STL #76 Summer's End

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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.