Simplest Things Last

STL #101: No Dylanologist II

2011-07-07T20:59:00.000-04:00

A month or so ago, I posted "No Dylanologist I" in honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. The title was a syntactic inversion that actually sounded good in the draft version, but came out as clumsy as a song writer groping for a rhyme. What it means is that I have not pursued Dylan as a subject with anything like the assiduity of some of his most dedicated amateur or academic aficionados. Nevertheless, I did just finish a book about his album Highway 61 Revisited, which as it happens is not the first book about him or his work that I've read, so I suppose I know something about his music. Given that he also figured in many of Ellen Willis's essays in the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps that I also recently finished, I thought I might come back to Dylan as lens to talk about music writing, rather than dig any deeper into his music as such. So it looks like I'm no Dylanologist, again.

I hedged on whether to say "music writing" or "writing about music" above. The whole activity is fraught, from the name onward. "Music writing," because of its very laxity, is more encompassing than "writing about music." Much music writing is not necessarily about music, but about the production of or personalities behind the music, or of the cultural or social contexts of the music. Writing about music as such can fall into several traps. Think of an axis with two poles, descriptive and interpretive. Now imagine a perpendicular axis ranging from technical or impressionistic. Technical description or interpretation of music is beyond my capabilities to write or to fully understand. I'm stuck in the camp of pure impressionism--the subjective response to the music, to what it makes me feel or think of. This is the heart of criticism, but can lead to writing that is murky at best and solipsistic at worst.

With popular music, especially in the case of a songwriter like Dylan, there's a further split between talking about music or talking about lyrics. With some technical prowess, one might talk about the relationship of words and music, but in the case of Dylan the words have always been paramount. (The lyrics have been published without music on several occasions.) I number myself among ham-handed lyrical exegete of song lyrics, that often resort to gobbling quotations into the vague engines of interpretive prose. Here's a snippet from Mark Polizzotti''s Highway 61 Revisited stays away from the worst of this, though he does have a penchant for lyrical allusion--more than one ending is called as a "restless farewell." Polizzotti's short book on Highway 61 Revisited is in the attractive 33 1/3 series. Each book in this series pays tribute a classic album in one way or another. A variety of approaches are used, including fictional, descriptive reporting, and subjective impressionism. Polizzotti's book is largely descriptive of immediate context of the music's production and of the music itself (doing a nice job with the latter). As mentioned, he does some lyrical interpretation, mostly in identifying who the various songs may have been addressed to. In doing so, he makes Dylan's songs all seem like diatribes, like complaints against sundry individuals. That's true to an extent, but misses some of the songs' richness.

With popular music, you're probably better of working with context--how the work of the artist positions itself within a subculture, say, or how the culture at large reads it. The organization of Ellen Willis's gives us some guidance here: after an opening section of straightforward aesthetic criticism, there's a section on the context of fandom, one on the sixties, one of feminism, one called "The Navigator" that includes economic and geographic perspectives, and one that engages social class. Not that this was planned; this book collects columns from the 60s and 70s responding to what was actually going on in the world of pop music at the time. Willis, the first pop music critic of The New Yorker, wrote about a now fairly predictable swath of classic rock through early punk--Dylan, Velvets, CCR, Janis Joplin, New York Dolls. She was the first to notice Dylan's manipulation of his own persona--the artist providing context for himself. Between Polizzotti and especially Willis, I've come to understand Dylan much more as a man of his times, responding to his audience's responses to him as much as anything. That's not just self-obsession, since it invokes an underlying struggling for self-determination that was reaching a new high pitch in the 60s.

Good music writing is out there. I always read the current pop critic in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere Jones, and I read Matthew Perpetua's great Fluxblog on a regular basis too. There's still a lot of bad music writing too, but you can find that on your own. Since I'm not liable to be on the subject of writing about Dylan again anytime soon, I thought I might mention a couple of other titles worth looking at. First, there's Greil Marcus's Old Weird America. This, in Marcus's rhapsodic prose, traces the lineage between Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and The Basement Tapes. Anyone interested in Dylan should also read his memoirs, Chronicles. The first section, on the early sixties, is especially interesting for thinking about his folk period in a beat context.

STL #100: Objects of Fascination and Agents of Revelation

2011-07-01T10:53:00.002-04:00

It has taken 8 years to complete 100 posts; that's only a little more than a post a month. With my rededication to daily writing, I hope that I can return a bit closer to my weekly rate. In any case, I have decided to mark the occasion by writing in my favorite form: the list. Following is a varied list of things, mostly works of art but a few ideas or lifestyle accoutrements, I've become familiar with during the life span of STL. Some of these things I've written about, but most I haven't. The most significant thing I've noticed in compiling this list is that the books are all of my own choosing: I haven't been assigned a reading list this whole time. This list might be seen as a memoir of the last 8 years of my life, but then again that might be pushing it. I'll add a bit more commentary after the list.

Absu, "Ye Uttuku Spells"
Belgian ales
Charles Olson, Maximus Poems
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Jack Green's Fire the Bastards
Kill Bill
Graham Greene, The Comedians
Guy Davenport, Tatlin!
Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
Reality-based politics
Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina”
Eddie Campbell, How to be an Artist
"Lying In Bed On A Summer Morning," by Carl Rakosi
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Deep Red
Halloween
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Millennium Actress
Lost in Translation
Etre et Avoir
The Sopranos
The Wire
William Bronk
Watchmen, reluctantly
Seven Soldiers of Victory
Hendrick’s Gin
In the American Tree
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)
Bread crumb eggs
George Simenon
Django Reinhardt
Freaks and Geeks
My So-Called Life
Carson, NOX
Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
Fiery Furnaces, Rehearsing My Choir
Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel
Something Said
Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Out of Season
Joanna Newsom, Milk Eyed Mender
Sleater Kinney, One Beat
His Dark Materials
Battle Royale
John Cheever's Collected Short Stories
American Elf
Black Riders
Robert Duncan, "Opening of the Field"
Gilbert Godfery in The Aristocrats [2005]
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
Team America
The singularity
Tender Buttons
The Pound Era
Three Places in New England
Alban Berg, Violin Concerto
Matt Fraction, Casanova
The New American Poetry 1945-1960
The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
Immortal All Shall Fall
Deathspell Omega Chaining the Katcheon
Wardruna
Girl Talk, All Night
Lair of the Minotaur, "Let's Kill These Motherfuckers"
Dopethrone
Modern Life Is War “D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”
Mountain Goats “This Year”
Benji Hughes Love Extreme
Heartless Bastards, The Mountain
Opeth, Blackwater Park
Josephine Foster, Hazel Eyes I Will Follow
Cat Power The Greatest
No Thanks! Anthology
Haydn, Symphony 88
Robyn “Be Mine”
Spoon “Back to the Life"
Arcade Fire, Funeral
Dirty Weekend
Old Boy
The Rothko Chapel
“Appalachian Spring”
Audition
Enter the Void
Y The Last Man
Marcel Dzama
Battlestar Galactica
John Porcellino, King Cat
Can These Bones Live?
Wicker Man
Blow Up
King Lear (Russian film)
Mozart, Symphony 40
Brandenberg Concertos
Garth Merenghi's Dark Place
The Grey Album
Community
Song of Ice and Fire
Siraccha and Earl Grey Ice Cream
O Paon

A few explanations are in order. With the exception of a few pieces of classical music, everything on this list is from the second half of the twentieth century or later. That is where my interests drive me, but as I was drawing up the list I made a conscious decision to make it this way to relieve me of the obligation to include things because I felt I should. Tom Jones, some Shakespeare plays, Milton, and other things I read for the first time in the last eight years might otherwise be on here. I felt that by keeping them off would cut away pretense and help me perhaps discover more of my true inclinations.

Each work of art on this list was chosen because it keeps drawing me back in one way or another, offering more each time I revisit it. Some of the films (namely, Audition and Enter the Void) keep their claim on my psyche, but I doubt I will ever summon up the resolve to watch them again. What the works offer is different is each case: the goofy comedy of Garth Marenghi sounds different chords than Ed Dahlberg's jeremiad Can These Bones Live?. Dahlberg I'm sure would be mortified to be keeping company with much of this list--I notice that I trend lowbrow in much of my tastes. Looking over the list, I don't feel I can make any grand pronouncements, nor do I even understand why I include half a dozen foodstuffs and only two works of visual art. As with everything I write, this turns up more questions. Here's to the next 100 opportunities to figure out the answers.

"Are You Being Meta?" A Sketch Toward Community

2011-06-23T16:32:00.001-04:00

All I've been watching lately is the two seasons of Community. I love it more than any show I've discovered in a while, and we've been watching it in big batches--all the first season in a weekend, the second as fast as we could while still going to our jobs, and now we're working through it a second time, but just doing a few a night. I hadn't thought to write about it at first. It so compulsively watchable that it seems like a confection. Perfectly delightful, but now real substance. Not that I want to be the one who always explains what things mean (and is wrong about it half the time), but I think there's more to Community than a brilliant series of TV and movie homages. I think that the fairly regular but seemingly glib gestures toward "community," that the crazy study group must somehow become a family, actually indicates the significant substance of the show.

The show obviously appeals to pop culture aficionados. Spotting the references would be an obvious drinking game, and any research into the show would soon lead you to a show like TV Tropes. The existence of such a show proves that we've reached mass teleliteracy, just as technological changes starts to drain television audiences away. But despite episodes that ape My Dinner with Andre, Goodfellas, The Right Stuff, Bass and Rankin Claymation, and many other sources, Community is more than a parade of parodies. Instead, this shared imaginarium is a tool for the focal character, Abed, to understand the world. We, whether we admit it or not, are a lot like Abed. The savvy audience knows, with the characters on the show, that we don't want the telegenic leads Jeff and Britta to be together, because we've see Ross and Rachel and we've seen Sam and Diane. Instead of avoiding the romance, the show seems at war with it. They "hooked up" at the end of the first season, but the show explicitly disfavors this relationship in the first episode of the next season, declaring its attention for more stand alone shows, like Paintball. Abed wants to make life conform to TV. He tells Jeff, on one of his more despicable days, that "TV makes sense. It has logic, structure, rules. And likable leading men... We have you." It's the inclusion of imperfect matches with its sources that show us that TV can and does help us understand the world. Even as the televisual fires die down, we still gather around them, to listen to stories together, to puzzle out the world together, and to become community.

Shirley, a blessedly non-sophisticated character, at one point asks Abed, with complete sincerity, "Are you being meta?" We get the sense that she only knows the word from having to understand her new friend's odd approach. The answer is always yes, but not only yes. In Community, we're being meta, but we're also being human.

STL #98: An Assay Into the Nature of the Fantastic

2011-06-15T20:31:00.000-04:00

I haven't written an academic article in some time. In fact, I have on occasion wondered if I'll ever write one again. But I've had for some time in my mind a theory that would best be explored in such a setting (if it's not too banal). My theory is as follows: "Science fiction and fantasy" is an umbrella term that yokes together two large genre groups that are radically different politically. Science fiction is inherently politically progressive while fantasy is by nature reactionary. This theory of mine obviously has two propositions, one about science fiction and one about fantasy, so in actuality would be best explored in two separate articles. I thought I might use this space to start to articulate my thoughts on the fantasy half of the equation, in recognition of my recent reading.

My current obsession is George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, but I'm not ready to write about Martin's work yet. I tore through Game of Thrones and am a few hundred pages into the second book, A Clash of Kings. Being only 1,000 pages in to the yet-to-be-completed series, I can't actually make a judgement. I have the better part three fat paperbacks yet to read, not to mention a new hardcover of equivalent length and at least one unwritten volume. Among the many virtues I've found so far, though, is the political intrigue of the apparent dissolution of a kingdom. The characters, fantastic yet utterly believable, act as the participants of any court of any era might. The plot and storytelling is handled well in what I've read so far. Martin, a former television story editor, balance many strands and character viewpoints. We see the action from the shifting perspectives of a small number of key characters, each, in the fashion of the classic screenplay, with desires and obstacles. As a result, he balances a number of character strands. In Game of Thrones, the endings to these strands were thrilling. Because of the multi-volume format, each ending had to conclude the character's arc and start them out on a new one. Each marked a sudden but suddenly inevitable turn in character development. The first of the four endings was a pleasant surprise, the second a grand gesture. In response to the third, I pumped my fist in the air (an unusual maneuver to make while reading). As I read the fourth and final ending, I had a mild epileptic fit. On finishing the novel, I did a shamanic dance on one foot.

But back to my basic theory, that sf is inherently progressive and fantasy is reactionary. I'll begin by saying that I don't intend any value judgement. Though in my personal politics I am a progressive and feel stern antipathy to reactionary politics, as a reader I rather prefer the fantasy genre (being quite taken with Martin, for instance. I may be somewhat old-fashioned in the belief that one can separate aesthetic response from political facts (and, for what it's worth, I fancied myself a scholar of Pound's work some years back.) For another disclaimer, I do not think my theory will describe the whole terrain in absolute terms. Some science fiction writers no doubt have been personally conservative and set out to write pronouncedly conservative books. Robert A. Heinlein comes to mind. The reverse is no doubt true too. Rather, I mean to argue that each genre has developed a set of qualities that tend toward one political pole or the other. Science fiction is predicated on change: a story is not considered to be science fiction unless its world can be differentiated from our own. Fantasy postulates worlds without change: Elric of Melnibone is the 976th of the name. Change that does occur is either the coming of evil or a reversion to an older order; vide Return of the King. Science fiction strives to explain change in lifestyle and technological development, sometimes to its detriment. Fantasy is under the obligation to explain nothing, having the option to mystify power into magic. Power is thereby festishized in a familiar fascistic manner. Finally, and I'm on shakier ground here, fantasy may tend to be racially essentialist in a way that sf is not. Alien races if sf can be symbols of humanity manifesting itself in myriad forms. First contact fiction generally ends with new understandings or accommodation of newness. The traditional races in fantasy realms (elves, dwarves, orcs) have essential natures that are less than the (often implicitly white) human race. This last point is problematic, because it compares shoddy examples of one camp with sophisticated examples of the other. One could select examples to make the opposite point. If I don't think of some structural reason for this difference, I may cut it.

This brings me to the question of texts. In fantasy, I must at least address Tolkein's foundational text and I will be thinking about this as reading Martin. While something like Norman's Gor series is a sitting target, Tolkein, which can be read as an anti-Nazi book is not a ready candidate for a fascist text, nor is Martin on the surface of it. Reading Martin, I do not feel myself to be in the company of a Tea Party zealot or even necessarily a Republican. (Nor is he patently liberal or progressive.) After finishing Martin, I hope to read further in the field to see if my theory will bear out. Then I'll return to sf, specifically the progressive novels of the 60's and 70's that inspired my theory in the first place.

STL #97: No Dylanologist I

2011-06-09T20:05:00.000-04:00

I feel the need to note another huge gap in posting. Since I've again determined to begin a daily writing habit on my birthday last, I should resume a regular schedule on my lead up to STL #100.

Looking at a few of the many "10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs" lists that appeared in recognition of the old man's 70th birthday, it is easy to discern the rules that govern them. You need one from early on, during his pure folk-singer incarnation; one from his Born Again or later, wizened minstrel, days; one or two from the decade prior to that (his first inward turn from John Wesley Harding through Blood on the Tracks (technically Street Legal)); and the lion's share from his major creative period from Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, including one that wasn't on an album (but may have shown up later on The Basement Tapes). In the broadest terms, then, you can think of his career in three stages, each stage lasting longer than the last: the folk period, the major period, and the late period. While the arc of his career is fascinating, especially his penchant for recreating himself contrary to his audience's expectations or desires, I don't particularly respond to either his folk days or his long bizarre descent. If his major period was wiped away, I don't think I'd pay much attention at all to the young singer or the older one.

My list, then, is as follows (in chronological order):

1. "Like a Rolling Stone": I'm not including this because it's his most important song, defining and shaping a generation, but because of its complex structure and richness of meaning. I'm not crazy about his word collage explosions that really came to fore on Bringing It All Back Home. Like so many of those songs, it's hard to say exactly what this means, but that doesn't mean it means nothing. But beyond the words, this song's sound lets us know that it's creating a zeitgeist.
2. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"- My favorite first line, perhaps of any song ever: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter-time too." It makes me eager to listen to the song everytime. Who's in Juarez, why are they there? Why is the fact of it being Easter time a complicating factor? The sense of the words evoke both a detailed personal story but also the sweep of a mythic one. The sound of it alone states that this is a song that will have beautiful language, but the narcotic liquids (ells and arrs) and long vowels of the first half of line are snapped awake by the sudden tees and short vowels of the second half tell us it won't be an insipid beauty.
3."One of Us Must Know"--I went into Blonde on Blonde for "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." and "Visions" but came out with this song. Dylan has so many songs that it's easy to forget or overlook one that didn't particularly shake things up, like this. I include it on this list as a marker of the provisionality of any list like this. While #1 and #6 will always be on my list, the whole 10 could take many different forms.
4. "Visions of Johanna"-- Maybe the most obscure song lyrically on this list.
5. "Lay Lady Lay"--Maybe the most straightforward song lyrically on this list
6. "Tangled Up In Blue"-- My favorite Dylan song and one of my all time favorites. No Dylanologist I, but there must be a ton of exegesis on this one. Every time I listen to it I hear something a little bit different-I just realized this time how the directions invoked in the go from heading back east to the memory of coming west and then going north and drifting south to New Orleans. Quite honestly, I could compose a top ten only of songs from Blood on the Tracks and Desire. "Idiot Wind," "Shelter From the Storm," "Sara," almost every song on either album. The other one on Blood on the Tracks that really gets me though is
7. "If You See Her Say Hello"-- Pretty much each song is the embodiment of the same open sound, the same lost-love theme, and the same swirling through time. "Sun down, yellow moon/ I replay the past" might be a simplified statement of the album's theme, and this song has a beautiful and simple arrangement and one of his finest, most emotive vocal performances.
8. "Hurricane"--So the last song, chronologically, is actually the most like his early work. It's nothing if not a protest song. It's the long story of an injustice that ends with a call to action ("This is the story of the Hurricane/It won't be over until they clear his name"--which they did.) Again, I could pick other songs from Desire, but this first song captures the sound of the album and a number of images ("Ruben sits like Buddha in his ten foot cell") remain burned in my brain. Like its predecessor, Desire has a unified sound, but where Blood on the Tracks is like a novel or a set of finely wrought interlocking stories, Desire is an anthology of pulp fiction genre stories: crime, the boxer, the gangster, adventure in a foreign land, romance.

The final two that I am throwing in are songs of BD sung by others:
9. "I Shall Be Released" as performed by The Band. I can't say definitively that this is his first real gospel song. But listening to it now, it's no surprise that he'd later identify himself as born again.
10. "Si Tu Dois Partir" (aka "If You've Got To Go, Go Now") as performed by Fairport Convention. This is a good one to go out on, methinks, if for now other reason than the simple lyric has been translated to French and the folk rock idiom transposed into a cajun reel. It reminds us that Dylan was a musician, not a poet. One thing he did was write a lot of great rock songs, not all of which changed the world.

New Year

2011-01-03T17:35:00.000-05:00

Since I don't have my calendar to write these things down yet, I'm scratching down a few notes on what I've been up to so far this year. By "up to," I only mean reading, watching, and cooking.

On Saturday the first, I started reading Tom Jones. I'm on a schedule of 85 pages a day which will get me done by the tenth. So far I'm enjoying it quite a bit. The rules of the road haven't been set yet, so Fielding will sometimes address us directly, sometimes tell us what will happen later, sometimes tell us what someone is thinking and will sometimes deliberately and flagrantly withhold information. He's not afraid of coincidence or long speeches or chapter long asides thumbing his nose at his perceived critics. I passed on the chance to see Black Swan at the theater, instead watching The Kids Are Alright. I made some split pea soup and then we went to a party. When we got home, we watched some of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time.

We finished Swing Time on Sunday afternoon. I read another chunk of Tom Jones and made some risotto style barley with citrus and arugula. In the evening, we watched three episodes of Breaking Bad, which we found quite addictive.

Today, Monday the 3rd, I went in to the office to start getting things together for Spring semester. I had lunch with my colleague Mike at a big and okay Chinese buffet. I rather dithered away the afternoon buying some music (Jack Rose, Beach House, Sharon Van Etten). Now I'm off to write a thank you note or two for Xmas presents.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do some work on class, hopefully buy a calendar and check out some brewing supplies, and do another big chunk of reading.

STL #96: The Year in Reading (2010)

2010-12-30T20:54:00.000-05:00

This was a disappointing year. What I most like to do is read and write, and as I look back, I see I didn't do much of either. A scant few posts to the blog after last year in reading post. In my reading log, pitiful few choices to winnow down for this year in reading. Oh, I write quite a bit. Comments on papers that are unread or ignored. A novel and a screenplay, both unfinished. I read a fair amount too. Horrible wretched prose by teenagers who likely will never improve. Distractions of modest length skimmed online. Even so, my list below is pretty decent, and shows that my mind isn't quite dead yet.

Shakespeare's Histories and Tragedies. This, despite my grousing above, is a pretty impressive mark. I finally got done with the most obvious hole in my reading, Romeo and Juliet along with the rest of Shakespeare's ten tragedies and ten history plays. I'm not done with them, as I'm reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and plan to go back to my play-by-play (heh) revisitation. The reading was sometimes frustrating and confusion, and sometimes illuminating. As I went along, I watched many of the film versions too. One of the worst movies I watched last year was O, based on "Othello." One of the best of the Russian King Lear, a black metal diadem of a film.
Salinger. Works. Salinger is one of the easiest writers to read the complete works of, barring any posthumous deluge. I reread and enjoyed all his books. The "Franny" story was probably my favorite, along with a few of the nine stories. "Seymour: An Introduction" was probably my least favorite because of it's too devoted reporting of the details of Seymour's life and death.
Scott Pilgrim. So lightweight it doesn't seem to belong here. But the thick books are delightful and quick. My favorite moment is the awkward shift about halfway through the first book where O'Malley finally figures out what kind of book he's writing and prepares for the first exhibition of Scott's heretofore unmentioned kung fu with a chorus line number.
I'll balance it out with the heavier Skim by the Tamaki sister and Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. The graphic elements of these books are far more accomplished than the previous and more essential to the works than the following.
While I'm at it, I'll throw in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel by Azarello and Bremejo. While I don't like the heavily rendered style of art, the writer Azarello absolutely won me over to Luthor's side of the conflict.
Blackswan Green. David Mitchell. I listened to the audio book on my iPod. I was totally enveloped by the technique even so.
Rabbit, Run. While theoretically I turn my nose up at and the pedestrian realism that Updike represents, it was well-written and a legitimate stab at the Great American Novel.
Dancing in the Dark. Morris Dickstein's book could have been more comprehensive (why ignore comics, bub?), but tells the cultural story of the Great Depression in readable prose.
Hunger Games. Came across this shortly after watching the Japanese film Battle Royal (best movie I saw this year) that begins with the same premise more or less. Read the rest of the trilogy, of course, though they couldn't live up to the first one.
The Comics Journal 1987-2004. I scored a big stack of these for a dime apiece at the annual library sale. Watching the magazine change over the years was very interesting. It represented a critical industry without an object. Early issues would talk about issue of X-Men or Asterix and mostly complain about the medium's untapped potential. That general stance continued over the years, but at least a more respectable body of work grew up around them. I also read a lot of New Yorkers which proved a more satisfying option to the Sunday paper. I work down a big stack every few months, and it's time to make another move on a building stack.
Even as I complain that it was a bad year, I'm going to put in two extra slots. If you prefer, imagine 4-5-6 all packed into one slot. In any case, I realized after completing the ten that I overlooked Cory Doctorow's Makers. While I have some complaints about Doctorow as a stylist, he does represent an important ethos that this book attests too. Also, I selected it for my first ever winter reading group, so I'll be reading it again in order to discuss it with my students.
My records weren't the best this year, so I could be wrong about Makers and Skim. I know that I read E.M. Forester's Aspects of the Novel, not for the first time, because I finished it yesterday. It formed the basis for a year of novel reading for the wife and I next year. We'll start big with Tom Jones (maybe Moll Flanders if there's time), then move on to Tristam Shandy (Sentimental Journey too), Mill on the Floss (maybe Silas Marner or Daniel Deronda), Sons and Lovers (and The Rainbow and Women in Love), and Ulysses (plus Portrait). We'll then read James Wood's How Fiction Works and make another list for then second half of the year, starting with Henry James.

Other books in my stack include a book on Highway 61 Revisited, Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, Elephantmen, and two volumes of Nick Hornby's Believer columns, which, in the way they chronicle one man's reading life, will be good inspiration for this blog in 2011.

STL #95: How do you blog about Shakespeare?

2010-06-08T18:59:00.008-04:00

So I've been reading my way through Shakespeare's plays in my spare time over the last year and a half. I started with the comedies, which took six months, then hopped to the end of my Riverside Shakespeare to read the romances (essentially his late, and less straightforwardly funny, comedies) over winter break. I began this year with a chronological reading of the histories (by time of the plot, not order of composition), and now am halfway through the tragedies. I haven't mentioned this reading here for two reasons: 1) I hardly write about anything here anymore; and 2) how do you blog about Shakespeare? The words "blog" and "Shakespeare" don't combine promisingly. One is ephemeral, imperfect and the other (rightly or wrongly) signifies the eternal and blotless. My posts are somewhat developed for an unaffiliated Internet poster (and I avoid the words blog and blogger), but it's hard to imagine myself writing anything that isn't cant and trite. Given my relative laziness (I'll read the plays and maybe the introduction in my edition, but have done no serious research) couple with a lack of training (by no means am I a Shakespearian scholar), what insight am I likely to bring? Instead, isn't it far more likely that I'll embarrass my anonymous self and mislead the legions of readers of this blog out there?

But my objections, that I'll embarrass myself or mislead my readers, are defeated in stating them: I do this anonymously, far from my professional life, and this forum remains in blessed obscurity. The reasons I keep returning to this space aren't entirely clear to me, but I think the following apply: it's a kind of r&d lab in which I might strike on something brilliant that I can develop and use elsewhere; it helps me figure out what I think about topics that matter to me; I remember things I write about much better than things I don't write about; it's fun, after a fashion.

Would writing about Shakespeare be so different than my adventures through Don Allen's "New American Poetry" anthology? You remember, dear reader, the epic run of STL #65-91, my dogged commentary on each poet included in that book. Half the time I was talking out of my ass, so why is it any different if the topic is Two Gentlemen of Verona rather than "A Supermarket in California"? Is it just because I don't need a footnote to explain what the setting is? My gigantic scholarly edition has those anyway. Using the lab framework, there isn't much difference, though I think I'm less likely to ever write anything formal about Shakespeare.

What would I gain by the writing? Primarily, the act of composition would help be regain what I've already started to lose-- a recall of the plays. Which one is Olivia? Is she in the one in Illyria? What was it Hamlet said to Osric (I just read that one, but I can't really remember) about his "bonnet"? Writing even a brief note on each play would help me reclaim it in my memory--and each note could be a gesture toward what I want to retain. But if I write as an aid to memory, what am I trying to reclaim? Or, to put this question another way, what did I hope to gain by the reading in the first place? That is not a question I can deal with here--the majority of my interior life is based on a reading regime which I continue on the faith that it enriches my life. But that remuneration can't continue if I forget the material, whatever its nature might be.

Two of my favorite modes of operare deliberation and codification. I love to decide in writing, and I love to establish rules for myself to follow. So having determined that I can proceed, the real question is how should I proceed? Since the reading project has encompassed the whole body of Shakespeare's drama, I'd like to touch on each play, if only briefly. Since I'm nearing the end, that suggests a retrospective: I'm late in the tragedies, but began early in the comedies. This might be a good opportunity to put the plays back together in a way different than I read them: in the (supposed) order of composition. I did begin reading with one Shakespeare's first plays, the "Comedy of Errors," but my reading order led to seeing how his comedy developed. What if I reconsidered the "Comedy" as the play between Richard III and Titus Andronicus? Not that I'm in any position to expansively synthesize themes--such things have been done before I'm sure. No, this reconsideration is simply to help me think about the plays again.

So I'll return through them in order of composition. To further the concept of this writing project as a reclamation for memory, each piece will focus on something I find worth remembering about the play in question--a scene, an insight, or some piece of language. I know that I want to commit some few lines to memory, so I'll start with Shakespeare's first words as a dramatist.

Henry VI, a three-part potboiler, starts with a series of speeches bemoaning the death of King Henry V, who Shakespeare will chronicle later in a far better play. Henry VI is a clunkly, obtuse play, but right from the beginning we can see the playwright's verbal gifts. The Duck of Bedford opens the play:

"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

Comets, importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,

And with them scourge the bad revolting stars

That have consented unto Henry's death.

King Henry the Fift, too famous to live too long!

England ne'er lost a king of so much worth."

Notice the sound patterns at play here--interlocking aspirant h and b in the first line, which introduces the liquid l that manifests in the l and r's holding together the middle lines. The kr of crystal turns around in the form of "scourge" which takes the returning b and a sequence of l and r's as its object. The rhetoric of the passage is interesting itself--using a astronomical sign to punish the engines of the fate, the "bad revolting stars" who are blamed for taking Henry V, and the fine line of saying not that Henry was the best king (and therefore better than the current king) but the best they have lost.

I'll let this happy beginning stand in for the entire trilogy. So having begun, I'll try to continue at a fairly rapid pace. Next week, I'll do address at least "Richard III" and "The Comedy of Errors."

STL #94: Evil or Divine

2010-06-01T14:51:00.005-04:00

Ronnie James Dio died a little more than a month ago. He was 67, died of cancer, and is the first metal person to die from what is sort of old age. His passing was noted as expected in the media--the second singer Black Sabbath, he who introduced the devil horns into the metal world, fronting his own band in the 80's, etc. While to the casual follower of pop culture he was the guy who replaced Ozzy, to the metal world he was unto a god. (See Lars Ulrich's moving letter to Dio.)

Dio is an example of a the role of lead singers in the metal world. When Ritchie Blackmore hired him to be the lead singer in what was originally called "Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow," it clearly showed that the identity of a band was not necessarily derivative of the lead singer's personality. Tony Iommi must have been taking notes, because he hired Dio to replace the charismatic but unreliable Ozzy Osbourne a few years later. Band identities in metal are not linked to a line-up of players; in most bands, most of the players were replaceable. The singer, like any other member, was a hired gun, and could choose to leave or be fired in a corporate model. While this might seem to lead to a kind of facelessness or interchangeability, it also encourages competition and virtuosity--if you are good enough, you could rocket to the highest reaches. Dio was definitely good enough: nearly every fan debate on Dio vs Osbourne era Sabbath begins with the premise that Dio is one of the three or so best singers in metal. He might have felt miffed by lack of appreciation in his two previous bands, since he learned the key to job security after leaving Sabbath--if you name the band after yourself, they can never fire you. Both Rainbow and Black Sabbath carried on with other singers, though of course the band Dio never could.

As a sometime resident of the metal world, I knew him as a giant voiced, impassioned singer--he was what we call in that realm, "awesome". His voice was always what you would call "big" but not, as some recent commentators have said, "operatic." Unlike Rob Halford of Bruce Dickinson, he never used his pipes for sheer pyrotechnics. I've listened to a lot of his work lately, including his early band Elf and even some of his doo-wop stuff recorded as Ronnie and the Prophets, and he also had a sense of phrasing in service of the lyrics.His awesomeness can be demostrated in a relatively short playlist. I'd skip over his first 15 years and start it with "Man on the Silver Mountain" (1976) when he was the lead singer in Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Then "Heaven and Hell" (1980) from his first Black Sabbath album and "Mob Rules" from the second, and round it off with three from his band Dio: "Holy Diver" (1983), "Rainbow in the Dark" (1983) and "The Last in Line" (1984). This last song in particular has been a longtime fascination of mine. Emerging from the contemplative first minute, it is an example of the chiaroscuro technique beloved by classic metal--to go from light to dark, light to heavy, at a moment's notice. The moment of transformation, of waking up, occurs with one of the greatest high intensity screams of eighties metal is at the 53 second mark of "The Last in Line," when he kicks it up to 11: "We are coming... HOME!"

The lyrics of "The Last in Line" meant a lot to when inscribing them on the inside of my Pee-Chee at the age of 14, but I'm still moved by them now. Dio's work has a penchant for repeated imagery of an elemental variety: "We are fire, we are stone" that creates a sameness when bingeing on his music, but summons an archetypal mood in the moment. Sometimes this elemental imagery muddles into non sense, like in "Mob Rules": "If you play with fire, you'll burn your fingers, and lose ahold of the flame." In "The Last in Line," though, there is nary a false step. He flirts with incoherence in the second verse: "We are all born upon the cross/We're the throw before the toss"--what does that mean? But that moment of bafflement is washed aside, everytime I hear it, by the dynamic fall at the end of the line "You can release yourself but the only way to go is down."

The grandeur his voice perfectly suits his major theme the problematic search for the truth. This is present in all of the songs I mentioned above, and is the primary topic of "The Last in Line." Truth is the ultimate goal ("We search for the Truth, We could die upon the Truth") but it is never clear--we will not know until the Final Reckoning is "We're Evil or Divine." In this case, the search for truth is bound up with his other great lyrical theme, loyalty. In the song, he forms a community of the cast out and abject in the chorus--"We're the last in line." Watching online videos of performances, I saw a communal aspect (in the sense both of community and communion) of this song in particular. The crowd would come alive, joining in singing and throwing the horns with the master himself.

Dio explained that the devil horns were taught to him as by his superstitious Italian grandmother. Pointing out with the fingers down is a method of giving the evil eye, that is, of cursing an enemy. Held up, in the ubiquitous heavy metal salute, is a means of blocking the evil eye. So what is commonly viewed as Satan worship is actually a spell of protection. The horns are a unifier--gathered together, his people, the last in line, were protected, and learned the occult means to protect themselves (forbidden knowledge to be sure). There is a sense of allegiance in throwing the horns--you gain the protection and fellowship of a community, but don't succumb to the fellowship of Christianity and 'upstanding society' that has travestied itself so many times over.

When a public figure dies, the rest of us strive to make sense of what his or her life meant. Newspaper obituaries and fan tributes both recap the major events of the deceased and in varying degrees, make an argument about why he or she was important to the culture and society he or she departed. Though Dio made his impact in less than a decade's time, his longevity is part of his legacy. Tenacious D helped RJD experience a kind of revival in the last few years, through a novelty song about how RJD was too old to rock anymore, and should pass the torch on to Tenacious D. This is intended as joke of course--Jack Black couldn't hold a torch if there was one to offer, but it's true that at this Dio's flame will keep burning in all the rites he originated.

Curio: Best Films of 2005

2010-01-11T15:52:00.003-05:00

Jotted on a piece of paper I've had in my files for a while (since winter of 2006, I'd suppose).

2046
Brokeback Mountain
Crash (?)
Sin City
The Squid and the Whale
King Kong (??)
Broken Flowers
Skeleton Key
Aristocrats
Match Point

The backlash against Crash has changed my mind about it, and I have no idea what I was thinking about King Kong. Probably just being contrary. I'm glad to see Skeleton Key, but I clearly remember seeing both that and Red Eye on the same night, and think I like Red Eye better.

STL #93: Films of the Decade.

2010-01-08T09:49:00.002-05:00

Top 25 movies of the decade: The first ten are ranked; the rest are roughly ranked but with the combinations there's some obvious slippage. All told I mention 35 movies: 22 date from 2000-2004, 13 from the second half of the decade. The top four years are 2001 (6), 2000, 2003, and 2009. The number from 2009 is probably due to recency inflation, and only Rachel Getting Married is a top 25 film overall. So was the first part of the decade better, am I seeing fewer movies, or does the retrospective nature of such a list privilege the earlier material? Another option is that I wrote more regularly about movies in 2003-4, and perhaps those movies have an advantage.

In the Mood for Love (2000). The most beautiful movie I ever saw, in depth and on surface.
Kill Bill (2003-4). Part 1 reviewed previously in STL #16.
Lost In Translation (2003). Reviewed in STL #14
Royal Tenenbaums (2001). I would like, sooner or later, to take on Anderson's work. This to me is not only the best of the decade but better than Rushmore. At face value, it seems to be an ambitiosly art-directed adaptation of Salinger's Glass family, but every time I watch it I get a little bit more out of it.
Almost Famous (2000). Pure charm.
WALL-E (2008). Completely unexpected--I simply had not liked the big animated movies of the preceding 10 years. In retrospect, Ratatouille's solidity was the beginning of a now 3 movie streak for Pixar.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Reviewed (poorly) in STL #38.
Etre et Avoir (2002) In STL #35 , my top 10 films of 2003, I said of this and Spellbound "some of the best movies of the last 10 years have been documentaries, because real life has a way of bucking against cliche and histrionics. Note the vivid personalities in these movies are achieved without actors."
Children of Men (2006). Has the gravity and composition comparable to any canonical classic. I would like to see this again.
The Wrestler (2008). Just like I lauded Lost In Translation's use of music, the music here is heartbreaking for its faded glitzy fragility: "Round and Round" in the bar, and the final entrance to "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a valediction/elegy.

Volver (2006)/Talk to Her (2002). Two Almodovars linger like dreams.

Amelie (2001): Its cuteness, which draws you to it at first, might be a liability.

Team America World Police (2004)/Borat (2006). They bring the funny, and they question the whole notion of taste. Team America might want to be in the top 10, but I couldn't quite get it there. Borat is fine with the lower 20's.

Momento (2000)/JCVD (2008): Two action-movies with fascinating formal features. Both cause us to question what we're seeing: Momento through the structure, JCVD by enlisting our own capacity for illusion.

Rachel Getting Married (2009)/Monsoon Wedding (2001). Both have great ensembles. Both are smart enough to let the intricacies of the occasion generate the action.

Up (2009)/ Waking Life (2001): Up gets it for the first 10 minutes, while Waking Life unfolds over the length of the movie, and even beyond a bit.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)/Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). Two Asian movies with "Dragon" in the title. One is beautiful and orchestrated and rapid, the other beautiful in its glacial slowness.

Ocean's 11 (2001): In terms of attitude alone it makes the list.

A Christmas Tale (2008) The last of these that I watched so I'm a little wary of it. Seems like it might want to gravitate up the list in time.

Honorable Mention: Lord of the Rings and Napoleon Dynamite. In there different ways, both are two "big" to be ignored. Certainly impressive in their own ways, but neither are standing up for themselves and making a pitch in the way that the listed movies are.

Sundry lists:

Top 5 comedies

Team America

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

The Aristocrats

Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Action/Thriller

Kill Bill

Children of Men

Memento

Torque

Borne Identity

Documentaries

1.Etre et Avoir

2. Waltz with Bashir

3. Man on a Wire

4. Anvil:The Story of Anvil

5. Spellbound

Animated

1. WALL E

2. The Fantastic Mr. Fox

3. Up

4. Triplets of Bellevue

5. Spirited Away

6. Waking Life

7. Millennium Actress?

8. Waltz with Bashir

9. Chicken Run

10. Kill Bill

Romance

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)***

2. Eternal Sunshine

3. WALL-E

4. Almost Famous

5. Before Sunset

Top 5 Performances of the Decade

1. Bill Murray in Lost in Translation

2. Heath Ledger in Dark Knight and Broke Back

3. Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

4. Anne Hathaway in Rachel and Brokeback

5. Sasha Baron-Cohen in Borat

STL #92: The Year in Reading, 2009

2010-01-08T09:32:00.003-05:00

Alas, another extended gap. Again I resolved to post more in the new year... we'll see. If I adapt the adage of "The Good is the enemy of the Great" to "the Horrible is the enemy of the Not Horrible," I may be able to make good on the resolution. I think you'll see what I mean with the following Year in Reading, 2009 edition. This list is presented chronologically by roughly when I started the reading.

Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances.* The first thing I started is actually the last thing I finished. I hoped to tackle all 36 Shakespeare plays as my big reading for the year, but faltered and finished only the comedies by summer. December I read the late comedies/"romances." My favorites: Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale. This year I started with the histories and plan on moving on the the tragedies.

The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross. I was surprised to see this on the list for this year, because I thought I read it two years ago. Even so, most informative and the kind of book I would like to write (on a different topic of course).

Batman and Robin #1-3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely/Popeye dailies. It was a frustrating year for me and serial comics. I dropped most of the series I had been following.The Batman GM/FQ Batman was mixed-up at its core--by design, since it's the story of a Dick Grayson Batman and a new bratty Robin. But of course Quitely's art is time-consuming, so I dropped it after his three-issue story. Popeye's appeal is evident. The tightly controlled cartooning, the verbal exuberance. Unfortunately, it does wear on.

David Copperfield. Ah, Dickens. I take some big thick 19th century novel with me every plane trip I take. If I don't take another plane trip, will I ever read Nicholas Nickleby? It really makes you wonder.

Parker novels by Stark (not Spencer by Parker). The most entertaining discovery of the year. I read four of the later ones and fully enjoyed the entwining of characterization and heist-planning.

Runaways/Twilight. I couldn't not mention that I read the complete Twilight series. I found out a painless way to do it--read 100 pages, skip 300, and read to the end. You get to skip the awkward telegraphing and repetition that way. Far far better is the complete Brian K. Vaughan Runaways. I'd started on it years before, but picked up recent installments at the library. This triggered a one-day binge on volumes 1-5

Master of Reality/Music From the Big Pink. Apparently, I'm the type of guy who reads books inspired by classic albums. I never wanted to be that guy, but there you go.

Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray. I haven't read that many how-to-write books. This one is okay.

American Born Chinese/Maus. Two not dissimilar books about cultural identity. ABC is much fresher at this point, using three stories and three modes=autobio, outlandish stereotypes with a sitcom, and a magic realist fable that eventually encompasses all three.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Nothing like the occasional YA near-future sci-fi thriller. It introduces its audience to some privacy tactics for computer monitoring. A kind of Edward Abbey manual of resistence for the surveillance age.

2008 Anna Karenina

2009 Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances

On 1 Jan 2010, I began rereading King John to kick off the completion of Shakespeare's dramas. Assuming I finish all of Shakespeare's plays in 2010 (and I might as well through in the longer poems since I've read the sonnets), I will have read 14 works (not counting Swann's Way for both '96 an '98 counting the collected Shakespeare as one), including 7 novels, 6 works of poetry, and 1 impressive body of drama.

STL #91: ATOP II Wrap Up: Line and Lineage

2009-07-23T11:19:00.008-04:00

I'm going to begin by quoting a paragraph I wrote at the beginning of this second Test of Poetry, written over a year ago. In it I quote the wrap of the previous test, so some of this is three-times removed:

I've decided to undertake another "test of poetry," this time over Don Allen's seminal anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960... In worrying over whether I "passed" the last test, I noticed that in my reading practices, "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery" (STL#48). In this second test, I am seeking to deepen and enrich that framework. The anthology in question is well-suited for this purpose. The poets represented in all respond in some ways to Pound's poetics (sometimes to contest or reject it, but never in ignorance of it) and the anthology was the first to include a "poetics" section (it might mark the birth of that discipline, but that's a question for other scholars.) My question for this test is "In what terms, and by what terms, should poetry be judged?" I'll coordinate between the statements on and enactments of poetry and in each post develop some key terms of my poetics.

I didn't refer back to this during the reading project, and at times I felt adrift, picking up on random qualities to harp on. But in constructing a personal aesthetic, an ongoing if not life-long project for me, following your instincts and even the happenstance created by the juxtaposition of different authors and the selection of their poems can be fruitful. Having read back over the last 22 posts (and correcting the typos I saw), I have come to realize some more things about my tastes. Writing through poetry can be very helpful. Though my mode is generally descriptive of my response as I work through the poem, pausing to articulate that reaction allows the poem to linger longer in the mind.

Many of my comments fell into the category of line or lineage. I fell into the gravity of Olson's oracular commentary on the line as the unit of the poem's energy transmission. For those who work "in the open," the line whether or not thought of a unit of breath, is the graphic reflection of the poet negotiating his or (seldom, in this sample) her materials. I was particularly interested in the line in my first posts on the Black Mountain poets (who I spent the most time on), but it continued outside that boundary as well. The work of Larry Eigner and Robin Blaser in particular brought the interface of line and energy into focus for me. Both those poets are very interested in the surface of transmission--often the physical body, especially for Eigner.

Other of my comments were oriented toward the poet's self-constructed lineages and alliances. The structure of the anthology encourages these readings. In the Preface, the very first words of the book retrace three generations at work at that moment--the late flower of Pound and Williams and H.D. Cummings, Moore and Stevens; the mature works of poets who emerged in the 30s and 40s, including Bishop, Rexroth, and Zukofsky, and the emergence of this "strong third generation" into several loose geographically defined nodes. The back matter allows space for the poets to explicitly name their inspirations and co-conspirators, though these names crop up in the verse itself too. Creeley's expression "the company" focuses the concept of self-constructed lineages for me. Though these pacts sometimes encourage the datedness that comes through (the timeless is individualistic) occasionally, they are also nourishing for the field of poetry at large. That primary metaphor of the open field where these poets work is suggestive: the company is out working in this field, but the members' individualism is easily expressed in the very openness of the field. Ultimately, the concepts line and lineage come together. If line is an attribute of "how you sound" it's also a marker of who you sound with. The project of the anthology was in part to create a new nation of poetry out of the (American) earth broken by Pound and Williams and recently tilled by Olson.

I noted a number of poets I'd like to know better. The most surprising were Paul Blackburn, and Jack Spicer, along with Eigner and Blaser. I'm also interested in the bizarre work of Orlovsky and the obscure Stuart Perkoff, though I've a feeling these last two may backfire on me. Since I've some spare time this morning, I think I'll make a card of books to look for, and perhaps report back here later.

So, what's next in the world of STL? I have notes for a few topics that I could back to and finish, I began an album of the month project that I'd like to go back to (and a backlog of topics), and I could do a round up of summer reading (before it's over). Eventually I'll do another Test, perhaps on Copper Canyon's Gift of Tongues, an old favorite. I'll try to post once a week again, starting next Tuesday.

STL #90: New American

2009-07-20T21:03:00.000-04:00

John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, David Meltzer

One of the innovations of the NAP anthology, is, I believe, the inclusion of the poetics section at the end. In basing so many of my readings on these statements I reveal the assumption that they matter, that codifiable (or at least articulatable) poetics underlie individual poetic projects (and further, that poems are moments in individual poetic projects) (and further-furthermore, that "codifiable" and "articulatable" are words). Allowing only poetics of selected poets is something of a disservice (as is my recent practice of 'group readings') to the unrepresented poets, though the poetics should be deducible from the poetry. But the assumption of individual poetics reveals a main theme in this anthology and in poetry influenced by it: that a poet's work is an individual negotiation of his or her world, however defined. This individualism might be what makes this anthology American poetry "American."

The last item in the poetics section is a poem by John Wieners "From a Journal." He argues against the idea of poetry as an exalted special category of universal knowledge. His poems are only his personal "salvation," or way of knowing himself, and a reader "can do with them what he likes." What can be shared in the reading of poetry is the "different techne a man uses to make his salvation." This is why some many of the poems in from this time going forward incorporate their own poetics as subject matter, either implicitly or explicitly. Wiener's "A Poem for Painters" does. This impressive poem is a meditation on knowing the world through art, starting with the portraiture ("Our age bereft of nobility/How can our faces show it?") and concluding with his own poems (which "contain no / wild beestes, no / lady of the lack, music / of the spheres, or organ chants" but "Only the score a a man's / struggle to stay with / what is his own, what / lies within him to do.") This heroic vision of poetics is immediately undercut by the qualifier "Which is nothing" but doing so gives a existential nobility to Wiener's work.

My other theory of what makes this the anthology American its expansive geography. It's organized into geographical sections, including the Beats whose home is "on the road" in the that "holy triangle" from New York to San Francisco to Mexico City. Poetics and geography aren't necessarily unrelated. The Wiener poem I just mentioned travels from coast to coast and Ron Loewinsohn (born in the Philipines) does the same in "Insomniac Poem." The title suggests the restlessness inherent in the generation that explored the nation (and the world) as they experimented with their writing. Loewninsohn describes being "awake, alone & aware / or our own absurdity" a dour precondition similar to Wiener's that likewise led to a kind of nobility--with this awareness, "we can begin to love & to give / to clothe ourselves in the color / of the Shasta Daisy." A massive enlightenment of the world population, perhaps through poetry, would create "Two & a half billion Gods / crowning the crazy world with sainthood." Some of this generation of wanderers eventually found 'home' some place, like Loewinsohn did in San Franciso, or through some enlightenment like he describes.

The last poet in the anthology, David Meltzer, also discusses the poet's work and travels far and wide in his work. "Revelation" travels through time and space to describe a meeting of himself and the Japanese master Basho. There short poem concludes with a meta-discursive formalist gesture: "The haiku will come later. / After dinner & / a Havatampa cigar." This stanza not only fits the spirit of the haiku but the 5-7-5 form. The Hav-a-tampa cigar plant in Tampa, Fla. actually just closed a month ago. The cultural and chronological non-sequitur rattles the formal cage that he set up, and once confirming and rejecting the overloaded communion with Basho, where they drink tea, eat soup, drink beer, and smoke cigars. This sensual cluttering might either delay the clarity of the haiku or constitute it, if not both at the same time.

In this last Test on Allen's New American Poetry anthology, I feel I've finally uncovered an area for academic research: did this generation entangle open field poetics and geographical mobility in a renewed definition of American individualism?

STL # 89: Outsiders looking in and insiders looking out

2009-07-17T14:03:00.000-04:00

Ray Bremser and LeRoi Jones

My last post mentioned the impossibility of keeping my own knowledge about the poets, including their future careers, out of my reading of the anthology. However, the fact that Mike McClure served as a hippie icon as soon as the hippies caught up with him really isn't surprising. LeRoi Jones makes a more interesting case. After establishing himself as, essentially, a New York Beat, Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka and became a Black Nationalist. However, in this selection, there's barely any hint of what you'd generally consider "Black identity." Nor does the apparatus of the anthology provide his race as a context: his bio mentioned he attended Howard and his statement of poetics begins with a question in what could be heard as black vernacular ("How you sound?") The only direct reference to race in these 7 poems is in "To a Publisher": "I ride the 14th. St. bus/ everyday... reading Hui neng/Raymond Chandler/Olson.../I have slept with almost every mediocre colored woman/On 23rd St...." This is obviously denigrating to African American women, and the line's relation to his multicultural reading list suggests severely limited interest in his own cultural heritage. The poems are reference heavy to contemporary writers, European high culture (M.A. in German lit), and pop culture. Of course, it's short-sighted to make a generalization such a small sample (he did write articles about jazz in this period) and even stupider to say that Prokofiev, Gary Snyder, or the Shadow are not part of his cultural heritage. His poem "In Memory of Radio" makes clear that he spent his formative years listening to adventure serials which still influence his work. I mean, he says as much: "Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk./At 11, Let's Pretend & we did we did & I, the poet, still do, Thank God!"The poem is based on an attachment to the hero The Shadow, who, in his secret identity of Lamont Cranston, possessed some kind of (divinity) that only he and Jack Kerouac knew about. The Shadow famously knew "what evil lurks in the hearts of men"--Jones emulates this quality and his position as an outsider who is able to formulate his own cultural identity out of the complete array of available material, picking and choosing from the 'high' and the 'low.'

That's very much the "Beat" position, which Bremser emulates in "Poem of Holy Madness." According to Bremser, the best poets of his generation include a few of the Ginsbery, Corso, Jones, and himself, so humility is not his strong suit. His poems seem to be standard issue Beatnikery, but the discourse over his cultural identity is interesting. He identifies with every conceivable category of outsider: criminals like the thrill-killer Charley Starkweather, blacklisted "traitors," prisoners on the "visionary journey out of jail," "tramps,/ and homosexual cats in drag," atheists, Jews, and especially African Americans. (He writes "give me a black / and miserable hide--and I will un-tar it!") This romanticization by white guys who "dig jazz" has become embarrassing, but that doesn't mean he didn't mean it. It is odd that Jones and Bremser both build outsider identities, but do it with different materials. In fact, Jones builds the outsider identity out of mostly insider materials--not only the references to pop culture and high culture, but in the domestic situations of scenes like watching his daughter pray in "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note." If you radically simplify things, it's as if the white Bremser is the insider looking to the outsider while Jones is the outsider looking in in order to be out.

STL #88 Sound Effects

2009-07-16T14:01:00.000-04:00

Edward Marshall and Michael McClure

If it weren't for this project, I'm sure I'd never mention Edward Marshall and Michael McClure in the same sentence, or probably in separate sentences. Although my intention is to use the texts alone for my interpretation, I can't help but draw on my prior knowledge of the field. I've never heard of Edward Marshall, and while I know of McClure, I'm surprised by the role he's assigned here. McClure's stature has fallen while Marshall never really gained any. There are six poets in the NAP who are allotted 15 or more pages: Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Whalen, Snyder, and Michael McClure. These men (of course) are also all represented by a statement of poetics, so it is reasonable to consider them focal points in the new geography of poetry which Allen is mapping. From out vantage today, Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Snyder clearly still deserve a special designation. Philip Whalen maintains a good reputation, though Snyder's old roommate now seems a less than major figure to SF Renaissance/West Coast Beats. The real odd man out to me is McClure. While not totally forgotten, he is seldom mentioned in discussions of the period. He's remembered for 60's shenanigans like his play The Beard or far out readings accompanied by Ray Manzarek.

This "test of poetry" I'm doing here is on my own sensibilities more than anything. In reading Marshall's one longish poem and the sample of McClure, I came across one passage of Marshall's that I rather admire and one in McClure's that I absolutely abhor. Marshall's "Leave the Word Alone" is a dark family narrative that I don't particularly care for, but one passage stands out. It's right justified, and although that appearance lends to the poems effect, I'm transcribing it in the traditional way for convenience:

Sometimes I hear cries and cries when I go

through the center road to the far

farm where the blueberry

bushes are high

and the upper pasture and

fields--the sheep

nose apples wither and the pears rot--

the ice house turned about and no barn

with cupola

The barn burned down to get fire insurance--

never proven.

In a poem that describes mental turmoil, which intrudes even into this landscape. I've referred before to sonic effects knitting a poem together. That happens here in maybe too pronounced ways--the echoing "far/farms" and the alliterative "blueberry bushes." But check out how that plosive /b/ turns into a /p/ and the /r/ continues through "the upper pasture and/fields--the sheep/nose apples wither and the pears rot..." and then return back to the /b/ of the "barn burned." While overall the poem sprawls, this excerpt shows excellent craft.

That touch is missing from most of McClure. The McClure passage that really rankles me floats in the middle of the page, but again...

I am on a mesa of time and space.

!STOM - ACHE!

Writing the music of life

in words.

Hearing the round sounds of the guitar

as colors.

Feeling the touch of flesh.

Seeing the loose chaos of words

on the page.

(ultimate grace--

(Sweet Yeats and his ball of hashish.)

I won't even address the cliched diction ("space and time" "music of life" "touch of flesh"). I won't touch on the unresolved absurdity that is "!STOM - ACHE!" I won't mention the laziness of writing in sentence fragments either, but instead focus on the sonic qualities. He completely mismanages consonance. The "round sound" rhyme is cloying, and the clunky last line suggests seems to think it's doing something it isn't. The vowel sequence is cacophonous when it seems to strive for melifluity. The two long vowels and the start clash against one another, and the long /e/ is picked up awkwardly by the end of the last word. It's as if he wrote the line and thought "looks good" but didn't sound it.

The curious thing here is that McClure is one of the few poets to disavow the Pound/Williams tradition. In his poetics piece, he says he "despises" those primary influences most of the other five focal points, preferring Lawrence and Melville. Marshall, on the other hand, name checks Williams and Pound's main emissary to this anthology, Charles Olson. It could be that my modernist rearing has defined poetic competence for me. While I do seek to challenge that paradigm, the many offenses of McClure foreclose that particular path for me. Instead, I'm planning another reading test to challenge my reading practices, once I finish and analyze this one.

STL #87: Flesh and Stone

2009-07-14T14:00:00.001-04:00

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder writes that his poetic rhythms derive from the rhythym of the physical work he was doing at the time of writing. As a young poet, this work was "riprap," "the daily trail-crew work of picking up and placing granite stones in tight cobble patterns on hard slab." This prosody is seen described in the poem "Riprap":

"Lay down these words/Before your mind like rocks./ placed solid, by hands/In choice of place, set/Before the body of the mind /in space and time." These lines show Snyder's desire to build lines up with short, substantive words. The words are fit together by the recurring sound patterns; the last two lines of the quoted section contain the sonic key to the poem: the long i, the long a and the ahh sound of body (and rock). Snyder's craft is patient and deliberate, the kind of effort needed to build a road up a mountain.

In the longer "Myths and Texts," his rhthyms reflect the tranquility of working on a mountain look out, the occasional heave of attaching logs to tractors, and the chants of Great Basin Indians. Not that riprap in discarded: he still considers "[p]oetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics." We still see the careful constructed lines of "tough, simple, short words, with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. However, he also delves into more a traditionally meditative mode: "One moves continually with the consciousness/of that other, totally alien, non-human.../Attentive to the real-world flesh and stone." This phrase subtly echoes the common expression 'flesh and bone.' In Snyder, "Bones & flesh knit into the rock." John Muir is a figure in "Myths and Texts" who becomes both flesh and stone, melding with the mountain he's climbing. He describe Muir's paralyzing fear, clinging to the rock face and imagining falling into the chasm. After the fear passes, he perceives the rock in detail and his "limbs moved with a positiveness and precision" that he "seemed to have nothing at all to do" with. It is as if his flesh self did fall, and his stone self brought him up the cliff. Near the end of the sequence, there's a sort of reverse riprap. Human improvements, like the flesh's desire to know for knowledge, is not permanent. While the poet sits on his mountain lookout, he observes "It's all falling or burning--/rattle of boulders/steady dribbling of rocks down cliffs." Snyder has a comprehensive poetic that accounts for the "two sources of human knowledge--symbols and sense-impressions." Often they are the same: in the poems discussed here, he creates symbolic discourse out of the sense-impressions of labor and observations. A man can create roads that up, but the mountain will push the rocks back down-- "It's all falling or burning."

Further reading: the complete Myths and Texts

STL #86: the sun will be invisible soon (3 unlyrics)

2009-07-13T10:52:00.007-04:00

Philip Whalen, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stuart Z. Perkoff

I hope to wrap up the present Test of Poetry on The New American Poetry in short order, by storming through the fifth and final section in groups of three or two poets. The rules of this test have been that my readings be based on the texts as presented and on the apparatus of the book itself--the authors' notes, the statements on poetics, and the organization of the book. The first four sections represent geographically-centered mid-century poetic movements: the Black Mountain group, the San Francisco poets, the wandering Beats, and the New York school. But as Allen writes in his preface, the fifth group "has no geographical definition"; they are poets "who have evolved their own original styles and new conceptions of poetry." This claim of iconoclasm doesn't exactly fit the first three poets: While Philip Whalen is a well-known San Francisco poet with Buddhist leanings, Gilbert Sorrentino is a life-long Brooklynite who wouldn't fit in so well with the cosmopolitan O'Hara cabal, but the obscure Stuart Z. Perkoff fits right into the Beat sensibility. But the logic operating in the previous four sections implies that the poet's are in conversation with one another. I'm going to try to discover such a conversation among the iconoclasts, using the poetics of one as a starting point for the discussion of the group.

Whalen's "Sourdough Mountain Lookout," dedicated to San Francisco grandmaster Kenneth Rexroth, is a constructivist lyric that packs citations of sources around a recognizable lyric moment (laying on the granite mountainside in the September sun). Whalen calls his poetry "a picture or graph of a mind moving..." and also "bald-faced didacticism moving... from the particular to the general." In his own terms, he's using the lyric form for non-lyric (didactic) ends. The particular, or the originating lyric moment, is the day before his summer job as lookout ends, sunbathing nude while thinking of the words of Heraclitus, Samuel Johnson, Empedocles, his father ("Remember smart-guy there's something / Bigger something smarter than you.") and Buddha. It ends with the Buddhist mantra that is literally translated 'Go, go, go beyond, go thoroughly beyond, and establish yourself in enlightenment!' but is (sort-of) phonetically translated by Whalen as "Gate / Gate / Really gone / Into the cool. /Oh Mama!" The last two lines are a wonderful Zennish non-resolution resolution: "Like they say, 'Four times up, / Three times down.' I'm still on the mountain."

Sorrentino's "The Zoo" also frustrates typical lyric meditation within lyric from, using a much different range of reference. He draws from entomology and comic strips. The situation is "the death of the one banana / peeling beetle in the U S A" but it doesn't even flirt with the potential for bathos of the situation. Rather than operating as an elegy for the insect, half the poem describes the beetle in objective terms, while half of it compares it to the baby from Gasoline Alley, Skeezix. The unspoken context is the medium of the newspaper: no doubt Sorrentino's knowledge of the insect was provided by the same source that supplies his tongue-in-cheek frame of reference. The poem doesn't allow the moment to be an epiphanic reflection on the speaker's inner being--in the end the speaker doesn't care or even believe in any of it.

Whalen wa a well-known poet, Sorrentino became well-known as a novelist. I never heard of Stuart Z. Perkoff outside of this book. Two of his three poems here are non-starters, interesting only for being dated to sixties cliches but written in the fifties. The third transcends this hippie-ish vocabulary even as it utilizes it. "Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love" begins as a 'going up the country' pastoral, as "beautiful girls & boys" frolic in the sun. The setting turns out to be a Jewish summer camp ("off in the wisconsin woods, where there were neither jews nor cities"). The sun doesn't only warm the young bodies, but it shines a revealing light on the horrors of the Holocaust. It's yet another critique of the lyric, along Adorno's lines: how to write of the sun and youth with knowledge of genocide. The fairly long poem alternates the camps scenes with grave descriptions of the condemned "howling in the crowded boxcars / howling in the dark barracks... silent / in the furnaces." It concludes with the sun, but not the sun that dapples the boys and girls playing, but the sun that will eventually burn out.

Oddly enough, Whalen uses the same concept when talking about "the sun / Which, as I said, will disappear / Anyway it'll be invisible soon." It probably shouldn't be surprising that late poetry-- verse written long after the dominance of the form, should upend one of its traditional images. These poems all challenge the lyric form in some way. Whalen and Perkoff use it to show a mind moving to a didactic conclusion, while the mind moving in Sorrentino drains a seemingly relevant poetic trope of its potential gravity.

STL #85: Very Funny Fellows

2009-06-26T11:54:00.013-04:00

Triple Play: Kenneth Koch to Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery.

Before widening the scope of this piece, I had planned on calling it "Kenneth Koch Is a Very Funny Fellow...Right!" (in tribute to Bill Cosby's comedy album). But when I sat down to draw by thoughts together, I was struck by the idea that the flip side to my tempered enthusiasm for Koch is my unbounded admiration for O'Hara. He has a wider range than Koch, yet even his funny poems are richer. To round out that generation of New York poets, I then decided to bring in John Ashbery, another wise guy who has made a lot out of a wry, ironic tone.

I like Koch, but have found him limited--his reworking of W.C. Williams or Frost's "Mending Wall" as "Mending Sump" are worth a smile, but don't go anywhere. He's a cut-up, but the apparent lack substance in his work makes you question it (right?). But a poem like "Fresh Air," though not a direct reworking of a source and longer than the two I mentioned, has many small pleasures, mostly in the charming, droll tone, but isn't as fully engaging as any of the O'Hara or Ashbery poems here. The poem mocks the codification of poetry into lineages, techniques, and workshop lessons ("My second lesson: 'Rewrite your first lesson line six hundred times. Try to make it into a magnetic field.'")

I think of a similarly light tone when I think of O'Hara, even though, as this lengthy selection shows, he can turn on a dime into something as moving as the last lines "The Day Lady Died": "and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of/leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT/while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing"(the lack of the period at the end really makes this). O'Hara was "mainly preoccupied with the world as [he] experience[d] it" and, as much as anyone ever did, writes in what seems to be his natural voice, which happens to be witty and ubane. Some of his poems do seem to be jokes, at least structurally speaking. "Why I Am Not a Painter" is a sort of a shaggy dog story--sometimes you've got oranges and sometimes you have sardines.

All the New York poets have the wit and diction I referred to above as 'urbane.' But the title "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher" might not appear funny at all--perhaps it recalls 17th century devotional verse. I haven't seen much of the voluminous criticism on Ashbery's works, but I'm sure that relationship has been worked out. My theory is that the poem is narrated by Jesus in the tomb, and he's hanging around trying to figure out what happens next. The idea of Christ saying "Huh" is funny enough by itself. The rest of the threads through place and time, perhaps weakening the identification of JC as the speaking voice (who says "I'm/Named Tom"--at once the master and doubting disciple) but engages an uncertain relationship with the divine throughout.

According to Nabokov, "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game." A game is by nature more rewarding--it's open and agile where a lesson is closed and rigid. In the anthology, O'Hara and Ashbery's work is more expansive--you get a greater complexity of tone than in Koch's accomplished wise-guyism. O'Hara and Ashbery swing from serious to humorous, while Ashbery at his best is both at once.

STL #84: Lines of Influence

2009-05-14T11:04:00.002-04:00

(On Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Edward Field)

I have been sitting on this one for a while now so to crank it out I'll resort to both my writing tricks: 1)I'll declare an arbitrary time limit for myself (let's say one hour) and 2) begin by stating what it is I want to do with this piece.

In this piece, I want to consider the question of influence in the work of Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Edward Field. This focus seems especially apt given the obvious stamp of Wallace Stevens on Guest's early work, Schuyler's articulation of abstract painting's influence on his cohort of writers, and Fields's apparent separation from that primary influence of other, more well-known of the "New York poets."

I've read and enjoyed Guest's work from the 70s and 80s, and while I like these poems they are obvious apprentice work. As I said above, you can clearly see the influence of Stevens in the tourism of poems like "Santa Fe Trail" and "Piazzas," the gentile conversationalism in "Sunday Evening" (the very title of which beckons for a Stevensian comparison) and the focus on the imaginative intelligence in all the poems. These elements all come to a head in "Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher." It begins with an address to an interlocutor which is straightforward in tone but deceptively obscure in meaning:

I just said I didn't know

And now you are holding me

In your arms,

How kind

The very next line is the refrain that provides the title. It's not an easy line to interpret. The following imagery suggests the parachute is billowing in water as the speaker floats up past "[p]ink and plae blue fish." Following the repeated phrase, though, the speaker is trembling in "mid-air," having just finished swimming, and by the end of the poem she is "treading water/Near it, bubbles are rising and salt drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer/Air than water." She is "closer to you/Than land and I am in a stranger ocean/Than I wished." This is a wonderful, mysterious poem.

In "Poet and Painter Overture,"Schuyler argues that the poets of New York are more influenced by their painter friend and colleagues than anyone else. In the New York of the 1950s, "writers and musicians are in teh poet but they don't steer.".. If you pursue too literally the analogue between painting and writing, you are bound to be disappointed. While there is something to mapping non-representational use of words in something like John Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath to abstract art, it might be better to compare the arts more loosely. I wrote a paper in graduate school (that I think was quite good, actually) that compares the New York painters' flatness with the poets' "flatness." See how clever I am with the quotation marks there--the picture field actually is flat and the the painters can manipulate that fact with techniques ranging from distorted perspective to collage. For writers following the painters' lead, "flatness" is more in attitude than anything else--as Schuyler says, "'Writing like painting' has nothing to do with it." It's hard, impossible, pointless, stupid therefore to make a direct comparison between a flat field painting by Robert Rauschenberg and the interior monologue in "Freely Espousing":

or Quebec! what a horrible city

so Stubenville is better?

the sinking sensation

when someone drowns thinking "This can't be happening to me!"

the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped the Romans

the sinuous beauty of words like allergy

the tonic resonance of

pill when used as in

"she is a pill"

on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack.

That last quoted line I read as a dig at the suburban fiction of John Updike and his ilk. As we wander toward that wonderful destination, we pass through a number of 'items' arranged on a field--places, thoughts, words as words, none inflected nor poignant as the inevitable central image/symbol of a lawn-mower-clacking story.

While Schuyler establishes connections with New York painters, Edward Field looks to different fellow artists. In his bio he discloses "I am trying to make the New York theatre scene." I can't find online that he ever made it, but I re-examined his poems to look for any performative influence. Read with that in mind, I guess they both sound a bit like monologues: they don't advance 'plots' but can be read as psychological portraits. El Interneto says he used his theatre training to develop a compelling reading style. I can see that, though the poems don't particularly grab me.

Further reading in Guest and Schuyler, but not Field.

STL #83: Four Beats

2009-04-07T17:30:00.005-04:00

I'm going to cut a huge swath here and do about 45 pages and four poets at once. The Beat canon has shifted a little since the publication of the anthology. From Allen's quartert of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Orvlosky you might drop K (whose gift was prose) and Orlovsky (presently more a character in Ginsberg's biography than anything else) and draw Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in from other sections. Despite criticisms and shortcomings, these Beats all have something to offer.

Of course, those offerings aren't necessarily on display here. The best writing by Jack Kerouac in this collection is the first few autobiographical sentences of his contributor's note: "After my brother died, when I was four, they tell me I began to sit motionlessly in the parlor, pale and thin, and after a few months of sorrow began to play the old Victrola and act out movies to the music." I am not a Kerouac-basher. People who shake off an adolescent admiration for On The Road tend to over-react and find his work adolescent. His style has its limits to be sure, but I've reread some of his novels with interest. Unfortunately, his cult to big enough to keep everything he ever wrote in print, including his bad poetry (and it's all bad). The thought that he wrote over 250 "choruses" of Mexico City Blues is distressing. The dozen included here don't have much to offer, and are as fatuous and mis-informed as his detractors would have it. One of the things about Kerouac that I find fascinating is that he was a Roman Catholic in continual confession, not the hip Buddhist gunning for Enlightenment as he claimed. But as he wrote in his note on poetics here, "I have trouble covering up my bullshit lies."

Ginsberg's towering achievement is unquestionably Howl and his ode to Walt Whitman "A Supermarket in California" is an American-lit anthology stand-by for its allusions, imagery, and 'discussabilty.' In his "Notes for Howl and Other Poems," he describes how his line is "one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of breath." This of course sounds a lot like the Projectivist rap promoted by Olson, except for Olson the breath represents WORK rather than thought. This difference makes sense, since Olson works his learning and sources pronouncedly than Ginsberg, who even when squirreling into Eastern or visionary traditions is much more open to inspiration and the first-thought best-thought ethos. In "A Supermarket in California," his first line/thought-breath contains Whitman, the night, and his headache--it is a reproduction of a moment in time when Walt Whitman came into his mind. When he goes "shopping for images" inside the store, enumerations sweep into his head. What is so delightful in the poem is the 'fact' that he follows Whitman through the store, follow only in his "imagination by the store detective" (when the opposite is "real".)

Less hallowed than "Supermarket" or Howl is Corso's "Marriage." As I write through these pieces, some of the hallmarks of the Beats become apparent: loose, spontaneous conglomerations of nouns jammed together in long baggy lines, gestures toward Eastern philosophy, and an a-political protest of institutions like marriage. It's a do-nothing kind of protest because it never proposes doing anything about current conditions. In "Marriage," Corso even imagines capitulating to the square institution. To not be ridiculous, the do-nothing critic must temper his critique with humor:

I see love as odd as wearing shoes

I ncver wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother

And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

And there's maybe a girl but she's already married

And I don't like men and --

but there's got to be somebody!

Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,

all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear

and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

The most puzzling (and least well-known) of these four Beats is Peter Orlovsky. I feel genuinely uncomfortable reading his "Second Poem." It starts off as a pleasant description of a desultory morning, seeming like a poised naivete hiding a savvy hipster. The line "like my farther/I've done flick the ashes & buts" strike one as a bit odd, but probably intentional. This momentary doubt flares up as a flurry of misspelled words ("frist of all"; a "nock on the door"; "pancaks") turns up over the next few lines. Flipping to the back biography, we read "I.Q. 90 in school, now specialized IQ in thousands." It's harder for a savant to succeed in literate art than a visual one, but the imagination can transcend traditional intelligence. But intuiting a little about his relationship with Ginsberg, the situation and execution of this poem about making a "paradise" of his "room-land" gets a little ooky. Putting that context aside, it can be read as a self-portrait of a marginal man with a powerful imagination: "My life and my room are like two huge bugs following me around the globe."

Further reading? Maybe Orlovsky, maybe Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra

STL #82: SF Omnibus

2009-04-07T16:07:00.007-04:00

For the first time in a month, I've returned to the green pastures of STL. I was ready to dispense with the remaining SF poets, with the strong memory in mind of having completed a three part critique of Lew Welch, Richard Duerden, and Philip Lamantia and ready to write up notes on Bruce Boyd, Kirby Doyle, and Ebbe Borregaard. Much to my surprise, I find my memory has been playing tricks on me again, since all I had on the former three was as follows:

Lew Welch is the apocryphal author of the perfect American poem "Raid kills bugs dead." His "Chicago Poem" is a hate song to the city of broad shoulders.

Duerden's "Musica No. 3" is a topologically engaging poem about a sea cave. I had to draw a sketch, but I think I understand it.

Lamantia seems to have thought he moved beyond a juvenile surrealism, but I'm not so sure. There's a poem called "Terror Conduction" with lots of words in ALL CAPS. I can't bear to go on.

But come to think of it, I don't have too much more to say (though I do like that Welch poem, especially the resolution where he decides "I'm just/going to walk away from it. Maybe/ A small part of it will die if I'm not around/feeding it anymore."). And since I'm so far behind, I've decided to deal with the last three in similarly brief fashion.

Bruce Boyd's "Venice Recalled" reads like a Projectivist (Black Mountain) poetics. He speaks of a company of poets whose speech is "only open & discursive." This company, "we who would live openly," exists at and as "the natural peripheries" of language. That credo expresses the outsider tendency (but not the self-importance) that unifies the scenes around which this book is organized (though transcends).

If Boyd is a Projectivist ex officio (am I using that correctly?), Kirby Doyle is a Beat undercover. He has the Corso reform school pedigree and his poem "Strange" has a "Howl"-esque construction of long thought-breath lines knit together with a repeated "or" beginning each line. It's a neat little period piece based on how the world is "groping about" through a dozen different similes.

Borregaard seems famous for being obscure. He has a cool name to be sure, which might in some way way bear a connection to his penchant for obscure words. The poem "Some Stories of the Beauty Wapiti" contains a fistful unusual words, from "wapiti" (a large deer) to "oleo" (margarine), "wastrel" (a dissolute), "vatrix" (unknown), "hyades" (a star cluster), and "nedda" (an Italian woman's name). His tendencies in the poems here seem to point toward a Rothenbergian ethno-poetics, which might be my next anthology test.

So if there's a lesson here, it's that categories enforced by the anthology were loose to start with and, as Allen admits, became "obviously irrelevant." But next week I'll move into a category that is still used, if not relevant: the Beats. I hope to write more regularly over the summer months, dealing with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Orvlosky quickly before diving right into the New York poets.

further reading: Of these six, I'm most likely to seek out more Welch: Ring of Bone (collected) and How I Work as a Poet (essays).

STL #81: Jack Spicer

2009-04-07T15:12:00.004-04:00

While going through the Allen anthology has introduced me to many enjoyable voices, reading Jack Spicer for the first time makes me feel I'm in the presence of something truly great. I had heard of Spicer, but this isn't what I expected. (The great stuff never is.) "Imaginary Elegies I-IV" seems to both embrace and push away the Poundian Imagist standard that undergirds so many of these poetics. Spicer said in his "Letter to Lorca" that he "would like to make poems out of real objects" like a collage artist does. But he comes out against images as such; he wanted "to make things visible rather than to make pictures out of them." Over time, things "become garbage" but poetry, by making visible, can correspond, co-respond, to the world.

"Imaginary Elegies" begins with a consideration of this correspondence. It begins "Poetry, almost blind like a camera/Is alive in sight only for a second." If poetry captures images of say a specific bird in flight, it is only "the continuous Platonic pattern of birds flying" that lets us hold it in our mind. We use "disciplined adjuncts/To the moment of sight" to make sense of our impressions. As a poet then, Spicer might write of the sun, but really would rather "praise the very tall blond boy/Who ate all my potato chips at the Red Lizard." It's the Platonic ideal that provides the center of discourse. That's all well and good--the real turn comes in the next section when he describes the moon as "God's big yellow eye remembering /What we have lost or never thought." This isn't a normal eye, not a " yellow camera. It perceives/What wasn't, what undoes, what will not happen." But, in the third stanza, "God's other eye is good and gold." This Apollo's eye is accurate and absolute as opposed to the questioning tentative Dionysiac moon-eye. The poet is to "be like God" and use these two eyes.

But the final section of the poem (and presumably the last of four elegies, though it's not clear how that works) what that injunction means, or more precisely "what I thought/When I wrote that." That thought is gone, "No realer than old/poetry." Though "Time does not finish a poem," Spicer seems to be waiting it out in this fourth stanza. The originating image that inspired this poem is far gone, all that is left is moderated by memory and language. The poem ends with a more modest directive than "Be like God." Instead, "The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds." Yet we are left with the same conundrum of the image. Is this "the Platonic pattern of birds flying" that we believe or the real birds at a real moment in time?

25 Writers Who Have Influenced Me

2009-02-26T14:44:00.009-05:00

So, I've been tagged with a Facebook note on 25 writers who have influenced me. I'm not sure how to respond. Influenced me how? Influenced my pretend career as novelist or poet? Influenced my negligible career as a literary critic? Or influenced the way I see the world, or think about nutrition, politics, teaching, etc. ? I tried to make a chart that included the writer, a key work, and the nature of the influence, but soon realized I'd never finish that. Instead I've opted for a chronologically arranged list of writers who influenced me in one way or another at some point in my life. I did this to capture ways of thinking that might not hold sway over me now, but nevertheless have had some lasting impact on me. After completing the initial list, I had way too many writers, but I cut away mercilessly to (almost) twenty-five.
Phase One: The comic book and Fantasy years. I start here because, starting around the age of ten, I started to make completely independent choices about what to read. As a young boy, I read what was given to me and might have picked up something laying around the house, but since nobody particularly encouraged these interests I had to go out of my way to get them.

1. Marv Wolfman. Writer of the adult-seeming super hero soap opera The New Teen Titans
2. Michael Moorcock. Creator of the anti-hero wizard king Elric. I didn't realize Moorcock was parodying Tolkein and Robert E. Howard, both of whom I read and loved. I checked out some of his books lately and found him to be unreadable.
3. Ursula K. LeGuin. Loved her Wizard of Earthsea trilogy. I reread those books with interest recently, and enjoyed other of her social science-based science fiction too.

Phase Two: The Don Quixote years. Named after Don Quixote's Bookstore in Everett WA where I bought bales of used paperbacks while in high school. Now firmly self-identified as a reader, I read more comprehensively in more 'serious' literature.

4. Albert Camus/Herman Hesse. Now that's what I mean by serious! I alternated between The Stranger and Steppenwolf as my favorite book for a few years, though I can't remember what Steppenwolf is about anymore. Perhaps I never knew.
5. Philip K. Dick. "The Empire never ended"; “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum." That's freaking my shit out man!
6. Jack Kerouac. Ah, I will live a life of bohemian freedom!
7. William Blake. Romantic poetry, along with beatnickery, seemed a way out.

Phase Three: College. My main sources for books were the Student Co-op bookstore, the University library, the smelly used bookstore downtown, and the non-smelly store that opened up across the street and drove the smelly one out of business. This list was really long, as I took a heavy load of lit classes and was transformed by virtually everything I read. As you see, this is a pretty canonical list, and in paring it down I removed Homer, Ovid, Tolstoy and Yeats.

8. Chaucer.
9. Shakespeare. Everyone who uses English (for things like, you know, thinking) has been influenced by Shakespeare.
10. Borges.
11. Nabokov.
12. Beckett. "I had just crawled out of the shelter for my evening guffaw and the better to savour my exhaustion." In a ranked list, Beckett might come in number one.
13. Ezra Pound.
14. Sam Hamill and Kenneth Rexroth.
15. Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston. There's a dearth of minority writers on the list, I know. I studied Ellison and Kingston with an old school New Critic who was fascinated by the formal innovations of these two, and showed me that formalism and cultural identity are closely linked.

Phase Four: Twenties In the last half of my twenties I hung around, got an MA, moved to Seattle. I got back into comics in my twenties, but am limiting the number of comics writers I let onto my list. I have to think of them as "writers" rather than "artists," so I'm arbitrarily ruling that anyone who draws as well as writes is ineligible. That's stupid and I'm embarrassed for writing it.

16. James Joyce
17. William Carlos Williams
18. Raymond Chandler
19. Steven Shaviro: His book Doom Patrols was a "theoretical fiction" that helped me wrap my head around critical theory and also introduced me to the work of Grant Morrison.
20. Alan Moore/Grant Morrison: Two pretty darn similar writers of comic books.
21. Greil Marcus/Glenn MacDonald: Two music writers with radically different tastes and writing styles.

Phase Five: Thirties In which I moved to Austin to go to grad school. While I have continued to read after finishing my dissertation, I don't know what's influenced me yet.

22. George Oppen would appear high on a ranked list.
23. Lyn Hejinian. I've gotten deeply into the "Language" poetry that descended from Stein and Zukofsky. I chose Hejinian because I read both her poetry and criticism with great interest--for other poets it's one or the other.
24. Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner were friends. Any subject either of these critics write on I am immediately interested in because they write with a comprehensivness and authority I could never approach. I also like the poetry and short fiction of Davenport. (One of the obsessions of his short fiction is a bit off putting)
25. Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson did not like one another. They did, however, both write gigantic poems that are by turns perplexing and incandescent and that you could read for the rest of your life.

Down the Rabbit Hole!

2009-02-06T12:19:00.003-05:00

I missed the official Down the Rabbit Hole day when bloggers made posts which were significant departures from their normal styles. In that spirit, here is a list of 25 random facts about me personally.

I am likely to be evasive, coy, or chary when talking about myself.
"I get confused every day" is a line from a Sonic Youth that I like.
I used to go to the comic book store almost every week. Now, it's more like every other week. (But I know what comes out every week.)
I've taught a university course on comics.
I got married in Las Vegas. Her name was Lola. She was a dancer.
The preceding item is partially false.
I'm pretty good at identifying Republicans by sight.
I think fences built with the inside facing out are sociopathic.
I think the work I do is important.
Almost every day I think of Ben Franklin's advice to end the day by thinking "What good did I go today?" and "What good will I do tomorrow?"
I have never uttered the phrase "President Bush" except when quoting a source. Not during the reign of 41 and sure as hell not during 43.
44 is my new favorite number.
It used to be 11.
Before that it was 3.
I giggle to myself at the thought of adding "For a long time I used to go to bed early" to my list.
"I lived through the eighties one time already."
I like extreme heavy metal (your black metals, the death metals, the grindcores), but only as an intellectual, analytical appreciation usually associated with avant-garde concert music.
I like avant-garde music (your Alban Bergs, your Bartoks, your Morton Feldmans) but only in a very visceral, instinctive way.
I love making lists. The most ambitious is my Top 100 songs. The last time I did it, my top 5 was "Tonight’s the Night," Neil Young and Crazy Horse; "Divorce Song," Liz Phair;
"Idiot Wind," Bob Dylan; "Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson & The Miracles; "Brompton Oratory," Nick Cave.
I'm having trouble thinking of things to add that don't have to do with books, films, and music I like.
I like punctuation. I also like prepositions.
One time, during a sensitivity training (there's no story there; I just work for a university), I had to write down the five most important things in my life. Then I had to talk to someone I didn't know very well without mentioning any of those five things. That really wasn't a problem.
In A Pack of Two, when Carolyn Knapp writes, "I seem to spend a great deal of time just staring at the dog, struck by how mysterious and beautiful she is to me and by how much my world has changed since she came along," she could be describing my life.
A rare steak and some roasted brussels sprouts sounds like a perfect dinner to me.
My top ten lists of all time list: all those "begats" in the Bible; the catalogue of ships in The Iliad; all the stuff Gargantua ate in Gargantua and Pantagruel; All Known Metal Bands; the ways that Elizabeth Barrett Browning loves thee; "Top 10 Albums of 1986" by The Rocket staff; "The Comic Journal's Top 100 English-Language Comics of the 20th Century"; "Top 5 Break-up Songs" in High Fidelity; "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"; Seven Deadly Sins/Heavenly Virtues (tie).

STL #80:"I Find My Surface" (Robin Blaser)

2009-01-13T10:17:00.008-05:00

I know enough of Robin Blaser to associate him with Jack Spicer, but that's it. In his 5 NAP poems, all dated 1956, I find a poet sensitive to the natural world and his mortal body's relationship to it. He speaks in a tone of disclosure--a 'listen, I've got something to tell you' frankness that avoids overtly 'poetic' effect. For example, "Now let me give you this experience./We change. No lies."

Of the 5 poems, all invoke some animal. He chooses less anthropomorphic animals like fish, snakes, and birds. 3 of the 5 mention (human) skin and 2 mention breath. Skin and breath are both interfaces between himself and the natural world, between the surface where his internal depths meet the external world. Skin meets the air where human warmth butts against the chill of the where; breath takes in that cold air, warms it, and turns it back. Blaser shows us that skin in like breath in "Poem by the Charles River." On observing the dead fish floating on the surface, he writes "I see them stretch the water to their need/as I domesticate the separate air to be my/breath." In the tradition of the Romantic Sublime, the outer world inspires introspection. In observing that "These fish die easily" he implies the question, 'do I?' He implies that question, but stop shorts of asking it, instead focusing on the act of interpretation: "I find my surface in the way they feed."

He shows that breath is like speech (another surface, or interface, or limen) in "Herons." I don't think I can excerpt the poem effectively to show him make the equation, so here it is complete:

I saw cold thunder in the grass,
the wet black trees of my humanity, my skin.

How much love lost hanging there
out of honesty.
I catch at those men who chose
to hang in the wind
out of honesty.
It is the body lies with its skin--

Robed in my words I say that the snake
changes its skin out of honesty.

And they
hanged there with some symmetry
died young
like herons proud in their landscape.

Now it is age crept in, nobody younger knows
the quick-darting breath is
our portion of honesty.

I don't totally know what to do with the poem, which has some echoes of Shakespeare (sonnet 74) and Pound ("In a Station of the Metro" and "Mauberly") but following through my equation (skin=breath=language or surface=interpretation) helps. At the beginning, there's something to observe, which is both nature but some how the self (so maybe the self situated in nature). Whatever it is, is "my skin." The object of perception then shifts from something of the natural world to something that seems political, men hanging from trees killed because of their honesty. Since the historical context might suggest lynching, skin takes on a different sense. In the center of the poem, skin and speech are equated: "Robed in my words I say that the snake/changes its skin out of honesty." Skin is linked with honesty, a function of speech, and in the end honesty is explicitly linked with breath. (This reminds me of Pound/Olson/"Objectivist" axis linking the poetic line with the breath and with the measure of sincerity.) The interesting thing that I'm grasping onto as I work through this idea of surface or interface being the equivalent of expression. Poetry, as honest language, happens on the skin.

STL #79: 2008 in Review

2009-01-03T16:09:00.010-05:00

I'm going to combine two things I did at the end of last year: recap the year in reading and semi-quantitatively review the music I listened to most. Almost all the music I listen to is computer-mediated, so I actually have a record (obscure pun) of what I listened too, but the reading list is based on spottier records and recollections.

First, the reading. As before, anything with text is eligible, but the list is still pretty traditional--more novels than I would have guessed. The list is presented alphabetically.

1968. A captivating cultural history of the year change coalesced in cities across the world: New York, Mexico City, Prague, London. The most remarkable passage in it is a RKF's quote on the GDP: "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." The world, obviously, has changed again since then.

Anna Karenina. The big book with which I started this year. A expanse of vision in the best tradition of the novel. The only comparable novel I read this year was Adam Bede.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. The serial comic of the year in a year that was not great for comics (at least for me). I enjoyed JSA (not for the non-initiated) and the current New Krypton storyline too. In more ambitious comics, DMZ intrigued me, though it's nowhere near as fully realized as Y: The Last Man, which wrapped up this year.

The Dew Breaker. Much better than I would expected. The fractured narrative reflects the trauma and instability of the characters' stories.
fivethirtyeight.com. The best political horserace blog. It's stats-savvy analysis (the guy has a background in sabermatrics) got me through to election day.

For Your Eyes Only. I read books by most of the stable of suspense writers I go back to: Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana and the excellent Tenth Man), Allan Furst (Red Gold), Simenon (the one Monsieur Hire is based on) Peter Abrahams (the one where the douchey pool guy goes "A million sounds right") among them. This real surprise was Fleming, a precise and even sensitive writer. There's a unexpectedly moving bit where Bond, a killer of man, meditates on his trigger finger.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Transmissions from the semiosphere that had been racing into outerspace since 1941. This book pulled the visionary art back to the present.

The New American Poetry 1945-1960. An ongoing project.

Of Human Bondage. While Adam Bede should take this spot, I have a nostalgic yearning for the days when a long book like this could just unspool--one day in the life of Philip Carey after another. A sequence of first sentences of chapters gives you the idea: "The day broke gray and dull. It was a week later. When they reached the house Mrs. Carey had died in--it was in a dreary,respectable street between Notting Hill Gate and High Street, Kensington--Emma led Philip into the drawing-room. Philip parted from Emma with tears, but the journey to Blackstable amused him, and, when they arrived, he was resigned and cheerful.Philip came gradually to know the people he was to live with, and byfragments of conversation, some of it not meant for his ears, learned a good deal both about himself and about his dead parents."

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" I single out this short story because it brief and compelling. Quite unexpectedly, Ursula K. LeGuin was the author of the year. I read six of her sf & fantasy books this year, and I discussed her work briefly in STL #76. So many sf writers of the 70s are fascinating--I realized after reading 1968 that they turned their speculative skills to contemplate the culture rupture of the time. Le Guin fascinates me because the framework of her speculation is the social sciences. "Omelas," for instance, is an extrapolation of the practice of tribal practice scape-goating, while her Earthsea books build a folkways of magic and just as Left Hand of Darkness invents an alternative sociology of sex.

Honorable Mention: Persistence of Vision by John Varley (another compelling 70s sf artifact); Poem of a Life (wish this had been published when I was working on my dissertation); Master and Margarita; (So unlike Tolstoy of the preceding generation); Writing is an aid to memory (I posted on this in STL #64). Elizabeth Willis's Turneresque (maybe I'll expand on this sooner.

The work of the Planet Money podcast, starting with its genesis on the This American Life "Giant Pool of Money" episode, should get special mention for making the economy not only comprehensible but fascinating.

On to music, but briefly. Like last year, I used play counts of music acquire in the last 400 days to determine what should be on here, then used my judgment to finalize it. I mix single tracks with albums and present them in no order whatsoever.

"Bar Woman Blues" Jenny Lewis
"Aly Walk With Me" Raveonettes
"Bye Bye Bye" Plants and Animals
"Dr. Carter" Lil Wayne
Stay Positive The Hold Steady
"Tiger Phone Card" and "Seeing Hands" Dengue Fever
Jukebox Cat Power
"Becky" Be Your Own Pet
"I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me" Annie
"Swimming Pools" Thao
She & Him Volume 1
"Time to Pretend" MGMT
For Emma, Forever Ago Bon Iver
"Murder in the City" Avett Brothers
The Stage Names Okkerville River

STL #78: Ferlenghetti

2008-11-21T14:38:00.004-05:00

(Note: The misspelling of the subject's name in the title seems somehow appropriate in reflecting my utter lack of interest in the poet, so I have intentionally left the incorrect form. Other errors are unintentional.)

Some time ago, I said that the only poets in NAP I knew were Creeley and Levertov. Using the threshold of being in the same room with as knowing someone, I actually know Lawrence Ferlingetti too, having been loitering in the City Lights poetry room when he came sprily up the stairs. I've known his poetry for a long time, having come across it in an anthology my sister had called, dig this hipness, Beowulf to the Beatles (cause the modern rockers, they're like poets man). The "little charleychaplin man" and "christ climbed down" are in there for imagery or something. I read Coney Island of the Mind on the recommendation of a hipster I knew while an undergrad. Despite (or because of) the long acquaintance, his poetry doesn't mean that much to me. The Coney Island book has become an official Beat artifact, and it's hard to read it as other than something acting out its own dated hipness. I don't think this is a fault exactly, but there's nothing in the book that transcends the period it helped define. In NAP, a handful of poems from Coney Island are presented as numbered sections of, by implication, a book-length poem. I had never thought of Coney Island of the Mind as a long poem. That doesn't salvage it for me, but does make it potentially interesting. Unfortunately, neither my memory of the whole text or the represented extracts show on extension from the beginning to the end. Each poem begins by invoking an outsider artist (usually through a specific work) and ends with some existential resolution: damning the "engines/that devour America," or contemplating "her eternal form/spreadeagled in the empty air/of existence." There are other repeated elements to these poems: the descending and ascending white space, the scare quotes thrown around phrases, the agressive alliteration and long-vowelled assonance. Later poems I've seen work out of this paradigmatically 'beat' framework: not to my taste still, but more varied.

STL #77: A Blessing

2008-11-21T14:35:00.008-05:00

The last piece I wrote in response to a political event was four years ago, after a terrible election when I was in a desperate mood. (It was actually on Inauguration Day: read it here.)Following Obama's election, I'm more optimistic--hopeful really--about government than I can ever remember being. And in the month it's taken me to find time to return to this post, I've become even more hopeful. And while STL is not a political organ as such, I wanted to mark this mood by prying into coincidence that entwines my mood with Obama and my own intellectual geography. "Barack" means "blessing" in Arabic, just as "Baruch" does in Hebrew. The coincidence is that that because Benedict Spinoza's birth name was "Baruch," and because Louis Zukofsky loved Spinoza, etymologies and puns, variations of the word "blessed" are woven through Zuk's long poem "A". I'm very familiar with "A" which is, as it happens, a work which is easily navigable by its index. Its index notes nineteen occurrences of "blessing," "blessed" or "blest," so as an experiment I cobbled together a poem from those lines. That poem isn't interesting and regardless I certainly will never publish original poetry here. But to get back in the saddle (its been forever since I've posted), I thought I'd examine a few of the most striking and relevant lines.

1.) "Honor, song, sang the blest is delight knowing/we overcame ills by love." From "A"-11, the famous turn into family life. Most uses of the word suggest a redemption, overcoming a difficult (cursed) past. It also suggests unity, with the collective pronoun.

2.)"Some hundred years later the blest:/ A timid child thinks he can fight" Time and transformation. This also suggests the disenfranchised standing up, "yes we can" etc.

3.)"To be blest--/To act well/Or live well (235) But to be blessed is a cultivated virtue. You can bless yourself by acting nobly.

4.) "Blest/Ardent/Celia/ unhurt and/ Happy" Most of the uses of 'blest' occur in "A"-12, where the word is a cipher for Spinoza, one of the movement's tutelary spirits. The four motifs entwine here: to be blest is to behave with an ardent heart. If you are like Celia, you will be like Celia: unhurt and happy.

5.) "how unhappy a place once blessed can grow" The four key terms come together again. The place is America.

6.)"none legislated/into blessedness: Blest/ against obstinacy" Suggesting the hope of coming change.

7.)"mean 'no/shame'--that is 'blessed' sun/for a light" And that change: to not be ashamed of the land once blessed that will end blessed.

There are small blessings, like the three week break that will give me the time to somewhat recoup the three and a half months of silence (not once since the first week of the semester did I post!), but then there are the larger blessings, like the return of public discourse, of debate and deliberation, of drawing energy from allies and opponents alike. Am I too optimistic? I hope not.

Coming up in STL: Back to the NAP project with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, albums of the month from Minutemen, Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention, and the year in this and that.

Recencies: West Wing seasons 1 and 2, trip to Baltimore (Lola Montes at the Charles St. Theater), Ian Fleming and Allan Furst novels, bunch of Black Saint recordings.

STL #76 Summer's End

2008-08-28T10:04:00.004-04:00

I had thought of writing posts on both summer movies and summer reading, but since summer ended suddenly (it's the first full week of classes), I might not get to both. So instead I'll roll both into a cumbersome omnibus (cumnibus).

I. 3 Super Hero movies: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight: 2008 will certainly mark the apex of the "comic book movie"--Wanted and the second Hell Boy movie also came out, and next year's Watchmen adaptation is provoking buzz and booksales with its trailer. Watchmen might well be the Heaven's Gate that ends the comic book (actually superhero) movie motherlode by exceeding its grasp, but this summer, the genre has offered a range of spectacle and even aesthetic satisfaction. Iron Man was maybe the most satisfying as spectacle--though I enjoyed the fun performances of Downey and Bridges (the Dude turns evil), what sticks with me is the coolness of armor. My favorite scene was an action set piece. Iron Man sets down in the middle of a hostage situation--terrorists have guns close on a number of innocents. We switch to the Iron Man internal display--like a high tech security camera, with digitized information of some sort floating around the figures of the scene. Abruptly, guns built into the armor pop up and take out the terrorists in one precise instant. As a display of technology and force, which is after all the appeal of this movie as a techno-thriller, it's pleasing in its mastery and abruptness. The situation goes from impossible to solved in the blink of an eye.

As spectacle, the Hulk movie leaves a lot to be desired. The animated title character is offensively fake--not that I want the 7 foot tall green monster to look "real," but I don't want it to look like a video game demo, which is what the last third of the movie is. I like the first third quite a bit. The backstory is dealt with quickly in an old fashioned montage of news reports and headlines, and the movie becomes a tense and human fugitive movie for a while. The Rio shanty town is a captivating setting, and Ed Norton's performance brings out the desperation and sorrow of his character, along with one unexpected joke, when he warms some bullies in his broken Portugese that they "wouldn't like him when he's... hungry."

The Dark Knight is really the one that demonstrates the potential of the super hero movie to succeed as a serious work. It's a probing psychological piece that transcends the apparent silliness of its costumed protagonist. He's simply a driven man with some unusual methods. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is of course getting a lot of attention, but it's well-deserved. While Nicholson's performance was also ballyhooed, the contrast between that and Ledger's reveals the ham-handed clumsiness that it is. Every choice Ledger makes is toward the understated. His Joker looks down at the ground, mumbles, demonstrates a deep protectiveness of his interiority. It's a shockingly good and immensely scary portrait of real evil. I'd like to watch it again, to think about how Bale's Batman follows and departs from this model. The Batman voice is extraordinarily grating on the ear, but I think that's the point--on one level it's a mask for hiding his identity, but on another it's his true mad and wounded self.

II. Summer Reading

I had some time for reading this summer, which is nice. I reacquainted myself with some of the sf/fantasy writers I liked in my early teens. I read books by Michael Moorcock, Urusla K. LeGuin, and Philip Jose Farmer. I read 2 of Moorcock's "Von Bek" books--The Warhound and the World's Pain (which I had read before) and City of the Autumn Stars (which I had not read). I liked the former--the protagonist and Lucifer were enjoyably presented, and the magical "Mittelmarch"--a counter-Europe hidden in strands across the continent--was a lot of fun too. One of the most provocative bits is a passing reference to an adventure in the alternate Europe where Carthage destroyed Rome and, centuries later, an order of Rabbinic Knights had arisen as a sort of counterpart to the Knights of Malta. The latter book didn't captured my fancy. It had more of Moorcock's multiverse philosophy of a strugle between order and chaos. Moorcock's ideas seem to have been vastly influential on Dungeons and Dragons, and is actually a simple but powerful tool for thinking about ethics, but can make for tedious writing. It's a problem in the Elric novels I also read through. I had fond memories of Elric, and while I still like the idea of the character--the effette end of a long line of emperors, a weak albino kept alive by drugs, spells, and an evil, soul-eating sword--the novels read little better than role-playing scenarios.

I'm unlikely to go back to Moorcock, but was very excited by Le Guin's work. I loved her Earthsea trilogy when I was younger, and while they hold up (I have two of the later second trilogy to read yet), I'm very excited by her science fiction. SF of the seventies, reflecting a range of foment from radical collectivism to libertarianism, produced some of my favorite genre novels. Her short stories that I read in The Wind's Twelve Quarters inspired me to read The Left Hand of Darkness and especially her anarchist novel The Dispossessed.

The seventies also produced Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld. The first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go is short and readable, but the real triumph is, as so often in this genre, the idea. The entire population of the world's history is clustered near a river with no known beginning or end. Courageous individuals are able to navigate this river, though they don't know where they're going. This is really a lovely metaphor for the human condition, though I'm not sure if that's enough to keep me reading through three more novels.

So summer's over, like I said. I'm off today, trapped in the house by torrential rain. The last movie I saw was early Fall fare--Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona. I'm reading Adam Bede. People are deceptive but not costumed. The have secret identities but are not heroes. They fight but with paltry power, with words and negligence, and not laser beams or swords. I guess I'm back in the real world now.

Favorite Movies, 1999 edition

2008-08-16T17:28:00.004-04:00

Found a print out of the following in my files. Recorded for posterity's sake. Strikethroughs made at some later date.
Noslen 100 (sic=99)
11/24/1999

8 1/2
A Nous la Liberte
Across 110th Street
Amateur
~~The Apartment~~
~~Apu Trilogy~~
~~The Bad and the Beautiful~~
The Bad Lieutenant
Badlands
Barry Lyndon
Bicycle Thief
The Big Lebowski
Breathless
~~Bleu~~
Bonnie & Clyde
Bride with White Hair
Bring me the Head of Alfred Garcia
Bringing Up Baby
Broadway Melody of 1935
Casablanca
Children of Paradise
Citizen Kane
City Lights
The Conversation
Cries and Whispers
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Days of Heaven
~~Dr. Jeckel~~
La Dolce Vita
Don't Look Now
Double Indemnity\
Drowning By Numbers
Dumbo
~~Easy Street~~
Elevator to the Gallows
Everybody Says I Love You
Fallen Angels
Fanny and Alexander
Flirt
The 400 Blows
Frankenstein
Freaks
The Godfather Trilogy
Goodfellas
~~Grand Hotel~~
~~Intolerance~~
Irma Vep
Hard Boiled
High Noon
His Girl Friday
Hoop Dreams
Jules and Jim
King Kong
King of Comedy
Last Days of Disco
~~The Letter~~
Lone Star
~~The Man Who Knew Too Much~~
Manhattan
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Naked Kiss
Night of the Hunter
~~Nights of Cabiria~~
~~Nosferatu~~
Out of the Past
Out of Sight
~~Pat and Mike~~
Paths of Glory
~~Picnic at Hanging Rock~~
Philadelphia Story
The Player
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Ran
Rear Window
~~Roaring 20s~~
Rope
Rules of the Game
Safe
~~Scarlet Empress~~
Seventh Seal
The Shining
Smoke
Stagecoach
Stranger than Paradise
Stop Making Sense
The Sweet Hereafter
The Thin Man
The Third Man
The 39 Steps
To Have and Have Not
Touch of Evil
~~Tristiana~~
Vertigo
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Wild Bunch
Woman Under the Influence
Yojimbo

Final Cuts: Annie Hall, The Big Sleep, Discreet Charm, English Patient, Kiss Me Deadly, Lolita, Once a Cop, Rashomon, Reservoir Dogs

Written Down Later: Hud, Chinatown, Duck Soup, Raging Bull
I am a Fugitive...
Sunset Boulevard, Aguirre, Sweet Smell of Success
Singing in the Rain
My Best Friend's Wedding

STL #75: Four San Franciscan Medievalists

2008-08-09T09:30:00.011-04:00

On Helen Adam, Brother Antoninus, James Broughton, and Madeline Gleason

Moving now into the second geographical grouping of the anthology, I encounter a group of poets I am much less familiar with. Of the 13 poets in this section, I only know a handful by name and have only read Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a couple of poems by Lew Welch and Philip Lamantia. What little I do know about the SF poets is through Beat connections, so I'll be interested to see how the groups diverge in the NAP. (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky get a section to themselves.) Two poets I most associate with SF, Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, aren't here--Duncan is filed under Black Mountain and Rexroth was apparently born too early (1905). So I have fewer preconceptions about this grouping than the last, so I'll have to develop a wholly new framework for reading this group. Toward that end, I'll be grouping poets together when there's a reason to. Strangely enough, the commonality I see in the first four poets of this section is, despite the group's naming as the San Francisco Renaissance, a real interest in the medieval period.

Helen Adam is only a few years older than Kenneth Rexroth, but it is probably her strong attachment to Duncan that brings her here. I don't have any tangible evidence, but I strongly suspect Duncan somehow convinced Allen to include the eccentrically medieval Adam. I've heard that Duncan would withhold his work unless he had a commensurate page count to Olson's, so perhaps he also insisted that his mentor be included. He credits her example with freeing him from the Modernist cult of style. Duncan writes that "Adam was right, passions may have voice in ballads and orders appear in fairy tales that were otherwise mute or garbled." Before coming to write this piece, I was inclined to agree with Duncan's idea but nonetheless thought that Adam's ballad seemed 'wrong.' But I'm starting to find the mysterious gaps that make a ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens" enchanting. The way that the man's fetishizing of the woman's hair somehow magically imbues it with the power to revenge her death suggests one of these deep, muted passions. While I think anachronistic forms can do the work Duncan says--heck, we're talking about print forms in the 21st century--but I doubt if I'll be spending much more time with Adam's work.

William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, also appeals to a medieval tradition--Catholic mysticism. He modulates it through a nice variety of the nature lyric, as seen in "The South Coast." The sound pattern of this short poem prominently features long vowels, e's and a's, mostly "closed" by consonants (that is to say, the long vowels are curtailed by consonants at the end of words--like "bean" rather than "be.") Short vowels are similarly closed, with few exceptions for the nigh unavoidable "the." The effect is a very consciously articulated, clipped sound. Here's the beginning of the poem: “Salt creek mouths unflushed by the sea/And the long day shuts down.” “Sea” and “day” are two of six substantive nouns that have an open sounding, and all the rest rhyme with “sea”: three, lea, sea, He, be. Since “He” is God and the “sea” is the focus of Antoninus’s meditation, the long e is a crucial part of poem’s meaning. It’s part of the central question about the pattern Everson sees: “Whose mind conceives?” Both a and e contribute to the answer: “God makes”; “His own mind conceives…Where He, whom all declares,/Delights to make be!”

Based on this sample, the defining aspect of the San Francisco Renaissance seems to be philosophic anachronism. We next come across James Broughton, somewhat more modern in style and perspective, although his "Feathers or Lead?" seems to be an alchemical treatise at first blush. On closer inspection, it’s actually a portrait of medieval quackery haunting modern medicine. The physician, “the Devil of Remedies” locks his patient in the exam room to “claw [her (?)] belly.” Some sort of “Other” is aborted, and the speaker tears the physician apart. The speaker looks at the pile of disgorged “filth”: “Feathers or Lead?/ the dungheap cackled/and slithered out under the door.” Broughton’s poem shares in the fairy tale ordering that Duncan attributed to Adam. The meaning is in the poem but not extractable from it. It resists the intelligence successfully.

Madeline Gleason curiously combines the all the virtues of these quasi-medieval poets. “Once and Upon” exhibits Broughton's ability to modernize time-worn themes in a modern style and sensibility yet emulates Adam's commitment to tone of the the ballad tradition (though in a modern form) and also equals or surpasses Everson's finely crafted sound, with Christian overtones to boot. Here's a representative stanza:

Once and Upon

she ate the plum

and from a full mouth

disgorged the pit

into her hand

while Mother spun as she canned

peach and plum in season--

the land, holy Mother to

the plentiful fruit

Gleason's poem does more to "make it new" than Adam, yet avoids the jaded, dated hipness of Broughton. It has the mystery of language and action that might draw me back.

To read: Michael Davidson's San Francisco Renaissance. I think I consulted this book while working on my dissertation, but nothing stuck. Maybe some more Gleason and Everson.
To listen: Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance

STL #74: Loaded

2008-07-28T13:22:00.003-04:00

The first Album of the month (TM).

The story behind the title of The Velvet Underground's final album Loaded is that their new record company were pressuring them to find commercial success, to make an album "loaded with hits." They record is tight, and is more commercially-oriented than the previous three efforts, but asking the Velvets to make a hit record is like putting a chef to work in MacDonald's. People of taste will hear about it, but don't expect it to change your business. The injunction to produce a hit became a buried theme of the album's 10 songs, which subtly parody hits and popular formats, and critique the machinery that makes hits and the audience that consume them. At least, I think that's right, but let's run down the track list and think about it.

"Who Loves the Sun" kicks things off with a dour rebuttal to the "Here Comes the Sun"-worshiping flower children. While it's a lovely, hummable love song that shoulda/coulda been a hit, it also sets up a nihilistic counterpart to the frame of popular rock in the late sixties. It's a great start to a great album, but nothing compared to the next two tracks.

Lou Reed delivers a wonderful, swaggering vocal in "Sweet Jane," punctuated with asides to us and Jim ("just watch me now") and arriving at something like bliss in the end. Like a lot of songs on the album, it suggests a story more than tells one. It describes a dynamic between the singer of a rock and roll band to two peoples who got to work but live a bohemian, intellectual life in a bubble separated from the rest of their city.

In "Rock and Roll," we find another, another Jane (the lyrics online say Jennie, but I hear "Janey") finds another refuge, but not in bohemianism but in the New York station that plays a revolutionary thing called, rock and roll. That for a moment transcendence and redemption could be heard on the airwaves must have been an astonishing thing, but to the Velvets this didn't happen in the free-form FM of the sixties, but in the racially integrating inchoate rock and roll of 10 years earlier. I guess that WLOVE in the following "Cool It Down" alludes to call letters of a radio station too, but it's the kind of love you can "rent by the hour" from Miss Linda Lee, not the love of the Aquarian age.

This is an album 'loaded' with characters like five of the second and third songs. Reed and Doug Yule casually mention names of the people who populate the songs, though one of the most memorable characters is the Fat Blonde Actress of "New Age." These peoples, from Jack and Sweet Jane to Linda Lee to the actress, populate a Weird Urban America that is at once part of but separate from the late 60s, just as the music is sometimes rock and roll but often also involved with other popular music, from the ballad of "New Age" to the country of "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" to the doo-wop of "I Found Someone." It's always the case, as in "Sweet Jane," that "those were different times"; in fact, these are different times. These are different people too--different even from themselves. Many of these songs are about the private lives of people who wear masks in public, whether as a bank clerk or as an actress or cowboy.

"Head Held High" suggests what's under those masks: "But, just like I figured, they're always disfigured." This song also hearkens back to the wild rock of the 50's, complete with exortions to "do the dog." "Train Round the Bend," another rave-up, includes a wryly humorous description of the train "Takin me away from the country/I'm sick of the trees." The rock and roll playing on Janey's radio isn't the self-indulgent concept rock mocked by the Velvets and Frank Zappa, but an older more deeply rooted version. This wasn't necessarily the best recipe for making a hit in 1970 though.

The highlight of the album for me, after many listenings, is the last cut, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'." Without being too grandiose about it, it a requiem for the living: "Say a word" for Jimmy Brown, for Ginger Brown, for Polly May and Joanne Love who all walk the streets with "nothing at all." The last word, of the album, of the real Velvets career, is a beautiful, poignant Nothing that lasts, in its full version, a good seven and a half minutes. The album went to number zero with a bullet--it never charted.

Loaded was the first album of the month in a new listening club that J and I have started (and are the only members of). It's purpose is to draw our attention to an album that is important to us and that we want to know better. The album of the month of August is the Minute Men's Double Nickels on the Dime, which I will write about in a month or so.

STL #73: Three (Once) Young Poets

2008-06-20T09:22:00.011-04:00

On Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Joel Oppenheimer

One thing I'm not doing well in this project is reading the poems in context. Although I've been mindful of the anthology as an artifact of the 'poetry wars' of circa 1960, I tend not to think of the individual poets as existing at the time the poems were written--rather, I'm thinking of most of the poets, the ones I am familiar with at least, in the context of their careers and the poems as indicators of some single aesthetic realized over the course of a career. The thing I've been forgetting is that these guys are all young. With the exception of Charles Olson, who was fifty in 1960, and Robert Duncan (41), everyone I've written about was under 40 at the time of publication. The three men I'll be writing about today, Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Joel Oppenheimer, were all students at Black Mountain in the 1950s and were around 30 in 1960. In that spirit, I'll be reading their poems as the poems of young men.

Ed Dorn was 27 when he wrote "The Rick of Green Wood." I know Dorn's work fairly well. I've read his long poem Slinger two times; I also like his North Atlantic Turbine. His humor, masculine blinders, and line seem similar to Paul Blackburn's. You can see most of these qualities in "The Rick of Green Wood" which tells an anecdote of Dorn taking his daughter into the Skagit valley woods to purchase firewood for his wife. I suppose it's self-consciously mature in its dramatic situation: a man in the woods, doing business on behalf of his wife and family. During the business transaction, he literally declares his presence: "My name is Dorn, I said." His identity, still taking the traditional shape of adulthood. The poem is strangely like a folk ballad in the way an action is elaborately described but the consequences of it arenot entirely clear. Dorn is adamant that the "rick of wood" (an archaic measurement) not be green because his wife couldn't handle it: "Her back is slender/and the wood I get must not/bend her too much through the day." That seems considerate, but suggests that Dorn might be leaving her "in the november/air, in the world, that was getting colder." And who is this woodsman "Burlingame," with whom Dorn exchanges names and spends time "there in the woodyard talking/pleasantly, of the green wood and the dry"? Burlingame seems the most important person in poem, more than the wife, daughter, or Dorn himself. These questions are subtly suggestive, and the poem rich enough to nourish but not resolve them.

I also know Jonathan Williams's work fairly well, having read his thick selected Jubilant Thicket and his earlier selected An Ear in Bartrams Tree, which I quite admire.* (I bought the first New Direction paperback printing of this book a few years ago for the list price of $1.95. It had apparently been sitting on the shelf since 1972.) In a way, Williams was the James Laughlin of Black Mountain. Although he was known as a publisher of important poetry, he wrote exquisite, witty, frequently erotic poems himself. "A Little Tumescence" shows his light touch. It's not the kind of poem you can describe, so

This time, I mean it:

twice tonight!

(omne animal, always

The Hope

Triste, triste

situation, such outrageous

limitation,

limp,

simply

I always think of Williams as an old man, and in fact his aesthetic seems fully mature here at the ripe old age of 25. He's self-deprecating, off-handedly learned, and shows the finely tuned ear you'd expect of one of Zukofsky's publishers. Look at the sequence of i's, from the pair of optimist long vowels in "twice tonight" that shrivel up to a chain of short sounds that are "limp, simply." This poem may have been written by a young man, but it's not a young man's poem.

Finally, there's Joel Oppenheimer, who was only 23 when he wrote "The Bath." This is a young man's poem. Like Dorn's, it is shrouded in the mantle of maturity. It describes, from the point of view of a commanding masculine presence, "his" wife taking a bath. It's quite dated in form and content. I guess it implies a critique of the patriarchal society it portrays: "what he is most pleased about is/her continuing bathing./in his tub. in his water. wife." That quote also shows the stylistic ticks in this selection: a lack of capitalization and a bounty of sentence fragments. As far as I can determine, these are meaningless affectations of a young man.

So, there you have it. Three poems by young men: two good, one overcoming the poet's youth and the other irrelevant to age; and one bad because of the poet's youth. I guess I'm happy to be growing old, though these three men had a lot more to show for themselves when they hit 30 than I do now. Ah, well, at least I can criticize!

I hope to do more more posting for the rest of the summer, but I might take a break from my Test of Poetry. I've made it to the end of the Black Mountain section, and there's a few other things I've been meaning to write about before delving into the San Francisco section. For instance:

/reading/: a rash of fantasy novels, something I haven't done for 20+ years
/watching/: a few of the summer's superhero movies, season 3 of Entourage
/listening/: moving into the requiem form, listening to VU's Loaded repeatedly

*Gilbert Sorrentino on JW: "His extraliterary concerns include wildflowers and other flora, stories and speech patterns of Southern mountain people, jazz, classical music, baseball, and on and on. He is a wit, gentleman, bon vivant, hiker, raconteur, and discoverer of scores, if not hundreds, of artists and craftsmen of this and other centuries, minor but oftentimes brilliant people whom time and fashion have obscured... He is a unique man, one to whom everything is interesting; i.e., I cannot imagine him ever being bored by anything that is not fake."

STL #72: Shut partly in

2008-06-20T09:21:00.008-04:00

On Larry Eigner's "Open"

Even though I know very little about Larry Eigner's life, there is one biographical fact that can't be escaped when reading his work. As he puts it in his biographical note in the NAP, "I'm a 'shut-in,' partly." What this means, to snip from Wikipedia, is "Eigner suffered from severe Cerebral palsy among other physical disabilities, and his parents believed that he was incapable of language until he taught himself to use a typewriter in his teens. The physical act of writing took more effort for him, and the physicality of each line is something that Silliman has remarked on repeatedly on his widely read poetry weblog." Now, there's some kind of New Critical 'heresy' in reading poetry through the facts of the author's life, but that in Eigner's case how can you not? (By the reading rules I've set up, his biographical note, beginning with the specifics of the institutions he was born into (the hospital in Lynn, MA) and schooled in (correspondence course with the U of Chicago) and describes him as a "shut in, partly" is admissible as 'text.' ) The "partly" modification is fascinating, since the rest of his note describes how he "bumped into Cid Corman reading Yeats, on the radio... from Boston." The part shut-in "bumped into" Corman "on the radio." The ensuing correspondence continued and one gathers supplanted his University education, converting him from a "non-declamatory way of reciting" and was the means by which he "got introduced to things." The last phrase of the biographical note is "the ice broke considerably," which I think means not only the friendship of Eigner and Corman, but Eigner's seclusion. He entered into the Black Mountain 'company' of poetry and continued as an elder statesmen for Silliman's cohort of Language poets. Through poetry, he was in the world, though physically he was largely shut out of it.

There is a poetry interview site that has been dormant for a while called "Here Comes Everybody" that asked an array of poets the same 10 questions. The tenth question always seemed strained to me, but it is provocative in thinking about Eigner: "What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?" A full answer to that question on behalf of Einger might be contentious and theory-laden, and would have to respond to his later work, which is dominated by concrete nouns and largely devoid of conventional syntax. This earlier work is more conventional, but still indicates a physical relation to the world found nowhere else I know in poetry. The obvious marker of the relation of language to body is the word "I," a word manipulated in a fascinating way in "Open." The poem begin in the lyric standard Romantic sublime: "They [flowers] nod at me and I at stems." As in the Romantics, nature seems to mirror the psychological interior, "me," as "I" fully engages in a relation to nature, but not all is as it seems. After two more uses of "I" which demonstrate imaginative engagement with nature ("I flower myself" and "As, I pass on the air"), the personal pronoun morphs into the lower case "i," a letter which stands for an imaginary number. This marker appears four times in the poem, replacing the mask of "I" with "As i, pause / As i dream" and finally "o i walk i walk." The "pause" not only sonically mirrors the "pass" of the preceding line but marks a literal pause during which the Romantic I becomes an imaginative 'i' cognizant of and bound by reality. The only other time the upper-case I intercedes is between "i dream" and "i walk": "I have been on all sides / my face and my back." There is an i that dreams and walks, and there is an I constrained by the limitations of his body and by the conventions of language.

To read: areas lights heights, Writings 1954-1989

STL #71: Paul Carroll's "Father"

2008-06-19T10:26:00.006-04:00

Paul Carrol is the first poet in the NAP collection about whom I had no previous knowledge. I had never read anything else by him and am quite sure I'd never even heard of him. He must have had some direct connection to Black Mountain or the friendship of one of its members, because "Father" might as well be a Beat poem as a Projectivist one. It's an enumerative, troubled-elegiac, image-strewn memory poem about a father's funeral. I find some sociological interest in it as a treatise on immigrant power in the U.S.. Carroll's biographical note mentions the financial success of his Irish immigrant father, and this poem alludes to how he "transform[ed]/that old cow pasture Hyde Park/into [his] own oyster" and how he earned "his millions by himself" and coming to the position where he could "quarrel with congressmen from Washington about the New Deal bank acts./Or call Mayor Kelly crooked to his face." There's nothing particularly bad about this poem, though the language is a little stale: "the raw October rain/ rasped against our limousine/guiding the creeping cars back into Chicago." In all honesty, that sounds like something I might have written in my early 20s: romantic strum and drang, heavily worked consonance and subtler assonance, neither particularly meaningful. There is one image that does pop out as intriguing in context. After getting a haircut in preparation for the funeral, the penniless Carroll thinks of "that old snapshot of Picasso/& his woman Dora Maar" which belonged to the elder Carroll (implying he knew Picasso?) It is an image of age and the remembered vigor that preceded it: "Picasso bald & 60. But both/in exaltation, emerging/with incredible sexual dignity/ from the waters of the Golfe Juan." It's a very lively image partitioned by space and time from the dour occasion of the poem. Note that the sound in this image is much more subtly wrought: the short [a] of 'bald,' "exaltation," and "waters" thread through, an [r] rolls gently through "emerging," incredible," and "waters." The sound is more secure and dignified than the description of the emotionally frenzied funeral scenes.

STL #70: Robert Creeley

2008-06-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

I haven't done the homework, but I suspect that a lexicon of Robert Creeley's poems would be surprisingly small in comparison the the girth of the two chunky volumes that comprise his Collected Poems. Creeley gravitates to a handful of small, seemingly innocuous words, words like "this" (he has several poems bearing that title), and his poems and conversation returned often to a set of abstract nouns like "company," "circumstance," and, most oddly, "etc."

Out of this modest lexicon, Creeley built a body of work that seemingly rejects the weight of lyric tradition yet fully embraces its history of craft, of the well-wrought urn. Creeley saw himself as part of a company with his fellow Black Mountaineers working in the open field. Yet reading his prose statements, one doesn't find antagonism toward the other side of the 'poetry war' of which which the NAP was a major front. While he notes that "a division of method appears between those who make use of traditional forms, either for discipline or solution, and those who, as Olson, go "By ear... " he does in this passage note good reasons for using traditional forms. Tradition continues in his company; it is "an aspect of what anyone is now thinking, --not what someone once thought. We make with what we have..." The difference between his company and those who use traditional forms is described in this passage: "They [the traditionalists] argue the poem as a means of recognition, a signboard as it were, not in itself a structure of 'recognition' or--better--cognition itself. Some, then, would not only not hear what Olson was saying, but would even deny, I think, the relevance of his concerns. The great preoccupations with symbology and the levels of image in poetry insisted upon by contemporary criticism has also meant a further bias for this not-hearing, since Olson's emphasis was put upon prosody, not interpretation." Olson and Creeley's emphasis is on prosody, perhaps the strongest tradition in poetry that there is.

For this company, prosody is what Pound said: "the articulation of the total sound of the poem." Creeley uses the surprisingly traditional method of rhyme over and again. In this selection, 11 of his 14 poems use some sort of end rhyme, including slant rhyme and irregular patterns. The question I want to turn to now is simply "why?" To limit my investigation I'm concentrating on the poem "The Warning," though I will also open myself up to the more traditional realm of prosody, meter, to better graph the "total sound of the poem."

Since I'll be discussing the poem in detail, here it is in its entirety:

The Warning

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

There it is: eight lines, 32 words not including the title. The dominant meter is iambic dimeter, but expressively varied--the shocking second line starts with a decisive dactyl and grows an extra foot. The seventh line complicates the poem and is also longer, though a smooth iambic tetrameter. The seventh line lets out some hidden context before the eighth line pulls it quickly back. The final rhyme, reaching back to the last line of the first stanza, is the most pronounced rhyme, but looking back you see it is not the only rhyme. While the first stanza is unrhymed (a, b, c, d), the fifth line slightly echoes the fourth (eyes/us) and the sixth and seventh don't only rhyme with one another but pick up "put" from the second. Broadening the definition of rhyme, the rhyme scheme of the poem might be seen as (abcd d'b'b'd), though more conservatively as (abcd effd). Beyond rhyme, the poem is tightly knit together by recurring sounds in these unassuming words: l and d sounds in the first three lines, n sounds in lines 2-5, z sounds in lines 3-4 and 6-7, and r sounds in the last three lines. Particularly impressive is the n, d, l pattern in the first stanza, and how all three sounds cluster around the mysterious "candle" in the skull. Finally, its worth noting that almost every word is closed--begins and ends with a consonant. You might say this sound pattern is a guarded, close-mouthed one.

After the gruesome imagery of the first stanza, the second stanza twists away ending with an in-itself-surprising "eyes"/"surprise" rhyme. The second stanza is in itself a "surprise" that as with a lot of Creeley poems I can't quite resolve. The most unusual word in the poem is perhaps "amulet." Not an uncommon word except when compared to the rest of the word in this poem, amulet is taken up in its shamanic sense as a charm against evil. But that must be read ironically--in the name of love, I will kill you to make a charm to protect love? But what is the "quick surprise" of the last line? Is it a new love? As I recall, the book this eventually appeared in, For Love, is largely concerned with the disintegration of a marriage and specifically the complications of infidelity. That may sound like the kind of confessionalist crap that was starting to be churned out at the time, but note that "The Warning" doesn't describe anything at all, but enacts a state of mind.

To (re)read: For Love, Words, Pieces. A Quick Graph.

STL #69: Paul Blackburn

2008-06-09T17:47:00.008-04:00

Paul Blackburn is a poet I've heard of, and I've read some of his poems in, I think, the Origin anthology. But I don't know his work well at all. He is a hanger-on at the edge of biographies I've read, most recently turning up pretty devotedly in the second half of the Zuk bio. Judging from the gathering in NAP, Blackburn writes in two modes: short wry jokes in contemporary urban (usually) settings ("The Continuity, "The Assistance, "The Problem," "The Once Over," "The Encounter"), and longer poems drawing on medieval traditions ("Night Song for Two Mystics," "Sirventes"). Though my tastes generally run to the former, I'm drawn by "Night Song for Two Mystics." The two mystics are W.B. Yeats and "Llull," who Wikipedia suggests is Ramon Llull (1232-1315), also known as Raymond Lully. Llull was a scholar of astonishing breadth, writing on theology, mathematics and logic (his work forecasts modern information science) and the author of the first prose narrative in Catalan (and arguably the first European novel.) He lobbied for the study of Hebrew and Arabic in the universities, and sought the conversion of Muslims through his system of logical argument. Renowned in this time, the man Duns Scotus nicknamed "Dr. Illuminatus" (there's a comic book name for you!) was parodied by Swift and condemned by Popes until 1858. Though I've seen the name "Raymond Lully" here and there, I think it's safe to say he isn't now widely known.

The Llull that Blackburn writes about is both a mystic and a philosopher of love. There's a longish quotation in the first half of the poem which describes "the light of the beloved's room" illuminating (this key term for Dr. Illumunatis is stretched out over a line by Blackburn: "t o i l l u m i n a t e") the lover's room. "[T]hen/all the shadows are thrown back,/then he is filled and surfilled/with his peculiar pleasures/the heavy thoughts, the languors." The light of the beloved overtakes and inhabits every corner of the lover's room and mind. He changes his life and his habits for the beloved, but she "remains forever/far enough removed/and in a high place/ as to be easily seen from a distance." I'm not sure of the source of this quotation, but in the end this love story seems to transform into a theological parable.

The second half of the poem questions the other mystic, Yeats, on what lesson we might learn from Llull, from the distant perspective of the twentieth century. The second half starts with two quesions, one rhetorical "you see where we stand?" and one critical "must it always lead to gods?" In other words, must earthly love be divinely transformed to be worthwhile? Is Llull still meaningful in an age that has outstripped his philosophy? Llull is gone and nearly forgotten: "The man's shadow dissolves in shadows./Most men go down in obliteration/with the homeliest of remembrances." Blackburn opens a parenthesis on the seven deadly sins, asking what are the positive virtues with as much force, and then opens another suggestive parenthesis ("down, sailor/blow the man/c o i l e d d o w n t h e r e") that at once recalls the spacing of "illuminate" on the previous page and also invokes the serpent "in the dark pools of the mind." The poem ends with a classically ambivalent take on mortality: "Dust, Yeats, all dust,/tho Llull remain a lover." It's not overreaching to say that the mysticism of Yeats and Llull is transient and trendy, but love (or really their lyricism that conveys it) is what will endure.

I may have been attracted to writing about this poem simply to find out who Llull was. Most of the poetry I read is densely allusive, a quality that leads people to the conclusion that the poetry is difficult, or 'hard.' The assumption, erroneous I am sure, is that if you don't know who Llull is, then you don't know what the poet is talking about (or plug in other examples from Eliot, Pound, etc.). Blackburn doesn't offer in any cribs of notes, yet read with attention the poem yields up a great deal of intellectual pleasure. The cited Llull is really all the Lllull you need--such was Pound's argument about The Cantos. ("It's all there.") The minimal background I dug up on Llull revealed the illumination joke, and I'm sure further acquaintance with his work might deepen my understanding, but these two night mystics have been brought into the field of the poem so that we might learn from them and converse with them, as the poet himself does. They aren't there to make us feel deficient or confuse us. The "hard" poetry I like is not elitist; quite the opposite I think. A poem like this embraces seven centuries, and welcomes any reader who cares to stop in.

To read: Journals, praised in Sorrentino's excellent essay on Blackburn in Something Said. Also Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry.

STL #68: "Beyond whatever ends"

2008-06-09T12:58:00.000-04:00

On Denise Levertov

In the run-up to the this new "Test of Poetry," I think I said Denise Levertov did not have a statement on poetics included in the NAP. That is incorrect. I made the mistake because the order of the poetics section does not quite follow the order as the poetry roster. Robert Creeley jumps the line from fifth in the poetry section (based on his age) to third in the poetics section (based, probably, on his stronger identification with Black Mountain.)* I'm glad Levertov's statement is there, because it brings up her enticing idea of organic form: "I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life." She also believes that "content determines form, and yet that content is only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery." In these few lines we can see the strong intellectual identification with the other Black Mountaineers, especially Duncan and Creeley who she considers the "chief poets among [her] contemporaries."

With her thoughts on organic form in mind, "Beyond the End" reads as an ethical defense of how that form emerges in free verse. It begins "In 'nature' there's no choice --" which seems to argue against the 'organicism' of free verse. Free verse offers infinite choice, so how can it be called organic, in the sense of 'natural'? If "flowers/swing their heads in the wind, [and] sun & moon/are as they are," then why should the poet presume not to similarly confine verse to the boxes of sonnets "as they are"? The answer will rely on those inverted commas around "nature" that I will work my way back to. While "nature" operates without "choice," "we seem / almost to have it." Choice is Olsonian "energy: a spider's thread: not to / 'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:" The energy is creative, one that reaches out to contribute to ("quicken" or "activate" as opposed to simply represent) that which exists. 'That which exists' surely must be nature-- a spider web as much as "the girls crowding the stores." Although this creative energy exists in and affects "nature," "[i]t has no grace like that of/the grass." It is "barely/a constant" like other natural forces. It does not only manifests in work, although "every damn / craftsman has it while he's working / but it's not / a question of work: some shine with it, in repose." Rather it is a Stevensian "will to respond"--again, not to represent--that shapes poetry. The poet, in a sincere response to "nature," creates further "nature" that is "beyond the end/beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy."

This creative defiance, in a poetics descending from Pound to Zukofsky to Olson, is defined in by poetic line. The line, the organic unit of breath in the Black Mountain/Projectivist program, is often linked to the poet's integrity or sincerity. Levertov specifies the poet's decision of the line break to be essential to craft. I touched on line breaks when discussing Olson, and indeed I'm always fascinated by line breaks in both open and closed forms. But as interesting in open forms is lineation itself. The poem has stanzas of 6, 6, 4, 6, and ends either with one of 11 or probably two of 7 and 4 (there's a page break that confuses the issue.) I could hit my prosody handbooks to come up with closed forms with 6-4 line patterns, but it's the variation-- the shift from 6-6-4 to 6-7-4, that is most important. The 7-line stanza, concerned with craft, incorporates the Stevens quotation which overflows into the next stanza, the only stanzaic enjambment of the poem. This construction echoes the pushing "beyond the end" of the poem's argument.

At this stage in her writing career, Levertov that the "social function" of poetry, if it has one at all, "is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock." (Her Vietnam-era poetry might suggest she reconsidered this position.) Perceiving the craft in this poem and meditating on its significance could be just such an awakening. There's a small lexicon for the awakened mind in the second and the final stanzas. The two triads map onto one another nicely: quicken=to begin, activate=to be, extend=to defy.

To read: the Poems 1960-1967 I've had on the shelf for a dozen years.

*Levertov and Creeley are the only poets in the NAP I ever met. ("Met" is an exagerration; I was in the same room as Levertov once and Creeley twice.) Some time later than this writing, Levertov became a Northwesterner, writing at least a few poems about Mount Rainier. I went to a poetry reading of hers sometime in the early 90's. She was a dignified kindly presence, with a slight British accent remaining and, I remember, a slight lisp.

STL #67: Melees and Mosaics

2008-06-03T10:56:00.000-04:00

On Robert Duncan's "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar"

"There is natural mystery in poetry. We do not understand all that we render up to understanding."

Duncan writes that a poem "is an occult document" subject to "x-rays and vivisection." In this sense, "occult" means that a poem resists and it yields, in Stevens's sense that it resists the intelligence almost successfully. This happens because the poem is a "field" into which the poet brings his or her materials. In the case of his long, famous "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar," the materials are not only the Roman poet's Third Pythian Ode, but the myth of Pysche and Cupid (as represented by Goya), a poetic lineage from Whitman to Williams and Pound, and American Presidential history.

The poem is in four parts: the first begins with a mishmash of Pindar, the beautiful but nonsensical "The light foot hears you and the brightness begins," quickly clarified as "god steps at the margins of thought." In some ways, this poem provides evidence of the numinous: a foot cannot hear in any way we understand, but the lingering occult presence brings with it luminosity. Most of this first section describes Goya's painting of Pysche and Cupid, the troubled story of a god in love with a human. The second section transitions from myth to the imperfect present, using the strokes of President Eisenhower and William Carlos Williams to represent the rupture of poetry from public policy (a public poetry being possible from before Pindar to Whitman). The stroke victims' language is a distorted, mis-signifying stutter: "The present dented of the U/nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?/Cloud. Invades the brain." At this point in history, "The smokes of continual ravage/obscure the flame." A catalogue of presidents is a list of graceless "idiots fumbling at the bride's door." In the third section, dedicated to Charles Olson, we see Ezra Pound, an inspiration for such a jeremiad against "liars in public places." Pound as Olson came to know him at St. Elizabeths is the broken "old man at Pisa," though, unlike WCW, his language is untouched and stronger than ever, even if he a "A man upon whom the sun has gone down." Pound transforms into a mythic figure, "the hero who struggles east/widdershins to free the dawn." He is against the grain of the American myth, in which "West/from east men push." The fourth section is a diffuse return to the misreading of Pindar, punctuated by the footfall of a "boundary walker," his "foot informed/by the weight of all things." This walker traverses a wilderness and dissolves into a ring of children dancing. Near the end of the poem, Duncan represents its genesis: "the information flows/ that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves/ from the area of my lamp/ toward morning." The poem ends with the children dancing "In the dawn that is nowhere... clockwise and counterclockwise turning."

In this final section, Duncan comments on his line from Pindar in a prose paragraph aside that also describes the poem: Pindar's art "was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor." It is an inspiration for Duncan's poetics of the field. He, like Olson and others in NAP is not pursuing a well-wrought urn, but initiating a sometimes occult process, or creating a field where thinking and music can occur. Found within his "Pages from a Notebook" is a statement enclosed in quotation marks but not attributed: "I do not seek a synthesis but a melee." This uncontrolled "melee" is as apt a description of field poetics as the accumulating mosaic. It is a poetics of action and of presence--poems are not objects for readers to enjoy but fields of participation. They are energy transfers (Olson's) or "passionate dispersions" of magic (Duncan).

While working through this poem, I have begun to identify with Duncan the same way I identify with Olson. Personally, politically they are far apart, and they have different intellectual interests too. But each seems on first blush a little ludicrous. They have large ambitions that seem to have been accomplished by others in styles that seem dated. But I'd encourage any one interested enough to have read this far to give both consideration. Though I've read and liked his Opening of the Field, studying "Pindar" at length is driving me to further study of his work.

Recommended: The Opening of the Field
To Read: Lisa Jarnot's bio (forthcoming), Bending the Bow, Roots and Branches, Selected Prose

STL #66: "Image, therefore, is vector" (on Charles Olson)

2008-05-22T14:05:00.003-04:00

My fascination with the big American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) began with a line break. As an undergraduate with some time between Fall and Winter quarters, I read through the whole anthology I had used in my Intro to Poetry class, and I came across a poem headed "Maximus, To Himself" which begins with the two lines, "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties." That sequence "simplest things / last" instantly became a sort of motto, both for the truth of the notion (it speaks to my habit of struggling with complexities at length to eventually step back and say "oh, I see") and for the energy inherent in the lines, energy that derives from that line break. The meaning of that first sentence hinges on the last word, and starting the line with it relays it with astonishing power. (And no small verbal irony, in that the last becomes first.) There's much to admire just in the very beginning of the poem: the temporal precision of the verb tense (present perfect, which "suggests the process is not complete and more actions are possible") and the pattern of declarative ("I have had to learn...") and parenthetical elaboration ("Which made for difficulties"--truncated but poignant). (Olson uses parenthesis (often nested and/or unclosed) to open new lines of energy

"New lines of energy..." What does that mean? I mentioned "energy" twice in that paragraph, in part because in Olson's own poetics, energy plays a defining role. In "Projective Verse" (1950), he argues that that a poem is a "high energy-construct” and so reading and writing is a matter of transmitting and receiving that energy by means of breath and eye, syllable and line. In a sense, Olson is the father of modern poetics, as I alluded to in my previous note. In his work, theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable. Likewise, work and life are identical too. Personal letters (famously and lengthily to Creeley, but in NAP to Elaine Feinstein) serve as public statements of practice. Olson's "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" follows his more well-known essay in the anthology, and although it is less well-known than the former, it is explicitly a continuation of "Projective Verse." There's a special focus on the image (actually "Image") I want to focus on. It depends on a special definition of "image," which he never articulates. Common ideas of visual and auditory images aren't useful to him: Poetry's truth is not accessible by description. The Image has to be taken by a double (the reader)=its seems to be the conduit by which energy in transferred. "Image, therefore, is a vector," meaning that it is a magnitude (of force) coupled with a direction (to a reader). (This thinking is actually very close to the constructivist pedagogy I'm getting into via John Dewey: An idea can't be given to someone, it merely takes the form of an accepted fact. To be an idea, the learner needs to enact the thinking that leads to it. Teaching as creating a vector. Olson said that "what you find out yourself ('istorion) keeps all accompanying circumstance.")

Okay, I think we need to stop and figure out what "Image" means. Olson, despite his decidedly liberal politics, is closely identified with Pound in matters of technique, and rightly so. With the help of Hugh Kenner's astounding The Pound Era, we can hear the influence of EP on Olson's idea of Image. Pound calls the poetic image "...a radian node or cluster... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Upon which quote Kenner elaborates: "A patterned integrity [knot] accessible to the mind." From his early days as Imagiste to his last poems, we can see in EP's work the intention that "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The Pound/Olson poetic is essentially fractal (no doubt chaotic) in that an image is an irregular piece of larger whole that reflects that irregular whole.

There are only one or two traditional "images" in "Maximus, to Himself." The second verse paragraph reads

It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet

The assymetry of the 1st/2nd stanzas strikes me as powerful: it implies this short passage has the commensurate energy of the first one. This image, then, ought to be a vector (the magnitude of the sea does stretch out from his feet) or a radiant node through which his ideas rush. And in fact, the longer first stanza resonates in every word of this one: he has received his mission or "business" from his insight, (the simplest thing he has learned is that "we grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known") the sea, which was not his trade, lies before him, immense but conquerable. This is a vector that points to the future, to a newly defined reality.

I haven't begun to dig into the magnitude of “Maximus, To Himself." There are layers of linguistics and history, all realized on the level of the syllable. I finally discovered, while thinking about Olson these past few weeks, what he meant by identifying the poetic line with the poet's ear and the syllable with the mind when the opposite would seem to be true. Cory Greenspan’s 1972 article "Charles Olson: Language, Time and Person" ends with an Appendix of “Words Governing ‘Maximus, to Himself” that lists entomological touchstones that Olson used in constructing this poem. (To Feinstein, Olson wrote of "the line of force" one can discover by "tracking any word... to Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and out to Sanskrit.") The morphem "reg" means “moving in a straight line”; “to direct to rule” in Greek (oregein) and Old English (gerecenia) and is heard in the poem in “arrogance” “sharpness” and “stretching out” Furhtermore, with Old English and Sanskrit relatives reccan and raga therefore are subsidiary meanings, through various languags, of rain, to put in order, to dye red.

You can effectively parse my motto "simplest things / last") this way too. “Simple” relates back to Old Norse “Soemr” making one, or reconciling ; “things” relates to German and Old English words for throw, mark, and teach (Olson has found "what pleasures / doceat allows and Greenspan notes the relation to "tokens"); while last is governed by “leis,” to learn. Leis also means "footprint" which links the first sentence of the poem with the final image of the sea at Olson's feet.

I've become fascinated by Olson's life and work. I've read much of his prose, and read his lengthy Maximus Poems Though his writing is can be chaotic and convoluted, it promises a generative cosmos of meaning. Some how it's larger than a cosmos=it's a supercosmos in which you can invent your own universe. "Supercosmos." That's the perfect note to end on for a note on Olson-- a freshly coined term, halfway between poignacy and embarrassment, and far away from where I began.

Further reading: short poems (esp in Archaeologist of Morning and The Distances) and his prose The Special View of History another time through Maximus and A.N. Whitehead, an important influence.

STL #65: ATOP II: NAP

2008-05-15T17:48:00.002-04:00

I've decided to undertake another "test of poetry," this time over Don Allen's seminal anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960. [Thus is uncoded the obtuse title of this edition of Simplest Things Last.] In worrying over whether I "passed" the last test, I noticed that in my reading practices, "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery" (STL #48). In this second test, I am seeking to deepen and enrich that framework. The anthology in question is well-suited for this purpose. The poets represented in all respond in some ways to Pound's poetics (sometimes to contest or reject it, but never in ignorance of it) and the anthology was the first to include a "poetics" section (it might mark the birth of that discipline, but that's a question for other scholars.) My question for this test is "In what terms, and by what terms, should poetry be judged?" I'll coordinate between the statements on and enactments of poetry and in each post develop some key terms of my poetics.

In coming weeks you can expect to see pieces on the first four poets in the anthology, the Black Mountaineers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. The anthology include statements on poetics by all of these except Levertov. I plan on writing between the two sections of the book as much as possible: I've started on Olson, using his idea of the Image as Vector to think about "Maximus, To Himself." I'll follow suit with Duncan, but with Levertov I've decided not to seek out any poetics. I did once write a short essay on this model, drawing on material in Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry, a volume from the 1990's very much modeled on Allen's anthology. However, I've decided to strictly limit myself to materials included in NAP. I reserve the right to respond however I wish--if inspiration leads me back to Zuk's or Pound's ideas, I will follow it.

With that procedural stuff out of the way, I'll concluded this long-delayed, awkwardly formed note with some further thoughts on the anthology. It's often pitched against Donald Hall's traditionalist New Poets of England and America which appeared a few years earlier. I only know that book by reputation, but judging on titles alone you can see that Allen's interest is in creating a new distinct tradition--not only the geographical refinement but even the movement from Poets to Poetry does that. This anthology therefore is an argument--that there is a strong and variegated community of poets at work in the U.S.A. He divides the 44 poets he selected into five groups: Black Mountain, San Fransisco, the itinerant Beats, New York, and an odd "other" group that no seems as easy to sort into the existing categories as the others. No matter--the geographical groupings suggests a period of ferment about to mature, that "something is happening but you don't know what it is." And indeed, much did happen subsequent to this anthology. In the 1960's many new poetries made an impact on American and world culture. In the seventies, the poetics section of the anthology had grown into the first poetics programs in universities--spearheaded by Olson's and Creeley's work at Buffalo. To say that NAP defined a field is no overstatement. I'm now beginning to see how it's a touchstone to my own scholarship, and surely Olson more than any one refined the understanding of poetry as an intellectual nexus, creating a space for poets as researchers, fitting in as poets at research universities. (That's an influence he has had apart from what I fear is a generally declining poetic influence.)

I'll end a good way--abruptly. I see I've started to talk about one of my favorite topics, Olson, and so I'll pick up with his poem that gives this blog its name next time.

STL #64: writing, memory, and knowledge

2008-04-20T16:42:00.010-04:00

"a clock clink hardly the solid links/and retell, more retell, and all retell"

This post has been taking up time I don't really have right now, so I am posting it in less than finished shape. I hope to revisit and extend it sometime, probably into some other form.

Like a lot of people, I know Lyn Hejinian's work primarily through My Life, which is probably the only book in the so-called "Language" tradition to achieve anything like a 'breakthrough success' or become a 'beloved classic.' It is taught, though probably less than widely, in colleges and high schools. My Life is read and liked by people who have the curiosity to pursue the Language poet's critique of language as a representational medium, but who aren't consumed by that critique to the point where all language is inevitably about language. (And therefore can live a normal life.) I am more than the casual fan--I find language-oriented writing, which can sometimes but not always be sorted into the categories of theory and poetry, to be very powerful and a necessary mode for understanding the world today--yet I had never read Hejinian beyond My Life. I corrected that oversight by reading her earlier volume Writing Is an Aid to Memory yesterday, and since the edition was not in a fit condition to keep, I thought I should type up my notes for posterity (to put that memory into writing).* Where My Life was written in 37 blocks of prose (expanded to 45) that all relate to the title, Writing is written in 42 lineated blocks that explore the important relationship of writing to memory, and of both to knowledge. As readers of My Life and her theoretical writings (though it's all theory: ""writing constitutes the mind of the/theorist in the mind/Latin is a very genteel business") know, writing, memory, and knowledge all exist within the same medium--language.

In the Preface to Writing, Hejinian writes that she is "always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me..." Memory, which follows along this rush of experience is "the girth, or again." Because the reliving the past again through language struggles to embrace the whole missing past (the girth of it), writing is not so much an aid to memory as a supplement, adornment, or extension of the past, or "a gain." The memorial function of language cannot fill in the gaps of onrushing time, but, paradoxically, it overfills these gaps: "Argument demonstrates that truth cannot end. Continuous quantities, like continuous qualities, are endless like the truth, for it is impossible to carry them." Prefiguring the images of cats and dogs in her poem, Hejinian ends the Preface with the suggestive line "Though we keep company with cats and dogs, all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable with language." This image of restlessness shows the pull of writing against the memorial function--though equipped to memorialize life gone by, it just as soon charge ahead.

Any individual section of this poem might be described by "that sweet little block/the taste of a larger pattern." The larger pattern is Hejinian's argument about memory and language which by nature of subject and medium is "endless like the truth. Like language, "memory only mimics/paint." Memory works, supposedly, by removing a part from a whole, and preserving it--but these blocks are necessarily pieces of the whole. Memorials, ruins, diaries, --these are seen again and again in her text. The complete sixth section reads

you must show yourself to catch
to be amused, to equate the man, to
shoot his autobiographical work.

This equation of the record and the subject is the idealized goal of language and memory, but is unattainable. Is the job of writing then "recognizing patterns or pruning the truth"? A lot of pruning happens in Writing. Periods of ellipses are broken down into physical images in the poem ("link rule dots"), and in fact the poem is brimming with conceptual "ellipsis [that] makes its promise leaving us to get out." Faced with these gaps, we are forced to ask "how did this happen like an excerpt"?

The question is difficult to answer, and difficult to ask. This writing is less than pellucid. The first line, "apple is shot nod" is uninterpretable as sentence, and followed immediately by non-signifying morpheme ("ness"). Throughout the poem, Hejinian incorporates little known words and coins nonce words like "ting," "persion," "guage". She truncates existing words ("guage" from "language") , and coins reasonably acceptable terms like "pensated change" (presumably thoughtful change), but because none of these are in dictionary, the poem moves along resistant to exterior authority. At one point she writes "I remember a very good joke, something which everyone/can understand/as thoughts should be." But aren't.

As a forty-two block poem unified by thought if not action, Writing, like any longish poem, begs comparison to other long poems, most notably for Hejinian are Pound's and Zukofksy's. LZ seems manifest in several places in this poem. In the Preface, Hejinian evokes Zukofsky in a passage, which sounds like a quotation from Bottom: "Knowledge is part of the whole, as hope is, from which love seeks to contrast knowledge with separation, and certainty with the temporal." LZ almost manifest in Block 19, from its numeric/alphabetic incantations to its violin music:

number city and numerical the alphabet
do trees in the thickness of thoughts
glides out of the minute
across as through thread
fiddle by the rough of hidden music
it were otherwise quickly and hours each rate
rough most better of recent dark
two borders a series takes
as through thick bits to any limit
fixing do trees glide two rates
trot of taught beauty
hour my daily connection like an edge trod
every blind fuddle something sweet.....

Block 32, on the other hand, might be an undercover appearance by Ezra Pound. On rereading, I find many potential references:

"all small colors have colors with an infinite number of/images" (Pound's gold)
"we may take the smoke between the eye/and a background" (historical backdrop)
"The mess of air rises five times bluer
of the same size
between the great variations and a background
veiled from a bench and without precise
limits vaguely economic
populist: sum at the daily paper is a little volume
bandit through chew deal abstract lack" (lateness in history, closer to Zuk's diction tho)

but what really struck me where these lines which I think acknowledge the weight of the cultural archive that is everywhere in Pound:

"history lovers look backward at the daily paper/thrown to a better philosophy"
"yellow-papered thousands but tacks/in depth or to speak to the house of a great man/chosen were from tent quotations"
"many other are luscious mentioned
chant ships may happen
cooper different wooden stack and pin.... goats and high wages
trade each social busily... ideas a happy little opera"

While Pound thinks of knowledge as the production of history, that can be combed through and sorted, as a "happy little opera" that can be contained in time and space. Zuk sees it as a function of language that is always rife with connection, with continuous quantities and qualities. I think that it is to Zuk's mission that Hejinian relates late in the poem:
"I suppose a dictionary with a rhythmic base
an impulse of remembering
could show what I could"

and in the final block

"I study is material
thoughtfulness collage bit river
the test apple bank as material think is
sense difference later differ doubt the
shape"

***

I mentioned that Writing predates My Life, but Hejinian had already started work on it as several hints divulge. She seems to refer to its structure: "nothing less is done in one year block/cut it only in dark reduction/how ness posites/autobiography sees the world." And she is more specific in referring to the thirty-seven annual blocks in "the more regretted cozy paradise/the nature of my thirty-seven of whom/my own astonished sequel." (The astonishment of My Life is seen in Writing as well, occasionally as "wonderment." Even as she was working on the volume at hand, it's evident that she had a sense of a major work in the offing: "I am impatient to finish in order to begin." Like many of the so-called Language poets, Hejinian has a sunny disposition toward her work and her world. The complications of language which prevent memory from definitively preserving the past aren't something to despair over: "memory is a trick of coincidence/which overturned has invisibly legible/use." That "legible use" is the always astonishing creation through language of memory and knowledge.

*If these notes seem more disjointed than usual, it is probably due to the fact that in getting rid of the book, I became intent on "saving" all the "good" parts I marked. I've tried to weave these into something coherent, but no doubt failed again.

**Cats and dogs appear throughout the poem. As an example, section 9 begins with allusion to the jazz idiom: "a cat is 'in time'/ between wind and water a queer character" while the first line of section 10 combines the wind and water into "rough plays smooth the surface of dogs"

STL #63: A Year in Reading

2007-12-12T15:09:00.000-05:00

I toyed with the idea of incorporating other "texts" into my review of my 2007 reading, but nixed the idea at the last second. While an interpretation of Bleak House draws on similar skills as one of The Sopranos (and some point in a hierarchy of skills anyway), I'm ultimately partitioning the printed word for somewhat political reasons. Traditional reading is beset by a tangle of cultural forces, though not to the degree some would think. I'm including online reading in the following list as well as other non-book reading. As with my music list, I'm doing away with canonical form, in this case the "book." Unfortunately, my records of what I read are spotty, so I'm relying on memory in the following alphabetical list of notable reading experiences.

"A" I begin each year by reading a "big book," sometimes for the first time and sometimes not.* To focus my energy toward completing my dissertation, I read this huge poem entire for fourth time.
Assassins The Nicholas Mosley books I've read remind me of Graham Greene. I may have read Greene's terrific Haitian novel
The Comedians this year, I'm not sure. Greene's better than Mosley, who I'm including so I can talk about Greene.
Epileptic Twenty pages in I knew that David B. had created a unique perceptual world. At this writing, I've only read the first volume.
Freakanomics This book shows how economists think. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but the idea that their are modes of thinking about idea is crucial to education, which is what I do.
Google Reader has changed how I read blogs. No more aimless clicking, now I get to scan my 25 feeds several times a day, marking some for later reference and letting the rest slide into the dustbin of my subconscious. There are problems with this model of reading to be sure.
Iron Fist is my monthly comic of the year, edging out JSA and another Matt Fraction book, Casanova. Fraction's work deserves a longer consideration. Maybe after the current IF and Casanova arcs are done.
Love and Hate in Jamestown I don't read much history, but bought this on my house-hunting trip to Richmond to learn a little of Virginia history. There is, needless to say, much more to learn.
Letters of James Laughlin and Guy Davenport. Not italicized because I'm not sure of the volume's proper name. I selected this to note the manner of reading rather than the matter. I read this over several afternoons while waiting for my wife to get off work at the bookstore. The fact of its presence there symbolizes the kind of refuge a bookstore can provide. Two relatively unknown carrying on a conversation in face of general disregard. The book is actually quite chit-chatty and even embarrassing (especially for JL), but it marks my general pursuit of Davenport ephemera.
Party-Going. My first take on Henry Green is as a funny Virginia Woolf. I think I'll stick with that for the time being.
Portable People (Which I finished the day before Freakanomics while housesitting in Austin this spring). Wonderful, short sketches of artists and the ilk in a fat, square volume.
"Projective Verse" by Charles Olson. Which I've read many times but really resonated during a recent rereading. There will be a post on Olson soon. (I'm publishing a piece on Olson next year, BTW)
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Wonderfully enjoyable, especially the ending with the narrator listening to his brother breathing. The last novel I read.
What the Best College Teachers Do. A great tool for thinking about my own practice.

*I originally intended a history of my "big reading" project to be the topic of this STL, but along the way I got sidetracked. I do at least want to record the list:

1995 Ulysses
1996 Swann's Way
1997 Poetry of William Carlos Williams
1998 In Search of Lost Time
1999 Don Quixote
2000 The Divine Comedy
2001 The Cantos
2002 Middlemarch
2003 Bleak House
2004 Paradise Lost
2005 The Recognitions
2006 The Odyssey
2007 "A"

On 1 Jan 2008, I began rereading Anna Karenina. Not counting 2008 (since I'm only 100 pages in), I've read 13 works, including 7 novels and 6 works of poetry. Since the split will grow after this year, I should read poetry in 2009, or perhaps branch into drama or nonfiction? (I once planned 30 years of reading while working at Boeing. That was a fun diversion, but I don't want to be so strict as to plan my reading years in advance.)

STL #62: Done with ^unplayed

2007-12-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

Technology and listening to music.

I made a small move the other day--I deleted a carat (^) from the name of a playlist on iTunes--that's going to have a determinative effect on what music I listen to. An on-again off-again obsession of mine from at least six months was listening to a huge number of songs that I had in my iTunes library but had never listened to on my iPod or computer. That least was huge when I created a 'smart' playlist of all songs with a playcount of 0. This generated a playlist of over 5,000 songs. That number is a little misleading, since it reflects the uploading of many CD's over the summer. Many of these CD's we had had for years, and if we felt like listening to them, we simply put it in the player. But since we resolved to sell those artifacts, I uploaded dozens of CDs with a failing drive. Unfortunately, I was to learn that many of those unheard tracks had blips toward the ends of the songs, and some had distracting skips and blips throughout, to the extent that they are unlistenable. I came to this realization after months of dedicated listening to a playlist I titled "unplayed," or more precisely, "^unplayed." The non-alphabetical symbol caused that playlist to rise to the top of my many playlists, so it was always handy for listening.

As I said, I'm done with ^unplayed for now. At the moment that I'm typing this, there's a trivial 322 songs left to be played, and many of those are classical pieces I listened to intently on CD before uploading for posterity. My present listening is mostly recent music, the smart playlist ^December, and a random shuffle through outside authorities' ^bestof2007. So much of my music-listening is done on my iPod, as I walk to work or walk the dog, that I didn't much regret getting rid of my CDs. Some remorse is creeping in, as the limitations of the mp3 format become apparent. Perhaps when the money loosens up a bit, I will buy the occasional CD that I want to sit down and listen to intently. An upcoming listening project is to rent DVD's of operas, which we'll watch one day a week as a movie. That kind of attention is a model of music listening that I admire but seldom followed, apart from my recent classical education project.

This post has been incubating for so long that I'm disappointed to see how boring it is turning out. Among the notes on how technology has affected my listening to music is "emusic/open source movement," which alludes to the fact that most of our musical acquisition in 2007 was through the online music store eMusic. Only independent labels comfortable with releasing tracks without DRM (and for cheap) are on eMusic, obviously affecting what I listen to. You might link this with the ideological freeware of the open source movement--a democratic mass of individuals courageously offering there labor for little, trusting that they will be paid back by a changed world. That's a crude homoloy that I only mention to satisfying my nagging past self who made the note.

Mentioning eMusic also allows me to make a top 10 of 2007, since we're on the subject of new music. Most, not all of these came through that pipeline. I used play count for music added in the last 400 days to determine what should be on here, then used my judgment to finalize it. For the first time, these mix single tracks with increasingly irrelevant "albums."

1. Lily Allen, Alright, Still
2. Amy Winehouse "Rehab"
3. Panther, "You Don't Want Your Nails Done"
4. Jens Lekman, Night Fell on Kordova
5. Dude n Em "Watch My Feet"
6. The National, The Boxer
7. Burial, "Ghost Hardware"
8. Pigeon John, "Growing Old"
9. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
10. "Lindsay Lohan," Spank Rock

Eh, I'm not crazy about that list, so maybe I'll revise it in a month or so.

STL #61: Numbers

2007-12-11T17:23:00.000-05:00

Finding my place in the history of STL, and beginning again.

I promised this bibliographic essay on the numbering of the Simplest Things Last series in the then-unnumbered follow up to the "Test of Poetry." The problem at that time was how to account for my free-form, months long sporadic engagement with the poetry in Zukofsky's anthology. My obligation to my dissertation got the best of me, and I never posted under the title Simplest Thing Last again. Early this year, I claimed the blog spot that unsurprisingly no one had taken and began posting a handful of short essayistic pieces, but did not post them explicitly under the STL imprimatur. The Archives Series (and life, in the form of finishing the dissertation, landing and starting the job) overshadowed these original posts, but with that project over and the free time of winter break imminent, I'm finally ready to return to posting new pieces under the STL banner. First though, I want to sort through the very STL-ish pieces I've written and posted since June of 2005. Doing so will not only give me a number under which to file this, but will help me articulate my intentions for STL posts.

Following the demise of the first generation of STL, I posted (and have archived) 13 posts on my Locus site. The backstory of Locus is simply that it is a CMS created to give CWRL staffers a place separate from where the were posting class materials to work on personal or professional projects. The fluidity of the CMS allowed for powerful searching and sorting, but also broke down boundaries so that students might not recognize the difference between a personal blog post and course materials. My plan was to use Locus more as a notebook, to seed and build on future projects. After making an introductory sketch or blurb on a subject, I could search by tags later to add to or consult it. My 5th Locus post was simply notes on Other British Poetry compiled after reading the anthology by that name and denoting names of authors I'd like to read more of. These notes are then "other" than what I was doing with STL. They do not have a claim to completion nor the acknowledgment of a hypothetical reader. STL posts are nothing if not essayistic: they have some formal structure, a unified purpose or subject, and some notion of an audience. Locus notes thus do not qualify on any of these criteria, but the five posts tagged as "eleven" arguably meet them all. These annotated lists of eleven current enthusiasms do possess a formal structure and are written for an audience. Some clearly have a unified subject: Eleven for Free Comic Book Day is grouped around comics; Eleven from Best American Poetry 2005 is essentially a review of that book, just like STL # 7 reviewed the 2002 volume. The only Eleven that doesn't have an obvious unified theme is the one date 4/13/2006, number 7 in the series. Yet even this one traces a narrative from sickness to health. Therefore, I'm designating the following posts as part of the STL series:

STL 49/Locus 6 Eleven for 3/24/2006 (organized by nerdiness)
STL 50/Locus 7 Eleven for 4/13/2006 (sickness to health--not bad for a 50th post because it avoids the embarrassing pomposity I'd be predisposed toward)
STL 51/Locus 8 Eleven Poems from BAP 2005
STL 52/Locus 9 Eleven for Free Comic Book Day
STL 53/Locus 10 Basho's Narrow Road (selects 11 scenes from the problematic Cid Corman translation. This is a bit shorter and less developed than the others.)
I didn't record the date of Locus 10 and don't particularly want to go back to look. I know that it was summer of 2006, soon after I bought the translation in question on a trip to the West Coast. I bought it at a wonderfully shambly bookshop in Newport Oregon on the way down to San Francisco for a Charles Olson conference. (This will be important later.)

I got back into blogging with the current Blogger space, thanks in part to the conveince of Google gobbling up the company and in essence creating an account for me. (Flooding back to me at this moment is my "creative" blog buspoems which recorded poems I wrote while waiting for/riding the bus to work in the summer of 2005. Someday, someday.) In the current incarnation of STL, any essayistic post is by implication an edition of STL, since it was published under the heading. There must be exceptions: again, undeveloped notes do not count. By the tradition of the first post to the first blog, "meta" posts about what I intend to do don't count. Therefore, the first post to this incarnation, announcing the excellent goals

1. Catalogue my intellectual pursuits by reviewing various "cultural artifacts" like movies, books, and comics.
2. Articulate my critical perception of the world, especially in regard to aesthetics and information literacy.
3. Archive past writing from the aforementioned projects.

and Rules

1. Make one substantial post a week, on Tuesdays if possible.
2. Archive one previously written post per week, on Thursdays if possible.
3. Tag each post.
4. Review each quarter's posts to refine my taxonomy and revise these rules.
5. Eschew obsfucation.

(Yet this post is a meta post, is it not? It's more in depth then the first post or the "15 Minutes to Meta" post and it reflects on the cultural artifacts of previous posts rather than speculating on unwritten pieces. Yeah. That's it.)

Following the initial meta post, I posted 3 or 4 posts on appropriate topics and one underdeveloped post on teaching appropriately titled "Improvised Blather." On January 4 and 5, I posted "Reading Wang Wei" in two parts. After a gentle revision, this will become STL 54. "Three Thrillers" is a piece from which the properties of STL could be adduced. A loose structure drawing together related cultural artifacts, written in an affectedly "charming" style for the purpose of uncovering a personal aesthetic. "Three Thrillers" must be STL 55. The "Comics Round-up" is relatively unimpressive, but not in the manner of a note and so will be swept up as STL 56.

The "Blog Every Day Month" of November saw the end of the Archives Series, but also a few items of new content. Several of these are clearly notes or meta statements of practice ("meta statements of practice"?). Those that are not will also be incorporated into the STL numbering:
STL 57: Detachment (about getting rid of the materials objects of music)
STL 58: Horrorfest 2007
STL 59: Why Study Literature? The Usable Past
STL 60: 300 (followed by a note on a possible future post on the movie, which will certainly never be written)

I've written my way to the present STL 61, which re-institutes the Title/Description format. I do not intend to do the clerical work of editing the above posts in the near future, which makes this piece so important, dear reader. In the coming weeks, expect to see one or two posts on music listening practices, a reading roundup of some challenging and enjoyable novels, and the beginning of another Test of Poetry, this time based on Don Allen's New American Poetry anthology.

Archives Project: STL #48

2007-11-27T10:19:00.000-05:00

Title: Final Exam
Description: Afterthoughts on The Test of Poetry.
Date: 22 June 2005

This is the final edition of the first series of Simplest Things Last. I've numerically passed the number of days in November, but obviously haven't blogged every day to do it. This post ends with the promise of a bibliographical essay on the numbering STL, which you may very well find in the near future.

Did I "pass" the Test of Poetry? Despite the fact that my intent was wholly exploratory, I still feel a sense of failure about the reading/writing I did on these texts the past several weeks. The sensation of failure can be parsed: failure to identify, failure to read through an understanding of Zuk's aesthetic, and (most distressingly) failure to understand my own taste. The first type of failure might be mitigated by the hurriedness of my reading toward the end, though might more likely by explained by the general shoddiness of my education and the fallibility of my memory. Regardless, I'd like to think I could pick out the passage from Paterson, or tell Byron from Shakespeare. Confusing WCW and LZ makes sense, and I could probably demonstrate something through comparative close readings. But the second case is pretty sad--not only should I have a better knowledge of Shakespeare's plays, but I should be able to distinguish these two styles.

The second manner of failure has led to the anxiety that I don't understand the subject of my dissertation at all. And this cannot be mitigated by Zuk's constraints as a historical subject, b/c I should understand that too. I can counter this by rebutting aspects of the poetics embodied in ToP: in selecting excerpts and critiquing on a word-by-word basis, he shows himself as an absolute formalist, whereas I'm a relative formalist. I want to know how a piece (excerpted or not) relates to a whole and how a context affects the part and whole. In other words, I should disregard this second sense of failure.

The third manner of failure I can wholly blame on the above-mentioned hurriedness and partially redeem in reflection--indeed, creating such a place for reflection was the intention of this project and the larger intent of this ongoing blog. Cid Corman wrote an essay (published as The Practice of Poetry) reading through the 2nd section of the Test, gently critiquing Zuk's assumptions and handling the excerpts with much greater confidence than I could, supplying formal and occasionally social context. I figure Corman's a guy who was pretty in touch with his own aesthetic, and in fact supplements his essay with "As Addendum A Little Compendium of Poets on Poetry" which quotes the usual Objectivist and Modernist suspects. (I'm taken with a matched pair of quotes by Zuk and Oppen: first, the convoluted Zuk "trust of expression, the incentive and end of which is to unite others to it in friendship." Then, the plain spoken Oppen: "I mean to be part of a conversation among honest people." Both quoted from private letters to Corman, I'm guessing) So I'm not the only one to undertake such an exploration. Reading back over my notes, I see I accept the model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance, freshness, and resonance; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery. So do I pass or not?

NEXT: A fascinating bibliographical essay on the numbering of STL.

Archives Project: STL #47.9

2007-11-27T10:12:00.000-05:00

Description: TOP 3.19-25
Date: 8 June 2005

The end of this monstrous edition, with one more post left in the Archives Project. woo

I rather rushed to end--my excuse for not identifying the passage from Paterson. I'm afraid that this experiment has failed, but I'll be back with some further reactions next time.

19a-b. Two adequate Burnsian lyrics. The first is built on a simple verbal irony: “Welcom be ye whan ye go,/And farewell whan ye come”) The second on simple hyperbole (“The Deil he could na scaith thee,/Or aught tha wad belang thee;/He’d look into thy bonnie face,/And say, ‘I canna wrang thee.’” Both gud at wha they be B+ (actually anon + Burns)

20a Yet another lament for the poor, but “Take physic, pomp;/Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,/Though mayst shake the superflux to them/And show the heavens more just” A (Lear)

20b. This must be John Webster, despite strangely weak enjambment. Violent, harsh, exciting B+ (Lear)

20c. Bunting? Precise though aphoristic nature suggests translation. A (Wallace Stevens—why was “the imagination” not a give-away?)

21a. speech from a play. a pretty dull passage on disguise. (Shelley)

21b. Turn to language in Shax? “We were and are—I am, even as thou art—/Beings who ne’er each other can resign” A (Byron)

21c. Another speech, this on the happiness of going to prison “And take upon’s the mystery of things,/As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,/In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones/That ebb and flow by the moon.” A (Lear again—which I clearly need to reread)

22a. Practically moribund as far as movement goes with a dose of Romantic landscapism. It sounds like Wordsworth to me “To the dim light and the large circle of shade/I have clomb” And then escalates to crisis immediately. Though there’s no grass, “my longing loses not its green” Here’s how I’d revise it

Shade circle—snow-stomped grass.
Farther down, hard stone

but this sestina goes on a little longer. The vogue for sestina precedes and antedates Romanticism, so I don’t have a guess C (d’oh, it’s Dante trans by Rossetti)

22b. Victorian something. What I know not, and I honestly don’t follow it past the first 3 lines. C+ (Cavalcanti by Rossetti)

22c. Swinburne trans of Sappho. The strength is based on the source B+ (Rossetti’s Sappho, actually)

22d. Strong voice of social protest, probably from the 30s. B+ (Reznikoff!)

22e. Same as above, I wd think. Nice Homeric simile: “you would not die with your work unended,/ As if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?” A (Rez)

23a. Zukofsky himself? Very finely tuned l’s and n’s. A (Paterson II, you idiot)

23b. Is it Herrick? Lyrical and uncluttered. B+ (Troilus and Cressida)

23c. Apparent doggerel. D (Dies Irae trans Walter Scott)

23d. Don’t quite get this riddle. C (cummings)

24a. WCW’s first real poem “what/sort of man was Fragonard?” A (WCW)

24b. Wonderful: Robt Herrick busts a move on Venus who smacks him down: “Hence, Remove,/Herrick, thou art too coorse to love.”(R H “The Vision”)

25a. That same “Negro verse” compilation that’s come before. As much ironic wit as Langston Hughes discovered in this material. A (actually a different one: Chain Gang Song coll. Lawrence Gellert)

25b. Not interesting to me: Unfolds slowly for little reward. C (WC Williams of 1913)

25. I dislike “I too, dislike it” but it’s suggestive for my current project. [N]or is it/vlaid to discriminate against business documents/school-books,//trade reports—these phenoma/are important; but dragged into conscious oddity by/half poets, the result is not poetry./This we know. In a liking for the raw material in all/its rawness,/and for that which is genuine, there is liking for poetry.” B (1932 version)

Archives Project: STL #47.8

2007-11-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

Description: TOP 3.11-18
Date: 6 June 2005

I finished this two days later, and my archiving finishes just as I run out of decimals.

Expect a wrap up this week.

11a I have not yet tested by theory that all numbered sections are governed by the corresponding concept and analysis in part 2. It makes sense to me b/c of the overlapping content. In part 2, section 11 is devoted to “Content” of two anonymous folk ballads. This one might be covered by the comment I quoted “There is no use in modern sophistication trying to get back to folk art.” It’s too logical, there’s no outrunning oddity to it. Though it’s pretty nice, B+ (Wyatt, so I think my comment is right)

11b. This though has that inexplicable element, of an abandoned “may” suddenly seized by her old lover. Quite musical through, A (anon, 16th c song book)

12a Ben Jonson, “his best piece of poetry” A

12b. Speech from Shax. Very good emotional depiction of bereaved (Emotion as section head follows my theory in both cases) A (Webster, The White Devil)

13a+b Follows the template exactly: the Inevitability of the music 13a: “a song that will sing to a tune” 13b “a lyric that will not sing to music, but must be declaimed or intoned.” A, B- (Shax, Henry VIII, Richard Crashaw)

14a Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” was one of the first poems I was guided through with any intellectual rigor by my Freshman honors prof Tom Moore. It’s obviously a great poem built on interlocking conceits:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be tow, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

14b. This I don’t recognize, though it could be Donne as well. Maybe not though, there’s a little more iambic rhythm, less recourse to intellectual object matter for conceits

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And here tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as distant poles have place,
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth dwell)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

It’s got that Metaphysical vigor. A

(It’s Andrew Marvell, who I simply must read more of)

15a Must be Chaucer. I’ll say again he’s a narrative master, who might prove a great complement to study of the postmodern tradition, but I don’t feel much from his lyrics. I’m sure they’re good, but I just don’t have a medieval mind

15b. This is Elizabethan, and quite good. An aubade to Aurora “Ere thou rise, stars teach seamen where to saile/But when thou comest, they of their courses fail.” (Ovid by Marlowe)

16a. This might be Herrick. If it is, I’ve learned something from the Test. It’s got a refrain, varied rhythm, clear but not simple love song. A (damn, it’s Campion)

16b. I’ll double down re: Herrick. Not quite as fresh, A- (Sir Frances Kynaston?)

17a. Satire on Truth’s absence from ladies chambers, law courts, church A (Anon 15th C)
17b. Similar moral, though a bit more pronouncedly moralistic B (Samuel Butler, Hudibras)

18a. George Crabbe, lamenting the taverns where working men “taste their coarse delight.” Since, you know, “The gayest place has its sinks and sewers.” Comprehensive eye, and I think the proletarian in Z would like it. It’s just for me, yo: B-

18b. Another lament for the poor. Don’t recognize this though. It’s about the same as above (Philip Ayres)

Archives Project: STL #47.7

2007-11-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

Title: Test of Poetry
Description: TOP 3-10
Date: 25 May 2005

Let me say that my comparative reading of 3a&b yields nothing, but was a lot of fun. The previous entry has been edited so that all of #3 is together.

3a+b near contemporaneous versions (Elizabethan) versions of an ode to classical poets past and present. I feel I should know what it is but I just don’t. The vocabulary and structure are so close, that it’s only the fine details that a reading can focus on. For instance, the two first lines:
a) Envy why carpest thou my time is spent so ill, b)Envy, why twitst thou me, my Time’s spent ill?

so, the differences: one of vocabulary, carpest vs. twitst (not twists); three of punctuation, two commas for an inaccurate parenthetical phrase in b and a comma in a, which better joins the next line as a compound question; one additional word, “so” in A; and one of capitalization, Time is an abstraction in b. The score: A wins for the lower case t easily, and for the sentence construction. It’s a split for the commas: there really should be one comma, after Envy. The lexical substitution and added word leads to a much spritelier rhythm in B, which should count a bit more. So it’s a tie after line one.

line two differences: two of vocabulary termst vs. call’st, works vs. verse termst works better with “fruits” but it’s less direct. Another tie

Line 3: two differences of punctuation: comma at the end of the line in a, parentheses in b. The winner is b, for grammatical accuracy and the slight modulation of an otherwise too-regular line.

Line 4: one difference of phrasing: a says “Wars dusty honors are refused being young? but b says …I pursue not young? There’s a difference of sense here, so I will defer judgment until the end, though instinct says B.

Line 5 two lexical differences, Nor vs. Or, and brawling vs. tedious; and two of punctuation, a comma in the middle of b which also has a terminal semicolon. I’m familiar enough with Elizabethan diction to know that I can’t make a call on Or vs. Nor, and the other difference should resort to the original (“tedious” makes more sense), and like line 3, the punctuation complicates the rhythm in a nice way, as well as the sense “Or that I study not, the tedious laws;” “tedious laws” being both the object of study and the compelling custom that he should study. Slight edge to b

Line 6: one difference of phrasing “Nor set my voice to sale in every cause?” vs “And prostitute my voice…”The second is more incisive, and the first has too smooth a meter. “Prostitute” also uncannily echoes “study not” It goes to B

Line 7 one of punctuation, comma in A (who as is by now clear prefers fewer impediments) vs semicolon in B and a capital F for Fame in B. Maybe I’m misreading the capitals; these rules were less strict at the time. However, the semicolon is just misleading, so I’m awarding this line to A, his first win. (This is so fun, and so useless!)

Line 8 difference of phrasing “That all the world may ever chant my name” vs. “Which through the world shall…”Different subject, so Fame is being personified by B. “May” resonates nicely with “my name” and shall is stuffy anyway, so A wins two in a row.

Line 9: 2 lexical differences: shall vs. will, while vs. whilst; 1 punctuation difference of parenthetical commas added in B. edge to A b/cause the punctuation does not follow sense

Line 10: 2 lexical differences: into Sea vs. to the sea and swift vs. fleet, 1 capitalization: Sea in A; 1 punctuation, period vs. colon for end stop. I think “into” must be the correct sense, and I like the elided article. The period seems a better choice as well. A all the way

Line 11: greatest variation so far, but I guess I’ll categorize it as two differences of phrasing and one of lexicon: “Ascraeus lives,” vs “And so shall Hesiod too” and “while graps with new wine swell,” vs. while vines do bear,” First, I don’t have a handy reference to sort out the name difference. They’re all otherwise the same. Anyway, A is obviously more compact, and B calls on a verb from two lines back (that’s probably more faithful to the Latin) A choose to be brief for the first phrase and expand the second with commendable effect grapes picks up Asraeus, new wine swell is a nice run. the line to A, the comeback kid. Halfway through, the score is A 5, B 3, with two ties and one leaning to B

Line 12: another problematic diagnosis different actor men vs sickles, random cap of Sickle in A, corn down fell vs. crop the ripened ear. I’ve got to go with B in this case, as it’s less contorted. (A pays for the rhyme with swell)

Lines 13-14: “The world shall of Callimachus ever speak,/His art excelled, although his wit was weak.” vs. “Callimachus, though in Invention low,/Shall still be sung, since he in Art doth flowe.”
A is way, way better: the last phrase of b is an ugly solecism.

Line 15: different” “For ever lasts high Sophocles proud vaine” vs. No losse shall come to.Sophocles’...” Tiny advantage B ("high” is padding)

Line 16: no difference

Line 17: two differences of phrasing: "While bond-men cheat” vs. “Whilst Slaves be false,”; "bawds whorish,” vs. “Bawds be whorish,” w3 of capitalization in B. Both have problems of construction and scansion, so I’m calling a tie

Line 18: 2 lexical.cap difference: And vs Whilst; strumpets vs. Harlots. Tiny edge to B: by maintaining grammatic consistency in previous line he earns a little boost from a change

Line 19: “Till Cupid’s Bow and fiery Shafts be broken,” vs “Till Cupids fires be out, and his bow broken,” Edge to A for having a single concrete event

Line 20 1 diff of voca/punct : “Thy verses sweet Tibullus…” vs (neat Tibullus)” B is craftier: setting the addressee and not relying on the too poetic “sweet”

Line 21 1 difference of lexicon: And vs Our; one of punctuation comma vs colon Edge to B “Our” draws together speaker and Tibullus, the colon better for the concluding line

Line 22 One of punctuation, a comma in B and one verb tense: “whom he loved best.” vs “whom he now loves best.” This too you’d have to go to the Latin, but I’d lean to A

Final score: A 7, B 8. If I force a result on every non-identical line, its 10-10
Grades: After all the work, I’m giving both A’s (turns out it’s a: Marlowe and b:Jonson translating Ovid)

4a+b: I think we have Ovid again, Golding vs. Shakespeare. Once again, Golding comes out better, but then again this isn’t the best of Shax. Exhibits: “Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone, / Of standing Lakes…” vs “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;” and “I call up dead men from their graves: and thee O lightsome Moone / I darken oft..” vs “…graves at my command/Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth/By my so potent art.” In the first case, Shakes version is a boring list: Golding’s seems like a charm. In the second, G’s first phrase makes Sh’s last totally unnecessary Grades Golding A Shakespeare A-

5a Some prosaic translation with senseless enjambments Grade D (Catullus C)

5b. from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Grade: one supposes A

5c something Modernist, but classically influenced. Cummings? A nice mix of registers, very “Objectivist” construction A (Cummings, Is 5)

6a Again with the Gavin Douglass. In lieu of grading, a transliteral translation

Before his regal high magnificence,
Misty vapor up-sprang and, sweet as sense,
In smoky sop is of donc-do his wake
Mo ick hail some stoves our held and the slack;
The oreat fan is of his throne so very own
With glittering glans o’erspread the oak sheen
The large fluid is lemon All of licked
Bought with a blink of his supernal sicked.

For to behold it was a gloried Uzi
The stabbed wind is and the Comet sea,
The soft session, the firm amend “sir”-in
The loam illuminant air, and further men;
The silver-scalt fishes on the grate
Ortho’er clear stems sprinkling of the heat,
With fins skinned and brow as I know par,
And chisel tallies, stow ‘round here and there;
The new culler all icht-ing all the land is
For gain their standers skein the burial strand is,
Quill the reflex of the diurnal be miss
The being bone kiss kissed full of variant gleam is.

6b possibly another Aeneid, I guess Dryden, because it’s boring C (well, Milton anyway)

6c also maritime, Victorian I think. Nice detail with some beetles: B (how embarrassing: It’s Lear. (King, that is) That I leave this up should show I’m not faking. God I’m embarrassed) )

6d. Cummings, or Williams? Typographically the former, but sounds like the latter. A (Cummings)

7a. A parody or unorthodox pre-Modern translation of the invocation of the Muse from Virgil. I like the light-hearted tone, though might not through the whole epic. A- (It’s Whitman!)

7b. Modern plain spoken trans of same “Tell me, Muse, of that man who got around/ After sacred Troy fell” Undercover Zukofsky? Grade C (Odyssey “Adaptation”)

8a Chaucer? I like the simile: “Madame, ye ben of al beaute shrine,/ As fer as circled is the mappemounde/ For as the crystal glorious ye shyne,/ And lyke ruby ben your chekes round.” Why not finish the stanza: “Therewith ye ben so mery and so jocounde,/That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,/ It is a n oynement unto my wounde,/Thogh ye to me ne do no dalianunce,” Grade: A

8b I can’t say exactly what I mean, but it’s straining after the condition of folk-lyric C (Browning)

9a, Another Chaucer lyric, I think, which summarizes all the Classical, historical, and mythic lore knowable in a 21-line love lyric. Pretty good A (Chaucer, from Legend of Good Women)

9b. Similar to (if not the same) as the Douglass Old Scots “That wele is comen to welaway/To many harde stoundes” Maybe not (Southron)

9c A nice ubi sunt poem: “Hwer is Paris and Heleyne,/That weren so bryht and feyre on bleo.” Z says that last phrase, “on bleo” means literally dark bule, so mayb in bleak weather, in bleak times” “Heo beoth iglyden ut of the reyne, / So the scheft is of the cleo” Means They have glided out of the reins as the form is out of the clay (or sheaf is out of the steep hillside). Fascinating piece A (Thomas of Hales)

9d. Trans of Villon Not that interesting B- (Rosetti)

10a Petrachan sonnet. Rather dry C (Wyatt)

10b Shax sonnet. “the foison of the year” A (Shx 53)

Archives Project: STL #47.6

2007-11-27T07:55:00.000-05:00

Title: Test of Poetry
Description: TOP 3.2
Date: 23 May 2005

Follow up to Davenport's list (could be an independent post): since making the list, I've come to enjoy Ives (though not that piece yet) and Franck and read the Simenon novel. Davenport's taste is so reliable that following up on the rest would be profitable.

2a+b 2 versions of the invocation of Venus from the Aeneid(?). At an earlier reading, I coded the corresponding lines—A is stilted and abstract, B direct. Vide: “Be though my aid, my tuneful song inspire;/And kindle with thy own productive fire” vs. “trim my poetry/With your grace; and give peace to write and read and think.” First time thru I gave C and A respectively—the spread still seems right. (Lucretius, not Virgil, by Dryden and Bunting)

Bonus: good things in life, according to Guy Davenport's Apples and Pears: "The Rockstrewn Hills Join the People's Outdoor Mountains" by Charles Ives; Archaic Greek lettering; the Appalachian trail; Simenon's Le Petit Saint, Balthus's "Passage du Commerce," the hordes and bands of Charles Fourier, Hokusaki's 36 Views of Mt Fugi, Franck's Symphony in D Minor (the "little phrase"?), Serat's "Grand Jatte & Bathers," Rilke's angels, Rousseau's "Les Joueurs de Ball," the Oslo sculpture of Adolf Vigeland, Mondrian, George Herriman, Dufy's woodcuts, the photos of Imogen Cunningham, Gerald Murphy's "Wasp and Pear," table manners, Shaker housekeeping, the coloring of Rik Wouters, Robert de Launay's paper on labyrinths.

Archives Project: STL #47.5

2007-11-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

Title: Test of Poetry 3
Description: Test of Poetry 3
Date: 19 May 2005

Response to only one of the exhibits. Contains phrase "lap it home" punctuated by a parenthetical "yo."

okay, there’s been a considerable break I know, but let me lap it home (, yo). I did later read Sleeping with the Dictionary, which just isn't as good as Muse and Drudge.

1a. Elpenor and Odysseus in rhyming couplets—Hobbes maybe: fair enough, but I’m distracted by the implication that after death the soul leaves the body to inhabit a shade: I always thought the shade was the soul. Perhaps “this infernal shade” is a synechdoche for Hades, where the exchange takes place. B-

1b. Three lines of expressive iambic pentameter. “Death is not knowing what is not a shadow”—line shows some thoughtful variation Grade: A-

1c. a bit of Bunting: Night swallowed the sun as/the fish swallowed Jonas.” Bunting was a classicist at heart—modest but perfect language Grade: A

1d King James Bible. Stirring even to an unbeliever like me. Grade A (I Samuel)

Shorter more frequent posts coming, including wider ranging blurbery, such as follows...

So what else? Read Harriet Mullen's Muse and Drudge, for the second time (since I can't find Sleeping with the Dictionary in the stacks. Four line stanzas using lots of internal rhyme, four to a page for 80 pages: 320 stanzas and 1280 lines in all. There's no punctuation, no consistent narrative, but a unity of imagery--barely hidden picnics, kitchens, churches. I think this would be a book of difficult poetry (diffpo) to get people who resist difficult poetry.

Continuing a campaign through Guy Davenport's fiction. If I hadn't come through first the essays and then Da Vinci's Bicyle, I'd be really unimpressed by the ponderous eroticism of "Apples and Pears." I should make an inventory of good things according to Guy.

Read Moxley's Imagination Verses which I liked but am already starting to forget. She reminds me that a lot of langpo types have a groundig in 19th C literature, and therefore rhetoric: S. Howe, Friedlander, Bernstein I think. Something to pursue there.

Archives Project: STL #47.4

2007-11-24T11:12:00.001-05:00

Title: Test of Poetry
Description: Test of Poetry 2.16-25
Date: 31 March 2005

I had the idea of doing a sort of test of poetry with the Don Allen New American Poetry 1945-1960 which I'm reading right now. I'd invent my own vocabulary, or perhaps adopt it from the corresponding poetics section. It's an interesting and uneven selection. There's great Olson and Duncan (as far as I am right now) but also really subpar work compared to what the pair did in the 1960s. There's also a good number of forgotten poets and dated material from those that are remembered--this is important material for an ongoing poetic education. (Why? To make measurements apart from standards of excellence? To question those very standards?)

I don't have reliable Internet at home, so while I'm writing a few of these measurements everysooften I post much less frequently. In this installment I become distracted from the exhibits toward Z's curatorial practice.

16a. Robt Herrick, “Violets” Uses a varied meter with great deal of grace: Four quatrains abba, the 1st line of each trochee, trochee, ampribrach (I think: .#.), the second and third line single anapests, and the last an iamb and amphibrach. Grade: A

16b. Herrick, “To Keep a True Lent” A number of semantically unimportant stresses, though I do feel informed by the theological explanation. I simply don’t see the “righteous indignation” that Z detects. Grade: B-

17a. Pope’s Dunciad. The first of 5 examples of discourse. I’m not sure what he means, but he does also mention he sees all 5 as satire, this of epic invocation. I’ll read it someday. Grade:B+

17b. George Crabbe. Inebriety. A parody of Pope. Not good and I don’t get the point: C-

17c. Rochester, A Letter. “Your country drinking breath’s enough to kill/ Sour ale corrected with a lemon-peel…” Grade: B

17d. Rochester, Letter. Grade:B

17e. T.S. Eliot, Waste Land. The “What are you thinking of?” bit, not great representation of the whole, which I like more after teaching it twice. Z’s glosses suggest that the keyword “discourse” refers to the deploying of information: satire better when particular the case in point. grade: A

18a. George Crabbe, The Borough. Many of Z’s examples center on Greek hell as portrayed by Homer (which he draws on in “A”-1 as well). This passage riffs on the appearance of the newly dead in Hades, where the denizens beseech the him for news of the world before showing him their world. Crabbe goes at some length to compare this with the poet’s job. Grade: B+

18b. Wordsworth, Laodamia. Is Z the anti-Wordsworth? The beginning of this passage has emotions making direct perception of the world. But as the note tells us, “only objectified emotion endures.” This text might help a reading of “Sincerity and Objectification.” Grade C

19a Robert Burns, A Winter Night. I suppose that the energy at question is the winter storm summoned here-in. Although Burns is one of the real finds of this project for me, this is doesn’t work for me. grade: B-

19b Ibid. Ditto. Actually, this is a bit worse, as he resorts to Everyman kind of personification. Grade: C

19c Burns, For A’ That and A’ That More in line with the Burns I’m coming to like. Limits of power mirroring limits of language. Grade: B+

20a. Shelley, Indian Serenade. Shelley, deep feeler that he is, is critiqued for creating a “lull of sound” with lines like “I arise from dreams of thee/In the first sweet sleep of night.” (The first lines which establish the meter ../ ./ ./, though not afraid of variation) True, some lines are filler, like “And the stars were shining bright” Grade: B+

20b. Hopkins, Moonrise. After reading these exhibits, I still don’t know what duration is. I only have a vague notion of Bergson, but I don’t think that’s it. Z’s argument is that this is semantically denser than Shelley, that “many shades of meaing [are] packed into one word.” Z’s critical eye is local; he makes judgment at the level of the line, though judgments are inevitable instinctive, or at least unsupported. This sounds like his praise of Rez in ‘Sincerity and Objectification”: “The next line is a masterful example of the visual imagination forming a relation of images of facts hitherto unrelated so that the result is a new experience.” Sure, the line he is admiring is nice (“The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a fingernail held to the candle,”) but it’s only the 2nd line, so how could these “facts” not be “hitherto unrelated.” The “scientific” criticism of Z and Pound leave out a lot of evidence. Grade: A (the music is so much more energetic )

21a. Browning The Ring and the Book. The impact of a part of a long poem might be thought to be dependent on its relation to the whole, but LZ obviously doesn’t think so. I don’t get much from this excerpt, though I’m intrigued by the observation that the “emotional quality of good poetry is founded on exact observation which is often a combination of humor plus sense.” Satire as Sincerity. Grade:C

22b. Landor Epithamalion. "Walter’s Savage Satire" reads the headline. “Pounds, shilling and pence/And shrewd sober sense/Have clapt the straight waistcoat on”is only the set up for “The cord’s fatal jerk/Has done its last work/And the noose is now slipped upon”

22a Browning, Pippa Passes. There was another section of this poem I liked as well. This is getting old, but I’d like to have a frame for this excerpt. Grade: B

22b Swinburne. Chorus from Atalanta. There is in fact no movement, just swirling about. Z points out for similes for a woman in 2 lines, yet the vehicles are not likened to one another. grade: C

23a. Skelton, “To Mistress Margaret Hussey.” The recurrence of a refrain that makes no sense to me (“Gentle as a falcon/Or a hawk of the tower”—birds of prey are gentle?) doesn’t do much for me. grade: C

23b.Hardy “Timing Her” One of the most contemporary things LZ says: “Poetry does not arise and exist in a vacuum. It is one of the arts—sometimes individual, sometimes collective in origin—and reflects economic and social status of the peoples; their language habits arising out of everyday matter of fact” His comments gesture toward a materialist poetics, and he even thinks Hardy’s piece engages physical cues of repetition used by “folk” to mark sincerity. It's a quick enjoyable poem that he pegs right as a jig. Grade B

24a Anon. “I have a gentil cok” I suspect there’s a sharp satire in praising a common rooster in terms of opulence and noble lineage. I’d be inclined to do some philological research of corel, inde and other words to connect them with wealth. Grade A

24b. WCW “So much depends” What to say? “It may take only four words to shift the level at which emotion is held from neatness of surface to comprehension which includes surface and what is under.” Grade: A

25a. H.C. Work ‘The Year of Jubilee” H.C. Work must be the transcriber of this song sung by black Union troops. First of two thoughts on dialect poetry: I’d like to do a study of AfAm from Work to Dunbar to Jordan and Scots from Douglas to Macdiarmid to Tom Scott, examining issues of anonymity, margin and center, and “speaker’s” relation to both. If I’m ever in the position to propose a senior seminar, that’d be a good topic. This poem is chilling and sublime if you don’t let the “dem darkies” vocabulary/transcription distract you. Grade: A

25b. anon Anglo-Irish dialect. Second thought: (it's a question)—what’s LZ’s position on dialect signify? Is it related to his literal translations? Grade: A

Archives Project: STL #47.3

2007-11-23T16:05:00.000-05:00

Title: Test of Poetry
Description: A Test of Poetry I.11-25
Date: 22 February 2005

Thing I like in the following: The observation that why I have trouble with folk sources is that they lack authorial gestures. Thing I find problematic: that statement isn't true.

I finished Part 1 in the past week or so, but am just now getting around to posting. Toward the end I get sketchier and sketchier in my comments; I wonder if I'll finish this project? I will at least start Part 2, which includes attribution and analysis for me to negotiate with.

11a First of a pair of ballads about Robin Hood. I have a hard time evaluating folk poetry, perhaps to the extent that it lacks individuality, or more precisely (I’m going out on a limb here) lacks the kind of authorial gestures I like—knowing and deviating from tradition in a creative way. Of these two, I like this one a little less, although it’s a nice vignette of noble outlawry in Sherwood Forest. Grade B

11b. This one shows a confrontation between Robin and the Sheriff. I like it a little more because of Robin’s inventive threat: “Thou shalt be the first man/Shall flower this gallow tree. Grade A-, and I think I’d like to look up other RH ballads sometime
(Child ballads)

12a. I think Lysander, invoked here-in, is in Shakespeare, so my evaluation is skewed already. This passage isn’t the best Shx, and is on the familiar subject of hearing improving on blindness. None of the rhymes are unusual, though they play off one another in the argument. Grade: A
(Midsummer Night Dream, which I haven’t read)

12b. I’m guessing WS again. Nice insult: “painted maypole” Grade: A-
(Midsummer’s Night Dream again)

12c. Completing the set: King Lear I presume. I note that I’m letting identification trump evaluation, which is troubling . Grade: A
(yep, Lear)

13a Dammit! There’s a phoenix, there’s a turtle. I haven’t read this whole thing either, but like the excerpt. I’m reminded of the lack of context through out, not only in the history and society implied by the name, but the function on the lines in context of a whole. This works fine on its own, but the real test is if it’s a good prologue, climax, etc. Grade: A-
(Shakespeare)
13b. “So virtue, giv’n for lost/Deprest and overthrown, as seemed,/Like that self-begotten bird/In the Arabian woods embost” As I was saying: from near the end of Samson Agonistes, in which the happy news that “Samson hath acquit himself as Samson” is relaid, by way of a comparison to the phoenix. (I believe the phoenix in 13a is literal). What would be interesting wd be to map out the interplay of religious and mythic (pagan) imagery in the play, but this passage succeeds on its own Grade: A
(Milton)

14a I’m on a real streak. The first half of Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” followed by
14b. The second half. This poem is included in Pound, though in a slightly different text. ABC breaks it into quatrains, this forgoes stanza breaks but indents every other line. Crucially though, it read “Atomies” instead of “Anatomies.” Grade: A

15a. Can’t think of a way this is good. Grade: D
(Anonymous)
15b. This “an Angel… sawest my heart” is too thick for my taste, and neither does the style appeal to me. Grade C
(Donne)
15c. A simple plebian ditty. Grade: C-
(John Fletcher)

16a. I like the delicate stanza arrangement of this little song to daffadils a lot. Nice play of meters Grade: A
(Herrick)

16b. Also invokes daffadils (how I love that spelling), but the comparison with the short life of a flower and our own mortality breaks down in the last line Grade: C
(Herrick again)

16c. Zukofsky’s “Little wrists” In many of his lyrics, he circles around his subject, whistling. As it appears in this set, I guess the “wrists” are stems—he asks if the wrists content (hands?) are what’s seen or held or the intangible smell. Grade: A

17a. I don’t know what this is, but I like it—sort of a Something/Nothing “Whose on First’ routine (except not at all, being a monologue) I wrote Wit in the margin, thinking of French Esprit. Grade: A
(Lord Rochester)
17b. Also riffs on “Nothing”—a place holder for non-being has delighted deconstructionists throughout the ages I guess. Grade; C
(The Rubyiat)
17c. Some more metaphysical levity, but with a bit more grounding. Grade: B+
(oh my, it’s Yeats)

18a. A work of portraiture with some vague political comment. Dammit Louie, how can I evaluate “intellection” without context! Rhyming couplets, subdued tone Grade: C+
(Geo. Crabbe)
18b.Probably Golding again. A really moving account of fishermen’s poverty and pride, and it blows 18a out of the… “For when that death bereft him use of aire/Save water he me nothing left.” Grade” A
(Golding)

19a. Scottish dialect poetry—Burns? “A certain Bardie’s rantin’, drinkin’” Grade: A
(Burns)
19b. Same dialect as previous, also preoccupied with the Fall of Adam. If this is Burns, it’s lot more sophisticated than I thought. It’s wearing naiveté as a mask Grade: A-
(Burns)

20a. Flat rhythm and outdated diction. Houseman? Grade: C
(Wordswoth, “Simon Lee”)
20b. Real Scottish folk poem I’m guessing. Similar diffidence as to others Grade: B
(“Waly, Waly”)
20c. Are the last words of lines called teuletons? If so, notice the links in this stanza of the Chimney Sweep: young-tongue (the tongue is young)- ‘weep (what the tongue cries out b/c it is young) sleep (in soot, that makes us weep) Grade: A
(Blake)
20d. Two classical lines Grade: B+
(Byron “Oh! Snatched Away”)

21a “Dusk winding-stairs, dim galleries got past,/ You gain the inmost chambers, gain at last/ A maple paneled room” Back that up with “The Arab’s wisdom everywhere” and it seems like Poe, but it’s not a formally stilted. I’m quite frankly drawn to exoticism Grade: B+
(Browning
21b. WCW. An argument against the preceeding, and an argument I have within myself. Grade: A

22a Mix of registers—the spoken and unfinished with composed and archaic. I wonder what this is Grade: B+
(Browning)
22b Way overblown diction, my “lady of light” Grade: D
(Swinburne)
22cAlso mixing registers, though mostly with vocabulary between the 2 stanzas. Grade: A
(Burns)
22d Strangely compelling, but more like notes to a poem. 16th c, I’d wager Grade:C
(George Peel Batshebe Sings(?)
22e Something modern and (intentionally) naïve. Grade: C-
(Browning, same poem as A)

23a What’s “Hedge-crickets sing” from? Complex, sensual image anyway. Grade: uh, B?
(Keats, “To Autumn”)
23b Play on qualities of mirror. Grade: B+
(Lord Herbert of Cherbury)
24c I’m missing some of sense, but the texture and melody is wonderful Grade: B+
(Shakespeare, Pericles)
23d Niedecker? I’m not really crazy about her Grade:C
(LN)
24a Dislike the poeticizing on rereading. And “My king, my country, alone for whom I love”—really, king and country must be different things. grade: D
(Wyatt)
24b This invokes similar “bad” politics, but does so gracefully “Thou show’dst a subject’s shine, I a true prince.” grade: A
(Shakes)

25a Minstrelsy? I actually kind of like it. Grade:B
(H.C. Work)
25b Another medieval song (“Lollai, lollai, litil child”) Grade: B
25c. “The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love” grade: B+
(Richard Edwards)

Archives Project: STL #47.2

2007-11-23T11:24:00.000-05:00

Title: A Test of Poetry
Description: A Test of Poetry I.6-10
Date: 26 January 2005

I coin both the word "anthological" (pertaining to anthologies") and the term "anthological plagiarism" in the following.

6a This is Gavin Douglass’s translation of The Aeneid. Douglas is well-represented in ABC of Reading, in fact, this very passage is there. (I wonder if might be thought of as a kind anthological plagiarism.) Pound at least provides a crib, but Zuk wants us to take on “takillis grafillis cabillis” and frate and frais w/out any help. I guess I like it as far as I understand: “And euerythyng manissis the men to de/Schewand the ded present before there E.” Grade: B

6b: Shakespeare, from the Tempest. Also about sailing thru a storm, when “Hell is empty/And all the devils are here.” Knowing this is Shakespeare imprints value on the passage, but the pattern of “flamed amazement” is impeccably woven. Grade: A+

7a Two poems on the immortality of verse. This first one incorporates some classical allusions that I don’t know: Propertius and Tibullus. T is a pile of ashes who can’t even fill his urn.
When all bodies meet
In Lethe to be drowned,
Then only numbers sweet
With endless life are crowned.

The situation is confused: poetry not people so never enter the situation describe Grade: B-
(Herrick)

7b: A bit more moralistic take on the same theme: “Let base conceipted wits admire vilde things/ Gair Phoebusl ead me to the Muses spring.” This one ends with a strong image and a paradoxical restatement of the argument: Though death rakes my bones in a funeral fire/ I’ll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher” Grade: B
(Ovid trans Marlowe)

8a This set has three medieval songs. The first is most strongly based on repetition: 12 lines, and only six non-repetons. It dances nicely through this constraint Grade: B+

8b: I know this well “I sing a maiden//That is makeles” I remember that I actually had to be informed by a footnote that this was to Mary. Despite that the text says “Well may swich a lady/Gods moder be.” Implying that I gained something from the English major, like paying attention. Grade: B (but somehow these seem especially irrelevant when applied to the folk tradition)

8c: There’s an almost modern complexity to this one: in the repeated “Erthe out of erthe” phrase, ether becomes an overdetermined term. the final stanza returns to the era and wraps everything up in a pious bundle: a let down. Grade: B
(attributed to Richard Rolle)

9a This longish poem (in rime royal?) has some lushly-sounded lines:”Girls, lovers, glad young folk and newly wed/ Jumpers and jugglers jumping heel over head” but its grounded by a moroseness (word) of a prisoner abandoned by his friends. Grade: B+
(Villon trans Swinburne—of course)

9b No, this is rime royal: ababbcc (I should know this cold). This poem skillfully praises “stedfastnesse” I love the directive to the king to "do law" Grade B+
(Chaucer)

10a Wyatt’s classic “They flee from me that sometime did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber.” I love the rhythm of this poem, and also admire the hunting conceit. Grade A+

10b Eh. Don't get much from this. Grade: C
(from Tottel’s)

15 minutes to meta

2007-11-23T11:10:00.000-05:00

I need to make a decision before I carry on with my November 'daily' blogging: Do I number my long Test of Poetry post as one STL post or more? And how many more, if that's what's needed? Since I have things I need and want to do, I don't want to spend more that 15 minutes on this task, so by the time "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" starts, I must be done with this deliberative post.

There's 7 or 8 posts in this category. However, many of these posts are far sketchier than any other STL post, which are closer to reviews or essays than blog notes (and there is no question of ever numbering the 'notes' I've posted in the STL series. The project as a whole is a bit off of the other STL's, with the exception of the reflective "Final Exam." The "Final Exam" then should be numbered separately, while the other parts will be STL #47.2 ect. To provide further infomatic flexibility, I'll tag each post "TOP" and "poetry." Titles will be Test of Poetry, Description will be the designated portion of the test.

"She's Leaving Home" just started, leaving me a few minutes to review and add further thoughts. [pause] Not really, but the decision does assume some unspoken definition of what an STL post is, which I may pick up next week.

Archives Project: STL #47

2007-11-21T09:28:00.000-05:00

Since I won't actually post tomorrow, and since I don't want to start sweeping just yet, I thought I'd do another archive post. This is the last numbered STL, and since it's a multi-part post, this fact sends me to an editorial dilemma. Do I number subsequent posts in serial order (48, 49, 50...) or do I call the whole thing number 47? Possibly 47A, 47B, etc. I'm leading toward the former, since the posts occur over the course of months. Then I miss my 50th anniversary post of STL, but I may have done that anyway since I haven't accounted for/numbered other STL-like posts I've done since opening up shop on blogspot. I guess I can decide on Friday. (I can see a big ol' editorial meta-post coming up.)

Title: A Test of Poetry
Date: 25 January 2005

I actually buy the Pound/Zuk notion that exercising one's discriminating faculties (or call it 'discernment') is a forceful reason for reading poetry. Thus, I’m engaging in LZ’s Test of Poetry I’ll elaborate on criteria as I go, but I’m deferring to LZ’s “sight, sound, and intellection,” which obviously parallels Pound’s phanopeia, melopeia. and logopeia.

If you don't know the book, it's a textbook that Zukofsky put together that consists of "exhibits," or sets of unattributed poems with some connection in content or otherwise. You have to flip to the back for the attribution, so you're reading the poem cold. I’ll be read by batches of 5 “exhibits” before "checking" my answers.

1a “Arrived now at our ship” We start with a set of three translations of the same passage from the Odyssey, which makes for easy comparison. This first one is starts with a howler; apparently the crew loads their sheep after setting sail. To top that off, the two sheep are vaguely called “late-got cattle.” Nothing following the first line makes up for the start. Grade: D
(Chapman’s Homer!)

1b I belatedly realize that Chapman’s “put forth sail” is the actual raising of the sail, which I guess you’d do before depart, and potentially before loading livestock. Ah well. Here, the sheep appear just before the succinct “And so for Hell we stood, with fears in mind, /and tears in eye” The fears/tears rhyme is trite, but nonetheless shows a nice inside/outside mirroring. Grade: C
(Thomas Hobbes—who knew?)

1c.Terse, modern rendering. Maybe by Zuk? This starts “For hell we launched with two sheep to sacrifice/And trimmed the gear despite our tears.” That interior rhyme creates an exteriority that’s probably more accurate—sailors doing their work despite the doom of the first phrase hanging over them. Later, the boredom of sailor is bluntly shown: “We sat, steered, nothing to do.” Grade: A
(“Adaptation”—Zuk?)

2a. The passage continues and Odysseus and chums make their sacrifice. This is the same translator as 1c. It’s just as quick and lean. The elision of “we” in the first line “And paid our respects in hell” suggests Pound, but since it’s so close to “And then went down to the ships like I suspect a Pound imitator. (Like LZ at this point). I like how it represents the creepy fear of being in hell: “Slain soldiers, the wounded armed--/ All clamoring--/My blood paled.” Grade: A
(“Adaptation”)

2b. Here’s a partial catalogue of the folks in hell: “Fair pensive youths, and soft enamour’d maids; And wither’d elders, pale and wrinkled shades.” Dated but nice, but compare to 2a’s “Brides, virgin boys, old men tried in hardship.” Pretty fluffy in comparison, as “aghast I stood/ And a cold fear ran shivering through my blood.” Grade: B-
(Pope)

2c.Pretty bland “I grew pale with fear”Grade: C+
(W.C. Bryant)

3a Okay, now we’re moving on the Ovid’s history of the ages. I like this passage, dwelling on (in this excerpt) the Golden Age “when man, yet new,/No rule but uncorrupted reason knew;/And, with a native bent, did good pursue” and moving on to “Hard Steel” (should be iron, no?) when wars raged over, ironically, gold. Grade: C
(Dryden)

3b. This is much livelier. In the Golden Age, “There was no feare of punishment, there was no threatening lawe/In brazen tables nailed up, to keepe the folk in awe” (note the stately septemeter, the vivid image of the table of laws put in striking assonance”) and ultimately “hurtfull yron came aborde, then came forth yellow golde/More hurtful than the yron farre then came forth battle bolde/That feights with both, and shakes his sword in cruel bloudy hand.” I think this is the Arthur Golding translations praised in ABC of Reading. Grade: A
(Golding)

4a. Account of some flood, probably from Ovid. Same meter and orthography as 3b. Wonderful image of ships floating over fields (“In meddowes greene were Anchors cast”) Grade: A
(Golding)

4b: A love poem from the same period. Nothing particular strikes me. Grade: B-
(Golding’s Ovid)

5a. Some sort of epigram about one “Mentula.” Prosaic, humdrum conclusion. Grade: C
(Catullus CXV, trans F.W. Cornish)

5b High-level folderol: both exhibit 5a and this are satires on wealthy land owners: I like the last stanza of this one:

he had rolled in money like pigs in mud,
Till it seem’d to have enter’d his blood
By some occult projection:
And his cheeks, instead of a healthy hue,
As yellow as any guinea grew
Making the common phrase seem true
About a rich complexion.

The play on “rich” is funny , the feminine rhymes satisfying. I wonder about the relation of pig and guinea though. Grade: B

(Thomas Hood, Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg)

Inane post

2007-11-21T09:15:00.001-05:00

So anyway, it's a quarter after nine in the morning and I should start cleaning the house. We aren't having guests for Thanksgiving tomorrow, but it just seems wrong to go into one of the major domestic holidays with a dirty and cluttered house. In a few minutes, I'll put on some music and start sweeping. I'll at least do a general straightening and wipe down bathroom fixtures. I invited my friend M over over lunch to discuss class planning. We'll have ham or meatloaf on rye sandwiches, which reminds me I should run to the corner store to pick up some chips and beer.

This is a meta post. Other things I could post about: a follow up on 300 focusing on the problematic foreign policy of the Spartans(!); a plan for a blog/webzine devoted to the freak-folk scene (an idea I had a year ago--is the moment over); a meditation on how technology controls the way I listen to music; a review of Nicholas Mosley's Assassins; thoughts on Norman Mailer. But I did not post on them, and now I will go sweep.

300 (STL 60)

2007-11-20T14:20:00.001-05:00

I can't say I actually hated 300, the official action film of the Balco entertainment complex, but it disturbed, or maybe just annoyed, me on several levels. The first is it's shitty CGI-ness. Who exactly is this fooling? I guess the wheat fields outside of Sparta kind of looks like wheat, but the composition and texture distract from any real/"real" connection between actors. Speaking of "connection," the 'extreme intimacy' of Leonidas and Queen Independent Woman made me laugh out loud. Just like the violence, the sex was strictly for display. The violence as such didn't bother me, but as a purely aesthetic experience it imitates but falls short of the standards of John Woo. In its segmentation, it seemed to evoke the key combinations you would need to master in the video game version. Historical inaccuracy doesn't bother me, but the transplanting of contemporary mores and values on the past has the apparent good intentions of representing women and minority characters in positive light, but actually has insidious effects. By smoothing over and trivializing past conditions, present ideologies now seem more natural--that they easily extend over millenia. Lucky for us, that only applied to the portrayal of Queen Independent Woman, since the Persians were treated as racial stereotypes and King Xerxes as a nancy boy. American conceptions of Freedom, as a form of capital (yeah, the Queen did actually say "Freedom isn't free") to be hoarded is at very least ironic in considering it applied to the militaristic, slave-holding Spartans.

Yeah, so, anyway. I now get to prepend a stentorian "Spartans!" to any simple statement, such as "Spartans! Pass me the milk." Or "Spartans! I'm going to the store now."

Archives Project: STL #46

2007-11-17T16:53:00.000-05:00

Title: War Pigs/Black Celebration
Description: Finding ways to survive--this time, with pop music.
Date:20 January 2005

I think this one speaks for itself, almost 2 years later. (Do we really have that much time left?)

Today Bush gets sworn in as Emporer and I'm thinking of writing about art? It's my continuing dilemma: how do books, movies, etc help at times like these, especially those which appeal to my rareified tastes? A literature of social action, yeah, but for some reason I mostly love difficult work of cultural conservatives from Pound to the recently deceased Guy Davenport.

Today though I've got two songs in my head--Black Sabbath's turgid "War Pigs" and Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration." An unlikely pair to be sure, but at times like these we take nourishment where we find it. I think of this like 45 with two A-sides (an outdated reference, but bear with me). "War Pigs" describes the truth of the coronation: "Generals gathered in their masses/ Just like witches at black masses." Rhyming the same word in a pop song is usually a cop out, but succeeds here in creating an identity between the war mongers who claim to carry out policy and protect the 'homeland' and the "Sorcerers of death's construction" they really are, "making war just for fun" [if fun means extraordinary profit and power consolidated by fear and lies]. Metal has a reputation for conservatism if not fascism, but this song is straight up protest music: "Politicians hide themselves away/ They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to poor." When thinking about these words in context with the current reign of witches, the conclusion is ironic: Ozzy predicts that the war pigs will fall from power and face divine retribution. In a way this will happen: the rabid right will return to the hills when the theocracy doesn't rise in the next term and the reality based community--be it McCain, Giuliani, Clinton, or Obama, will return to power. I just hope it's in time.

After the ceremonies, when the next round of balls has begun, we'll go home and flip the single. The New Wave dirge fits our mood: "Let's have a black celebration...To celebrate the fact that we've seen the back of another black day." We'll have a few drinks--the hardest stuff we have--and we'll figure out a way to "carry on/ When all hope is gone." My slogan for the last Bush term has been "alcoholism--it's the new suicide," but we'll find other ways to carry on. For me, it's going to be the hard work of teaching and the continuing solace and challenge of art. It's a paradox that a "single" has two songs on it, but even such an overbearing occasion as today's Black Mass is complex and multivalent. I guess this little ditty on two sub-pop songs actually answer me question about aesthetic life in dire times: we learn to eschew simplicity and to strive for something beyond our reach.

/other/
books: The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Three Piece Suit by Eddie Campell
quote: "To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free--as opposed to rote--human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion--and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas." Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Archives Project: STL #45

2007-11-16T16:48:00.001-05:00

Title: Strategy
Date: 10 December 2004

The last post of 2004, and 2005 were not to be fabulous years for blogging. The post promises a lot of things I never did:
Best of years (I don't think I've done this in a long time)
Best movies ever
Definitive Buffy entry
Retirement of glenn mcdonal (though he still posts now and then)

I do still manage my projects by scholarship teaching service and personal.

I've got a little time on my hands: What should I do next?

For one, I'm going to revivify the blog. I like doing it, and more I like having it done: I can see exactly how I wasted my time a certain week. It's coming up on the end of the year, the season of best-of lists. I don't have the money or leisure to speak authoritatively on the best X of the year, so last I year I dropped the 50 bestest songs ever on you, and the bestest albums of the last two years (bigger sample size, see). What I lack in money and leisure I make up for with subjectivity. I found in my papers recently a 1999 of my favorite movies ever. In my next entry, I'll type this up for posterity, and make any revisions I see fit. After that, you can expect to see my definitive Buffy entry, since the text is now complete, and maybe a catch up of the last two years of cd's, though I'm not sure that I'm that active a music fan anymore.

Getting back to art, after 2 political posts, an unpublished post on the retirement of glenn mcdonald, and months of nothing, will be a notable return to "normal," if I manage it. I ground my teeth for so long since November 2 that part of a tooth fell out. Art as a refuge might not be that noble, but it keeps me sane. It's also easy to swivel, while immersed in art, to the political conditions of its existence. In fact, it's getting hard not to. During the present reign of terror, with its malaprops, lies, and degradations of language, intense devotion to literature is important, if only to keep language, liberal education, and the human spirit alive.

Next year I'm off from teaching (next year I'm off from teaching!) so I'll pour it on with my dissertation. One of the four categories that I use to manage my time (teaching, admin, research, and leisure) is going latent, so I need to redirect that energy, and I don't mean toward leisure. I hope to have the complete thing drafted next year. I can't say for sure whether A Round of Fiddles will play a role in it or not-- probably not, since I don't really want to get caught up in the rhetorical battles of the poetry blogosphere. I do need to create some other "information architecture" through which to route my work, though, since it took me two years to produce a 30 page prospectus (and my reading really isn't done).

In the face of this little pledge for activity, I should note that I'm about to take off on a two week, cross-country adventure with Willow. I'll be writing while I'm at my mom's I'm sure, but might not actually post again til 2005. But despair not, gentle reader, I shall return.

Archives Project: STL #41

2007-11-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

Title: Carl Rakosi 1903-2004
Description:
Date: 30 June 2004

I missed this in first time through while archiving STL. Later obituaries from the U Penn alumni site and a NYT blurb.

The poet Carl Rakosi died Saturday June 25, 2004, at the ripe age 100. He was the last of the Objectivists, those poets who emerged in the early 1930s as left-wing counterparts to the rising tide of Modernism, who nonetheless followed in and elaborated the Pound/Williams project of "thinking with things as they exist" (to quote Zukofsky, and admitting that's a gross oversimplification). A quick search shows no official obituary in the the American press, only one from the Guardian. I actually referred to him in the paper I gave last week, adding that he was "alive and well." I felt a little... guilty almost when I found out a few days later, for not 'touching wood' or something. I only made passing reference to him in my paper, which might add to the guilt, so thought I'd write a little about him this week. I called his work "genial and aphoristic," a phrase I may have unconsciously picked up from someone else but is nonetheless descriptive enough. I want to look at "Lying In Bed On A Summer Morning," supposedly the first poem he wrote after retiring from social work and embarking on a 35 year second career of poetry.

The poem begins

How pleasant are the green
and brown tiles
of my neighbor's roof.
The branches of his elm tree
stretch across
and make a delightful
composition
the angle
of the roof
the exact plane
which the branch needs
to be interesting.
Le mot juste? la branche juste!

From the beginning, it's a sort of origin myth/ poetic exercise. On the first day of his retirement, he takes in the scene outside of his window in an act of explicitly poetic attention. He continues his giddy visual survey:

And you, my dark spruce,
dominate the left side
of this composition.
You are clannish but authentic
and stand, uncompromishing,
for the family of trees.

Here's very self-aware in this stanza, pointing out some fairly hollow poetic tricks he's using--apostrophe to the tree, and exposing a synechdoche that really isn't employed in the poem. Despite how simple this and other CR poems seem, I don't totally get this stanza.

And all at once the early birds
all break out chirping
as when the bidding opens
on the stock exchange.
Then one,
the long sweet warble
of a finch.
Oh stay!
And then a chant from down the street,
two boys triumphant,
very samll in thick glasses:
"We go a bird nest! We got a bird nest!"
A contrary air.
It is gone.
And the blue sky,
clear as in Genesis,
holds.

Here's an obvious image of rebirth, morning birds, linked with the unusual but senible comparison to the Stock Exchange reopening in the morning. The stanza picks through some open lineation, and ends with another "beginning" comparison.

What is there between us?
an abstract air...
a state sans question
or inquietude.....
something light
as a country air
yet serious as gold
or man sui generis

"Air" means both atmosphere and song here: everything changed by poetry. Grappling at significance, he offers some possible consequences of his new life, ending with another image of value and an image of his new, "sui generis," self, which sonically links to "Genesis" above.

Ugh, sorry Carl. You'd think I could at least do a satisfactory exposition of the poem. Maybe by reading it though, you get an idea of his work, and of his 'value' of a life renewed by poetry.

Archives Project: STL #44

2007-11-15T17:11:00.000-05:00

Title: A political follow-up
Description: Clarifying last week, before moving on.
Date: 8 November 2004

I didn't exactly follow up on my mission here, but I'd like to rethink this in terms of my teaching.

Last week I may have implied that I'm against abortion and gay marriage, or think they're unimportant. I feel a responsibility to my readers to clarify my position, especially to those readers searching Internet archives in 30 years when I'm unexpectedly appointed to the Supreme Court.

When I was writing last week, I didn't know that Satan's Army (aka the RNC) would successfully use gay marriage as a wedge to pop the competent candidate out and hammer the incompetent bully back into place. If Ohio hadn't had the measure on the ballot, who knows if the wacko turn out would be as high. Now, it'd be simplistic to wish that the DNC would disassociate itself from the issue, especially since the national ticket was against it. The measures in 11 swing states were calculated to do what they did-- solidify the Orcish army. The problem is that in conservative world views, gay marriage is a strong issue, since they really think God hates homosexuality and that gay marriage is a sign of the end. But in liberal world views, it's less compelling, an afterthought-- of course all citizens should be equally protected. Similarly, pro-life is stronger for its believers than pro-choice is for its party: the former see it as murder, the latter as a legal interpretation of the right to privacy. Even I'm not sure: pro-lifers turn me off with their distasteful virulence, and I'm not particularly drawn to the sanctity of life. Since those positions of mine are hardly mainstream, it's easy to see how that particular wedge works.

The problem we're having, then, is that the other side is setting the terms of the debate. I'm hardly the first to point this out, I know. The work we need to do, and liberal educators need to think about in particularly, is to reframe the issues. We should tax-and-spend abortion out of existence: bury girls and boys in condoms and sex education and we'll hardly ever hear of abortions. We should redefine marriage as strictly religious-- the govt will have no role in it whatsoever, but anyone can petition for a civil union at the courthouse. My strategy as a scholar and educator is to go back to the very books the right treasure so much, the Bible and Federalist Papers, and reinterpret them: use these and other texts to build a new frame for national debate on issues.

Archives Project: STL #43

2007-11-15T17:00:00.002-05:00

Title: good day/bad day
Description: Back to writing--on politics this time
Date: 2 November 2004

This was the day before the worst day in American history. I was so angry and depressed that day. I remember walking Willow in the morning and picking up and smashing a rock on the ground. I remember sitting in a developer meeting commiserating. I stole a box of pens from the supply cabinet and gave one to everybody because what else can you do.

Today, a gray day in Austin, TX preceding I hope a glorious night, I've been thinking about what I care about. If today's the last day of the American Republic, and I think another Bush term would make an Imperial State impossible to deny, then what I think won't matter much. If John Kerry, who I've decided to love unreservedly, wins, and I really think he will by a considerable margin, then we can stave it off for a little longer and maybe what I believe is important might remain relevant a little bit longer.

I'm backing Kerry as a party man-- like a lot of people I started out strictly anti-Bush. That 'no real difference' argument about both parties invested in the ownership class is fine in theory, but politics is the art of the possible. There are real differences between Democrats and Republicans, but they aren't the dumbed down versions you get from the mass media or even worse from partisan sources.

Two issues that sharply divide the parties and, guess what, the country matter almost not at all to me. In fact, I only care about abortion and gay marriage as they are markers of a civil society. Don't get me wrong--I am in favor of women making informed decisions about their health and personal lives as much as I favor legal rights and due respect for all people. But in all honest they're both special cases. I care far more about a civic-minded society, environmental conservatism, and curbing corporate power.

A civic-minded society respects the variety of its citizens. It reaches decisions through consensus and compromise, and respects minority opinion. I also mean a secular society--one that makes no presumptions about the right or the sacred. Bush, the sanctimonious ass that he is, assumes that whatever he finds in his "heart" was put there by God. Kerry on the other hand quoted Lincoln at the convention-- that we shouldn't assume that God in on our side, but that we should humbly pray that we're on God's side.

I say environmental conservatism rather than proctectionism because despite the Republican's currents hostility toward the world we live in, preserving the environment is at heart a conservative stance. Fiscal responsibility is equivalent to ecological responsibility, and I'm in favor of both. The difference is that we can always print more money.

My first belief is consonant with my general intellectual outlook, developed by years in college. (They don't call it a liberal education for nothing.) My second belief contradicts it in assuming that Nature is Good, but pragmatically recognizes the fact that we only have one environment. My third point is much more specific, and I hope will burn itself out in my lifetime although railing against big business has been a Democratic staple since the party has taken its contemporary form. This is actually a subset of my first point. One mild instance of the corporate invasion of civic life is the selling of sports stadium names to the highest bidder. It's sad that nobody cares, but I'm not expecting any legislation against this soon. But letting drug companies run riot through our health care system impacts a lot of personal lives, so I hold out hope.

It's 10 to 4 on election day. Soon I'll know if there's any justification for that hope. I don't usually write about politics, but since I haven't been writing at all lately I don't think anyone will mind. Even so, here's a few lines that've been relevant since Robinson Jeffers wrote them in the 1920's:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten masss, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Allegory of the Cave, Revised Version

2007-11-15T16:56:00.000-05:00

So, anyway, this is pretty good for off-the-cuff commentary. I call it the allegory of the cave two-point-0h.

Don't forget the advice to fully explore your ideas. Think of ideas as caves that may include vast territory full of twists and turns and maybe even buried treasure. Don't walk by a lot of cave openings just glancing in. Instead, pick one to go into and explore. You may find tunnels to other caves, but that's a part of your exploration.

Archives Project: STL #42

2007-11-13T08:25:00.000-05:00

Title: Hitting to all fields
Description:
Date: 15 July 2004

I sign off of this July post with "Till next time," which turned out to be November.
[I had posted this as STL #41, but it was corrected to #42. The archives fo #42-44 add edition numbers that were missing in the original publication.

Last week I started and abandoned a defense of difficulty in literature (too hard). I had several things in mind this week, but since I couldn't pick just one I thought I'd do them all. In honor of the recent All-Star game, I'll call this "hitting to all fields" (if music, film, and literature make a totality, and for me they just about do), as if this installment of Simplest demonstrates my versatility. The fact is, I forgot to turn the game on until after 6 runs had been scored and fell asleep between the 6th and 7th innings, so expect this likewise to be sloppy and inattentive.

First, let me pull into right for two albums I downloaded from iTunes. Generally I still buy CDs and only download singles, but I was trying to win a contest, dad-gum, and thought the albums would give me a better chance. I bought Appetite for Destruction, Nothing's Shocking, and part the Cult's Electric, three albums released in 1987 (according to Top of my Head research) which defined that summer. I'm not sure why I cling to hard rock and metal: they're completely declasse, unimaginative, and a little offensive. Oh wait, that's why I've returned to this music--it's mine. I know every note on these three records, even though I probably haven't heard them for 10 years. Jane's Addiction, despite their alt-rock credentials, don't do much for me anymore. While unveiling hypocrisy with arty "poetic" lyrics once strongly appealed to me, "The news is just another show" is so obvious as to be embarrassing. The music alternates between RHCP slack funk and proto-grunge and also sounds played out. The Cult, in their invocations to hippie philosophy and arm whirling guitar heroics, made no claims to originality, and "Peace Dog" sounds just as good as ever. I was most worried about Guns N Roses. I'm sure I listened to Appetite every day for over a year, and I'm just as sure I made sophomoric claims like 'Axl Rose is a poet of the streets.' They became huge of course; Axl spouted nonsense on stage and the band produced some bloated music. But for a moment they towered above the abject LA metal scene--the riffs were tight, funky even, the attitude sharp and exactly right. And it turns out I still love the record--I've listened to it every day since I bought it.

Next, the mainstream smash Spider-Man II. We are, of course, living in the golden age of the super-hero movie. Many factors of brought this about, including the emergence of CG effects (which are fine in this movie, though I'm generally unimpressed), the rise of the geek as a culture hero (including the entrance of the comics fan into the film industry), and the content wars (I mean, what intellectual property isn't being turned into a movie?). But most important of all is the fact that Marvel Comics, the one-time "House of Ideas," finally figured out how to market their characters to the film industry. I mean, Batman's cool and all, but most DC comics characters are hold-overs from the WWII era. The nice thing about Marvel movies is that they import the basic mythos of the characters from the comics. The savvy viewer can have a deeper experience by meditating on the relationship between the film and the canonical comics, while the uninitiated viewer can just have a good time. The question of identity is central to most super-heroes, none more than Spidey (one long(ish) running title was actually "Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man"). It's carried over into the movies in his loss of powers, his repeated maskless appearance, and the relationship between not Peter but Spidey and the ever-dewy Mary Jane. Hopefully, I do another summer movie round up in a few weeks.

Finally: a blooper to left.* A few weeks ago I blurbed Gilbert Sorrentino's collected stories. It was fairly weak I know, and I think I referred to his "craft." I'm pretty embarrassed about this, seeing as how GS savages "fine writing" usually associated with that term (I just meant I liked the way he wrote sentences). In his great novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things he proudly renders his characters as cardboard cutouts (from some Art World comic book maybe), saying at one point something like: 'If you want to know what kind of bag she carried ask John O'Hara.' IQAT (heh) far outpaces the short fiction and deserves to be read, not talked about in trite reviewer short hand.

*Hey, look at me dept: Notice, dear reader, the witty structure I've created. As a left-handed batter (an affectation I've abandoned actually) I 'pull' into the conservative, regressive 'field' of hard rock. The "mainstream smash" naturally resides in center, and my flair to left is a defensive swing to the off field. I'm so tickled with myself that I must be done. Till next time.

Archives Project: STL #40

2007-11-12T16:57:00.000-05:00

Title: Silencio
Description: N/A/
Date: 18 June 2004

At this point, the unhealthy blog begins to whither. It actually mirrors my current rut on a macro-scale, since as you see the demands of work draw me away from blogging. I can say with confidence that I am not the only blogger to experience this.

Sorry about last week, and for that matter sorry about this week. If you're interested, the file is a draft of the conference paper I'm giving next week on Objectivist poets and their literary silences.

Next week, also silence.

[following is the unformatted, unedited draft]

Paper Title: Rhetorics of Silence: Objectivists and the 1940s
Author: REDACTED

Intro
To call the Objectivists poets 40’s is a bit paradoxical. Although the poets most directly associated with the quasi-movement—such as George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky—were all alive and well, they wrote little and published less during the decade. Objectivists might be better considered poets of the 30s, based on early association and publication in the October 1931 issue of Poetry which include Zukofsky’s famous manifesto on sincerity and objectification, and when a discourse on Objectivist practice briefly circulated, even tho the poets associated with it never actually formed a cohesive movement. Alternately, they might be called poets of the 60s, because of the renewal in interest in and return to print of these poets during those years. Indeed, the major publications of these poets in the sixties and seventies—such as Reznikoff’s Testimony, Zukofsky’s All, the American edition of A 1-12 in 1967 and complete A in 1978, and Oppen’s string of remarkable volumes beginning with The Materials in 1962—represent their greatest contribution and continuing influence. But the decade of the 40s falls into the period of what Ron Silliman calls “Second Phase Objectivism,” the fallow period between early publication and the return to print in the 1960s, a period marked by silence and neglect. Oppen had fallen into his famous 25 year silence, and Rakosi followed suit after his 1941 Selected Poems. The ever-busy Zukofsky continued to work, but took a long break from his “poem of a life,” “A’ for most of the 40s. Though this silence has fascinated readers, particularly Oppen’s, it is difficult to integrate into critical discourse, for the very reason that it provides us no text. In this paper, I will briefly look at three Objectivist silences—Oppen and Rakosi’s absolute silences and Zukofsky’s relative one—and consider how we, as literary critics, might read them.

Hugh Kenner, in A Homemade World, explained this fallow period as resulting from the neglect of publishers and academics.
The academy has consistently shunned [the Objectivists]. Though the Objectivists were college men, though Zuk spent many years at college teaching, and tho the New Criticism of the 1940’s tended to be first and last something practiced by teachers, though Ph. D. candidates with New Critical supervisors scratched on their hands and knees for dissertation subjects, the Objectivists remained unnoticed, unreprinted, till the late 1960’s . That is because, when the university network was linking up after the war, and taste for the first time was being made in classrooms, the prime criterion of poetic excellence was tending to become teachability…
Kenner then catalogues “teachable” aspects of poetry (according to New Critics): paradox, concrete imagery, and a certain obviousness of argument, and concludes that “Poets who offered no handle for such apparatus to hang onto were simply ignored…” (173). While this academic neglect is demonstrable, we must also recognize that the silence of some these poets was intentional. They weren’t simply waiting around for the award committee to call, but chose other forms of work. The paradigmatic case is George Oppen who Jerome McGann calls a “symptomatic and instructive figure” in considering poetry and silence.
Oppen
George’s wife Mary Oppen writes in her memoir Meaning A Life that she and her husband left off artistic work for political work because it seemed the appropriate response to first the suffering of the Great Depression, in the 30’s, and then war and fascism in the 40’s. Direct political action was more valuable to them than political art, which they found largely insincere (a noteworthy violation of the Objectivist credo of sincerity and objectification in poetry). Mary explains that
an appeal was made to intellectuals by the seventh World Congress of the Communist Parties in 1935 to join in a united front to defeat fascism and war. We responded to that call, and in the winter of 1935 we decided to work with the Communist Party, not as artist or writer because we did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left… We said to each other, ‘Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our other interest in the arts for a later time.’ (151)
As they worked as organizers for the Communist Party, they still, as Mary recalled, “held close a belief in ourselves as artists, and we intended to find our way back to a life in poetry and the arts.” George later enlisted in the Army to fight in the European theater. After the war, the Oppens were harassed by the FBI because of their communist background and in turn fled to Mexico, where they lived and worked for several years. By 1958, the Oppens were able to return to the United States and in Mary’s words, began to assimilate the violent years… into thought and poetry” (200). George began work on The Materials, which was published by New Directions in 1962.
An understandable impulse in Oppen criticism is to use his long silence as a frame to interpret his subsequent poetry. Consideration of silence in poetry often figures it textually—a mute or unresponsive interlocutor, semantic gaps, or a spare style. Even the use of white space on the page is often taken as a material metaphor for silence. John Taggart, one of Oppen’s best readers, calls Oppen’s poetry “a structure which is so composed as to contain—almost preserve—all that which is most threatening, the openness of time, the abraiding grain of silence” (227) through various stylistic means. That the qualities of Oppen’s poetry can be talked about in terms of silence may propogate an overriding explanatory myth of silence, creating a metaphoric frame for the poetry. This frame is strengthened by the ethical motivation of the silence (other work was more important for the good of all) and the corresponding ethical issues of the poetry. Nevertheless, the frame valorizes the poetry and de-emphasizes Oppen’s other work. It also romanticizes and in fact fabricates silence: the work of organizing, or of simply carrying on quotidian life, obvious is not done without using language.
Maybe a better tactic is to read the silence itself. In his introduction to the recent Collected Poems Michael Davidson reads Oppen’s silence as a form of refusal:
In a culture heavily committed to production, the idea of a writer who becomes silent seems heretical. Hugh Kenner provided the most convenient explanation of Oppen’s silence by observing that “…it took twenty-five years to write the next poem,” a remark to which Oppen has given assent in various interviews. However elegant, Kenner’s formulation dehistoricizes Oppen’s silence by sidestepping the challenges it was trying to meet in the politically charged 1930s…. However much one may want to textualize his silence by seeing it as a lacuna in a long—a very long—poem, the facts of economic depression at home and the growth of Fascism abroad placed demands on his aesthetics that could not be resolved through aesthetics.”xxxi
But even Davidson translates the silence into Oppen’s poems, noting that he “found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun.” This is not to fault either Davidson or Taggart, who are sensitive and articulate readers; they use silence as fruitful interpretive frames.
It might be more accurate to seek instead of a poetics of silence, a rhetoric of silence, which reads not speaking (or better, not writing or publishing) as a meaningful gesture in the context of a life’s work. To do so it would be necessary not only to read texts, but also careers, as Libbie Rifkin suggests doing in her book Career Moves. Citing Bakhthin, she calls for “a ‘social evaluation’ of the interlocking set of textual and historical factors … and thus ‘actualizes the utterance both from the standpoint of its factual presence and the standpoint of its semantic meaning’ (121). Poetic careers are both produced by and productive of this larger social texture…” While I have no problem with using silence as a context for Objectivist texts, the silence of Second phase objectivism has an existence and a meaning apart from the renaissance of the Third Phase.
Rakosi
While Oppen’s silence is one of the crucial tropes found in his criticism, Rakosi’s 25 year gap is less deterministic in the few considerations of his work we have. However, it was apparently used as a sort of promotional device, an enticement for readers. The jacket copy of his first Third Phase volume Amulet reads as follows:
New Directions published his POEMS in 1941. Then to the great disappointment of his admirers, R stopped writing; he had become disillusioned with the state of our society and felt there was no place in it for a poet. The world seems little better off today, but at least we can be grateful that R began to write poetry three years ago and has now given us this selection from his poems, old and new.
This blurb interprets silence as a strong ethical stance: like Oppen, the times did not call for poetry, but direct action (in Rakosi’s case, social work and psychotherapy—again, talking professions). But in his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo, Rakosi said this was only part of the story: “social work just drew me very strongly…it wasn’t until the late thirties that it seemed impossible for me to be a social worker and to write at the same time” (179) In this formulation, it isn’t that “the times” invalidated poetry, but that they called for a response other than poetry. The jacket copy is another instance of substituting historically-situated silence for differently historically-situated text. But as it turns out, the frame of silence doesn’t provide much help to Rakosi’s aphoristic, genial work. The textual metaphors for silence—semantic gaps, white space, etc—are simply not pronounced features in Rakosi’s early or late work. Not that it was easy to separate his early and late work: 28 of the 37 poems in the 1941 Selected, turn up some with minor revisions, in Amulet. suggesting a continuity across time. That his silence hasn’t been the object of fascination that Oppen’s has may be because it is not textually resonate. (Incidently, Rakosi celebrated his 100th birthday last fall and, as far as I know is alive and well and living in San Francisco)
Zuk
In 1941 Zukofsky self-published The First Half of “A”-9 as his first volume of poetry. According to Celia’s “Year by Year Bibliography to the Works of LZ,” he didn’t finish this movement until 1950, the longest gap in the writing of “A” . But as I indicated, he did keep himself busy in the 40s, as the panels here testify to. This silence is, like the others, only silence in a sense.
The First Half of “A”-9 represents a welter of conversation; in addition to his poem and explanatory materials, it includes work by Guido Cavalcanti’ Karl Marx, various modern physicists, Ezra Pound, and Zuk’s friend Jerry Reisman. The formula of “A”-9 suggests that literary production results from textual interchange, from vibrant discussion. Zuk’s essay “Objectification and Sincerity” says that the goal of poetry is to record “historic and contemporary particulars” (189), a task which silence obviously could not accomplish. So it would seem that silence doesn’t bear much on Z’s work either.
But publishing the first half independently accentuates the rupture in the composition and publication of “A”. The second half of“A”-9 was not published until 1959, in the Origin Press edition of ‘A” 1-12. I’ll turn now to pieces of A which recuperate this gap while thematically engaging silence: the completed A-9 and A-10.
The completion of A-9 is obliquely narrated in the essay “Poetry. To My Son When He Can Read” printed at the back of the American edition of A 1-12. In the essay, Zukofsky tells his infant son that he had recently taken some “almost illegible notes on poetry” out of his wallet (269). He explains that while the war had discouraged him, his son’s emerging language skills inspired him to follow up on these notes. While he is not specific, it is possible that these notes refer to the card on which he had sketched out the plan of “A” in the late 20s. The second half of “A”-9 takes on additional significance as the resumption of his life’s work. As many readers of A have noted, the 2nd half of A-9 represents a turn form the public realm of materialist critique to the private realm of love of family. This shift is not to silence, but perhaps to quiescence. The reprinting of A-9 in its complete form, without the additional voices in the first half, contribute to this impression.
“A”-10, appearing obviously immediately after 9, was actually finished first, in 1940. In straddling the gap in this fashion, it engages the question of the poet and silence in time of crisis. Describing the wreckage of war, he say “Let a better time say/The poet stopped singing to talk.” This strangely traces personal decision made by the organizer Oppen and the psychotherapist Rakosi, tho the reference is more likely to himself, descending toward his lower limit to engage political tumult. Though he kept at literary work, he acknowledges that wide scale suffering challenged him, and challenged his very medium. As the movement draws to a close, we find one of the flattest, most banal lines in the poem: “The capital of France is Vichy.” There’s a subterranean logic in that line: if war and fascism forces language to such a position, perhaps silence is the necessary choice.
Conclusion: a rhetoric of silence

And so we arrive at last at George Steiner’s position in his well-known essay “Silence and the Poet,” that “the political inhumanity of the 20th century” has made language “debased” and “dehumanized” so “to a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question…two essential courses are available: he may seek to render his own idiom representative fo the general crisis… or he may choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence” (69). But the Objectivist suggest that silence need not be as dire as this, nor be considered a single monolith. Silences might speak as well, and speak variously. We should then, as rhetoric scholar Cynthia Ryan urges us, “perceive silences within broader cultural and social terms” (675). We need rules that govern the “interpretations we make.. about the discursive significance of individual instances of silence” (675) that go beyond framing subsequent texts, but address the gaps and blanks in the terms of poet’s, the man or woman’s, life’s work. Although Rhetoric and poetics have historically been at odds, the silence of 2nd phase Objectivism can, after all, be read as an “unquiet gesture” a rhetorical act composed of a rhetor, implied auditor, and an ecodeable and decodeable statement.

Wolfgang Iser “What is said only appears to take on significance as a reference to what is not said.” (168)

Christopher Gaynor’s piece “Speculations through the mirro: silence” in Code of Signals invokes a GENERATIVE SILENCE and he juxtaposes VOWS OF SILENCE-AN OCCULT ORDER- A LOGOS

Davidson: “His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering His return to writing was political by representing the inability of communal forms to account for individual agency.”

Mary: “We have always felt that our writing required distance from the politics of experience. ““Gestures of silence are filled with unquiet implications (Ryan 676).

Why Study Literature? Part One: The Usable Past (STL 59)

2007-11-08T07:47:00.001-05:00

Really only scratching the surface, but the following began in reply to a student of mine who asked about what I thought about her use of the first-person in the conclusion of an essay she wrote. The usable past is from Lionel Trilling, and I first came to it through a book called The Unusable Past that usefully categorizes historical approaches to teaching American literature.

Dear X(tina):

Thank you for your e-mail. See I never really meet or speak to the students in this class, I am always glad to hear feedback. I did appreciate your use of the first-person in the essay. It was an appropriate and effective strategy. The reason that students are warned away from the first person is that it can steer them away from the actual subject at hand. Instead of studying the thing to form an understanding of it, the inexperienced student might rush to judgment view the thing (the story, the historical event, the biological specimen) with pre-formed and unwarranted opinions. But more experience and accomplished students should use the first person, since understanding is ultimately a personal experience. (Especially in literature, but true for other fields too.)

One of the reasons we study literature is to recover what is called "the usable past." So much of our lives are defined by the times we live in. Political and technological factors are always changing, so any moment in time is a "now" sealed off from the past. But as your connection with The Yellow Wallpaper shows, our reactions to where we are now aren't necessarily that different than people in the past. By connecting with a woman who wrote 100 years ago, you might begin to see connections between now and then. Without pausing to reflect on it, the conditions of a woman in Victorian times--that she is little better than her husband's property, that she is thought of as a child unable to make her own decisions--are far removed from your own life. Yet the fact that you can't end an academic paper without referring to your own experience is proof that Gilman's story relates to your life on some level. (The fact that you respond so well to this unit suggests that the experience of 19th century American women is somehow useful to you as a 21st century American woman.) As you point out, the specifics are different, so different that we can only partially empathize with that past. But part of it we can incorporate into our own 'now,' and so benefit from the power of a "usable past."

Horrorfest 2007 (STL 58)

2007-11-07T15:46:00.001-05:00

Every year around Hallowe'en, wifey and I curl up on the couch and watch a few horror movies. I kind of like horror movies--they can be exquisitely crafted, beautifully composed, and, thanks to creative scoring and sound design, incomparably moody. Nevertheless, we don't see that many during the course of a year. Aside from our seasonal viewing, we might only see one or two other horror movies a year, or none. Unless you count Snakes on a mf plane or Pan's labyrinth, I doubt if we saw any last year, aside from our Hallwe'en goodies, The Wicker Man (original British version, please) and the Dario Argento movie Deep Red. This year's batch was a Hammer film starring Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It was rather dull, and the plot was somewhat like a middling episode of Angel in the way it mixes vampirism, corporate intrigue, and science fiction. The hired heavies in this movie are hilarious. They are typical mustachioed 70's dudes in sheepskin vests, that look like they were made out of their Trans-Am seat covers. Much better was Suspira and Halloween. Suspira is not as good as the Dario Argento film we saw last year (Deep Red), which relied more on suspense than the supernatural elements and gore of Suspira. (There's an evil witch, and a close up of a heart getting stabbed, if you want the specifics.) Wife puts her finger on Argento when she calls him the Italian DePalma (which only now sounds funny and redundant). They're both Hitchcockian (with a dash of Fellini), with deliberate and vivid imagery and a tightly controlled camera. By far the best of the three was John Carpenter's Halloween. All three of the qualities I mentioned earlier--craft, composition, and mood--are abundant in this movie. The horror comes from the background--of course it does, always--which remains still and empty most of the time, but is several times subtly violated by the affectless mask of Michael Myers, an inexplicable and incomprehensible evil. My favorite scenes are of the house across the way, observable my Jamie Lee Curtis. It's dark out but the porch is well lit. Several times Michael Myers comes around the corner, slowly and malevolently, but often it's just a still and horrible suburban night.

Archives Project: STL #39

2007-11-06T13:57:00.000-05:00

Title: The Moon In Its Flight
Description: Okay, what you weren't waiting for: STL returns, (in May, as promised!) with some thoughts on Gilbert Sorrentino's collection of stories.
Date: 31 May 2004

Written, apparently, on my 34th birthday. Sorrentino's best work is his essays, which are collected in Something Said. Perhaps one day I will blog on that work, which are one of the models for what I do here. (To the extent I have models).

In an interview, Sorrentino called Ed Dahlberg "a subversive and destructive master of prose, who is, at his best, so good that he takes your breath away. He is also zany, goofy, loopy, misogynistic, deeply prejudiced, bitter, nasty, paranoid and absolutely unfair... He is a great American writer, astonishingly original, a virtuoso without peers,and probably much too good for us." You might say the same about Sorrentino himself, and that Sorrentino is virtually unknown (like Dahlberg himself, these days) tells you something-- that he probably is too good for us too. Sorrentino was first a poet (some of his work was incorporated into Paterson 5) and a literary raconteur (he befriended Hubert Selby and Leroi Jones early in their careers--if I'm not mistaken, Last Exit to Brooklyn is dedicated to him) and went on to write a stack of novels in the last 3 decades. The Moon In Its Flight collects his occasional short stories from the past 35 years.

Not only is Sorrentino is a master stylist "irreducible" prose ( vide this interview.)--manifested in perfect, acutely observant sentences, but he's a supreme innovator whose range is apparent in this collection. My favorite mode of his work combines metafictional self-awarenesss with a conversational, seemingly off-hand tone.* He works diligently within imposed constraints, such as writing a story only in questions (he actually continued this constraint through an entire novel) or integrating popular song titles into a discursive narrative, as he does in the title story, a moving consideration of nostalgia.

To top it off (so to speak)**, the right-minded reader might find an almost moral satisfaction in reading Sorrentino. He is a cranky Jeremiah who rails at fakeness where he sees it--whether in the insincerity of self-satisfied "fine writing" or in the intellectual laziness of contemporary America. Like Dahlberg, he's not for everyone--like any prophet he can turn nasty, which he does against inconstant women of his own creation, and his art is strongly devoted to artifice, which some might find cloying, if not occasionally befuddling.

And honestly, it's not his best work. His experimental and digressive tendencies need space to develop, which probably explains why he's written comparatively few stories over the years. Those of us who cultivate "oppositional" tastes (read "snobs") get some pleasure from our sure and unprovable knowledge that time will show us right. We would surely have been enthusiastic about Moby Dick, would have bought the first edition of The Way By Swann's, etc. In 2050, GS will have readers, if anyone has readers. Once we get a full picture of his body of work, his stories won't seem major in the way that novels like Mulligan Stew or Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things already do for some of us.

*"Meta-fictional" is an over-used description of an over-used device. Thankfully, in GS it's played less often as a writer sitting at his desk writing than as a story-telling questioning himself, and checking in with and interacting with his audience.
**This bracketing of the cliche is a GS speciality--it accentuates what the cliche glosses over.

Archives Project: STL #38

2007-11-06T13:34:00.000-05:00

Title: "Other Dreams My Erring Soul Employ"
Description: A Note on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Date: 2 April 2004

I admit being drunk (droonk) when I wrote this, and it shows. This shames the previous candidate from worst post ever! It was also the last post before a temporary hiatus that then gave way to a longer hiatus. Ergo, my drinking ruined my blogging career.

This is the briefest of notes, written on a Friday night after inventing a ratio for making boiler makers out of "Gentleman Jack" sub-trademark and Shiner, left all alone after my hard day a-reading. It was edited thereafter when I remembered that some drunk guy left a post on me blog.

I saw Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My first nota bene leads to the next: no other screen writer gets benighted with the project. Yeah, some guy named Michel Gondry directed this, but it's a Charlie K. "film." Secondly, note the way that the writer's process, his "inventio" gets captured in the plot of the movie. At the crucial juncture between the clinical treatment and 'reality' (also between the mental projections of Joel and Clementine and the 'real' clinic staff), Kirsten Dunst recites two quotes she gleaned from Bartlett's, one of which gives the movie its name. When I saw this wonderful movie, I thought to myself "hey, I bet that Charlie wuz paging thru Bartlett's one day, and these two quotes starting knocking together, until the sparks led to the script." But later I start thinkin' to myself: what if it's a little harder than that? What is CK is only pretending to be like the clinic receptionist, reading quote books for conversation topics. And so I checked my sixteenth edition: four quotes from 'Pope, Alexander's' "Eloisa to Abelard," not including "The world forgetting, by the world forgot/ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"! I bet the Nee-Chee aint there neither, but I is too droonk to look it up. My point? There's a lot of work happening here, a lot of deep thinking and reading of the old school that's getting disguised in an entertaining movie. The bottom line is that this movie isn't as simple as it looks.

In fact, it doesn't seem that simple compared to other movies: it respects your intelligence to let you juggle temporal lines based on the color cues of Kate Winslet's hair. But I think as I see this movie again and again, as I hope to, I'll keep thinking about the significance of this movie, of the intertwining of the subject and object, of the inseparability of moment and history. The saddest part of the movie only comes to you in retrospect: by removing Clementine from his life, he's sacrificed Huckleberry Hound, who obviously threaded in with his life earlier. You can try to separate emotional entanglements from your life, but like Alexander Pope says in the Big Alexander Pope Book and not Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, there are always "other dreams" that "my erring soul employ."