on Brand Upon the Brain!

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!

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!

Prosodic bodies

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.]

To hazard (a chance meeting)

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..."

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.]

Pay Attention!

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

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

Language's Carnality (a French postcard)

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.]

A letter to you

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.