Primitive Information

I’m not one for big year-end lists, full of sentimentality and memories and whatnot. Actually, I love reading them–I’d wanted to put together a top-ten list of my favorite top-ten lists from the end of the year–but I just don’t have the time or the energy and I’m sure to leave something out.

So, inspired by Jack’s latest post, I’ll confine this to a brief summary of my current writing projects and plans for the immediate future. The project that’s consumed me for most of the past year has been the completion of my thesis manuscript.

The idea for the whole thing began last spring with Tina and I being woken up one night by a strange sound. The sound–a kind a scratchy whine–revisited us periodically, off and on, for many nights, though we were never able to figure out exactly where it originated from or what was making it. In describing it I began writing a letter, borrowing the form and character names from Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. I realized that I could write a series of such letters, interspersing them with the poems I had already written and would write.

That was the germ of the project, but I’ve encountered many obstacles and changed direction many times. Most recently, I scrapped all the letters I had written up through the fall and started that part completely over. The main reason for this was an effort to solve the largest problem the project presented–that is, how to incorporate the poems with the letters in a way that made sense or at least fit. There were also conversations that Steve and I were having about epistolary fiction, fueled by the surprisingly large number of books on the subject.

Since that time, the work’s gone more smoothly, but slowly… A lot of work goes into each letter. But I guess that’s how it should be. The poetry, of course, is a completely different animal, but still a great deal of work. It’s work that I’m happy to be doing, and grateful to have the time to be doing. Still, there are days when I’d rather be watching a 24 marathon on WGN.

I’ve started sending work out again, too, but I’m not paying any attention to the prestige factor of the journals. Mostly I’m sending to journals I have some affinity with or feel my work fits with, and trusting that, should they choose to publish something, the right readers will encounter it. I think that’s about all any of us can ask for. Sure, there are some mags I’d really like to be in, and I’ll probably keep hammering away at those. But in the long run, I don’t really see the difference between publishing something in The New Yorker or in John’s Big Pants Webzine. It has nothing to do with the work.

Aside from that, I’ve still a big stack of books and mags that Rich and others were kind enough to give me last month, along with some I’ve recently ordered, and I want to read through those and hopefully note my thoughts on them here. Then there’s finishing the construction of Ovid books with Micah, and getting those out, along with the 2nd issue of kadar koli, and preparing to publish the 3rd. That’s enough, I think…

Happy new year, everyone.

Tags: Uncategorized by dhadbawnik
1 Comment »

A response to Agnes Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life” (excerpted here)

The shape of the shadow does not always or even often conform to the shape of the body that throws it. I am thinking of shadows that break up like fleas, say, and crawl undetected over the skin, to shadows that grow to the size of dragons as Martin describes and haunt one day to day in one’s solitude, to shadows that form grotesque shapes on the floor of the sort Holbein painted in The Ambassadors (the “skull smudge” that proves, to me, that it was only the hardened Christian mind that sought to slay the dragon), to the chimeras that Baudelaire spotted on the shoulders of the men walking outside of Paris – “to each man his chimera”! – a modern resignation born of “romantic despair.”

I wake up this morning in a sort of despair – not having been able to defeat or moderate my own dragon/shadow and so defeated by it, having given it voice, having allowed it to amplify and enlarge by bouncing off the walls of others, carving holes in my own solitude to cast that shadow on those walls instead of containing it within, jack o’lantern instead of pumpkin.

The role of the dog in all of this is interesting. Dog as screen on which shadow’s thrown. Dog happy and playful when one is having difficulties, dog being cute when one is arguing with another, dog running along the periphery as in those wonderful paintings by Rubens that capture so much more than the mere pageantry of the Medici who commissioned them. How one comes to rely on this almost without noticing it, to treat dog as ground for one’s emotional state, to toss things on it as on a coffee table as one rushes in and out the front door.

Is it always best to tip-toe around the dragon, I wonder, to try to get it to sleep rather than enrage it from time to time and watch it burn. Perhaps it’s a question of longevity in the practice of art. I think of Keats who once called poetry a jack o’lantern. Keats who was so hurt by the double wound of his brother dying and finding out that his brother had been led on by a cruel prank, a friend writing fake love letters that made fun of the poet’s style. The vitriol expressed in his letters, for this one, “If I have the chance to hurt him I will,” VITRIOL as an alchemical element/acronym: Visit Interiora Terram (to) Rectify Intentionally Occultum Lapidam, to face, in other words, transform, perhaps be broken by, modify, defeat even, for the moment, match one’s life against this flame.

I spent several years in the practice of therapy, starting out with the concept that I could not defeat or destroy, but only hope to understand and integrate my own shadow. There is no need to go into the particulars of this or how it has played out in my life. But it’s some powerful mojo, that. What one gradually comes to learn is simply to endure its coming, at times with some semblance of equanimity, at others “dazzled and horrified.” It is part of the territory one works in as an artist, like a matador working in close to the bull.

Isn’t there a sort of deliciousness in the presentation of the fog in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes,/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening”… And in Roethke’s “The Lost Son”:

The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.

I know that I’m getting off-track here, that what I call shadow is not exactly interchangeable with Martin’s “Dragon,” but I also know that there were times in San Francisco I was physically unable to do something because of its presence, or I should say the sudden awareness of its presence, which to me is the genius of the painting by Holbein and of the pieces of poems I mentioned above. That is, first, the recognition of the presence of the shadow, next, the growing familiar with the proximity of its terror and (potential) destructiveness, third, the beginning to transform that into a positive entity which might be art and which might or might not point to “perfection,” or hold a mirror up to the imperfection of the Real in all its beauty.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
No Comments »

Response to a talk by Fanny Howe

What is the relationship, say, to style, solitude, the daily practice of sitting down to work, is this a question of faith and how does one deal with the simultaneous urge to explain and the agitation with explanation of any kind?

Yesterday I pulled out a book of poems by Brautigan, remembering that he was a student of Spicer’s, a sort of touchstone for me of everything that I came to know about poetry in California and thus about poetry, loving and hating his mundane brevity in the same measure that I came to know poetry in myself and trust what it meant.

And that a friend’s father who lived in the hills of Marin was very proud of once having played chess with Brautigan at a café. He simply came in, sat down, and they played, without saying a word.

I was thinking exactly of that distance between different “persons” in the sense of first, second, third, and how we traverse that distance both inside and out, in language and action, what is gained and what is left behind.

I find myself very frequently checking the time throughout the day, but what am I waiting for? I find that I am waiting to eat, to go someplace, to see someone, do something, commit some act demanded of me by the terms of my employment or duty as student, or enjoy some entertainment. Mostly I am waiting to eat.

I do not find that I am waiting or looking forward to being alone with myself, unless it is as a change in the situation of being too long with somebody else or being otherwise occupied with many other people at work or at school. Is this because I am always with myself – but set that aside for a moment – the point is that there is simultaneously a desire that time not go by so quickly, that I not keep waking up and having to do over again the things I’ve already done, wash the same dishes, eat the same meals, and yet there is a desire to eat and drink the same delicious food and coffee just as there is at the same time a desire to encounter something new in the day and a fear of that encounter, that difference that will force a decision or even a minor irritation.

And this is a perception or a sensation that one turns inwards, and it is not wrong to feel one way or the other, it simply is: at times it seems incredibly easy and enjoyable to write poems because there is an endless profusion of subjects and one never feels exactly the same way about them and they never sit still for long, but at the moment of feeling so one ceases in some way to be able to perform the difference and so one goes into the other state, that is, of feeling that nothing changes and everything has been said and the forms are all used up.

So is there as one might posit a state of “positive” bewilderment that does not attempt to finish things off or get to the end of this feeling and how does one attain it… And perhaps a testament to the need of the two parts of the self for each other, the small human doubting part with the divine questioner who already knows the answers, yet never an easy or equal relationship, one always leading the other, the endless variations and ritual of that.

The question of faith then on so many levels: for me personally (as for me symbolically in a state of Poetry), to wake up every day both dreading and welcoming it, the change and the sameness, not as answer but as question not to be finished off or explained but playing with the urge to do that. As one might play with a hangnail or attempt to run a four-minute mile.

I am extremely agitated, for example, I want to destroy my enemies, but even the attempt to do so would both give them reality and give them victory on some level and so I cannot do that, cannot even name them. I want to think this is somewhat close to the final statement in Howe’s essay: “After all, the point of art – like war – is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”

For example in the film version of The Subterraneans – an otherwise terrible movie on every level – there was one moment I thought profound almost in spite of itself. A woman character – the best character in the film perhaps because a wholly new character not in the book, and so not perverted from its original conception – is seen by another woman character as she puts on the black and white face paint that she wears as a sort of “bohemian disguise.”

“I used to be considered beautiful, but they couldn’t see what was inside… Society hides behind fake smiles and pleasant hellos, so I decided to hide behind a real mask…”

This as an accidental expression of what the artist must in a sense do deliberately, for self-preservation, to blend in, merely to survive, function, observe. Call it distance. A refusal to live the life that would name or reveal anything with the kind of resounding finality the world calls for at every turn. And thereby show that it’s worth living at all.

And war paint? Disguise that hides in plain sight the reality of the inner soul.

I recognize more and more that I need my enemies to grow and prosper – if I didn’t have them the mind would strike out to find new ones, new fears, worries, it is the immediate easy victory that ought to be suspected and feared.

Last night I dreamed not of an enemy but of an old friend I had not spoken to in a long time. There was once a great deal of anxiety around keeping in contact with this friend. In the dream this came up again, but she reassured me that she would always come and to trust my intuition as a sign of her coming.

More things happened in the dream – I stood out front saying goodbye to some other friends, after she had gone, casually pissing in the front yard, feeling only mild embarrassment that anyone might see. But the main thing was this crux of feeling the elements combined to carry forward. In dreams, yes, there is seldom a satisfying sense of anything ending. This happens and that and people appear and disappear. But there is a sort of precision and wildness within absolute limits, as in this poem by Brautigan:

“AH, GREAT EXPECTATIONS!”

Sam likes to say, “Ah, great expectations!”
at least three or four times in every
conversation. He is twelve years old.
Nobody knows what he is talking about when
he says it. Sometimes it makes people
feel uncomfortable.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
6 Comments »

Tags: Video by dhadbawnik
6 Comments »

Where is the heart I am calling?
Heart become eyelid
of an eye on its way to where I am.
The eye is not here yet and already I can see.
Before there is a heart I am made of beating.
I am calling in an open doorway.
I am calling from inside.
(Roberto Juarroz, 1st Vertical Poetry, trans. W. S. Merwin)

(The above come across while skimming through book looking for the below:)

The stone is a clenched lap
where the bird’s open maneuver is in peril,
but also it is an open memory
where the bird’s clenched fist
plummets like an unexpected threat.

There has to be a point
where the journeys of forgetting stop
and the forms remember.
(2nd Vertical Poetry, ibid, ital. mine)

Which is worth reproducing in the original:

Tiene que haber un punto
donde cesen los turnos del olvido
y las formas recuerden.

Opposed to or juxtaposed with Derrida’s concept of the poet as hedgehog and the poem as something both wounded and wounding – or as Hoa Nguyen so brilliantly came up with an extemporaneous line during an exercise, “porcupine ball, fun to catch” or some such thing – I propose the poet as shark. Now I don’t know a lot about the shark but I know that classic thing about movement, the shark must keep moving or die, and therein it seems to me lies both its greatest strength and deepest vulnerability all at once – imagine, the need to keep moving, even in sleep, in order to breathe.

And I can think of a number of levels on which the same might be said of a poet. Keep moving within the poem, mind heart breath, logos, line, image, sound, and so on, in order to give that swiftness or torque even to the most seemingly static form (for example the first poem by Juarroz above, with its heavily end-stopped lines). Also keep moving without the poem, perhaps (one might imagine) like a basketball player moving without the ball, in order to confuse the defense, wear it out, break open for the pass and the easy slam dunk. And in a larger sense, keep moving so that one never arrives at finality, so that one is not pinned down in parody (self or otherwise) and stagnation.

But keep moving means one is never settled or comfortable or secure. One might be comfortable in the water and the king of the food chain so to speak but what is the water – a question it would be interesting to ask a shark. The poet must then be a shark aware of what the water is, is made of, how it changes, as deeply and on as many levels as possible – locality, speech, sound, environment, self, other, light/shade, aware and at once willing to “accept loss forever” and move on through to new waters – or not to trust – imagine the urgency of a shark suddenly realizing it wasn’t in water at all but mud or confetti or “excelsior” (of the kind I always think of when Bogart is cutting open the package containing Maltese Falcon) can’t breathe and must get to water fast or die.

Or – this is getting interesting – how about a poet as shark that must somehow breathe in that false water, a kind of Plato’s pilgrim who has ventured out and up from the cave to the “real” light but must come back down to the shadow-world and why? Is it only to do that which Plato describes as so preposterous, to preach the Real in a world of shadows and echoes and reflections, to endure the ridicule, to be whipped, scorned, etc. and what could be more “wounded and wounding” than that. And does one go up/down, in-out, overunder to get to the Real light/water and does even THAT change one moment to the next.

Thankfully there are these poems by Juarroz which I don’t pretend to understand but which seem to mark so beautifully this movement. On the facing page of the second poem, above, I read this:

The center is an absence,
of a point, of infinity, even of absence,
and it can be located only in absence.

Huh? But it feels right somehow, doesn’t it? There’s a tremendous vulnerability there in going into the absence “even of absence” and certainly MOVEMENT which I had never noticed to such a degree in all these poems being a condition of that. For in the next stanza:

Look at me after you’ve gone
even though it’s only a moment since I was there.
Now the center has taught me not to be here
but later this is where the center will be.

If “to be” can ever be said to have tension and force it seems to me to be here, where the very thing not mentioned is what’s behind every word, between every line, and that’s movement. And he seems to have had to say it this way, not only because “the center is an absence,” but because he’s explaining it so straight one almost can’t believe it’s real, but there it is, bang. I was here/I will be there/in that absence constantly occupied a moment ago lies the center I’m moving away from/towards. Against that a tremendous freedom; a baby being tossed up in the air of its own volition trusting that even as the “journeys of forgetting stop/the forms remember” – the forms being the light, the Real, Water, arms of the mother to catch it. But a vicious baby, a shark baby, a hedgehog baby that might bite or prick or at any moment get squished flat into another dimension.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
No Comments »

“This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving… My life has been spent in the midst of heroic landscapes which never overwhelmed me and yet I live in a single room in the city – the room a lens focusing on a sheet of paper. Or the inside of your head. How do you like your world?” – Phillip Whalen, “Since you ask me – A press release,” October 1959

“FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” – Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” by way of Robert Creeley.

“The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE;
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”
– ibid

I take it that we have assumed a solution to the problem of content just as poets prior to 1900 had assumed a solution to form. That is a dumb statement but it’s a place to start. Certainly Keats was never satisfied with the forms he had been handed and wrote sonnets about how shitty the sonnet form was and broke rhyme schemes apart like a man intent on splitting the atom and came up with his great new creation in the late Odes, before that tried the Spenserian stanza, tried ottava rima, tried the couplet of Dryden and Pope, tried Miltonian blank verse, was trying drama at the time of his death, sort of by accident stumbled upon an expository letter form that had never been done before and has never been equaled since; was on a constant quest to reshape the power and thrust of his individual lines and moved the active verbs around as I say like a scientist to see what it would do to be here or there on the line, in the original Hyperion for example gave the heave to the front of the line, front-loaded lines with super-active words recognizing Milton’s great achievement and mastered it, out-Miltoned Milton if you will, and developed the idea further to use in later work (front-loaded too with trochees to further accentuate the opening stress):

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”

But then too constantly played with the syllabic interplay of vowel sounds within and between lines, something he had seen early on in the forgotten boy-poet Chatterton (Chesterton?), and again far outstripped his teacher,

“Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; (tart)
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, (soft)
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; (sharp – piquant)
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d” (sumptious)
– Eve of St. Agnes

And learned use of caesura/enjambment to free line from sing-song heave from Leigh Hunt, but again had the idea to move caesura around to avoid Hunt’s clumsy “pouncing.”

All this to say that form was already something superior poets had become dissatisfied with as early as 1800, but it took till Pound and Williams (and H.D.) to come out in AMERICA and say and do something totally different, to very consciously free poetry from the restrictions of received form and fall much closer to Olson’s idea (gotten largely from Pound/Williams) and Whalen’s perhaps even more radical and less dogmatic one. So you can have a poetry that says

so much depends on
the apparition of these faces
a red wheel
barrow/petals
on a wet, black bough

which might be a simple declarative sentence chopped up into fragments. As Lew Welch once joked, “Poetry is just writing that doesn’t go all the way to the end of the page.” Or as Tina asked this morning, having to go teach freshman english class, “what is poetry?” We know it’s not that. But we end up talking about what it’s not to get at what it is. We know it’s not prose. How we know is that you can translate prose fairly readably without too many complaints but you can’t ever satisfactorily translate poetry. You end up losing sense, meaning, rhyme, rhythm, musical flow of the language, so you therefore conclude it’s a special kind of writing concerned with all of those things in a more heightened sense than prose is, and you also get into poetry’s way of condensing (dichten = condensare) which might or might not be at work but usually if it’s any good is.

But why I say we seem to have “solved” the problem of content is that so much of poetry today seems caught up in an endless pursuit of form, a pursuit of new form, form to distinguish my poetry from yours, yours from mine, Flarf, langpo, pomo, even a cat I remember on the SUNY poetics listserv who’d post chunks of computer programming language filtered through some program or other and people would get really angry at getting these vast binary-code like e-mails and other people would defend him and say no he’s a genius and even (because he was/is Jewish) would get into these debates about Anti-semitism and anti-intellectualism and things like that. But what is the content, what would Shahn say and what would anyone say if you asked. Is it dumb or obvious to ask or is it valid to ask what the content of a Flarf poem is (when the content is whatever comes up in a Google search) or the content of a “language poem” (though I’m still not sure such a thing exists) where the content is whatever the reader brings to it, i.e. the charge of particular words or sense fragments and connections between them.

I take Creeley on the other hand to be saying, essentially, I see a thing and my seeing it dictates exactly how the poem MUST be written, the shape of the woman is the shape of the poem, the shape of the distance between us, the shape and the energy of the speech and the way the light hits and the shadow and silence, all of it as accurately as I can get it down in language to give the sense of that to a listener or “experiencer” of the poem in the moment of experiencing it not exactly as I had it but as close as possible or to give an equivalent hit in a different way. Which does not seem so very radical or revolutionary to me, in fact has a sort of classical feel to it (as I compare Derrida’s “hedgehog” to Olson’s poet being out in an “open field” I am convinced again that we are all saying essentially the same thing about poetry everywhere at all times). But try writing a poem using only the text message function of your cell phone. Try typing one in an e-mail, writing it with finger on the dirt on a windshield, scraping it on a bathroom wall or writing in lipstick on a mirror (Piper Laurie in The Hustler) – that we would even think to do so says so much about where we are as a culture and time different and advanced perhaps but certainly desperate but that is a topic for another essay.

NOTES

The Olson statement on syllable/line seems to refer solely to sound in poetry whereas the Creeley “form… content” is more encompassing but somehow exact as his poetry is and the Whalen “graph of mind moving” strikes me as ultimately freer but this might also be the influence of his poetry working in my mind as I think this.

…

I am aware of the inherent weakness of my statement re. “solved content” but it is merely a place to start and the more I think about it an intriguing one. Just consider how almost embarassing it is to even admit to having content… e.g. in the Subterraneans a novel “about” sex/gender/race in a really sincere but also sexist/racist way and imagine even doing that now without being ironic or distanced or funny or postmodern. Thus one is given to approach this problem by skewing representational lines and almost of supreme importance becomes the question of POV.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
3 Comments »

Tags: Sports, Video by dhadbawnik
5 Comments »