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
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
STL #66: "Image, therefore, is vector" (on Charles Olson)
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”
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.
"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”
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.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
STL #65: ATOP II: NAP
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.
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.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
STL #64: writing, memory, and knowledge
"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"
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"
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
STL #63: A Year in Reading
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.
*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.)
- "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.)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
STL #62: Done with ^unplayed
Technology and listening to music.
I made a small edit 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 for at least six months has been 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 list was huge when I created a 'smart' playlist of all songs with a playcount of 0; that action compiled a playlist of over 5,000 songs. That number is a little misleading, since it reflects the uploading of many CDs over the summer. Many of these CDs 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. But 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 DVDs 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 follow, 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 raw notes on how technology has affected my listening to music was "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 homology 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."
- Lily Allen, Alright, Still
- Amy Winehouse "Rehab"
- Panther, "You Don't Want Your Nails Done"
- Jens Lekman, Night Fell on Kordova
- Dude n Em "Watch My Feet"
- The National, The Boxer
- Burial, "Ghost Hardware"
- Pigeon John, "Growing Old"
- Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
- Spank Rock, "Lindsay Lohan"
(Eh, I'm not crazy about that list, so maybe I'll revise it in a month or so.)
STL #61: Numbers
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.
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.
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