Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil.

So I have lots of notes about her quotes, which are endlessly quotable-- I feel like I'm copying down favorite passages from a self-help book or something. But she is, and I saw many parallels between this text and The Cloud of Unknowing... we are separated, we must try to achieve unity by not trying to achieve unity but by accepting that we are nothing, by loving our suffering, by accepting it because it is, by turning to art?? She says quite a bit about art, specifically poetry, and it's interesting when the two collide-- she reminds me a bit of Spicer--we possess everything and divine inspiration (choose yr term here) works with what you've got-- keep yr attention on the inexpressible, etc.

There seems to be some alignment (maybe not much) with Bataille on this point

decreation (28) brought back to God-- away from solitude (29) renunciation

with the renunciation of self, which seems to be part of our animalistic natures, maybe-- to achieve a 'higher' state.

Introduction: 'The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down.'

(11) Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.

(13) We must not believe in immortality ('sweetens what's bitter') and accept the void; shun the consolations of providence, utility of sin, etc.

(14) Attachment is no more or less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist. (many people believe destruction of town = to their exile from that town)

(18) The future is a filler of void places. Sometimes the past also plays this part ('I used to be,' or 'I once did this or that') But there are other cases where affliction makes the thought of happiness intolerable; then it robs the sufferer of his past

The present does not attain finality. Nor does the future, for it is only what will be present.

(19) We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future. This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure.

(20) If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire. ... In such cases of suffering, [death or hunger] emptiness are the mode of existence of the objects of our desire. We only have to draw aside the veil of unreality and we shall see that they are given to us in this way. When we see that, we still suffer, but we are happy.

(21) To lose someone: we suffer because the departed, the absent, has become something imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary. We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of the desire which is not imaginary... The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing.

(23) We possess nothing in the world-- a mere chance can strip us of everything-- except the power to say 'I'. ...There is absolutely no other free act which is given us to accomplish-- only the destruction of the 'I'.

(27) Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'

(28) It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough 'I' in us to make it possible to surrender the 'I' for love's sake. Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we cease to be.

(30) May that which is low in us go downwards so that what is high can go upwards. For we are wrong side upward. We are born thus. To re-establish order is to undo the creature in us.

(35) Humility is the refusal to exist outside God. It is the queen of virtues.

(41) With all things, it is always what comes to us from outside, freely and by surprise as a gift from heaven, without our having sought it, that brings us pure joy. In the same way real good can only come from outside ourselves, never from our own effort. We cannot under any circumstances manufacture something which is better than ourselves.

(45) The image of the cave refers to values... We accept the false values which appear to us and when we think we are acting we are in reality motionless, for we are still confined in the same system of values.

(47) We must prefer a real hell to an imaginary paradise.

(54) We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility in us-- only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.

(55) To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger. [For this reason [[God]] loves all creatures equally, itself included.]

(58) It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation that that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they exist...To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. ... Thus in love there is chastity or the lack of chastity according to whether the desire is or is not directed toward the future.

love-- not possession but contemplation

(62) Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.

decreation (28) brought back to God-- away from solitude (29) renunciation

(68) evil: We have to love GOd through evil as such: to love God through the evil we hate, while hating this evil: to love God as the author of the evil which we are actually hating.

(70) truth: The presence of illusions which we have abandoned but which are still present in the mind is perhaps the criterion of truth.

(72) evil: I should not love suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.

(78) war: to keep the love of life intact within us; never to inflict death without accepting it for ourselves.

(82) Cloud of Unknowing: There are people for whom everything is salutary which brings God nearer to them. For me it is everything which keeps him at a distance. Between me and him there is the thickness of the universe-- and that of the cross is added to it.

(88) on poetry: The beautiful poem is the one which is composed while attention is kept directed toward inexpressible inspiration, in so far as it is inexpressible.

(108) writing like birth: Writing is like giving birth: we cannot help making the supreme effort. But we also act in like fashion. I need have no fear of not making the supreme effort-- provided only that I am honest with myself and that I pay attention.

(109) interpreting symbols: Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.

(121-2) reading defined: We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people.

(128) We have to feel the universe through each sensation. What does it matter then whether it be pleasure or pain? If our hand is shaken by a beloved friend when we meet again after a long separation, what does it matter that he squeezes the hand and hurts us?

There is a degree of pain on reaching which we lose the world. But afterwards peace comes.

(132) The world is a closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

(136) Beauty eat: The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. The desire that it should be.

(139) sign/signifier/signified: The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs...

(154) art & inspiration: The eternal alone is invulnerable to time. In order that a works of art should be admired for all time, that a love, a friendship should last throughout a life (even stay pure for an entire day, perhaps), in order that a conception of the human condition should remain constant despite the manifold experiences and vicissitudes of fortune-- there must be an inspiration from on high.

(159) revolution not religion people's opiate maybe because it ignores necessity?: Deprivation of this poetry explains all forms of demoralization.

Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics

Roman Jakobson, Style in Language. I have a lot of anxiety about this post because I only marginally understood this essay but I'll try to write about it. It seems that most of this essay is devoted to defending these statements:

(377) ...In poetry any verbal element is converted into a figure of poetic speech... 'poetry is a kind of language'... [therefore] 'there seems to be no reason for trying to separate the literary from the overall linguistic.'

Jakobson seems to be concerned with what Bernstein talked about-- but rather than dubbing it 'extralexical,' he identifies these qualities as inherent to language. He begins by describing language's purposes and functions, with a little diagram

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE

CONTACT

CODE

Which is then revised (or complemented by):

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUAL

He spends a significant amount of time tracing linguistic patterns/sounds through lines of poems, idioms, stories-- not only in English. It seems to be an in-depth study of 'why poetry works'.

(372) In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound [think Poe] is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning. ...Sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on phenomenal connection between different sensory modes, in particular between the visual and auditory experience.

(373) Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent into patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely.

So we can never escape meanings created or associated with sound but they can be tinkered with. Jakobson looks at Poe, but I can't help thinking of Plath or Stein here too (or Bunting, obviously). I love this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce about some literary forms in which verbal devices are 'unostentatious' and language seems a 'nearly transparent garment':

(374) 'This clothing can never be completely stripped off, it is only changed for something more diaphanous.'

Again, language-- and sound-- and its appearance-- can never be totally transparent, just more and more sheer.

And I think Jakobson would agree with Bernstein that these 'extralexical' components of a poem are legible and deserve to be read, as well:

(375) Textbooks believe in the occurrence of poems devoid of imagery, but actually scarcity in lexical tropes is counterbalanced by gorgeous grammatical tropes and figures.

I'm still not quite sure here-- it seems that sound & sense are very much connected for Jakobson. It still sort of feels hierarchical-- or maybe it's that sound has its own sense that foregrounds 'semantic sense'.

Second Addendum to Forth Poem

Below, a plea. A mis-

take Below, aple a. A mistake Below

a plea, Amis. take. Be. low, a plea.

A mis. take Below. ap lea Am is take Be

Lo—wa—? Plea—A mist ake, B[e]low

a plea, Ami, stake B[e]low a plea, Ami, stake.

Nonse Poem

skyward, I'm not

turned upward

towardward

load me touch me

shit, that's what happens

c'mon let's go

Babylon!

I'm counting

in several

codes

steady storm

united then

united

attack

oh my god

smashed I want that

god damned machine

taken

down pistol gun loaded

take this

shit

she's gotta fat ass

keep 'em off

me

all is one, one is all

get me?

stop it this noise

is too loud my ears

are too big

if you load me, I can take it

got my belt?

god damn it

closed off but we love you

like flies

we love you

parasitic forging

to keep the homestead

harvested

for the babies

turn skyward

it's coming, fast

approaching

I'm killing it, ARGH

I'm lovin' it, YES

You'll survive after

my best parts

cut off

11 Lines After Rational Artifice

Awana git

in sod yore

whirled

butter

eye yam eye

whirled

danube-y

ore whirled witch

leaves bus hose

-- chutzpah--

blue

Rational Artifice

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice.

In the preface, Forrest-Thomson lays out her intentions for the book:

(x) [Responding to Wittgenstein's assertion that poems, though composed in the language of information, 'aren't used in the language-game of giving information'] It is easy to treat poetry as if it were engaged in the language-game of giving information and thus to assume that what is important about a poem is what it tells us about the external world. The meaning of the poem is extended into the world; this extended meaning is assumed to be dominant, and if formal features are to become noteworthy components of a poem they must be assimilated into this extended meaning. Such an approach falsifies are experience of poems...

(xi) all components of poems are taken up and smothered by a critical reading anxious to convert all verbal organization into extended meaning-- to transform pattern into theme.

F-T calls this "Naturalization": an attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language & organization by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice appear natural.

this can't be completely avoided-- useful to understand both poetry as an institution and poems as significant utterances. BUT 'intelligibility at the cost of blindness'... good naturalization dwells in the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organization rather than set them aside in an attempt to produce a statement about the world.'

*I think I'm starting to understand the root of my dissatisfaction with the lyric poetry I was in the habit of writing: besides not acknowledging the overweening ego of the writing, [and this isn't entirely another separate thought] I was taking the devices of its artifice for granted. Meaning was paramount, with puns or sound play present but all to one end-- little consideration of the sonic landscape or the visual aspects of the poem. Aaron was talking about some poets he met in TX at his school, and described them "as though they were trying to figure out the mystery that is poetry, once and for all" which sounds familiar. Not in the "let's play and experiment" way, but in the "this is how it's done" way. Yuck.

"Rational Artifice"

F-T begins by examining some Wallace Stevens poems-- poems that "rely on and refer to experience rather than... question and explore it"; poems that ask us to perform naturalization, where they are "only obscure enough to hint at profundity."

Whereas William Empson's poem baits the reader with "normal conversation diction" but inverts itself & the reader's expectations-- the naturalization that has been happening, unchallenged, is suddenly stopped in its tracks:

I find it normal, passing these great frontiers,

That you scan the crowds in rags eagerly each side

With awe; that the nations seem real; that their ambitions

Having achieved such variety within one type, seem sane;

I find it normal;

So too to extract false comfort from that word.

It's the repetitions of "I find it normal" that cause us to go back and reexamine the relationship set up in the beginning 4 lines, the image that we partook of willingly and uncritically-- because the poem has larger concerns than just rendering a scene.

"Are the judgements of the first three lines 'normal' because of their appropriateness to the experience and the objects of experience, or are they normal because they are explicable, though at odds with the facts objectively viewed?... Is it normal and false to derive comfort from judgements that something is normal, or is it normal to extract false comfort-- comfort that one knows is false?"

In another Empson poem, "High Dive," three types of specific language are employed-- this demonstrates rational obscurity-- to describe the poet and reader's position with language:

(61) Like God, Diver, and Scientist, the poet and reader stand above language, to whose potential function they give form; stand above a text which they inform." (this "depends on our knowledge that we are reading a poem-- our ability to undertake the kind of operations necessary to construct meaning in poetry.")

Extending this metaphor of the diver/poet, who must be outside/tribal outcast in order to re-create the conceptual schemes of a society which offers him no hope of absolute knowledge or value in human activity, there are 2 options: either don't dive/walk down the already-constructed stairs or accept the task of creating new society, personality, and order as he dives.

(65) If he is a poet this means that he must create a new kind of technique which will make critical reading difficult and his style obscure, but the style will be rationally obscure so that the critic can, by applying his rules, eventually interpret the poem."

So if I'm understanding this chapter correctly, it's important to resist shallow poetry-- F-T gives an example of a Larkin poem that first renders a scene then concludes with a semi-epiphanic ending-- but this only tells us something we already know, in a pretty straightforward way. It encourages us to naturalize its images but doesn't move beyond that relationship of relating. So, if I understand, there's really no point to this as an exercise-- because poetry should be doing something more. It might have a meaning or meanings, but it shouldn't just hand it over direct--it should embody its clues to its undoing or understanding and invite the reader to play along.

Eight Poem/ Hate Poem

I is spent

but all we’ve got

get used to means

get used by

fornicating on a dirty

eiderdown,

a little death

in your voice

Poetry and Pleasure

Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works. Just a few quick thoughts on this little essay: Mac Low says that pleasure is the whole point of art (besides the point of bringing it into being).

(xxxii) despite his multifarious methods, Mac Low concedes that the ego is, ultimately, inescapable-- but he still values his methods. For one reason, in performance, for example, the piece sets up a model of society-- everyone has agency (and thus chance comes in, diminishing artist's ego a bit) but they are also aware of and responding to each other. My problem with this assertion is that it's still scripted-- and not just vaguely-- so I'm not exactly sure about the idea of performance as social model. I mean, it only seems to work (for Mac Low, anyway) if he stays in charge.

I can't figure out how he's differentiating the terms "source text" and "seed text".

Reading now Odes for Iris and Twenties.

Seventh Day Poem

Happy stinking resolution

ever after AL losers

Scaredy-cats chortle at water

(can’t drown crawdads ‘cept in butter)

Muggy LA air seeps North

and water freakt with jet

engine juice blossoms in quick

real time. Oil thick as blood-

suckers and skeeters

with long noses swab

their spit to ease the sting.

We need a blood meal to reproduce

and yours tastes better.

Can’t scratch silver dollar bites,

Can’t bite back;

Can’t back blood suckers,

Can’t suck ‘em off.

But we don’t process negatives.

We will:

Give our hair, our air,

Our money and our pelicans

—No, not the pelicans—

but hay, why not?

And giant cotton maxi pads

and a huge catheter because

this isn’t sexy.

Shhhh.*

Can’t feel

anything

because everything

’s so far

a-

way

right

now.

*It stings then

your eyelids start feeling

waits then your arm is so heavy

you laugh because you can’t

lift it then legs next then stairs

and counting ten nine eight

down to one then zero is actually a

door you open then you’re flying

or floating on an inky black sea

I think. Water scares me

but I like driving.

Artifice of Absorption

Charles Bernstein, A Poetics. A lineated critical essay? Yes please.

(12) extra-lexical components in poem are meaningful rather than contribute to meaning... even to disavow meaning is a form of meaning-making

(18) "As/ McCaffery puts it, 'such features of general/ economic operation do not destroy the order of/ meaning, but complicate & unsettle its/ constitution and operation'. They destroy, that/ is, not meaning but various utilitarian &/ essentialist ideas about meaning. To this point/ it must be added that to speak of the nonutilizable/ strata of a poem or a verbal exchange is as/ problematic as to speak of nonsemantic elements-- for what is designated as nonutilizable/ & extralexical is both useful & desirable/ while not being utilitarian & prescribable... That is, the meaning is not absent or/ deferred but self-embodied as the poem/ in a way that is not transferable to another code/ or rhetoric."

This reminds me of Bataille's idea of sacrifice v. the inutile, the economy of use... also, thinking about visual and page aesthetics and form as sites of meaning, not in the "sound pulling sense" nonsense way, but as just-as-important components in the poem (so not lesser or 'extra' even if they are 'extralexical'.)

Bernstein is pretty careful in this article to examine texts where he locates 'absorption' but doesn't give a prescription for how to achieve absorption-- his examples are deictic, not didactic-- though there is a tension between transparency and opacity... and self-consciousness.

DOWN WITH IRONY

is poetry possible without artifice?

(29) Absorption v. Impermeability

Absorption: engrossing, engulfing/ completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie,/ attention intensification, rhapsodic, spellbinding,/ mesmerizing, hypnotic, total, riveting,/ enthralling: belief, conviction, silence.

Impermeability: artifice, boredom,/ exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction,/ digression, interruptive, transgressive,/ undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured,/ fragmented, fanciful, ornately stylized, rococo,/ baroque, structural, mannered, fanciful, ironic,/ iconic, schtick, camp, diffuse, decorative,/ repellent, inchoate, programmatic, didactic,/ theatrical, background muzak, amusing: skepticism,/ doubt, noise, resistance.

What must occur for absorption? According to Ford Maddox Ford, we must respect the 4th wall-- no self-consciousness. The reader must be entranced, suspend disbelief, "get caught up." Similarly, I think, 19th century lyric poetry shared this goal: the overheardness/eavesdropping effect creates absorption (hopefully).

So is absorption really just about creating suspense? Thinking now of Kenneth Burke's definition of good literature-- one that sets up expectations/desires and fills them. Which still feels too reductive, but maybe the genius of the definition lies in its simplicity. (I can't help jumping ahead in my notes to Bernstein's examination of Brecht's idea of absorption-- getting the audience to participate on a critical level as maximum engagement... I wonder if Burke's model allows for a reordering of our desires? As in, perhaps in watching Brecht's play (or reading it, or whatever) we want a certain thing to happen, but another thing happens (perhaps its antithesis, perhaps something we hadn't dreamed) and we feel that our expectations were set up and unfufilled. Until we consider what did happen and why it happened-- then we see what Brecht intended, a bit at least, and our desires change/and are fulfilled, perhaps. (Is this how epiphany happens?) Anyway, is a certain level of familiarity required for this to work (I'm using 'familiarity' to cover a # of things here-- training, exposure, schooling, participation in communities, etc.) Moving on.

(38) causal unity employed often to create absorbing poems but tricky and often phony

(47) charm v. song melos, according to Andrew Welsh:

song melos-- externally imposed meter

charm melos-- internally derived from sound & rhythm patterns

related somehow to Jerry Rothenberg-- and continuing,

charm melos depends on/ 'artificial,' jaggedly rhythmic/ prosodic elements to create a centripetal/ (or vortical)/ energy in the poem that is/ able to capture & hold the attention (not/ just conscious attention, but the imagination/ or/ psyche...)

(48) Back to McCaffrey: "'Semiotically viewed, the shaman drum/ is a profound contradiction; it is both itself &/ the very means of transcending that self.'"-- same as rock& roll, where the disbelieving hear noise and the initiate is totally engrossed

(50-1) beyonsense (in chant etc.) could be language to unite all people? (reminds me of Spicer's "infinitely small vocabulary") not to know the meaning but to intuit it (from sound mostly? and the experiencing of it?)

(65) "unreadable text is the outer limit for poetry" antiabsorptive ≠ nonentertaining. in fact, whereas Barthes describes the pleasures of the text, (an erotics of absorption)

(72) Bataille finds disgust & nausea necessary, as transgressions of inhibitions, to achieve pleasure (specifically erotic, but applies here too). Bernstein: "Transgression, in his account, may be the paradigm/ case of using antiabsorptive (socially disruptive,/ anticonventional) techniques for absorptive/ (erotic) ends."

Bataille: "Eroticism always entails a breaking down of the established patterns... But in eroticism... our discontinuous mode of existence is not condemned [but] jolted... What we desire is to bring into a world founded on continuity all the continuity such a world can sustain... Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism-- to the blending and fusing of separate objects." (What was your first textual experience?)

This brings us to the "mark":

(86) "... writing re-/ verses the dynamic Merleau-Ponty out-/ lines for the visible & the invisible:/ for it is the invisible of writing/ that is imagined to be absorbed/ while the visible of writing usually goes unheard/ or is silenced."

Language is oftentimes a necessary means of communication-- but in writing it disappears

Bernstein concludes:

(88-9)

"Absorption & its many con-/ verses, re-/ verses, is at heart a measure/ of the relationship between/ a reader &/ a work: any attempt to isolate/ this dynamic in terms exclusively of/ reading/ or composition/ will fail on this account./ As writers--/ & everyone inscribes/ in the sense/ I mean here--/ we can/ try to intensify/ our relationships by considering/ how they work: are we putting/ each other to sleep/ or waking each other up;/ & what do we wake to?/ Does our writing stun/ or sting? Do we cling to/ what we've grasped/ too well, or find tunes/ in each new/ departure."

Voice and Possession

Susan Stewart, from Poetry and the Fate of the Senses.

Why do we privilege voice? Because we see it as a vehicle of the soul (personalized to each).

(108) Hearing one's own voice is as horrid/uncanny as viewing one's own corpse-- this reminds me of Riley. Why are lyric poets so afraid of themselves? BOO.

Apparently, it's because the voice contains the seed of its own disappearance (echoing death)-- again, the way Dickinson felt disturbed by seeing her letter at a friend's house or Riley gets spooked every time she sees a poem or whatever.

Stewart outlines two modes of thinking concerning poetry:

one is Diotima's: poets are masters of form

another is Plato's: poets are dangerous because they are mastered by something else; the poetry comes from somewhere else, and worse, poetry sounds good but perverts the ideals-- assuming poetry has power in society (I'm thinking it must have had more immediate societal affect than it does now?)

but paradox! how can poetry be both a mastery of form and mastered by something else?

examining Plath and Brooks (this is the explication I found most useful, more than Keats, Hardy, or Bishop, though she goes more in-depth for them):

(118-9) Both Plath and Brooks employ redundant word choice and exact rhyming as a means of representing the transport or compulsive way-laying of subjective intention. To this extent, they demonstrate that we cannot necessary (sic) conclude that strict form signifies authorial mastery or control, it as readily can signify the submersion of will within convention.

Which brings me to her examination of Keats, Hardy, and Bishop-- which really just felt like a plug for form as sense's little helper-- she concludes this chapter with, "By acknowledging the ways in which our voices are spoken through, we are bound to hear more than we meant to say" (143).

But her entire analyses are based on locating formal matches with semantic pieces-- look at the meter here! or the repetition there! --and this is what it means! Which isn't to dog on meaning. But I guess this gets back to the problem of the paradox-- how much is given/ bequeathed/ ventriloquized/ whatever, and how much control does the poet have? and how often is the poet thinking about all his/her own referents, anyway?

Sex Poem

les femmes-- les filles-- en vitrine

pistachio and chocolate

we mean business, BRING IT

rrrring it

She didn't tongue her spoon at you,

blonde man, don't wink at her like that.

Don't want

your sweet stick-

y kiss, prick,

hold it out

or have a look

but we don't want your EL LAGARTO

when we're eating THIS GELATO

.

Smooth move, groovy dude. You drink water with no ice cubes. Squeeze some lime in my cilantro,

vodka mixed with limoncello, whipped me in a fresa frenzy, cardamon, my avacado

honey, I bet your caramel's dulce de leche, sweet and creamy, slightly

smokey. Can't nobody top this ginger.

Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen. This is a book of Mullen's I hadn't read before-- and it's just as seriously playful as her other books, though perhaps a bit less formally consistent-- she's using homophonic translation, s+7, found text, etc. etc. to form these poems. I appreciated the range in this collection-- it coheres thematically, sure-- I got that she's reading the inherent/embedded prejudices (namely sexism and racism) in 'Standard English'-- but the poems are also linked in their sequencing (alphabetical). This encouraged me, because my thesis is shaping up to be... diverse... formally, and it was a nice reminder that properly sequencing your project/poems can make the whole thing seem a lot more logical.

Some examples of Mullen's play that caught my eye:

(16) You can give a man a rock or you can teach him to rock.

(26) [Eurydice] Can't wait to be sprung from shadow,

to be known from a hole in the ground.

(30) Some of his favorite trees are books.

She also toys with folk and fairy tales-- my favorite is "Once Ever After," which jumps from one fairy tale to the next at lightning speed, each jump sprung from a word or pun--

She couldn't make it gold without his name. Her night shifts in the textile mill. She forgot she was a changeling peasant girl. Spinning, she got pricked. That's where roses fell and all but one fairy wept.

and in "She Swan On from Sea to Shine," Mullen looks backward into more recent history (pre- then post-Civil War America, it seems) and crafts a mythos of her own-- this reminds me of what Mackey's doing, a little-- but whereas Mackey ends School of Udhra with the acknowledgement that his "inlet" into myth and culture can't be totally what it aspires to be (a collective myth?) Mullen's tale concludes,

Revolution is a cycle that never ends. Rumors of May made mermaids murmur. Plato opens utopia to poets on opiates.

Sidenote: in this poem, rather than using 1st person POV, she uses third, which, for some reason, feels totally refreshing and more authentic. Worth imitating.

I Love Artists

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Reading Berssenbrugge reminded me of the experience of reading Hannah Weiner, which reminded me of reading in French: reading, understanding most of what's going on but not fully and trying to keep it all in my head as I continue, figuring understanding will accrue or be realized as I go on. Berssenbrugge is grappling with a number of themes, but to simplistically list them: language and how we experience it, borders and boundaries-- including language and the ineffable, the scientific colliding with the intangible/abstract-- explanations for what is (and how) but not erasing the mystery-- actually, increasing it with these explorations.

She mixes the concrete and the abstract, these meditations concentrated often on the rhetorical-- both the inherent rhetoric in her subjects and the questions that punctuate her poems.

As I Love Artists is a selected works book, I got to see a range of her work; her earlier poems are more concrete, I think, than her later poems, but often end without punctuation at the ends of stanzas/sections/poems. They feel open, waiting for closure (or maybe not seeking it?)

The following passage reminds me of Notley's explication of song in Close to Me & Closer:

In "Empathy:" (50)

In the same way the song must never be allowed to threaten the presentation of what takes place in the song, so that she may try to develop empathy for what she really wants to happen to her, instead of desire being the song.

(Context: "The speaking becomes fixed, although there is no such thing as repetition./ The speaking is a constant notation of parallel streams of thought and observations,/ whose substance is being questioned in a kind of oral thought at once open and precise,/ but with a tension between ideas and her sense of scandal at invoking a real person.")

I think there's an expression in French about thinking by talking-- "la langue pense" maybe? which seems to be what she's considering in the context-- but in the extracted lines about song, it seems to be more concerned with control: song has a purpose, an almost documentary-purpose, (but note that it's focused on the presentation of what takes place in the song-- desire/emotion mustn't overwhelm form-- so that she may try to develop empathy (which I'm reading as a marker of authenticity?) moving on.

concerning borders: (90) "The Doll:" connecting this ideology with de Certeau, look here:

Discourse on death contains a rhetoric of borders./ ...I employ two symbolized realities, so connecting paths traversed by light make an edge./ We're the other for this boundary./ ...I want to locate the ineffable beyond middle ground.

and later, in "Nest" (115)

Speaking, an artifact, creates a loophole for no rapport, no kinship, no education, on a frontier where wild is a margin of style, and rhetoric's outside that."

This poem in particular is also focused on language's alienating properties-- including its limits and borders, but here, she's concerned with loopholes: "Pick one and slip through it, like a girl whose body is changing." This reminds me of de Certeau's ideas of appropriation for practical use, but seems to extend beyond personalization as an end-- Berssenbrugge is concerned with transgressing these boundaries (if possible?)-- at least treading these lines-- for another reason, perhaps found in "Audience" (122)

My story is about the human race in conflict with itself and nature.

...I grapple with theme, again and again.

...When I find a gap, I don't fix it, don't intrude like a violent, stray dog, separating flow and context, to conform what I say to what you see.

This gets back to authenticity, maybe; also in "Audience" (which is a sort of meta-poetry, less ars poetica than an explication of desire?)

I didn't want to use sympathy for others as a way through my problems.

There's a gap between an audience and particulars, but one can be satisfied by particulars, on several levels: social commentary, sleazy fantasy.

...I thought my work should reflect society, like mirrors in a cafe, double-space.

And so she's not pretending a lack of artifice; ventriloquizing her critics:

"'She achieves a personal voice almost autistic in lack of affect, making ambiguous her well-known power to communicate emotion, yet accusing a system that mistakes what she says.'"

But what are the stakes? Social commentary, sure, testing language for its limits in our interactions and comprehension of the world-- but isn't a quest for authenticity in expression a little self-indulgent? For me, this is where the mystic comes in: I don't know that Berssenbrugge is a mystic poet per se, but there seems to be, in addition to the testing of boundaries, a desire to transcend them/achieve transcendence. In "Fog":

The more accurate memories turned out to be white on the outside, but they were unconditioned by the desire to form story out of her memory, continuing story, the way we wish this space and light to continue.

Therefore, we appreciate fog, as the power to make the space continue beyond a single perception in raw material or youth of the body, like a body of light.

...It is not so much the quality or brightness of light, or her understanding of this light, as the number of times she dissolves. The faster she can dissolve into space, the better.

It is almost as if the complete dark would be ideal.

and in "Red Quiet:"

These words are the opposite of verisimilitude.

Doings

Jackson Mac Low. Finished Doings today but wasn't that jazzed by the book, as it's mainly performance pieces-- and therefore, lots of performance instructions-- but I really enjoyed the "Nuclei for Simone Forti" and the various Vocabularies and visual (often almost asemic) poems. He seems to be extremely concerned with pacing, simultaneity, and order-- interesting, as these pieces are derived from so many "chance procedures". (Interesting that he takes great pains to control the way they're performed.) At the heart of his work, though, seems to be play-- serious play, but play nonetheless-- which is a similar impression I got from Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day (and reminds me too, for some reason, of Notley's 165 Meeting House Lane sonnets)-- though his methods are pretty different. Maybe it's the interest in rhythms that connects these three in my head? Mac Low, however, scores his poems-- literally-- sometimes with accompanying notes, sometimes just with instructions for speaking-- which again, is interesting-- esp. because many of his pieces, such as some of the Vocabularies or the Crossword Gathas give little indication of which way they "should" be read.

Quickly, a bit from "Nuclei for Simone Forti"*

*these are written on cards, and so their form will be mostly lost in this medium. But a transcription, nonetheless:

words--

request, adjustment, record, apparatus,

history, theory, short, space, reaction,

lip.

ACTIONS:

SEEMING TO COME BY WING

GIVING FALSELY

words--

if, finger.

ACTIONS:

POINTING TO A FACT THAT SEEMS TO BE AN

ERROR AND SHOWING IT TO BE OTHER THAN IT

SEEMS,

MAPPING,

PAINING BY GOING OR HAVING WAVES.

words--

frame, line, glass, request, fact.

ACTIONS:

LETTING POTATOES GET BAD,

SEEING SOMETHING THAT SEEMS TO BE WAX,

PUTTING SOCIETY AT ODDS WITH FAMILY,

HAVING A BABY OR SEEMING TO HAVE ONE.

words--

slip, ail, plant, or.

ACTIONS:

BOILING DELICATE THINGS,

HAVING JEWELS,

MAKING THUNDERTHROUGH TAKING PIGS SOME-

WHERE,

SAYING SOMETHING AFTER A MINUTE.

These kind of remind me of Thalia Field's Point and Line, but with more room, perhaps, for improv-- and though these are performance prompts/pieces, I think it would be fun to use these somehow as writing prompts. Or to create something like these as prompts to write.

I am interested in Mac Low's use of found material, his setting up of constraints (less visible, maybe, in this book than in Representative Works, which I got out of the library today, along with Twenties and The Virginia Woolf Poems to browse around what else he's been up to-- specifically, more page-oriented poems), and his play with the sounds/bits/phonemes of words.

To end, for now-- I'll add more later after reading the other 3 books--

A VOCABULARY FOR JACKSON MAC LOW

jowl know jackal mas wack lawn loan jam sock sham clown walk can calm clam clan mock jock won no son claw on jacks con mack lack jaw wan clack clock sack am mojo know now coma woks calk joan camo slaw cow mow nocks mason loca locks

Addendum to Forth Poem

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

Forth Poem

Goest, you say, to hell, says I

with rats on tails, backwards

shiny bastards in caves haunt

down, downy

Closed-off mouths.

When I die, oh, when I’m gone,

Thurl be one rat down and a rat to carry down

Take care and drown

Go east, follow licked fingers

under the rising sun, Keeping

low to earth damp dug with almond

fingernails, burrowed, then tunneled

through

to

the bottom. And at the bottom,

pockets emptied, undressed, lapis

eyes limpid as swimming pools and tears

expunged torn or bitten

back, a herd

of flies flying o’erhead, Above too,

Below, a plea. A mistake,

milk spilt, blood churn, expelled,

expelled, gone out, and screaming.

As in childbirth.

I’s plucked loose, hanged up-

side down to dry, ghost to the

wall. No ghost moan. 4 free days.

Maggoty eyes, copse rot, fairies fly

and two. From clay from the carvèd

tree throne from the great great grand

father from Above. To the blanched

world to bleach to the un-world to

the space inside to ward the brink au-delà

flesh to the dead and back.

Fit Poem

Get fit faster
Eraser
Still legible
When she writes

Midwinter Day

Bernadette Mayer. This book is split into 6 sections: lineated, prose, lineated, prose, prose then lineated, lineated. Use of rhyme in the first section feels song-like; lists in second (both meaning of "lists" here); third-- lineates quote from Hawthorne (42)

Hawthorne said,

"I detest it! I hate Berkshire with all my whole soul

And would joyfully see its mountains laid flat...

One knows not for ten minutes

Whether he is too cold or too hot."

Like Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal, everyday issues, events, and concerns are the subjects here: living in New England, children, shopping, food (the way Mayer talks about food!), sex, love... and I wonder-- is this really a one-day poem? Written in one day? I wouldn't doubt it, but gosh. There's so much finesse; she's playing with rhyme, with form, and how is she simultaneously living and writing these experiences?

1st section: dreamscape, lucid dreaming maybe, refrains in poem mimetic of repetitions in dreams

3rd: list of building/businesses in town (play here): wordplay: (49)

In the center of town an obelisk for the Revolutionary War

Under the counter Playboy, Trojans, Tahitis and contraceptive cream

On top of the sisters' white brick house, a man on the roof

3rd again: list of current book titles (some are films maybe?) flexing intellectual and cultural muscles?

4th: everything is edible.

(68) Wittgenstein says there's no such thing as a private language. I think it would be worth trying to make one.

moves again in and out of dream, recollection and present happenings; Admiral Byrd (again) winter weather connection-- the space of a day?; uses mythical stories and Bible stories-- usually female protagonist

5th she sort of outlines the project:

Listen, I had this idea, before I met you but after we kissed in the car when I insisted on driving you right to the door though you said you could easily walk, it was only around the block

To someday become

spendthrift of emotion

as any girl or woman

No I don't mean that, I have this idea now to imitate you though I do it in secret and attribute simple love to your idea of pleasure but before that I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of mind like memory.

and in 6:

From dreams I made sentences, then what I've seen today,

Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory

To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason

Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season

Now I've said this love it's all I can remember

Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light

That takes the bite from winter weather

And weaves the random clouds of live together

And drives away the long black night!

So much to say about this amazing book-- so I'll focus on form-- I love the way she moves between prose and lineated verse. It feels purposeful but also organic and spontaneous. I love too the long lists-- at first, I just skimmed, but then I realized that she's putting information in there that comes up again, she's painting landscapes in the poem, she's playing and punning, and she's using a classic device (listing) in this mini-epic. I was wondering how some of the devices in Inanna's poems and hymns could be appropriated to contemporary poetics, and I think this is one method. I love that Bernadette just goes for it-- and pulls it off (of course).

Clairvoyant Journal

Hannah Weiner. Reading Hannah Weiner and Bernadette Mayer always makes me hungry. There's something so earthy about the way they talk about food-- I want to eat English Muffins and chocolate pudding and drink beer and cucumber juice in my dungarees at a kitchen table in a kitchen with no a/c. I read this in the waiting room for the free clinic with Aaron (sinus infection) for hours and hours and got very hungry then a headache.

Weiner's writing down the words she sees, indicated in capitals and italics (though I'm still unsure of the difference between the two-- it must signal some difference, though, otherwise why not just use one method? visual interest?) So what she's doing is a sort of dictation, though she is also writing down her own thoughts (often trying to complete or make sense of the dictations-- "BErnadette") and recurring themes appear in both the dictated words and her "own" thoughts-- composers (esp. Phil Glass), friends (Bernadette, Noa, Jerry Rothenberg, Rhys [lover]), yoga and meditation, quotidian concerns (a dresser, an aspirin, a potential book deal, a retreat, pants from Bloomingdale's, alcohol consumption, weight gain).

The form was a little hard to get used to at first-- but once I got used to it, its feel of simultaneity (which may or may not have been the inspiration/situation) was really energetic and engaging. She's also hilarious (please excuse the transcription, much is lost):

then saw a chest of drawers write and ended up with the wrong one, a maple one, it looks 10 drawers too big in the bedroom So why didn't they help me get the other one, it did say HURRY a little while before the other woman came in and bought it back it had rollers on it wrong clean drawers used hesitated because the confusion was larger .... Fuck I'm pissed off at the furniture and them NOS VOICES .... I cant go back to the bedroom the chest is too depressing MAPLE FURNITURE what has that to do with it? bad vibrations

and later, in May, after having taken an aspirin:

They do the refusals They did obey YOU HEAR THE RADIO TURN IT OFF too late in aspirin bottle you kept seeing TAKE ONE ASPIRIN YOU TAKE A COCKTAIL PARTY ... TELL A DOCTOR CODE POEM BIG ASPIRIN Big is a must be Your liver friend YOUR OLD AGE ... You can't digest aspirin And you usually take Tylenol but you damp dont jingle bells in tylenol cream color by the sink YOU BROKE IT help your mother the bottle no aspirin in it you think GO TO THE BED The bed says IT ISN'T BED TIME YET BIG RHYS TOMORROW says pussycat GOVERNMENT Ever since you took that rotten aspirin you've got too much interference

She does refer to the words she sees as "interference" and interruptions:

How can I describe anything when all these interruptions keep arriving and then tell me I dont describe it well WELL forgive them big ME

and often receives instructions to OBEY and DONT EDIT-- but she is engaging with these texts as she's writing them (it's not just straight dictation) but maybe documentation?:

realise write something you are documenting it

"Linguistic Unease"

Denise Riley.

There is a lyrical guilt as well as a linguistic unease-- "I" lies ( lIes)

57) declarations of the I-- self-description and naming-- very grammar of language of self-reference seems to demand or guarantee an authenticity but also cancels this possibility-- for "I" belongs to everyone-- is universal

58)stripped bare of ownership not only linguistic dispossession-- also plentitude/proliferation but "I" is a necessity (so this isn't only the fault of the word itself)

--in poetry: refreshing not to possess I's voice or to resemble oneself

63) words are everyone else's--

Dickinson on letters: "A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone." (Riley expresses discomfiture then at seeing her own writing-- like glimpsing her own death)

65) for Heidegger, naming isn't bestowing identity but calling (invocation, bidding, calls into the word)-- which guarantees a lively distance (rather than subjugation, I suppose?)

64) Am I, in practice, written?

65) stillness=fullness, and its peal is bidding or invocation. To hear becomes dynamic, a concentrated attentiveness. Then "Language speaks". It's not repressive but it is in charge, calls into the word.

Heidegger again: "Man acs as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."

66) lyric "I" advertises simulacrum of control under the guise of form

67) being written through-- energetic materiality of words

68) "'When the mind is like a hall in which thought is a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else' describes one impression of being spoken through. But there's also a less straightforward directionality, which is not 'through' the writer as a conduit but across." (This makes me think of Spicer's definition of the word metaphor, "traverse across")

68) Riley-- we're neither completely in control of language nor only the "vatic mouthpiece through which language frolics"

70) Jakobson says poet's metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic language-- where does poetic choosing then come from? intuitive verbal latency like in implication to "the remainder of language" (but affected by timing and temporality)-- which is just another way to answer this question of "where does it all come from" and "how much agency and control do we really have, anyway"-- so here poet is in more control, maybe, but still receiving all this stuff from outside-- but here, outside is culture, conversation, etc.

72) similar sounds-- homophony-- bring up different shades of meaning

***would be interesting to write a poem that had to be read aloud/spoken for its semantic purposes-- and/or one that must stay on the page to be understood

73) Stevens-- language evolves semantically through a series of conflicts between denotative and connotative forces in wors

79) you angel!-- no. moot cries on the street are accusatory

89) 3 factors from "outside themselves" all entail puzzles about agency; Adorno: subject sounds forth in language until language acquires a voice

90) unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to language

91) nothing is ever for the "first time" (okay, but what about ritual or rites of passage?-- why is lyric poetry so geared toward the individual experience that then translates to some universal rather than a sense of communal experience?)

"your writing on the page arrives largely from the outside"-- but again, what if individuality isn't the goal?

in short: Riley says: it's language and culture that create this stuff

Turd Poem/ Waiting Room Sonnet

Spent the day at the free clinic reading

Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal

Sweaty and freezing no makeup

Plastic chairs and hard slat benches.

Wait to wait to wait then prescribed vitamins.

Camaraderie in the waiting room—we’re all in it

Together, I guess—then we’re told we look

like movie stars in a movie with a forgotten title

with a ’57 Chevy soft-top.

Aaron’s nametag says “Rex” and my imported library

Book is borrowed from the University

of Chicago. Everyone keeps calling Aaron

“Rex” and I make a joke about a new nametag—

“Oedipus”—and immediately regret it. He gets it.

Second Poem/ Orange Poem

Aren’t I glad I didn’t say

You?

You’re my trick, You do something for me

Shit, I went

and said it.

Now you’re there before me, shimmery

Shape-shifter, and I’ll Nail You to the

Wall with specific details, bits

by bits. I’s a little uneasy.

But you! Have nice legs, I never

Wake up laughing, your nose wrinkles

when you wrinkle it.

IRON YOU.

I do. I’ll catch you, shadow you,

I-so-unlike-you,

and stitch us together. FOREVER.

.

But you’re so slippery! Hey,

Come on!—

Come back!—

well, #$%*. You

were

a

shoddy

foil

for me,

ANYWAYS.