragon’s battles / royal . . .”), and Joseph Ceravolo (reprinting eleven poems Fagin originally printed in the initial Adventures in Poetry in 1968, pieces that “remain uncollected”—unincluded in the big 2012 Collected Poems).

What I read with no little alacrity and delight: Bill Berkson’s “A Frank O’Hara File”—a terrific hodge-podge of notes, letters, journal entries, &c., most of it seemingly gathered for O’Hara biographer Brad Gooch’s use. Assembling here a personal miscellany of some items thereat. Out of a listing of O’Hara recordings, an entry marked “Lost? Erased?”:

FO’H solo reading at the New School for Social Research, June 22, 1962. Introduced by Bill Berkson. Filmed in the courtyard of the school for broadcast as part of WNDT-TV (NET) “educational tv” series that included other readings that summer at the same venue by Kenneth Koch, Marianne Moore, possibly Robert Lowell. When BB started work at WNDT in 1964 he inquired about this never-broadcast recording and was told that it had not been aired because O’Hara’s voice was considered “too fruity for television,” and further that any tape not broadcast before a certain amount of time had gone by had probably been erased—the implication being that the O’Hara tape had suffered this fate. Excellent reading included “In Memory of My Feelings” and other poems.

Out of a raft of “Memory Notes”:

Frank reading Desolation Angels at Morris Golde’s Water Island beach house, liking the first half, then unable to finish the book because it was “too depressing.”

Other reading: Frank always seemed to have James Joyce’s Collected Poems lying around somewhere in his apartment, ready to be opened. Then around 1963 or so, it was D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in the 3 (4?) volume set. (He referred to Lawrence’s “Ship of Death” constantly.) Another old favorite of his was Auden’s The Orators, which he eventually read parts of at the Free University that Ed Sanders organized on the Lower East Side.

Frank’s bookshelves: Anatomy of Melancholy (2 vols.), Grandgent Divine Comedy with facing original & prose translation, Péret, Fantômas, John Wheelwright. (Those, at any rate, were the ones I used to take down & look at.) Frank used to speak of a book & then say, “Oh shit, it’s in one of those boxes in storage in Chicago—which my brother has probably thrown out!”

. . .

A moment in early 1966, when I asked Frank why he was writing so few poems: “I just don’t have any ideas.”

. . .

One thing that struck me looking at the hundreds of photographs of Frank is how glamorous he seems—still? or more as time goes by? He is in the Nijinsky-Picasso-Marilyn Monroe line of photogenic genius. Another aspect that strikes me is that everyone writing about him uses completely different words than everyone else, and all of them are true, to Frank, and to those people. Frank has his own character, and everyone else’s stands all the more revealed in relation to him.

[from a letter to Joe LeSueur] “It is time people realized that Frank, for himself, left no accounts unsettled, no appointment unkept, and therefore there is nothing they can do but celebrate what awareness they have of him—and if that, or Frank in person, put them in contact with unsettling (uneasy) parts of themselves, that is left to those people to deal with, as they are, and not Frank, not his image, not even in being caution about besmirching his image. Everyone remembers, but Frank is “not that person” and neither is he that person’s bloody conscience. He wasn’t the messiah. Maybe he was, at least for some of us, the real Peter Pan.

Frank as Peter Pan, or “childhood perfected and sustained” (Guy Davenport on Baudelaire).* [Jane Freilicher was the first to mention Frank’s “Peter Pan” aspect; she did so in connection with his presence in different artists’ studios in the early ’50s.]

Frank’s athleticism: like Bob Cousy (peripheral vision) and (bantam) Willie Pep.

Frank’s foods: pork chops (grilled) & frozen strawberries bought at the old city market on 1st Avenue. Oeufs Picabia (scrambled eggs cooked very slowly in a deep pan with scads of butter, according to the recipe in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook). Drinks: vodka, vodka Negroni, bourbon on the rocks, no beer, red wine. Cigarettes: Camels. Drugs: not much; hashish or grass if some was around; mescaline (once); bemused by the incipient LSD / psychedelic craze. Did he ever use heroin—with Larry? I doubt it.

Out of “Notes on the Poems / 7 varieties of Frank O’Hara poems”:

1) early, often thrashing “clear the decks” poems
2) “Harbormaster”-type white language
3) Action Poems (“Second Avenue”)
4) Odes
5) “I do this I do that”
6) “Just start writing” (“Biotherm”)
7) Final dramatic monologues

And:

Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain a formal feeling comes”: a clue to Frank’s turning to the numbers, “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille Day, yes . . .” Nothing is more formal than numbers . . .

Out of a note regarding O’Hara’s collaborations (under “Answers to Brad Gooch, September 9, 1988”):

. . . The first collaboration I ever did was with Kenward Elmslie. Frank had written poems with Kenneth, John (& of course “the French language”). Collaboration was like a commodious extension of social life for him: talking just seemed to slip toward the typewriter, as it did anyhow in writing his own solo poems. Frank probably would have continued to collaborate with his old friends if they were around—but John was in Paris & Kenneth was at home with his family. The old gang wasn’t so together around 1960: Frank could be said to have not “matured” as others had, nor had he entered into psychoanalysis. Anyhow, sometime in 1960, Frank & I were walking along 1st Avenue & noticed the funny steeples of St. Bridget’s church on Tompkins Square Park in the distance—one steeple curved limply (I think neither of them is any longer there). We were delighted by the sight, and later that day I went home & wrote a poem in outright imitation of Frank called “Hymn to St. Bridget,” which became the first St. Bridget poem. The dates are on the mss., right? I don’t remember the order in which the rest were written. Most were written at Frank’s place, some at Larry’s in Southampton, taking turns at the typewriter. (Oddly enough, I don’t think either of us ever crossed Tompkins Square Park to get a good look at the church; if we had, we would have seen that the Irish saint’s name is Brigid, not Bridget.) Then we started the “FYI” series of exchanges (see note in Collected Poems) and eventually the Fobb correspondence. We also wrote a play, starting in 1965, now lost—we got 40 pp. into it, with a cast of hundreds of historical (& other) characters. It was called The Novel. Another collaboration was with Patsy Southgate, a novel that Patsy & I tried to keep going after Frank died but couldn’t.
      Frank was incredibly quick, so most of the collabs are mostly him, and mostly my parts are me being influenced by him. . . .Evergreen Review published two St. Bridget poems in 1962. Frank thought they would make a good book. He liked to compare them to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Larry Fagin did the book in 1975, with a Larry Rivers drawing on the cover. You can read them as chat, and sometimes more than chat. They’re like the way we talked (including me talking like Frank) so in a way they’re preludes to “Biothem.”

Finally, Berkson’s lovely ending note labeled “Vulgarity”:

De Kooning: “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or outside—or of art in general—as a situation of comfort. I know there is a terrific idea there somewhere, but whenever I want to get into it, I get a feeling of apathy and want to lie down and go to sleep.”
      Aha! I knew that riff about “vulgarity” in T. J. Clark’s lecture on [Abstract-Expressionism] some months ago rang a bell. But the word means one thing to the Dutchman who has paid close attention to American slang and something else to an Englishman who quotes liberally not from de Kooning but from Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, and Jane Austen.
      The point is very much not to go to sleep but to keep the energy in art foremost. “Vulgarity”—or is it simply the energy that comes from the vernacular of life at street level?—is a constant source, where the action is & what anybody knows, versus all kinds of cloistered assumptions . . . Oil paint, colored mud—“flesh . . . the reason oil paint was invented,” as de Kooning recalled—is vulgar. In a poem Frank O’Hara writes of “love’s life-giving vulgarity” in, I think, the same light (and elsewhere the desire for a poetry “at least as alive as the vulgar”).

—

Interrupting my hiatus / reprieve of (exactly) eight weeks, I think of a line out of Edmund Berrigan’s newish Can It!—how he sought therein “a place where I could store intangible information while letting myself off the hook.” (Recalling, slightly, Ashbery’s remark regarding O’Hara’s “Easter”— “whose form is that of a bag into which anything is dumped and ends up belonging there . . .”) Heeding a perceived (and longstanding) need to somehow throttle down the terminal relentlessness of the form, if not its largely involuntary commodiousness, Isola di Rifiuti hereby sees itself going “occasional”— beholden no more to the ritual abscondency of the per diem. On verra.

* Davenport, out of A Balthus Notebook: “Baudelaire saw genius as childhood sustained and perfected. There is a sense among the French that adulthood is a falling away from the intelligence of children.”

Notebook (André Maurois, Pierre Michon, Bruce Boone, &c.)

Pierre Michon

Out of André Maurois’s A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles, translated by Charlotte de Koch (Turtle Point, 2012):

      The mysteries of art are respected exactly as the mysteries of religion are in other countries. The most celebrated playwright in Maïana is Pedro Sanzoni, whose plays are beautiful but so obscure that most Béos don’t understand them. They admire Sanzoni all the more for this. Thus it happened that we witnessed, during our stay in Maïana, an episode that, for us, came to symbolize the attitude of the Béos.
      Sanzoni’s favorite actress, Noémi, was so passionate a performer that, directly she began to play any part, she fell into a sort of trance. To help her get into this nervous condition—which was necessary to her success—she required that her dresser put the name of the character she was going to play, rather than her own name, Noémi, on the door of her dressing room. On one of her first nights, the dresser having forgotten to change the name on the door, Noémi came on stage dressed and made up for a part that didn’t belong to the play. When the other actors heard her delivering the wrong lines, they tried to attract her attention and make her realize her mistake, but Noémi seemed not to notice them. Pedro Sanzoni, mortified, was about to jump on stage and stop the show, when, looking at the audience, he saw they were not in the least disturbed. He let his actors finish the act. The curtain fell to wild applause from the Béos, who were telling each other that Sanzoni had never written anything more daring.
      The censorship of the Articoles was such that it forbade the publication of any accounts of this episode in the Gazette. The play was printed as it had been performed, with the incoherent part substituted for that of the original text, and Sanzoni gave it a new title, A Figure from Another World. It has since become a Maïanian classic. . . .

—

Out of Pierre Michon’s The Eleven, translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays (Archipelago, 2013):

This period, which is a kind of climax of History and which, consequently, is justly called the Terror, one late winter, one spring, and one early summer, from the snows of Nivôse to the hot hand of Thermidor, is made of tight knots impossible to untangle, short-lived enthusiasms, reversals, wild fluctuations more uncontrollable than a seismograph needle when a volcano erupts; or if you prefer animal life to geology, it is like a rabbit hole when the ferret is released, except that here, all are both ferret and rabbit for all the others. The brothers, accomplices in the killing of Capet le Père, the orphans who no longer slept after the father’s death, were killing one another through the increasing force of momentum, mechanically and machinelike—and that is why the great cutting machine located on the Place de la Révolution, the guillotine, is such a perfect emblem of that time, in our dreams as in reality. With the Royalists fallen, the Feuillants fallen, the Girondists fallen, there were no more truly divergent opinions within the triumphant Montagne; as Michelet said so clearly, as you read in the antechamber, the brothers, the killers, who were still trying to distinguish themselves from one another since distinction is in man’s nature, all the brothers could find to put between them was the distinction of death. These men have excuses, Sir, and deserve our admiration on more than one account: they slept three hours a night for four years, like sleepwalkers they worked for the happiness of humankind, they throbbed in the hands of the living God. All that, the single distinction of death, the terrible hand of the living God, the ferrets in the hole, you have read between the lines in the notes in the little antechamber, even if it is not written there in black and white; in black and white it is written that there were, broadly speaking, three clear-cut partis, the orthodox under Robespierre, the moderates under Danton, the extremists under Hébert, and it is written that Robespierre thought this, Danton thought that, Hébert thought something else again; but you, Sir, who will not be taken in, who can read between the lines, you have read and read clearly that, with only the slightest nuances, Robespierre, the good Danton, and the bad Hébert wanted the same thing, that is, a more or less just Republic and within that Republic, power, but that death in them (exhaustion and death, the living God and death) wanted the big knife of distinction. . . .

—

Out of Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds (Nightboat, 2009):

      Inseparable from this question of rhetoric is history, as our example of the Caribs has shown. One way of describing can be seen to triumph over another. And it’s not at all a question of keeping your hands clean—for anyone. Least of all for the historiographers, for the storytellers. How many of us whose function is to describe things have accepted such a characterization? Do we wish that our writing function could be free of its minatory qualities? Those holding the narrative office may accept its radical-negative implications only reluctantly. Each new description of things becomes a challenge to all the old ones, actively seeking to displace them, becoming new ways of seeing things. Contrary to the conventions then, writing is by nature a combative calling. New writings particularly are placed in opposition to old writings, and writings of groups newly coming to power contest vigorously the writings of the groups already in social dominance. But as a writing comes to be established, it comes to take on positive values. It sees itself as less contestatory than it actually is and it disavows its polemic origins. Its estimation of itself is as a maintainer of the status quo, and history comes to have less and less meaning for it. Time no longer seems to be change. The French social philosopher Guy Debord presents evidence of such a mentality in antiquity. ‘Those for whom irreversible time has ever existed,’ he asserts, ‘find in this same time both the memorable and the threat of oblivion: “Herodotus of Halicarnassus presents here the results of his investigations, in order that time not abolish the works of men . . .”’ What a disturbing mentality clothes itself in such sentences! Not to abolish the works of humankind—a strange way of putting it, I agree, a way of looking at things that would dissolve human conflict in human integration. . . .

—

Out of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923):

      The value of the imagination to the writer consists in its ability to make words. Its unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence
      This separates
      Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences “freshly and with the appearance of reality”—This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a—It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world,—
      The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
      A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent—moving at will from one thing to another—as he pleases, unbound—complete . . .

Notebook (Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, &c.)

Ezra Pound, 1885-1972

Indolence persisting, and joined—with the all the sweet officiousness of a camp meddler—by some grosser hebetude. The cardinal’s red redder than the rose’s red. (Stella d’oro lilies festoon the suburban embankments, “the yellow of their yellow” jangling in the closed bag of pre-thunderstorm light . . .) I like how William Gaddis, in A Frolic of His Own (1994), quotes a line apropos “the stage” out of a letter dated “[Between 6 and 12] September 1915”) Ezra Pound writes to James Joyce, calling it “A gross, coarse form of art . . . speaking to a thousand fools huddled together . . .” Pound, who’s just read Joyce’s Exiles:

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim. (so here I am with a clavichord—beside me, which I cant afford, and cant reasonably play on . . . . here I am chucked out of the Quarterly Review for having contributed ithyphallic satirical verse to “BLAST” . . . . . .
      and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the “Portrait”, I should have addressed you “Cher Maitre”.
      Now what would he want to write for the stage for
                                          ?  ?  ?  ?  ?
Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once
                              A. a stage play
                              B. not common, not a botch.
There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.
When we feel we unite.

—

By the “untrammeled” roundabout of morning’s own instigating—fossicking the impacted verbal plunder—one arrives at some seemingly pertinent lines out of Pound’s 1933 note to The English Journal:

      When Remy de Gourmont wrote me that a writer’s sole pleasure was the untrammeled expression of what he was thinking (“ce qu’il pense”) he used the present tense of the verb. He didn’t refer to something then writer HAD THOUGHT.
      Nobody thought it wd. be a nice thing for the aged Theodore Roosevelt to charge up San Juan Hill yet again in 1914 to wrest Cuba from the Spaniards. Frobenius notes the same distinction between the tenses of the verb in the healthy stage of narrative production. His Africans talk about what the leopard and antelope are doing and saying NOW, not what they did or said in the time of Aesop. They call the Aesop, “school book exercise.”

Pound reprints Remy de Gourmont’s “post-mark June 13, ’15” letter in the essay “Remy de Gourmont, a Distinction followed by notes” in Instigations (1920), oddly enough translating Gourmont’s (ungrammatical, Pound likely made a bad copy) lines “Le but de Mercure a été de permettre à ceux qui en valent la peine d’écrire franchement ce qu’il pense—seul plaisir d’un écrivain. Cela doit aussi être le vôtre . . .”:

      “The aim of the Mercure has been to permit any man who is worth it, to write down his thought frankly—this is a writer’s sole pleasure. And this aim should be yours.”

Pound here burying the doing—the divergent exploratory push of thinking—in the dud closure of “thought.” (Pound’s Frobenius recalls Fenellosa’s warning against English grammar’s tendency toward durcissement, its “lazy satisfaction with nouns and adjectives, and subsequent loss of “the verbal undertone of every noun.”)

—

“A novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim . . .” That placid lack of the exhortatory, the breakneck, the clamorous, I like it. Like Gertrude Stein in “Introducing” (out of the 1928 Useful Knowledge):

This one was one who was doing something and another thing and another thing and in a way he was doing each thing in the same way as he was doing each other thing and in a way there were differences and in a way certainly there were not any differences at all . . . He was doing something and he certainly did it for sometime and it was certainly something he should then be doing. Some one might be thinking that he might be more successfully than doing some other thing but really not any one thought he should not be doing the thing he was doing when he was doing the thing and certainly he was very steadily doing the thing, the thing he was doing when he was doing that thing. In a way he had been doing a number of things, in a way he was always doing the same thing . . .

(Recalling—the way recalling makes a perpetuum mobile of itself, sliding along the fatty grease of its own making—the glibly defiant particulars of Ron Padgett’s “Tone Arm” opening—“You people of the future / How I hate you / You are alive and I’m not / I don’t care whether you read my poetry or not . . .”—and Ted Berrigan’s sassy taunt of a reply—“People of the future / while you are reading these poems, remember / you didn’t write them, / I did.”)

Notebook (William Gaddis, Herman Melville, &c.)

William Gaddis, 1922-1998

Usual indolent Friday, the honey-colored sunlight splashing down unheeding against the fence, the sooty-looking swifts skittering noisily along the sky’s “invysible and chaungeable” upswells of breeze, and me summoning up no pertinent syllables—copious, ransacked, or delinquent—with which finally to shut down the usual indolent week . . . What is the point of so endlessly arranging such glib and unimpeded re-arrangeables, words? (Williams, out of The Great American Novel: “Words cannot progress. There cannot be a novel. Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them—Awu tsst grang splith gra pragh og bm— Yes, one can break them. One can make words. Progress? If I make a word I make myself into a word. Such is progress . . .”) Or there’s William Gaddis (A Frolic of His Own) quoting a line out of Larzer Ziff’s Literary Democracy (1981)—Ziff is talking about Melville’s tendency toward “pure wordplay” in The Confidence Man: “reality may not exist at all except in the words in which it presents itself.”

—

Out of Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own (1994):

. . . the conviction that risk of ridicule, of attracting defamatory attentions from his colleagues and even raucous demonstrations by an outraged public have ever been and remain the foreseeable lot of the serious artist, recalling among the most egregious examples Ruskin accusing Whistler of throwing a paint pot in the public’s face, the initial scorn showered upon the Impressionists and, once they were digested, upon the Cubists, the derision greeting Bizet’s musical innovations credited with bringing about his death of a broken heart, the public riots occasioned by the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and from the day Aristophanes labeled Euripides ‘a maker of ragamuffin mannequins’ the avalanche of disdain heaped upon writers: the press sending the author of Ode on a Grecian Urn ‘back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’ finding Ibsen’s Ghosts ‘a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly’ and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina ‘sentimental rubbish,’ and in our own land the contempt accorded each succeeding work of Herman Melville, culminating in Moby Dick as ‘a huge dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimentalism and tragic-comic bubble and squeak,’* and since Melville’s time upon writers too numerous to mention. All this must most arguably in deed and intent affect the sales of their books and the reputations whereon rest their hopes of advances and future royalties, yet to the court’s knowledge none of this opprobrium however enviously and maliciously conceived and however stupid, careless, and ill informed in its publication has ever yet proved grounds for a successful action resulting in recovery from the marplot. In short, the artist is fair game and his cause is turmoil. To echo the words of Horace, Pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendisemper fuit aequa potestas, in this daring invention the artist comes among us not as the bearer of idées recues embracing art as decoration or of the comfort of churchly beliefs enshrined in greeting card sentiments but rather in the aesthetic equivalent of one who comes on earth ‘not to send peace, but a sword.’

* Out of a survey of Melville’s work up to the 1852 Pierre (“Speaking of the passengers on board Redburn’s ship Highlander, Mr. Melville significantly and curtly observes, ‘As for the ladies, I have nothing to say concerning them, for ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.’ He will pardon us for including in this somewhat arbitrary classification of forms of beauty and forms of faith, his own, last, and worst production, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities . . .”) signed “Sir Nathaniel” (pseudonym of Francis Jacox) in the July 1853 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (London, England):

      For so successful a trader in “marine stores” as Mr. Melville, The Whale seemed a speculation every way big with promise. From such a master of his harpoon might have been expected a prodigious hit. There was about blubber and spermaceti something unctuously suggestive, with him for whaleman. And his three volumes entitled The Whale undoubtedly contain much vigorous description, much wild power, many striking details. But the effect is distressingly marred throughout by an extravagant treatment of the subject. The style is maniacal—mad as a March hare—mowing, gibbering, screaming, like an incurable Bedlamite, reckless of keeper or strait waistcoat. Now it vaults on stilts, and performs Bombastes Furioso with contortions of figure, and straining strides, and swashbuckler fustian, far beyond Pistol in that Ancient’s happiest mood. Now it is seized with spasms, acute and convulsive enough to excite bewilderment in all beholders. When he pleases, Mr. Melville can be so lucid, straightforward, hearty, and unaffected, and displays so unmistakable a shrewdness, and satirical sense of the ridiculous, that it is hard to suppose that he can have indited the rhodomontade to which we allude. Surely the man is a Doppelganger—a dual number incarnate (singular though he be, in and out of all conscience):—surely he is two single gentlemen rolled into one, but retaining their respective idiosyncrasies—the one sensible, sagacious, observant, graphic, and producing admirable matter—the other maundering, drivelling, subject to paroxysms, cramps, and total collapse, and penning exceeding many pages of unaccountable “bosh.” So that in tackling every new chapter, one is disposed to question it beforehand, “Under which king, Bezonian?”—the sane or the insane; the constitutional and legitimate, or the absolute and usurping? Writing of Leviathan, he exclaims, “Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand ! Friends, hold my arms!” Oh that his friends had obeyed that summons! They might have saved society from a huge dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimentalism, and tragi-comic bubble and squeak.

Oh the savagery of the American lyric paroxysmus! (“When thei bee in their traunce, or paroxismos, the smoke of it maketh theim to awake.”) “Sir Nathaniel” writes next: “His Yankeeisms are plentiful as blackberries. ‘I am tormented,’ quoth he, ‘with an everlasting itch for things remote.’” Me, too. Schism and click in the angelic parvenu light . . . “I make myself into a word.”

Harriet Monroe and The Great American Novel

Harriet Monroe, 1860-1936

William Carlos Williams, out of Paterson Book III (1949):

—of this, make it of this, this
this, this, this, this             .

And, out of the end of The Great American Novel (1923):

      What difference is it whether I make the words or take the words. It makes no difference whatever.

Or:

      He took any kind of rags just as they were collected, filth or grease right on them the way they were and teased them up into a fluffy stuff which he put through a rolling process and made into sheets of wadding. These sheets were fed mechanically between two layers of silkolene and a girl simply sat there with an electric sewing device which she guided with her hand and drew in the designs you see on those quilts, you know.
      You’ve seen this fake oilcloth they are advertising now. Congoleum. Nothing but building paper with a coating of enamel.
      ¡O vida tan dulce!

—

After a rather cursory look around, I haphazardly conclude that it’s gone previously unnoted—how William Carlos Williams, in The Great American Novel (1923), included therein la plupart of a Harriet Monroe commentary titled “Flamboyance,” a piece found in the November 1922 issue of Poetry (Vol. XXI, No. 2). Here’s the Monroe:

      “America needs the flamboyant to save her soul”—so said Vachel Lindsay at one of those Glacier Park camp-fires where he and Stephen Graham talked of art and life to the indifferent mountains.
      He might have added that America tries to satisfy this need in strange and often uncatalogued ways. America, living an exemplary three-meals-a-day-and-bed-time life in a wall-papered home, goes now and then en masse to the circus to see men, women and animals perform exquisite and impossible feats of grace and daring. What could be more flamboyant than the trapeze-performer hurtling through the air, the tiger leaping through man-made hoops, or the elephant poising his mighty bulk on his two forelegs lifted to the top of bottles? What more flamboyant than the painted clown, timeless type of the race, laughing that he may not weep, grinning through a thousand tragic jests while little human beings perform their miraculous tricks around him?
      And America, sitting respectably at home with its newspaper; America, suppressing its feelings and censoring its artists; America, fearing emotion as the gateway to perdition—America finds the flamboyant in the courts, and listens to every passion-molded word uttered to judge and jury in Reno or New Brunswick or South Bend.
      Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in orange and green gown and war-paint of rouge, the skyscraper lighting its thousand windows, the airplane skimming the clouds, the freshman shouting his college yell—these are all extravagant, impossible frenzies of color in a world that refuses to be drab. Even the movies, devoid as they are of color in the physical sense, are gaudy in the imaginations of the people who watch them; gaudy with exaggerated romance, exaggerated comedy, exaggerated splendor or grotesqueness or passion. Human souls who are not living impassioned lives, not creating romance and splendor and grotesqueness—phases of beauty’s infinite variety—such people wistfully try to find these things outside themselves; a futile, often a destructive quest.
      The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women can not be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life—the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough—it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy—it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.

Signed “H. M.” Williams’s use of the material (with a few minor cuts and fewer inserts) occurs in chapter XII:

      That cat is funny. I think she’d be a good one for the circus. When she’s hungry she bites your legs. Then she jumps at you as much as to say: Caramba, give me something.
      America needs the flamboyant to save her soul—said Vachel Lindsay to the indifferent mountains.
      He might have added that America tries to satisfy this need in strange and often uncatalogued ways. America, living an exemplary three-meals-a-day-and-bed-time life in a wall-papered home, goes now and then en masse, by Gosh, to the circus to see men, women and animals perform exquisite and impossible feats of daring. What could be more flamboyant than the trapeze-performer hurtling through the air, the tiger leaping through man-made hoops, or the elephant poising his mighty bulk on his two forelegs lifted to the top of bottles? What more flamboyant than the painted clown, timeless type of the race, laughing that he may not weep, grinning through a thousand tragic jests while little human beings perform their miraculous tricks around him?
      Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in orange and green gown and war-paint of rouge—impossible frenzies of color in a world that refuses to be drab. Even the movies, devoid as they are of color in the physical sense, are gaudy in the imaginations of the people who watch them; gaudy with exaggerated romance, exaggerated comedy, exaggerated splendor of grotesqueness or passion. Human souls who are not living impassioned lives, not creating romance and splendor and grotesqueness—phases of beauty’s infinite variety—such people wistfully try to find these things outside themselves; a futile, often a destructive quest.
      The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women cannot be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life—the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough—it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy—it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.
      All right go ahead: A TEXAS PRIZE CONTEST—The Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, recently emerged from a prize contest which had a strange dénouement—
      Look here young man, after this you examine those girls in the cold weather.
      Who is Warner Fabian? Flaming Youth is the story of the super-flapper, of her affairs at country clubs and cozy home-dances with all the accompaniments of prohibition stimulants. Warner Fabian believes that the youth of this country feeds on excitement and rushes to knowledge “heeled” by way of petting parties and he elemental stimulus of jazz. The barriers of convention are down . . .

And so forth, off into a brief investigation of the 1923 book by the pseudonymous (for Samuel Hopkins Adams) Warner Fabian. Oddly enough, Williams’s paragraph beginning “All right go ahead”—a kind of exhortatory parallel to the earlier pre-grab “Caramba, give me something”—uses both title and opening line of a (directly) subsequent “H. M.”-penned commentary in the same November 1922 issue of Poetry.

—

No news per se in the way Williams assembled borrowed material.* Hugh Kenner, in “A Note on The Great American Novel” (out of the 1958 Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature) refers to both its “blocks of verbal material” and how it is “the dream of a writer who hasn’t written a word, and it parodies certain naïve motives for undertaking authorship which—once more—are part of Williams’ subject.” Kenner:

. . . the “Novel,” bringing its lyric phases under progressively stricter control, acquires by cunning trial and error a reliable tone which in the final chapters can handle with a compositor’s sureness a surprising variety of materials and effects: from “Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts” to “The Perfection of Pisek-designed Personality Modes: A distinctly forward move in the realm of fashion is suggested by the new personality modes, designed by Pisek . . .”

It is entirely likely that other borrowings of “verbal material”—“small (or large)”—are evident, or traceable.** What I find notable—and somewhat lamentable—is how Monroe’s fine final outburst (“The imagination will not down . . .”), routinely assigned to Williams (and seeming to fit perfectly), makes its incognito way in the world. So Charles Altieri (oddly glossing “The imagination will not down . . .” as “The imagination will not d[r]own . . .”) in a piece (rather ironically) titled “Rhetoric and Poetics: How to Use the Inevitable Return of the Repressed” writes of Monroe’s lines: “Here William Carlos Williams provides a striking example when he imagines how a poetry resistant to rhetoric might be central to democracy.” Or there’s Herbert Leibowitz, in “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams quoting Monroe’s lines in order to evoke a pulpit-mounted and afflatus-scorched Williams, one who “exhorts us to find the grace that imagination’s holy powers alone bestow.” (Note: Williams cut Monroe’s “impossible feats of grace and daring” to “impossible feats of daring.”)

* Williams himself seemingly had little to say about The Great American Novel. In the Autobiography he (rather flippantly and with a modicum of accuracy) calls it “a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car fall more or less in love with a Mack truck.” In a 26 March 1924 letter to Kenneth Burke, Williams seems ambivalent (if not dismissive):

      Yes, my Gr. Am. Novel never found a beginning. It was that I must have wanted to say. And that’s how you get me, one of the ones with that that I am after. It’s got to be said to be read. I am trying to speak. To tell it in the only way possible, but I do want to say what there is. It is not for me merely to arrange things prettily. Oh purple anemones! (you get what I mean? I mean “Shit.” But I’m through with that now. No more “shits.” It is dead, that kind of slang.)

** In the June 1922 issue of a monthly magazine called The Mentor (Vol. 10, No. 5) one discovers a number of paragraphs Williams used in chapter XIII of The Great American Novel. Thus (out of a piece called “Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellers” by Ronne C. Shelsé)—

      Afterward came the cliff dwellers—a much advanced race—who formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. They fashioned stones into perfect blocks and built the solid walls which have withstood the lashing storms of time forgotten. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story in the mute language of the ages . . .

—is transformed by Williams into—

      The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers—a much advanced race—formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story of the ages . . .

A couple of paragraphs later, Williams uses nearly verbatim this lengthy caption to an illustration of a Navaho blanket (out of a piece called “Indian Blankets and Their Makers” by George Wharton James):

      The word bayeta is merely Spanish for baize. Great quantities of this were made in England for the Spanish and Mexican trade, the major part of which was of a brilliant red color. In this way English baize became Spanish bayeta to the Indians of the American Southwest. Familiar with the art of weaving, these Indians unraveled the bayeta, retwisted it into one, two, or three strands, and then rewove it into their blankets, which are now almost priceless. This old blanket was picked up by the author in a New Mexican corral, for the purpose of wiping his buggy axle. It was covered with filth and mud. A number of “washings” revealed this glorious specimen of the weaver’s art.

Williams’s next paragraph—it, too, verbatim—is out of an unsigned item in The Mentor titled “Why Did They Say No?”

      Accepted by a cultured and talented belle, Lincoln, according to his law partner, had already been refused by Sarah Rickard, an obscure miss of sixteen, of whom apparently nothing further is known.

And so forth. Art out of the assemblagist’s idle page-flippings and recklessly sure intuitings.

Notebook (Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, &c.)

Robert Duncan, c. 1984
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

Robert Duncan (c. 1967, in conversation with L. S. Dembo), out of the Christopher Wagstaff-edited A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985 (North Atlantic Books, 2012):

When I’m writing a poem, I no longer have access to the meaning of a word. I use the OED not because I think I can give the word a history or because I can get to a root meaning, but because the OED provides me with a story—an immediate sort of material right there. If I were thinking, I’d be thinking about the definitions and meanings, and that’s the last thing I want to do. My poetry is filled with talk about boundaries, and especially intriguing to me is that the universe has only the boundaries that we imagine and so we’re constantly imagining other boundaries.
      I think of a poem as taking place on the ground of language, which is a pure creative ground. We don’t make up language ourselves, and we don’t think it. The OED snaps me out of what a word does mean. It gives me reference all the way across to the word as it actually exists in a communal sense, and I work with words thinking of them as communal, not expressing something in me. It’s like the absorption of a child building with blocks. He’s not thinking; he’s building architectures.

—

Jack Spicer, out of After Lorca (1957):

When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
      It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem—and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer . . .
      Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection—as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, “See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!”

—

Gilbert Sorrentino, out of “The Act of Creation and Its Artifact” (Something Said, [1984]), opening with Walter Benjamin’s line out of “The Task of the Translator”: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener . . .”

Eliot, in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,” writes: “What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning—or without forgetting, merely changing.” There is a story told of the late Jack Spicer, reading proofs of one of his books with friends, who pointed out to him that one of the poems in the book was exactly—word for word and line for line—the same as another poem in the book. To which Spicer replied that the poem had to stay because it was written at a different time and was, therefore, a different poem. This is only truly understandable in light of Jack Spicer’s practice of writing poems by the process of what he called “dictation” . . . We may go back to the middle of the twelfth century, and discover Marcabru, the Provençal troubadour, writing:

I’ll take him on as critic,
who’ll call the meaning in my song,
of each word,
who’s analytic, who
can see the structure of the vers unfold.
I know it’ll sound absurd, but
I’m often doubtful and go wrong myself
in the explication of an obscure word,
for I myself have trouble
clearing up obscure passages.*

—

Duncan (again):

I don’t have the experience of thinking when I’m writing poetry. Certainly I don’t feel the poem as a problem, for instance, that I’m trying to find the solution for. The experience I have in a poem is very much as if my brain were dancing, not thinking. Right now I’m trying to think what thinking is and something very different happens than when we were talking before and going along with meanings and ideas . . .

—

William Carlos Williams, out of the “Prologue” to Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920):

      Although it is a quality of the imagination that it seeks to place together those things which have a common relationship, yet the coining of similes is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all other things which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question.
      But this loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a destructive power little to be guessed at: all manner of things are thrown out of key so that it approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of anything. All is confusion, yet, it comes from a hidden desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination, a will to accord two instruments in a duet . . .

* Referring, seemingly, to the opening lines of Marcabru’s “Per savi teing ses doptanza”:

Per savi teing ses doptanza
celui qu’e mon chan devina
cho que chascus moz declina,
si com la razos despleia,
qu’eu meteis sui en erranza
d’esclarzir paraula escura.

(“I unhesitatingly consider wise the man who can divine in my song what each word means, as the theme unfolds, for I myself have difficulty in clarifying obscure speech.”) Subsequent lines point to the childishness (“sen d’enfanza”) of troubadours who “deliberately interweave words with fragmentation” (“fan los moz per esmanza / entrebescaz de fraitura”). Pertinent, too: lines out of the Marcabru fragment “[Co]ntra [l’i]vern que s’e[n]ansa”—

Selh qui fes lo vers e e·l tresc
no sap don si mou la tresca.

Marcabrus a fag lo tresc
e no sap don mou la tresca.

(“He who composed the poem and the dance-tune does not know where the round-dance begins. // Marcabru composed the dance-tune and yet does not know where the round-dance begins.”)

The Letters of William Gaddis (Stray Notes)

William Gaddis, 1922-1998

Final stray points d’intérêt rounded up out of The Letters of William Gaddis (indulging some gaffe of a procedural that leads my obligatory “notebook”-ing toward a perceived eventuality of use, that necessary and sufficient fiction). So be it. There’s the lovely phrase got out of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886): “the melancholia of things completed.” Nietzsche:

      It is too bad! Always the old story! When a man has finished building his house, he finds that he has learnt unawares something which he ought absolutely to have known before he—began to build. The eternal, fatal “Too late!” The melancholia of everything completed!—

And Gaddis (out of The Recognitions):

I look at the clean paper that I’m saving to write the finished score on, and then I look at the pile of . . . what I’ve been working on, and, well I can see it all right there, finished. And yet, well . . . you know I never read Nietzsche, but I did come across something he said somewhere, somewhere where he mentioned “the melancholia of things completed.” Do you . . . well that’s what he meant. I don’t know, but somehow you get used to living among palimpsests. Somehow that’s what happens, double and triple palimpsests pile up and you keep erasing, and altering, and adding, always trying to account for this accumulation, to order it, to locate every particle in its place in one whole . . .

Recalling a tiny barrage of stability’s refusals—say, Charles Olson’s “keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen” (“Projective Verse”) or A. R. Ammons’s “I don’t want shape: / I’ll have water muscles bending streams (recurrences of // curvature): wind sheets erect, traveling: lips accommodating / muscle glides: identity in me’s a black, clear bead: I’ve / strongboxed and sunk it, musseled and barnacled with lock, // but it’s breathing in there, a dumb eager little botch” or—later, with a sense of death’s dopey finality—“crush a bug and the universe goes hollow / with hereafter” (Sphere: The Form of a Motion).

—

William Gaddis writing to Donn O’Meara and William Carnahan (19 November 1993), quoting the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” (1859):

And here The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan . . . literally, literally; & did I ever mention that a ½ century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quiet limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . .

(Thus in Agapē Agape: “. . . where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper . . .”) (Too, there’s the implacable dry scratch of Gaddis’s humor: I think of a remark regarding a somewhat unlavish room in Rome, that its simplicity’d nevertheless “provide refuge from that operatic people while we sample their remains . . .”)

—

Out of a 12 April 1981 letter to William H. Gass, regarding Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), a book Gaddis calls (in a later letter) “a willed book”—“unlike its predecessors which, in Samuel Butler’s phrase,* ‘demanded to be written’”:

      I should also note I really am working on the book, the ‘romance’ (nothing I think that can be accused as ‘experimental’ here!), came back a few days ago from Mexico with 50 clean first draft pages so it is not all hornswoggle (though it may turn out to be about hornswoggle) . . .

Joyce?:     Q. What are you writing about?
                    A. I am not writing about something. I am writing something.

Enough of that.

Referring to Samuel Beckett’s lines regarding Joyce’s Work in Progress in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” (1929):

      Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.

Oddly enough, in the highly Beckettian monologue Agapē Agape (2002), Gaddis again assigns Joyce the line:

. . . pianos nobody can play and millions of piano rolls left in the dust while their splendid phantom hands are pushed further from reach by the gramophone and finally paralyzed by the radio teaching birds to sing birdsongs O God, O God, O God, Chi m’a tolto a me stesso that’s Michelangelo, that's from my book, Ch’a me fusse più presso O più di me potessi that’s in my book, who has taken from me that self who could do more, and what is your book about Mister Joyce? It’s not about something Madam, it is something and goodbye to that hidden talent, those ghostly fingers hard as petrified wood . . .

Pertinent: Gaddis’s 19 July 1988 note to Don Delillo regarding Libra (1988), “its marriage of style & content” and how such

is marvelously illustrated here I think & especially as it comes together at the end as we know it must, speaking of the ‘nonfiction’ novel if we must but why must we, except that concept does embrace the American writer’s historic obsession getting the facts down clear (from “tells me more about whales than I really want to know” to Dreiser tapemeasuring Clyde’s cell at Sing Sing, or Jack London’s “Give me the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!”) & again one marvels at what you’ve marshaled in this impressive piece of work.

Pertinent, too: William Carlos Williams’s lines out of Spring and All (1923):

      Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency—but because it possesses the quality of independent existence, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it.

      I suppose Shakespeare’s familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us than—

      the mistake in it (though we forget that it is not S. speaking but an imaginative character of his) is to have believed that the reflection of nature is nature. It is not. It is only a sham nature, a “lie.”

      Of course S. is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing.

      He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own.

      He himself becomes “nature”—continuing “its” marvels—if you will . . .

Williams’s essay “A Point for American Criticism” is included in the 1929 Beckett-edited Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination (wherein Beckett’s “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” is printed). No sign that Beckett read Williams’s 1923 Spring and All.

* Out of The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (under the rubric “My Books”):

I never make them: they grow; they come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. I did not want to write Erewhon, I wanted to go on painting and found it an abominable nuisance being dragged willy-nilly into writing it. So with all my books—the subjects were never of my own choosing; they pressed themselves upon me with more force than I could resist. If I had not liked the subjects I should have kicked, and nothing would have got me to do them at all. As I did like the subjects and the books came and said they were to be written, I grumbled a little and wrote them.

The Letters of William Gaddis (Stray Notes)

William Gaddis, 1922-1998

William Gaddis, out of a 28 September 1993 letter to “the Editors, Iowa Review” regarding an upcoming “experimental fiction” issue:

I fear . . . that in this deluge of critical approaches and categories—high modern, post-modern, deconstruction, post-structural, where I frequently see my work discussed at length—‘experimental’ is the one which I find specifically unsuited, due to my sense of the decline in the use and meaning of ‘experimental’ and ‘experiment’ from the blunt dictionary definition as ‘A test made to demonstrate a known truth’ to which I should happily subscribe, to the rather loose embrace of writing pursued willy-nilly in some fond hope of stumbling on those strokes of brilliance which that perfect poet Keats mistrusted even in himself observed with “It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.”
      From the start almost a half century ago I have believed (& Keats to witness) that I knew exactly what I am doing: as ‘known truth’ for example, that style must match content, hence the fragmentation in The Recognitions; language and disorder, in J R; exercising the cliche in Carpenter’s Gothic; language and order in A Frolic of His Own.
      Thus it would be quite unseemly (not to say inflammatory) for me to name as ‘carrying the torch of the experimental movement’ writers who might well feel that they too know exactly what they are doing as I trust you will understand, as I trust you will further understand that I have no wish or intention of belittling your generous appraisal of my work. I have no short stories recent or otherwise, I do not wear T shirts, but can at least respond to your notion regarding ‘the work of new and established visual artists who use text in their works’ with the enclosed from Julian Schnabel’s Recognitions Series (there are a half dozen or so of them nicely reproduced in his catalogues &c) which you may find pertinent.

The Keats line out of an 8 March 1819 letter to B. R. Haydon—found thus worded in Gaddis’s 1949 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In context (out of the 2002 Grant F. Scott-edited Selected Letters of John Keats):

What a set of little people we live amongst. I went the other day into an ironmonger’s shop, without any change in my sensations; men and tin kettles are much the same in these days. They do not study like children at five and thirty, but they talk like men at twenty. Conversation is not a search after knowlege, but an endeavour at effect. In this respect two most opposite men, Wordsworth and Hunt, are the same. A friend of mine observed the other day that if Lord Bacon were to make any remark in a party of the present day, the conversation would stop on the sudden. I am convinced of this, and from this I have come to the resolution never to write for the sake of writing, or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge and experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me; otherwise I will be dumb. What Imagination I have I shall enjoy, and greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the toil of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an ode to darkness; and with respect to my livelihood I will not write for it, for I will not mix with that most vulgar of all crowds the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages, but that is nothing.

Schnabel’s Recognitions series—originally exhibited in 1988 in the ruins of the El Carmen monastery in Seville—included words or phrases out of The Recognitions. Schnabel: “Letters are real. For me they’re pictorial elements that also have a sociological connotation and a historical, temporal connotation.”

Julian Schnabel, “The Afflicted Organ,” 1987

Julian Schnabel, “Turba Philosophorum,” 1987

Julian Schnabel, “Cortes,” 1988