This Cruellest Month

iPod Cento II

2008-04-04T19:37:00.004-04:00

Far away
and fingers -- those
teardrops in my eyes. Uh-
uh. Why don't you melt
your heart again in my hand?

I know it's going
to feel like ice. In this charming
car, listening to the rain, the blue,
blue, blue sky felt

like you did then. So
fast it's real -- so
scientific it makes
no difference.

Same writing process as yesterday. Sources:
• Televison. "Marquee Moon."
• The Smiths. "This Charming Man."
• JYL. "Computer Love."
• The Monkees. "Take a Giant Step."
• Ronettes. "The Best Part of Breaking Up."
• Glass Candy. "Covered in Bugs."
• Pino Donaggio. "Someone Like Me."

iPod Cento I

2008-04-03T23:45:00.004-04:00

fffp — straight to gravitation. Straight
to "pulls you down" like nothing
's between my bones + skin. Oh
yeah! It is so quick,
my heart — every beep, beep, beep,
beep, beep, beep, beep to the bottom
of the sea. Beep beep beep — can't you
see what I've seen? Do you see
what I see? Look in my eyes, night
and day with the force of lunar
gravity stopped my heart
and soul so soft and shaking my
name and I know.

An aleatory cento (the first of many) composed of lines and phrases from songs played by my iPod's shuffle function on the commute home from work. Material comes from:
• The Zombies. "Nothing's Changed"
• von LMO. "Outside of Time"
• The Velvet Underground. "I Heard Her Call My Name"
• Television. "Venus"
• Sam Cooke. "Cupid"
• Norman Greenbaum. "Spirit in the Sky"
• Love. "Andmoreagain"
• The Delfonics. "Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time"
• Silicon Teens. "You Really Got Me"
• Black Mountain. "Faulty Times"
• The Seeds. "Pushin' Too Hard"
• Scott Walker. "Mathilde"

Songs mean a lot (iii)

2008-04-02T15:17:00.003-04:00

iii

I’m gonna boy with
the steeples, graceful
to the only and ’til it
rests I try in a ways. To hear

shake lineament stars. I’m
a late the roof. Just you, so
only so nearly, so roving – I

chew and I’m empty, lose
the diamond completely.

Songs mean a lot

2008-04-02T00:51:00.003-04:00

i

All in the bin: a hum
steed, a trouble mumbler
hour. On ten on
your on topster, stop. So
stop and I fled you. Sling

o’ the feat feath-
er thing, her finger
meal. Firing fly my
back there. There

rain, here sing there
sees the old thing, the nylon
let them, the spools or loose.

ii

If I please
plank, if I risk, if
I sow the deep
and dangled. How
& if I coo &
how & sweet. To

been sold the ven-
eer, the moon and rivers’
rivers drop. In fits
and steps in line – no
reels, nor feelers’ fails.

I'm getting a late start on the NaPoWriMo experience this time out. Oh well -- only missed it by a little bit. Count this for yesterday.

These come from a new serial thing I've been readying to begin for a couple of weeks, derived from the lyrics of Pavement songs, mostly from their first two albums and a couple of early EPs.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2007-11-04T17:27:00.001-05:00

If you're going to be in New York City on November 10th, I'm reading with Daniel Magers, Alex Smith, and Steve Roberts at the Four Faced Liar on W. 4th St., between 6th and 7th.

The flier linked above will answer all of your questions.

Book reviews

2007-09-10T11:46:00.000-04:00

I've started an account at Goodreads.com, and have uploaded most of my library (my similar account at LibraryThing made this an easy task).

I'm not sure about the site's general usefulness — it's interesting to see what books others are reading, or have read. And on the occasion that the users have given stars to a particular book, it's not clear that the meaning of a starred review is consistent, even among an individual's ratings: do the five stars I gave to Zukofsky's "A" mean the same thing as the same rating I've given to Tina Darragh's on the corner to off the corner? And what about a similar rating for a book of critical essays, or a novel? Certainly, we don't read poetry and criticism in the same way – their "values" (for want of a better word) are different, and their functions, both social and personal, are different.

Needless to say, it's the reviews that are important, in that they at least allow for some explanation, if not outright defense. So I've decided to begin work on reviewing my entire library, with no formal plan for how to do so, and no projected date for completion. I procede with a sense of futility — there aren't many of these that haven't been reviewed countless times before, rendering my commentary frivolous and excessive in advance of the fact.

Oh well.

on the corner to off the corner
Tina Darragh
Sun & Moon Press, 1981

An exploratory surgery of sorts, Darragh's procedure, simple enough at first glance (the curious can vide her explanation in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book), interrupts lexicographical discoure — its aim at closure, stability, fixity — as it re-reads the page, treating keywords as clues, suggestions for a derive at lyric's limits. The result is a meaning altogether at cross-purposes to definition's drawing of boundaries, its regulation of voice and of tongue.

Still more on criticism

2007-08-21T14:17:00.000-04:00

Steven Fama, in a comment on one of my posts on criticism, suggests that I should have mentioned Olson's Call Me Ishmael. Consider it an addition to my list, and heartily endorsed, along with Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare and Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore.

There are, of course, countless other books (and essays) that I could add. Fama points out an apparent blindness in my list to anything more than thirty years old; it stems not from a deliberate project or agenda on my part, but from the non-systematic and off-the-cuff manner in which I approached the task. And his observation calls other omissions to mind as well, particularly of art and film criticism. Certainly Arthur Danto's Art After the End of Art merits inclusion, along with P. Adams Sitney's Modernist Montage and much of Cahiers du cinema.

Of course, there's more that could be added — as before, I remain stubborn in my refusal to stand up and have my memory triggered by even the most basic "research" of looking at my bookshelf.

But instead, I'm curious what other books you would include on your own list(s). Comment in the appropriate space, if you're so inclined.

Addendum

2007-08-20T03:26:00.001-04:00

Something else occurs to me, with regards to a couple of texts listed in my last post. Though I included, without caveat or hesitation, Fliegelman's Declaring Independence, it might more properly be considered a work of cultural and/or social criticism, as opposed to literary criticism, which was the ostensible purpose of the post, at least considered in the context of the discussion that prompted it. Nonetheless, it's inclusion is merited, inasmuch as Fliegelman's discussion of Revolutionary-era rhetoric is relevant to an understanding not only of the non-literary texts (where "literary" is bounded according to traditional dictates) that fall within his scope, but also to an understanding of the literature contemporary with, and immediately following, the era in question. Furthermore, his study of evolving notions of authorship are, by virtue of the potential for their extension, relevant to present-day literary issues, particularly with regards to copyright, which I take to be the legal codification of both authorship and ownership of a text, where "text" is defined in its broadest sense, and where authorship and ownership may not always be coterminous.

The same post-facto qualification applies as well to my inclusion of Ruttenburg's book. Though she does discuss a range of literary texts, her focus is on cultural and social notions, rather than on the texts as text, at least according to traditional and/or conservative considerations of the term's limits. Furthermore, the chapter of her study that is most interesting (to my mind, of course) has virtually nothing to do with literary writing, per se, as it deals with the Salem witch trials, and the social upheaval and spontaneous reorganization thereof that attended that moment. Like Fliegelman, she is interested in rhetoric and text as manifestations of, and as a force operating within, the socio-cultural sphere, rather than with text as "pure art," or some such...

All of which is to point to a fourth question I should have raised earlier:

4. Given historical criticism, the boundary between literary criticism and certain forms of cultural criticism is, at least in cases where cultural criticism deal explicitly with concerns at the heart of notions of textuality / literature, often indistinct. The cases of overlap are certainly less common than in the other instances of overlap or indistinct boundary than I mentioned earlier, but they nonetheless do exist, and pose a relevant question (if not outright "concern") to a discussion of literary criticism that might seek to define the latter rigidly, or according to traditional definitions. That is, it's not possible to make a statement — at least not without breaching good faith — that all cultural criticism involves literary criticism in the way we might, in good faith, make such a claim about poetry always involving a critical act. Nonethless, certain instances do demonstrably trouble a simple identification...

Critical texts

2007-08-19T12:27:00.000-04:00

In response to, and as an extension of, a discussion I recently had about the "art of criticism," I've present an unranked list of a baker's dozen critical works I consider to be important. I'm not going to provide extensive commentary at the moment (other than a few notes by way of conclusion), but may do so in the near future, if the mood so strikes; nonetheless, a general and unqualified endorsement applies in each case.

Patricia Crain. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.

Ulla Dydo. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934.

Umberto Eco. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.

Jay Fliegelman. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance.

Susan Howe. The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history.

Michelle Leggott. Reading Zukofsky's "80 Flowers".

Nathaniel Mackey. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing.

Sianne Ngai. "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust."

Marjorie Perloff. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage.

Jerome McGann. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism.

Nancy Ruttenburg. Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship.

Juliana Spahr. Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.

Jalal Toufic. (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film.

— - — - —
A couple of quick thoughts, each deserving of more attention than I've allowed for at the moment:

1. I've omitted from this list texts that might more properly be considered either/both statements of personal poetics or/and manifestoes. Thus, essays akin to (and including) Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" have been deliberately omitted. At the same time, drawing such a line reminds me that this is a difficult distinction to make, especially given the number of poets who work as critics, and the necessary act of criticism that accompanies, and is implied by, any creative act (in writing or any other art) or product thereof. In fact, some works on the list — those by Howe, Mackey, Ngai, Spahr, etc. — might be omitted along with Hejinian's; or hers might be included.

2. Given the extent to which aesthetic production constitutes a criticism (both negative, referring to that which is rejected, and positive, referring to that which is projected, by the text) of the work's precedents and contemporaries, the case could be made for including poetry itself. At the same time, a list so inclusive would risk meaninglessness, inasmuch as it would be distinguished from a list of important poetry only via the presence of works that cannot be considered poetry.

3. Another line that cannot be placed precisely and unproblematically: the distinction between ("pure") criticism and ("pure" — or "impure," if you're so inclined) theory. The thrust of Eco's career as a whole might suggest we consider the above work an example of theory, or of philosophy, even; the same may also be said of Toufic. Furthermore, a number of writers I reflexively describe as theorists are in fact engaged in criticism: Blanchot's reviews, certainly, and perhaps The Space of Literature, even if Writing of the Disaster might more readily be called "pure" theory (or philosophy — this distinction is similarly fraught). Similarly, it's worth recalling that Derrida's key essays, by and large, emerge from attentive readings of particular texts. In the end, a statement from note one might also be applied here: any act of criticism necessarily relies upon — whether explicitly stated or not — theories of criticism, of meaning, etc.

Celluloid Poetry (Moritsugu, Anger)

2007-07-29T06:44:00.000-04:00

Here's the trailer for Jon Moritsugu's Mod Fuck Explosion (1994), a bizarre synthesis of teensploitation classics like West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause, with Quadrophenia, as filtered through the works of John Waters.

London, the female lead in Mod Fuck Explosion, is an obvious homage to the lead from Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment. The key scene in Moritsugu's film — where "key" refers to its aesthetic impact, if not its relevance to the plot — in which London walks through a room decorated entirely in raw meat, can be understood as a rewrite of portions of Anger's short piece.

Alphaville

2007-07-26T22:56:00.000-04:00

The best scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville: Une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965).

Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips... Our silences, our words... Light that goes, light that returns. A single smile between us. In quest of knowledge, I watched night create day while we seemed unchanged. O beloved all, beloved of one alone, your mouth silently promised to be happy. Away, away says hate; Closer, closer says love. A caress leads us from our infancy. Increasingly I see the human form as a lovers' dialogue. The heart has but one mouth. Everything by chance. All words without thought. Sentiments adrift. Men roam the city. A glance, a word. Because I love you, everything moves. We must advance to live. Aim straight ahead towards those you love. I went toward you, endlessly toward the light. If you smile, it enfolds me all the better. The rays of your arms pierce the mist.

Anthological development

2007-07-25T22:23:00.000-04:00

In his discussion of Poet's Bookshelf, the on-going series edited by Peter Davis, Ron Silliman quotes Fanny Howe's list of books that were "most essential to [her] as a poet." Unusual for such a list (at least in my experience of them) is her mention of several anthologies. Among a wide range of authors, Howe mentions "Jerome Rothenberg’s America: A Prophecy, The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, Moving Borders, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan, and Early Celtic Poetry. "

Howe's list reminds me of the importance of anthologies to my own early development as both a writer and reader of poetry. More than any single work, or individual, a few anthologies provided me with an understanding of the poetry's history, and opened the field, as it were, to its range of possibilities. The following books, acquired at the end of my high-school years, or (relatively) early in my college days, were indispensable; they are organized, to the extent that memory is accurate, in the order I acquired them.

Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover

Poems for the Millennium, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990, ed. Douglas Messerli

The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium, ed. Rothenberg and Joris

It is because of these books that I spent my freshman year at college identifying myself (yes, publicly) as a Dadaist, that I discovered "Language-oriented" poetry's strange and foreign-seeming surprises, that I first read Gertrude Stein. For the first time, I read poets who talked about writing in terms other than mere "personal expression," who thought poetry could, and should, do more than convey emotion. Excerpts in Messerli's anthology and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book inspired me to spend quite a bit of time seeking out Tina Darragh's on the corner to off the corner before finally finding it, what seemed an eternity later, at the Sun & Moon Press shop, where Douglas Messerli told me that it was the last copy, as he reminisced about making it. &c.

Still Moving: Richard Serra

2007-07-21T02:32:00.000-04:00

It's tempting, in thinking about the Richard Serra show at MoMA, to talk about the pieces in terms of risk. Some works foreground their own toxicity, even if not as explicitly as does Gutter Corner Splash: Late Shift, and even though this foregrounding may not be intrinsic to the work, but rather to SFMOMA's warning signs. Others loom ominously over — and, in one case, directly above — the museum-goer, threatening a terrifying noise and even more devastating loss of limb and life. And in each case, there's a temptation, at once offset and encouraged by plexiglass partitions, not only to touch, but to push, perhaps as part of an investigation into their sturdiness and monumentality, both of which are offset by the sense of a more fragile equipose and balance upon which the sculptures are built.

In the large-scale pieces, this interplay of temptation and risk manifests itself as attraction and repulsion, where I mean these terms not in their merely aesthetic senses (i.e., desire and disgust), but in terms of physics. I am drawn closer to those corners where steel arcs overhead, but seem to be forced back. Where Serra's tendency to foreground experience seems to demand a personal, rather than objective response, this "forcing back" seems, paradoxically, not to be rooted in subjective fears, but in the physical property of magnetic repulsion, as inexorable as the earthward pull of gravity that allows for the carefully balanced dialectical synthesis of weightlessness and mass that allows for the work's existence.

Or, to put it another way, the experience of Serra's sculptures is an experience of activity, of interaction among and between objects.

Serra's "Verb List Compilation" reminds us that the art object exists as the result of actions performed on materials — a simple truth of any work of art, but rendered in the sculptures at simplicity's extreme, even if their scale comes, in turn, to complicate the notion of simplicity. The list, especially when drawn in relation to static objects, recalls the assertion made by Adam Smith and reiterated by Noah Webster, that all nouns were born as verbs. "[T]he verb," the lexicographer asserts, "is primarily the root of most words, probably of all — from the verb are formed nouns; and from these nouns are formed verbs." Elsewhere, he writes: "Motion, action, is, beyond all controversy, the principal source of words." Put into practice, this shows the lexicographer to figure action as meaning's foundation:

The human body is named from shaping, that is, setting, fixing, or extending, and hence sometimes, the general name of the human race. The arm is a shoot, a push, as is the branch of a tree. A board, a table, a floor, is from spreading, or expanding, extending. Skin, and bark are from peeling, stripping, &c.

This theory of language, which opens possibilities for thinking things otherwise, is especially relevant to the experience of Serra's art. And his list of verbs should have been printed, in a font as large as the pieces' scale, on the wall of one of the galleries. To recall the list is to foreground not only the pieces' genesis, but their presence. To see these works — and especially the larger ones — is to experience mass as energy, as force.

That is to say that Serra's pieces are not "action sculptures" in the way that Pollock's are "action paintings" — not the result of action, but actions performed and ongoing in the moment of their viewing. For their stability is rooted not in movement's opposite, but in its equipose, in tensions carefully set one against the other, such that the museum's title for the survey of its film collection, Still Moving, might have been better applied to these sculptures.

Nobody

2007-07-15T14:41:00.000-04:00

The most difficult — and thus most compelling — of the poetic dance-scores in Mac Low's Pronouns are those in which the grammatical subject is "nobody."

27th Dance — Walking — 22 March 1964

Nobody does any waiting,
& nobody has an example.

Does nobody give gold cushions or seem to do so,
& does nobody kick?

Nobody.

& nobody's seeming to send things or's putting wires on things —
nobody's keeping to the news.

At least nobody ends up handing or seeming to hand snakes to people.

There's a level of punning at play here — "no body" engages in the physical acts described — but more importantly an interpretive difficulty. From the perspective of the dancer, the question of how to follow these instructions takes the form of an impossibility. On the one hand, "nobody kick[s]" could be represented via a dancer not kicking, doing anything other than kicking. And, from this angle, the instruction seems to open itself to a nearly infinite range of possibilities, proscribing only one action.

But how to distinguish, in performance and for an audience that may not have Mac Low's text at hand, an instruction like "nobody's seeming to send things" from an instruction that simply dictates the activity that is taking place? It is not enough to simply perform an activity other that "seeming to send things," as it does not embody the instruction, and thus does not interpret the instruction to the letter.

Of course, its possible to approach such an instruction as providing precisely such a degree, nearly without limit, of interpretive freedom, but the fact that these proscriptive instructions co-exist with prescriptive ones (stated in the positive rather than the negative) suggests that a clear distinction should be drawn between the two modes, in order to fully and truly perform interpretation...

Something else

2007-07-13T15:23:00.000-04:00

In a comment on my last entry, Kasey rightly points out a connection — one I had not thought of myself — between the refusal of specificity I've been talking about, in texts by Mayer, Spahr, and Anderson, and Jackson Mac Low's Pronouns — A Collection of 40 Dances — For the Dancers (1964; reprinted w/ revisions in 1971 and '79). What strikes me, as I return to a set of poems I've not looked at in some time, is how differently (again) this refusal works in a different case.

— - — - —

The laws governing textual interpretation are the laws of an authoritarian regime which guide the individual [i.e., reader] in his every action, prescribing the ends for him and offering him the means to attain them.

— Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader

As scores for dances, the Pronouns take up what may be the most imperative and authoritarian of forms, one that demands that the reader conform his/her body to the will of the author. Where this would be loathsome to Mac Low, it is anathema to the text. Mac Low's demand — and, as Eco points out, the demand still exists, and in such terms — is that the reader "find some definite interpretation of the meaning of every line of the dance-poems they choose to realize." That is to say that we are dealing with an open text, and with a social relationship of a different order.

"Something" comes to trouble the "authoritarian regime" in the Pronouns. Through its indefiniteness, Mac Low performs a crucial refusal, presenting an interpretive problem, leaving the interpretation of that "something" up to the reader. As dancer, the reader is allowed to specify where the author does not, is given a "very large degree of freedom of interpretation," as Mac Low puts it. The word, then — and alongside "anyone," "whoever," and the verb "to seem" — as a sort of blank.

[S]ome damage something foolish,
& some seem to be generally like clocks are,
& some see danger
while letting something be made the same as something simple,
but some send a warm thing by spoon over a slow one.

— Jackson Mac Low, "20th Dance —
Going About Between and Through
Unserious-Seeming Goings-On."

The refusal of specificity in Mac Low's Pronouns does not lay social structure bare. That is to say that Mac Low's particular deployment of this refusal is not descriptive — a la Mayer's, Anderson's, and Spahr's similar refusal — of social arrangements. Rather, it is constitutive of new social organizations, both on stage and, more crucially, between author and performer/reader, in Mac Low's treatment of text as itself a performance not only of a dance, but of a social dynamic. To use Eco's terms, the refusal of specificity embodied in Mac Low's "some," "something," etc., works as an invitation, in this case to dance.

Leery of overstating the freedom afforded and created by such a text, Eco notes that this "invitation offers the performer the chance of an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author." That is to say that the text always returns itself, so to speak, to the author, who remains "the one who proposed a number of possibilities which had always been rationally organized, oriented, and endowed with specifications for proper development." In light of these caveats, we might think the Pronouns — which are inseparable from Mac Low's poetics, and devoted to propositions of equality and democracy — in terms of mutual responsibility, in which deliberately "vague" terms and enthusiastic deployment of choices indicated with "or" create a dynamic and collaborative engagement in the production of meaning and the creation of an artistic work.

Who is saying an idea,
touching,
& whipping?

Then who is doing something with the nose or getting something

by attraction,
& who is making things new?

— Jackson Mac Low, "22nd Dance —
Saying Things as a Worm Would"

The "something" thing

2007-07-11T15:00:00.000-04:00

I did something to someone in one way so that he could do something to something, then I did the same thing to the same person in another way so that he could do something else with this same thing, then I did that thing a third time, this time to the thing in the same ways I had done it to the person and this time I gave the thing to the person and then I did it again to more than one of the things so he could do something to them in one way up to a certain point, then for the fifth time I did it to something that could be used to do something to the thing which was his and finally I did it for the sixth time to something in the other way so that it could do something with the thing:

— Bernadette Mayer, "Moon in Three Sentences"
0 to 9, no. 5 (Jan. 1969)

It is Mayer's refusal of specificity that interests me most. She opens with defamiliarizaton, by removing specificity to point towards underlying structure. We don't, upon reading this, know who did what to whom — and our uncertainty is underscored by the recollection that "I" is itself a shifter, that it points only towards the voice of who speaks it, rather than to a particular individuated consciousness or actor. And though the "I" is uncertain — though both its status as shifter and the prohibition against the intentional fallacy underscore its uncertainty — it is tempting to read this passage in terms of, if not as autobiography.

Mayer's refusal of specificity recalls (to my mind, at least) and extends upon the conclusion to Berrigan's sonnets, in which "Someone / is having a birthday and someone is getting / married and someone is telling a joke." And her play with, and effacement of, the autobiographical also calls out to Lisa Jarnot's own "Autobiography" (from Ring of Fire):

I didn't sleep with anyone for six months until I met X. While I was sleeping with Y I also slept with Y's girlfriend. While I was sleeping with Y's girlfriend I also slept with S and T. During the six months between sleeping with Y and sleeping with X I spent a lot of time with K. I never slept with K but J slept with K and Y's girlfriend and also with S. After leaving Y and before meeting X I didn't sleep with anyone for six months.

But in the beginning of "Moon in Three Sentences," we don't even know what was done: whatever action "something" points to can apparently be done both to people and to objects, but the term is complicated by the appearance of a "something else." There is, in fact, a Stein-ian play on the word "something" in Mayer's poem — it refers to objects and actions. "Thing" also refers to an action: "I did the same thing." It is as though Mayer points to the limits of the conventional, if not technical, definition of a noun as "the name of a person, place, or thing," reminding us that a thing can also be an activity, and perhaps suggesting we rethink the distinction between material object and action.

What we're left with at this point in Mayer's poem is a two-fold structural analysis, that examines grammar and syntax while it also reports on a set of interpersonal relationships. Because of the complexity of the poem, it isn't clear which of these levels of interpretation is to be taken as literal, and which as metaphorical: are we looking at grammar as though it were personal? Or is it the personal that, under scrutiny, reveals itself to be structured grammatically? Is there a difference? With such abstraction, does metaphor simply become a way of playing between to "levels" (but that term is too hierarchical in itself — "dimensions," maybe?) of meaning?

The poem's next section is less satisfying, inasmuch as it resolves these questions, provides an answer to the riddle at the same time that it reconstructs what has proceeded as riddle in the first place:

I brought you here to round this moon
I brought you round to hear this moon
I brought this moon round here to you
I brought you moons to round to here
I brought this here to round your moon
I brought this round to hear this moon.

But where the ambiguity of the poem is resolved, and where this resolution is a bit disappointing, the poem turns back in on itself, redirecting us in the final line to the beginning, and turning "Moon in Three Sentences" into a self-generating text.

Then I tried to explain what I had done so far.

The effect is to return us to the grammatical play, and to reassert the structure as primary, as that which underlies the specificity, reframing the resolution as an extension of this deeper structure, which is in turn positioned as an "explanation," despite the fact that it "explains" less, at least in terms of what a conventional understanding of "explanation" would allow us to expect, than that which follows it.

[See also my discussions of Laurie Anderson and Juliana Spahr, which deal with similar approaches in writing, and are, really, of a piece with this.]

"At Night the States"

2007-07-10T13:05:00.000-04:00

Not at all new — it's on Exact Change Yearbook, which Peter Gizzi edited a dozen years ago — but I've returned, by way of PennSound, to Alice Notley's 1987 reading of "At Night the States" (mp3).

And I'd never before heard the recording of her introduction to the poem, excised from the Exact Change version, in which she explains that the poem was her first attempt at anaphoric repetition, and that it is an elegy for Ted Berrigan. In this prefatory commentary Notley describes finding, in a writing process that proceeds from what becomes a stock phrase, a sense of possibility.

This is borne out by the poem: as it rushes past, almost too quickly, the phrase's meaning shifts, expands the potential of its signification, as Notley draws on the varying senses that attach themselves to the words that constitute it, and finds curious correspondences between states of mind and of the "Montana. Illinois. Escondido" that close, as "the states where what words are true are words, not myself."

[NOTE: My brief quotation of part of Notley's poem is based on the recording, and not on the print version. Inaudible, or only partially audible, elements of formatting (punctuation, line breaks, the Notley quotation marks) are not present for this reason.]

"Perhaps No One Will Notice Them"

2007-07-09T21:12:00.000-04:00

"I had sweet company / because I sought out none"
As Kristin Prevallet notes, Helen Adam's collages are "strikingly simple." She writes:

They combine two images — a beautiful man or woman, and a creature. And this combination results in a ironic playfulness that teases the viewer to wonder: are these collages a form of self-portrait, a projection of this woman's deep fears mingled with her repressed desire?

For Prevallet, this simplicity must be read in the context of Adam's contemporary, Jess, whose collages create complex fantasias, interconnected and complex worlds that can only be read as allegory or as metaphor. That is, taken as a whole, a Jess collage cannot be interpreted as mimetic; it's closer to the allegorical narratives of Breugel the Elder's paintings of proverbs, or to Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights."

In contrast, aside from their surrealistic play with scale and with nonsensical juxtaposition, Adam's collages often imitate the quote-unquote mimesis of perspectival photography, even where they refuse to practice it. In a way, they can be regarded as fakes, closer to the use of composited landscapes in early photography, or to the practices of matte compositing or the techniques of Georges Méliès' fabulist cinema.

"Perhaps no one will notice them"
At the same time, there's nothing really simple about these, as Prevallet is well aware. In the second of the two pieces illicitly reproduced above, the caption contextualizes what is presented before our gaze; indeed, lacking the caption, the opposite interpretation would be available. And the text, which works alongside the image to evoke advertising copy, produces a complex tension that does not quite resolve itself. It initially works as a delightful critique of the fashion/glamour industry, inverting the importance of being seen, of being "noticed," of transforming one's self into the gaze's object. What might seem a bizarre manifestation of haute couture ("bats are the new black," or are "in for spring") is turned into a source of shame.

But this shame — this desire for one's unpleasant aspects to be obscured — is precisely that which advertising relies upon in its pitch. Adam's apparent inversion, which might almost be a critique, ends up recapitulating the logic of advertising, perhaps laying its mechanism bare, but no more so than do ads that hearken to, and construct, notions like the "heartbreak of psoriasis." That isn't to say that the latter meaning doesn't still imply critique, but that its a different form of critique. And it isn't entirely clear to me where we stand in relation to this message, what position it constitutes for its reader, or what meaning it produces for the image.

To complicate things further this tension is unresolved: the sense of shame implied by the caption is so thoroughly belied by the delight of the collage itself... Why wouldn't you want everyone to notice your bats?

If

2007-07-07T22:10:00.000-04:00

Like Juliana Spahr, whose brief discussion I mentioned before, Rob Stanton centers his reading of Peter Gizzi's A panic that can still come upon me (reprinted in The Outernational) on the prevalence — a use that seems to have become a study — of the word "if" in Gizzi's recent oeuvre.

As Stanton notes, Gizzi's use of the word in "Château If"

invoke[s] an ideal state, somewhere nearby in which poet, reader and world would be in perfect alignment, meaning would become transparent and true communication could take place

Similarly, Spahr's reading thinks this "beautiful 'if'" in terms of an opening of possibility, remarking on its effect — within consciousness, rather than merely the semiotic space of the text — is generative. The word's capacity adheres not only to meaning, but to a larger creativity that carries with it the potential to reshape the world in terms of, and by way of, imagination.

Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language figures "if" in precisely this way. Pointing perhaps at the activity of its generative dimension, Webster thinks the term not as conjunction, but as verb. And he argues for this conception of "if," comparing it to our use of the words "grant," "admit," and "suppose." To this end, the lexicographer establishes a parallel between "if John shall arrive in season, I will send him with a message" and its counterpart, "give John shall arrive; grant, suppose, admit that he shall arrive, I will send him with a message." His definition concludes by proposing "if" as prayer, as wish, as hope: "The sense of if ... is ... cause to be, let the fact be, let the thing take place."

At the same time, Stanton notes that there is a darkness to Gizzi's use of "if." He locates a tension in the irresolution of A panic's phrases, in their refusal to turn to the closure of "then," and in the uncertainty that attends Gizzi's use of the term. "If our wishes are met with dirt," he notes in A panic. But this tension, this irresolution, inheres in the word's meaning itself. Webster's second definition is cryptic — "uncertain or not" — but its illustrative quotation, borrowed from Dryden, clarifies: "Uncertain if by augury or chance." "If" points to what cannot be known, to what cannot be resolved with any surety.

Thus, the optimism of "if" is bound up in a sense of irresolution. Possibility, "if" reminds us, is always fraught with and complicated by the possibility, perhaps equal, of its failure, or at least of the hope not being answered. To read these together, to read "if" as embodying this tension, is to read it as a sign of contingency. "If" reminds us — as a conditional — that the world is interdependent, that this depends on that. That is to say, whatever follows "if" is "not absolute," that it, as is noted in Webster's Revised Unabridged (1913), "must exist as the occasion or concomitant of something else."

Idea of North

2007-07-05T11:57:00.000-04:00

Download Glenn Gould's Idea of North here. The piece, a documentary produced for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, consists of the voices of five people discussing the Arctic and sub-Arctic "northern third" of Canada.

Rather than presenting the interviews separately, Gould weaves and layers them, inventing and exploring a contrapuntal form derived from the composers Gould studied before he left live performance for studio art. In places, this is not particularly different from today's radio broadcasts, voices drawn, via mixing board, into a dialogue. Elsewhere, voices overlap into polyphony, into a babble from which distinct phrases emerge, are picked up by other voices, echo.

In its documentary relationship to testimony and to place, as well as the polyphony of voices, common ground is shared with Charles Reznikoff, Chris Marker, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, others.

Once trilobitten, twice

2007-07-03T14:00:00.000-04:00

As always, Steven Fama provides comments (which see) that send me back into something I've said — and not seen — in an earlier post. This time, he responds to my too-brief commentary on Coolidge's poem, taking up the discussion of "torque" at Kasey's blog that returned me to the poem in the first place, and redirects torque to bear on the poem's sound, rather than its syntax and grammar.

In particular, he notes that the poem is built around rhythms, like drum-beats, in bursts of three, and connects this to the etymology of trilobite, "three lobed." And a surprise that the OED refers this etymology, in its gloss of the Greek λόβός, specifically to the earlobe, as though suggesting just such a way of reading the last line of Coolidge's poem.

We might extend this approach, shifting our attention from rhythm to tone. Thus, we'll notice that the poem's first line is similarly built around a repetition of three Os, each of which represents a distinct sound. The long o of code recurs in ohm, and twice in trilobite. Two of the words in the second line — a and the — have indeterminate/variable pronunciations, their doubling allowing for a total of three vowel sounds.

Given its lack of grammar, the first line does not invite a particular rhythm, suggesting that we stress its syllables almost evenly, allowing only for orange's second syllable to provide contrast. The "third line," itself broken into three (after Williams?), similarly resists determining vocal stress, but its visual "descent" points to the scansion of trilobite. And puns emerge, as trilobite's dactyl (evocative of another prehistoric creature) waltzes out to the cymbal (symbol?) crash of the terminal s.

What does trilobite do?

2007-07-02T01:45:00.000-04:00

An untitled poem, from Clark Coolidge's Space (1969):

ounce code orange
a
the
ohm
trilobite trilobites

Of which Kasey writes:

Even in the absence of a clear grammatical structure, it is still difficult not to read even abstract linguistic assemblages of this sort on the model of normative syntactical connections between words. One might read the first line as three listed nouns in a series, or alternately one might treat ounce as subject, code as verb, and orange as object...

For whatever it's worth, I find it easier to make a "clear grammatical structure" out of the last line. While it initially seems a repetition of a noun, first in the singular and again in the plural, I read it as consisting of a singular noun and an intransitive verb.

A painful shadow

2007-07-01T18:56:00.001-04:00

Sombra Dolorosa (dir. Guy Maddin)

Superstar

2007-06-28T13:30:00.000-04:00

Short on time, once again. But nothing I have to say today could be as rewarding as a screening of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), directed by Todd Haynes and starring Barbie in the titular role.

The film plays with the high-camp rhetoric of made-for-television docudramas, noting in subtitles that the opening scene, of Carpenter's death, is "A dramatization," and employing the melodramatic voice-overs one would expect from the genre. The casting of Barbie points less to the (inconclusive) connection between the doll and eating disorders than to the ways Carpenter's celebrity status, and her image, reduced her humanity. Despite its own campiness, Superstar is a sympathetic portrait that takes Carpenter quite seriously as a performer, and that regards her death as a real tragedy.

[I should mention that this film — the screening of which is made possible by Google video — may not be available for long. Because Haynes did not legally acquire the rights to the music, Richard Carpenter was able to file a lawsuit and have the film pulled from distribution. I assume that this is still the case.]

Audible breaks

2007-06-27T23:52:00.000-04:00

Steve Evans points me in the direction of an article that allows for a more sophisticated analysis of Spicer's sounding of the line break in the lines "No / One listens to poetry" from "Thing Language."

Reuven Tsur, arguing against the received/conventional notion that the "delivery" (his word) of a poem must resolve line-break ambiguities by sounding either one interpretation or the other, explains the process by which a poet can read both the poem's line and its syntax simultaneously, allowing for the same unresolved tension that the page provides. He writes:

when the endings of the syntactic unit and the metric unit do not coincide (that is, when syntax is run-on from one line to the other), the reciter may indicate continuity and discontinuity at one and the same time by having recourse to conflicting cues.

In "Thing Language," the first of these cues is the prolonged pause between "no" and "one," which invites a grammatical interpretation, allowing the reader to imagine a dash or comma dividing clauses. Spicer introduces "conflict" with the second cue, irreconcilable to the first, which is the lack of vocal stress one would "naturally" expect to find on either "one" or "listens," particularly in that such an interpretation of the line would place it in direct contrast with the prior assertion that "no one listens." The combination of these two allows the ambiguity present on the page to reside in the sounded poem.

Conventional speech, in normal circumstances, would of course work to resolve precisely the ambiguity in which Spicer's sounding traffics. For Tsur, this constitutes a "rhythmical" approach to reading, an alternative that combines elements of the metrical (= following the pattern of the line) with the grammatical (= following the sentence). And in thematizing this rhythmical sounding, Tsur extends the metaphor of conflict quoted above, regarding it as an "organized violence" waged against speech. As he writes, "continuity and discontinuity can be suggested at one and the same time by using conflicting phonetic cues, thus committing 'organized violence' against speech processing."

Tsur's figuration of the sort of "delivery" (to use his terminology) Spicer employs as "violence" is interesting, not least for the fact that it highlights the uncomfortable relationship between a metered use of language and the spoken version. Is it possible to extend this notion into our reading of the type of line-breaks characteristic of Spicer's work? We could approach the matter by examining the ways that the term "line-break" suggests, if not a "violence," a trauma performed on the conventions of written language...

Recorded Language

2007-06-26T10:56:00.000-04:00

[A couple of quick thoughts as I listen to Jack Spicer's reading (July 14, 1965) of Language, once broadcast on Susan Howe's Pacifica radio program, and recently made available on PennSound.]

The material that opens the program comes from the Bastille Day talk Spicer gave in Berkeley (reprinted as "California Lecture: Poetry and Politics" in Peter Gizzi's House that Jack Built). Mark Weiss has edited the recording to organize it around the issues Spicer raises with regards to community and society, and the distinction, somewhat provisional and uncertain, that he makes between the two. Weiss' editing of the recording has a further effect: the audience — central to Spicer's concerns in both the discussion and the poems that follow — is effectively erased, except in one instance in which they respond with laughter. Spicer's assertions about audience are stripped of complexity, as lively discussion is reduced to lecture.

— - — - —
The line break that differentiates "No one listens to poetry" from "No / One listens to poetry" in "Thing Language" is sounded, and heavily, but with a flat tone that does not diminish the ambiguity that resides in the latter line, which fluctuates on the page between "No one listens" and its negation, "No — One listens." I've tried, when teaching the poem, or showing others the complexity and thoughtfulness of Spicer's line breaks, to bring this flatness to the second iteration/variation, but am unable to do so. The break, in my own sounding, always punctuates, and the line comes out firmly as the latter iteration, an assertion that one does in fact listen to poetry.

— - — - —
Elsewhere, the poem's voicing resolves ambiguity: Spicer sounds "constructs" in "Constructs / Of the imagination / Of the real canyon and the heart's / Construct" with the accent of the second syllable, as "con-STRUCTS," as verb. On the page, the word fluctuates between syllabic accents, between verb and noun.

— - — - —
Scarcely a section goes by without producing differences between the page and the sounded poem. Most are of little consequence ("compared with" as "compared to"), but the difference, in "The deer / Your heart and guesses, blandly seek water," between printed "blandly" and sounded "blindly" seems deeply significant.

Not name its names

2007-06-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

At Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum provides a textual passage from which he has stripped all the nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

My most was with, who'd been, of, to. Was at the, and only was that he not be. I with her by for an. What through was her — she'd as a — and her. During that, she never a, and in — all the today don't. She was a. Like many from, she how to be, and it was of the. I can why her.

This text is a response to — and is made from — a comment by William Katz, who apparently claimed that contemporary entertainers do not, in fact, use these parts of speech. While the purpose of Pullum's text is to lambaste Katz's hyperbolic claim — itself intended as a criticism of the allegedly poor grammar of talk show guests — Pullum's text also points to the workings of the parts of speech that are left. (He notes that he's "cheated" a bit in retaining words that arguably constitute nouns and verbs, including auxiliary verbs and pronouns...)

A couple of things are interesting here. In the cases where a phrase's syntax most closely resembles conventional grammar, some words' grammatical functions change, based on their relative position alongside other of the words. In "I can why her," why becomes, through the presence of the auxiliary verb can, something like a verb, as it occupies a position in which we would expect to find a verb. Reading this in basically the same way we read Stein, we can associate — even if only vaguely — action with why, reading the sentence to suggest perhaps interrogation as to intent or cause. The possessive pronoun my in "my most was with" has a similar effect, thrusting most into a provisional noun-status.

As is also the case in Stein's work, the Pullum's version of Katz's text points to the functions carried by these words, which often do not point — or at least not in the ways nouns, verbs, and adjectives do — to the world of things. The text calls out to Stein's notion, in "Poetry and Grammar," of "the need of making it be a thing that could be named without using its name," and of a writing that is not mimetic, but instead works as a kind of "intellectual recreation."

Another quick one while I'm away

2007-06-22T18:30:00.000-04:00

Also recently made available through PennSound is Ted Berrigan's 1981 reading of the complete Sonnets at New Langton Arts in S.F. Though the recording has been available for quite some time, it has now been broken up into individual tracks, which makes it easier for the casual listener (or a serious one who is short of time) to work with.

Out of time

2007-06-22T15:21:00.000-04:00

In lieu of a real post, I'll just put up a link to Susan Howe's Poetry Programs from Pacifica Radio, recently put online by PennSound. I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list of broadcasts — could there have been only four?

Patrick Durgin has already recommended the Reznikoff episode, so I'll add that the one featuring Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein is also worth a listen. It consists of both readings and discussion, and has Bernstein providing an excellent explanation of the politics of normative language use.

Mmph

2007-06-21T16:39:00.000-04:00

I'm interested in the fact that there are two (relatively) recent poetic projects that deal with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index (MMPI): Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale and Craig Dworkin's "Legion II." A set of companion-pieces, in a way, each of which takes a different approach to the test's true/false statements: the former builds poems by Google-sculpting the statements; the latter provides responses, but subtracts the statements themselves.

Dworkin's piece, then, calls attention to what is absent: we are presented with a string of affirmative and negative responses, punctuated by slight elaborations, many of which suggest exasperation at the statements' stupidity or obstinance. And if the questions' absence is disorienting, it points to the proprietary hold of the licensing corporation: Dworkin's prefatory material remarks that the poem itself, taken as a whole, constitutes a "response" to a suppressed text, in which the test's statements were recombined into a lyric voice.

If our attention is pointed outside the text in Dworkin's poem, it comes to bear on Degentesh's book by way of paratextual materials that resonate with my discussion of flarf's complexity. The book is described so variously by its blurbs that one might almost wonder if they refer to the same text: two of the pre-reviewers playfully evoke prophesy (a central theme in the book), and a third notes a mixture of the "comic and provocative." Though darkness and violence inform these comments on the book's humor, Juliana Spahr brings this aspect to the forefront, describing a "scary" and "uneasy" book with "complicated politics."

Obviously, more needs to be said about these texts — I've not even gotten in from their outsides yet!

Keep Watching the Sky

2007-06-20T18:07:00.000-04:00

"Books are not dispersed but assembled." Georges Perec's "Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books" identifies key problems in the classification, assembling, and arranging of one's books. Ideas are proposed and abandoned, one after another, their limits reached; books are instead meta-classified in terms of their relative ease of classification. Though "we would like to believe that a unique order exists" — one that is not only unique, but ideal, such that it "would enable us to accede to knowledge all in one go" — we instead resort to arrangement's opposite, hoping "that order and disorder are in fact the same thing, denoting pure chance."

And, in a belated follow-up to Perec's analysis, Anne F. Garréta has proposed a few principles according to which one's library might be arranged. Though, unlike Perec, she goes so far as to devise concrete systems for organization, her essay shares with his an interest not in classification itself, but its limits. This is evident in her fanciful principles, most of which resist the universalizing and rationalizing impulses of, say, the Dewey Decimal system, and share more, in the end, with Sei Shōnagon's idiosyncratic organizational schemata.

PRINCIPLE #6
— books in which one encounters whales;
— books in which not even the shadow of a whale is to be found;
— books from which have disappeared, inexplicably, the whales one imagined there.

Each of Garréta's principles — ten in all — amounts, in the end, to an imaginative way of articulating the et cetera against which all classificatory systems necessarily run, despite their efforts to the contrary.

Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Book project enacts a further way of thinking organization. Rather than categorizing books according to similarities of content, Katchadourian groups books by their titles, treating them as fragmentary phrases which can be arranged more or less syntactically. The library, then, becomes a re-combinatory literary work unto itself — a sort of cento.

• Books are grouped into a summary or loose interpretation of another title:

"King Lear / Old Age is Contagious, But... / If I'm in Charge Here, Why Is Everybody Laughing?"

• Sometimes one title comes to define another:

"Cindy Sherman / A Harlot High and Low."
"The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography / The Naked Ape."

• Other groups work as highly paratactic poems, or shot-by-shot accounts of a film:

"A Day at the Beach / The Bathers / Shark 1 / Shark 2 / Shark 3 / Sudden Violence / Silence."

The most interesting of Katchadourian's groupings finds titles placed into their own systems of classification, such that the first title provides a rubric for gathering those that follow: "Tales of Unnatural and Natural Catastrophes / Dante's Inferno / The Flight of Icarus." "Kinds of Love / Ecstasy / Sensation / Distemper." "The Secret Language of Dreams / Fences and Gates / Queues, Rendezvous, Riots / Picnic, Lightning / Swimming Pools." Where most organizational orders are imposed from without — particularly in the cases where order relies on preconceived classes of knowledge (as is the case with the Dewey Decimal system) or genre — these strange and provisional categories are especially interesting in that their schemata emerge from within, and are dispersed within, the field to be classified.

["On Bookselves" by Anne F. Gerréta was published in The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo, one of the three volumes bound by Athanasius Kircher's "secret knots" as McSweeney's 22.

Perec's essay is, of course, included in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.]

Some noises

2007-06-20T14:16:00.000-04:00

Steve Evans, whose new-ish Lipstick of Noise takes its cue from the ubiquitous mp3 blogs to present readings of single poems, has made a master-list of the audio files he's included to date. In each case, the link goes to an entry on the poem that provides enough context to increase the level of fascination afforded.

Some of my favorites:

• Elizabeth Willis. "Kiss Me Deadly."
• Bernadette Mayer. "Catullus 42." (Mayer: "probably the only time you'll hear a real translation of this poem")
• Jackson Mac Low. "Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon from Every Direction."
• Charles Bernstein. "Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold."
• Tina Darragh. "Collective Lament for Banishing Animals from History."
• Joseph Ceravolo. "Drunken Winter." (Ceravolo's poem goes by so rapidly, I can't follow its shifts)
• Peter Gizzi. "A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me."
• Brian Kim Stefans. "The Umm-Uh Poem."

Etc.

2007-06-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to say about it, other than to point it out, but I'm really fascinated by the move Zukofsky makes towards the end of "A"-12, where he lists all the projects he never completed:

These are some things I wanted
To get into a poem,
Some unfinished work
I may never finish,
Some that will never be used anywhere

And after "getting it into the poem," in a manner of speaking, he gives it to his readers: "Anybody's welcome to it. / Take: a raft of stuff."

This strange and inclusive — and generous — move is predicated by, and extends, a stanza-long expression of fatigue that, despite lacking the crucial sense of disgust, resembles the similar one I mentioned yesterday in Deer Head Nation.

I don't seem to read books any more
Tho I suppose actually
I read them all the time.
I don't read the newspapers
Tho once a week I seem to spend a day on them —
As I did today —

— - — - —

Also: after my too-brief discussion of Sianne Ngai's "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust" yesterday, I linked to two of the texts she addresses: Kevin Davies' Pause Button and Deanna Ferguson's Rough Bush. Find 'em to your right.

Nautical homophonic puns (a flarf primer)

2007-06-18T17:53:00.000-04:00

Alex Smith wrote in the other day to ask if I'd be willing to write a bit about flarf, as I've mentioned it a couple of times, both here and in conversation with him. I should probably begin with a list of caveats, the most significant of which is that I don't speak as a representative of flarf. Also, and as such, I'm not sure that I can offer anything that hasn't been said before, so I'll begin with a list of articles that might better perform the task at hand. It's probably best — though not necessary, per se — to read at least the first of these before continuing with my commentary, even if that means that the need for this blogpost is effectively negated.

"The Flarf Files," compiled by Michael Magee

"Jacket Flarf feature: Introduction," by Gary Sullivan

"The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf," by Rick Snyder

Mainstream Poetry, a blog of flarf poetry

— - — - —

Alex's inquiry hinges on — or opens with — a question of whether flarf is "bullshit," and this seems like an interesting enough avenue deeper into the matter. Of course, there are multiple ways the question might be taken: it could be read to get at whether Flarf, as a movement, is nothing more than "marketing" (a charge that has, as Gary Sullivan notes, been leveled against it). But I presume the question to get at a more fundamental issue, which is whether flarf is mere play, or worse, a joke played on the reader, or on poetry itself. Or, in contrast, if it implies a seriousness of purpose.

As has been often noted (e.g. in the official creation myth), flarf began as, if not bullshit, a joke played by Gary Sullivan on poetry.com. This origin survives in what might be identified as its central aesthetic principles, which have been variously described as: a "studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile" (K. Silem Mohammad); as something like camp, but "more awkward, sumbling, 'wrong'" (Gary Sullivan); as "a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness" (Sullivan again).

Nontheless, the statements in "The Flarf Files" and elsewhere indicate an underlying, if varied, seriousness. And it's when we approach the movement (or "movement," if you prefer) from this angle that it's at its most rich. Rick Snyder, writing of K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, notes that the book can be interpreted — if not unproblematically — as an "attempt to undermine the legitimacy of American aggression by placing it in some fantastic landscape, a liminal dystopia likely culled from the internet," and remarks that it "present[s] a type of inchoate, violent rage [...] against the incoherence, idiocy, and violence exemplified by American domestic and foreign policy." This is paralleled in Magee's suggestion that flarf — or at least his own strain of it — is written under the sign of Frederick Douglass' admonition, that "at a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument is needed." Magee figures his own "scorching irony" in terms of an "interrogat[ion of] dumbness, ridiculousness, stupidity," and suggests the need "to work undercover in the middle of it, to pretend to be it if necessary, all the while reporting back to the reader."

Of course, not all flarfists describe the work performed by their aesthetic in terms of this aggressive "scorching irony," this slash-and-burn form of critique. Nada Gordon has suggested that "at least some 'flarf'" — and I presume this to mean her own — "is not about irony at all, but about pathos" and empathy, about the "recognition of a universal pathos: 'aren’t we all a bunch of fools, and isn’t that funny? and bittersweet? and fucked up?'" Snyder finds Gordon's V. Imp, and her writing in general, marked by "desire to maintain intimacy even in the face of increasingly a de-humanized world." A similar approach marks Magee's My Angie Dickinson, which works on the surface as a play between the high and low cultures of the two Dickinsons to which its title refers, but which its author describes as engaged in a practice of "dis-orientation and re-orientation" that works in part — through "shock, bewilderment, excitement, [and] pleasure" — as a rescue of Emily Dickinson's work from her readers' "pieties," which frequently threaten to reduce the poetry and render it precious.

— - — - —

[I'm not finished yet, and am already aware of certain failures in this post, some of which may be fatal. I itemize them here as a further set of caveats for the wary reader.
• I've only referred to a small segment of the "body of flarf." What is worse, I've over-represented the movement's male presence.
• I've risked misreading flarf's collectivist origins as a form of homogeneity, effacing distinctions between different strains of an aesthetic movement that is, as all are, in fact marked by a sometimes contentious diversity of approaches, perspectives, opinions.
• I've omitted reference to the tactic of Google-sculpting. This, though, is partially deliberate, as the practice is often too-closely identified with flarf, to the extent that non-flarf writers who use Google are forgotten or misunderstood as flarfists.
This in mind — yours and mine — I continue...]

— - — - —

The "scorching irony" of certain strains of flarf might be considered (and I think has been already) in terms of Sianne Ngai's notion of a poetics of disgust.

A poetics of disgust would begin with this basic position: that there are at least as many things to turn away from as things to be drawn to and that this repulsion is worth thinking about seriously.

Put into practice, this entails a form of criticism: "not a moving toward the object, either to possess it or to be possessed by it, to engulf it or to be engulfed by it ... but a turning away," which is attended by a marked inarticulacy, the expression (= "pushing outward") of (as Ngai puts it) "language's raw matter (flow, gush, outpouring; inarticulate sound; 'something between a groan and a cry'; ow, help, no; woo, braah; smiles and shouts)."

An expression of repulsion and fatigue seems key to the poems in Deer Head Nation, and particularly to the opening of "False / Vodoun Democracy": "I can no longer fight the delusions of the majority." Here, the poem finds itself at the limit of critique, exhausted, but no less disgusted, by the state of the world. Elsewhere, poetry is shown to have been rendered impossible, as critique, as articulation, as thoughtful interpretation of the world:

my hobbies include

kidding myself into believing I am a poet,
trying to write: 'ack ack a dack
dack dack a ack ...'

In these failures, these poems demonstrate limits — both of the ability for Ngai's poetics of disgust to account for them, and of Snyder's assessment of Deer Head Nation as expressing "a type of inchoate, violent rage." As I read them, the poems also trouble Snyder's attempt to provide a clear line demarcating the difference between Gordon's and Mohammad's projects. In their reliance on the inchoate and inarticulate, a sense of mourning attaches itself to the failure of reasoned discourse, and of the difficulty of finding an alternate mode of articulation or expression. In considering the apparent cynicism of Deer Head Nation, and the failure of discourse the poems address, we might think here of Magee's reminders of the ease with which the state "co-opt[s] the language of dissent" to collapse its meaning. We might further extend this by substituting, as I have above, reasonable and reasoned discourse for dissent, noting that Magee's estimation of the current situation isn't dark enough, ack ack a dack.

But I'm reluctant, in the end, to describe Deer Head Nation (or other of flarf's most interesting works) as merely cynical. The sense of mourning is, when all is said and done, far too pronounced for cynical "cool." That's not to say that cynicism isn't part of the equation, but that it doesn't stop there; the poems' multiple and shifting valences include cynicism as only one of a gamut. Take, as perhaps the most pronounced example, the opening lines of "Puppy Craziness":

what we all really need is love
in these horrendous times
in this toxic atmosphere

Cynicism works by way of the poem's ironic distantiation, in its recognition that the solution suggested within these lines is woefully and painfully inadequate. It continues to work through the poem's lyric reiteration of the phrase "what we all really need," and in the increasingly trivial objects to which it attaches itself as it reminds us of the ways that the word "need" has been abused, torqued out of its meaning, by consumer society. And the ways that notions of love (and peace, which is integral to Deer Head Nation as a whole) have themselves been similarly reduced. The old ways of thinking, the poem reminds us, are inadequate; it cannot venture what might suffice to take their place.

The poem points to another inadequacy, as well: the failure for trite phrases like "horrendous times" and "toxic atmosphere" to account for the realities presented by the contemporary world. Again, poetry finds itself run up against its defamiliarizing task, its charge to provide some route towards understanding, and it is as though it cannot find an alternative, choosing instead to turn the vocabulary towards irony.

At the same time, cynicism and ironic distantiation are held in tension, if not at bay, by what the poem doesn't ever really shake: a fundamental pathos, a sense of hope, or at least a wish, perhaps (knowingly) futile, that, were it even available, love might somehow be enough, that a tool "which greatly reduces human error" could in some way suffice, that repairing the current scarcity of "information that will give us / an intellectual understanding" will do the trick.

Critical question

2007-06-17T23:43:00.000-04:00

A question came up in conversation the other day, and I wasn't able to answer it: whether the act of criticism, as performed by a scholar or critic, is the same as a comparable act performed by a poet.

In an aim towards answering this question, we might consider the matter from two perspectives: first, whether there are differences of goal; second, whether there are differences of approach. Again, I'm not sure I know how to answer the question, or, in the end, if it even matters much, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to map out the terrain just a bit, in thinking-out-loud fashion.

If we approach this from the matter of the end-aims of the projects, we might find some differences, arguably crucial. Certainly, both the poet and the critic are engaged in the fundamental business of criticism, which I take to involve investigation, the act of coming to a deeper understanding of the poetic text. The argument could be made that the critic ("pure" critic?) has a different goal for this understanding of the text than does the poet: where the latter's investigation is directed, perhaps, towards a deeper understanding of her/his own practice, the "pure" critic's goals might be thought in terms of scholarship, or (to place abstract "scholarship" within its material context), an inquiry into the cultural production of meaning.

Certainly, the poet's critical inquiry resembles that of the "pure" critic — for examples, vide Pound's inquiries into the history of poetics, Lyn Hejinian's philosophical investigations, Bruce Andrews' scrutiny of the economic and social relations embodied by textual production, Susan Howe's archaeology of American literature and examinations of the work of Emily Dickinson, Olson's reading of Melville, and so forth, ad infinitum.

In the end, I'm not sure I can answer the question any better than I could when I began writing this; I'm instead hoping others will weigh in with some opinions. I am willing to venture a few more thoughts — less well-formed than even the above — on the matter, not least of which is that I tend to feel a bias, somewhat unexamined, in favor of the poet, or the poet-critic, over the "pure" critic.

Descriptive tone

2007-06-16T22:44:00.000-04:00

One of the things that has interested me most about Juliana Spahr's writing since I was first introduced to it is the particular and peculiar tone she strikes. It's not a poetic tone, per se — or, to be more precise, it's not a "poetic" tone, one that gestures towards poetry as it is typically or traditionally imagined.

Though I could locate a position for it with respect to "language-centered" writing, I'm not quite sure how to characterize its own peculiarities, the particular approach Spahr takes — through this tone, or with it — to the world. We could call it "descriptive," did the term not suggest an especially florid and lurid use of modifier and metaphor. So I'm tempted to propose "analytic-descriptive" or some such.

What characterizes — and is at stake in — this tone is Spahr's resistance to specificity. Much is shared here with Laurie Anderson's account of walking, as I described it here. Anderson facilitates an examination of walking that renders it foreign, that underscores its relationships to falling and catching. Furthermore, those terms extend themselves — as metaphoric and allegorical language — into dimensions (faith, defeat, etc.) that aren't nominally or ostensibly relevant to the activity of walking as we conventionally and habitually practice it.

Spahr's account of balance, from Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You, works similarly:

It is balance that tells us to keep
our head up and the hips and
knees well flexed.

It is balance that keeps the elbows
bent slightly and the fingers
pointing forward.

In balance, one tries to realize if
the weight is too far forward and
if so one presses downward with
the finger tips and raises the head.
Or if one realizes that the weight
is too far backward then one
presses downward with the heels
of the hands and lowers the head.

Over the course of Spahr's poem, balance becomes a way of thinking the complexity of social interactions, to participate in culture, a "group enterprise" that "requires the cooperation and teamwork of we who are in formations," and in which "innumerable combinations may be developed."

In both Anderson's and Spahr's writing, our focus is shifted away from our habitual attention to specifics, and over to the underlying structures that govern the interactions and relationships described. If the effect is a defamiliarization, it allows for a renewal of perspective, such that the quotidean is made redolent with meanings. This tone — flatly descriptive, "cool," the language we might find in technical writing, characterized in part by the neutral "one" — makes it so. So that the world is found to be haunted by diverse causes and effects, by unseen forces. And that action might be drawn into relation, with world and others.

Another way to think this — and it may demand a revision of the term I've proposed — is to return to Stein. Though the term "description" recurs throughout her work, I'm thinking here of Stein's account, in An Acquaintance With Description, of "studying in description." We might twist Stein's use of the term "studying" away from its painterly sense, pointing it instead towards the notions of research, experimentation, or analysis. Instead — and because neither Anderson's account of walking nor Spahr's writing in general emphasize the visual — we might revise Stein's practice of "look[ing] ... really look[ing]," such that its attention is re-focused on "being ... really being."

Quick post

2007-06-15T06:53:00.000-04:00

Time is tight for a few days, so I'll just present a couple of quick and interesting links, some of which are new, and others of which are not.

Jack Spicer reading The Holy Grail, extracted from the Vancouver Lecture of June 15, 1965. (It's nothing new, if you've already heard the lecture, but it's a convenient way to get to the poems themselves.)

Susan Howe's shows on Pacifica Radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Some flarf-esque translations of Rilke, by Brian Kim Stefans.

Kenneth Goldsmith singing philosophical and/or critical works over the music of others. "Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Roland Barthes," which sets the concluding section of Mythologies to an instrumental jam by the Allman Brothers, is the best.

A few of Stan Brakhage's lectures on film, from the very early 1970s.

A blank stare — mysterious and blank

2007-06-13T23:05:00.000-04:00

Steven Fama again writes in with some incredibly generative comments on my reading of the stroboscopic blank in Bruce Conner's REPORT. I have a couple of quick thoughts in response...

To begin, I want to return — apropos of Fama's comments — to the question of the physiological and emotional resonances carried by this passage of Conner's film. Between my posts and Fama's, we've read it as shocking, anxious, and hypnotic. As a heartbeat that quickens and stops. And Fama notes further that a mystery attends this "scene," writing: "Is the 'picture' ever coming back? Maybe this concern also creates anxiety, at least in some watching the film. Of course, this effect would be strongest on the first viewing." There's nothing much I can add here, really, except to note that he's right, and that much of the film's tension does in fact hinge on this dynamic within the passage in question. And to say that this sense of mysterious anxiety continues to attend the stroboscopic blank even on repeat viewings. Even after we know that the "picture" does in fact come back, it seems to take too long.

But this raises another emotional response — one we haven't mentioned — that is at play here. The fact of the matter is that this passage is also boring. It lasts for what seems an eternity, and that it compells me to stare deeply into it (though this may not be a universal response), makes it feel longer than it in fact is. And this boredom is integral to the particular anxiety produced by the film: we don't merely wonder whether the "'picture' [is] ever coming back" — we fear that it won't, and that we're suddenly watching something we didn't plan for. And it's frustrating, not only because nothing is "happening" (except, of course, in the audio track), but because what we want to see — the moment of national tragedy — is withheld from us. In a sense, the film's use of the blank, already a refusal of representation, is a refusal of our desires, perverse as they may be.

What is more, this sense of boredom, and of frustration, works throughout the film. Footage, chopped-up and repeated, works to frustrate forward progress, not only of narrative, but of physical movement. There's a resemblance to Gertrude Stein's use of "repetition," her confounding insistence on a continual present that, here, becomes ominous. And the Presidential limo begins its fateful journey, turning perhaps onto Elm St., perhaps onto one of many that lead — have already and irrevocably lead — to Elm St. And, though the voice-over's narrative continues unimpeded, the footage begins again and again, advancing only a few frames at a time. It staggers, and it reiterates the cruel inevitability of the past, almost to the point that the historical narrative, violent as it is, seems a relief. Later, the First Lady begins a walk — only a few steps — towards the ambulance that carries her husband's corpse, the uncanny analogue to the limo with which we began. Already "former," she never arrives, being blown back to the beginning of her movement, even as she comes closer to closing the distance with each successive attempt. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

— - — - —

If we read, as Fama suggests, the stroboscopic and blank section of REPORT as containing a mystery, it's an interesting one. Certainly, we can read the JFK assassination — and either or both Conner or/and Fama may be pointing in this direction — as a murder mystery. Further, where the notion of mystery resonates on this level, it finds itself in direct and fascinating conflict with the fact that, whether the "picture" ever comes back, we know, and all too well, what happens next. A strange mystery, indeed!

[Read Fama's comments in full here, and my original post there.]

Juliana Spahr — The Transformation

2007-06-12T13:41:00.000-04:00

[I've already written a bit about Juliana Spahr's newest book, but have been meaning to get around to a longer post on it...]

Juliana Spahr's "barely truthful" memoir, her "catalog of discomfort," The Transformation, locates its subject, the self, within what Joan Retallack calls "the chaotic interconnectedness of all things, the dynamic pattern-bounded indeterminacy in which we find ourselves." Here, subject positions are collective and collaborative; they are often uncertain and unstable.

As Spahr reminds us throughout The Transformation, thinking such a subjectivity necessitates a re-imagining of language, that it may itself be transformed to articulate the sort of complexity that is at stake here. Spahr's work contorts itself away from convention in order to model interrelationship. But it becomes clear, over the course of the text, that these strategies are only partialy adequate to the task.

What is at stake is the dismantling and opening up, à la the projects of first Levinas and later Derrida, of a pervasive "expansionist language" that "often absorbed in order to kill out ... local languages," that "was not innocent," that works alongside "the coercive economic dominance of the governments that spoke [it], the military might of the governments who spoke [it], and the technology industry and its alliances with the entertainment industry." Within such a language, it is impossible — Spahr's text reminds us of this throughout — to see things correctly, to understand self or world in anything other than reductivist terms. Thus language's transformation.

Thus the memoir's narrative "I" gives way to a "they" that works twofold, pointing towards a model of community without allowing the reader to forget that the speaker's subject position is marked by an outsider status that is no more innocent than the expansionist language the text disrupts. (Spahr deals with her time spent living and teaching in Hawai'i.) At the same time, it points towards a model of community, even if that community is first and foremost a domestic and hermetic one. Over the course of the book, this "they" splits, becomes various and multiple, reunites again, suggesting that "they" are not a homogenous "them."

Thus, too, the refusal of the habitual vocabularies that fail — and in their habits fail to acknowledge the failure — to account for the complexity of the activity of being's interrelation, whether conceived in ethical, political, ecological terms. Native, Hawai'i, United States, America: to fall into habit, to use these words habitually, is to risk naturalizing these terms, effacing their history and presuming a stasis that Spahr's book constantly places under erasure in its continual emphasis on complex non-teleological change as truth.

The effect is a defamiliarization. We know what is meant when "they" talk about "the island in the Pacific," "the government that currently occupied the continent," just as we know what buildings fell down. Nevertheless, the act of reading here, though not strenuous, demands an agility of mind, an attention; and it is attended by a tendency to rethink the assumptions we make, the thinking we skip over, when we rely on habit and use the familiar names and nouns. If, as Spahr writes, the trauma brought on by terrorism — and, more significantly, its political and social ramifications — marks a certain impossibility of language, The Transformation demonstrates that this catastrophic impossibility has already occurred, well in advance of itself.

Nonetheless, we "find an ease in discomfort," as the text wishes we will. And the text draws to a close by finding a collective and collaborative model in an ancient and fragmented poem. The effect is haunting, gives us pause, reminds us that drawing breath finds us drawn into relation with one another. That the act of writing is intimately connected to the act of being human.

Species of Indices

2007-06-11T13:29:00.000-04:00

One of the most interesting ideas Mark Scroggins raises in his recent post on the aesthetics of indexing is that the index constitutes a "re-seeing" of the text to which it refers:

Or – the index as a re-seeing of the volume, a re-reading of what one has already written. Zukofsky’s own indices: the index to Prepositions, which is nothing but concepts; the collaborative index to “A” – LZ indexed only “a,” “an,” and “the,” and his wife Celia did the rest, chiding him that no-one would find a three-word index of any earthly use. As if anyone “uses” the index to “A” that way.

Reading the index after the Chicago Manual — and thus perhaps pointing at a more normative and normalizing function to this peculiar text, or adjunct to a larger text — Scroggins notes that it affords the reader capability of "getting to the heart of the book & tearing it out."

Index, then, as veins that carry us, returning, towards the book's heart; and as eyes that revise the text, redirecting our attention. This revision relocates the book's heart. And because an index, of functional necessity, rearranges the text according to arbitrary alphabetization, it remarks upon strange juxtapositions: word and work are, logically enough, adjacent in "A", where Eros and Eskimo surprise.

Witihin indices, there is a special pleasure in those concepts, names, terms, etc. that appear only once within the text. As in "A":

clematis, 553
clover, 18
coconut, 400
[...]
invariance, 509
invention, 131
iris, 103

As a revision — and as a relocation of the book's center to its extremities and examples — this list calls out for special attention to these details, where others have been necessarily left out, lest index become complete concordance and overtake the book proper. Inviting us to imagine the book anew, they seem to work as an act of salvage, asking that we not overlook something for its scarcity, as though that very scarcity were accidental, or should be repaired.

Among indices, then, Georges Perec's for Species of Spaces stands out. No term listed appears more than once — or, at least is indicated as having multiple locations within the text's space. Perec invites our attention to the details, to the transitory, rather than to the generalizations or key concepts within the text. Or, to take up terms he deploys elsewhere: the index provides refuge for the fugitive ideas within the text. How else but through such an index to recall his reference to Forbidden Planet in his meditation on doors? This example — along with passing references to ice-creams and a large red O, to marshmallows and to monkey-wrenches — would risk being lost among concepts and ideas.

How else, too, to not forget that he invokes crayfish in an account of utopia? And this utopia provides a way of thinking such an index. Perec here describes a village in terms of the sort of familiarity a well-written index, used as well as it is written, might afford: "You'd know whether it was going to rain by looking at the shape of the clouds above the hill, you'd know the places where there are still crayfish."

To wit

2007-06-10T07:13:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, K. Silem Mohammad's recent post on "Competence and Wit" is quite interesting, and I thought I might weigh in for a moment, if only to work through some of Kasey's ideas. I do so in the spirit of "thinking out loud" some ideas that are not yet fully fleshed out. [Note: I've added a bit more, at the end.]

If I read Kasey's post correctly, he's raising questions about what sort of "test of poetry" might be applicable to contemporary poetics, given that poetry (or, rather, the sort of poetry he's writing about) no longer thinks itself in terms of rigid and formally codified rules. As he explains, Victorian poetry (to use one example) could be objectively regarded in terms of prosodic rules — that, in other words, its "mere competence" could be objectively regarded by way of testing it against rules of scansion, rhyme, etc., and that its relative merit beyond this point is extrinsic to these qualities. Competence, then, is a value at once positive and prescriptive: it can be ascertained by testing the poem against the rules, and can be used to rule out a poem as merely incompetent without a consideration of the poem's "content," without reading the poem for other, less-quantifiable values, like "brilliance" (whatever that means).

Modernism, as Kasey describes it, arrives onto the scene, and intervenes within its space, as a sort of "death of art," as the term has been applied to, and subsequently used by, Arthur Danto in theorizing aesthetics after Warhol. As Danto writes (after Hegel), "...whatever art there was to be" after this point "would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage of the story," at which point art becomes self-reflective of necessity, the meaning of the term art having been placed under question, though not erasure, by such works as Warhol's Brillo Boxes. Thus, and thenceforth, "an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art, raising the question 'Why am I a work of art?'"

Tests of poetic merit still exist, though, as Kasey notes, these usually rely upon subjective qualities as their bases for valuation. Kasey notes that certain tendencies in post-war poetry value avoidance of cliché, or the construction of arbitrary rules, and adherence to those rules. We might add to his list such consideratons as the maxim that a poem must strive for a minimum number of words used to express a maximum of ideas, or certain notions of formal "closure" and "completeness." Or strictures like Olson's "form is never more than an extension of content" (and the architectural analogues thereof). Or the phrase "what will suffice" in Wallace Stevens' description of the "poem of the act of the mind." Or etc. etc. etc.

But certain of these tests present themselves as an ironic refutation of absolute rules. By way of an example, he cites O'Hara's joking "Personism," which treats craft-competence as "common sense" and "tightness": "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you." As Kasey points out, O'Hara's invocation of craft is raised only to poke fun at it. He — O'Hara, that is — doesn't deny that craft exists, but suggests the objective measure is nothing more than desire, itself a subjective value, even if it is playfully universalized with the word "everyone."

O'Hara's account of techné serves as a model for what Kasey calls "wit," which he (also playfully, if I read him correctly) describes according to the mathematical formula "competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence [as a model for assessing a poem's relative merit]." It's this ironizing awareness — analogous, if I read correctly, to the "why am I a work of art" question posited in Danto's account of art — that wit relies upon in his formulation. Wit, then, is dialectically related to competence; it is a competence at competence's limits, or some such.

Certain hints in Kasey's post — namely his reference to "certain strands of contemporary poetry" — lead me to believe that he's talking about flarf, to which the notion of wit seems particularly applicable. I could, of course, be wrong, and I suppose that one could also ask how we know that this or that of Bruce Andrews' poems is competent. But flarf's desire to be deliberately "bad," at least in certain of its theorizations, necessarily invokes a standard, a certain quality of "goodness," according to which it negatively positions itself. This need not presume competence, of course — and Kasey's own formulation of this badness as a heavily ironized rejection of "acceptable" and "P.C." sentiments is one way of formulating it. Nonetheless, the general tenor, or what have you, of flarf is such that it not only implies, but relies upon, a standard of goodness against which it positions itself, and this standard is, at least in part, based on notions of craft that, if a poem can be determined to be flarf, or "good flarf," must be at least somewhat stable.

It might be interesting to look, even if only for a moment, at the question of wit (and at flarf in general) in terms of Danto's writing on the "death of art." One of the examples that he raises, and that might be relevant, even if only partially, to flarf and to Kasey's notion of wit is that of the Most Wanted paintings by Komar and Melamid. These paintings, executed after the collapse of the Soviet Union's totalitarian rule over art production, and desgined according to poll results on what people want from art, are terribly bad. Nonetheless, they do adhere — and surprisingly strictly — to normative paradigms of art, including a particular emphasis on mimetic representation that isn't all too different from the realism demanded by edict under Soviet rule. That is to say that they would score high on the comptetence measuring stick.

Komar and Melamid's paintings are, by any standard other than kitsch, quite bad. At the same time, they are quite good — once the viewer becomes aware of the apparatus according to which they were produced, their insistence on an imagery that Danto compares to calendars is re-read not in strict terms of normative conventions of art production, but in something like an opposition to them. Or a problematization of them, rather, as simplistic models of opposition are not apt either.

The question, then, is whether this constitutes a form of wit, as Kasey's using the term. Danto reads Komar and Melamid's paintings in different terms, of course, regarding the "rules" to which they apparently adhere as, in actuality, a result of the reductive values of the marketplace, to which the polls implicitly refer. Nonetheless, that the paintings find themselves drawn into relation to extremely conventional rules according to which, as in Kasey's mention of the Victorian measures of competence, contemporary assessments no longer subscribe. So, in other words, the rules are "there," even if only accidentally, and the paintings' process of generation would seem to ironize them, even if their "target" is elsewhere. Furthermore, Komar's and Melamid's insistence on designing the paintings such that they include everything the polls identified as "wanted" points to an ironic relationship to the rules extrapolated from the polling data.

But what, then, of the bad paintings Komar and Melamid created as an adjunct to these? I'm referring, of course, to the Least Wanted series, which turns the screw of good/bad with regards to polls and to conventions of competence once further? Can this still be considered wit? Do they continue to "= competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence"? What's interesting in them is precisely this further complication of the relationship. These painting's can't rightly be considered kitsch — they're too much a departure from conservative notions of competence — but their continuation of the play executed by the former series doesn't produce "good" works of art, either...

— - — - —

Another question we might consider, and which I've added later: what happens if we regard the question of competence from its opposite perspective? Competence, as Kasey describes it, could be applied to a critique as follows: a poem that follows the prosodic rules of its era might be good or bad (or interesting or uninteresting, or whatever), depending on what it does within the framework those rules allow. But, from an objective perspective, it cannot be regarded as incompetent. Competence, then, serves as a kind of baseline by which an absolute — incompetent poetry — is "weeded out."

But what of the incompetent poem — the one that breaks the rules or is sloppy with its use/application of rules — that nonetheless says something fascinating? I'm thinking here of Dickinson, and the history of the editing of her work. Her work — as she wrote it in her manuscripts, that is, with the "irregularities" that have been "corrected" by her editors — demonstrates the failure of competence as an absolute measure of poetry, and does so twice over. First, because it shows that a poem can be good despite its refusal to conform itself to prescriptive rules of versification. And second, because it allows us the occasion to see what happens when the publication industry forces her work to conform: it reduces the poem by forcing its conformity to regularizing rules.

The reason I think this last is worth considering is that it raises the issue that "competence" — as a way of evaluating a poem's merit — works as an exclusionary device. I'm not going to suggest, though I suppose that the point may be raised, that there's an intersection of competence and gender politics, at least not necessarily. But there is a limit to competence, as Kasey no doubt knows, as a measure for poetry or its criticism...

But the issue of Dickinson's work also seems relevant in that it shows the ways comptetence, as a measure, functions in relation to those other things that the poem takes as its business. In particular, what I'm thinking of is Dickinson's description of poetry as, essentially, that which "makes [her] feel as if the top of [her] head were taken off." I'm inclined to read this statment — one of those subjective tests of poetry — alongside her writing's violation of the prosodic rules that, in her day, might have regarded the poems as "incompetent" (and that, in fact, have allowed her editors to feel it necessary to edit the poems). That is, to see her apparent "incompetence" as a symptom of a very real "competence" (if we can use that word) of the poem's non-prosodic/intellectual elements, which might in fact be considered an excess — demanded by the poem's intellectual process — of the rules that constitute competence in the first place.

Roundup

2007-06-09T15:42:00.000-04:00

A lazy post. A list of things I've found on the internet and found interesting. I am sure that none of this counts as "news," and that, if men or women will die for lack of finding these, they've already found them.

"She'll be Coming 'Round" by James Sherry, at Nick Piombino's blog. (Scroll down a bit.)

Legion (II) by Craig Dworkin.

An interesting post by Mark Scroggins on the index. (It's the entry for June 5; scroll down if necessary.)

From UbuWeb's Anthology of Conceptual Writing:

— "Points for Motion" by Vito Acconci.
— "a an av es" by Alan Davies. (Also available at Eclipse.)
— "Denny Lile" by Richard Meltzer.
— "The first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order" by Claude Closky.

Earlier versions of parts of The Transformation by Juliana Spahr:

— here.
— here.
— here.

[ADDENDUM: K. Silem Mohammad's remarks on competence and wit would have been on the earlier version of this list, but I hadn't read it yet.

Noah Webster's 1828 definition of the noun scary.]

Sound + Image

2007-06-08T16:50:00.000-04:00

Steven Fama remarks in the comments to my post on Bruce Conner's REPORT that the stroboscopic flicker of black and white blanks induces a state of heightened anxiety that he describes in physiological terms.

He's right, of course. In fact, I thought that I'd said this, but a review of the published version shows that I connected this dimension of the film exclusively to the soundtrack, and the newscaster's horror at what is unfolding. Fama's point is important because it elaborates what is at stake in the difference between the experience of a traumatic event of national urgency and the sutured and closed official narrative written after the fact. That is, an attention to the emotional response generated by the film's strobed blank reminds us that it is precisely this immediacy — experienced in a visceral, rather than "rational" or reflective way — that distinguishes the event from its analysis or intepretation after the fact.

At the same time, I think Fama overstates the role of the stroboscopic flicker in producing this anxiety-effect. Certainly, strobes tend to disorient, confuse, etc. And anxiety may well attend these effects. But I wonder if the film's particular anxiety is, in the end, an effect of the audio narration rather than the flickering crescendo that accompanies it. Certainly, the strobe works on the mind, and I can't deny that, in the rush towards its peak, it resembles a quickening pulse that corresponds to the breathlessness of the newscaster's report on the soundtrack. But when I watch the movie silently, the strobe, though disorienting, simply doesn't have the effect Fama describes.

[I should also note that Fama's comments allowed me the opportunity to correct my errant ways, and to render the title of Conner's film correctly. So, thanks!]

ten + 1

2007-06-07T00:40:00.000-04:00

A few furtive thoughts about the ten + 1 poetics quotes from yesterday:

1. The challenge of the task wasn't limiting myself to only a slight excess of the proposed limit. It was finding statements succinct enough to stand on their own.

2. I tried not to shape the list too much, really only deciding between two contenders when they expressed nearly identical ideas. Nevertheless, most of the quotes deal with three not unrelated themes: poetry as a study of language; attention to language as a transformation of language and a re-thinking of the relationship between language and world; the re-thinking of the world as an involvement in the transformation of social organization. No surprises, I suppose...

3. I probably wouldn't have expected John Taggart to end up on the list. It's not that I don't like his work, but that I've not made an extensive study of his poetics. I'd happened to read the text in question, and it came to mind as a way of thinking about a poem being rooted in sound, as emerging from something like nonsense or gibberish. A mouthing. And I envy his ability to use an incredibly repetitive musicality in his poetry.

4. The Craig Dworkin quote also took a convoluted route to end up on the final list. I'd recently re-read a number of Kenneth Goldsmith's essays, and went back through one or two, hoping to find something useful. It was this quote that stood out, though I'd mis-remembered its sentiment as Goldsmith's. I was even tempted for a moment to include just enough of Goldsmith's signal phrase introducing the quote to call it his, but thought that wouldn't be fair to Dworkin. I think Goldsmith might have liked it, though...

Quotes on poetics

2007-06-06T13:50:00.000-04:00

Some bloggers have been tagging other bloggers and asking them to quote ten statements of poetics; some of the other bloggers have done so, listing the influences and ideas that inform them, and some have not. Some bloggers have not been tagged at all, but have decided to participate nonetheless.

Here's my list — ten poets, plus Shklovsky. I'll resist the temptation — for today, at least — to provide commentary or explanation, or to elucidate in which ways, exactly, these have shaped my writing and thinking.

Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.... [T]he ultimate purpose of the work of art is ... the renewal of perception, the seeing of the world suddenly in a new light, in a new unforeseen way.

— Victor Shklovsky
"Art as Technique"

— - — - —

To begin with, I don't think that the messages are for the poet any more than the radio program is for the radio set. And I think that the radio set doesn't really worry about whether anyone's listening to it or not, and neither does the poet. The poem may have some Nielsen ratings of its own. It carries on in the middle distance somewhere.

—Jack Spicer
"Vancouver Lecture I"

— - — - —

[A] case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe in this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words.

— Louis Zukofsky
"Poetry / For My Son
When He Can Read"

— - — - —

dont you know that "No" is the wildest word we consign to Language?

— Emily Dickinson
Letter 562, c. 1878
to Otis P. Lord

— - — - —

Due to N. O. Brown's remark that syntax is the arrangement of the army, and Thoreau's that when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsyntactical "demilitarized" language.

— John Cage
Empty Words

— - — - —

I am a grammarian I do not hesitate but I rearrange prepositions.

— Gertrude Stein
How to Write

— - — - —

The "open text," by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive.

— Lyn Hejinian
"The Rejection of Closure"

— - — - —

[T]he poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachments or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The Poet"

— - — - —

Say the rhythm before you play it. It may not be necessary to express this in nonsense syllables. Perhaps there could be such syllables which coalesce into words as the poem moves along.

— John Taggart
"Were You: Notes & a Poem
for Michael Palmer"

— - — - —

What would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with ‘spontaneous overflow’ supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.

— Craig Dworkin
UbuWeb Anthology
of Conceptual Writing

— - — - —

[W]riting which seems to be "about" meaning also takes as its goal the challenging of existing frames and the widening of this social realm of possibility. It involves testing the horizon, setting up a probe, by violating codes so that each unit keeps getting reframed — or keeps reframing what's going on before it and what might come next as you challenge these wider and wider concentric circles of normalization, or of a functional fit, almost a machinelike fit that exists within the social dimension of language. So this larger operation of the entire body of language — the internal relations of this totality — can begin to be recast.... The methods by which meaning arrives in a prefabricated way are challenged and, at the same time, so are the limitsof the socal order.

— Bruce Andrews
"Total Equals What"

Bervin's Emily Dickinson

2007-06-05T23:59:00.001-04:00

Jessica Smith, over at looktouchblog, recently called my attention to Jen Bervin's quilting project on the Emily Dickinson Fascicles. Bervin begins by taking one of Dickinson's fascicles — self-published and handmade collections of poems — and removing the vocabulary. In its stead, she stitches in thread onto oversized cotton "pages" the dashes, dots, and crosses that characterize Dickinson's manuscripts and distinguish them from the published versions of her writing. The result: a palmpsest of ambiguous and gestural markings that collapses an entire fascicle's dashes, dots, and crosses into a single field, allowing the viewer to see them clearly.

It's tempting to compare this, in its blanking of the text, to Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing." After all, a poem is made of words, and Bervin's removal of these words would seem to be just such an erasure. But Rauschenberg's approach — an interrogation of the relationship between creation and destruction, about the ways art and artist are related within a commodity economy and to one another — is fundamentally different from Bervin's, which essentially constitutes a textual and literary investigation. The result raises — or reiterates, given that Susan Howe, among others, have already so raised — "questions about the nature and meaning of the marks." It reverses the treatment given to the poems through most of their history, effacing what has hitherto been retained, and retaining what was once effaced. And it calls into question the assumption that a poem is its vocabulary, redirecting our attention so that we examine that which is outside of language, yet undeniably and indelibly present on the page.

Conventional punctuation was abolished not to add 'soigné stitchery' but to subtract arbitrary authority. Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the struture of each poem. Hush of hesitation for breath and for breathing.

— Susan Howe

At the same time, I'm a touch ambivalent about the act of collapsing the marks of eleven and twenty-one poems (in the works based on fascicles sixteen and forty, respectively) into these single fields. It certainly, and usefully, calls attention to the gestural variety of the markings, as Bervin suggests. And where it does suggest a way of thinking the poems' seriality in vertical, rather than horizontal, terms, it simultaneously effaces that seriality's sequential structure, and risks losing each poem's relative autonomy from the others within the fascicle. That is, it risks losing the spatial layout of each poem's own markings in reducing them to a single surface.

In the end, the problem I'm raising here might not be soluble. It might, in fact, be analogous to Saussure's remarks about the need to choose between diachronic ("horizontal") and synchronic ("vertical") analysis.

Nor do I think that the critique I'm bringing here should detract from the project as a whole. That Bervin is investigating this component to Dickinson's work is significant. That she is doing so through visual art — and, in so doing, that she suggests we regard these markings in visual, rather than grammatical terms — is more so.

This space is the poem's space. Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and ruptured stanzas are points of contact and displacement.

— Susan Howe

[NOTE: The first quote from Susan Howe can be found in My Emily Dickinson. The second is from "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values," published in The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History.]

Report on refusal

2007-06-04T23:49:00.000-04:00

In my post on Bruce Conner's REPORT a few days ago, I read the film's stroboscopic blank spot as a limit of representation, as a manifestation of representation's limits. There's a passage in Juliana Spahr's newest book, The Transformation, that addresses this topic as well, and that I think is worth mention. Where questions of representation, of language, of explanation, of defintion constitute the book's displaced and decentered "center," they come to one of their many heads in relation to another, more recent, national tragedy.

"Basically, langugage itself became impossible" in the aftermath, in the seventh section of The Transformation. Approaches to language taken up by the avant garde, Spahr writes, that were designed to critique power, to provide ways of thinking that resisted the structures of power, no longer made sense, no longer worked their resistance, when "all the government officials avoided clear language and stuttered."

It was as if the government that currently occupied the continent had taken over one of the few remaining tools of resistance, the very tools of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on, and even used them, leaving not only the poets but also the organizers and the activists empty handed.

This impossibility of language takes the form of an uncertainty, a confusion, that, while it precedes the national tragedy, takes a different direction, takes on a different charge in this aftermath. Spahr articulates an uncertainty of what, or even how, to think within this place where language has become impossible.

It — this confusion, this uncertainty in the face of language's new impossibility — is also framed as a refusal. Spahr writes, of herself and her domestic collective community: "Even though they were trained ... in close reading, trained in making sense out of nonsense, ... they refused the sense." Elsewhere, "they refused to understand" what was happening around them. This refusal's form works throughout the text, in its refusal of specifics, particularly of descriptors and proper names, and of the official language used, by the "government that currently occupied the continent" to describe the tragedy, which, in this account has no name. The question of what to call this event, how to think it, how to describe it without using the language used by the government is left unresolved, presented as a problem of naming, of definition, of representation. To call it anything is to participate in the construction of a particular interpretation; thus, refusal.

There is a resemblance here, between this refusal of representation and Conner's use of the blank spot, but it comes with a difference. Spahr's text explicitly theorizes — even as it resists the temptation to a solid and non-problematized theory — the impossibility of language and of representation, where Conner's film does not. The difference is of effect, and of the ideal readers constituted by these texts. Where Spahr's work is at its base critical, where The Transformation intellectualizes the question of a refusal of representation, Conner's film is an act of mourning that calls upon its reader in emotional terms, even as it comes to problematize representation, and ultimately to refuse it.

Immediacy

2007-06-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

The July issue of Jacket magazine includes an interesting essay by Craig Perez on Mike Magee's controversial poem — the one that caused a shitstorm about a year ago — "Their Eyes, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay." Perez approaches the poem within the context of Magee's critical work on Emersonian symbolic action, suggesting that the poem is "armed with 'pragmatist view of language,'" which it takes up against the "devious rhetoric of ritualized prejudice on the internet [to] propose social change through the remaking of social discourse."

At the same time, Perez's article demonstrates — inadvertently, if not unconsciously — the ways that the discourse surrounding poetry has been changed by the internet. The change does not come in the form of a new critical approach to poetry or a new set of terms, but the fact that the publication and critique(s) of, and response(s) to, "Their Eyes, Their Asian Glittering Eyes" happened almost immediately. As testament to this, Perez presents the poem alongside Magee's commentary, written during the controversy as direct response to his critics. Of course, criticism has often brought authorial explanation (e.g., letters) to bear on a poem's interpretation. But two factors are different here: the immediacy with which Magee's commentary (as well as that of his critics) was made public, and the extent to which this act of explanation and defense has occurred in full view of an incredibly wide public.

The effect is that the poem's boundaries are extended. "Their Eyes, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay" is not limited to the poem itself, but almost necessarily includes the entire text of its controversy — if not all 500 pages, at least all of Magee's side of the discussion. We can, in a sense, read Magee's responses to his critics as part of the poem, at least inasmuch as they clarify, amend, and (arguably) revise the poem. As public texts, they complicate our sense of the poem's scope, not in the sense of what it chooses to address, but in the sense of its own boundaries as text. As revisions, Magee's comments may not change the text of the poem proper, but they are, in a manner of speaking, part of the poem.

For Perez, the poem is democratic in its relationship to its source materials, the rhetoric it seeks to call into question through its "scorching irony," and particularly in the attitude towards language that allows for such to be regarded as political action. I'm tempted to say that the effect of this extension of the poem's boundaries constitutes a democratization of the text, such that "authorship" (perhaps broadly conceived) is extended to include not only the particular act of authorship, or the commentary Magee follows it with, but also the commentary of the interlocutors. This is not especially unique — poets have always written within a social space, have always modified their writing based on the suggestions of peers, and in response to the economic and aesthetic pressures of publishers, etc. But, again, the fact that this happens here within view of a theoretically limitless public does seem to mark a change of some sort, even if it is only of degree. (This is perhaps reiterated by Perez's invitation at the essay's close to weigh in on his blog; unfortunately, the link does not currently work...)

In the end, I'm not certain that this is so significant a change, or whether it does imply the democratization I've hinted at. It seems to me, in fact, that it potentially raises more questions than it answers. Or it could be that the case of "Their Eyes, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay" is not at all different, that the questions one might apply to it are in fact relevant to any act of writing, of explanation, of controversy. That it is, in other words, an example of the ways texts have always worked within the social realm, where this case simply plays out the dialectical author/reader relationship within a broader and more visible social space.

[NOTE: Much of the discussion of Magee's poem is included or linked here. The original blog — the one to which Perez's essay refers — appears to be defunct; my link is to a cached version of the page.]

[ADDENDUM (a few hours later): Another way of thinking about the last issues I raise is, of course, to suggest that an insistence on regarding Magee's defense of "Their Eyes..." as part of the poem reasserts authorial control — along with attendant notions of authority over the text's meanings. Nonetheless, the fact that these defenses are given over to the interlocutors, inasmuch as they respond directly to their charges, shows the poem to exist within a direct relation to the critiques raised in the controversy.]

Report on Bruce Conner

2007-05-31T17:19:00.000-04:00

REPORT, dir. Bruce Conner
1963-1967
16mm, b&w, sound.
13 min., ~ 9 sec.
~ 18936 frames

Something has happened — the audio track tells us as much — and what we see is interrupted by a chaotic scramble of images and text taken from film leader. Conner's title is a key: it lays out one of the film's primary purposes, and refers explicitly to the film's audio track, which presents recordings of live newscasts covering the events. At the same time, it recalls gunshots.

Bruce Conner's film, at once a found-footage documentary and an act of mourning, reports on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film often seems degraded: iconic images of the motorcade start and re-start, jump cut and broken. The mismatch between what we see and hear — or between the procession of images themselves — is jarring. We are interrupted by film-leader, blanks.

Everything centers on the film's blank spots. The filmic image — jump-cut newsreel of the Kennedy motorcade nearing Dealey Plaza — disintegrates at the most crucial moment in the film's audio narrative, the moment of murder. Images are replaced by "white expanses where we see hairs in the gate and wear and tear on the frames themselves," which, Matthew Wilder notes, are the film's "most startling moments" — they begin at the moment a voice on the audio track, having noted that "something has happened in the motorcade route," begins to describe the witnesses' panic in a tone equally panicked, breathless.

At this point, and for three minutes and twenty-three seconds, the film's diegesis is located entirely within its narration. A further replacement: the whitened screen becomes a strobing flicker of black and white frames, while the voice describes "a severe gunshot wound." Sirens, ambient sounds, sound like horrorshow Theremins. And the strobe doesn't sit still. Bruce Jenkins writes: "the rate of flicker begins to decelerate — shifting from its most kinetic and stroboscopic as the reporter from 'Mobile Unit 6' races to Parkland Hospital — to infrequent flashes, finally fading to darkness as the reporter arrives and is barred entry to the hospital."

This strobing of black and white makes the invisible blank visible, underscores its blankness, in its alternation of clear and black frames, representing both the absence of color and the absence of light. It employs the rhetoric, as Jenkins claims, of "those horror films where the monster remains offscreen and viewers are left to conjure up its unseen hideousness." As such, it is terrifying. It refuses, in its refusal to show, to allow violence to rise to the status of icon; this same act refuses to make us into witnesses, allowing the narrating newscaster to witness on our behalf. It points to erasure, and absence — not only the absence that is death, but also the inability of mourning to reconcile itself to the traumatic event.

The blanks are blindspots. As a historical document, REPORT covers the Kennedy assassination and the chaos and confusion of its immediate aftermath. The film was begun within days of the event, and updated and revised as history unfolded, as other reports (including the Warren Commission's) were begun and completed, over the next several years. According to Jenkins, eight versions were completed; only one is definitive. Or: one film was remade continually, as its author attempted to settle on a historical account satisfactory to the moment it describes. In many ways, Conner's film reports on reportage itself, on the gaps, absences, and erasures in the historical record. It investigates the contrast between history as it is lived — in the chaos of its unfolding, in its rupture — and history as it is rationalized and codified within and by social institutions.

[NOTES: In my emphasis on the role of the blank in Conner's film, I've focused exclusively on the first part of REPORT. This is not to suggest that the film's second chapter lacks interest. As Jenkins notes, the shorter second section investigates — through layering of newsreels, commercials, and audio — the mythology surrounding Kennedy: it is "an astounding exposé of the ways in which the media creates meaning, constructs messages, and ultimately controls information" that "implement[s] Barthes' advice that the 'best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn."

Bruce Jenkins' article, "Exlosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner," published in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II, is an invaluable resource on Conner's filmmaking in general, and particularly on REPORT.

Stan Brakhage's lecture on Bruce Conner, published in Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers also includes excellent commentary on the film. Brakhage provides a detailed explanation of REPORT's genesis and the different shapes it took over the years of its production, as well as a thoughful discussion of the emotion elicited by particular segments.

Conner's REPORT is not currently available.]

Olson and Rimbaud

2007-05-31T09:38:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

Would it sound too weary of me to say that I'll just pick up where I left off yesterday? Good — then I'll jump in with both feet, as they say.

Like O'Hara's reworking of Rilke, Charles Olson's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Ô saisons, ô châteaux..." involves significant differences from its original. This much is indicated by its title, "Variations Done for Gerald van der Weile." The poem itself is in three parts, and is, as its title also suggests, less a serial poem than an accretion of revisions.

The first half — twenty-one lines — of Olson's first "Variation" bears no apparent relationship to Rimbaud's text. Instead, the poem begins as imagistic verse not unlike those of Pound or H.D. (or the poetry of Williams, Stevens, and Yeats, as Thomas F. Merrill notes): syntactically condensed lines arranged into stanzas of irregular length describe a pastoral scene onto which bursts tractors, busy as birds, bees. "The Diesel / does not let up pulling / the plow." The other sections of Olson's poem effectively constitute revisions of this passage: the Diesel and plow have dropped away by the second part, though the action of plowing reappears in the third. And so forth.

The business of translation begins in the poem's first part with a direct quotation, preceded with an open parenthesis and lacking quotation marks or circumflexes, of Rimbaud's opening line. What appears to be further quotation in an isolated one-word stanza — "Délires!" — is in fact invention, though it recalls Rimbaud's themes. The translation continues in the following couplet, and is, at its base, an accurate translation of the original: "Quelle âme est sans défauts!" ["What soul is without sin!"] becomes "What soul / is without fault?"

Where Merrill's interpretation emphasizes Olson's varying renderings of Rimbaud's fifth couplet ("Ce charme a pris âme et corps / Et disperse les efforts"), I'd like to examine his versions of the poem's second couplet. It is here that, in the first section of "Variations" becomes a variation on Rimbaud's text. "J'ai fait la magique étude," reads Rimbaud's original, "Du bonheur, qu'aucun n'élude" ["The magic study I've made, / Of happiness none can evade"]. Olson's text responds to, rather than translates, this: "Nobody studies / happiness." Not only does this move depart from translation in favor of direct address, it does so with a skepticism that would call the original text, in its sincerity and its romantic imagination of poet as seer, into question.

Questioning continues in the version presented in Olson's second variation. Here, the skepticism is replaced with necessity, and the truncation of Rimbaud's couplet is reversed: "can you afford not to make / the magical study // which happiness is?" Rather than opposing happiness with study, Olson here rereads happiness as a special category of study, one that cannot be refused. The lines are directed not at Rimbaud's poem, but at the reader, and the antagonism of the rhetorical question in part one is replaced with an imperative. And here versions of Rimbaud's couplet disappear from the scene, never to return.

[NOTE: I plan to continue this in the next day or two, as Olson's variant readings of another couplet from Rimbaud merit some commentary.]

[ADDENDUM: For "next day or two" in the above note, please read "indefinite future." It's not that I don't want to contine this, but rather that other ideas have intervened.]

"Aus Einem April"

2007-05-30T11:50:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

I promised to write more about translation as departure — about poems that treat translation less as adaptation between languages than as occasions for a new work radically different from their original. I've already referred to Jack Spicer's After Lorca, in which Spicer uses translation as a framing device for a series of poems whose relationship to the Spanish writer's work is placed under the anarchic sentiment expressed in one of the American poet's open letters included within the text: "When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right."

But what I want to look at today is Frank O'Hara's poem, "Aus Einem April." The poem, unlike Spicer's After Lorca or poetic translations like Zukofsky's Catullus, does not explicitly announce itself as a version of Rilke's poem of the same title (English version here). In fact, Marjorie Perloff, in Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, avoids the term "translation" entirely, substituting instead "loose adaptation," and quoting Albert Cook's "de-'poeticisizing' [...] commentary." David Lehman, in an essay on postmodernism, calls it a "deliberate mistranslation," while Jonathan Mayhew uses the term "channeling."

My interest here isn't in challenging any of these other critics' accounts of the poem, but to draw the two texts into relation to see what is found in the contrast, and to illuminate O'Hara's methods, which include homophony, inversion, and invention.

Lehman's account of the poem addresses only the first two lines: he contrasts O'Hara's "We dust the walls" with Rilke's "Wieder duftet der Wald" ["Again the forest is fragrant"]. As I read it, Lehman wants us to see two things. He calls our attention explicitly to the contrast between the meanings of the two lines. At the same time, by quoting the original German, he points to a translation of the German sounds that is essentially homophonic, though with a few differences. Reading the letters as though they were English, O'Hara transforms the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ (w is named "vay" in German) into the voiced labiovelar approximate /w/; the result recalls Hollywood caricatures of a Germanic accent. And the contrast between Rilke's German and O'Hara's English finds the hint of a lisp in the transition from /f/ to /s/ in "duftet" and "dust." Finally, dropped syllables alter the meter, and bring what might have been rendered in the past tense — "duftet" as "dusted" — into the present. And from here, O'Hara's version of "Aus Einem April" abandons close homophonic play with Rilke's prosody, though select sounds are retained, most clearly O'Hara's "haven't you ever," which recalls and redoubles the German "aber" ["but"].

Much of O'Hara's "Aus Einem April" works from Rilke's text through a series of inversions. That a mirroring practice is at play is evident early: where Rilke implicitly contrasts his poem's "us" against the larks in the second and third lines, O'Hara not only equates the two, but makes the relationship explicit: "we are weeping larks." Words often become their opposites: softness becomes roughness, "empty" is made into "full," the "darkening glint of the stones" changes into "the hour of sunlight, early morning." And joyful connotations become adjectives of pain or sorrow — "soaring" becomes "weeping." The overall result of these inversions is that Rilke's motifs of ascent and rising succumb to gravity.

Donald Allen's endnotes to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara identify only the title of "Aus Einem April" as having any relationship to Rilke. And, arguably, the most interesting element of O'Hara's version is the amount of it that is apparently absolute invention on the translator's part. By the fifth line, O'Hara has departed entirely, and Rilke's "aber nach langen, regnenden Nachmittagen" ["but after the long, raining afternoons"] corresponds with "Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas?" It is not clear where Christmas enters into O'Hara's poem: it can not be regarded as an inversion of "afternoons," nor is it a literal reading of the weather patterns Rilke's poem describes. One possibility is that "Nachtmittagen" provided the occasion for a personal association on O'Hara's part, connecting Christmas with German carols. But if a relationship other than absolute departure — an abandoning of the attempt at translation — is at work here, it is hermetic enough to elude easy explanation.

This practice of departure continues through the end of the stanza: "neueren Stunden" ["newer hours"] shares its relative position within the poem — if little else — with O'Hara's "isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure," which can be read as extension of the Christmas motif introduced earlier. Traces of the original are carried across, but bits of even those portions of text are lost or found along the way, and so Rilke's "wounded" emerges, turned from adjective to noun, as "suicide."

Inversions, echoes, flights from the original. In O'Hara's version of Rilke, everything becomes a swoon. And the effect is dizzying: because so much of O'Hara's poem reverses the relationships articulated in Rilke's text, some of the content seems to have come full circle. In the end, though, it is difficult to tell for certain. Both poems close with images of stillness and nature:

Alle Geräusche ducken sich ganz
in die glänzenden Knospen der Reiser.

["All sounds duck entitely away
in the glistening buds of the brushwood"]

Nonetheless, in O'Hara's version this stillness is troubled by its inversion into turbulence, even if it is located "out there," at a remove from the speaker:

in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

More — More! — Maddin-Mania!

2007-05-29T18:13:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

You're still thinking about Guy Maddin, aren't you? I thought so! So I'll feed your hunger for more with links to some shorts, filled to overflowing with hypnogogic montage, subliminal edits, and subject matter both lurid and risque!

— - — - —

"Zookeeper Workbook"

Maldoror, or is it? Some things are put in the mouth for safekeeping: lightning rods and tiny crabs, finger-rings for fingers. A tyger is made in the space where light is not. Q: What does a eunuch eat? A: Anything he wants! // [This film is obviously related to Maddin's "Maldoror: Tygers," which I've never seen. The treatment for that film, published in From the Atelier Tovar, entangles Comte de Lautréamont's character within Shakespearean webs of enchanted and misdirected desire.]

— - — - —

"Fuseboy"

"Boiler room boys" put their fingers places they should never go, enduring dares and daring danger! Nightmares turn to passions, as metaphors turn literal! And are those Cocteau's rubber gloves, attempting a pass through the camera lens? // But oh! those "sockets of fire!" // ["Fuseboy"'s soul-mate is "Sissy Boy Slap Party," the title of which is so utterly self-explanatory as to render further exposition of its humid harem themes not only redundant, but reductive. Watch an extended cut — the third of three versions — of the latter here.]

— - — - —

"Rooster Workbook"

"This little montage sequence was meant to be part of a longer film called Love Chaunt of the Chimney, but this latter film — an adaptation of Herman Melville's short story "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo," shot in 1997 — was completely lost, except for a few excerpts, when vandals torched my editing studio. When my editor John Gurdebeke and I decided to edit the few minutes that survived, we found that the spirit of the original feature-length film survived in the shorter piece — lots of ennervating sexual submission to the cock's crows, lots of filthy ash writhing — and that we just saved viewers a lot of time by submitting to fate and grieving no more over the loss of the feature" — Guy Maddin

[NOTE: All links are to YouTube, which means that these films might only be available for a moment or two.]

on Brand Upon the Brain!

2007-05-28T22:52:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

I'm often afflicted with amnesia. So I can't remember if you've seen Brand Upon the Brain!, Guy Maddin's newest film. I can't recall if you've ever even heard of Maddin, or if you have already been infected with the brain-fever his movies spread. No matter — I'm going to talk about the film; you'll have to decide if you want it spoiled, or if you've seen it yet. I'll leave a dotted-line trail, as of breadcrumbs, to tell the wary where to wait, or skip ahead to safety.

In a sense, I'm ill-equipped for the task I've set out for myself here: I always need to watch each of Maddin's films twice, once to allow myself an overview of the ways its threads of plot, motif, and image work together to form its whole, and again to actually see the film, guided along by an Ariadne's thread of hindsight that keeps me from losing my way. They're too fevered and hallucinatory for anything less. Nonetheless, I charge ahead, knowing I do so half-blind...

Brand Upon the Brain, like Maddin's other films, eludes easy description. Like Careful it is, to use his own words, an "opera without singing." An especially operatic opera, certainly.

The film's ideas sleep furiously: images are all staccato. They pant and they tremble. They hold their breath in anticipation. Voices float in from on the aerosphere, carried by emotion's waxy wings. They cackle and crumble — they crackle. Vaseline makes memories spit-slick and blurry. Searches are mounted to find them. Others — coated and covered over with paint.

Along the way, "nectarine" changes its meaning, is lapped up with gusto. Color fleetingly flashes — it flickers. (And, as an aside — it is forgotten by many who see it!) Rules are drawn, and designs dreamt up. Desires are disguised; others are pursued under the guise of others, of brothers. Gloves are there for the kissing, for undressing. Secrets yearn to be told. Rage rages, gasps are gasped, sotto voce. Rumania blushes on bellies — a map. Certain designs are dashed like hopes. Scientists invent inventions, while matriarchs rule, and repress, at telescope's reach. Vampires run rampant, if wingless...

— - — - —

[This is where I start to really read the film's "last pages" aloud... O! reader! take care to be cautious!]

Brand Upon the Brain! wants for easy coherence, but nothing about the film really wants it, either. Subplots multiply, but are often uneasy in their relationships with one another. ("One memory leads to another," the silent film's intertitles tell us, without articulating the joints between one memory and another.) Threads wind their ways together, becoming a tangle rather than knot. That's true of all of Maddin's films, even those that last less than a few minutes.

Within Maddin's fevered and nightmarish scenario, an orphanage is ruled by those with designs on the brains of their wards. The vampiric wardens steal "nectarine" with signet-rings from the brain-stems of the children, using the orphans to ensure eternal youth. Allusions abound, and the whole of it — this subplot, at least, though it is only one among many — can be read as allegory of the rhetoric employed by opponents of stem-cell research. I'm tempted to offer such a reading.

But such a reading seems overly simplistic. Maddin — remarking on the film's framing device, of an adult recalling his childhood ("A remembrance in 12 chapters") — suggests a more complex relationship between film and reality, referring to "the faulty models of the universe one constructs while trying to make sense of the world." And the film's status with regards to the world is further embodied, and further complicated, in the fact that it presents itself as autobiography. In an interview, Maddin explains further:

At the dawn of memory, one makes some wildly incorrect models of the world — these result in the almost narcotic magic of every new sensation being received incorrectly. Cause and effect are often flipped; new phenomena loom up hyperbolically and misleadingly; mysteries deepen instead of clearing up; everything is dreamy and wondrous! Truths are made more emotionally truthful by the mistakes and untruths.

To take up this approach is to reread the film's allusions less as allegory, as a one-to-one palimpsest of map and world, and regard them instead as points of departure, as occasions for invention. To reread the film thus is to see it as a variation or play on the rhetoric employed by those who oppose stem-cell research. Less a manifestation of the unconscious mind than a form of discourse analysis that revels in — rather than, say, critiques — a hidden and fabulistic level of the discourse, turning it not against itself but into its own ends.

— - — - —

[Here, my words become once again safe, even for the most skittish among you, O reader, readers, mine!]

The Village Voice describes the film as, if I may be allowed a loose paraphrase, just another Guy Maddin. There's truth to this: recurring motifs and themes from elsewhere in his oeuvre recur here as well. The characteristic lurid tone remains lurid. Repression and desire play between one another — and the latter bursts forth from its fetters — as before. What is queer about his cinematic vision is queer once again. But these repetitions are worth repeating, and as Maddin repeats them.

And though it may be that Brand Upon the Brain! is not his best — that award would be shared by Careful and Archangel, as well as the shorts "Heart of the World" and "Sombra Dolorosa" — "another Guy Maddin" is, as those in the know know for certain, no minor thing.

— - — - —

The savviest among you have by now already turned to the interview with Maddin linked above. Those that haven't should! For, there, our swooning auteur announces a future project, and confirms a rumor. The rumor, that he is working with John Ashbery, is exciting enough — and doubly so in its truth. But even more exciting is that the project will borrow its structure from Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, and thus promises this: that parenthesis will enclose parenthesis, and so on, ad infinitum.

[ADDENDUM: Watch the trailer here.]

Thou art translated!

2007-05-27T12:19:00.001-04:00

Dearest reader:

Of late I've been listening to Caroline Bergvall's "Via." Her poem (and I prefer the audio to the visual text) consists of a ten minute documentary history of 48 English-language translations of the first three lines of Dante's Commedia. Taken together, organized alphabetically rather than according to chronology or a hierarchy, they work through repetition ("erratic seriality," as she puts it) to illustrate, if paradoxically, variation. There is a necessary recurrence of themes from one line to the next, but this sameness is undercut by a wild variety of rhythm and of lexicon that is surprising.

In the tangle of variant translations, "found myself in a dark wood" becomes "I was made aware that I had strayed." This variety multiplies meaning's different shades, and Dante's "mi ritrovai" yields "found myself," "found myself astray," and "found myself again." The "mi ritrovai" is imagined as wandering, and as a waking that recalls the swooning that concludes his meeting with Paolo and Francesca.

Where, as she notes in her remarks on the poem in Fig, concern for accuracy of transcription is central to Bergvall's work here, a parallel concern for accuracy of translation is not. Bergvall's repetition of variation doesn't raise the question of fidelity, and I'm tempted to rethink the notion of accuracy entirely, and to instead recall the etymology of translation, which is often rendered as "bearing across": the act that brings a text near. "Via" suggests we rethink translation in terms of its departure. Dante's text operates here as a point for such departure, from which variety "finds itself," even if that finding might be regarded as — even if it carries with it the implication — "astray."

This figuration of translation as departure isn't unique to Bergvall's treatment of Dante; it is in fact typical of a tradition of poetic (mis)translation. I plan to write a bit more about this in the next few days, so stay tuned!

rest • pause • dwell • stay

2007-05-25T02:30:00.000-04:00

When I hoped I
hoped everywhere and l ing er

— - — - —

voice in di c e he
a rar y s
rar y in a ction • Well

in direction of • leaves,
of wind vanes takes
w ing • flushed and mistaken

— - — - —

To curl the air

A ate
the cal m of the candy
a Arrow straighter Love

e cor re s

bre k in vers

Checking in and out again

2007-05-24T23:34:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

It's been a while, no? It's not that I've not been thinking of you. I've been busy — too busy to write anything of substance, though I have two or three things in the works. In the meantime, I will take a moment — and it will only take a moment — to answer all your questions.

Yes, I did change the heading that appears under the blog's title. And yes, the new heading is borrowed from an outside source. In this case, it's the first line of "Bold Soul Sister" by Ike and Tina Turner.

And now you know.

Let me close with a promise. I promise this: more posts of more substance than this one in the next day or two. I know, it's a long wait, but — hold your breath — it will be worth that wait.

Silent letters

2007-05-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

Over at dbqp, Geof Huth has also weighed in with an interpretation of Aram Saroyan's one-word poem, "lighght." His reading — which he positions in contrast to mine, from Monday's post — emphasizes silence in its address of the doubled "gh" letter combination that is, in essence, the very essence of the poem:

The internal elongation of the word adds two letters, letters that are usually audible when read aloud in English, but letters which, in this case, are silent when paired together. The doubling of “gh” extends the silence within the word, and that silence represents the weight of light and its movement through space. No matter the number of gh’s added to the pwoermd, the center of it will always be silent, and light will extend itself continuously through space.

There's nothing I can really argue with here. In fact, I almost feel obligated to defer to Huth's expertise on the subject of vispo, minimalism, and one-word poems.

Except...

Except there's something in this interpretation that doesn't satisfy me. It's not that the interpretation is wrong; it is, in fact, more likely that my reading — or sounding, rather — of Saroyan's poem is off-base. Nevertheless, the interpretation misses what is for me a crucial mark: namely, that the poem is absolutely confounding. It was when I saw it for the first time, maybe ten or eleven years ago, and it is when I see it today. The poem presents itself first as problem, as impossibility. And, to my mind at least, reading the doubled "gh" as an extension of the silence in "light" reduces this crucial aspect of "lighght."

It's its strangeness — the problem the poem presents (itself as) — that I was attempting to apprehend with my attention to sound on Monday. It isn't that any of the sounded senses I suggested are particularly satisfying — and, in fact, none of them are, as I mentioned in my earlier post. But they point, or I meant to point through them, to a dynamic the poem itself relies on: that it troubles the act of reading on its most fundamental levels. I might have approached the poem in another way, without referring to phonetics, and noted that it compels us to stumble on that — the ghostly "gh" — which we, in English, pass over in silence. Silence here as stammer.

In the end, it's that the poem — read as sound, as word, or as image — doesn't settle into the visual and sonic puns of "eyeye" that makes it the more satisfying of the two texts. It's the same, for me, with its meanings: I want the poem to resist an interpretation as lucid as the one Huth suggests, if only because it seems to tame "lighght" too much.

[NOTE: For those not in the know, "pwoermd" is a term Huth created specifically for neologistic one-word poems such as "lighght" or "eyeye."]

eyelighte

2007-05-21T12:53:00.000-04:00

Ron Silliman's blog post today finds him discussing the work of Aram Saroyan. In so doing, he closely examines two one-word Saroyan poems originally published in 1968, in a book that is either untitled or eponymous, depending on how you read its cover.

The first of the Saroyan poems in question, reprinted here in its entirety:

eyeye

And the second, also in its entirety:

lighght

Silliman argues that the first of these is the better poem, noting that the latter "just sits there on the page doing not much of anything." In contrast, he judges the first poem "effective" in that it "calls up the double-image element involved in stereoscopic vision," which connects, and fulfills, the poem's use of the "graphic elements of language."

But exclusive attention to these poems' graphical components ignores — as Silliman does — their sonic dimensions. I'm not interested in disagreeing with Silliman, of course; his attention is focused on the visual by the parameters of his essay, and particularly by his comparison of Saroyan with Grenier. Rather, and nevertheless, I want to look at other ways of reading the poems to investigate them differently.

Read aloud — with an "eye" to its sound, rather than graphical presentation — the poem takes on, through homophony, a variety of other possible meanings. "eyeye" sounds the affirmative: "aye-aye." Or it can be read as "I I" — a doubling of the personal pronoun that, in turn, might be regarded as a doubling of the self, as in a split consciousness, or as an expression of plurality, of "we," taken as a union that does not suppress distinct subjectivity. The latter might, in turn, be read to recall Olson's "polis is / eyes," which relies in part on the eye/I/aye homophony for its meaning. And we could take this further still, substituting one homophone for each of the "eyes" that comprise the poem: "I aye," or "aye I." Operating in this fashion, "I eye" and "eye I" are also possible, as are "aye eye" and "eye aye." That some of these formulation defy grammatical conventions seems of little consequence, as we are dealing here in the realm of pun, rather than of sentence structure.

As I read it, there is no apparent connection between the poem's voicing and its visual appearance. I suppose we could look towards a reconcilitation by taking up the homophonic play between "eye" and "I," to return to Olson's statment, and suggest that we read our multiplicity, our condition as "we," in terms of stereoscopic vision, suggesting a more-or-less commun(al)istic and affirmative conception of society that emphasizes the ways we work together. But this seems, at the moment, a bit of a stretch — though I stand to stand corrected, of course.

The meaning of "eyeye" proliferates upon its utterance. "lighght" confounds its sounding. Where the former works through pun, the latter presents itself in terms of the impossibility of even the most fundmental form of interpretation that is reading aloud. It is not clear at all how to voice the poem's doubling of the silent "gh." Nevertheless, possible solutions come into view, despite its presentation: we could recall that "gh" indicates that the "i" is a long one, and draw the vowel out, effectively doubling its length. Or we could read the poem as a homophone for "light" — read the poem as a rejection of logocentrism, that is — and rely on the assumption that its difference from the conventional word exists solely on the page. Or we could recall that earlier versions of English in fact sounded the "gh" combination as the velar fricative /x/ (as in German "nicht"). This in mind, we could return to this sounding, drawing it out to honor its graphical doubling, or perhaps allowing the first "gh" to silently lengthen the "i" sound, and voice its second manifestation as either /x/ or the /f/ into which the former transformed prior to the completion of the "taut-taught merger" (as historical phonologists term the evolution of words like "taught" towards homophony with words like "taut").

As in "eyeye," puns begin to suggest themselves with these last possibilities. We can move between a short and long "i" while voicing the "gh" as /x/ or as /f/ to find: "lift," "licked" or "lick't" (if we allow a slight mispronunciation of /x/), and "liked," as well as the neologistic "lifed," which we might interpret as meaning "lived." And these might be superimposed upon the ambiguities that the conventional word "light" allows: when divorced from syntactic context, the word fluctuates between adjective and noun. And the varying meanings of "light" as adjective inhere as well.

None of these puns is, for me, as fulfilling as the working together of meanings in "eyeye." And each is somewhat unsatisfying, inasmuch as it solves the problem with which we are presented when we first look at "lighght." The very difficulty of sounding the poem reminds us — in a way that the ease of "eyeye" does not, because it moves this difficulty to the background — that one way of thinking ambiguity, uncertainty, and undecidability is in terms of impossibility. And the impossibility of reading interests me, not least because it problematizes the dominance of voice in our culture. But also because it confounds the most fundamental levels of interpretation. The verb "to read" means to interpret, but before it means interpretation, it implies a sounding that "lighght" has certainly complicated. Or, to return to Silliman's phrasing, "lighght" "sits there on the page," but doing so is doing something.

[NOTE: if you decide to read UbuWeb's reprinting of Saroyan's text, be aware that they've misspelled "lighght" as "lightght," a fact Saroyan has mentioned here. I mention this not to prevent the accusation that I've misread the poem, but to point to the difficulty of even transcribing the poem — a testament to what we might, variously, call its confounding poetics, or its poetics of impossibility.]

[ADDENDUM: There's another sense in which "lighght" does more than "sit ... there on the page." Silliman clearly intends to describe the poem qua poem — as it is on the page, if you will — but "lighght" has another life off the page that is worth mention. The poem became part of a decades-long controversy when it was discovered to have been awarded an NEA grant. "lighght" is regularly referenced in critiques of government arts subsidies, though usually without mention of its author, and has been referenced in the Senate as recently as 1997, by such luminaries as Jesse Helms (according to Saroyan) and John Ashcroft (according to the Congressional Record).]

Prosodic bodies

2007-05-20T16:52:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

You keep coming back for more on Robert Kocik, don't you? Don't try to hide it — I've seen the report from Google Analytics. It's okay — I keep coming back to him, planning to write more. This will also allow me to elaborate on, and further develop, ideas I mentioned to you earlier.

"Every feature that is not meaning is prosody," Kocik writes in "Stressogony." An invitation, here, in this inclusive definition of "prosody": to acknowledge the limits of signification and reference as models of meaning, and to attend instead to gesture, to sound-as-sound, to the materiality of textual production (font choice, texture of paper, etc.). To attend, in other words, to that which exceeds meaning.

And, in the next breath, a dialectical turn: "in a fully prosodized world" — that is, a world properly attentive to everything outside the bounds of signification — "there is no feature that doesn't have meaning or can't be made to mean." That which exceeds meaning would seem to have returned as meaningful. But this return is a return with a difference; it has already passed through the first proposition.

To move these contradictions towards synthesis, then, is to note a suppressed pun at play here: what exceeds — exists beyond — meaning is simultaneously an excess — an abundance — of meaning. Once we allow ourselves to become aware of meaning's limits, we become aware of the potential for meaning that inheres in everything. Or: all is meaningful, but that meaning occurs outside the economic models (signification, reference — communication, even) according to which we typically regard meaning.

Kocik's concern is with imagining language otherwise, as initiative, rather than representational (mimetic) or presentational (performative). If his initiative language is attentive to its own "carnality" (as I used the term a while back), it also attentive to its function as incarnation: of knowledge, of "voices from the most distant past." As initiative, language is "that which is requisite for all things to appear."

What interests me here — in the final synthesis of meaning's excess and excess of meaning, and in incarnation — is ethics, particularly in terms of language's tangibility. Roland Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, writes:

Language is a skin: I rub myself against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.... I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.

Add emphasis, underscore "caress": Barthes' emphasis on skin rather than flesh — a subtle distinction, but nonetheless fundamental — allows us to apprehend language not only as (mere) pleasure, but as touch. And, as Susan Stewart has noted in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, touch involves a reciprocity that complicates and undermines — it presents itself as vertigo, as instability — the conventional binary relationship of subject and object, of self and other:

One hand or the other can be subect or object; one "I" or the other can take the position of the "you"; one speaker or the other can become the listener — indeed, each is waiting upon the other, anticipating the other.

But a poem is not contact with the other — Barthes' description of language aside — in the same way touch is. Rather, we might return to Barthes, to his account of the amorous gift, which shares with language a sense of "contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched. A third skin unites us." The question, then, is how to regard the poem as this "third skin" without, in so doing, limiting the poem to expression between individuals, between lover and beloved.

As I read it, Kocik's idea of a prosodic body — in its insistence on initiative, on reading meaning's excesses — opens the potential for poetry (or prosody, as he would have it) to be conceived in these ways.

[Sources: "Stressogony" and "The Prosodic Body" by Robert Kocik. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart.

Thom Donovan, over at Wild Horses of Fire, has also addressed the connection between Kocik's work and ethics.]

discomfit • surrender

2007-05-19T23:26:00.000-04:00

not, or no fit er for
t he h ear t

this: as in ease, as
in Her same was Surrender

to return, to tear

up • of a bird: gloomily, to yield
to d well • with the wings

up • is not elegant
do-si-does, does she?

And how close she clings
and how

how • with rapture melt e

[From a sequence I've been working on for some time, entitled "In Very Variant." The challenge here was to adapt the form to the layout necessitated by Blogger, which doesn't allow for a scatter of words across the "page." Sources include Merrian-Webster's 10th Collegiate.]

To hazard (a chance meeting)

2007-05-16T19:14:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

I like to leave off and then I like to return to what I've left. What's interesting about this return is that what I've left never seems quite the same as it was. John Cage's performance of "Water Walk" on I've Got a Secret is a meeting between the avant garde and a sitcom, as I wrote yesterday. What interests me now, in this different (and stormy) light, is the complexity of the performance's juxtaposition of the avant garde and the televisual.

As Joan Retallack explains in "Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2," Cage's aesthetic practice aims towards a "heightened awareness" that "delight[s] in the graceful, anarchic harmonies of nonintentional configurations of sounds and sights." Cage notes (and Retallack quotes): "Music is about changing the mind — not to understand, but to be aware." There is for the composer a social goal, of "bring[ing] about some kind of change" that is at once political and ethical (these two categories are not separate for Cage).

For Retallack, this is best described by "the French notion of jouissance, a playful erotics of informed sensuality." Roland Barthes' formulation of jouissance (for which, of course, there is no adequate English translation) regards it as fundamentally different from mere pleasure in that it is based in transgression and rupture. Jouissance does not "content" us. Jouissance "discomforts" and "unsettles ... historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language," as well as meaning.

The jouissance in Cage's "Water Walk" comes from its invitation for us to rethink our daily lives: it encourages us to regard quotidian objects as musical instruments, to think about the range of sounds that could be produced by a pressure cooker, a vase of roses, etc. And it further suggests we rethink assumptions regarding the categories of noise & music, of the everyday & art. That the arrangement of musical objects resembles the set for a sitcom's representation of domesticity — that I'm inclined to call it a set at all, rather than an orchestra, or instrument — invites us, given that the piece was scored "for solo television performer," to rethink televisual representations of domesticity. This is the subversion his performance performs: by bringing the avant garde to the space of game show and sitcom, Cage encourages us to listen to the slapstick's slap, and to rethink it as composition.

At the same time, Cage's composition is attended by a great risk. Writing an radical avant garde composition for television confronts the danger that the radical message might be overwhelmed and subsumed by the medium. Instead of encouraging the audience to actively rethink their relationship to television, the composition might be reduced to nothing more than slapstick comedy, worthy, despite the (playful) seriousness with which the show's host frames the performance, of no more thought than a particularly unusual episode of Leave it to Beaver, a show noted neither for its radical transformation of consciousness, nor its critique of our society's bad habits of thought.

I assume Cage was aware of this risk — it's just that I'm not sure the performance survives it intact.

[Sources include two essays by Joan Retallack: "Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2" and "Poethics of a Complex Realism," both in her Poethical Wager (U. of California Press, 2003). I also used the Richard Miller translation of Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text, published by Hill and Wang (1973).]

"If you are amused, you may laugh..."

2007-05-15T20:01:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

Our comrades at WFMU have posted an incredibly entertaining — and touching — video of John Cage on an episode of the game show I've Got a Secret back in 1960.

He performs "Water Walk," a composition scored for "solo television performer," and played on a variety of instruments, listed in a whisper into the ear of the show's host, and displayed on screen for the at-home audience:

a Water Pitcher
an Iron Pipe
a Goose Call
a Bottle of Wine
an Electric Mixer
a Whistle
a Sprinkling Can
Ice Cubes
2 Cymbals
a Mechanical Fish
a Quail Call
a Rubber Duck
a Tape Recorder
a Vase of Roses
a Seltzer Siphon
5 Radios
a Bathtub

and
a
GRAND PIANO

According to the John Cage Database, the piece's score consists of diagrams showing a floorplan for the layout of the above objects, a partial sequence of actions to be performed with said objects, and the instruction: "start watch and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score."

I assume that it is obvious why I consider this interesting — but why did I describe it as "touching"? Two moments in particular strike me so:

• When the host, after stressing that Cage is "take[n] ... seriously as a composer," says to the composer: "inevitably — these are nice people, but — some of 'em are gonna laugh. Is that all right?" To which Cage replies: "I consider laughter preferable to tears."

• Cage's adorably goofy grin at the conclusion of his performance.

Cage's statement about his preference for laughter over tears — which I take to be representative of a significant facet of his work — gets almost as big a laugh as some of the most delightful and surprising moments of the performance itself, and allows the composer to graciously and gracefully demonstrate that experimentation and humor are not incommensurate. As Joan Retallack explains in "Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2": "According to Cage the proper response to art is 'merely' to delight in it with heightened awareness, to experience the reflexive humor of the figure/ground shift."

What's at stake in Cage's performance is recontextualization: the sounds we ignore and treat as background are shifted to the foreground when re-presented as music. It allows us, along with the live studio audience, to recognize our world as melodic rather than noisy. We laugh because we are delighted; we are delighted — and I'm paraphrasing Retallack here, if loosely — not only because what we see and hear are unexpected, but because our expecations and our understanding of a false music/noice dichotomy are troubled.

Cage's performance of "Water Walk" — and it is important to remember that it was specifically created for a televisual context — complicates the matter, adding another shift between figure and ground. As I watch it for a third time, I'm struck by the ways the performance works within its medium. The layout of instruments/objects resembles an absurdly cramped apartment in which bathroom, kitchen, and living room overlap, and Cage's movements between the various objects recall those of C. C. Baxter in The Apartment. Add the laughter of the live studio audience, and the avant garde — framed by the show's host as serious, as "controversial" and as recipient of reviews "not entirely favorable" — finds common ground with slapstick sit-comedy.

[ADDENDUM: if WFMU's format doesn't work with your internet-watching contraption, here's a YouTube link. Now you can no longer say I never gave you anything.

Joan Retallack's "Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2" is available in her The Poethical Wager, published by U. of California Press in 2003.]

[To look, to stand]

2007-05-14T00:07:00.000-04:00

To look, to stand — a place
where pause is made, or

where one stands nearer. How
closely, near touching, tangles:

silver than — danger
than — foster than — harbor

than most dearly and troubled.
None that say swollen. None

that say whistles. None that
say wand'ring. None that say

bramble, and none
that say nothing at all. No —

slipped and squalled and no
nearer than that.

[ADDENDUM: My use of this blog has demonstrated that I'm unable to leave a poem alone once I've put it up. As such I've decided to start recording my edits — like errata slips, but where the errata described are my own, rather than a publisher's.

In this instance:

• the last sentence (in the final three lines) was added a few minutes after publication.

• the positions of "harbor" and "danger" have been reversed

• in the last sentence, "No" was earlier "O."

• line breaks have been revised; the end words before the afternoon of 5/14 were: is | nearer. | tangles: | foster | dearly | None | wand'- | none | slipped | that.]

The mouth, that "channel of vocal utterance"

2007-05-13T21:21:00.000-04:00

Mouth, from the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1889-1991)

— - — - — - —

[An excerpt from Vocal Sounds by Edward Search (1773):]

If on pronouncing u psilon you change to "au" you will find your under jaw drop, and your lips expand in a nearly circular form; if from thence to "o," you will find the corners of your lips draw in so as to turn into an oval; if to "u," you will find the orifice still more contracted, and the lips a little thrust forwards, the tongue in all these three operations lying close at the bottom of the mouth; if from thence you pass to "a," the lips at the corners will widen so as to form the long diameter of an ellipsis, the jaw remaining as before, and the tongue rising and spreading a very little; the transition thence to "e," is effected only by raising the hinder part of the tongue in the manner you did for an "h," and that to "i," by throwing the tongue into a convex, corresponding with the hollow roof of the mouth.

Pay Attention!

2007-05-11T23:48:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

Do you remember "Walking & Falling" by Laurie Anderson? You can find it on the album Big Science, if you've forgotten. And I hope you will want to remember by the time you finish reading this letter to you.

It's a song I've been interested in for some time — since I was in college, since the century before the one in which I write today — and that I think informs, and may in fact have sparked, my attention to the activity of language. Her lyrics don't deal with speech or its organs, but do deal with the minutae — the unconscious minutae, that is — of quotidean action, in this case, walking. Her analysis of the mechanisms of walking deal in paradox. Furthermore, it suggests faith, not of a religious nature (though this may in fact inform her account), but of a more material variety:

You're walking. And you don't always realize it
but you're always falling,
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then you catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you're falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time.

The simple act of walking, something most of us do without reflection, turns out to involve rescue, and defiance of gravity.

What's at stake in this — and I know that's what you want me to tell you, now — is attention, which is, for me, one of the primary goals of poetry. Not mere awareness; attention is more careful. And not research — though attention doesn't preclude, or reject, a scholarly approach, and is in fact the basis for good examples thereof — but rather the heightening of awareness of the relation between self and world, where world can refer to the material around us (in the most literal sense of the world material), and/or the social orders that shape our consciousness.

If awareness is fundamental to critique, it is also key to concern, which is, in turn, the basis for ethics. And awareness of activity in particular reminds us that the world is not static. It is not adequately described with nouns, but with verbs.

[P.S. — If Anderson's emphasis on the body's action fascinates you as it does me, look also at Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget. Or listen to it here.]

Observations

2007-05-10T00:19:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

The aspect of evolution that makes it interesting — as a model of (natural) history, of change, and of being — is that it rejects the following ideas: design, progress, linearity, and conclusion. That is: evolution doesn't assume a pre-existing plan, nor does it assume that a given moment is necessarily an improvement over those that preceded it, or with which it shares its space. It doesn't presume that a particular development is final, that it constitutes a "coming into its own" or a "maturity."

All of this is to say that this blog is undergoing an evolution of sorts. It's beginning was clear, and clearly stated a design. But this design — to write a poem a day for a month — built into itself its own endpoint, which has passed. The blog has exceeded its own purpose, its own plan. And yet it persists.

As good evolutionary scientists, we can't know how this evolution will unfold, and we can't say with any certainty that it improves upon its earlier variety. We can't know if its new traits are evolutionary dead-ends, and we don't know what changes to the environment will alter the blog's needs, or what specific adaptations may be required.

We can only observe; all else is speculation, like staking a claim, or playing the futures market. It's an act of faith I'm not willing to participate in at present — the risk of "OR BUST" is too significant. So we'll stick with observations. We can observe an increase in the number of letters written to you, dear reader, have increased. We can note that the blog's focus seems to be poetics, rather than poetry. And we can observe that the blog no longer presents a new poem every day, though some do persist. They seem to be, for the most part, vestigial. These poems might have no function but to occasionally break when sat upon too hard, or to become inflamed and burst.

I, for one, look forward to that explosion.

ADDENDUM — It is worth note, as part of this report on the state of the blog, that This Cruellest Month is the first Google hit for the following phrases:
- French postcard meaning
- ixnayed and ogled

Addendum: Honolulu

2007-05-09T17:59:00.000-04:00

So we hula-hooped and longly. Lurking
in a circle. I um and I rained, ixnayed and
ogled.

Flip the front flap slip-and-slides across
the flingers.

Everything is tell-tale, goaling along
smoothly along. Was neither strained nor
sliding, nor golden, nor hackneyed and
flushed. Sidled up and down. Everything
was meteors after midnight.

Appendix (the letter L)

2007-05-08T00:47:00.000-04:00

L, as in:

salt. battle. sold. saddle. coolness. channel. lily. loose. shield. feel. real. reel. ideal. deal. vial. vile. would. alms. salmon. half. talk. folk. trouble. handled. struggling. awfully. pool. fiddle. like. canal. fall. full. tell. bell. foul. fool. prowl. growl. foal.

— - — - — - —

[From An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster (1828):]

L, the twelfth letter of the English Alphabet, is usually denominated a semi-vowel, or a liquid. It represents an imperfect articulation, formed by placing the tip of the tongue against the gum that incloses the roots of the upper teeth; but the sides of the tongue not being in close contact with the roof of the mouth, the breath of course not being entirely intercepted, this articulation is attended with an imperfect sound…

— - — - — - —

[From "The Poetical Alphabet" by Benjamin Paul Blood (1879):]

L is the chilling and polishing letter…. L, by itself, makes all clear, lucid, placid, liquid; it is the polish of glow, gleam, glide, glassy, glance, glitter, etc. The l lends the cold, metallic quality to the solidity of lead; it gives lustre and ring to silver, as the r roughens and darkens iron.

— - — - — - —

[From "A Checklist: The Alphabet of the Mind," by Velimir Khlebnikov (1916). Note that Paul Schmidt's translation of this material, necessarily relies on transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet of the author's original Russian.]

Л [L] is the conversion of motion from motion along a line to motion over an area transverse to it that intersects the path of the motion. L = the square root of -1. Lob [forehead], laty [armor], lyzhi [skis], lodka [boat], let [flight], luzha [pond] (the motion of weight), lava [cavalry charge], i.e., a laterally extended formation.

— - — - — - —

[From Khlebnikov's "Let us consider two words" (1912):]

L indicates that the distance between the comprehending mind and the object comprehended has decreased: the object leans toward or clings to [l'net] the individual.

L is the motion of a point that derives from its own force.

The active voice, where the actor embraces [l'net] the action is based on the letter l of let [lift, flight]…

So les [forest], which reaches for the sky and arbitrarily increases its distance from everything immobile, from the perceiving consciousness, independently of that consciousness, begins with the letter l…. So we can establish l as a marker for self-instigated motion toward an immobile point.

The letter l everywhere begins words describing self-initiating actions that cut through what surrounds them.

L refers to those motions where the cause of motion is a moving point.

L is the reduction of distance as an action caused by the force of a motionless body.

— - — - — - —

[From "The Warrior of the Kingdom," also by Khlebnikov:]

Л [L]—the uncontrolled movement of a great force of freedom (time past).

[A set of addenda to yesterday's post, designed to give a sense of the range of approaches to language's carnality, and to the symbolism that can be applied to a single sound.]

Language's Carnality (a French postcard)

2007-05-07T18:43:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

I was hoping — hoping against hope, I suppose, as my hope came to no fruition — that you were also planning to attend the reading/talk held by Robert Kocik and Jonathan Skinner at the Peace on A reading series in Alphabet City. Since I failed to see you there, I assume you failed to attend. Of course, assumptions are sometimes wrong: you may have sat in the back, behind me, towards the kitchen. You may have left the room before I turned around. I, often a failure at the art of recognizing, may have failed to understand your face as familiar, as yours, dear reader, dearest mine. Maybe this is so, and maybe you saw what I saw, heard what I heard; this is my hope.

I bring this up now, in this peculiarly still silence, because some of Kocik's ideas were relevant to — gave voice to, if we can say such a thing without sounding our naïvety — some ideas I've been too exhausted to formulate or raise since we spoke last, last week. I mentioned then that "I often start with sound." I mentioned, and you, as in a silent response, raised your eyebrows into little question marks. I should not — and I'll admit it now, and in no uncertain terms — have used the term "sound" simply, as though it could mean what I wanted it to mean, as though it could mean more than it means. I meant more than mere sound, something more than the rush of syllables. I referred to "labiodental fricatives," "sibilants," and "the liquid L," drawing upon a linguistic vocabulary, as though doing so could speak for me.

This linguistic vocabulary interests me, with its attention to language's sound; I hope it will interest you, too. It gives voice to the qualities of these sounds we use when we mean. And it, in certain cases, at least, describes the manner with which language's sound is made. "Labiodental fricative" describes not only a noise distinct from other noises, human-made and meaningful; it also describes the manner in which the sound is made. Here, we draw teeth to lips, and breathe across the space — a space that is not created, per se, but obstructed. There is a scrape to the sound we draw as an F or and f. And we can give voice to this breath, as when we hum v's vibration into air.

"Isn't it remarkable" — Kocik asks this in "The Prosodic Body" — "that the acoustic fact 'd' can build diverse meanings while tapping at the same place on the alveolar ridge and sending forth the same frequency with the same physiological impact time after time?" When he asks this, Kocik touches on the ideas that I've been trying to explain to you for days, and that I am telling you now, right now. Kocik's desire is to situate meaning within each of the sounds that constitute language — to reinvent (for it would necessitate a reinvention) our understanding and use of English to allow us to regard each of these sounds as meaning-full, even before they are built into words. But I'm rushing ahead of myself, into a terrain better saved for a later letter...

What I am trying, by citing Kocik's work, to remind you — and what he is explaining in a vocabulary different from the one I am able to fully employ — is that meaning, at least inasmuch as it exists within language, is located in the body before it is located anywhere else, be it page or mind. But I'd like to — and I'd like to do this without detracting from Kocik's assessment of sound, if that is possible — shift our attention from the sound itself to those actions that precede and facilitate and allow the sound to come into being. He calls 'd' an "acoustic fact," but I'd call it a physical one first.

Call it langauge's carnality. Perhaps you know what I mean: before syllable or sound, before an explosion of the breath can become phoneme or letter, the tongue's tip flips from teeth to the alveolar ridge, raised and bony just behind those pearly whites, before it drops down so its back can raise and close the throat while the mouth is already closing to let breath — which has been a part of this process from the beginning, and through to the end — hiss. Tongue back up and down again, so lips can close and explode outward like a gasp in reverse and miniature... Feel, don't hear, what Dante says. Read silently, even. You need not read his Italian correctly — mouth it: "Quando leggemmo il disïato riso / esser baciato da cotanto amante, / questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, / la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante."

Let me give you another example — Noah Webster's definitions, in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), of lip:

LIP, n. [Sax. lippa, lippe; D. lip; G. Dan. lippe; … L. labium, labrum; It. labbro; Sp. labio; Fr. levre; Ir. clab or liobhar; … It may be connected with W. llavaru, Ir. labhraim, to speak, that is, to thrust out. The sense is probably a border.]
1. The edge or border of the mouth. The lips are two fleshy or muscular parts, composing the exterior of the mouth in man and many other animals. In man, the lips, which may be opened or closed at pleasure, form the covering of the teeth, and are organs of speech essential to certain articulations. Hence the lips, by a figure, denote the mouth, or all the organs of speech, and sometimes speech itself.

LIP, v.t. To kiss.

Webster's "at pleasure" seems crucial, if not to his purposes, then to my own. Lips slips from the liquid to an explosion of breath, eases in a relaxed and hissing rush. I've suggested you — or I, or we — call this pleasure language's carnality. And, in so calling it, shift attention from sound to the activity — fleshy, muscular, breathy, and tooth-sharp — by which language is made. And, in so calling it, identify a locus of physical pleasure that, in my estimation, is located outside of meaning. Locate it on meaning's hither side; place it prior to meaning. This pleasure is meaning's, and language's, excess. What I mean is this: that this carnality — this pleasure of the flesh — happens before meaning takes its shape, as sound or as process of signification. The pleasure in language's carnality does not return to, nor is it reduced by, the utterance that produces it. It's insistence on — or striving for, or what have you — meaning does not detract from the experience of this pleasure. It is not bound by the economy of communication, though it is at once essential and intrinsic to our speech.

I locate poetry at this interstice of body and language — of flesh, sound, meaning.

Perhaps... Wait. Let us interrupt our communication to take a moment to reflect on the close of that word — perhaps the way the mouth draws to a close after perhaps widening to let the breath flee in an h, only to spring open again for s's slip, perhaps a surprise. Perhaps we cannot let our attention to this carnality get the better of us. We cannot live out our days in this trembling. Like Dante, we must swoon — not "as if in death," but into meaning.

[ADDENDUM: I've made a few alterations to this entry, as the mood has struck, and as I have decided certain elements have merited minor modification and/or addition. I've also added an appendix that examines, through the work of several writers, a single verbal sound, both in terms of the physiology of its pronunication and its (potential and speculative) symbolism.]

from a very Valentine out of season

2007-05-05T23:00:00.000-04:00

iv

some L does two does it twice; bar r—a sucret—you
have a secret. double, then miniature slips [of paper].
a breath, a breath and a vocal breath: coming up, for
air. does

xiii

intreat>A’lure>intice : com –pell/-e hither spel’t
in k, but with face turned—as january. 1. Silence; 2.
Secrecy [sting of pearls. . .help, help]; 3. Pleasur
inornat. (/[L]ike this): sugared catch’s reflect light,
pierce together flesh (a mystery ’s viewed thro’
small—explicit—o-penning

[These weren't new the other day when I put them up. They weren't new when I deleted the post by mistake. They are new now, somehow.]

Index (belated)

2007-05-04T20:34:00.000-04:00

By way of taking stock of the past month, I present an index of the serial projects I wrote for NaPoWriMo. I should have put this up a few days ago, but, as the blog is currently undergoing an evolution of sorts (and with uncertain results), I didn't get to it until now.

Declarations
— Parts 1-3
— Parts 4-6
— Parts 7-10
— Part 11

For instances
— "Letting the sun set is not my own" (after Brian Schorn)
— "And noises have no other" (after Gertrude Stein)
— "Stranger, I had words for dinner" (after Jack Spicer)
— "Come shadow, come, and take this shadow up" (after Louis Zukofsky)
— "Sweet ekes / of soft drips" (after Lorine Niedecker)
— "Oh would I were where I would be" (after an anonymous ballad/nursery rhyme)
— "Oh would I were where I would be, continued"
— "Rasp we also heard it / was / called" (after Nathaniel Mackey)
— "As for we who love to be astonished" (after Lyn Hejinian)
— "...abandon syntax as a lark..." (after Bruce Andrews)

Translations of O'Hara's "Qu'est-ce que de nous!"
— "After O'Hara"
— "Having Another Go"
— "Once More, With Feeling"
— "Doing a Double Take With You"
— "Over and Over Again"
— "Turning and Returning"
— "Do Over a Ditto"
— "A Final Translation"

Difficult pleasures

2007-05-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that I'm a bit late in realizing this, but /ubu editions has a new series of reprinted and/or new books available in .pdf format. For those not in the know, each of the three series provides a sampling of avant garde and "post-avant" writing. It's a good way to familiarize yourself with the terrain, if you're in need of a field guide. For free. Or to read something within a tradition that already feels cozy, if that describes you. Also for free.

I haven't had a chance to peruse any of this as thoroughly as I'd like, but will do so soon; I'll likely comment a bit here...

In the meantime, check it out!

A letter to you

2007-05-02T13:08:00.000-04:00

Dearest reader:

Maybe we met last night for a drink. Maybe you were too shy to talk to me at all, preferring instead to blush, or to avert your gaze. But it could be that, after one drink had turned to more-than-one drink, you asked me to comment on the poem I posted for May Day. Maybe you were curious — about why I didn't comment on my process in writing the poem, about why I didn't list sources, about whether this failure to comment represented something about the process by which poem came into being. Maybe. Maybe, you thought, it's a more conventional poem than my others?

Whatever you meant, I didn't answer. I'm sorry if you were offended. But I resolved — silently — to wait and answer the question in the public of writing, which I'm doing now, and which you're reading now, too.

Let's start by saying that, in a sense, you're right — the poem is an off-the-cuff improvisation. It's not a procedural poem. I didn't begin writing it with a set of rigid rules and source texts from which the final results were shaped, or built, or sculpted, or held together with tape and glue. But before you get ahead of yourself, lean in close, so I can whisper something else in your ear: I also didn't begin by saying "I want to write a poem that says...," or even (in this case) "a poem that means..." Nor was I trying to convey a particular emotion or feeling. I'm sorry if I mislead you then, so I'll say now that the poem isn't a communique, memo, manifesto, love letter, or declaration.

Now, I say "improvisation" — you hear "stream of consciousness." But that's not it, either. (Isn't it funny how our attempts to communicate are always marked by misdirection, by crossed signals, by breakdown?) Call the poem's process "stream of idiom," maybe, or "stream of discourse," if you want. I'm not committed to a particular label, here. But I am trying to trouble assumptions — not yours, but our culture's — about writing's roles and functions. Let me explain: we usually assume that using language implies communication, don't we? And that communication, in turn, implies that the phrase or sentence or line begins with a particular and stable author, who is trying to tell you something, like I'm doing now, or to get you to submit to his or her wildest and most moist fantasies.

Rest assured — this poem doesn't want those things. It's activities are located within, and relative to, its language, not its author. There's no hidden message that I buried there for you to diligently decode or unravel.

Like I said, the poem — the one we're talking about, not "the poem" as a category — is neither a communique nor a love letter. Nor did I begin with set rules or specified sources. So how did I write it? Gertrude Stein somewhere talks about enjoying "the feeling of words doing as they want to do." The act of writing as letting words, for want of better words, do things. That has a lot to do with it — I've learned quite a bit from Stein over the years. So I often start with sound. I like the way its patterns thump and thud and slide and roll. Lately, I like labiodental fricatives and sibilants, and the ways they mix with the liquid L. So I sound out, remembering that "to sound" is also "to measure."

Then, I borrow. I know — I didn't list sources, so you thought there were none. I'll list them now, so you can see: American-English idiom, transcriptions of the hand movements in the ASL lexicon, shamelessly bad puns and homophonic translation, William Shakespeare, and things overheard on the television. I should also say that, either despite or because of my love of sound, I mishear quite often. I miscopy, too. And I didn't begin with a plan to use these sources — that's why I didn't list them. I picked them up, objets trouvés, as I found them, and moved on to another scavenger hunt, and me without a map to retrace my steps. Even if you needed to know, even if our very lives depended, I couldn't always tell you where I trouvé-ed 'em.

Dear reader — dearest — I can imagine the look on your face, right now, as I write these things. Because facial expressions are sometimes keys to the innermost thoughts, I can guess at what you're thinking right now. Maybe you think I mean to say that I reject meaning, or poetic meaning. But I don't. What I am saying, though, is that I don't write a poem with the intent of conveying a particular meaning. Meaning, in the sort of poems that I have been writing for the past while, is more like an experience than a message; it's a collaboration between you, reader, and the poems themselves. An ethics of reading, if you want to call it that, or an unfolding process. Like origami in reverse, if you want to be cute.

It's the same with feeling. If it makes you feel any better, I can admit that I feel quite a bit when I write. Surprise, pleasure, a sort of melancholy we might call "sweet sorrow." Whole ranges of emotion, Tehachapis and Alps of feeling. Like Stein, I feel, and like the feeling of, "words doing as they want to do," and so I let them do. And I feel my tongue in my mouth — and that matters, too. But I don't mean to make you feel anything. It's not that I don't care, dear reader. I do. It's just that I'd rather you tell me what you feel when you read. That's a collaboration, too, and a process. Sunsets don't want us to feel anything, they don't mean to make us sentimental, or melancholy. They don't want us to fall in love, or to make our hero ride horseback into the west. But they do, and we do.

And that's what I do.

[A lotta lottery]

2007-05-02T12:57:00.000-04:00

A lotta lottery, Kemosabe! Gotta they go and they
stop. So hundred I gotta burn my life. Forgot a lot
of earth, forget a lot of this. Make my shoe size,
shoe-sized shoe ain't gonna do my time, but you
do. A blah-blah-blah wish that sings.

Open up and open wide — six or seven words I
used to know in syllables and spades. Two times
the notion — two times the two and twice. It's a
good got, my paper — it was turned around and
weighty. Over there and over again.

Yeah, I could've swollen a sure surrender, a short
shot. Heat up the blow-drier, I'm on my way home.

Mayday!

2007-05-01T10:46:00.000-04:00

All's as well. Seashore meets the horizon and
Descartes smiles. Wide as miles. Cooler fridge
spells disaster, a type of flower that either is or
is not edible, depending on your hover and how-
ever. Slight of a slow block holds the rain off.
We're backs and sidled. Remember that every
floor pushes downward.

Lonely is a special kind of rolling — a tuck-and-
roll, with a twist. An x twirls at the side of the
eye. Or you could break your ankle and lose your
mind. The hands burst apart — something bright-
ly shining. Sometimes, we collect flowers from
hissings and eros. See — trouble!

[It's May Day, so it's time for a parade! Roll out your nuclear missles and your cults of personality...]

For instances ("...abandon syntax as a lark...")

2007-04-30T22:45:00.000-04:00

i

Slipping lark-wise. Syntax
is body — it's dial syntax, people

syntax, ticklish to my ship. Your
body is could nor sometime

out for glish or a signal.
A verb with lower parts do

the very or warm. Exactly
purse and pray precisely. When

numbing it right, order
parts, the first not there.

ii

There's blue — may
the chips fall in numbers. And

we went, there
of a however. We

go — up like abandon —
loop low by lures, low

as larks. Look still and scribbled
to mouthing company. And

I was sparky and lost, and I
was not a verb. My

May bed — hackneyed and flushed
— it's the morn or sometime.

iii

O the sky I conquer
to the flames forms all

beyond — flunges. The thing
that out a sight does feature.

[An "instance" in which I begin with a portion of a line from Bruce Andrews. The full sentence, from I Don't Have Any Paper, So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) is: "Bugs inspect the abandon syntax as a lark — sudden pockets pout end duly drought" (61).

I picked this passage because Andrews' work has been particularly important to me, and because this line (or portion of a line, rather) nearly sums up his poetic practice, focused as it is on an "abandon syntax." But for Andrews, this practice isn't a "lark" — on the contrary, his treatment of "syntax as a demolition derby" works to "both construct and disrupt [the] social order," and to "suggest a social undecidability" (as he puts it in "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis").]

For instances ("As for we who 'love to be astonished'")

2007-04-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

i

In a two as yours, from
ever those rose — ever

the pairing upons. Two
openings out — a flicker from

the eyes have caused
and sky surprised. All there

those visible words become
as wounds be ever in, only

for as fair as fire.

ii

It was poured. It was
the sacred in was. It

was lost, though,
for found again. Hope —

love loose and lovely,
let for language long

ago. Langour sames
no lips. Fitter

with becauses, of
coursed and swollen.

The winds came, and
the me they affect. I know

for a clock, I next the pull
around you, sure

as torpedoes.

[Yet another in the "For instances" sequence, this one stemming from a line that recurs throughout Lyn Hejinian's My Life.]

A True Poem

2007-04-28T22:07:00.000-04:00

i

Scrunch purple! I've
pudding on panties. Snug!

My hobo name's Brushfires
Andy — seriously! My *other*
name's Chattahoochee. Luggle-
juggle dip droopy. Swedish
meats lick stud missles. Bad beets
mean good gravy — starslings
and lost lumplets.

Every dragon eats
a wizard; every wizard
is an elf.
Cobblers, each one.

ii

"Fel-leeeeeeni!"

Get that spurt
outta there!

I diddle butter better, bite
a whoop in ain't-it-good...
Crumpet fumbled un-
crushed boats. It's "on
porpoise!" Beerbelly
shake-up in a wakened town.
Oh, well. What's
the heck?

It's all gravy, glorious
and grody. To that maxi-pad, indeedy.

[Most of my poems are lies — beautiful lies that, as Dante says, cover the truth like veils. This poem, however, is true.]

For instances ("Rasp we also heard it / was / called")

2007-04-27T21:04:00.000-04:00

i

They grew to they, they
let varies vary

with ekes and alsos.
The bird a birds, a

so say, rasped
on odes. Sleeping

and double. And scrape
the dark, or wild

sounded has became
becomely call.

ii

Starbroar. We had our and
out — at land has bellow. Broom

— bunch nearing
a typo, nor the named. Was

noised in rushes. Gracious —
gracious and hardly. There

really follows a type of
first eyes, then into our

take, and treat, and harder.
Hustle-backed, they give

gooseberries to a god-damn.

iii

If there, thirsty — if
here, not the wents. They

have to has. They have
telephone and tightly.

All is not one night
names. All is able, ailing

to extra. Quart quart
quart and on, and truant

katydids.

[This installment of the "For instances" sequence is derived from a few lines of Nathaniel Mackey's "Song of the Andoumboulou: 50."

The first of my "instances," along with a general explanation of my approach in writing the sequence, can be found here. Other "instances" are here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

[O'Hara translation 8]

2007-04-26T23:48:00.002-04:00

I am off, and cut-out — could
keep inventing new words for

each click and bang of
throat and teeth. This

balmy heat of morning —
this thrum and tumble, rarer

and far furious. To slump
toward the lay of the land. We

part as the piece is. Long
as the luck is. Surely as

the dream is mended. And I
go ooh! enough.

[My last translation of O'Hara's "Qu'est-ce que de nous!"]

For instances ("O would I were where I would be," continued)

2007-04-25T20:10:00.000-04:00

iii

Ne'er did sky and
water grace. Again. To sing

as sing were many — we
were what words were not

be: slippered, and startled,
drank and drawling. We called

— - — - —

things by wrong names,
reiterant and rolling. To coin

and carry. Things came out
dots — only and woes. End-

ing with sky, and beginning.

iv

We were where whole
words weren't — we carried

them on our backs, and slept
on them as sheets. Many

— - — - —

appeared, and many
candled about below. Never

did sky, slung low
as loaded.

[A continuation of yesterday's entry in my "For instances" series; explanation and context are here. The rest of the sequence can be found here, here, here, here and here.]

For instances ("O would I were where I would be!")

2007-04-24T07:44:00.000-04:00

i

Weary at words — ceased
where go cannot go —

in a secret babble. Many
a hazard, and many O

— - — - —

arcs to Orion, sad-ohs for
shadows' throb. Dots. We

syllabled and lay — low,
dispersed, and weary.

ii

were wind led by wind,
invisible or infinite —

delights but thus parted
when departed — all

kind of vapors, bested

— - — - —

— all goods point night

[Another of the "For instances" sequence; others and explanation are here, here, here, here and here.

The source text in this "instance" is a poem — variously identified as a nursery rhyme, or as an English ballad titled "Suspiria" — that first came to my attention as the epigraph to Susan Howe's Western Borders. If the rhyme's attention to subtle-yet-significant shifts of sound and meaning — and the close unfolding and folding-in of its minimal vocabulary — resonate with Howe's interest in "the articulation of sound forms," they bear a similar correspondence with Gertrude Stein's work.]

[O'Hara translation 7]

2007-04-23T20:57:00.002-04:00

These expressions amuse
me. Tremulous, and graced. They

do things to things' others. As:
to fall a saying, to slump

an ogle, to groan an
only, to if a whether. Did

every plummet sound? Direr
and dearer than that, even. I

should have studied
each tiniest word — cast-

off and cut-out. "How simply
it sounds as it sounds," and easy.

Some suddenly, it hooted,
and suddenly, it parted.

Suddenly, it startles.

[Material in quotes comes from Gertrude Stein's "What is English Literature," the first text in Lectures in America.]

For instances ("Sweet ekes / of soft drips")

2007-04-22T17:38:00.000-04:00

i

It's is and it and
soft-cut sense. Paper

pets peek — a dry lace
and as well. Their floors

whole were coming
common — oft liquid

to eking and sweep. Of a
put and a part, all

of lens and discolor. Bone
down bone eyed.

ii

O lobster requit it
or quiet. Thumb's song — sweet

and claps. Summeried in thrillings
of and space. Lots of cradle

to so beef. Tango
book — tango scans. Soft

puddings and commonkeys!

iii

If the words that test
shake — if a gone water

orbit. During a good ever b,
and more, of our

mute mouth. Chills! The sweet taste
of a sauce; her hand — melons.

Tame fancies, tame cables —
and heavy wind howl, or fro', or do.

[Another of the "For instances" sequence, this time derived from two lines in Lorine Niedecker's "Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous." Others — and explanation — are here, here, here, and here.]

[Ooh!]

2007-04-21T23:58:00.000-04:00

Ooh! — this clattering heart, these
tense verbs. Really — we dozed

the taunt in a heck; typed
a dub, Joe. Sleeply in the near go slow,

slowly in an undertow. — Best
one ever! — Wait along the nighttime

and wand'ring. Every
lost a little, and every drop

a danger, every sight a sailing, and
every floor a falling, and every

walk a silken, and every whole
a hardly and every straight

a seashore and every.

[O'Hara translation 6]

2007-04-20T20:24:00.003-04:00

Reckless and disorderly — in nonpareils
and pearls, paste. Grrr! You are lurid,

untenable as bric-a-brac: "ellipses —
As for example the ellipse of the half moon,"

a single glass swan, a knife
and spoon, paper cut-outs and cockatoos.

Oppress me! — just a little bit —
in the sunrise or set. Whatever.

Here we are, in the calm, cool, and
collected, swatting flies with

fronds, etc. This slap-and-tickle, these
pushes-and-pulls — that will

suffice. Your dimples, and so forth.

[Quoted material comes from "Six Significant Landscapes" by Wallace Stevens. The objects in the couplet that follows come by way of Joseph Cornell.]

[O'Hara translation 5]

2007-04-19T20:45:00.002-04:00

This heart, with its crickets'
rhythm, has had enough. It is this

and it's that: marks and angels
invisible, on paper where the lemon's

spilled. "A lemon that the reader could cut
or squeeze or taste—a real lemon

like a newspaper." He whispers — she
whispers — they whisper: a cause,

the opportunity, all acts that contribute
to human welfare, each other.

And here — a lonely kind
of encounter — there

have been three or four. The wide
world's shadow, cast up into

the more and more — I recall
those things and hold

my breath, and sweat.

[Material in quotes comes from Jack Spicer's letter to Lorca's ghost, published in After Lorca.]

Declarations (11)

2007-04-19T20:34:00.000-04:00

11

I am enough to the other. I am the left of you, with
lower. I am other and take, inhale the heart. I feel
that on a never. I double, lips resembling little. I do
not alone. I stress no one my drums. I had meaning.
I do not know this. I do not slake the never. I am the
sky if a book is of loving. I am all words.

[Context for this poem, along with the first three in the sequence, can be found here. The comments for that post include an exhaustive list of sources. Parts four through six are here; parts seven through ten are over there.]

[O'Hara translation 4]

2007-04-18T19:38:00.002-04:00

A sigh for these sights, for this
dangerous landscape, with plains,

trees, and cataracts — a tear. I am next
to myself, am flicking my wrist

in the moon-/June- light, now
murdered. The wind abates me,

averts me, turns sorrow to an embrace
or something. See, saw, sang, song,

sunk! This light's of poetry like a dollar's
of gas, and I am no longer

entertained by the calm allure
of the west (palm trees and swimming

pools!), the earth's lazy loops
toward the lay of the land.

[Other translations are here, here, and here. The original can be found on page 258 of O'Hara's Collected Poems.]

[O'Hara translation 3]

2007-04-17T19:06:00.002-04:00

Quiet as all get-out. No
two of them alike — these beauties,

all their teeth in rows. Fireworks,
angels, the lemon trees

flower out of season. Very
"très Français"! Everything

presents itself —
out from under

shadows — as if by sonar. And I am
embarrassed, and I am nude

but calm. The click!
of fly-swatters in this balmy heat,

the peeps of spring frogs, the cries
of crickets — this horizon looks more

like a peacock without its tail.

[The third translation of O'Hara's "Qu'est-ce que de nous!" My first two versions can be found here and here.]

Declarations (7-10)

2007-04-16T14:17:00.000-04:00

7

I am still, my look pierced my parachutes. I am the
swallow of your eyes on that and this. I am the
shadow that savors and showers. I have stars,
perfect acorns. I had to inhale to my love, if I was
and I make that. I have and I call there. I am all
quiet. I enjoy my still home.

8

I, alone, do no other thing, this language which
pulses my hide. I have a lips' needs in me. I call
words: glory words, love's words. I call them home. I
have language and firestart in it. I carry. I capture a
loving. I spring like myself. I also light this contact. I
feel the emotion. I feel there is red.

9

I have sky — it was conglomerates of desert, the
plainest. I have telling that end in arms, in in seeing.
I have seeing and I feel there. I rush and, seeking,
am lofty. I can catch wakes of prayers. I exorcised
words. I contact, not easy. I have telegrams. I was
as conducted.

10

I enjoy mid-air in August. I'm into heightening, if the
height was new. I'm in that — the sky. I, having
pools, do what was neither. I watch little light. I can
take white. I am the not end, the Milky Way first. I do
not seize, my soot takes nobody. I am a little door,
depths of a gave.

[Context for these poems, along with the first three in the sequence, can be found here. The comments for that post include an exhaustive list of sources. Parts four through six are here.]

[O'Hara translation 2]

2007-04-16T14:00:00.002-04:00

The question is a new
one, this time. The line

that divides the heart
in two is getting on

my nerves. I am impressed,
just a little bit. This

attention causes me to roll
my Rs around in my mouth.

Time is tight, the seas
are calm, and one, two, three

memories pursue. Hot. It is
so very very rare — allure,

cries, the whole world re-
turning in its furious circle.

[A re-translation of Frank O'Hara's "Qu'est-ce que de nous!" An earlier version can be found here.]

Declarations (4-6)

2007-04-15T19:35:00.000-04:00

I am in the dreams Lucretius, I have helped you to assemble all the mammals on the lawn... (Lisa Jarnot)

4

I am a counter of words, of nevery words. I rub my
words mid-air. I, damp of delight, do the night there.
I, in the night, was flowering. I have night, too. I am
there, dressed and doubly. I catch real pains, close
to my prayers. I was vision, look and contact. I was
a close watch and there my heart do what from me.
I am quits, am skin, flat as flowers.

5

I catch water. I can submerge. I pierced, then I
couldn't height. I have noon. I, having that, wanted,
but your eyes are ever above. I damage the
perfumes that she loses of lover. I feel perfumes on
you. I wake to flee, through this, my lover, the sky. I
instead sun.

6

I was nobody. I was no other. I am there, in the pink
and never. I was then acorns, hidden to others. I
feel the never no one has on there. I couldn't. I can
enough over from love. I know in a far-off flow. I
guess there a lullaby. I'm in together.

[Context for these poems, along with the first three in the sequence, can be found here. The comments for that post include an exhaustive list of sources.]

Declarations

2007-04-14T22:36:00.000-04:00

Je est un autre. (Arthur Rimbaud)
I contain multitudes. (Walt Whitman)

1

I am a sweater. I carry my sleeping. I double. I do
the desires. I am swift with desire. I am heart as not
hurry. I am heart above, was not, is not. I start on
other light. I enclose streams, I enwrap when your
eyes are not. I inhale you, whether no other. I inhale
like some land. I have no sighs.

2

I am a thread. I am stresses. I still my language. I
rush and beneath. I feel the not in neither. I am still
the nightning, the let. I am next to the depths on
your river. I cannot coral. I am heave never. I have
having too much. I, having, have corns high my
boat. I have no moon. I have not turned. I have not
turned fly. I had even you, with words on. I, having,
had ever searching there.

3

I know beneath desert, and narrow, and gentle. I
have fingers, to kiss the first by. I call there, through
there, through capture if I care. I dare what I call
drinks. I do no other. I am heart, am wandering
head-on enough. I am a like-me heart with cocked
pulse. I am water on gently. I know, I am thrashing.

[An exploration of the lyric "I," the vocabulary for which is drawn from other texts (listed in the comments), nearly all of which give voice to desire. Further debt — not only to the authors whose lines serve as epigraphs, but also to Lisa Jarnot's Sea Lyrics — must also be acknowledged.]

[O'Hara translation 1]

2007-04-13T21:05:00.003-04:00

What is the word? for this cris-de-cour? No —
it is not plain enough for such an elegant dance and tentative

Come, bricabrack, the angelic beads
of morning, dew — lemon trees blossom, I am

A tinier prize, the presence of more
and these articles roundly sound. (Zzzz — they snore!)

Embrace me, I am graying — the hour is late
& the chase is on, atop railway cars, calm in the sunlight

In my memory, a chance reunion, a recollection
rare as it is painful

All the world dances, more and more each day,
while I recall a ferocious homily

[A translation of Frank O'Hara's "Qu'est-ce que de nous!" Jack Spicer's remarks to Lorca's ghost in After Lorca are relevant: "When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in."]

[this is this...]

2007-04-12T22:07:00.000-04:00

this is this and that is that. this is that
and that is this. that is this and this is this. this
is that and that is this. this is this and that is
this. this is forget and sizzle is shush. care is
return and turn is treat. dulcet is rocket and
worry is transom. what is bananas and weather
is yet. toward is boasts and phrase is dressing.
rabid is careful and cough is feelings. showboat
is umbra and stumble is only. gossip is sugar
and lonely is sleeping. okay is surely and tell is
can’t. total is terrible and two is tea. trailer is
and expire is plus. hurry is lover and hungry
is warren. recourse is minor and twisted is
period. chapter is always and something is dis-
connected. greatest is needed and ever is bunch.
crushed is event and survive is baloney. buzz-
kill is yearning and slap is pink. whatever is
somehow and nobody is pepper. packing is
written and impression is lovely. warble is
showing and weather is showing.

[Miss one was fact.]

2007-04-11T22:43:00.000-04:00

Miss one was fact. Two-
sea that what away. Easy

on the bees’ needs, this
touch thing

that stud the sky
keeps and change for only,

for hopeful, for a gulp. So see I
fit far for this – a phrase

in let up, in flaps.

For instances ("Come shadow, come, and take this shadow up")

2007-04-10T22:12:00.000-04:00

To region. To lose up. To
surface, which bright

the lined wind lay, nor
lay, nor a some be

same. Ibid. did I
sleep soundly in the greens.

Before to throw
’fore I would word,

start more prettier notes,
that at and measure out
the ofters.

It is a slight in some
synonymous — wanted always,
so un-unbroken.

[Another of the "For instances" (see below) this one stemming from the first line of Louis Zukofsky's "Julia's Wild." Zukfosky's original, published in Bottom: On Shakespeare, is a fugue-like series of variations on a line from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona that foregrounds the original poet's attention to the relationship between sound and sense in the construction of meaning. Zukofsky's poem can be found here.]

For instances ("Stranger, I had words for dinner")

2007-04-09T22:27:00.000-04:00

I could have flung for
fear a fairer word. At sixes and
seven-eight-nine-ten — no
other voices disturb. All vocabulary

is subject and cues. No clue
but timber, no love but
stranger. So much
and so much. And so
far.

[Another in the “For instances” sequence (see below), this one based on the second line from Jack Spicer’s “Magic,” published in “Homage to Creeley / Explanatory Notes,” the first section of The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.]

Sunday megamix poem no. 1

2007-04-08T22:44:00.000-04:00

O! a sea to twinkish sunset! All this
sunsettery — dim as tinder, and here
a few dozen. Let’s fall was the old game:
Customary change comes by nite, leaving
a vague tradition. Fits
of night, fling and thingly! Time tight
in shadows, else charming — too deep. Been
dancing to Trotsky’s call, ankles in
proper places, surprising. Kind of uh-oh.
And for this: every other gust
of my vowels now doubled like lost lips!

[Compiled exclusively from words and phrases used in the previous week’s poems; punctuation is, by and large, new. I began with something of a procedure, alphabetizing each line to find unexpected combinations where one line ended and a previously-unrelated line began. The final poem is a selection and re-ordering of those results.]