Isola di Rifiuti

A Box

A YEAR

CXCIV
The scrub ferocity
of the minor,
Gwendolyn’s anxious “adhesion”
to the devices
of the nineteenth-
century, a low-
relief cameo of
Annie Oakley cocking
a six-shooter,
a turtle-sized
brooch. Ah, American
obscurantism! jubilantly we
meander with disarming
candor, skirting dogma,
imperturb’d. It is
what is “within
the thing” that
one bathes in
the dew-hammer’d
momentary clarity of
memory, affixing it
to the specimen
board so that
its flux—musky
and compact Sophia
strumming a cithern
under evangelical light—
ceases to eat
at one. It
“cakes the brain,”
it being all
tumult and advisory,
the autochthonous flub,
the sentimental witchery.
Truth is nowhere
and provisional, argot
empirick in Dies
Irae lottery duds,
breach’d and ready
for the scrimmage.

—

Uncanny how the stacks of books pile up, and I am swept around the point by tides and fail to beach at my intentions. Why is it that a note in Camus’s American Journals seems suddenly pertinent: “Naturally a man should fight. ‘But if he loves only that, what’s the use of fighting.’” (Accompany’d by vague sense—in tangled weekend revery—of fighting, gang-swift, echoing boots against cobblestones.) (How related to the noisy and wild hammer-swinging required to re-hang the gutter?) (And why the sudden inkling—just now—astride the bicycle, shooting through the empty intersection, that one ought to dump the daily half-ass’d squibs, and write only when compelled?) (“The compulsion is, precisely, the graphomania of the “daily half-ass’d squibs.”)

Trying to re-construct the reading of late (the littlest reading, sleep-interrupt’d, precanned, un-expanding). I keep pulling (as at a tap) at Robert Baldick’s Pages from the Goncourt Journal: how I love (for my sense of its terrible accuracy, for how it ought be apply’d to some of “our” notables, (“our” notaries, “our” notorious) criticules who make marvelous exceptions for any chair et os cohort, whilst remaining utterly blindfold’d by pre-disposed scurrility to some lumpen imaginary other, label’d for easy dismissal): “Sainte-Beuve is the Sainte-Beuve he has always been, a man forever influenced in his criticism by tiny trivialities, minor considerations, personal matters, and the pressure of opinion around him: a critic who has never delivered an independent, personal judgement on a single book.” Recall: it is Proust who writes Contre Sainte-Beuve, a man whose name sounds like the noise a cow makes. (Addendum: Paulhan, too, notes that “Sainte-Beuve attempted to classify writers’ minds; their works seemed inconsequential to him.”)

And, dabbling too, I approach Jean Paulhan’s 1941 The Flowers of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature (University of Illinois Press, 2006), translated by Michael Syrotinski. Isn’t it enough that he begins with an apparently made-up epigraph?

As I was about the repeat the words that this kind native woman taught, me, she shouted out: “Stop! Each one can only be used once . . .”
—Botzarro’s Travel Journal, XV

(The Père Botzarro, along with “Alerte”—“for whom poetry seems so serious that he has taken the decision to stop writing it”—and “Innocent Fèvre” and “Juvignet” and some others, likely due to Paulhan’s “propensity for playful invention.”) The book is full of lines like “Aragon calls literature a machine that turns people into morons, and calls men of letters crabs.” Or: “Gourmont adds that a personal work quickly becomes obscure if it is a failure, banal if it is a success, and discouraging in any event.” (So gutting the flopping fish one’s land’d. “The banality of success surrounds us”—what Creeley might’ve admitted, had he the wherewithal.) Or: “Just as there is no revelation that literature is not expected to provide, so there is no contempt it does not also seem to deserve. And every young writer is astonished that anyone can stand to be a writer. Almost the only way we can manage to talk about novels, style, literature, or art is by using ruses, or new words, which do not yet seem offensive. . . . If it is true that criticism is the counterpart to the literary arts, and in a sense their conscience, we have to admit that literature these days does not have a clear conscience.”

What Paulhan is concern’d with is the continual rut of language’s codification (he calls it Rhetoric). Opposed to that is “Terror,” a demand for continual novelty. Syrotinski:

Terror . . . stands for a decisive turning point in French history, and more specifically in French literary history. This is described by Paulhan as a shift from the rule-bound imperatives of rhetoric and genre to the gradual abandonment of these rules in Romanticism and its successors, with the consequent search for greater originality of expression. This opposing imperative is what Paulhan terms Terror. Terrorist writers are those who demand continual invention and renewal, and denounce rhetoric’s codification of language, it tendency to stultify the spirit and impoverish human experience.

(Suddenly the figure of “Alerte” seems less a stand-in for Rimbaud, more akin to Laura (Riding) Jackson, particularly the (Riding) Jackson of Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. “If one used words as possessed of their meanings so thoroughly that they had no existence except as meaning what they meant, one would have to—in the use of them—mean what they meant, have in mind to express what they expressed. Otherwise, one would be, while seemingly at one with the sense of one’s words, perpetrating a pretence with them, or, at best, putting oneself through an exercise in self-frustration.” So saith Schuyler B. Jackson in the (1967) “Epigraph” to that book.) What the refreshingly suspicious Paulhan notes (“I’m simply suspicious of a revolt, or a dispossession, which comes along so opportunely to get us out of trouble”) is precisely how illusory the seeming difference between Terror and Rhetoric is, how both the drive toward endless originality and the longings for a stable language end up, as Syrotinski notes, “enslaved to language,” Terror “trying to bypass it” and Rhetoric stuck with the canned expressiveness of cliché. Paulhan:

For Terror is above all dependent upon language in a general sense, in that it condemns a writer to say only what a certain state of language leaves him free to express: He is restricted to those areas of feeling and thought where language has not yet been overused. That is not all: No writer is more preoccupied with words than the one who at every point sets out to get rid of them, to get away from them, or to reinvent them.

Terror-writing is blind to its own rhetorical status, blind to its limits as (one is tempt’d by one’s inner graduate student to say) always already codify’d language. (See FlarfCo®’s extremely limit’d “palette.” Examine briefly—it won’t require lengthy study—exactly what it condemns a writer to “express.”)

(Again the need, reading Paulhan, to quote that thing out of Barthes’s Roland Barthes: “a Doxa (a popular opinion) is posited, intolerable; to free myself of it, I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek further for a new paradox . . .”) The only thing to do: keep the Janus-faced god that is literature turning (at high enough speed, the two faces merge into one). (That’s a kind of barmy mystical soft-shoe off the quibbling-stage, and resolves exactly nothing.)

Jean Paulhan, 1884-1968

Jean Dubuffet, “Jean Paulhan,” 1946
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

A Window, Philadelphia

A YEAR

CXCI
Copernicus jettison’d the Ptolemaic
paradigm of an order’d
universe, The Jetsons got
oust’d off the net-
works before the introduction
of the euro. Empiricism
of the “straight reply”
is the straight reply.
Napping scores the brain-
cells for a post-
preprocess’d bout with slouchy
diligence, a disposition session
wherein the idiocy folds
appear pre-creased, so
easy it is to
say the Skokie thing.
I am trying to
keep up a high-
dollar ratio between militantly
unmitigated musical sawing wild
and bash ratiocinatory stress-
relations: who can’t see
that? A robin is
singing its cheery [beat]
cheerio nonsense high up
in a red oak:
there’s always a robin
hereabouts doing that shit,
it’s Michigan after all.
I like to think
I hear Robert Duncan
intoning a sotto voce
count-off during that
pause in the robin-
blaze. That guy: talk’d
a continual circuitry—all
throughout the patient dis-
mantling of a noise
he’d be there talking.
What’s gamut for one’s
elixir for another. “Oh
Ptolemy,” one says—stretching
it (the word) out
like tea with boysenberry
jam—“I miss’d my
chance to say ‘Meet
you in the Eurozone!’”

—

Lazy. Trying to comprehend what Lezama Lima means (what anybody means) by “image.” Here (out of the excellent José Lezama Lima: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), edited by Ernesto Livon-Grosman) Lezama Lima is responding to a query by Armando Alvarez Bravo (“Image in your poetry is a motif, a theme, a concern. It arises as a defense against realities that become realities by their own momentum, but, at the same time, it arises as a force. How do you establish the relationships between image and metaphor?”):

In terms of my poetic system of the world, metaphor and image have as much in the way of carnality or living flesh within the poem as they have in the way of philosophical efficacy, external world, or essential reason. One of the mysteries of poetry is the relationship between the analogue or connective force of metaphor, which advances and by so doing creates what we might call the substantive ground of poetry, and this advance through infinite analogies to a final point where the image is located, which image has a powerful regressive force, capable of covering all the substantiveness. The relation between metaphor and image can be likened to a horse that can both fly and swim and persists within a resistant substance, which is what we may consider the image to be. The image is the reality of the invisible world. Thus the Greeks placed images as populators of the world of the dead. I believe that the marvel of a poem is that it manages to create a body, a resistant substance set between a metaphor that advances by creating infinite connections and a final image that assures the survival of that substance, that poiesis. . . . The connections of metaphor are progressive and infinite. The firecovering that the image forms over the substantiveness of poetry is as unitary and fixed as a star. That’s why I state in one of my poems this deep paradox of poetry: that love is not made caressingly from pore to pore, but from pore to star, where space forms a suspension and the body plunges down and swims at length.

Something, Toto, tells me we’re a long way off “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” no? Although: Pound’s sense of the instantaneity of the “presentation”—the suddenness of that unveiling (“It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth . . .”)—seems akin to Lezama Lima’s breathtaking sense of liberation (“the body plunges down”). What is absent here (if one insists on translating it into a norteamericano context): a sense of the “thingness” of the physical world as what Lezama Lima calls the “substantive ground.” It’s as if metaphor (a cycle of unending replacements) leaps into motion of its own accord, only to arrive (land, “ground”?) somehow (“the marvel of a poem is”) at “a final point where the image is located.” “Of its own accord”—I trust that’s what the Williams of Spring and All would call “imagination” (“an actual force comparable to electricity or steam”):

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it—It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but—

And Williams’s defining line—“poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself”—swoops in the complete the ellipsis. (Or: “As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight”—an image rather oddly akin to Lezama Lima’s “horse that can both fly and swim and persists within a resistant substance.”) Too, like Lezama Lima, isn’t Williams suggesting that the triggering spark of poiesis (“independent—moving at will from one thing to another”) is “not ‘like’ anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth”:

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 the 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.

At which point my recognizably “lazy” brain-box need’d a long walk through the aster-spiked fields under the spray’d-out recklessness of the salutary stars: not a “fit” but a unitary skinless experience.

José Lezama Lima, 1910-1976

Ferns

Read through, with pleasure, Arthur Sze’s new book, The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009). Sze is a cataloguer, ranging widely to heap up details, capable of sudden shifts of scale (“a Life photograph / of bodies piled up in Nanjing; koi mouth / the surface near a waterfall”), displacements of point of view (“Meandering across a field with wild asparagus, / I write with my body the character for grass, / water, transformation, ache to be one with the spring”). He eases comfortably through (that is to say, accumulates—lists—with no sense of encumbrance or “study”) all sorts of cultural tesserae (a Sze word) and detritus (Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Native American), scientific fact, natural history, workingmen’s manner and lingo and ways, and is adept at sifting the quotidian mulch and surround for the pertinent moment, or noise, or comment. He knows the names of things and is particular and deft in usage, an economy of “right delivery.” Here’s one of the longer pieces in The Gingko Light:

Chrysalis

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost,

as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink;
on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light

undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous
as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to

seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom

of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed
jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar

slices through whales, even as a portion
of male dorsal fin is served to the captain

of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from

a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush.
Moistening an envelope before sealing it,

I recall the slight noise you made when I
grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out

the chalk-blue flowering plant by the door,

I watered until it revived from the roots.
The song of a knife sharpener in an alley

passes through the mind of a microbiologist
before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery.

The first night of autumn has singed

bell peppers by the fence, while budding
chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground.

Observing people conversing at a nearby table,
he visualizes the momentary convergence

and divergence of lines passing through a point.

The wisteria along the porch never blooms;
a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water

from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes
downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes.

An ex-army officer turned critic frets

over the composition of a search committee,
snickers and disparages rival candidates.

A welder, who turns away for a few seconds
to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line

of trucks backed up on an international overpass

where exhaust spews onto houses below.
The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain,

but the naming of a day will not transform it,
nor will the mathematics of time halt.

An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly

thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two-
lobed, with forking parallel veins but no

midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty,
while ginkgos along a street dropping gold

leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian.

Once thought to be extinct, the gingko was
discovered in Himalayan monasteries and

propagated back into the world. Although I
cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost

trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway,

I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange
bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand,

lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs,
we construct a ground to render a space

our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse

diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and
sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned

to fanned fingertips, debouch into plentitude.
Venus vanishes in a brightening sky:

the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists.

You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001
to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death

and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning.
I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings,

the bow of a long liner thudding on waves,

crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle,
echoes of humpback whales. In silence dancers

concentrate on movements on stage; lilacs bud
by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate,

I rouse to a 3 a.m. December rain on the skylight.

A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway,
oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields

of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace;
whale flukes break the water as it dives.

The path of totality is not marked by

a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface
at three thousand kilometers per hour.

Our eyelashes attune to each other.
At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull

and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts

of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish.
The Shang carved characters in the skulls

of their enemies, but what transpired here?
You do not need to steep turtle shells

in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone

dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed
while you admire the yellow blossoms of

a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs
fragrance from a line of onions in her garden;

you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea.

The continuous bifurcates into the segmented
as the broken extends. Someone steals

a newspaper while we snooze. A tiger
swallowtail lands on a patio columbine;

a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock.

Pushing aside branches of Russian olives
to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot

a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt.
Here chance and fate enmesh.

Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea,

savor the warmth at my fingertips,
aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth,

back and forth on water. Fins of spinner
dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts

to the north-northwest. What is not impelled?

Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hair brush;
barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still

my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens
gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples

on branches are weightless against dawn.

Elsewhere Sze admits that “The pieces of a life stay pieces / at the end,” but here there is (in spite of, or because of that “mindless beauty of the quotidian”?) a sense of fullness and release (concomitant with the world and its lovely variousness), a “debouch into plentitude.” (That delicate sexual moment—“we rock and / sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned / to fanned fingertips”—is echo’d in “We rock back and forth, // back and forth on water,” whilst the “fan” of the gingko leaf is mimick’d in the lovers’ hands.) I like the tiniest of notes—“lilacs bud / by a gate”—and how it thrusts the great cataloguer Whitman into the poem. I like how Sze registers a stop’d incomplete (coming and going) shapeliness not unlike the poem’s own: “Observing people conversing at a nearby table, / he visualizes the momentary convergence // and divergence of lines passing through a point.” I like the jagged materiality of “The continuous bifurcates into the segmented / as the broken extends,” a generality become particular (and illustrative of itself) through its sounding. I like the buzzing z’s and near-z’s (in “hibiscus” and “brush”) in the miniature list of “Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hair brush”—Sze working the sound-registry. I love the story of the lost gingko re-found “propagated back into the world” and the slightest hint of allegory in the fossil imprint’d gingko leaf’s “momentary beauty” versus the “mindless beauty” of the drop’d gold leaves of the present.

There is little commentary, little explicatory verbiage (one sees it in the eruption of the line “Here chance and fate enmesh,” counter to the patient weightlessness of “things and the doings of things” that comprises the piece). There is a vivid ongoing sense of return and recovery—beginning with the terrific first line, “Corpses push up through thawing permafrost”—or openings (“the moments dilate”) and closings (“about to / seal a borax capsule”; “Moistening an envelope before sealing it”), that I associate with a kind of war between the processual continuum (“nor will the mathematics of time halt”) and its momentary (of necessity) reprieve in convergence (a poem). Sze says at the end of “Departures and Arrivals”: “Each moment in time is a hub.” The chrysalis-like “shriveled apples / on branches . . . weightless against dawn” at the end of “Chrysalis” wheel around the same hub as the permafrost-freed corpses, echoing and exchanging energies (“What is not impelled?”), all of it about to lapse “back into the world.” (It is here that Sze’s question, “Is Venus at dusk as luminous / as Venus at dawn?” is answer’d with an always provisional yes.)

Arthur Sze
(Photograph by Margaret Randall)

A YEAR

CXC
Either everything is palpably here—that
tiger lily bobbing up colossally orange
with mole-sized spots, the ivory-

color’d moon’s hammer’d thin fatidic look
of being preoccupy’d somewhere beyond ken,
the rose with its red brush’d

up like fur—or everything is
part of a rotary chain of
beleaguer’d correspondences routinely haul’d forth by

a system of pulleys hid deep
in the skulls of undone robots.
Dunned one is by possibility, though

so what? What if that insect—
one of the rarer hymenoptera—settling
down weightless into the sparsely-hair’d

zone of one’s wrist-bone, is
a mechanical toy so adequately executed,
so fill’d with grammar and rudiments

of insect-design the whole worldly
apparatus clowns in around it? The
way a hummed strain of music

is proviso enough for a complete
orchestra to bloom up melodic and
divine: sustainably engendering God-knows-what.

—

Sontag (the aphorist): “Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. . . . Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish.”

Sontag (the binarist): “The artist ends by choosing between two inherently limiting alternatives, forced to take a position that is either servile or insolent. Either he flatters or appeases his audience, giving them what they already know, or he commits an aggression against his audience, giving them what they don’t want.”

Sontag (on Barthes): “Barthes’s strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries of situations and ideas—their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.”

Sontag (on Artaud, on “the willed classic,” essential fraudulence of): “He is an example of the willed classic—an author whom the culture attempts to assimilate but who remains profoundly undigestible. One use of literary respectability in our time—and an important part of the complex career of literary modernism—is to make acceptable an outrageous, essentially forbidding author, who becomes a classic on the basis of the many interesting things to be said about the work that scarcely convey (perhaps even conceal) the real nature of the work itself, which may be, among other things, extremely boring or morally monstrous or terribly painful to read.”

Just some notes I kept thinking of use (for something) put here in abeyance (of that something).

Some Clouds, Dryden, New York

A YEAR

CLXXXIX
Rousseau rubbing himself
up with hairy-
stem’d saxifrage, or
Beckett’s solitary walks—
consider’d, too, a
vice, or ample
evidence of one—
in a ‘churn
of stale words.’
Errant humors took.
A murky consensual
thing array’d against
stasis, a post-
fuck cigarette flick’d
into semi-permanent
orbit. That gap-
tooth’d girl tending
a red barn
full of books,
cinnamon-scent’d bedlam
or ruttish BO.
The world’s indebt’d
to its irretrievable
pieces, its hints
and bumps unmentionable,
its unrecord’d splinters
off monumental gaffes,
grotesqueries of signage
misspell’d, inassimilable, dumb.
Nerf Devanagari alphabetickals.
Spittin’ vocable gists.
The way the
Cohocton merges with
the Mud at
Savona, slips blue
through scree like
a truckler, or
a miscreant—every
crepitant slosh a
gush metaphysical, the
ineluctable essence of
the earth momentarily
sound’d out, resounding
with a fierce
and conciliatory serenity
that lies dislodged
for looks, a
cheat, visibly incomplete.

—

Proceeding with uncertainty lodged out front, like a snowplow. I must admit to a rather tenuous sense of Blogland of late—I return and scan the high yellow meadows with my binoculars and see what? There’s the gaseous Kevin Killian quoting the gaseous Charles Bernstein, who increasingly appears determined to remake himself into a New York School poet:

Shaw [Lytle Shaw in Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie] sees O’Hara’s art writing as a powerful and necessary counter to the monological and hyperprofessional rigidity that descends from Clement Greenberg (who dismissed O’Hara’s art writing) to Michael Fried and, I’d add, extends to the October brand, the epitome of, let’s just say, High Orthodoxical art criticism. For if the luminous rigor and prodigious insights of Greenberg and Fried end in the tragedy of misrecognition, the self-serious vanguardism of the High Orthodoxical ends in the farce of academic gate-keeping and market validation. In other words, Greenberg’s and Fried’s insistence on conviction and agonism morphed into a practice of regulation by exclusion.

Which is blackly funny if one considers the “self-serious vanguardism of the High Orthodoxical” “post-avant” misérables like, say, Marjorie Perloff or (junior “member”) Ron Silliman (or Bernstein himself, or Barrett Watten, keeper of the censor’d Grand Piano “response” archive—uh, where is that larghissimo / ritardando Piano anyhow?) with a completely like practice—“morphed” out of “heroic”-period Language writing “agonism”—of “regulation by exclusion.” It’s laughable to see Bernstein’s contort’d attempt to recuperate O’Hara’s “complicit and promiscuous criticism [that is, an essentially “poetic” / “lyric” criticism] that stands in stark contrast to the ideologies of formalist criticism of his time” for the current Doxa academickal of, precisely, Bernstein & Co.

(Killian does manage to point out how Bernstein—in writing about Shaw’s book under the title “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?”—is echoing cut-up writer Brion Gysin’s thirty year old statement that “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage”—Killian: “You don’t even name him”—though, no hard-nosed Woodward he, immediately allows Bernstein an out, the ejaculatory: “I love Kenny, Kenny Goldsmith, but how many times have I gone to a reading by him and heard him say that poetry is fifty years behind art!” We snickered. “Well, he doesn’t do that any more ‘cause I jumped up so many times.”) Self-satisfy’d art yokels yukking it up. (Nearly as rich as Silliman’s referring recently to the “topic sentence”—“Disjunction is dead”—of Goldsmith’s piece of inane and asinine flatulence “for” Poetry. How rich to see Silliman intoning “no one means a word of it” and “I don’t think he’s arguing against disjunction”—almost worrying, one thinks, that the epigone New Sentence, brazenly clumsy knockoff of Pound’s imagist juxtapositions, ’s had its day in the sun.) “We snickered,” indeed. Puff piece giveaway: how Killian “quotes” the gaseous Bernstein’s smarm (“that’s not to say that among the very worthy art writers writing now, people we all know, people in this room, there’s not some brilliant writing . . .”) as retrospect’d trailer to the main event: “At that moment . . . Susan Bee . . . firing up a projector.” “Why, here come’s one now.” Insufferable, homeys.

—

Happy to see Ben Friedlander’s public writing (“American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson”), particularly the recent “Lint” entry (“Minute shreds of information gathering in my head, as in a pocket or belly button . . .)—recalling a rangy notational style of Hotel Point days I apparently abandon’d without noticing (I recall “Scratchpad Dumps”). Pleasing: report of Julia Ward Howe’s arming herself with an “old stump of a pen” because “attacks of versification . . . visited me in the night.” (Though that “old stump” seems excessively literary, that is to say untrustworthy.)

I like Friedlander’s insistence on troubling the lineage, or the way lineage is (repeatedly) portray’d by poetry’s quartermasters, laying out the provisions like so many pairs of boots (the way I see the lines “It’s a fiction to say that the American sonnet developed out of the British, as if poetry were a river with tributaries or a tree with branches. Relationships within tradition are not determinate in that way, though it may be said that tradition ‘has currents’ or ‘grows’” and “It makes as much sense to say that Petrarch enlarged the British tradition whenever he was read as to say the opposite: that the British poets enlarged the Italian tradition whenever they wrote.” Recalling the argument that Virgil made Homer Homer.

While I remain unconvinced (a way of saying “constitutionally incapable of reading rhyme”) of a need to reassess the high and low recesses of nineteenth century American literature, I am took by Friedlander’s finesse and persistence in the matter. And here, in the quoted lines of Tuckerman, I see something I am sorry to miss: that “grasshopper molasses-mouthed,” if only for the reminder of hands cover’d with “tobacco juice,” or of thwart’d attempts to capture the flying Carolina grasshoppers along the sandy logging roads of northern Michigan. (Tuckerman’s detail is nearly as succinct and “right” as Toni Morrison’s “yam-breasted” robins in Sula.)

—

For Richard Owens’s brilliant essay call’d “Misc. Notes on Flarf, Conceptual Writing &c.”: thanks and bravo. I like, in its midst:

Nihil Novi. WCW remarks somewhere or other than the avant-garde is nothing more than a set of stubborn peasant loyalties. An uninterrogated fidelity to innovation is undoubtedly one of these loyalties.

Team mentality. Those oozing glam-conglomerate groupuscules. How lineage is about nodding politely to the boss that he may notice. Owens: “At bottom there’s nothing at all fundamentally new about the ‘new writing.’ The new boss bears a striking resemblance to the old boss. Perhaps defetishizing innovation and directing attention away from newness and toward shared concerns or sources of pleasure might be the most innovative thing any contemporary writing could hope to achieve.” And, after a terrific romp-exposé of Gary Sullivan’s piece of supposedly comic “avant-garde bravado” against a “delightfully easy target,” Owens nails it: “This is precisely the sort of Malthusian survival-of-the-fittest approach to cultural production and criticism that greases the gears of the market. These approaches are always rewarded. Big fucking surprise.”

Do the work and put it where anybody’s able to read it. I always think of O’Hara’s “you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may.” And “that’s not why you fell in love in the first place”—or, if you did, if you think maybe a swell notoriety or a funky hat or a teaching job or a summer in France comes with the writing territory, you probably ought to be run out of town.

Carolina Grasshopper

A Window, Ithaca, New York

A YEAR

CLXXXVIII
Morning’s nipple’s pucker’d up—
anticipating a greedy mouth.
There’s a kind of
congestion, a shoring against
use, or a measure
of disuse, a gambit
the way the sun
crimps in its fingers,
comes up out of
the sagging power lines
like a fist. Kapow!
says the day, eager
to proceed, to fetch
some eats, scrub down,
smooth a gap-tooth’d
comb through the dozen
or so hairs remaining.
Nulla dies sine linea—
what Balzac, that prize-
fighter, thickish and preening,
pouch-jowly and cape-
draped in a sketch
by Rodin, pinion’d to
the scriptorium wall. Mallarmé,
a shirt-waist’d nebulosity
jerking vaguely left and
right like a velocipedist,
routinely declaim’d how one
oughtn’t begin a sentence
with a monosyllable, ineffectual
(impotent) engine for hauling
forth any statement of
note. Zola’s scuffling days
mark’d by the night-
shirt he wore, unable
to go out, coat
and trousers pawn’d for
eggs, happy and supremely
confident of ‘a capacity
for work,’ a mistress
call’d it ‘going Arab.’
And here it is.

—

Ah, driving. In Olean, thinking of a Main Street dinner some thirty years back, the only way that particular memory’s accessible, passing through. Or of Robert Lax, friend of Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt, who return’d there—hometown—at millennium’s end after years of hollowing-out hermitry living on the Greek island of Patmos. Riparian memory mode, driving is. In between the onslaughts of reverying, one attempts to remember the names of the creeks and rivers—French, Prendergast, Cassadaga, Conewango, Cold Spring, Olean, Oil, one scans the skies for hawks, one makes a million perfect and imperfect photographs with reusable (interchangeable, and of supremely high resolution) pixils of one’s own pinhole-perfect brain-box, a kind of camera obscura, veil’d chamber of one’s richesse.

(Looking for a photograph of Robert Lax, finding lines apropos the morning, presumably out of Circus of the Sun:

The silver morning shifts her birds
From tree to tree;
Young green fires burn along the branch;
The river moves but each wave holds a place,
Pattern of knives above the juggling tide.

Now in the south, the circus of the sun
Lays out its route, lifts the white tent,
Parades the pachyderm,
And pins the green chameleon to the cloth.
Coffee-mists rise above the gabbling cook-tent;
Aerialists web above the tumblers’ ring;

Behold! In flaming silk, the acrobat,
The wire-walking sun.

Lax did, pre-Greece, travel with the Cristiani Family Circus in Canada.)

Robert Lax, 1915-2000

Ithaca, though, is ruin’d. You can’t go home again. Collegetown buckling under the weight of fake-stone monstrosities, six or eight story eye-sores too tall for the hill. Sense of the hippies in the hills ethos become self-congratulatory, codify’d. Cornell cramming one new building in after another (whilst the gorge-crowding James Stirling-design’d Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts—that I watch’d being construct’d in the late-’eighties before I left—looks worn, dirty, broken, and rather dated with its postmodern “quotes” of campanile, &c.) The used bookstores mostly expensive and stock’d with junk. The little reading I managed consolatory (out of the Goncourt Journals, dated 2 January 1867):

A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling, and chatty, friendly browsing.

Off to check my traplines, see what’s transpired in my short absence.

Failure of stone veneer, James Stirling’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Cornell University (1989).
(Photograph by Jonathan Ochshorn)

A Window, Philadelphia

A YEAR

CLXXXIII
Cold rain, sore throat
routing out the right
discoursing Leland. Or Betty,
who of nothingness manufactured
a tract regarding justly
proportion’d reagents, and wax.
A busy thing, imponderable
in its unnerving legginess,
though wrongly accusatory, like
the vengeance one sees
dealt out by nature.
Attention, normally slow at
joinery, regimen-wary, un-
hook’d, hard to weigh
out in the hand.
Today it’s as if
its brassiere is un-
hook’d, causing the two
pans of its scale
to dash madly back
and forth, or up
and down, like two
twins fighting for top
bunk. Oh I am
here to have it
out with the fuss-
budgets of metaphorical romps,
the asinine God’s begat
materialists, the pure object-
beholders, the plethora-denying
boobs of the fact.
The rufous-head’d wood
thrush is up singing
a limpid slurry three-
note that’s unmitigated angelic
discard, pure au-delà,
pure eau-de-vie,
the terrestrial trading up
through a succession of
attending gaffes, split infinities,
celestial hand-me-downs.

—

If I’d been savvy rather than anxious (raging mal à la gorge, work heebie-jeebies, incipient east-scoot) yesterday, I’d “of” track’d down the Edwin Denby piece that’s the result of that walk with Willem de Kooning with all its talk of “dispersed compositions” of debris, and scale. Call’d “The Silence at Night” (it’s found in the 1948 In Public, In Private, though probably dates earlier)—and Denby runs a little dedicatory reminder under the title: “(The designs on the sidewalk Bill pointed out)”:

The sidewalk cracks, gumspots, the water, the bits of refuse,
They reach out and bloom under arclight, neonlight—
Luck has uncovered this bloom as a by-produce
Having flowered too out behind the frightful stars of night.
And these cerise and lilac strewn fancies, open to bums
Who lie poisoned in vast delivery portals,
These pictures, sat on by the cats that watch the slums,
Are a bouquet luck has dropped here suitable to mortals.
So honey, it’s lucky how we keep throwing away
Honey, it’s lucky how it’s no use anyway
Oh honey, it’s lucky no one knows the way
Listen chum if there’s that much luck then it don’t pay.
The echoes of a voice in the dark of a street
Roar when the pumping heart, bop, stops for a beat.

I like that honey of a Greek chorus toward the end, Williamsesque, American speech. I like the awkward “by-produce” and “portals” (a word that nearly always recalls O’Hara’s “Rhapsody”: “515 Madison Avenue / door to heaven? portal / stopped realities and eternal licentiousness”). I like the tipped-in “bop” (making me even more curious as to the date of its composition: is it a nod to the “bebop” coming out of ’thirties swing in the early ’forties?) I like the intrusion of the highly-“dict’d” “cerise” against the “it don’t pay.” I try to relate the title to something else Denby relates in the piece call’d “The Thirties.” Recalling late night talk-sessions at de Kooning’s loft, Denby writes of remembering “someone saying, ‘Bill, you haven’t said a word for half an hour.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, his voice rising like a New Yorker’s to falsetto with surprise,’ I was just noticing that, too.’”

That attending—even to one’s own quietness—Denby relates to de Kooning’s insistence on the responsibility of the artist to (I refuse to even say “the vex’d question of”) self. De Kooning: “All an artist has left to work with is his self-consciousness.” (And cruising up mid-sentence, out of “In Memory of My Feelings,” the terrific opening lines: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent / and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. / He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.” Is that O’Hara’s version of Emerson’s rip out of “Nature”?

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.

Maybe not. Though I am tempt’d to argue for a continuity, for a quietly consternated imbalance trying (and barely succeeding) to right itself, that is “how art (all art) works.”) Denby says of de Kooning’s painting that “he wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it.” And, of de Kooning’s desired “form”: “a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all over the canvas at once.” Against “seduction and climax” (narrative), a “vibration” (Emerson’s “currents”?) Denby: “One could not get into the picture by way of any detail, one had to get into it all at once.” (See O’Hara’s “Easter,” or “Second Avenue.”) In a 1954 essay titled “Forms in Motion and Thought,” Denby writes:

In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is a part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance; one keeps on doing it, and step by step the mass of the body moves about. But the action is more fun and risk increases when the dancers step to a rhythmic beat of music. Then the pulse of the downbeat can lift the dancer as he takes a step, it can carry him through the air for a moment; and the next downbeat can do it again.

(“Out of and into balance” recalls C. S. Giscombe's terrific memoir Into and Out of Dislocation, that phrase, coming out of a doctor’s remark regarding a dislocated shoulder, coming to “stand for” the movements of a black nineteenth-century Jamaican across the North American continent, and Giscombe’s own trajectory up into British Columbia in chase only partly genealogical.) Naturally, in “applying” that “rhythmic beat” to writing, or painting, one need not make the obvious connection to word (or syllable) beat, (or brushstroke)—one thinks of the slow beat of the hours, or the days. (I simply cannot think of rhythm without Joyce’s line out of “The Dead” deviling me: how “An irregular musketry of applause” “escorts” so and so to the piano, or, post-performance, away.) Denby, too, nearly provides a poetic strategy in one tiny description of talk: “I remember people talking intently and listening intently and then everybody burst out laughing and started off intent on another tack.” Simple as that. Intensity, release, the beat of it. (And, distantly, I recall a night in Milton Kessler’s kitchen in Binghamton, New York, with John Logan, extremely drunk—everybody extremely drunk—spouting a theory of how poetry resembles surfing, mounting and riding the diminishing wave. In one Logan poem, “Honolulu and Back”: “all day long they rode / Surf in the summer sun. Waves knock, and gun.”)

Rhythm and tack and pause, the connectors eschew’d. I like what Denby writes about the “critic”:

The existence of an “authoritative critic” or of a “definitive evaluation” is a fiction like that of a sea serpent. Everybody know s the wild errors of judgment even the best critics of the past have made; it is easier to agree with contemporary judgments but no more likely they are right. It seems to me that it is not the critic’s historic function to have the right opinions but to have interesting ones. He talks but he has nothing to sell. His social value is that of a man standing on a street corner talking so intently about his subject that he doesn’t realize how peculiar he looks doing it. The intentness of his interest makes people who don’t know what he’s talking about believe that whatever it is, it must be real somehow . . .

One quote deserves another: ““So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—where, certes, lies the new found land.

—

Off another few days. To Ithaca, whence once I scuffl’d, young and perfervid. Think of the opening to Richard Fariña’s marvelous Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me:

      To Athené then.
      Young Gnossos Pappadopoulis, furry Pooh Bear, keeper of the flame, voyaged back from the asphalt seas of the great wasted land: oh highways U.S. 40 and unyielding 66, I am home to the glacier-gnawed gorges, the fingers of lakes, the golden girls of Westchester and Shaker Heights. See me loud with lies, big boots stomping, mind awash with schemes.

Correspondents of late unbelabor’d by my missives, please note:

I'm with you in Rockland
      in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
      journey on the highway across America in tears
      to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Edwin Denby, 1903–1983
(Photograph by Peter Hujar)

Chair and Table, Philadelphia

A YEAR

CLXXXII
The lightning bugs work
the mullion’d field, cutting
against the grid, primitive
and greenly luminous. Fat
air so humid it
claps its formlessness around
each heav’d out sigh
of cosmic fortitude. There.
How odd that Ezra
Pound in the ‘devilish
hot’ summer of 1912,
after hiking through ‘thoroughly
damnable’ flies towards Puivert,
and noting Montségur with
‘its stilt of a
mountain with a little
snow behind it,’ complain’d
he lack’d the common
sense to wait for
‘the diligence.’ How nineteenth-
century that diligence is!
Off the ‘top of
a Diligence, Turner sketched,
on the back of
a letter, Heidelberg’—sentences
mimicking the rhythm of
the conveyance. The soughing
of a breeze works
the solemn mulberry leaves
unseen, the smallest parcel
of the unencompassable world.

—

Edwin Denby, in a 1962 essay call’d “The Thirties”:

I remember walking at night in Chelsea with Bill during the depression, and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon-light—neon-signs were few then—and I remember the scale in the compositions was too big for me to see it. Luckily I could imagine it. At the time Rudy Burckhardt was taking photographs of New York that keep open the moment its transient buildings spread their unknown and unequalled harmonies of scale. I could watch the scale like a magnanimous motion on these undistorted photographs; but in everyday looking about, it kept spreading beyond the field of sight. At the time we all talked a great deal about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy and not small scale.

“Bill” being Willem de Kooning, of course. Quoted by Phillip Lopate in Rudy Burckhardt (Harry N. Abrams, 2004), a fine big book of photographs, with, too, an essay by Vincent Katz. I immediately think of Tom Clark’s lines “The color of stepped on gum / is the color of our times.” “Dispersed compositions”—meaning, in one sense, the constant compositions of everyday life—mark of chronic, honed, and obstinate attending. (Differing in several orders of magnitude—including moral magnitude—from the reckless flurries of mechanical constructivism so popular “today.” How modest—and assumed, and rare—Denby’s “in everyday looking about”!) I am struck by what Denby notes along several lines. The poem I am writing semi-publicly call’d “A Year” begins (for one thing) with “If meaning changes with scale, a collapsible / Stage” (it read “Theater” before I revised it, noticing that I’d directly channel’d Rodrigo Toscano), and one of my “exploratory concerns” (oh my) is what it means to work at a scale wherein one is unable to see the extent of one’s materials at any single moment (even at completion). “Too big for me to see it.” Replacing the frame of space (the single page, the camera’s viewfinder) with the frame of time (the year, the shutter speed, the sequence, the movie). In my daub-photographs, I am challenged by landscape (or cityscape): I tend to make pictures of small arrangements, close-ups, single objects. Rudy Burckhardt, coming to New York in 1935:

I was quite overwhelmed with its grandeur and ceaseless energy . . . The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and people in the street [I love how that little fragment of Denby’s title “Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street” just lies there awaiting its day. Or is Burckhardt nodding to Denby?] astonished me and it took a couple of years before I was ready to photograph . . . I started with details. Setting up a 9 x 12 cm view camera on a tripod I made plain, direct photos of walls, building entrances, stand pipes, candy stores, barbershops, Coca Cola or telephone signs.

Now the whole world (some say) is New York: “grandeur and ceaseless energy,” “beyond the field of sight.” Against the argument that one “captures” it by proportionate immodesty, ga-ga vrooming in the dizzying gyrosphere, I’d pose Burckhardt’s “plain, direct” details, the color of gum.

Rudy Burckhardt, “Legs of Woman Walking Across Manhole Cover, New York City,” 1939
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Rudy Burckhardt, “Eagle Barber Shop Window, New York City,” 1939
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Rudy Burckhardt, “Checkerboard Tiled Wall Detail with Ice Cream Advertisements, New York City,” 1939
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)