London - my young Jesus freak days. Henry Hankovitch, con guitar. Thought the Stones might be useful for evangelization. (Now there's a new idea! Are you tuned in, Canterbury?) That was when I proclaimed the Fall of Babylon, in all seriousness, one midsummer day, to the hippies & potheads at Glastonbury Tor. Return of "the King".
These days I'm playing with Jim & Colette in a jug band, tentatively the K.C. Moaners. Old-timey, ragtime, blues, & some Canadienne fiddle-stomps. We're live at the No. Smithfield Public Library (I think) on March 22, if anybody's in town.
2.28.2003
Will my poetry become famous? It's a long shot.
But I did audition for Mick Taylor's old job with the Rolling Stones.
I told Keith Richards he should read Bible; he suggested I read William Blake.
How did I get in? I rang the little bell at the gate to their studio-mansion in Richmond.
When they asked over the intercom, "who is it?" I said "JOHNNY B. GOODE".
But I did audition for Mick Taylor's old job with the Rolling Stones.
I told Keith Richards he should read Bible; he suggested I read William Blake.
How did I get in? I rang the little bell at the gate to their studio-mansion in Richmond.
When they asked over the intercom, "who is it?" I said "JOHNNY B. GOODE".
There was a poem in the New Yorker not long ago I found completely adequate, & now, dagnab it all, I can't remember her name exactly, can't find it. . . Linda Biehrl? Teaches at Univ of WA Seattle? The poem was called "1934". I read & reacted very strongly : Mandelshtamian.
It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.
"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]
Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.
It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.
"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]
Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.
To conclude that words are not a game is to acknowledge the realm of Necessity. No longer aggression, desire, or interest : awareness.
Something many postmodern philosophers argue we are no longer in a position to acknowledge (reality is fantasmal, a sub-Heraclitean chaos).
But poetry is not necessary. Not a philosophy.
Poetry admits Necessity; then plays with it like a toy. Maybe in this oscillation resides the authentic approach. Also maybe here lies the secret of the emotions, the affect. Free from pain; enslaved to pain. Joking on the scaffold - victory in defeat. The layered emotional effect of music. Both and.
When I sit or stand alone somewhere, in absolute quiet, & imagine speaking. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Poetry at the onset of time & space.
Something many postmodern philosophers argue we are no longer in a position to acknowledge (reality is fantasmal, a sub-Heraclitean chaos).
But poetry is not necessary. Not a philosophy.
Poetry admits Necessity; then plays with it like a toy. Maybe in this oscillation resides the authentic approach. Also maybe here lies the secret of the emotions, the affect. Free from pain; enslaved to pain. Joking on the scaffold - victory in defeat. The layered emotional effect of music. Both and.
When I sit or stand alone somewhere, in absolute quiet, & imagine speaking. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Poetry at the onset of time & space.
Playing doubles with Joe & Jordan:
Frames are games. Critical games with little round counters & a checkerboard. The yucky feeling of reviews, yes, most of the time; because the reviewer (me) is thinking "this is an easy assignment". The words are anybody's, without much commitment or authenticity.
But let's suppose somebody who can respond with feeling & intelligence & new insight. So criticism might be possible in that case. & if the frames are inadequate, can they be made to work more adequately? In reference to Joe's comments about globalism & war & all : is it legitimate to propose general ideas about how poetry in general responds meaningfully to the world in crises? I really don't know the answer to this.
I sent an email to a list recently complaining about the inadequacy of a CK Williams poem at the back page of this week's New Yorker. Inadequate to me, anyway. So why? I sensed a combination of complacency, vagueness, & cheap tricks ("fire" as a metaphor for general sense of doom & blame the gummint).
I remember with fear & trembling long harangues & debates on Buff List & SubSubpoetics over "general rules" (frames); that puts me in trepidation. But I'm tempted again to look for a way of asking for something of poetry - something between Ron's alternative dialect dialectic, & the typical sleight-of-hand of professional poets represented by the CK Williams poem. Authenticity? Complex engagement? Patience? Unwillingness to rhetorize a reality? What is this called in poetics?
Just blabbing, as usual, ever & anon. Maybe it has something to do with looking for poetry as opposed to the verbalized "positioning" of writers on different spots on the political scale. To focus on the resources of poetry so intensely that it begins to speak to ALL sides, without equivocation. Another idealized frame-up?
More leaven from Henry the blabbing fair-see.
My father, in his mid-70s, still plays poker with his friends from high school. The game-player. A lawyer, it was all about winning games. Now that he's retired, it's games all the time. Up & Down the River with my daughter. I remember the eternal Sunday afternoons, too quiet, us kids at loose ends, Mom & Dad & Aunt Martha & Grandma playing bridge, so quietly. Chuckling now & then. The Mississippi River down in its canyon across the street.
Frames are games. Critical games with little round counters & a checkerboard. The yucky feeling of reviews, yes, most of the time; because the reviewer (me) is thinking "this is an easy assignment". The words are anybody's, without much commitment or authenticity.
But let's suppose somebody who can respond with feeling & intelligence & new insight. So criticism might be possible in that case. & if the frames are inadequate, can they be made to work more adequately? In reference to Joe's comments about globalism & war & all : is it legitimate to propose general ideas about how poetry in general responds meaningfully to the world in crises? I really don't know the answer to this.
I sent an email to a list recently complaining about the inadequacy of a CK Williams poem at the back page of this week's New Yorker. Inadequate to me, anyway. So why? I sensed a combination of complacency, vagueness, & cheap tricks ("fire" as a metaphor for general sense of doom & blame the gummint).
I remember with fear & trembling long harangues & debates on Buff List & SubSubpoetics over "general rules" (frames); that puts me in trepidation. But I'm tempted again to look for a way of asking for something of poetry - something between Ron's alternative dialect dialectic, & the typical sleight-of-hand of professional poets represented by the CK Williams poem. Authenticity? Complex engagement? Patience? Unwillingness to rhetorize a reality? What is this called in poetics?
Just blabbing, as usual, ever & anon. Maybe it has something to do with looking for poetry as opposed to the verbalized "positioning" of writers on different spots on the political scale. To focus on the resources of poetry so intensely that it begins to speak to ALL sides, without equivocation. Another idealized frame-up?
More leaven from Henry the blabbing fair-see.
My father, in his mid-70s, still plays poker with his friends from high school. The game-player. A lawyer, it was all about winning games. Now that he's retired, it's games all the time. Up & Down the River with my daughter. I remember the eternal Sunday afternoons, too quiet, us kids at loose ends, Mom & Dad & Aunt Martha & Grandma playing bridge, so quietly. Chuckling now & then. The Mississippi River down in its canyon across the street.
2.27.2003
Lots of poetry books cross my desk;
Geryon or Cerberus, I route them
over to the vault (the Harris Collection).
This one looks pretty good,
though terribly straitened.
(Pure Descent, by Elizabeth Robinson.)
Geryon or Cerberus, I route them
over to the vault (the Harris Collection).
This one looks pretty good,
though terribly straitened.
(Pure Descent, by Elizabeth Robinson.)
From Mandelstam's essay "The Word & Culture" (1921):
"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs and gateways insure the state against the ravages of time.
Poetry is the plow that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface."
With that in mind, some curious political-poetical correlations & my Forth of July: "poema" or long poem as a reflection of the "state". "the father of his country". Dubya, & the "W" etched into the East Side hillside, mirroring the eagle-eye "M" of Justitia in Dante's heaven (of Mars?). Inscriptions withstanding the corrosion of time. M & W forming cat's eyes. Pushkin the lost black cat, lost in Petersburg, lost in the Kremlin, lost (in Stubborn Grew) on Halloween & leading into the "catabasis" narrative. & who is the lost Pushkin, the lost black cat, the lost African elephant? The lost "W" in the heavens is Cassiopeia, the daughter of the Ethiopian queen. Ethiopia, "home of the lost ark of the covenant". Black-talk, Delta-talk in Forth of July, redman-talk, rus-talk. Primordial origins. Origin & end in the ark of Jubilee, Eden & Paradise. What is Jubilee? My politics: holiday, equilibrium, liberation, justice, equality, sanctioned by the time-warp ineffable intervening Ethiopian-Hebraic ark-word we don't yet comprehend.
Nutty Nile-notes.
"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs and gateways insure the state against the ravages of time.
Poetry is the plow that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface."
With that in mind, some curious political-poetical correlations & my Forth of July: "poema" or long poem as a reflection of the "state". "the father of his country". Dubya, & the "W" etched into the East Side hillside, mirroring the eagle-eye "M" of Justitia in Dante's heaven (of Mars?). Inscriptions withstanding the corrosion of time. M & W forming cat's eyes. Pushkin the lost black cat, lost in Petersburg, lost in the Kremlin, lost (in Stubborn Grew) on Halloween & leading into the "catabasis" narrative. & who is the lost Pushkin, the lost black cat, the lost African elephant? The lost "W" in the heavens is Cassiopeia, the daughter of the Ethiopian queen. Ethiopia, "home of the lost ark of the covenant". Black-talk, Delta-talk in Forth of July, redman-talk, rus-talk. Primordial origins. Origin & end in the ark of Jubilee, Eden & Paradise. What is Jubilee? My politics: holiday, equilibrium, liberation, justice, equality, sanctioned by the time-warp ineffable intervening Ethiopian-Hebraic ark-word we don't yet comprehend.
Nutty Nile-notes.
Some comments on Ron Silliman's remarks today (2/27), on Brian Kim Stefan's "Creep" theory.
Ron has a frame for everything, which if I might oversimplify, goes something like this :
There is a community in opposition to mainstream capitalist-controlled society. There is an avant-garde, oppositional poetry & poetics community which stems from & represents this wider community. There is no alternative to membership in this community : anyone who claims otherwise is either a dupe or a sellout. Language Poetry is the classic manifestation of this oppositional community. The younger generations have so far failed to meet its standards, either because they do not recognize the L-Po techniques which they themselves have imitated, or because they are tempted into apostasy by the wider capitalist "serial publication" culture. ["Rugged"] Individualism in this context is false consciousness, a joke.
Maybe an important thing to recognize in this constellation of ideas is that for Ron, thinking about this political community or this alternative culture is a creative activity in itself, and poetry is an outgrowth from this activity rather than something with its own independent center & sphere. & while my first impulse is to try to debunk this whole intellectual constellation as a tautology, a mental prison-house, I have to recognize a strange parallel to the concept of "tradition", or the main line of development in world poetry, which I proposed as the real (though denied) context within which oppositional poetries happen. They are both framing concepts.
I guess the reason I feel more confident in my own concept is that the frame is still poetry per se; also as I have tried to sketch it out, my concept of tradition is fairly open-ended. That is, I don't propose a set of particular works or styles as "the tradition", but the idea of poetry as a global, characteristic, distinct ACTIVITY, which re-arranges the relations between past & present, history and Now.
And the basic error of Ron's concept is that he has imposed one distinct activity (political philosophy) on another distinct activity (poetry), the former providing a kind of control function. Of course, both poetry and philosophy stem from the same source, human creativity, so it's possible to design all kinds of bridging perceptions & vocabularies & judgements - this is the substance of this kind of intellection, Ron's actual creative-critical activity. The problem appears when we recognize that there are a variety of political philosophies, rather than a single one, and a variety of poetries : so that the bridge-making from ONE philosophical community to absorb one acceptable poetry is inherently partisan. In Ron's case it proceeds to a series of polemic oppositions between a capitalist-individualist-market-driven Mainstream on the one hand, and the righteous community of oppositional poets on the other. & his comments on post-lang-po generations exhibit a bemused confusion about why all these youngsters don't fall more solidly & appropriately into his constructed camps.
It seems useful to me to go straight to the perception that for Ron is most taboo : the poet as individual Person. The Person develops distinct notions & attitudes which sometimes get verbalized or crystallized in philosophical beliefs or political opinions; the Person who may also be a poet approaches the distinct activity of making poetry from a similarly unique & individual perspective. Sometimes through the miracle of communication & shared beliefs & common needs, communities form & collaborative work is accomplished; books are edited & published, poems shared, cathedrals are built. We can argue about the status of individuality & consciousness until the sun goes down; but I for one will always tend toward recognizing the inimitable uniqueness, difference, particularity of each thing among species & groups & abstractions. It's how the poem differentiates itself that it comes out of the shadow of its predecessors & the gene-pool of those that have gone before.
Ron has a frame for everything, which if I might oversimplify, goes something like this :
There is a community in opposition to mainstream capitalist-controlled society. There is an avant-garde, oppositional poetry & poetics community which stems from & represents this wider community. There is no alternative to membership in this community : anyone who claims otherwise is either a dupe or a sellout. Language Poetry is the classic manifestation of this oppositional community. The younger generations have so far failed to meet its standards, either because they do not recognize the L-Po techniques which they themselves have imitated, or because they are tempted into apostasy by the wider capitalist "serial publication" culture. ["Rugged"] Individualism in this context is false consciousness, a joke.
Maybe an important thing to recognize in this constellation of ideas is that for Ron, thinking about this political community or this alternative culture is a creative activity in itself, and poetry is an outgrowth from this activity rather than something with its own independent center & sphere. & while my first impulse is to try to debunk this whole intellectual constellation as a tautology, a mental prison-house, I have to recognize a strange parallel to the concept of "tradition", or the main line of development in world poetry, which I proposed as the real (though denied) context within which oppositional poetries happen. They are both framing concepts.
I guess the reason I feel more confident in my own concept is that the frame is still poetry per se; also as I have tried to sketch it out, my concept of tradition is fairly open-ended. That is, I don't propose a set of particular works or styles as "the tradition", but the idea of poetry as a global, characteristic, distinct ACTIVITY, which re-arranges the relations between past & present, history and Now.
And the basic error of Ron's concept is that he has imposed one distinct activity (political philosophy) on another distinct activity (poetry), the former providing a kind of control function. Of course, both poetry and philosophy stem from the same source, human creativity, so it's possible to design all kinds of bridging perceptions & vocabularies & judgements - this is the substance of this kind of intellection, Ron's actual creative-critical activity. The problem appears when we recognize that there are a variety of political philosophies, rather than a single one, and a variety of poetries : so that the bridge-making from ONE philosophical community to absorb one acceptable poetry is inherently partisan. In Ron's case it proceeds to a series of polemic oppositions between a capitalist-individualist-market-driven Mainstream on the one hand, and the righteous community of oppositional poets on the other. & his comments on post-lang-po generations exhibit a bemused confusion about why all these youngsters don't fall more solidly & appropriately into his constructed camps.
It seems useful to me to go straight to the perception that for Ron is most taboo : the poet as individual Person. The Person develops distinct notions & attitudes which sometimes get verbalized or crystallized in philosophical beliefs or political opinions; the Person who may also be a poet approaches the distinct activity of making poetry from a similarly unique & individual perspective. Sometimes through the miracle of communication & shared beliefs & common needs, communities form & collaborative work is accomplished; books are edited & published, poems shared, cathedrals are built. We can argue about the status of individuality & consciousness until the sun goes down; but I for one will always tend toward recognizing the inimitable uniqueness, difference, particularity of each thing among species & groups & abstractions. It's how the poem differentiates itself that it comes out of the shadow of its predecessors & the gene-pool of those that have gone before.
2.26.2003
Yes, & about that long poem (Stubborn Grew/The Rose - &/or Forth of July). I was looking out the library window this afternoon toward downtown Providence, trying to stay awake, thinking about the motivations which started back in the early 80s. Perhaps very big poems like the Divina Commedia really come from a similar impulse to the very brief poems, epigrams, Emily, Celan. The feeling that a prophet feels with words - Yeats' line, "speech after long silence". Facing the universe & trying to get it right this time, this once. Not so much an intellectual thing as an emotion, as when some serious music begins to take hold.
That was one aspect. Another motivation seems less exalted : a long poem allows you to dawdle, plan, cogitate, live with it - even when you're not ready to SPEAK that way. It's a way of getting old & set in your ways & unpoetic while remaining inside a POEMA (russian name for "long poem").
& the miracle was (at least from my biased experience) I got older & older & the poem(s) got younger. My early poems are older & creakier (I mean my early peoms from my SECOND phase. . . it gets complicated when you take a powder from poetry for almost 10 years).
The genre fascination, another aspect. There is a kind of hierarchy among the buildings. I mean the Bible & Dante are HUGE. . . & the American Long Poem (Pound/Crane/HD/Zuk/WCW/Olson et al.) bears a curious affinity to these ENCYCLOPEDIC works, these WORLD-CREATIONS. & this goes back to what I said above, about the motivation to say the absolute perfect thing, large or small. Pound: "who will lift the great acorn of light?" So it becomes a great game.
& it was a great game! Chess masters manuever within a nexus of thousands of moves. It began to feel that way, after I accepted the procedure I first caught from Mandelstam : the idea of a sequence of DRAFTS or variations on a theme. Many-in-one. It was a very simple idea which grows complexity. & it really worked for me. One thing you can see if you look for it in Forth of July is a progression from the opening chapter made up of very short distinct lyrics, to the next chapter in which the individual poems are linked more closely, to the next chapter in which they are linked less by narrative & more thematically, to the next chapter which pulls all of these together into an uber-narrative (Bluejay/Orpheus). . . to the 2nd half of the book which makes a larger, tighter amalgam in this vein, to the 2nd book (Grassblade Light) which crystallizes & formalizes the balance between whole & part, to the 3rd book (July), which subjects this crystal to SPEED & FLOW. . . There is a distinct progression from specificity & localness & narrative at the start of the poem to music & universality & indirection at the end. The narrative is there but it's part of a very elusive/allusive net toward the end, a sort of cabala of alphabetic characters & significant anniversaries. Under the sign of Orpheus & the shadow of William Blackstone & the light of "J" (Bluejay/Juliet/July/Jubilee/J). Overall the process of thematic variation or many-in-one begins to take on a life of its own as it unifies & draws taut its own materials even as it absorbs & swallows up an increasingly larger range of materials - the BLOB ! It must be this process itself which gives the sense of acceleration. Acceleration toward the past, the springtime, the Jubilee, the Eternal - a time machine. As I've already suggested in this blog somewhere, the notion of a time-warp or ark-machine or J-nave-ship is central to the "historical argument" of this long poem (one more of its motivations being to suggest something slightly different in the way of History than as provided by the other long-poem makers : not COMPLETELY different, but a variation (there are intimations of renovated time or life-renewal in Crane, Zukofsky, Pound, Olson. . . but I place the emphasis in my own way).
It will never be the Divina Commedia, which is the Mozart of poetry, the perfect crystal. But it is a kind of singing HG Sophia!
That was one aspect. Another motivation seems less exalted : a long poem allows you to dawdle, plan, cogitate, live with it - even when you're not ready to SPEAK that way. It's a way of getting old & set in your ways & unpoetic while remaining inside a POEMA (russian name for "long poem").
& the miracle was (at least from my biased experience) I got older & older & the poem(s) got younger. My early poems are older & creakier (I mean my early peoms from my SECOND phase. . . it gets complicated when you take a powder from poetry for almost 10 years).
The genre fascination, another aspect. There is a kind of hierarchy among the buildings. I mean the Bible & Dante are HUGE. . . & the American Long Poem (Pound/Crane/HD/Zuk/WCW/Olson et al.) bears a curious affinity to these ENCYCLOPEDIC works, these WORLD-CREATIONS. & this goes back to what I said above, about the motivation to say the absolute perfect thing, large or small. Pound: "who will lift the great acorn of light?" So it becomes a great game.
& it was a great game! Chess masters manuever within a nexus of thousands of moves. It began to feel that way, after I accepted the procedure I first caught from Mandelstam : the idea of a sequence of DRAFTS or variations on a theme. Many-in-one. It was a very simple idea which grows complexity. & it really worked for me. One thing you can see if you look for it in Forth of July is a progression from the opening chapter made up of very short distinct lyrics, to the next chapter in which the individual poems are linked more closely, to the next chapter in which they are linked less by narrative & more thematically, to the next chapter which pulls all of these together into an uber-narrative (Bluejay/Orpheus). . . to the 2nd half of the book which makes a larger, tighter amalgam in this vein, to the 2nd book (Grassblade Light) which crystallizes & formalizes the balance between whole & part, to the 3rd book (July), which subjects this crystal to SPEED & FLOW. . . There is a distinct progression from specificity & localness & narrative at the start of the poem to music & universality & indirection at the end. The narrative is there but it's part of a very elusive/allusive net toward the end, a sort of cabala of alphabetic characters & significant anniversaries. Under the sign of Orpheus & the shadow of William Blackstone & the light of "J" (Bluejay/Juliet/July/Jubilee/J). Overall the process of thematic variation or many-in-one begins to take on a life of its own as it unifies & draws taut its own materials even as it absorbs & swallows up an increasingly larger range of materials - the BLOB ! It must be this process itself which gives the sense of acceleration. Acceleration toward the past, the springtime, the Jubilee, the Eternal - a time machine. As I've already suggested in this blog somewhere, the notion of a time-warp or ark-machine or J-nave-ship is central to the "historical argument" of this long poem (one more of its motivations being to suggest something slightly different in the way of History than as provided by the other long-poem makers : not COMPLETELY different, but a variation (there are intimations of renovated time or life-renewal in Crane, Zukofsky, Pound, Olson. . . but I place the emphasis in my own way).
It will never be the Divina Commedia, which is the Mozart of poetry, the perfect crystal. But it is a kind of singing HG Sophia!
Responding to Jordan Equanimity's blogdentity crisis: he's such a natural!
I think I'm blogging to find readers and provide a context for my poems at the same time. It's been such a lonesome road. & also to stay near poetry through this new technic of writing, when often I feel very far from the creative state. A giddy person trapped inside the body of a saturnine phlegmatic pre-Alzheimer(?) fiftian. I don't have a poetics, I just have a history which can be thought about as the practice of poetics of some kind. & also I just like these blogs, their variety & characteristicness. All the antennae out there - those blogs with 500 links along the side. Joe Duemer for example as he says was way before Ron Silliman. & also to change the dynamic: ie. I want to TALK SOME MORE ABOUT MY LONG POEM PROJECT !! Because of the odd thing that happened on the Poetry Lists in the 90s : what was that?? Well, the attention I attracted through a new medium (Buff Poetics List) actually militated against finding readers. Here I was, doing what I thought was very much in the swim of "experiment" in American poetry : & I felt very physically the swishing sound of the "innovative" world turn its back on me. Hey, folks, I've written a 900 page American Long Poem !! Hello?? Oh, they don't like me. I was probably putting them down without even realizing it, or maybe I was realizing it.
I think I'm blogging to find readers and provide a context for my poems at the same time. It's been such a lonesome road. & also to stay near poetry through this new technic of writing, when often I feel very far from the creative state. A giddy person trapped inside the body of a saturnine phlegmatic pre-Alzheimer(?) fiftian. I don't have a poetics, I just have a history which can be thought about as the practice of poetics of some kind. & also I just like these blogs, their variety & characteristicness. All the antennae out there - those blogs with 500 links along the side. Joe Duemer for example as he says was way before Ron Silliman. & also to change the dynamic: ie. I want to TALK SOME MORE ABOUT MY LONG POEM PROJECT !! Because of the odd thing that happened on the Poetry Lists in the 90s : what was that?? Well, the attention I attracted through a new medium (Buff Poetics List) actually militated against finding readers. Here I was, doing what I thought was very much in the swim of "experiment" in American poetry : & I felt very physically the swishing sound of the "innovative" world turn its back on me. Hey, folks, I've written a 900 page American Long Poem !! Hello?? Oh, they don't like me. I was probably putting them down without even realizing it, or maybe I was realizing it.
Something more obscura from Grassblade Light:
3
Infant crocuses (purple and white,
yellow at the matrix - sweet,
infinitely delicate) emerge
into raw-sprung air, among
skunk cabbages, detritus
uncovered after snow -
as an inverse couch potato
crouches in his plot (his potted
messages). Camera obscura
in the darkened room -
Rome through a pinhole,
upside-down. Air-
cushioned mattress microcosm.
Image of your fiftieth American
home run in the grass coliseum
empty absolute zero field of one.
Too-wit, too-woo. . .
This is a path.
The mark P of Philip.
John Sassamon is a witness.
Flying blind to Brazil or Lebanon
Admiral Gago crashes twice.
3.30.22. A 360-hp Rolls-Royce.
4000 miles. See dar, Noah -
the Sperry-Mag is in his hand,
a wheel within a wheel - the
compressed-air spool goes
gaga - countertop-time and -
3.27.99
3
Infant crocuses (purple and white,
yellow at the matrix - sweet,
infinitely delicate) emerge
into raw-sprung air, among
skunk cabbages, detritus
uncovered after snow -
as an inverse couch potato
crouches in his plot (his potted
messages). Camera obscura
in the darkened room -
Rome through a pinhole,
upside-down. Air-
cushioned mattress microcosm.
Image of your fiftieth American
home run in the grass coliseum
empty absolute zero field of one.
Too-wit, too-woo. . .
This is a path.
The mark P of Philip.
John Sassamon is a witness.
Flying blind to Brazil or Lebanon
Admiral Gago crashes twice.
3.30.22. A 360-hp Rolls-Royce.
4000 miles. See dar, Noah -
the Sperry-Mag is in his hand,
a wheel within a wheel - the
compressed-air spool goes
gaga - countertop-time and -
3.27.99
2.24.2003
Spontaneity. . . then again, Nowness (awkword word). Eliot's Tradition after great labor comes to sounding everything Again, Now, Anew. I remember finding some phrase once in Zukofsky for that but I can't remember it! How he felt himself re-doing what is always done in every age. Contemporaneous/perennial.
Behold, I make all things new. "The Bible is muh main book (blog?)."
As it is. . . when the universe comes home to the odd & distant nooks & crannies of a particular unique person's essence (soul expressed in character written in experience). David the sinner-man harper hand in hand with his Maker.
So that you hear the universe through the homey voice of someone who's come home - & that filter changes the nature of the universe.
Stevens probably put it more concisely somewhere.
Behold, I make all things new. "The Bible is muh main book (blog?)."
As it is. . . when the universe comes home to the odd & distant nooks & crannies of a particular unique person's essence (soul expressed in character written in experience). David the sinner-man harper hand in hand with his Maker.
So that you hear the universe through the homey voice of someone who's come home - & that filter changes the nature of the universe.
Stevens probably put it more concisely somewhere.
Dale Smith wins the award for the most conflicted review of Gabriel Gudding's Defense of Poetry. If you're confused, Coast-wise insiders, here's the explanation: this is a Minnesota/Texas thing. Ever since Humphrey/Johnson, North Star/Lone Star. . . Yank/Reb. Pickett's Charge & the 3rd Minnesota.
p.s. go straight from "Quintus Laberius Durus" to David Jones, The Roman Quarry. Do not stop at eode.
p.s. go straight from "Quintus Laberius Durus" to David Jones, The Roman Quarry. Do not stop at eode.
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