Slim Shady Salmon

On September 20, 2013 I posted a poem of mine I called "Perspective." Strangely, for my poems (or any posts), I got six "pluses" from Google Plus users (two were probably my own). I assure you, a real rarity.

analogous of minded me
supposition of a maker

if this then that
be salmon-fin

or salmon-red
white upon a spawn

outbreak of bounds
to wingless burst of air

antagonist of course
interdict of bear

an agonist of accidents
coincident intention

I was told that there was no way "in" to the poem by a few readers. Noted, but I'm not one to really know what to do to open the right door. So...

Later I cut four lines, called it "A Law," and inserted it into a series of poems I called "Fold."

A Law


if this then that
be salmon-fin

or salmon-red
white upon a spawn

a breaking bounds
by wingless burst of air:

antagonist of course
interdict of bear.

Today, I got my last issue of The Boston Review in the mail (Jan/Feb 2014). In it was the the following poem by Henk Rossouw called "Sonnet for My Son."

The way to see the invisible salmon is to cook it at once,
on lowered heat, in a cast-iron pan glossy with the fat

of earlier salmon that cannot be seen. When the salmon is ready
it is cerise. This is supper, and also supposition--

no-one has caught the invisible salmon but the invisible
bear, nine hundred pounds of desire, who hibernates

in the double bed. The bear is not an idea. Since when
was desire a good idea? The bear is a Kodiak instance, stolen

from the time stream that slips around the airfoil
of the present, an aerodynamic hump in the double bed, scion

of a long-crested line of airborne bears, who fishes
and whoops asleep, invisible paw dangling over a colander

full of water, rife with coho, sockeye, Chinook, chum,
swirling and transparent as the night is at night time.

Of course this poem is not like my poem. But I would like to suggest that this poem interprets my poem and makes it into something that seems more personal (it is for "my son" after all)--that perhaps it opens a door to the reader where "Perspective" offers a few locks.

But, noting that, I'm not exactly sure that my poem doesn't more accurately interpret Rossouw's poem. In any event, I find this poem more perplexing than my own.

Perhaps if we combine "A Law" with "Out of Many Mouths" it makes more sense.

inimitable voice
are you listening

we hear you everywhere
it turns out you have a following

in others who speak to be heard
they hear through you

blown as you are
out of a twirl

though you walk
above gardens

in a twinkle

though you balance
so keenly

on an edge
a peak

cut

to bear
one interpretation

if this then that
be salmon-fin

or salmon-red
white upon a spawn

a breaking bounds
by wingless burst of air

antagonist of course
interdict of bear

Enclosing Next To Nothing

Anarchy, like Communism, like Marxism, is one of those words that institutional power has poisoned for so many of us. That is to say, we cannot think of it without fearing it in some way: we might fear the idea of it, that is be afraid of what we think anarchy means if "unleashed" upon us, if Marxism means Pol Pot or Mao then we might as well just starve ourselves, or if Communism means Lenin or Stalin then, again, we must imagine our immediate murders, but perhaps we'd prefer this end rather than be forced to live through such a social order. But, let's think a little harder.

We might just argue that bad men make bad things happen by force. We might argue that "ideal" men make bad things happen by force. We might even argue simply that good men make bad things happen by force. And I suppose now there are two common denominators here that you've recognized. Men and Force (and by that I mean violence, but not just physical violence--coercion is often psychologically violent as well, and as an extreme we can point to forms of torture that are directed at the mind more than the body). (I think we might assert a real connection of anarchy to the female and so offer another reason a society dominated by men would want to disabuse us of exploring anarchy.)

Anarchy, Anarchism, is, I think, best characterized by a single tenet: that of eschewing force and coercion. I had written "opposing" here but think that, though true, it might indicate a "counter-force" and I am uneasy using "force."

Further, as a person who writes as a part of self-making, and who writes poetry in particular, I am an anarchist. Which is to say, I am seeking words to embody an openness. Poetry too is coercive, at least as an institutional practice. That is to say form is coercive...which is as much to say that history is coercive. But, let's be clear that it is the systematizing of history that is coercive; the systematizing of form that is coercive.

This (form) does not need to be considered always a negative. Form, at least in poetry, can help focus our thinking. If I have to put a word down that conforms to a rhyming pattern, or a syllable count, for example, then I am forced into a limit. This can prompt one to finding "the right" word.

But see how even as I wrote all of this I used words that really, if enlarged and placed in other contexts, become troubling. We might all believe that limitations and "narrow" or focused thinking are, or can be positive, yet, they seem to me more probably detrimental, at least where thinking is concerned.

Perhaps it is the insistence on form that becomes difficult; the insistence on form is an external pressure, but one that gets internalized in societies and thus becomes a propriety and thus a calcification of thought.

William Carlos Williams said once that Marianne Moore was always a poet. He didn't quite know what else to say about what she wrote, but he knew it was poetry. It might be difficult to understand the idea of Williams, a poet who eschewed form, other than the fact that poems were written on paper and to him really needed to "look" a particular way (that is, he applied a visual aesthetic which may be said to be less of an interference in his thinking than a "metered" or linguistically formal practice might have been), liking Moore's poetry as it seems to stand apart from his own constructions. Moore creates her poems often via "syllabics" and so applies a kind of self-imposed form. Which is to say that MM did not use traditional forms, she made up her own as a way to be "formal" but, we might say, her forms are anarchically free, or "open." Add to this the fact that she changed (revised) her poems constantly throughout her life often to the point of very nearly erasing them entirely.

We might see Williams as a poet of anarchy. Or an anarchical poet. (I think possibly that his contemporary Mina Loy might be a greater example, but I'm not quite, but almost, prepared to say that.)

What he offers in Kora in Hell and in Spring and All are discoveries of the anarchist in the artist. We could go back to Emerson for a "foundation" if only to assert a program to undermine foundations (and programs!): "I unsettle all things," and "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim."

David Graeber (anarcho-anthropologist?), in his latest book, The Democracy Project, seems to make two primary further points about anarchism as an idea "in practice": it is an opening of a space that allows for, encourages, improvisation. And in that space flowers imagination.

Hence, poetry. Hence, the truly human.

And so too the Williams of Kora ("improvisations") and Spring and All ("the book of the imagination").

There's so much more to say, but I'm really just starting to feel my way into this. And surely I'll have to bring Melville's White Whale into it somehow along the way!

Let's close though with this from Williams (1938):

THE POOR

The anarchy of poverty
delights me , the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements

Or a cast iron balcony
with panels showing oak branches
in full leaf. It fits
the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and
custom of necessity-
Chimneys, roofs, fences of
Wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to
nothing at all: the old man

in a sweater and soft black
hat who sweeps the sidewalk-

his own ten feet of it-
in a wind that fitfully

turning his corner has
overwhelmed the entire city

Let's say that with emphasis, "in an unfenced//age and enclosing next to/nothing at all..."

Advice from a Poet: Better to be vulgar than affected

Selections from the Preface to the Collected Poems (1911) of Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939):

I do not wish to apologize for this publication, but I wish to propitiate beforehand those who may object that I am putting out Collected Poems rather than a Selection, and I wish to make some speculations as to the differences between prose and verse as they are written nowadays. I do the latter here because there is no periodical in this town that would print my musings — and quite rightly, because few living souls would wish to read them. Let me then become frankly biographic, a thing which may be permitted to the verse-writing mood.

The collection here presented is made up of reprints of five volumes of verse which have appeared at odd times during the last fifteen years. The last poem in the book was ivritten when I was fifteen, the first, a year ago, so that, roughly speaking, this volume represents the work of twenty-five years.

But the writing of verse hardly appears to me to be a matter of work: it is a process, as far as I am concerned, too uncontrollable. From time to time words in verse form have come into my head and I have written them down, quite powerlessly and without much interest, under the stress of certain emotions. And, as for knowing whether one or the other is good, bad or indifferent, I simply cannot begin to trust myself to make a selection. And, as for trusting any friend to make a selection, one cannot bring oneself to do it either. They have — one's friends — too many mental axes to grind. One will admire certain verses about a place because in that place they were once happy ; one will find fault with a certain other paper of verses because it does not seem likely to form a piece of prentice work in a school that he is desirous of founding. I should say that most of the verses here printed are rather derivative, and too much governed by the passing emotions of the moment. But I simply cannot tell; is it not the function of verse to register passing emotions? Besides, one cherishes vague, pathetic hopes of having written masterpieces unaware, as if one's hackney mare should by accident be got with a winner of the Two Thousand.

With prose, that conscious and workable medium, it is a perfectly different matter. One finds a subject somewhere — in the course of gossip or in the Letters and State Papers of some sovereign deceased, published by the Record Office. Immediately the mind gets to work upon the "form," blocks out patches of matter, of dialogue, of description. If the subject is to grow into a short short-story, one knows that one will start with a short, sharp, definite sentence, so as to set the pace:

"Mr Lamotte," one will write, "returned from fishing. His eyes were red; the ends of his collar, pressed open because he had hung down his head in the depths of his reflection. . . ."

Or, if it is to be a long short-story, we shall qualify the sharpness of the opening sentence and damp it down as thus:

"When, on a late afternoon of July, Mr Lamotte walked up from the river with his rod in his hand ..."

Or again, if the subject seems one for a novel, we begin :

" Mr Lamotte had resided at the White House for sixteen years. The property consisted of 627 acres, of which one hundred and forty were park-land intersected by the river Torridge, of forty acres of hop-land . . ." and so on. We shall proceed to "get in" Mr Lamotte and his property and his ancestry and his landscape and his society. We shall think about these things for a long time and with an absolute certainty of aim ; we shall know what we want to do, and — to the measure of the light vouchsafed — we shall do it.

But with verse I just do not know: I do not know anything at all. As far as I am concerned, it just comes.

***

Is there something about the mere framing of verse, the mere sound of it in the ear, that it must at once throw its practitioner or its devotee into an artificial frame of mind ? Verse presumably quickens the perceptions of its writer as do hashish or ether. But must it necessarily quicken them to the perception only of the sentimental, the false, the hackneyed aspects of life ? Must it make us, because we live in cities, babble incessantly of green fields; or because we live in the twentieth century must we deem nothing poetically good that did not take place before the year 1603 ?

This is not saying that one should not soak oneself with the Greek traditions : study every fragment of Sappho ; delve ages long in the works of Bertran de Born ; translate for years the minnelieder of Walther von der Vogelweide or that we should forget the bardic chants of Patric of the Seven Kingdoms. Let us do anything in the world that will widen our perceptions. We are the heirs of all the ages. But, in the end, I feel fairly assured that the purpose of all these pleasant travails is the right appreciation of such facets of our own day...

***

I remember seeing in a house in Hertford an American cartoon representing a dog pursuing a cat out of the door of a particularly hideous tenement house, and beneath this picture was inscribed the words: "This is life — one damn thing after another." Now I think it would be better to be able to put that sentiment into lyric verse than to remake a ballad of the sorrows of Cuchullain or to paraphrase the Book of Job. I do not mean to say that Job is not picturesque; I do not mean to say that it is not a good thing to have the Book of the Seven Sorrows of whom you will in the background of your mind or even colouring your outlook. But it is better to see life in the terms of one damn thing after another, vulgar as is the phraseology or even the attitude, than to render it in terms of withering gourds and other poetic paraphernalia. It is, in fact, better to be vulgar than affected, at any rate if you practise poetry.

***

To get a sort of truth, a sort of genuineness into your attitude towards the life that God makes you lead, to follow up your real preferences, to like as some of us like the hard, bitter, ironical German poets, the life of restaurants, of Crowds, of flashed impressions, to love, as we may love, in our own way, the Blessed Virgin, Saint Katharine or the sardonic figure of Christina of Milan — and to render it — that is one good thing. Or again, to be genuinely Irish, with all the historic background of death, swords, flames, mists, sorrows, wakes, and again mists — to love those things and the Irish sanctities and Paganisms — that is another good thing if it is truly rendered ; the main thing is the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression.

The actual language — the vernacular employed — is a secondary matter. I prefer personally the language of my own day, a language clear enough for certain matters, employing slang where slang is felicitous and vulgarity where it seems to me that vulgarity is the only weapon against dullness.

***

(...I am merely, quite humbly, trying to voice what I imagine will be the views or the aspirations, the preferences or the prejudices, of the poet of my day and circumstances when he shall at last appear and voice the life of dust, toil, discouragement, excitement, and enervation that I and many millions lead to-day.)

When that poet does come it seems to me that his species will be much that of the gentlemen I have several times mentioned. His attitude towards life will be theirs ; his circumstances only will be different. An elephant is an elephant whether he pours, at an African water-hole, mud and water over his free and scorched flanks, or whether, in the Zoological Gardens, he carries children about upon his back.

Damned Appreciation

So, if you write, you might on occasion want some notice of this work.  Well, let's slot this little tidbit into the category of "be careful what you wish for."  Once again we are indebted to The Modernist Journals Project for their endlessly fascinating archives.  Thank you Brown University and University of Tulsa!

City Point, Vinalhaven

1937–1938,

The Little Review, in 1919, published an essay by Marsden Hartley (a painter and sometime poet, living much of his life in Maine, but a somewhat tenuous member of the Kreymborg-Williams gang in Greenwich--WCW mentions his book of essays, Adventures in the Arts, in Spring and All) in appreciation of his friend, the poet Wallace Gould (and movie-house pianist), whom Hartley calls "The Poet of Maine."  

Hartley

At the end of the essay, the editor (and founder) of the journal, Margaret Anderson, appends this:

[I print this article as a good example of what passes for criticism in America.  Mr. Hartley has simply made up words about Wallace Gould.  Almost nothing that Gould has written justifies any of Mr. Hartley's praise.  Wallace Gould is a writer who has not yet learned to write....]

There's a bit more that mitigates this judgment re: Gould, but it is ridiculously rude in terms of Hartley!  Although, one might grant it a just assessment of Hartley's essay, this seems an intentionally cruel act intentionally done in public.  And then, and then, and then...she prints three of Gould's poems!

Here's one of the poems she printed, part of a series apparently--#30.

I should have struck you between the eyes,
peroxide trollop with the voice of a man --
Irish queen with the head of a tomcat,
I should have made you sprawl in the gutter.
Nevertheless, I salute you, as one salutes the great.
For you are a great and glorious queen.  Your wileness* is so
      resplendent
that to comprehend is to gaze at the sun.
Not pearls, but emeralds, are the tears you shed
over the man who tries to escape you
and whom all women should escape.
Your great voice bellows its ribald truths and hoarsely howls
      its bellicose lies.
Your mind is the source of massive inventions, lewd de-
      ductions, perverse conjectures, nauseating insinuations.
Your bosom is great.
Your hips are great.
Everything about you is great.
I should have struck you between the eyes,
to leave an hieroglyphic in the language that you love --
that you best understand.
if I had done this thing,
and you had sprawled in such a place
as that which England's virgin queen
once shunned as being unfit to tread,
you would have been more gracious than Elizabeth,
and I could have laughed at the man who spread his cloak.

*I don't know if this is a misprint or a misspelling...wiliness or vileness?

You can download or read online Gould's first book Children of the Sun (1917).

***

Margaret Anderson's The Little Review might be considered a leftward balance to Harriet Monroe's more conservative Chicago-based Poetry.  Though early on these two women seemed to have had a fierce "first to publish" rivalry.  

Of the The Little Review (again from the MJP):

During its first three years, The Little Review was largely an anarchist publication that battled on behalf of imagism and published such writers as Richard Aldington, Sherwood Anderson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Ben Hecht, and Amy Lowell. Under Pound's influence, the magazine experienced a fresh infusion of international experimentalism and added contributions by the likes of Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, and W. B. Yeats. But even among this talented field, The Little Review's most lasting (and boldest) achievement was its serialization of Joyce's Ulysses, in 23 installments, from 1918 to 1920—until the Society for the Suppression of Vice charged the magazine with obscenity and Anderson and Heap, losing the court trial, were forced to discontinue the novel amid the "Oxen of the Sun" episode.

Of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (MJP):

In 1911, Harriet Monroe persuaded a hundred Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year, for five years, to support a poetry magazine. With that guarantee, she founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912, and it is still going today. Its motto was a quotation from Walt Whitman that appeared on the back of almost every issue: "To have great poets there must be great audiences too." To that end Monroe not only published the best modern poetry she could find, but also used the pages of the magazine for debate and discussion about the forms and content of poetry proper for a modern age. She published poems by Ezra Pound, who became her foreign correspondent, and such other poets as Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Sandburg, Masters, Robinson, Lowell, Flint, Aldington, H. D., and many others, introducing new poets to the world and helping to revive an art many people thought had no place in modern culture. As she put it herself, "Somewhere I have read a quaint old myth of a goblin who, blowing the fog out of his face, started a tempest which went careering around the world. Now and then I feel like that goblin. Is it possible that less than four years ago poetry was 'the Cinderella of the arts'? Already a great wind is blowing her ashes away, and on the horizon are rolling dust-clouds which may conceal a coach and four—or is it an automobile?" (Poetry 8:3 140). It may have been a jet. In any case, we are all in her debt for blowing away the fog around poetry in 1912.

One will simply note that in 1920 several poems by Gould appeared in Poetry.  Here's one, "Diversion," from a series "In Maine."

SOMETHING is happening, at last,
now that the snowflakes are falling.
Something is happening.
It has been too long that nothing has happened.
The poor old year has been a bore.	5
She has been unkempt.
She has worn a faded calico dress too ragged for repair.
She has murmured of doom.
She has crooned of former profusions
of silk brocades,	10
rare perfumes,
or lovely lusts.
I come to the forests.
Even now the forests are green and black,
but within them,	15
instead of the tawn of the spills,
there is the white of the snowflakes.
I come to the fields.
Even now the fields are tawny,
but across them there are streaks of white—	20
the white of the snowflakes on the frozen brooks.
I look at the skies.
Even now the skies are gray,
but the gray of the skies is enlivened with streaming white—
the white of the snowflakes.	25
The snowflakes are falling,
to circle,
or wander,
or dart,
or float,	30
all like children at play—
like desperate children
awaiting the sound of the school bell.
Something is happening, at last,
now that the snowflakes are falling.

You can find Hartley's essay, "The Poet of Maine," at The Modernist Journals Project.

The Only Game

One's actions are prompted not by theories of pessimism or optimism, but by the will to play the game with the cards in hand--a banal figure, alas.  Some of us play on though Nature, Destiny or Whatyoumaycallem hold all the aces and trumps and we hold nothing but ignominious nines or "dieces."  I refer to pinochle, rather than poker, because I was brought up on the German, not on the American game.  What has this to do with our poetry?  Merely this: a "diece" may become the ace of trumps before the cards are laid away.  There is no challenge behind the present diece, nor an air of prognostication in studying its prospects.  If the diece remains a nine and is ultimately taken, not by an ace or trump, but by an almost as ignominious jack, one has had the privilege of participating in the sole game known to mankind.

Arthur Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength, "T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland"

Nothing Like Us Ever Was

Fragments Of A Lost Gnostic Poem Of The Twelfth Century

Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.

-- Herman Melville


Let us allow the past to comment upon the hollowness of a suit and tie speaking to the necessity of mass killing and a triggering humility.


“But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.  That’s what makes America different.  That’s what makes us exceptional.  With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”  -- Barack Obama, address to the nation on Syria, September 10, 2013

Let us praise the lies of stalking betterment:

"A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” -- Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Let us study a time when atrocities came to pass out of sheer inanity; when only stinking piles of rotting youth could stop the laughter born of gnosis.

Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind (1920)
Carl Sandburg

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

I

THE WOMAN named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil      
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

II

The doors were cedar      
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
  We are the greatest city,
  the greatest nation:      
  nothing like us ever was.

The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
  where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
  We are the greatest city,      
  the greatest nation,
  nothing like us ever was.

III

It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
  a nation together,      
And paid singers to sing and women
  to warble: We are the greatest city,
    the greatest nation,
    nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang      
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
  there were rats and lizards who listened
  … and the only listeners left now      
  … are … the rats … and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, “Caw, caw,”
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest      
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
  We are the greatest city,      
  the greatest nation:
  nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,”
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are … the rats … and the lizards.      

IV

The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood      
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts      
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.      

A Finding--Arrowhead Audio recordings

Don't forget Arrowhead Audio!

Yesterday I posted a recording of "Minna" a poem in 27 lyrics by Maxwell Bodenheim (WCW called him Bogie).  It's about 13 minutes.

A Progressive Experiment

“The angel of history”

Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and join together what has been smashed to pieces….But a storm is blowing from Paradise [and] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows skyward.  What we call progress is this storm.”   

Walter Benjamin quoted by Hannah Arendt

***

I find my poems reveal "me" and reveal the stories that reside within me in ways that are surprising, but only if I give myself time to think about them; that is, to read and interpret my own accidental being in the moment of composition and consequently in the moment of interpretation.  Sorry for that meta-me talk...but it seems highly necessary these days to see yourself as a particular agglomeration open to disciplined attempts at understanding as a process investigation.  This is akin to saying of words that I put on paper, "Who wrote that?" or "What of that is true of me?"  As might be obvious, those are difficult if not impossible questions to try to answer with anything close to certainty.  If asked, "what did you mean to say?" I might be tempted to assert that I don't mean to say anything but the words seem to say something.

***

Below I excerpt stanzas from a longer piece, "test results," to illustrate my own compositional confusion as I try to discover the ways this condensed version spotlights a stronger and more dangerous interpretation.

furious chemicals will
impregnate political
flesh to embody the fates

they no longer remember
entangled in the specious
present their own history

described by the same quantum
mechanical description
which is indefinite in

terms of important factors
a treachery forgotten
in the course of thousands of

years, forgotten by the gods,
the eagles, forgotten by
the jew as metonymic

experimental subject
a rational example
yielding progressive results

***

The italicized words are out of Kafka.

***

What I wanted to offer here is something akin to that economic quip by that horrific man Milton Friedman, "we're all Keynesians now."  Is it wrong for me to think of Friedman in the way I imagine Eichmann--a man who's thinking and justifications are excused by ostensible obeisance to the operations of a system one doesn't "control."  That is a refusal of responsibility and an acceptance of following power as the correct, pragmatic, action.

***

One thing I mean to say is that what is visible to us culturally is often this very powerful and strange recurrence of narrative elements with often, again, visibly, a "representative" of the "storied" Jew in his storied guises.  It's often inescapable AS story but too as real elements of our imaginary.

But here, that is in the poem, it is the Holocaust, the genocide, that "becomes us" and the Jew in the poem (as metonymic) stands in for the whole of us.  Historically we are all in this relationship to extreme arbitrary power and our current mechanisms of state--primarily military and financial (or should I say as citizen-debtors), but also really all systems of sustenance and knowledge--make it extraordinarily easy to CREATE useful catastrophe wherein we are all subjects of experiment.

***

Himmler seems as readily characterized as an opportunistic businessman.  A rather staid description for one committing genocide.  But a key factor in much of what he perpetrated was how this human resource might be used to enrich him before liquidation.

***

So it is from this vantage point that we look back to the example of history.  The narrative lessons of easy systematic eradication.  Man's chemical fury is NOT effective on insects, but VERY effective on Man.  That is "we are all jews now," objects to expunge without compunction--ie, un-beings.  There is only power, and only what power can use or destroy.

And here is Arendt, corrective to the "man" Heidegger, and a furtherance of his best work but with greater human, relational, insight.  An ethics of how we might correct "technicity" before it loads onto cattle cars (controlled remotely) all those useless to the paradigm "at large."

***

The full poem is dedicated to Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring as a warning to us about the "banality" of our response to the chemical war on fundamental aspects of our ecology ("bugs" and "weeds" and people who are bugs and weeds to those who hold the spray nozzle), was incisive and clear and a deeply poetic writer.

But in the end the book, while certainly alarming, can be too readily minimized by the human ignorance of interconnectivity.  Human chemical agency is like a billion-billion butterflies flapping their wings and altering the world.  And it only weakly addresses the fact that human "control" mechanisms are imaginatively as "positive" as the economic realities of the human lives employed in this industry.  We invest our being in our economic validation.  Death-dealing is a livelihood.

***

In another context I heard that science, to some, can reveal God to Man, that with enough money, enough people seeking, we will find out the "mind" of God.  This is a Progressive idea.  It posits a Good that must (reasonably) be considered a Universal and then calculates the cost/benefit of achieving it.  This might be considered a scrambled eggs utilitarianism promoted by those whose shells won't ever be cracked.  That is, from the right perspective "experiment" will be justified.  In fact, we like to say, as those do who praise and seek to justify military aggression in the Middle East, "time will vindicate us."  That is, what seems like a terrorizing and murderous venture will be shown "in time" to have been an act of great benefit to "human freedoms."  So perhaps, with the aid of passing solar revolutions, humans, if there are still humans, will make The Holocaust out to be a useful experiment for the species.

***

Or, perhaps, nothing is as hot when you eat it as when you cook it.

***

This poetic truncation seems a more powerful poem, but as I read this rendition (now a troubling term itself), it becomes arrestingly problematic in interpretation.

A procedure I use in many of my poems is to strip "location" from the text by eliminating the signs of direction...upper case, punctuation, enjambing lines that should be separate...in order to, as a friend has said (warned of), disconcert.  I think of it as opening up interpretation.  It's a kind of experiment in miscommunication.

In the full poem the "they" in stanza two is meant to refer to the chemicals (furious and fatal) and to render that fate via the political flesh that then applies those furies to other flesh--the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

In this version, due to this lack of direction and this particular truncation, it reads something more like the familiar "blaming the victim" for treachery against God (the Kafka parable of Prometheus).

And that story too has been tested.

The Eyes of Our Jaguar God

Another from Lowenfels out of Some Deaths (1964).

From the Mayan Book of Chilam Balam

In the beginning there was no sin; we adhered
     to the dictates of reason.  There was then
     no sickness, no aching bones, no high fevers,
     no smallpox, no burning chests,
     no abdominal pains, no consumption.  We had
     then no headaches; the course of humanity
     was orderly.  The foreigners made it
     otherwise when they arrived here.

With the false god, the false word, came the
     beginning of our misery, the beginning
     of strife with purse-snatching, the
     beginning of strife with blow guns,
     the beginning of strife by trampling
     on people, the beginning of robbery
     with violence, the beginning of forced debts.

We were the very poor people who did not
     depart when oppression was put on them.
     It was done by the kinkajous of the
     towns, the foxes of the towns, the
     bloodsucking insects of the towns--
     those who drained the poverty of the
     working people.

But it shall come to pass that tears
     shall become the eyes of our jaguar
     God.  His justice shall descend upon
     every part of the earth, straight upon
     Ah Kanteria and Ix Pucyola, the
     voracious hagglers of the world.

The Great Peace

A poem by Walter Lowenfels.  Never heard of him, right?  A pity for all of us, really.

This was printed in the collection Some Deaths, published by Jonathan Williams as Issue #32 of Jargon.

The Great Peace
(from the Amerindian)

What is more beautiful
       than the land that has no grave
             because there is no fear,
where bravery doesn't bleed
             because there is no enemy,

where warriors of the Hundred and One Nations
       uproot the tallest pine tree
and in the hole that's left
       drop their bombs and guns,

deep in the underearth,
       throw all their weapons,
and plant again the tree.  Then
       when the Great Peace is won

we will find the land
       where truth is without a name
because there is no lie
       where charity has no home;
because there is no hunger;
       where nobody is an Unknown
Hero any more,
       and no one is a seer--
because the light of wisdom
        is everywhere.

A God's Door-Mat

Here is "Song II" from Mina Loy's "Songs to Joannes."

                                      II

                             The skin-sack

In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completions of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
    My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair
A God's door-mat
                              On the threshold of your mind

________________

I like this, but I seem to need to read it from the bottom up.

That is, the last phrase speaks most clearly to me of the poet/persona as woman as writer confronting either reader or another person (lover/friend/other).

These words a "fretting" attempt to convey something to you that you are simply not getting.

What?  Are you the skin-sack?  And with that figuration perhaps the poet does not think much of you, of humanity generally.  

She is not paced with machines or clockwork--she is, as "woman" often is, a weaver.  

And yet, what is she making?  A thing on which one wipes the shit off the shoes.

What are your thoughts?

It Started Rings

Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor's attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.

The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship's prow.

An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.

WCW, Kora in Hell (Prologue)

To Friends Who Write

Dear Friends (You Know Who You Are),

...in search of recognition...in a world where your work is a "one in many" "face in the midst of the crowd" "still small voice"...you are lost.  In what flows from hot to cold to make engines turn, we are the dissipate leavings.

And it's not surprising, but surely dispiriting.  As I looked at your poems I grew more impressed, more interested.  That is the best I can say.  And the best, really, I think I can do, is to be an eager reader...waiting and wanting more from you. 

That is what I want in a reader...well, just that A READER.  That is the "community" we want.  Appreciation from one reader...and then one more, and then another, and then...well you see the problem.

Imagine...I am only now waking up to Williams as a man of fierce intelligence but also of fierce ambition and fierce need.

As I hold Williams-as-written in my mind, in my ears, in my hands (tangible love) I realize that publishing in 1920 is STILL small.  Still a community.  Still easily divided among small numbers of writers we label members of "schools."  There are poets, great and good, who just want to be loved (and hated) by one another and to stand in time next to other names.  To be named!  And also, bed Mina Loy...who deserves so much more than that from me here now...but there it is.

We have no more great poets because the acquisitive mind has co-opted the world and poetry is CONTENT--and content, really, turns out to be irrelevant.  And that is a warp and weft of its own devising.  Realizing that poets both love and hate Williams, that the public knows one poem and makes gleeful "get it" fun out of another; realizing that the world does not know any of Williams really as you can't know the wheelbarrow outside of its home in its book where it carries a quantity of uncertainty as payload.

As I hold Williams I hold a book Spring and All that is nearly 100 years old.  This corresponds with Williams holding onto Shelley's Triumph of Life.  Or even my holding onto Auroras of Autumn like Williams holding onto the 1850 Prelude or the barbaric Leaves of Grass.  Who is the Ashbery who springs into life at the death of Stevens?  Who is that Ashbery?  He seems volcanic of the undigested being, but who am I to judge?  What is true is that monuments are made while moments are lost.  

We have exploded and are only pieces, are one in pieces, unbounded in our bond.

Trunks like Shelley like Whitman are surely only branches though with great circumference.  You and I are nearly forced to be the ideas of leaves hoping to bud into existence on a fruitful fruiting branch not fruited.  Still to grow juicy and even sweet which is a product of dry seasons so we may fall in the autumn and be usefully dead for the great continuing Yggdrasil.

Or something like that...something more than paper recycled for bodily use.

But if so so.

As ever, your friend,
One/Many

There is proficiency in dissection...

The whole field of education is affected -- There is no end of detail that is without significance.

Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge -- in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.

This would clarify his field at once -- He would then see the use of data.

But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.

nothing could be more ridiculous.  To data there is no end.  There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the knowledge--

It is imagination that --

That is : life is absolutely simple.  In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always.  There should never be permitted, confusion --

There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible -- But it must never be lost -- as it is today --

I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture -- In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash.  Not one.  The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.  There is no end --

And what is the fourth dimension?  It is the endlessness of knowledge --

It is the imagination on which reality rides -- It is the imagination -- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science -- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current -- which it has always sought --

In other times -- men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense -- Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts -- broken, bruised

few escape whole slaughter.  This is not civilization but stupidity -- Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination --

The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience -- which today are absolutely lost -- There exists simply nothing.

from Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)

Dedicatory

so hello.

be unreasonable
waste your liesure upon this vanity
no, i insist, dedicate your life of work to it
thus, the matter is me and i am the matter
fully clothed and fully full
that is to say wholly this and also that so that and this are
well, you get it or at least...,
can't pout to find a point in it.
no right in it to salt the pork,
better gut the beast and live juicy,
at least at first.
perish the blemish, naturally, if that's the show
allowed.  but between you and me, breath
happens here and there.  not breathing too.
color me colored.  oh, i'll do it myself.
no tricks or trades, promise.
for real.
plainly put, this is all there is to me.
it's what i want you to see, really.
but...the bees and pollen and honey, right?
hives and all that, i mean, that tastes
sweet.  and yonder window and roses
and names and juliet and
that's wrong here, i think.  or
out of order.  anyway what do you care
what i care for your caring?
it's the others that matter more.
the ones that matter more mean more
in the matter of meaning
to me that is.
remember me to them for me for you.
at least show them a picture.
that is all there is
anymore.  look at me.  what a smile.
my eyes sparkle...with
antique blight.
but those who know know
but shhhh.
really i am i
in this
honest.


7 March 2013

With Pins and String

it is instructive to listen to him warming himself up
the delightful deceit of fables
their superfluity of talking
close, naked, natural

we can thus say every thing
we can say about anything
thought is difficult to imagine
an angel intervenes with flaming sword

when he spoke he was apt to be
quarreling about priority of discovery
in his role as sage, he did not say
wordless is alone

you are to respect the experiment
you may reproduce with pins and string
when not otherwise oriented
1728, 1719, 1726, 1802

by definition aye
am not repeatable
against the vacant and pensive moods
come upon you

we may note the word quantity
though not how measured
it is exactly that grave
(in 1818 she would publish)

his surprising answer
meter is a kind of anesthetic
as a disciplined hermetic priesthood
notam in calculandum facultate

measurers of circumference
sounders of depths
the belief that were there plain words
might unite truly

all language reeks of artifice
words refuse to mean what they ought
insidious is the belief
that it could be any other way

An Unstated Set

metamorphosed into a horse
derived from the favorite strategy of a man
the fallacy of the heap

the inflexible behest of the meanings themselves
order the unbridled naming animal
never having been guided by method

keeping always a clear eye on your categories
you use the name to designate location
the place where neither rain nor bow is located

the ark can carry them all in the bottom deck
so fancy a divagation in 1852
marks the saurus sedimentous

approximate to the prelapsarian
so you can think that you did not know you had a feeling
never, perhaps, without, and knowing

and cause is malfunction
not omitting your option of doing nothing
these are details

about her sensations when she did not come
but two states, merely yes and no
merely to exclude the members of an unstated set

feelings cannot survive
demands that we define our terms
manacled with syntactic order

what it can induce us to supply
under the illusion that we find it
a figure

drawn in 1855
self-evident at a glance
disciplined into assaying

there were even occasional kisses
for into affirmation psyche flows
as well-behaved as any flunky

trivially prepared complications
routinized order-giving
minding minds minded to complicity

A Necessary Office

note: we detect by practice

local industry is the manufacture of sentences
his fan mail included a letter from
the narrator of if:
he has disappeared

into an assize whole
it takes 3 good-sized men to watch.
governed by marks on paper
seized to assert final control:
outside every mark
in fiction
nothing new is under

finding-systems
we may inflect;
holes don't get stolen.

daylong a red-bearded man
polishes parking meters;
that is not a reasonable job
though a necessary office:

doing something as simple as
laying tracks laying
letters on lines
duly noticed.

A Double-Take

remarking incuriosity about machines and processes:
damn detail of the coin, sentimental symbolism,
    rather expose innards,
    on the whetted tip of the engraver's chisel

giving notice
to clean efficiency:
we, entitled, see everything
entailed in exchanges of notation

fatiguing mindless strokes with a muscled
score for robotic choreography
to cut teeth around the rim of a steel disk;
his work grows empty.

an instance:
could be seen filling out
     analogously removing
in which energy
     not being concentrated
remarked letters affirmed
underwritten
in some aesthetic;

one effect is to diminish
even in husbandry
...not where the aesthetes were looking
let us register a double-take;

one need never meet
     what is down-to-earth
the visitor thinks
     best not to specify.

1885 was born late:
its epic the dictionary
entailing by the hundreds
thousands
hours readers,
labor abscessed with glances;

more than any single syllable
one 2-thousand-year-old guess
confers a boom
where lore irradiates scholars
span allotted.

as it happens, it happens
     we can particularize:
fete for issuance
coining
imprecisions;
1885 was born too late.

Observe No Occasion

observe no occasion
so to speak
called his first book
minutely governed clock
works how
all those hands
apt to turn up on time
to be fragmentary
from 1887 clear to 1918
surrounded by advent
paid no heed
brought in rapidly in batches
need discharged upward
invention above all
people emerged in capitals
look right, not left
look not
dreary facts were novel once
a way of fusing
what must be pent
begin with loose parts
"quite forgotten"
speculation is lifted
phenomenology may have
could have known
in training
the numerous voices
a telephone